In the clip below, Bill O’Reilly bashes the Jan. 27 anti-war protests with blatant lies on his Jan. 29th edition of The O’Reilly Factor on FOX. Featured in the clip are Sunsara Taylor of World Can’t Wait and actors Sean Penn, Jane Fonda, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins. Check back here for a refutation of Bill O’Reilly’s lies.
Correction: In the FOX transcription, FOX misquotes Sunsara Taylor in a significant way. They have her saying: “If you have not been attacked then you have no legitimate claim to self defense…” What she actually said (verifiable from FOX’s own clip): “If you have not been attacked, if you have no legitimate claim to self defense, if it’s pre-emptive, that’s by Nuremberg standards a war crime. We should not commit war crimes. We should not be engaged in the illegal war in Iraq …”
A Refutation of Bill O’Reilly:
On a Monday, Jan. 29th segment called “Behind the
Get-Out-of-Iraq Movement” about last weekend’s massive anti-war protests, Bill
O”Reilly had the audacity to act as though he has it all right about the Iraq
war and the anti-war movement had it all wrong.
O”Reilly and FOX News never questioned Bush’s blatant lies
used to justify war on Iraq,
and still refuse to acknowledge that the Bush administration was knowingly
lying to justify the war. Nor have they
reported on the incredible suffering the Iraqi people have had to endure at the
hands of the US
war, from the bombing of population centers, use of chemical weapons, torture,
and massacres of civilians. But now O”Reilly
wants to flip the script and act like out of some great concern for the
well-being of the Iraqi people he is against the United
States getting out of Iraq,
whereas the anti-war movement
is not dealing with the consequences of withdrawal. Reality could not
be further from this claim. The consequences of the war have been
horrific
for the Iraqi people.
To get a clear picture of this, let’s look at some of the
lies Bill O”Reilly tells.
Lie #1:
O”Reilly: “Now many of the protesters say the Iraq war is illegal and immoral. Of
course, they are absolutely wrong about the illegal part. After the first Gulf
war, Saddam signed a
cease-fire, which among other things, allowed the United Nations to
inspect his military operations. Saddam violated that part of the cease-fire 17
times.”
Reality:
Under international law, and as established by the Nuremburg Tribunals,
invading a country when it’s not in self-defense and doesn’t have the consent
of the United Nations is a war crime. The
Bush regime attacked Iraq knowing that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction,
posed no threat to the United States or other countries, and had nothing to do
with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. UN
weapons inspectors never found evidence of weapons of mass destruction and
never reported that Iraq
was posing a threat to other countries. Thus,
even taking O”Reilly’s claim that Iraq violated the cease-fire
agreement 17 times by restricting UN weapons inspectors as true still does not
make invading the country legal. Preemptive
war and regime change are not recognized by international law as legitimate
reasons to start a war.
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Want to know why the Iraq war is a war crime? Get the evidence from the Bush Crimes Commission. Click here to read the verdict. Click here to order a DVD of the hearings:  |
s far as the immorality of the Iraq
war, below are just a few of the war crimes the Bush regime has committed in
its conducted of the Iraq
war. If you don’t find these things
immoral, then perhaps you can get a job at FOX.
-
The torture seen in the pictures of Abu Ghraib was not the isolated actions
of a few soldiers, but policy ordered from the highest levels of government
(including by Rumsfeld), and now legalized by the Military Commissions
Act. While a handful of soldiers have been prosecuted and some cosmetic
changes have been made, reports of torture continue to come from US military
detention centers in Iraq.
-
US-led forces in Iraq have
attacked population centers. There were two major offensives on the city
of Fallujah in 2004, as well as on al-Qaim, Tal
Afar, Samarra
and Najaf. These attacks have resulted in many civilian casualties and
massive destruction of the urban physical infrastructure, reportedly cutting
off vital necessities including water and medical supplies. These siege
tactics are prohibited under Article 14 of the Second Protocol of the Geneva
Conventions.
-
On the night of Nov. 13 in Ramadi, at least 35 people were killed by US
military tanks firing on their homes. This is only the latest in several
massacres of civilians carried out by the US military that have come to
light, often after cover-ups. Other chilling examples include the murder
of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha on by US marines on Nov. 19, 2005, the
rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl along with her whole family in
Al-Mahmudiyah, and the murder of 11 Iraqis, including 5 children and a 75-year-old
grandmother, in Ishaqi on March 15, 2006.
-
White phosphorous chemicals, which burn people’s skin upon
contact, were used by the US
military on Iraqi people. An international treaty restricts the use of
white phosphorous, but the United
States refuses to sign the treaty.
American officials denied using the chemical until an Italian documentary aired
pictures of civilians who were clearly killed by white phosphorous.
Lie #2:
When Susan Sarandon told FOX “Do you know how many civilian casualties
there’s been already in Iraq?
