This book is an account of a vicious, unprovoked, and unjustified military attack on a civilian population as it unfolded. It was not written retrospectively months or years after the fact with the benefit of time. Each entry was published in immediate response to current events.
Before the Internet, there were four ways to write about war:
1) actually be a war correspondent and accompany troops into battle,
2) hang out in the capital city, far from the action, in a hotel (preferably one with a swimming pool and a well-stocked bar), and relay whatever junk information and propaganda your side wants you to deliver,
3) go to press briefings at the Pentagon, write down whatever the spokesperson says, and relay it, uncritically, to the public as fact, or
4) years (or decades) after the war is long over write a dense tome revealing that the war was based on and perpetuated by fraudulent government statements enabled by inept and/or corrupt news media.
With the Internet, a fifth option emerged: Deconstruct obvious government, military, and mass media lies as they are being delivered.
This fifth approach to war reporting, the book in your hands, was unique in 1999 - and it would still be relatively unique today. The author, Internet commercialization pioneer Ken McCarthy, offered it as a demonstration of how the Internet could be used to report and analyze news, independent of government, military, corporate, or ideological censorship. (From the preface.)
Excerpts from the book:
“At the time of violent, unlawful interventions like these, there is *always* a perfectly plausible cover story presented that seems to make our actions both necessary and morally correct. Years later, when the truth ultimately comes out, the enormous human suffering created is shrugged off - if it is even acknowledged at all.“
“Rather than inform (the public), the US news media has chosen - as it has in every other manufactured war - to participate in a choreography of misrepresentation designed to draw Americans, whose families provide the sons and whose taxpayers provide the funds, into throwing their emotional support behind a war they would never approve of if they knew the facts, a war that has the potential to destabilize the world, bankrupt US society, and spill oceans of innocent blood before all its reverberations reach their end…”
“The citizens of the United States paid for this war, while their newspapers and TV news programs carefully tutored them as to why this immoral, illegal, and irrational slaughter of innocents was all for a good cause.”
"It is a horrible irony that the very same people who believe they are defending an innocent group against persecution have instead been enrolled through the technique of the ‘Big Lie’ to become cheerleaders to the moral successors of the Third Reich."
“What the Nazis didn't accomplish, NATO is going to finish. The extent of damage to churches, monasteries, and other landmarks has not even been hinted at by the US press.”
“Yes, some countries are run by individuals who are ‘problematic,’ but if that were a qualification for a military invasion, we'd be bombing every capital on earth, including our own."
“One of the most successful applications of social engineering has been to split people along right/left lines when their interests and sensibilities are in reality nearly identical.“
“I can best sum up my beliefs this way: I believe in the basic decency of the average person and the thorough indecency of the industrial system that's taken control of my country's government.”
