Lessons From Media Involvement In Yugoslavia

[Husky]

Nothing to do with Yugoslavia, but sounded to me like the following may have a bearing on certain other aspects of this thread.





1. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...02037.html

Amnesty questions claim that Gaddafi ordered rape as weapon of war

By Patrick Cockburn - Friday, 24 June 2011



2. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/com...99701.html

Lies, damn lies, and reports of battlefield atrocities

World View: Gaddafi is feeding his troops Viagra and ordering them to rape the womenfolk of the rebels ... well, maybe. Or is truth, as usual, the first casualty in this war?

Patrick Cockburn - Sunday, 19 June 2011





People can make up their own minds. On this next bit though, from the 2nd item above:

[...]

In the first Gulf conflict of 1990-91 two notorious pieces of propaganda and misinformation greatly helped to rally support for the war by seeming to demonstrate the savagery and duplicity of the Iraqi government. The first was the appearance of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl before a US congressional committee to testify how, as a volunteer hospital nurse, she had seen Iraqi soldiers tip babies out of incubators and leave them to die on the floor. Her account was greeted with outrage until, some time later, it was revealed that the girl was the well-coached daughter of Kuwait's ambassador in Washington who had never left the US during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

(For some reason that last sentence recalls to mind that Irish catholic director who'd never been to India until he went there to make the anti-Hindu christo-propaganda movie "You SlumDogs, Me Millionaire" - or whatever it was called. Oscar nominations for the absurd OTT film were for no other reason than to peddle the dawaganda underlying the fictional plot among as many people across the globe as possible. After all, it's not only the media that's set up to demonise and to manufacture consent.)



The second story took place a few months later, during the bombing and missile strikes on Baghdad. CNN's Peter Arnett reported that the US had destroyed a baby milk factory on the western outskirts of Baghdad, while the Pentagon furiously maintained the facility was making biological weapons. I visited the ruins of the plant on the same day as Arnett and I remember reading through letters about the baby milk business I found in smashed up desks in the factory office. Many were about abortive efforts to save the factory from bankruptcy, convincing evidence that the Iraqi authorities could scarcely have concocted overnight.

[...]