January 07, 2007
This isn't about selling toothpaste
Newsweek has a piece titled "How the U.S. Is Losing the PR War in Iraq.
The P.R.War?
And here's some of the problems they highlight:
Most large-scale attacks on U.S. forces are now filmed, often from multiple camera angles, and with high-resolution cameras. The footage is slickly edited into dramatic narratives: quick-cut images of Humvees exploding or U.S. soldiers being felled by snipers are set to inspiring religious soundtracks or chanting, which lends them a triumphal feel.....
The U.S. military's response, on the other hand, usually sticks to traditional channels like press releases. These can take hours to prepare and are often outdated by the time they're issued.
So is that what we are supposed to think it comes down to? We need better-edited footage? Faster turn-around time with press releases?
The article would be very, very funny if it weren't all very tragic.
Posted by zeynep at 12:42 PM | Comments (1)
November 14, 2006
It's quite remarkable that ...
... a business columnist can write the following without anyone remarking on how remarkable it all is:
Let's consider the pluses and minuses [of the results of the election for the economy of the D.C. region:]The big negative is that the government-contracting gravy train, which the regional economy has been riding for the past four years, just jumped the tracks. It's not only that the war in Iraq will start to wind down, along with all the logistical support and reconstruction work that goes with it. Even more significantly, the Democratic Congress is about to lift the veil on the orgy of contractor waste, fraud and abuse that has gone unchecked at the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the Homeland Security Department.
The process of De-Halliburtonization will lead to a cutback in defense and homeland security contracting, a squeeze on contractor profits, a hit to share prices and a noticeable deceleration in wage increases for key employees.
So, one can openly and matter-of-factly say that the contractors live on unchecked "waste, fraud and abuse", that the on-going contractor gravy-train is fed by the Republican-dominated Congress and be considered perfectly respectable... as long as one says it in the business pages.
Posted by zeynep at 08:21 PM | Comments (1)
July 30, 2006
When are Children Children?
On Sunday, Israel hit a building in Qana, Lebanon, killing 34 children. The Associated Press story reporting the killing of these children was headlined "34 youths among 56 dead in Israeli strike," which seemed really peculiar to me. (The text of the story correctly reported that the victims were children. The headline was also used by many outlets that carry AP stories.)
Youths sounds just a bit less childreny, I suppose. We've already declared that all "military age male"s are terrorists. The women are collaborators. The infrastructure is all command and control centers. Trucks carrying food and aid could be munition relief. Ambulances... don't ask.
But the children pose a bit of a problem because while we have managed to dehumanize entire nations, our caring towards children is a bit more resistant to propaganda.
Ergo, all children are youths. And they will one day grow into adults, who are all terrorists (men) or collaborators (women), after first growing into youths.
But this child in Qana will not be doing any more of that pesky growing up thing, solving in one fell swoop the problem of the tension we have between continuing to care about children, and our utter lack of concern for their parents, their environment, and their well-being:
We can now feel bad for him and only him.
Posted by zeynep at 09:23 AM | Comments (3)
May 26, 2006
Will They Call This Abuse too?
I just watched a segment on CNN where the anchor and the pentagon correspondent competed with each other to explain how great Marines are, and how the Haditha case is still under investigation, how much stress everyone's under, how "unprofessional" conduct is not the norm, etc. etc.
It's quite sickening. Frankly, the military seems to be a lot more honest than the media. "Unprovoked murders" was the word used by a "senior defense official" quoted by CNN:
Investigators believe that their criminal investigation into the deaths of about two dozen Iraqi civilians points toward a conclusion that Marines committed unprovoked murders, a senior defense official said Friday.
You can see the media's apolegetics in the original exchange between Rep. Murtha and Chris Matthews. Murtha calmly points out that the Iraqis were killed in "cold blood." Matthews has a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that Murtha just said what he said...
I'm just waiting till the media dubs this "the worst abuse," or "horrific abuse," or some other form of abuse. After all, they only killed dozens of unarmed, crouching, crying, praying women, men, and children at close-range.
Posted by zeynep at 03:31 PM | Comments (4)
April 16, 2006
You Know You're A Rogue State When ..
You know you're a rogue state when dissident websites like commondreams have an assortment of "Attack [insert country]? No!" stickers:
At this rate, we might run out of primary colors and start having to use those fashion industry colors. Get your stickers here: available in mauve, sea foam, taupe and teal. Country names organized alphabetically.
Posted by zeynep at 07:26 PM | Comments (1)
April 09, 2006
Moqtada Gets Image Help From Newsweek
Most days of the week, Moqtada al Sadr, the son of slain shi'ite cleric Al-Sayyid Mohammed Mohammed Sadeq Al-Sadr, has an image problem that he does not look scary enough, or old enough, to be respectable in the Shi'ite religious hierarchy. Compare him to what seems to be a picture of his father in the background:
He is, in fact, rumored to be in his twenties, not in his thirties as he claims. Too young, too chubby cheeked with not a whiff of gray hair in sight. But, no panic Moqtada! Newsweek is here to help!
There, Moqtada as Darth Vader. Both sides should be happy.
Posted by zeynep at 02:13 PM | Comments (1)
March 28, 2006
They "Claim," We Don't Know
Note the story here:
Shiite politicians raged at the United States and halted negotiations on a new government Monday after a military assault killed at least 16 people in what Iraqis claim was a mosque. Fresh violence erupted in the north, with 40 killed in a suicide bombing. ... The U.S. military said in a statement that "no mosques were entered or damaged during this operation." It said the raid targeted a building used by "insurgents responsible for kidnapping and execution activities."...
"In our observation of the place and the activities that were going on, it's difficult for us to consider this a place of prayer," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman. "It was not identified by us as a mosque, though we certainly recognized it as a community gathering center. I think this is frankly a matter of perception."
Associated Press reporters who visited the scene Monday said the site of the attack clearly was a neighborhood Shiite mosque complex.
Here's what's probalby going on. Even after three years of occupation, the troops on the ground haven't learned that Shi'ite shrines don't necessarily look like mosques.
That's how bad things are.
Of course, Post can't just come out and say it so they say "military assault killed at least 16 people in what Iraqis claim was a mosque." Can you imagine if they reported everything that way: Last weekend in Seattle, a gunman entered a compound that the survivors claimed was a house and killed six people inside...
Posted by zeynep at 08:20 PM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2006
Who Are We Killing? And Is Anyone Counting?
Imagine a regular day. It's winter so it's cold. Other than that, it's a regular day. Your children are running around. The little one is still coughing so you make sure he puts his hat on. You worry about how to keep the house warm. You go about your business.
Except some people in the other side of the planet have sent a personless machine to kill you and your childern. And that's that.
Al-Qaida's second-in-command was the target of a U.S. airstrike near the Afghan border but he was not at the site of the attack, two senior Pakistani officials said Saturday. At least 17 people were killed.Citing unnamed American intelligence officials, U.S. networks reported that a CIA-operated Predator drone aircraft carried out the missile strike in the Bajur tribal region of northwestern Pakistan. The two Pakistani officials told The Associated Press on Saturday that the CIA had acted on incorrect information, and Ayman al-Zawahri was not in the village of Damadola when it came under attack
...
An AP reporter who visited the scene in Damadola village about 12 hours later saw three destroyed houses hundreds of yards apart. Villagers recounted hearing aircraft overhead moments before the attack. By their count at least 30 people died, including women and children.
...The official added that hours before the strike some unidentified guests had arrived at the home of one tribesman named Shah Zaman.
Zaman, whose home was destroyed, told AP he was a "law-abiding" laborer and had no ties to militants. He was not hurt but said three of his children were killed.
...
Doctors told AP that at least 17 people died in the attack. But at one destroyed house, Sami Ullah, a 17-year-old student, said he alone lost 24 of his relatives. Five women were weeping nearby, cursing the attackers.
"My entire family was killed, and I don't know whom should I blame for it," Ullah said. "I only seek justice from God."
Zaman said he heard planes at around 2:40 a.m. and then eight explosions. Speaking as he dug through the rubble of his home, he said planes had been flying over the village for the last three or four days.
"I ran out and saw planes were dropping bombs," said Zaman, 40, who lost two sons and a daughter. "I saw my home being hit."
The attack was the latest in a series of strikes on the Pakistan side of the border with Afghanistan, unexplained by authorities but widely suspected to have targeted terror suspects or Islamic militants.
...
Will anyone investigate? Will there be compensation -- even though neither would comfort these distraught parents. Will there even be an "oops, sorry about that" ever uttered?
How can we just kill dozens of people like that? No accountability, no remorse. What would the officials who make these decisions say? That war on terror is complicated and sometimes civilians get in the way? Would that be what Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the alleged target of yesterday's attack, would say about attacking the Towers on 9/11?
If these decision to destroy villages on the other side of the world are defendable, let the men and women who make these decisions please stand up and defend them.
P.S. I'm sorry. The missile had hit a "compound." That explains it all. ::slaps forehead::
Great reporting Knight-Ridder journalists!
A CIA-controlled unmanned aircraft fired a missile Friday into a compound just inside Pakistan's border with Afghanistan after the CIA received intelligence that Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant and other senior al-Qaida members were inside, U.S. intelligence officials said.
Do you notice how what the CIA says is reported as fact --it was a compound-- what the people affected say is always hearsay --the villagers said women and children were killed--.
Posted by zeynep at 08:33 AM | Comments (2)
December 22, 2005
The Brainwashed Report to Duty
Frankly, what kind of reporting can one expect from a journalist who can write "democratic leaning strong man" without catching on to the contradiction with that statement:
America’s preferred candidate in the Iraqi national elections last week didn’t do nearly as well as he expected, according to more preliminary results released today. America will not have the pro-western, democratic leaning strong man it wanted here.
It's the flipside of calling the thrice-elected Chavez an autocrat -- it simply means he is not our man.
Posted by zeynep at 10:36 AM | Comments (1)
December 19, 2005
Some Actual Reporting
The following was an AP story:
President Bush is making selective use of an opinion poll when he tells people that Iraqis are increasingly upbeat.The same poll that indicated a majority of Iraqis believe their lives are going well also found a majority expressing opposition to the presence of U.S. forces, and less than half saying Iraq is better off now than before the war.
Bush frequently talks in general terms about millions of Iraqis "looking forward to a future with hope and optimism," as he put it in a news conference Monday. The previous evening, he was more specific in his televised address when he declared, "Seven in 10 Iraqis say their lives are going well — and nearly two-thirds expect things to improve even more in the year ahead."
