Posts filed under 'Media'

Abu Ghraib and other Iraq abuses reported long before photos, but no one listened

On November 1, 2003, Associated Press reporter Charles Hanley wrote of the terrible abusive conditions in US detention centers in Iraq. As noted by Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher, the story was virtually ignored. No major paper published it and no other reporters followed it up. I’m proud to say that my Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report contained a link to the Hanley piece. As I quoted from the article on November 2 2003:

In Iraq’s American detention camps, forbidden talk can earn a prisoner hours bound and stretched out in the sun, and detainees swinging tent poles rise up regularly against their jailers, according to recently released Iraqis.

I’ll post here Mitchell’s article on this, which includes his May 1 2004 [after the Abu Ghraib photos came out and the scandal broke] interview with Hanley, followed by the original 2003 article. In the 2004 interview Hanley presciently said:

My gut tells me the story will spread outward to Guantanamo and Afghanistan and to other prisons in Iraq. I guess it already is.

Imagine how history could have been different if more of the press had done their job instead of acting as conduits for military propaganda and US lies.

Greg Mitchell’s piece:

Four Years Later: Why Did It Take So Long for the Press to Break Abu Ghraib Story?

Charles J. Hanley, Pulitzer winner for the Associated Press, uncovered abuses at the infamous prison months before the scandal really exploded. Why were so many others so slow to act?

By Greg Mitchell

(May 08, 2008) — Four years ago this month, as May unfolded, each day brought fresh horrors, images, or details about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq. Pictures of shackled and hooded prisoners gave way to detainees on leashes, cowering before snarling dogs, or just plain beaten and bruised.

On May 10, 2004, an Iraqi human rights official charged that American overseer Paul Bremer had been repeatedly informed about abuses at Abu Ghraib. The New Yorker revealed that Donald Rumsfeld personally okayed a set of procedures that led to the abuses. Several major newspapers called for Rumsfeld to quit.

At that time, in a column, I disclosed how Pulitzer-winning correspondent Charles J. Hanley at The Associated Press had actually “broken” the Abu Ghraib story months before it came out via The New Yorker and other outlets—but the rest of the media had paid it little mind. This led me to ask, Is the press trying to make up for lost time once again?

The media was now bursting with accounts of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, but where were they the previous fall when evidence of wrongdoing started to emerge—when a public accounting might have halted what turned out to be the worst of the incidents? “It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source,” Hanley told me.

Hanley started looking into accusations of abuse when he returned to Baghdad for his latest tour of press duty (he had earlier broken several key stories and worked on AP’s early revelations about heavy civilian casualties). It led to a series of pieces, culminating in a shocking report on Nov. 1, 2003, based on interviews with six released detainees.

He was still amazed that apparently no one else quickly looked into the allegations, and no major newspaper picked up on his reporting after it appeared. Why? “That’s something you’d have to ask editors at major newspapers,” he said. “But there does seem to be a very strong prejudice toward investing U.S. official statements with credibility while disregarding statements from almost any other source—and in this current situation, Iraqi sources.”

The Hanley stories that fall told of detainees being attacked by dogs, humiliated by guards, and spending days with hoods over their heads, now familiar images in the American—and Arab—mind. Even after the Pentagon promised an investigation in January, and announced arrests in March, Hanley was “surprised there was not more interest and investigative reporting done. It’s hard to fault my colleagues in Baghdad considering the pressure and danger they feel. Many stories are missed—that’s the way it is in war. But clearly there is a mindset in the U.S. media that slows the aggressive pursuit of stories that make the U.S. military look bad. The greatest fall down, of course, was the uncritical and often ignorant swallowing of claims about weapons of mass destruction presented by often unidentified sources.”

A partial transcript of our discussion in may 2004 follows.

When did you get involved in the prison angle?

Last September I arrived in Baghdad for another tour. What sparked my interest was an obscure British Web site which cited Amnesty International saying it had gotten some information about possible abuses.

I set about trying to locate released detainees. I think my first approach was to defense lawyer-types from the Iraqi League of Lawyers. They gave me some secondhand information. While working on that, I talked to the military officer at the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] who was responsible for the prison program. He let out that they had just shut down Camp Cropper at Baghdad airport, which had the worst reputation for abuse at that time.

