This was the slaughter known as the First World War. 16 millions died and 21 million were wounded. At the height of the carnage, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Lloyd George, had a private chat with the editor of The Guardian, C.P. Scott. If people really knew the truth, said the Prime Minister, the war would be stopped tomorrow.
But of course they don't know, and can't know. The British public were desperate for real news. More than half the nation flocked to see an official propaganda film, The Battle of the Somme. Cameras were so unusual that young troops would shout, Hello Mum, as they marched to the front. And they were heard crying for their mothers as they died on the battlefield.
This was almost never reported. These days we have 24-hour news. The soundbites never stop and the wars never stop. Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine. This film is about the war you don't see.
Drawing on my own experience as a war correspondent, it will look mainly at television, concentrating on the most popular channels. in America and Britain. The film will ask, what is the role of the media in rapacious wars like Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do many journalists beat the drums of war, regardless of the lies of governments? And how are the crimes of war reported and justified when they're our crimes?
A pioneer of modern propaganda was this man, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the term public relations. He wrote, The intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.
He was part of a secretive group called the U.S. Committee on Public Information, set up in 1917 to persuade reluctant Americans to join the war in Europe. Edward Bernays and Walter Libman go to Woodrow Wilson and say, look, man, if you're going to enter into this war, we are going to need to sell this war to the American people.
And so Wilson institutes and creates the first modern propaganda machinery. It was actually quite brilliant in its conceptualization, so that the best way to persuade people is to grab them by their emotions, by their unconscious and... instinctual urges. Let's not bother with pumping out facts. Let's scare the hell out of people.
A picture of the Statue of Liberty in tatters, crumbled into the New York Harbor with German planes flying around it. A picture of the world being gobbled up by the bloody hands of a gorilla wearing a German helmet. So, you know, it's not about facts anymore.
The facts don't matter. For Edward Bernays, public relations was like a war on people, on bending their will. He persuaded women to smoke at a time when smoking in public was not considered ladylike. He convinced a group of debutantes to parade along Fifth Avenue, holding up Lucky Strike cigarettes.
as symbols of women's liberation. To his delight, the press called these torches of freedom. What he was interested in doing was creating an association between a product, in this case, cigarettes and the desire for women's liberation. It worked in the sense that it got lots of news coverage. It worked in the sense that women started smoking publicly and in fact smoking became a symbol of the new woman, of the emancipated woman.
Here go there, you know you held my heart aglow, between your fingertips. Iraq, March the 20th, 2003. The creation of illusions and the selling of war had come a long way since Edward Bernays. The selling of this invasion...
...dependent on the news media to promote a series of illusions, like the link between Saddam Hussein and 9-11. The vision of the World War I poster of the Statue of Liberty in a shambles in New York Harbor is not that different from the image of the World Trade Center, a burning symbol that sort of entered into the stock footage of... people's dreams.
So immediately you have these associations between the image of the World Trade Center and Saddam Hussein and Iraq. But Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with it. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it, but that didn't matter.
Because when you start using symbols that have been separated from their meaning and have sort of taken on a life of their own, the facts don't matter anymore. This is the Pentagon, which spends almost a billion dollars a year just on advertising, recruiting, propaganda, the selling of war. There are Pentagon contracts with news organizations in terms of how to manipulate the news.
There are Pentagon officials involved in press releases that go to the media, in which intelligence is used to manipulate public opinion, which is a violation of... the charter of any intelligence organization. Then you have retired generals who serve as press spokesmen for all the networks, and it's never revealed which military industrial firms they work for. Central to this...
is the co-opting and spinning of a media regarded as the freest in the world. Showdown Iraq. If America goes to war, turn to MSNBC and the experts. If we journalists, including myself, had right from the get-go, from the opening pop, had started asking the kind of tough, digging, aggressive questions we should have been asking, and doing our reporting, rather than just being kind of stenographers, go to a briefing, have an official meeting, She'll say something, print it in the paper next day.
If we had done our job, I do think a strong argument can be made that perhaps we would not have gone to war. The attack on Iraq was sold by these two men. The blueprint for the invasion was this military doctrine called shock and awe.
Designed to paralyze the country and destroy food production, water supply and other civilian infrastructure. The effect would be similar to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. This was terrorizing people on a grand scale, and it would be covered up by deception in massive amounts. But this was not how it was reported at the time. Scores of American reporters have now joined U.S. 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.
A new word, embedding, entered media land. language in the planning for the invasion. Most of the reports that viewers saw came from within a system in which media organisations agreed to certain conditions laid down by the Ministry of Defence in London. and the Pentagon in Washington. At the time that our forces crossed into Iraq, we had some 700 reporters embedded throughout our military formations.
Embedding was important for that conflict for a number of reasons, one being that we knew we were going up against an enemy that was somewhat masterful at misinformation, disinformation. We have... We have a number of correspondents in bed with our troops across the region. And very deeply embedded in a personal way with the Marines that he's traveling with.
I love this expression for the Iraq War, the embedded journalists. Well, too many journalists have been in bed with the administration on a variety of issues. I would say 80 to 90 percent of what you read in a newspaper is officially inspired. If they're covering the intelligence community, for example.
and they become critical of the CIA or a major intelligence organization, they're going to lose their sources. If they become critical of the Pentagon, it's going to be very difficult to get into the Pentagon to deal with official military sources. So I think journalists like to be part of the game, part of the inside crowd, and therefore the conventional wisdom is the best wisdom. 24-hour news in particular is a system that is the most easy to manipulate. 24-hour news is a giant echo chamber.
So that's why, for example, Basra was reported as having four... 17 times before it actually fell and yet within 24 hour news when you're reporting it for the seventh time in that chain of 17 times when the city has fallen falsely the fact that it's been wrong the previous seven times just doesn't matter American armor is moving at will across whole swathes of Baghdad. This is Raghi Omar reporting for the BBC from Baghdad.
He describes the arrival of the Americans as a liberation. welcoming them, holding up V signs. This is an image taking place across the whole of the Iraqi capital today. But it was not happening across the rest of Iraq.
This was another illusion. The toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein was seized upon by the invading force as a target of opportunity. What was not news was a US Army investigation describing how they exploited what they called a media circus. There are almost as many reporters as Iraqis, says the report.
It was an American PSYOPs officer who ordered the statue brought down. The resulting TV pictures gave no sense of the bloody conquest of Iraq that was already well underway. You know, I didn't really do my job properly. I think I'd hold my hand up and say that one didn't press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough.
As you described the arrival of the Americans, you didn't tell us the story of how that whole statue was itself manipulated. Why not? The entire live cameras of the world's press were, on the balcony of the Palestine Hotel. And that was really the only event that they saw about Iraqis coming out.
