WEBVTT

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[sil.]

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[music]

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This was the slaughter

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known as the First World War, 16 millions
died and 21 million were wounded

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at the height of the carnage the
Prime Minister of Great Britain

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David Lloyd George had a private chat with
the editor of The Guardian, CP Scott.

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\"If people really knew the truth,\"

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said the Prime Minister, \"The war would
be stopped tomorrow, but of course,

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they don’t know and you can’t know.\" The
British public were desperate for real news,

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more than half of the nation flocked to see

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an official propaganda film,
\"The Battle of the Somme.\"

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Cameras were so unusual that young
troops would shout, \"Hello, mum\"

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as they marched to the front and they
were heard crying for their mothers

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as they died on the battlefield,
this was almost never reported.

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These days, we have 24-hour news,
the sound bites never stop

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and the wars never stop Iraq,
Afghanistan, Palestine.

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This film is about the war you don’t see,

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drawing on my own experience as a war
correspondent. It will look mainly a television

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concentrating on the most popular
channels in America and Britain.

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The film will ask, what is the role
of the media in rapacious wars like,

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Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do many
journalists beat the drums of war,

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regardless of the lives of governments?

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And how are the crimes of war reported
and justified when there are crimes?

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A pioneer of modern propaganda

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was this man Edward Bernays. Bernays
invented the term \"Public Relations.\"

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He wrote, \"The intelligent
manipulation of the masses

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is an invisible government which is the
true ruling power in our country.\"

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He was part of a secretive group called
the US Committee on Public Information,

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set up in 1917 to persuade
reluctant Americans

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to join the war in Europe.

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Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman go to Woodrow Wilson and
said, \"Look, man, if you’re gonna enter into this war

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we are gonna need to sell this
war to the American people.\"

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And so Wilson institutes and creates
the first modern propaganda machinery.

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It was actually quite brilliant
in its conceptualization,

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so that the best way to persuade people
is to grab them by their emotions,

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by their unconscious and instinctual urges.
Let’s not bother with pumping out facts,

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let’s scare the hell out of people.

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A picture of the Statue of
Liberty in tatters, crumbled

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into the New York Harbor with German
planes flying around it. Umm…

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A picture of the world
umm… being gobbled up

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by the bloody hands of a gorilla
wearing a German helmet.

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So, you know, it’s not about facts anymore.
The facts don’t matter.

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For Edward Bernays’ \"Public Relations\"

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was like a war on people,
unbending their will.

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He persuaded women

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to smoke at a time when smoking in
public was not considered ladylike.

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He convinced a group of debutantes
to parade along Fifth Avenue,

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holding up Lucky Strike cigarettes
as symbols of women’s liberation.

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To his delight, the press called these

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torches of freedom. What he was
interested in doing was creating

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an association between a product,
in this case, cigarettes

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and the desire for women’s liberation.
It worked in the sense that

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it got lots of news coverage, it worked in the
sense that women started smoking publicly.

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And in fact, smoking became a symbol

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of the new woman of the emancipated woman.

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[music]

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Iraq, March 20th, 2003,
the creation of illusions

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and the selling of war had come a
long way since Edward Bernays.

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The selling of this invasion
depended on the news media

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to promote a series of illusions like,
the link between Saddam Hussein

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and 9/11. The vision of
the World War I poster

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of the Statue of Liberty in a
shambles in New York Harbor

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is not that different from the
image of the World Trade Center,

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a burning symbol that sort of entered into
the stock footage of people’s dreams.

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So immediately, you have these associations

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between the image of the World Trade
Center and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

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But Saddam Hussein had absolutely
nothing to do with it.

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Saddam Hussein had nothing to do
with it, but that didn’t matter

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because when you start using symbols that
have been separated from their meaning

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and have sort of taken on a life of their
own, the facts don’t matter anymore.

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This is the Pentagon

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which spends almost a billion dollars a
year just on advertising, recruiting,

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propaganda, the selling of war.

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Their Pentagon contracts with news organizations
in terms of how to manipulate the news,

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their pentagon officials involved in press
releases that go to the… the media,

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in which intelligence is used to manipulate public
opinion which is a violation of the charter

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of any intelligence organization,
then you have retired generals

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who serve as press spokesman for all the networks and
there… It’s never revealed which military-industrial firms

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they work for. Central to this

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is the co-opting and spinning of a media
regarded as the freest in the world.

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Showdown Iraq. If America goes to
war, turn to MSNBC and the experts.

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If we journalists, including myself, had
right from the get go, from the opening pop,

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had started asking the
kind of tough, digging,

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aggressive questions we should have
been asking and doing our reporting.

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Rather just being kind of stenographers, go to
a briefing, have an official say something,

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print in the paper next day. If we had done our
job, I do think a strong argument can be made

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that perhaps we would not have gone to war.
The attack on Iraq

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was sold by these two men. The
blueprint for the invasion

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was this military doctrine
called \"Shock & Awe\"

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designed to paralyze the country
and destroy food production,

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water supply and other civilian
infrastructure. The effect would be similar

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to the dropping of the
atomic bombs on Japan.

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This was terrorizing
people on a grand scale

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and it will be covered up by
deception in massive amounts,

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but this was not how it
was reported at the time.

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Scores of American reporters have now joined US military
units in Kuwait as part of the Pentagon’s effort

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to make any war with Iraq what the
Pentagon calls a media-friendly campaign.

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A new word embedding entered media language

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and the planning for the invasion.
Most of the reports that viewers saw,

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came from within a system in
which media organizations

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agreed to certain conditions laid down
by the Ministry of Defense in London

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and the Pentagon in Washington.

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At the time that uh… our forces crossed
uh… into Iraq. We had some 700 reporters

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embedded throughout our military
formations. Embedding was important

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for that conflict for a number of reasons.

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Umm… One being that we knew we were
going up against an enemy that was

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uh… somewhat masterful at misinformation,
disinformation. We have a number of correspondents

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in bedwith our troops across the region…
And very deeply embedded in a personal way

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with the Marines that he’s traveling with… I love this
expression for the Iraq war, the embedded journalists.

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Well, too many journalists have been in bedwith,
the administration on a variety of issues.

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I would say 80% to 90% of
what you read a newspaper

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is officially inspired. If they’re covering
the intelligence community, for example,

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and they become critical of the CIA
or a major intelligence organization,

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they’re gonna lose their sources. If they become critical of the
Pentagon, it’s gonna be very difficult to get into the Pentagon

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uh… to deal with official
military sources. So I think

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journalists like to be part of the game, part of the
inside crowd and therefore, the conventional wisdom

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uh… is the best wisdom.

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[music]

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24-hour news in particular is a system

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that is the most easy to manipulate.
24-hour news is a giant echo chamber.

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So that’s why, for example, Basra
was reported as having fallen

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17 times before it actually fell.
And yet, within the 24-hour news,

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when you’re reporting it for the 7th time

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in that chain of 17 times when the city has
fallen falsely, the fact that it’s been wrong

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the previous 7 times, just doesn’t matter.

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American Armor is moving at will across whole
swathe of Baghdad. This is just one of…

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This is Rageh Omar, reporting
for the BBC from Baghdad.

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He described the arrival of the
Americans as a liberation.

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People have come out, welcoming them, holding up V
signs. This is an image taking place across the

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whole of the Iraqi capital today, but it
was not happening across the rest of Iraq.

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This was another illusion.

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The toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein
was seized upon by the invading force

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as a target of opportunity.

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What was not news was a US Army
investigation describing how they exploited

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what they called a \"media circus.\"

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\"They’re almost as many reporters as Iraqis,\" says
the report. It was an American psyops officer

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who ordered the statue brought down.
The resulting TV pictures

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gave no sense of the
bloody conquest of Iraq

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that was already well underway. You know,
I didn’t really do my job properly.

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I think I’d hold my hand up and say that

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one didn’t press the most
uncomfortable buttons, hard enough.

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As you describe, the
arrival of the Americans,

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you didn’t tell us the story of how that
whole statue was itself manipulated.

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Hmm. Why? Why not? The entire live cameras

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of the world’s press. We’re on the
balcony of the Palestine hotel,

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and that was really the only events
that they saw about Iraqis coming out.

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So it was a sort of made-for-TV moments.

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And uh… the most telling
moments in that whole day

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was when an American
soldier climbed up a crane

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and put the American flag over the
statue’s face, because in fact, that was

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a true iconic moments of what had happened.

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The America had taken ownership of Iraq.

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In Britain, Blair and Bush’s invasion
was applauded as a vindication

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of them and their strategies.

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He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a
bloodbath and that in the end, the Iraqis would be celebrating.

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And on both of those points, he has been proved
conclusively right and it’d be entirely ungracious,

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even for his critics not to
acknowledge that tonight he stands

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as a larger man and a stronger
Prime Minister as a result.

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It is absolutely without a doubt a vindication of
the strategy… You know the vindication for him,

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those who say…

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Should they, you know, use a MOAB,

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the mother of all bombs, and new daisy cutters? And, you
know, let’s not just stop at a couple of cruise missiles.

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[music]

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I’ve… I’ve fallen almost in love with the F/A-18 Super
Hornet because it’s… it’s quite a versatile plane.

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[music]

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I got to tell you my favorite
aircraft, the A-10 warthog.

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I love the warthogs.

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The war we don’t see in Iraq is
largely the massive toll on civilians

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in Iraq where daily, even
now people are being killed

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and wounded because of this occupation.
Open the door!

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Seeing what I see contrasting
that with what has been

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reported by most of the mainstream it’s…
it’s like two completely different worlds.

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[music]

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In 2004, American marines

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twice assaulted the City of Fallujah,
the second time with British forces,

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a nightmare unfolded. The Americans made

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the city of free fire zone.

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[sil.]

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The UN reported that 70% of
the houses were destroyed

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and those standing were riddled with
bullets. Thousands of civilians were killed,

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little of this was shown on
the majority TV networks

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in Britain and America that the Americans met courageous
resistance was not news at all. Viewers did not get a sense

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of the sheer scale of the
suffering of ordinary people.

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This remarkable film from inside Fallujah

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was made by an American Mark Manning
with Rana Al-Aiouby, an Iraqi,

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it has never been shown on
television in the wars of today.

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It’s often daring independent
filmmakers like these

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who give the victims a hoist.

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American journalist, Dahr Jamail
also entered Fallujah independently

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and revealed that the Americans had used
white phosphorus and attack civilians.

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His eyewitness dispatches and photographs

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contradicted the version
many people saw and read,

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but were not published in the
mainstream media. I have photos of

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trenches being dug and I watched him burying
people there and put little makeshift gravestones,

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writing anything to try to identify the
people and I walked the rows of these stones.

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After the April siege with Mona,
my interpreters while she read,

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\"Old man in tracksuit
with a key in his hand,

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mother and two children\" These were the identifying
markers. And these are… These are clearly civilians.

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What does embedding do to
journalists themselves?

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An important distinction
between embedded journalists

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and independent journalists is that when you
choose to embed you’re giving the military

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the… the full power to control
where you go, how you get there,

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what you see and when you see it, and in a lot of
instances even how you’re going to report that.

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[music]

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Hundreds of thousands of people
were forced to evacuate the city,

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refugees in their own land.
They were given nowhere to go,

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many are still unable to return.

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Evidence that the invaders
had terrorized civilians

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was provided by Al Jazeera
and other Arab TV networks

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who’s fearless, unembedded reporters and camera
crews became a threat to military propaganda.

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They gave voice to people
who refused to be betrayed

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simply as victims. I happened to be I think the
only journalist in the world that has seen

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the bombing of Al-Jazeera Arabic’s
bureaus in both Kabul in 2001

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and in Baghdad in 2003.

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The case of the bombing of the
Al-Jazeera office in Kabul

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was without doubt and categorically, a direct
targeting of those journalists to shut them up

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and possibly kill them.

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Al-Jazeera had informed Washington.
Every news organization provides umm…

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Western military uh… commanders with exact
coordinates of where their genocide,

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but the point about the bombing of the
Al-Jazeera Arabic office in Kabul

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was that they were given a
warning to get out umm…

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So that was a clear targeting
of a journalistic organization

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and personnel to get them off the air.

