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Please distribute far and wide... ------------------------------------------- Wanted: Dissenting news reports on Iraq ------------------------------------------- This can be found on the webpage http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/iraqbomb.html The US and British news coverage of the last Gulf War was marked by extreme propaganda. For example, after the war the British press was outraged that the British government had "covered up the truth" about the deaths of 9 British servicemen in the gulf due to "friendy fire". Correct me if I'm wrong, but little, if any, mention has ever been made of the "Up to a quarter of a million men, women and children were killed or died as a direct result of the US-lead attack on Iraq", according to the Medical Educational Trust in London, and corroborated by US and French intelligence estimates of "in excess of 200,000 civilian deaths". [sources at the end] It is no exaggeration at all to say that the coverage was racist and incited racism. And although the process goes to an extreme in wartime, the process of dehumanising Iraqis, and, in general, people who don't live in the US, Europe, Japan, or Australasia, continues all the time. Just think about it - if France [which possesses WMD] was being bombed by the US now, the reaction would be very different. I think that shows how racist we [and here I am addressing the population of Britain and the US] really are underneath it all - myself included. The coverage of this latest attack will no doubt follow the same pattern. However, there may be little chinks of light that show, just for a second, the reality of the carnage and suffering. As in the extract below about Basra Road. If you encounter any such reports - please email them to me ASAP at r.d.green@lancaster.ac.uk Your contribution may be vital, since dissenting reports are unlikely to be frequent or well-noticed, and may be censored or denied a short while after they are published - it is important that we gather together all sorts of dissenting facts and voices in order to most effectively condemn the bombing. We can't, of course, trust the mainstream media. I will forward the reports to certain journalists and newsrooms (much good that it will do), to excellent writers such as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, and put them on a public web page for anyone to read (subject to copyright restrictions). So, please, if you notice a dissenting report or even just a revealing comment, please do the following: 1.If it is long, to avoid typing it in, search for it on the Internet first. Then copy and paste it into an email, if you can, and send me the internet address of the page(s) as well (preferable to sending me just the address, since it may have been censored by the time I read that email) This does not breach copyright under "fair use" guidelines in many countries. 2.Also, let me know the email addresses of anybody who would definitely like to receive the reports. I will not send them many messages - just one or two with a summary of reports and the address of my webpage. Thank you very much. Please also consider what you could do to protest - call your MP or congressional rep, or the White House; organise a protest in your locality, just hand out some leaflets, anything to put a dent in the biased, nationalistic coverage we are already seeing. There will be protests in front of Downing Street today (Thu 17 Dec 1998) at 6:00pm, and, I suspect, in Times Square and other national centres. Try searching the internet or contacting local left-wing/peace groups to find local contacts. A good place to start on the Internet is http://directory.mozilla.org/Society/Issues/Economic_Sanctions/on_Iraq which has links to several protest groups. Extract from "Hidden Agendas" by John Pilger, Vintage, 1998, p.49 To be completed in a few minutes... Come back to http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/iraqbomb.html in a few minutes to read this extract. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To be removed/added, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk, NOT the whole list. Archived at http://linux.clare.cam.ac.uk/~saw27/casi/discuss.html