Mass Media Hasten To Help Pentagon Exonerate Itself In Afghan Airstrike
"So the Pentagon literally did the 'we investigated ourselves and cleared ourselves of any wrongdoing' meme, and the mainstream press is passing that off as a real thing."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/mass-media-h…
Mass Media Hasten To Help Pentagon Exonerate Itself In Afghan Airstrike
"AP was told by their source, a senior defense official, that the report is 'independent', and then they passed that claim on to their readers as though it's an objective fact."
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The mass media are full of headlines announcing that a "watchdog" has concluded in an "independent" investigation that US military personnel did nothing wrong in an August airstrike in Kabul which killed ten civilians and zero combatants.
apnews.com/article/afghan…
"The review, done by the Air Force Lt. Gen. Sami Said, found there were breakdowns in communication and in the process of identifying and confirming the target of the bombing, according to a senior defense official familiar with the report," AP informs us.
AP was told by their source, a senior defense official, that the report is "independent", and they passed that claim on to readers as though it's an objective fact when it's actually an assertion by a US government official. This Pentagon stenography is journalistic malpractice.
Not only there is there clearly nothing "independent" about government officials investigating their own agencies, but the possibility of any actual independent review of the airstrike has been made impossible, since the Pentagon's report on the matter has been classified:
The Pentagon killed 10 people, none of whom were combatants and 7 of whom were children, lied about it, got exposed, investigated itself and found that those who perpetrated the attack were not even guilty of so much as negligence, then classified the report and called it a day.
And then the mass media legitimized this by calling it an "independent" investigation conducted by a "watchdog". The world is dominated by opaque and unaccountable government agencies who are legitimized and normalized by the mass media.
The most powerful military force ever assembled does not care about human beings and is completely unaccountable to the public. That's why these things happen, and that's why they will continue to happen until this entire corrupt power structure ceases to be.
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