No More Learning

We have shown elsewhere that in 1975 and later the U. S. media treated the East Timorese as unworthy victims, saving their attention and indig- nation for the almost simultaneous killings under Pol Pot in Cambodia. The victims of Pol Pot, a Communist leader, were worthy, although after he was ousted by theVietnamese in 1978, Cambodians ceased to be wor- thy, as U. S. policy shifted toward support of Pol Pot in exile. 32 The East Timorese remained unworthy in the 1990S, as the table suggests.
As the leader of the faction insisting on harsh sanctions against Iraq following the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States itself was respon- sible for a very large number of Iraqi civilians deaths in the 1990s. John and Karl Mueller assert that these "sanctions of mass destruction" have caused the deaths of "more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction [nuclear and chemical] through- out all history. "33 A large fraction of the million or more killed by sanc- tions were young children; UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy pointed out that "if the substantial reduction in child mortality through- out Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children lUlder five in the country
as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998. "34 However, as these deaths resulted from U. S. policy, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared on national television that these 500,000 child deaths were "worth it/'35 we would expect the U. S. media to find these victims unworthy, to give them little attention and less indignation, and to find the word "genocide" inapplicable to this case. The table shows that this expectation was realized in media practice.
The case for severe media bias suggested by the usage of genocide shown in the table is strengthened by the fact that, despite the great media attention to and indignation over the abuse of the Kosovo Albani- ans by the Serbs in 1998-1999, this mistreatment was almost certainly less severe than that meted out to the Kurds in Turkey in the 19905 and to the East Timorese by the Indonesian army and paramilitary forces in East Timor in 1999. Deaths in Kosovo on all sides in the year before the NATO bombing were estimated by U. S. and other Western sources to number no more than 2,000, and the Serb assault and expulsions that followed and accompanied the NA TO bombing campaign also appear to have resulted in deaths in the low thousands (an intensive postwar search for graves had yielded some 3,000 bodies by August 2000, not all ofthem Albanian civilians or necessarily victims of the Serbs). 36 Deaths in the Turkish war on the Kurds in the 1990S were estimated to be 30,000 or more, a large fraction Kurdish civilians, with refugee numbers running to 2 to 3 million. In East Timor, where the Indonesian military organized and collaborated with a paramilitary opposition to a U. N. -sponsored in- dependence referendum held on August 30, 1999, an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 East Timorese civilians were slaughtered even before the referen- dum vote that rejected Indonesian rule, which unleashed a furious In- donesian army-paramilitary assault on East Timorese. 37
The double standard reflected in the politicized use of "genocide" is applicable to the treatment of news events more broadly, with the media regularly focusing on the abuse of worthy victims and playing down or neglecting altogether the plight of unworthy victims. As an illustration, we may consider the contrasting media treatment of the alleged killing of some forty Albanians by the Serbs at Racak, Kosovo, on January 15, 1999, and the Indonesian army-militia killing of"up to 200" East Timo- rese at Liquica in East Timor on April 6, 1999. 38 The former was seen as useful by U. S. officials,39 who were trying to ready the U. S. and Western publics for an imminent NATO attack on Yugoslavia. Although the facts in the Racak killings, which occurred in the course of fighting between the Serbian military and Kosovo Liberation Army insurgents within Yugoslavia, were and remain in dispute-and recent evidence raises fur- ther doubts about the NATO-KLA account ofevents there40-the deaths
INTRODUCTION XXlll
XX1V INTRODUCTION
were immediately denounced and featured by U. S. and NATO officials as an intolerable "massacre. " The U. S. mainstream media did the same and gave this reported massacre heavy and uncritical attention. 4! This helped create the moral basis for the NA TO bombing of Yugoslavia that began on March 24, 1999.
The Liquica killings of East Timorese seeking refuge in a Catholic church by Indonesian-organized militia forces were indisputably a "mas- sacre;' apparently involved many more victims than at Racak, and it took place in a territory illegally occupied by a foreign state (Indonesia). It was also neither a unique event nor was it connected to any warfare, as in Kosovo--it was a straightfonvard slaughter of civilians. But U. S. officials did not denounce this massacre-in fact, active U. S. support of the In- donesian military continued throughout this period and up to a week after the referendum, by which time 85 percent of the population had been driven from their homes and well over 6,000 civilians had been slaughtered. The U. S. mainstream media followed the official lead. For a twelve-month period following the date of each event, the mentions of Racak by the five media entities cited in the table exceeded mentions of Liquica by 4. 1 to I, and mentions of "massacre" at the two sites was in a ratio of 6. 7 to I. The greater length of accounts of the Racak event elevates the ratio to 14 to 1 as measured by word count. Newsweek, which mentioned Racak and its "massacre" nine times, failed to mention Liquica once.
Thus, with the cooperation ofthe media, the Racak killings were effec- tively used by U. S. officials to ready the public for war, not only by their intensive coverage but also by their taking the official allegations of mas- sacre at face value. In the same time frame, the media's treatment of the indisputable massacre at Liquica was insufficient in volume or indigna- tion to mobilize the public, in accord with the U. S. policy of leaving the management of events in East Timor to the U. S. ally Indonesia.