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Journalist who refused to
go along with the military

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are often those who report the real news.
In August, 1945,

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a public-relations spectacle
was staged on the USS Missouri

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in Tokyo Bay, in which
General Douglas MacArthur

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ostentatiously took the surrender
of the Japanese. The embedded media

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were told to attend.

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Cameraman and reporters of many countries record this
historic moment. An Australian reporter, Wilfred Burchett

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of the \"London Daily Express\" refused

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and set out on a perilous journey
for the ruins of Hiroshima.

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The official truth of the atomic bombing was
presented in this \"New York Times\" report,

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which claimed that radiation
sickness did not exist.

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The reporter who wrote the story was later
revealed to have been secretly on the payroll

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of the US War Department.

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Burchett says Toric’s scoop had exposed
the lie. There was, he reported,

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an atomic plague. I interviewed
Wilfred Burchett in 1983,

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shortly before he died. It was…
I think as I’ve described it,

00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:34.999
it was like a city, not a bomb city of
ragged, a city ever which a steamroller

00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:39.999
is going to flattened everything out
of existence. What I was seeing there

00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:44.999
and this feelings of grew into to me and I walked around
and I looked at people. Here, this is the last minute,

00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:49.999
what happened in the one last minute of a
World War II would be the fate of cities

00:22:50.000 --> 00:22:54.999
all over the world in the first
hours of a World War III.

00:22:55.000 --> 00:22:59.999
What happened to you personally in
Japan after that was published? Umm…

00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:04.999
I went back to Tokyo by train and arrived
just as there was a press conference

00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:09.999
being held to deny my story because the official line
was that there was no such thing as a comic radiation,

00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:14.999
and that that denial of that
story has gone on for decades

00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:19.999
as well as still going on.
The media consensus

00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:24.999
was that the atomic bombs have
brought the war to an end,

00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:30.000
but official files told another story.

00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:39.999
A nuclear race had begun

00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:44.999
and the cold war followed. Based
on the propaganda of fear,

00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:49.999
it was a war we never saw,
but was always threatening.

00:23:50.000 --> 00:23:54.999
And we never knew how close America
came to using nuclear weapons again.

00:23:55.000 --> 00:23:59.999
What follows is a secret
conversation in 1972

00:24:00.000 --> 00:24:04.999
between President Richard
Nixon and Henry Kissinger

00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:10.000
taped in the White House.

00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:23.000
Thinking big

00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:29.999
was what the Bush administration
did in February 2003.

00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:34.999
This is US Secretary of State Colin
Powell at the United Nations

00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:39.999
promoting the invasion of Iraq with an
extraordinary theater of the absurd.

00:24:40.000 --> 00:24:44.999
Iraq declared 8,500 liters of anthrax,

00:24:45.000 --> 00:24:49.999
but UNSCOM estimates that Saddam
Hussein could have produced

00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:54.999
25,000 liters. If concentrated…
Nothing of what he claimed was true.

00:24:55.000 --> 00:24:59.999
All these pictures were meaningless.

00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:04.999
Saddam Hussein’s intentions have never changed. He
is not developing the missiles for self-defense.

00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:09.999
These are missiles that Iraq wants in
order to project power to threaten

00:25:10.000 --> 00:25:14.999
and to deliver chemical biological
and if we let him nuclear warheads.

00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:19.999
This irrefutable, undeniable,

00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:24.999
incontrovertible evidence today, Colin Powell
brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today.

00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:29.999
It was devastating. I mean, and overwhelming.
Overwhelming abundance of the evidence.

00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:34.999
Point after point after point with… He just
flooded the terrain with… with… with data.

00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:39.999
Did umm… uh… Colin Powell close
the deal today in your mind

00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:44.999
for anyone who has yet objectively
to make up their mind?

00:25:45.000 --> 00:25:49.999
Uh… I think for anybody who
analyzes the situation.

00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:54.999
Uh… He has closed the deal.

00:25:55.000 --> 00:25:59.999
Colin Powell’s incredible performance
was never seriously challenged

00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:04.999
in the American broadcast media of
which Rupert Murdoch’s Fox television

00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:09.999
is the biggest network. Like the
rest of the Murdoch Empire,

00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:14.999
it backed the invasion. We expect every
American to support our military

00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:19.999
and if they can’t do that to shut up. How do
you steer this thing? I mean, there’s no,

00:26:20.000 --> 00:26:24.999
I mean, you have a stick, is that right?
Sure, we have both…

00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:29.999
But the cartoon journalism of Fox can often overshadow the fact that
the respectable media has played a critical part in promoting war.

00:26:30.000 --> 00:26:34.999
Like, Fox the celebrated New York Times

00:26:35.000 --> 00:26:39.999
published the false claims that Saddam
had weapons of mass destruction.

00:26:40.000 --> 00:26:44.999
The paper apologized to its
readers one year later.

00:26:45.000 --> 00:26:49.999
In Britain, the observer another
respected liberal newspaper

00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:54.999
published the same false claims.

00:26:55.000 --> 00:26:59.999
David, you’ve written about your
articles in The Observer in the build-up

00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:04.999
to the Iraq invasion that you feel

00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:09.999
and I quote you \"nauseated,
angry, and ashamed\"

00:27:10.000 --> 00:27:14.999
about what you wrote. What
did you mean exactly?

00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:19.999
It’s now and has been for a number
of years, very painfully apparent

00:27:20.000 --> 00:27:24.999
that the facts that I believe to be
true in those articles were not true.

00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:29.999
They were a pack of lies
fed to me by a fairly umm…

00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:34.999
sophisticated disinformation campaign.
But didn’t it occur to you

00:27:35.000 --> 00:27:39.999
that these people were professional liars.

00:27:40.000 --> 00:27:44.999
I overcame what should have been stronger doubts. I…
I… I… can make, I can make no excuses. I… I… I… I…

00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:49.999
I mean, you… I should have been more skeptical. I
mean, you’ve finished off one of your articles

00:27:50.000 --> 00:27:54.999
by expressing almost a little editorial.
At the end, which you wrote that

00:27:55.000 --> 00:27:59.999
for the West Iraq was and I quote \"An
ideal place to establish a bridgehead.\"

00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:04.999
There are occasions in history
you wrote when the use of force

00:28:05.000 --> 00:28:09.999
is both right and sensible.
This is one of them. I mean,

00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:14.999
in essence you were advocating an
attack… Yes. On a defenseless country.

00:28:15.000 --> 00:28:19.999
That’s quite something, isn’t it? What has happened…
The enormity of what has happened in Iraq

00:28:20.000 --> 00:28:24.999
is far bigger than, you know, my own embarrassment,
my own feelings. And what happened was a crime.

00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:29.999
It was a crime on a… on a
very large scale. Umm…

00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:34.999
Does that make journalist accomplices?

00:28:35.000 --> 00:28:39.999
Yeah, poorly. Hmm. Unwitting
perhaps, but… but yes.

00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:44.999
This CBS news special report is
part of our continuing coverage

00:28:45.000 --> 00:28:49.999
of America at War. Here’s is Dan Rather.

00:28:50.000 --> 00:28:54.999
For 24 years, the most famous news
anchor on American television

00:28:55.000 --> 00:28:59.999
was Dan Rather. Your own
career is remarkable

00:29:00.000 --> 00:29:04.999
for many things, but one of them in
that you… you have stood up to power

00:29:05.000 --> 00:29:09.999
your questioning of Nixon, which
I remember and back in ‘74

00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:14.999
and also your interviewer over on gate with

00:29:15.000 --> 00:29:19.999
Bush Sr., but then later on,

00:29:20.000 --> 00:29:24.999
you appeared on the famously
on the David Letterman Show,

00:29:25.000 --> 00:29:29.999
uh… which I happened to see. And you… you…

00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:34.999
you said George Bush is the
president, he makes the decisions

00:29:35.000 --> 00:29:39.999
and you know as just one American wherever
he wants me to line up, just tell me where

00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:44.999
and he’ll make the call.
Well, why did you say that?

00:29:45.000 --> 00:29:49.999
This was in the almost
immediate wake of 9/11,

00:29:50.000 --> 00:29:54.999
and that’s the way I genuinely felt. I was
responding as an American citizen in a personal way

00:29:55.000 --> 00:29:59.999
and I have said that whether those of us
and journalism want to admit it or not

00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:04.999
then at least in some small way uh…

00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:09.999
fear is present in every newsroom in the
country, a fear of losing your job,

00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:14.999
a fear of your the institution the company
you work for, going out of business,

00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:19.999
the fear of being stuck with some
label unpatriotic or otherwise

00:30:20.000 --> 00:30:24.999
that you will have with you
to your grave and beyond umm…

00:30:25.000 --> 00:30:29.999
the fear that there’s so much
at stake for the country

00:30:30.000 --> 00:30:34.999
that by doing what you deeply feel, use your
job or sometimes by invariance of this,

00:30:35.000 --> 00:30:39.999
all of these things go into the mix, but it’s very
important for me to say because I firmly believe that

00:30:40.000 --> 00:30:44.999
I’m not the vice president in charge of
excuses that we shouldn’t have excuses.

00:30:45.000 --> 00:30:49.999
We should do is, take a really good look
at that period and to learn from it.

00:30:50.000 --> 00:30:54.999
And, you know, suck up our courage.

00:30:55.000 --> 00:30:59.999
Charles Hanley who won Pulitzer Prize for
reporting was in Iraq in January of 2003

00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:04.999
and he went to all the
sites that had been named

00:31:05.000 --> 00:31:09.999
by Bush officials as suspicious sites,
Al-Tuwaitha and Fallujah. He went every site

00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:14.999
that had been named by George
Bush, Cheney Rice, Collin Powel,

00:31:15.000 --> 00:31:19.999
and he found that in every
case they were still sealed

00:31:20.000 --> 00:31:24.999
since 1991 by when they’ve
been sealed by UN inspectors.

00:31:25.000 --> 00:31:29.999
He filed a report on January 18th, it went
to every major newsroom in the United States

00:31:30.000 --> 00:31:34.999
because it’s the AP which goes to every major
newsroom in the United States, got no pick up.

00:31:35.000 --> 00:31:39.999
No unpublished it? It didn’t fit the
script. He got virtually no pick up.

00:31:40.000 --> 00:31:44.999
It didn’t fit the script. We were
going to war, no matter what,

00:31:45.000 --> 00:31:49.999
I think that if other than good media coverage, good journalism
that tells truth to power can make a huge, huge difference.

00:31:50.000 --> 00:31:54.999
So do I think that we would’ve gone to war

00:31:55.000 --> 00:31:59.999
if the media had done their job and it challenged,
not just the lies about weapons of mass destruction,

00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:04.999
but the lies about how… how Saddam
kicked the inspectors out of 1998

00:32:05.000 --> 00:32:09.999
and the whole, the whole litany
of propaganda that led up to,

00:32:10.000 --> 00:32:14.999
you know, March 20th 2003, the launch
of the war, I think if the media

00:32:15.000 --> 00:32:19.999
had been challenging that there’s no, I
think we would not have gone to war.

00:32:20.000 --> 00:32:24.999
Jeremy Paxman said last year, he and the
rest of the media had been hoodwinked

00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:29.999
in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Is that something that

00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:34.999
you would agree with?
Umm… Well, what I think

00:32:35.000 --> 00:32:39.999
I would say about that is that
clearly we did not realize

00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:44.999
until much later in the day that
the weapons of mass destruction

00:32:45.000 --> 00:32:49.999
were not there. And of course,

00:32:50.000 --> 00:32:54.999
there was the so-called dodgy dossier as
well. So there is quite a body of evidence

00:32:55.000 --> 00:32:59.999
to build up to suggest that the
media certainly were taken in

00:33:00.000 --> 00:33:04.999
by the claims that were
coming from government

00:33:05.000 --> 00:33:09.999
at that point. Yes. Why didn’t the media
get it? Why didn’t the BBC get it?

