How The Government Manipulates Facts | Secrets and Lies | Documentary

These days we have 24-hour news the sound bites 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 a 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 lives of governments and how are the crimes of War reported and Justified when there are 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 live and 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 [Music] he convinced a group of debutants 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 [Music] [Music] thank you Iraq March the 20th 2003 the creation of Illusions and the selling of Ward come a long way since Edward Bernays the selling of this Invasion depended on the news media to promote a series of illusions like the link between Saddam Hussein and 9 11. This is the Pentagon which spends almost a billion dollars a year just on Advertising recruiting propaganda the selling of War

their Pentagon contracts with news organizations in terms of how to manipulate the news their Pentagon officials involved in press releases that go to the 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 spokesman for all the networks and they're 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 it right from the get-go from the opening part It 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 say something print 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 anore designed to paralyze the country and Destroy food production water supply and other civilian infrastructure the effect will be similar to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan this was terrorizing people on a grand scale and it will 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 but the Pentagon calls a media friendly campaign a new word embedding entered

media language and the planning for the invasion most of the reports that viewers saw came from within a system in which media organizations agreed to certain conditions laid down by the ministry of Defense 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 a number of correspondents in bed with

our troops Across the region very deeply embedded in a personal way with the Marine 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 uh is the best wisdom [Music] 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 fallen 17 times before it actually fell and yet for our 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 this is regular reporting for the BBC from Baghdad he described the arrival of the Americans as a Liberation people have come out welcoming them holding up these 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 U.S 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 describe 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 events that they saw about Iraq is coming out so it was a sort of Made for TV moment and uh the most telling moment in that whole day was when an American Soldier climbed up 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 celebrating 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 of the Vindication

for Him those who said [Music] should they you know use a MOAB the mother of all bombs with 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 [Music] I got to tell you my favorite aircraft the A-10 Warthog I love the warthogs [Music] 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 it's like two completely different worlds [Music] 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 ala yubi and 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 yeah yeah [Music] um [Applause] [Music] hang on American journalist Jamal also entered Fallujah independently and revealed that the Americans had used white phosphorus and attack 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 watch 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 uh old man in track suit with a key in his hand mother and two children these were the identifying markers and these are these are clearly civilians what Does embedding do to journalists themselves an important distinction between embedded journalists and independent journalists is that when

you choose to embed you're giving the military the 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 [Music] everyone all right evidence that the Invaders had terrorized civilians was provided by Al Jazeera and other Arab TV networks whose Fearless unembedded reporters and Camera Crews became a

threat to military propaganda They gave voice to people who refused to be betrayed simply as victims y children here is 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 and possibly kill them Al jazeered informed Washington every news organization provides um Western military uh commanders with exact coordinates

of where their journalist side but the point about the bombing of the Al Jazeera Arabic office in Kabul was that they were given a Warning to get out um so that was a clear targeting of a journalistic organization and Personnel to get them off the air journalists who refused 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

[Music] 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 's historic scoop had exposed the LIE there was he reported an atomic plague I interviewed Wilfred burchard in 1983 shortly before he died it was I think as I described it

was like a city not a bomb city right which Steamroller was going to flattened everything out of existence what I was seeing there and this feeling sort of grew into me as I walked around and I looked at people and here this is the last minute what Happened in the last minute of uh World War II it would be the fate of cities all over the world in the in the first hours of a World War III what happened to you personally in Japan after that was published um 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 that that the denial of that story Is going on for decades it's called this 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 taped in the White House [Applause] thinking big was what the Bush Administration did in February 2003 this is the U.S Secretary of State Colin Powell of the United Nations promoting the invasion of Iraq with an extraordinary theater of the Absurd Iraq declared 8 500 leaders of anthrax but unscom estimates that Saddam Hussein Could have produced 25 000 leaders 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 it 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 uh data did uh Colin Powell close the deal today in your mind for anyone who has yet objectively to make up their mind

uh I think for anybody who analyzes the Situation uh he had closed the deal Al'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 backed The Invasion we expect every American to support our military and if they can't do that to shut up I just steer this thing I mean there's no I Mean you have a stick is that right sure we have the uh 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 very painfully

apparent that uh the facts That I believe to be true in those articles were not true they were a pack of Lies fed to me by a fairly um 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 I can make I can make no excuses I I I I mean you I should have been more skeptical I mean you've finished off one of your articles by expressing almost your 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 yes on a defenseless country that's quite something isn't it what has happened the enormity of what has happened in Iraq is far bigger than you know my own embarrassment my own Feelings and what happened was a crime uh it it was a crime on a very large scale um does that make a journalist accomplices yeah