Legitimating Versus Meaningless Third World Elections
In chapter 3 we show that the mainstream media have followed a govern- ment agenda in treating elections in client and disfavored states. In El Salvador in the 1980s, the U. S. government sponsored several elections to demonstrate to the U. S. public that our intervention there was ap- proved by the local population; whereas when Nicaragua held an election in 1984, the Reagan administration tried to discredit it to prevent legiti-
mation of a government the administration was trying to overthrow. The mainstream media cooperated, fmding the Salvadoran election a "step toward democracy" and the Nicaraguan election a "sham," despite the fact that electoral conditions were far more compatible with an honest election in Nicaragua than in EI Salvador. We demonstrate that the media applied a remarkable dual standard to the two elections in accord with the government's propaganda needs.
This same bias is apparent in the press treatment of more recent elec- tions in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Kenya, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, and Uruguay. Cambodia and Yugoslavia were the only two of these seven ruled by a party strongly objectionable to U. S. policy-makers, and it is in these cases that the New }Ork Times warned of serious problems: As re- gards Cambodia, it asserted that "flawed elections are worse than none," and that "the international community must proceed cautiously, lest a rigged election give Iv1r. Hun Sen a veneer oflegitimacy. "42 In reporting on the Yugoslavian election of September 2000, in which US. officials intervened openly to prevent the reelection of Slobodan Milosevic, the Times and media in general repeatedly warned of the possibility of fraud and a rigged election. 43 In the case of Kenya, where US. policy toward the ruling government was ambivalent, here also the Times was skeptical of election quality, noting that "holding elections is not enough to assure democratic government" and stressing the need for "an independent electoral commission less bound to political parties" and "independent broadcast media, allowing opposition voices to be heard outside election periods. "44
But in the other four elections, organized and won by governments strongly favored by the US. State Department, there were no suggestions that "flawed elections are worse than none" and no featuring of the threat of fraUd; the importance of an independent electoral commission and broadcast media was not pressed, and in each case the election was found to be a step toward democracy and hence legitimizing.
In the case of Mexico, long subject to one party (PRJ) rule, but sup- ported by the U. S. government over the past several decades, the Times has regularly found the Mexican elections encouraging, in contrast with past fraudulent ones which, at the time, the editors also contrasted favor~ ably with those in the more distant past! It has featured expressions of benevolent intent and downplayed structural defects and abuses. Thus, in its first editorial on the 1988 election t. . '1at brought Carlos Salinas de Gortari to power, the Times noted that prior elections were corrupt (the PRI "manipulated patronage, the news media and the ballot box"), but it stressed that PRI candidate Salinas "comends" that political reform is urgent and "calls for clean elections,"45 The editors questioned whether
INTRODUCTION XXV
xxvi INTRODUCTION
"his party" will "heed his pleas," a process of distancing the favored can- didate from responsibility for any abuses to come. In the editorials that followed, the Times did not suggest possible ongoing electoral fraud, ""manipulated patronage," or media controls and bias, although this elec- tion was famous for a convenient "computer breakdown" in the election aftermath, which turned Carlos Salinas from an expected loser into a winner. Just three years later, however, at the time of the 1991 election, the editors stated that "as long as anyone can remember, Mexican elec- tions have been massively fraudulent" as it prepared readers for new promises of a cleanup. 46 But all through this period and later, the Times (and its media rivals) did not focus on fraud or call these elections rigged; in both news stories and editorials they portrayed these deeply flawed elections as steps toward democracy and legitimizing.
In the 1983 Turkish election, held under military rule, with harsh censorship and only three parties "led by politicians sympathetic to the military government" allowed to run, the Times found that "Turkey Ap- proaches Democracy. "47 Similarly, in Uruguay's 1984 election, under another military regime that jailed the leading opposition candidate and also refused to allow a second major candidate to run, but organized by a government approved by the U. S. State Department, the Times once again found that "Uruguay is resuming its democratic vocation . . . the generals are yielding to the infectious resurgence of democracy in much of Latin America. "48
The Russian election of 1996 was important to the United States and its allies, as Boris Yeltsin, the ruler who was carrying out their favored policies of privatization and the integration of Russia into the global financial system, was seriously threatened with defeat. The Yeltsin gov- ernment had presided over a 50 percent fall in national output and large income declines for 90 percent of the population, while the hugely corrupt privatization process provided windfalls to a small minority, in- cluding an important criminal class. The social welfare and health care systems had disintegrated under Yeltsin's rule, contributing to a startling rise in infectious diseases and mortality rates. Just before the 1996 elec- tion campaign, Yeltsin's popularity rating was 8 percent That he could win reelection in such circumstances suggests-and reflects-a seriously flawed election.
