George Orwell described this as "words falling upon the facts like soft snow, blurring their outlines and covering up all the details". Thanks to the freest press on earth, most Americans, according to a national poll, believe Iraq was behind the 11 September attacks. "We have been the victims of the biggest cover-up manoeuvre of all time," says Jane Harman, a rare voice in Congress. But that, too, is an illusion.
The verboten truth is that the unprovoked attack on Iraq and the looting of its resources is America's 73rd colonial intervention. These, together with hundreds of bloody covert operations, have been covered up by a system and a veritable tradition of state-sponsored lies that reach back to the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans and the attendant frontier myths; and the Spanish-American war, which broke out after Spain was falsely accused of sinking an American warship, the Maine, and war fever was whipped up by the Hearst newspapers; and the non-existent "missile gap" between the US and the Soviet Union, which was based on fake documents given to journalists in 1960 and served to accelerate the nuclear arms race; and four years later, the non-existent Vietnamese attack on two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin for which the media demanded reprisals, giving President Johnson the pretext he wanted to bomb North Vietnam.
In the late 1970s, a silent media allowed President Carter to arm Indonesia as it slaughtered the East Timorese, and to begin secret support for the mujahedin, from which came the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the 1980s, the manufacture of an absurdity, the "threat" to America from popular movements in Central America, notably the Sandinistas in tiny Nicaragua, allowed President Reagan to arm and support terrorist groups such as the Contras, leaving an estimated 70,000 dead. That George W Bush's America gives refuge to hundreds of Latin American torturers, favoured murderous dictators and anti-Castro hijackers, terrorists by any definition, is almost never reported. Neither is the work of a "training school" at Fort Benning, Georgia, whose graduates would be the pride of Osama Bin Laden.
Americans, says Time magazine, live in "an eternal present". The point is, they have no choice. The"mainstream" media are now dominated by Rupert Murdoch's Fox television network, which had a good war. The Federal Communications Commission, run by Colin Powell's son Michael, is finally to deregulate television so that Fox and four other conglomerates control 90 per cent of the terrestrial and cable audience. Moreover, the leading 20 internet sites are now owned by the likes of Fox, Disney, AOL Time Warner and a clutch of other giants. Just 14 companies attract 60 per cent of the time all American web-users spend online.
