Archive for December, 2007

Musa Qala: The return of the censor

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

Nato’s recapture of Musa Qala in December went unrecorded in the British media, says veteran war correspondent Martin Bell. This shocking comment is 100 per cent correct. There was, as the father of a soldier involved in the battle told a local paper, “a news blackout”. Bell writes: “Even in the Falklands war, which was hardly a model of media-military relations, television had better access than in this unseen operation.”

The Sunday Telegraph splashed the story on December 9, but after that it was buried by the papers. As a result, the British public knows almost nothing about the sheer scale of this massive assault, and the extent of the inevitable civilian casualties.

The fighting was intense. None other than Jeremy Clarkson witnessed it for the Sun newspaper: “At Camp Bastion I watched the Apache gunships lifting off with Hellfire missiles and rockets slung under their bellies. And half an hour later, they’d be back – empty. … The numbers are astonishing. Our troops have fired 12,000 artillery shells since June. And to put that in perspective, only 6,000 were used in the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq. What’s more, in the last 15 months, infantry troops have got through 2.7 million rounds of ammunition. That is 6,000 – a day.”

Clarkson’s conclusion? This is “a bloody, horrible and pointless war, in hell”. Well said, Jeremy.

The only two sources of information we have about Musa Qala are journalists embedded with NATO troops, and the intrepid locals employed by the Institute of War and Peace Reporting.

Some embeds have done an amazing job – Nick Meo for the Times and Stephen Grey stand out. Here is Grey’s description of the fighting: “Embedded with a team of British troops and a detachment / ‘A–team’ of U.S. special forces, I watched the Taliban being pounded these last few days with overwhelming force – vapor trails circled in the clear blue sky over the Helmand desert as B1 and B52 bombers backed by A10 tank busters, F16s, Apache helicopters and Specter gunships were used to kill hundreds of Taliban fighters.

Apart from this and Nick Meo’s reports, you will find no other mention of B1s and B52s, the tank-busters, F16s and similar killing machines in the mainstream British media’s coverage of the assault on Musa Qala – not forgetting the use of Mirage 2000 combat fighters.

Almost all other reports in the mainstream media have relied on correspondents in Kabul, Islamabad and London, who have simply repeated MoD press releases. The worst was Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian, who reported that “troops were met by cheering locals“. Norton-Taylor was the only journalist to make this observation. Meo’s reports make clear what shameful nonsense this was.

It was truly comical the extent to which the print and broadcast media reported MoD lies. In the first days of the fighting it was widely reported that two senior Taliban commanders had been captured. The Telegraph, BBC, Metro, Times and Guardian carried this news, taken from the Reuters, AFP and UPI news wires. A few days later the Afghan government admitted this was rubbish.

At least the Telegraph bothered to report the Taliban’s reaction to the claim: “I am almost crying, I am laughing so much,” the Taliban’s chief spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi told the paper. “This is just lies. Do you think these are people who are easy to capture?”

On Monday December 10 the wires and mainstream websites were buzzing with the news that Musa Qala had fallen. But as the Telegraph reported two days later, “There was some initial confusion as the Afghan Defence Ministry announced that Musa Qala had been ‘completely captured’, while a UK military spokesman later claimed there had been a misunderstanding in translation, and that forces remained on the outskirts of the town.”

These reports echo the “good news” reporting that accompanied the first days of the invasion of Iraq, much of which turned out to be false. Just as the announcement of an “uprising” in Basra in March 2003 in was timed for the main evening new bulletins, so was the good news from Musa Qala timed for Gordon Brown’s arrival in Helmand on December 10.

From the IWPR, however, we see a very different picture of what happened. Musa Qala is not likely to be a death blow to the resistance. The renewed fighting, with the attendant displacement of families and damage to property, may in fact further inflame local passions against the Afghan government and its foreign allies, in whim the locals’ trust seems to have reached an all-time low.

Thousands of families fled their homes in Musa Qala and are in need of help, especially given the cold winter weather, the IWPR reported. Interviews with people from the district reflected the terror caused by the battle. “I swear I will never forget my little daughter’s screams,” said Zmarai, from the village of Chenai. “She was scared to death of the bombs. There was blood coming out of my son’s ears. I just want one side or the other to control Musa Qala. The government or the Taleban – I don’t care.”

IWPR received several reports from Musa Qala of collapsed buildings, dead bodies that cannot be moved because of the fighting, and civilians caught in the crossfire. Many people mentioned a figure of 40 dead, but this has yet to be substantiated.

“Every single place has been bombed,” said Mohammad Gul, a resident of Toughi village. “I cannot go out, so I don’t know how many people are dead. But a missile landed on my neighbour’s house, killing his five-year-old daughter and his cow.”

“The past five days have been hell,” said another Musa Qala resident. “There has been bombing and more bombing. People are terrified.” The centre of town was closed down, he added, with people afraid to leave their homes, even to obtain basic necessities like food and water. “A neighbourhood called Nabo Aka near the main mosque in Musa Qala was bombed, and 28 civilians were killed just there,” he said. “But the bodies are still lying under the rubble. There were women and children among them, but no Taleban.”

Hajji Ghulam Mohammad, also from Musa Qala, told the IWPR, “The governor promised that he would take the district peacefully. Well, where is he now? The ANA and NATO are bombing us, they are pounding us with artillery. This is not the way to defeat the Taleban. Instead, everybody becomes a Taleb. Please, tell the government that if they want to capture Musa Qala, they have to stop killing innocent people. Otherwise, the civilians will just join forces with the Taleban.”

In the week after the Musa Qala assault, the Telegraph was alone of the UK media to report claims of an atrocity by western troops nearby in Helmand province. The British Army says it is “taking seriously” claims that children were shot and several adult villagers had their throats cut during a secret military operation by unidentified forces in Helmand province, the paper reported. The alleged Nov 18 mission in the village of Toube reportedly involved Afghans and unspecified foreign soldiers.

