Let us pray that peace
be now restored to the world
and that God will preserve it always.
These proceedings are closed.
The final United Nations victory has been won.
The war is over. Peace is here.
The crowd of two million review the greatest
parade of victorious arms ever witnessed.
This is the news that electrified the world.
Unconditional surrender of a new world of peace.
Today the guns are silent.
The skies no longer rain death.
The entire world lies quietly at peace.
On the way American infantrymen once again
hit the road toward Korea's capital city of Seoul.
US Marines were ordered into the Dominican Republic.
The US Marines have also taken center stage in South Vietnam.
This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.
The first wave of marines landed in Grenada.
Twelve hundred US Marines would land in Grenada for several days.
Most of the Libyans were terrified with last night’s heavy bombing raid.
President Bush's decision to neutralize Panama’s General Manuel Noriega.
Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is over.
The war in Iraq.
Since World War II, we have seen a dramatic escalation
in the United States' military actions around the globe.
Ranging from missile strikes and rapid troop deployments
to all out wars and occupations.
The reasons for these military interventions have varied,
each involving complex geopolitical interests in
different parts of the world at different times in US history.
But the public face of these wars has not reflected this complexity.
Over the past five decades
the liberation and debate about US Military actions
have largely been left to a closed circle of elite Washington policy makers,
politicians and bureaucrats whose rationales for war have come into public view
only with the release of lea ked or declassified documents,
often years after the bombs have been dropped and the troops have come home.
In real time, officials have explained and justified these military operations
to the American people by withholding crucial information
about the actual reasons and potential costs of military action.
Again and again choosing to present an easier version of war's reality.
A steady and remarkably consistent story line designed not to inform
but to generate and maintain support and enthusiasm for war.
Nationally syndicated columnist and author Norman Solomon began to notice the
basic contours of this official storyline during the war in Vietnam.
As a teenager I read about the war in Vietnam as it escalated.
I saw the footage on television.
In combat there are no niceties.
A dead enemy soldier is simply an object to be examined for documents
and then removed as quickly as possible - sometimes crudely.
People that I knew began to go to Vietnam
in uniform of the US military and as time went on I began to wonder,
particularly as I became draft age,
about the truthfulness of the statements coming from
the White House and top officials in Washington.
We fight for the principle of self-determination,
that the people of South Vietnam should be able to choose their own course.
Choose it in free elections, without violence, without terror and without fear.
And through that process I began to really wonder
a bout whether we were getting more truth or lies.
In the years since, Solomon has focused his attention on
a set of striking parallels between the selling of the Vietnam War and the
way Presidents have rallied public support for subsequent military actions.
Looking back on the Vietnam War, as I did many times,
I had a very eerie feeling that while the names of the countries changed
and of course each circumstance was different
there were some parallels that cried out for examination.
Rarely if ever does a war just kind of fall down from the sky.
The foundation needs to be laid and the case is built - often with deception.
In the background was the growing struggle
between two great powers to shape the post-war world.
Already an iron curtain had dropped around Poland,
Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria.
It can't happen here? This is what it looks like if it should.
Chief of Police is hustled off to jail.
Public utilities are seized by fifth columnists.
Editor who operates under a free press, he goes to jail too.
This will account for some of the enemy, but some will get through to your home.
The use of propaganda to arouse public support for war is not new.
Leaders throughout history have turned to propaganda to transform populations
understandably weary of the costs of war into war's most ardent supporters.
Invoking images of nationalism and channeling fear and anger
towards perceived enemies and threats.
And in the United States since World War II,
government attempts to win public support for military actions
have followed a similar pattern.
We are living in an era marked by the growth of socialism.
Its basic Godless philosophy.
Lying. Dirty.
Its goal of world conquest.
Shrewd. Godless.
Its insidious tactics.
Murderous. Determined.
And its cunning strategy.
It's an international criminal conspiracy.
It's the same sort of message that's utilized today
and often identical techniques.
States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil,
arming to threaten the peace of the world.
These are barbaric people.
Servants of evil. The cult of evil.
A monumental struggle of good versus evil.
But good will prevail.
Whether it's the Soviet Union or Al Qaeda,
it provides a way to legitimize US plans for war.
You have the comparisons between the enemy leader and Hitler.
President Bush calls Saddam Hussein a little Hitler again today.
We are dealing with Hitler revisited.
Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions
as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them.
We don't get information that would help us put the images in perspective.
This mad dog of the Middle East.
I find that he's not only a barbarian but he's flakey.
The drug indicted, drug-related indicted dictator of Panama.
And to support their claim that Noriega was out of control,
ghoulish evidence of Satanic practices with dead animals
that one official called kinky.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator
who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.
And as Aldous Huxley said long ago,
it's more powerful often to leave things out then to tell lies.
For instance, quite often the US government
directly helped the dictators that were now being told
must be overthrown and it's that selectivity of history
that's a very effective form of propaganda.
This selective view of reality, buttressed by these fear-based appeals
represents a larger pre-war pattern.
The repeated claim that the United States uses military force
only with great reluctance.
We still seek no wider war.
The United States does not start fights.
America does not seek conflict.
I don't like to use military force.
Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly.
And only for the most virtuous of reasons,
first and foremost to spread freedom and democracy.
We want nothing for ourselves,
only that the people of South Vietnam
be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.