broadly hmm unwitting perhaps but but yes this CBS News special report is part of our continuing coverage of America at War here is Dan rabbit for 24 years the most famous news anchor on American television was Dan Rather Your own career is remarkable for many things but one of them in that you you have stood up to power your questioning of Nixon which I remember in back in 74 and also your interview over Iran gate with uh Bush Senior but then later on you appeared on the famously on the David Letterman show which I happen

to see and uh you you you said George Bush is the president he makes the decisions and you Know as just one American wherever he 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 your the institution the company you work for going on a business the fear of being stuck with some label unpatriotic or otherwise that you will have with you to your grave and Beyond the the fear that there's so much at stake for the country that by doing what you deeply feel is Your job will sometimes be in variants of those all of these things go into the mix but it's very important for me to 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 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 El toetha and 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 by when they had been sealed by U.N 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 got no pickup no one published script it didn't 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 the good media coverage good journalism that tells truth the 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 it challenged not just the lies about weapons of mass destruction but the lies about how how Saddam kicked the inspectors out in 1998 and the whole the whole Litany of propaganda that led up to you know March 20th 2003 the launch of the war I think if the media had been challenging that there's no 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 Um well what I think I would say about that is that clearly we did not realize 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 uh 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 onshcom'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 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 that's The question for the BBC why why weren't those who were those voices heard yes well because there were also other voices that we were putting on the air

unscum Mohammed al-baradi Hans Blix so we were actually listening to to those voices but yeah I think you've got a good point you know why why didn't we it's a question that we asked ourselves afterwards why was it that we didn't discover this first uh didn't discover the state of Saddam Hussein's weapons of Mass destruction I think what 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 halt 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 always it's up it's The BBC's duty to scrutinize

what it is that people say we're not there to accuse them of lying though because that's a judgment no no no that's not being suggested that you make a judgment the point is that it appears now that those important journalistic Challengers were never made it's not up to me to make a judgment we're there to report what their claims are and hold them up to scrutiny and and investigate in August 2002 ITV reported a warning by Vice president Cheney that Iraq would soon have a nuclear weapon the and that was nonsense but it was presented

uncritically as news wouldn't you say that that contributed to the The Invasion that happened the following March what it might have done but with respect not our fault I mean I 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 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 no but that 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 was making 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 um but you're absolutely writing 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 the process of being a journalistically based organization I mean I was thinking

of uh of Blair's many statements one on the 29th of January 2003 ITV news reporter Blair is 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 sort of semantics now but if you they're very important he used the word links between the two your quotation not mine I think that was the quotation from 19 years yeah links now links can mean a thousand things it doesn't necessarily mean a Bond of support links well I 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 show me that even those claiming things said there were no leaks any Communications of any kind between those two organizations come on it's impossible to do that and he chose his word carefully and of course well they're not careful we do know of links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq but the word Links yeah could mean a thousand things is 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 um if the media had been doing its job when Blair was standing up and saying our our policy in the region was to Bolton 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 the more democratic more liberal forces in the region and I think that if journalists had even had a a slight interest in looking at the history and In looking at the at what what the government was actually saying at the time and 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 Don Buster 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 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 [Music] this is a photograph of the town of ham long in the north not a building remained only bomb craters pictures like this were sold and 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 Roger it's time that we recognized ours was in truth on 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 where the suffering of its people exists what I saw was a film that was a complete uh celebration of the lone lunatic but who ultimately you know is the quintessential American hero because lunatics are very big in this country we even elect them presidents 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 a public inquiry into the killing of Baha Musa and

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 um and so the things that we developed and we weren't alone the Americans did the same obviously a much more subtle leaving someone hooded putting someone into a wall standing position depriving 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 things 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 Views utterly failed that's 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 of their tactics so let's take detention it 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 Um things involving sexual acts Etc embedded journalism is never ever going to get close to hearing the story of those Iraqis foreign [Music] this is the B1 Lancer bomber which costs the American taxpayer 283 million dollars each and 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 that I was taken to was just a mass of craters and several bombs had fallen in that area Then after that um 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 two

thousand pound bomb was dropped into the middle of them and that was where the majority of the people died [Music] first thing that struck me when I was going in there Was 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 I think the thing that's um

struck me more than anything else was The children it was almost as if all their energy and emotions have 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 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 or 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 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 dispute over a body count and nothing more now I know for a fact that the pitch is taken by the Afghan Radio journalists were out there I know that string is on the ground we're filing those pictures and I mean a lot of those pictures were very graphic but a lot of them you know did show people digging bodies out of the out of the rubble it did show those bodies lined up for burial why do you think um British audiences and other Western audiences have no real sense of an atrocity of this scale

