In Afghanistan, Embedded BS And A Crumbling Fourth Estate
(War • Media)
The “major news organizations” never have spent the money required to do the kind of thorough reporting on the Afghanistan War that the public, and the public’s children fighting and getting their legs blown off or dying over there, deserved.
Instead, the news orgs allowed their reporters to be “embedded,” which is to say, baby-sat, by a military that either intimidated them into sanitizing their reports or completely controlled what they saw and heard.
Then some guy with an Internet site developed a reputation for his willingness to publish government and business secrets some people would deem deserved to see daylight – without disclosing the sources of the leaks. The most recent result has been the disclosure of a huge diary of reports on the Afghan War over the past six years, direct from soldiers and intelligence officers.
Now some in Congress and the Obama administration are wringing their hands for fear the public will read this and not support the war. Because – who could have guessed it in a million years? – it turns out the current administration and the past administration have been lying to the American people about how badly this war has been going.
The disclosures, with their detailed account of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations had portrayed, landed at a crucial moment. Because of difficulties on the ground and mounting casualties in the war, the debate over the American presence in Afghanistan has begun earlier than expected. Inside the administration, more officials are privately questioning the policy.In Congress, House leaders were rushing to hold a vote on a critical war-financing bill as early as Tuesday, fearing that the disclosures could stoke Democratic opposition to the measure. A Senate panel is also set to hold a hearing on Tuesday on Mr. Obama’s choice to head the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, who would oversee military operations in Afghanistan.
Administration officials acknowledged that the documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, will make it harder for Mr. Obama as he tries to hang on to public and Congressional support until the end of the year, when he has scheduled a review of the war effort.
“We don’t know how to react,” one frustrated administration official said on Monday. “This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood.”
To those of us curious enough to seek out the truth about this war, Wikipedia’s disclosure was pretty much no surprise whatsoever. The problem is, most of the people who now hold the purse-strings to the major American news organizations apparently no longer possess such curiosity, otherwise Wikileaks would’ve been redundant.
Today we have at least one big media player (FOX) whose owner has taken the position that it should serve as the propaganda minister for the rightist political party, and a bunch of other big players whose media properties are merely small pieces of big entertainment (ABC and CBS) corporations or conglomerates with major defense-contractor holdings (NBC). Their owners’ gross interference in their news operations is legion to those who keep their eyes open. But – and this is natural and I’m not being critical – the public is too busy trying to stay alive to devote time to such behind-the-scenes malarkey, and the big media outlets themselves do a great job of covering it up.
So here we stand today, again, with an economy still torn and bleeding as far as the American working stiff is concerned, while corporations are feeling fat and profitable even amid a new round of major layoffs. People without jobs cannot spend, though, which even the fattest corporation will learn eventually – unless their products are major weapons systems, in which case, apparently, the corporate welfare goes on forever and the party never ends.
The Machiavellian Republicans have used deficit fear talk to scare timid Democrats into putting forth a stunted stimulus program that mostly went to big corporations that didn’t need and won’t spend or lend the cash, while the acknowledged champion American job-growth engine, small business, sits out on the curb trying to figure out how to start a new venture that doesn’t require any capital. Meanwhile, the Mexican drug wars long ago spilled over our borders here in Texas, and the main route from my house to Houston also is the mainline for tons of cocaine traveling from Nuevo Laredo to Houston, yet amazingly, law enforcement is only able to intercept chicken feed – a couple of pounds of coke here and a couple of pounds there.
Yet we could afford enough needed public works projects to effect a bold economic stimulus and secured our southern border with some military muscle in one fell swoop, by bringing our troops home from Afghanistan and employing them where they’re needed. We are, after all, dumping billions of dollars down the drain over there every week and, perplexingly, a Republican Congress and Democratic president always appear ready to pour in more.
The Republicans, in the pockets of the military-industrial complex, will and do howl about the responsibility of not turning our backs on those who perpetrated 9-11. But the truth is that pilotless aircraft with remote-control missiles have done more to wipe out those terrorist enemies – by far – than all the troops roaming Afghanistan in an effort to, essentially, prop up the crooked Karzai family, proven crooks and opium lords. And even our own CIA director has stated that there may be as few as 50 Al Qaeda within the entire of Afghanistan. People in the know realize Pakistan is where they’re hiding, but neither the administration nor the media cares to talk much about that fact.
So if it takes a WikiLeaks to break the logjam of government cover-ups and media complicity and allow real truth to fill the vacuumous void in the collective head of a preoccupied American public, well, that’s a good thing.
The only thing that would be better would be for an awakening American public to start questioning its leaders’ spending priorities and foment change.
→ B.Dunn, Jul 27, 2010, 04 43 AM
I don’t understand why we aren’t taking it all down as a mob with pitchforks and torches. Apathy. I am the first one to acknowledge it, my disgust with all of this brings on the worse kind of apathy ever. Is it a self-protective measure, I wonder? Like, there is just so much anger one can feel before short-circuiting?
— Trudy Jul 28, 12:01 PM #
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