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.

With speakers:

Stephen Grey, investigative journalist embedded with British troops in Helmand and author: “Operation Snakebite: The Explosive True Story of an Afghan Desert Siege“, and “Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program”

Guy Smallman, photojournalist, recently returned from Afghanistan

Seumas Milne, columnist, the Guardian

And others

Monday July 13, 7pm

Friends Meeting House (small hall)

173 Euston Road, NW1 2BJ, opposite Euston station

Map: http://tinyurl.com/p33vhf

All welcome!

Hosted by Media Workers Against the War / Stop the War Coalition

www.mwaw.net / www.stopwar.org.uk

Speakers appear in a personal capacity

For more information and flyers: tel 0207 801 2768

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

The petition comes as the latest form of protest from BBC staff to Thompson’s decision. A number of BBC National Union of Journalists (NUJ) branches have already called upon Thompson to reverse his decision.

The DG has had at least a couple of meetings with staff members concerned about the DEC issue over the past weeks. In both meetings Thompson faced strong criticism from staff who felt that his decision, far from preserving the impartiality of BBC, has in fact caused considerable damage to the organization’s reputation.

The petition reads:

To Mark Thompson,

As BBC employees we are writing to express our deep disappointment with your decision to reject broadcasting the Disasters and Emergency Committee Gaza Appeal.

We strongly disagree with your assessment about the effect that such a broadcast would have on the impartiality of BBC. By denying the victims of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza a chance of assistance, the BBC is actually taking sides. DEC aid appeals for victims of armed conflicts have been broadcast by BBC in the past, such as the appeals for Congo and Darfur, and we see no reason why the victims of this conflict should be treated differently. Far from preserving the impartiality of BBC, we feel this decision has in fact caused considerable damage to our organization’s reputation.

Today the BBC stands alone among British broadcasters – with the exception of Sky News – in its refusal to air the appeal. Numerous public figures have spoken out against this decision and thousands of complaints have been made to the BBC. All this shows that BBC is out of line with British public opinion on this matter.

We strongly urge you to reverse your decision, in order to preserve the reputation of BBC as an impartial and fair organization, not only among license fee payers but also among our audience worldwide. Over several decades the BBC has managed to build a large audience base in different parts of the world and we feel that your decision has seriously damaged this global standing.

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.

As a journalist I love being first with the news so when I was handed a red hot exclusive story a few hours ago I could barely contain myself. I already had a captive audience having just finished a live broadcast for Press TV in front of scores of members of the Viva Palestina convoy which is currently making its way through Morocco.

“Listen up everyone,” I shouted as they walked towards their hotel from the car park where Press TV’s outside broadcast vehicle was parked.

They turned and gathered around and then the words came tumbling out: “Ten minutes ago police released the Burnley Three without charge and they are heading our way to hook up with the convoy.”

Most times I never get to see peoples’ reactions to my exclusive news breaks, but this time I did and the “wow” factor was amazing. Viva Palestina convoy members jumped up and down for joy and shouted “Allahu Akbar”. 

I was referring to the three men who had been arrested as part of an anti terrorist operation which just happened to be performed on the eve of departure for the history-making convoy led by George Galloway.

Of course the so-called anti terror raid made huge headlines in the British media which had, until that moment, shown little or no interest in Viva Palestina. I wonder if the convoy gets the same amount of newsprint and airtime devoted to this good news story to re dress the balance. I doubt it.

I didn’t get a chance to see George Galloway’s reaction, but as the leader of the 110 vehicle British aid convoy bound for Gaza, he has now spoken of his anger at the high profile Lancashire Constabulary police action which led to the arrest of nine innocent men who set off to join the Viva Palestina convoy last Friday.

Six of the nine were released without charge some days ago and are now heading for Tunisia in three vehicles laden with humanitarian supplies for the people of Gaza. But three more were detained in custody for almost a week before being released without charge this afternoon.

The negative publicity which the arrests attracted had a knock on effect and Viva Palestina organisers said that there was a drop of 80% in donations. Sadly the media continues to give Viva Palestina a wide berth, with a few notable exceptions including Press TV.

This is a real shame because they’ve really missed out on some excellent stories including:

• Heroic convoy members saving the lives of Moroccan police men after a near-fatal road crash near Fes;
• Heroic London mother-of-six battling cancer continues her mercy mission for the sake of the children of Gaza;
• History in the making as Morocco and Algeria open their land borders for the first time in nearly two decades to let the mercy convoy pass.

/p> Of course most of those making the headlines are muslims and as we know, the Islamaphobic media in Britain prefers to write about Muslims in a negative way. 

But this flawed news judgment reflects badly on them and not the Viva Palestina crew who come from all parts of Britain – they might not have been born in the UK but they are doing their adopted country proud.

Yvonne Ridley is on board the Viva Palestina convoy with film-maker Hassan al Banna Ghani to make a documentary for television

PUBLIC MEETING – ALL WELCOME!

With speakers:

Ghada Karmi, Guardian columnist
  Richard Horton, The Lancet
Jeremy Dear, general secretary, NUJ
Lauren Booth, presenter, Press TV
Jane Shallice, Stop the War Coalition
BBC journalist
Student from King’s College occupation

Monday February 2

7pm

Old Cinema lecture theatre
Westminster University
309 Regent Street
London W1B 2UW
Nearest tube: Oxford Circus
Map: http://tinyurl.com/dj6ywh

ALL WELCOME!

Hosted by Media Workers Against the War www.mwaw.net

More info: info@mwaw.net, tel 07801 789 297

Download the leaflet here: http://mwaw.net/gaza.pdf

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

With Peter Wilby, columnist for the Media Guardian, formely editor of the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday

Tom de Waal, Caucasus editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting

Stop the War Coalition speaker (tbc)

Tuesday September 9

7pm

Pearson Lecture Theatre
University College London, Gower Street WC1
Nearest tube: Warren Street or Euston

Map: click here

All welcome!

Download a leaflet for the meeting as a PDF file

More details: mediawar@riseup.net, or tel 07801 789 297

Called by Media Workers Against the War

Pete Wilby on the media coverage of war in the Caucasus:
In the Media Guardian

Tom de Waal on the war:
In the Financial Times
In the Guardian

N.B. our original meeting on Somalia on Sept 10 has been postponed because of the Caucasus crisis

The Guardian correctly notes: “The disclosure that a Whitehall counter-terrorism propaganda operation is promoting material to the BBC and other media will raise fresh concerns about official news management in a highly sensitive area.”

According to the paper, the secret services’ report says: “We are pushing this material to UK media channels, eg, a BBC radio programme exposing tensions between AQ leadership and supporters. And a restricted working group will communicate niche messages through media and non-media.”

These revelations raise very serious questions about recent corporate media coverage of the “war on terror”.

In June there was a string of stories in the British press stressing that al-Qaeda was “down but not out”, suffering set-backs in Iraq and Afghanistan – precisely the message being pushed by Whitehall counter-intelligence, according to the Guardian story. For example, Times columnist Gerard Baker wrote: “We are winning this war on terror“.

