FASCIST BBC - Power Without Responsibilty (http://ping.fm/y14Az)

FASCIST BBC - Power Without Responsibilty

Duplicate of article censored by other wire services.

Fascism whether it be the German form of Hitler, Italian form Of Mussolini, Spanish form of Franco, Russian form of Stalin, Brit form of MI5 BBC are essentially the same. Fascism is a religion of Empire state. It invades by stealth the organic unity of the body politic and brainwashes a people, to a leader attuned to supposedly embody the will of the people. It is totalitarian and holds that any action by the leader is justified, to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility away from the people for all aspects of their lives and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by censorship, indoctrination, propaganda, force, regulation and social pressure. Everything must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity or questioning, is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy.

Adolf Hitler didn’t smoke indeed he was regarded as quite PC before he lost the war, like any MI5 BBC closet fascist, hiding their right-wing ideology, while at the same time winning hearts and minds, he named his fascists, the National Socialist German Workers Party. It is also worth remembering, that in the 1920s and 1930s, fascist dictators, like Benito Mussolini of Italy and Hitler in the early days of their regimes in Germany and Italy in the 1930s, were not considered by the masses to be cold-blooded killers but visionary statesmen, who believed that the state and its experts could rationally solve all problems.

This was at that time called, the 'Third Way', also expounded lately by our late, beloved and glorious MI5 cultivated leaders, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. Which takes us directly to the politics of the third way, in Britain today. Anyone who disagree or questions it, is labelled a "fascist". The worst perpetrator of this insult to our intelligence, you won’t be surprised to read, is the BBC, which routinely uses the word “fascist", either without having any idea what it means, or because it is happy to use the word as a form of PC abuse, to excuse its feral censorship. Get ready to hear the latest fascist MI5 BBC, America !


DO IT !, because MI5 BBC knows best, and because Auntie said so !


MI5 BBC creates first with its world service, dumbed down wits, who are then told in the nicest possible way of course, how to be civilized in the organized Brutish way. Slash your alcohol consumption, drive slower and save the world from climate change, while subliminally telling citizens of other countries to trash their own culture, in order make their own enterprise feel more at home and safe, from restless natives. Today their stooge is the MI5 appointee Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the control freak’s, control freak, like his predecessors Blair and Thatcher, brownspeak is once more the mantra of the day.

Britain with it colonial experience and special relationship (W.A.S.P.) secretly helped organize the first modern fascist state in America, instigating the use of the Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 to end criticism of government policy. British agents in the 1920's, came up with alcohol prohibition,loyalty oaths, eugenics and state capitalism. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, brainwashing or brainfilthing to be precise, with much used military metaphors to re-ignite the American economy in the 1930s. The British worked with the American President of the time, organizing the use of massive militaristic parades (Nuremberg style) to enable further brainfilthing.


The British using their experience in the colonies, helped organize government goons to smash down doors to impose domestic policies. G-men were treated like media demigods, as they spied on the plain people's dissidents. British captains of industry wrote the rules by which America was governed at thE time. They secretly taped conversations, used the postal service to punish enemies, and taught American politicians how to lie repeatedly to their own people, in order to manoeuvre the United States into a war to protect the British form of fascism in Europe. The patriotism of anybody who opposed the economic programmes or the war itself, was questioned. They helped create the military-industrial fascist complex, that is destroying the lives OF ordinary people's families today.

Today, MI5 BBC spout all sorts of prattle, just like Mein Kampf did, replete with concentration camp type fascism, sometimes camouflaged in a softer veneer, which couches unmistakeably its fascist fist of steel in a velvet glove. We in Ireland remember well their Concentration camps in Ireland at Long Kesh and now in Derry. Yes, moderators sound much better that censors but it is still rampant brutal censorship, like the book burners in Munich. "First you burn the word and then you burn people" not just burning the plain people of Ireland but citizens worldwide, including its very own commoner licence payers. Yes their over-the-top claims for children and their rights and counter-productive slogans still mask a dogma with a record that shows one of the world's worst childcare records.


With the help of their CIA colleagues and BBC America we may well ask who is the next fuehrer being groomed with their buddies in Fox right now ?. Believe me native American, your ancestors were absolutely correct. MI5 BBC speak, with forked tongues. They promise protection from their self created threat of terrorism, their latest version of their colonial perfected policies of divide and conquer. MI5 BBC will then promise the compromise in the name of your security, while your rights to a quality life are squandered away for the magical illusions, created by the eternal wars of these "Securocrats" and BBC doctored spin merchants.

The BBC itself still struggle however, as its journalists are running short of ideas on how to cover positively, their eternal wars of aggression against the dwindling number of countries left, which its special partnership is currently attacking. How and where to get any ideas, any clues? Another beautifully rapped fascist bone to throw their commoners, even if it is taken from its dusty old filthy rotten empire files, for another success story, using its insidiously crafted and treacherous propaganda, fashioned from its endless never ending empire wars.

They constipate, meditate and regurgitate, on how to defend the un-defendable? How to present their latest war crimes as a success stories!. How to weave and spin lies into half-truths. The BBC editors demand all of their rookie reporters to write about what has been achieved, without being gloomy and negative, or they will be bullied, or lose their job. The special relationship with Wall street wants to sell yet another war, against ordinary plain people and the BBC MI5 czars will sell it but first they must demonize ordinary plain people.

They search for their carrion like desperate ravenous dogs, fighting and gnawing at each other, for some possible remains in her Majesty's filthy streets, looking for waste and rubbish to survive on. Desperate for any positive on its latest campaign of organized murder, like feral dogs roaming the streets, presenting their rubbish and filth to satisfy their MI5 masters. They are ridiculous in their enslavement to their MI5 warlords and their lucrative war business. It is common knowledge to all and sundry, even the real dogs on her Majesty's filthy streets, that BBC journalists work in reality for MI5 secret warlords. Brown, Blair and Thatcher all groomed by them.

Still the BBC's bullying editors and pundits believe that there are no other sources of information except themselves. They still imagine that truthful stations like Aljazeera don't exist or can be flattened and all of their reporters assassinated or imprisoned. The BBC homepage with its columns of poison, feed their created power struggle of divide and conquer in Iraq and Ireland. The BBC is also a travel agent, a one way travel agent for their latest war with their special partnership addicted to yet another war Afghanistan. Will they tell their commoners what happened the last time they were in Afghanistan? No definitely not, they desperately need more cannon fodder.

War, War, War.War..... while their journalists never quit their hotel rooms and parrot, what their military press officers tell them, verbatum, be it Baghdad, Belfast or Kabul. The green zone and Europa Hotel were bombed almost daily and the BBC journalists still talked about tourists visiting Sumerian remnants in Ur and climbing the Ziggurat of the Chaldeans or the Giants causeway while their gangsters and murderers in army uniforms, obliterate women and children to create just another military base.

Unbelievable? repeated again today in Afghanistan, with remote control drones perfected by Israel, to sanitize the never ending worldwide genocide of innocent "collateral damage". The MI5 BBC journalist meantime bullied by an editor, requiring every single day, some good positive spin on its latest murderous campaign.

The commoner's licence fee, paying for a BBC reporter, or to be precise MI5 full time employee, didn't tell us that the barbarians in uniform have now killed 1.3 miillion civilians, mostly women and children in Iraq or that they destroyed the sites of an ancient Babylon culture, or banned all Gaelic speaking spokespersons of the people of Ireland or that the very walls of the III millennium BC Ziggurat, just like the walls of occupied Ireland, were sullied by their uniformed yobs with porn graffiti., with their MI5 BBC embedded reporters.

Who the hell are you kidding MI5 BBC? Who besides your licence paying commoners are you taking for a ride next, while flying your butcher's apron and MI5 BBC flagship from the middle ages? What feces are you writing next?, we have other sources to check your hallucinating and delirious journalism, as you try to enforce your censorship worldwide, in you litany of obedient compliant former colonial states.

MI5 BBC fascist propaganda to divide, to rule, to promote their third way, to plunder the world with their marauding brutal uniformed murdering gangsters, while selling them as peacemakers, amid their manufactured divisions of racism and sectarianism, fostered with their couched propaganda, crafted by liars!



Try to convince the world, BBC, that you are not profoundly racists or that you have not cultivated this with your worldwide service.! With your Irish, Islamic, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, African Jokes ! These people who visit you, they laugh at your second-rate journalism and third class propaganda. Your lies are so flagrant and your so called analysis are so ideologically shallow, that most intelligent people who enter your site, overseas, check up on your lies and ridicule you. Have Your Say, a superficial pathetic sop and an utter waste of time. Writers from all over the world are suppressed, banned and censored on a totally fascist scale, on the pretext of a balanced point of view. In fact nothing contrary to MI5 BBC fascist ideology is allowed. Pretending to talk about different opinions and views or neutral journalism, is just a white elephant of the MI5 BBC fascist agenda.

