MORE ‘INCREDIBLE’

• Civilian revolt in Basra: Turns out there really wasn’t one, it was just a ruse by the U.K. propaganda machine to try to terrify Basra’s civilians into a ‘pre-emptive’ strike on the Iraq army and local militias. Basra’s citizens have been living without water, electricity, heat and medicines since the start of the war, and a humanitarian disaster of staggering proportions looms in that city, Iraq’s second largest. When the people find out about this ruse, they are unlikely to be too partial to the conquering army for the rest of the war, nor to the greedy American corporate conglomerates that will be paid (with U.S. taxpayer dollars) to ‘reconstruct’ the city once the U.S./U.K. armies have destroyed it.
• Importance of Iraqi TV:  The U.S. military described the destruction of the main Iraqi TV transmitters as a “huge strategic success” . One can only conclude they have never watched Iraqi TV. The people of Iraq are not stupid – they know the main TV network is all lies and propaganda. And the suggestion that the national TV network was somehow important in communicating news to Iraqi troops is ludicrous – if the Iraq army was so backward that they needed to rely on TV news to plan their defence strategy, this war would have been over before it started. At any rate, the backup transmitters restored the meaningless signal within a few hours.

CBC has been talking all day about the inanity of ’embedded’ journalists’ reports and the immense courage of those ‘unembedded’ journalists who chose instead to dare to report the truth, some of whom have paid for their bravery with their lives. I’m pleased to say that the CBC now precedes all ’embedded’ journalists’ reports with a warning that ‘the following report was subject to prior review by allied military authorities‘.

$75 Billion just for the first phase of the war – that’s $3,000 (a fortune) for every Iraqi man, woman and child. Think of what could have been done with that money.