However, with the Yeltsin regime strongly backed by the U. S. govern- ment and its Western allies, the New YOrk Times once again found this election "A Victory for Russian Democracy," and so did the U. S. main- stream media in general. For that paper of record, electoral flaws were slighted or ignored, and its editors declared the very fact of holding an "imperfect" election "a remarkable achievement. "49 The same bias
INTRODUCTION xxvii
was evident in reporting on the March 2000 Russian election, won by Yeltsin's anointed heir and former KGB operative Vladimir Putin. Putin had built his popularity by conducting a brutal counterinsurgency war against Chechnya, and his electoral success rested heavily on the fact that the powerful state TV and radio stations campaigned furiously on his behalf and denigrated and gave no broadcasting time to his opponents. A September 2 0 0 0 expose of the Putin election campaign by the expatri- ate Moscow Times, based on a six-month investigative effort, uncovered compelling evidence of election fraud, including ballot stuffing, ballot destruction, and the creation of 1. 3 million "dead souls" inflating the election rolls. 50 The U. S. mainstream media, however, never found any evidence of fraud at the time of the election, and they have been reluctant to report the findings of the Moscow Times study. 5l Putin is another "re- former," like Yeltsin, supported by the West, so that it follows once again that for the mainstream media a flawed eIection~hardly admitted to be flawed~remainsbetter than none. 52
The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Assassinate the Pope
During the Reagan era (1981-88), there was a concerted effort to demo- nize the Soviet Union, in order to support a major arms buildup and a new, more aggressive policy in the Third World and globally. The Soviet Union was described as an "Evil Empire" and accused of sponsoring in- ternational terrorism as well as abusing its own and client-nation peo- ples. 53 \Vhen the would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II in Rome in May 1981, this provided the basis for one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the Cold War era.
Although the pope's assailant was a Turkish fascist and member of a violently anti-left party in Turkey, after a seventeen-month stint in an Italian prison Agca "confessed" that he had been hired by the KGB and Bulgarians. This confession was convenient, fitting well the interests of the dominant Italian parties anxious to discredit the powerful Italian Communist party as well as the Reagan administration's "Evil Empire" campaign. It was extremely suspicious for other reasons, coming so belat- edly, and after numerous visits to Agca by Italian secret service represen- tatives, judges, and papal agents, all with a political ax to grind, and with the secret service notorious for ideological extremism and willingness to doctor evidence. 54
But the mainstream media accepted this story with astonishing gulli-
xxviii INTRODUCTION
bility-the possibility of coaching and pressure on Agca to name the KGB and Bulgarians, much discussed in the Italian media, was almost never mentioned as even a theoretical possibility. And the weakness of the alleged Soviet motive, the sheer stupidity of the enterprise if Soviet- based, and the complete lack of confirmatory evidence was almost en- tirely ignored by the media (as described in chapter 4). W'hen the case was lost in an Italian court in 1986, despite a substantial Italian govern- ment investment and effort, for the U. S. mainstream media this merely reflected the peculiarities of the Italian system of justice; the continued absence of hard evidence led to no reassessment of the case or reflections on their own role.
In the years that followed, two developments threw some light on the case. One is that the Soviet and Bulgarian archives were opened up, and Allen Weinstein of the Center for Democracy gained permission from Bulgarian authorities in 1991 for members of his investigative commis- sion to look at the Bulgarian Interior Ministry's secret service files. After a stint in Bulgaria, Weinstein returned home having failed to locate any confirmatory evidence of Bulgarian or KGB involvement. The Los Ange- les Times, New YcJrk Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time, each of which had reported Weinstein's initiative and impending trip to Bulgaria in 1991, all failed to inform their readers of his negative fmdings. 55
Later in 1991, at Senate hearings on the confirmation of Robert Gates as head of the CIA, former CIA officers Melvin Goodman and Harold Ford testified that the CIA's analysis of the Bulgarian Connection had been seriously compromised and politicized in support of the Reagan era anti-Soviet propaganda campaign. Goodm<tn testified that not only had the CIA found no evidence of Soviet or Bulgarian involvement in the shooting, but that based on the CIA's "very good penetration of the Bul- garian secret services" its professionals had concluded that a Bulgarian Connection did not exist. 56
This testimony, which was a brutal coup de grace to the claims of a connection, put the media on the spot. It was now clear that in their enthusiastic support of the plot they had seriously misled their readers and performed badly as news purveyors and analysts, although serving well the propaganda needs of their government. But as in 1986, after the case against the Bulgarians was dismissed in an Italian court for in- sufficient evidence, none of them felt any obligation to explain their fail- ures and apologize to their readers. They reported the CIA revelations tersely, with some still claiming that while the connection had not been proved it had not been disproved either (ignoring the frequent impos- sibility of proving a negative). 5i But in general the mainstream media
INTRODUCTIO~ XXIX
moved quickly on without reassessing their performance or the fact that they and their media colleagues had been agents of propaganda.