The IWPR confirms the story, which was echoed by dozens of villagers from Toube whom IWPR interviewed as they underwent treatment in Lashkar Gah or accompanied injured relatives there. All spoke consistently of soldiers breaking down doors, shooting children and cutting throats. They agreed that the raid began at two in the morning with the sound of helicopters bringing in dozens of armed men, both Afghan and foreign.

The question is, why has the huge operation at Musa Qala, and the events leading up to it, been so poorly covered by the media?

Martin Bell says that “now the political commissars appear to be in charge”. He notes that, when a reporter and cameraman for Panorama filmed a recent battle in Afghanistan, they were obliged to have with them a Ministry of Defence “minder” who acted as frontline censor. So in the heat of battle when the troops advanced under fire to a compound with a family of five in it, the censor forbade them to show these terrified people.

News from Afghanistan is tightly managed by the MoD. As a result, this is indeed Britain’s forgotten war.

Dave Crouch

Posted in Abroad, Editorials | 1 Comment »

Musa Qala: Is this Afghanistan’s Fallujah?

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Just as the immediate threat of war on Iran appears to be receding, the full horror of the “war on terror” is being unleashed on the town of Musa Qala in Afghanistan – and is in danger of being grossly mis-reported by the British media.

This is, according to British officers quoted in the Sunday Times, one of the biggest British military operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, involving as many as 3,000 British troops – almost half the British forces in the country.

It has been five weeks in preparation, and yet the first we learned of it were BBC reports on Friday evening (Dec 7). The Saturday papers ignored the story. BBC news on Sunday night led on Gordon Brown in Iraq, reducing the assault on Musa Qala to a brief mention of the death of a British soldier.

This stunning delay in reporting such a major operation means that all the reports of what is happening appear to be strictly controlled by NATO.

The Sunday and Monday papers make it clear, nevertheless, that this is the biggest British-led operation staged so far in the Afghanistan war. British, Afghan and American forces were advancing all last week towards Musa Qala amid heavy fighting. Backed by several hundred vehicles and dozens of Apache attack helicopters and A-10 Thunderbolt jets, there were violent gun battles as the troops neared the town. British officers said the whole operation was so big that some aircraft were redeployed from combat in Iraq.

The movement began on Tuesday (Dec 4) at first light when Royal Marine commandos stormed across the Helmand river in amphibious vehicles near the town of Sangin. On Thursday, a big Afghan army column began an advance, backed by British and American special forces. The Taliban (the label universally used for the Afghan resistance) have spent months laying anti-personnel and minefields, preparing bunkers and digging trenches in preparation for the attack.

Estimates of the number of troops involved are vague, but the Observer said 4,500 NATO soldiers and Afghan National Army troops were involved, while the Guardian puts it at 6,000. In November 2004, Pentagon officials said 12,000 troops were involved in re-taking Fallujah – a city of 350,000 – from the Iraqi resistance. Given that Musa Qala has a population of about 20,000, you have some idea of the sheer scale of the NATO assault. House-to-house fighting is anticipated.

Like Fallujah, Musa Qala town has become a symbol of the Taliban’s ability to resist NATO and Afghan forces. After very fierce fighting British troops were forced to withdraw in the summer of 2006, after which Afghan forces moved in early this year. Now NATO wants revenge.

Like Fallujah, thousands of civilians are trapped in the town, as reported by embeds who also witnessed US troops open fire on and kill refugees trying to flee the town. Several children have been reported killed in fighting on Saturday. People are staying behind in Musa Qala because they fear their homes will be looted when the town falls. This, by the way, is what “precision” bombing looks like in Afghanistan. This year has been the deadliest in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion in 2001 with more than 6,200 people estimated to have been killed in insurgency-related violence.

British media reports so far have all been framed in terms of Afghan atrocities – right on cue, Afghan president Hamid Karzai accused the Taliban of suspending a 15-year-old boy from a ceiling and lighting a gas stove underneath him, burning him alive. The media are also faithfully reporting British troops’ claim to be fighting for “hearts and minds” (i.e. we’re the nice guys), and to cut heroin production, with no mention that it is the occupation that has abjectly failed to prevent an explosion in poppy cultivation as the only means of subsistence.

The retaking of Fallujah didn’t stop the Iraqi resistance – in fact it fuelled it. Have the British media learned any lessons from Iraq? Their coverage of Musa Qala in the next few days will be a test.

Posted in Abroad, Editorials | 2 Comments »

Sami Ramadani: Media complicity in the Iraq war

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

Speech at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Sami Ramadani is a senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan University. Born in Iraq, he was exiled by Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1969 for campaigning in support of democracy and socialism. He is a prominent activist in the anti-war movement.

I’m quite pessimistic about the media. Although I’m a very optimistic person, when it comes to the media I’m afraid I get depressed and become quite pessimistic.

The main reason, apart from being constantly upset reading the press and how much off-beam they are, is that I feel very strongly that in general most of the media does what it does not because there is some sort of a conspiracy, or somebody is right behind a curtain telling these editors what to write (although I’m sure some of this does happen), but mainly because the editors and most of the writers they employ come from a political and ideological mould which is part of the establishment in general, at least in terms of the politics they believe in, in terms of the social connections they create, the political connections and so on.

So there is a myriad of reasons why the media cannot in a sense do better than it does. I’m not preaching that we should not do anything about it, or that there isn’t a very important role for alternative voices to come out and to fight our corner, to establish other pointers, other landmarks, use the internet, the press itself and so on. But we have to take on board that, in general, the media is part of the establishment.

