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Free Press special issue - War in Afghanistan
Special Issue
Editorial
We went to press as the US and the UK began air strikes in Afghanistan. Our concern is to ensure that accurate information and a range of views are presented in the media. Our worry is that, as in other military conflicts (the Falklands, the Gulf war and the bombing of Serbia) we are often subjected to spin, disinformation and cheerleading from most sections of the press for military solutions to complex problems. Indeed all the English national newspapers gave editorial support for the air strikes on Monday 8 October.
We will be putting material on our website www.cpbf.org.uk to present our views and those of other organisations. We also give details in this issue of the launch of Media Workers Against the War. There are also a number of other US-based web sites that give a range of critical and alternative views, including: www.mediachannel.org, www.tompaine.com and www.salon.com.
Finally, we need to understand what are the reasons for this present crisis. Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism by John K. Cooley (Pluto Press) provides part of the essential background. He details how the repercussions of the United States training and equipping militant Islamic groups after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 have been devastating. The book documents how a volatile cocktail of religion, drugs, cold war politics, oil and arms dealing have brought us to the present conflict.
THE MEDIA'S WAR
By Richard Keeble
It's a sobering thought that better evidence is required to prosecute a shoplifter than is needed to commence a world war. This was the wry comment of Anthony Scrivener QC after Tony Blair announced to parliament on 3 October the supposed "proof" of Osama bin Laden's responsibility for the atrocities in the United States. As the Daily Mail commented: "Circumstantial it undoubtedly is. A lawyer would have a field day picking holes in it." Only nine of the document's 70 points focused on the 11 September attacks and provided no evidence that directly linked the Saudi-born dissident to them.
Yet Fleet Street could not allow reason to divert it from standing shoulder to shoulder with battle hungry Blair. So editors over-indulged in Orwellian doublethink pronouncing that the dossier did, indeed, provide all the proof needed to justify military attacks on Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban. According to The Times, the evidence was "compelling". It thundered: "There is no further need for diplomacy or room for negotiation: the choice, as the Prime Minister said, is to defeat the terrorists or be defeated. Action is therefore imminent." The Daily Mail, carried away with Blairite adulation, described it as a "remarkable dossier" that "was never intended to be picked over by lawyers."
For the "liberals" of the Guardian, fresh from their rabid support for the Nato bombing of Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo conflict, "it is simply perverse to pretend that anyone other than bin Laden and his group is responsible". And no independent line was forthcoming from the Independent. The dossier, it claimed, was "more than enough to justify action against al-Qa'ida".
The Express was worried about the inadequacy of the evidence against the "prime suspect". But it continued: "We have to accept on trust that the vital piece of the jigsaw pointing to Bin laden's guilt is in place." No such doubts worried the hyper-hawks at the Daily Telegraph. "Even if there had been no evidence at all to link bin Laden with the terrorist attack of September 11 - even if those attacks had not happened - the United States would be wholly justified in tracking him down and killing him, " it commented chillingly.
This Fleet Street propaganda offensive on the "dubious dossier" - just days before the US led attacks on Afghanistan began - was all too predictable given editors' reactions to recent international crises. Instead of calling for restraint and working for a reduction in tensions, Fleet Street has too often backed bombing. Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, editors immediately went on a war footing calling for "surgical" strikes to take out the new-found monster, Saddam Hussein. And later during the Desert Storm campaign, when 200,000 Iraqi conscripts were estimated to have died, no newspaper spoke out against the massacres (though the Guardian was sceptical throughout).
The pro-war consensus emerged again during the Kosovo conflict of 1999. But once Nato's risk-free bombings from the skies began, Fleet Street's armchair strategists united in calling for a ground assault on Serbia. Not even the generals dared adopt this battle plan. Only one newspaper opposed the bombings, the Independent on Sunday, and its editor was removed days after the strikes were halted. Yet while the vast majority of Fleet Street columnists backed the Desert Storm massacres, dissent did surface during the Kosovo crisis and out of 99 columnists I surveyed 33 opposed the bombings.
The post-11 September crisis has again seen a lively debate amongst the columnists. Voices both for and against the military response to the US outrages were heard. Significantly most of Fleet Street's commentary on the press coverage highlighted this diversity. But the hum of controversy amongst the columnists was drowned by the din from the editorials which almost unanimously backed the military option - and by the news coverage which hyped the inevitability of strikes.
