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norman solomon
Holding the Press and Biden Accountable on the Gaza War
Building on themes in his War MadeInvisible, anti-war organizer and author Norman Solomon's new afterword to the paperback edition reveals the human toll of an imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Sep 05, 2024
In Norman Solomon’s new Afterword in the paperback edition of his book
War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,, the author excoriates the White House for arming a genocide with assistance from a negligent press. Solomon tracks events following Hamas’ killings and kidnappings of Israelis on October 7, 2023, a few months after publication of the book in hardcover. The 31-page Afterword indicts the Biden administration for complicity in Israel’s genocide, a horror facilitated by Pentagon media stenographers who covered up, ignored, or under-reported U.S-Israel war crimes.
As executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Solomon values truth in reporting, a rarity in a country where the press fails to report near trillion-dollar military budgets that defund urgent needs at home despite Americans living one paycheck away from desperation, even homelessness.
Solomon’s lucid “Afterword: The Gaza War” exposes the lies, half-truths, omissions, and pivots of U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State “rules-based order” Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan as they bemoan the “unintentional” killing and wounding of tens of thousands of Gazans, most of them women and children who had nothing to do with October 7.
Either the corporate media knew of the Biden administration’s culpability or chose not to know—both worthy of derision.
“After 10 weeks of the carnage, it was big news on December 12 when Biden got around to voicing some unhappiness with Israel’s ‘indiscriminate bombing,’” writes Solomon, explaining that during this time a duplicitous Biden was green-lighting and fast-tracking “enormous U.S. shipments of weapons and ammunition to Israel—including one-ton bombs—so that indiscriminate bombing could continue.”
Solomon’s addition to his
War Made Invisible tells the truth in harrowing detail, reflecting the author’s commitment to accuracy in journalism and political discourse. A collection of Solomon’s “Media Beat” columns, published from 1992-2009, won the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. Solomon’s incisive analysis and scathing foreign policy critiques are also hallmarks of his other books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich) published in January 2003, two months before then-President George W. Bush ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In “Afterword: The Gaza War,” Solomon demonstrates a knack for narration, offering a cringe-worthy snapshot of Biden’s callous detachment from the suffering in Gaza. Solomon describes the president in late February hosting a photo op at an ice cream parlor near Rockefeller Center, where Biden ruminated on the prospects for a cease-fire. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden tells the press before strolling off holding his ice cream cone.
Meanwhile, the author points out, it was five months into Israel’s killing spree before a compliant
Washington Post finally reported the U.S. was able to secretly deliver to Israel more than 100 separate weapons transfers without public debate since the transfers fell below the dollar threshold that required congressional notice and approval.
Apparently the Biden administration could read the tea leaves—the majority of Americans wanted an end to the killing—and so the weapons were transferred quietly lest the public throw stones at the White House or a shoe at President Biden. After all, according to Solomon, the U.S. was supplying Israel with 80% of its imported weapons to bomb Gaza’s hospitals, schools, United Nations refugee centers, and so-called “safe” zones to which the Israeli military directed tens of thousands of Palestinians to seek refuge.
Readers remembering New York Times stories about individual Palestinian suffering may judge Solomon as too harsh on corporate media and its guest pundits, but these stories, Solomon notes, rarely blamed the White House because “...the narratives of catastrophe were short on zeal for exploring causality—especially when the trail would lead to the U.S. ‘national security’ establishment.”
Either the corporate media knew of the Biden administration’s culpability or chose not to know—both worthy of derision.
In examining mass media complicity, Solomon reminds us of The Intercept’s findings: The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times coverage of the war’s first six weeks minimized Palestinian suffering, with editors and reporters employing 60-1 the term “slaughter” to characterize the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians and using “massacre” 125-2 to describe the murder of Israelis versus Palestinians.
Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org, a grassroots anti-war organization, chastises the press for ignoring Israel firing artillery shells loaded with white phosphorus at civilians in Gaza. White phosphorus can burn its victims down to the bone, cause them to blink spasmodically until blind, or struggle to breathe before dying from asphyxiation.
To the skeptic, Solomon offers abundant examples of media bias, including press failure to cover the declaration of U.N. experts who in March, 2024, issued a statement: “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.”
