The REAL Monstrous Hoax in the Brian Williams Scandal
February 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Brian Williams, one of the most prominent network news broadcasters in the U.S., experienced an abrupt, highly public takedown and shaming in the past week. Williams is accused of making on-air claims that in 2003, when he was embedded with the U.S. invaders in Iraq, he was in a helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. He embellished, developed, and changed this story somewhat over the years. Now, 12 years after the supposed event, some people who had been with Williams when he went to Iraq have come forward to say he has been lying.Williams has been removed from his post as lead anchor for NBC Nightly News for six months, without pay, and indications are that he won’t be reinstated. Williams is being called a “disgrace.” Pundits said NBC would “lose all credibility” if it didn’t fire him.
What did Williams do that is deemed so terrible by virtually every other media mouthpiece and hack in the country?
Did he say he should not have allowed himself to be “embedded” in Iraq with an invading imperialist army? Did he say he should have exposed the massive atrocities and war crimes this army committed? Did he say that he should have done everything he could to bring the towering crimes against humanity—the rivers of blood being shed unjustly that he was literally in the midst of—to the world’s attention?
Did Williams finally acknowledge and apologize for his part in perpetrating the “weapons of mass destruction” hoax, the obvious lies coming from the George W. Bush regime that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had chemical and nuclear weapons, which was used as the pretext for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq? Did he call on his fellow journalists to do the same, to “come clean” and admit that they too had aided and abetted horrible war crimes, and vow never to do so again?
No.
A REALLY Monstrous Hoax
The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that began in 2003 is one of the towering crimes against humanity perpetrated by U.S. imperialism. Up to a million Iraqi people have died from the war, either directly from the massive violence inflicted by the U.S. or because of the destruction and devastation it has caused; millions have been maimed and injured, often crippled for life; four-and-a-half million people lost their homes in the warfare; and poisonous weapons of mass destruction used by the U.S. continue to cause severe illnesses among Iraqi people, and in particular birth defects among children. Horrific networks of torture chambers were set up by the Americans. Children have been orphaned; massive numbers of women have been forced to turn to prostitution for basic survival; and much of Iraq’s infrastructure—sewage treatment plants, hospitals, roads, bridges, schools, railroad lines—has been laid to waste.
This was an unjust, immoral war initiated on the basis of a big lie and fought in the interests of a predatory imperialist power. The big media in the U.S.—of all stripes—including Brian Williams, helped promote criminal war aims; they also contributed to attempts at intimidating and silencing opposition to the war. Williams and other news anchors did or led no serious journalistic investigation into the Bush administration’s blatant lies that “weapons of mass destruction” were in Iraqi hands. They never brought out the scale and depth of the horrific violence and destruction the U.S. inflicted on the people of Iraq, which barely registered as an afterthought in their “coverage.”
Instead, the mainstream media played an endless loop of statements by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying that she didn’t want the evidence of Iraq’s alleged (nonexistent, in fact) nuclear weapons to be the “mushroom cloud” of their detonation, and by Colin Powell with his completely fictitious PowerPoint display at the United Nations about Iraqi weapons and nuclear material.
Williams and other journalists embedded themselves with invading U.S. troops and blatantly discarded even the pretense of journalistic objectivity. They fronted for an endless stream of commentary by military, political, and “intelligence” (i.e., spy) officials, and contending, antiwar views were virtually completely absent—all this was part of the systematic barrage of war-mongering propaganda trumpeted by Brian Williams, NBC News, and every other major media outlet in this country.
The job of major news anchors is to tell official lies in the service of the system, and to do it so well that the great majority of people actually believe them, no matter how outrageous—and deadly—the lies are. It is to assure the population that America is the “greatest country in the world, always fighting for good against evil”; that the wars it fights are “good wars” and that all the troops are “heroes”; that its leaders have, in the end, the interests of the people at heart, that the police, leaving aside a few “bad apples,” are there to “serve and protect” the people, that this is the “land of opportunity” for anyone willing to “work hard and play by the rules,” and on and on and on.
This episode is about much more than the professional destruction of Brian Williams. It is about continuing and compounding the lies, deceit, cover-ups, and hypocrisy that have justified not only the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but all the bloody aggression the U.S. has inflicted in the past 14 years. It is about trying to make “heroes” out of U.S. military personnel who carry out barbaric acts of murder and torture, when in fact the only heroes in the military are the ones who resist and expose the atrocities that are an everyday part of its functioning.
What kind of system can carry out such despicable acts, and why should it be allowed to exist a day longer than necessary?
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