By John Pilger
11 September 2008

Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.

First question: Why are "we" in Afghanistan? Answer: "To try to help in the country's rebuilding program." Who says so? Huw Edwards, the BBC's principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.

Second question: Why are "we" in Iraq? Answer: To "plant a western-style open democracy." Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC defense correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. To prove her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org with 2,700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.

Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been researching Bush's speeches for "evidence" of noble democratic reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilization. Says he: "The 'D' word is not there, but the phrase 'united, stable and free' [is] clearly an allusion to it." After all, he says, the invasion of Iraq "was launched as 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'." Moreover,20says the BBC man, "in Bush's 1 May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi transition to democracy ... These examples show that these were on Bush's mind before, during and after the invasion."

Try to laugh, please.

By Ian Burrell
10 March 2008
The Independent

Given the pain suffered by the BBC over its previous attempts to decipher the events that led to the invasion of Iraq, some might be surprised by its plans to produce a series of dramatic reconstructions of some of the critical stories in the days prior to the war.

Yet Newsnight viewers remain so fascinated and exercised by this period that the writer Ronan Bennett was hired to make 10 Days to War, a series of eight short films that will attempt – through the medium of drama – to enhance understanding of what actually went on.