Media Workers Against the War

The Guardian’s Peter Wilby has again hit the nail on the head:

Whenever, to coin a phrase, a war breaks out in a faraway country of which we know little, I am reminded of a news editor I once worked for. He would go to a wall map showing the location of the paper’s correspondents, produce a ruler, and measure the distance of each from the area in question. Regardless of travel links or national boundaries, he decreed that the nearest should go.

It was a bit like that, I imagine, in many media offices when the conflict between Georgia and Russia broke out. Not only was it August, when many reporters are on holiday, it was also the Olympics, and the few still on duty were mostly in Beijing. The Financial Times headline, “Georgia says Russia at war“, may have seemed strange, but it summed up the state of Fleet Street’s verifiable knowledge as the armies moved into action. In the age of 24-hour news, however, the press cannot hang about waiting for reporters to arrive. Readers want bombs, tanks and death tolls. They need to be told who are the goodies and baddies. News, remember, is part of the entertainment industry.

Into the vacuum stepped the Georgian government. Its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, speaks English, wants to join Nato, sent troops to Iraq, got himself educated at Harvard, cultivates a media-friendly style, and sends Georgian university exam papers to be marked in Britain, though whether he expects to get them back is another matter. He took power in the Rose revolution of 2003-04 and professes to be a democrat. He’s clearly an all-round good egg. And he has a PR firm, Aspect Consulting, based in Brussels, London and Paris, which also acts for Exxon Mobil, Kellogg’s and Procter and Gamble.

Almost hourly over the five-day war, press releases landed on foreign news desks. “Russia continues to attack civilian population.” The capital Tblisi was “intensively” bombed. A downed Russian plane turned out to be “nuclear”. European “energy supplies” were threatened as Russia dropped bombs near oil pipelines. A “humanitarian wheat shipment” was blocked. Later, “invading Russian forces” began “the occupation of Georgia”. Saakashvili’s government filed allegations of ethnic cleansing to The Hague. Note the use of terms that trigger western media interest: civilian victims, nuclear, humanitarian, occupation, ethnic cleansing.

It would be unfair to accuse the British press of accepting the Georgian PR uncritically. Most papers dutifully reported that a Georgian attack in the breakaway province of South Ossetia, where most people want to join Russia, started the conflict. But casual readers might have struggled to understand that. The Mail’s headline announced: “‘1,500 die’ as the Russian tanks roll in” [August 9]. Only in the last paragraph of the story did it become clear that the Georgians, not the Russians, were alleged to have killed 1,500.

Russia’s behaviour, newspapers implied, was in a quite different category from Georgia’s. In the Sunday Times, Russian tanks went “rampaging” in South Ossetia, while Georgian tanks merely “moved”. If Georgian forces had bombarded civilians, it was “reprehensible”, the Telegraph allowed. Russia, however, was “offending every canon of international behaviour“. An analysis in the same paper avoided any mention of how Georgia provoked the crisis. Saakashvili was “paying the price” for his pro-western foreign policy. A “resurgent Russia” was “itching to flex its muscles and burning with post-imperial hubris”.

Such comments are illuminated by substituting Britain or America for Russia, and Iraq for Georgia. Try “resurgent Britain … itching to flex its muscles”, etc.

As the conflict went on, press coverage became more balanced, with several commentators noting, to quote the Independent’s Mary Dejevsky, that “it is quite hard to argue that there is one law for assisting Albanians in Kosovo and quite another for Russians and Ossetians in Georgia”. Increasingly, the press portrayed Saakashvili as a self-regarding fool who blundered into a war he was bound to lose.

But Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia went largely unexamined, and it was hard to find, from press accounts, what refugees from the province were fleeing from. Again, the Georgians played the PR game more skilfully. Western correspondents were welcomed into Gori and shown areas apparently bombed by the Russians. Saakashvili held international media phone conferences, got himself on TV news channels and even found time, within hours of war breaking out, to write for the Wall Street Journal. Russia, by contrast, allowed little access to South Ossetia. Its government attempted no comparable media offensive. Though it also has a PR agency, GPlus Europe in Brussels (and Ketchum in Washington), it was not asked to issue press releases. As a source wryly put it, “the press release is not a common tool of the Russian government”.

The brief war in the Caucasus was a classic example of the situation outlined in Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News. Most newspapers hadn’t a clue what was going on and lacked sufficient resources to find out. So skilfully presented PR was at a premium. Most journalists treated it with at least some scepticism, but it inevitably had an effect. If there was a military war, there was also an information one, and Georgia got the better of it.

10-point reminder of the low-points of Condaleeza Rice’s career:

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.

Speech by Alan Johnston, the BBC reporter kidnapped in Gaza last year and held for 144 days, to the NUJ/CPBF conference “New Threats to Media Freedom”, in London on January 26. Read more reports and listen to audio here and here.

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.

