Furthering Lies: The "Director's Cut"

Back in January, I wrote an article for the Gateway on a talk given at the U of A by Scott Taylor, a Canadian war veteran and journalist. Due to space constraints, a significant portion had to be cut. I had hoped to get the original article published somewhere, but most media sources won't publish reviews more than a few days after the event being reviewed happened. Except blogs, that is.

So, I hereby present to you "Furthering Lies: The 'Director's Cut.'" The Gateway article can be read here: http://www.gateway.ualberta.ca/view.php?aid=3808

Furthering Lies: The "Director’s Cut"

Miscommunication and outright lies tainted the media’s coverage of both Iraq and Kosovo, argued Scott Taylor, a veteran of the Canadian military and the editor of Esprit de Corps, the magazine of the Canadian military.

Taylor, who spoke Tuesday 18 January at ETLC, made his case in a presentation entitled "From Belgrade to Baghdad: How Mistakes in the Balkans Led to Disaster in Iraq" focusing on the wars in the Balkans and Iraq, and the misinformation that followed.

"People like Madeline Albright were claiming 100 000 people were killed in Kosovo," Taylor reported.

In actuality, only about 2000 Serbs and Albanians, most of them fighters, were killed.

The effectivness of the bombing campaign was similarly exaggerated. Despite claims of massive damage to the Serbian army, relatively little damage was done in actuality.

"The Americans spent 13 billion dollars to destroy thirteen tanks. That’s 1 billion dollars a tank," Taylor said.

Taylor also sharply criticized the occupation of Kosovo after the bombing campaign.

"[Serbian refugees] were dragged from their cars and beaten while NATO troops looked on," he said of NATO’s failure to protect Serbian civilians in Kosovo.

"All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t make the Albanians and Serbs like each other."

Shifting to the post 9/11 era, Taylor described the prevailing mood in the Pentagon. "It was 50/50 in the Pentagon, they wanted to nuke Kabul," he quoted a source in the Pentagon.

"The guy who was leading the fifty percent who wanted to drop a nuke to send a statement? George W."

Taylor also accused the Americans of arrogance in their invasion of Iraq.

"They’re unrepentant, and that’s the incredible part. They think they’re protecting us," he said.

Taylor also related how the Americans ignored warnings from the international community.

"We told the Americans that if you go that way, you’re going over a cliff. They went that way, they went over the cliff, they’re burning, and they’re asking us to get in the front seat."

Taylor also dismissed the notion that the Bush administration was genuinely mistaken about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To back up his claim, he cited former presidential speechwriter David Frum’s book "The Right Man."

"The whole ‘axis of evil’ that he came up with, he was told to do something that would include Iraq inside that parameter. That was coming from the president down to him, not coming up from the CIA." Taylor said that even before 9/11, the Bush administration intended to take out Saddam Hussein.

"Bush said, and this is from Frum’s book, that the first meeting they had after [Bush’s] inauguration, that he was going to snuff out Saddam during his first term."

The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation were both plagued by poor planning and incompetence he argued.

"[The Pentagon] said we’ll be out of there in six months. That was what their war planning was based on."

Taylor also noted that morale has been slipping.

Despite the fact that the US armed forces voted four to one for the Republicans, many soldiers in Iraq are getting frustrated, especially those who had their tours extended.

Additionally, US efforts to train a new Iraqi army and police for have had little success. "Fifty percent of their police forces are unreliable. Forty percent deserted and ten percent turned their guns on the Americans. The other fifty percent didn’t see combat." Taylor also described how six heavily armed police stations in the city of Mosul were overrun with hardly a shot fired.
Taylor was highly critical of the media for not properly reporting the failures in Kosovo and Iraq.

Although outright censorship is rare, distortion is not.

Taylor related one incident in which a copy editor changed a story he had written about an atrocity committed by Albanian rebels in Macedonia.

"[The copy editor] switched it, because he knew from what he’d read about Kosovo that it was the Albanians who were the victims, so he changed it to a Macedonian atrocity."

The structure of the media itself can be a detriment to discovering the truth in a conflict, Taylor said.

"They pay the money for the air fare, they pay the person to go over there, they pay for the satellite phone at ten bucks a minute for them…. they’d better have a story," he said.

"You can’t get in there and say, ‘listen, I’m going to look around for a couple weeks, get the feel of things," he said, noting that journalists often end up repeating what other major news outlets are saying, rather than doing their own research.

Taylor stressed the necessity of learning the truth about past mistakes and failures, so that we may learn from them in the future.

"Nobody wants to go back an look at the mistake that Kosovo was," he said.

Failing this kind of self-criticism, Taylor predicted dire consequences for the US. "We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the American empire," he said.

Ultimately, it is up to the public to demand the truth.

"People have to be questioning, should be questioning, what is happening," he said.