Glenn Greenwald: The message sent by America's invisible victims
As two more Afghan children are liberated (from their lives) by NATO this weekend, a new film examines the effects of endless US aggression
The most propagandistic aspect of the US War on Terror has been, and remains, that its victims are rendered invisible and voiceless. They are almost never named by newspapers. They and their surviving family members are virtually never heard from on television. The Bush and Obama DOJs have collaborated with federal judges to ensure that even those who everyone admits are completely innocent have no access to American courts and thus no means of having their stories heard or their rights vindicated. Radical secrecy theories and escalating attacks on whistleblowers push these victims further into the dark.
It is the ultimate tactic of Othering: concealing their humanity, enabling their dehumanization, by simply relegating them to nonexistence. As Ashleigh Banfield put it her 2003 speech denouncing US media coverage of the Iraq war just months before she was demoted and then fired by MSNBC: US media reports systematically exclude both the perspectives of "the other side" and the victims of American violence. Media outlets in predominantly Muslim countries certainly report on their plight, but US media outlets simply do not, which is one major reason for the disparity in worldviews between the two populations. They know what the US does in their part of the world, but Americans are kept deliberately ignorant of it.
What makes Dirty Wars so important is that it viscerally conveys the effects of US militarism on these invisible victims: by letting them speak for themselves. Scahill and his crew travel to the places most US journalists are unwilling or unable to go: to remote and dangerous provinces in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, all to give voice to the victims of US aggression. We hear from the Afghans whose family members (including two pregnant women) were slaughtered by US Special Forces in 2010 in the Paktia Province, despite being part of the Afghan Police, only for NATO to outright lie and claim the women were already dead from "honor killings" by the time they arrived (lies uncritically repeated, of course, by leading US media outlets).
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/31/dirty-wars-terrorism-victims
idwiyo
(5,113 posts)radiclib
(1,811 posts)More odious anti-Obama agitprop from the odious leper.
(Where's the old sarcasm thingie?)
K&R, btw..
Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)Someone named scatological or scatonscooter or some other shit based name, provided us with that
Response to radiclib (Reply #2)
Hissyspit This message was self-deleted by its author.
marmar
(77,077 posts)L0oniX
(31,493 posts)NoMoreWarNow
(1,259 posts)the military industrial congressional media complex -- which has mutated into such an all-pervasive, all-powerful, banal and insidious evil that no one can do anything to stop it, it seems.
There are way too many problems to work on, for those who care, and the rest of us are distracted and complacent.
Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)I would ask them if they are proud of what he is doing with his kill lists and dehumanization of innocent bystanders, but really, what is the point, they will claim it is all lies and the rest of the world is part of all these lies, in cahoots with the known hater, Glenn Greenwald the unclean devil and foolish enemy of his holiness and God of the sun, Kim j... I mean Obama, honestly I tend to get the God's that are descended from heaven to lead their people confused; Kim, Barrack their supporters make similar claims and are either part of the propaganda or hypnotized into it's myth, it's hard to keep them straight.
If you want to try, go there and link to this, we know their pre-released script that will start by attacking the source but not the facts and go from there.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)sock and all.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)bvar22
(39,909 posts)He never loved Obama,
so nothing he says is worthy of bothering my beautiful mind.
You will know them by their WORKS.
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Unknown Beatle
(2,672 posts)of the Iraq war just months before she was demoted and then fired by MSNBC."
Not only her but Dan Rather, Phil Donahue, and most recently Soledad O'Brien.