Caitlin Johnstone: Do you remember seeing an average of 46 news reports a day on bombings conducted by the U.S. and its allies over the last 20 years? I don’t. 
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
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The Pentagon has finally admitted to the long-obvious fact that it killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, in an airstrike in Kabul last month.
In an article with the obscenely propagandistic title “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians,” The New York Times pats itself on the back for its investigative journalism showing that the so-called ISIS-K facilitator targeted in the strike was in fact an innocent aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi: “The general acknowledged that a New York Times investigation of video evidence helped investigators determine that they had struck a wrong target. ‘As we in fact worked on our investigation, we used all available information,’ General McKenzie told reporters. ‘Certainly that included some of the stuff The New York Times did.’”
Indeed, the Pentagon only admitted to the unjust slaughter of civilians in this one particular instance because the mass media did actual investigative journalism on this one particular airstrike. This is an indictment of the Pentagon’s airstrike protocol, but it’s also an indictment of the mass media.
EXCLUSIVE: Twenty years after 9/11, compelling statistical data suggests that the true death toll of the 'War on Terror' is a staggering *6 million people*: which is likely a conservative estimate. I breakdown the data for @BylineTimes https://t.co/YTV6IoZ3ic
— Dr Nafeez Ahmed (@NafeezAhmed) September 15, 2021
This after all comes out following a new Byline Times report which found that
“at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”
It also comes out two months after whistleblower Daniel Hale was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for leaking secret government information about America’s psychopathic civilian-slaughtering drone assassination program.
It also comes a few months after a Code Pink report found that the U.S. and its allies have been dropping an average of 46 bombs per day in the so-called War on Terror for the last 20 years.
Do you remember seeing an average of 46 news reports a day on bombings conducted by the U.S. and its allies? Do you remember even reading about one single U.S. bombing per day in the mainstream news? I don’t.
Raining Explosives
The U.S. power alliance has for decades been continuously raining explosives from the sky on impoverished people in the Global South and the mainstream news reported on almost none of those instances, much less launched an in-depth investigation into whether each one killed was who the military claims they were.
The difference between the Aug. 29 airstrike and the thousands which preceded it in America’s post-9/11 wars was that this one was politicized. The Biden administration ordered it to look tough on terrorism after the Kabul airport attack (most of the fatalities from which were probably due to panicked gunfire from U.S. and/or allied troops), amidst a withdrawal for which Biden was being aggressively slammed by plutocratic media outlets eager to paint ending U.S. wars as a bad thing that everyone should oppose.
There was nothing unusual about what the US did in Afghanistan: extinguishing an entire family and then getting friendly NYT & NBC reporters to ratify their lie that they killed terrorists but no civilians – except this time the whole world was watching:https://t.co/WoYpcLBkOp
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 17, 2021
The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.
“Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges.” Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake.” How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.
Think about all the murder victims we’d have known about if the news media had done its job and used their immense resources to investigate them as journalists should over the last 20years. Think about how much harder it would have been for the war machine to inflict these evils upon the world if they had. Instead, it’s been left to obscure bloggers and indie journalists to question these actions using scant resources and shoestring budgets.
Mainstream news organizations have shown that they can do these investigations into the validity of U.S. airstrikes, and they’ve shown that they’ve spent two decades choosing not to. The mass-media-manipulators who provide cover for mass-military-murder by journalistic malpractice and negligence are just as complicit in these depraved acts of human butchery as the people firing the weapons and the officials giving the orders.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Her work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following her on Steemit, throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of her sweet merchandise, buying her books Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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I recommend everyone think back to the picture of the vehicle hit by the missile in this instance. The media could not wait to get it out, more red meat for the millions watching.
But wait!
Seemed very obvious to me something was very odd there. The military says they had reports this vehicle with a rocket launcher had been reported (heading for the airport ?) and they feared an attack so they lit it up.
If that vehicle had been carrying a loaded rocket launcher when it was hit those tubes would not have still been in that vehicle in ordered arrangement the photo showed. The early reports clearly state that a secondary explosion was detected. Hog spit!
This entire story is BS. I suspect that had those tubes been loaded with rockets, the normal when moving to attack, when the missile hit that vehicle little would have remained of it. Rocket launching tubes would have been scattered everywhere and likely they would have been unrecognizable.
Never made any sense then and now we know why, it was all a lie.
Murder comes to mind , the cold blooded killing of innocents for photo ops. And for what, so some cowboy joy stick manipulator could get a patch for his uniform.
Please Joe tell me it isn’t so!
“Life is cheap in Asia” — Genl. Westmoreland
One of the enduring mysteries I cannot solve is why people get their information from the legacy media that has a stellar track record of lying.
Rand Paul asked Blinken (top diplomat) if the man killed was an aid worker or a terrorist, and mused that surely that should have been known before the bomb was used, not “after an investigation of the incident”. Such unfeeling arrogance by the Biden mob.
Ms. Johnstone,
In future please use the term “attack” instead of the sophomoric word “strike”, as in drone strike, missile strike, airstrike, and the rest of the “strike” euphemisms our fascist-oriented, corporate media use to sanitize their interpretation of undeniably violent actions. It is semantically illogical to characterize blatantly violent USA / UK / Aussie actions as “strikes” while reserving the word “attack” to the actions of our alleged and often media-concocted and media-defined enemies. I first brought this semantic anomaly to the attention of the press / media at least fifteen years ago. Didn’t seem to do much good, however.
Strike, attack, assassination? The last one is the most appropriate.
We assassinate innocent people all over the world to enhance our career and to secure our lifestyle.
I regretfully advise another euphemism, new to me at least, in South Australia’s only statewide newspaper “The Advertiser” today 22 September in article page 23 “Drone and dusted” !
“US forces conducted a kinetic counter terrorism strike near Idlib , Syria”.
“The Advertiser” is a Murdoch owned, paywalled, paper.
Just for a moment suppose the intelligence was accurate and children were deliberate targets.
Wouldn’t that serve as an expletive to “enemy” Kinda like, See You Around Boys?
I hate to think so.
I don’t think the military is that inept!
“Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.” Excellent point, well taken. The incriminations would never end.
Yes, and of course it would serve as an example of how ruthless and unfeeling those ‘Roosskies’ are, and as yet another indictment of their entire form of government. But when WE do it, it’s normally casually explained away as a sad but understandable mistake—the only UNUSUAL thing about this particular instance is that the media picked-up on it in a critical manner. But as Caitlin and others have suggested, it’s because it serves some minor domestic political purpose, not because they ‘got religion’ and are trying to present an ethical world-view.
I have to admit that I first gave-up taking the MSM seriously during the Vietnam War(crime), and that reporting looks positively progressive in comparison to today’s media. Then I happened to catch some coverage of the US bombing of Kosovo in the 90’s, but had to turn it off (more or less permanently, as it turns out) when the US national news was complaining that a couple of US pilots who were captured were being put in front of TV cameras in violation of the Geneva Conventions!?! The proverbial cognitive dissonance (ie; concern for the bombers vs the ‘bombees’ who were underneath the falling bombs) and hypocrisy was too much for me, and I really realized that the US MSM couldn’t even do a passable job of PRETENDING to be even-handed (ie; like the Brits do).
The people in charge knew instantly of two explosions but nothing of any civilians killed in the attack.
After a hellfire missile hits is there any time for another explosion, least of all a second while the ten people were killed instantly.