They did not announce it, they just told me that in passing. I can only surmise that they did not want to draw attention to Cropper.

I did that story on Oct. 5, mainly about the closing of Cropper but also cited Amnesty’s contention about physical abuse and their protests. Then on Oct. 9, I did a longer piece based mainly on the lawyers and what they were finding inside. The president of the Lawyers League was a former political prisoner under the Baathist regime. They had so many families coming to them saying husbands or sons did nothing, they had been held for months, and couldn’t even find where they were. Only a few of the lawyers had gotten inside. Of course we now know, from the Red Cross, that a large percentage of the inmates were mistakenly imprisoned.

What led you to the released detainees?

The key was finding the right person at the Iraqi equivalent of the Red Cross, the Red Crescent Society. Then they began leading me to released detainees. In the end, with my interpreter, we spoke to six of the former detainees and they were from all three major camps—Cropper at the airport, Bucca in the south, and Abu Ghraib. One of them might have been in all three. We spent hours talking to them. Nothing like what we found had been published at that time, as I found out in a check of our database.

After writing the big piece, we held it and presented the U.S. command in Baghdad with a list of specific questions: Were certain kinds of deprivation and physical punishment used against detainees, as we were told, and why? How many deaths had occurred, and what were the circumstances? What types of weapons were used to put down disturbances? How many cases had there been of discipline or prosecution because of abuse? We learned that the MP (military police) brigade had sent responses to the Baghdad command, but they were never released to us, and there was no explanation given. Around this time, the MP general, Janis Karpinski, told an Arab TV interviewer the detainees were treated humanely. We quoted her on that.

So what happened after your AP story came out on Nov. 1?

The play was very disappointing. A few papers ran it, like the Tulsa World and Akron Beacon Journal. It got wide use in Germany. None of the major U.S. newspapers published the story. And I was surprised to see that none of them followed up.

Why do you think no one else jumped on it?

One reason is simple and practical—it’s a difficult story to get, in a chaotic city like Baghdad. Although, in the end, simply realizing that the Red Crescent Society was the Red Cross liaison could have occurred to others. But the other thing is, there was no official structure to the story. It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source. A handout from CPA eventually happened in January, but even after that there was not much pursuit.

The story did not pop out at everybody. But there was a lot going on elsewhere. Clearly there is a lot of indiscriminate killing going on in Iraq in general and there’s little focus on that. It’s not like the only human rights story is behind the walls. But the one behind the walls is toughest to get out.

Why didn’t more papers just run your story, when it was handed to them, then?

That’s something you’d have to ask editors at major newspapers. But I do think there’s often disproportionate weight of credibility given to the statements of U.S. officials. There seems to be a tendency at times to discount the statements of others—people like Iraqi former detainees—if they’re not somehow supported by a U.S. source, or perhaps by photographs.

Rumsfeld said this week the military, not the media, reported the Abu Ghraib abuses.

This is strictly correct if you’re talking about the specific abuses shown in some of the photos. But the AP provided specifics on other abuses throughout the system many months earlier and at the time was unable to get the U.S. military command to comment on them.

What do you think will happen now?

My gut tells me the story will spread outward to Guantanamo and Afghanistan and to other prisons in Iraq. I guess it already is.
*
Greg Mitchell’s new book “So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits–and the President–Failed on Iraq” explores this and other issues related to the war. It includes a preface by Bruce Springsteen and a foreword by Joseph L. Galloway.

Hanley’s November 1, 2003 article:

AP Enterprise: Former Iraqi detainees tell of riots, punishment in the sun, good Americans and pitiless ones


Associated Press

9:36 a.m. November 1, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq – In Iraq’s American detention camps, forbidden talk can earn a prisoner hours bound and stretched out in the sun, and detainees swinging tent poles rise up regularly against their jailers, according to recently released Iraqis.

In these secretive islands in a scorched landscape, “they don’t respect anyone, old or young,” Rahad Naif said of his U.S. Army guards. He and others told of detainees in wheelchairs, and of a man carried into a stifling hot tent in his sickbed. “They humiliate everybody.”