Irish and Iraqi resistance revealed to the world the real face of the BBC and unmasked their patent hypocrisy. Remember the outrageous BBC reports from Fallujah or Derry on Bloody Sunday ?. There we saw the true values of the special relationship, when their journalists were spouting daylight lies, enabling the wholesale slaughter of civilians, while they were embedded with their barbarian war criminals. Remember the actors hired to fake Irish spokespeople censored. When it comes to killing or looting, the values of the "civilized" MI5 BBC suddenly become clear and show their real brutal viperous fangs. When it comes to Ireland all dissidents are censored, an essential part of the Peace process scrapped as it declares war once again on the plain people of Ireland.



Media like MI5 BBC is ugly, really ugly, without any scruples whatsoever they are military press whores, brainfilthers, yes as in filth! Brainfilth with a 'h' to be precise, as they teach our children, that murder in uniform is heroic, that they should grow up to be warriors and drop tons of bombs, on sleeping "terrorist" babies from a saf distance of 30,000 ft so that their "security forces" can keep you safe. As they force our youth back onto the streets, as the only form of expressing resistance, to their age old war on the Irish people.

Meanwhile on a totally unrelated matter Hollywood has been chosen for MI5's largest base of operation outside the BBC in London. Coincidence or Plan B ? No, its Hollywood in the Northern part of occupied Ireland actually, where they will always be guaranteed to have a supporting fascist fanbase, that was cultivated by decades of their Brutish Brainfilth.

So much for the idea that Britain was somehow neutral towards the six counties or has no selfish intent in Ireland ! as part of the peace process ?

So much for the end of MI5 BBC censorship, which was supposed to end, as part of the Peace Process?

Ach ! here we go, all over again !

Perfidious Albion has reneged once again!

A culture of Eternal War !

MI5 BBC does not want Peace !

Not in Ireland its first colony, Not Anywhere !

Ping.Fm

FRANK McCOURTS CLAN BOMBED BBC TRANSMITTERS

FRANK McCOURTS CLAN BOMBED BBC TRANSMITTERS

FRANK McCOURTS CLAN BOMBED BBC TRANSMITTERS

For most of his life Frank McCourt wasn't a writer, he was a teacher. It was not until he was well into his 60s that as a writer, he became the author of the memoir Angela's Ashes. He has just died in New York of meningitis. He was 78 years of age.


Frank was born in Brooklyn in 1930 he later described the scene in his memoirs but he grew up in Ireland. His parents were both Irish and they moved back there, to Limerick. Malachy, Frank's father, worked intermittently as a laborer, but he drank constantly.

McCourt was the first of seven children whom their mother, Angela his mother took care of the family. She found life hard with the grinding poverty that Malachy's drinking brought upon the family, and for the cold and damp air of Limerick. They became so poor that three of their children, twin brothers and a baby girl all died of disease and malnutrition, which was common at that time in Ireland.

"It was, of course, a miserable childhood," McCourt wrote in Angela's Ashes, "The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."


"In reality, our life was worse than Frank wrote," said McCourt's brother Malachy. "Insane outbreaks of laughter saved us." McCourt once said that as a child he dreamed of being a prison inmate in the United States, for the food and the warmth. Instead he became a hospital inmate: he caught typhoid at age 10 and spent three months well-fed in a well-heated hospital.

Malachy McCourt Snr., was a tender father at times, and a great storyteller but he was dominated by alcohol and eventually all but abandoned the family. At 11, McCourt became their principal source of income, stealing and working odd jobs. Although he quit school he continued to read whenever he could. At 19, he returned to the United States served in the the Korean War and earned a degree at New York University under the G.I. Bill.

He dabbled in journalism and the theater, McCourt spent most of the next 30 years teaching English in New York City schools for a modest salary. He had a natural flair for it. On his very first day in the classroom, one of his young charges threw a sandwich at another kid. McCourt picked it up and ate it in front of the class, while the students watched, stunned. He had taught his first lesson in what it means to survive starvation.

For many years McCourt tried and failed to write about his childhood. The family talent for storytelling kept him alive in the classroom, but he couldn't get the words down on paper. He kept company in bars with writers like Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, but his own voice stubbornly refused to emerge.