To that extent, if most of the establishment decides to go to war, then most of the media will follow suit. And with the war on Iraq there was a division within the establishment, they weren’t all united, so there were a few more oppositional voices than usual appearing in the press.

Our press here is more widely read as a national press than, say, the press in the US. But television in the US is even more powerful than it is here. I don’t know who it was in the US who coined the phrase “Unless it’s on television then it doesn’t exist.” The media in the UK exercises much more influence on the political agenda, so there is a heavy responsibility on the newspapers to get some of their stories right.

On Iraq I think they have been seriously complicit in the war of aggression against the Iraqi people, seriously complicit over the naked lies that were told to the British people. And remember most of the British people were against this war. Imagine had it been the other way around what sort of headlines we would have had – they were bad enough with most people being against the war. But the media systematically failed to question the government and the establishment about its sources. And therefore when the war happened there was no serious opposition within the media against this war.

And once the war happened there was a new unity established, so that even if you were against the war, once it started your patriotic duty was to support it. No. Your patriotic duty, surely, is to the young men and women who go and kill and get killed in Iraq – British young men and women – in the service of a cause that doesn’t coincide with the interest of most British people. Their definition of patriotism itself is questionable anyway because it belongs the mainstream definition of these words. So when they talk about Iraq being a threat, it becomes unquestionable. If you question it then you are on the fringe, and the media will give you a little bit of a voice because you are on the fringe of that main argument.

The mainstream argument gets established, re-established, defined, redefined – it’s not always the same but changes according to the main tasks facing the establishment at any one point. So if Iran is the perceived threat, then everybody, including school children, within months would know who Ahmedinejad is. But talk about other contexts about Iran and then you become outside the mainstream.

You don’t obviously need to say that Hitler is bad, because we all know he is bad. This mainstream understanding has been established and maintained, and rightly so. But if somebody comes along and says Hitler is good then they are obviously and rightly on the fringe, because the facts speak for themselves.

But on many issues that concern our world today, voices that are critical of the so-called mainstream parameters are regarded as fringe voices and therefore given as little time as possible. For the sake of democracy and free speech, they should be allowed to have their say, but it has to be confined within certain limits. So we have Tony Benn appearing on Question Time once in a blue moon and this is regarded as the voice of the left being heard democratically. Well, I think we need people like Tony Benn to appear three, four hours – 10 hours – a day to even begin to combat the flood of information that we are bombarded with!

Take the jamboree yesterday to raise money for Children in Need – they raised, I think, £19 million. I’m not opposed to doing these things, but think about it. The mainstream tells us that there is a problem with children and we should raise money – £19 million. But imagine if the mainstream was different and we were all very upset, and the media has been pumping us and telling us day and night that the US is in the process of spending $1.6 trillion on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. How much is $1.6 trillion?! I mean it took me 10 years to get used to a billion.

And these wars kill children. In Iraq, The Lancet estimates more than 1.2 million people have been killed since the invasion. This is not part of the mainstream figures. Once The Lancet started bringing out these periodic figures that correspond much more closely to reality and people’s experiences in Iraq, the media suddenly starts saying, oh, the Iraq Body Count figures might be more accurate.

Why is it the same statistical method used by The Lancet team – by the way, this is an American team of doctors and this is a well-known statistical procedure and type of research which applies not only to counting the dead but also to counting statistical populations, an established scientific method for estimating deaths and other statistical populations. The government in Britain and the US were happy to use this same team’s figures about Uganda, Rwanda, and other places in the world. But when it came to Iraq – no! This entire body of science – and scientists usually in our society and in the mainstream are godly figures, the people in white, surely you respect their word and so on. But when it came to these horrific figures about Iraq – no. The media would not use these figures, they would regard these figures as being beyond the pale, they belong to the fringe, you do not report them as the normal events that you would report in general.

The same companies that are keen to grab Iraq’s oil wealth are very similar to and are the same companies that are trying to grab and have been grabbing the wealth of Africa and much of the third world, where the main reasons of the hunger and starvation today are the wars of aggression and the excessive exploitation exercised by the transnational companies. And the children who are dying – more than 2 million a year die directly of hunger. This is not mainstream stuff, but when it comes to spending and figures then the charity figures become what soothes our consciences, we say “we raised money for charity”.

The mainstream media does not begin to tell us the story. If they did, then I am sure there would be millions on the streets tomorrow demanding immediate withdrawal from Iraq, demanding changing the priorities of public spending, demanding stopping all wars of aggression all over the world, because substantially the public in Britain are for peace, for justice, and they do not go quiet or become reserved unless they have been duped and convinced otherwise.

And I think the mainstream media’s attempts are generally successful in terms even of convincing people who, in this case on Iraq, are anti-war. A lot of anti-war people that I meet and talk with ask me: “Is it okay really to withdraw the troops? Wouldn’t there be even more bloodshed, enormous civil war in which millions of people could die?” And of course such concerns are genuine and you would respect such concern for the Iraqi people. But this type of concern has arisen and the anti-war voices have become more subdued in terms of demanding immediate withdrawal because the mainstream media has got to us, they have convinced us – even we who are anti-war – that once the troops withdraw Iraqis are waiting in their millions to kill each other, because they belong to different sects, different religions, different ethnicities.

Obviously the mainstream media doesn’t explain why it is that for over a thousand years that great Shia shrine in Samarra, that was blown up twice – in February 2006 and June 2007 – and is reputed by the media to be the cause of much of the so-called civil war, is bang in the middle of a Sunni city. Samarra is substantially Sunni and the Sunni clergymen of Samarra have been the custodians of that most sacred of Shia shrines for over a thousand years.

Why is that after the occupation of Iraq, a team of at least 12, with their four-wheel drives, parked in front of that mosque, under US curfew – the city was under US curfew in February 2006, US helicopters were roaming the skies, the city was completely cut off and surrounded by US forces. A team arrives, they go into the shrine, they stay there 12 hours, they plant one tonne of explosives, according to the Iraqi construction minister. And they blow up the place as soon as the curfew is lifted.

The people of Samarra went on demonstrations immediately – across Iraq hundreds of thousands demonstrated – blaming the US, saying they want to stir up civil war. OK, suppose the Iraqi people are wrong? I have no evidence to say who blew up the Samarra mosque. But why is it every editorial here after that event, immediately, within 24 hours, says that Sunni extremists have blown up the Samarra mosque? How do they know? When I, or others, or Tony Benn or whoever, wants to write a single accusation to say that US troops may be behind all this, we will be asked to produce the evidence – and that is rightly so. Otherwise this is speculation, or this is what the Iraqi people think.

They establish a mainstream argument so when they say it and repeat it we accept, it because this is the “logical” mainstream. If you go beyond it and say “maybe the US death squads are behind it, maybe that quarter is behind it, maybe Al-Qaeda’s terrorist operations in Iraq are being turned a blind eye to because they are helping the occupation, they are helping sow divisions in the country” – when you put an alternative scenario to what is going on in Iraq, and this is a scenario that I haven’t invented, this is the scenario that most Iraqis you talk to on the streets of Iraq strongly believe in. They say – every single explosion in the markets of Iraq, in the civilian areas – the US is behind it.

Now, there have been incidents where people came close to proving these things. I cannot state them with 100% categorical affirmation because I do not have the evidence.

But if you look at the politics of Iraq you will see that the US has failed to occupy and subdue the Iraqi people. They have occupied the country but they have failed in subduing the Iraqi people, they have failed in not only gaining their support, but also in gaining their acquiescence. They are opposed by most of the Iraqi people very, very strongly. There is not just armed resistance, there’s a deep social, political, in-depth opposition to the occupation, such that for another thousand years Iraqis will fight this occupation tooth and nail.

The US has realised this and because they don’t want to withdraw from Iraq they are sowing divisions, spending hundreds and thousands and millions of dollars on all sorts of organisations.

I don’t have time to tell you all these details. But I have one indicator of this. The US shipped the biggest shipment of cash in history, from the US to Iraq – 350 tonnes of $100 bills – totalling $12 billion. This is a fact, they shipped them to Iraq. And Paul Bremer, who ruled Iraq for three years, distributed that money, $12 billion. Where did that money go? Where are the accounts for it? So Bremer was brought before congress and passed by a congressional committee who asked him: “Could you tell us what you did with this $12 billion because only $3 billion have been accounted for?” All in cash, all in $100 bills. And Bremer snapped at them and he silenced them. He said: “This is not US taxpayers’ money, this is Iraqi money, therefore you have no right to question me about that.”

So $9 billion have been spent by Bremer on nobody knows what and where and how, what sort of political organisations they have spent this money on, the myriad of so-called civil society organisations. Iraqis call them “$100,000 organisations” because Bremer used to pay $100,000 for all these hundreds of so-called civil society or paper organisations – to buy consciences, as Iraqis say.

Coupled with that $9 billion disappearing and the fact that US congress was not allowed to know what happened to it because it is “not US taxpayers money”, there is another story. I call these “one-off” stories, they appear one day but they will never appear again, never get discussed. “US in secret gun deal” (Guardian headline, May 12, 2006). This is a report attributed to Amnesty International that says the US, the occupying power of Iraq, smuggled into Iraq 200,000 Kalashnikovs, using private companies in Bosnia. The private companies contracted secretly by the Pentagon smuggled into Iraq 200,000 weapons in one year, 2004-2005. And the US generals don’t want to say who they gave the weapons to.

Wouldn’t you think that this is worth pursuing? That this should become part of the mainstream daily reporting, questioning the US administration and the British government here, since they are in the so-called coalition forces ruling Iraq? And when you combine the $9 billion with these disappearing arms that they are distributing in Iraq, you get a much better idea of who is killing whom and why there is so much bloodshed in the country.

And the death squads themselves – there are two US generals on the record saying that US has sent death squads into Iraq (US forces, I’m not talking about Iraq mercenaries now): General Boykin and General Downing, both served in Iraq. And both are on the record as saying that the US trains death squad special forces at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. They train them there, they send them into Iraq and they have been sending them since immediately after the Iraqi invasion. Their last bit of training takes place in Israel, because Israel has fantastic expertise in the area of death squads and bumping off people across the world.

Why isn’t that part of the mainstream? What we get in terms of a generalised picture is a distorted picture that ultimately silences us. Silences us because we are faced with a dilemma – if we withdraw the troops the Iraqi people will suffer.

No – the troops are the problem, most of the problem. The troops are a poison in Iraq, they are a force for division. The occupation is not a force for reconciliation, it’s a force for social and political division. If as an Iraqi you come anywhere near the US, most of the population call you a traitor. That exasperates all the potential – all room for compromise, for getting together, is being undermined by the occupation.

So – the sooner they get out, the better.

Posted in Editorials | 2 Comments »

New Threats to Media Freedom: How We Fight Back

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

CONFERENCE Saturday 26 January 2008: Called by the National Union of Journalists with the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.

Mounting political and commercial pressures are affecting the freedom to report as never before. Hear leading journalists, broadcasters and union campaigners on why an unfettered media is central to democracy, and how we can mobilise to defend freedom of information and expression

Saturday 26 January 2008
9.30am-4.30pm
National Union of Journalists
308 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8DP
(King’s Cross Underground)

Speakers include:
Alan Johnston, former BBC correspondent in Gaza, recently held hostage, on covering conflict
Martin Bright, New Statesman political editor, on the anti-terror laws
Peter Wilby, former editor, Independent on Sunday, on the Murdoch empire
Granville Williams, media commentator & CPBF, on media ownership
Victoria Brittan, freelance journalist and author, on the narrowing news spectrum
Jo Glanville, editor, Index on Censorship, on secrecy and censorship
Heather Brooke, freelance journalist and author, on the Freedom of Information Act
Joy Francis, managing director, the Creative Collective on reporting diversity
David Crouch, Media Workers Against the War, on bias in war reporting
Jeremy Dear, NUJ general secretary, on defending quality journalism
Chris Frost, NUJ ethics council, on fair reporting
Tony Lennon, BECTU president, on the crisis at the BBC and wider implications
Paul Mason, Newsnight correspondent, on how BBC journalists are organising
Aidan White, general secretary, International Federation of Journalists, on the fight for media freedom world-wide

Download the full conference programme here

Tickets: £10 / £7

Download a registration form here

Posted in U.K., events | 2 Comments »

AP photographer still detained in Iraq

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

Last month over 1,850 professional photographers and journalists from over 90 countries sent a petition to the US Government demanding the immediate release of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, detained by US Forces in Iraq on April 12, 2006, and held in prison ever since without charges. Hussein was part of AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo team in 2005.

Last week the US Military announced that they planned to seek a criminal complaint against Bilal before an Iraqi court this Sunday, December 8. The court is due to decide whether to drop the case or bring it to trial.

Despite the fact that the US Army had said to media outlets that they have “irrefutable evidence” that Bilal is “a terrorist media operative” who had “infiltrated the AP”, they won’t say what the charges are or what evidence will be presented. After holding Bilal for 19 months without charges, they still will not reveal to AP’s defence lawyer the accusation or the evidence they feel so strongly about. Further, the US Army says that if the Iraqi justice system acquits him they could still throw Bilal back in jail.

A nearly 50-page report by former federal prosecutor Paul Gardephe on behalf of the AP and recently disclosed by the news agency concludes that there is no hard evidence for any of the allegations that the US Military has so far unofficially made about Bilal.

Among the petition’s signatories are Pulitzer Prize winners Al Diaz, David Leeson, Judy Walgren, Anja Niedringhaus, Alexander Zemlianichenko, Oded Balilty, Lucian Perkins, John Moore and Charles J. Hanley. Agency VII photographers Gary Knight and John Stanmeyer, Noor agency photographer Philip Blenkinsop and Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado have also signed the petition. The full list of signatures is available at www.freebilal.org, together with more on Bilal’s incarceration, and links to news coverage of efforts to free him.

Bilal Hussein is not alone. There are eight further cases of prolonged journalist detentions by US troops in Iraq since March 2003.

To contact the Free Bilal Committee:
Annika Engvall: annika.engvall@worldpicturenews.com
Tel +1 646-454-5953, Cell +1 (347) 582-1165
Tomas Van Houtryve: tomas.van.houtryve@gmail.com
Cell +33 (678) 53 03 16

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Nick Davies: How “flat earth” news is killing journalism

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

Speech at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Nick Davies is an award-winning investigative reporter who writes regularly for the Guardian.

I’m not an expert on Iran or Iraq. I think I’m here partly because I’ve been a hack, a reporter, not just a journalist but a guy running around with a notebook and a pen, for an extraordinarily, ridiculously long time, but also because in the last couple of years I’ve decided to do something rather weird which is to interrogate my colleagues, which has turned into a book to be published next year called Flat Earth News.

The reason it has that title is that for hundreds of years everyone knew the Earth was flat. Indeed it was a heresy to challenge that statement. Eventually someone, Galileo or Copernicus, bothered to check and discovered they were wrong. But if you look at the way the mass media functions today you’ll see we are riddled with “flat earth” statements.

The most notorious, deadly one of those, or collection of those, was everything we were told in the build up to the invasion of Iraq. It was that in particular which made me want to do this. What I want to try to convey is that we can’t understand what went wrong with the media in the build-up to Iraq unless we understand that what went wrong is part of a much bigger picture in which the media now routinely, consistently convey falsehood, distortion and propaganda. Although this has always happened to some extent, I want to argue that this is now happening on a far greater and destructive scale than it has done previously. Speakers in an earlier session talked about systemic weakness, and that’s what I want to try to explain to you – why we are delivering so much flat earth news.

Remember the Millennium bug story? That’s a classic piece of flat earth news. The global media just consuming falsehood and distortion, pumping out this stuff. It’s wonderful, to look back on the cuttings – utterly unreliable. Most of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton was, to use the technical term, bollocks. Just pushed out on this huge scale.

And there’s flat earth policy. I’ve done loads of work over the years on criminal justice, drugs policy, education, digging deep down into government policy, looking at the factual foundations on which this policy is built, the evidence. And what do you find? Nothing. Just a black hole of populist misconception and self-serving politics. It’s terrifying. Routine, small stories flowing through the media. The scale of it is huge.

If you say that to people outside the media on the whole they’ll rapidly they’ll sign up to the idea that you can’t believe everything you read, but what worries me is that if you ask them why you tend to get flat earth stories back about the media itself. So for example there’s been quite a bit of talk today about proprietor interference. The likes of Rupert Murdoch do interfere, it’s part of the picture, it’s disgusting and immoral that they do, perhaps even more disgusting and immoral that it’s so easy for them to do so. You’ll hear people talking about corporate advertising influencing the content of the media. Maybe it happens. I’ve really tried to find evidence of them doing that successfully. You find it in local papers, you find it in specialist magazines like fashion mags, but in the national media that ain’t where it is.

Sami Ramadani was really interesting about ideology earlier today. But if you take proprietor influence, advertising and ideology and say those are factors that perniciously influence the media and then ask how much of the total picture are they responsible for I want to argue that it’s 5 or 10 per cent. That isn’t where the problem is. There’s a much, much bigger problem at work here.

Let me try to explain. I raised a lot of money from the Rowntree Foundation and gave it to some academics at Cardiff University. One of the things I got them to do was to go back through the annual reports of every Fleet Street company going back to 1985. 1985 is an important year because in January 1986 Rupert Murdoch moved his newspapers into Wapping and broke the print unions. He broke the resistance, such resistance as there was in Fleet Street, to the logic of commercialism, to what those big corporations which had taken all those newspapers over wanted to do.

The academics did two things. Year by year they looked at what happened to the editorial staffing levels of those Fleet Street papers over the next 20 years. The second thing they did was they measured the space which those editorial staff were filling, how many column inches of news. You crunch all those numbers for all these companies and you come up with something that is really important – essentially, your average Fleet Street reporter now is filling three times as much space as he or she was 20 years ago. Turn that round, look at it from the reporter’s point of view: we only have one third of the time to do our job. That’s terribly important.

If you take time away from some processes, like if you’re manufacturing cars and you take time out so you do it quicker you can argue that this improves the process, it makes it cheaper so you can sell more and put more money back into production. But if you take time away from reporters you take away our most important working asset. We cannot do our jobs properly if they won’t give us the time to do it. It’s as simple as that. We’ve been caught in this pincer movement where our staffing levels have been cut, our output has been increased – all the newspapers have extra supplements, you have 24-hour broadcasting – the whole nature of being a reporter and the back-up journalists involved has changed: instead of being active news gatherers we’ve become passive processors. Most reporters nowadays don’t have contacts, we don’t go out and find stories, we don’t check facts.

We did a huge analysis with these Cardiff researchers of the extent to which you can look at factual statements in Fleet Street stories and find evidence of whether or not they’ve been checked. The answer was that there is evidence in 12 per cent of those statements. 12 per cent. It’s pathetic. But that’s the reality. It’s not because the journalists are dishonest. It’s not because they’re being told to do so by advertisers or Rupert Murdoch. It’s because we’re not allowed to do our job. I call this “churnalism”. That’s the first part of the picture.

Nevertheless we’ve got to fill all these supplements, all these 24 hours of broadcasting. Where are we going to get our material from? While we’ve been losing our jobs, somebody else has been getting more and more jobs. Which is the PR industry. There was an invisible moment at some point in the last decade when the number of PR people in this country finally exceeded the number of journalists.

When we’re talking about PR, first it’s the whole magical world of Alastair Campbell in central government, which has flowed down into every local authority in the country, and the police and the health service, every limb of the state now has press officers working for it. Even when I started, 30-odd years ago, it wasn’t like that. When I started on local papers, if you wanted to write a story about a hospital you phoned the hospital you talked to the hospital manager or a doctor. Now you deal with a PR. Across the public sector – and across the private sector. All corporations now defend themselves. And charities and even terrorist groups! Everybody has PR people.

Whereas you should have a system where journalists, working honestly and independently, make what used to be called news judgments and say this story is important, this angle needs to be expressed, this research needs to be done, instead now we sit there passively and those decisions are made by Alastair Campbell and the whole magic world of PR and the public and private and the charity sector and the terrorist groups. They write the press releases and we bung ‘em in.

And it isn’t just about press releases. It’s about deeply manipulative behaviour. So for example, PR companies work very assiduously to set up front groups. These are phony grass-roots groups. There are so many phony grass-roots groups in the US that they have a nice little term for them, they call them Astroturf, because they’re not real grass.

A classic example of an Astroturf group is the Iraqi National Congress, the INC. The INC didn’t just emerge out of nowhere, it was invented and created by a man called John Rendon, a PR guy who used to work for the Democrats, he ran Jimmy Carter’s PR campaign. And since the American invasion of Panama in 1987 has been working on contract for American intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, running PR campaigns to change the way we think and feel about the world. And it’s very easy. Once you’ve reduced journalists to churnalism, all they have to do is feed us stories. So John Rendon says okay, we’re going to change the way the world looks at Iraq, I need a story, I’ve got a huge budget from the State Department, I’ll create the INC, I’ll hire Ahmed Chalabi and all these other guys, we’ll hold conferences in Vienna and London, we’ll invite the hacks, the hacks will write the story, we get them to put it across. It’s easy.

While PR has become so huge and so sophisticated and so successful in effectively writing our stories for us and doing our work for us, alongside that, almost unnoticed since September 11, 2001, there has been a significant increase in old-fashioned propaganda activities. PR on the whole doesn’t deal in fiction. Alastair Campbell and his ilk will lie to you if you put them in a corner, but they don’t really want to lie. Really what it’s about is making our judgments for us, picking which story, which angle, which quote, but often it’s in the realm of truth. Propaganda is about fiction.

There’s always been a threat of propaganda, for years and years going back to Elizabethan times, certainly it was active during the Cold War. That’s got much bigger and institutionalised. The problem with propaganda is that it doesn’t tell the truth about itself. The expression it uses is “strategic communication”, so you find that military, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies, particularly in the United States but also in Britain, France and all the NATO countries, are grouped together in order to manipulate us vulnerable hacks into running stories that are fiction.

There are marvellous examples of it. You can see them running on Iran now. I love the Zarqawi story. Remember Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Huge chunks of the Zarqawi story were produced by this strategic communications machine. Absolute bollocks, to use that technical term again. Remember when he first surfaced Zarqawi only had one leg? Then later on when he was on video cutting people’s heads off miraculously he had sprouted a second one. They’d lost their own story line!

If you’re trying to understand what needs to be done to get the media to tell the truth, it’s not just about the traditional explanations about advertising, owners and ideology. They are there, I’m not denying that, and they are pernicious and wrong. But it’s to do with the structural weakness of our profession. Our jobs are being taken away, our output has been increased, we are now almost infinitely vulnerable to being manipulated – and so we are. And that’s why we are seeing the same thing happening about Iran as you earlier saw with Iraq.

