Censored 2014 (17 page)

As such, it is important to note that the current sanctions on Iran were not in fact inevitable, as the official Washington narrative insists. Moreover, these sanctions are not a “peaceful” or “humanitarian” means of negotiation given some of the more deadly consequences most vividly evidenced in the lack of access to medicine and medical equipment.

In June 2012, Hamid Dabashi offered a searing critique of Nicholas Kristof's report for the
New York Times
in which Kristof unequivocally declared that sanctions against Iran were working. Based on his much-hyped “i,700-mile drive around the country,” Kristof offered his “blunt” claim that US-led “sanctions are succeeding as intended: They are inflicting prodigious economic pain on Iranians and are generating discontent.”
¹⁸
Assessing Kristof's reportage, Dabashi wrote, “This is journalism at the
de facto
service of a bewildered empire, a journalism that does not only fail to raise very basic and simple questions about dangerous policies of the journalist's home country but that has in fact become the effective extension of imperial wars by other means.”
¹⁹

Censored #12: The US Has Left Iraq with an Epidemic of Cancers and Birth Defects

Depleted uranium is highly radioactive with a 4.5 billion year half-life. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has classified it as a “weapon of indiscriminate effect,” alongside nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
²⁰
Yet, depleted uranium has been used in conventional warfare—particularly by US forces—since the Gulf War; more recently, its use has also been documented in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Lebanon.
²¹
By 2003, US Army training manuals advised personnel to use respiratory and skin protection when operating within seventy-five yards of destroyed tanks or spent shells, though Pentagon officials categorically denied any link between depleted uranium and the dramatic rise in cancers reported in areas known to have been densely bombarded.
²²

Acknowledging the severe health consequences of exposure to depleted uranium would also dramatically affect the US government's position on the vexed topic of Gulf War illness (also known as Gulf War syndrome). Indeed, the “slow violence” of environmental contamination has not discriminated against US veterans of the Gulf War.

While contemporary corporate media coverage of ongoing violence in postwar Iraq focuses superficially on “sectarian” conflict, the magnitude of the health crisis that permeates daily life due to the war remains effectively invisible. Nonetheless, epidemiological studies are beginning to register the extent of long-term health effects in
Basra and Fallujah, two known sites of intensive bombing during the war. At Al-Basra Maternity Hospital, a team of researchers reported that, from 2003 to 2011, “congenital birth defects increased by an astonishing seventeen-fold.”
²³

In addition to depleted uranium, this study also found unhealthy levels of other heavy metals—including mercury and lead—among the affected populations. Reporting for the UK's
Independent,
Sarah Morrison quoted Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan and one of the study's lead authors: the study's first documentation of a “footprint of metal in the population” is “compelling evidence linking the staggering increases in Iraqi birth defects to neuro-toxic metal contamination following the repeated bombardments of Iraqi cities.” Dr. Savabieasfahani called the “epidemic” a “public health crisis.”
²⁴
She added: “We need extensive environmental sampling, of food, water and air to find out where this is coming from. Then we can clean it up. Now we are seeing 50 percent of children being born with malformations; in a few years it could be everyone.”

The stark case of censorship in this instance pushes the question of media ethics and accountability to an extreme. Although new epidemiological studies demonstrate links between Iraq's current health crises and the US's past military activities and make plain the severity of this environmental disaster, US officials refuse to acknowledge responsibility and American corporate media ignore investigating the story. As Ross Caputi reports in the
Guardian:

To put the Fallujah birth defects in comparative perspective, Dahr Jamail noted: “From 2004 up to this day, we are seeing a rate of congenital malformations in the city of Fallujah that has surpassed even
that in the wake of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” on which the US used nuclear bombs at the end of World War II.
²⁶

One of the most egregious aspects of coverage of the US war on terror has been and continues to be the systematic exclusion of the voices of victims of US violence, whose lives, suffering, deaths, and mourning are invisible to news spectators, dehumanized into nonex-istence.

RELATED VALIDATED INDEPENDENT NEWS STORY

Oil and Fraud: Why We Went to Iraq

In efforts to forestall the US invasion of Iraq, antiwar protestors marched with signs that read “No Blood for Oil” and activists called for a “separation of oil and state.” As Norman Solomon identified, advocates of the invasion of Iraq used the negative frame, “This is Not at All About Oil or Corporate Profits,” to build the case for war.
²⁷
Corporate news outlets acted as a verbatim megaphone for the government to sell a repeatedly rebranded war, from preemptive strike against nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), Operation Iraqi Liberation, and dictatorial regime change, to installing democracy and freedom (better understood as free trade), to a necessary victory in the war against terror, to a refusal to “cut and run,” to the rhetorical detergent of Operation New Dawn.