"I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument," he said. "It was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened."

While he was babysitting his granddaughter he had the idea of writing like a child, detached keeping it simple, in the present tense. "I had this extraordinary illumination, or epiphany," he said, "Children are almost deadly in their detachment from the world. They are absolutely pragmatic, and they tell the truth, and somehow that lodged in my subconscious when I started writing the book."

The result was his memoir Angela's Ashes, which appeared in 1996, when McCourt was 66. The book told the story of his early years in a non angry way, without bitterness or self-pity. In a forgiving way he wrote about his father with humor and compassion. Angela's Ashes was published as the personal memoir of an Irish childhood. "My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all," McCourt said. But it became immediately a critical sensation, then a bestseller. In 1997 McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize.


McCourt followed Angela's Ashes with two more volumes of memoirs. 'Tis picked up where his first book left off, on his arrival in New York City; it sold spectacularly but received mixed reviews. Teacher Man was both a critical and a commercial success recounting his years teaching English and creative writing, 18 of them spent at New York's famous magnet school Stuyvesant, where he was a legend as a compelling teacher.

"George Bernard Shaw said those that can do, and those that can't teach," McCourt was fond of observing. "Just goes to show that Shaw didn't know his arse from his elbow about teaching." Although he often spoke of a novel in progress, it has never been published.


There is now an Angela's Ashes walking tour in Limerick, and the university there awarded him a doctorate. By all accounts McCourt was in no way transformed by his success. Though that doesn't mean he didn't enjoy it immensely. "I wrote a book about growing up miserable, and the next thing I know I'm here," he said. "It's absurd, isn't it? It's extraordinary."

Two of his cousins bombed BBC transmitters and served 5 years in Crumlin Road jail. Frank along with his brother Malachy are two Irish voices that the BBC failed to censor. Frank's brother Malachy called after his father wrote a history of Ireland which is normally now written with M15 and BBC spin and revisionism involved.

...go ndeanfaidh Dia trocaire ar a anam

DIRTY FILTHY BBC 9/11 CENSORSHIP & SURVEILLANCE - NewsTrust.net

DIRTY FILTHY BBC 9/11 CENSORSHIP & SURVEILLANCE - NewsTrust.net

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DIRTY FILTHY BBC 9/11 CENSORSHIP & SURVEILLANCE

The BBC world service broadcasts into almost all countries world wide unhindered but when people from other cultures reply, this is a typical example of their censorship, particularly with respect to Palestine and Ireland. In the Irish case there racism is consistently subtle but systematic in an incessant cultural war on Britain's first colony.

Their Have Your Say debate for example, on the Israeli bombing stikes in Gaza during December 2008 which killed more than 1400 civilians, with more than a third of them children had an interesting pattern. As of Tuesday 30th, two posts were 'battling' for top slot in Reader's Recommended, with in excess of 1700 votes each. Wednesday 31st, these two have gone and another story is top, out of nowhere!

Suddenly, we have reader's recommended supporting the Pro-Israeli pogrom's and war crimes. The BBC's censorship is just one tool used in Britain's eternal colonial wars worldwide. With BBC America it will pursue it attacks on communities within the the US such as the American-Irish one for example.

Below is a link to an example of their DIRTY FILTHY BBC 9/11 CENSORSHIP:


http://www.prisonplanet.com/bbc-hit-piece-edits-silverstein-comment-in-dirty-tricks-scam.html

BBC BRUTAL BRITISH CENSORSHIP

On 14 April 2006, the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University in New York brought together John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk and Charles Glass for a discussion entitled 'Breaking the Silence: War, lies and empire'.

Tne following is a transcript of John Pilger's address - 'War by Media':

"During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said their spokesman, “that we were astonished to find, after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How do you do it?”

What is the secret? It's a question now urgently asked of those whose job is to keep the record straight: who in this country have extraordinary constitutional freedom. I refer to journalists, of course, a small group who hold privileged sway over the way we think, even the way we use language.

I have been a journalist for more than 40 years. Although I am based in London, I have worked all over the world, including the United States, and I have reported America's wars. My experience is that what the Russian journalists were referring to is censorship by omission, the product of a parallel world of unspoken truth and public myths and lies: in other words, censorship by journalism, which today has become war by journalism.

