No mention of those Iraqi teenagers and kids jumping up and down on the burned out vehicles of the Blackwater mercenaries and cheering on the burning and dragging of their bodies in the street and the hanging of two from that bridge in Fallujah on March 31, 2004.
How come? Is it not amazing – such an expression of extreme hatred from the people we liberated from their butcher dictator, Saddam Hussein? (Albeit sanctimoniously so, as educated Iraqis knew well that Saddam was Ronald Reagan’s stooge and collaborator during his highly gratifying and appreciated long and bloody invasion of America’s hated enemy, Iran.)
Backtrack to a similar scene of seemingly inexplicable anti-US military crowd rage. The almost gleeful dragging of mutilated bodies of two Black Hawk helicopter pilots through the back streets of the Somali city of Mogadishu in October 1993.
But wait, this writer just happens to remember hearing a first report, just one single time mind you, that prior to having been shot down, the helicopter(s) had been firing down into the roof of a market, perhaps as part of an effort to assassinate or capture a war lord, who some time before had ordered a deadly attack on UN forces of another nation. Never heard about that firing down into the roof of a market crowded with shoppers ever again, just thousands of sound bites of America’s outrage on witnessing the murderous ingratitude of Somalis. But if that first report, thereafter suppressed, was true, maybe it could have something to say about the grisly and vicious actions of the civilian mob against US military personnel in the streets of a densely populated area of Mogadishu, celebrating a Somali militia success. There is, after all, a reason for everything.
OK, forget “Black Hawk Down”. Let’s fast-forward and return to possible explanations for that street reaction to the 2004 Blackwater ambush in Iraq.
On the Internet, one can read in detail about the humiliation, torture and occasional murder of Iraqis caught in some round-up net of citizens only suspected of activity against the occupying Coalition forces. One can review the so very many many incidents of Americans firing on civilians demonstrating, of mistaken or ‘mistaken’ firings on civilians in the street and on their homes, shootings of whole families to pieces for failing to drive ‘correctly’ near US road blocks, heartbreaking air strikes on buildings suspected of harboring suspected insurgents or suspected bad guy Shiite militia or Bathists, and even once in a while a slaughter of innocents for a mere tip off of possible al-Qaida elements in a neighborhood targeted. And could Iraqis, already early in 2004, have been experiencing the kind of abuse later highlighted in court martial for massacres and rapes, while public opinion smoldered over confiscations of their nation’s oil revenues.
All this during the year following the initial (second) destruction of Baghdad’s water and electricity infrastructures, not to mention the hundreds of dead, thousands of maimed, during the colorful pyrotechnical display of the highly touted performance of the precision guided ‘smart’ missile bombardment Americans watched on TV as the evening before ‘softening up’ of Baghdad for an invasion no Iraqi ever had the chance to vote in favor of or against.
Regarding Iraqi street reactions, one can only imagine the reaction of much tougher US inner city teen gangs to an occupation of the United States by Iraqi Army and Iraqi Marines. What if the far more brutal present-day generation of notorious US West Side Story-like club members got their hands on the bodies of four Iraqi mercenaries working as ‘security’ for Iraqi Marines as they went about ‘protecting’ America, kicking in doors in the middle of the night and calling in air strikes on tenement buildings in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
There is a reason for everything. Reasons, however, are not always to be found in ‘reasons’ that are stated publicly.
One won’t see, hear or read reasons for many of the things that might shock or puzzle people, because conglomerate owned media is still in the business of war promotion while the stock market is up so high. Commercial media suppresses news like the legislatures of both Afghanistan and Iraq having voted for the withdrawal of foreign forces, and even seems to be able to set the tone of what is discussed and what is not discussed in academia.
Presidential candidate Mike Gravel cites only one frightening example of the iron grip of the military-industrial complex on media, pointing out that NBC is owned by General Electric, one of the world's leading military contractors, and that GE has benefited financially from the ‘global war on terrorism’ and currently holds almost $2 billion in military contracts.
Upon investigation one finds similar interlocking war promotion motives and incentives for Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., five conglomerates, which together with General Electric own 90 percent of the media in the United States.
Disturbing popular expressions of hate for US military and CIA, is something US media entertainment/news programming seeks to black out or at least underplay and discount, for it does not jibe with media characterizing these wars of occupation as benevolent and necessary.
Speak up to take back our nation's air waves. Make conglomerates pay for leases and fund honest citizen and balanced professional constituency media journalism.
