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Read some excerpts from various articles that
discuss the faking of the statue pulldown.
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Last night I heard that the U.S. military is bringing not only embedded press with them

when they enter, but also 3,000 Iraqis who very well might become "embedded dancers"

frolicking in the streets to demonstrate how jubilant Iraqis are to be "liberated." Should

this happen, we only hope that there will be a few journalist who will document the truth.

The feeling here is anything but joyous and jubilant."

electroniciraq.net/news/625.shtml


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ABC's "Nightline" of April 11 closed with a report titled "The Art of Framing" by Robert

Krulwich. The segment's opening shot showed tight framing of people jumping on the Hussein

statue, and then pulled wide to reveal a mostly empty public square- just as you see in the

photo posted on this page! This is a familiar tactic of the US networks- showing biased

coverage 100 times, and then covering their butts by doing one quick "mea culpa." But hats

off to ABC for their mea culpa- their CIA plants must have left early for the weekend.

sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/04/1598451_comment.php
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Unlike most of these, the toppling of the statue was partly staged. Several efforts were

made to get it right.

Consternation must have been felt in Washington and London when two Marines - doubtless

remembering their forefathers on Iwo Jima - scaled the statue to wrap the head in the Stars

and Stripes.

That was not the picture the world was supposed to see. This was a war of liberation, not a

war of conquest.

One can imagine the political movie directors in the Pentagon wanting to scream down the

hot-line to the field commander telling him to get rid of it.

The Marines tried again with an Iraqi flag, provided by the crowd. No, no, the director

must have shouted again. We cannot show the world a shot which presents us toppling the

Iraqi flag - only toppling Saddam.

Eventually, the Marines got it right and pulled the statue over. It turned out to be

hollow, failing to tumble with a satisfying crash but slumping to the horizontal - rather

like the regime.

At last the US and Britain had the clear, simple image they wanted. Saddam's fate may still

be uncertain but his statue had been torn apart live on television and Baghdadis had danced

on the pieces.

www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm

rld

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Several photographs publicized by an antiwar web site shed light on the way the American

media is manipulating images of the war in Iraq to give the false impression that the vast

majority of the Iraqi people are joyfully welcoming the invasion and occupation of their

country by US and British troops.

These photographs, available on the web site of Information Clearing House show that the

toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, given massive publicity in the US

and international media April 9-10, was a stage-managed affair.

As transmitted to the world by US television and newspaper reports, the pictures from

Firdos Square purported to show a mass of enthusiastic Iraqis hailing the US military and

trampling on a gargantuan bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. Hours of television time and

pages of newspaper coverage were devoted to these pictures, with accompanying commentary

comparing the scene to the bringing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the liberation of

Paris in 1944.

The first photograph on the Information Clearing House site is a wide-angle shot

encompassing the entire expanse of Firdos Square, rather than the narrowly focused, closely

cropped framing used in the mass media. It shows that the “crowd” surrounding the statue of

Saddam Hussein is anything but massive, and that the square itself has been surrounded by

US Abrams tanks, cutting it off from the rest of the city. . .

. . .The Los Angeles Times quoted one Iraqi bystander who said that while some Iraqis in

the square were praising Bush in English to the American media, others were denouncing the

US president in Arabic. “Today I saw some people breaking this monument,” he told the

Times, “but there were people—men and women—who stood there and said in Arabic: ‘Screw

America, screw Bush.’ So all this is not a simple situation.”

The cynical staging of “news” and manipulation of visual images in the service of

gargantuan lies is typical of both the Bush administration and the US media. It is the

technique of Madison Avenue applied to the justification of a program of aggression and

military conquest. In their Orwellian presentation, conquest is “liberation,” bombing is

“humanitarian aid,” and seizure of the world’s second largest oil reserves is “rebuilding

Iraq.”



www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/fird-a12.shtml

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''It was the mother of all photo ops,'' says Norman Solomon, coauthor of ''Target Iraq:

What the News Media Didn't Tell You.'' Solomon saw yesterday's focus on the statue as an

''example of the tremendously subjective character of the media coverage in this war. . . .

What was notable was how few Iraqis were there. It was almost like a lethargic pep rally.

There was scarcely a pompom in evidence. Despite the best of efforts, it had a kind of

low-budget staged quality as though a movie was being shot but they couldn't get any

extras.''



www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0410-09.htm

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