So it was a sort of made for TV moment. And the most telling moment The moment in that whole day was when an American soldier climbed up a crane and put the American flag over the statue's face. Because in fact that was a true iconic moment of what had happened, that America had taken ownership of Iran. In Britain, Blair and Bush's invasion was applauded as a vindication of them and their strategy.
He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and that in the end the Iraqis would be... and on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right, and it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger Prime Minister as a result. It is absolutely, without a doubt, a vindication of the strategy.
It was a vindication for him. Those who said... Should they, you know, use a Moab, the mother of all bombs, and a few daisy cutters, and, you know, let's not just stop at a couple of cruise missiles. I've fallen almost in love with the F-18 Super Hornet because it's quite a versatile plane.
I gotta tell you, my favorite aircraft, the A-10 Warthog, I love the Warthogs. The war we don't see in Iraq is largely the massive toll on civilians in Iraq, where daily, even now, people are being killed and wounded because of this occupation. Seeing what I see, contrasting that with what has been reported by most of the mainstream, it's like two completely different worlds.
In 2004, American Marines twice assaulted the city of Fallujah, the second time with British forces. A nightmare unfolded. The Americans made the city a free-fire zone.
The UN reported that 70% of the houses were destroyed, and those standing were riddled with bullets. Thousands of civilians were killed. Little of this was shown on the majority TV networks in Britain and America.
That the Americans met courageous resistance was not news at all. Viewers did not get a sense of the sheer scale of the suffering of ordinary people. This remarkable film from inside Fallujah was made by an American, Mark Manning, with Rana al-Alioubi, an Iraqi. It has never been shown on television.
In the wars of today, it's often daring, independent filmmakers like these who give the victims a voice. We stood here, and they beat us from here. From this door?
Yes, from this door. I walked, I walked, I walked, and then someone came and took us from here. I was all bruised. All bruised?
All bruised, I broke my leg. You saw it, it was bleeding. The blood was flowing from my leg.
One of them is standing here, and the other one is standing here. He is a terrorist. He is a terrorist.
He is a terrorist. He is a terrorist. American journalist Dar Jamal also entered Fallujah independently and revealed that the Americans had used white phosphorus and attacked civilians. His eyewitness dispatches and photographs contradicted the version many people saw and read, but were not published in the mainstream media.
I have photos of trenches being dug and I watched them burying people there and put little makeshift gravestones writing anything to try to identify the people. And I walked the rows of these stones after the April siege with one of my interpreters while she read. An old man in tracksuit with a key in his hand, mother and two children, these were the identifying markers and these are clearly civilians.
What does embedding do to journalists? An important distinction between embedded journalists and independent journalists is that when you choose to embed, you're giving the military the full power to control where you go, how you get there, what you see, and when you see it, and in a lot of instances, even how you're going to report that. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to evacuate the city.
Refugees in their own land. They were given nowhere to go. Many are still unable to return.
How can the government accept this? They are calling the Mujahideen terrorists, and they are not your brothers. They are not talking about the infidels who came and took Iraq.
Why is this happening? Why? God doesn't accept it. Evidence that the invaders had terrorized civilians was provided by Al Jazeera and other Arab TV networks, whose fearless, unembedded reporters and cameras were able to track the crews became a threat to military propaganda, they gave voice to people who refused to be betrayed simply as victims.
I happen to be, I think, the only journalist in the world that has seen the bombing of Al Jazeera Arabic's bureaus in both Kabul in 2001 and in Baghdad in 2003. The case of the bombing of the Al Jazeera office in Kabul was, without doubt and categorically, a direct targeting of those journalists to shut them up. possibly kill them. Al Jazeera had informed Washington.
Every news organization provides western military commanders with exact coordinates of where their journalists hide. But the point about the bombing of the Al Jazeera... Arabic office in Kabul, was that they were given a warning to get out.
So that was a clear targeting of a journalistic organisation and personnel to get them off the air. Journalists who refuse to go along with the military are often those who report the real news. In August 1945, a public relations spectacle was staged on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, in which General Douglas MacArthur ostentatiously took the surrender of the Japanese.
The embedded media were told to attend. Reporters of many countries record this historic moment. An Australian reporter, Wilfred Burchard of the London Daily Express, refused and set out on a perilous journey for the ruins of Hiroshima.
The official truth of the atomic bombing was presented in this New York Times report, which claimed that radiation sickness did not exist. The reporter who wrote the story was later revealed to have been secretly on the payroll of the U.S. War Department.
Burchard's historic scoop had exposed the lie. Because, he reported, an atomic plague. I interviewed Wilfred Burchard in 1983, shortly before he died.
It was, I think as I described it, it was like a city, not a bomb city, it was like a city which steamrollers were going to flatten everything. out of existence. What I was seeing there, this feeling sort of grew into me as I walked around and I looked at people, here this is the last minute, what happened in the last minute of World War II, but it would be the fate of cities all over the world.
in the first hours of World War III. What happened to you personally in Japan after that was published? I went back to Tokyo by train and arrived just as there was a press conference being held to deny my story, because the official line was that there was no such thing as atomic radiation. And the denial of that story has gone on for decades. It's still going on.
The media consensus was that the atomic bombs had brought the war to an end, but official files told another story. A nuclear race had begun and the Cold War followed. Based on the propaganda of fear, it was a war we never saw but was always threatening.
And we never knew how close America came to using nuclear weapons again. What follows is a secret conversation in 1972 between President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger Thinking big was what the Bush administration did in February 2003. This is US Secretary of State Colin Powell of the United Nations promoting the invasion of Iraq with an extraordinary theme. theater of the absurd. Iraq declared 8,500 liters of anthrax, but UNSCOM estimates that Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 liters. Nothing.
of what he claimed was true. All these pictures were meaningless. 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.
This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today. Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today was devastating i mean and overwhelming overwhelming abundance of the evidence point after point after point with he just flooded the terrain with with with data did Colin Powell closed 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.
Colin Powell's incredible performance was never seriously challenged in the American broadcast media, of which Rupert Murdoch's Fox television is the biggest network. Like the rest of the Murdoch empire, it... back the invasion.
We expect every American to support our military and if they can't do that to shut up. How do you steer this thing? I mean there's no I mean you have a stick is that right? But the cartoon journalism of Fox can often overshadow the fact that the respectable media has played a critical part in promoting war. Like Fox the celebrated New York Times published the false claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the paper apologized to its readers one year later.
In Britain, The Observer, another respected liberal newspaper, published the same false claims. David, you've written about your articles in The Observer in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. that you feel, and I quote you, nauseated, angry and ashamed about what you wrote. What did you mean exactly?