I think people become desensitized to it when they 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 it faces the names the names 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 new Services I think the Press really conspires to

play Down the Carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan this gets to what the Great American writer and academic Ed Hermann called worthy and unworthy victims the Iraqis are not worthy victims so we can play down their deaths Because if we accept 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 wrangled when you killed their family members their Civilian family members and in another case they said that uh they argued that Afghanistan Afghan Society was peculiar because they didn't like people breaking into their houses in the middle of the night you know and this caused them to get angry and sometimes 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 hauls many secrets [Music] there are sixteen thousand names here every year since 1948 British forces

have been in action somewhere in the world and there's space for another fifteen thousand names of young service men and women waiting to die [Music] what's extraordinary about this Memorial is its record of constant War during So-called peace time 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 uh episodes where Britain has been either involved in coups or has been involved in military interventions that have uh appalling impacts on people's lives that simply never get mentioned they're never referred to in the in the newspapers they never get on TV histories of Britain um they uh they're 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 I if you go back say 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 shagos 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 labor government in the 1960s and none of those ministers have ever been questioned and yet those decisions cost literally millions of lives [Music] 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 U.N imposed an economic blockade led by Britain 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 traveled with him to Iraq the very provisions of the charter and 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 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 Suffer 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 at 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 U.S 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 live unquote that's 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 to talk about things like humanitarian suffering when you're dealing with Saddam Hussein is a bit wet you know that it's it's not what the issue is 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 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 um journalists accept these factoids they had very little chance to do anything other than accept Our version of events and more or less relay it on 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 in the foreign office we would control access to the foreign off to the foreign secretary as a form of reward to journalists if they they were critical if they we

felt they were 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 you know exclusive 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 of you know favoritism that um certain journalists are rewarded with access for for being Supportive of the story they will

basically tell journalists you carry on with that line that that kind of unjustified criticism of our government policy on xyl said we will punish you and that that is very explicit those kinds of threats what happened was was not an intelligence based process it was basically a PR process run by number 10 to to produce a document that was much more 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 97 I

did the round of departments in London saying to them okay 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 officers 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 uh I said that's extraordinary I mean um I thought we had sanctions because we thought

Iraq had large amounts of weapons he said no no uh the justification for sanctions is basically that uh we have unanswered questions about how those stocks were destroyed in the past but what I feel I mean I feel very Uh I feel very guilty about it I feel very ashamed about it I feel ashamed about it sitting 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 [Music] 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 10 journalists have been killed by Israeli

forces since 1992 and many more have been wounded the Pioneer in Glasgow University Media Group has just published its latest 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 criticize Israel then it's potentially trouble if they criticize the Palestinians then that'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 wouldn't

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 or trying to throw off that control Professor Greg farlo heads the Glasgow unit looking at his research and it come 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 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 at 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 two two journalists in Britain

to BBC journalists and I spent time with people who were senior producers on on television news and one of them said to me in the context of a 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 he said the only issue we face then is how high up it's come from Them has it come from a monitoring group as it come from the Israeli Embassy and then how high has

it gone up our organization is it the duty editor is it has it gone above that is it the director General he said he said I have had journalists on the phone to me minutes before we've gone on on a major news program saying what can I say which words can I use is it all right if I say this on May the 31st 2010 Israeli forces Attacked an aid flotilla headed for Gaza in international waters they kill nine people in the days that followed Israeli propaganda set out to manipulate the news agenda they were

clubbed they were beaten stabbed it was even a report of the 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 evalued human life because I don't think we did no I didn't 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 the people running around and they were hitting us with the back of their gums the Israelis are accused of carrying out a bloody massacre but they claim it was self-defense Are planning for yesterday's interception was for a peaceful

police operation our Sailors on the on the job were told you are to use minimum minimum force and maximum restraint the top of the main news was Mark regev unchallenged Mark regev as you know is is the chief Israeli propagandist Mark regev is a spokesman for the Israeli government now you can describe him as a propagandist well what else is he that's but please don't that's a Pejorative way of putting what government spokespeople are you know they're entitled to express their point of view and we have a duty to report it I'm afraid that their

polite view wouldn't be shared by the families of the people who were killed on the back absolutely accept that and we have a duty to report that that perspective as well who's the Palestinian equivalent of Mark reggae who appeared so often who's the Palestinian equivalent of all those Mainly female Israeli spokespeople during operation casts lid 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 uh you know who are those people yes well why why hasn't the

