Afgan War Censorship

[bigperm]

I got this from my amnesty email group, and wanted to share.



This article from the San Francisco Chronicle supports our suspicion that the American media are hiding the grim news we in Britain have been seeing about the war on the Afghans. The American journalist who forwarded it to us commented: "Most interesting is that the writer isn't going on like many American journalists do about the Pentagon's restrictions on information releases - he's going on about how the press here simply isn't reporting stories that it COULD get."
Guy Ottewell

CENSORSHIP
What we don't know will hurt us

Bruce Mirken

Thursday, October 28, 2001

On Oct. 11, the U.S. government quietly bought
exclusive rights to all satellite images of the bombing
of Afghanistan that aren't under Russian control. By
purchasing all rights to photos taken by the civilian
satellite Ikonos, operated by a company called
Space Imaging, the Pentagon guaranteed that the
public will not see high-resolution images of damage
caused by our attacks.

The Pentagon doesn't need the pictures for its own
use. It has seven satellites of its own taking pictures
far sharper than the one-meter resolution of the
Ikonos photos. The only conceivable purpose of the
move is to keep these images from the public.
Strikingly, the decision to buy them came shortly
after reports of heavy civilian casualties in a
bombing raid near the town of Darunta.

Did you know about this? Probably not, if you get
your news from U.S. television networks or
newspapers. I found out about it by reading a
British paper, the Guardian, on the Web.

I'm doing that a lot lately, and I'm not alone.
Increasingly, those of us who want to understand
the full ramifications of the U.S. "war on terror" are
finding that big chunks of the story are severely
underreported -- or missing entirely -- in the U.S.
media. Nearly every time I check British papers like
the Guardian or the Independent, I find at least one
significant story that has been ignored or buried by
our domestic press.

Take, for example, the prospect of famine in
Afghanistan in the wake of two decades of war and
three years of drought. Our media have noted this
issue, as well as U.S. airdrops of food rations. Most
have at least mentioned that international aid
agencies consider these drops inadequate and have
urged a pause in the bombing so that vital supplies
can get through.

But the British papers have given their citizens a far
more thorough -- and grim -- picture of how our
bombing campaign has made mass starvation a near
certainty unless things change very soon. In news
stories and commentaries that began just days after
the Sept. 11 attacks, the Guardian and Independent
have laid out for readers why a bombing campaign
and food aid on the scale needed to avert famine
are simply incompatible.

In the Oct. 21 Guardian, Nick Cohen reported the
grim math: "The World Food Program says
Afghanistan needs 250,000 metric tons of food to
get through the winter . . ." The most estimate by aid
workers calls for 52,000 tons by mid- November,
along with stockpiles of 35,000 tons each for the
central highlands and northwest. If the food isn't
there, tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands are going
to die.

"Do the math and you can see that 122,000 tons
needs to be moved in the next month at a rate of
about 4,000 tons a day," Cohen reports.

"The best the World Food Program has managed
since the bombs started was 900 tons in a day. Last
week it shifted 4,000 tons in total. As an
unemotional chap at Christian Aid told me, it's
impossible to recruit enough drivers while the
bombs fall."

Ten days earlier, a story in the Independent quoted
officials of the Red Cross and other aid agencies
saying that food supplies will run out within a month
unless shipments can be increased far beyond the
trickle getting through during the bombing.
Commentators in both papers have asked pointedly:
What will become of our fragile alliance with other
Muslim countries when mass starvation hits
Afghanistan as a result of the military campaign?

And on Oct. 18, Peter Popham, reporting for the
Independent from Peshawar, in Pakistan, explained
that "economic desperation is driving more and
more young men to sign up as fighters with the
(Taliban) militia, merely to feed their families."

Popham interviewed numerous refugees who all told
similar stories. "Young men aged 20 to 27 are
joining the Taliban because there is no other work
available," one explained, "and they need to get
food to feed their families . . . As there is no other
work available, they are answering the call to wage
jihad against the infidel."

Another refugee explained that while many in
Afghanistan had been angry at the Taliban, the
bombing is changing people's minds. "When civilians
started dying," he said, "people began to be angry at
America for targeting innocent people."

These reports suggest that our "war against terror"
may kill innocent civilians on a scale that will dwarf
the slaughter in the World Trade Center, while
recruiting new generations of terrorists fired by
hatred for the United States and Britain. Perhaps
these reports can be refuted -- I don't know for
sure. But this grim, carefully detailed picture of the
effects of our actions isn't even part of the
discussion in the United States, because our media
outlets -- many of whose logos are festooned with
red, white and blue ribbons and other signs of overt
cheerleading -- haven't reported it.

What we don't know can hurt us, along with millions
of starving Afghans that most Americans will never
see. That we must rely on the foreign press to find
out what is really going on is both immensely sad
and profoundly dangerous.

Bruce Mirken is a freelance writer in San Francisco.

[Toefur]

Very good article, brings up some good points.

Particularly this...

Another refugee explained that while many in
Afghanistan had been angry at the Taliban, the
bombing is changing people's minds. "When civilians
started dying," he said, "people began to be angry at
America for targeting innocent people."

I said it from the start...

And yet the bombs continue to drop...

And the innocents... unlike the poor Americans in the WTC... are merely... colateral damage...

But yes, the thing about censorship does make one (well this one anyway) wonder that for all we know, we've got some mass slaughterings going on over there...

[Blank Verse]

I agree wholeheartedly...however, I do find it hard to believe that massive slaughter is going on out there, still, given the Americans track record, it's very possible. that's the power of censorship I guess.

It's important to note that censorship is a huge factor in the middle east as well. I'm sure most people in Afghanistan are not fully aware of what exactly happened on September 11th. They've probably been given a story that condones the whole attack, and one that portrays Americans as evil, which is the psyche they've had for a long time, so they would be easily convinced of all this.

Censorship is powerful, and it's scary.

[Epgs]

very interesting

[keith]

Originally posted by Epgs
very interesting

you said this word-for-word in another thread. quit trying to fool everyone and run your post count up.

[Epgs]

ok sorry keith calm down. just cause i said 2 things word for word in 2 diff. threads doesn't mean i am just trying to run up my post count. i really could care less. fyi

[keith]

extremely intriguing.

[Gayowulf]

I got tired of reading it all. I don't know who do believe anymore.

[Epgs]

yeah i don't think anyone knows what exactly is going on.

[kojiro]

stop the bombing!

let an independent body like the UN investigate the real damge and assess the situation in Afghanistan.

It would be naive to think that all targets hit were military targets. Some may be really hospitals or something.


America doesnt really have a good track record when it comes to civilian casualties. take for example the vietnam war. Many villages were burned because they were suspected VC sympathizers.