We extend our deepest sympathies to Rupert’s wife and children, to his colleagues at the Sunday Mirror, and we wish Phil a speedy and full recovery.

Rupert’s death reveals the risks faced by journalists trying to cover this war. Eight years into the US/UK-led occupation of Afghanistan, the country is becoming ever more dangerous for the media. It is thanks to journalists like Rupert that the British public has a picture of the disaster unfolding in that country.

We are sad, but we are also angry.

The Nato occupation of Afghanistan is propping up a deeply corrupt, bloody and unpopular regime in Kabul. British support for US imperial ambitions in Asia requires that a price be paid by soldiers, by journalists and by the civilian
populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

That price is too high.

We will continue to do everything possible to campaign to bring the troops home.

Media Workers Against the War
info@mwaw.net
tel 07801 789 297 ]]> http://mwaw.net/blog/2010/01/11/death-of-rupert-hamer-in-afghanistan/feed/ 0 http://mwaw.net/blog/2009/07/09/groundhog/ http://mwaw.net/blog/2009/07/09/groundhog/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:37:46 +0000 MWAW http://www.mwaw.net/2009/07/09/groundhog/ What a difference two weeks makes. The media have swung from triumphalism to despair as British troops have died almost daily during Operation “Panther’s Claw” in Helmand.

“Triumph for Brits in raid on Helmand” was the Mirror headline on June 23. “Commanders hailed the assault as ‘very successful’, with no British soldiers killed and none seriously wounded,” reported the Telegraph on the same day.  “Taliban crushed” proclaimed the Star, while the BBC had “UK forces ‘encounter few Taliban’” – “British forces on a major operation in Afghanistan say they have encountered little resistance from the Taliban.”

And then on July 1 came the first of seven British deaths in as many days.

But we have been here before. Unfounded media optimism has been a feature of every new “push” in Afghanistan – victory is always just around the corner. Operation “Panther’s Claw” was given the headline “British troops in final push to clear out insurgents” by the Independent on Sunday. Yet the “one last push” nonsense is always followed by a fresh bout of grim news.

“After the fighting, a battle for hope” was the headline in the Guardian above a full-page report from Afghanistan in September 2006, which claimed that “Nato’s anti-Taliban offensive in southern Afghanistan is now entering its mopping-up phase.” Over and over again the media proclaim that a turning point has been reached, that the fighting is over and now the troops will “win hearts and minds”. Over and over the fighting escalates once more, with more civilian deaths and more British troops killed.

“Job done: Taliban are on the run” proclaimed a headline in the Sunday Times in early 2007. After Musa Qala was retaken at the end of that year, a leader column in the Independent talked about “a turning point in the conflict”, a “watershed”, with a new focus on reconstruction and diplomacy meaning that, “for British troops, what could be described as the ‘combat phase’ here was drawing to a close, with a new reconstruction phase beginning”.

And when US president Obama announced a “surge” of 20,000 troops to the country this year, the media was inevitably full of speculation that this would “end the afghan stalemate”, as a Daily Mirror headline put it. But the US troops had hardly hit the ground when the Telegraph warned: “Fears of Afghan summer of death” as British casualties were mounting, and the forces in Helmand faced “something of a groundhog day”.

The real groundhog day, however, is in the media’s reporting – newspapers and broadcasters repeatedly clutch in ignorance at the latest optimistic pronouncement from the military, which is shortly disproved by events.

At times the uncritical parroting of army propaganda borders on the absurd. The Telegraph, Scotsman and BBC, among others, all reported that British troops has seized large quantities of poppy seeds for opium production at the start of “Panther’s Claw”. These turned out to be mung beans.

The media fails to look behind the robotic optimism of the army spin-doctors, and so misses the real story of Helmand. And because of these lies people are dying.

Every Friday night at 8pm Channel 5 is showing Air Force Afghanistan, claiming to be a documentary series about life for British forces at Kandahar air base. With Pizza Hut and Burger King, three canteens, an ice hockey rink, football pitches, three state-of-the-art gyms, two massage parlours, and even a disco run by the Dutch army, the Kandahar base comes across as wet dream for teenage boys. The series is designed to sell the idea of war as a macho all-action adventure playground for a Top Gear audience. The commercial breaks carry ads for the army, and when the same series was shown (with a different title) a few months ago clicks on the RAF’s careers website quadrupled.

The killing in Helmand shows that it’s time for these lies to stop.

The media is using the deaths to try to whip up demands for yet more troops and yet more armour to be sent to Afghanistan. No more groundhog days – get the troops out now.

The BBC Trust’s preposterous attack on Jeremy Bowen last week is a crude attempt to push back the wave of protest inside the BBC over the DEC appeal decision. If Bowen is slapped down, they calculate that no other BBC journalist will dare to speak out.

The Trust’s report itself has been massively spun by the right-wing press – in no way is it a demolition of Bowen’s journalism, let alone proof that he is in any way biased against Israel.

We call on all our supporters to urgently:

• Scan the report summary (pages 4-15)
• Read Robert Fisk’s superb comment on the report
• Note the research showing BBC bias IN FAVOUR of Israel

• Email Jeremy Bowen with your support: jeremy.bowen@bbc.co.uk

• Copy your emails to the BBC Trust: trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk

Led by a panel of establishment figures chaired by Sir Quentin Thomas, it took evidence from all sides, including Greg Philo’s detailed research “Bad News from Israel” and a quantitative study by the Communications Research Centre at Loughborough University.

It also saw the top secret Balen Report – an unpublished internal report prepared for BBC management by its senior editorial adviser on the Middle East, Malcolm Balen, in 2003 – about which there has recently been speculation that it showed anti-Israel bias at the BBC.

Entitled “Report of the independent panel for the BBC governors on impartiality of BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict“, the review was widely seen as confirmation that the BBC is biased towards Israel. The headline in the Times, for example, on the day after the report was published, read: “BBC news ‘favours Israel’ at expense of Palestinian view“.

The report itself concluded: “One important feature of [the BBC's problems telling a complicated story] is the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation. Although this asymmetry does not necessarily bear on the relative merits of the two sides, it is so marked and important that coverage should succeed in this if in nothing else.”

It continued: “We recommend the BBC should make purposive, and not merely reactive, efforts to explain the complexities of the conflict in the round, including the marked disparity between the positions of the two sides, and to overcome the high level of incomprehension among the audience.”

Page 22 of the report states:

“Among the findings from the quantitative content analysis which the researchers judge to be most important for the Panel are these: …

that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) [brackets in original, ed.] existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in the amount of talk time given to non-party political Israelis and Palestinians;

that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in the amount of talk time given to Israelis and Palestinians;

that there was a broad parity in BBC coverage taken as a whole in terms of the appearance of Israeli and Palestinian party political actors;

that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in terms of the appearance of non-party political Israeli and Palestinian actors;

that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in terms of the appearance of Israeli and Palestinian actors”.

At least three BBC NUJ workplace branches have passed motions calling on the BBC to transmit the Gaza aid appeal. A petition is circulating within the corporation which concludes: “The victims of Gaza deserve the aid appeal like any other victims of humanitarian crises. The conflict they are caught in is as controversial as any other armed conflict in the world and singling them out is what harms the BBC’s reputation of impartiality.”

The latest issue of Ariel, the BBC’s internal staff magazine, carries 10 letters on the BBC’s refusal to air the Gaza appeal – all are critical of the decision.

Here is a selection posted on the Media Lens message board:

1. The director general’s comments defending the BBC’s decision not to broadcast the DEC appeal appeared timid and unconvincing.

The main reason given is that he doesn’t want to compromise our reporting impartiality, because the issue of aid to Gaza is controversial. The flaw in this argument is that we are allowing the combatants (or their allies) – in this case Israel – to define whether or not an appeal for aid is legitimate. It is a curious logic to argue that we are defending the principle of impartiality by caving in to Israeli pressure.

There is a smell of fear about this decision – fear of controversy, fear of criticism, fear of repercussions. Perhaps this is the true fallout from the Hutton report, Queengate and Jonathan Ross; an organisation so mired in fear that it finds itself able to sacrifice aid to the victims of war for a principle that nobody (outside the BBC higher echelons) seems to believe was at stake.

Staff member, London factual

2. For the first time in my career I am ashamed to work for the BBC. The Disasters Emergency Committee – made up of the 12 biggest aid charities including the British Red Cross and Save the Children – has asked for help in raising money for the people in Gaza. Even the government has pledged money. The head of the UN says the situation in Gaza is ‘outrageous’. People are dying because of a lack of food, medicine and basic sanitation. The BBC has decided not to broadcast the appeal because it believes impartiality would be at risk. I believe the message the BBC is sending out is clear. And it is not impartial.

Staff member, BBC London

3. Whatever the politics of the situation it is obvious that Gaza is in the middle of a massive humanitarian crisis, people are suffering and need help. The BBC’s own coverage of flattened homes and parents mourning lost children amid the rubble clearly demonstrates that. The decision not to broadcast the appeal opens the BBC up to justified accusations of bias towards Israel and implies that the people of Gaza only have themselves to blame for what happened.

Staff member, News interactive, Plymouth

4. The BBC points to question marks over how the funding would be delivered, but that hasn’t stopped us running other DEC appeals where the distribution of funds is far from straightforward – Goma for example. And anyway, surely the mechanics of the appeal aren’t our problem. We’ve run appeals for victims of conflict before, so why not these people? We don’t need to mention the cause of the conflict or assign blame when we run the appeal, or schedule it near a news or current affairs programme. We just need to get vital funds for people who have no food, water, shelter or medical supplies.

Staff member, TV news

5. The refusal to carry the Gaza appeal insults the intelligence of licence fee payers, implying that they are unable to tell the difference between a charity appeal and a political broadcast. It also undermines the BBC’s claims to impartiality. In almost every war there is contentious debate about who is responsible for the consequent humanitarian crisis. Why is it only in the case of Gaza and, previously, Lebanon that this debate has been used to justify refusing to broadcast an appeal?

Staff member, multiplatform productions

1. BBC director general Mark Thomson says: “The danger for the BBC is that this could be interpreted as taking a political stance on an ongoing story. When we have turned down DEC appeals in the past on impartiality grounds it has been because of this risk of giving the public the impression that the BBC was taking sides in an ongoing conflict.”

When a dog savages a child, it is not “impartial” to stand back and watch the child bleed. On the contrary – it is to side with the dog. Thompson’s shibboleth of impartiality in reality means siding with Israel against the suffering people of Gaza.

Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk puts it like this:

“I think it is the job of journalists to be impartial on the side of those who suffer most. I was present on the same street when a Palestinian suicide bomber walked into a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem August 2000. When I got to the scene there was a woman with a chair-leg through her, a child with no eyes, Israelis of course in West Jerusalem. I wrote about the victims and the survivors. I did not give equal time, I did not give balance to the article by giving 50% of my report to the spokesman for Islamic Jihad.

“When I was in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut September 1982 where Israel’s militia allies from Lebanon, the Falange, had gone into the camp and murdered and massacred and eviscerated and raped women for two days while the Israelis watched, as we learned from the Israeli report the Kahan commission report the following year, I did not give equal time to the IDF spokesman, I concentrated on the victims and the survivors. That is what our job is to do.

“When we are reporting a football match in the UK we can give equal time to both sides or a public enquiry into new motorway. But the Middle East is not a football match, it is a massive tragedy of blood, sorry and revenge. And we need to reflect that.”

As a former BBC World Service current affairs producer wrote to his colleagues this weekend: “The question of partiality is a red herring. It is for the general public to respond to a humanitarian disaster as they choose.”

2. Mark Thompson again: “The BBC should not broadcast the DEC appeal “because Gaza remains an ongoing and highly controversial news story within which the human suffering and distress which have resulted from the conflict remain intrinsic and contentious elements.”

Other DEC appeals broadcast by the BBC are no less political than Gaza. Any disaster is “controversial” in as much as its root causes are contested. The BBC broadcast the DEC appeal for victims of fighting in the Congo last November, for example. A more “controversial” conflict it is hard to imagine. But the BBC does not deem that war central to its coverage, and so it was permissible to broadcast an appeal for its victims.

The BBC also broadcast the DEC’s Burma cyclone appeal last May. Again, the death toll from that cyclone is a highly political issue, and Western powers are keen to oust the military regime in Burma. But because it could be portrayed as a “natural disaster” the BBC deemed it permissible to broadcast the DEC appeal.

So BBC top management thinks its is legitimate to broadcast disaster appeals if it can get away with ignoring the political roots of disasters or pretending that they are not political at all. In the Gaza case this is impossible, but it does not follow that previous appeals were less political. It is simply that the Congolese and Burmese lobbies are far less influential than the Israeli lobby.

The Gaza decision by the BBC board is not therefore a matter of principle, as Mark Thompson tries to argue, but a matter of political expediency.

Thomson’s number 3, chief operating officer Caroline Thompson, admitted as much when she told al-Jazeera: “We never say never and clearly, if the DEC came to us with another request when things have calmed down and we didn’t have the same worries about the controversial nature of this, we would look at it again in that light.”

“Things calming down” means the restoration of the status quo, when it becomes legitimate in the BBC Board’s eyes to support emergency appeals because they do not raise any fundamental questions about the causes of the suffering.

This goes to the heart of the coverage of the Gaza crisis over the past month. In the eyes of the pro-Israeli camp, the carnage in Gaza is justified by the context. The corollary of this position is that it is not in fact necessary to show the carnage, because the context – Hamas rockets etc – justifies it. For this reason, we have seen far too little of the bloody reality of Gaza on our screens.

However, the sheer scale of the destruction – the DIME weapons, phosphor bombs, targeting of schools and refuges – threatens the Israeli argument. That is why Israel prevented Western journalists from entering Gaza.

The British public needs to see these images of Gaza in order to make an informed decision on the Israeli case. Broadcasting the DEC appeal would in fact restore some balance to the mainstream media coverage since December 27.

4. Chief operating officer Caroline Thompson claims that the BBC refused to carry aid appeals before, for Lebanon and Afghanistan. But in neither case were those appeals made by the DEC, as the Independent on Sunday points out. The fact that a committee of 13 aid agencies is able to agree an appeal ought to be testimony to the degree of consensus that the humanitarian crisis is above politics

5. Mark Thompson says on his blog: “One reason [for turning down the Gaza appeal] was a concern about whether aid raised by the appeal could actually be delivered on the ground.”

Here Thomson is taking issue with the DEC itself, which consists of the foremost charities in the land, namely: ActionAid, British Red Cross, CAFOD, Care International, Christian Aid, Concern, Help the Aged, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund World Vision.

The DEC states:

“Gaza has been under a blockage for the past three years. Throughout the shelling some DEC Member Agencies, working directly or through local partners, have managed to continue limited activities, providing food and medical care. The current ceasefire is enabling Humanitarian actors to commence needs assessments. Trucks are now arriving in Gaza, many of which are carrying humanitarian supplies. DEC Member Agencies and the UN are scaling up their response and have applied for additional visas for International staff to enter Gaza.

“The DEC members are committed to humanitarian principles including independence and have confirmed they are able to work without hindrance from the Hamas controlled authorities both to identify who are the most needy and to channel assistance to them directly, either through their own staff or well established local non governmental partners. The DEC members have submitted lists of partners and their banking arrangements, to insure proper systems are in place.”

Thompson is a broadcaster, not an aid specialist, and should therefore confine his remarks to broadcasting.

Jon Snow, Channel 4 News anchor, told the Observer that the BBC should accept the judgment of the aid experts of the DEC. “It is a ludicrous decision. … I think it was a decision founded on complete ignorance and I am absolutely amazed they have stuck to it.”

6. Former BBC director general Greg Dyke has stepped in on the side of the BBC Board: “I can understand why the BBC has taken this decision, because on a subject as sensitive as the Middle East it is absolutely essential that the audience cannot see any evidence at all of a bias.”

But inaction by the BBC means that the audience will see a clear bias in favour of Israel. Why should the BBC be more scared of being accused of pro-Palestinian bias than pro-Israeli bias? It is because Israel is the client state of the UK government’s ally, the United States, is armed by both the US and the UK, and shares strategic interests of these governments.

As a senior BBC news presenter told the Observer: “I’ve been talking to colleagues, and everyone here is absolutely seething about this. The notion that the decision to ban the appeal will seem impartial to the public at large is quite absurd.”

7. Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, said he is “concerned that the level and tone of some of the political comment is coming close to constituting undue interference in the editorial independence of the BBC”.

Let’s be clear: this government doesn’t give a monkey’s about BBC independence. After the government-inspired Hutton Report in 2004 that decapitated the organisation, the BBC’s top management has slavishly toed the government line on the “war on terror”.

The concern of Ben Bradshaw, Douglas Alexander and Hazel blears is rather that the BBC Board’s outrageous decision will undermine public faith in the corporation, which is often a useful tool for the establishment.

Martin Bell, the former BBC foreign correspondent, told the Observer that “a culture of timidity had crept” in at the BBC. “I am completely appalled,” he said. “It is a grave humanitarian crisis and the people who are suffering are children. They have been caught out on this question of balance.”

8. Caroline Thomson, interviewed on Today on Radio 4, said: “From the BBC’s point of view, the most important thing is that we keep our reputation and trust with the audience.”

But the audience’s trust is precisely what the BBC risks losing by banning the Gaza aid appeal.

As a senior BBC news presenter told the Observer: “Most of us feel that the BBC’s defence of its position is pathetic, and there’s a feeling of real anger, made worse by the fact that, contractually, we are unable to speak out.”

* * * *

We are working to fix the “comments” function on this blog. In the meantime please email your comments to info@mwaw.net

This fact was ignored by ALL the mainstream media apart from Rory McCarthy in the Guardian.

Here is the same report on Reuters TV, and on Democracy Now radio.

Yet ALL the British papers carried the Israeli accusation that Hamas had been
firing rockets from within the compound: the BBC, the Independent, the Telegraph, the Times, the Scotsman, and the Daily Mail.

And here is the Israeli Defence Force official lie, cited everywhere, that “mortar shells were fired at IDF forces from within the Jabaliya school“.

Why has the fact that the IDF blatantly lied about this massacre not been reported widely?

An on-the-record, authorised quote from a UN spokesperson spilling the beans on a private admission by the Israelis that they were lying – surely a newsworthy story?

Below there follows a transcript of Fisk’s remarks on Israeli censorship, journalistic impartiality and Middle East history, which includes the following key observation:

“When we are reporting a football match in the UK we can give equal time to both sides or a public enquiry into new motorway. But the Middle East is not a football match.”

You can listen to the full programme on the World Service website. Or you can cut and paste into your browser this link to the podcast: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/whys/whys_20090106-2005a.mp3

Other journalists involved in the programme were Gil Hoffman, chief political correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post, Greg Philo, research director of Glasgow University Media Unit, author of Bad News from Israel, and Jasim Azawi, presenter, Al-Jazeera.

Presenter: How do you get to the truth during a war? How do you tell the difference between facts and lies? Did Israel break the ceasefire or did Hamas? Do the Israelis target civilians or does Hamas use human shields? With both sides accusing the other of propaganda and spin, we’ve assembled a cast of respected correspondents to talk to you about how they go about trying to blow away the fog of war.

…Robert Fisk, I was reading your piece in the Independent today, could you tell listeners your impressions of coverage of the conflict so far?

Fisk: The identifying mark of it is that the Israelis have prevented western correspondents from going into Gaza to witness with their own eyes what they are doing and what Hamas is doing. This has presented the world with a very one-sided picture in which the suffering of the Palestinians is not told through Western eyes and the suffering of Israelis is.

What is interesting, and I think what indeed may be a worthwhile by-product of this effective censorship by the Israelis, not allowing Western correspondents into Gaza, is that we are hearing the voices of Palestinians themselves unhindered by what I think is often the false balance of western media reporting in which they speak directly to their audience of their own experiences under fire, just as of course the Israelis can speak directly the Palestinians are doing so, and doing so without the presence of a western journalist to guide them or guard them or intervene if they say something which the western journalist doesn’t like.

And in this sense we may be seeing through censorship by the Israelis – which is a big mistake, and I gather quite a lot of Israelis think it think it’s a mistake as well. We may be seeing the beginning of something fruitful in journalism where the people who actually do the suffering on every side will be able to tell their own story, not though our filtering lens.

[discussion]

Fisk: Can I come in here for a second? If the western journalists were in Gaza they would be able to talk not to the man the street but to the man and the woman and the child in the hospital. And we can’t do that, none of us can. And that is the problem.

It’s not that the images are a distortion – the images are real. The distortion is when we’re told afterwards that the Palestinians deserve it or indeed that the Palestinians had it coming to them because Hamas was using them, Hamas was in the school.

I’ve been reporting the Middle East for 32 years. We had this in ‘82. We were told in 1996 after the Qana massacre by Israeli artillery that the 106 civilians got killed because Hezbollah gunmen were among them in the refugee centre in the UN base. It was totally untrue. And I actually predicted in the paper this morning that we’d hear that Hamas was in the school. And sure enough, here we are again.

I think what we need is a much freer voice, not among the Palestinians but in Israel. One of the things I keep pointing out, and I think my colleague in the Jerusalem Post will agree, is that you have some fine correspondents who are Israelis. Amira Hass [Haaretz], who I admit is a friend of mine, Gideon Levi [Haaretz], whom I haven’t met, who is a brilliant journalist. I wish we were covering their stories, running their reports in our papers, because they are certainly more courageous than our journalists.

[discussion]

Presenter: This is not a balanced conflict when you look at the death toll on either side. So can we be balanced in our reporting?

Fisk: I think it’s a bigger picture than this. We aren’t talking about balance between casualties. When we’re talking about 20 Israelis dead in 10 years, as I said in my piece in the Independent this morning that is a very grim figure. But when we are talking about 600 Palestinians dead in 9 days this is grotesque, not just disproportionate.

I think it is the job of journalists to be impartial on the side of those who suffer most.

I was present on the same street when a Palestinian suicide bomber walked into a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem August 2000. When I got to the scene there was a woman with a chair-leg through her, a child with no eyes, Israelis of course in West Jerusalem. I wrote about the victims and the survivors. I did not give equal time, I did not give balance to the article by giving 50% of my report to the spokesman for Islamic Jihad.

When I was in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut September 1982 where Israel’s militia allies from Lebanon, the Falange, had gone into the camp and murdered and massacred and eviscerated and raped women for two days while the Israelis watched, as we learned from the Israeli report the Kahan commission report the following year, I did not give equal time to the IDF spokesman, I concentrated on the victims and the survivors. That is what our job is to do.

When we are reporting a football match in the UK we can give equal time to both sides or a public enquiry into new motorway. But the Middle East is not a football match, it is a massive tragedy of blood, sorry and revenge. And we need to reflect that

We also need to look at history. Not enough journalists in my view take history books into war. Nobody has – I know our paper has but I haven’t seen any other paper explain it – have asked: why are all these Palestinians in Gaza? Many of them, their families, 93% I gather, actually come originally from that part of Palestine that became Israel. In other words these missiles that have been falling from Hamas are landing on land that before 1948 belonged legally to the families who are now in Gaza. That is an ironic situation that in any war we would be pointing out. In the Balkans that would be paragraph two.

Presenter. The problem is that people just don’t agree on the history in this conflict

Fisk: A lot of Israelis and a lot of Arabs do now agree on the history. Things have changed since the old days when the story was that all the Arabs left Palestine because they were ordered to leave while the Arab armies drove the Israelis into the sea. They were not ordered to leave by radio stations on the Arab side. If you read Benny Morris, if you read Ari Shlaim – there’s a wonderful article in today’s Guardian – who lays this all out, you’ll find that Israeli historians today, many of them, and Arab historians and British historians are actually coming together to see a common picture. I think that’s one of the few hopes in the Middle East at the moment, that the story is coming together. It’s not necessarily a different history any more.

[ENDS]

Greg Philo also pointed out in the discussion that if a state limits of coverage in the way that Israel has it is a form of censorship. All organisations should say this. It should be labelled as censorship. It needs to be made an issue in the news.