He was referring to an ABC News poll conducted with Time magazine and other media partners before the Iraqi general elections last week. Bush is dismissive of polls that reflect on his own performance, claiming not to pay attention to them.
Among the findings:
_More than two-thirds of Iraqis surveyed face-to-face opposed the U.S. presence, but only one-quarter of respondents wanted American troops to leave right away.
_44 percent said their country is better off than before the war.
_More than six in 10 said they feel safe in their neighborhoods, up from four in 10 in June 2004.
_Half said the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was wrong, up from 39 percent in February 2004.
_More than two-thirds said they expect things to get better in the coming months.
Don't you wish they'd done a bit more of that before? Before the war? When the lies were just as blatant and knowable?
Posted by zeynep at 09:19 PM | Comments (3)
December 18, 2005
Desperate Housewives, Of Course...
The President gives a speech, "assuring" the nation that he will stay on the course that was based on lies and has caused tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people their lives. What do the major networks do as soon as the speech is over? Invite critics and supporters for in-depth analysis? Put forth the usual talking heads, however unrepresentative or unsubstantive their comments might be? Hey, let their anchors ramble, even?
No. They promptly went back to Desperate Housewives, after "assuring" the viewers that it would be broadcast in its entirety, thank heavens.
Posted by zeynep at 09:42 PM | Comments (2)
November 30, 2005
Exporting Democratic Journalism
Postings about resume... Among so much to comment about, this one stands out because it sums up so much:
U.S. Army officers have been secretly paying Iraqi journalists to produce upbeat newspaper, radio and television reports about American military operations and the conduct of the war in Iraq.U.S. officials in Washington said the payments were made through the Baghdad Press Club, an organization they said was created more than a year ago by U.S. Army officers. They are part of an extensive American military-run information campaign - including psychological warfare experts - intended to build popular support for U.S.-led stabilization efforts and erode support for Sunni Muslim insurgents.
Members of the Press Club are paid as much as $200 a month, depending on how many positive pieces they produce.
What would they do without us bringing them democracy.
Posted by zeynep at 10:35 PM | Comments (1)
November 08, 2005
Ancient Hatreds, It's in their Blood, Etc.
You'd think there'd be wall-to-wall coverage of a story like this. It has all the elements, tragedy, tension, forgiveness, death, happy endings, children, dead and resurrected.
The parents of a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers have donated his organs to three Israeli children.Ahmad Khatib, 12, was carrying a toy rifle when he was gunned down on Thursday in the West Bank town of Jenin.The soldiers, who were conducting a raid, had mistaken him for a militant.The boy died on Sunday but three Israeli girls underwent surgery to receive his lungs, heart and liver.
Ahmad's father Ismail Khatib said the decision to donate the organs was influenced by the act his 24-year-old brother died while waiting for a liver transplant.
Mr Khatib hoped the gesture would send a message of peace to Israelis and Palestinians.
He said: "In our religion, God allows us to give organs to another person and it doesn't matter who the person is."
The father of 12-year-old Samah Gadban, who had been waiting five years for a heart, called the donation a "gesture of love."
Riad Gadban said: "I want to thank him (Mr Khatib) and his family. With their gift, I would like for them to think that my daughter is their daughter."
The Schneider Children's Medical Centre in Israel reported that a 14-year-old Jewish girl has received Ahmad's lungs and a seven-month-old girl was given his liver.
Israel has a chronic shortage of donor organs that many medical officials attribute to Jewish religious taboos against such donations.
It was on page 24 of the Washington Post and a few mentions buried here and there. To make front page, it would have had to have been the other way around, I suppose. Something about Muslim prejiduces and ancient hatreds, and how we must save them.
Posted by zeynep at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2005
Counterinsurgency: Another Name for "You're in the Wrong Country When..."
Here's an interesting bit from this week's NYT magazine story about the killing of an Iraqi youth -- the two unarmed men, cousin, were forced to jump into the Tigris. Zaydoon Fadhil died that day, an incident I wrote about earlier.
But that's not what I want to talk about here. Note this passage below:
But as a consequence of its overwhelming power and prowess, the American Army is not likely to face an enemy similar to itself. It is more likely to face guerrillas. Guerrilla wars typically begin when a smaller army is confronted by a larger one, forcing it to turn to the advantages it has: its ability to hide amid the population, its knowledge of the local terrain, its ability to mount quick and surprising attacks and then melt away before the larger army can strike back. This is more or less the case in Iraq, as it was in Vietnam, yet the leadership of the American Army is still wary of preparing the bulk of its troops to fight a guerrilla war. Most American soldiers are trained to use maximum force to destroy an easily identifiable enemy. Waging a counterinsurgency campaign, by contrast, often requires a soldier to do what might appear to be counterproductive: use the minimum amount of force, not the maximum, so as to reduce the risk of killing civilians or destroying property. Co-opt an enemy rather than kill him. If necessary, expose soldiers to higher risk. In the American Army, that sort of training is mostly relegated to forces like the Green Berets, who account for a small percentage of the Army's manpower."It's a chronic problem that runs deep in the DNA of the Army," says John Waghelstein, a retired colonel in the Special Forces who helped to conduct the American-backed counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador. "The Army has never taken counterinsurgency seriously. The Army's doctrine hasn't changed since the 1840's." At the Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., attended by all American officers hoping to rise above the rank of major, students must pass a rigorous program consisting of roughly 700 hours of instruction. Of that, not a single required course focuses on how to fight guerrilla wars.
For one thing, the constant need to fight counterinsurgencies is portrayed as a consequence of the size of our Amry. But that is not it at all. It is simply because we are fighting against populations, who by nature aren't armies, in their own soil. The key passage is this: "Guerrilla wars typically begin when a smaller army is confronted by a larger one, forcing it to turn to the advantages it has: its ability to hide amid the population, its knowledge of the local terrain, its ability to mount quick and surprising attacks and then melt away before the larger army can strike back."
Think for a minute. Why can they hide among the population and we can't? It's not the size of the army. The U.S. army could well hide among the population in this soil if we were attacked by a foreign nation. It is simply this: we fight and/or support unpopular wars in foreign countries.
And this is another way in which media bias works. They portray things as consequences of things that are at most questionable and often plain wrong. It's just stated as fact: our Army is large so we fight guerilla wars. Not: our "enemies" fight guerilla wars because they can, and we can't because we are foreigners.
And maybe that's just too hard for the U.S. Armed Forces to even admit this fact to themselves so that they could do it better:
Waghelstein says that the Army's leaders actually decided to de-emphasize counterinsurgency following Vietnam. When Waghelstein was an instructor at the Command and General Staff College, the school eliminated several courses that dealt with guerrilla war or turned them into electives, he says. Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer and a counterinsurgency adviser to the American command in Iraq, told me: "It's a cliché that the Army is always fighting the last war, but with the American Army, that's not true. When the Vietnam War ended, the Army tried to pretend it never happened. The typical officer in the military knew far more about the Battle of Gettysburg than he did about Vietnam. Initially, in Iraq, they were just making it up."
Posted by zeynep at 07:31 PM | Comments (1)
August 30, 2005
Finally! I Can Cancel My Vacation!
So the headline reads, "Bush Cancels Vacation to Focus on Relief"
How badly do you think they had been waiting an opportunity to cancel his vacation, both to get away from the antiwar protesters camped in Crawford and to get people to stop talking about how much time he spends vacationing?
I think pretty badly.
If we had a functioning media, that headline would be accompanied by a paragraph that recapped his vacation.
Also, I bet those states hit by hurricane Katrina, which many experts are warning was so strong as an effect of global warming, sure could use the reserve units that are in Iraq. If there is one thing a military style organization is good for, it's disaster relief. Yet, they are over there, helping to create a disaster in that country instead of being here to help out.
Posted by zeynep at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)
August 22, 2005
The Poor, The Unlikeable
Last weekend, I came across this blatant example of the kind of subtle and not-so-subtle "blame the poor" angle that one often sees in the stories regarding low-income people (if it wasn't bad enough how rare such stories are).
Now, if you were a journalist and were assigned to write a story about how the rising energy costs were making life hard for low-income people, who would you pick? And what would you cover?
Certainly, most low-income people live frugal lives, out of necessity, which often becomes an admirable habit, and find their budgets strained by even small fluctuations --such as an increase in gasoline prices. Plus, in a country with scant public transportation, many low-income people are forced to drive to work whether they like it or not. So, it shouldn't be too hard to go to, say, a job search center, a welfare-to-work office, or any of the myriad of places one can find huge numbers of people struggling to make ends meet.
Or, if you are really unimaginitive, one could ask the janitor that cleans your office every night about how gas prices are effecting them, or people they know. (And one can be against gas being too cheap, since it is a non-renewable, limited resource, along with some subsidies for low-income people as well as subsidies for mass transit).
Then again, you might spend your time and find an unsympathetic character. (Extra points if that person is black).
So, here's the person chosen by a Washington Post reporter:
Alfred Jones used to steer his sporty Mazda MX-6 onto the Beltway and drive the entire loop for the thrill of it. He knew the trip was senseless, but he could afford the gas.Things have changed. Jones lost his job, and rising gas prices have forced him to give up driving his car entirely.
Higher pump prices have drained his savings and left him unable to renew his vehicle registration. Jones, 48, of Upper Marlboro spends much of his time at his mother's house, where he lives, frequently checking online job listings.
"You have to make choices now between food or gas," Jones said. "It hurts. It's killing me."
It's not like the rest of the story is that bad -- except perhaps for the family that -bohoo- had to cancel the Pizza Hut outings and stop buying PlayStation games. It's just that when you start with someone reckless enough with money --and earth's resources-- to loop around the beltway for the fun of it, you are rolling your eyes by the time you get to the it's now food or gas line.
Plus, the story also ends with this person, with the line, "moving and grooving," which seems to me to be aimed at reminding everyone that our wanna-be gas-guzzler is black (with an additional picture on the side if anyone is still underinformed at this point.)
When his car registration expired, he did not have enough money left to cover it, so he has parked his Mazda for now.When he does leave the house to run errands for his mother and he sees other people driving, he realizes what he is missing.
"I'm supposed to be out there moving and grooving too," he said.
Yeah, moving and grooving. That's all poor people think about, get it? Nudge-nudge. I say, let's not stop with Social Security, let's abolish Medicaid too.
