Hide the Ball, * & Blair

[spindrifter]

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1649351,00.html

The British government is attempting through an unprecedented threat to use the Official Secrets Act to bury reports of the goings on between the B Brothers.

...snip

Fears that fresh revelations about disputes between Tony Blair and George Bush on the Iraq conflict could damage Downing Street's intimate relationship with the White House prompted this week's unprecedented threat by the attorney general to use the Official Secrets Act against national newspapers.

...snip

The meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair took place at a time when Whitehall officials, intelligence officers, and British military commanders were expressing outrage at the scale of the US assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, in which up to 1,000 civilians are feared to have died. Pictures of the attack shown on al-Jazeera had infuriated US generals.

snip...

The Guardian wrote in an earlier story that the International Federation of Journalists has concerns about 16 foreign journalists and media assistants who have reputedly died at American hands.

IMHO, this story is so big that it must come out. It will tie up some of the loose ends regarding the * administration's efforts to create a message that would sell a stateless war to the American and British public.

[Tom Joad]

1. Very Important Story.

[calzone]

2. I've been trying to find a civilian head count

...for Fallujah, with no success, now I see 1000 feared dead. War supporters I've debated say there were negligible civilian deaths, that they were given a month to evacuate, that few bldgs were destroyed, no chemical or incendiary weapons were used and extreme care was taken to avoid civilian deaths.
Much of the time they use white house, state dept and coalition provisional authority/central command press releases as their "incontrovertible" backup sources.
The facts I've found from many different sources contradict all these points. Interestingly, Dar Jamail, Riverbendblog, an Iraqi doctor and several freelance unembedded reporters as well as numerous photos are all dismissed as not remotely credible.
Neither the war supporters or the Pentagon could dismiss the military commander reports that "the gloves were taken off" in Fallujah and chemical wep white phosphorous and incendiary Napalm were used, and then there's the SOP (standard operating procedure) orders to "shoot anything that moves" that was made public at the time.
What isn't made public is the fact that there's been many Fallujahs, and Iraqi cities still are being treated to the same "heavy-handed" treatment. I guess the truth is not only the first casualty in war, it's among the last too.

[spindrifter]

3. I don't know if you've seen

this: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1587

[calzone]

4. Thanks spindrifter

I wasn't surprised to have read that, CNN reacted by questioning the need for the truth rather the the import of it. I heard a challenge to several CNN war correspondents from other journalists, asking them if they even realized the slant and bias of their war coverage...the response? "Of course we want the US to win, we make no apologies for that, it's normal".

"One of the reasons the public doesn't have much empathy for the press's troubles is that often they see us as people claiming privilege. Another reason—maybe the primary one—is that we haven't made our case with the public. We haven't gotten across why people need us or why what we do is important to the functioning of a free nation. We haven't effectively gotten our readers to understand that if they get lied to by their government or other power centers, and we—or some other watchdogs—don't quickly show them the lie, bad things can happen. People can lose their health insurance or have their homes seized by the bank. And wars can happen and people can die. So we have to find better ways to show them why this is true and therefore why aggressive journalism is a necessity."

Sydney H. Schanberg

[spindrifter]

5. Check out

the graphic for the current Newsweek article,Iran Won't Need an Exit Strategy. It says 1900 Iraqi civilians. Don't know if it's on-line.

[global1]

6. Reward The Liars And Bomb The TruthTellers.......

that is *Co's motto. That is the bizzaro world we now live in.

Free all the Downing Street Minutes. Let's rid ourselves of these crooks and killers.