Naif, 31, is one of three brothers – butchers from the east Baghdad slums – who were thrown into the three biggest detention centers by the Americans in July after a nasty quarrel with an influential neighbor. They never faced charges; the last brother was finally freed Oct. 15.

The camps and prisons hold a mixed population: curfew-breakers and drivers who tried to evade U.S. checkpoints, suspected common criminals, anti-U.S. resistance fighters, and many of deposed President Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party leadership.

A Naif brother released in September, Hassan, 32, said there are “good people” among the U.S. guards, like an older man the Iraqis respectfully dubbed “al-Haji” – “Pilgrim.” Ex-detainees also say conditions improve at times, as new underwear, toothbrushes and other supplies arrive; some facilities are better than others, and none compares with Saddam’s bloody political prisons. On Oct. 1, the most notorious U.S. center, the Baghdad airport’s overcrowded Camp Cropper, was closed.

For the third brother, however, the bitterness is too fresh.

“They confined us like sheep,” the newly freed Saad Naif, 38, said of the Americans. “They hit people. They humiliated people.”

Although details cannot be otherwise confirmed, the accounts by a half dozen former detainees in Associated Press interviews corroborated each other on key points, and meshed with what Amnesty International has heard from released Iraqis. The human rights group has accounts of detainee uprisings, punishment by exposure to the sun, and other examples of what it calls “inhumane conditions.”

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the U.S. Army commander of Iraq’s detention facilities, has said prisoners are treated humanely and fairly. Specific questions about AP’s ex-detainee accounts were submitted to the U.S. command on Oct. 18, but no response has been received.

Two pending U.S. military legal cases may offer a glimpse at problems in the detention system: In one, four soldiers are accused of beating Iraqi prisoners; in the other, two Marines are charged in connection with an Iraqi’s death in detention.

The number of prisoners is in dispute. The U.S. command says it holds 5,500, but some lawyers and other Iraqis believe the figure is higher. In toppling the Saddam government last April, the U.S.-British invasion force inherited a legal vacuum and began incarcerating ordinary criminals with prisoners of war and less well-defined detainees.

Iraq’s chief U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, says he has moved to speed up release of unjustly held Iraqis, and Iraqi lawyers and judges are slowly taking on criminal cases. The International Committee of the Red Cross, responsible under international law for inspecting wartime prison camps, says the listing and processing of detainees has improved in recent weeks.

The Baghdad spokeswoman for the ICRC, whose representatives are the only outsiders allowed into the camps, said the organization’s policy does not allow any public comment on any abuse or other poor conditions detected. Nada Doumani noted, however, that the law – the Geneva Conventions – forbids all physical pressure on detainees.

The ICRC’s decision to reduce its Baghdad staff, because of the bombing of its headquarters, may limit its ability to visit detention sites.

Baathists deemed “high-value detainees” by the Americans have been concentrated at a detention site in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca.

Before he was moved to Camp Bucca, one of them, former Parliament speaker Saadoun Hammadi, shared a tent with more than 100 men at the Baghdad airport camp and “was in miserable condition, very thin,” said a former tentmate, Hassan Ali Muslim.

Hammadi, a man in his late 60s who once served as prime minister, “didn’t speak with anybody. In the morning and afternoon, he walked alone for an hour, back and forth along the fence,” Muslim said. The famous Baath politician was dressed in shorts, his dyed hair had gone white, and he’d grown a long beard, the freed detainee said.

At Camp Bucca, in the wastes near Basra, “we were suffering, sitting in the desert,” said one of the Naif brothers, Rahad, who was released from Bucca on Sept. 22.

Water was the first concern for internees everywhere, especially as summer temperatures topped 120 degrees. There was never enough to drink and wash with, they said.

“They’d give us hot water while we’d see them drinking cold water,” said Ra’id Mohammed Hassan, 41, freed from Bucca on Oct. 15 after two months’ detention for having a weapon in his car.