Posted by zeynep at 09:02 PM | Comments (1)
June 20, 2005
WWII Unembedded Journalist's Papers Finally See The Light of Day
An American journalist who sneaked into Nagasaki soon after the Japanese city was leveled by a U.S. atomic bomb found a "wasteland of war" and victims moaning from the pain of radiation burns in downtown hospitals.Censored 60 years ago by the U.S. military, George Weller's stories from the atom bombed-city surfaced this month in a series of reports in the national Mainichi newspaper.
...
Though he skirted American authorities to get into Nagasaki, Weller submitted his reports the first was dated Sept. 6 to the censors. The stories infuriated MacArthur and he personally ordered them quashed. The originals were never returned to him.
...
[George Weller's son] Anthony Weller told Mainichi he thought wartime officials wanted to hush up stories about radiation sickness and feared that his father's reports would sway American public opinion against building an arsenal of nuclear bombs.
How many years will we have to wait for the truth from Iraq?
Posted by zeynep at 06:02 AM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2005
Pro-Base, Anti-Despot
Remember our ally, Uzbekistan, where they boil prisoners to death and shoot demonstrators by the hundreds? Well, here's our most recent gift to that regime:
Defense officials from Russia and the United States last week helped block a new demand for an international probe into the Uzbekistan government's shooting of hundreds of protesters last month, according to U.S. and diplomatic officials.British and other European officials had pushed to include language calling for an independent investigation in a communique issued by defense ministers of NATO countries and Russia after a daylong meeting in Brussels on Thursday. But the joint communique merely stated that "issues of security and stability in Central Asia, including Uzbekistan," had been discussed.
...
The communique's wording was worked out after what several knowledgeable sources called a vigorous debate in Brussels between U.S. defense officials, who emphasized the importance of the base, and others, including State Department representatives at NATO headquarters, who favored language calling for a transparent, independent and international probe into the killings of Uzbekistan civilians by police and soldiers.
In other developments, the same paper the above article was published, the Washington Post, has another piece today titled "Bush Takes Aim at Despotism." Bush is apparently meeting with dissidents from various strategically-important countries, including Uzbekistan. Well, I guess a toothless photo-op almost never hurt anyone.
Posted by zeynep at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2005
"2,200 Journalists Await Jackson Verdict"
That's right: 2,200 "journalists" were credentialed for the trial.
Don't you feel better, with our media on the job?
Posted by zeynep at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2005
How a Man Becomes K2
We are told that the latest offensive in Haditha, Iraq is "aimed at uprooting insurgents who have killed more than 620 people since a new Iraqi government was announced on April 28."
So, having been informed of our venerable aims by the eager AP reporter, what do you think we are doing here, in this house in Haditha:
That man in the picture is "accused of having too much ammunition for a licensed weapon." For that crime, he is blindfolded, marked, and taken away while "while his mother, seated, and sisters plead with U.S. Marines through a translator, right, for his release." (This in a country where we know it is customary for most households to have a weapon.)
That picture where that unnamed man’s furrowed forehead is marked "K2" by the marine captures the fundamental process of dehumanization that you will find if you scratch the surface of all major 20th century atrocities. That man is no longer a man for those soldiers: he is a detainee, a number, a representation of the enemy, of the people who shoot at them, the people who they hate, people who they are scared of, people that aren’t people. He can be blindfolded, marked, humiliated before his heartbroken family, taken away at will.
Once you cross that line, some of those soldiers will eventually abuse, torture and kill some of those “non-people.” This isn’t even an indictment of American culture, rather, this is the fundamental lesson of a bloody century: dehumanization is the first step towards atrocity. The particular way in which we do this may be influenced by our culture --and where else have you seen such a pornographic interest in the victims-- but we are hardly unique or immune. In fact, reading about that very disturbing account of Dilawar’s death in Bagram, Afghanistan published last week in the New York Times made me think that we seem to have arrived somewhere between Chile and Argentina during the military dictatorships in terms of systematization of the torture.
And some of those humiliated, dehumanized people will indeed drop their licensed weapons and pick up homemade explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenade launchers aimed at us. We will round up even larger numbers of the people from whom those insurgents are drawn, detain, mark, humiliate and dehumanize more of them.
The question facing us is whether we will stop before magic markers turn into tattoos.
Posted by zeynep at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2005
The New Democracy
Sometimes you read a piece that is just so full of incredible contradictions, Orwellian language and unfinessed propaganda that you cannot figure out what the writer was thinking when she typed those words.
Here's a story from the AP regarding Afghan "president" Karzai's visit to Washington.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai left the White House on Monday with no promise of more control over thousands of American troops in his country and with strains in his relationship with the United States on full display.
Despite a chummy side-by-side news conference with President Bush that was designed to showcase U.S. support for Afghanistan's first democratically elected leader, Karzai also got no promise of the quick repatriation of Afghan prisoners now in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.
...
"Of course our troops will respond to U.S. commanders," Bush said, even while praising the progress of Afghan forces and taking pains to say that the U.S. military consults with Karzai's government.
...
Three years after the fall of the rigid Islamic rule of the Taliban, Afghanistan is a grateful U.S. ally but one obviously eager to assert greater independence. Juggling heavy troop commitments in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, the Bush administration would gladly hand the Afghans more authority if the country's military and economy could manage independently.
That time is years away, as Bush's pledge of continuing support and a joint statement laying out U.S. help for Afghan security, anti-terror and economic programs attest.
"Our mission in Afghanistan and Iraq is the same," Bush said at Monday's press conference in the White House East Room. "I mean, we want these new democracies to be able to defend themselves. And so we will continue to work with the Afghans to train them and to cooperate and consult with the government."
Karzai smiled and nodded as Bush spoke.
I can’t stop shaking my head in disbelief. By what right does this journalist insert a sentence in the middle that reads “the Bush administration would gladly hand the Afghans more authority if the country's military and economy could manage independently.” How does she know that? Where is the evidence they would gladly hand over any authority? Is the evidence their stubborn refusal to leave or cede control if asked by the president they recognize as democratically-elected ? Is the evidence the well-documented, widespread torture of Afghan detainees on Afghan soil, by U.S. soldiers while the government of Afghanistan meekly protests?
By what rights is this reporter making excuses for what can obviously be best described as good old colonialism?
[P.S. Edited for correct usage of Afghan with much thanks to reader Andrea Dunbar-Haysmith who commented that "Afghan" and not "Afghani" is the correct adjective for referring to people from Afghanistan.]
Posted by zeynep at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2005
Propaganda Everywhere
This one is from Newsweek:
As he tries to build a legacy of promoting democracy around the globe, Bush has run headlong into Fortress Russia.
Once again, we are presented with this uncritical, favorable, and demonstrably false view of what this administration is trying to do: "promote democracy around the globe." If that were the case, why would we be supporting regimes that boil people alive? Launching coups against duly-elected and re-elected popular regimes like in Venezuala and Haiti?
Posted by zeynep at 07:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sending People to Be Boiled to Death to "Combat Terrorism": Meet the 21st Century State, and the 21st Century Propaganda System
It is so hard to come up with "commentary" on these stories. Ummm, yeah, we send people to places where they boil them to death. Ummm, no, no trial or evidence before or after "the rendition."
Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. ...
Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in fighting global terrorism. ...
Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation...
...
Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States was confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
...
There is other evidence of the United States' reliance on Uzbekistan in the program. On Sept. 21, 2003, two American-registered airplanes - a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737 - landed at the international airport in Tashkent, according to flight logs obtained by The New York Times. ... Over a span of about three years, from late 2001 until early this year, the C.I.A. used those two planes to ferry terror suspects in American custody to countries around the world ...
But here's what really annoys me. Here's the picture of Bush and Islam Karimov, president of Uzbekistan:
Here's the NYT caption under this photo:
President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House in 2002 to form a partnership to combat terrorism.
See, immediately, it's all explained away. The partnership was formed "to combat terrorism."
Although the article is damning in its evidence, it means but a whiff. If you so easily surrender the context that this is all done to "combat terrorism", who will really object? What's a few people boiled, few fingernails pulled, in this glorious partnership "to combat terrorism"?
This is how our current propaganda system works. The strongest, the most insidious lies are not about the who, what, where or when, but about why.
Posted by zeynep at 01:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 29, 2005
Spot the Missing Piece
Heartbreaking pictures from a mass grave in Samawa, Iraq were made public today. The non-acidic soil preserved the bodies of these victims of Saddam's genocidal campaign against the Kurds. Almost all the murdered were women and children, some shot at point blank range in the head, dressed in many layers of their best clothes because they were probably told of being relocated.
There was something missing, though, in this otherwise informative article about the mass grave published in the Washington Post. Here's Post's description of the Anfal campaign:
From 1987 to 1988, Hussein initiated a wave of violence, called the Anfal campaign, to punish the Kurds for siding with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Hussein's forces forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their lands in northern Iraq. Amin said that as many as half a million people died or were killed outright and thousands of villages were destroyed.
Hmmm, what else could be crucial to this story?
Let's think for a minute. Saddam Hussein, our then-close-ally gasses the Kurds. Our response was, naturally ... to help cover it up.
Yes, here's the missing piece of information:
... 16 years ago today was the gassing of the northern Iraqi town of Halabja, which killed 5-8,000 people. It was part of the Anfal campaign, which is estimated to have killed 100-180,000 Kurds.At the time it happened, only the left in the United States, and in Turkey, took heed and criticized the U.S. government for its support of Saddam Hussein. They might as well have been speaking in outer space. The Reagan administration squelched efforts in Congress to react to the atrocity, kept the Security Council from passing a resolution on the issue, and kept up the stream of agricultural credits and export licenses to firms to provide chemicals, biological materials, and weapon components to Iraq. Most damning of all, it organized a disinformation campaign to help suggest that Iran was the real culprit (it didn't address who was behind the numerous other chemical attacks on civilian populations that characterized Anfal).
The regime we went to such lengths to protect and prop up at the time did this:
Yes, that blue thing in the bottom third of the photo is a baby's bottle.
Posted by zeynep at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 27, 2005
Contempt and Contempt in Competition
Here's Thomas Friedman writing why John Bolton should not be appointed as "ambassador at an institution he has nothing but contempt for."
But at its best, the U.N. has been, and still can be, a useful amplifier of American power, helping us to accomplish important global tasks that we deem to be in our own interest. ... In short, I don't much care how the U.N. works as a bureaucracy; I care about how often it can be enlisted to support, endorse and amplify U.S. power. That is what serves our national interest.
