Several months ago NATO began bombing Libya and across mainstream media we were all lead to believe that the NTC was in fact representative of the Libyan people – who themselves were 99% against the dictatorial Muammar Gadaffi – and if NATO was engageing its military might thus, it was for a good cause; to save the lives of civilians.
With retrospect we now know with almost absolute certainty that the 6000 civilians reported killed by Libyan Air Force strikes over Libya never existed and that the raids themselves never took place. Similarly misleading were the “protesters” who were shot in Benghazi; later revealed they were armed and attacking the military barracks. As it was these “facts” that were used by the FUKUS (1) to sway members of the UN to pass resolutions 1970 and 1973 – giving the European NATO countries the green light to invade – and that these “facts” have been totally discredited would have you think that some revision of strategy and the UN resolutions would have been appropriate.
In fact, as with the discovery that weapons of mass destruction [WMD] were nonexistent in Iraq, instead of leading to a logical reassessment, the mainstream media were at pains to find other reasons to continue the planned action and the FUKUS’ governments only too happy to supply them with the raw information to apply the necessary spin (2). There was an almost seamless shift from protecting civilians from the ruthless dictator to helping the Libyans rid the country of the ruthless dictator.
As Michel Collon (3) has often stated “every war is preceded by a media lye” (Afghanistan – Al Qa’eda 9/11, Iraq - WMD, Vietnam – the bay of Tonkin, WW1 – the sinking of the Lucitania) but the initial lies, whilst giving impetus to forge public opinion to applaud the initial offensive are not sufficient to maintain support throughout protracted campaigns. It is the omissions in content more often than fabricated news bytes that are the worst enemy of truth. Having said that, Libya and especially Muammar Gadaffi seem to have been targeted by smear and misinformation more intensively than usual (4).
The greatest form of omission of which news media is guilty is the lack of context when reporting on events. Snap-shot, still-frame reality provides nothing more than anecdotal content that allows for whatever spurious conclusions disingenuous journalists wish to attribute. The greatest example by far of this is the colonization of Palestine by a non-indigenous people – the vast majority of whom are white Europeans. Incredibly it is the Palestinians who have to justify everything as media reports their understandable reactions to 60 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing and treats these reactions as preemptive agression.
Had the general public of France, UK and USA known the statistics for literacy and human development (5) in Libya, that free health-care and education were universally available and that home ownership for young couples and food for the needy were subsidized, that 2800 people’s congress halls had been built to allow participatory democracy for ordinary people would the FUKUS governments have been able to justify what they have done before their own citizens? No way!
The point I am making here is that corporate media should be made accountable for willfully misleading the public in cases where great loss of life is incurred. I am not alluding to editorial mistakes in content or of minor in-exactitude but of purposefully putting facts in the back seat and promoting support for decisions or actions that lead to massive and avoidable loss of life – especially in military campaigns.
Specifically concerning Libya, I have personally not come across more than three or four isolated articles in mainstream media over the past months that have tried to bring to readers attention the unsavory backgrounds of almost all the members the NTC and their vested interests. From Mahmoud Jibril’s business connections with Bernard Henry-Levy and the Qatari Al-Jazaera (6) to the sordid past of Abdel Hakim Belhaj. Little or no mention of the reported genocide that has taken place at Tawerga where the entire population of twenty to thirty-thousand of black people is no longer in the town; fled and massacred. The NTC and corporate media have repeated incessantly since March that the Libyan government was using black foreign mercenaries. Some suggest there is a direct link between NTC / NATO propaganda and the ruthlessness of the exactions carried out by the rebels on the ground. No mention either of the 95% of oil revenues that were being directly channeled into the Libyan treasury and are now being sold off to foreign corporate interest – 35% of concessions appear to have been promised to France company Total alone and the proportion of tax due to the Libyan government non-explicit. No mention of the billions of dollars seized by NATO governments and private banks and that it appears less and less likely that the Libyan people will ever see that money again.
Corporate media owners have a duty to the truth. They have not respected this during the invasion of Libya. If, one day, Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama or their generals are called to trial to explain why 60,000 Libyans are now dead then I think the owners and the editors in chief of Fox News, CNN, Reuters, AP, AFP and affiliate newspapers should stand beside them in the box and pay in equal measure for the part they have played.
Independant journalist Julien Teil who was stranded in the Hotel Rixos during the attack of NATO forces on Tripoli has made the following film entitled “The Humanitarian War” and recounts in detail the farrago of twisted facts which were used to prepare public opinion and justify the invasion of Libya.
- That is France, UK, US – but the acronym is not undeserved or inexact considering the last 100 year alone.
I first saw this acronym in an article by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey on english.pravda.ru - NATO provides video footage for press agencies in raw uncut versions or edited with commentary. Reuters, AP, AFP and the major western television networks have made great use of this service without making clear the origin of the information. No NATO insignia appears anywhere on these videos and networks have “the right” to embed their own corporate logos.
- Michel Collon is an independant Belgium journalist who has written long and large on the role of medias and their use in preparing public opinion for war. Read his Libya-Nato Media Lies report.
- The Serbs and Palestinians, as a people, may have been more maligned. Probably Hugo Chavez has been referred to as a dictator more often than Muammar Gadaffi in recent years; the former having faced 15 electoral processes since 1999 and the latter holding no official office since 1979.
- Libya had a higher UN index of human development than Saudi-Arabia and Russia and literacy rate of 83% (compared to 20% before King Idris was deposed) up until the invasion.
- Thierry Meyssan on Réseau Voltaire