Rahad Naif said 1,000 men in his section at Bucca had to share just 10 water taps. “They would come, especially the Kuwaiti translators, and throw ice into the sand just to make us suffer psychologically,” Naif said.

At the airport’s Camp Cropper, Muslim, a 28-year-old factory worker, tried to keep a bottle filled and hidden from thieves. When the Americans finally erected a tank for showers, there was so little water the detainees got into vicious arguments over it, he said. Skin diseases became common, he said.

The ex-prisoners, uniformly, said the sick men among them were the camps’ saddest sight. “There were crippled people at Bucca. Some were in wheelchairs,” said Rahad Naif. He said two died in the next tent while he was there.

“At the airport, they brought in a chronically ill man in a bed and put him near me. He was very sick,” Hassan Naif said. One crippled man had to be carried up the steps to a toilet, he said.

The prisoners staged protests or hunger strikes demanding better care for their sick comrades. At other times, they would erupt in anger over their own plight.

“Twenty or so of us would start shouting, ‘Get us out! Let us go!’,” said Muslim, who was freed Sept. 20 after two months’ detention, accused of attempted carjacking.

“The demonstrations happened almost every day at Bucca,” said Rahad Naif, who described scenes in which military police countered with the tools of U.S. prison guards.

“Sometimes we’d fight the Americans with tent poles. The Americans would come at us behind riot shields, firing plastic bullets and electric pistols (stun guns). We can’t fight against that. We knew they’d win. We’d never manage to get out.”

The ex-detainees said the common punishment, even for such lesser infractions as shouting over to the next tent or stealing food, was “The Gardens” – a razor-wire enclosure where prisoners were made to lie face down on the burning sand for two or three hours, hands bound.

They said they would also be punished by having rations reduced or withdrawn, or by being denied two staples – cigarettes and tea. They were allotted two cigarettes a day.

At Camp Cropper, Muslim said, he endured four days in solitary confinement, in a dark, sweltering 3-by-6-foot cell, after a confrontation with a notoriously tough guard over cigarettes.

“It felt like my skin was melting,” he said of the heat in the cell. A doctor came on the second day to check on him, and the Americans apologized after he was freed, Muslim said. The guard responsible was moved elsewhere, he said.

“There are some good ones who don’t like to punish people,” Hassan Naif said of his time at Cropper. “There was an old black soldier we called ‘al-Haji’ who argued with the other Americans if they weren’t respecting our rights.”

But much of what detainees saw was intolerable, Naif said, “especially when we saw Iraqi women punished in the same way as men.”

When one detainee shouted to his sister in a nearby women’s tent, the guards punished the woman, Naif said. Seeing her lying bound in the sun, the brother angrily started to cross the razor wire ringing his tent, “and they shot him in the shoulder,” Naif said.

“The worst thing was their treatment of the women,” said Saad Naif, who spent time both at the airport and at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where tents spread across the prison yards.

“Innocent women were kept for months in the same clothes,” he said. He said he remembered in particular an elderly woman “whose hands were tied up and she was lying in the dust.”

Saad Naif said he saw a prisoner shot dead at Abu Ghraib when he approached the razor wire.

Amnesty International says it has received credible reports of such shootings. AP queried the U.S. command here about deaths in the camps, but got no response.

Not knowing what they were charged with and when they might be released, detainees grew angrier and more depressed, said Ziad Tarik, 24, a friend who was swept up with the three Naif brothers after the fateful quarrel and spent more than a month at Abu Ghraib before abruptly being freed.

“They interrogated me about Saddam’s family, about al-Qaeda terrorists, about weapons markets – things I know nothing about,” he said. “I thought they’d ask me about my case. Why was I arrested?”

“There’s no law,” Rahad Naif said. “It’s up to them. It’s arbitrary.”

Tarik gave an example: An Iraqi colonel was released from Abu Ghraib, but the Americans still hold his wife and, according to Tarik, “she didn’t do anything.” That account could not be verified.

The Naif brothers’ mother, black-veiled Fawzia Ibrahim, 59, said she feels “like a bird” since their release, but she dreads the memory of the mid-July night when 16 U.S. soldiers, with Iraqi police, stormed into her house to take her sons away.