Can someone tell me the difference between John Bolton's nothing but contempt and Thomas Friedman's nothing but contempt for the United Nations -- and, obviously also for international law?
Posted by zeynep at 02:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 26, 2005
Yup. We Lied to You. Anyway, You Don't Care, Do You?
This wasn't anywhere near the top story in most major papers and television news programs. The let's-pretend-to-look-for-'em "WMD" "search" is over.
Weapons Inspector Ends WMD Search in Iraq
Wrapping up his investigation into Saddam Hussein's purported arsenal, the CIA's top weapons hunter in Iraq said his search for weapons of mass destruction "has been exhausted" without finding any.
Nor did he find any evidence that such weapons were shipped officially from Iraq to Syria to be hidden before the U.S. invasion, but he couldn't rule out some unofficial transfer of limited WMD-related materials.
There, that's it. Nada. Zip. Nothing.
Not that they even need to spin it much, given the lack of attention, but I'm sure we'll hear grumblings about "intelligence failures." What happened was not an intelligence failure, it was premeditated deception. Here's a few links to past articles and press releases:
http://www.empirenotes.org/intelligence.html
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/16/a-war-against-the-peacemaker/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/10/08/thwart-mode/
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR031803.htm
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR020304.htm
Posted by zeynep at 07:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 20, 2005
We'll Publish Your Photo, But That's It
So we learn a bit more about something that came to light just as Marla Ruzicka was killed. The U.S. military does indeed have some form of tracking for the number of Iraqi civilians killed by their actions:
A week before she was killed by a suicide bomber, humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka forced military commanders to admit they did keep records of Iraqi civilians killed by US forces.Tommy Franks, the former head of US Central Command, famously said the US army "don't do body counts", despite a requirement to do so by the Geneva Conventions.
But in an essay Ms Ruzicka wrote a week before her death on Saturday and published yesterday, the 28-year-old revealed that a Brigadier General told her it was "standard operating procedure" for US troops to file a report when they shoot a non-combatant.
She obtained figures for the number of civilians killed in Baghdad between 28 February and 5 April, and discovered that 29 had been killed in firefights involving US forces and insurgents. This was four times the number of Iraqi police killed.
Can you imagine if all those media outlets that jumped on the story of her death, publishing many pictures of the photogenic, blond Marla hugging children of Iraq and Afghanistan, directed just a small portion of that attention to the cause for which she was willing to put her life on the line?
Posted by zeynep at 10:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 10, 2005
Spot the Staged Demonstration
Remember the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdos square two years ago? While the sentiment against Saddam Hussein in Iraq was very real, the event was obviously staged:
So, here's the same Firdos Square, two years later:
And the demands are very clear: they want the occupation to end and they want a speedy trial for Saddam Hussein.
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As you can tell from these pictures, Saddam Hussein is held with the same regard as George W. Bush and Tony Blair (So much for the Baathist-dead-enders theory):
Posted by zeynep at 03:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 08, 2005
My Way or the Highway, Says GM
While we are on the subject of the propaganda model, here's GM in action:
General Motors Corp. on Thursday pulled its advertising from the Los Angeles Times over disagreements with car reviews and other articles that have appeared in the newspaper.The world's largest automaker said the move was "based on strongly voiced objections from our dealers in California about factual errors and misrepresentations in The Times editorial coverage."
A GM spokesman would not specify the errors or say which articles caused the rift.
...
A GM executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday's review of the Pontiac G6 by Times Pulitzer Prize-winning automobile critic Dan Neil was particularly offensive.
Neil wrote that "GM is a morass of a business case" and called for the ouster of GM's chairman and chief executive, Rick Wagoner. Among other things, Neil took the company to task for not more aggressively developing fuel-efficient cars and focusing instead on SUVs.
All this over a few critical reviews... Imagine if there were critical reporting on our automobile culture. (I guess it's easy to see why the previous sentence had to be in the hypothetical subjunctive mood.)
Posted by zeynep at 09:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 07, 2005
This is Your Brain on Propaganda
Here's a text-book example of propaganda in action from this Newsweek interview with Paul Wolfowitz:
Newsweek: Your opponents say you are going to use the bank to pursue the Bush administration's philosophy of pushing democracy all around the world.Wolfowitz: No, but I think when the bank performs its mission, which is reducing poverty and promoting economic development, it makes it more possible for people around the world to achieve their own goals of freedom and democracy.
Gee, once you pose the question that way, what's there to argue about? Why would it even be a bad thing to "push democracy all around the world"? That question is wrong because pushing democracy is not what the Bush administration is doing, and it's wrong because that's not what opponents of Wolfowitz were saying.
You know the saying: if you can get them to ask the wrong questions, the answers don't matter.
Posted by zeynep at 08:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 02, 2005
Family Values and Corporate Heroes: The Curious Makeover Jack Welch
Here's Jack Welch, ex-CEO of GE on honesty and family values:
Bosses know that the work-life policies in the company brochure are mainly for recruiting purposes and that real work-life arrangements are negotiated one on one in the context of a supportive culture, not in the context of, "But the company says ...!"People who publicly struggle with work-life balance problems and continually turn to the company for help get pigeonholed as ambivalent, entitled, uncommitted, incompetent—or all of the above.
In other words, don't believe what we say. And families are not our problem. He hobnobs with all the politicians who can't stop saying how much they are for family values. Why is this man on the cover of Newsweek? And why are these corporations allowed to control our airwaves?
Posted by zeynep at 01:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 31, 2005
If I Pretend Not to See You, You Will Not Exist
The worse it gets, the less we hear of it from the media:
In Iraq, the United States is now detaining a record 10,200 people, more than double the number held five months ago. The number of detainees held in Afghanistan also appears to be on the rise. Individuals detained in Afghanistan by U.S. forces rose from 350 in June of 2004 to 500 in January of 2005. No numbers on Afghanistan are available since January 2005 since the Department of Defense has introduced a policy of classifying information related to U.S. detentions in Afghanistan, including the number of detainees held and the specific legal basis for their detentions."One of the concerning developments we're seeing as U.S. detention operations in these places mature is a trend toward greater secrecy, not less," Pearlstein said. Behind the Wire updates a report Human Rights First issued in June 2004 on the scope and nature of U.S. global detention operations in the "war on terrorism."
That's 10,000 people held under conditions the State Department would condemn, especially if the deed was committed by a nation we did not like. The scope of the torture story is increasing; there are more and more confirmations of people who died under custody. Corroborating evidence is emerging on the "renditions."
In other words, the situation is the exact opposite of the impression one would get by watching news or reading newspapers.
Posted by zeynep at 09:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 10, 2005
Pajamas! He arrived in Pajamas!
The wires report that:
"A suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shiite mosque during a funeral Thursday, killing 47 people....
"After the cloud of smoke and dust dispersed, we saw the scattered bodies of the fallen and smelled gunpowder," said Adnan al-Bayati, another witness.
At least 47 people were killed and more than 90 wounded, said Dr. Saher Maher, speaking from a hospital in the city."
Someone targeted a Shi'ite funeral in such a savage attack. But what's the top story in Yahoo top news? Or on CNN? The important stuff, of course.
A pajama-clad Michael Jackson arrived late for his trial today.
Oh, my.
Posted by zeynep at 04:04 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 21, 2005
Idealist. Lofty Goals. Too Ambitious. Really.
I haven't had a chance to follow the press coverage of the inaugral speech too closely. But I did flip through the channels a bit, and read a bit of the commentary.
Idealist. Such lofty goals. Are commiting to fight all the dictatorships now?
That kind of rhetoric was a non-trivial portion of the pundit chatter. Have these people completely lost their sense of reality? Have they lost every last shred of dignity and self-respect? But even then, how does one keep a straight face while discussing if this president is too much of an idealist in search of democracy? Are they all this superb actors? Are they all this delusional?
Some of this is becoming really hard to comprehend.
Posted by zeynep at 11:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 17, 2004
Let Me Condescend to You, My Dear Arab Friends
Here's Thomas Friedman, lamenting how the Bush administration is apparently holding up the third "Arab Human Development Report":
So I eagerly awaited the third Arab Human Development Report, due in October. ... I waited. And I waited. But nothing.Then I started to hear disturbing things - that the Bush team saw a draft of the Arab governance report and objected to the prologue, because it was brutally critical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation. This prologue constitutes some 10 percent of the report. While heartfelt, it's there to give political cover to the Arab authors for their clear-eyed critique of Arab governance, which is the other 90 percent of the report. [emphasis mine]
Everything else aside, don't you love this kind of Condescension Special to Those Who Bravely Carry the White Man's Burden that Friedman seems to practice with the same ease as breathing. It's not possible that a bunch of Arab intellectuals and activists really, really wanted to register their "brutal criticisms" of Israel's settler colonial occupation and the U.S.-led war on Iraq. It's just cover.
And to make sure that the depth of the insult is not missed by anyone, he deigns to add that the criticisms were "heartfelt".
Posted by zeynep at 12:07 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 16, 2004
How Propaganda Works
Let me follow up on the last post with a small example of one method by which propaganda works: through journalists' use of the "objective voice" to describe the very motives which they should be questioning. This from the Post:
The Bush administration's effort to build a system for defending the country against ballistic missile attack suffered an embarrassing setback yesterday when an interceptor missile failed to launch during the first flight test of the system in two years.
Certainly, there is more to be said on why "missile defense" is a first strike weapon. And, certainly, there is more to be considered in terms of the role of corporate profiteering in such project. But note how the above graph cuts the discussion: the Bush administration's effort to build a system for defending the country.
Once that framework is presented and accepted, all criticisms look silly. What's a few billion in an effort to defend the country? So a few tests fail. So a few well-connected corporations make a buck. It's an effort to defend the country. A piece that starts like that mainly reinforces the propaganda system, no matter how critical the rest of the contents.
Posted by zeynep at 12:28 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
November 10, 2004
How Dare You Show Pictures of Dead Soldiers.... Unless, Of Course, We Do It
Remember the brouhaha and the massive outpouring of outrage when Al-Jazeera had aired some pictures of dead American soldiers last year? Which was even more blatantly hypocritical since Al-Jazeera routinely airs pictures of dead people on all sides: Iraqis, Americans, hostages, soldiers and non-soldiers. On the other hand, American media will almost never show you pictures of dead Iraqi children or women killed by our weapons, but will show lots pictures of dead Iraqi soldiers, insurgents -- which makes it look like we only kill soldiers or otherwise armed men.