It's now, and has been for a number of years, It's very painfully apparent that the facts that I believed to be true in those articles were not true. They were a pack of lies fed to me by a fairly sophisticated disinformation campaign. But didn't it... occur to you that these people were professional liars? I overcame what should have been stronger doubts.
I can make no excuses. I should have been more skeptical. one of your articles by expressing almost a little editorial at the end, which you wrote that for the West, Iraq was, and I quote, an ideal place to establish a bridgehead.
There are occasions in history, you wrote, when the use of force is both right and sensible. This is one of them. I mean, in essence, you were advocating an attack on a defenceless country. That's quite something, isn't it? What has happened, the enormity of what has happened in it.
in Iraq is far bigger than, you know, my own embarrassment, my own feelings. And what happened was a crime. It was a crime on a very large scale.
Does that make a journalist's accomplices? Yeah, broadly. Unwitting, perhaps, but yes.
This CBS News special report is part of our continuing coverage of America at War. Here is Dan Rather. For 24 years, the most famous news anchor... anchor on American television was Dan Rather. Your own career is remarkable for many things, but one of them in that you have stood up to power.
Your questioning of Nixon, which I remember. back in 74 and also your interview over Iran gate with Bush senior but then later on you appeared on the famously on the David Letterman show which I happen to see and you you you said George Bush is the president he makes the decisions and you know as just one American wherever he wants wants me to line up, just tell me where and he'll make the call. Why did you say that?
This was in the almost immediate wake of 9-11 and that's the way I genuinely felt. I was responding as an American citizen in a personal way and I have said that whether those of us in journalism want to admit it or not, then at least in some small way, fear is present in every newsroom in the country. A fear of losing your job, a fear of the institution, the company you work for going out of business, the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise, that you will have with you to your grave and beyond, the fear that there's so much at stake for the country that by doing what you deeply feel is your job will somehow be in variance.
All of these things go into the mix, but it's very important for... from him say, because I firmly believe it, I'm not the vice president in charge of excuses. That we shouldn't have excuses.
What we should do is take a really good look at that period and learn from it. And, you know, suck up our courage. Charles Hanley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting, was in Iraq in January of 2003, and he went to all the sites that had been named by Bush officials as suspicious sites, and he was held to wait there.
in Fallujah. He went to every site that had been named by George Bush, Cheney, Rice, Colin Powell, and he found that in every case, they were still sealed since 1991 when they had been sealed by UN inspectors. He filed a report on January 18th. It went to every major newsroom in the United States because it's the AP, which goes to every major newsroom in the United States. It got no pickup.
It didn't fit the script. It didn't fit. fit the script. It got virtually no pickup.
It didn't fit the script. We were going to war no matter what. I think that if good media coverage, good journalism that tells truth to power can make a huge, huge difference.
So do I think that we would have gone to war if the media had done their job and had challenged not just the lies about weapons of mass destruction, but the lies about how Saddam kicked the inspectors out in 1998 and the whole litany of propaganda? that led up to March 20th, 2003, the launch of the war, I think if the media had been challenging that, I think we would not have gone to war. Jeremy Paxman said last year he and the rest of the media had been hoodwinked in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Is that something that you would agree with? Well, what I think I would say about that is that clearly we did not realise until much later in the day that the weapons of mass destruction were not there. And of course there was the so-called dodgy dossier as well. So there is quite a body of evidence to build up to suggest that the media certainly were taken in by the claims that were coming from government at that point, yes. Why didn't the media get it?
Why didn't the BBC get it? I think that we didn't get it partly because of lack of access. If you want to find out what's happening...
then you really need to go there and do some first-hand reporting, which wasn't possible in the run-up to the war in Iraq. But the crucial facts were available. The Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, gave me this interview four years before the invasion.
In 1991, Iraq had significant capability in the area of chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons production capability, and long-range ballistic missile manufacturing capability. By 1998... the chemical weapons infrastructure had been completely dismantled or destroyed by UNSCOM or by Iraq in compliance with UNSCOM's mandate.
The biological weapons program had been declared in its totality late in the game. but it was gone. All the major facilities eliminated. The nuclear weapons program, again, completely eliminated. The long-range ballistic missile program, completely eliminated.
All that was left was the research and development and manufacturing capability for missiles with a range less than 150 kilometers, a permitted activity. Everything that we set out to destroy in 1991, the physical infrastructure had been eliminated. So if I had to quantify Iraq's physics... threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction, the real threat is zero, none. The former chief weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, was saying as early as 1998 that Saddam Hussein was completely disarmed.
Scott Ritter, I think, appeared in 2003 twice and once at three in the morning on BBC 24 News. He was a vital expert witness. and there were others.
Well, I don't know why Scott Ritter didn't appear more, but he clearly did appear at times. That's the question for the BBC. Why weren't those who were witnesses...
Why weren't those voices heard? Yes. Well, because there were also other voices that we were putting on the air, Unskam, Mohamed Al-Baradei, Hans Blix.
So we were actually listening to those voices. But, yeah, I think you've got a good point. You know, why didn't... It's a question that we asked ourselves afterwards. Why was it that we didn't discover this first, didn't discover the state of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction?
I think what critics of that would say is that the broadcasters, notably the BBC, echoed or amplified the lies told in the run-up to the invasion, rather than investigating itself. What the BBC, though, have a duty to do is to report what governments and their representatives are saying, which we, of course, did. We were just reporting quite legitimately the claims that people at the time were making.
They weren't legitimate claims, though. They were in the mouths of legitimate leaders, though, and therefore we had a duty to report that. But those leaders, both of them, you mentioned, Blair and Bush, have long been discredited.
I mean, isn't it the BBC's role, as well as reporting what politicians say, to hold power to account? Of course it is. It's the BBC's duty to scrutinise what it is that people say. We're not there to accuse... accuse them of lying though, because that's a judgement.
No, no, no, that's not being suggested that you make a judgement. The point is that it appears now that those important journalistic challenges were never made. It's not up to me to make a judgement. We're there to report what their claims are and hold them up to scrutiny and investigate.
In August 2002 ITV reported a warning by Vice President Cheney that Iraq would soon have a nuclear weapon and that was nonsense. But it was presented uncritically as news. say that that contributed to the invasion that happened the following March?
Well it might have done but with respect not our fault. I mean I don't believe that you're suggesting are you that we should completely dismiss the words of arguably the second most powerful man in the Western world. We reported it.