The rhetoric of democracy is part of the process of convincing people
that even though unpleasant things must be done sometimes in its name,
like bombing other countries, democracy is really what it's about.
The United States has been engaged in an effort to stop the advance
of Communism in Central America by doing what we do best.
By supporting democracy.
And it's almost as if though repeating it enough times makes it so.
Our cause of liberty, our cause of freedom,
our cause of compassion and understanding.
People want democracy,
peace and the chance for a better life in dignity and freedom.
We want to lift lives around the world, not take them.
These are forms of propaganda that are insidious because
they tug at our heart strings.
We must get the Kosovar refugees home safely.
Mine fields will have to be cleared.
Homes destroyed by Serb forces will have to be rebuilt.
Homeless people in need of food and medicine.
Of course we want to help other people.
These are propaganda messages that say,
don't just think of yourself, America can't just be selfish.
It makes bombing other people ultimately seem like
an act of kindness, of altruism.
Today our armed forces joined our NATO allies in air strikes
against Serbian forces responsible for the brutality in Kosovo.
We are upholding our values,
protecting our interests and advancing the cause of peace.
But even as planes from the multi national forces attack Iraq,
I prefer to think of peace. Not war.
If my motives are pure then
the fact that I'm killing people may not be too upsetting.
It may indicate that I'm killing people for very good reasons.
America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements
in the Middle East and beyond,
with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
So you have kind of the high ground president
with the lofty motives being proclaimed or told that peace is being sought.
Alternatives to war are being explored and that's kind of the official story.
I am continuing and I am increasing the search for every possible path to peace.
Whether we are talking about Johnson, Nixon or the president today,
you have one chief executive after another in the White House
saying how much they love peace and hate war.
We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression,
to preserve freedom and peace.
No one, friend or foe, should doubt our desire for peace.
The United States wants peace.
We seek peace. We strive for peace.
Every President of the last half century has gone out of his way
to say that he wanted peace and wanted to avoid war.
I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war
in a way that we could win the peace.
Even while ordering military action.
So you have this paradox in a way of the president who has just ordered
massive military violence and lethal action by the Pentagon,
turning around and saying I want to oppose violence and promote peace.
Nixon: I respect your idealism. I share your concern for peace.
I want peace as much as you do.
Actually war becomes perpetual when it's used as a rational for peace.
George W. Bush: We cannot wait for the final proof,
the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
As Americans we like to think that we're not
subjected to propaganda from our own government.
Certainly that we are not subjected to propaganda
that is trying to drag the country into war,
as in the case for setting the stage for the invasion into Iraq.
Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
Weapons of mass destruction.
Botulin, VX, sarin, nerve agent.
Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda.
Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Terrorism.
Cyber attacks.
Nuclear program.
Biological weapons.
Cruise missiles, ballistic missiles.
Chemical and biological weapons.
Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
Tony Blair has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
Donald Rumsfeld has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
Richard Butler has said they do.
The United Nations has said they do.
The experts have said they do.
Iraq says they don't. You can choose who you want to believe.
The war propaganda function in the United States is finely tuned.
It's sophisticated and most of all it blends into the media terrain.
The White House says it can prove that Saddam Hussein
has weapons of mass destruction, claiming it has solid evidence.
The White House insisted again today it does have solid evidence
that Saddam Hussein is hiding an arsenal of prohibited weapons.
It's necessary to provide a drum beat media echo effect.
They might fight dirty,
using weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological or radioactive.
There are ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
Anthrax, small pox.
Dirty bomb.
Iraq-Al Qaeda connections.
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda share the same goal.
Both of them want to see Americans dead.
And I was very struck by the acceptance,
the tone of most of the media coverage as the sabers were rattled,
as the invasion of Iraq gradually went from
possible to probable to almost certain.
President essentially giving Saddam 48 hours to get out.
War now seems all but inevitable.
Short of a bullet to the back of his head, or he leaves the country, war is inexorable.
I think that's exactly right. War is inevitable and it is approaching inexorably.
Is war with Iraq inevitable right now?
I think it is 95% inevitable.
You at this point right now tonight, don't see any other option but war?
Do you?
I'm asking you ambassador.
I agree. I don't think there is a viable option for the administration at this point.
We're way too far out in front in this.
Send us over there guys. Let's get on with it. Let's get it over with.
Showdown Iraq. If America goes to war, turn to MSNBC and the experts.
And in many ways, the US news media were equal partners with
the officials in Washington and on Capitol Hill in setting the agenda for war.
We'll take you there, MSNBC.
And although it's called the liberal media
one has a great deal of difficulty finding an example
of major media outlets in their reporting
challenging the way in which the agenda setting for war is well under way,
and when that reporting is so much a hostage of official sources,
that's when you have a problem.
US officials tell CNN
Bush official says that
Analysts say
Pentagon officials tell us
According to US intelligence
Often we're encouraged to believe officials are the ones who make news.
US officials say
US officials say that
US officials here say
The US officials here at the White House tell us
They're the ones who should be consulted to understand the situation.
I just pulled these two things out.
I've laundered them so you can't really tell what I'm talking about
because I don't want the Iraqis to know what I'm talking about.
But trust me, trust me.
If history is any guide the opposite is the case.
The officials blow smoke and cloud reality rather than clarify.
We will in fact be greeted as liberators.