For me, this is the most virulent and powerful form of censorship, fuelling an indoctrination that runs deep in western societies, deeper than many journalists themselves understand or will admit to. Its power is such that it can mean the difference between life and death for untold numbers of people in faraway countries, like Iraq.

During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group, Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, “We are more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always subversive.” By subversive, he meant that truth comes from the ground up, almost never from the top down. (Vandana Shiva has called this 'subjugated knowledge').

A venerable cliché is that truth is the first casualty in wartime. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. The first American war I reported was Vietnam. I went there from 1966 to the last day. When it was all over, the magazine Encounter published an article by Robert Elegant, another correspondent who covered Vietnam. “For the first time in modern history,” he wrote, “the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen.” He was accusing journalists of losing the war by opposing it in their work.

Robert Elegant's view became the received wisdom in America and still is. This official truth has determined how every American war since Vietnam has been reported. In Iraq, the “embedded” reporter was invented because the generals believed the Robert Elegant thesis: that critical reporting had “lost” Vietnam. How wrong they are.

On my first day as a young reporter in Saigon, I called on the bureaus of the main newspapers and TV companies. I noticed most of them had a gruesome photo gallery pinned on the wall -- pictures of the bodies of Vietnamese and American soldiers holding up severed ears and testicles. In one office was a photograph of a man being tortured. Above the torturer's head was a stick-on comic strip balloon with the words: “That'll teach you to talk to the press.”

None of these pictures had ever been published, or even put on the wire.

I asked why. The response was that "New York" would reject them, because the readers would never accept them. Anyway, to publish them would be to “sensationalise”; it would not be "objective" or "impartial". At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this: that atrocities surely were aberrations by definition. I, too, had grown up on John Wayne movies of the "good war" against Germany and Japan, an ethical bath that had left us westerners pure of soul and altruistic towards our fellow man and heroic. We did not torture. We did not kill women and children. We were the permanent good guys.

However, this did not explain the so-called “free fire zones” that turned entire provinces into places of slaughter: provinces like Quang Ngai, where the My Lai massacre was only one of a number of unreported massacres. It did not explain the helicopter “turkey shoots”. It did not explain people dragged along dirt roads, roped from neck to neck, by jeeps filled with doped and laughing GIs and why they kept human skulls enscribed with the words, “One down, one million to go.”

The atrocities were not aberrations. The war itself was an atrocity. That was the “big story” and it was seldom news. Yes, the tactics and effectiveness of the military were questioned by reporters, but the word "invasion" was almost never used. The fiction of a well-intentioned, blundering giant, stuck in an Asian quagmire, was promoted by most journalists, incessantly. It was left to whistleblowers at home to tell the subversive truth -- those like Daniel Ellsberg, and mavericks like Seymour Hersh with his extraordinary scoop of the My Lai massacre. There were 649 reporters in Vietnam at the time of My Lai on March 16, 1968. Not one of them reported it.

The invasion of Vietnam was deliberate and calculated, as were policies and strategies that bordered on genocide and were designed to force millions of people to abandon their homes. Experimental weapons were used against civilians. Chemicals banned in the United States -- Agent Orange -- were used to change the genetic and environmental order in Vietnam. All of this was rarely news at the time. The unspoken task of the reporter in Vietnam, as it was in Korea, was, to normalise the unthinkable - to quote Edward Herman's memorable phrase. And that has not changed.

In 1975, when the Vietnam war just over, I witnessed the full panorama of what the American military machine had done, and I could barely believe my eyes. In the north, it seemed as if I had stumbled on some great, unrecorded natural disaster. On my office wall in London is a photograph I took of a town in Vinh province that was once home to 10,000 people. The photograph shows bomb craters and bomb craters, and bomb craters. Obliteration.

The Hollywood movies that followed the war were an extension of the journalism. The first was The Deerhunter, whose director Michael Cimino fabricated his own military service in Vietnam, and invented scenes of Vietnamese playing Russian roulette with American prisoners. The message was clear. America had suffered, America was stricken, American boys had done their best. It was all the more pernicious because it was brilliantly made and acted. I have to admit it remains the only time I have shouted out in protest, in a packed cinema.

This was followed by Apocalyse Now, whose writer, John Millius, invented a sequence about the Vietcong cutting off the arms of children. More oriental barbarity, more American angst, more purgative for the audience. Then there was the Rambo series and the “missing in action” films that fed the lie of Americans still imprisoned in Vietnam. Even Oliver Stone's Platoon, which gave us glimpses of the Vietnamese as human beings, promoted the invader as victim.

