Former Australian Army general warns against war

A retired Australian Army general has expressed some astonishingly refreshing views on Australia's involvement in the buildup of military forces readying for an attack on Iraq, and warned that America possessed the greatest weapons of mass destruction and inspectors should focus their efforts there.

In an article from Yahoo! News (see article ), Retired Major General Alan Stretton said that the looming war in Iraq was an American diversion to cover up its mistakes in Afghanistan last year. He said that whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was no excuse to launch military strikes that would kill innocent civilians.

"That doesn't give us a right to go and declare war and send our troops to get involved in a war in the Middle East when we don't know what the consequences are going to be," Maj Gen Stretton said in the Yahoo! News article.

"Australia is not under any threat, it is an American-led war in order to cover up their mistakes in Afghanistan and to switch American public views on another front" he said.

Spinning Propaganda

Such revelations in the mainstream media are becoming increasingly rare, as blanket media coverage of the war is drawn directly from propaganda produced by the US and Australian governments.

A recent interview with independent journalist John Pilger (see ABC Media Report) revealed that news from the mainstream media undergoes extensive doctoring, manipulation and censorship before it reaches the populations of the world.

Pilger stated that journalism rarely presents the 'truth' on issues like the war on Iraq. Facts relating to the mass murder of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians in the last Gulf War was not reported in the mainstream media, says Pilger.

When 200,000 Iraqis were killed, many at night and many buried alive in their trenches, during the Gulf War, "there was the most awful carnage" said Pilger.

"But at the end of that war ... the public came away with the idea that casualties were light, that it was something of a kind of high tech surgical strike type war; and that it was a great victory."

War Debates in Mainstream Media

When questioned on the extent of debate in the Australian media about the war on Iraq, Pilger stated that no real debate actually occurs. News information is drawn directly from the propaganda machines of the Australian and US Governments, says Pilger.

"[The level of debate in the mainstream media] is poor because so much space and so much time is given to channeling and echoing what I would call the official viewpoint", Pilger explains.

"Howard does something--he farewells some ships ... that is channeled as if that is all that we pretty well need to know."

The extent of the 'debate' in the media is determined by the restricted ownership of the media in Australia, a country where a great majority of the mainstream media is owned by two individuals, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch.