Vanochtend was Daan de Wit te gast in het tv-programma Ochtendspits om vragen te beantwoorden naar aanleiding van Dossier Mexicaanse griep. Dit boek heeft het doel een dossier te leveren voor een parlementaire enquête rond de Mexicaanse-griepaffaire.
Bekijk de uitzending (12'00).
Bekijk de website bij het boek.

The first group of people to be targeted in a military conflict is the public. They are the first victims, for in a military conflict war is only one stage of the battle. The biggest battle is for the hearts and minds of the public at large.

The CIA Red Cell recommendations for influencing the European public into continuing their support for the mission in Afghanistan was quite remarkable. But the reality is that the contents of the document prove the rule, not the exception. From my book The Next War - The Attack on Iran - A Preview I took some excerpts that show that the CIA document is not quite unique

What's special about the case of the document is not so much its content, but the fact that it is now available for all to see. In a military conflict, war is only one stage of the struggle. The biggest struggle is for the hearts and minds of the public at large.

Zich basererend op ruim 1500 bronnen toont Daan de Wit in zijn boek De Volgende Oorlog de voorbereidingen voor een oorlog tegen Iran.

Op maandag 25 februari 2008 leidt Daan de Wit van DeepJournal een discussie over de rol, de werking en het effect van de massamedia. De bijeenkomst in Den Haag is gratis toegankelijk en een ieder mag eraan deelnemen, dus kom ook. Het gesprek wordt georganiseerd door het Institute of Social Studies (ISS), de voertaal is Engels. Eraan wordt deelgenomen door vertegenwoordigers van zowel de reguliere als de alternatieve media. Onder voorbehoud zijn aanwezig dagblad de Pers, de Wereldomroep, RTL, SBS, ZoomIn.tv, Zapruder, IndyMedia en SocioMedia.

Sometimes journalism is not doing what it should do. Problems of this type can be seen for example in the coverage of September 11th, the lead-up to the Iraq war and the coverage of the War on Terror. But on a less serious level, things don't always go well either. A few examples.

Heeft RTL-Nieuws het geluid bij een item over de doop van prinses Ariane (20 oktober) gemanipuleerd zodat de demonstratie tegen de vader van Máxima niet was te horen? Een lezer van DeepJournal meent van wel en voert bewijsmateriaal aan in de vorm van uitleg, videobeelden en een foto met een overzicht van de situatie.

Onze democratie is afhankelijk voor haar functioneren van een goede informatievoorziening door de media. Ondanks de overvloed aan beschikbare informatie laten die ons toch vaak in de steek door veel relevante feiten niet te rapporteren. Docs at the Docks signaleert dit probleem en probeert er iets aan te doen. Maar wat is er de reden van dat dit nodig is? Wat verklaart de opbloei van de Nieuwe Media en de burgerjournalistiek? Laten de reguliere media steken vallen? Het zijn enkele van de prikkelende vragen die aan de gasten van deze avond zullen worden voorgelegd.

The flood of reports began with the attacks in London and Glasgow at the end of last month, at which critics pointed to the strategic interests at stake for the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the American President George W. Bush. The Scotsman Brown had just been appointed prime minister, and he portrayed himself as being tough in the wake of the attacks in Scotland and England, which took place right before the commemoration of the attacks of 7/7, 2005. Bush underscored the coverage leading up to the important decision by the Senate last Tuesday night to continue the war in Iraq.

Graag willen we je hierbij uitnodigen voor de presentatieavond van Docs at the Docks op maandag 9 juli aanstaande om 20.00 uur op de NDSMwerf te Amsterdam.

Former Dutch UN observer, Colonel (ret.) Jan Mühren, said last Monday on the Dutch current affairs program Nova that in the run up to the the Six-Day War Israel provoked most border incidents as part of its strategy to annex more land. Jan Mühren, who was stationed interchangeably at the Golan Heights and the West Bank in 1966 and 1967, says Israel was not under siege by Arab countries. Mühren said neither Jordan nor Syria had any intention to start a war with Israel.