The New Thrk Times, which had been consistently supportive of the connection in both news and editorials, not only failed to report Wein- stein's negative findings from the search of the Bulgarian files, it also excluded Goodman's statement on the CIA's penetration of the Bulgar- ian secret services from their excerpts from his testimony. The Times had long maintained that the CIA and the Reagan administration "recoiled from the devastating implication that Bulgaria's agents were bound to have acted only on a signal from MOSCOW . "58 But Goodman's and Ford's testimony showed that this was the reverse of the truth, and that CIA heads William Casey and Robert Gates overrode the views of CIA pro- fessionals and falsified evidence to support a Soviet linkage. The Times was not alone in following a misleading party line, but it is notable that this paper of record has yet to acknowledge its exceptional gullibility and propaganda service.
VIETNAM, LAOS, AND CAMBODIA
Vietnam: Was the United States a Victim or an Aggressor?
In chapters 5 through 7, we show that media coverage of the Indochina wars fits the propaganda model very well. The United States first in- tervened in Indochina immediately after World War II in support of French recolonization, after which it carried out a twenty-one-year effort (1954-75) to impose a government in the southern half ofVietnam that U. S. officials and analysts consistently recognized as lacking any substan- tial indigenous support, and in opposition to local nationalist-though Communist-forces that were understood to have a mass base. U. S. leaders operated on the belief that their overwhelming military might would not only enable them, but entitled them, to force submission to a minority government of U. S. choice.
By normal word usage this would make the U. S. effort in Vietnam a case of "aggression. " The mainstream media, however, rarely if ever found U. S. policy there to be other than highly moral and well inten- tioned, even ifbased on miscalculation ofits costs-to us (see chapter 5). The media readily accepted that we were protecting "SouthVietnam"-a
XXX INTRODUCTION
u. s. creation ruled by a dictator imported directly from the United States-against somebody else's aggression, vacillating in their identifica- tion of the aggressor between North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, or the resistance in SouthVietnam engaging in "internal aggression"! It is compelling evidence of the propaganda service of the mainstream media that throughout the war they accepted this basic propaganda assumption of the war managers, and from that era up to today, we have never found a mainstream editorial or news report that characterized the U. S. war against Vietnam, and then all of Indochina, as a case of aggression.
After the United States terminated the military phase of the war in 1975, it maintained and enforced an eighteen-year boycott of the coun- try that it had virtually destroyed. According to Vietnamese estimates, the war had cost them 3 million killed, 300,000 missing, 4. 4 million wounded, and 2 million harmed by toxic chemicals; and its land was left ravaged by bombs and Rome plows as well as chemical weapons. With 58,000 killed, the U. S. death toll from the war was under one-tenth of I percent ofits population;Vietnam's death toll was 17 percent ofits popu- lation, and only Vietnam's people were attacked by chemical warfare and had their countryside devastated.
Nevertheless, U. S. officials and the mainstream media continued to view the U. S. role in the war as creditable, the United States as the vic- tim. President George Bush stated in 1992 that "Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past. "59 That is, the Vietnamese had done things to us that might justify retribu- tion on our part, but we only seek answers regarding our men missing in action. 60 New lOrk Times foreign affairs commentator Leslie Gelb justi- fied classifyingVietnam an "outlaw" on the grounds that "they had killed Americans. "61 This reflects the common establishment view, implicit in Bush's comment, that nobody has a right of self-defense against this country, even if it intervenes across the ocean to impose by force a gov- ernment that the people of that country rej ecl.
U. S. Chemical Warfare in Indochina
It is also of interest how the media have treated the massive use of chemi- cals during the Vietnam War and the horrifying aftermath for the vic- tim country. In 1961 and 1962 the Kennedy administration authorized the use of chemicals to destroy rice crops in South Vietnam-in violation of a U. S. tradition as well as international law (Admiral William Leahy, in response to a proposal to destroy Japanese rice crops in 1944, stated that this would "violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and
all known laws of war"). 62 Between 1961 and 1971, however, the U. S. Air Force sprayed 20 million gallons of concentrated arsenic-based and dioxin-laden herbicides (mainly Agent Orange) on 6 million acres of crops and trees, besides using large quantities of the "super tear gas" CS and vast amounts of napalm and phosphorus bombs. "} An estimated 13 percent of South Vietnam's land was subjected to chemical attacks. This included 30 percent of its rubber plantations and 36 percent of its mangrove forests, along with other large forest areas, destroyed by toxic chemicals in programs that included multiple "large-scale inten- tional effon[s] combining defoliation with incendiaries to produce a forest fire in South Vietnam. "64 A 1967 study prepared by the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japanese Science Council concluded that U. S. anticrop warfare had already ruined more than 3. 8 million acres of arable land in South Vietnam, killing almost 1,000 peasants and over 13,000 livestock. 65 This policy of attempting to force enemy capitula- tion by destroying its food supply was not only contrary to the rules of war,66 it was notable in that it "first and overwhelmingly affected small children. ,,67
Laos was also subjected to chemical attacks in 1966 and 1969, directed at both crops, and vegetation along communication routes. And in Cam- bodia, some 173,000 acres of rubber plantations, crops and forests were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange in the spring of 1969. 68 The Cambo- dian government complained bitterly at the violation of its neutrality by this inhumane and illegal action, but Cambodia was too small and weak for its voice to be heard or for it to be able to mobilize a legal or other defense. Although the U. N.