In that sense, our media is much more part of the propaganda apparatus of the Pentagon than Al-Jazeera is part of the propaganda aparatus of the Iraqi resistance. Well, here's another example from the New York Times, a man identified as an insurgent is lying on the street, shot in the head. It looks very similar to the pictures published last fall by Al-Jazeera.
So, where's the outrage? Does anyone even notice the hypocrisy?
UPDATE: Ok, let me add this one:
The caption? "From inside a mosque, marines continued to fight for control of Falluja." Remember that one the next time Rumsfeld explains how wrong and immoral it is for the insurgents to fire from inside mosques.
Posted by zeynep at 11:51 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
November 09, 2004
Umm, Who Are We kidding Again?
At the New York Times main website today, the central picture is a photo of two soldiers inside a building with sunlight streaming in from the windows -- captioned "Protecting the Islamic cultural center in Falluja was one the U.S. objectives today."
Well, thanks, I spat out my coffee chuckling. The New York Times is well-advised to tone down its level of sucking up to the Pentagon -- there is a point at which it becomes so ridiculous that it backfires.
It's obvious we've abandoned any pretense of propaganda aimed at the Iraqi people -- it is kind of hard when they're being bombed. And most of the rest of their propaganda efforts are so aimed at the domestic populace since, again obviously, you can't make Iraqi people believe lies about what's happenning right in front of their eyes: "In Fallujah, Iraqi Forces are attacking Anti-Iraqi Forces", "No Civilians Will Be Harmed in the Making of Your News Unless It Was Their Fault", and "Allawi is an Independent, Legitimate Iraqi Leader We Happen to Be Supporting"...
But, puh-lease. "Protecting the Islamic cultural center in Falluja was one the U.S. objectives today"? As the most central, visible message of the day, on this day? Chill out, liberal media.
UPDATE: That picture has now moved to the inside pages, replaced by an equally useless --but less outright ridiculous-- "Marines deployed smoke screens as they guarded American tanks." Anyway, here it is:
Caption: "Protecting the Islamic cultural center in Falluja was one the the marine's objectives today."
Posted by zeynep at 01:47 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
October 19, 2004
Does Mr. Kerry Deserve a Medal For Killing Your Countryman, Ma'am?
In an exemplary feat of the kind of tough journalism we need today, Nightline went back to the Vietnamese village that Kerry now boasts of having chased down and killed Ba Thanh, a Vietnamese fighter with the NLF, to get to the bottom of things. Empire Notes has a must-read post, including transcripts of Nightline's shameful, shameful conduct:
The unlearning of the lessons of Vietnam is now complete. The presidential campaign was for at least two months dominated by an absurd discussion on the subject, in which the only "moral" issue was, apparently, how many Vietnamese Kerry had killed and how tough the ones he killed were. ABC's Nightline finally put the icing on the cake by going to consult the other witnesses to Kerry's action or nonaction -- the Vietnamese....
It's difficult to communicate how disgusting and macabre this is. It's like questioning the family members of a murder victim in order to figure out whether the killer deserves a medal. Imagine the reaction of the average American being questioned on whether a particular Iraqi resistance member deserves a medal for personally killing some American soldier or whether the soldier was merely killed in an explosion. And the Iraqi resistance is fighting in its own country to expel foreign invaders, not occupying and destroying another country, as the United States did in Vietnam.
It really is the saddest thing. I've seen some of the Swift Boat ads which include snippets of Kerry's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971. And even in those brief, distorted, weirdly-narrated ads, the young Kerry is very moving. I think it may be one of the best testimonials ever given on the subject of colonial war by a member of the aggressive nation.
Just how did that young man die, and who is this opportunist, war-mongering, death-celebrating politician I can't bear to listen to, masquerading around in the remmants of that man's shell? I really recommend reading his testimony in full, and reading it often. Then he spoke a deep truth -- now he talks about "Iraqification" the same way politicians of his day spoke of Vietnamization, which that Kerry understood perfectly well:
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
And the Kerry-then, speaking on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, proclaimed their desire to fight one last battle, a noble one unlike the ignominious one they had been pushed into:
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
Sad to say, that battle has been thoroughly and completely lost. Vietnam did not become the place that America finally turned, that burden remains with us today. On that day, that John Kerry confronted the nation with this unforgettable question: how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? I'd like to ask the current Democratic Party presidential nominee, also named John Kerry, another question. How do you kill your own soul for a shot at power? I would have hoped that it were not possible, that once awakened, a conscience could not be discarded as if it were just another empty campaign promise by just another power-hungry politician.
Posted by zeynep at 10:57 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 23, 2004
In Case You Missed It
We're bombing Baghdad, from the air, with warplanes. And it's not even news. You won't even notice the story unless you look for it. That's Baghdad, as in Baghdad the capital of Iraq.
And why are we bombing it?
“The intent is to provide security for the people of Thawra so we can get back to the business of reconstruction,” said 1st Cavalry Division commanding general Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli in a Wednesday statement. Thawra is an old name for Sadr City. The district is now named for Muqtada al-Sadr’s father, a revered cleric killed under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
So far, "U.S. military officers monitoring the fighting" put the Iraqi death toll at 40. All this sacrifice we're making just to get back to the the business of reconstructing the place we won't even call by the name used by the actual residents. Guess they should be grateful we aren't calling it Myanmar.
Posted by zeynep at 05:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 22, 2004
We All Scream About Forged Documents
Tom Toles again, from the Washington Post (9/22/04).
Posted by zeynep at 10:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 17, 2004
The Forgeries
Isn't amazing that the media and the public can seriously pretend that there is any question whether George W. Bush, who is privilege personified, had strings pulled for him to get out of going to Vietnam.
And isn't it even more amazing how many liberal politicos are implying or claiming what Kerry did was honorable because he didn't dodge the draft like Bush? So, what now, these liberals believe the Vietnam war was just and honorable? And why are they then opposed to the war on Iraq? If anything, Iraq is more justifiable since the Vietnamese people aspired to nothing more than national self-determination while Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant and a serious danger to his people and the region.
The truth is Bush's dodging of the draft doesn't qualify as honorable because he was for the war -- he just wanted other people to go kill and die. Kerry's participation in the war doesn't qualify as honorable either because he believed the war to be immoral yet he voluntarily signed up. Risking your life in the service of vice is no virtue.
Meanwhile, as everyone remains occupied with superscripts in old typewriters and such important matters, 54 percent of Americans still believe that "Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war" and 50 percent believe "Iraq gave substantial support to Al-Qaeda."
Here's Tom Toles from today's post:
Posted by zeynep at 12:56 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 10, 2004
Dick Cheney Can Lie Again and Again and Again...
As I write this, I'm watching MSNBC commentator John Scarborough go on and on about how the documents used by CBS in the context of how privilege got George W. out of the Vietnam and into a cushy guard position may have been forged and how it's the media's sacred duty to expose lies and forgeries wherever they may lurk...
Umm, yeah. How about some "documents" "from" "Niger" that could have benefited from such scrutiny?
Or how about today?
"[Saddam Hussein]provided safe harbor and sanctuary to terrorists for years … and had provided safe harbor and sanctuary as well for Al Qaeda."
"The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was 'no credible evidence' that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda target the United States."
Cheney, denying that oil was a factor in the war decisions, replied: "Anybody who'd suggest oil" was the reason for the military action was missing the challenges the administration faced, in Afghanistan — which Cheney pointed out has no oil — and in Iraq.He used the question to reiterate what has become his litany of reasons for the war: The refusal of Hussein to obey U.N. Security Council resolutions, the former Iraqi leader's use of chemical weapons against Iraqis, his waging of war against Iran and Kuwait, and the sanctuary the vice president said Hussein had given to Palestinian and Al Qaeda terrorists.
"We don't want to stay a day longer than necessary," he said of the U.S. deployment in Iraq.
How about that, not one of the stated reasons are true. Let's go over them.
1-The refusal of Hussein to obey U.N. Security Council resolutions,
2-The former Iraqi leader's use of chemical weapons against Iraqis
3-His waging of war against Iran and Kuwait, and the sanctuary
4-Hussein had given to Palestinian and Al Qaeda terrorists.
Now (1) is obviously false because Saddam Hussein no longer had the dreaded Weapons of Mass Destruction, so he had indeed complied with the resolution -- in spite of the fact that the resolution was written in a way that was almost impossible to comply with. That's why the inspections were cut short by George W. Bush to make way for the bombing, they were about to remove the pretext. Points (2) and (3) are certainly true, and those are certainly big crimes, but we supported and helped Saddam Hussein throughout that period -- and Dick Cheney was a major architect of that policy. And point (4) is false except one point: Saddam Hussein did give money to families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Is Dick Cheney saying tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than a thousand Americans have died to stop Saddam Hussein from giving money to families of suicide bombers? (Besides it doesn't take a genius to understand that suicide bombers are already extremely motivated, beyond anything promise of money could achieve.)
Well, Cheney's black-is-white worldview does provide some important clues, though. What's the only thing Dick Cheney denies as a reason for the war: control over oil supplies. Just that should almost settle the case, no?
But who's going to bother about these trivial questions: who really has WMD, how does Al Qaeda actually work, what's the truth about current oil consumption levels and remaining global reserves... Please. Save those for your "Far Left Trivial Pursuit"(R) games. Let's find out if typewriters in the seventies had superscript capability and proportional fonts.
Posted by zeynep at 09:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 01, 2004
"Torture" versus "Abuse"
Of course, if you'd like to let New York Times know what you think of their selective use of the word torture, click here to send them an email.
I don't mean to single out the New York Times, I picked it because it's representative. Almost all other major journalistic outlets practice the same slanted language, so here's FAIR's list of contact info for some of them.
Posted by zeynep at 04:15 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
July 20, 2004
The Inspectors Were Withdrawn, Not Kicked Out. The Inspectors Were Withdrawn, Not Kicked Out. The Inspectors Were Withdrawn, Not Kicked Out.
From today's AP report on the possible return of the IAEA inspectors to Iraq:
Instead, they [the inspectors] will be performing a routine task that even Iraq's ousted President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) allowed the U.N. agency to carry out after barring U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq in the wake of U.S. and British bombing raids in December 1998.