• Because of the year long Ethiopian invasion, illegal under international law, and the consequent escalation in violence, Somalia’s humanitarian crisis is now as bad as Darfur’s Reports on the numbers of people killed, injured and displaced since December 2006 include 6,500 killed in Mogadishu alone, 8,500 wounded, and between 850,000 displaced and 600,000 displaced. 1.5 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. Malnutrition among under-5s has reached nearly 20%. Women have been raped by Ethiopian soldiers, including an 18 year old girl by 12 soldiers and a mother of 7 children.
• There is no evidence of an Al Qaeda presence in Somalia, nor of an Eritrean military base (Eritrea has been intermittently at war with Ethiopia since 1998). Both of these were given as justifications for the Ethiopian invasion.
• There is strong circumstantial evidence that the US backed the Ethiopian invasion. The press reported US military personnel accompanying Ethiopian troops into Somalia in December 2006, and US military personnel entering Somalia in December 2006 to report on the US air strikes of January 2007. The US provided the Ethiopian military with satellite surveillance and aerial reconnaissance, and did not disassociate itself from the invasion. In Jan 07, a Pentagon spokesman said the US and Ethiopian militaries have a “close working relationship”. US arms sales to Ethiopia since Sept 2001 have roughly doubled and Ethiopia has received nearly $20 million in U.S. military aid since late 2002. In 2007, Ethiopia received $2,640,000 military aid from the US, according to a US government website.
• Somalia is the African front in the US’s ‘war on terror’, the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia is the US’s proxy war. Before resigning as US Secretary of Defence in late 2006, Donald Rumsfeld identified the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, Somalia and Yemen) as the area of Africa most at risk of becoming a “safe haven for terrorists”.
• But not only a proxy war. In January 2007 the US launched bomb attacks from an aircraft carrier off the Somali coast on south Somalia. A hospital reported thousands of civilians wounded. Many were killed, their livestock with them. The US “has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania”, the Ethiopian-backed leader Abdullahi Yusuf said.
• According to some commentators like the Jamestown Foundation, a conservative US think tank, the Hawiye clan form the basis of resistance to the Ethiopian invasion and indeed of the Union of Islamic Court (ICU) itself – i.e. this is a clan struggle against the occupation, not a national one. This is apparently supported by reports of the assassination of a leading Hawiye, Ahmed Diriya, by the Ethiopian military on 27 Dec 07. However, an alliance of anti-Ethiopian interests appears to be strengthening the ICU and other insurgents.
• Most Somalis see themselves first of all as Somali citizens, secondarily as members of a clan. Somalis are often portrayed in the western media and by western governments as only capable of acting in their clan interests, as incapable of acting in their national or regional interests.
• An 800-strong demonstration organised by the UK Somali community outside the House of Commons, London, on 28 December 2007, aimed to bring Somalis together to show the world that they are not divided by clan and region but are united in their opposition to the US-backed Ethiopian invasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Crouch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AFP posted this interesting material to the wires last week (Oct 25), comparing what the White House is saying about Iran today with what it said about Iraq before the invasion (emphasis added):

WASHINGTON, Oct 25, 2007 (AFP) - While the US administration insists it is pursuing diplomacy in its disputes with Iran, critics of President George W. Bush see worrying parallels between recent statements on Tehran and the run-up to the war in Iraq. The Bush administration announced new sanctions against Iran on Thursday, accusing the regime of backing terrorists, supporting insurgents in Iraq and working to build an atomic arsenal. The following are recent comments by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on Iran’s nuclear program and statements on Iraq made prior to the 2003 US-led invasion.

IRAN “The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences.” — Vice President Dick Cheney speaking to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on October 21, 2007.

IRAQ “The Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations.” — UN Security Council Resolution 1441, adopted in 2002, which the Bush administration says authorized the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

IRAN “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust. Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late.” — US President George W. Bush in a speech to the annual American Legion convention on August 28, 2007.

IRAQ “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” — Bush in a speech on Iraq in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002.

IRAN “Our intelligence community assesses that, with continued foreign assistance, Iran could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States and all of Europe before 2015. If it chooses to do so, and the international community does not take steps to prevent it, it is possible Iran could have this capability. And we need to take it seriously — now.” — Bush said in a speech to the National Defense University on October 23, 2007.

IRAQ “If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.” — Bush in the speech on Iraq in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002.

IRAN “Our struggle is not with the Iranian people. As a matter of fact, we want them to flourish, and we want their economy to be strong. And we want their mothers to be able to raise their children in a hopeful society. My problem is with a government that takes actions that end up isolating their people and ends up denying the Iranian people their true place in the world.” — Bush congratulating General David Petraeus on his confirmation as commander of forces in Iraq on January 26, 2007.

IRAQ “The Iraqi people cannot flourish under a dictator that oppresses them and threatens them. Gifted people of Iraq will flourish if and when oppression is lifted.” — Bush signing the authorization to use military force in Iraq on October 16, 2002.

IRAN “All options are on the table. I would hope that we could solve this diplomatically.” — Bush, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on June 19, 2007.

“The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” — Cheney in the October 21, 2007 speech.

IRAQ “All options are on the table, and — but one thing I will not allow is a nation such as Iraq to threaten our very future by developing weapons of mass destruction.” — Bush speaking at a press conference on March 13, 2003, less than a week before military action against Iraq.

Sami Ramadani mentioned this clip at an MWAW meeting in September on the Iraqi resistance. It shows a convoy of trucks driven by US contractors which loses its way in the small town of Balad, 70km north of Baghdad, in September 2005. It is attacked, first by youths throwing stones, and then by small arms fire. The video, broadcast on US TV a year later, demonstrates that the Iraqi population at large is well-armed and intensely hostile to the occupation.

Watch the clip here and read background here.

Just in case we needed reminding, here’s a brilliant audio-picture sequence from Iran, showing who will be the real victims of any western military attack on Iran.

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