650,000.”, O”Reilly responded “Six hundred fifty thousand? Well that’s Susan
Sarandon and the far left’s number. The
Brookings Institution, however, says about 59,000 Iraqi civilians were
killed as of last July. The U.N. number is 150,000.”
Reality:
In October of 2006, a group of scientists from John Hopkins
University working with their
counterparts in Iraq
released the results of a study into Iraq deaths caused by the war and
occupation in the British medical journal The
Lancet. Through employing cluster
population samples and going door to door in Iraqi neighborhoods (which no
other studies have done), the study found that an estimated 655,000 Iraqis had
been killed, with over 90% from violence, that would not have been if the war
hadn’t happened. The methods used to
arrive at this number are respected scientific population survey methods, and
no one has been able to refute this study with actual substantive evidence. The US government has even used the
same methods in medical studies. If O”Reilly
wants to claim that 655,000 is just the number claimed by the far left, he
needs to cite evidence as to why this study is wrong. Moreover, even if O”Reilly’s figures of
either 59,000 or 150,000 Iraqi civilian deaths were accurate, wouldn’t that be
a grave crime against humanity and reason to stop this unjust war?
Lie #3
O”Reilly claims that after the US
left Vietnam, three million
people were killed as a result (one million in Vietnam
and two million in Cambodia).
Reality:
First of all, O”Reilly conveniently skips over the fact that
millions of people were killed by the United States
in that war. Many estimates put the
number of deaths caused by the United
States at three million, with most of those
being civilians, and often the result of atrocities such as napalm, carpet
bombing, and massacres of whole villages.
So Bill O”Reilly gets it all wrong when he acts like the United States was doing wonderful things in Vietnam,
but after it pulled out, everything went bad.
As
far as the number of people killed after the US ended the war on Vietnam,
O”Reilly’s claim that one million people in Vietnam were killed is completely
unsubstantiated, and while undoubtedly some deaths occurred, it was nothing
like the one million O”Reilly claims (estimates put this more in the amount of
thousands).
In Cambodia, mass killings did ensue after Pol Pot’s
government took power, and it is difficult to obtain actual statistics for a
number of reasons, but estimates ranging from the hundreds of thousands to
1.5 million. This was undoubtedly a horrible situation for the people of Cambodia with much needless suffering.
But it must be made clear the continuing the US
war on Cambodia would not
have stopped the killing of Cambodian people, but in fact would have continued
it on a massive scale with the US
carpet bombing of Cambodia.
In
short, the unjust war the
Southeast Asia
was not going to help the people there, but only cause the killing of more
innocent people.
O”Reilly’s Logic: Whatever We Do Is Good
Aside from the blatant lies being put forward, O”Reilly is
demanding we accept a logic that can justify the worst of crimes: that what the
United States and the Bush administration does in the world is always good, and
cannot be questioned.
While it is true that if the US
pulled out of Iraq it would
be a chaotic situation with much suffering for the Iraq people, two things have to be
confronted about this:
1) This
chaotic situation, including the sectarian killings, were in large part caused
by the war that the Bush regime launched on Iraq, and have only gotten worse
with the ongoing occupation.2) Any
continued US military presence in Iraq will only bring about more
suffering for the Iraqi people. The US is not liberating the people of Iraq, but
committing war crimes on a massive scale.
Justifying War on Iran
O”Reilly also uses his critique of the anti-war movement to justify
attacking Iran, saying that
the US cannot “allow Iran to dominate the Persian
Gulf” or develop nuclear weapons.
Sean Penn gets it right when he told The
O”Reilly Factor that the conflict with Iran
is in part created by the fact that the US has nuclear weapons. Moreover, the Bush regime has openly
threatened to attack Iran
and potentially use nuclear weapons. When
asked whether a nuclear strike on Iran was a possibility, Bush has responded
“all options are on the table”.
Penn also pointed out that the Bush administration has
refused to negotiate with Iran,
which has also only furthered the conflict and closed the door to diplomatic
solutions.
Moreover, it must be said that who on earth is the Bush
regime (or its supporters like O”Reilly) to talk about not allowing Iran to
dominate the Persian Gulf when it is the Bush regime that has set out on a
mission to dominate the Middle East through military conquest?
The point here is not to say that the Iranian government
represents anything good or should be supported in any way, but that what the
Bush regime is doing is in fact waging an unjust war for empire, and in so doing
has only strengthened and unleashed Islamic fundamentalist forces like the
Iranian government.
The right thing to do in this situation is to oppose and
mobilize to stop the unjust wars (current and potential) our government is
waging in our names, and in so doing give support and heart to people all over
the globe who so urgently need and want the Bush regime to be stopped.
Mr. O”Reilly: please stop pretending you have some great
concern for the Iraqi people. If you
did, you would use your TV show to expose the horrible war crimes being
committed by your government and call on your viewers to mobilize to end this
war.