29 November 2005
By now it must surely be obvious to pretty well everyone that the BBC’s messing with reality is rife, the twists and turns are tortuous and on-going as anyone following the British State’s Broadcasting Company’s coverage of White Phosphorus will know. The Cat’s Dream Website pretty well blew it apart, so much so that the BBC finally gave up any pretence of trying to defend its position (see the latest MediaLens piece).
18 November 2005
Finally, the ‘white phosphorus’ obscenity made it into the BBC’s main news, at least for a couple of days before being relegated into the Beeb’s dustbin of ‘allegations’ which of course, at least according the BBC, is where the story belongs. Of course, ‘making it into the news’ is a bit of a misnomer as it took the BBC nearly two weeks for the story to actually ‘break’ into its mainstream news coverage, no doubt because it was us non-entities, the independent news sources that made such a big fuss about it.
8 November 2005
Fallujah White Phosphorus victim
A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact – Mohamad Tareq, a Fallujah resident
Although reported by a handful media outlets at the time, the mainstream media took the official US denials at face value — that there had been no use of the illegal white phosphorus weapons on the inhabitants of Fallujah in December 2004. However the newly released movie (35 mb) from Italy’s RAI News 24 television programme blows the lie out of the water. Will we now see the mainstream media report the horrific crimes committed on the inhabitants of Fallujah?
14 November 2004
“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.”
– Cecil Rhodes, “founder” of Rhodesia
12 November 2004
Western press coverage of the horror that is Fallujah has with the odd exception been nothing short of outrageous in its distortions and blatant propagandising. Even where it purports to be critical of the US in its destruction of Fallujah and its inhabitants, the sub-text continues to push the Western line of ‘foreign militants’, ‘mistakes’ and in the case of the following story, as some kind of retribution for the deaths of four US mercenaries and the beheadings by the mythical Abu al-Zarqawi.
6 November 2004
Under the headline “Fixing the Problem in Fallujah”, the BBC Radio 4’s Website (7/11/04) tells us:
“Troops say they are ready to reclaim Falluja for its citizens”
That is, what’s left of Fallujah and its citizens after almost continuous pounding by the US since last April. So as far as the BBC is concerned Fallujah is merely a ‘problem’ that has to be fixed, what like a leaky pipe? In contrast the following puts the BBC’s government-inspired propaganda into some kind of context:
“I began to count out loud…as the bombs tumbled to the ground with increasingly monotonous regularity. There were 38 in the first half-hour alone… The perimeter of [Fallujah]…is already largely in ruins. The crumbling remains of houses and shell-pocked walls reminded me of my home town Beirut in the 1980s at the height of Lebanon’s civil war.”
Hala Jaber, a reporter for the Times
28 April 2004
The BBC this morning on Radio 4 (28/04/04) carried two reports on the (ongoing) US attack on Fallujah. One by an ’embedded’ reporter with all that that means and the other, an interview with US commanding officer Brigadier-General Kimmitt, who informed us that attacks on the city were performed using “incredibly precise weapons system” that minimised “collateral damage”. Tell that to the hundreds of innocent civilians who have been murdered in Fallujah.
11 April 2004
A pimpers paradise, that´s all she was now
A pimpers paradise, that´s all she was
A pimpers paradise, I´m sorry for the victim now
A pimpers paradise, soon their heads, soon their
Soon their very heads will bow
Bob Marley – Pimpers Paradise
Nearly 3 Million Iraqis, Sunni and Shiite, Approve of attacks on Americans
An opinion poll taken in late February showed that 10 % of Iraq’s Shiites say attacks on US troops are “acceptable.” But 30% of Sunni Arabs say such attacks are acceptable, and fully 70% of Anbar province approves of attacking Americans. (Anbar is where Ramadi, Fallujah, Hadithah and Habbaniyah are, with a population of 1.25 million or 5% of Iraq–those who approve of attacks are 875,000).
4 April 2004
So went the headline in the Independent on 1 April 2004 and the story (penned by ‘anti-war’ journalist Robert Fisk) occupied the entire front page and ran onto page 2. The four Americans, described by Fisk in the article as “contractors” were actually mercenaries or Private Military Contractors who worked for Blackwater Security Consulting and whilst nobody can condone the manner of their deaths, or how they were treated after their deaths, atrocities occur on a daily basis in Iraq, the only difference being they occur to Iraqis and hence don’t warrant front page headlines. Continue reading
Investigating Imperialism 