May 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Short Takes

From MoveOn, a catalyst for grassroots involvement, supporting busy but concerned citizens through online activism. Visit www.moveon.org.

American media outlets have chosen to stifle or simply not show the most terrible and saddening aspects of this war. They are reluctant to air the voices of critics who are raising important questions about its effectiveness and purpose. And they appear to have acceded to the Bush Administration's desire to black out pictures or footage of civilian casualties.

Now more than ever, it's important that the media report the full story, unvarnished and unspun. But all we saw on TV were retired military officers and Administration officials narrating a clean and precise war that bore little resemblance to the chaos, bloodshed, and tragedy on the ground.

We need to demand the full picture. Please consider joining the MoveOn Media Corps, a group of committed online activists who will keep the media accountable. The action ideas we send you won't generally take longer than 15 minutes, but to be part of the Corps we ask that you commit to taking up to one action per day. The actions include calling media outlets when they air especially bad coverage, pushing Clear Channel radio to stop censoring anti-war songs, and writing letters to the editor.

Sign up now at: www.moveon.org/mediacorps

From "Crime Against Humanity" by John Pilger, a British journalist, on www.zmag.org

A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by an American fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with "friendly fire," spoke to his mother on a satellite phone. Holding the phone over his head so that she could hear the sound of the American planes overhead, he said: "Listen, that's the sound of freedom."

Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was being ferociously ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever designed the Observer's page three last Sunday had Joseph Heller in mind when he wrote the weasel headline: "The moment young Omar discovered the price of war." These cowardly words accompanied a photograph of an American marine reaching out to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having just participated in the mass murder of his father, mother, two sisters and brother during the unprovoked invasion of their homeland, in breach of the most basic law of civilised peoples.

Versions of the Observer's propaganda picture have been appearing in the Anglo-American press since the invasion began: tender cameos of American troops reaching out, kneeling, ministering to their "liberated" victims.

And where were the pictures from the village of Furat, where 80 men, women, and children were rocketed to death? Apart from the Mirror, where were the pictures, and footage, of small children holding up their hands in terror while Bush's thugs forced their families to kneel in the street? Imagine that in a British high street. It is a glimpse of fascism, and we have a right to see it.

From an interview with Robert Fisk, a British journalist, on the radio program Democracy Now, 4/22/03

So what I've been writing about these past few days is simply the following. We claim that we want to preserve the national heritage of the Iraqi people, and yet my own count of government buildings burning in Baghdad before I left was 158, of which the only buildings protected by the United States army and the marines were the Ministry of Interior, which has the intelligence corp of Iraq and the Ministry of Oil, and I needn't say anything else about that. Every other ministry was burning. Even the Ministry of Higher Education and Computer Science was burning. And in some cases American marines were sitting on the wall next to the ministries watching them burn.

After the Koranic Library was set on fire I raced to the headquarters of the Third Marine Force Division in Baghdad and I said there is this massive Koranic Library on fire and I said what can you do? And under the Geneva Conventions the US Occupation Forces have a moral, whatever occupation forces there are, and they happen to be American, have a legal duty to protect documents and various embassies. There was a young officer who got on the radio and said "there was some kind of Biblical library on fire," biblical for heaven's sake, and I gave him a map of the exact locations, the collaterals on the locations to the marines and nobody went there, and all the Korans were burned, Korans going back to the 16th century totally burned.

Larry Golden, Mountain Home, AR

The Peace Pilgrim had as a slogan "Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, hatred with love." We could all be better citizens of the world by ascribing to these few simple truths.

With the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, I feel that a great gesture of world community would be for all religions of the world to gather resources and rebuild the ancient Buddhas the Taliban destroyed.

We are, after all, one world, all brothers and sisters. Like it or not.

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