Yet the crisis in Pakistan and the killing of 10 French and 9 Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan in successive weeks shows what rubbish this is.

The secret services in the UK and US have a disgraceful record of planting mis-information and propaganda in the media.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the Observer’s reporter David Rose became a mouthpiece for MI5 and MI6 propaganda – by his own admission. Rose now deeply regrets this.

In April the New York Times exposed that the Pentagon conducted a major campaign of placing retired generals on US TV news to put the case for war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. In 2002 Rumsfeld’s “Office of Strategic Influence” inside the Pentagon had to be scrapped after it emerged that the OSI planned to plant “black propaganda” in foreign media.

The news that counter-intelligence is targetting the BBC should be a wake-up call to all journalists.

There were serious doubts about the story’s authenticity, however. For example, the Metro and the Telegraph reported that the circumstances of her arrest remain unclear, with US officials saying she turned herself in but Iraqi police claiming she was caught after behaving suspiciously.

The Guardian, however, published the claims of the Iraqi police without a shred of probing or scepticism. For example, the paper said that the girl’s father “had carried out a suicide bombing”, while Arabic TV stations showed both the girls’ parents sitting indoors.

Moreover, publishing Abu Ghraib-like photos and video of the young woman in such a humiliating situation verged on the pornographic. The Iraqi police certainly appeared to be enjoying the interrogation.

The Iraqi police have been shown on many occasions in the past to have made up stories. The widely-reported claim that women with Down’s syndrome blew themselves up in a market in Baghdad in February was full of holes.

Everyone in Iraq knows that all the police do after the bombing is washout the evidence. On numerous occasions eyewitnesses have said an explosion was a car bomb – with government number plates – while the police and the puppet government claim it was a suicide bomber. The truth is always the first casualty in these incidents.

All these recent claims about Iraqi women suicide bombers are either made by the US or by the Iraqi puppet government of the Green Zone in an attempt to show that the resistance in Iraq is defeated and therefore resorting to desperate measures. But very few people in Iraq believe that these security forces are there to protect them. According to Mohamed Al Dayni, member of the Iraqi parliament, there are at many documented cases of rape committed by members of the Iraqi security forces, yet to be properly investigated or prosecuted.

I telephoned the reader’s editor of the Guardian to lodge a complaint, in a polite but upset voice. The woman who answered the phone breathed a sigh down the phone as I was explaining to her my complaint as if she was bored.

Can I suggest that people write a short email or make a telephone call to the reader’s editor to complain about the Guardian’s article: reader@guardian.co.uk,
0207 7134736

Tahrir Swift

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.

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

The most influential armchair soldier in the Western world is back in his metaphorical fatigues. Yes, it’s Field Marshal David Aaronovitch, who championed the invasion of Iraq with more vigour than any fellow officer in Her Majesty’s First Light Pundits. There have been times in recent years when David seemed to be taking the weeniest backward baby-steps towards admitting that, on Iraq, he may perhaps have dropped the tiniest of bollocks. However, these faint flickerings of the reverse lights on the tank have been quickly extinguished by defiant challenges to opponents, on the exquisitely subtle lines of: “Do you want Saddam back, is that what you want?”

And now, far from succumbing to self-doubt, the Field Marshal wishes to invade Zimbabwe and oust Mugabe, which he believes would be another military piece of cake. “How many South African or British soldiers would it take to unseat the junta and disperse the Zanu-PF veterans?”

This is not a rhetorical question, of course. Having unleashed that military brain on the logistical problems, and consulted with his masters at the MoD, he well knows the precise answer, although the Official Secrets Act of course precludes him from sharing the information. Without dwelling on the ramifications of such retro-colonialism in a country that remains so sensitive on the point, lesser thinkers foresee a grave danger of hideous civil unrest. They forget that David was correct to ignore that outlandish prospect so far as Iraq. We salute the Field Marshal for the indefatigability of his faith in interventionism, and look forward to him leading his troops into battle.

And he very well might. Visitors to The Times website will relish a three-minute video of David training for a triathlon in August. Frankly, he looks in amazing shape for a chap turning 54 a week from today, especially in an aerodynamic bodysuit on Brighton beach, and it’s suspected that the Field Marshal may be training less for that triathlon than because, tiring of all the desk work his military role imposes, he intends personally to spearhead the initial raid on the presidential palace in Harare.

Would the first Times employee to find him digging a latrine in the Wapping car park please let us know?

Michelle has been an inspirational figure at the Daily Express and Star, leading campaigns against the newspapers’ racism and Islamophobia, making the union’s “Journalism Matters” campaign a great success and fighting to build strong grassroots union organisation. She has been open about her opposition to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Journalists’ working conditions are intimately connected to the quality of the public service they provide, as Nick Davies has shown in “Flat Earth News”, which sets out to explain the media’s failure on Iraqi WMD. The government’s assault on the BBC over its coverage of the “war on terror” has included massive job cuts, particularly in news and current affairs.

Targetting of the media by the military in war zones has made journalists’ work more dangerous, while “terror law” restrictions on reporting at home threaten journalists with arrests and prosecutions. For these reasons the NUJ needs a deputy general secretary who recognises the importance of the war for our union.

See Michelle’s election website here: www.michelle4dgs.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

1. SATURDAY: MWAW activists’ meeting
2. Police use “terror” laws to attack journalists
3. MEETING: Racism, war and Muslims
4. George Bush in London, protest Sunday June 15
5. So wrong for so long: US newspapers and Iraq
6. Somalia: Hidden catastrophe, hidden agenda
7. Media coverage of Palestine and Israel
8. From Basra to Beirut: US is gunning for Iran
9. Join our campaign

1. SATURDAY: MWAW activists’ meeting

There will be an activists’ meeting of Media Workers Against the War to discuss campaigning priorities this Saturday (May 31) at 2pm in the Terrace Café, South Bank Centre (nearest tube: Waterloo, Embankment). We’ll sit outside if the sun shines…

Agenda items include the news blackout on Somalia, Alton’s editorship of the Indie, an autumn conference, MWAW media briefings, and lots more

All welcome! Please R.S.V.P. to this email or call Dave on 07801 789 297

2. Police use “terror” laws to attack journalists

Journalists face arrest, prosecution and even deportation under “anti-terror” laws that give police extensive new powers. The government is rushing to deport an Algerian editor after police seized him for downloading a document from a US government website. The case follows the ongoing attempt by police to force a leading journalist to hand over notes from interviews with a former Islamist.

Read the full article here: www.mwaw.net/2008/05/28/terrorlaws

3. MEETING: Racism, the war on terror and the Muslim community

The War on terror has been accompanied by a rise in racism targeted at Muslims. Stop the War are hosting a series of meetings across the country with high profile speakers.