The notion that it will take several hundred thousand US troops
to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq are wildly off the mark.
So the money's gonna come from Iraqi oil revenue as everyone has said.
They think it's going to be something like 2 billion dollars this year.
They think it might be something like 15, 12 next year.
A country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.
National security advisors Ken Adelman and Richard Perle,
early advocates of the war, said the war would be a cake walk.
The sources that have deceived us so constantly don't deserve our trust
and to the extent that we give them our trust,
we set ourselves up to be scammed again and again.
There are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link
between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say that we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns.
The ones we don't know we don't know.
Excuse me, but is this an unknown unknown?
There are several unknowns. I just wanted to know if this was an unknown unknown.
I'm not going to say which it is.
Mr. Secretary?
I'm right here, I'm right here.
In the run up to the war in Iraq,
the failure of mainstream news organizations to raise legitimate questions
about the government's rush to war was compounded by the networks' deliberate
decision to stress military perspectives before any fighting had even begun.
We've got generals and if you ask them about the prospects
for war with Iraq they think it is almost certain.
CNN's use of retired generals as supposedly independent experts
reinforced the decidedly military mindset even as serious questions
remained about the wisdom and necessity of going to war.
Often journalists blame the government for
the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting.
But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary
from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it.
You had a top CNN official named Eason Jordan going on the air of his network
and boasting that he had visited the Pentagon with a list
of possible military commentators and he asked officials
at the Defense Department whether that was a good list of people to hire.
I think it's important to have experts explain the war
and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics,
talk about the strategy behind the conflict.
I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started
and met with important people there and said for instance at CNN
here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us
on the air and off about the war and we got a big thumbs up on all of them
and that was important.
It wasn't even something to hide ultimately.
It was something to say to the American people on his own network,
see, we're team players.
We may be the news media but we're on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.
And that really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press.
And that suggests that we have some deep patterns of media avoidance
when the US is involved in a war based on lies.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson falsely claimed that an attack
on US gunships by North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin
gave him no choice but to escalate the war in Vietnam.
That renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas
in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the
military forces of the United States to take action in reply.
Routinely the official story is a lie, or a deception,
or a partial bit of information that leaves out key facts.
In international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin,
destroyers of the United States Navy are assigned routine patrols from time to time.
Sunday, August 2, 1964, the destroyer Maddux was on such a patrol.
Shortly after noon the calm of the day is broken as general quarters sound.
In a deliberate and unprovoked action
three North Vietnam PT boats unleash a torpedo attack against the Maddux.
The official story about the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie.
The destroyer was carrying out a mission, a patrol in those waters,
in international waters when it was attacked.
But it quickly became accepted as the absolute truth
by the news media and because of the press' refusal to challenge that story,
it was much easier for Congress to quickly pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution,
which was pivotal because it opened the floodgates to the Vietnam War.
I think it's a very clear demonstration of the unity of the country,
behind the policies that are being followed by the President in South Vietnam
and more specifically of the action that was taken
in response to the attack upon our destroyer.
At that point the facts were secondary.
In the case of the Washington Post reporting,
I asked, more than three decades later, whether there had ever been
a Post retraction of its reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin events.
And I called the newspaper and eventually reached the man who had been
the Chief Diplomatic correspondent at the time, Murrey Marder, and I said,
Mr. Marder, has there ever been a retraction by the Washington Post
of its fallacious reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin?
And he said, I can assure you it never happened. There was never any retraction.
And I asked why.
And he said, if the news media were going to retract its reporting on the Gulf of
Tonkin it would have to retract its reporting on virtually the entire Vietnam War.
Fast forward a few decades, you have President George W. Bush
saying that to an absolute certainty there were weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq and that intelligence sources told him that clearly which was not at all the case.
Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence
about Iraq's illegal weapons programs,
its attempts to hide those weapons from inspectors,
and its links to terrorist groups.
The failure of American news media to check government distortion
reached new heights on when the eve of war the highly respected
Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations
to make the case that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein's intentions have never changed.
He is not developing the missiles for self defense.
These are missiles that Iraq wants in order to project power, to threaten,
and to deliver chemical, biological, and if we let him, nuclear warheads.
Today Secretary of State Powell brought the United Nations Security Council
the administration's best evidence so far.
After Colin Powell's speech to the UN immediately
the US press applauded with great enthusiasm.
Did Colin Powell close the deal today in your mind
for anyone who has yet objectively to make up their mind?
I think for anybody who analyzes the situation, he has closed the deal.
This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today.
Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today.
Colin Powell was outstanding today. I mean it was lock-step.
It was so compelling.
I don't see how anybody at this point cannot support this effort.
He made a wonderful presentation.
I thought he made a great case for the purpose of disarmament.
It was devastating I mean and overwhelming.
Overwhelming abundance of the evidence.
Point after point after point. He just flooded the terrain with data.
It's the end of the argument phase. America has made its case.
The Powell speech has moved the ball.
I think case is closed.
But at the time it was quite possible to analyze and debunk what he was saying.
Whereas the British press and other international news sources
immediately raised legitimate questions about the accuracy of Powell's presentation
the major US news media were virtually silent about the factual basis
of his claims and near unanimous in their praise.
Even the purportedly anti-war NY Times editorialized the next day
that Colin Powell had made a sober case, a factual case.
