U.S. Media hiding bad news about Iraq

An article from Canada points out what the media and pundits here miss - far from only reporting bad news about Iraq the U.S. media is going out of its way to hide bad news.

A lot of this is due to the opposition they get from the GOP and conservatives on critical stories and more is from the damning silence from the national Democratic Party. How many of the general public heard of the leaked Army report that shows the terrorists winning and warned that the US has zero credibility among Arabs? A classified cable sent by the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Baghdad also warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon. These are the reports analysts send even after knowing they must send reports Rove likes, or else.

A story you won't see in US media: a Turkish Press story accompanied by a grisly photo reveals a new mission for U.S. marines in Fallujah: hunting down and killing "stray animals grown fat on the flesh from corpses and who could harbor rabies."

So who are the better US papers? Infrequently the NYT, the back pages of the Washington Post, and the Knight-Ridder syndicate. By better I mean you occasionally see a story from ground level, not what the PR flacks and GOP leaders want.

But another example of the much more typical case would be the so-called liberal CBS News interviewing a paid operative from GOP conservative think tanks as your typical American.

"I'm going out telling the story that I think is the biggest story of our time," says Bill Moyers, "how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee." It's almost easier to read right-wing nut publications to get the real stories just slanted in the opposite direction.

How many know Fallujah is Iraq's Tet Offensive? This is where we clearly lost the war despite our officials proclaiming a great victory. Before the war Fallujah had a population of over 250,000 (about twice the size of Pasadena to put it in local perspective). A report out after the offensive had an Army official thinking there might be a hundred or so families left. (I can't find that link, here is a recent report from antiwar.com.) Here is also one family's story.

Winning Democrats and their messages - It's no Da Vinci Code. Economic populism presented in American values form seems the common thread.

Because, as red-region progressives show, having the guts to stand up for middle America -- even when it draws the ire of corporate America -- is as powerful a statement about morality and authenticity as any of the GOP?s demagoguery on "guns, God, and gays."

All the Democratic Party has to do is look at the election map: The proof is right there in red and blue.

This is the counter to the other argument taking place - Democrats should seek 'A Fighting Faith' by aggressively promoting an aggressive foreign policy. There is a strong suggestion to purge anti-war activists from the party from the formerly leftist DINO neo-con organization. A reasonable response to Beinart is at Talking Point's Memo.


I set up this blog to get the news out to progressives and Libertarians and Greens on stories you couldn't find in the America media. They were even difficult to track down online. As I said before Powell went to the UN, there are no WMDs in Iraq - all the evidence is slanted and twisted exaggerations. You still can't find the real stories in the American mass media but they are all over online now. Go to Cursor or Raw Story or some other independent source and become informed and tell your friends who might not be getting the real news that you now can get online.

To my nephew in Iraq see 'WAR IS A RACKET.' The classic book by the Marine general who told the people why America really goes to war.

Originally printed in 1935, War Is a Racket is General Smedley Butler's frank speech describing his role as a soldier as nothing more than serving as a puppet for big-business interests... The introduction discusses why General Butler went against the corporate war machine and how he exposed a fascist coup d'etat plot against President Franklin Roosevelt. Widely appreciated and referenced by left- and right-wingers alike, this is an extraordinary argument against war - more relevant now than ever.

Another more modern look at how the military industrial intelligence finance complex works is 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.' John Perkins walked around the 9/11 site and realized he had contributed to it by helping US companies and policies that lead to it. The World Trade Center attack was the ultimate blowback from the CIA intervention in Iran and Afghanistan.