The most inspiring passages—the pages that restore our faith in reporters on big media’s payroll—describe how courageous journalists, including those at
CNN, risked their lives and careers to cover Israel’s bombardment and starvation of over 2 million people in Gaza, 9 out of 10 internally displaced where “trauma in Palestine is collective and continuous,” according to the chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Solomon tells us that reporters at some of the largest news outlets—The Associated Press, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, McClatchy, the Chicago Tribune—signed a letter in November, 2023, denouncing their employers for “dehumanizing rhetoric that served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” A month later the Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern over the Israeli military’s pattern of targeting journalists and their families, citing a journalist killed wearing press insignia and other journalists whose families were threatened by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Referencing a report in
The Guardian, Solomon writes of internal dissension at CNN, where reporters, including star veteran correspondent Christiane Amanpour, decried editorial policies demanding disgraceful regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and censorship of Palestinian voices in what amounted to “journalistic malpractice.”
Broken up into sections, peppered with news quotes and congressional grilling of the secretary of defense, Solomon’s Afterword presents a rare and valuable synthesis of post October 7 events and bedfellows.
Presidents can get away with genocide as long as the press gives them a free pass.
Building on themes in his
War MadeInvisible, Solomon reveals the human toll of an imperial U.S. foreign policy. The new edition with “Afterword: The Gaza War” is a must-read for policymakers, academics, activists, and anyone wondering how war criminals in the White House can cry crocodile tears that pass for real anguish.
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Norman Solomon's 'War Made Invisible' Repudiates Collusion With War Makers
Solomon's 13th book shows how the U.S. hides the human toll of its military machine.
Jun 18, 2023
Following a string of U.S. “forever wars,” a profusion of well-written, often riveting novels, memoirs, and analyses have been published. Talented authors have aimed to promote understanding about the human cost of war.
In the same period, mainstream media sources have continually developed ways to make war appear normal—something necessary, justifiable, or in some cases, “humane.”
Norm Solomon’s War Made Invisible erects an edifice of evidence showing deliberate, consistent, coordinated and well-funded efforts to squelch movements opposing the vicious consequences of war.
Solomon asks why people identify more with the bombers rather than the bombed. Then he traces the history of embedded reporters. He shows how the presence of “embeds” (journalists who live among and travel with units of the military) has changed the way wars are covered. The embeds are beholden not only to the military that protect them but also to corporate heads who collude with war profiteers and war planners.
Solomon asks why people identify more with the bombers rather than the bombed.
Militarists’ justifications for wars often emphasize the terror wielded by insurgents using bloody tactics. Solomon points out the similarities between suicide bombers causing slaughter on the ground and sophisticated warplanes maiming and killing civilians from the air.
The legendary peace activist Phil Berrigan once likened racism and threats of nuclear war to the many faces of the hydra written of in Greek mythology. Cut off one head and another appears. The many-faced hydra of racism and war now turns to all corners of the globe. Any country refusing to subordinate itself to serving U.S. national interests risks being devastated by U.S. military and economic wars. Increasingly, war planners invoke the nuclear threat.
Authors and orators who challenge the status quo of glorifying and justifying wars face well organized opponents with deep pockets and a vice like grip on mainstream media. Astonishing past efforts, in U.S. history, to outlaw war and denounce the “merchants of death” reached millions of people after the industrial slaughter of World War I.
Eugene Debs, the indefatigable campaigner imprisoned for opposing U.S. foreign policy, ran for president from his jail cell and won nearly a million votes in 1920. The Kellogg Briand pact outlawing war was written into U.S. law in August of 1928. In April of 1935, the New York Times reported that over 60,000 students went on strike, declaring they would never enlist to fight in a foreign war. Former U.S. Representative Jeanette Rankin voted against entering both World War I and World War II. Norm Solomon shares the moral compass and honorable intent of these heroic resisters. His highly worthwhile book invites readers to embrace his clarity, expose the military machine’s human toll, and campaign to end all wars.
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20 Years After the Invasion of Iraq, Will the Media's Complicity Be Flushed Down the Memory Hole?
