Sir



ALMOST daily the past week's CNN has been showing news conferences from the White House.

The televised events remind me a little of meetings in an English gentlemen's club around the beginning of the past century, where the members were discussing developments in an important game of cricket. The representatives of the Bush administration address most of the reporters by their first names, and in turn the reporters ask kind and uncritical questions. The most "indecent" one that pops up from time to time, is how many Iraqis might have been killed during the combat. The answer is standard, "this is very difficult to know about, but our estimate is a couple of thousand".

Come again? Difficult, for a nation with the most advanced intelligence on this planet?

The simplest way is to visit all the hospitals and their directors. The world-famous reporter John Pilger and his staff did just that. They maintain that 11 000 civilians is a modest estimate, and if you count in the Iraqi soldiers, the number of dead would be multiplied by four.

Now one could of course maintain that Pilger has been manipulated and lied to by the Arabs, had it not been for the fact that few know more about Iraq than he, having paid the country countless visits during the years. Besides, he is a highly esteemed reporter who has won many prizes for his books, articles and television documentaries. His mission is threefold, first, to show how our perception of reality, to a great extent, is decided by what the most powerful media are telling us, second, that these media lie a lot, third, that we have not taken a step further since the colonial days. The life of a white Westerner is still worth hundred times more than that of an Arab, an African or any other lives from less "civilised" races than the superior white one. The deep mourning for the tragic loss of a few American astronauts, while the daily deaths of hundreds of African children ill with AIDS, is hardly ever mentioned or thought about, but is a good example.

Concerning the discoveries of how American and British soldiers have been torturing and humiliating their prisoners of war, I simply think this too disgusting to comment on. However, just a few days before the atrocities became public knowledge, I witnessed a few angry Arab reporters behaving indecently in the "gentlemen's club" asking about misbehaviour by the invasion forces. They were arrogantly told that they had been manipulated by Arabic television channels and should be watching CNN instead. I think a comparison between the propaganda machinery of the former Soviet Union and the American one is becoming ever more appropriate.

Yes, these are indeed worrying days for those who care about the future of our planet. I find consolation in the fact that psychological research shows that man is capable of empathy as well as evil. Leaders like the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and the late Martin Luther King, are prime examples of the former.



- Geir Thomassen

Lovetch