London meeting: Tuesday June 3, 7.30pm

With speakers:
Moazzam Begg, George Galloway MP, Anas Al-Tikriti, Lindsey german, Louise Christian, David Edgar

Bishopsgate Institute
230 Bishopsgate EC2M
www.bishopsgate.org.uk
Nearest tube: Liverpool Street

Called by: Stop the War Coalition www.stopwar.org.uk

4. Bush in London protest

War criminal George Bush will be visiting Britain on Sunday 15 June. No doubt he will receive a sycophantic welcome from Gordon Brown. The anti-war majority, however, will recall the hundreds of thousands who have died, the millions driven from their homes and the utter devastation resulting from the illegal attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Stop the War will be organising a protest in London on that Sunday. For details, watch this space: www.stopwar.org.uk

5. So wrong for so long: US newspapers and Iraq

For the first time a mainstream editor – who just happens also to be a professional media-watcher – has written a book attacking the Iraq war coverage by the US corporate press.

Read the full article here: www.mwaw.net/2008/05/23/mitchell

6. Somalia: Hidden catastrophe, hidden agenda

Media Lens has a very useful summary of the realities underlying Bush’s war of terror on Somalia and the media’s failure to report it. It demonstrates how the government’s strategic silence on the proxy “war on terror” being fought in Somalia is reflected in press reporting:

Read the analysis here: http://tinyurl.com/6z8saz

7. Media coverage of Palestine and Israel

Arab Media Watch has compiled a study on the different language used to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. It shows that Israeli deaths are afforded strong, emotive adjectives, while Palestinian fatalities are reported in a much more sanitised, measured way.

View the full report here: http://tinyurl.com/4545nf

8. From Basra to Beirut: US is gunning for Iran

Robert Fisk sees the recent eruption of conflict in Beirut as a “proxy” war between Washington and Tehran. Add this observation to US recent accusation that Hezbollah is training Iraqi militants in Iran, and the American military’s promised dossier on Iran’s role in the Iraq war, and we can see that the old drumbeat of war on Iran is growing louder again.

Read the full article here: www.mwaw.net/2008/05/21/iran

9. Join us!

Join Media Workers Against the War to help us campaign for fair coverage of the “war on terror” and troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Who we are: www.mwaw.net/about

Download a standing order form – a few pounds a month would be a huge boost to our campaign:

http://mwaw.net/standingorder.pdf

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.

With speakers:

Dahr Jamail, independent journalist in Iraq and author of “Beyond the Green Zone“

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

Kim Sengupta, defence and diplomatic correspondent, the Independent

Lindsey German, national convenor, Stop the War Coalition

Venue: The Old Lecture Theatre, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street (2 mins from Oxford Circus)

Date and time: Thursday April 10, 7pm

Called by: Media Workers Against the War

Tickets: £5, £3 (concessions)

On April 9, 2003, Baghdad “fell” to US troops. The event was welcomed by a torrent of gushing media coverage. When Saddam’s statue was toppled that day in Firdoz Square, the British media unleashed a string of superlatives. But Robert Fisk called it “the most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima“.
Five years on, we have to say: the media have hardly changed in the way they lap up propaganda from the military and the government. The collusion of senior media editors in the blackout on Prince Harry in Helmand last month gave the military a propaganda coup, boosting the notion that Britain is fighting a glamorous and just war.

This event will ask how this has happened and how we can change the situation.

Buy your ticket for this event now:

For more information, email info@mwaw.net

Background information on Dahr Jamail:

Chemical weapons in Fallujah: How he broke the story

“I have interviewed many refugees over the last week coming out of Fallujah at different times from different locations within the city. The consistent stories that I have been getting have been refugees describing phosphorus weapons, horribly burned bodies, fires that burn on people when they touch these weapons, and they are unable to extinguish the fires even after dumping large amounts of water on the people.”

Dahr Jamail on Democracy Now, Nov 29, 2004

His new book: What the reviewers said

Beyond the Green Zone:
Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq
www.beyondthegreenzone.org

“While so much reporting from Iraq has remained embedded and wrong, Dahr Jamail’s courageous truth-telling from the frontline has been a beacon.”
John Pilger

“Essential for anybody who wants to know what is really happening in Iraq. A book which reports what Iraqis endure and what has happened to them during the occupation.”
Patrick Cockburn, foreign correspondent, The Independent, author, The Occupation

“From the earliest days of the war, Jamail has been a human conduit for the voices of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. In the face of tremendous personal risk, his commitment to the crucial, principled task of bearing witness has never wavered, and this extraordinary book is the result.”
Naomi Klein, author, The Shock Doctrine and No Logo

“What is chilling about Jamail’s accounts is the routine destructiveness of the US forces; how they demolish nearby homes after a roadside bomb, leave unexploded munitions in the fields of farmers who don’t give information, bulldoze orchards. Livelihoods destroyed, families displaced every day, incubating hatred. One of the worst episodes occurred when Jamail’s friend was caught by chance at prayer time in a mosque when worshippers were shot dead, with children trapped in the mayhem: a holy place desecrated in a US operation. We may know nothing of such routine details of the prosecution of this war, but these are the stories filling the Arabic media.”
Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian

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.

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

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

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

Download the full conference programme here

Tickets: £10 / £7

Download a registration form here

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

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.

Jane Shallice opened the workshop, describing some of the particular challenges the Stop the War Coalition faces in opposing the “War on Terror” and how and why journalists might portray the perspective of the anti-war campaign more effectively.

Shallice emphasised that activists in the anti-war movement come from various backgrounds but with great experience. She strongly rejected the notion famously expressed by Andrew Marr that the opposition to the Iraq war reflected the “petulant mewlings of amateurs.” She pointed out that such “amateurs” are usually motivated by deep concern and have “studied and fought and argued and expressed ideas in a way that ‘mere’ journalists, as professionals, may not.”

Describing her own direct experience campaigning against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, Shallice highlighted that many campaigners also have a grasp of the way the media operate and how this has changed in recent years. For example, coverage of the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan lacks the visual representation that brought the truth of Vietnam into the mainstream.

Shallice briefly summarised the Stop the War Coalition’s three main founding aims, namely:
1. To stop the war;
2. To prevent the erosion of civil liberties;
3. To prevent the growth of Islamophobia.

Despite huge support, she said, the anti-war movement ultimately failed to prevent war, while the erosion of civil liberties and growth of Islamophobia continue.

Clearly there were sections of the media that supported the Stop the War Coalition and there is no doubt that The Mirror’s backing contributed massively in recruiting protestors to the March 2003 demonstration. But too often editorial decisions were taken in other papers to dampen anti-war sentiment and elevate the pro-war argument, Shallice said.

And the role of New Labour’s communications advisors – specifically Alastair Campbell – and the capitulation of the BBC in the wake of the Hutton enquiry undermined the anti-war message. On this issue Shallice lamented that, while there were understandable reasons for the BBC’s concern, “there is huge support for the BBC that was never really tapped.”

As a result, the anti-war movement developed largely out of “old methods” of organising, i.e. public meetings – and the support it received says much about the government’s arguments. “Whatever the ‘best’ journalists were saying to promote their views, people didn’t believe them,” Shallice remarked.

Acknowledging that there are – and always have been – good journalists, Shallice stressed that strong, remarkable editorial decisions to give space to unpopular stories are few and far between.

Finally, Shallice discussed an emerging theme – the “asymmetry” of the mainstream narrative, which overwhelmingly represents those in power.