Another crucial element of the propaganda war were the public opinion polls (as, for instance, in the Guardian, Observer and Telegraph) which helped in the manufacture of public consent for the military action. For none of the polls explored in any detail public views about peaceful, legal, diplomatic, humanitarian solutions to the crisis: Since the polls were based, like most of the news coverage, on the inevitability of military action, they served to create rather than reflect opinion.
Moreover, the Bush/Blair "war on terrorism", avidly promoted by Fleet Street, crucially ignored the state terrorism of the US and UK and their new-found "allies" such as Russia and Pakistan. And the hyper-personalising of the crisis, with all the focus on "terrorist warlord" Osama bin Laden, diverted attention from other destabilising factors such as the ever-expanding, global military industrial complex. Indeed, the totally disproportionate display of military might around war-ravaged, famine-striken Afghanistan showed a military industrial complex frighteningly out-of control. The "restraint" of the US-led forces, heralded by Fleet Street before the strikes began, was a myth.
Richard Keeble, senior lecturer in journalism at City University, London, is author of Secret state, silent press (John Libbey)
SPREADING DISINFORMATION
By Stephen Dorril
When journalists write about intelligence matters and reach for a cliche,inevitably it is that intelligence is 'a wilderness of mirrors'. Rarely used is James Angleton's other dictum that 'disinformation might be the chief job of an intelligence agency'. The latter is a more accurate statement of what has been appearing in the media since the events of 11 September.
Most journalists appear to confuse 'information' with 'intelligence' when they are two separate concepts. The truth is, they are very different.
Agencies collect information that is collated, processed, analysed and then, more often than, spun into intelligence. Raw, unmediated intelligence is rarely available to the media, though it is worth recalling that during the Cuban Missile Crisis the Kennedy administration did release ultra-secret U-2 high-altitude surveillance photographs of the Soviet missile sites on Cuba to the United Nations and then the press.
In the last few weeks we have been liberally dosed with hasty, unverifiable and often contradictory intelligence (Osama Bin Laden is worth $400m: he is broke; he is a friend of Algeria and Iraq: he hates Algerians and Iraqis),
little of which can be regarded as reliable. The working practices of investigative journalists on the Washington Post of All the President's Men era, when no fact was published without three separate sources to verifiy it, seems a distant dream.
Ministers, who are often entranced by the magic word 'secrecy', hide behind the phrase 'intelligence sources and methods' to curtail debate and scrutiny. The reality is that sources can be obscured and blacked-out in documents, while methods have not really changed, except for technical details, in decades. Bugs are planted, telephones, fax machines, mobile phones, web sites, internet communications are tapped. All this is common knowledge.
Bin Laden knows this all too well, which is why some reports claim that he never uses these forms of communication. Which, of course, makes his alleged telephone call to his mother just before 11 September, all the more intriguing. Did he make it? His step-father naturally rebuts the claim but adds: 'Osama has not used a telephone since he discovered that his conversations were being monitored by the United States.' (Sunday Times, 7 October.)
The point here is, why not release the original tape of the conversation? Did he use the phrase 'massive events'? Is it a correct translation? Robert Fisk, whose sceptical reporting has been a beacon of good journalistic
practice, has noted (The Independent, 29 September) previous 'serious textual errors' made by CIA translators.
The British government's 21-page document laying out the case for Bin Laden's orchestration of the events of 11 September is not particularly impressive. In fact, it is at best flimsy, with little new material of any substance. Chris Blackhurst (Independent on Sunday, 7 October) called it 'a report of conjecture, supposition and unsubstantiated assertions of fact', which is about right. Clearly, the Americans thought the same because the CIA decided two days later to 'leak' further information in an attempt to
shore up the case. Bin Laden may indeed be guilty of the crime but we have, as yet, seen little evidence to prove it.
In 1951 Prime Minister Clement Attlee was warned of intelligence fears that Russian agents had suitcases with kits to construct an atomic bomb. Attlee was not unduly concerned. The same scenario appeared in the early seventies. Then it was Soviet special forces. It surfaced again in the mid-nineties, when stories appeared about weapons-grade plutonium disappearing from Soviet states.
