Media keeps Americans in the dark about massive foreign policy failure: 14 percent of soldiers and 28 percent of marines had killed a civilian

Media keeps Americans in the dark about massive foreign policy failure: "By Kristina M. Gronquist | Online Journal Contributing Writer

May 27, 2005—The dismal failure of U.S. mass media to challenge Washington over its early decision and unsubstantiated reasons for going to war, combined with the media's incomplete coverage since the invasion, create a continual challenge for those of us who want to expose the truth about what is really happening. The success of the antiwar movement lies in its ability to disseminate information and provide a clear, truthful message about the need to end this war now.

U.S. media reporting since 9/11 has been, for the most part, excruciatingly shallow and jingoistic. Believing that 50 percent of voters support the current administration, the media feels the need to play to the "winners," the Bush clientele who want only upbeat assessments from Iraq. War news that does surface is sanitized, wrung through official channels, and presented in such a manner as to deceive American viewers into believing everything in Iraq will still be okay.

The basic truth—which is obvious to many but unreported—is that the spiraling violence in Iraq is symptomatic of a country in which there is mass opposition to the occupation and no government recognized as legitimate. Kenneth Katzman, an expert on the Persian Gulf region with the U.S. Congressional Research Service says, "We are approaching a situation that is unstable, of a war of all against all, complete chaos, where the government is ineffective, the security is ineffective, and anybody can be killed at any time by anybody."
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Few Americans have a true sense of how profoundly botched and bloody things actually are in Iraq. Nor are people cognizant of the level of human suffering that exists in a failed state. As in all situations of war, women and children suffer the most; they face a continual lack of security, electricity, clean water, medicine, and food. The reality that the war has claimed tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq is never mentioned in any mass media news reports, not on CNN, not on the Lehrer News Hour, not even on NPR. Civilian casualties are only reported in conjunction with resistance attacks. According to a study published in the Lancet, the most highly regarded medical journal in the world with stringent peer-review procedures, "at least" 100,000 civilians had died violently, the great majority of them at the hands of coalition troops." The study also described how American military doctors had found that 14 percent of soldiers and 28 percent of marines had killed a civilian: a huge, unreported massacre.