Somewhat ironically, she pointed out, the US military’s use of the term “asymmetrical warfare” for suicide bombing and IEDs has been widely adopted by the media, yet the use of air force against people without any air power is never described as such.

“In a sense you feel that about the way the world is expressed. The asymmetry is very clear – those in power have their message given, those without and who are critical of it are still attempting to find ways of having at least a little bit of their argument presented,” Shallice said.

To redress these imbalances, she urged journalists to recognise these fundamental arguments are among citizens and views should not be valued according to whether they are those of amateurs and professionals. She called on all to observe the mantra “doubt everything” when interpreting any line of information.

Peter Wilby continued by making some further observations about how the media influenced the anti-war movement’s impact, aside from its failure to develop an “alternative narrative” which he described in his plenary session talk.

Wilby noted that the movement changed the political course, even if it did not ultimately succeed in preventing war in Iraq. The fact that Tony Blair only won the vote in the House of Commons very narrowly was in that sense a victory, he said.

One “unfortunate” reason the protests did not have a higher profile in the media was that there was not enough drama – there was no violence, no direct action. Wilby recalled that newspapers described the successful anti-Vietnam war demonstration in the spring of 1968 a flop, because alarmist ideas that there were plots to attack Whitehall and the BBC failed to materialise.

He added that the media had marginalised the alternative, anti-war message by focusing on different groups within the Stop the War Coalition and speculating that it was being used as a “front” by the Socialist Workers Party, by Muslim organisations, or by “various undesirables.” Wilby noted that this is a familiar tactic that was used in coverage of anti-Vietnam war protests.

Discussion
Reporting demonstrations

A number of points were raised about the low profile or misrepresentation of anti-war demonstrations in the media. Becky (journalist) said that a poorly attended demonstration about BBC cuts received worldwide media attention, and that although turn-out alone is not the only marker of a movement’s importance, a more proportionate response to anti-war protests is needed.

Sheila (anti-war activist) asked why a Countryside Alliance demonstration one weekend received far greater media coverage, both during the build-up and afterwards, than a Stop the War demonstration of similar size the following week.

Daniel (freelance journalist) noted that the Guardian’s coverage of the 2000 May Day demonstration was no different to that in the Daily Mail – he asked why would this be the case if journalists on the ground are truly “free” to report the facts, as Sami Ramadani proposed? Daniel queried whether journalists should be covering anti-war demonstrations if, from a news editing perspective, the events in themselves are not necessarily newsworthy without something dramatic taking place. Should there be coverage of a movement, its ideas, or the facts on which the various arguments are structured?

He suggested that a bridge between journalists and activists could operate outside of the realm of “who’s in the SWP, or have you done something exciting on the streets today” and instead focus on building up a subcontext that cannot be ignored in the same way the government does.

Maintaining the movement’s profile – countering ‘Iraq fatigue’

People picked up on Peter Wilby’s recent commentary about “Iraq fatigue” in The Guardian. It was suggested this fatigue is due to the constant nature of the events, so despite extremely high level of atrocities there is no element of surprise or a change warranting greater coverage. This may also elevate or somehow legitimise any story about improvements in the situation, for example recent reports suggesting that the US “surge” has worked.

Trish said a similar problem arose in reporting atrocities in Northern Ireland but did not necessarily reflect public disinterest – would somehow changing the way news is delivered generate more interest in stories?

There was some discussion about the continuing interest in other stories about, e.g. Madeleine McCann and Amy Winehouse, and whether in fact this is therefore rather a “selective” fatigue.

Wilby commented that fatigue arises because newspapers feel that their readers cannot identity with Iraqis and their situation, partly because of the massive scale and horror of their problem, but also because they are of another ethnic background, religion, and culture.

Control of the media and how to resist it

The relationship between power and the means to control the narrative was seen as central to the problem. Sue (journalist) highlighted that effective “propaganda machines” from, for example, the US state department and Israel, monitor sensitive issues extremely closely, leading to a kind of censorship. The opposition does not have the necessary resources to counter this kind of media scrutiny.

NGOs, governmental and other institutions have enormous resources of information and it was suggested that there could be an equivalent resource to help journalists substantiate and explore alternative narratives on the war. Briefings to inform journalists about specific issues, e.g. political use of the UN Charter to legitimise wars of aggression, were suggested.

However, it was pointed out that journalists have the power to avoid inaccurate euphemisms such as “friendly fire” and “met the target” in their language. And a number of alternative sources of information were touched on, such as Arab media outlets, citizen journalism and the internet in general.

Daniel described a need to recreate the framing conditions in the newsroom and to think about how this can be influenced.

Jane Shallice stressed the need to follow trusted activists who read systematically and write investigative pieces for alternative publications. She praised an article in the Financial Times about US bases in Iraq, which followed up a more extensive article in the London Review of Books. She suggested that perhaps more analysis is needed rather than straightforward news briefings.

Peter Wilby noted that a serious limitation to setting up a major resource is the left’s lack of funds and inability to raise revenue the way that right-wing institutes and centres can. The rise of the “PR state” has compounded this problem.

By Caroline Price

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.

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.

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

The article starts here: In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “The President has made it clear that the United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution with respect to Iran. The State Department is working diligently along with the international community to address our broad range of concerns.” (The White House declined to comment.)

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”

In a speech at the United Nations last week, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was defiant. He referred to America as an “aggressor” state, and said, “How can the incompetents who cannot even manage and control themselves rule humanity and arrange its affairs? Unfortunately, they have put themselves in the position of God.” (The day before, at Columbia, he suggested that the facts of the Holocaust still needed to be determined.)

“A lot depends on how stupid the Iranians will be,” Brzezinski told me. “Will they cool off Ahmadinejad and tone down their language?” The Bush Administration, by charging that Iran was interfering in Iraq, was aiming “to paint it as ‘We’re responding to what is an intolerable situation,’ ” Brzezinski said. “This time, unlike the attack in Iraq, we’re going to play the victim. The name of our game seems to be to get the Iranians to overplay their hand.”

General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, in his report to Congress in September, buttressed the Administration’s case against Iran. “None of us, earlier this year, appreciated the extent of Iranian involvement in Iraq, something about which we and Iraq’s leaders all now have greater concern,” he said. Iran, Petraeus said, was fighting “a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.”

Iran has had a presence in Iraq for decades; the extent and the purpose of its current activities there are in dispute, however. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, when the Sunni-dominated Baath Party brutally oppressed the majority Shiites, Iran supported them. Many in the present Iraqi Shiite leadership, including prominent members of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, spent years in exile in Iran; last week, at the Council on Foreign Relations, Maliki said, according to the Washington Post, that Iraq’s relations with the Iranians had “improved to the point that they are not interfering in our internal affairs.” Iran is so entrenched in Iraqi Shiite circles that any “proxy war” could be as much through the Iraqi state as against it. The crux of the Bush Administration’s strategic dilemma is that its decision to back a Shiite-led government after the fall of Saddam has empowered Iran, and made it impossible to exclude Iran from the Iraqi political scene.

Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, who is an expert on Iran and Shiism, told me, “Between 2003 and 2006, the Iranians thought they were closest to the United States on the issue of Iraq.” The Iraqi Shia religious leadership encouraged Shiites to avoid confrontation with American soldiers and to participate in elections—believing that a one-man, one-vote election process could only result in a Shia-dominated government. Initially, the insurgency was mainly Sunni, especially Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Nasr told me that Iran’s policy since 2003 has been to provide funding, arms, and aid to several Shiite factions—including some in Maliki’s coalition. The problem, Nasr said, is that “once you put the arms on the ground you cannot control how they’re used later.”

In the Shiite view, the White House “only looks at Iran’s ties to Iraq in terms of security,” Nasr said. “Last year, over one million Iranians travelled to Iraq on pilgrimages, and there is more than a billion dollars a year in trading between the two countries. But the Americans act as if every Iranian inside Iraq were there to import weapons.”

Many of those who support the President’s policy argue that Iran poses an imminent threat. In a recent essay in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz depicted President Ahmadinejad as a revolutionary, “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it . . . with a new order dominated by Iran. . . . [T]he plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force.” Podhoretz concluded, “I pray with all my heart” that President Bush “will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel.” Podhoretz recently told politico.com that he had met with the President for about forty-five minutes to urge him to take military action against Iran, and believed that “Bush is going to hit” Iran before leaving office. (Podhoretz, one of the founders of neoconservatism, is a strong backer of Rudolph Giuliani’s Presidential campaign, and his son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, is a senior adviser to President Bush on national security.)

In early August, Army Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, told the Times about an increase in attacks involving explosively formed penetrators, a type of lethal bomb that discharges a semi-molten copper slug that can rip through the armor of Humvees. The Times reported that U.S. intelligence and technical analyses indicated that Shiite militias had obtained the bombs from Iran. Odierno said that Iranians had been “surging support” over the past three or four months.

Questions remain, however, about the provenance of weapons in Iraq, especially given the rampant black market in arms. David Kay, a former C.I.A. adviser and the chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations, told me that his inspection team was astonished, in the aftermath of both Iraq wars, by “the huge amounts of arms” it found circulating among civilians and military personnel throughout the country. He recalled seeing stockpiles of explosively formed penetrators, as well as charges that had been recovered from unexploded American cluster bombs. Arms had also been supplied years ago by the Iranians to their Shiite allies in southern Iraq who had been persecuted by the Baath Party.

“I thought Petraeus went way beyond what Iran is doing inside Iraq today,” Kay said. “When the White House started its anti-Iran campaign, six months ago, I thought it was all craziness. Now it does look like there is some selective smuggling by Iran, but much of it has been in response to American pressure and American threats—more a ‘shot across the bow’ sort of thing, to let Washington know that it was not going to get away with its threats so freely. Iran is not giving the Iraqis the good stuff—the anti-aircraft missiles that can shoot down American planes and its advanced anti-tank weapons.”

Another element of the Administration’s case against Iran is the presence of Iranian agents in Iraq. General Petraeus, testifying before Congress, said that a commando faction of the Revolutionary Guards was seeking to turn its allies inside Iraq into a “Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests.” In August, Army Major General Rick Lynch, the commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, told reporters in Baghdad that his troops were tracking some fifty Iranian men sent by the Revolutionary Guards who were training Shiite insurgents south of Baghdad. “We know they’re here and we target them as well,” he said.

Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me that “there are a lot of Iranians at any time inside Iraq, including those doing intelligence work and those doing humanitarian missions. It would be prudent for the Administration to produce more evidence of direct military training—or produce fighters captured in Iraq who had been trained in Iran.” He added, “It will be important for the Iraqi government to be able to state that they were unaware of this activity”; otherwise, given the intense relationship between the Iraqi Shiite leadership and Tehran, the Iranians could say that “they had been asked by the Iraqi government to train these people.” (In late August, American troops raided a Baghdad hotel and arrested a group of Iranians. They were a delegation from Iran’s energy ministry, and had been invited to Iraq by the Maliki government; they were later released.)

“If you want to attack, you have to prepare the groundwork, and you have to be prepared to show the evidence,” Clawson said. Adding to the complexity, he said, is a question that seems almost counterintuitive: “What is the attitude of Iraq going to be if we hit Iran? Such an attack could put a strain on the Iraqi government.”

A senior European diplomat, who works closely with American intelligence, told me that there is evidence that Iran has been making extensive preparation for an American bombing attack. “We know that the Iranians are strengthening their air-defense capabilities,” he said, “and we believe they will react asymmetrically—hitting targets in Europe and in Latin America.” There is also specific intelligence suggesting that Iran will be aided in these attacks by Hezbollah. “Hezbollah is capable, and they can do it,” the diplomat said.

In interviews with current and former officials, there were repeated complaints about the paucity of reliable information. A former high-level C.I.A. official said that the intelligence about who is doing what inside Iran “is so thin that nobody even wants his name on it. This is the problem.”

The difficulty of determining who is responsible for the chaos in Iraq can be seen in Basra, in the Shiite south, where British forces had earlier presided over a relatively secure area. Over the course of this year, however, the region became increasingly ungovernable, and by fall the British had retreated to fixed bases. A European official who has access to current intelligence told me that “there is a firm belief inside the American and U.K. intelligence community that Iran is supporting many of the groups in southern Iraq that are responsible for the deaths of British and American soldiers. Weapons and money are getting in from Iran. They have been able to penetrate many groups”—primarily the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias.

A June, 2007, report by the International Crisis Group found, however, that Basra’s renewed instability was mainly the result of “the systematic abuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias.” The report added that leading Iraqi politicians and officials “routinely invoke the threat of outside interference”—from bordering Iran—“to justify their behavior or evade responsibility for their failures.”

Earlier this year, before the surge in U.S. troops, the American command in Baghdad changed what had been a confrontational policy in western Iraq, the Sunni heartland (and the base of the Baathist regime), and began working with the Sunni tribes, including some tied to the insurgency. Tribal leaders are now getting combat support as well as money, intelligence, and arms, ostensibly to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Empowering Sunni forces may undermine efforts toward national reconciliation, however. Already, tens of thousands of Shiites have fled Anbar Province, many to Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, while Sunnis have been forced from their homes in Shiite communities. Vali Nasr, of Tufts, called the internal displacement of communities in Iraq a form of “ethnic cleansing.”

“The American policy of supporting the Sunnis in western Iraq is making the Shia leadership very nervous,” Nasr said. “The White House makes it seem as if the Shia were afraid only of Al Qaeda—but they are afraid of the Sunni tribesmen we are arming. The Shia attitude is ‘So what if you’re getting rid of Al Qaeda?’ The problem of Sunni resistance is still there. The Americans believe they can distinguish between good and bad insurgents, but the Shia don’t share that distinction. For the Shia, they are all one adversary.”

Nasr went on, “The United States is trying to fight on all sides—Sunni and Shia—and be friends with all sides.” In the Shiite view, “It’s clear that the United States cannot bring security to Iraq, because it is not doing everything necessary to bring stability. If they did, they would talk to anybody to achieve it—even Iran and Syria,” Nasr said. (Such engagement was a major recommendation of the Iraq Study Group.) “America cannot bring stability in Iraq by fighting Iran in Iraq.”