00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:14.999
I think that we didn’t get it
partly because of lack of access.

00:33:15.000 --> 00:33:19.999
If you want to find out what’s happening
then you really need to go there

00:33:20.000 --> 00:33:24.999
and do some firsthand reporting which wasn’t
possible in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

00:33:25.000 --> 00:33:29.999
But the crucial facts were available.

00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:34.999
The chief United Nations weapons
inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter

00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:39.999
gave me this interview four
years before the invasion.

00:33:40.000 --> 00:33:44.999
In 1991, Iraq had significant capability
in the area of chemical weapons,

00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:49.999
biological weapons, nuclear
weapons production capability

00:33:50.000 --> 00:33:54.999
and long-range ballistic missile
manufacturing capability. By 1998,

00:33:55.000 --> 00:33:59.999
the chemical weapons infrastructure had been
completely dismantled or destroyed by UNSCUM

00:34:00.000 --> 00:34:04.999
or by Iraq in compliance
with UNSCUM’s mandate.

00:34:05.000 --> 00:34:09.999
The biological weapons program had been
declared in its totality late in the game,

00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:14.999
but it was gone. All the major facilities eliminated. The
nuclear weapons program again completely eliminated.

00:34:15.000 --> 00:34:19.999
The long-range ballistic missile program
completely eliminated, all that was left was

00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:24.999
the research and development and
manufacturing capability for missiles

00:34:25.000 --> 00:34:29.999
with a range less than 150
kilometers, a permitted activity.

00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:34.999
Everything that we set out to destroy in 1991,
the physical infrastructure had been eliminated,

00:34:35.000 --> 00:34:39.999
so if I had to quantify Iraq’s threat in
terms of weapons of mass destruction,

00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:44.999
the real threat is zero. None.

00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:49.999
The former chief weapons
inspector, Scott Ritter was saying

00:34:50.000 --> 00:34:54.999
as early as 1998 that Saddam
Hussein was completely disarmed.

00:34:55.000 --> 00:34:59.999
Scott Ritter I think appeared in 2003 twice

00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:04.999
and once at 3 in the
morning on BBC 24 News.

00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:09.999
He was a vital expert witness
and there were others.

00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:14.999
Well, I don’t know why Scott
Ritter didn’t appear more,

00:35:15.000 --> 00:35:19.999
but he clearly did appear… Well, that was a toughest
question for the BBC. Why… why weren’t those who were…

00:35:20.000 --> 00:35:24.999
Those voices heard. Yes. Well,
because there were also other voices

00:35:25.000 --> 00:35:29.999
that we were putting on the air, UNSCUM.
Mohamed ElBaradei,

00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:34.999
Hans Blix. So we were actually
listening to… to those voices,

00:35:35.000 --> 00:35:39.999
but, yeah, I think you’ve got a good point. You know, why… why
didn’t, it was a question that we asked ourselves afterwards.

00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:44.999
Why was it that we didn’t
discover this first,

00:35:45.000 --> 00:35:49.999
didn’t discover the state of Saddam Hussein’s
weapons of mass destruction? I think what…

00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:54.999
what critics of that would say
is that the broadcasters,

00:35:55.000 --> 00:35:59.999
notably the BBC echoed

00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:04.999
or amplified the lies told in the run-up

00:36:05.000 --> 00:36:09.999
to the invasion rather
than investigating itself.

00:36:10.000 --> 00:36:14.999
What the BBC they have a
duty to do is to report

00:36:15.000 --> 00:36:19.999
what governments and their representatives
are saying which we of course did.

00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:24.999
We were just reporting quite
legitimately the claims that people

00:36:25.000 --> 00:36:29.999
at the time we’re making. They
weren’t legitimate claims though.

00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:34.999
They were in the mouths of legitimate leaders though.
And therefore, we had a duty to report that.

00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:39.999
But those leaders, both
of them you mentioned,

00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:44.999
Blair and Bush have long
been discredited. I mean,

00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:49.999
isn’t it the BBC’s role as well
as reporting what politicians say

00:36:50.000 --> 00:36:54.999
to hold power to account? Of course, it is.
It’s… It’s the BBC’s duty

00:36:55.000 --> 00:36:59.999
to scrutinize what it is that people say.

00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:04.999
We’re not there to accuse them of lying
though because that’s judgments. No… No… No,

00:37:05.000 --> 00:37:09.999
that’s not being suggested that you make a
judgment. The point is that it appears now

00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:14.999
that those important
journalistic challenges

00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:19.999
were never made… It’s not up to me to
make a judgment. We’re there to report

00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:24.999
what their claims are and hold them up
to scrutiny and… and… and investigate.

00:37:25.000 --> 00:37:29.999
In August 2002, ITV reported a
warning by Vice President Cheney

00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:34.999
that Iraq would soon have a nuclear
weapon and that was nonsense,

00:37:35.000 --> 00:37:39.999
but it was presented uncritically as news.

00:37:40.000 --> 00:37:44.999
When you say that that
contributed to the invasion

00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:49.999
that happened the following March… We might have
done, but with respect, not our fault. I mean,

00:37:50.000 --> 00:37:54.999
I don’t believe that you’re suggesting, are you,
that we should completely dismiss the words

00:37:55.000 --> 00:37:59.999
of arguably the second most powerful
man in the Western world. Uh… No.

00:38:00.000 --> 00:38:04.999
We didn’t necessarily agree with it. We reported
it and allowed our viewers to make up their minds

00:38:05.000 --> 00:38:09.999
as to whether this was a man telling the truth or not.
But that that… But that’s not fair on viewers, is it?

00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:14.999
Because they may not know what we as
journalists know or ought to know

00:38:15.000 --> 00:38:19.999
that this was an extremely dodgy politician.
He was making… Is making extraordinary claims.

00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:24.999
If we knew it, we should’ve said so.
If we didn’t know it, we can’t.

00:38:25.000 --> 00:38:29.999
And that applies across everything. Uh… But you’re absolutely
right in one regard. We shouldn’t take things at face value,

00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:34.999
we should do our best investigate and when
we do know, we should tell our viewers.

00:38:35.000 --> 00:38:39.999
Of course, we should. That’s part of the… the process of being a
journalistically-based organization. I mean, I was thinking of

00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:44.999
Blair’s many statements one
on the 29th of January 2003,

00:38:45.000 --> 00:38:49.999
ITV News reporter Blair is saying, \"We do
know of links between al-Qaeda and Iraq.\"

00:38:50.000 --> 00:38:54.999
As links as you know didn’t exist. I mean,
we’re getting into the realms of sort

00:38:55.000 --> 00:38:59.999
of semantics now, but if… Well, they’re
very important semantics, don’t they?

00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:04.999
He used the word \"links\" between the two.
Your quotation, not mine.

00:39:05.000 --> 00:39:09.999
Well, that was a quotation for ITV News.
Yeah. Links. Now links

00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:14.999
can mean a thousand things. It doesn’t necessarily
mean a bond of supportive. They weren’t links.

00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:19.999
Well, I’m sitting here across, you’re telling
me that. I would say to you, well, show me

00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:24.999
that there were no links, show me that they’d never, show
me that they’d never… Even those claiming links said

00:39:25.000 --> 00:39:29.999
there were no links. Any communications of any kind between
those two organizations, it’s impossible to do that.

00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:34.999
And he chose his words carefully. And of
course… Well, they’re not careful. We do know

00:39:35.000 --> 00:39:39.999
of links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. Yeah, the
word links could mean a thousand things,

00:39:40.000 --> 00:39:44.999
is the point I’m saying here. And you’re not suggesting, I’m sure
that we should’ve reported what the prime minister was saying.

00:39:45.000 --> 00:39:49.999
You were talking about
semantics a little while ago.

00:39:50.000 --> 00:39:54.999
Well, I find it virtually impossible to believe that
Britain could’ve got away with the invasion of Iraq

00:39:55.000 --> 00:39:59.999
umm… if the media had been doing its job.
When Blair was standing up and saying,

00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:04.999
our policy in the region, Mr. Bolter… Bolster, the forces
of democracy. I mean, really a proper reaction to that

00:40:05.000 --> 00:40:09.999
would’ve been to burst out laughing. And
there’s simply no history of that at all.

00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:14.999
Britain has been on the side of authoritarian
repressive regimes, they are our allies.

00:40:15.000 --> 00:40:19.999
The Armani’s, the Saudis, the Egyptians, they
are allies, not the… the more democratic,

00:40:20.000 --> 00:40:24.999
more liberal forces in the region. And I think
that, if journalists had even had a slight

00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:29.999
interest in looking at the history
and in looking at the what…

00:40:30.000 --> 00:40:34.999
what the government was actually saying at
the time or the evidence was at the time,

00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:39.999
they would’ve reported things in such a manner that the government
just wouldn’t know have been able to got away with what they did.

00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:45.000
[music]

00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:54.999
Good morning, Vietnam.
Welcome to the Dine Buster.

00:40:55.000 --> 00:40:59.999
This was the Vietnam War which I reported.
A new military jargon

00:41:00.000 --> 00:41:04.999
collateral damage was designed for
the media and to cover up the scale

00:41:05.000 --> 00:41:09.999
of the industrial killing of up to three million
people and the terror of indiscriminate bombing

00:41:10.000 --> 00:41:14.999
often known as Turkey Shoots.
The longest bombing campaign

00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:19.999
in history happened here in North Vietnam,

00:41:20.000 --> 00:41:24.999
mostly unseen from outside.

00:41:25.000 --> 00:41:29.999
This is a photograph of the town
of (inaudible) in the north,

00:41:30.000 --> 00:41:34.999
not a building remained, only bomb craters.
Pictures like this

00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:39.999
was sold and published. Vietnam was
the blueprint for the wars of today.

00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:44.999
Murder and destruction
replaced military tactics.

00:41:45.000 --> 00:41:49.999
Almost every man, woman, and
child became the enemy.

00:41:50.000 --> 00:41:54.999
(inaudible). Roger. Good job.

00:41:55.000 --> 00:41:59.999
That’s why you splatter one right above
for the rocket. Roger. Got lucky again.

00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:04.999
It’s time that we recognized
ours was in truth

00:42:05.000 --> 00:42:09.999
a noble cause. As in previous wars,
public memory of the Vietnam War

00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:14.999
was greatly influenced by Hollywood,

00:42:15.000 --> 00:42:19.999
\"The Deer Hunter,\" \"Platoon,\"
\"Good Morning, Vietnam\"

00:42:20.000 --> 00:42:24.999
\"The Green Berets,\"

00:42:25.000 --> 00:42:29.999
all these films perpetuated an
illusion turning fiction into truth.

00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:34.999
The theme was fake heroism and
self-pity, the invader is victim

00:42:35.000 --> 00:42:39.999
purged of all crime.

00:42:40.000 --> 00:42:44.999
Today a series of Iraq war
movies follows the tradition,

00:42:45.000 --> 00:42:49.999
the current Oscar winner \"The Hurt Locker\"
is the familiar story of a psychopath,

00:42:50.000 --> 00:42:54.999
high on violence in somebody else’s
country where the suffering of its people

00:42:55.000 --> 00:42:59.999
barely exists. What I saw was a film

00:43:00.000 --> 00:43:04.999
that was a complete celebration

00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:09.999
of the lone lunatic, but who ultimately, you
know, is the quintessential American hero

00:43:10.000 --> 00:43:14.999
because lone lunatics are
very big in this country.

00:43:15.000 --> 00:43:19.999
We even elect them president sometimes.
This film

00:43:20.000 --> 00:43:24.999
is a film about killing in which
killing is completely incidental

00:43:25.000 --> 00:43:29.999
and this is a war that was orchestrated

00:43:30.000 --> 00:43:34.999
purely for profit and for oil and for
ownership of other people’s resources

00:43:35.000 --> 00:43:39.999
of a control of global resources.

00:43:40.000 --> 00:43:44.999
[sil.]

