Iraq

Making A Killing On War

by Laura Miller — March 19, 2003 - 11:00pm

"As the first bombs rain down on Baghdad, CorpWatch has learned that thousands of employees of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, are working alongside United States troops in Kuwait and Turkey under a package deal worth close to a billion dollars. According to US Army sources, they are building tent cities and providing logistical support for the war in Iraq in addition to other hot spots in the 'war on terrorism,'" CorpWatch writes.

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CorpWatch, March 20, 2003

A Call For Independent Community Media

by Laura Miller — March 19, 2003 - 11:00pm

"The new US war on Iraq has begun: arguably the greatest moral tragedy of a generation, an unprecedented failure of diplomacy and international order, and a profound crime against the principles of democracy," the Independent Media Center wrote in a statement calling on citizens to seek out news from and create news stories for their nearest IMC.

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Indymedia.org, March 20, 2003

Filling Every Information Void

by Laura Miller — March 18, 2003 - 11:00pm

"Once the war starts, the [Bush] administration plans to fill every information void in the 24-hour worldwide news cycle, leaving little to chance or interpretation," writes the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung.

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Washington Post, March 19, 2003

Credibility Bomb

by Laura Miller — March 17, 2003 - 11:00pm

"The 'powerful odor of mendacity' (to borrow Tennessee Williams' phrase) hung over George Bush's primetime virtual declaration of war Monday night," TomPaine.com commentator Doug Ireland writes.

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TomPaine.com, March 18, 2003

Media Watchdogs Caught Napping

by Sheldon Rampton — March 16, 2003 - 11:00pm

In the run up to war in Iraq, foreign news websites are seeing large
volumes of traffic from America, as U.S. citizens increasingly seek news
coverage about the coming war. "Given how timid most U.S. news organizations have been in challenging the White House position on Iraq, I'm not surprised if Americans are turning to foreign news services for a perspective on the conflict that goes beyond freedom fries," said Deborah Branscom, a Newsweek contributing editor, who keeps a weblog devoted to media issues.

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Wired.com, March 17, 2003

Bush League Diplomacy: The Empire Strikes Out

by John Stauber — March 15, 2003 - 11:00pm

As PR Watch reported last year, the Bush administration has always intended to attack Iraq no matter what the results of UN inspections. The US's expensive post-911 propaganda and PR campaign to win foreign friends and change minds about US policy has predictably failed given Bush's bullying insistence on going to war.

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Washington Post, March 16, 2003

A New Definition of "Innocent"

by Sheldon Rampton — March 15, 2003 - 11:00pm

The United States and France were the source in the 1980s for "all the foreign germ samples ... used to create the biological weapons that are still believed to be in Iraq's arsenal, according to American officials and foreign diplomats who have reviewed Iraq's latest weapons declaration to the United Nations. ... The bioweapons declaration was obtained by Gary B.

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New York Times, March 16, 2003

Head Games with Media's Help

by Sheldon Rampton — March 12, 2003 - 11:00pm

So confident is the U.S. military about a swift victory in Iraq that plans are already afoot to fly a CNN correspondent and a BBC reporter to the southern Iraqi city of Basra the moment it falls. "I'm not doing this so that the CNN correspondent gets another $100,000 in their salary," he said. "I'm doing it because the regime watches CNN. I want them to see what is happening." The plan is part of a psychological warfare campaign that the British officer called "white pys-ops." "Yes, we are using them," he said.

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Newsday, March 13, 2003

TV Networks Continue to Ban Ads for Peace

by John Stauber — March 12, 2003 - 11:00pm

"MTV has refused to accept a commercial opposing a war in
Iraq, citing a policy against advocacy spots that it says
protects the channel from having to run ads from any
cash-rich interest group whose cause may be loathsome. ... 'It is irresponsible for news organizations not to accept
ads that are controversial on serious issues, assuming they
are not scurrilous or in bad taste,' said Alex Jones,
director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy at Harvard.

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New York Times, March 13, 2003

Reporters Warned to Leave Baghdad

by Sheldon Rampton — March 11, 2003 - 11:00pm

Defense Department officials are warning reporters to clear out of Baghdad, saying this war will be far more intense than the 1991 gulf war. "If your template is Desert Storm, you've got to imagine something much, much different," said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Pentagon says it is warning journalists in the interest of their safety, but some critics see the heads-up as an attempt to control the news, with the goal of minimizing politically damaging images of suffering Iraqi civilians.

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Chicago Tribune, March 12, 2003
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