The revised bombing plan for a possible attack, with its tightened focus on counterterrorism, is gathering support among generals and admirals in the Pentagon. The strategy calls for the use of sea-launched cruise missiles and more precisely targeted ground attacks and bombing strikes, including plans to destroy the most important Revolutionary Guard training camps, supply depots, and command and control facilities.

“Cheney’s option is now for a fast in and out—for surgical strikes,” the former senior American intelligence official told me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to the Navy, he said, which had been chafing over its role in the Air Force-dominated air war in Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything they need—even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a path out,” the former official said.

A Pentagon consultant on counterterrorism told me that, if the bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short, sharp incursions” by American Special Forces units into suspected Iranian training sites. He said, “Cheney is devoted to this, no question.”

A limited bombing attack of this sort “only makes sense if the intelligence is good,” the consultant said. If the targets are not clearly defined, the bombing “will start as limited, but then there will be an ‘escalation special.’ Planners will say that we have to deal with Hezbollah here and Syria there. The goal will be to hit the cue ball one time and have all the balls go in the pocket. But add-ons are always there in strike planning.”

The surgical-strike plan has been shared with some of America’s allies, who have had mixed reactions to it. Israel’s military and political leaders were alarmed, believing, the consultant said, that it didn’t sufficiently target Iran’s nuclear facilities. The White House has been reassuring the Israeli government, the former senior official told me, that the more limited target list would still serve the goal of counter-proliferation by decapitating the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards, who are believed to have direct control over the nuclear-research program. “Our theory is that if we do the attacks as planned it will accomplish two things,” the former senior official said.

An Israeli official said, “Our main focus has been the Iranian nuclear facilities, not because other things aren’t important. We’ve worked on missile technology and terrorism, but we see the Iranian nuclear issue as one that cuts across everything.” Iran, he added, does not need to develop an actual warhead to be a threat. “Our problems begin when they learn and master the nuclear fuel cycle and when they have the nuclear materials,” he said. There was, for example, the possibility of a “dirty bomb,” or of Iran’s passing materials to terrorist groups. “There is still time for diplomacy to have an impact, but not a lot,” the Israeli official said. “We believe the technological timetable is moving faster than the diplomatic timetable. And if diplomacy doesn’t work, as they say, all options are on the table.”

The bombing plan has had its most positive reception from the newly elected government of Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. A senior European official told me, “The British perception is that the Iranians are not making the progress they want to see in their nuclear-enrichment processing. All the intelligence community agree that Iran is providing critical assistance, training, and technology to a surprising number of terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, through Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, too.”

There were four possible responses to this Iranian activity, the European official said: to do nothing (“There would be no retaliation to the Iranians for their attacks; this would be sending the wrong signal”); to publicize the Iranian actions (“There is one great difficulty with this option—the widespread lack of faith in American intelligence assessments”); to attack the Iranians operating inside Iraq (“We’ve been taking action since last December, and it does have an effect”); or, finally, to attack inside Iran.

The European official continued, “A major air strike against Iran could well lead to a rallying around the flag there, but a very careful targeting of terrorist training camps might not.” His view, he said, was that “once the Iranians get a bloody nose they rethink things.” For example, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani and Ali Larijani, two of Iran’s most influential political figures, “might go to the Supreme Leader and say, ‘The hard-line policies have got us into this mess. We must change our approach for the sake of the regime.’ ”

A retired American four-star general with close ties to the British military told me that there was another reason for Britain’s interest—shame over the failure of the Royal Navy to protect the sailors and Royal Marines who were seized by Iran on March 23rd, in the Persian Gulf. “The professional guys are saying that British honor is at stake, and if there’s another event like that in the water off Iran the British will hit back,” he said.

The revised bombing plan “could work—if it’s in response to an Iranian attack,” the retired four-star general said. “The British may want to do it to get even, but the more reasonable people are saying, ‘Let’s do it if the Iranians stage a cross-border attack inside Iraq.’ It’s got to be ten dead American soldiers and four burned trucks.” There is, he added, “a widespread belief in London that Tony Blair’s government was sold a bill of goods by the White House in the buildup to the war against Iraq. So if somebody comes into Gordon Brown’s office and says, ‘We have this intelligence from America,’ Brown will ask, ‘Where did it come from? Have we verified it?’ The burden of proof is high.”

The French government shares the Administration’s sense of urgency about Iran’s nuclear program, and believes that Iran will be able to produce a warhead within two years. France’s newly elected President, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a stir in late August when he warned that Iran could be attacked if it did not halt is nuclear program. Nonetheless, France has indicated to the White House that it has doubts about a limited strike, the former senior intelligence official told me. Many in the French government have concluded that the Bush Administration has exaggerated the extent of Iranian meddling inside Iraq; they believe, according to a European diplomat, that “the American problems in Iraq are due to their own mistakes, and now the Americans are trying to show some teeth. An American bombing will show only that the Bush Administration has its own agenda toward Iran.”

A European intelligence official made a similar point. “If you attack Iran,” he told me, “and do not label it as being against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it will strengthen the regime, and help to make the Islamic air in the Middle East thicker.”

Ahmadinejad, in his speech at the United Nations, said that Iran considered the dispute over its nuclear program “closed.” Iran would deal with it only through the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said, and had decided to “disregard unlawful and political impositions of the arrogant powers.” He added, in a press conference after the speech, “the decisions of the United States and France are not important.”

The director general of the I.A.E.A., Mohamed ElBaradei, has for years been in an often bitter public dispute with the Bush Administration; the agency’s most recent report found that Iran was far less proficient in enriching uranium than expected. A diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is based, said, “The Iranians are years away from making a bomb, as ElBaradei has said all along. Running three thousand centrifuges does not make a bomb.” The diplomat added, referring to hawks in the Bush Administration, “They don’t like ElBaradei, because they are in a state of denial. And now their negotiating policy has failed, and Iran is still enriching uranium and still making progress.”

The diplomat expressed the bitterness that has marked the I.A.E.A.’s dealings with the Bush Administration since the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “The White House’s claims were all a pack of lies, and Mohamed is dismissive of those lies,” the diplomat said.

Hans Blix, a former head of the I.A.E.A., questioned the Bush Administration’s commitment to diplomacy. “There are important cards that Washington could play; instead, they have three aircraft carriers sitting in the Persian Gulf,” he said. Speaking of Iran’s role in Iraq, Blix added, “My impression is that the United States has been trying to push up the accusations against Iran as a basis for a possible attack—as an excuse for jumping on them.”

The Iranian leadership is feeling the pressure. In the press conference after his U.N. speech, Ahmadinejad was asked about a possible attack. “They want to hurt us,” he said, “but, with the will of God, they won’t be able to do it.” According to a former State Department adviser on Iran, the Iranians complained, in diplomatic meetings in Baghdad with Ambassador Crocker, about a refusal by the Bush Administration to take advantage of their knowledge of the Iraqi political scene. The former adviser said, “They’ve been trying to convey to the United States that ‘We can help you in Iraq. Nobody knows Iraq better than us.’ ” Instead, the Iranians are preparing for an American attack.