Intelligence agencies continually create alarmist disinformation. Who now recalls 'Red Mercury' the mysterious substance that was a source of cheap
nuclear weapons for terrorists; the 'white-coated mercenaries', the demobbed Soviet scientists selling their knowledge of weapons of mass destruction to Libya and Iraq; the nuclear artillery shells which went missing from Soviet
sourthern states; the 'Islamic bomb' which terrorists were building to be in use by 1995; and the cheap and easily assembled 'dirty bomb'.
Since 11 September the intelligence agencies with the aid of gullible journalists, editors desperate for endless copy and politicians on a crusade have constructed a truly global conspiracy theory. At the top is the mastermind from every Ian Fleming fantasy, Osama Bin Laden, who has a 'golden domino' theory of regional domination in the Middle East, controlling a vast network, Al-Qaeda, of thousands of terrorists across the globe, now asleep but with access to millions of dollars, and all awaiting the call to murder us in our beds.
Al-Qaeda, according to the press, has so far attempted to buy uranium from the Russian mafia; attempted to manufacture chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax and the plague; planned attacks on European gas and oil pipelines; plotted to blow up the US embassy in Paris; planned to kill President Bush at the G8 summit at Genoa; made a huge profit from share
dealing immediately prior to the attack in America; plotted a Belgium attack; and is planning another thirty attacks against the West in London, Washington, European capitals and the Vatican.
If James Angleton was alive he might have added a third quote: The function of an intelligence agency is to create fear. Occasionally, of course, they get their analysis absolutely right.
In 1993 British intelligence put together a paper, 'Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East'. It noted that it thrived on the failure to resolve economic and social problems, corruption in government and the bankruptcy of political ideologies of all kinds. The report said that 'fundamentalist groups advocating violence and revolution are in a minority. Nevertheless
... Western, particularly American, culture and materialism are seen as a threat to Islamic values [but] fundamentalism does not present a coherent and monolithic threat to Western interests in the way that Communism once did. It is not supported by a superpower. Its appeal in Western countries is confined to Muslim minorities and the threat of subversion is, in the UK at least, minimal, Dealings with extreme fundamentalist regimes would be highly unpredictable but not necessarily unmanageable.'
The essential message was that the West had to deal with the underlying problems rather than fundamentalism itself. Unfortunately, the message was not heeded and it continues to get lost in the mix of poor intelligence, political spin and disinformation that proves to be so attractive to the media.
Stephen Dorril is the author of MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations
LAPDOGS OR WATCHDOGS?
USA
There are two concerns about how US media may curb or silence independent and critical reporting of the actions of George Bush and the US government.
The first is the role of the Federal Communications Commission - appointed by the President - that controls who gets a broadcast licence. The FCC not only sanctions the licences for the TV and radio stations; it also clears the mergers that pump up the size of US media conglomerates.
Sam Husseini has a piece, The FCC, the Media and War, on www.tompaine.com where he points out that Daniel Ellsberg, who worked on the Pentagon Papers (a devastating internal study on the Vietnam War for the Ministry of Defence), risked everything by leaking the Papers to various media outlets. The TV networks wouldn’t touch them because they knew it might spark a costly investigation by the FCC and jeopardise their licences.
The New York Times published much of the Pentagon Papers but the Nixon administration got the courts to issue a restraining order, so Ellsberg leaked parts of the Papers to The Washington Post. However the Post, unlike the Times, had substantial broadcast holdings and was vulnerable to the FCC. The paper’s lawyers thought publication would endanger its broadcast licences. The paper only published articles about the Papers, not extended extracts.
Husseini points out the current FCC head is Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell, Chair of the Joint Chiefs during the Gulf War, when there were unprecedented restrictions on press coverage from the field, and the news played battlefield videos recorded by the Pentagon.
‘Think about it,’ Husseini concludes, ‘the person with the most say in determining who holds a broadcast licence in the United States is the son of the Secretary of State. Hopefully, the media managers won’t put their business plans and pleasing the FCC before seriously reporting, and questioning, the Administration’s war.’
