McClatchy News is reporting this: Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed "status of forces" agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely. Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the…
Tonight, I had the privilege to attend a private screening of Phil Donahue’s new movie, “Body of War.” The film was shown to several hundred people attending the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In his introduction to the film, Donahue indicated that “We have the most sanitized war in our history.” His point was that the American people cannot deal appropriately about this war if they can’t see the images related to the war. He implored, “Show the people the sacrifices the men and women of this country are making.” The American people cannot feel the pain caused by this war, because the full story of the war is not available to them, thanks to the continuing media blackout of all inconvenient images and stories. Instead of learning about what’s really happening in Iraq, the American people keep getting distracted with things like entertainment parading as news or tax cuts.
Donahue stated that the US involvement in Iraq has caused more than 20,000 “grievous injuries,” a fact which he finds “beyond horrible.”
What are the kinds of images that the American people are denied? Everyone knows about the government’s attempt to keep Americans from seeing pictures of coffins of soldiers returning from Iraq. There are equally dramatic pictures available, however. One of those was briefly shown in the film, and it was run only in the Rocky Mountain News. It is a photo of a woman who wanted to sleep next to the coffin of her …
Several soldiers who have returned from combat zones talk with the American News Project about what they say is the widespread practice of using "drop weapons" to cover up the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Arianna Huffington recently wrote a post that summarizes enough hypocrisy to throw the happiest concerned citizen into a long-term funk. The deep theme that all of these recent events have in common is that prominent American sources of information are demonstrably untrustworthy. How else can you explain the Administration's military…
I refuse to use the term "war" when referring to the U.S. occupation of Iraq for these reasons. Do you remember the many politicians and news media personalities who assured us that we needed to go to "war" with Iraq and that it would be easy, fast and relatively painless for American…