General Assembly did strongly condemn the use of chemical agents as contrary to international law by an 83-to-3 vote in 1969,69 it was powerless to act against the United States, and there was no "international community" mobilization to halt its use of chemical warfare in Cambodia or elsewhere in Indochina.
During the Vietnam war, the use of chemicals was reported and criti- cized in the U. S. media when first disclosed in 1966, but the subject was quickly dropped. The illegality of chemical warfare and a poljcy of star- vation, and their effects on the victim population, were virtually unre- ported. There were exceptions, such as Orville Schell, Jr. 's 1971 Look magazine article "Silent Vietnam: How we invented ecocide and killed a country," but they were rare indeed. After the war, because of the effects of Agent Orange on U. S. soldiers, there was some coverage of this chem- ical warfare campaign; but the vastly greater impact on the direct targets ofrbis warfare in South Vietnam remained close to invisible. Of 522 arti- cles in the New lOrk Times, the washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and Time during the 1990S that mentioned Agent Orange and
INTRODUCTION xxxi
xxxii INTRODUCTION
Vietnam together, the vast majority focused on the hann done to u. s. service personnel; only nine articles acknowledged the targeting of food crops (thiry-nine mentioned forest cover alone as the target); only eleven discussed in any detail the impact on Vietnamese and the Vietnamese environment; only three characterized the use of Agent Orange as a "chemical weapon" or "chemical warfare;" and in only two articles was it suggested that its use might constitute a war crime.
The wall Street Journal did have a lead story on this topic in February I997, reporting that as many as 500,000 children may have been born with dioxin-related deformities and that birth defects in the South were
four times those in the North. 70 The article did acknowledge U. S. re- sponsibility for this disaster but contended that "the United States, emo- tionally spent after losing the war, paid no heed. " But the United States did pay heed to the flight of the "boat people" and was not too exhausted to enforce a vigorous boycott of the target of its aggression, even ifit took no responsibility whatever for the condition of its victims.
The large-scale application of chemical weapons, and napalm, in Viet- nam was confmed to the South. One reason for this was that NorthViet- nam had a government with links to other countries, so that the use of these barbarous and illegal weapons against it would have been widely publicized. South Vietnam was occupied by the United States and its client regime, so that the victimized people of the South were voiceless and could be treated with unlimited savagery. This of course contra- dicted the claim that we were protecting them against aggression, but the media not only underplayed the savagery, they failed to call attention to the contradiction and its significance. New 10rk Times journalist Barbara Crossette did report that the U. S. failure to get involved in studying the effects of chemical warfare in Vietnam had been unfortunate, because as this country had used it heavily in the South but not in the North, this madeVietnam a controlled experiment in the effects ofdioxin on humans from which much could be learned of benefit to ourselves. 71 But neither Crossette nor any other mainstream reporter had anything to say about the fact that the United States had used dioxin only on the ones it was allegedly protecting against aggression, nor did they suggest that this constituted a serious war crime, or that this country might have an obli- gation to help those it had victimized.
During the 1980s, the Reagan administration mounted a major propa- ganda campaign over alleged victims of "Yellow Rain" in Cambodia and Laos, claiming that chemical warfare had been employed there by the Soviet Union through its Vietnam proxy. This propaganda effort eventually collapsed following the U. S. Army's own inability to confirm this warfare and, more important, the fmding that the alleged Yellow
Rain was bee feces, not chemicals. 72 Nevertheless, this campaign re- ceived vastly more publicity than the real and large-scale chemical war- fare carried out by the United States in Indochina. The wall Street Journal, which had heavily featured Yellow Rain and expressed the great- est indignation at this display of Communist evil, never mentioned the U. S. employment of chemicals in that area during its Yellow Rain cam- paign. The Joumafs publisher, Peter Kann, eventually wrote that the Vietnam war record had clarified "who were the good guys and who were the bad guys," definitively shown by "the poisoned fields of Laos" (his euphemism for Yellow Rain). 73 In short, Kann places the massive reaJ- world use of chemical warfare by the United States in Orwell's black hole and demonstrates Communist evil by purring forward the discredited claim of Yellow Rain that his paper has still not admitted to be fraudu- lent.