00:43:45.000 --> 00:43:49.999
Get your feet down! This is another
war we don’t see in Britain.

00:43:50.000 --> 00:43:54.999
In this video, British soldiers
are abusing Iraqi civilians.

00:43:55.000 --> 00:43:59.999
Get up. Get up!

00:44:00.000 --> 00:44:04.999
[sil.]

00:44:05.000 --> 00:44:09.999
A public inquiry into the killing of
Baha Mousa, an Iraqi hotel worker

00:44:10.000 --> 00:44:14.999
has been told that British soldiers
have tortured and killed prisoners.

00:44:15.000 --> 00:44:19.999
Phil Shiner is the lawyer acting for
more than a hundred Iraqi families.

00:44:20.000 --> 00:44:24.999
Modern democracies don’t leave marks,

00:44:25.000 --> 00:44:29.999
so stealth torture. Umm…

00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:34.999
So the things that we developed and we weren’t
alone, the Americans did the same obviously,

00:44:35.000 --> 00:44:39.999
a much more subtle. Living someone hooded,

00:44:40.000 --> 00:44:44.999
putting someone to of wall standing position,
deprived them the food and water, et cetera.

00:44:45.000 --> 00:44:49.999
My clients complain of every type of threat

00:44:50.000 --> 00:44:54.999
that your women will be brought here
and raped in front of you that,

00:44:55.000 --> 00:44:59.999
you know, death threat, you’ll be
transferred to Guantanamo Bay. And frankly,

00:45:00.000 --> 00:45:04.999
people should be prosecuted for all of the
things I am talking about in criminal courts,

00:45:05.000 --> 00:45:09.999
not military courts. You can’t have
soldiers prosecuting other soldiers

00:45:10.000 --> 00:45:14.999
being tried by a panel of soldiers.
The court-martial system

00:45:15.000 --> 00:45:19.999
in my views utterly failed. That’s…
That’s got to go. You need the people

00:45:20.000 --> 00:45:24.999
who are complicit in it all. You need
them prosecuted. What role do you think

00:45:25.000 --> 00:45:29.999
embedding plays in this? Well, the…
the problem with embedded journalism

00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:34.999
is always seeing is the point
of view of the troops.

00:45:35.000 --> 00:45:39.999
We’re not seeing or hearing
from the civilians who are on

00:45:40.000 --> 00:45:44.999
the wrong end of… of their tactics.

00:45:45.000 --> 00:45:49.999
So let’s take detention, it
seems clear that British forces

00:45:50.000 --> 00:45:54.999
in Iraq killed many people, maybe hundreds

00:45:55.000 --> 00:45:59.999
of civilians when they had custody of them

00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:04.999
and did the most extraordinary
umm… brutal umm…

00:46:05.000 --> 00:46:09.999
things involving sexual acts, et cetera.
Embedded journalism is

00:46:10.000 --> 00:46:14.999
never ever going to get close to hearing

00:46:15.000 --> 00:46:20.000
the story of those Iraqis.

00:46:30.000 --> 00:46:35.000
[music]

00:46:45.000 --> 00:46:50.000
[music]

00:46:55.000 --> 00:46:59.999
This is the B-1 Lancer bomber

00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:04.999
which costs the American
taxpayer $283 million each.

00:47:05.000 --> 00:47:09.999
[sil.]

00:47:10.000 --> 00:47:14.999
And this is what it did on May 4th, 2009

00:47:15.000 --> 00:47:19.999
in Farah Province Afghanistan, following
false intelligence of Taliban

00:47:20.000 --> 00:47:24.999
in a village. Its victims were some
of the poorest people on earth.

00:47:25.000 --> 00:47:29.999
Guy Smallman is an
independent photojournalist

00:47:30.000 --> 00:47:34.999
and the first Westerner to arrive in
the village following the bombing.

00:47:35.000 --> 00:47:39.999
The first strike happened
outside the village mosque,

00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:44.999
which was the first place that I was
taken to was just a mass of craters

00:47:45.000 --> 00:47:49.999
and several bombs had fall in
that area then after that umm…

00:47:50.000 --> 00:47:54.999
and the women and children were evacuated to
a compound in the far north of the village.

00:47:55.000 --> 00:47:59.999
And again, their heat signatures
were picked up by the bomber crew

00:48:00.000 --> 00:48:04.999
and a 2,000 pound bomb was
dropped into the middle of them

00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:09.999
and that was where the
majority of the people died.

00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:14.999
The first thing that struck me when I was
going in there was… was… was the silence.

00:48:15.000 --> 00:48:19.999
In the Afghan, countryside is usually a symphony
of birdsong and it was absolutely dead quiet,

00:48:20.000 --> 00:48:24.999
and the locals have done their
best to collect all the bodies

00:48:25.000 --> 00:48:29.999
and the body parts umm… but they were
still flies swarming all around the area,

00:48:30.000 --> 00:48:34.999
they were still a very pungent smell
of death, very heavy in the air.

00:48:35.000 --> 00:48:39.999
I think the thing that umm… struck me
more than anything else was the children.

00:48:40.000 --> 00:48:44.999
It was almost as if all their energy and
emotions have been drained out of them

00:48:45.000 --> 00:48:49.999
and they would stare right through me and
my translator into the middle distance.

00:48:50.000 --> 00:48:54.999
They didn’t laugh, they
barely spoke at all,

00:48:55.000 --> 00:48:59.999
umm… and that I think left the most lasting
impression. And I was given quite a

00:49:00.000 --> 00:49:04.999
grim tour of where people were buried umm…

00:49:05.000 --> 00:49:09.999
in a lot of cases entire families were buried in the
same grave. I think I counted just over 70 new graves,

00:49:10.000 --> 00:49:14.999
fresh graves and then one far end

00:49:15.000 --> 00:49:19.999
of the cemetery there’s an enormous mass
grave which is umm… around 30 meters across,

00:49:20.000 --> 00:49:24.999
and in that grave or the
remains of 55 people

00:49:25.000 --> 00:49:29.999
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,

00:49:30.000 --> 00:49:34.999
so they had to bury them together in one long
trench. And then there was the difference about

00:49:35.000 --> 00:49:39.999
uh… the casualties. Umm… you
know, the local people insisted

00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:44.999
that over 140 umm… civilians
had died, but NATO said

00:49:45.000 --> 00:49:49.999
there was 25. And so the deaths of
a 147 people including 93 children

00:49:50.000 --> 00:49:54.999
became a dispute over. Became dispute
over a body count and nothing more.

00:49:55.000 --> 00:49:59.999
Now I know for a fact
that umm… the pictures

00:50:00.000 --> 00:50:04.999
taken by the Afghan radio journalists were
out there, I know that strings on the ground

00:50:05.000 --> 00:50:09.999
were… were filing those pictures and that mean…
A lot of those pictures were very graphic,

00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:14.999
but a lot of them, you know, did show
people digging bodies out of the,

00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:19.999
out of the rubble. It did show
those bodies lined up for burial.

00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:28.000
[music]

00:50:35.000 --> 00:50:39.999
Why do you think umm… British
audiences and other Western audiences

00:50:40.000 --> 00:50:44.999
have no real sense of an
atrocity of this scale?

00:50:45.000 --> 00:50:49.999
I think people become desensitized to it.

00:50:50.000 --> 00:50:54.999
When they… When they’re told in the news a
wedding party has been attacked by accident,

00:50:55.000 --> 00:50:59.999
a compound has been bombed by accident, a farmer
and his family have been killed by accident,

00:51:00.000 --> 00:51:04.999
they don’t really connect with it because
I don’t actually get to see those bodies.

00:51:05.000 --> 00:51:09.999
The faces, the names… The faces,
the names… It’s just a number

00:51:10.000 --> 00:51:14.999
whether they’re Afghans or
Iraqis or Lebanese civilians, s

00:51:15.000 --> 00:51:19.999
they’re just numbers.

00:51:20.000 --> 00:51:24.999
And it’s perhaps easy to
understand why uh… British Muslims

00:51:25.000 --> 00:51:29.999
feel completely disenfranchised
from all domestic news services.

00:51:30.000 --> 00:51:34.999
I think the press really conspires to play
down the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan.

00:51:35.000 --> 00:51:39.999
This gets to what the great
American writer and academic umm…

00:51:40.000 --> 00:51:44.999
Ed Herman called worthy and unworthy
victims. The Iraqis are not worthy victims,

00:51:45.000 --> 00:51:49.999
so we can play down their
deaths because if we accept

00:51:50.000 --> 00:51:54.999
the reality that there are more than a
million dead, it’s largely our fault.

00:51:55.000 --> 00:51:59.999
And so for instance, the US press will talk
about 200,000 to 400,000 dead in Somalia,

00:52:00.000 --> 00:52:04.999
those victims are worthy victims
because they were killed

00:52:05.000 --> 00:52:09.999
by people that we don’t like. And in
one bizarre case, which talked about

00:52:10.000 --> 00:52:14.999
the cultural peculiarities
of Afghan society because

00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:19.999
they actually got rankled when you killed their family
members, their civilian family members. And in another case,

00:52:20.000 --> 00:52:24.999
they said that they argue that
Afghanistan… Afghan society

00:52:25.000 --> 00:52:29.999
was peculiar because they didn’t like
people breaking into their houses

00:52:30.000 --> 00:52:34.999
in the middle of the night, you know, and this caused them to
get angry and sometimes… sometimes uh… carry out vendettas.

00:52:35.000 --> 00:52:43.000
[music]

00:52:45.000 --> 00:52:49.999
This is the British Armed Forces
memorial in Staffordshire.

00:52:50.000 --> 00:52:54.999
It’s not as well-known as the great
cenotaphs and it holds many secrets.

00:52:55.000 --> 00:52:59.999
[music]

00:53:00.000 --> 00:53:04.999
There are 16,000 names here, every year

00:53:05.000 --> 00:53:09.999
since 1948 British forces have been
in action somewhere in the world

00:53:10.000 --> 00:53:14.999
and there’s space for another 15,000 names

00:53:15.000 --> 00:53:19.999
of young servicemen and
women waiting to die.

00:53:20.000 --> 00:53:24.999
What’s extraordinary about this memorial

00:53:25.000 --> 00:53:29.999
is its record of constant war
during so-called peacetime.

00:53:30.000 --> 00:53:34.999
As if revealing the secret of Britain’s
enduring imperial role, what’s missing?

00:53:35.000 --> 00:53:39.999
Is any record of the victims of
these wars, the countless men,

00:53:40.000 --> 00:53:44.999
women, and children killed mostly
in their own countries in our name

00:53:45.000 --> 00:53:49.999
and glimpsed only now and then on the
TV news, at least a million people

00:53:50.000 --> 00:53:54.999
have died as a result of the invasion of
Iraq. They are not part of our remembrance

00:53:55.000 --> 00:53:59.999
because they’re not allowed in our memory.

00:54:00.000 --> 00:54:04.999
Mark Curtis is Nestorian who
writes on British foreign policy.

00:54:05.000 --> 00:54:09.999
His specialty is revealing
long forgotten official files.

00:54:10.000 --> 00:54:14.999
I’ve certainly uncovered a lot of
episodes where Britain has been

00:54:15.000 --> 00:54:19.999
either involved in Coos or has been involved
in military interventions that have uh…

00:54:20.000 --> 00:54:24.999
appalling impacts on people’s lives, that simply never
get mentioned and they’re never referred to in the…

00:54:25.000 --> 00:54:29.999
in the newspapers, they never get
on TV histories of Britain umm…

00:54:30.000 --> 00:54:34.999
they… They’re just taken out basically, they’re
deleted from… from our historical memory.

00:54:35.000 --> 00:54:39.999
Why does the public in Britain have such
little idea of the sheer scale of this?

