US death in Afghanistan makes 2008 deadliest year

On the night of August 22, the U.S. committed what Chris Floyd, in a richly detailed and amply documented piece, calls an "atrocity" in the Afghan village of Azizabad, near the western city of Herat. The U.S. conducted a massive midnight airstrike on the village, killing scores of unarmed civilians, including large numbers of women and children. That was preceded just weeks earlier by another U.S. airstrike in Eastern Afghanistan which "killed 27 people in a wedding party -- most of them women and children, including the bride."

...a gruesome video has now surfaced clearly documenting the huge number of civilians that were killed. A very thorough, independent, on-the-scene investigation by the New York Times' Carlotta Gall -- who Floyd, a former colleague of Gall at The Moscow Times, rightly hailed as a truly intrepid war reporter -- resulted in the discovery of mountains of new documentary evidence and highly credible and pro-U.S. witnesses confirming not only that at least 90 civilians were killed, but also casting serious doubt on the U.S.'s claim that there were even any Taliban in the village at all.

...Way beyond Fox, this is the same thing that our media generally (and with some important exceptions) has been doing for years, at least -- mindlessly repeating and confirming false Government claims. That's what makes Carlotta Gall's on-scene actual investigation of the Pentagon's Afghanistan claims so notable -- it's so unusual. From Jessica Lynch's heroic Rambo-like firefight to Pat Tillman's murder by Al Qaeda monsters to pre-war claims of the Iraqi menace to post-war claims of Glorious Progress to current claims of the Grave Russian and Iranian Threats to the concealment and then justification of virtually every act of government radicalism over the last eight years, our media has, by and large, done what Fox News did in the Azizabad case -- offer itself up as an uncritical conduit for state propaganda.

And that's to say nothing of their more overt propagandistic activities -- the still-extraordinary fact that for the last seven years, virtually every American news program has employed as "independent analysts" people who were part of a formal, coordinated and likely illegal U.S. Government propaganda program run out of the Pentagon, a program which resulted in countless false stories broadcast by these networks to boost Government lies. And even after all of that was revealed and documented on the front page of the NYT, these media outlets -- all 3 networks, plus CNN and others -- continue to employ the propagandists, and worse, refuse even to tell their viewers about what happened, or even to disclose to their viewers the existence of the story, and then -- at best -- actually defend it all when forced on their obscure blogs to mention it.