The American main stream media's (MSM) part in the manipulation of the news to obtain American's support for the illegal war in Iraq has already been discussed. American MSM fell in line with the Bush Administration's lies and deceptions under the flags of patriotism. Anyone who questioned were quickly labeled "unpatriotic," "unamerican" and "anti-military".
Alissa J. Rubin, a member of the MSM during the Iraq war and NY Times reporter has finally confessed.
Alissa J. Rubin in Sunday's Week in Review says: " I came to Iraq three days after Saddam Hussein fled Baghdad. It was April 12, 2003. At the time, Iraqis bristled when asked if they were Sunni, Shilte or Kurd. It made no difference, they said, they were brothers. And, in the heady aftermath of the war, for a short while it almost seemed true." "I should have been the canary in the coal mine. But like so many others around me, I did not want to believe what I saw."
Rubin, who is now in Afghanistan, continues: "What are the lessons of Iraq that I carry with me? For outsiders, there is a familiar struggle to see the place as it truly is, not as we might wish it would be."
"Americans wanted to believe that their version of democracy was just waiting to spring to life in Iraq — a peaceful multiethnic, multireligious society adhering to the rule of law. That longing to find in another country a mirror of ourselves trumped cold analysis and led to years of denial that came to an end only when the mutilated bodies at the Baghdad morgue mounted each day…
In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe in was gunned down. Sunnis and Shiites each committed horrific crimes, and the Kurds, whose modern-looking cities and Western ways seemed at first so familiar, turned out to be capable of their own brutality. The Americans, too, did their share of violence, and among the worst they did was wishful thinking, the misreading of the winds and allowing what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide” to swell. Could they have stopped it? Probably not. Could it have been stemmed so that it did less damage, saved some of the fathers and brothers, mothers and sons? Yes, almost certainly, yes.
So the lesson I take away is never to underestimate hatred or history or the complexity of alien places. I came to love Iraq’s scrub desert, its date palm groves and marshlands, but most of all its courageous people who despite great personal losses did not lose faith in their country’s possibilities: the imams who prayed despite threats; my Shiite friend Salama Khafaji, who lost her eldest son in a Sunni ambush in the Triangle of Death yet continues to work for integration. Terrible things happened in Iraq over the last six years, and I go to Afghanistan feeling that we owe it to everyone who has died in Iraq — Iraqi and American — not to forget, not to gloss over, not to think in terms of success and failure, or victory and defeat, but to see as best we can, through a glass darkly."
Why Can't the Corporate Media Just Tell the Truth About Iraq and Afghanistan?
http://www.alternet.org/media/143723/why_can%27t_the_corporate_media_just_tell_the_truth_about_iraq_%26_afghanistan?page=1
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