00:54:40.000 --> 00:54:44.999
Well, a very large reason for that is,

00:54:45.000 --> 00:54:49.999
I mean, if you look at every war
or every coup or every regime,

00:54:50.000 --> 00:54:54.999
the Britain is supporting or have been
involved in. Uh… It’s usually accompanied by

00:54:55.000 --> 00:54:59.999
an increasingly sophisticated public relations
operation by the government. We’re told

00:55:00.000 --> 00:55:04.999
that British foreign policy is based on
promoting democracy on spreading development

00:55:05.000 --> 00:55:09.999
and promoting human rights. Well, if you
read the actual government planning files,

00:55:10.000 --> 00:55:14.999
planners are saying to themselves that their policy is
not based on that, it’s based on the control of oil,

00:55:15.000 --> 00:55:19.999
it’s based on creating an international economy
that works in the interests of British corporations

00:55:20.000 --> 00:55:24.999
and it’s based on maintaining their great
power status. This culture of impunity

00:55:25.000 --> 00:55:29.999
is deeply embedded within British society.
I mean, if you go back

00:55:30.000 --> 00:55:34.999
say… say in the 1960s, a time when
Britain was covertly supporting

00:55:35.000 --> 00:55:39.999
an Indonesian military that was
killing up to a million people

00:55:40.000 --> 00:55:44.999
where Britain was responsible for depopulating
the Chagos Islands and where Britain was arming

00:55:45.000 --> 00:55:49.999
the Nigerian government that was killing hundreds of
thousands of biafrans in the Civil War in Nigeria,

00:55:50.000 --> 00:55:54.999
all of that was taking place under
the labor government in the 1960s.

00:55:55.000 --> 00:55:59.999
And none of those ministers have ever been questioned. And
yet, those decisions cost literally millions of lives.

00:56:00.000 --> 00:56:04.999
The attack on Iraq

00:56:05.000 --> 00:56:09.999
did not begin was shock and awe
during the first Gulf War in 1991,

00:56:10.000 --> 00:56:14.999
Britain and America deliberately
bombed Iraq modern infrastructure.

00:56:15.000 --> 00:56:19.999
And when the war was over,

00:56:20.000 --> 00:56:24.999
the bombing continued. This
was sold and reported.

00:56:25.000 --> 00:56:29.999
During this period of the
1990s, the UN imposed

00:56:30.000 --> 00:56:34.999
an economic blockade led by
Britain America essentials like,

00:56:35.000 --> 00:56:39.999
clean water and vital drugs
were denied. In 1998,

00:56:40.000 --> 00:56:44.999
the United Nations Children’s Fund reported
the deaths of half a million children

00:56:45.000 --> 00:56:49.999
under the age of five. A direct result

00:56:50.000 --> 00:56:54.999
of the sanctions imposed by the blockade.

00:56:55.000 --> 00:56:59.999
This is Denis Halliday,

00:57:00.000 --> 00:57:04.999
former Assistant Secretary General of the
United Nations who resigned after refusing

00:57:05.000 --> 00:57:09.999
to administer the sanctions. In
1999, I travel with him to Iraq.

00:57:10.000 --> 00:57:14.999
The very provisions of the Charter
and the Declaration of Human Rights

00:57:15.000 --> 00:57:19.999
have been set aside. And we are waging
a warfare through the United Nations

00:57:20.000 --> 00:57:24.999
on the children and people of
Iraq with an incredible results.

00:57:25.000 --> 00:57:29.999
Results that you do not expect to see
in a war under the Geneva Conventions

00:57:30.000 --> 00:57:34.999
where targeting civilians worse
for targeting children like Safa,

00:57:35.000 --> 00:57:39.999
who of course, were not born when Iraq went into Kuwait.
I mean, what is this about. It’s a monstrous situation

00:57:40.000 --> 00:57:44.999
for the United Nations, for the Western world or
all of us who are part of some democratic system,

00:57:45.000 --> 00:57:49.999
who are at fact responsible for
the policies of our governments

00:57:50.000 --> 00:57:54.999
and the implementation
of economic sanctions.

00:57:55.000 --> 00:57:59.999
Carne Ross was a senior British diplomat of the
UN responsible for imposing the embargo on Iraq.

00:58:00.000 --> 00:58:04.999
You gave evidence on the
impact of sanctions.

00:58:05.000 --> 00:58:09.999
Yes. And this is what you
said, \"The weight of evidence

00:58:10.000 --> 00:58:14.999
clearly indicates that sanctions
caused massive human suffering

00:58:15.000 --> 00:58:19.999
among ordinary Iraqis in particular
children, we the US and UK governments

00:58:20.000 --> 00:58:24.999
were the primary engineers
and defenders of sanction

00:58:25.000 --> 00:58:29.999
and were well aware of this evidence
at the time, but we largely ignored it

00:58:30.000 --> 00:58:34.999
or blamed all these effects on the Saddam
government, sanctions effectively denied

00:58:35.000 --> 00:58:39.999
the entire population the means to live.\"

00:58:40.000 --> 00:58:44.999
That’s… That’s a shocking admission.
Yeah, I agree.

00:58:45.000 --> 00:58:49.999
Well, I stand by it today. Why didn’t you
speak out during those four and a half years?

00:58:50.000 --> 00:58:54.999
There is a certain macho culture
in foreign policy circles that to…

00:58:55.000 --> 00:58:59.999
to talk about things like humanitarian suffering
when you’re dealing with Saddam Hussein

00:59:00.000 --> 00:59:04.999
is a bit wet, you know, that it’s… it’s not what the
issue is really about that governments do security,

00:59:05.000 --> 00:59:09.999
that that’s the kind of hard thing
that we’re there to provide.

00:59:10.000 --> 00:59:14.999
And I think, however, wrong your decisions
may be whatever damage you may do

00:59:15.000 --> 00:59:19.999
to other individuals, there is… At the end of the
day, no accountable… accountability whatsoever.

00:59:20.000 --> 00:59:24.999
Umm… We had extraordinarily good
resources to put together our story

00:59:25.000 --> 00:59:29.999
to find little facts to justify their story factoids,
I began to call them. And how eagerly would

00:59:30.000 --> 00:59:34.999
journalists accept these factoids?
They had very

00:59:35.000 --> 00:59:39.999
little chance to do anything other than
accept our version of events are more or less

00:59:40.000 --> 00:59:44.999
relay it on unedited to the public.
Government is an information machine

00:59:45.000 --> 00:59:49.999
and we would control access for
journalists to us, to governments

00:59:50.000 --> 00:59:54.999
when I was in news department in the… in the Foreign Office, we
would control access to the foreign off, to the foreign secretary

00:59:55.000 --> 00:59:59.999
as a form of reward to journalists if they…
they were critical, if they we felt they were…

01:00:00.000 --> 01:00:04.999
they were too hostile to our account of events
we would not give them the goodies of trips

01:00:05.000 --> 01:00:09.999
with the foreign secretary around the world or, you know, exclusive
interviews every now and then. We did the same in New York.

01:00:10.000 --> 01:00:14.999
If journalists were not particularly supportive
to our account, we would freeze them out,

01:00:15.000 --> 01:00:19.999
we would make life harder for them, but there is a subtle
and private relationship between them which is basically

01:00:20.000 --> 01:00:24.999
of… of, you know, favoritism umm…
that certain journalists are rewarded

01:00:25.000 --> 01:00:29.999
with access for… for being supportive
of the story. They will basically

01:00:30.000 --> 01:00:34.999
tell journalists, you carry on with that
line that that kind of unjustified criticism

01:00:35.000 --> 01:00:39.999
of our government policy on XY or Z, we will punish you,
and that that is very explicit those kinds of threats.

01:00:40.000 --> 01:00:44.999
What happened was… was not an
intelligence-based process,

01:00:45.000 --> 01:00:49.999
it was basically a PR
process run by number 10

01:00:50.000 --> 01:00:54.999
to… to produce a document that was much more
politically credible than the evidence suggested.

01:00:55.000 --> 01:00:59.999
It was a major deception, wasn’t it? I
think it amounts in effect to that.

01:01:00.000 --> 01:01:04.999
Yes. I remember before I was
sent to New York in late ‘97,

01:01:05.000 --> 01:01:09.999
I did the round of departments in London saying to them,
\"Okay, I’m going to New York, I’m gonna be doing Iraq.

01:01:10.000 --> 01:01:14.999
What do I need to know?\" And I went to see
non-proliferation department in the foreign office

01:01:15.000 --> 01:01:19.999
and I was expecting a briefing on the vast piles
of weapons that we still thought Iraq possessed,

01:01:20.000 --> 01:01:24.999
and the desk officers sort of looked at me slightly sheepishly
and said, \"Well, actually we don’t think there’s anything.

01:01:25.000 --> 01:01:29.999
We don’t think there’s anything in Iraq.
\"Uh… I said,\" That’s extraordinary.

01:01:30.000 --> 01:01:34.999
I mean, I thought we were had sanctions because
we thought Iraq had large amounts of weapons.\"

01:01:35.000 --> 01:01:39.999
He said, \"No, no. Uh… The justification
for sanctions is basically that uh…

01:01:40.000 --> 01:01:44.999
we have our unanswered questions about how
those stocks were destroyed in the past.\"

01:01:45.000 --> 01:01:49.999
But what I feel, I mean, I feel very,
uh… I feel very guilty about it,

01:01:50.000 --> 01:01:54.999
I feel very ashamed about it, I feel ashamed
about it, sitting and talking to you, you know,

01:01:55.000 --> 01:01:59.999
I feel actual shame running through my body when I
talk to you about it. Should journalists feel the same

01:02:00.000 --> 01:02:04.999
those who pass on the deception?
Uh… Absolutely.

01:02:05.000 --> 01:02:09.999
We should all be accountable to each other and then I
think that’s the only way to have a civilized society

01:02:10.000 --> 01:02:14.999
is some kind of transparency with each other and
accountability and people holding, people morally accountable

01:02:15.000 --> 01:02:19.999
for what they do and that applies to
journalists as much as it applies to anybody.

01:02:20.000 --> 01:02:25.000
[music]

01:02:30.000 --> 01:02:34.999
[music]

01:02:35.000 --> 01:02:39.999
These were to be the borders of Israel and
Palestine. When Israel was founded in 1948

01:02:40.000 --> 01:02:44.999
and this is what’s left to Palestine today,

01:02:45.000 --> 01:02:49.999
fragmented and dislocated by a military
occupation that defies international law

01:02:50.000 --> 01:02:54.999
and is backed by one of the world’s
most sophisticated propaganda machines.

01:02:55.000 --> 01:02:59.999
[sil.]

01:03:00.000 --> 01:03:04.999
This is Palestinian cameraman

01:03:05.000 --> 01:03:09.999
Imad Ghanem been shot
repeatedly by Israeli soldiers.

01:03:10.000 --> 01:03:14.999
The killing of non-Western
journalist’s Israeli news.

01:03:15.000 --> 01:03:19.999
Imad Ghanem was 21 and lost both his legs.

01:03:20.000 --> 01:03:24.999
[music]

01:03:25.000 --> 01:03:29.999
Ten journalists have been killed
by Israeli forces since 1992

01:03:30.000 --> 01:03:34.999
and many more have been wounded. The
pioneering Glasgow University Media Group

01:03:35.000 --> 01:03:39.999
has just published its latest
study on the media reporting

01:03:40.000 --> 01:03:44.999
of Israel and Palestine.

01:03:45.000 --> 01:03:49.999
I think what it comes down to is a basic knowledge
that journalists have, which is quite simply that,

01:03:50.000 --> 01:03:54.999
if they criticize Israel then
it’s potentially trouble,

01:03:55.000 --> 01:03:59.999
if they criticize the Palestinians then
that’s… there is much less of a problem.

01:04:00.000 --> 01:04:04.999
So they might use a word like occupation,

01:04:05.000 --> 01:04:09.999
but they won’t say military occupation, they won’t say
military rule, they won’t explain in detail what it means.

01:04:10.000 --> 01:04:14.999
They wouldn’t, certainly wouldn’t do
it routinely to explain in detail

01:04:15.000 --> 01:04:19.999
what it means to be living under military rule and
why the Palestinians from their point of view

01:04:20.000 --> 01:04:24.999
are trying to overthrow that military
or trying to throw off that control.