Second, there needs to be a rigorous policy of making both sides heard. In Bad News From Israel we found that the Palestinian view was not being put. It has the effect of creating an environment in which Israeli perspective dominates. So if Israel says we invaded because of the rockets, we need to hear the Palestinian view that the rockets are being fired because of the humanitarian crisis that has been created here.

Middle East expert Juan Cole reports the background to al-Zeidi’s protest here. Millions of people around the world will feel nothing but sympathy for his actions.

But there is no doubt that the journalist’s life is in extreme danger from the Iraqi government and US forces, who have an appalling record of detaining, abusing, torturing and killing journalists.

The respected Committee to Protect Journalists describes the situation for Iraqi journalists in 2007 like this:

“The Iraqi government continued to commit a wide range of press freedom abuses that included censorship, arbitrary detentions, threats, physical attacks, and harassment. … Throughout the year there were numerous reports that security forces harassed journalists by physically assaulting them, seizing their footage, interrogating them, and expelling them from press conferences or from official offices…

“The vast majority of victims continued to be Iraqis, most of whom were singled out by armed groups and murdered with impunity. … Threats have forced many Iraqi journalists to live clandestinely, leave the profession altogether, or flee the country.”

In making his protest yesterday, al-Zeidi also acted as a professional. The only way for an Iraqi journalist to convey to the world the level of hostility to the Americans in Iraq is to protest in this fashion – revealing that you cannot be a journalist there without selling yourself to the government or putting your life in extreme danger.

As the Washington Post reported in October, the US government is paying private contractors in Iraq a further $300 million over the next three years to produce “news stories” and “public service advertisements” for the Iraqi media in order to expand what the US military calls “information/psychological operations” in Iraq.

This content is then broadcast by the Iraqi media without telling the audience. One contractor told the Post: “They don’t know that the originator of the content is the US government. If they did, they would never run anything.”

The US influence over Iraqi media is extensive. For example, the US pays local papers to run articles by US troops. As one Iraqi journalist told the Christian Science Monitor a year ago: “We thought the fall of [Saddam Hussein] would usher in a new era of press freedom, but now all of that has been quashed by religious institutions and the government itself. We all practice self-censorship for one reason or another.”

Al-Zeidi’s protest is no different from that of the campaigners who “pied” Phil Woolas in October after the immigration minister made racist remarks. The Iraqi government should treat al-Zeidi’s protest as such, and should release him immediately.

Please write to these organisations and ask them to raise al-Zeidi’s case as soon as possible:

International Federation of Journalists: ifj@ifj.org
(Please copy in the IFJ Middle East section: sarah.bouchetob@ifj.org and monir.zaarour@ifj.org)

National Union of Journalists: info@nuj.org.uk

Reporters Without Borders: rsf@rsf.org

Committee to Protect Journalists: info@cpj.org

The story is so pathetic that it barely warrants serious discussion. But it’s there in the Times. On page 4. And the article is typical of so much media reporting of Islam.

The paper published this “news” item on October 27 under the headline “Police warned of Ramadan tension during 2012 Games”.

The story claimed that Scotland Yard was concerned that the 2012 Olympics in London would “clash” with Ramadan, making it harder to “reduce tensions between Muslims and police” during the Games.

Instead of offering any proof, however, that a religious festival could present a problem for police, the Times article switched in its second paragraph to speculation about terrorism. The 40th anniversary of the shoot-out at the Munich Olympics – in which 9 Israeli hostages died after they were taken hostage by Palestinians – meant there was an “Islamic terrorist threat” to the 2012 Games, the paper said.

Only then did the story returned to Ramadan and the London Olympics. It quoted the head of the highly respected Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths that the police would need some basic training to deal with religious issues that might arise during the Games: “During Ramadan you’re going to have a lot of tired, hungry, less evenly tempered people because they haven’t eaten for 18 hours.”

The implication is clear: tired, hungry Muslims are more likely to lose their temper and… commit a terrorist attack on the Games.

MWAW contacted Dr Ed Kessler, head of the Woolf Institute.  He wrote back that he was “very unhappy” with the Times article, which “failed to depict the conversation” that he had had with the paper’s reporter. He said it was “sensationalism of the worst kind” and was “inaccurate in its reporting about the Olympics, Ramadan and the proposed Munich commemoration”.

Dr Kessler has written to the Times to complain, but the paper has yet to publish his letter.

The Times’ method is clear: take a bit of flimsy information from the police, slap on some unrelated speculation about terrorism, throw in a quote – torn out of context – from a respected source to make the piece appear reasonable, and let the reader draw their own racist conclusions. The article is constructed to make it appear that fasting during Ramadan makes Muslims more likely to commit a terrorist atrocity.

This is dog-whistle reporting: the article is couched in reasonable language but sends out a clear message that Islam is dangerous.

It is because of reporting of this kind that MWAW is holding its conference this year on Islamophobia.

Dave Crouch

One of our supporters wrote to the reporter whose byline accompanied the piece. He replied:

“We publicised a police appeal in exactly the same way we would publish a police appeal for a missing person, a rape suspect or a murder suspect.”

Our supporter wrote back to him:

“Your comparison of anti-war protesters with rape and murder suspects pretty much sums up why the mainstream media has so little credibility these days. You blindly parrot the police’s line without question and do not even ask any of the thousands of protesters in attendance what actually happened that day. What inspiring journalism on your part.”

Often reporters’ bylines appear on stories that they are unhappy about – senior editors present their material in ways that suit the newspaper’s editorial line, rather than the reporter’s understanding of the truth.

But in this instance it is clear that the reporter in question agreed wholeheartedly with the police. As the Stop the War Coalition noted, the reporter made “no attempt … to speak to the organisers of the demonstration, or indeed anyone who actually attended the protest without a police uniform”.

This was just plain bad journalism, and as such is indefensible. The reporter allowed himself to be an uncritical mouthpiece for views with which he agreed, rather than attempting to dig beneath the police press release and establish the facts.

Here is the full text of the article in The London Paper, which can  be found at: http://tinyurl.com/4jz33q

SUSPECTS SOUGHT OVER STOP THE WAR VIOLENCE

By Richard Moriarty

25/09/08

photos of four young men at top with byline

Picture caption: “Police are seeking these four men in connection with June’s Stop the War protest, which was marred by widespread disorder.”

THESE four men are wanted for questioning by police investigating a violent demonstration against George Bush, during which officers were pelted with metal bars, sharpened sticks and bottles.

At least 10 officers were hurt after protestors breached barriers during a Stop The War protest in Parliament Square as the US President visited George Brown.

Up to 2,500 people gathered at the height of the demo on 15 June and some, thought to be anarchists, tried to get through police lines to Downing Street. Police used batons to fight back, resulting in 25 arrests. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison said: “The Met will always facilitate lawful protest but what we will not tolerate is attacks on our officers under the guise of demonstration.

“We maintained a barrier line as part of security for the visit of President Bush. In a climate where London is at a severe level of threat from global terrorism, any attempt to breach security to protect the President had to be defended.

“What our officers did not deserve was to be the subject of such violence. A number of officers had sharpened sticks poked into their eyes.”

Anyone with information should call the investigation team on 07500 768 607, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111

(article ends)

Stop the War wrote to The London Paper, which refused to publish this letter:

“Your story about the demonstration in London on 15 June to protest against the visit of President Bush is one sided and full of unsubstantiated claims. Of the article’s two paragraphs one is almost wholly given over to quotes from Police Commisioner Chris Allison. The rest of the copy paraphrases a Metropolitan Police press release.

“Despite very serious allegations made against anti-war protestors,including the publication of 4 pictures of people apparently ‘wanted’ by the police, no attempt seems to have been made to speak to the organisers of the demonstration, or indeed anyone who actually attended the protest without a police uniform.

“The claim that Police officers ‘were pelted with metal bars’ for example is a complete fabrication. Given the accounts of the demonstration carried at the time in the press which described and pictured police baton attacks on peaceful protestors this article badly let down your readers, most of whom no doubt oppose Bush’s wars.”

On the day that the British government revealed details of its plan to throw £400bn at the banks, the Sun splashed on “£170,000 benefits so mum of 7 can live in £1.2m mansion”.

The Sun made its argument clear: “Taxpayers hit by the credit crunch fund the swish seven-bedroom home enjoyed free by Afghan migrant…” The tone of the paper’s coverage was summed up by one of its readers: “I’m disgusted by what’s going on. Surely we should be taking care of our own people first.”

Instead of the multimillionaire bankers ripping off the country and ravaging the economy, the papers now turned to an easier target: 35 year old Toorpakai Saiedi and her 7 children.

The Evening Standard took up the story and ran with it three days in a row. Of course the Express and Mail got stuck in. Ealing Council’s reaction? It sacked three temporary workers whom it blamed for the situation.

And this was even before the columnists got started. Carol Malone in the News of the World described she wanted to “smack” the “workshy” Afghan woman. “It’s a given with refugees these days that the minute you hit British soil and step aboard the benefits gravy train, you need never do anything for yourself ever again.”

Rod Liddle in the Times suggested that the Taliban had the right idea in driving Ms Saiedi out of Afghanistan. Tony Parsons in the Mirror spelled it out:

“Personally, I can’t tell the difference between the unemployed investment banker and that Afghan woman who is in the news because she receives £170,000 a year in benefits. … To me this mother-of-seven looks exactly like the scalded fat cats who are being bailed out from Canary Wharf to Wall Street.”

These ravings made Richard Littlejohn sound mild in comparison.

The facts: Ms Saedi receives £1,600 a month – under £20K p.a. – to feed a family of eight. The private LANDLORD gets £12,000 a month from the state to house the family because there is no council housing.

Susie Rushton in the Independent is the lone sane voice among the press jackals. She writes that she is “ashamed by our sneaky, racist press”:

“Never mind that Mrs Saiedi appears to be highly deserving of asylum, and needs a seven-bedroom house because her kids are too old to share rooms; that she is diligently learning English; that she struggles to pay bills; nor that, thanks to the ludicrous property boom in the capital, £1.2m pounds doesn’t actually buy “a mansion” – even as prices fall, that’d hardly get you a two-bedroom flat in Notting Hill. It does however buy a pleasant enough family-sized house in a cheap part of west London.”

As the economic crisis bites, the media will lash out at the weakest and most defenceless people in society. If they are Muslim, they make an even easier target.

This is why the Media Workers Against the War conference “Under siege: Islam, war and the media” is potentially such an important event. For us, slump + war = resistance.

Dave Crouch

I was absolutely enraged. I couldn’t believe that 400 editors could have signed up to this.

Why?

Because we have a protocol which we live by on every working day of the week which is that if someone vulnerable in terms of national security is making a movement or whatever we may well know about it but we won’t in fact tell the listener

If Brown is going off to Iraq you know perfectly well because you have to make your own arrangements but you don’t talk about it

It seems to me that there was nothing so very different about a movement of Prince Harry to Afghanistan and if they wanted complete secrecy it could fit with that protocol

The argument from the media organisations that went along with it was that this was in essence what they had sort of done.

No, and it’s not true. I am certainly aware that the basis of the discussion was: if you do not sign up to this he will not go, we will not deploy. Therefore the media suddenly became charged with a role in the deployment of a soldier to Afghanistan, which seemed a most bizarre position to be in.

This was propaganda, this was not journalism, this was not ferreting about to get at the truth, this was doing somebody else’s bidding, this was the picture that the Ministry of Defence and others wanted put across the front pages of the newspapers, this was a hole in one for the Palace, the military authorities and Prince Harry, there was no journalism involved at all, not one element of it.

The media, certainly the BBC, who were in this like everyone else, would dispute that, they would say that the quality of access, that one of the reasons that the deal took some time to stitch together was that arguments over – it appears to me anyway, they appear to be saying – the quality and amount and depth of access, so they are saying that the access enabled them to tell more of the story, to let listeners and viewers see more of what is really going on in Afghanistan because of the access they got because of the deal they had done.

That’s complete garbage, isn’t it.

Do you think…?

Absolute garbage. What was going on? What was going on was a number of posed photographs. Did they say: “We moved around the village and Harry posed on a motorbike. Whose it was we don’t know, it was red, it was probably nicked from some Afghan.”

What was the truth? Does an air traffic controller actually shoot from a machine gun nest? The BBC didn’t reveal this to us.

No, this was a series of manipulated photo-opportunities, it was not journalism and did not in any sense describe what was going on in Afghanistan.

Were you surprised at the reaction to your comments?

Not remotely. Not remotely. Do you think 400 editors who have sold their souls for a mess of pottage are in some way going to start being nice to me about my one lone voice of rebellion? No, absolutely not.

But I know I was right. And I have to tell you, I have had a vast mailbag from editors, friends, journalists, other people saying: “Spot on mate” – and viewers too.

Has it done the prince any good?

I think it’s done the press a lot of harm. Has it done the prince any good? Of course. Of course it’s a much better image than someone rolling around in the street half drunk.

Two peace boats, the “Free Gaza” and the “Liberty”, sailed from Cyprus to Gaza almost three weeks ago carrying 45 activists seeking to bring attention to Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Most of her fellow protesters left on the same boats they arrived in last week, but Lauren and several other activists chose to remain behind.

Israel controls all access to Gaza, although there is one border crossing at Rafah for pedestrians into neighbouring Egypt. Israel insists, however, on the right to screen all goods travelling from Egypt to Gaza and the pedestrian crossing opens rarely. This means crossing into Israel is now the only realistic means for Lauren to leave.

“This is a punishment, and it’s a warning to the people who may in the future want to come on the boat: imprisonment in the largest internment camp in history,” Lauren told the Times.

“It seems we are political prisoners, if you like, of Egypt and Israel’s blockade of Gaza,” she told Press TV.

Lauren is Tony Blair’s sister-in-law. Tony Blair is official Middle East peace envoy.

A third peace boat is due to arrive in Gaza on September 22 carrying doctors and members of the European parliament.

The UN investigation found that “the destruction from aerial bombardment was clearly evident with some seven to eight houses having been totally destroyed and serious damage to many others. Local residents were able to confirm the number of casualties – including names, age and gender of the victims.”

This is far from an isolated incident.

In the latest case at the end of August over 70 people are believed to have been killed in a massive bombardment of villages in southern Helmand province.

In July, coalition troops admitted that air strikes in Helmand killed civilians, as local people claimed that between 50 and 80 people, many of them women and children, had died.

Also that month, 47 people were killed and nine wounded on their way to a wedding in eastern Afghanistan. Among the dead were 39 women and children, including the bride-to-be.

More than 200 civilians were killed by coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been killed by Taliban militants. The growing toll of civilian deaths came as the US airforce disclosed that it dropped over 272 tonnes of bombs on Afghanistan in June and July this year – more than the whole of 2006.

And how has this story been covered in the British media? Paratroopers shot dead four Afghan civilians on July 26, close to the site where, less than 48 hours earlier, snipers had killed a British army dog handler – and his dog.

None of the media coverage named the dead Afghans. But several outlets named the dog that died, and its pedigree.

In January 2007 the British papers went wild over a “Rescue bid by heroes strapped to helicopters“. Describing how British soldiers had tied themselves to the wings of a helicopter to retrive a soldier’s body, an army spokesperson told the Mail:

“It was a leap into the unknown. It was an extraordinary tale of heroism and bravery of our airmen, soldiers and Marines who were all prepared to put themselves back into the line of fire to rescue a fallen comrade.”

Under the headline “Heroes of Helmand: the first amazing pictures“, the Observer talked of “a mission that carried echoes of Saving Private Ryan”, “a trip into the unknown, a mercy mission that has already etched itself into contemporary military folklore”.

The Guardian effused that the mission evoked “the manner of the heroes of the second world war film Flight of the Phoenix”.

The Times had this wonderful line: “Reports said that soldiers from 45 Commando Royal Marines did not want their 30-year-old section commander falling into the hands of insurgents, who they feared would mutilate his body.” Top marks there for demonising the enemy.

The Telegraph reported the operation’s success, followed by an army spokesperson’s words that it showed “the level of camaraderie and bravery of those soldiers involved.”

Now that the full MoD report on the mission is out, however, we learn that it was a tale of “poor training, confusion and friendly fire“. In the midst of the chaos, a British gunner had opened fire and shot another soldier dead. “A devastating board of inquiry report released by the Ministry of Defence exposed a catalogue of errors,” said the Guardian.

Of course most papers buried this news, and the Sun managed to tell it as a story of “MoD betrayal“.

So – when will the British media learn not to take MoD press releases at face value?

Dave Crouch

This was a very serious piece of journalism, broadcast at an extremely sensitive time – on the anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London. Channel 4 made sure the documentary was copper-bottomed by commissioning accompanying research by the excellent Cardiff School of Journalism team under Prof Justin Lewis. Moreover, Oborne produced his own pamphlet to go with the film, “Muslims Under Siege“. Both should be required reading for journalists.

The mainstream media’s response to Oborne’s challenge, however, has so far been disappointing, and by no means matches the seriousness of the issues he raises.

The Independent gave Oborne space for two major articles, one of which in its media section, and columnist Mark Steele last week demolished the Sun’s response to Oborne. The Mail gave him a double page spread.

But apart from a few comment pieces by Muslims praising the documentary in the Guardian, the Observer and the Times, and a splendid piece by the Guardian’s Seamus Milne, the response has been either silence or hostility.

The Observer’s Andrew Anthony slagged it off, accusing Oborne of “blasting himself in the foot“. In the Sindy, Hermione Eyre accused Oborne, of all people, of “white liberal piety“. To add insult to injury, Oborne was disgracefully thrown out of parliament for distributing his pamphlet to MPs.

Readers of this blog might wish to questions aspects of Oborne’s approach, which, for example, doesn’t make explicit the link between the rise of Islamophobia and the “war on terror”. But we share his criticisms of the war in Iraq. In his Dispatches documentary in March, “Iraq’s Lost Generation”, he said: “The British Government has misled us in the run-up to war and is in denial now about what we are leaving behind. It has failed to bring liberal democracy to Iraq, brought danger to the streets of London, damaged our international reputation, alienated millions of our fellow citizens and betrayed the values we stand for in a moral and strategic disaster.”

It is time for the dangerous Islamophobia that is rampant in the British media to be recognised and debated.

We must not let the issues that Oborne has raised be brushed under the carpet.

N.B. Last week the Independent reported record numbers of racist incidents – from verbal abuse to stabbings – are being reported to police, fuelling fears that levels of Islamophobia are rising.

Take the Guardian, for instance. Since Hilary Clinton’s remark on April 22 about “obliterating Iran”, the paper and its website have published over 100 items mentioning Israel in the context of the spread of nuclear power or weapons in the Middle East – about one every day. Yet only 8 of these mention Israel’s nuclear capacity, and only 4 appeared in the newspaper – the rest were online comment pieces, which carry far less import.

Of the newspaper articles, only one specified the size of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. The other two brief mentions in news items are here and here. The final mention came in a comment piece by Jonathan Freedland which was overwhelmingly an argument against Tehran.

In the same period, the paper published two editorials on Iranian nukes with no mention whatsoever of Israel’s nuclear weapons. One merely repeated Freedland’s handwringing of the day before, the other talked about “declaration of nuclear assets” – but without mentioning Israel’s undeclared weapons.

Notably, former US president Jimmy Carter talked at length about Israel’s nukes at a press conference at the Hay literary festival in May. The Guardian reported Carter’s press conference, but ignored that aspect of it.

As the US and Israel prepare for war on Iran, non-reporting of the balance of nuclear power in the Middle East adds to the sense that “something must be done” about Iran, strengthening the assumption that Iran is in the wrong and action of some sort is justified.

We saw this over Iraq. The US media specialist Ed Herman calls it “normalising the unthinkable“. MWAW will be writing to the Guardian on this score.

Malik’s crucial test case succeeded in reining in the police, who had raided his house in March in search of his notes. The court’s main ruling two weeks ago spelt out that the police have no right to conduct speculative “fishing expeditions” to force journalists to hand over their research.

But the case has starkly revealed how the terror laws mean journalists must go to the authorities if they suspect that a source has information about “terrorism”.

Given the broad-brush definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2006 – which includes “glorifying” terror and possessing terrorist materials without the intention of committing an offence – the latest ruling means many Muslims will perceive journalists as a direct extension of the police. Anyone with genuine information about the terrorist milieu will have to weigh up the risk that talking to a reporter is like talking to the cops.

The court’s first ruling, however, was welcomed by Malik, who stressed how it circumscribed police powers. He told Free Press: “It’s a victory for common sense in that, from the wider perspective, we can protect confidential sources – that’s a big victory.

“The High Court said production orders are allowed, but in my case they really do have to be precisely drafted, the police can’t just go on fishing expeditions. Protecting journalists’ sources should be paramount, and now the High Court has said even in terrorism cases journalists are allowed to maintain confidential sources.”

The NUJ also emphasised how the initial ruling sent a clear signal to police that they can’t see journalists as “simply another tool of intelligence gathering”. Speaking outside the High Court after the ruling was announced, general secretary Jeremy Dear said that Greater Manchester Police had “failed to recognise the special nature of journalistic material. Rather than take the time to consider what information they really needed, the police went fishing, hoping a general order would dredge up something of use.”

Malik is an established freelance who has written extensively on terrorism for national newspapers and magazines. He is working on a book with the former Islamist Hassan Butt, who is linked to a forthcoming terrorism trail in Manchester in the autumn. Greater Manchester Police, who raided Malik’s home in March in pursuit of his notes, have also served draft production orders on the BBC, the Sunday Times, Prospect magazine and CBS demanding that they hand over materials they believe to be connected with the case.

Malik’s High Court appeal is the first major test of the application to journalism of the Terrorism Act 2000, sections 19 and 38B (the latter was added in 2001) of which make it a criminal offence to withhold information. Formerly police had to satisfy a judge that the information they sought from a journalist was closely related to a “serious offence” – the 2000 Act contains no such restriction.

Malik said: “This makes it almost impossible for journalists working in the field of terrorism. It’s been a scythe hanging over our necks since it was enacted in 2000. Journalists in the field have been breaking the law and hoping they won’t get prosecuted.”

He believes the issue came to a head because the police decided he would be in no position to defend himself, so they imposed a wide-ranging production order. But the NUJ and the Sunday Times agreed to pay his costs.

There is a maliciousness in the police attack on Malik. As the court ruling states, the police interest in Malik is in what he can tell them about Hassan Butt, and not in whether he has committed offences under sections 19 or 38B. However, according to the Court, on May 9 Butt was arrested and extensively interviewed by police; he told them his earlier public statements about involvement in Al-Qaeda were untrue. He has now been released without charge.

The case shows that journalists face enormous difficulties researching the roots of Islamist extremism in Britain. As a result, policies aimed at preventing terrorism will come to rely even further on the shadowy secret services and the ill-informed prejudices of the Murdoch press.

Moreover, the line between legitimate support for resistance to western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporting “terrorism” will be further blurred, increasing the stigma attached to the Muslim community, where hostility to government foreign policy is strongest.

A range of high profile figures and organisations have supported Malik’s case. On March 19 leading figures from journalism and civil liberties organisations, including Jonathan Dimbleby and Shami Chakrabarti, signed a letter to the Times warning of its implications.

Dave Crouch
A version of this article will shortly appear in Free Press, www.cpbf.org.uk

Alarming changes are taking place in the BBC World Service structure and we are asking for your help.

The management has decided that 50% of language services should be transferred to countries where the language is spoken. As the law in most of those countries does not allow foreign media organisations to operate locally, the BBC is setting up private companies instead – BBC Pakistan Ltd., BBC India Ltd., BBC Nepal, etc.

Although preparations for offshoring different languages have been going on for the last 3 to 4 years, management neither took staff into confidence nor informed the unions of their plans. Hindi and Urdu services were told only a couple of months ago that 80% of Hindi and 50% of Urdu transmission and staff are to be transferred to BBC India and BBC Islamabad. Similar plans are in the pipeline for Nepali Service and there are signs that Bengali service will follow suit. Needless to say terms and conditions will be down-graded, and staffing levels will/may be cut.

