UPDATED - ColdType

ians, torn to pieces before they could be ‘liberated’
by the nation that destroyed their lives.
Who dares, I ask myself, to call this ‘collateral
damage’? Abu Taleb Street was packed with
pedestrians and motorists when the American
pilot approached through the dense sandstorm
that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red
and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.
“We may put on the hair shirt of morality in
explaining why these people should die. They
died because of 11 September, we may say,
because of President Saddam’s weapons of mass
destruction, because of human rights abuses,
because of our desperate desire to liberate them
all. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either
way, I’ll bet we are told President Saddam is ultimately
responsible for their deaths. We shan’t
mention the pilot.
“Are we seeing the death and destruction?
Word of it is rarely heard at the briefings that get
wall-to-wall coverage with all the talk of how we
are ‘on plan.’
Briefing-based journalism is a joke. Tomdispatch.com
explains why: “Let’s start with a touch
of irony. For thirty years, the men (and lone
woman) now running our country have also been
running away from Vietnam. In this war, it only
took six days for Vietnam to catch up to them. Last
night, for instance, here’s what I noticed on the
CBS and ABC national news, followed by the Jim
Lehrer NewsHour. CBS led off with word that the
U.S. military in Iraq, where all was going according
to plan and on schedule, had nonetheless called
for reinforcements from the States to guard
exposed supply lines and 700 soldiers from an
armored unit were being shipped out immediately.
“As the Vietnam War went on, of course, the
military was always offering public reassurances
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about how splendidly things were going and
then asking the President for more men. (DS: the
latest is that another 100,000 are being flown in.
All according to plan, of course.) PBS also aired
clips of the daily Centcom briefing in Qatar. The
uniformed briefer seemed distinctly on the
defensive! A Canadian reporter was shown complaining
that the military never displayed videos
of missiles that missed their targets or hit wrong
targets and demanded to know when some
would be available.
“Then, to my surprise, a CBS correspondent
rose to complain fairly vehemently that, while
“embedded” reporters were offering many tiny
pictures, the “big picture” was supposed to come
from Centcom; instead, he commented, all that
was being offered were videos of micro-air
strikes. In fact, all the Pentagon news conferences
of the day managed to look both ridiculous and
untrustworthy as spokesmen tried to pin the
blame for civilian casualties from the missile-inthe-Baghdad-market
on the Iraqis.”
Why are we here?
I WAS struck by a question that was raised at
yesterday’s CENTCOM briefing, which focused
on what is happening in the “theater,” a great
word that explains why we are seeing so many
performances. Michael Wolff of New York magazine
had the chutzpah to get up and challenge
the whole ritual by asking about its value proposition.
“Why are we even here, in this million
dollar media center?” was his question. It
seemed to piss off the briefer because it was a bit
pissy, even though he offered it “with respect.”
Wolff is not a journalist to be messed with.
In many ways the corridor correspondents of