We didn't necessarily agree with it. We reported it and allowed our viewers to make up their minds as to whether this was a man telling the truth or not. But that's not fair on viewers, is it? Because they may not know what we as journalists know or ought to know, that this was an extremely dodgy politician who is making extraordinary claims.
If we knew it, we should have said so. If we didn't know it, we can't. And that applies across everything.
But you're absolutely right in one regard. We shouldn't take things at face value. We should do our best to investigate.
And when we do know, we should tell our viewers. Of course we should. That's part of the process of being a journalistically based organisation. I mean, I was thinking of Blair's many statements.
One, on the 29th of January 2003, ITV News reported Blair as saying, we do know of links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. These links, as you know, didn't exist. I mean, we're getting into the realms of...
of sort of semantics now, but... Well, they're very important semantics, aren't they? He used the word links between the two.
Your quotation, not mine. Well, that was the quotation from ITV News. Yeah, from Tony Blair. Links.
Now, links can mean a thousand things. It doesn't necessarily mean a bond of support. There were no links.
Well, I'm sitting here across you. You're telling me that. I would say to you, well, show me that there were no links.
Show me that they'd never... Even those claiming links said there were no links. There have never been any communications of any kind between those two organisations.
It's impossible to do that. And he chose his words carefully. Well, they're not careful. We do know of links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. But the word links could mean a thousand things.
It's the point I'm saying here. And you're not suggesting, I'm sure, that we shouldn't have reported what the Prime Minister was saying. You were talking about semantics a little while ago. Well, I find it virtually impossible to believe that Britain could have got away with the invasion of Iraq if the media had been doing its job.
When Blair was standing up and saying our policy in the region was to bolster the forces of democracy, I mean, really, the proper reaction to that would have been to burst out laughing. There's simply no history of that at all. Britain has been on the side of authoritarian, repressive regimes. They are our allies, the Omanis, the Saudis, the Egyptians. They are our allies, not the more democratic, more liberal forces in the region.
And I think that if journalists had even had a slight interest in looking at the history and in looking at what the government was actually saying at the time or what the evidence was at the time, they would have reported things in such a manner that the government just would not have been able to have got away with what they did. Good morning Vietnam! Welcome to the Dimebuster!
This was the Vietnam War which I reported. A new military jargon, collateral damage, was designed for the media and to cover up the scale of the industrial killing of up to 3 million people in the world. and the terror of indiscriminate bombing, often known as turkey shoots. The longest bombing campaign in history happened here in North Vietnam, mostly unseen from outside.
This is a photograph of the town of Ham Long in the north. Not a building remained, only bomb craters. Pictures like this were seldom published. Vietnam was the blueprint for the wars of today.
Murder and destruction replaced military tactics. Almost every man, woman and child became the enemy. The War of the Worlds Now some people are running along the dykes. Roger.
Good job. I saw you splatter one right in the back with a rocket. Roger. Got lucky again.
It's time that we recognized ours was in truth a noble cause. As in previous wars, public memory of the Vietnam War was greatly influenced by Hollywood, the deer hunter, platoon, good morning Vietnam, The Green Berets. All these films perpetuated an illusion, turning fiction into truth.
The theme was fake heroism and self-pity. The invader is victim, purged of all crime. Today a series of Iraq war movies follows the tradition.
The current Oscar winner, The Hurt Locker, is the familiar story of a psychopath high on violence in somebody else's country. suffering of its people barely exists. What I saw was a film that was a complete celebration of the lone lunatic, but who ultimately, you know, is the quintessential American hero, because lone lunatics are very big in this country. We even elect them president sometimes. This film is a film about killing, in which killing is completely incidental.
And this is a war that was orchestrated purely for profit and for oil and for ownership of other people's resources and for control of global resources. This is another war we don't see in Britain. In this video British soldiers are abusing Iraqi civilians. A public inquiry into the killing of Baha Moussa, an Iraqi hotel worker, has been told that British soldiers have tortured and killed prisoners.
Phil Shiner is the lawyer acting for more than a hundred Iraqi families. Modern democracies don't leave marks, so stealth torture. So the things that we developed, and we weren't alone, the Americans did the same, obviously, are much more subtle. Leaving someone hooded, putting someone into a war-standing position, depriving them of food and water, etc. My clients complain of every type of threat.
That your women will be brought here and raped in front of you. That, you know, death threats, you'll be transferred to Guantanamo Bay. And frankly, people should be prosecuted.
for a lot of the things that I'm talking about in criminal courts, not military courts. You can't have soldiers prosecuting other soldiers, being tried by a panel of soldiers. The court martial system, in my view, is utterly failed.
failed. That's got to go. You need the people who are complicit in it all.
You need them prosecuted. What role do you think embedding plays in this? Well, the problem with embedded journalism is all we're seeing is the point of view of the troops.
We're not seeing or hearing from the civilians who are on the wrong end of their tactics. So let's take detention. It seems clear that British forces in Iraq killed many people, maybe hundreds of civilians, when they had custody of them, and did the most extraordinary, brutal things involving sexual acts, etc. Embedded journalism is never ever going to get close to hearing the story.
of those Iraqis. This is the B-1 Lancer bomber, which costs the American taxpayer $283 million each. This is what it did on May the 4th, 2009, in Farah province, Afghanistan, following false intelligence of Taliban in a village.
Its victims were some of the poorest people on earth. Guy Smallman is an independent photojournalist and the first Westerner to arrive in the village following the bombing. The first strike happened outside the village mosque, which was the first place I was taken to. It was just a mass of craters and several bombs had fallen in that area. Then after that, the women and children were evacuated.
to a compound in the far north of the village. And again, their heat signatures were picked up by the bomber crew and a 2,000-pound bomb was dropped into the middle of them and that was where the majority of the people died. The first thing that struck me when I was going in there was the silence.
I mean, the Afghan countryside is usually a symphony of birdsong, and it was absolutely dead quiet, and the locals had done their best to collect all the bodies and the body parts, but there were still flies swarming all around the area, and there was still a very pungent smell of death, very heavy in the air. And I think the thing that... strong ...me more than anything else was the children.
It was almost as if all their energy and emotions had been drained out of them, and they would stare right through me and my translator into the middle distance. They didn't laugh, they barely spoke at all. And that... I think left the most lasting impression.
And I was given quite a grim tour of where people were buried. In a lot of cases, entire families were buried in the same grave. I think I counted just over 70 new... graves fresh graves and then one far end of the cemetery there's an enormous mass grave which is around 30 meters across and in that grave are the remains of 55 people and they had to be buried there together because they were quite literally blown into pieces and it was impossible to tell who was who so they had to bury them together in one long trench and then there was the difference about the casualties you know the local people insisted that over a hundred 140 civilians had died, and NATO said there was 25. So the deaths of 147 people, including 93 children, became a dispute over... It became a dispute over a body count and nothing more.