01:04:25.000 --> 01:04:29.999
Professor Greg Philo
heads the Glasgow unit,

01:04:30.000 --> 01:04:34.999
looking at his research and it comes
through very clear, it’s a certain state

01:04:35.000 --> 01:04:39.999
of fear exists on who the
Israelis will complain to.

01:04:40.000 --> 01:04:44.999
They say in their research, people
producers worried, will they complain

01:04:45.000 --> 01:04:49.999
a director-general level or will they just
simply wring the newsroom, but the point is,

01:04:50.000 --> 01:04:54.999
this sense of intimidation almost.

01:04:55.000 --> 01:04:59.999
Welcome to the world of a correspondent who has
to deal with this pressure on a daily basis.

01:05:00.000 --> 01:05:04.999
Yes, where I would take issue
with you is the fear factor

01:05:05.000 --> 01:05:09.999
because actually no correspondent uh… that I
have come across who is used to working in

01:05:10.000 --> 01:05:14.999
Jerusalem particularly or dealing
with this stuff fears it at all.

01:05:15.000 --> 01:05:19.999
I was thinking of people here, a television
center. We don’t fear it either.

01:05:20.000 --> 01:05:24.999
We take a lot of it, but we don’t fear it.
After we did the first book,

01:05:25.000 --> 01:05:29.999
I gave a number of talks to… to
journalists in Britain to BBC journalists

01:05:30.000 --> 01:05:34.999
and I spent time with people who were
senior producers on… on television news

01:05:35.000 --> 01:05:39.999
and one of them said to me in the
context of quite a heated discussion

01:05:40.000 --> 01:05:44.999
that was going on with other journalists. He
said, \"Listen.\" He said, \"We wait in fear\"

01:05:45.000 --> 01:05:49.999
that was his exact words. We wait in fear for the telephone
call from the Israelis. \" He said, \" The only issue we face

01:05:50.000 --> 01:05:54.999
then is how high up its come from them.
Has it come from a monitoring group?

01:05:55.000 --> 01:05:59.999
Has it come from the Israeli embassy and then
how high has it gone up our organization?

01:06:00.000 --> 01:06:04.999
Is it the duty editor? Is it… Is it gone
above that? Is it the director-general?\"

01:06:05.000 --> 01:06:09.999
He said, and I… He said, \"I have had journalists
on the phone to me, minutes before we’ve gone on…

01:06:10.000 --> 01:06:14.999
on a major news program saying, what
can I say, which words can I use,

01:06:15.000 --> 01:06:19.999
is it all right if I say this?\"

01:06:20.000 --> 01:06:24.999
On May 31st, 2010, Israeli forces attacked

01:06:25.000 --> 01:06:29.999
an aid flotilla headed for
Gaza in international waters.

01:06:30.000 --> 01:06:34.999
They killed nine people.
In the days that followed,

01:06:35.000 --> 01:06:39.999
Israeli propaganda set out to
manipulate the news agenda.

01:06:40.000 --> 01:06:44.999
Or a club, who were uh… beaten,
uh… stabbed, was even report

01:06:45.000 --> 01:06:49.999
of the gunfire. Don’t
you think it’s fair to…

01:06:50.000 --> 01:06:54.999
to look at some coverage and
say there’s a tone, uh…

01:06:55.000 --> 01:06:59.999
the tone was, of course, you didn’t sit down and
say we’re going to put the Israeli point of view,

01:07:00.000 --> 01:07:04.999
but the tone throughout was
that Israel had a problem,

01:07:05.000 --> 01:07:09.999
not the people who were shot in the
back of the head, but that Israel

01:07:10.000 --> 01:07:14.999
had a problem. I think there are
two things here. One is that,

01:07:15.000 --> 01:07:19.999
are you saying that actually
we devalued human life?

01:07:20.000 --> 01:07:24.999
Because I don’t think we did. No, I didn’t
say that. But I think it’s legitimate to ask

01:07:25.000 --> 01:07:29.999
what the implications of this
were going to be for Israel

01:07:30.000 --> 01:07:34.999
which is what that question
was attempting to do.

01:07:35.000 --> 01:07:39.999
Tonight attend, the Israelis under pressure after the
raid on ships taking aid to Gaza. Hundreds of activists

01:07:40.000 --> 01:07:44.999
in the convoy were detained in Israel
including at least 40 British nationals.

01:07:45.000 --> 01:07:49.999
They were pushing everybody and uh… people
running around and they were hitting us

01:07:50.000 --> 01:07:54.999
with the back of their guns. The Israelis are
accused of carrying out a bloody massacre,

01:07:55.000 --> 01:07:59.999
but they claimed it was self-defense.

01:08:00.000 --> 01:08:04.999
Our planning for yesterday’s interception
was for a peaceful police operation.

01:08:05.000 --> 01:08:09.999
Our sailors on the job were told you are to
use minimum force and maximum restraint.

01:08:10.000 --> 01:08:14.999
The top of the main news was
Mark Regev, unchallenged.

01:08:15.000 --> 01:08:19.999
Mark Regev as you know was these…
is the chief Israeli propagandist.

01:08:20.000 --> 01:08:24.999
Mark Regev is a spokesman
for the Israeli government.

01:08:25.000 --> 01:08:29.999
Now you can describe him as a propagandist,
if you like. What else is he? Please tell me.

01:08:30.000 --> 01:08:34.999
That’s a pejorative way of putting
what government spokespeople are,

01:08:35.000 --> 01:08:39.999
you know, they’re entitled to
express their point of view

01:08:40.000 --> 01:08:44.999
and we have a duty to report it. I’m afraid that
that polite view wouldn’t be shared by the families

01:08:45.000 --> 01:08:49.999
of the people who were killed on about. I absolutely
accept that. And we have a duty to report

01:08:50.000 --> 01:08:54.999
that that’s perspective as well. Who’s the
Palestinian, equivalent of Mark Regev

01:08:55.000 --> 01:08:59.999
who appeared so often? Who’s the
Palestinian equivalent of all those

01:09:00.000 --> 01:09:04.999
mainly female Israeli spokespeople
during Operation Cast Lead?

01:09:05.000 --> 01:09:09.999
Who was… Who was their equivalent
articulate in English given…

01:09:10.000 --> 01:09:14.999
given a space right at the top of BBC news? Who
was that? I think that’s a very good point.

01:09:15.000 --> 01:09:19.999
Uh… You know who are those people?
Yes, but… But why… why hasn’t the BBC?

01:09:20.000 --> 01:09:24.999
But that’s not our job to go out and appoint the
Palestinians spokesperson. Did you say you’re impartial?

01:09:25.000 --> 01:09:29.999
Surely, you would find somebody to be,
yes, I’ve Mr. Regev ever saying his say,

01:09:30.000 --> 01:09:34.999
but then his equivalent. We do and we did.
You don’t, actually.

01:09:35.000 --> 01:09:39.999
You don’t have an equivalent of Mark Regev. That’s just not
true. Just because there isn’t an equivalent of Mark Regev,

01:09:40.000 --> 01:09:44.999
doesn’t mean to say that we didn’t allow those
viewpoints which you’ve just expressed to be heard

01:09:45.000 --> 01:09:49.999
across the range of our output.
This was ITV news

01:09:50.000 --> 01:09:54.999
on May 31st, using the
same Israeli footage.

01:09:55.000 --> 01:09:59.999
Filmed with night-vision cameras, Israeli
commandos dropped from helicopters

01:10:00.000 --> 01:10:04.999
onto the deck of a Turkish eight-ship
and violent clashes erupt.

01:10:05.000 --> 01:10:09.999
The immediate aftermath
of the Israeli attack

01:10:10.000 --> 01:10:14.999
on the aid flotilla in… in June for
one thing, the Israelis supplied

01:10:15.000 --> 01:10:19.999
doctored film even with captions which was

01:10:20.000 --> 01:10:24.999
widely used across ITV in the BBC.
It was labeled, but it the… the…

01:10:25.000 --> 01:10:29.999
the context of this uh… according
to the Israelis that their people

01:10:30.000 --> 01:10:34.999
who were attacking the flotilla
were actually being attacked

01:10:35.000 --> 01:10:39.999
by the people who were on the fulfilling
that that Israeli perspective

01:10:40.000 --> 01:10:44.999
propaganda dominated.
Well, not only dominated,

01:10:45.000 --> 01:10:49.999
but certainly the Israeli propaganda machine,
as you all know is very, very sophisticated.

01:10:50.000 --> 01:10:54.999
And in its own terms is quite
successful on occasions.

01:10:55.000 --> 01:10:59.999
And yes, it is the case that sometimes media
organizations fall into a trap laid for them by.

01:11:00.000 --> 01:11:04.999
It’s only sophisticated because we allow
them to be sophisticated. Yeah. But… But…

01:11:05.000 --> 01:11:09.999
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.

01:11:10.000 --> 01:11:14.999
When it’s actually happening
on a daily basis,

01:11:15.000 --> 01:11:19.999
you’re gonna be very careful what you do. When the
story is over and when someone has the time uh… uh…

01:11:20.000 --> 01:11:24.999
and brainpower left are actually gonna write the definitive history of it. Sure,
then if you got things wrong, you put your hands up and you say, well, at that time

01:11:25.000 --> 01:11:29.999
we weren’t aware that, we made a
mistake, that’s… that’s, you know,

01:11:30.000 --> 01:11:34.999
that happens from time to time. And people like the Palestinians
can’t wait until someone writes a definitive history.

01:11:35.000 --> 01:11:39.999
They depend on… They depend on… They depend on
journalist. Yeah, but you… Well, you’re suggesting

01:11:40.000 --> 01:11:44.999
that journalists can, that the job of
journalism is to change the world.

01:11:45.000 --> 01:11:49.999
It ain’t. I’ve got to tell you even
someone with your massive experience

01:11:50.000 --> 01:11:54.999
should know better than that. No, I’m not saying that. You’re saying
that. Our job is to make sure that the public who consume our news

01:11:55.000 --> 01:11:59.999
are as informed as we can make
them, so that they can make their

01:12:00.000 --> 01:12:04.999
own minds up. But viewers can only make
their own minds up if they’re given

01:12:05.000 --> 01:12:09.999
all the available facts.
Graphic independent video

01:12:10.000 --> 01:12:14.999
was available on the internet on the
night of the attack. Four months later,

01:12:15.000 --> 01:12:19.999
a United Nations investigation
described the Israeli attack

01:12:20.000 --> 01:12:24.999
as displaying unnecessary
and incredible violence.

01:12:25.000 --> 01:12:29.999
Six people were executed at point-blank
range. The attack warranted prosecution

01:12:30.000 --> 01:12:34.999
for war crimes. This was only reported

01:12:35.000 --> 01:12:39.999
in a 12 second item on ITV
News and completely ignored

01:12:40.000 --> 01:12:44.999
on the three main BBC TV bulletins
and seen only on News 24.

01:12:45.000 --> 01:12:49.999
[sil.]

01:12:50.000 --> 01:12:54.999
One of the public relations

01:12:55.000 --> 01:12:59.999
triumphs of the 21st century
was the rise of Barack Obama.

01:13:00.000 --> 01:13:04.999
His campaign slogan was
\"Change We Can Believe In.\"

01:13:05.000 --> 01:13:09.999
He was a brand that offered
something special, exciting.

01:13:10.000 --> 01:13:14.999
In 2008, Obama the candidate

01:13:15.000 --> 01:13:19.999
was voted marketer of the year ahead
of Apple, Nike, and Coors beer.

01:13:20.000 --> 01:13:24.999
He made many people feel good
as if his slogan might be true.

01:13:25.000 --> 01:13:29.999
Above all, the perception of brand Obama

01:13:30.000 --> 01:13:34.999
was that he was against war. Most of you
know that I opposed this war from the start.

01:13:35.000 --> 01:13:39.999
I thought it was a tragic mistake.
But that was false.