The adviser said that he had heard from a source in Iran that the Revolutionary Guards have been telling religious leaders that they can stand up to an American attack. “The Guards are claiming that they can infiltrate American security,” the adviser said. “They are bragging that they have spray-painted an American warship—to signal the Americans that they can get close to them.” (I was told by the former senior intelligence official that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which an American warship was spray-painted with a bull’s-eye while docked in Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.)

“Do you think those crazies in Tehran are going to say, ‘Uncle Sam is here! We’d better stand down’? ” the former senior intelligence official said. “The reality is an attack will make things ten times warmer.”

Another recent incident, in Afghanistan, reflects the tension over intelligence. In July, the London Telegraph reported that what appeared to be an SA-7 shoulder-launched missile was fired at an American C-130 Hercules aircraft. The missile missed its mark. Months earlier, British commandos had intercepted a few truckloads of weapons, including one containing a working SA-7 missile, coming across the Iranian border. But there was no way of determining whether the missile fired at the C-130 had come from Iran—especially since SA-7s are available through black-market arms dealers.

Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. officer who has worked closely with his counterparts in Britain, added to the story: “The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell us about the incident—in fear that Cheney would use it as a reason to attack Iran.” The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he said.

The retired four-star general confirmed that British intelligence “was worried” about passing the information along. “The Brits don’t trust the Iranians,” the retired general said, “but they also don’t trust Bush and Cheney.”

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.

The week began with a letter from a Guantánamo Bay officer suggesting that I might have smuggled some Speedo swimming trunks and “Under Armour briefs” to my client, British resident Shaker Aamer. Shaker was apparently caught wearing both “contraband” items in his prison cell.

I was unsure whether to be amused or annoyed. These are serious allegations, yet the notion that I was going to slip a prisoner some Speedos was pretty silly. So I composed a reply that contained every euphemism for underwear that I could conjure up, and relished reminding the officer that I am more concerned with legal briefs than the Under Armour variety.

Surely it would be clear even to the Guantánamo authorities that their own guards must have supplied the offending lingerie. My internet research disclosed that Under Armour does a line of “tactical” underwear for the military. They’re camouflaged, presumably in case a soldier gets caught with his trousers down somewhere in the jungle. Meanwhile, the only pool of water where Shaker could employ his Speedos would be his lavatory, putting me in mind of the hackneyed admonition at the public baths: “We don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in our pool.”

I had imagined spending the week on something rather more pressing. Sami al-Haj, the Al Jazeera cameraman held in Guantánamo, has been on a hungerstrike for more than 230 days, more than three times as long as the IRA strikers in 1980. Sami was seized when on assignment to Afghanistan, apparently because the US thought he had filmed Al Jazeera’s famous Bin Laden interview. As has so often been the case of late, the US was wrong (though name me a journalist who would turn down a Bin Laden scoop).

Now Sami is being force-fed with a 110cm tube shoved down his nose. The military is doing it in a way that is calculated to be painful – or, to borrow General Craddock’s offensive euphemism, to make it “inconvenient” for Sami and others to continue their peaceful protest. Instead of leaving the tube in – which would be bad enough – they insert it and pull it out again with each feeding. I tried experimenting with this on myself one time and it is excruciating.

Sami began his strike when his patience finally ran out on 7 January of this year, the fifth anniversary of his incarceration without trial. I have just received the unclassified portions of my notes from a recent visit – every word he tells me has to go through the censors, so there is a lot I cannot pass on.

I am very worried about him. His memory has been going, along with his grip on the English language. He has developed a paranoid fear that he will be the next prisoner to die at the island gulag. “My prison number is 3, 4, 5,” he told me, his face serious. “First, in June 2006, there were three prisoners who died. Then, this May, there was a fourth to die. Three, four… five, I am afraid I am going to be the fifth.”

I administered a psychological screening test on Sami when I saw him. I cannot write what he said as (for reasons that are beyond me) that part was not cleared for public consumption. I’ve consulted with various mental health professionals about him. One doctor reminded me not to refer to Sami as paranoid: “His fears of mistreatment at the hands of the Americans are not, unfortunately, paranoid. They are very worrying, but he has more than five years’ experience proving that they are very real.”

Doctors from the US, UK and Middle East all agree that there are urgent concerns about Sami’s health, and that he needs independent medical intervention. He won’t get it, no matter what I do. Sami has already told me what I have to say to his seven-year-old son, Mohammed, if he does not make it out of his prison cell alive. I hope I never have to deliver the message.

When BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was being held hostage by the Palestinian Army of Islam, Sami issued a plea asking them to let his fellow journalist go without conditions. It was broadcast by Sami’s Al Jazeera employers, in the hope that the kidnappers would be watching the Arabic news channel. I wonder how to contact Alan Johnston now, to see if he can return the favour.

The western media has been too slow to come to Sami’s aid. I am not sure why.
Clive Stafford Smith is the legal director of Reprieve, a UK charity which provides investigation and legal representation to prisoners denied justice by powerful governments across the world, from death row to Guantánamo Bay. He has just published a book about his work, Bad Men – Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Contact him at info@reprieve.org.uk, or Reprieve, PO Box 52742, London EC4P 4WS, or telephone 020 7353 4640

The plight facing Iraqis “is as significant (as Darfur),” says Margarette Wahlstrom, deputy head of the UN’s aid coordination arm Ocha.

Comparisons between emergencies are difficult but in terms of displaced people alone, Iraq’s crisis, with 4m displaced people, is double that of Darfur. For Iraq to be described in similar terms as Sudan – whose plight has mobilised a new generation of human rights activists – is striking testament to how bad the situation has become.

In early 2003, before US forces crossed the border from Kuwait, Iraqis may have thought things could not get much worse. A crippling conflict with Iran, followed by the first Gulf war and a decade of sanctions, had crippled the economy and left many millions dependent on food handouts.

But, anecdotally at least, the situation in mid-2007 is now even more dire than in 2003. “As far as children’s living conditions go, they are worse now than immediately prior to the war,” says Claire Hajaj, who works for Unicef, the children’s agency, in Amman.

Oxfam, the international aid agency, said in a recent report that 8m Iraqis were in urgent need of emergency aid, while “many more are living in poverty, without basic services, and increasingly threatened by disease and malnutrition. If people’s basic needs are left unattended, this will only serve to further destabilise the country.”

Iraqis are fleeing their homes in their millions, in the largest Middle East population movement since the creation of Israel. Jennifer Pagonis, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency, says the monthly rate of displacement has reached more than 60,000 people.

More than 2m Iraqis are displaced inside Iraq, and struggling to survive. Syria estimates that it now hosts more than 1.4m Iraqis, while Jordan has between 500,000 and 750,000. Both countries’ social services are overwhelmed, and even those Iraqi refugees who once had resources say their money is running out.