Now, I know for a fact that the pictures taken by the Afghan radio journalists were out there. I know that stringers on the ground were filing those pictures. I mean, a lot of those pictures were very graphic, but... but a lot of them did show people digging bodies out of the rubble.
It did show those bodies lined up for burial. Why do you think British audiences and other Western audiences have no real sense of an atrocity of this scale? I think people become desensitised.
to it. When they're told on the news a wedding party has been attacked by accident, a compound has been bombed by accident, a farmer and his family have been killed by accident, they don't really connect with it because they don't actually get to see those bodies. The faces, the names are not known to them.
It's just a number. Whether they're Afghans or Iraqis or Lebanese civilians, they're just numbers. And it's perhaps easy to understand why British Muslims feel completely disenfranchised from our domestic news services. I think the press really conspires to play down the carnage in Iraq.
Afghanistan. This gets to what the great American writer and academic Ed Herman called worthy and unworthy victims. The Iraqis are not worthy victims, so we can play down their deaths because if we accept them, we can play down their deaths. the reality that there are more than a million dead, it's largely our fault.
And so, for instance, the U.S. press will talk about 200,000 to 400,000 dead in Somalia. Those victims are worthy victims because they were killed by people that we don't like. And in one bizarre case, which talked about the cultural peculiarities of Afghan society, because they actually got rankled when you killed their family members, their civilian family members. In another case, they argued that Afghan society was peculiar because they didn't like people breaking into their houses in the middle of the night.
And this caused them to get angry and sometimes carry out vendettas. This is the British Armed Forces Memorial in Staffordshire. It's not as well known as the Great Cenotaphs, and it holds many secrets. There are 16,000 names here. Every year since 1948, British forces have been in action somewhere in the world.
And there's space for another 15,000 names of young servicemen and women waiting to die. What's extraordinary about this memorial is its record of constant war during so-called peacetime. As if revealing the secret of Britain's enduring imperial role, what's missing is any record of the victims of these wars. The countless men, women and children kill mostly in their own countries in our name and glimpsed only now and then on the TV news.
At least a million people have died as a result of the invasion of Iraq. They are not part of our remembrance because they're not allowed in our memory. Mark Curtis is an historian who writes on British foreign policy.
His specialty is revealing long-forgotten official files. I've certainly uncovered a lot of episodes where Britain has been either involved in coups or has been involved in military interventions that have appalling impacts on people's lives that simply never get mentioned. They're never referred to in the newspapers. They never get on TV histories of Britain. They're just taken out.
basically they're deleted from from our historical memory why does the public in britain have such little idea of the sheer scale of this well a very large reason for that is that i mean if you look at every war or every coup or every regime that britain is supporting or been involved in It's usually accompanied by an increasingly sophisticated public relations operation by the government. We're told that British foreign policy is based on promoting democracy, on spreading development and promoting human rights. Well, if you read the actual government planning files, planners are saying to themselves that their policy is not based on that. It's based on the control of oil, it's based on creating an international economy that works in the interests of British corporations, and it's based on maintaining their great power status. This culture of impunity is deeply embedded within British society.
I mean, if you go back, say in the 1960s, a time when Britain was covertly supporting an Indonesian military that was killing up to a million people, where Britain was responsible for depopulating the Chagos Islands, and where Britain was arming the Nigerian government that was killing hundreds of thousands of Biafrans in the civil war in Nigeria. All of that was taking place under the Labour government in the 1960s and none of those ministers have ever been questioned and yet those decisions cost literally millions of lives. The attack on Iraq did not begin with shock and awe.
During the first Gulf War in 1991, Britain and America deliberately bombed Iraq's modern infrastructure. And when the war was over, the bombing continued. This was seldom reported.
During this period of the 1990s, the UN imposed an economic blockade led by Britain and America. Essentials like clean water and vital drugs were denied. In 1998, the United Nations Children's Fund reported the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, a direct result of the sanctions imposed by the blockade.
This is Dennis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, who resigned after refusing to administer the sanctions. In 1999, I travelled with him to Iraq. the very provisions of the Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights have been set aside.
And we are waging a warfare through the United Nations on the children and people of Iraq with incredible results. Results that you do not expect to see in a war under the Geneva Conventions. We're targeting civilians, worse, we're targeting children like Safa, who of course were not born when Iraq went into Kuwait.
I mean, what is this about? It's a monstrous situation for the United Nations, for the Western world, for all of us who are part of some democratic system, who are, in fact, responsible for the policies of our governments and the implementation of economic sanctions. Khan Ross was a senior British diplomat at the UN, responsible for imposing the embargo on Iraq.
You gave evidence on the impact of sanctions. Yes. And this is what you said.
The weight of evidence clearly indicates that sanctions cause massive human suffering among ordinary Iraqis, in particular children. We, the US and UK governments, were the primary engineers and defenders of sanctions and were well aware of this evidence at the time. But we largely ignored it or blamed all these effects on the Saddam government. Sanctions effectively denied the entire population the means to protect themselves.
...to live, unquote. That's a shocking admission. Yeah, I agree. Well, I stand by it today. Why didn't you speak out during those four and a half years?
There is a certain macho culture... in foreign policy circles that to talk about things like humanitarian suffering when you're dealing with Saddam Hussein is a bit wet. You know, that it's not what the issue's really about, that governments do security, that that's the kind of hard thing. that we're there to provide.
And I think however wrong your decisions may be, whatever damage you may do to other individuals, there is, at the end of the day, no accountability whatsoever. We had extraordinarily good resources to put together our story, to find little facts to justify their story, factoids, I began to call them. And how eagerly would journalists accept these factoids?
They had very little chance to do anything other than accept them. accept our version of events and more or less relay it unedited to the public. Government is an information machine and we would control access for journalists to us, to governments.
When I was in news department in the Foreign Office we would control access to the Foreign Secretary as a form of reward to journalists if they were critical, if we felt they were too hostile to our account of events we would not give them the goodies of trips with the Foreign Secretary around the world or exclusive interviews. interviews every now and then. We did the same in New York.
If journalists were not particularly supportive to our account, we would freeze them out. We would make life harder for them. But there is a subtle and private relationship between them, which is basically of favouritism, that certain journalists are rewarded with access for being supportive of the story. They will basically tell journalists, you carry on with that line, that kind of unjustified criticism of our government policy on X, Y or Z. we will punish you, and that is very explicit, those kinds of threats.
