By CRYSTAL PARK
WASHINGTON (VR) – In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, former Wikileaks whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, chastises the U.S. government for manipulating media coverage of the war in Iraq. Manning, formerly known as Bradley, recalls the American media lauding Iraq’s 2010 presidential elections as a democratic success.
However, Manning writes, nobody was reporting on Iraq’s “brutal crackdown against political dissidents. Manning contends the American government did nothing to stop the crackdown, and discouraged questioning by American troops.
As an intelligence analyst in Iraq from 2009 to 2010, Manning says she became increasingly aware of a “disparity” between the military and diplomatic reports that came across his desk, and the “foggy speculation and simplifications” being fed to American media.
Two and a half years after the last U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq, the militant group ISIS is gaining tremendous traction and ground. Bea Edwards, executive director for the Government Accountability Project, believes the U.S. government could’ve been in a better position to stop ISIS before they began their blitz if it had been more honest with its failures in Iraq.
“The danger of a government controlling information and disseminating controlled information to the public is that the government, it seems, in the end seems to believe its own propaganda,” said Edwards.
Manning explains it was near impossible to have critical, unbiased, accurate reporting due to the fact there were less than 13 embedded journalists allowed to cover the war. Fear of job loss and fear of personal safety were good enough reasons for embedded journalists to portray the U.S. involvement favorably, writes Manning.
Edwards thinks the system of embedding journalists ensured favorable coverage. “The embedding of journalists with the military forces in the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan was an ingenious way of controlling the press and the message. The journalists in question who, as Chelsea pointed out, are very few- she said only 12 are actually in combat and covering combat missions in the whole country of Iraq at the end- they are then dependent on the troops they’re covering for their own safety and security, so they’d have to be in a very strange frame of mind to report negatively on what was happening on the battlefield.”
Despite Manning’s leaks and plea for the U.S. government to be more transparent to its people, Edwards is skeptical anything will change on Capitol Hill. She says because of that, whistleblowers like Manning, are imperative to checking the government’s power.
“It’s hard to see where the political will from the military or the government is going to come from. What that means is that the public remains dependent on whistleblowers to tell us what is really happening.”
Listen to the full audio version here.