But the more important facts are these: that with the help of the media, the Soviet Union was effectively linked to the use of this ugly weapon, based on false evidence; while by treating the real and large- scale use of chemical weapons in Indochina by the United States in very low key up to this very day, the media have helped convey the impression that this country is a moral force on this issue and opposes use of this ter- rible weapomy. U. S. leaders have opposed the use of chemical warfare- by enemy states-but it is a different maner when they choose to use such weapomy themselves, or when a client state does the same. 74
Rewriting Vietnam War History
There have been thousands of books written on the Vietnam War,7S and that war has been a brooding omnipresence in the U. S. culture since its end in 1975. For the dominant elite the war represents an era in which resistance to national policy and the associated rise of formerly apathetic sectors of society caused a "crisis of democracy. ,,7fj Those unruly sectors and the dissidents are seen as having damaged the cultural and political framework and imposed unreasonable impediments to the use of force, the laner referred to as the "Vietnam syndrome. " Within the umuly sec- tors and among the dissidents, of course, the "Sixties" are viewed as an era of liberation, of cultural and moral advance, and a temporary surge of democratization.
The propaganda model would lead us to expect mainstream media retrospectives on the war to reflect elite perspectives, portraying the 1960s as a dark age and the U. S. role in the war as, at worst, a case of good intentions gone awry. Focusing here on their treatment of the war
INTRODUCTION xxxiii
xxxiv INTRODUCTION
over the past decade, we see that the media have mainly repeated and elaborated several apologetic themes already entrenched by the end of the war.
One theme has been that the U. S. intervention was justified by the fact of "communism on the march" (editorial, Washington Post, April 30, 2000). It was argued from the beginning that the Communist advance in Vietnam was part of a global communist conspiracy, a position main- tained in the face of the split and hostility between China and the Soviet Union, tension between China and North Vietnam, and the absence of any evidence that North Viemam was anybody's tool. In his book In Ret- rospect,77 former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admits that he and his colleagues made a serious error on this point. But neither he nor the other establishment figures who have used this argument have ever questioned the U. S. right to intervene by force to stop the "march of communism" in a country where the Communists had led a nationalist revolution, were recognized by all official and nonofficial authorities to command the suPPOrt of a large majority of the population, and where their defeat would require open aggression, mass killing, and the virtual destruction of a distant society.
Closely related was the theme that we were protecting "South Viet- nam" and the "South Vietnamese," who "let the Americans take over the fighting" (editorial, Washington Post, April 30, 1995). A subtheme ofthis line is that we "let down" the South Vietnamese. But as noted earlier, South Vietnam as a political entity was a U. S. concoction and the U. S. war managers recognized that most of the southern population sup- ported the side the United States was fighting. This explains why the main thrust of U. S. violence was directed to the South, where napalm, B-S2 bombing raids, chemical warfare, the institutionalized killing of civilians, and a scorched-earth policy were used to destroy the base of the popular movement. 78 We also noted earlier that this ferocious U. S. assault on the South-which contradicted the claim that we were pro- tecting South Vietnamese-remains invisible in the U. S. media.
Another important theme in the mainstream media for many years has been the notion that the United States was the victim in the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese the cruel villains. This remark. able inversion of reality has been accomplished by two processes: first, by a massive suppression of evidence on the consequences of the war for the Vietnamese; and second, by demonizing the victims, based in large measure on "the national beat- ification of POWs [prisoners of war] and the myth of POWs. as. martyrs. s. till being tortured byVietnam. "19
The onlyVietnamese allowed modest attention in the media have been those mobilized to fight the U. S. war and who were "let down";8o the vast
INTRODUCTION XXXV
numbers killed or damaged by the U. S. assault have been treated as "unworthy victims. " The overwhelming preoccupation of officials, jour- nalists, pundits, and intellectuals with media outreach has been on U. S. victims and the effects of the war on this country. Robert McNamara's widely publicized book, supposedly a mea culpa and moral tract, is no- table for the fact that his notion of the war's "high costs," and the error and guilt he feels, extend only to U. S. lives and the effects of the war on "the political unity of our society. "81 He offers neither regrets, moral reflections, nor apologies for his country having invaded, mercilessly bombed, ravaged the land, and killed and wounded millions of innocent people in a small distant peasant society in pursuit of its own political ends.
