I gravitate these days towards what MEDIA LENS sends out for how incredibly good they are at making sense of these times, where they are astute at seeing beyond the water we're swimming in. (As the student fish said to the philosopher fish, “Water, what water?”) They keep calling the media o­n their ostensibly objective portrayals, which in fact support the idea of war.

Their email of January 17 is “GUEST MEDIA ALERT: A LETTER SENT BY GRANT WAKEFIELD TO JOURNALISTS.” It's written by someone who's outraged by media coverage of Iraq. It was written in response to Media Alert urging letter-writing to media outlets. (There's a GREAT story about a result another o­ne of those letters got — see “MEDIA LENS Really Sees, a previous post I made, and after you read my comment click through from there to the MEDIA LENS site to read the piece.)  In their intro to Grant's letter, which is a piece in itself that's worth a read, they comment o­n our new find of undeclared weaponry in Iraq that could be the excuse for our war, citing some misleading reporting o­n British TV:

Current levels of public dissent are all the more remarkable when we consider the extent to which the public has been remorselessly bombarded by government and media propaganda suggesting that terrorism is threatening us o­n every side, with implicit and explicit links being made to these 'threats' and Iraq. The clash between political/corporate media propaganda o­n the o­ne hand, and public common sense o­n the other, was revealed again in the latest ITN report in which anchor Nicholas Owen declared:

“The drumbeats of war do seem to be getting louder and louder. So what might be the countdown to conflict?” (Nicholas Owen, ITV Lunchtime News, January 17, 2003)

True enough, the drumbeats +are+ getting louder, but the drummers include corporate media employees like Owen and his colleagues, who saw fit to declare war inevitable o­ne month ago.

…Owen interviewed Air Vice Marshall Tony Mason. Did the 11 empty shells found in an Iraqi bunker constitute a “smoking gun”, Owen asked. The Air Vice Marshall replied that we had first to be sure about what the shells actually contained, adding:

“The real smoking gun of course would be if o­ne of those shells was still found to contain a chemical mixture.”

In other words, a massive attack by 200,000 troops against a country of 26 million impoverished people sitting o­n 200 billion barrels of oil would be justified by the discovery of o­ne 122mm artillery shell with a range of 4 miles – this o­ne shell, presumably, constituting a weapon of mass destruction and therefore a breach of UN Resolution 1441. Air Vice Marshall

Mason then proceeded to clarify what this o­ne shell might mean for the people of Iraq:

“I would expect the air campaign to be very intense, but this time not concentrated so much o­n Baghdad but o­n deployed forces all over the country. Previously of course, as you know, we were concentrating in the southern area around Kuwait; now we've got to go after troops across the entire country.”

The sexy phrasal verb 'go after' (other favourites include 'take out' and 'take down') refers of course to the blasting, lacerating, puncturing, dismembering and incinerating to death of “troops across the entire country” – troops who are often conscripts, but who are anyway compelled to fight by a dictatorial regime. These are troops without air cover who are therefore completely defenceless against air attack. Other terms for Mason's “air campaign” are 'massacre' and 'turkey shoot'.

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