What happened was not an intelligence-based process, it was basically a PR process run by Number 10 to produce a document that was much more politically credible than the evidence suggested. It was a major deception, wasn't it? I think it amounts in effect to that, yes. I remember before I was sent to New York in late 1997, I did the round of departments in London saying to them, OK, I'm going to New York, I'm going to be doing Iraq, what do I need to know?
And I went to see non-proliferation department in the Foreign Office and I was expecting a briefing on the vast piles of weapons that we still thought Iraq possessed. And the desk officer sort of looked at me slightly sheepishly and said, well, actually, we don't think there's anything. We don't think there's anything in Iraq. I said, that's extraordinary. I mean, I thought we had sanctions because we thought Iraq had large amounts of weapons.
He said, no, no, the justices are not going to be able to do anything. The justification for sanctions is basically that we have unanswered questions about how those stocks were destroyed in the past. But what I feel, I mean I feel very guilty about it, I feel very ashamed about it, I feel ashamed about it sitting and talking to you. You know, I feel actual shame running through my body when I talk to you about it. Should journalists feel the same?
Those who pass on the deception? Absolutely. We should all be accountable to each other.
I mean, I think that's the only way to have a civilized society, is some kind of transparency with each other and accountability and people holding people morally accountable for what they do, and that applies to journalists as much as it applies to anybody. These were to be the borders of Israel and Palestine when Israel was founded in 1948, and this is what's left of Palestine today, fragmented and dislocated by a military occupation that defies international law and is backed by one of the world's most sophisticated propaganda machines. This is Palestinian cameraman Imad Ganeen being shot repeatedly by Israeli soldiers. The killing of non-Western journalists is rarely news.
Imad Ganeen was 21 and lost both his legs. Ten journalists have been killed by Israeli forces since 1992, and many more have been wounded. The pioneering Glasgow University media group has just published its latest article.
...later study on the media reporting of Israel and Palestine. I think what it comes down to is a basic knowledge that journalists have, which is quite simply that if they criticise Israel, then it's potentially trouble. If they criticise the Palestinians, then it's... there is much less of a problem.
So they might use a word like occupation, but they won't say military occupation, they won't say military rule, they won't explain in detail what it means. They certainly wouldn't do it routinely, to explain in detail what it means to be living under military rule and why the Palestinians, from their point of view, are trying to overthrow that military rule, trying to throw off that control. Professor Greg Farlow heads the Glasgow unit.
Looking at his research, and it comes through very clear, it's a certain state of fear exists on who the Israelis will complain to. They say in the research, people... producers worried will they complain at director general level or will they just simply ring the newsroom but the point is this sense of intimidation almost welcome to the world of a correspondent who has to deal with this pressure on a daily basis yes where i would take issue with you is the fear factor because actually no correspondent that i have come across who is used to working in jerusalem particularly or dealing with this stuff fears it at all i was thinking of people here a television center we don't fear it either we take a lot of it but we don't fear it after we did the first book i gave a number of talks to two journalists in Britain to BBC journalists and I spent time with people who were senior producers on television news and one of them said to me in the context of quite a heated discussion that was going on with other journalists he said listen he said we wait in fear that was his exact words we wait in fear for the telephone call from the Israelis said the only issue we face then is how high up it's come from them has it come from a monitoring group has it come from the Israeli embassy And then how high has it gone up our organisation?
Is it the duty editor? Has it gone above that? Is it the director general?
He said, I have had journalists on the phone to me minutes before we've gone on a major news programme saying, what can I say? Which words can I use? Is it all right if I say this?
On May 31, 2010, Israeli forces attacked an aid flotilla headed for Gaza in international waters. They killed nine people. In the days that followed, Israeli propaganda set out to manipulate the news agenda. They were clubbed, they were beaten, stabbed, there was even a report of gunfire.
Don't you think it's fair to... to look at some coverage and say there's a tone, the tone was, of course, you didn't sit down and say, we're going to put the Israeli point of view, but the tone throughout was that... Israel had a problem, not the people who were shot in the back of the head, but that Israel had a problem.
I think there are two things here. One is that, are you saying that actually we devalued human life? Because I don't think we did.
No, I didn't say that. But I think it's legitimate to ask what the implications of this were going to be for Israel, which is what that question was attempting to do. Tonight at 10, the Israelis under pressure after the raid on ships taking aid to Gaza.
Hundreds of activists in the convoy were detained in Israel, including at least 40 British nationals. They were pushing everybody and people running around and they were hitting us with the back of their guns. The Israelis are accused of carrying out a bloody massacre, but they claim it was self-defence. Our planning for yesterday's interception was for a peaceful... Police operation.
Our sailors on the job were told you are to use minimum force and maximum restraint. The top of the main news was Mark Regev. unchallenged. Mark Regev, as you know, is the chief Israeli propagandist.
Mark Regev is a spokesman for the Israeli government. Now you can describe him as a propagandist if you like. Well what else is he?
Please don't. That's a pejorative way of putting what government spokespeople are. You know, they're entitled to express their views.
point of view and we have a duty to report it. I'm afraid that that polite view wouldn't be shared by the families of the people who were killed on the boat. I absolutely accept that and we have a duty to report that perspective as well. Who's the Palestinian equivalent of Mark Reger who appeared so often? Who's the Palestinian equivalent of Mark Reger who appeared so often?
equivalent of all those mainly female Israeli spokespeople during Operation Cast Lead who was who was their equivalent articulate in English given given a space right at the top of BBC News who is I think that's a very good point you know who are those people yes why why hasn't the BBC but that's not our job to go out and appoint the Palestinian spokesperson you say you're impartial Surely you would find somebody to be, yes, of Mr. Regev saying his say, but then his equivalent. We do, and we did. You don't, actually. You don't have an equivalent of Mark Regev.
That's just not true. Just because there isn't an equivalent of Mark Regev doesn't mean to say that we didn't allow those viewpoints which you've just expressed to be heard across the range of our output. This was ITV News on May 31st, using the same Israeli footage.
Filmed with night vision cameras, Israeli commandos drop from helicopters onto the deck of a Turkish aid ship and violent clashes erupt. The immediate aftermath of the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla in June. For one thing, the Israelis supplied doctored film, even with captions, which was...
widely used across ITV and the BBC. It was labeled but the context of this, according to the Israelis, that their people who were attacking the flotilla were actually being attacked by the people who were on the flotilla, that that Israeli perspective, propaganda, dominated. Well, I don't think it dominated, but certainly the Israeli propaganda machine, as you well know, is very, very sophisticated, and in its own terms is quite successful on occasions. And yes, it is the case that sometimes media organisations fall into a trap laid for them by... It's only sophisticated because we allow them to be sophisticated.