In a remarkable cultural process, also, the victims have been turned into the villains. As we describe in chapter 5, in an attempt to prolong the war President Richard Nixon seized on the question of the adequacy of Vietnamese accounting for our military personnel who were captured (POWs) and those missing in action (MIAs). He succeeded in keeping the war going, and some 16,000 more U. S. soldiers and untold numbers ofVietnamese died in the further fighting in the purported interest of missing paws. But although there has never been any credible evidence that a single POW was hidden by the North Vietnamese, this claim be- came an article of faith and cult that dominated U. S. policy toward Viet- nam for many years. 82
The mYth also became the basis ofpopular culture accounts in movies such as The Deer Hunter, Uncommon Jizlor, Ro. W: The Escape, and Missing in Action, in which Rambo-like heroes slaughter evil Vietnamese as they save our betrayed and tormented POWs. These movies turned history on its head. As Vietnam war historian H. Bruce Franklin points out, "America's vision of the war was being transformed. The actual photographs and TV footage ofmassacred villagers, napalmed children, Vietnamese prisoners being tortured and murdered, wounded GI's screaming in agony, and body bags being loaded by the dozen for ship- ment back home were being repJaced by simulated images of American POWs in the savage hands of Asian communists. "83 The powerful cul- tural myth of abused POWs as the central feature of the Vietnam war not only allowed the war to be extended; it helped justify the U. S. failure to aid its victim in accord with end-of-war promises and it provided the basis for an eighteen-year economic war against the victim country. It also functioned as a potent agent of militarization and force weakening the "Vietnam syndrome. "
In his recent book Vietnam and Other Ameman Fantasies, H. Bruce Franklin, who had previously exposed the fallacies and cult qualities of
xxxvi INTRODUCTION
the POW-MIA myth, addressed this issue once again, as well as other fantasies (such as the claim that the antiwar activists often spit at return- ing veterans). 84 Franklin's book was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times but was otherwise only twice mentioned in passing in the U. S. main- stream press. On the other hand, a book by Michael Lind, Vietnamj The Necessary Wilr,85 which explains that the war was justifiable because com~ munism was on the march, U. S. "credibility" was at stake, and the Viet- namese communists were cruel and ruthless-demonstrated in part by their refusal to surrender and consequent responsibility for those killed by U. S. bombs! -was treated differently. It received forty-four reviews and was mentioned twenty-seven other times in the mainstream media, and Lind was given Op-Ed space in both the New 'YOrk Times and the Wilshingwn Post, among other opportunities.
i "
l ,
In his review of Lind's book, Vietnam War historian Uoyd Gardner
noted that any U. S. "credibility" problem that arose in connection with
me Vietnam war was a creation of the war managers themselves and
flowed from their own decisions; and Gardner also comments, after ana-
lyzing a series of Lind arguments in defense of the war, that "the evidence j simply washes away his positions like a sand castle on the beach. "86 But
Lind was saying what the elite wants said, and Franklin was not, so that j mainstream media treatment followed accordingly.
1 1 1
Laos
j
I
t
Laos's Plain of Jars was subjected to some of the heaviest bombings of civilian targets in history, especially after 1968, when Washington was compelled under domestic pressure ro enter negotiations with North Vietnam and had ro terminate its bombing there. It turned to Laos, although that small peasant country was a marginal facror in the wars; but Nixon and Kissinger could hardly leave U. S. bombers inactive. Over- all, some 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos. These raids wiped out 353 villages and killed thousands of civilians, and they con- tinue ro kill now, as the Plain was saturated with hundreds of millions of "bombies"-tiny antipersonnel weapons specifically designed to kill and maim. With their 20-ro-30 percent failure-to-explode rate, they re- mained as potential killers, and their casualty rate is still high, estimates running from hundreds ro 20,000 or more per year, half of them deaths and half of the victims children. 87
There have been efforts to deal with this humanitarian catastrophe. The British-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG) has been trying ro remove the lethal objects, but the British press reports that the United
States is "conspicuously missing from the handful of western organiza- tions that have followed . \1AG," though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians. 58 The British press also reports, with some annoyance, that the United States has refused to provide. \1AG specialists with "ren- der harmless procedures," still treated as a state secret for weapons three decades old. 59 The U. S. mainstream media have treated in very low key the continuing human toll suffered in Laos and have maintained almost complete silence concerning the U. S. non-cooperativeness in attempts to alleviate a crisis dating back to the "secret war" against Laos, which again was "secret" only by tacit propaganda service of the mainstream media (see chapter 6).
C a m b o d ia
Important changes have occurred in Cambodia since 1988, including Vietnam's withdrawal from that country, elections held under UN aus- pices, and the death of Pol Pot. We noted in chapter 7 that, after the Viet- namese had ousted Pol Pot in December 1978, although the United States and its allies had denounced Pol POt as "another Hitler" commit- ting "genocide," they quickly became his supporter, allowing him to re- tain Cambodia's UN. seat and otherwise aiding and protecting him in his Thailand refuge. Vietnam was severely punished-by harsh sanctions and by U. S. support for a Chinese invasion to teach Vietnam a lesson- fOt having terminated Pol Pot's atrocities! President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in 1979 that "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help D. K. [Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot's forces]. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could. "9o In the late 1980s and early 1990$, as the Vietnamese sought to end their isolation by exiting from Cambodia, but insisted as a condition for withdrawal that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge be excluded from returning to power, the United States objected, and insisted, with eventual success, that the Khmer Rouge be included as a contestant party in the post-occupation settle- ment. 91
\Xlhat dominated U. S. policy and led to its support of Pol Pot was the classic rule that the enemy ofmy enemy (Vietnam) is my friend, and per- haps also the new tilt toward China, also hostile toward Vietnam. The support of Pol Pot was awkward, given the prior denunciations of his pOlicies, but the mainstream media handled it with aplomb, and the U. S. public was almost surely completely unaware that the United States had become his ally and supporter. (The explicit statement of support by
INTRODUCTION xxxvii
xxxviii INTRODCCTION
Brzezinski quoted above was never mentioned in the New 1{lrk Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek; it was quoted once in both the Los Angeles Times and Time. )
However, in the late 1990S, afterVietnam had left Cambodia and US. officials' anti-Vietnam passions had subsided, and Pol Pot was no longer a useful instrument of anti-Vietnam policy, U. S. officials and pundits rediscovered Pol Pot's and the Khmer Rouge's villainy and candidacy for war crimes trials. The media handled the previous "tilt" toward Pol Pot mainly by evasion, essentially blacking out the years 1979-95, or vaguely intimating that the US. had supported him for reasons of "realpolitik," but avoiding both details on the nature and magnitude of support as well as any reflections on the morality of backing "another Hitler. " The New 10rk Times's summary of "Pol Pot's Rise and Fall" (April 17, 1998) lists for "1979-1990: Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge are given refuge at Thai bor- der where they fight back against theVietnamese. " "Given refuge" is mis- leading: they were given economic and military aid and political support by the United States and its allies. The Times's main reporter on Cambo- dia in early 1998, Seth Mydans, repeatedly blacked out mention ofUS. support, referring to "the decade-long civil war that followed" Pol Pot's ouster (April 13), and a nineteen-year "guerilla insurgency in the jungles of western and northern Cambodia" (April 17).