01:13:40.000 --> 01:13:44.999
As President Obama has not
withdrawn America from Iraq

01:13:45.000 --> 01:13:49.999
and is back US military action in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia,

01:13:50.000 --> 01:13:54.999
and Yemen, and approved a
military budget of $708 billion,

01:13:55.000 --> 01:13:59.999
the biggest war spending of all time.

01:14:00.000 --> 01:14:04.999
Cynthia McKinney is a former Congresswoman

01:14:05.000 --> 01:14:09.999
and Green Party candidate for president.

01:14:10.000 --> 01:14:14.999
It’s a great shame on the black political
tradition in the United States

01:14:15.000 --> 01:14:19.999
to have

01:14:20.000 --> 01:14:24.999
a warmonger.

01:14:25.000 --> 01:14:29.999
It’s almost as if

01:14:30.000 --> 01:14:34.999
the black community in the United States,

01:14:35.000 --> 01:14:39.999
maybe we’ve lost our innocence too,

01:14:40.000 --> 01:14:44.999
because umm…

01:14:45.000 --> 01:14:49.999
It would be very difficult
to find a black person

01:14:50.000 --> 01:14:54.999
in the United States just an average ordinary
person who supports any of these wars

01:14:55.000 --> 01:14:59.999
and yet, these wars are being
carried out in blackface.

01:15:00.000 --> 01:15:04.999
More than any other president,
Obama has prosecuted

01:15:05.000 --> 01:15:09.999
truth tellers known as whistleblowers.

01:15:10.000 --> 01:15:14.999
And this is WikiLeaks, an Internet
whistleblowing organization independent

01:15:15.000 --> 01:15:19.999
and stateless. It represents
a landmark in journalism.

01:15:20.000 --> 01:15:24.999
WikiLeaks has released hundreds of
thousands of secret pentagon documents

01:15:25.000 --> 01:15:29.999
that describe the wholesale killing
of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

01:15:30.000 --> 01:15:34.999
In the information that you
have revealed on WikiLeaks

01:15:35.000 --> 01:15:39.999
about these so-called endless wars,

01:15:40.000 --> 01:15:44.999
what has come out of them.
Looking at the enormous quantity

01:15:45.000 --> 01:15:49.999
and diversity of these military
or intelligence apparatus,

01:15:50.000 --> 01:15:54.999
insider documents umm… what I
see is a vast sprawling estate,

01:15:55.000 --> 01:15:59.999
but we would traditionally call
the military intelligence complex

01:16:00.000 --> 01:16:04.999
or military-industrial complex,

01:16:05.000 --> 01:16:09.999
and that this sprawling umm… industrial
estate umm… is growing becoming more

01:16:10.000 --> 01:16:14.999
and more secretive, becoming more
and more uncontrolled. This is not

01:16:15.000 --> 01:16:19.999
umm… a sophisticated conspiracy
controlled at the top,

01:16:20.000 --> 01:16:24.999
this is a vast movement of self-interest
by thousands and thousands of players

01:16:25.000 --> 01:16:29.999
are all working together
and against each other

01:16:30.000 --> 01:16:34.999
to produce an end result which
is Iraq and Afghanistan

01:16:35.000 --> 01:16:39.999
and Colombia and… and keeping that going.
You know, we often deal with

01:16:40.000 --> 01:16:44.999
tax havens and people hiding assets and
transferring money through offshore tax havens,

01:16:45.000 --> 01:16:49.999
so I see some really quite
remarkable similarities.

01:16:50.000 --> 01:16:54.999
Guantanamo is used for

01:16:55.000 --> 01:16:59.999
laundering people to an offshore haven,

01:17:00.000 --> 01:17:04.999
which doesn’t follow the rule of
law, similarly Iraq and Afghanistan

01:17:05.000 --> 01:17:09.999
and Colombia are used to wash money

01:17:10.000 --> 01:17:14.999
out of the US tax base and back… Arms
companies. Arms companies, yeah.

01:17:15.000 --> 01:17:19.999
I mean, what you’re saying is that money
and money making is at the center

01:17:20.000 --> 01:17:24.999
of modern war and it’s
almost self-perpetuating…

01:17:25.000 --> 01:17:29.999
Yes. And… and it’s becoming worse.
What happens when

01:17:30.000 --> 01:17:34.999
WikiLeaks runs into the
United Kingdom, which has

01:17:35.000 --> 01:17:39.999
some of the most draconian secrecy
laws in the world, such as,

01:17:40.000 --> 01:17:44.999
the Official Secrets Act? We haven’t
found problem publishing UK information.

01:17:45.000 --> 01:17:49.999
I mean, when we look at

01:17:50.000 --> 01:17:54.999
the Official Secrets Act,
label documents, we see

01:17:55.000 --> 01:17:59.999
the state that it is an offence to retain

01:18:00.000 --> 01:18:04.999
the information and it is an offence to destroy
the information, so the only possible outcome

01:18:05.000 --> 01:18:09.999
is that we have to publish the information.

01:18:10.000 --> 01:18:14.999
[sil.] Umm… Which I have done
on many, many occasions.

01:18:15.000 --> 01:18:19.999
I noticed one that I uh…
had a personal interest

01:18:20.000 --> 01:18:24.999
in was one that from the
Ministry of Defence

01:18:25.000 --> 01:18:29.999
classified document that equated terrorists
with investigative journalists as threats…

01:18:30.000 --> 01:18:34.999
And Russian spies. And Russian spies.
Yeah. As… As… In fact,

01:18:35.000 --> 01:18:39.999
in many sections of their report
investigative journalists are the number one

01:18:40.000 --> 01:18:44.999
threat to the sort of information
security of the Ministry of Defense.

01:18:45.000 --> 01:18:49.999
There was a 2,000 page
document on how to stop leaks

01:18:50.000 --> 01:18:54.999
from the Ministry of Defense
which… which we leaked.

01:18:55.000 --> 01:18:59.999
I didn’t know whether to be offended
or honored. Well, it’s nice,

01:19:00.000 --> 01:19:04.999
nice to be having an impact.

01:19:05.000 --> 01:19:09.999
Since the release of the Pentagon’s
war secrets, Julian Assange

01:19:10.000 --> 01:19:14.999
has been subjected to extraordinary smears and
accusations originating in America and Sweden.

01:19:15.000 --> 01:19:19.999
These include threats against his life

01:19:20.000 --> 01:19:24.999
and bizarre character assassination.
The media all over the world

01:19:25.000 --> 01:19:29.999
has amplified this propaganda.

01:19:30.000 --> 01:19:34.999
This secret pentagon
document states clearly

01:19:35.000 --> 01:19:39.999
that US intelligence intends
to destroy trust in WikiLeaks

01:19:40.000 --> 01:19:44.999
by threatening whistleblowers with
exposure and criminal prosecution,

01:19:45.000 --> 01:19:49.999
thereby discrediting truth-tellers.
How you feel about

01:19:50.000 --> 01:19:54.999
whistleblowers as an essential
part of democracy? Do you…

01:19:55.000 --> 01:19:59.999
Do you approve of whistleblowers? Well, I
think, you know, this country has laws

01:20:00.000 --> 01:20:04.999
to protect whistleblowers.
Exactly. Uh… And uh…

01:20:05.000 --> 01:20:09.999
And I think that, you know, that there
have been instances in our history where

01:20:10.000 --> 01:20:14.999
shining a light on something
is important to do.

01:20:15.000 --> 01:20:19.999
Can you… As a senior official uh…

01:20:20.000 --> 01:20:24.999
of the United States government,
a guarantee that the editors

01:20:25.000 --> 01:20:29.999
of WikiLeaks and the editor himself
is not American are not in danger

01:20:30.000 --> 01:20:34.999
that they themselves will not be
subjected to the kind of hunt

01:20:35.000 --> 01:20:39.999
that we read about in the… the media.
Well, first of all,

01:20:40.000 --> 01:20:44.999
it’s not my position to give guarantees, not
anything. We do have an open criminal investigation.

01:20:45.000 --> 01:20:49.999
The investigation is targeted
on the individuals that have

01:20:50.000 --> 01:20:54.999
umm… violated the trust and confidence
that’s been bestowed upon them

01:20:55.000 --> 01:20:59.999
by this country. But WikiLeaks is an
organization run from outside the United States

01:21:00.000 --> 01:21:04.999
and the founder of that has been
told that he is at great risk

01:21:05.000 --> 01:21:09.999
from being hunted town. I
don’t know in what form.

01:21:10.000 --> 01:21:14.999
And neither do I. So I’m afraid I
can’t help you. I mean, for you

01:21:15.000 --> 01:21:19.999
to receive that volume of
documentation suggests

01:21:20.000 --> 01:21:24.999
that there must be something
of a rebellion going on

01:21:25.000 --> 01:21:29.999
within the system. Yes, I mean,
it’s the one hopeful thing

01:21:30.000 --> 01:21:34.999
is in fact, there are good
people in the US military,

01:21:35.000 --> 01:21:39.999
and some of those people have had enough. It’s sort
of another way of being a conscientious objector.

01:21:40.000 --> 01:21:44.999
In fact, arguably a far more
powerful way of objecting

01:21:45.000 --> 01:21:49.999
uh… to the revolt.

01:21:50.000 --> 01:21:54.999
In April 2010, WikiLeaks
released this cockpit video

01:21:55.000 --> 01:21:59.999
from an Apache gunship in Baghdad in 2007.

01:22:00.000 --> 01:22:04.999
The gunship is firing from a distance
of over a mile from its victims.

01:22:05.000 --> 01:22:09.999
This is the war you don’t see.
Clearly there were two cameramen.

01:22:10.000 --> 01:22:14.999
They’re holding cameras, not arms. Umm…

01:22:15.000 --> 01:22:20.000
these cameramen turned out to
be void as news reporters.

01:22:40.000 --> 01:22:42.000
[sil.] Hey, roger.

01:22:45.000 --> 01:22:50.000
(inaudible).

01:22:55.000 --> 01:23:00.000
The whole street covered with bodies.
The reaction to that was nice.

01:23:10.000 --> 01:23:14.999
This taped from me and the other people
involved made nice a dirty word.

01:23:15.000 --> 01:23:19.999
So he just couldn’t see
something has been nice anymore

01:23:20.000 --> 01:23:24.999
when a whole street uh…
covered with carnage is nice.

01:23:25.000 --> 01:23:29.999
Ethan McCord was one of the first soldiers
to reach the scene of the killing.

01:23:30.000 --> 01:23:34.999
Here, he speaks to an audience
in the United States.

01:23:35.000 --> 01:23:39.999
Myself and the team of soldiers I was with began running
in the direction where we heard the Apache fire.

01:23:40.000 --> 01:23:44.999
Backing. I was not even close to prepared for
the carnage that I was about to walk on to.

01:23:45.000 --> 01:23:49.999
I saw what appeared to have been three men on a
corner. Got that big pile of bodies to the right,

01:23:50.000 --> 01:23:54.999
on the corner? Yeah, right here. We got a
dismounted infantry and vehicles, over.

01:23:55.000 --> 01:23:59.999
It was an extreme shock to my system, they
didn’t look human. Then there was the smell.

01:24:00.000 --> 01:24:04.999
The smell was unlike anything I’ve
smelled before, a mixture of feces,

01:24:05.000 --> 01:24:09.999
urine, blood, smoke, and
something else indescribable.

01:24:10.000 --> 01:24:14.999
Yeah, Bushmaster, we have a van that’s
approaching and picking up the bodies.

01:24:15.000 --> 01:24:19.999
Request permission to uh engage.
Bushmaster Seven, roger.

01:24:20.000 --> 01:24:24.999
This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Engage.
One-Eight, engage. Clear. Come on. Clear.

01:24:25.000 --> 01:24:29.999
[sil.]

01:24:30.000 --> 01:24:34.999
Clear left.

01:24:35.000 --> 01:24:39.999
Oh, yeah, look at that.

01:24:40.000 --> 01:24:44.999
Right through the windshield. (inaudible).
I think they just drove over a body.

01:24:45.000 --> 01:24:49.999
Crying, I hear crying. Not cries of pain,

01:24:50.000 --> 01:24:54.999
but that of a small child who had just
woken up from a horrible nightmare.