One of the great myths then part of the war propaganda cycle
is way after the fact to claim that it couldn't have been known at the time
that US officials were lying us into war and in point of fact
it was known at the time and said by many people
who were not allowed on the networks, by and large.
One such critical voice belonged to MSNBC's Phil Donahue,
one of the few mainstream media commentators who consistently challenged
the official storyline coming out of Washington.
You know we're all now everybody's righteous. What a terrible Hitler this is.
We were mute when he was doing that. He was our SOB.
And now we're sending our sons and daughters to war to fix that mistake.
It doesn't seem fair to me.
Despite being the highest rated program on MSNBC,
Donahue's show was abruptly cancelled by the network
just three weeks before the start of the war.
Phil Donahue was an anti-war voice on MSNBC, one of the cable news channels.
And a memo that was leaked as the Donahue show was cancelled is very explicit.
It said, we don't want this to be a face of NBC as the United States goes into war.
This guy puts anti-war voices on our network.
The American people need to know there is no just cause for this war.
But there's no evidence that there is even a weapon that exists in that country yet.
Journalists, too many of them and some quite explicitly,
have said that they see their mission as helping the war effort
and if you define your mission that way you'll end up suppressing news
that might be important, accurate but maybe isn't helpful to the war effort.
We don't want to have that kind of public persona
when then we'd be vulnerable to charges that we're unpatriotic.
It'll make it more difficult to keep pace with
the flag-wavers at Fox or CNN or whatever.
And more broadly news media are very worried not only government pressure
but advertiser pressure, criticism from readers, listeners and viewers:
Our soldiers are in the field.
You've got to support them. Don't raise these tough questions.
It seems to me that the right thing to do for patriots
when American lives are at risk and Americans are dying
is to unite behind the troops until victory is won.
On this show, Buchanan and Press, we've had a good debate for 8 months on this conflict
but now it seems when the war comes, the debate ends.
I think unity, Bill, is essential at this time or at least when the guns begin to fire.
It's a very effective tactic at least in the short run
to a large extent to say "look you got to support the troops."
You're killing the troops.
And that's an effort to conflate supporting the troops
with supporting the President's policies.
Once the war against Saddam begins we expect every American to
support our military and if they can't do that, to shut up.
In addition to Phil Donahue, many other journalists have been silenced
for crossing the mythical line known as objectivity.
Today, NBC News fired journalist Peter Arnett this morning
for participating in an interview on Iraqi state controlled television.
Arnett criticized American war planning and said his reports about civilian casualties
and the Iraqi resistance were encouraging to anti-war protesters in America.
If you're pro-war you're objective, but if you're anti-war you're biased.
And often a news anchor will get no flak at all for making statements that
are supportive of a war and wouldn't dream of making a statement that's against a war.
I was trying to think of something that would be appropriate to say
on an occasion like this and as is often the case the best you can come up with
is something that Shakespeare wrote for Henry V,
"wreak havoc and unleash the dogs of war!"
And that is a tip off to just how skewed the media terrain is.
We should keep in mind that CNN, which many believe to be a liberal network,
had a memo from their top news executive, Walter Isaacson, in the fall of 2001,
as the missiles were falling in Afghanistan telling the anchors and the reporters
you need to remind people anytime you show images on the screen of
the people who are dying in Afghanistan, you've got to remind the American viewers
that it's in the context of what happened on 9/11.
As though people could forget 9/11.
We talked to several people who told us that various friends and relatives
had died in the bombing there in that collateral damage.
Nic Roberston, CNN, Kandahar, Afghanistan.
And we would just remind you as we always do now with these reports from inside the
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, that you're seeing only one side of the story,
that these US military actions that Nic Robertson was talking about are in response
to a terrorist attack that killed 5, 000 and more innocent people inside the US.
And we juxtapose what we're hearing from the Taliban
with a live picture of the cleanup that continues in lower Manhattan,
Ground Zero, again a 24 hour operation.
5,000 killed that day back on Tuesday September 11th,
their biggest crime as civilians? Going to work that day.
And yet we know statistically the best estimates tell us
that more civilians were killed by that bombing in Afghanistan
than those who died in the twin towers in New York.
And the moral objections that could be raised to slaughtering civilians
in the name of retaliation against 9/11,
those objections were muted by the phrase war on terror by the way
in which it was used by the White House and in Congress and also by the news media.
Free flows of information had been further blocked by
a more general atmosphere of contempt for anti-war voices.
Among them are a group called Code Pink
which is headed by Medea Benjamin who is a terrorist sympathizer,
dictator worshipping propagandist.
The far left element in America is a destructive force that must be confronted.
Some Americans, sadly, not interested in victory
and yet they want us to believe that their behavior is patriotic.
Well, it's not.
To call the President stupid,
he doesn't know much about anything. That's just great.
Go with Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon. You fit in perfect.
To in any way be defending a torturer, a killer, a dictator,
he used chemical weapons against his own people,
is pretty remarkable but it's a very long tradition in the Democratic party.
Pay no heed to the peaceniks and the left-wing rockstars.
They've had their 15 minutes of fame.
These people are essentially useless.
They are reflexively opposed to war.
It's a principled position, but it's the wrong position.
And you can't take them seriously as a strategic voice.
Millions and millions of useless people out there.
If you want to have democracy, you've got to have the free flow
of information through the body politic.
