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war on terror
How US Media Hide Truths About the Gaza War
Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view.
Jan 15, 2025
A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”
The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972—in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media—has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.
+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information”—which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.
What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11.
Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:
- Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.
- The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.
- Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.
- Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.
- Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”
- Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.
The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.
During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77%) than to Israelis (23%). The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”
Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view. Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.
As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements—and the policies they tried to justify—were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.
The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”
What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”
As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events. Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy”—and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”
The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.
This piece was originally published by MediaNorth. It is adapted from the afterword in the paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press).
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Dr. Martin Luther King's Prophetic Warning: Denouncing the Merchants of Death
We all have a choice to hold ourselves accountable in the face of Dr. King's warning that we are approaching spiritual death.
Jan 13, 2025
Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference will announce the tribunal's verdicts and release the report of 10 international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them.
Of necessity, the evidence was culled from examining a limited range of devastatingly criminal U.S. "forever wars," of brutal and needless wars of choice. The tribunal focused on specific U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations, and aerial assaults that followed the "9/11" attacks in 2001.
What if we could enlarge the tribunal, bringing before it war crimes occurring right now, the U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time on our phone and computer screens?
Certainly, one witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be Dr. Husam Abu Safiya, who was the director of Gaza's Kamal Adwan Hospital when such a place existed. The tribunal would wish to amplify his testimony on the harrowing weeks of siege during which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial bombardment. They would help to record his story of witnessing assassinations targeting medical staff, field executions of people clutching white flags in an attempt to surrender, the hospital's forced evacuation with at-gunpoint humiliation stripping of women and girls. The initial attacks disabled the hospital's operational capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen production equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking toward an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The tribunal would like to interview him, but he is being held without charge by Israel's military.
Our tribunal would surely turn to three of the world's most crucial international human rights groups for testimony.
On December 5, 2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Its research documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, "Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously, and with total impunity."
On December 19, 2024 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) stated that "repeated Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians over the last 14 months, the dismantling of the healthcare system and other essential infrastructure, the suffocating siege, and the systematic denial of humanitarian assistance are destroying the conditions of life in Gaza." The report says there are "clear signs of ethnic cleansing" by Israel as it wages war in Gaza.
Also issued on December 19, 2024 was a report from Human Rights Watch, entitled "Extermination and Acts of Genocide," stating that Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by denying them clean water, which it says legally amounts to acts of genocide and extermination.
Corroborating the testimony of healthcare workers and human rights advocates in Gaza would be Pope Francis' January 9, 2025 message to international diplomats. Pope Francis denounced Israel's ongoing war in Gaza, calling the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave "very serious and shameful." Pope Francis referenced the deaths of children who froze to death because of Israel's destruction of infrastructure: "We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country's energy network has been hit."
Recommendations made by jurors in the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal call for major weapon makers to pay reparations for suffering caused. They echo the words of Pope Francis, whose message to the assemblage of diplomats made this appeal:
With the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures, let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger and favor development in the most impoverished countries, so that their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions, or have to leave their countries in order to seek a more dignified life.
Considering such testimony from so many diverse sources, one might expect that U.S. lawmakers would reevaluate their murderous, unwavering support of Israel. Instead, on January 9, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to sanction the International Criminal Court in protest of its arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister.
Who are the criminals? U.S. news coverage of five former or current presidents gathered for the funeral of President Jimmy Carter never hinted that hideous wars of choice along with massive increases in weapon sales had marked the administration of each of the five. There was no mention of President Joe Biden's order to send $8 billion dollars of weapons to Gaza. This gathering of U.S. presidents is referred to as "The World's Most Exclusive Club." Exclusive indeed. What other club of so few has caused so much suffering to so many?
On April 7, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famously insightful, prophetic speech about another illegal U.S. war of choice—"Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break the Silence"—in which Dr. King said, "Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful resolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments."
Dr. King's verdict, in this speech, on the momentous first anniversary of which he was taken from us, was that "this business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
The four defendants before our tribunal certainly did their part to pressure these five other criminals toward their varied crimes, but we all have a choice to hold ourselves accountable in the face of Dr. King's warning that we are approaching spiritual death. One step toward reconciling with wisdom, justice, and love would be to demand the release of Dr. Husam Abu Safiya from an Israeli prison so that we could humbly learn from him about war crimes and reparations.
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As Trump 2.0 Looms, Durbin Urges DOJ to Rescind War Powers Opinions
Praising his targeting of "overbroad, undemocratic, and dangerous" opinions, one lawyer said that "irrespective of who holds the presidency, no one should have unilateral power to plunge the nation into major conflicts."
Jan 08, 2025
The top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this week urged the Department of Justice to rescind some war powers-related legal opinions and release certain records, a call that came in the lead-up to Republican President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) made the request in a Tuesday letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, stressing the Constitution's division of treaty-making and war powers between Congress and the president, as well as the president's obligation "to take care that the law be faithfully executed."
Highlighting that the DOJ "has previously withdrawn flawed or outdated" guidance, Durbin identified five opinions from the department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that he believes should be taken off the books:
- A 1989 opinion about the Federal Bureau of Investigation's authority to apprehend suspects overseas that concludes the president can unilaterally "override" the United Nations Charter's prohibition on the use of force;
- A 2001 opinion finding the president could effectively wage the entire "War on Terror" without congressional authorization;
- A 2002 opinion suggesting the president could wage the Iraq War without congressional authorization;
- A 2020 opinion related to the U.S. assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani that—though redacted—asserts the president has the authority to order an attack on a senior official from Iran; and
- A 2020 opinion claiming that a requirement for the president to give Congress advance notice of plans to withdraw from a treaty is unconstitutional.
"Congress and the executive branch may have differing views in some respects as to the separation of powers between them," Durbin wrote. "However, these opinions are concerning outliers even by the standards of the executive branch's own legal doctrine. Indeed, it does not appear that OLC has relied upon these opinions in other publicly available legal memoranda. For these reasons, I urge the Department of Justice to withdraw them."
The senator also gave Garland a list of 20 records to release "relating to the president's authority to deploy U.S. armed forces within the United States, and the activities in which those military personnel may or may not engage."
"The need for transparency regarding these legal interpretations is particularly urgent today given the risk of domestic military deployment to suppress protests or carry out mass deportations," he wrote to the outgoing attorney general.
Sharing the letter on social media Wednesday, Durbin more clearly said, "Donald Trump has promised to deploy the military for mass deportations, and we have a right to know how the Justice Department interprets this authority."
Durbin sent the letter on the same day that Trump, during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, refused to rule out using military force to take over the Panama Canal and Danish territory Greenland, sparking global condemnation.
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