This lie has been refuted so many times that it gets tiresome to constantly correct it. I suppose that's the difficulty of correcting problems that are caused by structural factors; the lies naturally propagate while efforts to correct them are time-consuming and difficult. Over time, the liars overwhelm the truth-tellers. And the biggest lies are the big picture lies, which are much harder to correct than these smaller, factual lies. A big lie takes a sentence; a proper refutation might need take a book.
On the lighter side, El-Baradei wants to play house:
"The return of international inspectors to Iraq is considered necessary, not to search for the weapons of mass destruction, but so the agency can write a final report on the non-presence of weapons of mass destruction so the international community can lift sanctions on Iraq," ElBaradei said.
Uh-huh. Right. "International community." "Lift sanctions". "On Iraq." How quaint, ye olde chap.
Posted by zeynep at 10:05 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 11, 2004
Most Bang for Your Buck: Mass Media
Don’t you always wonder how things like bribery or influence-peddling actually occur? Not in the general sense, but in the minute, day-to-day, detailed manner?
Once in a while it’s so brazen that we learn about it: six days before Clinton took office, Wendy Gramm, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission pushed for an exemption from regulation for over-the-counter derivatives, an important portion of Enron’s business. Enron contributed heavily to the campaign of her husband, Texas Republican Senator Phil Gramm, and appointed her to the board from which she collected about about a million dollars in stock options and what-not. What more is there to say?
That kind of story is easy to follow. But what about all the little stuff that forms the web of influence corporations have over our government, the revolving doors, the little favors, the corporate-sponsored vacations, all the petty goodies in pursuit of which bureaucrats jump over so many hoops? Our watchdogs, such as they exist, can barely keep up with the large scandals so often we wait for something big to happen, like collapse of Enron and the rigged California energy crisis, in order for subpoenas to roll out and a sustained public exposure to happen.
Wouldn’t you wish that Ken Lay kept some sort of diary? Hired Wendy: one million dollars; paid-off Phil: hundred thousand dollars; unregulated energy futures: priceless. Unfortunately, even if it existed, Lay’s auditors at Arthur Andersen would have made sure it was all shredded: that is their job description after all.
From Peru, comes a meticulous record-keeper, bless his bureaucratic habits, to shed light on the details of influence peddling. Vladimiro Montesinos, the head of Peru's secret service, kept detailed records of all his bribes which were studied by John McMillan of the Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and graduate student Pablo Zoido. Here's the story from today's Outlook section of the Washington Post:
"Montesinos kept meticulous records of his transactions," Zoido and McMillan recounted in their paper. "He required those he bribed to sign contracts detailing their obligations to him. He demanded written receipts for the bribes." And if that weren't enough to secure him a place of honor in the Hall of Shame, he "had his illicit negotiations videotaped."That allowed McMillan and Zoido to tally up the bribes by institution and then compare them to see where Montesinos, in his "expert" opinion, thought it most effective to spend the most money.
So, what was the most important institution to bribe, the most important potential opponent to squash, to buy-off, to silence in order to keep power in your corrupt hands?
It wasn't even close. "One single television channel's bribe was four times larger than the total of the opposition politicians' bribes," they found. "By revealed preference, the strongest check on the government's power was the news media."Of course methods are different in the United States since most of mass media is large corporations -- so bribes and threats between the media machinery and the politicians can run a multitudes of ways, both ways. But the lesson seems to be the same: control the media, control the public discussion. Control the public discussion, and you will pull off controlled “democracy.”The totals were staggering. Bribes to the owners of the six largest privately held television stations amounted to millions, with $1.5 million a month flowing to the owner of one station and $500,000 a month to another, while a third got a total of $9 million over an undisclosed period of time. Sometimes the bribes were payments for specific jobs: Montesinos paid the owner of one TV network $50,000 to fire two reporters critical of the government.
By comparison, politicians and judges came relatively cheap. Bribes to 21 judges came in the form of one-time payments that ranged from $2,500 to $55,000. Lawmakers were a bit more pricey: Dozens of opposition party legislators were paid bribes ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 a month, easily outstripping their monthly paychecks.
Newspapers were less of a concern because the overwhelming majority of Peruvians got their news from television, McMillan said. Still, Montesinos paid more than $2 million to the owners or directors of popular newspapers.The implications of the economists' findings extend far beyond Peru. These findings suggest that if a society wants to prevent corruption, the best weapon is an independent and corruption-free media that can act as a check on the government.
Posted by zeynep at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 07, 2004
An actual journalist! Someone take a picture!
Continuing on the issue for foreign fighters, Nir Rosen, who has spent a good part of last year in Iraq, has an informative guest commentary on Juan Cole's blog. He also had a recent piece in the New Yorker which was a rare example of actual journalism about Iraq.
Posted by zeynep at 11:48 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
July 05, 2004
Another Day, Another Bombing
Another house was bombed in Fallujah. The local police captain says it was a residential house. AP shamefully reports that "U.S. airstrikes have frequently targeted safehouses used by members belonging to the network of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" when there is simply no evidence that any of the targets were indeed safehouses.
Most of the rest of story is also about Zarqawi's purported deeds. When presented in this light, even if it is later revealed that it was just a house with a family living in it, as it usually is, it all looks like a regrattable mistake.
There's your liberal media for you.
It would appear much different if it was reported accurately based on what we, and AP for that matter, actually know: that this is the umpteenth house hit with massive bombs from afar; that in no case was there any evidence before or after the bombing that there were foreign terrorists or Zarqawi associates living in the pulverized house; that in each case the neighbors, local police and hospitals, and any media that actually bothered to go to the scene, such as Al Jazeera, reported that items in the rubble showed that it was a regular house and crushed bodies of women and children had been dug up.
Posted by zeynep at 02:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 24, 2004
Andrea Mitchell Wins; Problem of Immovable Object meets Irresistable Force Solved
What happens if a high-level official tells a prominent member of the media elite that the widespread Muslim discontent stems mainly from our policies and what we do and not from an irrational hatred of who we are? What happens when the imperative not to contradict high-level officials clashes with the imperative of never straying from the official line?
Well, read it here. I link, you decide whether to laugh or cry.
Posted by zeynep at 04:46 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 20, 2004
A New Style of Offensive
There was an airstrike against a house in Fallujah that killed at least a few dozen people with some children among the dead. The way it was carried out and reported on by the U.S. media serves as an early demonstration of how things will be done in Iraq after "the handover."
The U.S. military will attack from a distance with missiles, major newspapers will report from Kimmit's press conferences without going over to the site of the attack and CIA-asset Iyad Allawi will defend whatever it was the U.S. forces did. Meanwhile, the local authorities and police forces, eyewitnesses and journalists on the scene will report otherwise. The story will fade and we will discuss why they hate us so irrationally and why polls in Iraq show that they want us out, and they want us out now.
Tellingly, the New York Times calls this style of attack "avoidance of bloodbath," meaning, of course, that Americans were not killed:
The airstrike also allowed the military to stage an attack in Falluja without sending troops into the city, avoiding the kind of pitched urban battles that resulted in the April bloodbath. Ten marines and hundreds of Iraqis were killed. This strike could be the first of a series by the Americans in a new style of offensive there.
Even the headline is hard to justify: "Strike Aimed at Terrorists Kills 17 in Falluja." One would hope that in order to claim that an attack was aimed at terrorists, they would've demanded some proof which Kimmit pretty much confesses they don't have:
"We know there were members of the Zarqawi network inside the house," the general [Kimmit] said. He added that the attack was based on "actionable intelligence." But there was no evidence that Mr. Zarqawi was in the house or anywhere else in Falluja, he said.
Reported like that everything looks like innocent, well-meaning mistakes.
Other news sources bylined "Fallujah" and not "Baghdad" like the NYT --or probably, more accurately, 'the green zone'-- are reporting that Fallujah police and neighbors of the pulverized house are saying that the house was a regular house with lots of children and ordinary people residing there. This pattern has become so chillingly predictable that there is no excuse left.
Posted by zeynep at 05:08 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
June 18, 2004
Pandering to my readers
It's been pointed out that I should include the link for sending letters to the editors when blogging about media coverage -- as in the case of the last entry about the Washington Post story which gave ample space and legitimacy to the critics Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez who were complaining that the poor were receiving social services financed by -gasp- oil revenues.
In a moment of weakness, I decided to pander to my readers. You can send e-mail letters to letters@washpost.com. Don't send attachments and, as always, keep in mind that concise, polite letters are more effective.
Posted by zeynep at 02:44 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Stop Pandering to the Poor, Mr. Chavez.
Another anti-Chavez piece with some information and a lot of barely disguised hostility. Check out the brilliant headline: "With Social Programs, Chavez Buying Loyalty, Critics Charge."
Really! Who do you think those oil revenues are for? "Buying" loyalty by providing social services and education? Shame on you, Mr. Chavez.
Can you imagine similar headlines for other institutions doing their jobs, such as a state actually trying to help the poor. "With Providing Crucial Aid during Disasters, Red Cross Buying Loyalty, Critics Charge"; "By Providing Health Care, Hospitals Buying Loyalty, Critics Charge."
But critics say Chavez is pandering to the poor to save his political career and gambling irresponsibly with the long-term fiscal health of a state company that provides half the country's revenues.
Of course, the opposition is so fiscally responsible. Their strike last year, aimed at ousting the legally elected president, managed to shut down the oil industry --since they had occupied all the key positions-- at a cost of many, many billions of Dollars to Venezuela's national economy. Now that some money is being spent on the poor, we are all suddenly worried about "fiscal health."
And the article goes on to quote a very responsible sounding Alfredo Keller:
But Alfredo Keller, a pollster and political analyst, said Chavez was trying to "buy loyalty to maintain power" and "using the oil industry as a political weapon." Keller said Chavez was playing on the fears of a nation where 67 percent of the people live in poverty, 35 percent live in extreme poverty, three-quarters of the population is either unemployed or works in the informal sector, and there have been 43,000 homicides in the past five years.
And if Venezuela's people finally give up after so much assault, you know it will be heralded as proof of Chavez's unpopularity.
Posted by zeynep at 02:31 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack
June 13, 2004
Dots Connected, Colors Filled: Name that Thing
It's interesting to watch coverage of the torture issue in the media. On the one hand, you have many good journalists doing a good job reporting their portion. On the other hand, you have the editorial pages and the general tenor of the paper.
The Washington Post, for example has been providing fairly informative coverage of the various bits and pieces of the story. Yet, the editorial page sometimes acts like it doesn't read its own paper. Also, it lies blatantly about the past to help feed the "we've never done this before," "we've had the moral high ground before" myth. They provide a good portion of the facts, connect many dots, fill in lots of the colors but also run a vigorous campaign to make sure nobody names the thing appears.
