READER COMMENTS ON

"Two 'Revolutions': Egypt 2011 v. Iraq 2003"

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COMMENT #1 [Permalink]

... BlueHawk said on 2/2/2011 @ 1:41 pm PT...



COMMENT #2 [Permalink]

... Ernest A. Canning said on 2/2/2011 @ 1:53 pm PT...



The bottom photos depict the staged, faux revolutionary spectacle of the April 9, 2003 toppling of the statute of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. It was but one of somewhere between 50 to 60 stories the Pentagon made up from whole cloth.

What looked like a spontaneous uprising by thousands of Iraqis was but a few members of Ahmed Chalabi's private army. The Marines had sealed off the entire square in order to stage the event.

The smaller photo reflects what the corporate media displayed. The larger photo of the nearly empty square was a Reuters photo that reflected the reality.

Then there was the concocted story about the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl next door, Jessica Lynch, portrayed in the media as the wounded hero who went down shooting, “fighting to the death” at the time of her capture.

As Norman Solomon observed in War Made Easy, “Typical was a big story put together by Los Angeles Times reporters in Doha….Hailing the rescue as ‘a triumphant moment for U.S. forces,’ the front-page April 3 [2003] article reported that special operations troops ‘landed a Black Hawk helicopter in the courtyard of the hospital, shot their way into the building under heavy fire and moved to the room where Lynch lay…Once inside, the US forces grabbed Lynch, strapped her to a stretcher and—again, under fire—carted her to the waiting chopper.’"

It was a wonderful, made for TV heroic tale. It was also patently false, another instance of military propaganda that was exposed not by the American media but instead by John Kampfner of the BBC. Lynch had not been wounded in combat; had not gone down shooting, but instead was injured when her jeep crashed. She was well-treated by Iraqi doctors, who had sought themselves to take her back to the Americans only to turn back when U.S. soldiers fired on their approaching ambulance. The Americans did not face a hail of gunfire. It was a staged event in which the Americans brought their cameras along. All of this was confirmed by Lynch herself.

Such is the state of "journalism" of the corporate-owned media.