You can't have these blockages. You can't have the manipulation.
While mainstream journalists have rarely called attention in real time
to the failure of news media to provide necessary information and real debate,
they have repeatedly pointed to their own failures well after wars have been launched.
During the course of this war there was a lot of snap-to in press coverage.
We're at war. The world's changed. We have to root for the country to some extent.
Something missing from this debate was a critical analysis of where it was taking us.
Those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.
Because it just didn't occur to us. We weren't smart enough.
You'd had to have gone against the grain.
You'd also come off as kind of a pointy head trying to figure out some obscure issue.
Exactly. Negative, negativism.
News media down the road will point out that there were lies about
the Gulf of Tonkin or about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
I'm sorry to say that certainly television, and perhaps to an extent my station,
was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at FoxNews.
We should've been more skeptical.
But that doesn't bring back any of the people who've died,
who were killed in their own country or sent over by
the President of the United States to kill in that country.
After the fact, it's all well and good to say the system worked or the truth comes out.
But when it comes to life and death the truth comes out too late.
My fellow citizens,
at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations
to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.
The idea, to blitz the capital with bombs.
There is, quote, complete confusion.
This will be a campaign unlike any other.
The senior Iraqi military leadership.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Once public support is in place and war is finally underway
the news media necessarily turn from covering the rationales for war
to covering war itself.
When the President decides he wants the US to go to war
then the war becomes the product.
Particularly in the early stages,
news coverage of war is much more like PR about war.
Influencing the nature of this war coverage has been a priority of one
administration after another since Vietnam
when conventional wisdom held that it was negative media coverage
that turned the American people against the war and forced US withdrawal.
Since that time, and beginning with new urgency during the 1991 Gulf War,
the Pentagon has worked with increasing sophistication to shape media coverage of war.
As then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney noted
about the importance of public perceptions during the first Iraq War,
So for the invasion of Grenada and invasion of Panama in '83 and '89,
then the Gulf War in early 1991,
it was like a produced TV show and the main producers were the Pentagon.
They decided, in the case of the Gulf War,
exactly what footage would be made available to the TV stations.
They did non-stop briefings utilizing the increasing importance of cable television.
They named it Operation Desert Storm.
Breaking news of what's now officially called Operation Desert Storm.
Good evening, Operation Desert Storm rages on.
All that sort of stuff was very calculated
so you could look at that as an era of media war manipulation
from the standpoint of the US government.
Then you had a different era. You had the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Scores of American reporters have now joined US military units in Kuwait
as part of the Pentagon's effort to make any war with Iraq
what the Pentagon calls a "media friendly campaign."
Another part of that effort is on display at the US Military Command Center in Qatar.
A Hollywood set designer was brought in to create a $200,000 backdrop
for official war briefings.
And tied in with that is the worship of Pentagon technology.
I've fallen almost in love with the F-18 Super Hornet because it is quite a versatile plane.
I got to tell you my favorite aircraft, the A-10 warthog. I love the warthogs.
This morning around 4 am local time the first three took off
and when you're 300 feet away from 'em when they do it
you hear it in your shoes and feel it in your gut.
The Pentagon's influence on war coverage has also been evident
in the news media's tendency to focus on the technical sophistication
of the latest weaponry.
Should they have used more? Should they have used the MOAB? The Mother Of All Bombs?
A few daisycutters and let's not just stop at a couple of cruise missiles.
Newest, biggest, baddest US bomb.
We'll pound them with 2,000 pound bombs and then go in.
- 2,000 pound bombs in urban areas? - Oh, sure.
The plane I'm holding in my hand here, the F117 Stealth Fighter,
was used in these attacks.
How do you steer this thing? I mean you have a stick, is that right?
Sure, both of us have a matching center stick with left throttles.
Every war we have US news media that have praised the latest in
state of the art killing technology from the present moment to the war in Vietnam.
B-57's, the British call them Canberra jets.
We're using them very effectively in this war in Vietnam
to dive bomb the VietCong in these jungles beyond Danang here.
Colonel, what's our mission we're about to embark on?
Well our mission today sir is to report down to the site of the ambush
70 miles south of here and attempt to kill the VC.
The colonel has just advised me that that is the target area right over there.
1-2-3-4 we've dropped the bombs and now a tremendous g-load as we pull out of that dive.
I know something of what those astronauts must go through.
Well, Colonel, that's a great way to go to war.
And there's a kind of idolatry there.
Some might see it as the worship of the gods of metal.
That's the JDAM.
It's a 2,000 pound bomb that is deadly accurate
and that is the thing that has allowed us in Afghanistan
and will allow us in this next conflict to be terribly accurate,
terribly precise and terribly destructive.
In fact, even as US military technology has become increasingly sophisticated
with the development of so-called smart bombs
and other forms of precision-guided weaponry,
civilian casualties now greatly outnumber military deaths.
A grim toll that has steadily increased since World War I.
This is the beginning of the Shock and Awe campaign, according to one official.
This is going to be the entire nine yards.
It was a breathtaking display of firepower.
There's kind of an acculturated callousness
towards what happens at the other end of US weapons.
Behind the flight deck the weapons officer who goes by the call sign "Oasis"
will never see the ground or the target for that matter.
The airfield is simply a fuzzy image on his radar.
And this is another very insidious aspect of war propaganda.