The management argues that in the face of growing media competition we need to be closer to our audience. This is completely false premise and an extremely risky experiment which will mean moving independent journalists into the control zones of the governments of those countries and obliging them to comply with restrictive media regimes in those countries.

BBC World Service has built its reputation as the most independent and trustworthy international news organisation without its 32 language services ‘being close’ to their audiences. This is the most important issue in our campaign to stop offshoring plans. BBC World Service has earned respect and trust of its audience all over the world precisely because it was far removed from the political pressure of those countries and is perceived to be independent and unbiased. Programmes being broadcast from local stations and conforming to local media laws and political demands will not have the same authority, and BBC’s status as the world leader will be damaged for good.

Please support our campaign. Please discuss it at your next chapel/branch meeting; let people know in your communities, especially those from other Asian sub-continent; invite us to your meeting. And write to World Service management expressing your concern and challenging the wisdom of their plan, which is really about cost cutting.

You can write to:
Nigel Chapman – Director BBC World (nigel.chapman@bbc.co.uk)
Richard Sambrook – Director Global news
Thomson – Director General BBC
Sir Michael Lyons – Chairman BBC Trust

David Miliband – Foreign Secretary
Ede House
143 Westoe Road
South Shields
NE33 3PD
Telephone
(0191) 456 8910
Email: milibandd@parliament.uk

Thank you for your help.
Arjum Wajid
MoC
NUJ South Asia Chapel

Mitchell’s writing shows what comment should really look like – in contrast to the shallow hand-wringing that often passes for op-eds and editorials on Iraq in the British press. From the very start of the invasion he has raged at the media’s triumphalism and its downplaying of the loss of life. After Bush landed on an aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003, to declare “mission accomplished”, Mitchell slammed the New York Times’ coverage.

Four years later he was attacking the troop “surge” from the outset, condemning it as “a tragic escalation” of the conflict. When the US began blaming Iran for the mess, Mitchell wrote a column entitled: “We’ve been through this movie before”.

Over and over Mitchell comes back to the fact that a huge percentage of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks – a terrible condemnation of the US media. On the third anniversary of the invasion he wrote that pundits who agitated for an attack on Iraq should be “on their knees begging the American public for forgiveness”.

In one of his columns in April 2004 he made the first mentions of the deaths of US soldiers Casey Sheehan and Michael Mitchell – Casey’s mother and Michael’s father became prominent campaigners against the war. Another of Mitchell’s themes is suicides in the US army, the reasons for which he investigates to reveal the sheer awfulness confronting soldiers in Iraq. This has been largely ignored by the British media, although last year the Ministry of Defence disclosed that 17 serving personnel had killed themselves after witnessing the horrors of conflict in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Mitchell repeatedly castigates the refusal of newspaper editors to call for troops to be withdrawn, despite opinion polls showing this was a major, and even majority, opinion in the country. This changed fleetingly with a Los Angeles Times editorial in May 2007 entitled “Bring Them Home“, stating “The time has come to leave.” Two months later the New York Times stated boldly: “It is time for the United States to leave Iraq”.

Even the best of the British newspapers, however, evade the issue of getting the troops out. In leader columns to mark the fifth anniversary of invasion in March, only one British national newspaper talked about British and American troops leaving Iraq, but even then the Guardian said merely that it was “time to listen” to Iraqi opinion, calling on the next US president to “set a date” for withdrawal and talking about the “gains” made by presence of British troops. The Independent published a blistering attack on the war, but sadly evaded the question of troops. Otherwise:

• The Murdoch papers praised the troops’ presence;
• The FT said Iraq should be broken up;
• The Telegraph attacked Obama for being “dangerously naive” to talk about ending the occupation
• The Sunday Telegraph published an op-ed by Richard Perle (!);
• And the Observer in an extraordinary editorial called for more military intervention around the world.

It’s important to note, however, that Mitchell’s core argument is for better journalism, not “anti-war journalism”. He writes: “Most of those against the war did not ask for a media ‘crusade’ against invasion, merely that the press stick to the facts and provide a balanced assessment: in other words, that [journalists do their] minimum journalistic duty.”

Mitchell’s book is also hugely witty and entertaining: for a taste of this, see his recent column on an evening of satire at a White House dinner for journalists.

Remember, you read it here first – the British media have so far ignored the book.

Hilary Clinton’s shocking comment that the US would “obliterate” Iran if it should “foolishly consider” launching an attack on Israel is pandering to a broad constituency that wants to hear tough rhetoric about Iran. Clinton stood by her remarks this month: “I don’t think it’s time to equivocate. [Iran has] to know they would face massive retaliation. That is the only way to rein them in.”

Clinton has added to the chorus of neocon voices seeking an excuse to bomb Iran, including major media outlets. A disgraceful Washington Post editorial on April 13 talked of Iran as “a growing menace that the Bush administration, and its successor, cannot afford to ignore”. In Britain, the appropriately named Con Coughlin, the Telegraph’s political editor, is once again publishing British and US military reports on Iran’s “lethal meddling on the battlefields of the war on terror”, under the headline: “Why the West moves closer to bombing Iran“.

But it’s not all going the neo-cons’ way. In the first week of May the US faced major embarrassment when a cache of supposedly Iranian weapons seized in the Shiite holy city of Karbala turned out to be no such thing. The US military had just taken the word for it of local Karbala police. In fact, the US and Iran are on the same side in southern Iraq, both fearful of the Sadr resistance. Even the Iraqi government has distanced itself from the US talk of conflict with Iran.

The website Spinwatch has started an extremely useful blog by the retired US air force colonel Sam Gardiner which aims to follow the media’s twists and turns on Iran. Gardiner has performed extensive analysis of the media coverage before the war on Iraq, during the war and during the occupation as well as of the statements of Administration officials.

So don’t just watch this space for alerts on warmongering towards Iran – watch Gardiner’s too.

Evan Davis, Today’s new presenter, introduced a section on Basra on May 2 which opened with an resident of Basra describing Moqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army as “very ill-educated, basically criminals” and welcoming the renewed invasion by western forces. Davis then turned to Major General Barney White-Spunner, the UK’s senior officer in Iraq: “So it sounds like fairly good news from Basra?”

“That’s certainly our view,” White-Spunner replied. Davis pressed for more good news: “Are the gains sustainable, I suppose is the question isn’t it? Or do you think if you don’t get to mend the sewers very well people are going to become discontented again and we’ll start getting back to more street disorder?”

White-Spunner took his cue and talked unchallenged about the “excellent work” UK troops were doing, about “development”, “aid distribution”, “humanitarian work”, “sensitivity” to local needs and so on. The interview was almost as cosy as editorial meetings of The Field magazine or Baily’s Hunting Directory, where White-Spunner works when not occupying foreign lands.

Meanwhile, Iraqi government troops were parading the bodies of dead Mahdi fighters like trophies and beating up prisoners. On the same day as White-Spunner’s Radio 4 interview a huge crowd of Shia Muslims protested against Iraq’s US-backed prime minister al-Maliki in Baghdad’s Sadr City, urging him to end the bloody confrontation with the Mahdi Army. Since late March, there has been a surge of air strikes in Iraq: the military has fired more than 200 Hellfire missiles in the capital, compared with just six fired in the previous three months.

The British media routinely portrays supporters of Moqtada Sadr as “militia”, “extremists”, “men in black”, “rogue gunmen” and “death squads”. Yet, up until last September, Moqtada Sadr’s group was part of the Iraqi government. The US offensive has relied heavily on the Iran-backed Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, many members of the armed wing of which, the Badr Organisation, have been battling the Sadr-led resistance.

The US demonises the Mahdi Army because Sadr is resolutely opposed to the occupation. Moreover, many Shia view the Mahdi in part as a charitable organisation and are often grateful for the security it provides. Sadr’s organisation gives money to families of Shia dead and injured, resettles displaced families and offers funds for any victim of American weapons in Sadr City. Evoking comparisons with Hezbollah, Sadr’s movement “has established itself as the main service provider in the country,” says a recent report by Refugees International. Every month the Mahdi army distributes rations of rice, cooking oil, sugar, tea and other staples, much of it provided by the Iraqi Red Crescent, to thousands of Baghdad’s poorest families.

As the Financial Times put it last month, the clashes between the government and the Mahdi army reveal a class division at the heart of the Shia community. Sadr represents the angry, dispossessed Shia masses of Iraq who suffered under Saddam. “What we’ve seen over the past few weeks is a real class struggle open up with no political means for bridging the gap,” the International Crisis Group told the FT. “Sadr’s followers don’t care if he’s an ayatollah or not. They just want him to win for them the wealth and prosperity they feel should be theirs,” a US official told the paper.

The British media’s last line of attack is that British troops are defending women’s rights. But abuse of women was widespread in Basra before the British were driven out of the city last autumn. The US-backed government has brought right-wing Islamists to power, unleashing attacks against women.

The resistance in battling the occupation. But for the BBC’s flagship news programme our boys are just doing good, building sewers and helping reconstruction. This is far from the case – the British and US armies are building a sewer of bloodshed and sectarian hatred in Iraq.

But why the deafening silence in the British media? The release of Bilal Hussein, a member of the AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005, held without charge in Iraq for two years, went almost entirely unnoticed. When the British journalist Richard Butler was mercifully freed after in Iraq for two months, his rescue was given widespread coverage.

When the BBC’s Alan Johnston was held in Gaza last year, there were calls from throughout the international press and political community for his release. One of those appeals came from Sami Al-Haj, who imprisoned without charge in Guantánamo since June 2002 after being seized on his way to Afghanistan the previous December to work on an assignment.

Johnston responded to Al-Haj’s plight by writing an open letter in support of a fair trial; the ex-BBC documentary journalist Rageh Omaar also spoke out about him. However, unlike Johnston, this Sudanese-born journalist, received little sustained support or coverage from his colleagues in the media. This is despite the fact that he is the only journalist in Guantánamo and he was offered no opportunity to refute the US government’s charge of being an “enemy combatant”. Rageh Omaar, speaking to Guardian journalists in January 2008, said: “If you look at the response to the kidnapping of Alan Johnston in Gaza and compare it to the over-whelming, deafening silence in Sami’s case, it’s completely shaken my confidence in the notion of journalistic solidarity.”

From January 7, 2007, until his release al-Haj was on a hunger strike to secure his liberty or a free and fair trial. He was force-fed through tubes into his stomach, his weight plummeted and health deteriorated, with reports of poor sight, heart and kidney problems. Al-Haj’s supporters also claimed he suffered physical and mental abuse, including the withdrawal of medication.

The evidence against al-Haj has never been presented in public. Some see his imprisonment as part of a wider US campaign against al-Jazeera itself. His brother Asim al-Haj, speaking to Democracy Now in January 2008, said: “Sami al-Haj is a victim of a political operation against al-Jazeera, which Washington does not approve of. And as evidence of this is the fact that he was interrogated 130 times. And during these times, the interrogations were all about al-Jazeera and alleged relations between al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda.”

Al-Haj’s British lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of legal action charity Reprieve, also believed this to be the case and confirmed that virtually all Sami’s interrogations were an attempt to “prove” a link between al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda. He also said al-Haj told him he had been offered release if he was prepared to spy on his colleagues at al-Jazeera. On Sami’s release, his lawyer told the BBC: “We’ve disproved everything they threw at him.”

Reprieve also released two sketches by the political cartoonist Lewis Peake, based on drawings which al-Haj himself made of his experiences inside Guantánamo. The most recent showed a skeleton strapped to a gurney and indicates al-Haj’s own horrendous experience of the camp hospital.

Dozens of journalists – mostly Iraqis – have been detained by US troops over the last three years, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists. While most have been released after short periods, in at least eight cases documented by CPJ Iraqi journalists have been held by US forces for weeks or months without charge. Several of the detainees were photojournalists who initially drew the military’s attention because of what they had filmed or photographed.

Journalists continue to be targeted, by the US and by their puppet regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In February, Afghan journalism student Pervez Kambaksh was arrested for distributing a pamphlet about women’s rights, tried and sentenced to death without a defence lawyer, in a closed court. The Independent’s defence and diplomatic correspondent Kim Sengupta wrote to MWAW this week about his plight:

“Pervez has been transferred from Mazar to a prison in Kabul where, according to the authorities, he is being kept in solitary confinement for his own safety. As far as prison conditions are concerned, he was better off in Mazar where he could mix with other prisoners and had the protection of the fairly enlightened head of prisons for northern Afghanistan, Gen Taj Mohammed. There are still no definite dates for his appeal.”

Add your name to the Independents petition to free Pervez Kambaksh here:
www.independent.co.uk/pervez

Maddy Ryle

Click here for high quality recording by Middle East Panorama

Dahr Jamail was an independent journalist in Iraq and is author of “Beyond the Green Zone“

Nick Davies is an award-winning Guardian journalist and author of “Flat Earth News“

Kim Sengupta is defence and diplomatic correspondent, the Independent

Lindsey German is national convenor, Stop the War Coalition

Full details of the event here

Alton was a crusader for the invasion of Iraq. As Johann Hari, who himself backed the invasion at the time, put it on the eve of the war: “There is now a considerable school of British centre-left thinkers and commentators who are lobbying hard for war, so that the Iraqi people can be freed: Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd, Julie Burchill, Roger Alton and David Aaronovitch.”

In other words, Alton was up there with the worst of British journalists in terms of craven support of Bush and Blair and contempt for the anti-war case.

Hari’s observation is backed up by Nick Davies, who discovered that Alton had an intimate lunch with Blair in autumn 2002 “from which, according to colleagues, Alton returned full of determined support for the campaign against Saddam”. With the Observer’s home affairs correspondent David Rose being fed “sheer disinformation” by MI6, and its political editor Kamal Ahmed deep in Alastair Campbell’s pocket, readers of Alton’s newspaper were, as Davies catalogues in some detail, “slowly soaked in disinformation” about Iraq.

Yet Alton carried on with his support for the invasion. When columnist Richard Ingrams quit the paper in 2005, he insisted that the Observer’s stance on Iraq was damaging the paper: “It’s particularly noticeable on the whole Iraq issue. In the Indie, you had a very strong attack on the whole thing from the beginning. But The Observer’s got it wrong about Iraq, which goes on and on, and you’re clobbered by that unless you get up and say: ‘We got it wrong’.”

Ingrams was right that the gap between the Observer and the Independent was huge.

On the day after the Hutton report came out in January 2004, the Independent produced a totally white front page with a one-word headline: “WHITEWASH”. In Blair’s last major public speech as prime minister, he attacked the Independent, after which the paper splashed with: “Would you be saying this, Mr Blair, if we supported your war in Iraq?” Beneath that headline, the paper’s editor Simon Kelner hit back brilliantly at Blair:

“After 10 years of the Blair administration, a decade of spin and counter-spin, of dodgy dossiers, of 45-minute warnings, of burying bad news, of manipulation and misinformation, we feel that the need to interpret and comment upon the official version of events is more important than ever.”

Kelner saw it as a “badge of honour” to be singled out by Blair.

Will Alton take a similarly brave and principled stand against Gordon Brown and George Bush? It is enough just to ask the question to see what an absurd proposition that is. But if you need more proof, here it is from the horse’s mouth.

Alton on Blair: “Blair is fucking good.“

And again: “I think he’s a very good prime minister and an exceptional politician who will be much missed when he’s gone. Some of the hostility to him is quite baffling. I just can’t understand it. It doesn’t logically relate to things.”

Alton on editorial priorities: “Absolutely have your environmental horrors in Sudan, but you might put it on page four. On page three you might well have, as we did, inside Sven’s five-star England football World Cup love nest — just because it’s more visual.”

On the prosecution of BNP leader Nick Griffin: “ludicrous… should never have been brought”.

On Kamal Ahmed: “Kamal is one of the best journalists I have ever worked with and of the highest integrity, so if anybody impinges his integrity I’ll go and punch his fucking face in.”

What Alton’s editorship of the Independent means is this.

Every pro-war editor will feel safer in his or her job, and more confident in their editorial line. Piers Morgan and Greg Dyke, sacked over Iraq, are still in the news media wilderness. But Alton has taken over the Indie. The message couldn’t be clearer.

Every other editor will feel under even more pressure to give in to the dominant pro-war assumptions: our leaders’ intentions in the “war on terror” are noble; Iraq is yesterday’s story and our audience doesn’t want to hear about it; the anti-war movement is beyond the pale, an unrepresentative rump that is stuck in a rut.

Every journalist will feel it that more difficult to stand out against the notion that the Iraq WMD fiasco is behind us, we can carry on as if nothing had happened.

Alton’s appointment at the Indie is a disgrace. The anti-war movement should watch closely what happens to the paper and be ready to mobilise against Alton in support of the Indie journalists who have made their paper the conscience of the British media.

The London demonstration on Saturday March 15 will surround Parliament to remind our political leaders that their continuing collaboration with George W. Bush and his illegal wars has not been forgotten.

There will be more than 300 demonstrations worldwide against the occupation of Iraq. These include a march in Basra. A full list can be found at www.worldagainstwar.org

David Crouch, chair of Media Workers Against the War, said:

“Every survey of public opinion has shown that the Stop the War Coalition has consistently represented majority opinion in this country on the vital issues of war and peace ever since the initial attack on Iraq.

“Despite politicians’ decision to ignore public opinion, including the extraordinary London demonstration of 1.5m people in February 2003, the Stop the War movement has continued to organise protests far bigger, more inclusive and representative than anything this country has ever seen.

“We therefore ask journalists in print, radio and TV that today’s demonstration be fully and fairly reported.

“If public opinion continues to be ignored the result will be measured in yet more death and destruction – and public cynicism about the media and politics.”

Press contact: 07801 789 297

Notes for editors:

Media Workers Against the War is a group of media professionals who campaign for fair reporting of the “war on terror”. More info: www.mwaw.net

For details of today’s (Saturday) London demonstration, go to www.stopwar.org.uk or call 07801 789 297

The collusion of senior media editors in the blackout on Prince Harry in Helmand reveals how specious this argument is. Rather than questioning the government’s war in Afghanistan, the media’s proprietors and controllers conspired to give the military a propaganda coup, boosting the notion that Britain is fighting a glamorous and just war.

As a result, more young men will join the army to fight: “They have just used Harry as propaganda to promote and glorify a war which, in the end, is going to be found to be a terrible mistake,” said Anthony Philippson, whose soldier son James died in Afghanistan.

As a result, thousands more Afghanis will die, blown to pieces by bombs from the same air strikes directed by the Prince on his “Kill TV”.

Eighteen months ago the MoD faced a potential revolt in the army. General Sir Richard Dannatt told the Mail that Britain faced losing the war in Afghanistan. The MoD lashed out Blair’s favourite scapegoat for the problems – the media – and launched a campaign to regain the media initiative.

First the MoD banned ITN from embedding reporters with troops. Then it allowed the 15 military personnel captured by Iran to sell their stories to the press. And it banned soldiers from blogging and speaking in public. By the end of last year the MoD had succeeded in re-imposing strict censorship on the media in Afghanistan.

Now senior editors have handed the military establishment a gem. As Peter Wilby has explained, the Prince Harry story “was a PR stunt, from beginning to end”. By lapping it up, editors “dealt another blow to genuinely independent journalism and to the long-term credibility of the media”.

It is a grim irony that, as the Harry story flooded through the media last week, the government gagged the former SAS soldier Ben Griffin, preventing him from speaking out about UK involvement in illegal renditions.

For some well-known journalists, this stuck in the craw. Jon Snow of Channel 4 News asked some probing and critical questions about the media’s collusion on Harry. As a result, however, Snow became the target of a concerted campaign of “flak” in the Mail, Telegraph, Telegraph again, Evening Standard, and the Times, including accusations that he is “left-wing” and “unpatriotic”.

If you haven’t done so already, please write to Channel 4 News – email news@channel4.com – to back Jon Snow’s independent and professional journalism.

digg it

The Sunday Times is preparing to sue Davies for libel, as reportedly is the Observer’s former political editor. One executive editor has threatened to punch him in the face, while another has promised to bankrupt him. Another has tried to smear him with a made-up story about his private life.

More importantly, the media’s big guns have been wheeled out to rubbish the book in the crudest terms. As Davies himself wrote to the Times last week: “I am discovering what it is like to be on the receiving end of the press.”

Editors, former editors, managing editors, media professors – a string of top media people have come out to attack the book’s central observation that that the modern media are churning out PR to make money, leaving them wide open to manipulation by the rich, the powerful and the warmongers.

Moreover, the more subtle commentators on the right are trying to claim the book as their own. So John Lloyd of the Financial Times says that Flat Earth News merely shows how cynical journalism has become, repeating his Blairite mantra that “comment” is “papering over the cracks down which facts and investigation have disappeared”. There is a whiff off this attempt to co-opt Davies for the right in the Spectator’s review of his book.

You can follow the story in detail on the Press Gazette’s excellent blog, where you will also find a few insightful and sympathetic reviews.

Davies has replied to some of the attacks here and here. He writes: “What’s wonderful, of course, is the irony of seeing senior journalists attacking the book by reproducing precisely the kind of falsehood and distortion which it attempts to expose.”

This campaign by the media elite is so obviously self-serving – no editor of a national newspaper or broadcaster is going to admit that his or her product is a sham. It is striking how none of the critiques of Flat Earth News take up Davies’ points about media ownership and the crucial role of Murdoch in crushing the media trade unions at Wapping in 1986.

But Davies has taken on a powerful and ruthless establishment. Anti-war media workers must give him every support. As Davies explains on page 1 of his book, his research “started with a single, notorious story – the long and twisted saga of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. … It’s about everything I found when I started trying to explain how we managed to do so badly in covering what is probably the biggest single story of our era.”

Disgust with the “war on terror” runs right through this book. The anti-war movement must get behind its author.

Email him here: www.flatearthnews.net/contact

Please copy your emails to Media Workers Against the War: info@mwaw.net, or post them in the comment section below.

What are the basic facts behind the Muslim-baiting?

1. Most British Muslims do not demand Sharia law.

• Muslim Council of Britain: “We do not wish to see a parallel system or a separate system of judiciary for Muslims.”
• Shaista Gohir, government adviser: “The majority of Muslims do not want it. Many Muslim commentators and the media are wrongly assuming that all Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.”

2. What British Muslims want is for the UK, US and Israel to end their bloody occupations of Muslim countries.

3. They want an end to the racism against British Muslims, who are overwhelmingly dark-skinned.

4. A 2004 ICM poll found 61% of British Muslims might support Sharia courts being introduced in Britain, but only to resolve civil cases within the Muslim community, and only so long as the penalties did not contravene British law.

5. Archbishop Rowan Williams argued for “a delegation of certain legal functions to the religious courts of a community”, not for an extensive parallel legal system. The aspects of Sharia being considered by Williams are restricted to matters of family and finance law, i.e. civil matters. No one is suggesting introducing an Islamic penal code.

6. Religious courts already operate in this country for Orthodox Jews. Why shouldn’t Muslims enjoy the same right?

7. Sharia courts also operate in the UK, although without official recognition and concentrating only on mundane issues such as inheritance and divorce. Many British Muslims are already married under Sharia law, eat meat slaughtered by it, and bank according to it.

8. The UK is already amending its finance laws to allow Sharia-compliant products such as halal mortgages and Islamic bonds, in part to attract billions of petro-dollars from the cash-rich Gulf.

9. Ontario, Canada, for 15 years had a system of “faith based arbitration” whereby family issues such as inheritance and property division could be adjudicated by religious authorities. In 2005 Ontario’s attorney general reviewed how the system worked for Muslims and “did not find any evidence to suggest that women are being systematically discriminated against as a result of arbitration of family law issues”.

10. Criticism of Islam segues effortlessly with prejudice against black immigrants. “Niggers out” no longer wins many votes, but Muslim-bashing presses the same political buttons. For our rulers, Islam is a doubly-convenient scapegoat for resistance to the West’s “war on terror”. Any discussion of Islam today is therefore a discussion about war and about racism. By ignoring this basic fact the media join hands with the racists and the warmongers.

For the latest, see the excellent resource islamophobia-watch.com

1. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
In September 2002, Rice lies to the world about the Iraqi nuclear “threat”.

