Tuesday, October 14, 2008
War criminals and their media collaborators
On CounterPunch today, Robert Richter, political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968, discusses a topic oft mentioned here - John McCain as war criminal - and informs us that Gen. Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, "strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals" and said "that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution."
That was notable enough. But if you get to the very end of the article, you find this:
When I passed along Gen. Taylor's comments to my network superiors the program was scrapped: too hot to handle. Instead Air War Over the North was telecast, about “precision bombing” North Vietnam military targets by U.S. pilots. A few years after that broadcast, a Pentagon public information executive gleefully told Roger Mudd in The Selling of the Pentagon that he, the Pentagon official, not only had persuaded CBS to produce Air War Over the North, he even chose those to be interviewed and coached them about what they should say. This unethical collaboration and intercession by the Pentagon in the news media is sadly all too familiar a tactic repeated in the Bush-Cheney years.Needless to say, that collaboration continues to this day, and is quite independent of the odious Bush and Cheney.