There's a bias involved where because the United States has access to
high tech military weaponry that somehow to slaughter people from 30,000ft in the air
or a thousand feet in the air from high tech machinery is somehow moral
whereas strapping on a suicide belt and
blowing people up is seen as the exact opposite.
The targeting capabilities and the care that goes into targeting
to see that the precise targets are struck and that other targets are not struck
is as impressive as anything anyone could see.
The care that goes into it, the humanity that goes into it.
To see that military targets are destroyed to be sure
but that it's done in a way and in a manner and in a direction and with a weapon
that is appropriate to that very particularized target.
The weapons that are being used today have a
degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of.
Within this war-friendly news frame
the Defense Department has also been successful in shaping actual war reporting.
Its influence reached new levels with the
embedding of journalists during the war in Iraq.
The Pentagon tightly controlled the media during the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
limiting where reporters could go and often restricting access
to small groups of pool reporters.
This time the Pentagon is doing an about face
after running more than 230 journalists through media boot camps,
the Pentagon is inviting more than 500 media representatives
to accompany US combat units to war.
Despite being widely praised as a new form of realism in war coverage,
the strategy of embedding reporters has raised new questions about the ability of
war reporters to convey balanced information to the American people.
Rather than being kept far away they were embraced
and smothered and participated in the process of being smothered.
They were brought a long, hundreds and hundreds of them,
with the Marines, with the Navy, with the Army.
They became, in a sense, part of the invading apparatus.
You didn't have embedded reporters with people who were being bombed.
You only had embedded reporters with the bombers.
Last night a tremendous light show here, just a tremendous light show.
And it was through the eyes of the invaders that so much of the reporting was done.
It was a gradual process of getting to know and trust each other
and for them trusting me was knowing I would not blow their objective
and get us all shelled with artillery.
People who were correspondents for the major US TV networks would express in no
uncertain terms that they had been bonding very closely with the US soldiers.
We have a number of correspondents embed with our troops across the region.
Very deeply embedded in a personal way with the marines that he is traveling with.
And you had correspondents saying that you know,
I would do virtually anything for them. They would do anything for me.
There's all this camaraderie.
We had guys around us with guns
and they were intent on keeping us alive because they said,
you guys are making us stars back home so we need to protect you.
That's very nice except it has nothing to do with independent journalism
which we never need more than in times of war.
It was a very shrewd effort by the Pentagon to say,
you want access, here's plenty of access.
I doubt that in a conflict of this type there's ever been
the degree of free press coverage as you are witnessing in this instance.
And the embedding process was actually a new wrinkle
in an old game which was and is propaganda for war.
Praise for the embedding process as a step forward in balanced war reporting
has often invoked comparisons to media coverage of the Vietnam War.
A myth has kind of grown up after the Vietnam War
that their reporting was very tough,
that Americans saw on their television sets the brutality of the war as it unfolded.
And people often hark back to that as a standard
that should now be rediscovered or emulated.
This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.
Yes, there was exceptional reporting, but it was the exception.
And so you had the Zippo lighters being used by the GI's burning down the huts
of a village that Morley Safer on CBS reported.
Well people mentioned that actually because it was unusual.
And in point of fact very little a bout the tremendous violence in that war
was conveyed through the television set,
especially when the US government is responsible for the human suffering.
That is in a way the most taboo to show in detail,
in graphic human detail what's involved when
bombs, missiles, mortars paid for by US taxpayers
do what their designed to do which is to kill and to maim.
I know that this is a great concern. I think it's part of the Vietnam syndrome.
The Vietnam Syndrome that President Reagan mentioned
was a reference to America's attempt to forget its most unpopular war.
This will not be another Vietnam.
Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world
and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back.
Like President Reagan before him, George H.W. Bush explicitly set out
during the first Gulf War to rid the national psyche of the so-called Vietnam Syndrome,
the common belief after the bloody and protracted
conflict in Vietnam that the American public
no longer had the stomach for war unless guaranteed swift, easy and decisive victory.
Precision weapons and the strategic use of air power
helped make the Gulf War an enormous operational victory for the Pentagon,
helping it move past the legacy of Vietnam.
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
The idea is that supposedly the public is not willing to back
strong military action because people have become too skittish about US casualties.
In fact if you look at the actual course of public opinion
there's been a real willingness to support wars without exception at the beginning.
Public support for the WWII never fell below 77% according to opinion polls.
But during the Vietnam War, public support fell to about 30%
and within a couple of years of the US occupation of Iraq
public support was down to almost 30% among the US population.
So what's the difference?
In one case, WWII, the US public never felt that
the war was fundamentally based on deception.
But if it emerges that the war can't be won quickly
and that the war was based on deceptions
then people have turned against the war.
So first the public has to be sold on the need to attack.
Then, after the war is underway,
withdrawal needs to be put forward as an unacceptable option.
Withdrawal of all American forces from Vietnam would be a disaster.
Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Vietnam would bring an end to conflict.
We're not leaving so long as I'm the President. That would be a huge mistake.
Our allies would lose confidence in America.
To yield to force in Vietnam would weaken that confidence.
Any sign that says we're going to leave before the job is done
simply emboldens terrorists.
A retreat of the United States from Vietnam would be a communist victory,
a victory of massive proportions and would lead to World War III.