In 2007, the publication of former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's memoir,
The Age of Turbulence,
caused a stir, in part because he wrote, “I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”
²⁸
Dominance of the world's second largest oil reserves was at the heart of British-backed US military policy toward Iraq. These recycled narratives of disavowal—the war was about oil but nonetheless it was not about oil—are continuously deployed.

Since even before the start of the US bombing and invasion in 2003, independent reporters and alternative media sources have worked tirelessly to expose the war effort's material motives. In 2013, on the tenth anniversary of war, the corporate media appear to remain convinced by
the establishment line that anyone (besides Alan Greenspan, perhaps) who argues that oil motivated US military policy in Iraq is a conspiracy theorist. Indeed, this has been the fate of both Greg Muttitt, author of
Fuel on Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq;
and Antonia Juhasz, author of
The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time
and
The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry—And What We Must Do to Stop It,
among other critics with expertise on the topic. Thus, in 2008, the
Washington Post's
energy correspondent, Steven Mufson wrote, “There is no single conspiracy theory about why the Bush administration allegedly waged this ‘war for oil.'“
²⁹
Then Muf-son identified and described a variety of critical explanations—including those advanced by Juhasz and Muttitt—before concluding in terms that redefine his conception of “conspiracy,” dismissing how private, corporate interests might have motivated Bush administration military policy toward Iraq in favor of collective complicity as the best explanation. “In a sense,” Mufson concluded:

Over the past decade, even as Juhasz's analysis of Big Oil in Iraq gained standing in the corporate media, editors consistently relegated her work to the opinion section. Thus, for example, in April 2013, CNN featured Juhasz's “Why The War in Iraq was Fought for Big Oil,” as an opinion piece in its “complete coverage of the Iraq War anniversary.”
³¹
In her article, Juhasz identified opening up Iraq to foreign oil companies as the “central goal” of the war, and she cited “top U.S. military and political figures” who had stated so in public, including General John Abizaid, former head of US Central Command in Iraq, in 2007; former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan; and Chuck Hagel, who served as a senator in 2007.
³²
“Big Oil” was the true winner of the war, Juhasz wrote. “Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq's domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to West
ern oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms.”
³³

Of approximately 2,000 comments posted online in response to Juhasz's article, over 500 asked why it has taken ten years to say this; and many questioned CNN's decision to label Juhasz's piece as “opinion,” rather than “news.” When corporate outlets have filed “news” stories on contracts secured or lost in Iraq, these reports have typically failed to connect critical dots to examine the strategic relationships in the planning and execution of the war, thus serving to fragment understanding of the oil agenda beyond comprehension, coherence or concern.

As evidenced by the US attempt to overhaul the Iraqi economy at gunpoint, war is corporate globalization by other means.
³⁴
Indeed, after the start of its “shock and awe” bombing campaign, the Bush administration announced its plans for a Middle East Free Trade Area initiative (MEFTA) by 2013. In 2013, years after former Bush officials publicly stated that securing access for Western oil companies in Iraq was central to the drive for war, “Oil and Fraud: Why We Went to Iraq” is still a censored story—a stunning indictment of the corporate me-dia's failure to investigate war crimes in anything like a timely, independent manner. Any
mea culpas
from the corporate media, regarding their central role in promoting the Bush administration's case for the war to mobilize public support, have appeared in the opinion section, rather than as front-page news stories in their own right. To the extent that corporate media do look back on their own performance with a critical eye, they often give voice to government and military sources who, on looking back, identify and acknowledge “mistakes.” But there should be no ambiguity: what they call “mistakes” are, in fact, crimes. And now our leaders ask us to look forward.

TARGOL MESBAH, PHD
, is a member of interdisciplinary studies and anthropology & social change faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she teaches critical theory, postcolonial critique, global studies, and film and media studies. She received her BA in film studies from the University of California–Irvine and her PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California–Santa Cruz. She is cocurator of MENA Experimental: Experimental Film and New Media from the Middle East, North Africa and their Diasporas. She is currently writing a book on the multiple temporalities of war and media.

ZARA ZIMBARDO, MA
, is member of the interdisciplinary studies faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She has a background in independent media as producer of an alternative current events television series highlighting grassroots movements for social and environmental justice, and has developed critical media literacy workshops, presentations, and curricula in collaboration with schools throughout the Bay Area. As a member of the National Council of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, she has worked in solidarity with nonviolent activists resisting militarism in the US, Palestine/Israel, and Colombia. She is an anti-oppression facilitator and consultant, and cofounder of the antiracist feminist resource and training group, the White Noise Collective. Her ongoing research interests include the politics of representation; Islamophobia; collective memory; US militarism; and nonviolent social movements.