BBC but that's not our job to go and appoint the Palestinian spokesperson would you say you're impartial surely you would find somebody to be yes at Mr reggae of saying his say but then his Equivalent we do and we did you don't actually you don't have an equivalent of Mark Greger if 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 views points which you've just expressed to be heard across the range of our output this was ITV News on May the 31st using

the same Israeli footage filmed with night vision cameras Israeli Commandos dropped from helicopters onto The deck of a Turkish a chip and violent clashes erupt in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla in in June for one thing the Israelis supplied doctored film even with captions which was widely used across ITV in the BBC it was labeled but it the the 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 Patilla that that Israeli perspective

propaganda dominated well don't get 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 organizations fall into a trap laid for them by uh it's only sophisticated because we allow them to Be sophisticated but again you know it's only when you can come to write the history of these events that you can you can see it with that hindsight view what 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 brain power left to actually kind of 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's you know that happens from time to time people like the Palestinians can't wait until someone writes a definitive history they depends on journalists well you're suggesting that journalists can that the job of Journalism is to change the world it

ain't I gotta tell you even someone with your massive experience should know better than that no I'm not Saying that your 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 [Applause] 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 U.S military action in Afghanistan Pakistan Somalia and Yemen and approved a military budget of 708 billion dollars 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 Um 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 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 um what I see is a 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 um a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top this is

A a vast movement of self-interest by thousands and thousands of players are 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 I and Colombia are used to wash money out of the ux U.S tax base and

back arms companies arms companies yeah I mean what you're saying is that money and money making is at the center of Modern War and it's almost self-perpetuating yes and 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 offense to retain the information and it is an offense to

destroy the information so the only possible outcome is that we have to publish the information hahaha um and that's which we have done on many many occasions I I noticed one that I had a personal interest in was one that uh from the ministry of Defense classified document that um equated uh terrorists with investigative Journalists as threats and Russian spies and Russian spies yeah as 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 Defense so that was a a

2000 page document on how to stop leaks from the ministry of Defense which which we leaked I didn't know whether to be offended or honored well it's nice to be having a 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 Secret Pentagon document St U.S intelligence intends to destroy Trust in Wikileaks by threatening whistleblowers with exposure and criminal prosecution thereby discrediting truth

tellers how you feel about whistleblowers as an essential part of democracy do you do you approve of whistleblowers well I think you know this country has laws to protect whistleblowers exactly and uh and I think that you know that there have been instances in our history where shining a light on something is 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 the media well first of all it's not my position to give guarantees on anything we do have an open uh criminal Investigation the investigation is targeted on the individuals that have um 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 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 objective and in fact arguably a far more powerful way of objecting to the war when the soldiers on the ground he Describes the atrocity as and I quote 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 Iraq that this kind of atrocity is not an aberration well first of all this is not an everyday occurrence if it was an Everyday occurrence we would certainly know about it these incidences are unfortunate everyone in which there's a civilian casualty is 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 um fight and win this nation's Wars and so we have to be prepared for the possibility of

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 what we anticipate going into the future is is not necessarily a nation on

Nation type conflict okay it is these asymmetric threats that are out there it's the threat of um of weapons of mass destruction is there's been another asymmetric threat is the Cyber threat that exists these are all threats that transcend Um geographical boundaries so you know the United States military has to prepare for a wide range of threats that exist out there in order to protect its national interests on media drums beating for another War say a war with Iran I wouldn't say that the media are beating the drums for 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've 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 a round of nuclear weapons capability and I think we've got to be prepared to confront them military necessarily militarily if necessarily military I think there is no 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 you know 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 um and 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 in uh for the highest of noble intentions when in fact they're not when when they're usually acting out of hard-hearted straightforward calculation of elite interests so the public is a threat that needs to be counted 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 far away 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 or to be the voice of people not power house in the Hollywood Hills with a trunk load a hundred thousand dollar bills man came by the hook of mine cable TV we settled

in for the night my baby and me Enough 57 channels and nothing [Music] well now home entertainment was mine babies wish so I hop in town for a satellite dish tied it to the top of my Japanese car came home when I pointed out into the Stars the message came back from the great beyond just seven channels 57 times