In this book that I have written I did a chapter on the Observer. It’s fascinating and scary. It’ was a model of manipulation of a newspaper in the build-up to Iraq where all of this was at work. The PR people, particular from Downing Street, Alastair Campbell’s people working on Kamal Ahmed, the political editor. He resigned a few weeks ago because of the book, he doesn’t want to tell the truth about it. The intelligence agencies producing the anthrax story were working through David Rose. Very interesting. David Rose is actually a very good, experienced reporter, he was completely flipped over on his head, writing absolute crap because he was being manipulated by MI6 and the CIA. And I’ve traced it all. That’s the propaganda element. It’s just scary.

The impact of that was huge, because that’s the paper that’s read by backbench Labour MPs who had to vote in the House of Commons on the Blair resolution. It really mattered. It’s the sickening ease with which it now happens.

If you want to understand what’s going wrong it’s fascinatingly complex.
The internal procedural workings, the operational pressures that incline us towards more falsehood and distortion – it really is interesting how you look at it and find how rotten it is at its core.

The other thing that concerns this meeting is what we can do to improve it. I’m very pessimistic. I think we’ve lost it, I’m afraid we’ve lost the idea of the mass media are anything like a reliable source of information. In an imaginary world I’d like the media to be put through the same sort of regulation as foodstuffs, so that you have to label the content of a newspaper, so you would need some institution to be funded and set up to test the extent to which a particular media outlet produces falsehood and distortion. So the Guardian would have to run its running average – over say the preceding six months, for example, and say, 56 per cent of this newspaper’s output turned out to be not true.

The trouble is that this is an imaginary world. There is no way that I can see that there is anywhere in this country the political power to engineer that kind of change. The question is whether that’s politically possible. I think everyone who has been critical of the Press Complaints Commission is entirely right. I did a huge analysis of their last 10 years of operation and it’s embarrassing to be told as a professional that this organisation is responsible for holding you to standards. It does absolutely nothing. It is an outrage.

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Book review: Unembedded in Iraq

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, by Dahr Jamail, Haymarket Books, 2007

This book brilliantly captures the horrors of being caught up in conflict. Scorning the compromising position of an embedded journalist, Dahr Jamail travelled Iraq to report on a subject often neglected by the mainstream media: daily life in Iraq.

Discovering a country occupied by unwanted foreign powers, Beyond The Green Zone depicts Iraqis such as Khali Ahmed, who lost three of his family after American soldiers raided the wrong house and were forced to cover up, and Hassan Mehdi Mohammed, who told Jamail that eight out of 10 people in his village were unemployed.

The inclusion of photos at the beginning of each chapter provides a visual reminder of the dangers. For me the most poignant photo was of an ambulance with its door open and bullet holes in the windscreen, after American snipers shot at it. Clearly, the occupation is not fixing Iraq, despite the purring words of Gordon Brown and the brash phrasing of George Bush.

One of the reasons why his book is so important is the sheer breadth of interviews. As Jamail is not in the presence of the US Military, Iraqis are free to speak their mind. Every time he visits a house, he manages to interview four or five people within it, not just one spokesperson. Beyond The Green Zone is forensic in its detail when describing the injuries of citizens and the destruction of houses. In today’s world, forensic detail is far too often overlooked.

The second half of the book focuses on Fallujah. Unable to enter the city because of the military cordon, Jamail interviews refugees from the shattered city. The hellish nightmare for the thousands of residents who remained was made worse by the Iraqi Red Crescent convoys being unable to enter the city, despite an appeal to the UN.

Dahr Jamail is very critical of the United Nations, describing them as “prov[ing] its impotence in all matters”. I would disagree with him here, although there is plenty of evidence that the UN is becoming corrupted, given the revelations about UN aid workers in Liberia donating food in exchange for sexual favours.

As Jamail reminds us at the end of his introduction, each of the 27 million or so people in Iraq has their own story. Although no book could hope to document all of them, Beyond The Green Zone goes some way to explaining how it feels to be occupied by the gung-ho US military after years of Saddam Hussein’s despotic regime.

Richard Brennan

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Peter Wilby: We need alternative narratives

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

Speech at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Peter Wilby has a column in the Media Guardian and is a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman.

I want to talk about the systemic failures of journalism that led to the problems of the coverage of the Iraq war, which in my view will lead to similar problems with the coverage of the Iran war – which I am sure is going to come sooner or later.

I wrote a leader in the New Statesman (Sep 30, 2002) in the week of Alastair Campbell’s notorious dossier. It came out on a Wednesday so I didn’t have very much time to read it and I didn’t at that stage know how it was going to relate to the press:

“Most people, if they are honest, will confess that the technicalities of the debate on Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities are beyond them. Tony Blair’s dossier provides little enlightenment and was never likely to, as most of the new assertions depend on intelligence that is necessarily vague. Ministers are no better equipped than the rest of us to judge whether a grainy photograph actually shows a missile site, much less whether it is a threatening one. Equally, the journalists now touring factories in Iraq wouldn’t know a phial of Sarin from a thimble of finest malt.

“A few things stand out. Saddam wants uranium (we knew that; that’s why we have sanctions), but, even if he got it, he would need a factory to make nuclear bombs. He would also need the means to deliver them and other weapons of mass destruction. The dossier’s claim that he can ‘deploy’ them within 45 minutes produces the dramatic headlines that Alastair Campbell no doubt demanded. But what does it mean? Deployed how, where, against whom? According to Scott Ritter, ex-head of the UN inspection team, the designs of ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ which the team saw up to 1998 would produce rockets ‘that would spin and cartwheel . . . go north instead of south . . . blow up’. Iraq would have to test missiles. The tests would be detectable and presumably the sites could be bombed. So where lies the argument for all-out war?”