If this little nation goes down the drain and can't maintain their independence
ask yourself what's going to happen to all the other little nations.
It would not bring peace. It would bring more war.
And many propaganda lines become stock and trade of those
who started the war in the first place.
The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman
has become the party of cut and run.
The American people will not stand for surrender.
Cowards cut and run.
They're advocating a policy called cut and run.
That party's old pattern of cutting and running.
If we high-tailed it and cut and run.
We won't cut and run.
Cut and run.
We will not cut and run.
Cut and run.
Cut and run, cut and run, how do you respond?
We will stay the course.
We must stay the course.
We stay the course.
We will stay the course.
And we're not going to cut and run
if I'm in the oval office.
All a president has to do is start a war and these arguments kick in.
You can't stop them so it's a real incentive to lie, to deceive, to manipulate
sufficiently to get the war started
and then they've got a long way to go without any sort of
substantive challenge that says "hey, this war has to end."
Then appealing for public support for his peace policy
Mr. Nixon said the enemy cannot defeat or humiliate the United States.
Only Americans, he said, can do that.
The peacemakers are out there on the field.
The soldier and the statesman need and welcome the sincere
and the responsible assistance of concerned Americans.
But they need reason much more than they need emotion.
They must have a practical solution
and not a concoction of wishful thinking and false hopes
however well-intentioned and well-meaning they may be.
It must be a solution that does not call for surrender or for cutting and running now.
Those fantasies hold the nightmare of WWII and a much larger war tomorrow.
During the Vietnam War public opinion polls were showing after a few years
into the early 1970's that a majority of Americans felt the war was wrong,
even immoral and yet the war continued because the momentum was there.
Vice President Agnew's target tonight, as he put it, was the professional pessimist.
Most of those, the Vice President explained at a rally for California Republicans,
are Democrats, and it was all the kind of rhetoric
Republican crowds have been enjoying on this tour.
In the United States today
we have more than our share of the nattering naybobs of negativism.
The same has been the case in terms of the occupation of Iraq.
The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory
or their backbone but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history.
And that's an insidious process
because often those who oppose a war are simply discounted.
Congressman John Murtha, the first Vietnam Vet to serve in Congress,
a man awarded a bronze star and two purple hearts,
choking back tears as he talked about his change of heart.
It's time to bring them home.
They've done everything they can do.
The military has done everything they can do.
This war has been so mishandled, from the very start.
Not only was the intelligence bad, the way they disbanded the troops,
there's all kinds of mistakes that've been made.
They don't deserve to continue to suffer.
They're the targets.
As an original supporter of the war and somebody known as a hawk,
pro-military inside the Congress,
John Murtha, despite his credentials, he was not taken terribly seriously.
This guy has long passed the day when he had anything but the foggiest awareness
of what the heck is going on in the world and that sound byte is naiveté writ-large.
And the man is an absolute fountain of such talk.
His recommendations to pull out US troops, discounted by pundits.
Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha once again sounding like the grim reaper
when it comes to the war on terror.
Murtha's running a psyop against his own people and against his own military.
As a veteran, I consider it my duty to defend those who defend America
against repeated public attacks by a politician who cares nothing more than
political and personal gain than the welfare of our fellow Americans on the battlefield.
And yet you looked at the polls and you found that a large amount
of Americans totally were in his corner on this.
I go by Arlington cemetery everyday
and the Vice President, he criticizes Democrats. Let me tell you.
Those gravestones don't say Democrat or Republican. They say Americans.
And almost any analysis of public opinion data laid side-by-side
with what news media are or are not advocating in terms of editorials
will show that the media establishment is way behind the grassroots.
In February of 1968, the Boston Globe did a survey
of 39 different major US daily newspapers.
The Globe could not find a single paper that had editorialized
for withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam.
And even when calls for withdrawal have eventually become too loud to ignore,
officials have strategies for ending war that have the effect of prolonging it.
In some cases, as with the Nixon administration's strategy of Vietnamization,
actually escalating war in the name of ending it.
In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam.
In this administration we are Vietnamizing the search for peace.
It's the idea that
the war has become un popular in the US so let's pull out some US troops
and have the military burden fall on the allies inside that country.
White House officials say it is obvious that the South Vietnamese
are going to have to hack it on their own.
The model is to use air power while pulling out US troops
and training Vietnamese to kill other Vietnamese people.
And several decades later, in effect that is a goal of George W. Bush's administration.
Our strategy can be summed up this way.
As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.
The rhetoric about shifting the burden of fighting the insurgency
onto the shoulders of Iraqi people themselves is very enticing
for a president because it's a way of saying to people in the United States,
hey, we're going to be out of there, it's just a matter of time.
There isn't a person at this table who agrees with you
that we're in a quagmire and that there's no end in sight.
The media and political focus on the word quagmire
is a good example of how an issue can be framed very narrowly.
The criticism would be that you're in a situation from which
there's no good way to extricate yourself.
Then the word clearly would not be a good one.
Talking about a quagmire seems to be a positive way of fomenting debate
because then we can argue about whether the war is actually working out well.
We are now in a seemingly intractable quagmire.
That terrible word quagmire.
This could be or seems to be a kind of quagmire.
Quagmire is really a false sort of a critique because it says really the
problem here is what the war is doing to the United States. Are we able to win?
Are we winning in Iraq?
Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?
I can't tell who's winning and who's losing.
Do you believe that we are currently winning in Iraq?
We are not winning but we are not losing.
We are losing.
We're winning it.
You're winning this war?
I couldn't tell you.
And a big problem with the media focus is that it sees the war
through the eyes of the Americans, through the eyes of the occupiers
rather than those who are bearing the brunt of the war in human terms.
We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders
both in Vietnam and Washington
to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.
In early 1968, Walter Cronkite told CBS viewers that the war couldn't be won.
It seems now more certain than ever
that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.
And that was instantly, and through time even more so,
heralded as "the tide has turned,"
as Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have said when he saw Cronkite give that report,
"I've lost middle America,"
and it was presented as not only a turning point quite often
but also as sort of a moral statement by the journalistic establishment.
Well I would say yes and no.
It was an acknowledgement that the US, contrary to official Washington claims,
was not winning the war in Vietnam and could not win.
But it was not a statement that the war was wrong.
A problem there is that if the critique says this war is bad
because it's not winnable then the response is,
oh yeah, we'll show you it can be winnable, or the next war will be winnable.
So that critique doesn't challenge the prerogatives of
military expansion or aggression, if you will, or empire.
And a deeper critique says, whether you can win or not, either way,
empire enforced at the point not of a bayonet but of the cruise missile
that's not acceptable.
Over the last five decades we have witnessed a wave of US military interventions,
a series of bombings, invasions, and long-term occupations.
Undertaken we have been told, with the most noble of intentions.
And paid for with the lives of young Americans and countless others around the world.
What has occurred with one war after another is still with us.
These dynamics are in play in terms of the US occupation of Iraq,
looking at other countries such as Iran,
and the future will be replicated to the extent that
we fail to understand what has been done with these wars in the past.
The news media have generally bought into and promoted the notion
that it's up to the President to make foreign policy decisions.
This smart guy in the Oval Office has access to all the information,
he knows more than we do, he's the commander in chief
and the American people have no major role to play and nor should they because after all
they don't have the knowledge or capability to be responsive to the real situation.
That was certainly true during the Vietnam War as it was to be later time after time.
There were people in Congress who raised these issues and they
simply were marginalized by the news media even though in retrospect,
maybe especially because in retrospect,
they had it right and the conventional wisdom and the President were wrong.
However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint.
Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say,
let's step back for a moment, let's just pause just for a minute.
And think through the implications of our actions today
so that this does not spiral out of control.
As we act let us not become the evil that we deplore.
Thank you and I yield the balance of my time.
The gentlewoman's time has expired.
And this is a very common motif of history in the last several decades
where people who at the time were portrayed as loners, as mavericks,
as outside of the mainstream of wisdom turned out to understand the historical moment.
We've gotta back our President,
since when do we have to back our President
or should we when the President is proposing an unconstitutional act?
The best example is Wayne Morse, the senior senator from Oregon who,
beginning in 1964, was a voice in the Congressional wilderness.
Senator Morse was unusual in that he challenged the very prerogative
of the US government to go to war against Vietnam.
He said it's up to the American people to formulate foreign policy.
Senator, the Constitution gives to the President of the United States
the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.
Couldn't be more wrong.
You couldn't make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made.
This is the promulgation of an old fallacy
that foreign policy belongs to the President of the United States.
Then whom does it belong then Senator?
It belongs to the American people and the Constitutional fathers made it very clear.
Where does the President fit into this in the responsibility scale?
What I'm saying is under our constitution all the President is
is the administrator of the people's foreign policy.
Those are his prerogatives and I'm pleading that
the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.
You know Senator that the American people cannot formulate and institute foreign policy.
Why you're a man of little faith in democracy if you make that kind of comment.
I have complete faith in the ability of the American people
to follow the facts if you give them, and my charge
against my government is we're not giving the American people the facts.
And that's the kind of faith in democracy that's not in fashion
among the Washington press corps or the power elite in the nation's capital
but it's a good reading of the Constitution and it's a good definition of democracy.
The independent journalist I. F. Stone said that
all governments lie and nothing they say should be believed.
Now Stone wasn't conflating all governments and he wasn't saying that governments
lie all the time, but he was saying that we should never trust that something said
by a government is automatically true
especially our own
because we have a responsibility to go beneath the surface because the human costs of war,
the consequences of militaristic policies,
what Dr. King called "the madness of militarism,"
they can't stand the light of day if most people understand
the deceptions that lead to the slaughter and the human consequences of the carnage.
If we get that into clear focus
we can change the course of events of this country.
But it's not going to be easy and it will require dedication to searching for truth.
Dr. Martin Luther King: A time comes when silence is betrayal
and that time has come for us.
Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth
men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy
especially in time of war.
And I knew that I could never again raise my voice
against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos
without having first spoken clearly to the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,
my own government.
What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them?
Just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures
in the concentration camps of Europe.
Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness.
We are met by deep but understandable mistrust.
To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words
and especially their mistrust of American intentions now.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve.
This way of settling differences is not just.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Somehow this madness must cease.
We must stop now.
I speak as one who loves America
to the leaders of our own nation.
The great initiative in this war is ours.
The initiative to stop it must be ours. Edit this page (you have permission) Edit this page (if you have permission) | Report spam Google Docs -- Web word processing, presentations and spreadsheets.