From the staged toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square to the landing of the US president in a flight suit for his "mission accomplished" speech on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, to the ban on media photographs of coffins being offloaded at Dover Air Force Base, the Bush administration has sought relentlessly to manufacture and control the images from the US war in Iraq.

The aim has always been to mask the predatory and criminal nature of this war and promote the phony pretexts upon which it was launched and the false propaganda about its supposed aims: democracy and liberation, rather than oil and US global hegemony.

To the extent that this effort enjoyed partial and temporary success, it was due in large measure to the active assistance of the corporate-controlled media. It was none other than Bush's former press secretary Scott McClellan who described the US media as "complicit enablers" in "spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies." (See "Ex-Bush spokesman: White House fed war propaganda to a ‘complicit' media").

Now, a member of the Iraqi media has turned the tables, providing through a courageous act of protest an image that tells an essential truth about the US war of aggression. It is an image that will endure.

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