2. 9/11 – an “opportunity” for US imperialism
In the days after 9/11, between public displays of grief Rice rounded up senior staff of the National Security Council and asked them to think about “how do you capitalise on these opportunities” to fundamentally change American doctrine and the shape of the world.

3. Ignored 9/11 advanced warnings from CIA
July 2001: CIA director George Tenet knew of the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the US. The case was so compelling he met Rice, then national security adviser, to demand action. Rice gave him the brush-off.

4. Bush’s closest adviser on the “war on terror”
“During the last four years I’ve relied on her counsel, benefited from her great experience, and appreciated her sound and steady judgment,” says Bush in November 2004.

5. Iraq “was worth it”
December 2006: Rice defends the invasion as eight US marines are charged with a massacre in Haditha.

6. “I know we’ve made tactical errors – thousands of them, I’m sure.”
March 2006: Rice drops her guard on Iraq.

7. The SS Condoleezza Rice
So close to the oil industry she had an oil tanker named after her.

8. Backs bloody crackdown in Uzbekistan
May 2005: Rice refused to censure Uzbekistan over the massacre of hundreds of protestors in Andijan. Uzbek dictator Karimov had allowed the US a military base on the Afghan border.

9. Rejects negotiations with Iran
2003: Iran puts everything was on the negotiating table, including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups. But national security adviser Rice rejects the initiative.

10. Brings back Wolfowitz
January 2008: Rice appoints Paul Wolfowitz to head a State Department arms-control panel. Wolfowitz, the No. 2 official in the Pentagon under Rumsfeld and a key architect of the Iraq war, was ousted last summer as president of the World Bank for giving his lover a well-paid job.

I know we’re here to talk about other things, but all of you know how much the NUJ and many people in this room did with regard to the campaign to secure my freedom last year. I’ve tried to express my gratitude for that in many ways since I have been freed, but I’ll say once more time here that I am immensely grateful it was hugely important, and I am really in the debt of anyone who took part n that campaign in any way.

Moving on to the matters of today, I often think back to a perfect evening in Cairo in the months before 9/11. I remember being at a small gathering of journalists at a big old villa near the Nile and chatting on the lawn to two of my colleagues, Frank Gardner and the former Baghdad correspondent Caroline Horley. Of course all 3 of us were fascinated by the middle east and everything that happens there. That evening we couldn’t know that in the years ahead each of us would be touched very personally by the violence and the rising rage in the Arab world.

As many of you know in 2004 Frank Gardner was chased and gunned down by Islamist militants in the streets of Riyadh and suffered the most appalling injuries. Soon afterwards Caroline was having dinner in a hotel in Jordan when a suicide bomber walked in. In the room above here an entire Palestinian wedding party was devastated and Caroline saw things that I know will stay with her all her life on that night. And of course last year I was kidnapped in Gaza by the Army of Islam.

But at least we three survived. Frank’s cameraman Simon Cumbers lies buried in Ireland and my colleague Kate Peyton was shot dead in Mogadishu. If you look at each of those incidents you can begin to see a rather obvious pattern. Frank and Simon weren’t trying to make contact with Jihadis when they were attacked. They were on the edge of a rougher part of town but they were only filming in the street. Caroline of course was just having dinner. I was driving home when I was ambushed. None of us were looking for trouble at the time, we were targeted because we were westerners or we were in a place linked with westerners.

On the first night of my kidnap in the one face to face conversation I had with the leader of the gang that was holding me he asked me if I was, as he put it, a crusader like George Bush. I said I didn’t feel that I was, that the average crusader wouldn’t have chosen to spend the previous three years telling the stories of the refugee camps of Gaza. But I saw his remark like this. There are unfortunately some people in the west who regard all Arabs as terrorists or potential terrorists and the leader of my kidnapers was a kind of mirror image of that, he saw all westerners as crusaders or potential crusaders.

Those blanket, dehumanising assessments of the other camp are very much part of the current confrontation between the east and the west and perhaps those sorts of views are part of what accounts for the continued captivity of our colleague Sami al-Haj, the Al-Jazeera cameraman who has been held in Guantanamo Bay for some 5 years without trial.

Just the week before last we saw a bomb in the only decent hotel in Kabul killing a Norwegian colleague and afterwards the Taliban said all westerners would be targeted anywhere in the city and the country.

For a long time we have, rightly, put great faith in the argument that as journalists we ought somehow to be immune, that we are non-combatants, merely observers there to try to explain what’s happening and that our work will in the end be to the benefit of some sort of justice

Again and again journalists in the hands of dangerous men at checkpoints or on frontlines around the world have reached for that very reasonable defence. God knows it hasn’t always worked, and at times it has felt very tenuous indeed, I know that myself. But you feel that in recent years the power of our great argument has been eroding. And in some places now it means very little indeed. I can tell you that on the night of March 12, the first night of my captivity in that cell in Gaza, I made our argument for myself and it counted for nothing. The leader of the Army of Gaza said I had made a nice speech but it would not set me free.

All this has an impact on how and what and where we can report. The BBC was the only western media outfit to have a correspondent based permanently in Gaza. But what happened to me convulsed the organisation. For a while it looked like I was dead and gone. And in the real world the BBC is now much more wary about sending people into Gaza. Just as dangers of similar kinds have restricted the way that w e can report in Somalia and Iraq, when you translate that across the board you see that of course other organisations make similar choices and generally much less gets exposed or written about in the most important places than we would all like.

In some ways technology has come to our aid in recent years. It is much easier now via the internet, mobile phones, satellite phones and so on to tap into the work of bloggers, local journalists and others in places like Iraq. If the traditional work of journalists from outside a warzone is more difficult to carry out we still here more readily now from local people living and breathing the conflict, and you might well argue that those kinds of people can anyway bring far more feel and insight into the realities of life in Baghdad than the likes of me ever could, and I absolutely accept that.

But I would still say that there is very much a place for the reporter from outside trying to play the role of a more neutral observer. I know there are limits to anyone’s capacity to claim to be neutral. I am a middle class westerner from a Judeo-Christian society. We all have baggage of that kind from our past and some of it is sometimes difficult to set aside however hard we try. But I think that those on one side or the other in any conflict can have their limitations when it comes to reporting the drama around them. Whether the average journalist in 1945 in this country would have been able to provide the most nuanced, balanced account of the decision to firebomb Dresden say, with all its moral implications, you might have been better to go to a more neutral journalist for that.

And anyway local journalists are in many parts of the world are under the most appalling pressures, often very much worse than those experienced by visiting reporters. Just look at the number of Iraqi journalists who have been killed in recent years. And although Gaza might be less violent in that respect, local reporters there are very conscious indeed of the sensitivities of covering the fight between Hamas and Fatah. They walk a kind of tightrope and it is easy to make very dangerous enemies.

So on many fronts we see the people of our professions struggling to do their job in the places where their work is most needed. So what do we do about it? The one thing that we must do through our newspapers and broadcasting channels is focus attention on it. Since being freed in Gaza I’ve become more aware of the amount of work that organisations like the NUJ, RSF, the CPJ, Amnesty and other do to raise the general awareness of the centrality of the importance of freedom of speech and the work of the media. We’d certainly be in a worse position if it hadn’t been for decades of effort of that kind, and that effort must of course go on.

But it is always going to be hard to make an impact on the ground, I’m talking here about reaching down to the level of the kind of people who really do the damage, the people who threaten or abduct or kill journalists. The angry or drunk soldier on a checkpoint, the party hardman or the extremist kidnapper. These are people who aren’t easily persuaded by reason and the wider moral picture. They move to different rhythms, motivated by ideology or money or the pursuit of power, in their narrow, brutal world.

There are no quick fixes. Sometimes the dangers only really pass with the coming of a degree of order, the coming of some kind of peace or justice. There were times I’m sure when it was very hard to do the best kind of journalism in South Africa, say. I’m sure there are challenges there still, but it is a place that has moved on to something better. And what we must hope is that in many still troubled places policies will change and reason will gradually prevail, even if progress of that kind is almost always painfully slow.

But unless the world’s decision makers or their electorates have a flow of information from places like Gaza and Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia they won’t know the realities of the situations there, they won’t be equipped with the facts and the understanding that are the basis on which wise choices are made. Of course supplying those facts, providing that understanding, locally and internationally, is the job of us journalists. Our work may be harder and harder to do but it certainly does remain profoundly worth doing.

Background

Pre colonial and colonial Before the 1880s colonial scramble for Africa, Somalia, Muslim since the 9C, consisted of feudal fiefdoms and city coastal states with a well documented history. Colonial occupation and borders, as elsewhere in Africa, created bloodshed which has not since been assuaged. In particular, the Somali-speaking Ogaden region on Somalia’s western border was ’signed away’ by the British to Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1957 after 70 years of wheeling and dealing with feudal (clan) leaders.

Independence from both Italian and British colonists was won in 1960. In 1991, Somaliland, the ex-British colony bordering ex-French colony Djibouti, declared independence from the Somali Republic.

Somali is the majority language throughout the country, as Amharic is in Ethiopia. Somali-speaking people live in Kenya, as well as in Djibouti and Ethiopia.

Siad Barre and the Cold War Siad Barre, a military officer trained in the USSR, came to power in a coup in 1969 after the assassination of the elected president. He ensured that Somali was ascribed an orthography (Roman rather than Arabic) and became the medium of education, as opposed to Italian and English. He also established a one party state along Soviet block lines and conducted wide-scale repression of opposition groups. He relied on Soviet aid and advisors.

However, when he invaded the Ogaden region of Ethiopia in 1977, the USSR for strategic reasons switched their support to the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu who in 1974 had overthrown Haile Selassie, a US client. Barre then expelled Soviet advisors, imprisoned former party members – in the process exacerbating clan fractiousness – and accepted US patronage. The USSR and US had effectively swapped sides. Civil war and extreme and brutal repression ensued. Famine turned starvation into a WMD.

Barre visited the US in 1982 and made a military deal with the South African apartheid regime in 1984. The IMF and World Bank insisted on neo-liberal structural adjustment and progressively turned the screws on the Somali state and economy, at the same time as the US made use of military bases built by the USSR.

In 1991, Barre was overthrown and expelled from Mogadishu by General Mohamed Farrah Aidid, a former intelligence chief in Barre’s regime whom he had imprisoned for 6 years on suspicion of coup plotting.

Advent of ‘warlordism’ After Barre switched his allegiance to the US in 1977, many prominent government and party members were imprisoned or sacked. From 1984, the degeneration of the Somali state accelerated. Aidid and other former government members, now without access to state machinery and turned overnight into the opposition, consolidated their clan power bases instead.

Furthermore, prior to 1977, a mass literacy campaign had doubled up as an indoctrination programme into Soviet-style socialism. People could not overnight switch to US allegiance. Left without political direction, they identified instead with their families and clans.

The civil war was precisely the competition between the clan leaders – now called ‘war lords’ by the western media – for control of the country. Multinational arms companies threw fuel, M16 machine guns mostly, on the fire. After 1991, many Somalis who could raise the money began emigrating to the west.

Black Hawk Down 1993 By the time Operation Restore Hope utilising 30,000 US troops was authorised by George Bush Snr in November 1992, food had begun to reach famine-stricken regions. What were the real reasons for US (later UN but US-led) intervention? Academics argue that first, post-cold war US foreign policy was pioneering its global policing stance, which ignored national sovereignty.

Second, the US was seeking to establish a pro-western coalition government in Somalia to safeguard its oil interests. A number of oil companies, including Amoco, Chevron and Conoco, had secured drilling concessions from Barre. A cable from the US embassy in Mogadishu to the State Department, 21 March 1990, reads: “The first prerequisite will be that Somalia achieve internal peace. [President of Conoco Somalia, Raymond] Marchand explains to [Somali government] officials that if there is no peace, then neither Conoco nor anyone else will be able to get the oil out.”

Many Somalis were hostile to the troops because they identified the US with the hated Barre.

Nairobi and Dar es Salam US embassies bombed In August 1998, within five minutes of each other, bombs exploded in the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At least 80 people were killed and 1,700 injured, the majority Africans. Osamar Bin Laden was held responsible, Islamist ‘extremism’ now a US foreign policy concern. Kenya and Somalia share a border.

Transitional National Government and the 4.5 formula In August 2000, in Arta, Djibouti, a national reconciliation conference formed the Transitional National Government on the basis of the 4.5 formula: equal power sharing between the four largest clans, and the other five clans collectively having a 0.5 stake in government. The 2004 conference in Eldoret, Kenya, created the current Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Neither conference brought peace. Abdullahi Yusuf is the president of the TFG.

Union of Islamic Courts (ICU) The ICU won control of Mogadishu in June 2006 after a two month battle against the US-backed Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, consisting of war lords and their allies in the TFG. After Mogadishu fell to the ICU, Ethiopian troops started crossing the border into Somalia.
While individuals and militias in the ICU belong to clans, as do all Somalis, their administration sought a non-clan-based modus operandi. They brought some peace and stability to Mogadishu and southern Somalia. Citizens of Mogadishu no longer had to pay clan militias ‘taxes’ at ‘checkpoints’ on street junctions because the warlords had been disarmed; legal processes for the restitution of disputed land and property began. The ICU also opened all Somalia’s major ports. Diasporan Somalis began planning to return home.

Ethiopian invasion Ethiopian troops, backed by US personnel, intelligence and financing, had already invaded Somalia in June 2006. The ICU did not have equal military strength. In December 2006, the Ethiopians took Mogadishu and installed the TFG government there. The TFG government is also backed by the US. Initially the ICU retreated to the south of Somalia near the Kenyan border. Their militias are now among those resisting the Ethiopian occupation and the TFG, largely in Mogadishu.

The UN UN Security Council resolution 1725, 6 Dec 2006, authorised an African Union force to protect the TFG. It prohibited troops from any neighbouring country from joining that force. Neighbouring countries’ military intervention would be compromised by the many conflicts of interest in the region. Ethiopia’s military presence in Somalia is thus illegal. Resolution 1725 also lifted the arms embargo imposed on Somalia in 1992.
Mandated by UN Security Council resolution 1772, 20 Aug 2007, 1,600 African Union troops from Uganda and 100 (1,700 planned) from Burundi are now in Somalia.

Judith Amanthis

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A winner. Congratulations. Great conference. I only wished I could have divided myself, several times, to have been able to attend more than one workshop. The whole afternoon was excellent. Thought provoking, informative, enjoyable and you had a really good turn out. With at least two thirds from the media or students of media, you should be very pleased.
Shade

I attended the conference on Saturday and firstly wanted to say thank you for a hugely informative and eye opening day. It’s a topic I’m really interested in (actually doing my dissertation on) and think it’s great that more and more well known journalists and politicians are moving into the spotlight to confront this…
Craig

I was at LSE yesterday and congratulate you and all the contributors on a great event. How could I get hold of a copy of ‘The First Casualty? War, Truth & the Media’ shown during the plenaries? I run an Access to Journalism course for Truro College in Cornwall and would like to show the video to my students.
Jane

I hope you don’t mind me taking this opportunity to say firstly thank you for organising the MWAW Conference I attended at LSE yesterday. The range of speakers was excellent.
Helen

That was one of the best political events I have been to. All credit to you. I aim to be at the meeting on Nov 29
Ian

Fantastic day! It was amazing
Caroline

Congratulations to you and the organising committee on a great conference and a sense of a solid grouping of media folk + others wanting to create Peter Wilby’s famous alternative narrative. Hope further discussion of how to do that on 29 Nov. My feeling is that some will try to ignore the resources MWAW has built up already – briefings and website. I think they should be built on.
Judith

Thanks for organising yesterday’s conference, which I found both thought-provoking and inspiring, especially on account of how many people turned up.
Daniel

Just thought I’d drop a line to say well done for such a great event yesterday – an unequivocal success!
Tim

I thought Saturday’s conference was great. I didn’t stay for the last plenary session so can’t comment on that – but the opening session, and the workshop on Iran, were really useful and informative. A great audience, and some really good speakers.
Margaret

Thanks to everyone for working so hard to make Saturday’s conference at the London School of Comics a success. It was particularly pleasing to see so many new faces. Even I was shocked at the amount of information from Iraq and Afghanistan which is not getting into the media. This is the equivalent on D-Day only reporting Allied landings in Normandy but not reporting Allied landings in the South of France or the 8th Army liberating Italy.
Chris

Just to say many congratulations on a brilliant and really useful day on Saturday. I think the issues you were dealing with are absolutely vital because I believe we now have a military-industrial-media complex. I’m a non-media person & for me the day made explicit lots of things about the way modern media operates that I had half realised but not fully taken on board. I am sure that will be helpful in peace campaigning & general activism. Thanks a lot & best wishes for all you are doing,
Mary

London School of Economics

Saturday November 17 2pm-6.30pm
Hosted by Media Workers Against the War

Contributors:

Andrew Gilligan, Peter Wilby, Michelle Stanistreet, Nick Davies, Sean Langan, Catherine Mayer, Sami Ramadani, Phillip Knightley, Moazzam Begg, Andrew Murray, Rachel Morarjee, Amir Amirani, Piers Robinson and others

Tickets: £10 / £7 – buy securely online: http://mwaw.net/conference

Major media outlets are becoming markedly less questioning and critical in their coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. Independent studies show an overwhelming pro-war bias after 9/11.

The drums of a new war, this time with Iran, are beating. Will we allow the media to be used to sex up the Iranian “threat”? Sometimes it seems like the Iraqi WMD fiasco never happened.

With the recent breast-beating about media integrity, now is the time to look again at reporting the “war on terror”. This conference will set out the issues and debate how best to campaign to improve standards. It will seek to identify the main sources of pro-war bias as a first step to providing media workers with tools and resources for combating it.

* Have the media learned the lessons of Iraq?
* What are the pitfalls in reporting Iran?
* What can the BBC do to stand up to government bullying?
* What should accurate coverage of modern war look like?
* Are Muslims being unfairly targeted in the media?

Come and debate these key issues for our industry.

Tickets: £10 / £7 – buy securely online: http://mwaw.net/conference

“I am very critical of the way in which the media failed to ask the proper questions in the run-up to war, and the way in which much of the British media, if not the US, seems now to have put reporting from Iraq in the “too difficult” category. This is the most important story in the world and it’s amazing how little coverage it gets in the British press. “
Andrew Gilligan, sacked by the BBC
September 2007

“The press has apparently learnt nothing from the dodgy dossiers and phantom WMDs that preceded the Iraq war.”
Peter Wilby, Media Guardian
April 2007

For more information and conference updates email thefirstcasualty@mwaw.net or call 07801 789 297

Aegis in September won the largest single security contract yet in Iraq, awarded by the Pentagon to co-ordinate the 20,000 private armed guards working in Iraq, and worth up to $475m (£234m). (Financial Times, Sep 15)

A US military inquiry into the videotapes has been closed, with no further action expected.

Since 2004 Aegis says it has travelled more than 3m miles throughout Iraq and completed more than 20,000 missions. Aegis is run by former army officer Tim Spicer, former chief executive of Sandline International, which was involved in the 1998 “arms to Africa” scandal during the Sierra Leone civil war.

This is a real problem for the anti-war movement – the notion among senior editors and managers that “we’ve done Iraq” and that it’s time to move on. Here they are just mimicking Blair’s oft-stated desire to “draw a line” under Iraq.

It means reporters and documentary makers can’t get important investigative work published or broadcast.

Of course, the public’s interest in Iraq isn’t constant: the Financial Times noted recently (Oct 23) that “the war in Iraq has ceased to be the US’s hot political issue”

But that is partly because politicians drop the issue in a concerted attempt to divert attention away from the war, and also because the corporate media takes their lead and gets “bored” with the subject.

In fact, Piers’ decision to publish the photos was totally justified. The photos represented what actually took place, even though they were faked.

Stuart MacKenzie, a private in the Territorial Army who served with the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in Iraq, orchestrated the photos. A court martial against him was dropped, however, and he was cleared of all criminal charges in 2005.

Also, Mackenzie kept a diary where he boasted about the violence meted out to Iraqi civilians during his tour of duty in Iraq in 2003. Last year he appeared as a prosecution witness at the court martial of seven soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. The seven soldiers were accused of abusing of 11 Iraqi civilians in Basra, one of whom, Baha Musa, died. Baha Mousa was found to have had 93 separate injuries to his body, including fractured ribs, a broken nose and kidney failure.

The soldiers were acquitted on insufficient evidence, although one of them, Corporal Donald Payne, became Britain’s first convicted war criminal when he admitted that he had treated Iraqis inhumanely and “enjoyed” hearing Iraqis cry out during torture, referring to their screams as a “choir”. He was jailed for a year.

Mackenzie’s diary contained detailed accounts of abuse of Iraqis. Moreover, at the trial Iraqi civilian Muhanned Thaher Abdullah al-Mansouri said that – among other things — he had been urinated on by his captors.

So Piers Morgan published photos of abuse that really happened. He was sacked for depicting the truth of British abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

Those editors of British media who repeated the governments’ lies about the “Iraqi threat”, however, are still in their jobs.

If that wasn’t enough, Philip Stephen’s extraordinary article (Oct 5) demonstrates another theme of this blog – namely, the connection between Islamophobia in the media and pro-war reporting.

Stephens launches a scathing attack on CBBC, the BBC’s TV service for 6-12 year olds, accusing it of a politically correct “pseudo-liberalism”, a “perverse and dangerous mindset” that leads it to be biased in favour of al-Qaeda. He singles out a page on the CBBC website which discusses the events of 9/11 and offers it as proof that the BBC is soft on terrorism:

“The BBC’s omissions, the careful juxtaposition of alleged cause and effect, and the choice of language invite the conclusion that there is moral equivalence between a US presence in the Middle East and the random slaughter of innocents.”

This is Stephens’ cue for a lot of self-righteous guff about al-Qaeda, wheeling out the tired canard of neo-cons the world over – that Bin Laden is the new Hitler and al-Qaeda the new Nazism. You can see what’s coming next… Because the BBC doesn’t support the USA (Stephens would have us believe), it is on the side of the terrorists:

“From a studiously neutral standpoint, it becomes entirely logical to condemn abuses perpetrated by the US, while glossing over the bestial violence of its enemies. … The most the BBC will offer by way of judgment on al-Qaeda-inspired jihadis seems to be as follows: ‘Although they claim to be on a holy war, many Muslims say what they are doing is very wrong.’ That is just not good enough. Impartiality cannot throw out universal values.”

Stephens’ argument is fairly easy to tackle at a factual level.

The page on the CBBC website that gives him such offence is part of a package on 9/11. The previous page of the package describes al-Qaeda as “a militant Islamic group” and points out that Bin Laden laughed and boasted about the attacks – which the package makes clear killed 3000 people – and spoke of his joy. Twice the package makes it clear that al-Qaeda is a terrorist organisation.

The implication seems really quite abundantly clear that al-Qaeda is a dreadful organisation that takes pleasure from mass killing. It is hard to detect any “moral equivalence” at work. CBBC is aimed at young children, after all. Is that really the place for red-faced, table-thumping outrage? Moreover, there is certainly no trace of moral equivalence in CBBC’s treatment of the Iraq war (here and here), while the BBC’s adult package on al-Qaeda is completely different.

So Stephens has taken a children’s website and used it, out of all context, to pin all the crudest right-wing slurs on the BBC ’s coverage of war and Islam. Perhaps this was an original piece of research on his part? Sadly, no. It was taken from The Sun on September 11, 2007.

So the Financial Times, the country’s most serious liberal organ, is reduced to taking crumbs from Murdoch’s table and regurgitating them as pseudo-intellectual outrage. How are the mighty fallen.

The only reason the FT could get away with publishing such an article is because of the prevailing climate in politics and the media which screams at every opportunity that the BBC is “left wing” and a sucker for liberal causes. We need to fight back. The conference on November 17 at the London School of Economics must become the beginning of a real campaign to defend the BBC, and to silence those who use the media to make excuses for war.

“Scribbler”

P.S. I have just watched the stunning documentary “Taxi from the Dark Dide” broadcast on BBC 2 late on Monday (Oct 8th). There could be no better rejoinder to Philip Stephens.