For example, a a recent editorial claimed that U.S. had waged campaigns against torturing outlaw governments such as military juntas in Argentine and Chile, which, of course, we fully supported and propped up:
For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan --that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. "
Even the current example is not correct, Uzbekistan receives U.S. support.
As the paper correctly reports, even the methods used in the U.S. Gulag aren't new or unprecedented:
A CIA handbook on coercive interrogation methods, produced 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, shows that techniques such as those used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a long history with U.S. intelligence and were based on research and field experience.
Posted by zeynep at 04:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dots Connected, Colors Filled: Name that Thing
It's interesting to watch coverage of the torture issue in the media. On the one hand, you have many good journalists doing a good job reporting their portion. On the other hand, you have the editorial pages and the general tenor of the paper.
The Washington Post, for example has been providing fairly informative coverage of the various bits and pieces of the story. Yet, the editorial page sometimes acts like it doesn't read its own paper. Also, it lies blatantly about the past to help feed the "we've never done this before," "we've had the moral high ground before" myth. They provide a good portion of the facts, connect many dots, fill in lots of the colors but also run a vigorous campaign to make sure nobody names the thing appears.
For example, a a recent editorial claimed that U.S. had waged campaigns against torturing outlaw governments such as military juntas in Argentine and Chile, which, of course, we fully supported and propped up:
For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan --that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. "
Even the current example is not correct, Uzbekistan receives U.S. support.
As the paper correctly reports, even the methods used in the U.S. Gulag aren't new or unprecedented:
A CIA handbook on coercive interrogation methods, produced 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, shows that techniques such as those used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a long history with U.S. intelligence and were based on research and field experience.
Posted by zeynep at 04:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 12, 2004
Joke Makes Right
During his eulogy, George Herbert Walker wanted to express what a great sense of humor Ronald Reagan had. He recounted an incident that took place during the Apartheid era:
When asked, "How did your visit go with Bishop Tutu?" he replied, "So-so."
Posted by zeynep at 05:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Magic Light
After last week's shameless photo-op funeral, I couldn't help roll my eyes when I heard final ceremonies would be held right before sunset. That’s called the "golden hour" or "magic light" because, along with right around sunrise, that’s when pictures are most flattering, softest, bathed in that soft glow -- the light is slanted, shadows longer and softer, and the dimensionality and the texture of colors greatly enhanced. Ironically, sunset is better than sunrise because there are more pollutants in the air.
Most commercials are shot during that time and an actress like Nancy Reagan would surely be aware of the light. I had also noticed --and later read about-- the overhead camera used to get that initial “Nancy Reagan puts her cheek on the coffin” shot during the so-called "private" ceremony in the Regan library early in the week.
But when I saw Nancy Reagan approach the casket at the end, right after being given the flag, I felt that I was being too cynical. She looked so broken and frail, so much like any other widow at any other funeral. I wondered if, at that moment, she would be able to understand what so many people in Central America and elsewhere had lost because of policies spearheaded by her husband. Yeah, sure, the RNC and Bush 43 want to exploit Reagan’s death to no end but this is still a funeral and a sunset is sometimes just a sunset, right? It is an appropriate symbol for death, perhaps -- the end of the day, the coming of the night, etc.
Then, just as she put her hand on the casket and leaned forward, a machine-gun of shutters went off. It was so horrible and jarring. It must have been so much louder and so much worse right there because the TV cameras were not that close -- they were not picking up the voice audio of people speaking. The still cameras were clearly multiple and close. I later saw the same shot from another angle: there were at least three photographers at most four feet from the casket. I later saw stills of that moment from even more angles so there were even more photographers.
I understand they want to have some pictures but why not have one photographer and why not stand back a little -- there are these things called zooms after all? Isn’t there one decent person among the planners? Doesn't anyone actually grieve for this guy instead of wondering about how to use his image?
But, alas, that's the picture fronted by every major paper.
In retrospect, all the reports are she planned every detail -- a process which began while he was in the White House.
So I hereby reclaim my cynical reaction.
It's not like the left doesn't try to exploit imagery. We just tend to overdo, lose control and end up with Che swatch watches.
Posted by zeynep at 04:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 01, 2004
The new-new Iraqi goverment
I'm looking over the full list of posts of the new Interim Government right now. Here's the preliminary read:
Previous members of IGC who retain powerful posts:
President: Ghazi al-Yawar
Deputy President: Ibrahim Jaffari
Prime Minister: Iyad Allawi
Minister of State for Provinces: Wael Abdel Latif
Ministers who were already ministers under the old government appointed by the IGC:
Foreign Minister: Hoshyar Zebari
Oil Minister: Thamer Abbas Ghadban (previous U.S. appointed acting oil minister)
Electricity Minister: Ayham al-Sammarai
Health Minister: Alaadin Alwan (formerly education)
Culture Minister: Mufeez Mohammed Jawad al-Jazairi
Water Resources Minister: Abdul Latif Jamel Rashid
Planning Minister: Mehdi al-Hafez
Public Works Minister: Nasreen Mustapha Barwari
Youth and Sports Minister: Ali Faiq al-Ghadban
Science and Technology Minister: Rashad Mendan Omar
People appointed from parties that already had powerful posts in the IGC:
Deputy President: Rowsch Shaways (KDP)
Deputy Prime Minister (for national security): Barham Saleh (PUK)
Finance Minister: Adel Abdel Mahdi (SCIRI)
I haven't yet tracked down the affiliation of every member so this is the minimum list of holdovers from the previous government.
Meanwhile, the IGC disbands itself.
Shouldn't that be the IGC is renamed the Interim government?
Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice clears up the situation:
"These are not America's puppets," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters at the White House. "This is a terrific list and really good government and we're very pleased with the names that emerged."
Of course not! They just happen to be the people we handpicked last July right after halting all local elections.
In other surprising news, high on the new government's mind is a status of forces agreement with the U.S.-led occupation troops:
The incoming prime minister, Iyad Allawi, said his government would soon negotiate a crucial agreement on the status of U.S.-led international forces that will remain in Iraq.
To relieve the suspense, the new prime minister offered his assurances:
He [Allawi] expressed gratitude for what the coalition forces had done thus far in Iraq, saying "We will need the participation of the multinational forces to help in defeating the enemies of Iraq".
Posted by zeynep at 11:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 01, 2002
Let Them Eat Cake: TV blames Africans for famine
Published in Extra! November/December 2002
A famine is raging through southern Africa--a famine that Doctors Without Borders has called among the worst in Africa in the past decade. The international relief organization CARE reports that the famine "is largely the result of one of the worst droughts in a decade" and that "severe hunger--even starvation--threatens millions, particularly among the most vulnerable: children, the elderly, and pregnant and nursing women" in Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
This is occurring against the backdrop of an AIDS epidemic in Africa that has claimed 25 million lives and counting, leaving behind about 14 million orphans. It's a tragic story, full of suffering, especially of children; it's also a story of the heroism of those who relentlessly struggle against the odds under the harshest conditions. It's a story that produces haunting pictures of despairing mothers, of fading children -- and of the courageous people who are working against time, against all odds, to try to restore life.
But it's not good television, apparently.
Network by network
An analysis of transcripts of news programs for the six months between March 11 and September 11, 2002, by the three major broadcast networks--including daily news shows and such weekly programs as Nightline and 60 Minutes--demonstrates a striking lack of attention to the plight of Southern Africa. The rare stories were almost always without any substantive reference to the role of rich countries, transnational corporations and the international finance system in triggering or worsening the crisis. Analysis seemed to be present to the degree that blame could be put on the shoulders of African nations--fairly or not.
The best network--among dismal competition--was ABC News, which had a total of 14 mentions of the words "famine" or "starvation" in connection with Africa. Of these 14 stories:
- Two were about non-African subjects and mentioned the famine in passing;
- Two were about Colin Powell being heckled at the World Summit on Sustainable Development for blaming the famine on Zimbabwe's seizure of farms owned by the white minority and Zambia's rejection of genetically modified corn;
- Two were about the problems food aid shipments face in transport, such as smuggling and mismanagement;
- One was about the plight of Zimbabwe's white farmers and mentioned the famine in that context;
- One was about genetically modified corn being turned away by Zambia's government;
- Three were items in the overseas briefing section, which run about 50-60 words, that were largely devoted to criticisms of Zimbabwe's policy of land reform;
- Three were items in the overseas briefing section reporting U.N. warnings that 10 million people in Southern Africa faced starvation, and Doctors Without Borders' announcement that half a million people in Angola alone faced starvation.
CBS had a total of seven stories during the same period:
NBC had a single story regarding famine or starvation in Africa in its news programs during the same six-month period. Ironically, NBC's lone piece (8/9/02)--about Veronica, a 12-year-old AIDS orphan struggling to feed her siblings--was the only story among the three networks that was filed from the ground and concentrated on the fact that children were starving. The NBC story did mention that the famine was looming since the strategic grain reserve, meant to be kept at hand for emergencies exactly like this one, had been sold off. NBC, however, did not mention why it was sold: The president of Malawi had publicly stated (BBC, 4/9/02) that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “insisted that, since Malawi had a surplus [of maize] and the [government's] National Food Reserve Agency had this huge loan, they had to sell the maize to repay the commercial banks.”
Blaming the victims
As can be seen from the list, almost all the coverage concentrated on the perceived faults of African governments. Zimbabwe, which is only one country out of the six that face starvation, generated most of the coverage. Most of the criticism of Zimbabwe came from U.S. officials and white farmers who had lost their property. Only once (CBS, 8/18/02) was it mentioned that in a country of 12 million black people, the white minority of 40,000 owns most of the productive land--a legacy of the colonial occupation of the country that had ended 20 years ago.
According to the London Guardian (4/3/00), "About 4,500 white farmers own 11 million hectares of Zimbabwe's prime agricultural land, while about 1 million blacks own 16 million hectares, often in drought-prone regions." In other words, this is a country where a minority of less than one hundredth of one percent owns almost two-thirds as much land as the majority--and owns the choicest land, because they once ruled the country.
These whites were generally portrayed as hard-working, honest farmers who just wanted to till their land, rather than as giant land-owners who had usurped the most productive territory--although they were surely that, given the amount of starvation that such a small number of farms was reportedly able to cause.
