This War and Racism

Media Denial in Overdrive
6 May 2004, Norman Solomon, Common Dreams

excerpt:

"Ever since the war began, Amnesty International has been receiving reports of Iraqis who have been taken into detention by Coalition Forces and whose rights have been violated," said an Amnesty International press release dated March 18. "Some have been held without charge for months. A number of detainees have been tortured and ill-treated. Virtually none has had prompt access to a lawyer, their family or judicial review of their detention."

A statement from an independent credible source that some of the U.S. military's prisoners "have been tortured" would seem to cry out for a quick response in the form of journalistic exploration. But the statement conflicted with thousands of news stories that -- one way or another -- portrayed American troops as heroic and humane. It was easy for U.S. news editors to ignore what Amnesty International had to say.

Investigative reporter Hersh, who gained extensive access to official documents, writes that the 372nd Military Police Company's "abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine -- a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide." Unlike the U.S. mainstream press, some British daily newspapers have explored the racist aspects of that abuse.

In the daily Independent, the longtime Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that American and British soldiers who were involved came from "towns and cities where race hatred has a home." And he alluded to the pernicious role of some mass media entertainment -- "the poisonous, racial dribble of a hundred Hollywood movies that depict Arabs as dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy and violent people."

In the Arab world, the photographs "have strengthened the feeling that there is a deep racism underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the Third World generally," Ahdaf Soueif wrote in a Guardian article that appeared on May 5. She contended that "the acts in the photos being flashed across the networks would not have taken place but for the profound racism that infects the American and British establishments."

Soueif added: "There have been reports of U.S. troops outside Fallujah talking of the fun of being a sniper, of the different ways to kill people, of the 'rat's nest' that needs cleaning out. Some will say soldiers will be soldiers. But that language has been used by neocons at the heart of the U.S. administration; both Kenneth Adelman and Paul Wolfowitz have spoken of 'snakes' and 'draining the swamps' in the 'uncivilized parts of the world.' It is implicit in the U.S. administration's position that anyone who does not agree that all of history has been moving towards a glorious pinnacle expressed in the U.S. political, ideological and economic system has 'rejected modernity'; that it is America's mission to civilize and to punish."

FULL ARTICLE FROM COMMON DREAMS: This War and Racism -- Media Denial in Overdrive