Sept. 17, 2001: "The U.S. should bomb the
Afghan infrastructure to rubble: the airport, the power plants, their
water facilities, and the roads" in the event of a refusal to hand over
Osama bin Laden to the U.S.
Later, he added: "This is a
very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to
day will not be hard. " We should not target civilians. But if they
don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period."
On March 26, 2003, a few days after the invasion of Iraq began, O'Reilly said: "There
is a school of thought that says we should have given the citizens of
Baghdad 48 hours to get out of Dodge by dropping leaflets and going
with the AM radios and all that. Forty-eight hours, you've got to get
out of there, and flatten the place." [See Peter Hart's "O'Reilly's
War: Any rationale--or none--will do" Fairness & Accuracy in
Reporting, May/June 2003]
Collective Punishment
Another tremendously influential journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner and former executive editor of the New York Times, the late A.M. Rosenthal, also advocated attacking civilian targets and collective punishment in regard to waging war against Muslim nations in the Middle East.
In a Sept. 14, 2001, column, "How the U.S.
Can Win the War", Rosenthal wrote that the U.S. should give
Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Sudan three days to consider
an ultimatum demanding they turn over documents and information related
to weapons of mass destruction and terrorist organizations.
During these three days, "the residents of the countries would be urged
24 hours a day by the U.S. to flee the capital and major cities,
because they would be bombed to the ground beginning the fourth day."
Right-wing media figure Ann Coulter, on the Sean Hannity Show on July 21, 2006, called for another war and more punishment of civilians, this time in Iran:
"Well, I keep hearing people say we can't find the nuclear material, and you can bury it in caves. How about we just, you know, carpet-bomb them so they can't build a transistor radio? And then it doesn't matter if they have the nuclear material."
This pattern of the major U.S. news
figures advocating aggressive wars even predated 9/11. Three-time
Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman published a strident call for war
crimes including collective punishment of Serbs and the destruction of
their water supplies over the Kosovo crisis:
"But if
NATO's only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get
every ounce out of that. Let's at least have a real air war. The idea
that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out
for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are
"cleansing' Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade:
every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has
to be targeted.
"Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too." [New York Times, April 23, 1999]
These casual -- even joking -- comments about inflicting war on relatively weak countries came from American journalists and media figures at the very top of their profession. Each was addressing an audience of millions. It is difficult to overstate their influence.
Over the past decade alone, the massive
destruction and carnage wreaked by American pursuit of "the supreme
international crime" of aggression has been enabled by negligent,
reckless and/or malicious use of this influence.
Sadly,
the words of Nuremberg Prosecutor Griffith-Jones concerning the
propaganda of German journalist Julius Streicher hold considerable
meaning today for some of the most prominent journalists in the country
which, 60 years ago, provided the guiding light at Nuremberg:
Streicher "made these things possible -- made these crimes possible which could never have happened had it not been for him and for those like him."
In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 127 in which "the General Assembly " invites the Governments of States Members " to study such measures as might with advantage, be taken on the national plane to combat, within the limits of constitutional procedures, the diffusion of false or distorted reports likely to injure friendly relations between States."