But again, it's only when you can come to write the history of these events that you can see it with that hindsight view, when it's actually happening on a daily basis. You've got to be very careful what you do. When the story is over, and when someone has the time and brainpower left to actually write the definitive history of it, sure.
Then, if you've got things wrong, you put your hands up and you say, well, at that time, we weren't aware of that, we made a mistake, that's... That happens from time to time. People like the Palestinians can't wait until someone writes a definitive history. They depend on journalists now, don't they? You're suggesting that journalists can...
The job of journalists... is to change the world. It ain't. I've got to tell you, even someone with your massive experience should know better than that. I'm not saying that.
You're saying that. Our job is to make sure that the public who consume our news are as informed as we can make them, so that they can make their own minds up. But viewers can only make their own minds up if they're given all the available facts.
Graphic independent video was available on the internet on the night of the attack. Four months later, a United Nations investigation described the Israeli attack as displaying unnecessary and incredible violence. Six people were executed at point-blank range. The attack warranted prosecution for war crimes.
This was only reported in a 12-second item on ITV News and completely ignored on the three main BBC TV bulletins. and seen only on News 24. One of the public relations triumphs of the 21st century was the rise of Barack Obama. His campaign slogan was, Change We Can Believe In. He was a brand that offered something special, exciting. In 2008, Obama the candidate was voted marketer of the year ahead of Apple, Nike, and Coors Beer.
He made many people feel good, as if his slogan might be true. Above all, the perception of Brand Obama was that he was against war. Most of you know that I oppose this war from the start. I thought it was a tragic mistake.
But that was false. As president, Obama has not withdrawn America from Iraq and has backed US military action in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and approved a military budget of $708 billion, the biggest war spending of all time. Cynthia McKinney is a former Congresswoman and Green Party candidate for president. It's a great shame on the black political tradition in the United States to have a warmonger.
It's almost as if the black community in the United States, maybe we've lost our innocence too. Because... It would be very difficult to find a black person in the United States, just an average ordinary person who supports any of these wars, and yet these wars are being carried out in blackface. More than any other president, Obama has prosecuted truth-tellers known as whistleblowers. And this is WikiLeaks, an internet whistleblowing organization independent and stateless, it represents a landmark in journalism.
Wikileaks has released hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon documents that describe the wholesale killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan. In the information that you have revealed on Wikileaks about these so-called endless wars, what has come out of them?
Looking at the enormous quantity and diversity of these military or intelligence apparatus insider documents, what I see is a vast, sprawling estate, what we would traditionally call the military intelligence complex. or military-industrial complex, and that this sprawling industrial estate is growing, becoming more and more secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled. This is not a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top.
This is a vast movement of self-interest by thousands and thousands of players all working together and against each other. to produce an end result which is Iraq and Afghanistan and Colombia and keeping that going. You know we often deal with tax havens and people hiding assets and transferring money through offshore tax havens so I see some really quite remarkable similarities.
Guantanamo is used for laundering people to an offshore haven, which doesn't follow the rule of law. Similarly, Iraq and Afghanistan and Colombia are used to wash money out of the US tax base and back. Arms companies.
Arms companies, yeah. I mean, what you're saying is that money and money-making is at the centre of... modern war and it's almost self-perpetuating.
Yes, and it's becoming worse. What happens when WikiLeaks runs into the United Kingdom, which has some of the most draconian secrecy laws in the world, such as the Official Secrets Act? We haven't found a problem publishing UK information. I mean, when we look at the Official Secrets Act label documents, we see they state that it is an offence to retain the information and it is an offence to destroy the information. So the only possible outcome is that we have to publish the information.
Which we have done on many, many occasions. I noticed one that I had a personal interest in was one that, from the Ministry of Defence, classified document that equated terrorists with investigative journalists as threats. And Russian spies. And Russian spies. Yeah, as in fact in many sections of that report, investigative journalists are the number one threat to the sort of information security.
of the Ministry of Defence. That was a 2,000-page document on how to stop leaks from the Ministry of Defence, which we leaked. I didn't know whether to be offended or honoured.
Well, it's nice to be having an impact. Since the release of the Pentagon's war secrets, Julian Assange has been subjected to extraordinary smears and accusations originating in America and Sweden. These include threats against his life and bizarre character assassination. The media all over the world has amplified this propaganda. This secret Pentagon document states clearly that US intelligence intends to destroy trust in WikiLeaks by threatening whistleblowers with exposure and criminal prosecution, thereby discrediting truth-tellers.
How do you feel about whistleblowers as an essential part of democracy? Do you approve of whistleblowers? Well, I think, you know, this country has laws to protect whistleblowers.
And I think that there have been instances in our history where shining a light on something is important to do. Can you, as a senior official, of the United States government a guarantee that the editors of WikiLeaks, and the editor himself is not American, are not in danger that they themselves will not be subjected to the kind of hunt that we read about in the media? Well, first of all, it's not my position to give guarantees on anything. We do have an open criminal investigation. The investigation is targeted on the individual.
that have violated the trust and confidence that's been bestowed upon them by this country. But WikiLeaks is an organization run from outside the United States, and the founder of that has been told that he is at great risk from being hunted down. I don't know in what form. And neither do I, so I'm afraid I can't help you. I mean, for you to receive that volume of documentation, suggests that there must be something of a rebellion going on within the system.
Yes. I mean, it's the one hopeful thing, is in fact that there are good people in the US military, and some of those people have had enough. It's sort of another way of being a conscientious objector, and in fact, arguably a far more powerful way of objecting to the war.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks released this cockpit video from an Apache gunship in Baghdad in 2007. The gunship is firing from a distance of over a mile from its victims. This is the war you don't see. Clearly there were two cameramen there holding cameras, not arms.
These cameramen turned out to be Reuters news reporters. Kevin Phoenix. Anything since then? Just fucking, once you get on, just open up. Okay, Roger.
I see your element got about 400 Vs out along this line here. All right, firing. Let me know when you gather.
Watch out. Light them all up. Come on, fire. Hey, Roger.
Keep shooting. Bushmaster 2-6, Bushmaster 2-6, we need to move time now. Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.
A whole street covered with bodies. The reaction to that was nice. Yeah, look at those dead bastards. Nice.
2-6, Crazy Horse 1-8. This tape from me and the other people involved made nice a dirty word. So we just couldn't see something as being nice anymore when a whole street covered with carnage is nice.
Ethan McCord was one of the first soldiers to reach the scene of the killing. Here he speaks to an audience in the United States. Myself and the team of soldiers I was with began running in the direction where we heard the Apache fire. Let's shoot. Thank you.
