elementropy

Thursday, March 03, 2005

It's Worth Repeating

Majikthise insists that Eason Jordan was right, and makes a good case for it.

But, like Abu Ghraib, Jordan's claim underlines the Heart Of Darkness aspects of war that the wrong sort of patriots are congenitally unable to acknowledge; hence, facts that demonstrate pigheaded callousness at best, but more likely, blatant depravity and a war criminal mindset, must be marginalised or ignored or be made to seem false.

It was the Truth's bad luck that Jordan worded his claim poorly; also, that he lacked courage in defending it.

It is the Truth's good luck that Majikthise has resurrected a defense of Jordan's claim at a time when the triumphalism of the wingnut bloggers has blown over; there is also Good Luck in that she's posting it simultaneously at hugely-trafficked Pandagon.

Now that the Social Security arguments are somewhat abating, and Gannongate is being ignored enough by the PTB to start its slide to the memoryhole, now is as good a time as any to make up for much ground lost to the wingnuts on this front.

Thanks to norbizness, in comments to Majikthise's post, I'm made aware of this timeline of atrocities at Body and Soul.

Then there's Jeremy Scahill's "Shooting The Messenger", which corroborates Jordan's claim:

Eason Jordan's comment was hardly a radical declaration. He was expressing a common view among news organizations around the world. "We have had three deaths, and they were all non-embedded, non-coalition nationals and they were all at the hands of the US military, and the reaction of the US authorities in each case was that they were somehow justified," David Schlesinger, Reuters's global managing editor, said in November. "What is the US's position on nonembeds? Are nonembedded journalists fair game?" One of the BBC's top news anchors, Nik Gowing, said recently that he was "speak[ing] for a large number of news organizations, many of whom are not really talking publicly about this at the moment," when he made this statement about the dangers facing reporters in Iraq: "The trouble is that a lot of the military--particularly the American...military--do not want us there. And they make it very uncomfortable for us to work. And I think that this...is leading to security forces in some instances feeling it is legitimate to target us with deadly force and with impunity."

(Via Roger Ailes.)

See also this year-old story by Christian Parenti.

That the wingnuts shot the messenger and then bragged about it is par for the course but not the real problem. The real problem's that they wanted the message -- the Truth -- itself hushed, and they've largely succeeded.