Even the official truth, or the liberal version, that the “noble cause” had failed in Vietnam, was a myth. From Kennedy to Ford, the American war establishment had seen Vietnam as a threat, because it offered an alternative model of development. The weaker the country, the greater the threat of a good example to his region and beyond. By the time the last US Marine had left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, Vietnam was economically and environmentally crushed and the threat had been extinguished.

In the acclaimed movie The Killing Fields, the story of a New York Times reporter and his stringer in Cambodia, scenes that showed the Vietnamese as liberators of Cambodia in 1979 were filmed, but never shown.

These showed Vietnamese soldiers as the liberators they were, handing out food to the survivors of Pol Pot. To my knowledge, this censorship was never reported. The cut version of The Killing Fields complied with the official truth then dominant I the United States, especially in the liberal press, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books. This set out to justify the crime of the Vietnam war by dehumanising the Vietnamese communists and confusing them, in the public mind, with Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

In the post war period, the policy in Washington was revenge, a word that officials used in private, but never publicly. Famous insider journalists, like James Reston of the New York Times, embraced it and disguised it in anti-Vietnamese disinformation. An economic embargo was imposed on Vietnam and Cambodia. Supplies of milk were cut off to the children of Vietnam. This barbaric assault on the very fabric of life in two of the most stricken societies on earth was rarely reported in the United States.

During this time, I made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot and showed the human effects of the embargo. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States. When I flew to Washington and offered Year Zero to the national public broadcaster, PBS. I received a curious reaction from PBS executives. They were shocked by the film, and they also spoke admiringly of it, even though but I could see them collectively shaking their heads. One of them finally said to me, “John, we are disturbed that your film says the United States played such a destructive role in Cambodia, and we may have an issue of objectivity. So we have decided to call in a Journalistic Adjudicator.”

“Journalistic Adjudicator” was straight out of Orwell. But it was real, and PBS appointed one Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Dudman was one of the few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he even praised his hosts. Not surprisingly, he turned his thumb down on my film and Americans never saw the film. Months later, one of the PBS executives, told me, “These are difficult days under Reagan. Your film would have given us problems. Sorry.”

The lack of truth about what had really happened in South East Asia - the media promoted myth of an honourable “blunder” into a “quagmire” and the cover-up of the true scale of the slaughter -- allowed Ronald Reagan to renew the same “noble cause” in Central America and rescue, as the Reaganites saw it, America's lost prestige in the world. The target, once again, was an impoverished nation without resources, whose threat, like Vietnam, was in trying to establish a model of development different from that of the corrupt, colonial dictatorships, backed by Washington. This was Nicaragua: population three million, one of the poorest nations on earth.

I reported the so-called Contra War from the Nicaraguan side; but it was not a war. Like all the attacks of the American superpower on small, defenceless countries, it was about murder, bribery and “perception management”. A CIA-armed and trained rabble known as the Contra would slip across the border from Honduras and cut the throats of midwives, or blow up schools and clinics. Reagan called them the equivalent of his nation's Founding Fathers. The Iran-Contra scandal that followed produced some excellent investigative reporting in he United States, yet when it was all over, the overall impression was of a mildly embarrassed administration in Washington, not the barbarity of its actions. Thanks to journalists, Reagan emerged smiling and waving, “the great communicator”. According to the American historian Greg Grandin (Empire's Workshop: Metropolitan Books), 300,000 people in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador had paid with their lives.

Is Iraq different? Yes, there are many differences, but for journalists there are haunting similarities of both Vietnam and Central America. The "noble cause" of “bringing democracy to the Middle East”, the promotion of a civil war and the killing of tens of thousands of invisible people. On August 24 last year, a New York Times editorial declared: “If we had known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them. The result is a human disaster of epic proportions, for which journalists in the so-called mainstream bear much of the responsibility; and that includes responsibility for the lives lost and destroyed.

This is true not only in America. In Britain, where I live, the BBC - which promotes itself as a nirvana of objectivity and impartiality and truth - has blood on its corporate hands. There are two interesting studies of the BBC's reporting. One of them, in the build-up to the invasion, shows that the BBC gave just two per cent of its coverage of Iraq to anti-war dissent. That was less than the anti-war coverage of all the American networks. A second study by the respected journalism school at University College in Cardiff shows that 90 per cent of the BBC's references to weapons of mass destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them and that, by clear implication, Bush and Blair were right.