“Death would be better than the Americans again!” she said.

Ex-detainee Muslim says he knows of a worse fate – to have been imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, as his late father was for three months in 1995. Torture and summary execution became routine in the Baathist political prison system.

“Compared to Saddam, the Americans are better,” he said.

Add comment May 11th, 2008

Media “military analysts” were deployed in 2005 to counter Guantanamo truth

Glenn Greenwald in Salon shows how the Pentagon/TV Networks’ psyops program against the American public included 2005 reports denying the reality of Guantanamo, after Amnesty International described it as “the gulag of our time.” A group of so-called independent “military analysts” went to GTMO.

They spent a grand total of 3 hours and 55 minutes at the Guantanamo detention facilities, with almost one hour of that devoted to lunch with the troops. That was the sum total of their grand tour of the detention facility: less than 3 hours. And then the propaganda campaign to malign and dispute the extensive, amply documented findings of Amnesty was unleashed in full. [Emphasis from Greenwald]

AS one of these “analysts,”Gen. Don Sheppard, said:

“Did we drink the ‘Government Kool-Aid?’ — of course, and that was the purpose of the trip.”

This “analyst” witnessed a show-interrogation and reported on CNN how wonderful the interrogations were at GTMO:

NGUYEN: Let’s back up for just a moment, because you said you said watched an interrogation.SHEPPERD: Yes.

NGUYEN: Kind of explain to us how that played out. And were there any instances of abuse or possible abuse?

SHEPPERD: Absolutely not. These — when I sat and watched them, I want to be very careful in describing them. And I don’t want to describe how we watched or anything of that sort. But basically, you’re able to observe interrogations. They have various ways of monitoring the interrogations and what have you and letting you see what’s going on. With the interrogations that we watched were interrogators, there were translators that translated for the detainee and there were also intelligence people in there.

And they’re basically asking questions. They just ask the same questions over a long period of time. They get information about the person’s family, where they’re from, other people they knew. All the type of things that you would want in any kind of criminal investigation. And these were all very cordial, very professional. There was laughing in two of them that we…

NGUYEN: Laughing in an interrogation?

SHEPPERD: … in the two of them that we watched. Yes, indeed. It’s not — it’s not like the impression that you and I have of what goes on in an interrogation, where you bend people’s arms and mistreat people. They’re trying to establish a firm professional relationship where they have respect for each other and can talk to each other. And yes, there were laughing and humor going on in a couple of these things. And I’m talking about a remark made where someone will smirk or laugh or chuckle.

NGUYEN: All right. General Don Shepperd, we appreciate your time and that look inside Gitmo, with you being there on this tour. Thank you for that. [Emphasis from Greenwald]

Of course, American Psychological Association Presidents Ronald Levant and Gerald Koocher both went on similar demo tours and returned to tell us all they learned. But American Psychiatric Association President Sharfstein was along with APA President Levant and had no trouble realizing what was happening. Apparently, the wool can only be pulled over the eyes of those willing to shut them and turn off all critical faculties.

Add comment May 9th, 2008

Media Alert!

I will be interviewed on KPFK, Pacifica Radio for fouthern California, tonight at around 5:45 Pacific time, 8:45 Eastern time. the topic will be my recent article The Involuntary Drugging of US Detainees. Tune in at Los Angeles, 90.7F and Santa Barbara 98.7 FM. or listen online at www.kpfk.org and click “listen live.”

Add comment April 29th, 2008

Soldz WBIX Radio Interview: Does Torture Work?

My March 22, 2008 interview on the WBIX show Talking Things Through with Bob Stolzberg & Bill Pike is now online for listening: Does Torture Work?

Add comment April 27th, 2008

The Tube

A reminder from Network:

Add comment April 21st, 2008

Thomas Frank: Obama’s touch of class

Thomas Frank, of What’s the Matter With Kansas fame, on the Obama comments and what’s the matter with America. [From the Wall Street Journal, where Frank will soon have a weekly column.]:

Obama’s Touch of Class

By Thomas Frank

Allow me to introduce myself. According to the general clucking of the national punditry, my 2004 book – “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” – is supposed to have persuaded Barack Obama to describe the yeomanry of Pennsylvania as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or . . . anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Mr. Obama’s offense is so grave that the custodians of our national consensus have elevated it to gatehood: “Bittergate.”