Watch the clip here and read background here.

And here are some recent headlines that demonstrate the reality of this threat:

Britain ‘on board’ for US strikes on Iran
Sunday Telegraph. October 7

Secret US air force team to perfect plan for Iran strike
The Sunday Times, September 23

Bush setting America up for war with Iran
The Daily Telegraph, September 17

Israel bombed Syria, Netanyahu admits
Haaretz, September 24

Was Israeli raid a dry run for attack on Iran?
The Observer, September 16

I was in Riyadh reporting for British Satellite News, a government-funded news agency. We were covering an official visit by Bill Rammell, the minister for lifelong learning. Saudi Arabia is keen to educate and train its own teenagers in order to reduce the country’s dependence on imported labour and skills. The visit was designed to establish potentially lucrative educational ties between the two countries.

In line with UK policy Bill Rammell asked the Saudi ministers about democratic and social reform. Sipping mint tea in the sumptuous majlis, or parliament, the minister’s first attempt to tackle the Saudis on human rights was ignored. Instead, the Saudi ministers emphasised their country’s need for welders. The minister took the stonewalling well, seamlessly praising his hosts for limited reforms in local elections, while coaxing them again: when would women get equal opportunity? And when would the Saudi people get the vote?

At this point, the UK Ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, who’d been whispering in the minister’s ear throughout, intervened. The Saudi translator, he said, wasn’t up to the mark, and had made several mistakes. The ambassador, a fluent Arabic speaker, announced that he would take over as the minister’s personal translator, whispering in his ear. Fine for the minister, but impossible for anyone else to hear.

I protested quietly that I wouldn’t know what the Saudis were saying, but I was ignored. Later I was told the Saudis had explained that women were being allowed equal employment and education, but would remain segregated for their own good. They would not be allowed into politics or given the vote.

Nor would anyone else get the vote: the Saudi people had shown that they were perfectly happy with the House of Saud in charge, so why on earth would the House of Saud want to impose democracy?

If this was what Bill Rammell heard he was unable to debate it. The meeting was over, we were off to film at the medina and the minister was off to inspect oilwells in Eastern Province.

Returning to London, I wrote my report, including what I had been able to glean from the exchanges at the Saudi parliament. The report was doctored by the editor, Mike Nolan, to remove the Saudi government’s views on democracy and women’s rights.

We now know, what I did not know then, that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is the man who warned the UK government that the Saudis would end security co-operation if the police investigation into allegations of £60 million worth of hospitality for the Saudis in connection with British Aerospace’s “Al Yamamah” arms deal went ahead. The inquiry of course was duly dropped.

For me as a journalist the Foreign Office’s editorial influence at BSN was making it more and more difficult to do my job. I reported remarks by Dennis McNamara, the UN’s highly respected adviser on displacement, denouncing the west for flooding Africa with arms. Mike Nolan called me in for a little chat. Did I realise who our client was? Why did I persist in writing critical reports?

I tried to argue that our job was not to report professionally, so that the clients – in my view overseas broadcasters, and not the FCO – would trust us. Mike Nolan told me the UN adviser’s words were “too close to the bone” and they were removed from my report._I no longer work at BSN, but its biased and flawed material is being used by hundreds of TV stations in the Middle East and Asia. All this is funded by the Foreign and Diplomatic Service, courtesy of the British taxpayer, to the tune of some £3 million per year.

Another tale that ran into trouble was when I reported perfectly friendly remarks by Tony Blair about Islam, the war on terror and other contentious issues, made on the record to a world audience. Even these were removed by BSN on FCO orders. If the Foreign Office can censor its own Prime Minister to feed distorted news to the Arab world, how can Britain be trusted there?

Mike Nolan told the Journalist: “Unlike Bruce, I have no intention of breaking my confidentiality on what went on between the two of us. I completely refute his version of events. “It is wrong to suggest I doctor scripts. Bruce was certainly not alone in having his material subbed. When material was reduced I nearly always took the time to explain why. Bruce’s claim he ran into trouble when he reported friendly remarks made by PM Blair about Islam is untrue. I am not censored by the Foreign Office; I did not censor Bruce. BSN prides itself on providing accurate and balanced information on news and developments in the UK.”

The survey, by Opinion Research Business (ORB), asked a representative sample of 1,461 Iraqis how many members of their household had died as a result of the conflict. The survey showed that over 1.2 million Iraqis had died, with the death rate now exceeding the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Almost one in two households in Baghdad have lost a family member.

ORB is about as mainstream as you can get. It has been commissioned by the Tory Party, by the BBC (most recently by Newsnight), and its work is cited frequently in the British media.

When an ORB opinion poll in Iraq earlier this year provided statistics that were supportive of the occupation, it was splashed all over the Sunday Times (here and here) and other newspapers internationally.

So far only the Los Angeles Times has carried this story, although this weekend’s Observer mentioned it prominently within another article.

Why hasn’t the story been picked up elsewhere? If this isn’t double standards, what is?

Media Workers Against the War contacted ORB and spoke to managing director Johnny Heald. Mr Heald said that, although the press release had been on ORB’s website since Friday, the results of the survey will be formally launched on Tuesday (September 18).

He said that ORB has no ideological position: after publishing previous poll results on Iraq it was accused of being right-wing, but now he expects that left-wing media will pick up on the new research.

Mr Heald said that an objection to ORB’s latest findings might be that, with so many deaths, where are all the bodies? He said the organsation’s interviewers in Iraq, led by the respected pollster Munqeth Daghir, say people don’t report many murders for fear of reprisal. Four ORB interviews have themselves been murdered, he said.

Mr Heald also pointed out that the survey showed 48% had died from gunshot wounds, which is significant because car bombs and aerial bombardments usually make the news – gunshots rarely get into the headlines.

This figure tallies with the Lancet research, which found that 56% of violent deaths were a result of gunfire.

1. 70% of Iraqis believe security is now worse than before the surge.
2. There has been no reduction in civilian deaths.
3. Food rations have been cut by 35%.
4. There are fewer doctors and nurses.
5. There has been a sharp rise in Iraqis fleeing Iraq.
   
6. The US is partitioning Baghdad along sectarian lines.
7. The US is arming future militias.
8. The country is awash with US-supplied weapons.
9. The UN says Iraq’s crisis is worse than Darfur.
10. The situation is a bloody stalemate.

• That the Deobandi current of Islam “gave birth to the Taliban” and runs half of Britain’s mosques
• A bloke in the Deobandi leadership “loathes the British”, Jews and Christians;
• And of course, he wants Muslims to “shed blood”.

These allegations were generalised into a vituperative Times leader attacking “this virulent, exclusionary, uncompromising extremism”. And then, the icing on the cake – columnist Rod Liddle spelt out what all this is getting at, namely, you can’t make any distinction between moderate and extremist Muslims:

“The terms moderate and extremist are not much use to us when considering Islam; they sort of merge with one another.”

Monday’s Times followed all this up by giving a new twist to the hoary old row about the “mega-mosque” in East London also being controlled by extremists. This in turn was nothing but a re-hash of Friday afternoon’s Evening Standard’s re-hash of the original piece in the Times!

This is all textbook Islamophobic reporting, and it can be pulled apart quite easily.

The accusation that Deobandis are the British wing of the Taleban is laughable; it’s like saying the co-operative movement is responsible for Stalin’s Gulag, or that Cambridge University fosters fascism because BNP leader Nick Griffin got a degree there. As one Deobandi leader put it, it’s just “a load of rubbish“.

Ahmed Rashid, the Telegraph’s Central Asia correspondent, in his masterful book on the Taliban, spells out at some length that “The Deobandis, a branch of Sunni Hanafi Islam, have had a history in Afghanistan, but the Taliban’s interpretation of the creed has no parallel anywhere in the Muslim world.” Taliban madrassas “were run by semi-educated mullahs who were far removed from the original reformist agenda of the Deobandi school”. A clear and detailed exposition of the same position is also to be found in an essay by the historian of the Deobandis, Professor Barbara Metcalf.

The Times bends over backwards to make the bloke at the centre of the allegations, Rihadh ul Haq, look like a new Abu Hamza, but flinging lots of mud doesn’t guarantee it will stick. The quotes taken from his speeches are tendentious in the extreme. Ul Haq is certainly no Malcolm X, but Alex Haley’s autobiography of the great black Muslim anti-racist brings out some of the same themes bitterly expressed in Ul Haq’s sermons – namely, a hatred for the surrounding society that hates black people and persecutes Muslims.

As for “seperationism”, in London there are communities of Jews who still dress the same way they did in Lithuania a century or more ago and do not mix much with outsiders. They receive no great criticism for this. The same is true of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and various Christian sects in the USA. With Muslims, however, the media grab any stick they can to beat them with.

The Times’ reporter, Andrew Norfolk, has a pedigree of Islamophobic reporting – he is a neo-con journalist with an agenda. But he is just a cog in the machine. As even the conservative Wall Street Journal writer Paul Craig Roberts has recently pointed out: “An entire industry has been created that is devoted to demonising Islam”.

In a remarkable article, Roberts continues: “In the US it is acceptable, even obligatory in many circles, to hate Muslims and to support violence against them. … Blind ignorant hate against Muslims has been brought to a boiling point.”

Roberts points out how this Islamophobia is laying the basis for an attack on Iran. It goes without saying that Murdoch’s Fox News is a chief proponent of military action on Iran.

The UK has its own industry demonising Muslims. Its techniques are crude but effective – and a shameful comment on British journalism.
By Dave Crouch

The Mail, after all, had the same story from the same sources on August 31, and the Telegraph on the very next day, as did the Mirror.

In fact the story has been floating around for most of this decade and regularly resurfaces in one form or another.

So why should the Indy run with it now? Could it be that the anniversary of 9/11 found the paper without the obligatory story reminding middle England that those uppity Muslims are still making our lives difficult for us six years on? The other papers had “controversial expansion” of Muslim schools, while Newsnight is banging on about books in libraries.

The Independent quoted the author of the research on Leicester, known for his anti-racist views, saying that discussion of “minority white cities” is a “a crude expression of fear”.

But the fine traditions of Fleet Street have never allowed rationality to get in the way of a good headline.

De Palma, who is best known for movies like Carrie, Scarface and The Untouchables, has clearly produced a stunning anti-war work. In a detailed and sympathetic review, Time magazine calls it “a cry of national shame“.

Redacted is inspired by a real event, the March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family and torching of their bodies and their home, by four American soldiers. It is constructed of seemingly real snippets of media: YouTube-like blogs, video posts, picture-phone emails and a daily video record kept by one of the soldiers.

The reaction of the British press to this film reveals much about the corporate media’s attitude to war.

So far, the Guardian’s response has been sadly typical of the newspaper’s overall approach to Iraq, just hoping the war will somehow go away so we can get on with the important news, such as Amy Winehouse’s drug problem and the price of organic food: “Yes, this is a stupid war. Yes, there are lots of media outlets. And people are dying on both sides.”

The Times is even more explicit: “Is the public really ready to pay to see films about nasty, bloody, complicated wars that most wish would simply go away?” All the Mirror can say about it is to pick on the film’s depiction of an Al-Qaeda execution of a US soldier.

But the Telegraph devoted half a page to the film, including this from its reviewer: “There are several references to the shortcomings of the mainstream media in reporting the real horrors of the Iraq war; de Palma makes a telling point with these alternative narrative devices.”

Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times raves about it: “Crafted not just for a new conflict but also for a new age of multiform, open-access image technology, this is a brilliant film with a passionate payload of political conviction.”

See this film if you can, and better still, write us a review.

The programme, “Immigration – How we Lost Count“, was transmitted on July 23 and purported be an impartial look at how the government has lost count of the number of migrants arriving in places like Slough.

However, the programme merely reinforced racist myths about migrants.

It repeatedly claimed that over-stretched council services are the result of immigration, rather than under-funding. The program did not acknowledge that migrants actually contribute more to the economy than they ever take in benefits.

It also featured a number of alleged examples of anti-social behaviour by immigrants – including locals accusing Roma gypsies of defecating on the street – and then invited the audience to generalise to all immigrants.

It stated crime had been rising in Slough and implied that this is linked to the presence of Roma gypsies. The police, as the program reports, actually blame rising population, not any single racial group.

The programme was broadcast after months of racist hysteria in the media about immigration to Slough, much of it led by the BBC. A headline on the BBC website read: “Roma children flood into Slough“.

By Tom Wall

The programme can be viewed in full here.
Here is the BBC’s response to viewers’ complaints. The length of the reply point to the weight of criticism levelled against the Corporation:

Thank you for your email regarding ‘Panorama: Immigration: How We Lost Count’.

Please accept our apologies for the delay in replying. We know our correspondents appreciate a quick response and we are sorry you have had to wait on this occasion.

The programme has responded to concerns raised by some viewers about this edition of Panorama which transmitted on 23 July regarding immigration, the response is below:

“However we look at it, immigration is always a controversial topic which arouses strong feelings from individuals of every political persuasion.

This was a programme about how the government have lost count of the number of people living in our towns and cities and how that impacts on the local authorities who have to provide services to their residents. Obviously the pressure on services is greater in areas of high migration such as Slough.

This was NOT a programme about Asylum seekers or illegal immigrants. It was made quite clear throughout the programme that the majority of people who have come to Slough to work have done so legally. Slough has a long history of attracting migrants from all over the world. It is an extremely diverse town (more than 128 nationalities have registered for work) and it has a strong sense of social cohesion and integration. All these points were made in the programme.

However, since the European Union widened its borders in 2004, many more legal migrants have arrived, and while Slough has welcomed them, they have contributed to the pressure on the town’s infrastructure. As a nation we have encouraged immigration for the economic benefits it brings and the taxes paid by migrant workers boost our governments’ coffers. Buy most of this money stays with central government and does not help the councils who must provide local services. Slough Borough Council are so concerned that they commissioned 3 independent research projects to assess the scale of the problem and have been lobbying Parliament for a solution.

Our aim in this programme was to report the story as we found it and that meant in part reflecting the most commonly held opinions by people who actually live in Slough (many of whom are former migrants themselves).

Inevitably, some of these opinions are unpalatable to many people, but that does not mean that these voices do not also have a right to be heard. Indeed, one could argue that it is possibly more important in a democracy to hear the opinions of those we don’t agree with, than simply hearing the opinions of those we do.

It is a fact that more people create more rubbish and the impact this is having on Slough’s refuse collection service has been well documented. More rubbish in the streets makes people disgruntled and is one of the issues which increases negative feelings towards newcomers. This is an unpleasant reality we would do well not to ignore.

Sometimes, hearing people voicing negative beliefs enables us to dispel myths, such as the notion, commonly held, that migrants are given access to local authority housing on arrival in the country – not true. In fact, our programme tried to dispel that myth and point up both the need for housing and the pressure on Slough’s housing department as well as how some migrants are being exploited by unscrupulous landlords.

Our job as journalists is to report the facts of the situation on the ground. If we presented a report which did not acknowledge the stresses and strains on the town and how these are making normally reasonable people feel, we would not be doing our job. Some viewers have suggested that our reporting may have encouraged racism, we have tried our best for this not to be the case, but just as a programme about obesity may result in some people expressing prejudice, it should not mean issues of major importance are to be avoided.

Some viewers have made comments about the way both the Somali and the Roma residents in Slough were portrayed in the programme. Most of the Somali groups in Slough are legal migrants with Dutch passports, who have come voluntarily direct from Holland. They chose to leave Holland for their own reasons and come to live in Britain instead. This is their right as European citizens to do so. But it is still a fact that they now need housing and other services like any other local residents. As with the other residents of Slough, including the vast majority of Poles, those that work, pay taxes which go back to central government, not to the local council which must provide their services.

While Roma gypsies are indigenous to Europe and are not necessarily from Romania, The Roma featured in this programme were mainly Roma gypsies from Romania. Like the other European citizens, they have chosen to come to live in Slough of their own free will. The pressure put upon the local councils’ resources from some of this community is proportionally far greater than their numbers suggest.

There are also a very large number of residents who have complained to both the council and the police about anti-social behaviour from some of this group. The allegation that some of the Roma have been defecating in public was raised by no less than 50-70 local residents in a meeting which we attended but were not allowed to film. As a result we felt it was appropriate and representative to have 2 locals mentioning a problem felt by so many. While both the council and the police are trying to address these issues, it is indicative of the problem that not one member of the Roma community could be persuaded to attend a wider community meeting. Richard Bilton’s attempt to talk to some of the Roma on the street needed to be seen and their polite refusal on the grounds that people had already judged them was, we felt, very powerful.

Some viewers have taken issue with Slough’s efficiency and suggested that their problems may be more one of inefficiency than dispute over population statistics and under funding. It could be argued that councils can always “do better” and there will always be debate around how funding is distributed particularly as resources become scarce. We have to deal with facts, and critics should note that this year’s independent Audit Commission report on Slough describes it as “performing well – consistently above minimum requirements” and notes that while resources are constrained, the council have secured significant savings without reducing service delivery.

It is likely that the issues raised by this programme will continue to provoke debate for some time to come. This we hope will be a positive thing as it raises legitimate questions about the long term impact of population movement across Europe and how our country is run. We hope it will not be used to further ignorance or prejudice.”

Nevertheless, I would like to take this opportunity to assure you that your comments, concerns and misgivings have been recorded for the attention of senior management and the relevant programme makers.

Thank you once again for taking the time to contact us.

Regards

Colin Thomson

BBC Information

The three soldiers’ deaths, by contrast, warranted two days of front page stories (among them the Evening Standard, Guardian, Telegraph, Observer, Sunday Telegraph) and huge spreads inside about the men who died, the loss felt by their families, and agonised speculation about how further deaths could be avoided.

Comparison with the scale of civilian deaths warranted one line in articles in the Independent, the Scotsman, the Guardian, and right at the end of stories in the Herald and the Daily Record.

A day after the incident, Afghan elders said that airstrikes had killed 12 civilians in Helmand. This incident went unreported in the British press.

Even the Afghan government says some 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the conflict in 2006 alone. In June, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, a coalition of more than 90 aid agencies, said at least 230 Afghan civilians had been killed by western troops this year. The rate has been increasing. Aid agencies say that in 2006 the number of civilians killed by both sides was 700-1,000, the highest figure since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.

There is a word for the enormous disparity between the media’s concern for “our” troops and Afghan civilians. It’s called racism.

P.S. The Financial Times covered the friendly fire story as a 60-word brief on page 6 (Aug 25).

West Midlands’ finest set out to investigate Muslim “preachers of hate” after Birmingham Labour MP Roger Godsiff complained that Muslims shown in the documentary were “racist”. The BNP’s Nick Griffin demanded the mosques shown on the programme be shut down as a precaution against the “psychological virus” of Islam.

But the boys in blue feel Channel 4 has cheated them. They have complained to the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, after the Crown Prosecution Service examined the documentary and found that: “The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying.” To reach their conclusion, the CPS looked at 56 hours of footage on which the hour-long programme was based.

The managing director of Hard Cash [surely "Facts"? ed.] productions, which made Undercover Mosque, says it was “one of the programmes I’m most proud of“. Which aspect of the programme, and the reaction to it, was most worthy of pride, one wonders?

Was it the BNP’s gleeful response? Or was it that the judge at the trial of the July 21 bomb plotters told the jury that they should “ignore it completely” because “It’s a very good example of why you should close your mind completely to the media and concentrate on what is said in this courtroom”?

Was it that the programme invited Muslim organisations to respond just two weeks before it was broadcast? Or perhaps that it visited just four out of the UK’s 1,200 mosques, using just two DVDs to smear London’s largest Islamic centre?

Maybe he is proud of sexing up the programme with crude techniques, such as a sound track like “a cheap Fox News report“, as the Press Gazette put it? Is he proud of showing no audience reaction to what preachers had said, implying that Muslims are passive, unthinking dupes?

Is he proud of making dramatic cuts to footage of women in hijabs and burkhas whenever ignorant mullahs spouted off about male supremacy, as if the two were in some way related?

The programme was a textbook example of Islamophobic reporting, repeating the message that, however “moderate” Muslims claim to be, it is the fundamentalists who are really pulling the strings.

Undercover Mosque is part of an established genre, including John Ware’s Panorama programmes and Richard Watson’s reports for Newsnight and File on 4 – both singled out for fulsome praise last week by Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news (Talking Politics, BBC Radio 4, August 4, 2007. Listen to it here).

That the police were forced to complain to Ofcom is a staggering, stunning victory for the Muslim campaigners and their friends who have pursued their critique of “Undercover Mosque”. But it is also a call to action.

It is pointless arguing with the Nick Cohens, the Melanie Phillips’s and the army of media commentators who have never missed an opportunity to attack Muslim’s “culture of victimhood” and dismiss the very notion of Islamophobia. But the scandal of “Undercover Mosque” will have made many journalists look again at some of their methods and assumptions.

This is an opportunity to go on the offensive against those in the media who have made Islamophobia the last respectable form of racism against Asian and black people.

Dave Crouch
Chair, MWAW

Let’s look back at some recent history. In 1988 the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, decided to recognise the state of Israel, in other words, he decided to choose the “two state solution”. The Americans accepted this idea, the ambassador in Tunis opened talks and met Arafat. There were still, of course, lots of arguments among the Palestinians.

Arafat made a big error by appearing to support Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991. But as a politician he knew that his constituency was in favour of Saddam.

In September 1993 Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin met with Clinton on the White House lawn, shook hands and signed up to a system, the “Oslo accords”. On paper it looked quite good, and many Palestinians hoped it would offer a way out. But two basic things were wrong with this.

Firstly, the Israelis kept on building settlements on the occupied territories. 1993 passed, then 94, 95, 96 and still they kept building in a way that divided up the remaining territory, it changed the entire geography and was very intrusive.

Secondly, Arafat realised that he had forgotten about the other Palestinians, those living outside the borders of Israel: some 400,000 in Lebanon, 1 million in Jordan, 300,000 in Syria. These were people who had lost their lands inside pre-1967 Israel. At the Camp David summit in 2000, Clinton and Ehud Barack tried to humble Arafat into making a “final status” agreement, but Arafat decided that even if he signed it would be rejected by his constituency.

The talks broke down. The result was another Palestinian uprising, or the “Al-Aqsa” Intifada.

The West tried to institute elections in the occupied territories. But the “wrong” people got elected – the Palestinians were fed up with Fatah (Yasser Arafat’s political party, the dominant organisation in the PLO). In that part of the world you vote for whoever is going to defend you, and Hamas – like Hezbollah in Lebanon – were doing just that. Since Arafat’s death in 2004, Fatah has been led by Mahmoud Abbas, whom I describe as a Petainist figure, like Marshall Petain (whom the Germans allowed to rule an authoritarian regime in the Vichy region of France during World War II).

I was in Beirut recently. I couldn’t understand why the BBC kept going on about “factional fighting”. Any decent reporter or sub knows that the US has been sending finance and arms to Fata for the past year – you can read all about it in Ha’aretz. But this fact was never part of the mainstream reporting. Yet this was why the fighting was taking place – to get rid of Hamas. [For example, see here, here and here]

None of this was reported properly. One or two BBC reporters try their best, such as Jeremy Bowen [and Alan Johnston?]. But we’re getting the wrong information. The Israeli/western case is being put, but not the Palestinian case.

Q. Are Fatah really corrupt? They are constantly accused of it, but is it true?

A. I don’t think that’s the main reason people voted for Hamas, though that was an element of it. Arafat was an ageing leader of a liberation organisation, he was never in charge of a state. So he had debts to repay, emotionally and politically.

The main reason people voted for Hamas was that they were fed up with the system. Fatah was playing games with the Israelis, arresting people and so on. It’s like Hezbollah – a well-run, efficient set-up, none of the thuggery you might expect in the circumstances. The people on the ground adore it because it is looking after them.

Q. Did you yourself ever experience censorship?

A. Just once. An editor called me up and said would I alter a report I had made to include an Israeli denial of an attack on Palestinians. I refused – the Israelis had been firing into a mosque. I said if they want to deny it they can do it in a separate part of the bulletin. And that is what eventually happened: the Israeli denial ran separately from my report, not inside it, as my line-editor had requested. By the way, he told me he was getting a lot of pressure from the Israelis in London.