The second issue is the close links between Big Oil, government and media companies. At the pinnacle is the President himself, whose connection with oil interests is well known. Before taking her position as National Security Affairs Adviser Condoleezza Rice used to sit on the board of directors of Chevron. On the board of directors of General Electric/NBC is Texaco director (and former US Senator) Sam Nunn. Another Texaco director, Charles Price ll, sits on the New York Times/Boston Globe board of directors and a third member of Texaco’s board, William Steere Jr, sits on the board of directors of Dow Jones Co/Wall Street Journal.
Before he became Secretary of State, Colin Powell was a member of the board of American Online, prior to its merger with CNN’s parent company, Time Warner. Now a member of the Chevron board of directors, Carla Hills, also sits on the board of AOL Time Warner, the world’s biggest media conglomerate.
The mainstream media in its news shows or news columns may censor or marginalize the voices of anti-war activists. The drive to military action has much to do with protecting the interests of Big Oil in the Middle East and beyond.
Bill Maher Says The Unsayable
Bill Maher has been savagely attacked for his comments on the US late-night talk-show, Politically Incorrect, for his remarks contrasting the hijackers with US pilots. “We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building - say what you like about it, it’s not cowardly.”
Fedex and Sears promptly pulled all their sponsorship from the show, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer attacked him twice and other sections of the US media have weighed in.
John Patterson’s comment in The Guardian (5 October) is spot on: “The show is a place where voices usually excluded from the right-centrist consensus of TV current affairs shows can be heard. That is a problem at a time when the networks are bellicose and unyielding in their calls for war and retribution and in no mood for subtleties or political nuances. It acts as a reminder of the perils of one country marching in ideological lockstep towards a conflict half of its people can’t be bothered to educate themselves about.”
UK
‘How Can the US bomb this tragic people?’
Robert Fisk, Independent on Sunday, 23 September
“I was working for The Times in 1980, and just south of Kabul I picked up a very disturbing story. A group of religious mujahedin fighters had attacked a school because the communist regime had forced girls to be educated alongside boys. So they had bombed the school, murdered the head teacher’s wife and cut off her husband’s head. It was all true. But when The Times ran the story, the Foreign Office complained to the foreign desk that my report gave support to the Russians. Of course. Because the Afghan fighters were the good guys. Because Osama bin Laden was a good guy. Charles Douglas-Home, then editor of The Times, would insist that Afghan guerrillas were called ‘freedom fighters’ in the headline. There was nothing you couldn’t do with words.
And so it is today. President Bush now threatened the obscurantist, ignorant, super-conservative Taliban with the same punishment as he intends to mete out to bin Laden. Bush originally talked about ‘justice and punishment’ and about ‘bringing to justice’ the perpetrators of the atrocities. But he’s not sending policemen to the Middle East; he’s sending B-52s. And F-16s and AWACS planes and Apache helicopters. We are not going to arrest bin Laden. We are going to destroy him. And that’s fine if he’s the guilty man. But B-52s don’t discriminate between men wearing turbans, or between men and women or women and children.
I wrote last week about the culture of censorship which is now to smother us, and of the personal attacks which any journalist questioning the roots of this crisis endures. Last week, in a national European newspaper, I got a new and revealing example of what this means. I was accused of being anti-American and then informed that anti-Americanism was akin to anti-Semitism. You get the point, of course. I’m not really sure what anti-Americanism is. But criticising the United States is now to be the moral equivalent of Jew-hating. It’s OK to write headlines about ‘Islamic terror’ or my favourite French example ‘God’s madmen’, but it’s definitely out of bounds to ask why the United States is loathed by so many Arab Muslims in the middle East. We can give the murderers a Muslim identity: we can finger the Middle East for the crime - but we may not suggest any reasons for the crime.”
STOP THE WARMONGERING
Tim Gopsill on the aims of Media Workers Against the War
With the build-up to a global conflict, activists have revived Media Workers Against the War - MWAW. This grouping of journalists and others has set itself the following aims:
"We are workers in the media opposed to the current war drive and the plans for a US-led military assault on Afghanistan and possibly other countries.
"We are utterly opposed to all acts of terror against civilian populations, whether committed by governments or groups of individuals.
"We believe that in the current crisis it is more important than ever to protect and promote pluralism in debate, the free flow of information, and the public scrutiny of official pronouncements.