01:24:55.000 --> 01:24:59.999
I saw that there was a minivan and the
cries appeared to be coming from it.

01:25:00.000 --> 01:25:04.999
Myself and another soldier,
a 20-year-old private,

01:25:05.000 --> 01:25:09.999
walked up to the passenger side van and looked
inside. The private I was with reeled back,

01:25:10.000 --> 01:25:14.999
began to vomit and quickly ran away. What I
saw when I looked in the van was a small girl

01:25:15.000 --> 01:25:19.999
about 4 years old on the passenger side of
the bench seat. She had a severe belly wound

01:25:20.000 --> 01:25:28.000
and was covered in glass.

01:25:30.000 --> 01:25:34.999
The glass was in her hair and even in her
eyes. Next to her half on the floorboard

01:25:35.000 --> 01:25:39.999
with his head resting on the seat
was a boy about 7 years old,

01:25:40.000 --> 01:25:44.999
he wasn’t moving and from the severe wound on the right
side of his head, my first thought was he was dead.

01:25:45.000 --> 01:25:49.999
In the driver’s seat was who
I immediately concluded

01:25:50.000 --> 01:25:54.999
must have been these children’s father, by the way he
was hunched over the children in a protective manner.

01:25:55.000 --> 01:26:00.000
The whole time thinking \"Fuck,
what the fuck these are babies.\"

01:26:05.000 --> 01:26:09.999
See, my son was born May 31st 2007.

01:26:10.000 --> 01:26:14.999
I had yet to see him. And I had a daughter
who was barely older than this girl.

01:26:15.000 --> 01:26:19.999
The medic radioed in that she needed to be evacuated
because there was nothing else he can do here.

01:26:20.000 --> 01:26:24.999
I handed the child to the medic who then ran
the girl to a waiting Bradley armored vehicle.

01:26:25.000 --> 01:26:29.999
I walked back to the van, I don’t know why.

01:26:30.000 --> 01:26:34.999
I looked inside the van again. Did the boy
just move? Holy shit, the boy just moved.

01:26:35.000 --> 01:26:39.999
I grabbed the boy from the van

01:26:40.000 --> 01:26:44.999
and held him against my chest.
I was screaming at this point,

01:26:45.000 --> 01:26:49.999
\"The boy’s alive! The boy’s alive!\" I started
running to the Bradley in hopes it wasn’t leaving.

01:26:50.000 --> 01:26:54.999
At this point,

01:26:55.000 --> 01:26:59.999
the boy looked up at me,
then his eyes rolled back.

01:27:00.000 --> 01:27:04.999
My heart sunk, \"It’s okay, I
have you, it’s going to be okay.

01:27:05.000 --> 01:27:09.999
Don’t die, don’t die.\" I squeezed
him a little bit tighter.

01:27:10.000 --> 01:27:15.000
I put him into the Bradley
as gently as I could.

01:27:20.000 --> 01:27:28.000
\"What the fuck are you doing, McCord?\"

01:27:30.000 --> 01:27:34.999
It was my platoon leader. \"You need to quit worrying
about these fucking kids, and pull security!\"

01:27:35.000 --> 01:27:39.999
He screamed. At the time the only thing
I can think of was \"Roger that, sir.\"

01:27:40.000 --> 01:27:44.999
When the soldiers on the ground,
he describes the atrocity

01:27:45.000 --> 01:27:49.999
as an I quote him, \"An
everyday occurrence.\"

01:27:50.000 --> 01:27:54.999
And he said, the word from his commander
was, \"To kill.\" I won’t use the word.

01:27:55.000 --> 01:27:59.999
Everyone on the street and he replied to him,
\"Are you kidding me, women and children?\"

01:28:00.000 --> 01:28:04.999
He said, \"Yes.\" When it’s a point
made by many other soldiers

01:28:05.000 --> 01:28:09.999
have come back from Afghanistan,
Iraq, but this kind of atrocity

01:28:10.000 --> 01:28:14.999
is not an aberration. Well, first of all
this is not an everyday occurrence,

01:28:15.000 --> 01:28:19.999
it was an everyday occurrence, we
would certainly know about it. Uh…

01:28:20.000 --> 01:28:24.999
These incidences are unfortunate everyone
in which there’s a civilian casualty is…

01:28:25.000 --> 01:28:29.999
is unfortunate, but again, it is the enemy

01:28:30.000 --> 01:28:34.999
who is deliberately trying to inflict civilian
casualties and put civilians in harm,

01:28:35.000 --> 01:28:39.999
is the NATO forces, it is the US forces

01:28:40.000 --> 01:28:44.999
that are taking every precaution that they can to
prosecute the war and prevent civilian casualties.

01:28:45.000 --> 01:28:49.999
General James Cartwright who’s
vice chair of the Joint

01:28:50.000 --> 01:28:54.999
Chiefs of Staff, he says the United States

01:28:55.000 --> 01:28:59.999
can expect to be at war.
And these are his words,

01:29:00.000 --> 01:29:04.999
\"For as far as the eye can
see.\" That sounds like

01:29:05.000 --> 01:29:09.999
a permanent state of war. Our
job is to be prepared to

01:29:10.000 --> 01:29:14.999
umm… fight and win this nation’s wars.
And so we have to be prepared for

01:29:15.000 --> 01:29:19.999
the possibility of
conflict into the future.

01:29:20.000 --> 01:29:24.999
It’s a remarkable state of affairs,
isn’t it? Because the United States

01:29:25.000 --> 01:29:29.999
is not in fact, threatened by
a power that could possibly

01:29:30.000 --> 01:29:34.999
overturn it, defeat it. That’s impossible,

01:29:35.000 --> 01:29:39.999
but still it goes on as if we’re
all drawn into most of humanity

01:29:40.000 --> 01:29:44.999
into a permanent state of war.
For many people

01:29:45.000 --> 01:29:49.999
that seems very difficult to justify.
Uh… Well,

01:29:50.000 --> 01:29:54.999
first of all, there are some very dangerous
asymmetric threats that are out there.

01:29:55.000 --> 01:29:59.999
Terrorism obviously one of them. Umm…

01:30:00.000 --> 01:30:04.999
This is what we… What we anticipate
going into the future is…

01:30:05.000 --> 01:30:09.999
is not necessarily nation on
nation type conflict, okay?

01:30:10.000 --> 01:30:14.999
It is these asymmetric threats that are
out there. It’s the threat of… umm…

01:30:15.000 --> 01:30:19.999
of weapons of mass destruction.
There’s another asymmetric threat

01:30:20.000 --> 01:30:24.999
is the cyber threat that exists.
These are all threats that transcend

01:30:25.000 --> 01:30:29.999
umm… geographical boundaries.

01:30:30.000 --> 01:30:34.999
So, you know, the United States
military has to prepare for

01:30:35.000 --> 01:30:39.999
a wide range of threats that exist out there
in order to protect its national interests.

01:30:40.000 --> 01:30:44.999
A media drums beating for another
war, say a war with Iran.

01:30:45.000 --> 01:30:49.999
I wouldn’t say that the media are
beating the drums for… for war yet.

01:30:50.000 --> 01:30:54.999
Although, they are showing the same
credulous news, the same obsequiousness

01:30:55.000 --> 01:30:59.999
towards the powerful as they did
in advance of the Iraq war.

01:31:00.000 --> 01:31:04.999
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,

01:31:05.000 --> 01:31:09.999
I would be surprised if they did anything
but. You mentioned already Iran.

01:31:10.000 --> 01:31:14.999
Yeah.

01:31:15.000 --> 01:31:19.999
Umm… And there is an enormous choice to be made about Iran,
a more developed, more formidable, more populous umm…

01:31:20.000 --> 01:31:24.999
and certainly better armed country than Saddam’s
Iraq whatever was. Are you actually saying

01:31:25.000 --> 01:31:29.999
that we should threaten them militarily if they
are determined to develop nuclear weapons?

01:31:30.000 --> 01:31:34.999
I am saying that I think it is wholly unacceptable
for Iran to have nuclear weapons capability.

01:31:35.000 --> 01:31:39.999
But what can we do about it? And umm… I think
we’ve got to be prepared to confront them

01:31:40.000 --> 01:31:44.999
if necessary militarily. Militarily? If
necessary militarily. I think there is no

01:31:45.000 --> 01:31:49.999
alternative to that. Umm… If they continue to develop
nuclear weapons and they need to get that message

01:31:50.000 --> 01:31:54.999
loud and clear. Does this sound familiar?

01:31:55.000 --> 01:31:59.999
There is as much evidence that Iran is
building nuclear weapons as they was that Iraq

01:32:00.000 --> 01:32:04.999
had weapons of mass destruction
as claimed by Tony Blair.

01:32:05.000 --> 01:32:09.999
We know that great
falsehoods were perpetrated.

01:32:10.000 --> 01:32:14.999
And yet, the individuals who perpetrated these things are
still running around. You know, more or less much as before,

01:32:15.000 --> 01:32:19.999
you know, being taken seriously as
commentators as authorities on this all that.

01:32:20.000 --> 01:32:24.999
Uh… You know, I find it astonishing. These
people should hide their heads in shame.

01:32:25.000 --> 01:32:29.999
The British elites do not want the
public to know what they’re doing.

01:32:30.000 --> 01:32:34.999
They don’t actually even think they have a right to
know what they’re doing. Umm… And they know that.

01:32:35.000 --> 01:32:39.999
The more information that public has, the more difficult
it is for them to pursue policies that maybe are

01:32:40.000 --> 01:32:44.999
abusive of human rights or involve
supporting a repressive regime. Umm…

01:32:45.000 --> 01:32:49.999
And so there’s a conscious strategy
actually uh… of having these public

01:32:50.000 --> 01:32:54.999
relations campaigns that the government regularly has
whenever it resorts to an overseas military intervention

01:32:55.000 --> 01:32:59.999
to try and convince the public that they’re acting
in uh… for the highest of noble intentions.

01:33:00.000 --> 01:33:04.999
When in fact, they’re not. When, when
they’re usually acting out of hard-hearted

01:33:05.000 --> 01:33:09.999
straightforward calculation of elite
interests to the public as a threat

01:33:10.000 --> 01:33:14.999
that needs to be countered.

01:33:15.000 --> 01:33:19.999
For too many journalists, the
price of their independence

01:33:20.000 --> 01:33:24.999
is their life. They include Terry
Lloyd of ITN shot dead in Iraq

01:33:25.000 --> 01:33:29.999
by American marines. Since
the invasion of Iraq,

01:33:30.000 --> 01:33:34.999
more than 300 journalists have been killed,

01:33:35.000 --> 01:33:39.999
more than in any other war.
This film is a tribute to them.

01:33:40.000 --> 01:33:44.999
But doesn’t mean that we journalists have
to risk our lives to tell the truth,

01:33:45.000 --> 01:33:49.999
but we do have to be brave enough to
defy those who seek our collusion

01:33:50.000 --> 01:33:54.999
in selling their latest bloody
adventure in someone else’s country.

01:33:55.000 --> 01:33:59.999
That means always challenging
the official story.

01:34:00.000 --> 01:34:04.999
However, patriotic that story
may appear, however seductive

01:34:05.000 --> 01:34:09.999
and insidious it is. For propaganda
relies on us in the media

01:34:10.000 --> 01:34:14.999
to aim its deceptions not at a far
away enemy, but at you at home,

01:34:15.000 --> 01:34:19.999
it’s very simple in this age
of endless imperial war,

01:34:20.000 --> 01:34:24.999
the lives of countless
men, women, and children

01:34:25.000 --> 01:34:29.999
depend on the truth or
their blood is on us.

01:34:30.000 --> 01:34:34.999
\"Never believe anything until it’s officially
denied,\" said the great reporter Claud Coburn.

01:34:35.000 --> 01:34:39.999
In other words, those whose job
it is to keep the record straight

01:34:40.000 --> 01:34:45.000
or to be the voice of people, not power.