Things have changed a lot. The Israelis got a shock in 1982 – they got a very bad press when they invaded Lebanon, they realised that their PR was awful. So during the al-Aqsa Intifada they changed their approach, they put a lot more money and organisation into ringing up editors, reporters and so on.

Moreover, I think the BBC has lost its nerve in recent years, it’s afraid. The government funds the BBC, and of course the government is very close to the Americans and the Israelis.

Q. Why did the Palestinians support Saddam in 1990?

A. That’s a very good question. It was a difficult moment. Many Palestinians had family members working in Kuwait, where they were treated like dirt. Saddam was also seen to be standing up to the west. By the way, if you tried to get that across on the BBC it was very difficult. I was in Baghdad then; the Arab governments were backing the coalition against Saddam, but the people didn’t like it.

Q. Who is pulling Fatah’s strings?

A. There are many Fatahs. Their only respected leader, Marwan Barghouti, is in an Israeli jail. There is a long history of Israelis taking out the leaders, for example the time they blew Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin out of his wheelchair.

Q. Wasn’t Hamas at one point funded by the Israelis?

A. In the early 1980s the Israelis built up Hamas. They saw the PLO and Fatah as the main threat, and so they built up alternative leaderships such as the venal “Village Leagues”. But that all blew up with the Intifada. That’s why Hamas became an independent force.

Q. Is it right for the media to use terms such as “the Gaza takeover” by Hamas?

A. This is one of the things that really outrages me. I was sitting in Beirut listening to the BBC, and they kept saying that Hamas had taken over. But it was the other people who were trying to take over, and they got clobbered.

A lot of this was drowned out by the kidnapping of Alan Johnston. Ordinary Palestinian journalists showed the way in terms of campaigning for his release. But the BBC tried to turn him into a kind of Mother Theresa! He’s very embarrassed by it now.

And it was Hamas who freed him. It’s typical of the arrogance of the west that they won’t allow Hamas any credit.

Q. Why are the media so supine?

There’s an acceptance in the British media that our involvement in the Middle East is “helping people to behave better”. But we are not – we are supporting a country that is behaving like a gangster state. It’s not doing us any good.

I’d like to refer you to an excellent article in the New York Review of Books, entitled “Goodbye to newspapers?”

Let’s we look back now at what was said when they went to war in Afghanistan, what were the war aims? They were very basic. If we look back at the speeches by Bush and the pronouncements of the US military, the aim was to destroy Al Qaeda as a force and capture Bin Laden and Mullah Omar (the leader of the Taliban faction that supported al-Qaeda), dead or alive. That was all. Nothing else was said.

In terms of war aims this was (a) extremely limited and (b) very foolish. If you’re going to announce that this is your main aim, then you wait three weeks, then you go into the country and imagine that the people, you want to capture are going to be waiting for you, and then you’re surprised that these people have actually left the country and found new hiding places – it’s slightly bizarre.

In any event, if we accept that these were the war aims, they failed. Far form destroying al-Qaeda they strengthened it. Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Zawahri – the key people on their list – are still at large. But I think there was another reason. I remember 3 weeks after 9/11 I was debating on TV one of Bush’s most fervent supporters in the American media, Charles Krauthammer. The compere asked me what do you think is the real reason for the war in Afghanistan? I said it as a war of revenge, simple as that, they’ve been hit, there’s no basic war aims, they want to strike back, and it’s just revenge. She then turned to Krauthammer to rebut this but he said I agree, what’s wrong with revenge? The compere was absolutely astonished.

That was the aim for a large chunk of the American military establishment, they had to hit back, and they were backed in this by the entire world. Not a single country opposed it because of the position the USA occupies in the world today. Other countries have been victims of terrorist attacks, before and after 9/11, but no one reacts in the same way. And that in itself is a fact worth understanding. The USA is a very special country because of its strength, it is the only imperial power in the world today, and most governments at the time caved into it, there was no criticism.

Ironically enough there was more criticism in the American media in the first few weeks after 9/11 than in the British media, which became totally servile, just shaken by what had happened. The Los Angeles Times published in the first week a 4-page supplement on US foreign policy in the 20th century, looking at everything the US had done to other parts of the world. But this was not permissible here, the atmosphere was fear, you weren’t allowed to open your mouth. I remember a Cambridge academic in ancient history wrote a piece in the London Review of Books saying what’s the fuss about, all the people I meet in academic circles say they had it coming. She was apolitical, just being honest. All hell broke loose in the liberal media, how dare you even publish it? You can think it but don’t publish it. An atmosphere of fear was created.

And within this atmosphere of fear Afghanistan was invaded and occupied without any big battles being fought. Why? Because the Taliban government basically decided not to fight. Why? Because the Pakistan military told it not to fight. It was very dependent on that army, it was armed by them, in fact the Pakistani general inn charge of the ISI, told them: I have been told by the president of Pakistan and the government don’t fight, withdraw, let them take the country, then we’ll see, don’t lose lives. But my advice to you is to fight back.” He was sacked within 24 hours. I make this point to show the links between these two outfits. Without the support of the Pakistani military the Taliban could not have seized power in the first place. It’s not that they didn’t develop their autonomy – they did. But those three crucial weeks the Americans didn’t attack was to give their Pakistani ally time to withdraw its equipment, air force and officers from inside Afghanistan. They were given Pakistani military bases to use, they couldn’t use these bases to hit Pakistani personnel.

So they took Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance, with the approval of the Pakistani and Iranian governments – the Iranians hated the Taliban. If you look at what these people in Pakistan and Iran are saying now, they say we thought it would be different, we thought that it would be a more democratic dispensation, that the occupying powers would institute power sharing very sharply and transform the country. This last bit is not unimportant. One of the reasons they haven’t been able to get any grip on the country, because they have completely failed to build any social infrastructure. Here it is worth comparing with what the Russians did when they occupied Afghanistan in 1979 for 10 years. Their bad luck was that the Afghan communists were tiny, without a real mass base outside Kabul and consisting of largely of squabbling factions. But what they did do was build an infrastructure. However weak, they built schools, hospitals, they educated women, women teachers and doctors, they did succeed in doing that for a while. Which is why even the Russian troops lasted, that government didn’t fall to the offensive against it. They had some element of support because people could seen what they had done.

Corrupt, iniquitous elite

This occupation has done nothing. It costs less than $5000 to build a cheap home in which an ordinary family can live. Ask anyone in Afghanistan how many have been built, virtually none. Most of the money that has gone into the country has been used by the tiny clique around Karzai to build luxury homes and villas, in the face of the most poverty-stricken people in the world, and all this corruption is being defended by NATO troops, and they are seen now as being defenders of this extremely corrupt, iniquitous elite, a tiny ruling elite that runs the country. Without the backing of foreign troops this little group would collapse.

There is constant confusion of Taliban with Pashtun and Taliban with Afghan. This doesn’t exist only on the level of ignorant journalists. I was told by a senior Pakistani government minister that soon after they took Afghanistan Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, in a meeting with high officials in Pakistan actually said the problem is the Pashtun Taliban, we have to wipe them out. How can we do this? The Pakistani foreign minister said: “Why don’t you ask two members of the Taliban sitting at this table? They are Pashtun. Please try to understand, not every Pashtun is Taliban, it’s very divided. But the way you are operating you are going to antagonise them.”

In February this year there was a senate committee in the US on national security and defence that said the following:

“Afghans have over centuries proven themselves to be fierce fighters, particularly when confronting invaders from outside cultures. They repeatedly defeated the British during the 19th century Afghan wars when Britain was the world’s dominant military power. They routed the Soviets during the 1980s when the Soviet Union was the world’s second most dominant military power. Superior military technology does not always win the day, particularly in an era when suicide bombing and improvised explosive devices have proven themselves to be very effective tools in this kind of war. Afghans are used to killing and being killed. Their society has been in a state of war for most of the last two centuries.”

Now, this is pretty accurate. Seventy per cent of Afghans know how to use weapons. That is part of the culture, they’ve been doing it from a very young age, the men mainly. This means it’s not dificult for them when they join a resistance group to start fighting immediately, they know how to do it.

Secondly, the Taliban now is becoming an umbrella organisation for fighting the occupation. Many people who hate it are fighting underneath its umbrella and that is extremely dangerous for the occupying armies because they are isolated, there is no way they can win the war.

The only way they could have done if they wanted to create a slightly different social infrastructure was to spend billions on completely transforming the country, finding an alternative to poppy production. The sales of heroin have shot right up since the occupation. Ironically the Taliban had put a stop to it in the bulk of the country. Afghanistan is supplying 60-70 per cent of the world’s heroin. And you can’t tell the farmers don’t do it because they have nothing else to do. If you read the surveys conducted by the occupying armies when asked what is the biggest problem you confront, 70 per cent of the population say feeding our families twice a day, and we’re prepared to do anything to do so. This the occupation has been completely incapable of doing. How could they? Many people who initially supported the occupation said the Taliban is a horrible government, anything else is better – including many liberal journalists, not just in Britain but in neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, said that. They are now saying it was a very big mistake, we thought the Americans could do some good in the region. But how can you expect an imperial power and a NATO force that operates in today’s world, a neo-liberal world where they are deregulating and privatising everything in their own countries, to go and build a strong state in Afghanistan and make that state a sort of social-democratic one? It’s just unthinkable! And they are not doing it and it is completely isolating them.

Propaganda and news management

Every single day you read reports: 100 militants dead, 50 dead, 30 – don’t believe it, it is pure propaganda, wartime propaganda that goes back to every war waged by imperial powers, that’s how they report it, they assume everyone they kill is an enemy. Which they may or may not be, but by killing them they are making sure that the bulk of the country now is moving to a stage where they want the occupying forces out.

There’s no doubt about that, because they have failed, they have succeeded in destabilising their ally Pakistan where two provinces are in quite a delicate state. And who knows how this is going to end? One reason we don’t know how this is going to end is precisely because of the way the media have plaid it, Iraq was the bad war Afghanistan was the good war. But it wasn’t a good war ever, and it’s become worse as time goes on. So it has to be seriously analysed, there are very few serious journalists who spend time there and report.

One of the ways in which journalism functions today is as a pillar of the system, not just in times of war. There has been a fundamental shift in journalism in the west, largely in television but also to a certain extent in the print media. Serious coverage of the rest of the world is missing in most newspapers and certainly on the TV. You are given sound bites, there is very little regular reporting from important countries in the world so that when something happens you are surprised, people are deliberately encouraged to have short memories, so you forget, you can’t remember. And now we have this category of embedded journalists, who go in with the army and see what the army wants them to see, and then they report on that, which in itself affects the way they write.

Of course there are exceptions, Robert and Fisk and Patrick Cockburn break these rules. But they are few and far between. When a few journalists on British TV did it during the Balkan wars they were denounced. When John Simpson said he was watching the television station in Belgrade being bombed and he was appalled by it, he was denounced.

News management in all the western countries, but especially in Britain, is reaching the levels of an art form. There is a crisis of this news management thanks to the Iraq war. The fact that you have a majority of the population opposing a war and the majority of politicians in parliament supporting it created a crisis for the system of news management. When the BBC tried to balance it, it wasn’t permitted, even though it was a very strange kind of balancing there was an attempt. But Blair sacked his own placemen at the BBC, Gavin Davies and Greg Dyke, after the bogus Hutton report. As Dyke revealed in his memoirs, the real reason was not Hutton but the constant pressure from 10 Downing Street during the coverage of the demonstrations, the reporting of the war.

University departments teaching journalism have to teach what is the power of journalism. Students have to decide what sort of journalists they want to be, either it’s like selling goods in a shop – that’s one sort of journalism. Or the other sort of journalism is, I’m not saying a biased journalism, but a critical, independent-minded, aware journalism which at least tries to seek the truth.

In Afghanistan this has not existed, with rare exceptions. By and large that country has been written off as a small, poor country. It’s not that small – 29 million people, bigger than many members of the EU, and Scotland. So it’s a country that’s ignored because it’s not covered, and it’s not covered because covering it won’t benefit those who are occupying it. And this is not just a problem with the British media, it’s a European media. The press releases – you can see them in virtually every mainstream European newspaper, the reports are often the same.

I’ll give you another example of how PR dominates journalism. I was travelling two or three weeks ago and could read most of the European papers. There was a story coming out of Saudi Arabia, obviously a PR story, saying we’ve visited a school where those terrorists who supported al-Qaeda are now sitting in a class being re-educated. A total fantasy. Published in the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, Le Monde, El Pais, The Herald tribune. Exactly the same story.

What happens from the Saudi government’s PR agency happens generally because they’ve down-graded serious coverage of the world. Take Somalia – no one knows what’s gong on, it’s just not covered. Afghanistan is not so bad because British troops are being killed, and British politicians go there for a photo-op with the brave boys. But that’s about it.

This is a big, big problem confronting us. We have the problem of Afghanistan and we have the problem of what is happening to journalism. Both have to be fought against because they are both related.

The Guardian’s recent report on armed resistance organisations in Iraq and their plans to form a political front was a fresh and illuminating snapshot of the most dangerous and far-reaching conflict of our times. By eschewing the usual cliches and bundles of distortions about any Muslims bearing arms, the report enriches our understanding of the best organised of the resistance groups active in parts of Baghdad and the areas up to and including Mosul, north of the capital. What they say indicates a major shift in tactics and strategy, but also reveals these groups’ achilles heels.

Politically, one of the most telling statements was from the spokesperson of a faction of the Ansar al-Sunna resistance group:

“Resistance isn’t just about killing Americans without any aims or goals … Our people have come to hate al-Qaida, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists. Suicide bombing is not the best way to fight because it kills innocent civilians. We are against indiscriminate killing – fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy. They [al-Qaida] believe that all Shia are kuffar [unbelievers] – and most of the Sunnis as well … The Americans magnify their role, even though they are responsible for a minority of resistance operations – remember that the Americans brought al-Qaida to Iraq.”

The statement is significant in two respects. One is the fact that al-Qaida is being denounced openly, and the second is that the man making the statement is from Ansar al-Sunna, one the organisations that gained notoriety in its indiscriminate methods of fighting and sectarian ideology. Equally significant is the fact that the other faction of Ansar al-Sunna is being accused of working with al-Qaida.

One of the least sectarian of the seven groups forming the new alliance is the 1920 Revolution Brigades, whose leader, Harith al-Dhari, was assassinated recently by al-Qaida, according to Muthanna al-Thari, spokesperson of the very influential Association of Muslim Scholars. The leader of the AMS, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, is the assassinated leader’s uncle and the most influential of the anti-occupation Sunni cleric. Reversing earlier statements, Sheikh Dhari, has also become very critical of al-Qaida. His and other recent anti al-Qaida statements are fuelled by the enormous loathing that Iraqis of all sects and ethnicities have for al-Qaida and all sectarian attacks. Indeed, popular opinion in the streets of Iraq habitually accuse the occupation of backing al-Qaida to spread sectarian divisions and split the struggle against the occupation.

The seven groups are not only anti al-Qaida but also keen to distance themselves from the Saddamist wing of the Ba’ath party, led by Izz’at al-Douri, Saddam Hussein’s deputy until the 2003 invasion.

Such political credentials should in theory make the task of unity with Muqtada Sadr’s movement less difficult. However, the resistance leaders who talked to the Guardian accuse Sadr’s Mahdi army of sectarian killings while ignoring the fact that most of the sectarian attacks have been aimed at Sadr City, Najaf, Kufa and Karbala. For his part, Sadr has conceded that his movement has been infiltrated by its enemies, including the occupation authorities. Referring to the climate of chaos and occupation presence, Sadrist spokesmen have often referred to “the ease with which sectarian crimes could be committed by anyone wearing black and claiming to be from the Mahdi army.”

Following the second attack on the Samarra Shia shrine, Sadr accused the occupation of being behind the attack – a position echoed by Sunni clergy and secular forces – and stressed unity with Sunnis. He later accused the US of sabotaging his attempts to unite with Sunnis. While it obviously suits the US to divide the opposition to its occupation of the country, Sadr’s own tactics are attacked for being one of the biggest obstacles to greater anti-occupation unity. These tactics include on-off participation in the government and the Sadrists’ presence in parliament (in the sect-based Coalition List that won most of the seats in the January 2006 occupation-controlled elections).

Though some of the criticisms of Iranian policies by the resistance leaders interviewed by the Guardian are based in fact, the seven groups’ hostility to Iran is still trapped within the old Saddamist-style anti-Iranian chauvinism that fuelled his eight-year war against Iran following the 1979 overthrow of the US-backed Shah regime. Racist propaganda against the Iranian people lasted for a quarter of a century and permeated Iraqi society and its educational system. The US-led propaganda campaign against Iran has thus fallen on receptive ears. The US is happy to see Iraqis directing their wrath against the fictitious “presence of hundreds of thousands of Iranians fighting alongside the US forces to evict Sunnis from Baghdad and replace them with Shia” – in the words of one Iraqi victim of the occupation who, with her daughter, was forced to leave Iraq after the murder of her brother.

The seven resistance groups don’t appear to be facing up to the fact that effectively by far the biggest organised armed resistance group in Iraq is Sadr’s Mahdi army, estimated to be well over 100,000 strong – or that, in the absence of strong non-religious anti-occupation organisations, millions of people across Iraq are supporters of Muqtada Sadr’s anti-occupation message. US jets and helicopters are daily bombarding Sadr City in Baghdad and towns south of Baghdad. Thousands of Sadrists are in jail and the US is acutely aware that the Sadrists remain one of the biggest obstacles to controlling Iraq.

Last but not least, when talking about the resistance in Iraq it’s important to remember that most of the thousands of military operations that the Pentagon reports are carried out monthly against the occupation forces go unclaimed by any organisation. This confirms the impression that I and many Iraqis have that most of the armed resistance to the occupation is conducted by localised groups in the villages and cities of Iraq. Armed resistance to the occupation has much deeper and more popular roots than the politicians in Washington and London dare to admit. For admitting it, at least in public, means abandoning their much trumpeted “exit strategy”, otherwise known as having your cake and eating it. Having a pro-US government in Baghdad, withdrawing most of the troops but keeping military bases in Iraq is not what Iraqis mean by ending the military and economic occupation of Iraq. Such an exit strategy will not stop the resistance and the sea of popular support that feeds and protects it.

For even those who are engaged in anti-occupation political and trade union activities in Iraq do not hide their support for the “al-muqawama al-sharifa” (”the honourable resistance” as distinct from terrorism). And it is these deep Iraqi roots which are likely, sooner or later, to produce the united front that rises above the differences based on religion or ethnicity. A slogan gaining momentum in the streets of Iraq reflects this popular mood:”La lil ihtilal; la lil ta’iffia; la lil irhab”: “No to the occupation; no to sectarianism; no to terrorism.”

The clip — an all too rare honest look at the war from a reporter embedded with the Second Infantry Division’s Apache Company in Baghdad — shows tired and overwrought US troops who are into their 14th month of continuous battle, as they respond to a variety of battle situations.

In one case, after watching six of their comrades burn to death trapped inside a Bradley Armored Vehicle that a roadside bomb has flipped over and ignited, the soldiers break into a house, looking for weapons, only to find themselves terrorising an old woman with a zimmer frame, who dissolves into hysterical tears.

In another scene, the men open fire on a car cruising the neighborhood, which they fear might be a terrorist looking for a target. After killing the driver, they learn from a local woman that it was just a taxi driver she had called, who was trying to locate her address.

An angry GI says: “I challenge anybody in Congress to do my rotation… Because we have people up there in Congress with the brain of a two-year-old who don’t know what they’re doing I challenge the president to ride along with me for 15 months. I’ll do another 15 months if he comes out her and rides along with meThey won’t even have to pay me!”

If the above link doesn’t take you direct to the sclip, try clicking here and scroll down to “Exclusive look at soldiers on the front line”.

The row has raised doubts over the rampant commercialisation of the BBC. But it is also also deflecting attention from the fact that far more important issues threaten to undermine audience trust in the Corporation.

The BBC has been shown in academic research to have followed the government’s line on the invasion of Iraq; since the Hutton report there has been a significant shift to the right in the BBC, including its coverage of many aspects the “war on terror” and opposition to it.

Every staff member at the BBC has received the following email from the BBC’s Director General, Mark Thompson (see below), asking them to help identify “incidents of serious intentional or unintentional deception of the audience” which may “threaten the precious relationship of trust between the BBC and our audiences”.

Given the enormous pressure on BBC staff from senior management and the government to keep quiet about pro-war bias at the Corporation, Media Workers Against the War invites you (whether or not you work at the BBC) to post your criticisms of the BBC’s war coverage in the comment section below – we shall formally forward them to Mark Thompson.
Thompson’s email is as follows:

——– Forwarded Message ——–
From: Mark Thompson
Subject: Recent editorial incidents
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:02:23 +0100

This email is going to everyone
————————————————–

Dear colleagues,

This is an email which is particularly addressed to everyone who works in programme and content parts of the BBC, but I thought it was important that everyone who works in the organisation should see it.

As you will know, there have been a number of incidents – recent problems related to phone use including the controversy over Blue Peter and, in the last few days, the incorrect and misleading edit of Her Majesty the Queen in the BBC One seasonal launch tape – which defy our values and threaten the precious relationship of trust between the BBC and our audiences. We cannot take that trust for granted.

The vast majority of you ensure our TV, radio and interactive content is accurate, fair and complies with our own clear editorial guidelines and Ofcom’s code. We cannot allow even a small number of lapses, whether intentional or as a result of sloppiness, to undermine our reputation and the confidence of the public.

Even before the most recent issue involving the Queen, I had asked the Directors of Vision, Journalism and Audio & Music to work with their senior editorial and creative teams to identify any further issues or incidents of serious intentional or unintentional deception of the audience.

I am writing to you today to ask you to help and support this process in any way you can. If you know of any further incident, please let us know.

Next Wednesday I will be delivering a full report to the BBC Trust. After that, I will write to you again to set out the action that I and the Executive Board intend to take to minimise the risk of anything like these totally unacceptable incidents ever happening again. The vital first step is to ensure that we know about every problem that’s out there.

Nothing matters more for us than honesty, accuracy and fair dealing with the audience. We must now put our house in order. We need your help to enable us to do that as swiftly and as comprehensively as possible. I know I can count on your support.

Mark Thompson

Director-General

Dear Sir,

In the context of the widely-reported ambitions of US neo-conservatives to mount a military attack on Iran, we, Iranian/British academics, are disappointed to note that your article (”Al-Qaeda linked to operations from Iran“, by Stephen Fidler, dated 8th July 2007) adds the Financial Times to the list of “reputable” newspapers prepared to engage in amplifying the drum beats of a new and bloody war in the Middle East.

Would you, for example, have led with the headline: “Al-Qaeda linked to operations from Pakistan”? This would have been far closer to the truth, but no one in the White House is seeking war with Pakistan.

Your report is hardly “news”. The Guardian splashed precisely the same story – also citing anonymous officials – on May 22, alleging that “Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaeda elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq”.

Indeed, the FT is but the last of the British “quality” newspapers, with the exception of the Independent, to run recent front-page stories claiming that Iran is a major factor in the Iraqi insurgency.

However, any Middle-East expert would have told you that the likelihood that the Shia Iranian regime is backing Sunni extremists in Al-Qaeda is slim in the extreme. Of course Iran has its clients in Iraq, as everyone knows, they are members of the Iraqi government. Why should Iran back the mortal enemies of SCIRI and the Da’wa?

Only this weekend, the Associated Press reported that the leader of an al-Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq threatened to wage war against Iran unless it stops supporting Shiites in Iraq. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the group Islamic State in Iraq, said on a website commonly used by insurgent groups that his Sunni fighters have been preparing for four years to wage a battle against Shiite-dominated Iran, the agency reported.

In the run-up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq, Pentagon and MoD officials manipulated a credulous media to plant “news” stories bolstering the case for war. We are witnessing in the same process in the British press once more, this time pushing for military action against Iran.

Briefings with unnamed officials are a classic means by which governments and the military place their propaganda in the media. It is the ABC of journalism to treat such sources with scepticism.

When the New York Times on February 10 splashed with “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made By Iran”, sourced from those same unnamed officials again, the newspaper was widely condemned for resurrecting the “Judith Miller school” of journalism. It is a sad day indeed if the Financial Times has also failed to learn the lessons of the Iraq WMD fiasco and is adding its voice and reputation, wittingly or unwittingly, to those of the Pentagon hawks.

Signatures:

Dr. Mehri Honarbin-Holliday, Canterbury Christ Church University

Dr. Elaheh Rostami-Povey, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Dr. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, London Middle East Institute

Professor Haleh Afshar, OBE, University of York

Professor Abbas Edalat, Imperial College, University of London

Of course not. Yet this is just what the UK media – backed by police and politicians — appears to be doing in response to the terror scares in London and Glasgow.

The London Evening Standard led the way: “Bid to Kill 1,700 in West End” (Friday’s headline, June 29). The Mirror on Saturday followed this up: “The Baghdad-style bomb could have killed and injured hundreds, laying waste to people and property in a 300-yard radius.” The Sun: “London’s worst ever bomb carnage was foiled yesterday…”

Things hardly cooled over the weekend. In breathless tones, Monday’s Independent talked of the bombs “exploding compressed gas in the cylinders at 20,000 feet per second” and “spewing out nails for a hundred feet“, had they exploded. The Times had: ” [The terrorists] intended to cause mass casualties.”

But buried away were other reports painting a very different picture.

The Independent on Sunday: “The London car bombers could not have destroyed the Tiger Tiger club and killed people in it, experts said last night. … It emerged that the Haymarket gas and nail bomb was almost certainly not big enough to have brought down the building, as previously reported. It would have killed and maimed within 100 meters.

“Although deadly – the ambulance crew and any revellers on the pavement would have been killed – it would not have caused serious damage to the club or brought down the building.”

A report headlined “Gas canister bomb ‘an amateur job’” published on the Guardian’s website, but not in the newspaper, quoted an explosives expert: “Putting [nails] on the floor is an incompetent way of building a bomb. They would go straight into the ground. … The main impact of the device would be in the economic disruption caused by closing off the normally bustling shops, restaurants and businesses of central London.”

Friday’s Newsnight was even more guarded about the threat posed by these bombs, pointing out how difficult it was to make a car bomb like this actually work. The programme emphasised that the police said that the bombs were only “potentially viable”, as opposed to actually “viable”.

Newsnight: “There was no explosive in this car”

“In this case it is an important distinction,” Newsnight’s diplomatic editor Mark Urban explained. “My understanding is there was no explosive in this car. To have a fireball effect with propane gas cylinders you really need to break them immediately at very high speed with a military or commercial type high explosive. That was not there.

“It seems that the technique that was going to be used was simply to turn on the tap, let the car fill with gas and then try and ignite it using a flammable material that was also found in the car. So one has to question whether some of this analysis of Iraq-type bombs is really appropriate at all because in Iraq insurgents have access to hundreds of shells, large quantities of military grade high explosive, with which of course these similar ingredients, gas bottles, nails, can be turned into extremely lethal devices. In this case I don’t believe that was right.

“Instead I think there was an intention to hurt people. Clearly that’s obvious. … But equally perhaps there was a realisation that if it didn’t work, politicians, the media, would go through the motions as they usually do after an incident like this and amplify any effect that just placing those devices there might have had.”

Adding to this analysis, ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson told Keith Olbermann on MSNBC cable television: “This is not one of the truck bombs or car bombs we see going off in Iraq – what’s really striking about this is that you had two non-bombs in London when we had at least five bombs in Baghdad in which U.S. soldiers were killed in one of those, so I think it’s just out of proportion – this was an incendiary, this was not a high explosive.”

Johnson said that had the gas been ignited properly, there would have been a loud boom that would have split the tank but that no projectiles would have even escaped the car: “If someone was within 20, 30 feet of it they would have ear damage but not much more.”

We have been here before

The media should strive to balance the need to present accurate information to warn the public of a genuine risk, while dampening the terrorists’ goal of producing widespread panic. In this instance, the UK media have failed yet again to provide a pubic service, instead serving the needs of those who want to manipulate public opinion in favour of more wars, more clampdowns and more limits on civil liberties. By doing so, they have also played into the hands of the jihadist murderers.

We have been here before. In the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings, columnist Simon Jenkins issued a stinging attack on the panic-mongering of the police and press: “Apart from the gratuitous damage to public confidence and business, why stoke the very fears, hatreds and antagonisms which the bombers want stoked?”

He continued: “The truth is that those who want to subvert freedom can always rely on “useful idiots,” a phrase Lenin is said to have used of liberal apologists for extremists (but never did). Modern terrorism neatly inverts this attribution. It relies on “useful idiots” of the right to exploit any terrorist incident to foment xenophobia, suspend civil liberties and seek revenge on any ethnic group vaguely linked to the incident. …

“The useful idiots demand new powers, new restrictions and new measures against the Muslim community. Above all they declare ‘war on terror,’ turn murdered into warriors and incite Islam to proclaim jihad in response.”

And finally, if we really want to get events into perspective: “‘Up to 80 civilians dead’ after US air strikes in Afghanistan“

P.S. The new government appears to be showing admirable constraint in refusing to blame Muslims for the bomb attempts and avoiding “war on terror” rhetoric. But the media are already ratcheting up the pressure for another bout of Muslim-baiting. Is Hassan Butt another useful idiot?
By Dave C

What are the war lies that you will remember Blair for? Here are a few of them:

Please add you own by posting a comment below

1. 1998: US bombs Sudan

On Aug 20, 1998, the US bombed the al-Shifa chemicals plant in Sudan, claiming it was a “terrorist base”. The plant turned out to provide 50 percent of Sudan’s medicines; its destruction left the country with no supplies of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria.

Tony Blair and the then defence minister, George Robertson, rallied to the cause, claiming that America was justified and defending the apparently unassailable evidence. They were, however, alone in supporting the action and rejecting accusations that Clinton had ordered the attacks as a distraction from the unfolding Monica Lewinsky saga.

Noam Chomsky was one of many who pointed out: “One can scarcely try to estimate the colossal toll of the Sudan bombing, even apart from the probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese victims.”

2. 1998: US/UK bomb Iraq

In December 1998 the US and Britain bombed Iraq for four days as part of a new strategy of “regime change”. The attacks took place during Clinton’s impeachment hearings. Britain was the only ally to join the US, setting it at odds with almost all its European partners – even Kuwait refused to support the attacks.

Blair said war was necessary because Hussein never intended to abide by his pledge to give unconditional access to UN inspectors trying to determine if Iraq had dismantled its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.

But UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said the inspectors were sent in to carry out sensitive inspections that “had nothing to do with disarmament but had everything to do with provoking the Iraqis. This was designed to generate a conflict that would justify a bombing.” They were then withdrawn on instructions from Washington.

3. 1999: NATO bombs Serbia

NATO, led by the US and Britain, launched military action knowing that it would provoke a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign by Milosevic. This indeed occurred in stark fashion, with immense consequences, which then enabled NATO leaders to claim they were acting to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe that they had provoked.

With bombing under way, NATO military figures publicly refuted political leaders’ whole justification for the war by saying that the military strategy could not prevent the humanitarian disaster.

Human Rights Watch said: “We are concerned that NATO bombed the civilian infrastructure not because it was making a significant contribution to the Yugoslav military effort but because its destruction would squeeze Serb civilians to put pressure on Milosevic to withdraw from Serbia”

The war was undertaken without UN authorisation and complete with the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the use of cluster bombs. “We will carry on pounding day after day after day, until our objectives are secured”, Tony Blair said two weeks into the bombing in April 1999, revealing the brutal reality of NATO’s supposedly “humanitarian war” over Kosovo.

4. 2001: US/UK invade Afghanistan

Tony Blair, Oct 2, 2001: “To the Afghan people we make this commitment. The conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the outside world has so many times before.”

Cherie Blair, Nov 19 2001: “The women in Afghanistan are as entitled as the women in any country are to have the same hopes and aspirations for ourselves and for our daughters. … We need to help them free that spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see.”

The reality today: “Without a huge injection of foreign aid – and there is no evidence that anyone wants to provide it – it may not be long before British commanders start saying: ‘Let’s get out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.’” Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian, June 21 2007

The reality today: “In a filthy corner of a clinic in Lashkar Gah, a heavily pregnant 12-year-old lies wailing at a curt, dismissive doctor. Down the road some of the thousands of widows in the area beg in the mud. In the local hospital, women lie recovering from the horrific burns of failed suicide attempts. The brave new world promised by Tony Blair, President George Bush and Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, appears not to have reached the women of Helmand.

“When asked whether life was better now than under the Taliban, Fowzea Olomi, 40, the director of the women’s centre [in Helmand], laughs: ‘The Taliban have gone?’ Life now, she says, is worse.” Terri Judd in the Independent, June 13 2007

5. 2003: US/UK invade Iraq

Over to you…

As if any proof were needed, Downing Street actually banned broadcasters from screening the questions Blair answered at the end of the speech after ITV News asked him whether he regretted the way intelligence was used in the run-up to Iraq.

Amid the blizzard of comment on the speech, however, only one newspaper understood that this was all about Iraq – the paper singled out by Blair in his assault. The Independent’s front-page headline was spot on: “Would you be saying this, Mr Blair, if we supported your war in Iraq?”

In contrast, in the words of Simon Jenkins in the Sunday Times, “a stage army of sycophantic columnists leapt forward to hug Blair and say how right he was”. Most sickening among these was the Guardian, whose leader drooled over the speech and talked of the prime minister’s “courage” to say what he said. Courage?! Blair might have displayed some courage if he had stood up to Murdoch and Rothermere, but not by whingeing about the Independent.

On Iraq, Blair speaks in code aimed at senior editors of the “liberal” media. This is much more effective than stating outright his real opinions, namely that those who question the war are anti-American, appeasers of terrorism and soft on Saddam.

He is not always so coded. In January he said the public are “constantly bombarded by the propaganda of the enemy, often quite sympathetically treated” by the media. A year earlier Blair denounced the BBC’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina as “full of hatred of America” and “gloating” at the country’s plight.

As the American journalist Jeff Cohen notes in his recent book on his time as a presenter at Fox news, Fox’s pretence of impartiality appeals to its reactionary viewers because, “like voters who want to support a candidate who appeals to their biases (say, against blacks or gays), many are happier supporting a candidate who communicates in code, rather than one who is overtly prejudiced.” Blair’s code has the same effect on editors.

The fact that he could devote an entire speech to the media without mentioning Iraq is already a massive clue as to how this code works. So Blair talked about the “radically altered” media environment being to blame for “sensationalism” – read, don’t you dare call me a liar, warmonger or criminal.

He said “the real reason for cynicism” is “how politics are reported” – read, stop talking about why millions hate me because of Iraq.

He said “attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment” – read, stop questioning why we went to war and what we are really doing in Iraq and Afghanistan (for a classic example from the BBC, click here).

He said “opinion and fact should be clearly divisible” and singled out the Independent as a “metaphor” for opinionated journalism – read, cut out anti-war opinion from the media. This has long been a bee in Blair’s bonnet. According to Greg Dyke’s memoirs, on March 19, 2003 – on the eve of the invasion – Blair wrote a letter to the BBC complaining about its coverage of Iraq and alleging “a real breakdown of the separation of news and comment”.

Nothing Blair said in his speech was remotely new – another point missed in the coverage. He merely repeated the line long pushed by a bevy of Blairite commentators led by John Lloyd of the Financial Times. They maintain that “contempt” shown for politicians by the media is undermining democracy. Indeed, the tone, targets and tactics of Blair’s speech seemed to have been lifted from some of John Lloyd’s writings on the subject.

But this is little more than pseudo-sophisticated, faux-academic cover for the Blairite assault on the media’s coverage of the “war on terror”, which started in earnest with the Hutton Report and is taking the mainstream media further and further to the right. Where this is leading is demonstrated by Lloyd’s piece in the Guardian (June 20). If you can fight your way past the mumbo-jumbo, Lloyd’s argument boils down to an allegation that the BBC is too liberal and a call to give Daily Mail readers a louder voice.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of Blair’s speech has been overlooked – his reference to the Watergate scandal, which was exposed by the dogged investigative reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Blair said: “Watergate was a great piece of journalism but there is a PhD thesis all on its own to examine the consequences for journalism of standing one conspiracy up.”

This is a revealing comment. The right have long insisted that it was the media that lost the Vietnam war (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary). Watergate severely weakened the White House at a crucial period in Vietnam, revealing to millions of Americans that Nixon’s war was not worth the price in terms of domestic abuse of power.

Blair clearly sees himself wronged by the media. But now we know just how deep is the grudge he bears against it: he sides with Nixon and Kissinger against Woodward, Bernstein and the anti-Vietnam war movement.

Nixon resigned in disgrace. Blair has survived, but his disgrace is none the less for it.

By Dave Crouch

Somalia consists of five territories where people of the same language and religion live. During the colonial period it was partitioned into territories claimed by the British, French, Italians, Kenyans and Ethiopians.

In 1960 the former British and Italian territories were united to form the independent Somali Republic. The French territory of Djibouti won independence in 1977. Other territories remain under Ethiopian and Kenyan control.

In 1969, General Mohammed Siad Barre led a coup and created a military government. For 21 years Somalia was under a dictatorship. In 1991 President Barre was overthrown. The Hawiye clan led the uprising. But the opposing clans failed to agree and there was a power struggle for 16 years.

In 1993 the United Nations intervened. Actually it was US interventions with UN helmets on. They said they would confiscate the guns. But they clashed with the factional leader Aidid. It ended with 18 US servicemen being killed in a battle for Mogadishu, including the famous “Black Hawk down incident”. The US troops pulled out.

After that neither the US nor the UN cared about Somalia. The warlords ruled, and there was chaos. Some Somalis called for EU intervention, but no one was interested. Women were raped and children died. The situation grew worse.

Religion – Islam – began to unite people and overcome the factional infighting between the clans. People said: If the clan system is causing chaos, we should unite around our religion. The “Islamic Courts” that took power in 2006 stood for Islam – bringing people together and overcoming tribal loyalties – and for bringing killers to justice.

For a brief period there was relative peace. The warlords fled to Ethiopia. The Islamic Courts ensured that no one could carry a gun, no one could rape a woman. So the Islamic Courts spread.

US supported the invasion

That’s when the warlords turned to the CIA and accused the Islamic Courts of harbouring Islamic terrorists, including the people who planted bombs in the US embassy in Kenya in 1998, in which hundreds were killed.

The US backed the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in January 2007. Ethiopian forces killed thousands, raping women. US helicopters and C130 gunships bombarded the south.

They did not capture or kill anyone involved in the Kenyan embassy bombings. And in any case, why launch a hunt for these people now, 9 years after the bombings? For 16 years they weren’t bothered about catching the bombers. The Ethiopian ambassador to London himself says the invasion was about clan interests, not terrorists.

In March and April there were clashes between the occupying Ethiopians and the Hawiye. Ethiopian tanks shelled Mogadishu, a city of 2.5 million people. The UN says 1,380 people did in two days. The bodies were left to rot in the street. It was genocide. The Somali resistance say the Ethiopians have used chemical weapons.

The Red Cross said it was the worst situation in Somalia for 16 years. 400,000 have fled Mogadishu.

The occupying government and the warlords have closed Al-Jazeera and three radio stations. Women have no rights, they can’t take part in society. The government banned a women’s conference on June 13 called by the Italians, saying that Somalia is a Muslim country so women can’t take part!

Addis Ababa is now a new Guantanamo: anyone they aren’t happy with is taken there, imprisoned and tortured. People trying to flee to Kenya have been forced back.

We appeal to the UK government, to the media, to see what is happening, to broadcast what is happening. We need human and democratic rights. But no one is paying attention.

During the discussion part of the meeting, the following points were raised:

The US currently relies on Africa for 10% of its oil imports; by 2020 Africa will supply 25% of US oil.

The “war on terror” is active in Africa, and Somalia is the main front. Somalia reveals so clearly that the “war on terror” has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. The are no “terrorists” in Somalia, although the US-backed intervention could well attract Al-Qaeda, just as in Iraq. The US and its allies label any resistance “terrorist”.

During the Cold War the US and Russia fought proxy wars in Africa. The same thing is going to happen with the US and China as they battle for resources. Somalia is strategic. It is also the weakest country in Africa, and therefore the easiest to control.

The Ethiopian dictator Mengistu now lives on a luxury mansion in Zimbabwe. Yet we don’t hear about US demands for him to be extradited!

Every conflict in Africa has something to do with imperialist intervention.

A chance to see some of John Pilger’s classic documentaries has been provided with the release of a set of 12 dvds – John Pilger: In the Name of Justice. Although his more recent programmes are more immediate, these DVDs each uncover ugly realities that our rulers would prefer to have hidden.

One in particular – The Truth Game – has a terrible relevance to today. Made in 1983, it uncovers the US, UK and the then USSR’s lies surrounding the build up of nuclear weapons.

It follows the classic Pilger format: present a lie – that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima was a military necessity, that the Russians have “massive nuclear capacity”, and vice versa, that cruise missiles are “an insurance policy for the west” – and then demolish it. Gripping interviews, devastating facts, followed by shamefaced justifications from those supposedly in control, are all part of the powerful mix.

Two other classics in the set are about Vietnam – the country which Pilger covered as a war reporter for around 10 years. In one, made in 1978, Pilger revisits the country three years after the US was finally booted out to see how the Vietnamese were recovering from the devastation their country had suffered.

In Vietnam: the last battle, made on the 20th anniversary of the US defeat, Pilger presents a brief, bitter history of the war and the dreadful weapons the Americans deployed, and attacks relentlessly the claim, then being broadcast by the US administration, that the war had been a “noble cause”.

Three documentaries uncover the scandals, lies and corruption in Pilger’s homeland, Australia, with one focussing on the history of successive governments “sending people off to fight other people’s wars”, and another delving into its immigration policies.

Into the mainstream

John Pilger’s massive body of work, most of it for TV, shows that, despite their built-in bias towards the establishment, the mainstream media can sometimes be forced to broadcast programmes that challenge ruling class propaganda. Opportunities to air alternative viewpoints have to be fought for, however.

This is an important point. The alternative media, such as Indymedia and ZNet, are important operations. But the mainstream media is still the place where most people get their news and information, and must therefore remain the arena within which media workers who want to follow in Pilger’s footsteps fight for space.

Of course, it’s important to see how Pilger and (until his tragic death in July 2004) Paul Foot both won their credentials as great journalists during a brief period when independent channels made efforts to make an impact and distinguish themselves from the BBC with hard-hitting programs.

As Pilger has recalled: “Almost all of the more than 50 films I have made (mainly for the ITV and some for Channel 4) have had to navigate a system that rarely declares its intention to create and shape public opinion. The BBC exemplifies this, with its specious neutrality, mythically balancing contending extremes while turning out a flow of official assumptions and deceptions as ‘news’. In its youth, British commercial television was different.”

Since then, media workers have suffered massive attacks on their unions which have not only damaged their capacity to maintain conditions, but also their capacity to challenge the editors and broadcasters over what and how to present the news, both in casts and documentaries.

The intervening period has also seen the rise of neo-liberal policies which have themselves brought greater restrictions on the ability of journalists to buck the system – the “embedding” of war reporters being one clear example.

That said, however, even BBC2 was prepared to show one of the most hard-hitting documentaries about the build up to the war on terror – Adam Curtis’s three-part The power of nightmares – and that was after Lord Hutton had panicked the corporation’s executives. Nor have such programs been unique.

Of course, it is more difficult for journalists to “navigate” the system today, and particularly in the post-Hutton BBC. And requirements for “balance”, cast-iron facts, no hint of bias, and certainly no chance that people will sue, are greater than ever. But that does not mean the doors are completely barred to hard-hitting programs.

As Tariq Ali said at a recent Media Workers Against the War public meeting, media workers who want to present programs that uncover the truths our rulers want to hide will have to fight for space in the media. That space can be attained, but only through a campaign that brings together media workers sickened by the increasing contempt that their employers have for the truth.

Apart from those already named, films featured in this DVD set are: The Mexicans, Street of Joy, Pyramid Lake is dying. A faraway country, Do you remember Vietnam?, Japan behind the mask, Apartheid did not die, and the three one from Australia – Heroes unsung, Secrets and other people’s wars.

By Alan Gibson

The article claimed to present evidence that Iran was uniting with al-Qaeda to attack US and UK forces in Iraq. But the 3-page article making this claim, all 1,200 words of it, cited just one single, unnamed source throughout (”a senior US official in Baghdad”), and there was not a single quote from any expert who would question the allegations – although there are many who would.

How could crude and dangerous PR like this take up the first three pages of the Guardian? When the New York Times ran a similarly credulous front page in February headlined ‘Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, US Says’, the newspaper was widely accused of having learned nothing from the Iraq WMD debacle. How could the Guardian fall into the same trap?

David Edwards’ email to the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, was forwarded to us. It reads:

“Dear Alan

“I’ve been reading the Guardian for many years now. I have to say that Simon Tisdall’s front cover piece today is the single worst piece of journalism I can recall reading in your paper. I base the judgment on the lack of even the tiniest scrap of evidence in support of the anonymous official claims, the unwillingness to subject these claims to any journalistic scrutiny, the potentially lethal nature of the claims for millions of people in the region, and the extremely high-profile coverage afforded what is actually crude propaganda masquerading as a news report.

“We’ve disagreed with you on many occasions, but I’m just aghast that you could put this on the front page. I’m assuming you’re not away and that you did actually see it.

“Yours in amazement and dismay…”

The Guardian’s senior editors appear to have realised early on that something might be amiss. The paper’s website carried a defensive report on the discussion at the morning news conference on Tuesday. An indication of its weakness, however, is that it cites the Telegraph in its support, apparently unaware that the Telegraph’s reporting of Iran is no model of good journalism.

Media Workers Against the War also wrote to the Guardian on Tuesday, pointing out that the paper was vulnerable to the accusation of having learned nothing from the Iraq WMD debacle. The Guardian’s associate editor Elisabeth Ribbans replied a few hours later. She wrote:

“Thank you for your email to the letters desk, which has been forwarded to me for a personal response. For the record, Simon Tisdall requested the interviews with US officials in Baghdad and not the other way around. The article should be viewed in the light of Simon’s extensive and well-sourced reporting from and about the region, as well as the record of the paper, which certainly cannot be accused of being a mouthpiece for the US administration. Today’s front-page story is just one more part of a jigsaw of the growing power struggle in the region and our editors thought it in the public interest to publish the story.”

Two points can be made in response. First, it is not immediately clear which is worse, publishing PR that is sent to you or actively soliciting it.

Second, MWAW did not accuse the paper of being a “mouthpiece for the US administration”. This suggestion is a straw man. We proposed that the paper had forgotten how the WMD nonsense was used to whip up pro-war sentiment against Iraq. This same accusation was leveled at the entire British media by the Guardian’s own columnist, Peter Wilby, in a recent piece on Iran.

How has it come to this? How could the Guardian stoop so low?

First, the British media have shifted noticeably to the right. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Johann Hari have recently made this point in relation to the BBC (see the article on this website), but it applies more widely. Since the sacking of Piers Morgan from the Mirror and Greg Dyke from the BBC, the media have been bullied and browbeaten by the government, resulting in a climate of timidity and submission at senior levels.

A consequence is that editors tend to forget Harold Evans’ legendary warning to reporters at the Sunday Times: “Always ask yourself when interviewing a politician, why is this bastard lying to me?”

A further consequence is that only the powerful are now considered credible sources. “Balance” is reduced to quoting officials of one government (in this case the US) against officials of another (in this case Iran).

Further, It means that senior editors move in a rarified environment where they have no contact with arguments generated by social forces outside the narrow circle of government. The mass anti-war movement and its leaders are dismissed with a disdainful sneer.