Mugabe's administration in Zimbabwe has been thoroughly criticized by his own citizens, and the subject is clearly newsworthy. However, the omission of basic facts such as the skewed land ownership turned a potentially useful examination of the motives of Zimbabwe's land reform program into a one-dimensional promotion for a single message: It's their own fault they're starving.
Zambia's refusal of genetically modified corn also generated what was, relatively speaking, a flurry of coverage. While this finally got CBS to cover the issue of the famine (8/30/02), only once was it mentioned that a major concern was the consequences for the ecosystem and the economy if people planted some of the corn--quite a likely scenario since, as seen in all famine situations, what corn seed stock did exist has probably been eaten by the starving population. This is critical because Zambia exports corn to the European Union--an issue that CBS alluded to only once by saying one of Zambia's concerns was that Europe was "nervous" about GM corn. In fact, far beyond "nervous," the EU for all practical purposes bans imports of GM foods, and Zambia would indeed lose access to European markets.
It was also not reported that the U.N.'s World Food Program began acquiring non-GM corn and wheat for distribution in Zambia, or that Zambia had agreed to distribute milled GM corn that could not be planted. Perhaps most alarmingly for U.S. consumers, none of the networks noted that the Zambia's request to the U.S. government for proof of the long-term safety of GM corn was answered with assurances (AP, 8/22/02) rather than with studies and reports.
CBS and the other networks were uninterested in the famine that continued to rage in Lesotho, Angola, Malawi and Mozambique, countries that notably did not fit into the "it's their fault" theme--all four had accepted GM foods, and had no land reform program upsetting production.
Causes closer to home
Meanwhile, evidence is surfacing that the current famine may actually more the result of actions of the U.S. and other Northern countries, rather than a stroke of bad luck and/or mismanagement on the part of African nations. The U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) as well as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been warning that it's quite possible Africa's droughts are now being largely exacerbated or triggered by global warming (IPCC/UNEP report, 2/21/01)--a phenomenon for which Africa is the least to blame, as Africa, with 14 percent of the world's population, is responsible for only 3 percent of global CO2 emission. UNEP and IPCC have also warned that Africa suffers disproportionately from global warming.
Recent scientific papers also suggest that pollution from industrialized nations contributed to the tragic Ethiopian famine in the 1980s (AP, 7/21/02). These issues received only one mention on network news during the period studied--a reference on ABC (3/26/02) to a possible connection between climate change and drought in Africa.
The almost complete lack of coverage regarding the global warming/famine connection was made more striking by the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg, South Africa. George W. Bush refused to attend the summit, sending Secretary of State Colin Powell instead--who was heckled by the delegates. The interruptions in Powell's speech occurred mainly at two points: first when he tried to blame Zambia and Zimbabwe for the famine, and again when he stated that "the United States is taking action to meet environmental challenges, including global climate change."
The eruption of anger at Colin Powell among delegates and dignitaries from around the world might have been better understood had any of the networks explained the context of the famine, and reminded viewers that the U.S. withdrew from the Kyoto treaty earlier this year. During the WSSD, the U.S. further antagonized those concerned about global warming by torpedoing all attempts to set goals for increasing solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy. Another link between policies of the rich world and the famine that was repeatedly made my delegates at the WSSD, but ignored by the networks, was the issue of farm subsidies; they argued that it's not possible for the poor world to keep its agriculture alive when rich nations lavishly subsidize the exports of their own farmers (Food First, 9/02).
Not even Colin Powell's subsequent visit to Angola, one of the famine-stricken countries, prompted the networks to cover the famine. Angola had been a breaking story over the summer because a 30-year-old civil war, with one of the sides armed and financed by the United States and apartheid South Africa, had just ended. The international aid community had access to Angola's remote corners for the first time in decades, discovering shocking levels of starvation.
Powell's visit to Angola was indeed spurred by the end of the civil war, but he was there neither to apologize nor to assess the damage; rather, his trip was driven by Angola's 11 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, second only to Nigeria in sub-Saharan Africa, and the country's non-membership in OPEC. The famine in Angola was apparently on nobody's agenda: During the whole six-month period, it was mentioned only once by the three networks.
In 53 words, ABC News (6/12/02) duly reported that Doctors Without Borders attributed the starvation to "the chronic criminal neglect of the Angolan government," and the organization had accused the U.N. of being "shamefully slow in responding to the crisis since the civil war there ended earlier this year." In keeping with the "it's their own fault" rule, no mention was made of previous deep involvement of the United States in the war that devastated the country.
Some of the most surreal coverage occurred on Nightline (7/17/02) when Chris Bury reported that "the overall response still falls far short of what the U.N. says is needed," and went on to explain that "part of that is blamed on the slow onset of famine. By the time those familiar television images of starving children appear, it's too late to help them." So the lack of attention is not the media's fault but somehow the famine's fault because its "slow onset" delayed the images.
Never mind that the U.N. and aid agencies had been warning of the famine in Southern Africa at least since February 2002; never mind that images of malnourished children had been available for months; never mind that it is quite possible to file a news story about dangers posed to children who have not yet managed to consume all their body fat and develop the swollen bellies and aged faces of kwashiorkor. Never mind that all famines, almost by definition, have a slow onset.
We are not going to report the perfectly predictable course of events because they have not yet happened, the media seem to be saying, and when they do happen, we are going to duly inform you that "it's too late to help them"--and continue to ignore the story for all practical purposes. It's their fault, anyway.
Posted by zeynep at 10:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 30, 2002
Theme Song for 21st Century Famines
This article was written during a period of unprecedented coverage of the ongoing famine six African countries -- except most of the coverage implied that the famine was somehow primarily the result of Mugabe's actions in Zimbabwe.
“The situation in Zimbabwe hit you guys hard, I suppose” said my neighbor to the young woman who had just sauntered out of the customs area at the airport. She was from Malawi, he was trying to make small talk about the famine ravaging her country. She was resignedly nodding till he mentioned Zimbabwe.
With a puzzled look, she squinted in his direction: “What?”
As usual, we hear a lot about the side issue and almost nothing about the fundamental questions: hence the puzzling remark.
She probably didn't know that a good chunk of the media coverage in the United States regarding the famine that threatens six Southern African states and 12 million people concentrated on the fact that Zimbabwe’s government is trying to oust couple thousand white farmers from the most of the productive lands, most of which they control as a legacy of the white supremacist colonial rule. The truth is that this is but a side issue; the evictions haven’t helped the harvest; however, the hard reality is that rainfalls are down 75 percent in Zimbabwe. And Zimbabwe is but one country threatened by the famine.
While it is true that this famine, as with most famines, is the result of a combination of bad weather and bad policies, the real tragic story is that both the bad policy and the bad weather were severely exacerbated by the rich world.
That would be us.
It often seems that God perennially deals a bad hand to Africa. Remember Ethiopia in the eighties? The massive famine that came at the end of an almost ten year drought, the images of starving, wide-eyed, swollen-bellied children with the accompanying tune of “We are the World, We Are the Children”?
The song should be remade: “We Own the World, We Ignore the Children.”
It’s turning out that the Africa’s ‘bad luck’ is us.
Some scientists now believe that the Ethiopian drought in the eighties may have been triggered by “tiny particles of sulfur dioxide spewed by factories and power plants thousands of miles away in North America, Europe and Asia.”
In other words, pollution from industrial nations.
The current drought cycle is also quite likely aggravated by global warming and the general change in climate patterns due to human activities. In the report released last year by United Nations Environment Program, “Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” UNEP scientists predicted that, in terms of droughts, southern Africa would be one of the hardest hit areas from global warming and industrial pollution. The report talked of a ‘century of hunger’ and predicted that ‘lack of rain, warmer temperatures and increases in evaporation could reduce yields by a third or more in these areas.’
Africa's share of the global population is 14 percent but it's responsible for only 3.2 percent of global CO2 emission.
It gets worse.
Probably unbeknownst to my neighbor in the airport, Malawi, under the ‘advice’ of IMF, World Bank and other international lenders and donors, was forced to cut fertilizer and maize subsidies to its millions of subsistence farmers. The lack of subsidies made it hard for poor farmers to buy fertilizer and seeds -- and subsistence farmers constitute almost 70 percent of Malawi’s population. Meanwhile, back at the ranch in the rich world, farmers are heavily subsidized. The 2002 Farm Bill in the United States will provide $190 billion in new subsidy money over the next 10 years to US farmers, which constitute only two percent of the population -- and most of that money will go to the wealthy, corporate agribusinesses. European Union too heavily subsidizes its own farmers.
None of that for Malawi.
And, as Challis McDonough of Voice Of America reported, most farmers in Malawi could not borrow the money to buy fertilizer and seed since the interest rate on loans from commercial banks were incredibly high, about 55 percent.
My neighbor in the airport waiting lounge was probably also not aware that just two year ago, Malawi had a bumper crop and wanted to keep a chunk of in its strategic grain reserves to guard against famines.
The insolence.
Countries such as Malawi do not get to make their own policy, with the best interests of their people in mind. This little country with an annual per capita income less than $200 and a life expectancy of 38 (yes, thirty eight, 3-8 as in two times nineteen) already owes $1.5 billion, about 90 percent of its GDP, to various financiers.
Malawi’s President Muluzi gave an interview he gave to BBC on April 9th, 2002. In the interview, Muluzi explained that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “insisted that, since Malawi had a surplus [of maize] and the (government's) National Food Reserve Agency had this huge loan, they had to sell the maize to repay the commercial banks.” The ‘huge loan’ had been taken to establish the reserve. Its repayment meant that the maize in the reserve was sold off. Why was this done at all, you might ask. I didn’t do the research, I don’t know. However, I do know that a familiar pattern is well established with IMF bail-outs and loans and Heavily Indebted Poor Country initiatives and what not -- quite likely, some bank in New York, Paris, London Zurich or Tokyo made some money from the transaction itself with commission, interest, consulting fees...
So, onward, they starve.
This is the weekend of IMF / World Bank protests in DC. One of the key demands is ‘to cancel all impoverished country debt to the World Bank and IMF.’ IMF and the World Bank as well as most governments of the rich world are opposed to what they call debt forgiveness, mostly claiming that it breeds irresponsibility. They have come up with various schemes that are supposed to provide some debt relief while providing accountability -- most of these schemes have so far required that these countries take on fresh debt.
I, too have a proposal about debt forgiveness: let’s cancel the debt and hope they find it in their hearts to forgive us.
Posted by zeynep at 09:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack