Winston Churchill may or may not have seen Mark Twain's similar remark before he made his famous "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
Churchill and, of course, Twain lived long before the digital age sped up this process. Now we see a lie initiated by government or corporation boosted by the Associated Press or Foxaganda, a thousand blogs, a million Tweets and every other media outlet, traditional and social, until - just as in the past, but faster - it embeds itself into public consciousness.
In wartime, it is said, truth is the first casualty. In our permanent state of war, which now is designated the "Long War," wartime means always. And steady flow the lies, big lies, little lies, all of them together creating a pernicious narrative that typically requires considerable effort to unravel.
Happily, some of the same upstart media that transmit the lies can subvert them; sadly there always seem to be more liars than diggers for truth.
In this regard, Glenn Greenwald has a spot-on critique of the media once again swallowing government propaganda whole, then regurgitating it on the public:
Each time the U.S. bombs a new location in the Muslim world, the same pattern emerges. First, officials from the U.S. or allied governments run to their favorite media outlet to claim -- anonymously -- that some big, bad, notorious, "top" Al Qaeda leader "may have been" or "likely was" killed in the strike, and this constitutes a "stinging" or "devastating" blow against the Terrorist group. These compliant media outlets then sensationalistically trumpet that claim as the dominant theme of their "reporting" on the attack, drowning out every other issue.
As a result, and by design, there is never any debate or discussion over the propriety or wisdom of these strikes. After all, what sane, rational, Serious person would possibly question a bombing raid or missile strike that "likely" killed a murderous, top Al Qaeda fighter and struck a "devastating blow" to that group's operationg abilities? Having the story shaped this way also ensures that there is virtually no attention paid to the resulting civilian casualties (i.e., the slaughter of innocent people); most Americans, especially journalists, have been trained to ignore such deaths as nothing more than justifiable "collateral damage," especially when a murderous, top Al Qaeda fighter was killed by the bombs (besides, as Alan Dershowitz once explained, "civilians" in close enough proximity to a Top Terrorist themselves may very well bear some degree of culpability). The adolescent We-Got-the-Bad-Guy! headline also ensures there is no attention paid to the radicalizing effect of these civilian deaths and our attacks for that country and in the region.
Yet over and over and over, it turns out that these anonymous government assertions -- trumpeted by our mindless media -- are completely false. The Big Bad Guy allegedly killed in the strike ends up nowhere near the bombs and missiles.
[...]
In the last week alone, this pattern just asserted itself -- twice -- with regard to the air strikes in Yemen. The first set of strikes, it was immediately leaked, was allegedly aimed at "the presumed leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Qaaim al-Raymi," yet it turned out he was not among the dozens of people killed, though "U.S. officials believe one of his top deputies [unnamed] may have been killed." Then, after a second set of strikes on Thursday, it was claimed that "a Yemeni air raid may have killed the top two leaders of al Qaeda's regional branch," and an American Muslim preacher linked to Nidal Hasan, "the man who shot dead 13 people at a U.S. army base [Anwar al-Awlaki] may also have died."
Greenwald goes on to provide a bevy of examples of the same kind of mindless media repetition of lies about U.S. air strikes. No matter how many times they are snookered, when the next account is given them about what happened in this or that air strike, reporters dutifully speed the news off to their HQ and the consumers of that news - that's precisely how the audience is viewed - are given yet another dose of unreality.
Missing in most of those reports is any follow-up about whether the guy who was supposedly targeted actually was killed. And only rarely is there the slightest diligence paid to accounting for the collateral damage, the vile term used to sanitize splattered blood and guts of men, women and children who just happen to get caught by the missile of a Predator fired by somebody pushing a joystick in Omaha. Jane Mayer delved into this brilliantly in her October 26 New Yorker article, The Predator War.
No nation likes to count the number of civilians it kills in war, particularly when that war is ongoing. In the reports, they are transformed into combatants and, therefore, fair game. This was true in America's Indian wars from 1791-1890, in the Philippine insurrection of the early 1900s, and in the Vietnam War, where the body counts of American dead were compared with vast numbers of enemy dead. Five Americans, 250 Viet Cong. The only problem with this approach was the inevitable inquiry: If we're killing so many, why aren't we winning?
The publicly announced body count was dropped from the Pentagon's declarations after it was learned what had been obvious to critics for years - General Westmoreland's claims of enemy killed were bogus "estimates," otherwise known as lies. Getting a body count out of the Pentagon for numbers of enemy soldiers killed after the Iraq took a Freedom of Information Act request.
The body count has, however, been revived by the Pentagon for Afghanistan. That's to undermine the message of the insurgents and supposedly to soothe a home front that has grown weary of a war that is already America's second longest. If we're still killing a bunch of them for a relative handful of us, then it must be OK, eh?
How accurate those counts are can be guessed by how often the stories about al-Qaeda's No. 2 or No. 3 being killed are. But one count you won't be seeing is the number of civilians who die, just as we will never have an accurate count for civilians killed in Iraq.
While the American media are no longer forbidden from showing the arrivals of flag-draped boxes at Dover Air Force Base, there is little scramble by CNN or The New York Times to discover how many bystanders the latest air strike has put into graves in Yemen or Afghanistan instead of top commanders of al Qaeda who happened to be somewhere else that day.