Daan de Wit: 'So it looks like you see a distinction between the neoconservatives who are currently in power in America, and the rest of America's elite. In your mind, it's not the case that the neoconservatives represent the American elite...
Stan van Houcke: Absolutely not, the neoconservatives are bunch of radicals. They've hijacked America. And not just the America of the poor, because the America of the poor is always getting hijacked by the elite. It's now the American elite that's also been hijacked and is getting dragged along.
Daan de Wit: Do you still have hope for the future? Because you're saying that these neoconservatives don't represent the elite as a whole in America and might end up being held in check...
Stan van Houcke: No, I sure don't. It's going to be a violent mess, it's going to be total chaos. Your children are going to be brought into a world that you wouldn't want your children brought into.

Stan van Houcke: 'And one of the fundamental problems that keeps getting worse is the fact that journalism operates without a larger context. [...] Make no mistake about this one thing: the people you see on TV who do the reporting - they're working there for a reason. I'm not working there. They'll never see me there, though they would never ask for me either, just like they'll never ask for a number of other people as well. It's like a virus - the 'healthy immune system' of the media expels people like me.'

The confessions made by KSM while taking responsibility for the planning of more than thirty attacks raise the following question: Was it Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who confessed responsibility for 9/11? And while considering the coverage of Mohammed, still more questions arise, such as: Was he ever extradited to the U.S.? And is he still actually alive?

Cees Hamelink: It's idiocy anyway, to not be allowed to take more than 100 ml onboard a plane. It suggests that you can take 100 ml of nitroglycerin in your bottle with which you blow up a whole bloody airplane. So it's absolute rubbish. It's meant to scare the living daylights out of us, it's meant to keep us alert and to keep alive a notion that terrorism is really dangerous and it is necessary to spent an enormous amount of money. Because mind you, terrorism, or whatever it was in the WTC in September 2001, wasn't the defined as a criminal act. If it had been a criminal act, it would be clear what we should do: we send the police after the bastards and get them behind bars! But now it was defined as a war and a war needs an enormous amount of investments, needs an enormous defense expenditure. And in order to legitimize that, you make people scared; it was what Goering said after the second World War: We could make anyone believe whatever we told them, because we made them afraid.

The official theory regarding the events of September 11th is a bad conspiracy theory. It's a shaky theory any way you look at it, it even runs counter to some laws of nature, and it relies entirely on the shock effect felt by the public, and in turn the media, for its success. Sometimes journalists are just people. They also felt the shock of 9/11, and they also went along with the Bush administration's flimsy theory. Meanwhile five years have gone by, and the Old Media are lagging behind the facts that are being presented by the New Media. How was this possible?

The official theory regarding the events of September 11th is a bad conspiracy theory. It's a shaky theory any way you look at it, it even runs counter to some laws of nature, and it relies entirely on the shock effect felt by the public, and in turn the media, for its success. Sometimes journalists are just people. They also felt the shock of 9/11, and they also went along with the Bush administration's flimsy theory.  Meanwhile five years have gone by, and the Old Media are lagging behind the facts that are being presented by the New Media.

Het succes van de avond was groter dan voorzien. Veel mensen zijn geweigerd aan de deur. Mijn excuses aan een ieder die niet werd toegelaten. Er wordt gewerkt aan een beeldverslag van de avond, dat zodra het beschikbaar is te zien zal zijn op DeepJournal.

Eens in de zoveel tijd neemt DeepJournal de media eens onder de loep. Veel van de aannames die we maken, hebben hun oorsprong in de media en kunnen niet altijd zonder problemen de toets der kritiek doorstaan. Dat is een probleem omdat die aannames bijvoorbeeld tot gevolg hebben dat er doden en gewonden vallen in Irak en dat, zo schrijft de NRC dinsdag, de 'bevoegdheden steeds uitgebreider' worden van de overheid om haar burgers in de gaten te houden.