I think that one thing I’d like to note about that, which I think stands the test of time pretty well, is that I quote Scott Ritter, and you can’t get much more authoritative than the former head of the UN inspection team. Yet Ritter was an example – there are other examples – of someone who was treated as a complete non-person by the media at the time. He was hardly ever interviewed on television or radio and was hardly ever quoted in the newspapers.

If you look back at the Daily Telegraph through the whole of 2002-2003 Scott Ritter was only ever quoted on 16 occasions. And there was nearly always an adjective in front of the name Scott Ritter – he was nearly always described as “controversial” or “irascible” and reports of his remarks were almost always followed by American claims that he was an apologist for Saddam Hussein. And many of the occasions when he was mentioned in the Daily or Sunday Telegraph it was when there were attempts to smear him as a corrupt sex maniac.

I could give a lot of examples from our own trade of journalism. John Pilger, in my view one of the most able and objective critics of the war and the media. He appears fortnightly in the New Statesman. But again he is somebody who as far as the mainstream newspapers are concerned is very much marginalised. I noticed recently that the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs gave details of the 100 most influential people on the left, including all sorts of people I’d never heard of, but at number 100 there was John Pilger, with the comment that he was still somebody who appealed to gullible young people, he had a small but visible following. This is only a man who gets hour-long documentaries on ITV that attract audiences into the millions.

As to the core of the systemic failure, the way in which what has been called the “public relations state” operates, the way in which the government tries to establish a narrative and thus control the news agenda. Of course the opposition tries to do the same. And essentially politics in this country is a competition between the government and the opposition to establish a narrative of events. Sometimes the government has the upper hand, sometimes the opposition. What is very difficult, even for a backbench MP, is for anybody outside that system to establish an alternative narrative. That’s what we saw in the case of the Iraq war. There was no serious division between government and opposition on policy.

The second problem was that there was a shortage of credible alternative sources on the facts. Intelligence is necessarily a shadowy area of nudges, winks and disinformation. Almost nothing from intelligence sources is ever said on the record, so readers can’t judge the reliability of the source. Journalists are grateful for what can be presented as secret information so they are rarely willing to treat it sceptically. Suppose you are a journalist and you are told that 1,000 terrorists are plotting to blow up railway stations. Well that’s probably going to make a splash, so the journalist isn’t going to write a second paragraph saying this is a load of hyped-up rubbish. That I think is one of the problems.

The war on terror is a perfect example of a narrative that is controlled entirely by official sources. Nobody from outside can say how it is going. Nobody can say how big the threat is or where the enemy is or anything. When Singapore fell during the Second World War, nobody could very easily deny that it had fallen. During the Cold War nobody could say that the Soviets had marched into West Germany when nobody had actually seen them do so. But when you hear of victories, defeats and threats in the war on terror they are by their nature uncheckable – except I suppose when bombs go off, but perhaps not even then. When lots of bombs were going off in Iraq we were told we were winning, because the terrorists were obviously getting very desperate!

What always gives official sources the upper hand in this war on terror is that they can tell a simple dramatic narrative: good against evil, us against them. Introducing complications into that narrative, introducing doubts, is very difficult. Maybe Saddam doesn’t have WMDs, maybe Iran just wants civil nuclear power. Maybe there are only 20 or so really serious terrorists, or maybe a thousand, and maybe they aren’t very good at what they do. But that doesn’t make good stories. “Saddam/Iran/al-Qaeda not much of a threat” – that’s not a good headline. “They might be but we’re not sure” – that’s an even worse headline.

So what can journalists do? I think there are three things.

First, instead of dismissing non-government, non-official or Iranian sources as marginal, we should be cultivating, trying to build up alternative sources of authority. Right now we should be seeking out sources who know something about how the Iranian government operates and about the relevance of nuclear technology. Almost the only detailed discussion I have read in the newspapers about how countries might go about making an operational nuclear bomb has been in the London Review of Books.

I am not appealing at all for one narrative to take priority over another. It may be true that Iran can and will become a nuclear armed power within a very short space of time and that it can credibly threaten Israel and other countries with annihilation. But I would like the alternative narrative, which does exist, to be presented and given the same airing as the official one.

Second, I would like every American or British government statement on Iraq, including the alleged Iranian arming of militias in Iraq, to be scrutinised rigorously. Where does the evidence for it come from? What is the evidence? Is it disputed and if so by whom? If somebody said that the British government was full of warmongering lunatics nobody would just accept it, people would scrutinise this statement and ask if it’s true. So why are we so willing to accept it when it’s said about another country’s government?

We’re always being told, for example, that we should read what Osama Bin Laden has written, the Iranian president’s speeches, so see what they say about destroying Israel and destroying the west and so on. Neither are ever mentioned – the Iranian president particularly – in the press without reference to their blood-curdling views. So why are we not reminded every time there is a reporting of the US administration’s stance on Iran, the preparations it is making to confront Iran, why are we not reminded of the Project for the New American Century? It sets out in black and white, in very great detail, the Neo-Cons view of their aims and how America should proceed in the future. Why are we not reminded of that every time we read about the US administration?

[Third, there is the language we use.] What does “extraordinary rendition” mean? Is it by any chance kidnapping? What are “abuses” in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo? Are they by any chance torture? Torture is nearly always used in continental newspapers, but hardly ever in British or American newspapers.

Have the British media learned anything from Iraq? I don’t think so. I’m afraid even the Guardian recently led on a story that came from unnamed US sources on the wicked things Iran was up to in Iraq. It may be true, I don’t know. But it was without a word from other sources.

If they are going to do a better job, media outlets are going to have to change the way they operate and the way they deal with sources of information.

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