We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the secret intelligence service. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI6 agents planted stories about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All of these stories were fakes. However, that is not the point. The point is that the dark arts of MI6 were quite unnecessary, because a systematic media self-censorship produced the same result.

Recently, the BBC's Director of News, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain how one of her “embedded” reporters in Iraq could possibly describe the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as “bring [ing] democracy and human rights” to Iraq. She replied with quotations from Tony Blair that this was indeed the truth, as if Blair and the truth were in any way related. This servility to state power is hotly denied, of course, but routine. It is even called “objectivity”. This is the BBC's correspondent in Washington, Matt Frei, shortly after the invasion of Iraq. “There is no doubt,” he reported, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now in the Middle East ... is now increasingly tied up with military power". Last year, he lauded the architect of the invasion, Paul Wolfowitz, as "someone who believes passionately in the power of democracy and grassroots development." This is not unusual. On the third anniversary of the invasion, a BBC newsreader described the invasion as a "miscalculation". Not illegal. Not unprovoked. Not based on lies. Not a crime as defined by the judegment at Nuremberg. But a miscalculation. Thus, the unthinkable was normalised.

There is a new book out in Britain called “Guardians of Power”. The authors are David Edwards and David Cromwell, who edit a remarkable website called MediaLens. Their work is about the parallel worlds of unspoken truths and official lies. They have not bothered with soft targets, like the Murdoch press. They concentrate on the liberal media, which is proud of its objectivity and impartiality, its “balance” and “professionalism”. They studied the reporting of the invasions of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and the current build-up to an invasion of Iran. What they reveal is a pattern. In the British media, as in the United States, as in Australia, rapacious western actions are reported as moral crusades, or humanitarian interventions. At the very least, they are represented as the management of an international crisis, rather than the cause of the crisis. This truthful, bracing book has not been reviewed in a single British newspaper, even though informed people have offered to write about it.

Now consider the treatment of Harold Pinter, Britain's greatest living dramatist. In accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature last December, Harold Pinter made an epic speech. He asked why “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought” in Stalinist Russia were well known in the west while American state crimes were merely “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged.” Across the world, he pointed out, the extinction and suffering of countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power, “but you wouldn't know it”, he said. “it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest.” For the BBC, Pinter's speech never happened. Not a word of it was broadcast. It never happened.

Pinter's threat is that he tells a subversive truth. He makes the connection between imperialism and fascism and he describes it as a battle for history. I would add that it is also a battle for journalism. Language has become a crucial battleground. Noble words, like “democracy”, "liberation", “freedom”, “reform” have been emptied of their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of these concepts. Their counterfeits dominate the news. "War on terror” is used incessantly, yet it is a false metaphor that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, American, British and Australian troops are fighting insurrections in countries where their invasions have caused mayhem and grief. And where are the pictures of “our” atrocities? How many Americans and Britons know that, in revenge for 3,000 innocent lives taken on September 11th, 2001, up to 20,000 innocent people have died in Afghanistan? How many know that the equivalent of the population of a middle-sized American city have been killed in Iraq, most of them by American firepower?

It is too easy to blame everything on Bush, and to plead, as liberal journalists do, that the “neo-cons” have hi-jacked America. Ask the Native Americans how benign the system used to be. Or listen to Richard Nixon on the Watergate tapes, talking about power and bombing. "You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians," Nixon said to Kissinger, "and I don't give a damn. I don't care .... I'd rather use the nuclear bomb ... I just want you to think big." In the nuclear age, from Harry Truman to George W Bush, there is no evidence that Nixon was unique.

The lies told about Iraq are no different from the lies that ignited the Spanish-American war, that allowed the Vietnam and Korean wars to happen and the Cold War to endure. They are no different from the myths of World War Two that justified the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities. It is as if we journalists are being constantly groomed to swallow the fables of empire. Richard Falk at Princeton has described the process. We are indocrinated to see foreign policy, he wrote, “through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence.”

In my career as a journalist, there has never been a war on terror but a war of terror. Not long ago I walked down a leafy street in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the former dictator General Suharto is living out his life in luxury, having stolen from his people an estimated $10 billion. A United Nations truth commission had just released a report, based on official files, that credits Suharto with the deaths of 180,000 people in East Timor. It says that the United States played a "primary role" in this terror. Britain and Australia are named as accessories to this vast suffering.

