Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [283]
89. CBS-TV August 23, 1965; our emphasis. Hallin, pp. 118, 130–41.
90. Kevin Buckley; see PEHR, I, 313f., for more details on this major war crime. Hallin points out that the delta looked like a wilderness because “it was devastated by B-52 strikes in the late 1960s.”
91. Hallin, pp. 172, 143.
92. Ibid., pp. 148–58.
93. Ibid., pp. 209–10.
94. PP, II, 668–69, 653. See Pike, Viet Cong; PP, II, III; and for detailed discussion, Kahin, Intervention.
95. PP, III, 150; Kahin, Intervention, p. 205.
96. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 219f.; Smith, International History, II, 280.
97. Smith, International History, II, 277, 280; Kahin, Intervention, pp. 219f.
98. Hallin, “Uncensored War,” pp. 19, 16, 20, 70f.
99. See Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 274ff., and Circle of Deception, chapter 6, for detailed documentation and analysis.
100. Time, cover story, August 14; Newsweek, August 17, 24; U.S. News & World Report, August 17; cited with discussion by Elterman.
101. Hallin, “Uncensored War,” p. 21.
102. New Statesman, August 7, 14; National Guardian, August 8, 15 (three articles), 22; I.F. Stone’s Weekly, August 10, 24, September 7; cited with discussion by Elterman, who notes also that the New Republic accepted the U.S. government version with no question, although with some pessimism about the prospects, echoed in The Nation.
103. PP, III, 107.
104. PP, III, 531, 207.
105. James Reston, New York Times, February 26, 1965.
106. Braestrup, Big Story; see section 1, note 1; hereafter cited with volume and page number only. Don Oberdorfer, Washington Post Magazine, January 29, 1978; Oberdorfer is the author of Tet! (New York: Doubleday, 1971), praised as a “fine” study (I, xiii). Diamond, New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1977; a journalist, he headed the News Study Group in the MIT Political Science department. Roche, see note 5. Mohr, “Hawks and Doves Refight Tet Offensive at Symposium,” New York Times, February 27, 1978; Smith, “Reading History: The Vietnam War,” History Today (October 1984).
107. Herring, America’s Longest War, pp. 200–201.
108. On the record of Freedom House in service to the state and in opposition to democracy, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, appendix 1, a small fragment of a record that merits more detailed exposure.
109. For additional evidence and discussion, see the review in Race & Class and More, from which we will draw extensively, particularly in appendix 3, and Porter’s review, both cited in note 1, above.
110. Thies, When Governments Collide, p. 201. This analysis, familiar in the scholarly literature, is quite different from Braestrup’s conclusions, which, as Porter comments, he attributes to a consensus of historians without a single reference. Porter adds that “few independent historians” would endorse Braestrup’s conclusions or his analysis of Communist objectives, quoting CIA analyst Patrick McGarvey and others. See his A Peace Denied, pp. 67f., for further discussion of these issues.
111. New York Times, February 20, April 4, 1968. On internal U.S. government assessments, see below, and Kolko, Anatomy of a War, p. 329. Kolko goes on to describe how these assessments underestimated the success of U.S. terror in decimating the NLF infrastructure in rural areas, and were thus overly “pessimistic.” Note that by virtue of these conclusions, Kolko counts as “optimistic” by Freedom House logic, that is, supportive of U.S. goals. In fact, quite the opposite is true, still another illustration of the absurdity of the Freedom House assumptions—or, more accurately, of their blind adherence to the doctrines of state propaganda, reaching to the way in which the issues are initially framed.
112. Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 189. Hoopes quoted from his Limits of Intervention (New York: McKay, 1969), p. 145, by Herring and Thies.
113. PP, IV, 548, 558. April USG study cited by Porter, review of Big Story. McNamara, Statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jan. 22, 1968 (II, 20).
114. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 386f.
115.