"We therefore resolve to join together as Media Workers Against the War in order to:
"1. Participate in the broad movement now rapidly emerging against the war
2. Collate and disseminate facts and arguments pertinent to the war, not only from Britain but from around the world
3. Promote anti-war viewpoints through the media and expose and resist attempts at censorship and disinformation
4. Oppose media coverage that in any way licenses or gives succour to racism or attacks on asylum seekers."
MWAW first emerged at the start of the Gulf War in 1991, when it campaigned inside and outside the media industry for fairer, more balanced reporting.
It resumed its activity in 1999 with the bombing of Yugoslavia, and now with the threat of wider conflict, it has been revived again.
Following two well-attended planning meetings in London, it has moved quickly to set up a website and is planning to derive a printed bulletin
from the material. The site carries news, a discussion forum (in which all views, including those in favour of the war, are welcome), and an archive drawn from a team monitoring exercise. The group emphasises that it is interested not just in bad, unbalanced or dangerous reporting or commentary: it recognises there has been much very good journalism, which it will promote. A lot of the material comes from overseas, particularly the USA.
MWAW is leafleting media houses and holding workplace meetings. On October 10 it staged a big public meeting in London addressed by Paul Foot, John Pilger, Rosie Boycott and the National Union of Journalists General Secretary, John Foster. Regional meetings are planned.
For information on all aspects of the campaign, go to the website:
www.mwaw.org
MEETING
Challenges for the media in the aftermath of 11 September
Panel includes leading journalists covering the events Organised by NUJ London Press and PR Branch
Thursday 1 November 7.30-9.00pm
NUJ Head Office, Headland House, 308-312 Grays Inn Road, London
LINKSwww.tompaine.com
www.mediachannel.org
www.salon.com
Last modified: Monday, October 22, 2001
Previous war reporting stories
1 November - NUJ meeting
4th November - Caryl Churchill's 'Far Away', plus Kika Markham reading from Tony Kushner's 'Homebody/Kabul'.
October 23 - MWAW rally at the BBC
How Carter and Brzezinski helped start the Afghan mess
ARROW calls for anti-war vigils on 11 November
US TV networks fall in line and salute
Media Workers Against the War
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Notices
Events & Announcements
World Press Freedom Day
More reporters are currently imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Only a matter of weeks ago lawyers failed to persuade a Turkish court to release a 76-year-old journalist from a Turkish internet news station.
World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
The World Press Freedom Day rally is being staged by the National Union of Journalists at the NUJ head office, Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1 on Thursday May 2, 6pm-8pm.
DATELINE: 27/4/13
UK launch of EU media campaign
DATELINE: 13/3/13
The UK launch of a 'European Citizens' Initiative' calling for EU rules against concentration of media power will take place on Thursday March 21 from 11:00am – 12:30pm in Committee Room 4A at the House of Lords, London. Guest speakers will include actor and activist Hugh Grant (pictured), media consultant Claire Enders, Professor Steven Barnett, Barry McCall (President of the NUJ) and Marc Gruber (Director of the European Federation of Journalists).
A European Citizens' Initiative is an official petition, like a Downing Street petition. If it succeeds in gathering a million signatures across the EU, the Commission is obliged to respond.
This petition calls for the EU to act to protect media pluralism and press freedom.
CPBF Annual General Meeting
DATELINE: 1/3/13
Make a note in your diary
Saturday 13 July 2013 from 10.00am
NUJ HQ, 308/312 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1.
Leveson, media ownership, CPBF future work.
DOWNLOAD FREEPRESS NOW
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Download Freepress in PDF, ePub or mobi format. Issue 194 now available.
MEDIA FOR ALL CONFERENCE
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Papers from the Media for All Conference
MEDIA MANIFESTO
DATELINE: 26/3/10
The media’s job is to inform and entertain us but we rely on them too to tell us what our rulers and representatives are up to. In the run-up to the Iraq war the government used spin and disinformation in the media to create panic and mislead people. The truth is coming out now, but we need stronger, more independent media to be able to scrutinise governments and make informed choices.
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Previous stories
War Reporting
1 November - NUJ meeting
4th November - Caryl Churchill's 'Far Away', plus Kika Markham reading from Tony Kushner's 'Homebody/Kabul'.
October 23 - MWAW rally at the BBC
How Carter and Brzezinski helped start the Afghan mess
ARROW calls for anti-war vigils on 11 November
US TV networks fall in line and salute
Media Workers Against the War