Finally, the Guardian’s senior editors have been inconsistent friends of peace. The paper calls for more troops for Afghanistan, and on Iraq it joins the chorus of hand-wringing in the British media but pointedly refrains from calling for any timetable for troop withdrawal.

Nevertheless, Tuesday’s front page marks a qualitative shift for the paper. People who have read the Guardian in recent years frequently complain that the paper has lost its way, but often find it hard to put their finger on just what is going on. Now we know.

Please read the article in question and write to the Guardian with your opinions. Please also post them as comments to this blog.

And lastly, here is Juan Cole’s essential blog on Tuesday subjecting the front page to whithering scorn:

“I suppose I have to link to this silly article by poor Simon Tisdall in of all places, The Guardian, whom someone is using to push a sinister agenda. Yes, its sources are looney in positing a coming offensive jointly sponsored by Iran, the Mahdi Army and al-Qaeda. Anyone who reads IC [i.e. Juan Cole's blog] regularly will see immediately holes in this story.

“At a time when Sunni Arab guerrillas are said to be opposing “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” for its indiscriminate violence against Iraqis, including Shiites, we are now expected to believe that Shiite Iran is allying with it. And, it claims that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are shelling the Green Zone. The parliament building that was hit today by such shelling is dominated by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and its paramilitary, the Badr Organization. Who trained Badr? The Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And they are trying to hit their own guys . . . why? By the way, the US has 16,000 suspected insurgents in custody. Tisdall should ask how many of them are Iranian. (Hint: close to none. What, do they just run faster than the others?)

“The article even traffics in the ridiculous assertion that Iran is backing hyper-Sunni, Shiite-killing Taliban in Afghanistan. Why not just cut to the quick and openly say that Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei is in reality . . . Satan! It really is discouraging that Tisdall didn’t report instead on what crazy things the US military spokesmen in Iraq told him.

“US military spokesmen have been trying to push implausible articles about Shiite Iran supporting Sunni insurgents for a couple of years now, and with virtually the sole exception of the New York Times, no one in the journalistic community has taken these wild charges seriously. But The Guardian?”

Dave Crouch

The BBC that helped keep this immigrant in Britain has sold out to ‘right wing populism’ and allows extreme, angry voices too much airtime.

There have been two moments in my life in England as an immigrant when I have made serious plans to quit and move to Canada. The first was in 1975 when I had finished my M.Phil at Oxford. Relatives and friends who had moved to Canada from Uganda (where I came from in 1972, the year Asians were expelled) had settled better, were welcomed more warmly than we who had ended up here. Remember we were not refugees but ultra-loyal British subjects. Enoch Powell was the hero then and we had entered a bitter place.

In 1975, a Canadian friend I’d made in Oxford contacted his local MP and together they persuaded my ex-husband and myself to migrate. We didn’t. One reason was that I couldn’t part from the BBC and Call My Bluff and Just a Minute and the trademark sombre, planetary voices delivering the news that sounded truer than any other truth. (That was back then, when I was not a sceptical journalist).

The second time was in 1996 when I had a newspaper job lined up in Toronto and just as we made final moves, I got a column to write in the Independent, a dream I had had for years. Again, when assessing whether it was the right decision, the BBC floated right up, joining the top reasons why Britain still had a hold on my heart.

So I have stayed, unable to wean myself off the BBC, which played into my ears as a child in Africa, like perennial soothing sounds of an ocean washing in imagined worlds. My dad, a news junkie and anglophile, never went out in the evenings before listening to the World Service news. He missed birthdays, funeral prayers, weddings all for his BBC.

I picked up his passion. Even now, in order for the broadcasts to sound as authentic and dependable as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s, I need crackles to disturb the reception. It gives the impression that the powerful are trying to stop us listening.

When Idi Amin came to power, I was at Makerere University, then one of the finest in the world. Radio Uganda was playing My Boy Lollipop all day long interspersed with ominous warnings from military men. The crackling, valiant BBC told us what we needed desperately to know, though I now realise it was never the whole truth. It passed over the fact that Idi Amin was supported by Britain, the US and Israel, chosen to be their placed man in the Cold War playing out in Africa. Still, that trust and devotion would not be shaken.

Defenders of the Blairite onslaught

Of course a love like that sometimes hurts and disappoints. For too many years I have moaned about the lack of black and Asian reporters, editors, managers, controllers, and brand names. That wilful neglect continues to wound. As one of the two political columnists of colour in the national press (Gary Younge being the other) I expect to be seen as equal to my white peers. I am not. My colour and now culture limits what the Beeb believes I can or should do. Ah well. At least I have what is patronisingly called ‘access’.

However, I always, always defended the corporation and licence fee because it projected universal, good, liberal values – decency, justice, fairness, democracy, civil rights, national confidence, a common humanity, freedom, civilised conduct and the belief, if not the practice, of equality.

Thatcherism arrived and with it an onslaught on these principles denounced as ‘leftie’ or ‘politically correct’. The decade of Blairism produced further pressures, this time by the new right disguised as the new left. More alarmingly, the big boys and some girls too who lead the BBC were now sympathetic to these New Labour state controllers. In the aftermath of the Gilligan affair, I was truly shocked by how many journalists and editors privately told me they agreed with the Blairite onslaught and that Dyke was out of order.

Gilligan was proven right but the centre of gravity at the BBC is now to the right of where it was under Dyke. As my colleague Johann Hari wrote recently in the Independent: ‘The BBC’s most famous and high profile presenters today are figures on the right and make increasingly little effort to hide it.’ They chase each other for copies of the Daily Mail; they ceaselessly rail against feminism, equality campaigns, state interventions to promote health and safety and of course immigration. All progressive action these days gets stamped with the words ‘politically correct’ and the consensus at the BBC is that PC is always mad, bad and highly dangerous.

And still they cry foul, the right wing tabloids and parliamentarians.

Enigma of ‘radical impartiality’

This new century brought the extraordinary force of people power to radio, the web and new technology. It is shaking up all media outlets. The BBC, already too open to right wing populism and charged up to fight political correctness, is set for a further lurch away from its old values. BBC ‘shock jock’ presenters and producers know their fortunes can only get better. Vocal people use phone in programmes and the web to incessantly complain they are not being heard.

The trick is now used by experts too. Andrew Green, the anti-immigration prophet of Migration Watch, is never off the BBC but claims he is not allowed to present his views. The perpetually angry are also more than likely to be anti-immigration, anti-Europe, anti-equalities provision, anti-Muslim, nationalistic, pro-punishment, fearful and bursting with self pity and self righteousness.

I was recently asked to chair an internal BBC debate – part of the Audio and Music Festival. The subject was the enigmatic term ‘radical impartiality’, a new brand, potentially a bold new direction for the massive ship that is the BBC. It was floated by Peter Horrocks, head of television news, a man who from his demeanour is powerful, intellectual and an impeccable trend spotter.

Simply put (and he describes it in more complex terms) Horrocks believes the BBC needs to bring in voices and campaigners hitherto kept out of the corporation’s respectable broadcasting studios. This means, he says, a move away from the ‘no-platform’ posturings of student politics. On this I agree with him. But when he argues the BNP or extremist Muslim campaigners can be allowed to make their case, with robust interviewers ensuring ‘balance’ my blood freezes. The BBC was never a coliseum, a bloody arena for a fight to the death. That is already what I feel it sees itself as. And it wants more extreme action.

For the first time ever, I resent paying the licence fee because the BBC is not fulfilling its public service role with the integrity it always had.

Broadcasts impact on lives, on perceptions, on the sense of security of vulnerable citizens. Take one example. Day after day, the BBC arranges for an anti-immigration and anti-asylum mood to grow, which it has done over three years. Named asylum seekers are not put up to make their cases – they are always numbers; no equivalence exists between pro and anti immigration views.

A profoundly illiberal agenda is presented by respected presenters. And people like me get more afraid of the future. Some years ago Norman Tebbit, on the Today programme, told me I could never be British. Maybe he was right and I should have emigrated when I could have, before I had to witness the fall from grace of my BBC.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a columnist, author and broadcaster

The Guardian’s recent leader on the NUJ’s boycott vote is typical of the No position on this issue, accusing the NUJ of sacrificing journalists’ “general integrity” and “casting doubts on whether they can truly approach their work in a spirit of fairness and distinterested inquiry”. If we put to one side the condescending tone of this editorial, what are the serious issues at stake?

If we are concerned about our credibility being undermined, let’s first remember why it’s not particularly high in the first place. Journalists usually rank just above MPs and estate agents in BBC polls on respect for the professions. Going along with the Iraqi WMD farce didn’t do journalism’s credibility any favours — which suggests that the NUJ’s yearly conference votes against the war and for immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq have been a credit to the profession, rather than undermining it.

Moreover, the Guardian’s notion that British journalists “approach their work in a spirit of fairness and distinterested inquiry” might soothe a few senior editorial egos, but it is hardly convincing. Since when was the British media fair to anybody (let alone the Palestinians)? Much political activism in the British media masquerades as balanced reporting. It would be more honest for journalists to be open about their views than to hide behind the myth of professional impartiality – a central theme of Phillip Knightley’s classic book on war reporting, The First Casualty.The British media are well known for their robust editorial positions on all sorts of political issues, yet there is no suggestion that journalists might be compromised by working for these media. So why should we be compromised by taking political positions ourselves? Peter Wilby put this point very well in his column in the MediaGuardian, commenting on the NUJ’s boycott vote (which he opposed):

“Many newspapers take strong positions in their leader columns. These positions are determined by the bosses. Mere hacks – most of whom don’t have columns – should be allowed their say too. If individual correspondents can distance themselves from their paper’s opinions, they can easily do so from their union’s.”

Moreover, journalists’ politics inform all sorts of judgments we make about news and coverage, how we select and investigate our subject matter. Vigorous politics – of both right and left – therefore often stimulate the best reporting. Paul Foot was named journalist of the decade at the What the Papers Say awards in 2000 – no one could accuse him of being politically “neutral”.

So it is a myth that journalists leave our political views at the door when we come into work. Any professional understands how to excise their opinions from the work they produce, we apply standards and methods to make what we write stand above mere opinion. But it is simplistic to suggest that journalists should jettison their personal views. Worse, it is a recipe for stifling dissent in the newsroom.

If it becomes taboo for journalists to hold political views, the right-wing consensus among senior editors and managers will simply go unquestioned and unchallenged. A demand that journalists and their organisations cease to be political hands control of our copy to our employers. We cannot allow governments, the Richard Desmonds and Rupert Murdochs to become the arbiters of editorial standards.

In short, being political is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of being a good journalist. On the question of the “war on terror”, being actively anti-war clearly means standing up for better journalism. Just look at what has happened to the British media since the invasion of Iraq. Had the peace movement been successful in preventing the war, there would have been:

• No shadow cast over much of the British media for swallowing the government’s lies;

• No Hutton report and no Alastair Campbell gloating over bullying the BBC into submission;

• No Mark Thompson introducing swingeing job cuts across the BBC;

• The Mirror would still be a serious newspaper, rather than a pale imitation of the Sun.

Media Workers Against the War is about trying to strengthen the tradition of political activism among journalists. Journalists need to be inspired, supported and encouraged to fearlessly report the big issues of our time, rather than go along with the preferences of governments and proprietors. We have much work to do to achieve this aim.

MWAW committee

Regarding the NUJ’s boycott vote, much bluster in the media might have been avoided had commentators acquainted themselves more fully with the motion itself, the speech moving the motion, and the NUJ’s statement on the matter. Media Workers Against the War is not directly engaged in this issue, however. Our primary concern is to develop the broad anti-war movement among media workers to bring into it all those who are appalled by the “war on terror” and the way it is reported.

We are journalists, media staff, academics and campaigners who are concerned that sections of the media seem not to have learned lessons from the Iraq conflict, and are making the same mistakes in coverage of war policy towards Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea.

We now have dozens of members in Scotland and want to continue the momentum with a series of briefings, campaigns and protests to draw attention to media bias, flawed reporting and the failure of journalists adequately to challenge and question government and military statements on the various conflicts into which we are being drawn.

At the meeting in Glasgow, Professor John Eldridge of Glasgow Media Unit talked about the modern history of media war coverage, its errors and omissions. One particularly revealing statistic he gave was that only 9 per cent of people in a recent survey were aware that the Israelis were the occupiers of the occupied territories; John called this a classic example of the “social construction of ignorance”.

Dave Crouch from MWAW in London talked about the need for political action in the media, arguing that this neither compromised journalists’ integrity nor undermined their professionalism. He reported that NUJ conference a week earlier saw 30 delegates attend a MWAW fringe meeting; there was strong support at the conference for action to call the media to account on war coverage.

After the meeting we met Craig Murray, the British former ambassador to Uzbekistan who is now rector of Dundee University. Murray was sacked for opposing extraordinary rendition, where suspects are brought to foreign countries to be tortured to extract intelligence for use in the war on terror. He agreed to address the next meeting of MWAW Scotland and to speak about his experiences with the media and the recent detention of British naval personnel by Iran.

We need your support! Any help you can give with venues, speakers, leaflets and flyers, and contacts with journalists and politicians who might support us, will be greatly appreciated. If anyone knows of MSPs (elections nothwithstanding) MEPs and MPs who are interested in media issues, please let me know. In addition, authors, writers and broadcasters who support a fairer media are essential for our campaign.

Bruce Whitehead, brucek3@aol.com

It doesn’t matter what kind of journalist you are; we all want to report the facts truthfully and comprehensively. That means explaining context, including alternative views, questioning and challenging official statements and policies, and above all, opposing what’s morally wrong and illegal.

The issue of flawed and biased coverage is becoming ever-more problematic. The media was prone to supine and lazy journalism in the build up to both wars in the Gulf. Politicians and lobbyists must no longer be allowed to bully a weakened and pliable media to sell a misguided war on terror by perpetuating armed aggression in Iran and Afghanistan.

That is why we are organising Media Workers Against the War Scotland to oppose the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and to warn against attacking Iran, through fair reporting and better scrutiny of government policy and military conduct. If we can organise in workplaces to give media staff confidence in standing up to their editors and managers to insist on ethical standards of fair and balanced reporting, then we have made a start in telling the unvarnished truth.

DEBATE THE ISSUES ON APRIL 21

With speakers:

ON NEWS, TRUTH AND POWER

Professor John Eldridge, a member of the Glasgow University Media Group, the foremost centre for media research and analysis in the UK. Professor Eldridge will talk about the issues which war reporting raises, particularly the way the media is used in war coverage to build support for, and to normalise, state aggression.

ON ANTI-WAR ACTIVISM INSIDE THE MEDIA

Dave Crouch is the chair of Media Workers Against War and has been instrumental in organising its successful campaign. MWAW has protested, leafleted and debated with the major media organisations including the BBC, ITN, BSkyB, CNN and other broadcasters and with newspaper editors and politicians. Recent speakers at MWAW meetings included Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Gary Younge, Craig Murray, Yvonne Ridley and NUJ president Jeremy Dear.

Media Workers Against the War Scotland’s launch meeting is being held at the annual conference of Scotland Against Criminalising Communities, in the STUC, 333 Woodlands Road, Glasgow G3, Saturday 21 April at 1230-1400.

Contact: Bruce Whitehead Email: brucek3@aol.com Mobile: 07944 928 702 www.mwaw.net

Media Workers Against the War in believes not is the time for journalists to campaign against the waste of Scotland’s young people, press-ganged by poverty into fighting Blair’s wars.

For me, MWAW is a very simple issue for journalists. It’s an issue of health and safety. Over 170 media workers have died in Iraq, and the toll continues to rise. In many cases – like that of Terry Lloyd – the killings were the direct action of American troops.
MWAW began by campaigning to save Farzad Bazoft, the observer journalist hanged by Saddam Hussein.

Calling for the war to end is directly related to the freedom of journalists to do their job in safety. MWAW can help give journalists the confidence to stand up and speak out.

By Pete Murray, member of the NUJ national executive committee (personal capacity)

Nor was about the views of colleagues, many of whom defended the cartoons publication as a right in a free society. A motion even appeared on an internal BBC message board with a considerable number of signatories subscribing to this message: ”Bush House journalists express their solidarity with the newspapers and editors involved in the publication or re-publication of the Danish cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed. Criticising or satirising religion in general and any religion in particular is a non-negotiable right in a free society and a vital prerogative of the media in Liberal democracies. We are appalled by the threats to European journalists and other citizens in parts of the Arab or Muslim world and unreservedly condemn political pandering to religious bigotry.”

What forced me to bow my head in disappointment was the NUJ’s statement in support of the BBC’s decision to broadcast the cartoons on Newsnight.

The NUJ applauded what they called “BBC journalists’ impartial and responsible reporting of the issues surrounding the publication of the cartoons” and “supported the decision to show the cartoons”, saying “they gave a legitimate news story proper context” – basically rolling out the perennial sacred cow of the right to free speech.

Over the years I thought I had developed a thick skin to the anti-Muslim bias in the media, but something stirred in my heart when I read the NUJ statement. To me it was like my best friend was not understanding me. And if your best friend doesn’t know you, then who does?

The cartoons debate provides a perfect example of how the treatment of Islam has become so neglectful and sloppy that it’s confusing and dividing even friends. Justifying this as ‘freedom of speech’ and the right to publish are lazy and convenient arguments. What happened to creative writing? What happened to respect? Why couldn’t journalists have described the pictures using words?

What is going on in the press these days is good old-fashioned racism. Muslim-baiting is not an expression of press freedom, its racism.

Those who want to fight for media freedom should ask what role the press played when the government put forward its arguments for invading Iraq, or during the Iran hostage crisis that never was? Or they should look at how a handful of businessmen own the British press.

You don’t need a background in religious affairs to understand Muslims, you don’t have to be religious – the criteria are better understanding and respect for others of different cultures and faiths.

Many journalists know this already but basically they just don’t care – they deliberately treat stories to do with Islam in a certain way.

For example, I produced an item for BBC2 about how some Muslim activists were trying to turn the turn the tide of bad press coverage and reclaim Islam from extremist elements. The activists said the press didn’t have time for their grass roots work and community projects. So we carried out a stunt: we invited the broadsheets to a “Muslim” charity event. The response? Journalists seemed only interested if there was going to be violence or flag burning afterwards. Shameless.

The use of the word Islamaphobia is doing us no favours. Having a ‘phobia’ is acceptable, but nobody wants to be a racist.

So how can we counter this bigotry? During my training at the Beeb I was told there are six principal questions to ask when writing a story; who, what, when, where, why and how. To encourage conscientious story telling, I’d like to add a seventh question to the list: ‘Am I being racist?’

Finally, I’d like to quote one of my colleagues who responded to those who supported publishing or broadcasting the Danish cartoons.

“People like Ghandi and Martin Luther King will give up their lives to uphold the basic values of respect and understanding, not because they’re cowards and not because they want to appease the extremists but because they know that nothing can replace understanding and respect.

“It is this which will prevail in history and not the Bin Ladens and Abu Hamzas, or the editors and weak journalists who want to provoke unnecessary reaction by inflicting insults on more than a billion-and-a-half people with a particular faith.”

You can’t argue with that. If you do then it’s like arguing with a drunk. Make mine a lime soda – I’m a Muslim.

By Uzma Hussain, a BBC staff member who has worked in a variety of journalism and other roles at the organisation for nearly 10 years. She gave this speech at an MWAW fringe meeting at NUJ national conference

Perhaps the most memorable is the use of the word “kidnap” last summer when we were reporting on the Israeli soldier being held by the Palestinians.

In our newsroom we ruled that the word “kidnapped” implies an unlawful abduction. And if a man is armed, in military uniform, and taking part in a military operation, his capture by the enemy doesn’t amount to an “unlawful” act.

Corporal Gilad Shalit was taken by fighters from Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, during “Operation Summer Rain”, an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. Given that Hamas is – let’s not forget – democratically elected and hence representative of the Palestinian people, the capture is as lawful as any other capture of a prisoner of war.

Let’s remind ourselves of what a prisoner of war is: a combatant who is imprisoned by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict. To be a POW the service member must have conducted operations according to the laws and customs of war, be part of a chain of command, wear a uniform and bear arms openly. In short, there is no doubt that Corporal Shalit fits the criteria; and so to call him a hostage, or a kidnapped soldier, is simply wrong and misleading.

But what was surprising to see is that it wasn’t just the right-wing, pro-Israeli, Zionist news organizations using the word “kidnap”, but also those who are supposedly giving an Arab perspective; a sign perhaps that we journalists don’t care to question and challenge anymore. We’re beginning to sound more and more like politicians.

And when a Palestinian is taken from his home and imprisoned by Israel, before being tried in a military court, there’s no question over whether it’s a justified detention or not, no debate over whether it’s unlawful or lawful. There are thousands of children in Israeli jails, some as young as nine.

We’ll never see the word “kidnap” used when referring to Taliban fighters (who, incidentally don’t wear uniforms) or members of Al Qaida (no rules of engagement in their fights) being held in Guantanamo Bay. But perhaps that’s just another case of “George Bush says, journalists do”.

Sadiya Chowdhury, reporter, Islam Channel News

The general conclusion we reached was that using the term “hostages” was wrong, and we opted for “detainees” instead – apart from a few slips. We even carried an article about how UK diplomats were desperate to avoid using the word.
According to the Collins Dictionary – not the Oxford one, I know, but it’s just as thick – a hostage is “a person given to or held by a person, organisation, etc. as a security or pledge or for ransom, release, exchange for prisoners”; while to detain means “to delay; hold back; stop; to confine or hold in custody – detainee is a person kept in custody”.

The difference might seem subtle, but it is very important.

For example, the Daily Mail’s headline on March 13, the day after the crisis began, was “Marines taken hostage by Iran”, while the Daily Telegraph went with “Marines seized by Iranian guards”. What do these headlines tell the reader?

The Mail’s suggests that 15 UK citizens have been withheld for a ransom, i.e. The Iranians want something in return for the release of the sailors.
The Telegraph’s tells us that 15 UK citizens have been withheld, but the reason remains unclear and therefore is more balanced — i.e. the Iranians have captured 15 UK citizens, but we cannot tell you (the reader) exactly why because we don’t know.

Later on, the Iranians claimed that 15 British navy personnel entered their waters; the British government flatly denied it. What emerged in this case was an international dispute.

We as reporters and subs – unless we have compelling evidence – can’t take sides in our work. So if there is a dispute we must attempt to use the most neutral and least inflammatory term possible.

The MoD’s “GPS evidence” was as reliable as the coordinates given by the Iranians. This meant that no journalist was in a position to determine if the 15 marines had committed a crime or not, just as we couldn’t confirm whether the British marines had trespassed into Iranian waters or not.

Therefore the correct term to define the 15 UK citizens held in Iran had to be detainees, captives or prisoners, as the Iranians did not capture them to blackmail Britain, but opted to hold them for having allegedly committed an incursion.

If someone is accused of killing another person, the police will arrest a suspect as a precautionary measure. That does not mean that the police have abducted them or taken them hostage — they have arrested them for a suspected crime. The person arrested might dispute that, but will have to prove their innocence.

In the UK the red tops and the mid-market papers didn’t bother with any of this: for them the main issue was to sensationalise. However, this is hardly news. What was more worrying in the whole affair was to see how the broadsheets switched from “detainees/captives” to “hostages”.

The shift clearly occurred after George W. Bush demanded on March 31 that “The Iranians must give back the hostages.” This, in some way, permitted the “responsible press” to change the tone of their reporting. The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph and The Times all switched to “hostages”.

However, the appearance of “Iran” and “hostages” in the same headline is highly inflammatory. It takes us back to the 1979-80 crisis when Iran stormed the US embassy in Tehran to take over 50 US citizens hostage, after making a revolution that ended US power in the country and kicked out a regime backed by the CIA.

The Americans have never forgiven Iran for that. Equating the recent crisis with that of 1979-1980 is a gift to the hawks and fuels the drive for war on Iran.

In 1979 Iran wanted the US to hand over the former Shah of Iran, who had fled to America, to face justice in Iran. The exchange was clear in the 1979-81 crisis, not in 2007.

Of course, during the crisis the US allowed Iran access to five of