After I had filmed in East Timor in 1993, I interviewed Philip Liechty, a former CIA officer who, at his embassy desk in Jakarta, had seen the evidence of Suharto's horrors committed with American approval and American arms. He told me that, when he retired, he had tried to alert the media to East Timor. “But there was no interest,” he said, echoing Harold Pinter. And yet the deaths in East Timor are more than six times greater than all the deaths caused by terrorist incidents throughout the world over past 25 years, according to the State Department. The “mainstream” deals with this by reporting humanity in terms of its worthy victims and unworthy victims, its good tyrants and bad tyrants. The victims of September 11, 2001, are worthy. The victims of East Timor are unworthy. Israeli victims are worthy; Palestinians are unworthy. Saddam Hussein was once a good tyrant. Now he is a bad tyrant. Saddam must be envious of Suharto, who has always been a good tyrant, an acceptable mass murderer.

In the 1960s, the New York Times greeted Suharto's blood-soaked seizure of power in Indonesia as "a gleam of light in Asia". After Suharto had killed off 180,000 East Timorese, Bill Clinton called him “our kind of guy”. Margaret Thatcher offered similar unction, as did the Australian prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating on a regular basis. The media both led and echoed this chorus.

If we journalists are ever to reclaim the honour of our craft, we need to understand, at least, the historic task that great power assigns us. This is to “soften-up” the public for rapacious attack on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by de-humanising them, by writing about "regime change" in Iran as if that country is an abstraction, not a human society. Currently, journalists are softening up Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is likened to Hitler. That he has won nine democratic elections and referenda -- a world record -- is of no interest.

A few weeks ago, Channel 4 News in Britain - regarded as a liberal news service - carried a major item that might have been broadcast by the State Department. The reporter, Jonathan Rugman, the Washington correspondent, presented Chavez as a cartoon character, a sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin way camouflaged a man “in danger of joining a rogue gallery of dictators and despots - Washington's latest Latin nightmare.” In contrast, Condaleeza Rice was afforded gravitas and Rumsfeld was allowed to call Chavez Hitler, unchallenged.

Indeed, almost everything in this travesty of journalism was viewed from Washington, only fragments of it from the barrios of Venezuela, where President Chavez enjoys 80 per cent popularity. In crude Soviet-flick style, Chavez was shown with Saddam Hussein when this brief encounter only had to do with OPEC and oil. According to the reporter, Venezuela under Chavez was helping Iran develop nuclear weapons. No evidence was given for this absurdity.

The softening-up of Venezuela is well advanced in the United States.

Ninety-five per cent of 100 media commentaries surveyed by the media watch dog FAIR expressed hostility to Chavez. “Dictator”, “strongman”, “demagogue” were the familiar buzz words, so that people reading and watching had no idea that Venezuela was the only oil-producing country in the world to use its oil revenue for the benefit of poor people. They would have no idea of spectacular developments in health, education, literacy. They would have no idea that Venezuela has no political jails - unlike the United States.

So that if the Bush administration launches “Operation Balboa”, a mooted plan to overthrow the Chavez government, who will care, because who will know? For we shall only have the media version - another lousy demagogue got what was coming to him. The poor of Venezuela, like the poor of Nicaragua, like the poor of Vietnam and Cambodia, like the poor of Fallujah, whose dreams and lives are of no interest, will be invisible in their grief -- a triumph of censorship by journalism.

What should journalists do? I mean, journalists who give a damn? They need to act now. Governments fear good journalists. The reason the Pentagon spends millions of dollars on PR, or “perception management” companies that try to bend the news is because it fears truth tellers, just as Stalinist governments feared them. There is no difference. Look back at the great American journalists: Upton Sinclair, Edward R Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, I. F.Stone, Seymour Hersh. All were mavericks. None embraced the corporate world of journalism and its modern supplier: the media college.

It is said the internet is an alternative; and what is wonderful about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often report as journalists should. They are mavericks in the tradition of the great muckrakers: those like the Irish journalist Claud Cockburn, who said: "Never believe anything until it is officially denied." But the internet is still a kind of samidzat, an underground, and most of humanity does not log on; just as most of humanity does not own a cell phone. And the right to know ought to be universal. That other great muckraker, Tom Paine, warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of words". That time is now