US Mainstream Media Journalists With “Blood on Their Hands”

"Santa Putin" (Illustration by DonkeyHotey)

By Eric Sommer
Hey U.S. mass media journalists: A large number of you writing in outlets like CNN, Fox News, New York Times, and Washington Post have blood on your hands. It may initially sound exaggerated, but you are complicit in mass murder. In the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi war criminals at the end of WW II, the prosecution powerfully argued that those journalists who use propaganda to prepare the public to accept war crimes are themselves also guilty of those crimes.

As the Nuremberg prosecutor stated:

“The use made by the Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack….In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

During the run-up to the Iraq war – an unprovoked war of aggression – many of you endlessly repeated, without proper critique or doubt, the false Bush Administrations claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that this somehow justified military invasion.

By helping to manufacture the consent of the public for that war, and by helping to intimidate opponents of the war, you were complict in sending thousands of young American men and women abroad to kill and be killed; thousands of them died, tens or hundreds of thousands were injured or mentally traumatized, not to mention up to a million Iraquis who died as a result of the war.

“In The Six Months Leading Up To The Invasion,” according to well-known social commentator Bill Moyers, “the Washington Post would Editorialize In Favor Of The War At Least 27 Times.”

Among the dozens of mass media news columnists who prepared the public for the war were Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who even argued that an invasion of Iraq would bring democracy to the Middle East;

Post columnist Richard Cohen, who stated that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had proved that Iraq “Still Retains [WMD]. Only A Fool-Or, Possibly, A Frenchman-Could Conclude Otherwise.”;

Wall Street Journal vice-president and editorial page editor Paul Gigot, who told the public:

“The “Coalition Will Find “Nasty Weapons And The Cheering Iraqis … When It Liberates The Country.”;

and Fred Barnes, Fox News contributor, who stated that Iraq has

“weapons of mass destruction, there is a delivery vehicle, and it’s called terrorists, it’s called al Qaeda.

Of course, there were no weapons of mass destruction or al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq; and the current presence of al Qaeda in Iraq was a *consequence* of the destruction and destabilization resulting from the invasion.

Now many of you working for the corporate mass media are at it again – demonizing Russia and Putin, preparing the public to accept the necessity to ‘punish the devil’.

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