The Silence of the Bombs

Every afternoon, I receive an email bulletin that's called "U.S. Air Force Print News." It's one of countless ways that the Pentagon does outreach to journalists each day to encourage favorable coverage of what the American military is doing.

The messages are heavy on praise for the determination and prowess of the armed forces. There's a glut of visual and quotable material for human-interest stories that will impress readers, listeners and viewers with the bravery, compassion and towering stature of — in the words of retired Gen. Colin Powell a decade ago — "all of those wonderful men and women who do such a great job."

Along the way, journalists receive a stream of limited information about the bombings undertaken by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the official sources have very little to say about what happens to people at the other end of the bombs. And, overall, U.S. media outlets don't add much information about the human consequences.

In late May, a very important exception to the media rule appeared on the website TomDispatch.com (and, in shorter form, in The Nation magazine). The in-depth article — titled "Did the U.S. Lie about Cluster Bomb Use in Iraq?" — did more than probe the Pentagon's extensive utilization of horrific cluster bombs in Iraq since the spring of 2003. The piece, by journalist Nick Turse, also shined a bright light on fundamental aspects of a U.S. air war that has seldom seen any light of day in the mainline American media.

"Unfortunately, thanks to an utter lack of coverage by the mainstream media, what we don't know about the air war in Iraq so far outweighs what we do know that anything but the most minimal picture of the nature of destruction from the air in that country simply can't be painted," Turse writes.

The article raises a key question: "Does the U.S. military keep the numbers of rockets and cannon rounds fired from its planes and helicopters secret because more Iraqi civilians have died due to their use than any other type of weaponry?"

Turse, an associate editor and research director of TomDispatch.com, has written for daily newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

His article pulls no punches about the press as he assesses key information — and huge gaps in media coverage — about the air war on Iraq funded by U.S. taxpayers.

Sadly, he observes, "media reports on the air war are so sparse, with reporting confined largely to reprinting U.S. military handouts and announcements of air strikes, that much of the air war in Iraq remains unknown — although the very fact of an occupying power regularly conducting air strikes in and near population centers should have raised a question or two."

The available evidence is strong that the U.S. air war is intensifying — with a surge of Iraqi civilian casualties that disproportionately include young people. Their suffering and their deaths get very little coverage in the U.S. news media. "Since the Bush administration's invasion, the American air war has been given remarkably short shrift in the media," Turse writes. And he cites "indications that the air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children."

The combination of deceptive officials in the U.S. government and an evasive U.S. press has been a disaster for the flow of information to the American public. "With the military unwilling to tell the truth – or say anything at all, in most cases — and unable to provide the stability necessary for [non-governmental organizations] to operate, it falls to the mainstream media, even at this late stage of the conflict, to begin ferreting out substantive information on the air war," Turse points out. "It seems, however, that until reporters begin bypassing official U.S. military pronouncements and locating Iraqi sources, we will remain largely in the dark with little knowledge of what can only be described as the secret U.S. air war in Iraq."

This secrecy is bad for democracy — and deadly.

The new documentary film "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," based on Norman Solomon's book of the same title, will be released directly to DVD in June. For information about the full-length movie, narrated by Sean Penn, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.