As we mark the anniversary of the murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq, it's imperative to reclaim the memory of this war not only from the Bush administration officials who waged it, but also from the corporate media system that helped sell it.
Mar 17, 2023
"All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." -- Viet Thanh Nguyen
As mainstream U.S. media outlets pause to remember the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it's clear that there's a lot they hope we'll forget—first and foremost, the media's own active complicity in whipping up public support for the war.
But the more you dig into mainstream news coverage from that period, as our documentary team did last week when we put together this five-minute montage from our 2007 film War Made Easy, the harder it is to forget how flagrantly news networks across the broadcast and cable landscape uncritically spread the Bush administration's propaganda and actively excluded dissenting voices.
After 20 Years, Will US News Media Finally Admit its Craven Complicity in Iraq War? | WAR MADE EASYwww.youtube.com
The numbers don't lie. A 2003 report by the media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that in the two weeks leading up to the invasion, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and the PBS Newshour featured a total of 267 American experts, analysts, and commentators on camera to supposedly help make sense of the march to war. Of these 267 guests, an astounding 75% were current or former government or military officials, and a grand total of one expressed any skepticism.
Meanwhile, in the fast-growing world of cable news, Fox News's tough-talking, pro-war jingoism was setting the standard for ratings-wary executives at most of the more "liberal" cable networks. MSNBC and CNN, feeling the heat of what industry insiders were calling "the Fox effect," were desperately trying to outflank their right-wing rival—and one another—by actively eliminating critical voices and seeing who could bang the war drums loudest.
At MSNBC, as the Iraq invasion approached in early 2003, network executives decided to fire Phil Donahue even though his show had the highest ratings on the channel. A leaked internal memo explained that top management saw Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal" who would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." Noting that Donahue "seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives," the memo warned ominously that his show could end up being "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
Two decades later, as we hurtle ever closer to potentially catastrophic new wars, there's been virtually no accountability or sustained reporting in mainstream news media to remind us of their own decisive role in selling the Iraq war.
Not to be outdone, CNN news chief Eason Jordan would boast on air that he had met with Pentagon officials during the run-up to the invasion to get their approval for the on-camera war "experts" the network would rely on. "I think it's important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict," Jordan explained. "I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said . . . here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war, and we got a big thumbs up on all of them. That was important."
As Norman Solomon observes in our film War Made Easy, which we based on his book of the same name, the bedrock democratic principle of an independent, adversarial press was simply tossed out the window. "Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting," Solomon says. "But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it . . . It wasn't even something to hide, ultimately. It was something to say to the American people, 'See, we're team players. We may be the news media, but we're on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.' . . . And that really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press."
It's an act of forgetting we can ill afford, especially as many of the same media patterns from 20 years ago now repeat themselves on overdrive...
The result was a barely debated, deceit-driven, headlong rush into a war of choice that would go on to destabilize the region, accelerate global terrorism, bleed trillions of dollars from the U.S. treasury, and kill thousands of U.S. servicemembers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them innocent civilians. Yet two decades later, as we hurtle ever closer to potentially catastrophic new wars, there's been virtually no accountability or sustained reporting in mainstream news media to remind us of their own decisive role in selling the Iraq war.
It's an act of forgetting we can ill afford, especially as many of the same media patterns from 20 years ago now repeat themselves on overdrive–from the full-scale reboot and rehabilitation of leading Iraq war architects and cheerleaders to the news media's continuing over-reliance on "experts" drawn from the revolving-door world of the Pentagon and the arms industry (often without disclosure).
"Memory is a strategic resource in any country, especially the memory of wars," the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has written. "By controlling the narrative of the wars we fought, we justify the wars we are going to fight in the present."
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq, it's imperative to reclaim the memory of this war not only from the Bush administration officials who waged it, but also from the corporate media system that helped sell it and has tried to control the narrative ever since.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the RootsAction Education Fund will be hosting a virtual screening of "War Made Easy" on March 20th at 6:45 PM Eastern, followed by a panel discussion featuring Solomon, Dennis Kucinich, Kathy Kelly, Marcy Winograd, India Walton, and David Swanson. Click here to sign up for the event, and click here to stream "War Made Easy" in advance for free.
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