Why Do Those People in Toledo Hate America So Much? The National Media's Fear of Reporting the Truth

By Ahmed Nassef

Late last month, a small newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, The Blade, published a 15-page expose detailing war crimes committed by an elite platoon, known as Tiger Force, attached to the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army during the Vietnam War.

The crimes, taking place between May and November 1967, included torture, executions, and the killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians, including women, children and the elderly. The report describes gruesome details, such as American soldiers taking severed ears and scalps as souvenirs.

The Blade’s report also points to a high-level US government cover-up of the crimes.

Even after army investigations over a period of four years, no one had been charged with any crimes.

The newspaper spent eight months and interviewed over 100 people across the US and Vietnam in their investigation, which began on a tip and some documents handed over to their Washington bureau.

Around the time that the Blade was preparing to publish its report, President Bush was embarking on a campaign to circumvent the “biased” Washington media by giving interviews to small-town newspapers and other local media. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people,” declared the President.

Well, you can’t get more small-town than the Toledo Blade. But where is the national media that Bush is complaining about? As Seymour Hersh writes in the November 10 issue of the New Yorker, “The Blade’s extraordinary investigation of Tiger Force, however, remains all but invisible. None of the four major television networks have picked it up… and most major newspapers have either ignored the story or limited themselves to publishing an Associated Press summary.”

Yes, there is a “filter” as Bush claims, but it is a filter set to prevent the truth from reaching the American public. No wonder a vast majority of Americans still hold mistaken notions about the reasons for the Iraq war, believing the Administration’s deceptions that Saddam Hussein was tied to Al-Qaeda. In fact, it is to their credit that Americans are now opposing Bush’s Iraq policy despite all the media misinformation.

The media blackout of the Tiger Force story is indicative of the state of corporate journalism in this country. The real embarrassing question to the national media here is not just about their lack of coverage; it is why did it take a small newspaper in Toledo to break this story? Where were the legion of New York Times, Washington Post, and TV network reporters?

Is it realistic to expect that a journalist from the Washington bureau of a Toledo paper was the only one to have received this news tip and these documents that led to the investigation? Of course not. Like so many other stories that are being reported on the Internet and in alternative publications, the national media was not prepared to run a piece of investigative journalism that could raise serious questions about the current war that America is waging.

And if it took the honest journalists and editors of the Toledo Blade to break this story, how many other stories out there are not being reported or investigated because they’re just too controversial?

The recent flap over the illegal leaking of a CIA operative’s name by White House officials is another case in point. Here was a story that was begging to be uncovered—all it took was for a journalist to read Robert Novak’s column in July, where he names the official, to figure it out. But David Corn of The Nation was the only one to raise the question. Even then, no one bothered to follow up until the CIA itself made it an issue by asking the Justice Department to investigate.

Undoubtedly, the vast majority of the 101st Airborne, now serving in Iraq, is made up of good honest men and women. But warriors, no matter how virtuous, once they are placed into a dishonest conflict by a corrupt leadership, begin to lose their bearings. Vietnam was a place where we were not wanted and where we should not have been. Iraq is another such place. The more Americans remain there as occupiers, the more that we will invite more hatred, and more killing.

Just as in Vietnam, the mounting death toll of American servicemen and women should not come as an invitation for more foolishness by our “bring it on” president. If we as Americans allow this misadventure to continue and escalate, then the blood shed will not be only on the hands of our men and women in uniform, we will all be culpable.