Thursday, July 3, 2008

ACLU: Pentagon made ‘unprecedented’ effort to hide human cost of war.

The ACLU today released documents regarding Navy investigations of civilians killed by coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report notes that the administration has gone to “unprecedented lengths to control and suppress information about the human cost” of the wars. Some of the key findings:

Banning photographers on U.S. military bases from covering the arrival of caskets containing the remains of U.S. soldiers killed overseas

– Paying Iraqi journalists to write positive accounts of the U.S. war effort

– Inviting U.S. journalists to “embed” with military units but requiring them to submit their stories for pre-publication review

Erasing journalists’ footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan

Refusing to disclose statistics on civilian casualties.

The New York Times revealed in April that the Pentagon also had used a domestic propaganda program to paint a rosy portrait of the war effort. See the documents here.

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