Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs
John Pilger
Language: English
Pages: 425
ISBN: 0224062883
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
[The publisher given inside the book details is Random House, but on amazon the publisher is listed as Vintage Digital. This file was converted from retail azw3 to mobi, in order to meet the request. If you'd like the original file, let me know.]
Tell Me No Lies is a celebration of the very best investigative journalism, and includes writing by some of the greatest practitioners of the craft: Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre; Paul Foot on the Lockerbie cover-up; Wilfred Burchett, the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima following the atomic bombing; Israeli journalist Amira Hass, reporting from the Gaza Strip in the 1990s; Gunter Wallraff, the great German undercover reporter; Jessica Mitford on 'The American Way of Death'; Martha Gelhorn on the liberation of the death camp at Dachau.
The book - a selection of articles, broadcasts and books extracts that revealed important and disturbing truths - ranges from across many of the critical events, scandals and struggles of the past fifty years. Along the way it bears witness to epic injustices committed against the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor and Palestine.
John Pilger sets each piece of reporting in its context and introduces the collection with a passionate essay arguing that the kind of journalism he celebrates here is being subverted by the very forces that ought to be its enemy. Taken as a whole, the book tells an extraordinary 'secret history' of the modern era. It is also a call to arms to journalists everywhere - before it is too late.
British and American Governments knew perfectly well what happened at Lockerbie, and who was responsible, but that neither would say a word about it; That much of the ‘wilder speculation’ in the press about the bombing was perfectly true. The wildest (and most convincing) of the conspiracy theories about Lockerbie which had circulated up to that time was that certain luggage from Frankfurt airport had been designated ‘no go’ by the CIA, which was organising a drugs run to the United States to
Israelis were killed in the Strip alone, and some 500 Palestinians were wounded. Israel blamed Arafat for orchestrating the demonstrations but to people in the occupied territories, and in Gaza in particular, the outbreak seemed inevitable. People responded to the call out of a need to communicate their frustration to the world. At the time, my friend Abu Basel was on his way to Gaza City. When he saw the clusters of men outside Kfar Darom, the Jewish settlement, he stopped his taxi and walked
sanitation companies. They earn hourly wages that are about one-third lower than those of regular production employees. And their work is so hard and so horrendous that words seem inadequate to describe it. The men and women who now clean the nation’s slaughterhouses may arguably have the worst job in the United States. ‘It takes a really dedicated person,’ a former member of a cleaning crew told me, ‘or a really desperate person to get the job done.’ When a sanitation crew arrives at a
more dangerous – when line speeds increased and illegal immigrants replaced skilled workers – the federal government greatly reduced the enforcement of health and safety laws. OSHA had long been despised by the nation’s manufacturers, who considered the agency a source of meddlesome regulations and unnecessary red tape. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, OSHA was already underfunded and understaffed: its 1,300 inspectors were responsible for the safety of more than five million
children sat on one side of the room, palais-style, the men on the other. It was a lot of fun, especially when a competing jazz band next door struck up with ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’. But when a cassette of the much-loved Khmer singer, Sin Sisamouth, was played, people stopped dancing and walked to the windows and wept. He had been forced to dig his own grave and to sing the Khmer Rouge anthem, which is about blood and death. After that, he was beaten to death. It brought home to me that the