In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama’s tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch guns and irrationally oppose free-trade deals. In point of fact, I oppose many of those trade deals myself.

But I know one thing with absolute certainty. The media flurry kicked up by Mr. Obama’s gaffe powerfully confirms an argument I actually did make: That as they return again to the culture war, what the soldiers on all sides are doing is talking about class without actually addressing the economic basis of the subject.

Consider, for example, the one fateful charge that the punditry and the other candidates have fastened upon Mr. Obama – “elitism.” No one means by this term that Mr. Obama is a wealthy person (he wasn’t until last year), or even that he is an ally of the wealthy (although he might be that). What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market.

“Elitism” is thus a crime not of society’s actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has “a dash of Harvard disease,” proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of “supercilious” Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here’s a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers’ organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton’s own sins, when these are our standards? Didn’t he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes’ folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little . . . bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then?

That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People. That “bitterness” is an ugly and inadmissible emotion. That “divisiveness” is a thing to be shunned at all costs.

Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement’s job is to “organize discontent.” And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry.

Consider the shower of right-wing love that descended in February on small-town newspaper columnist Gary Hubbell, who penned this year’s great eulogy of the “angry white man,” the “man’s man” who “works hard,” who “knows that his wife is more emotional than rational,” and who also, happily, knows how to “change his own oil and build things.”

This stock character, unchanged since his star turns in the culture-war battles of the last few decades, is said to be as furious as ever, and still blaming the same villains for his problems: namely intellectuals, in the guise of “judges who have never worked an honest day in their lives.” But what he really wants is a chance to vote against Hillary Clinton, and “make sure she gets beaten like a drum.” I guess our angry toiler didn’t yet know about the Crown Royal.

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they’ve got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don’t care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I’ll fly the plane myself.

Mr. Frank is the author of “The Wrecking Crew,” forthcoming from Metropolitan Books.

Add comment April 21st, 2008

Media military “analysis” more akin to psyops manipulation

The New York Times today published its blockbuster analysis of the Pentagon psyops program to manipulate public discourse on the Iraq war and related matters by creating a cadre of retired military officers pretending to be independent military analysts on TV. Since these analysts were lobbyists helping their clients get military contracts, they were dependent on close ties in the Pentagon. They understood that independent analysis could threaten their access.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants….

The administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

They acted in close collaboration with the Pentagon, echoing talking points and helping the military develop strategies to manipulate the media.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks.

This was a systematic program designed in the early days of the administration:

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

[One had to read the article very carefully to come across this admission that that the Times was itself manipulated. Of course, they already had Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, who could be counted upon to publish administration propaganda on the front page, pretending to be news.]

Not only did these “analysts” help sell the bogus rationale for war, they sold the idea that the US was “winning,” even when they knew the opposite was the case. In September2003 a number of these analysts were taken on a trip to see the “progress” in Iraq. But actually they got a hint of how bad things were going.

Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

The trip was a huge success in manipulating American public opinion.

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In true American fashion, these “analysts” gor expanded business access as a reward for lying.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed….”

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

These “analysts” found their work so valued that other branches of the government started to utilize them.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

Finally, the article shows that the networks, while often aware that these “analysts” had potential conflics of interest, did absolutely nothing to learn if these conflicts were influencing their analysis. Of course, they never dreamed of identifying and hiring truly independent “analysts.” CNN was the best network in at least having some policies and procedures in place.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

We get a sense here of the highly refined propaganda machine that has targeted us over the last seven years. Unfortunately, it has now set a standard to which future administrations will undoubtedly strive, unless we stop them. Clearly such a program is a substantial danger — as is the media conglomeration which makes this program so easy — to the democracy that remains in our country.

[Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher has a A Guide to 'NYT' Scoop on Pentagon's Media Propaganda. In another piece he shows Pentagon's Media Manipulation on War Extended to Newspapers. ]

Add comment April 20th, 2008

NPR finds anthropogenic climate change denier “cute”

On Friday, as I drove into work, I heard a ridiculous NPR piece on 15 year old Kristen Byrnes, who has a web site claiming to disprove anthopogenic global warming. While Byrnes seems like an energetic, feisty girl who one roots for in he long run, the piece presented no evidence that she actually knew anything about science or that her views should be taken seriously. When someone makes claims that thousands of scientists, as well as Al Gore are full of crap, surely the media has an obligation to make some effort to evaluate heir arguments before giving them five minutes of exposure to millions of listeners. But NPR increasingly view substance as anathema to the entertainment function of its “news” shows.

In addition to the NPR listeners, Byrnes herself should be upset at being so condescended to by NPR. The fact that a 15 y.o. girl pontificates on climate science is “cute”  was the message. I once was a prodigy (in math) and am aware of how irritating the condescension by the media and other adults can be. I hated it when adults would ask about my work, only to ignore what I said and smile at how “cute” it was that a 14 year old thought he had something interesting to say.

Deltoid links to a number of sites providing commentary on the piece and critique of Byrnes’ claims.

1 comment April 20th, 2008

NYT Editorial: The torture sessions

The New York Times news section has essentially ignored last week’s blockbuster report from ABC News that CIA torture was micromanaged by top administration officials out of the White House, and that President Bush was aware of this. After all, news not originating with Times reporters simply does not exist. But today the Times contains an editorial, aptly titled The Torture Sessions, on the implications of the story and calling for an investigation aimed at revealing the truth about Bush administration crimes.

The Times emphasizes the central importance that this administration assigned to its torture policy:

These officials did not have the time or the foresight to plan for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq or the tenacity to complete the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But they managed to squeeze in dozens of meetings in the White House Situation Room to organize and give legal cover to prisoner abuse, including brutal methods that civilized nations consider to be torture.

They call for accountability but are sanguine as to its chances:

At this point it seems that getting answers will have to wait, at least, for a new Congress and a new president. Ideally, there would be both truth and accountability. At the very minimum the public needs the full truth.

They also counter the inevitable arguments that past abuses should be forgotten as we all look forward to the bright new future:

Some will call this a backward-looking distraction, but only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again.

Here is the complete editorial:

The Torture Sessions

Ever since Americans learned that American soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality?

The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the land not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed the orders.

We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy: Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

These officials did not have the time or the foresight to plan for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq or the tenacity to complete the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But they managed to squeeze in dozens of meetings in the White House Situation Room to organize and give legal cover to prisoner abuse, including brutal methods that civilized nations consider to be torture.

Mr. Bush told ABC News this month that he knew of these meetings and approved of the result.

Those who have followed the story of the administration’s policies on prisoners may not be shocked. We have read the memos from the Justice Department redefining torture, claiming that Mr. Bush did not have to follow the law, and offering a blueprint for avoiding criminal liability for abusing prisoners.

The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life.

We have questions to ask, in particular, about the involvement of Ms. Rice, who has managed to escape blame for the catastrophic decisions made while she was Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, and Mr. Powell, a career Army officer who should know that torture has little value as an interrogation method and puts captured Americans at much greater risk. Did they raise objections or warn of the disastrous effect on America’s standing in the world? Did anyone?

Mr. Bush has sidestepped or quashed every attempt to uncover the breadth and depth of his sordid actions. Congress is likely to endorse a cover-up of the extent of the illegal wiretapping he authorized after 9/11, and we are still waiting, with diminishing hopes, for a long-promised report on what the Bush team really knew before the Iraq invasion about those absent weapons of mass destruction — as opposed to what it proclaimed.

At this point it seems that getting answers will have to wait, at least, for a new Congress and a new president. Ideally, there would be both truth and accountability. At the very minimum the public needs the full truth.

Some will call this a backward-looking distraction, but only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again.

Add comment April 20th, 2008

The Pennsylvania Democratic debate in 1 minute

23/6 has boiled down Wednesday’s debate to one minute, without leaving anything out:

Add comment April 19th, 2008

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