For those who still want to peddle the "why doesn't the media tell the truth about all the good things going on in Iraq" line, check out this story. Remember last month when the Pentagon claimed that the number of deaths in the Baghdad area had dropped dramatically since they launched a security initiative in the city? They lied:
The U.S. military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday.
The decision to include only victims of drive-by shootings and those killed by torture and execution, usually at the hands of death squads, allowed U.S. officials to argue that a security crackdown that began in the capital August 7 had more than halved the city's murder rate.
But the types of slayings, including suicide bombings, that the U.S. excluded from the category of "murder" were not made explicit at the time. That led to confusion after Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed that 1,536 people died violently in and around Baghdad in August, nearly the same number as in July.
Hey, if the facts don't support you, just change the facts. And look at how they used this invented figure for propaganda purposes:
At the end of August, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said violence had dropped significantly because of the operation. Caldwell said "attacks in Baghdad were well below the monthly average for July. Since August 7, the murder rate in Baghdad dropped 52 percent from the daily rate for July."
However, Caldwell did not make the key distinction that the rate he was referring to excluded a significant part of the daily violence in and around the capital. On Monday, for example, at least 20 of the 26 people slain in the capital were killed in bombings.
And now listen to the Pentagon as they try and rationalize the lie away:
"These comments were intended to highlight some specific indicators of progress and were never stated in relation to broader casualty figures," U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Monday.
He said Caldwell "used murders and executions specifically because they are a key indicator of sectarian-related violence."
Johnson said other types of violence that are recorded by the military as "indicators for calculating casualties" include suicide attacks, mortar and rocket assaults, roadside bombs -- called improvised explosive devices, or IEDs -- small-arms fire "such as when used to fire in crowds after an IED attack versus an individual being murdered," and car bombs -- known as VBIEDs.
Under the military definition, murders include civilians killed "who are specifically targeted," but do not include executions or "those killed in indirect fire, IED, VBIED, or suicide attacks, all of which may or may not be related to sectarian violence."
Orwell would be proud of that kind of government doublespeak.
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Of course, they have to come up with that definition of murder in order for them to define "collateral damage" deaths as not-murder. The Feds are the masters of euphemisms and redefinition.
May I also nominate 'WMD-related program activities' for this particular award.
I think in this case it should read: If the facts don't support you, just leave them out.
Damn, I believed the bastards. When I heard about the falling murder rate, I thought to myself that maybe we have turned a corner and things will start to improve.
Ed:
You wrote Orwell would be proud of that kind of government doublespeak.
Careless getaway comment, Ed. Orwell would not have been proud of it. He would have pilloried it as he did in both 1984 and Animal Farm
John, I fell for it too, just as I did years ago when they told us we had to attack Iraq. As hard as it is to admit it, I've got to become yet more jaded and cynical just to preserve my sanity.
Yeah, AndyS, I was a big initial supporter. Surely the Pres has access to more facts than I do, I thought, having worked in the intelligence field. I momentarily put away my harsh feelings for the man after the FL vote imbroglio. Then came the OH vote imbroglio, the lack of evidence for WMDs, the lack of an Al Qaeda link to Iraq, the fudging of facts, the lack of progress in Iraq, Katrina in NO.....
Pretty sad state of affairs altogether.
[sigh]
You know, I actually thought about that when I wrote it. Of course Orwell would be appalled by it, but what I meant was it was reminiscent of the sort of doublespeak he had his characters speaking and, in that sense, he'd be proud that it was good doublespeak. But of course, you're right that he was in fact criticizing that sort of language.
This is why, when anyone quotes a government statistic in support of a political position--of any stripe--I'm inclined to look up the original source for myself. More often than not, there's a detail in a footnote somewhere that contradicts the quote.
As Homer Simpson once put it, "You can make up statistics to prove anything. Nine out of ten people know that."
Actually, the man who would be proud would be Joseph Goebbels. It was he who said that if a lie is big enough and repeated ofter enough, people will come to believe it.
That was the entire electoral strategy of the Republican Party - simply state things that were patently false time and time again and the minute anyone called them on it accuse them of biased reporting and being either unpatriotic, on the side of the tourists or part of the liberal media conspiracy that controls what the American peopleblahblah blah...zzzzz
It pretty clearly works like a charm.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I think the operative words here are 'make up' - statistics don't lie: Politicians do.
Oh, and Orwell called pentagun-speak newspeak and endless repetition duckspeak - not to be confused with doublethink - the ability to hold two mutually exclusive ideas to be simultaneously true.
- JS