Depressing piece from Comment is Free on The Guardian on the appalling state of the media in America and its failure to report on critical matters which it ought to - such as the one detailed in the piece. The article rightly concludes that Americans, through ignorance, have a benign view of events outside the US.
"The United States still has military spending that is higher in real, inflation-adjusted terms than it was during the peak of the Reagan Cold War build-up, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War. We seem to be in a state of permanent warfare, and – we have recently learned -- massive government spying and surveillance of our own citizens. This is despite an ever-receding threat to the actual physical security of Americans. Only 19 people have been killed acts of terrorism in the United States since September 11, 2001; and none or almost none of these were connected to foreign terrorists. And there are no “enemy states” that pose a significant military threat to the United States – if any governments can be called “enemy states” at all.
One of the reasons for this disconnect is that most of the mass media provide a grossly distorted view of U.S. foreign policy. It presents an American foreign policy that is far more benign and justifiable than the reality of empire that most of the world knows. In a well-researched and thoroughly documented article published by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), Keane Bhatt provides an excellent case study of how this happens.
Bhatt focuses on a very popular and interesting National Public Radio (NPR) show, “This American Life,” and most importantly an episode that won the Peabody Award. The Peabody Award , for distinguished achievement in electronic journalism, is a prestigious prize; so this makes the example even more relevant.
The episode was about the 1982 massacre in Guatemala. The story gives compelling eyewitness accounts of a horrendous slaughter of almost the entire village of Dos Erres, more than 200 people. The women and girls are raped and then killed, the men are shot or bludgeoned with sledgehammers, and many, including children, are dumped into a dry well – some while still alive – that would become their mass grave. The broadcast walks the listener through a heroic investigation of the crime – the first ever to win punishment for such murders. And finally, it provides a moving account of one survivor who was three years old at the time. Three decades later, while living in Massachusetts, he discovers his roots and his biological father as a result of the investigation. The father lost his wife and his eight other children but survived because he happened to be out of town on the day of the massacre.
The story makes it clear that this bloodbath was one of many:
“This happened in over 600 villages, tens of thousands of people. A truth commission found that the number of Guatemalans killed or disappeared by their own government was over 180,000.”
But there is one striking omission – the U.S. role in what the UN Truth commission in 1999 later determined to be genocide. The UN specifically noted Washington’s role and President Clinton publicly apologized for it – the first and to my knowledge the only apology from an American president for U.S. involvement in genocide. The U.S. role in providing arms, training, ammunition, diplomatic cover, political and other support to the mass murderers is well-documented and has gotten some more documentation and attention as a result of the recent trial of former military dictator General EfraÃn RÃos Montt, who ruled from 1982-83. (As Bhatt notes, the program states that the U.S. embassy had heard reports of massacres during this time but “dismissed” them; but this is very misleading at best -- there are cables showing that the embassy clearly knew what was going on).
In fact, one of the soldiers who participated in the Dos Erres massacre, Pedro Pimentel, who later was sentenced to 6,060 years in prison, was airlifted the day after the mass murder to the School of the Americas, the U.S. military facility known for training some of the region’s worst dictators and human rights violators."
"The United States still has military spending that is higher in real, inflation-adjusted terms than it was during the peak of the Reagan Cold War build-up, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War. We seem to be in a state of permanent warfare, and – we have recently learned -- massive government spying and surveillance of our own citizens. This is despite an ever-receding threat to the actual physical security of Americans. Only 19 people have been killed acts of terrorism in the United States since September 11, 2001; and none or almost none of these were connected to foreign terrorists. And there are no “enemy states” that pose a significant military threat to the United States – if any governments can be called “enemy states” at all.
One of the reasons for this disconnect is that most of the mass media provide a grossly distorted view of U.S. foreign policy. It presents an American foreign policy that is far more benign and justifiable than the reality of empire that most of the world knows. In a well-researched and thoroughly documented article published by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), Keane Bhatt provides an excellent case study of how this happens.
Bhatt focuses on a very popular and interesting National Public Radio (NPR) show, “This American Life,” and most importantly an episode that won the Peabody Award. The Peabody Award , for distinguished achievement in electronic journalism, is a prestigious prize; so this makes the example even more relevant.
The episode was about the 1982 massacre in Guatemala. The story gives compelling eyewitness accounts of a horrendous slaughter of almost the entire village of Dos Erres, more than 200 people. The women and girls are raped and then killed, the men are shot or bludgeoned with sledgehammers, and many, including children, are dumped into a dry well – some while still alive – that would become their mass grave. The broadcast walks the listener through a heroic investigation of the crime – the first ever to win punishment for such murders. And finally, it provides a moving account of one survivor who was three years old at the time. Three decades later, while living in Massachusetts, he discovers his roots and his biological father as a result of the investigation. The father lost his wife and his eight other children but survived because he happened to be out of town on the day of the massacre.
The story makes it clear that this bloodbath was one of many:
“This happened in over 600 villages, tens of thousands of people. A truth commission found that the number of Guatemalans killed or disappeared by their own government was over 180,000.”
But there is one striking omission – the U.S. role in what the UN Truth commission in 1999 later determined to be genocide. The UN specifically noted Washington’s role and President Clinton publicly apologized for it – the first and to my knowledge the only apology from an American president for U.S. involvement in genocide. The U.S. role in providing arms, training, ammunition, diplomatic cover, political and other support to the mass murderers is well-documented and has gotten some more documentation and attention as a result of the recent trial of former military dictator General EfraÃn RÃos Montt, who ruled from 1982-83. (As Bhatt notes, the program states that the U.S. embassy had heard reports of massacres during this time but “dismissed” them; but this is very misleading at best -- there are cables showing that the embassy clearly knew what was going on).
In fact, one of the soldiers who participated in the Dos Erres massacre, Pedro Pimentel, who later was sentenced to 6,060 years in prison, was airlifted the day after the mass murder to the School of the Americas, the U.S. military facility known for training some of the region’s worst dictators and human rights violators."
Comments