The Boston Globe, New 10rk Times, W&shington Post, and Los Angeles Times, editorializing on the death of Pol Pot on April 17,1998, were uni- formly indignant over his crimes and regretful at his escape from justice, but all avoided mentioning the long US. support ofthe criminal-as well as the U. S. contribution to the first phase of a "Decade of Genocide. "92
The washington Post blacked out the inconvenient fifteen-year period of support of Pol Pot with this summary: "After the nightmare of Khmer Rouge rule and genocide, the United States and its allies pumped mil- lions of donars into Cambodia to help rebuild and to hold elections. "9~
It is enlightening to compare the media's treatment of Pol Pot and Indonesian leader Suharto, who was also in the news in 1998, as Indone- sia suffered a financial crisis that-along with popular resistance to the dictatorship---eventually led to his ouster. Pol Pot was described in the editorials and news columns of April 1998 as "crazed," a "killer," "war criminal," "mass murderer," "blood-soaked," and as having engineered a "reign of terror" and "genocide. " But in 1998 and 1999, and in earlier years as well, while Suharto was occasionally referred to as a "dictator" and running an "authoritarian" regime, he was never a "killer" or "mass murderer" or one responsible for "genocide. " The terminological double standard is maintained reliably throughout the mainstream media. 94
Less obvious but equally interesting is the difference in willingness
to identify the responsible parties for the killings of Pol Pot and Suharto. In the case of Pol Pot, there is no uncertainty or complexity: editorials and news articles uniformly make him and the Khmer Rouge leadership clearly and unambiguously responsible for all deaths in Cambodia dur- ing the period 1975-78. He was the "man who slaughtered two million" (USA 1Oday), "the executioner" (Boston Glebe) who "presided over the deaths" of his victims (washington Post), "the man who drove Cambodia to ruin" (New Thrk Times).
But in Suhano's case, we move to an ambiguous responsibility, which means none at all: in the New Thrk Times, for example, "a 1965 coup led to the massacres of hundreds of thousands of supposed communists" (edi- torial, Aug. 23, 1996), where we have no agent doing the killing; or "a wave ofviolence that took up to 500,000 lives and led Suharto to seize power from Sukarno in a military coup" (Seth Mydans, Aug. 7, 1996), where the massacre not only has no agent, but is falseLy situated before the takeover of power by Suharto. In a latcr piece, Mydans states that "more than 500,000 Indonesians are estimated to have died in a purge of leftists in 1965, the year Mr. Suharto came to power" (April 8, 1997). Note the passive voice, never used in connection with Pol Pot, the word "purge" instead of "slaughter" or "massacre," and the continued faillU'e to identify the agent.
In the case of East Timor, also, the Times is uncertain about the source of the killing: "This is one of the world's sadder places, where 100,000 to 200,000 people died from 1974 in a brutal civil war and the consequent invasion through combat, execution, disease and starvation. . . . " (Steven Erlanger, Oct. 2I, 1990). In addition to the lack ofa clear agent, this sen- tence seriously misrepresents the facts-the civil war was shorr and left small numbers dead; and the invasion was not "consequent" to a brutal civil war, except in Indonesian propaganda.
Another important difference in the treatment of the "worthy" victims of Pol Pot and the "unworthy" victims of Suharto is in the willingness to explain away the killings. With Pol Pot, as we describe in chapter 7, the background of the first phase of the genocide was completely blacked out in the mainstream account-there is no qualification to Pol Pot's respon- sibility as a killer because his forces had undergone terrible damage and sought vengeance for the crimes they had suffered; nor are any deaths in Pol Pot's years of rule to be explained by the starvation and disease already pervasive in April 1975. No, the only mentionable background is his Paris training and Communist fanaticism.