COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Here's Bob Herbert, disgracing the pages of the New York Times again:

The vast amount of suffering and death endured by civilians as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has, for the most part, been carefully kept out of the consciousness of the average American. I can't think of anything the Bush administration would like to talk about less. You can't put a positive spin on dead children.

Well, no it hasn't, though it's fashionable for reporters to think so. Yes, innocent people have suffered and died. But there's been no media conspiracy to hide that fact. Indeed, you can find any number of media sources and stories about that precise matter.

There was, on the other hand, a conspiracy afoot NOT to cover the horrors and abuses of Saddam's regime before the war. And CNN, by its own admission, was one of the great conspirators.

For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk....

Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.

That's right, Herbert! You guys in the press lied to us! You lied by omission. Don't say it didn't count, because you are arguing that it counts now. I guess the news media had something better to do in 2002 and 2003. Like, you know, report on Jacko.

If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).

Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed. ...

Did Saddam leave the money on the dresser when he was done using you people?

All this was true, and you kept it from us. You didn't even bother to alter the facts enough to conceal the identities of the individuals involved in the service of greater truth. No. You whored yourselves out for "access."

I can't think of anything the Bush administration would like to talk about less. You can't put a positive spin on dead children.

No. But remember, it was the Blair government who released the awful dossier on the human rights situation in Iraq before the war. Not the media. Why weren't the details of Saddam's brutality part of the public conversation before the dossier's release? Well, because the media was more interested in plying the information minister with bribes than they were in revealing the truth that they already knew.

To wit:

There is one chapter, however, that is almost worth the price of the book, a trenchant attack by John Burns of The New York Times on some in the Baghdad press corps for their failure to report the true horror of Saddam Hussein's regime before the invasion by U.S. forces.

Burns accuses unnamed correspondents of bribing Iraq officials with candlelight dinners, $600 mobile phones and "thousands of dollars" to gain access, while never mentioning the minders, the terror. "And in one case," says Burns, "a correspondent who actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories - mine included specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others." Burns adds, "He was with a major American newspaper. Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance."

Link.

Yes, but again, this omerta code of silence in the media was unbroken in public until after the war. If John Burns or other Timesmen knew that other news outlets were printing out copies of other people's stories in order to curry favor with the regime, isn't that news, too? Would you not cover it if it were Bush Administration officials doing the same thing?

Why was the truth not revealed then?

More from Bob Herbert:

There's been hardly any media interest in the unrelieved agony of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq.

Bob, what planet are you on? There's been a good deal of media interest in that. Hell, Michael Moore made a whole freakin' movie out of it. You might have heard of it! It's not that there's been a lack of media interest. It's that what media interest there's been has been utterly incompetent, blindly accepting information provided by Iraq Body Count even though it can be demostrated that 1.) It lies about its own methodology, and 2.) Lays the blame for the deaths of Shias and other Iraqis deliberately targeted by Zarqawi's terrorists at the feet, in some perversion of logic, of the United States.


But Herbert and his colleagues do not have the discernment it takes to figure that out.

The fact is, that literally dozens of major media outlets have been citing this source of information (without bothering to vet or verify a damn thing.)


I mean, does this list look like "hardly any media interest" to you?

We hear very little about the frequent instances of jittery soldiers opening fire indiscriminately, killing and wounding men, women and children who were never a threat in the first place.

Ok, Bob. HOW frequent? I mean, what the Hell do you know about it anyway? I'll guarantee you one thing: You sure as Hell don't hear about the thousands of instances in which American soldiers exercized restraint - in which they didn't fire, even though under the rules of engagement and the right to self defense they had every right to light 'em up like a Christmas tree.

This kind of restraint is the norm, Bob. The norm.

Yeah, the post I linked to describes an incident where I held my fire, and the troops I immediately controlled held their fire. But you have to realize that it was a convoy of about 40 soldiers that all held there fire at the same time.

Here's another one.

Maybe you could f***ing cover that, for a change, Bob. Because if you don't understand that, then you sure as Hell aren't equipped to understand what happens in those instances when US troops do err, and injure or maim an innocent.

By the way, Bob Herbert doesn't bother to mention who killed Marla Ruszica. He uses the passive voice to say "she was killed by a suicide bomber."

No. The passive voice is the syntactical baggage of the weenie.

Terrorists killed Marla Ruszica.

Remember that.

Splash, out

Jason