I was not even close to prepare for the carnage that I was about to walk onto. I saw what appeared to have been three men on a corner. Got that big pile of bodies to the right on the corner. We got dismounted infantry and vehicles.
Over. It was an extreme shock to my system. They didn't look huge. Then there was the smell.
The smell was unlike anything I've smelled before. A mixture of feces, urine, blood, smoke, and something else indescribable. We have a van that's approaching and picking up the bodies.
Request permission to engage. Bookmaster 7, roger. This is bookmaster 7, roger, engage. 18, engage.
Clear. Come on! Clear.
Clear left. That guy just threw a grenade. Crying, I hear crying.
Not cries of pain, but that of a small child who had just woken up from a horrible nightmare. I saw that there was a minivan, and the cries appeared to be coming from it. Myself and another soldier, a 20-year-old private, walked up to the passenger side van and looked inside.
The private that I was with reeled back, began to vomit, and quickly ran away. What I saw when I looked in the van was a small girl about four years old on the passenger side of the bench seat. She had a severe belly wound and was covered in glass. We need to evac this child. She's got a wound in her belly.
The glass was in her hair and also in her eyes. Next to her, half on the floorboard, with his head resting on the seat, was a boy about seven years old. He wasn't moving, and from the severe wound to the right side of his head, my first thought was that he was dead. And the driver's seat was who I immediately concluded must have been these children's father by the way he was hunched over the children in a protective manner.
The whole time thinking, fuck, what the fuck, these are babies. Hey, I need to get the raft, the brass to drop rafts. I got a wounded girl, we need to take the rough to mine. No, sir, fault for bringing their kids. That's right.
See, my son was born May 31st, 2007. I had yet to see him. And I had a daughter who was barely older than this girl. The medic radioed in that the little girl needed to be evacuated because there was nothing else he can do here.
I handed the child to the medic who then ran the girl to a waiting Bradley armored vehicle. I walked back to the van. I don't know why.
I looked inside the van again. Did the boy just move? Holy shit, the boy just moved.
I grabbed the boy from the van and held him against my chest. I was screaming at this point, the boy's alive, the boy's alive. I started running to the Bradley in hopes that it wasn't leaving. At this point the boy looked up at me, then his eyes rolled back, my heart sunk.
It's okay, I have you. It's going to be okay. Don't die, don't die. I squeezed him a little bit tighter.
I put him into the Bradley as gently as I could. Can you tell Battalion that two civilian children casualties are coming back to left of my and the Bradley over? Roger, that's a negative on Evac and the two civilian kids to Rocky. They're going to have the... Now I'd be able to take him up to a local hospital over.
What the fuck are you doing, McCourt? It was my platoon leader. You need to quit worrying about these fucking kids in full security, he screamed. At the time, the only thing I could think of was, Roger that, sir.
One of the soldiers on the ground, he describes the atrocity as, and I quote, ...wrote him an everyday occurrence and he said the word from his commander was to kill, I won't use the word, everyone on the street and he replied to him, are you kidding me, women and children? He said yes. And it's a point made by many other soldiers who've come back from Afghanistan and Iraq that this kind of atrocity is not an aberration. Well, first of all, this is not an everyday occurrence.
an everyday occurrence, we would certainly know about it. These incidences are unfortunate. Every one in which there's a civilian casualty is unfortunate.
But again, it is the enemy who is deliberately trying to inflict civilian casualties and put civilians in harm. It is the NATO forces, it is the U.S. forces that are taking every precaution that they can to prosecute the war and prevent civilian casualties. General James Cartwright, who's vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he says the United States can expect to be at war, and these are his words, for as far as the eye can see.
That sounds like a permanent state of war. Our job is to be prepared to fight and win this nation's wars. And so we have to be prepared for the possibility of conflict.
conflict into the future. It's a remarkable state of affairs, isn't it? Because the United States is not, in fact, threatened by a power that could possibly overturn it, defeat it. That's impossible.
But still it goes on as if we're all drawn into, most of humanity, into a permanent state of war. For many people, that seems very difficult to justify. Well, first of all, there are some very dangerous asymmetric threats that are out there. Terrorism, obviously, one of them.
This is what we anticipate going into the future is not necessarily nation-on-nation type conflict. It is these asymmetric threats that are out there. It's the threat of...
...of weapons of mass destruction. Another asymmetric threat is the cyber threat that exists. These are all threats that transcend geographical boundaries. The United States military has to prepare for a wide range of threats that exist out there in order to protect its national interests.
Are media drums beating for another war, say a war with Iran? I wouldn't say that the media are beating the drums for war yet, although they are showing the same credulousness, the same obsequiousness towards the powerful as they did in advance of the Iraq war. I'm not sure it's to the point that they're beating the drums for war yet. But when the elites decide it's time to go, I would be surprised if they did anything but. You mentioned already Iran.
Yeah. And there is an enormous choice to be made about Iran. A more. developed more formidable more populous and certainly better armed country than Saddam's Iraq whatever was are you actually saying that we should threaten them militarily if they are determined to develop nuclear weapons I am saying that I think it is wholly unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons capability what can we do and I think we've got to be prepared to confront them military necessarily militarily if necessarily military I think there is no alternative alternative to that if they continue to develop nuclear weapons, and they need to get that message loud and clear. Does this sound familiar?
There is as much evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons as there was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as claimed by Tony Blair. We know that great falsehoods were perpetrated, and yet the individuals who perpetrated these things are still running around, you know, more or less much as before, you know, being taken seriously as commentators, as authorities on this or that. I find it astonishing.
These people should hide their heads in shame. The British elites do not want the public to know what they're doing. They don't actually even think they have a right to know what they're doing. And they know that the more information the public has, the more difficult it is for them to pursue policies that maybe are abusive of human rights or involve supporting a repressive regime.
And so there's a conscious strategy, actually. ...of having these public relations campaigns that the government regularly has whenever it resorts to an overseas military intervention to try and convince the public that they're acting for the highest of noble intentions when in fact they're not, when they're usually acting out of hard-hearted, straightforward calculation of elite interests. So the public is a threat that needs to be countered. For too many journalists, the price of their independence is their life. They include Terry Lloyd of ITN, shot dead in Iraq by American Marines.
Since the invasion of Iraq, more than 300 journalists have been killed, more than in any other war. This film is a tribute to them. That doesn't mean that we journalists have to risk our lives to tell the truth.
But we do have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else's country. That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear. however seductive and insidious it is.
For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a faraway enemy, but at you at home. It's very simple. In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth, or their blood is on us. Never believe anything until it's officially denied, said the great reporter Claude Coburn.
In other words, those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.