Unfortunately, what may now be the world’s biggest humanitarian emergency is – by comparison with the global angst over Darfur – relatively unnoticed. A serious problem, aid workers say, is that rampant insecurity means international relief officials cannot go in, and accurate numbers are almost impossible to find.

Based in Amman, the UN’s humanitarian operation relies mainly on local actors, who have reasons to massage the figures, and most official statistics date from 2005 and early 2006, before the bombing of a major Shia shrine in Samarra precipitated a new surge in sectarian violence.

At that point, indicators broadly did not suggest that Iraqis were faring as badly as before the war. Nevertheless, even then a comprehensive survey published in May 2006 by the World Food Programme revealed that more than 4m people (15.4 per cent of the surveyed population) were food insecure, and in dire need of different types of humanitarian assistance – 11 per cent higher than two years earlier.

The WFP is currently supporting a nationwide Food Security Survey; which should be ready by the first half of January 2008. “Figures are hard to come by. We know that things have got worse particularly in the latter half of 2006 and first quarter of 2007, but we haven’t got the stats to prove it,” says Ms Hajaj.

“All we have is qualitative data from our field people, who report drug shortages in hospitals, long queues at the ante-natal centres, curfews forbidding travel to hospital after dark, closed schools, frightened students and exhausted teachers.”

What can be said is that Iraq’s indicators are almost universally worse than those of its neighbours. Iraq’s maternal mortality rates in 2004 were 1 in 65 deaths, compared to 1 in 130 for Syria and 1 in 450 for Jordan. Immunisation rates were 55 per cent, compared to 68 per cent in 2000 and 95 per cent and 99 per cent in Jordan and Syria respectively.

The UN estimates that only 30 per cent of the population has access to safe water, and with only 17 per cent of Iraq’s sewage treated before release, the majority of Iraqis are living in unsanitary conditions – evidenced by a recent cholera outbreak in northern Iraq.

According to Oxfam, only 60 per cent of 4m Iraqis reliant on food aid have access to rations through the government-run Public Distribution System (PDS), down from 96 per cent in 2004. Forty-three per cent of Iraqis suffer from ‘absolute poverty’, with over half the population out of work.

It also claims child malnutrition rates have risen from 19 per cent before the US-led invasion in 2003 to 28 per cent now; while the number of Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies has risen from 50 per cent to 70 per cent since 2003.

Education is also in crisis. During the last year, the UN warns that many schools in the Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala areas were closed, and at least one in five children did not attend classes nationwide. In the south and north, teachers are struggling to accommodate displaced pupils who were able to re-enroll; many others were not because of bureaucratic hurdles.

“The people of Iraq have a right, enshrined in international law, to material assistance that meets their humanitarian needs, but this right is being neglected,” says Oxfam.

”The government of Iraq, international donors, and the United Nations (UN) system… have a responsibility to find ways to secure the right conditions for the delivery of assistance, both where conflict is intense and in less insecure parts of the country to which many people have fled.”

• 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.

Sitting in a High Court conference room one cold January day in 2004, little did we foresee the implications for Britain’s last well-loved national institution of what we were hearing. Of course we didn’t. We were too busy fighting to suppress the laughter to find the energy for clairvoyance.

For me, ever the professional, it proved a losing battle. Lord Hutton had weakened resistance by repeatedly pronouncing the word mass, as in WMD, to rhyme with arse, indeed farce. When he then revealed that the furthest he could go, in judging whether Alastair Campbell pressured John Scarlett to spice up the intelligence, was that just maybe, Scarlett had sensed some unspoken desire of Campbell’s that the reports be less equivocal and subliminally reacted to it, that was it. The giggling erupted, and I scurried from the room before His Lordship had me removed. This high point of judicial buffoonery soon lost its comic edge.

Within a day, a flawlessly executed establishment fix had removed chairman Gavyn Davies and director general Greg Dyke, and set the template for the cowardice under fire we now see from the BBC almost daily. Today, thanks to a monumentally clueless retired Law Lord, we look on helplessly as the BBC commits a lingering form of professional suicide.

It was snowing in the Strand that January day, and from memory I’m pretty sure that was the last time any snow settled in London. It should go without saying that one can draw no conclusion about climate change from the meteorological observation that that snowfall in one part of one country has all but vanished, where 30 years ago it was plentiful. It should do, but it doesn’t.

The central reason for the BBC’s abandonment of its climate change telethon Planet Relief is that those who dismiss global warming as a leftie conspiracy to purloin more taxes do not play by the same rules. To them, much as for Messrs Scarlett and Campbell, anything may be adduced as decisive proof.

Almost every paper has its resident climate change gainsayer… a hack with at most a chemistry O-level who, through some mystical process of scholarly osmosis has come to understand this complex subject better than all those hundreds of scientists, armed with powerful computer simulations, who have devoted their working lives to it. There are countless examples of their work, but one will suffice to give a flavour. A while ago, the Daily Mail’s Tom Utley assuaged worries about water levels rising as a result of melting glaciers on this single ground: when the ice in his gin and tonic melts, explained Mr Utley (and one presumes this won him a fellowship of the Royal Society), the liquid doesn’t come spilling over the top of his glass.

There are at least a dozen equally gifted amateurs in the national press, along with a small but vocal band of politicians and even the odd scientist, whose views dissent sharply from the mainstream. Somehow this elite corps has created a weather system of its own to freeze the well-meaning but enfeebled heart of the BBC.

I yield to no one in my disdain for TV marathons in which soap actors and comics brandish their empathy like AK47s, spraying bullets of misplaced moral superiority at the viewer. But I also accept that the likes of Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis are heroes for the barely calculable good they do in raising not merely money but awareness of the gravest global problems.

It isn’t easy to picture Lord Reith sitting in his armchair revelling in the sight of Davina McCall prancing across a stage in a £16,000 designer outfit hectoring the viewership to cough up for the starving of Somalia. But if there is a more effective modern translation of his mission statement about the need to “inform, educate and entertain” than a climate change telethon, I can’t imagine what it might be.

There is plenty of room too, of course, for more rigorous scientific documentaries for those who prefer them, and such a series will apparently replace Planet Relief. But when it comes to engaging a young audience with the perceived attention span of a goldfish in early stage Alzheimer’s, what you need is Ricky Gervais reprising his well-worn parody of the faux-altruistic celeb.

Trailing this latest act of BBC cravenness at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Newsnight editor Peter Barron declared that it isn’t the Beeb’s job to save the world. This brings to mind a politician whom few of you will remember. Long ago, it was the rhetorical gambit of a Mr Tony Blair to address only those arguments that had never been made.

No one to my knowledge has ever said that the BBC exists to save the world, or that this was Planet Relief’s intent. To conflate the desire to inform and educate about what may or may not be a danger to humanity with a megalomaniacal Messiah complex is the cheapest form of intellectual chicanery. If Mr Barron cannot trust his employer to include, in an entire day of programming, sufficient caveats about the reliability of scientific opinion, he might think about working for a less irresponsible broadcaster.

The truth is that this climbdown has nothing to do with the desire to avoid preachiness or partiality; and everything to do with the blind fear of being attacked that is the residue of Hutton and those recent, foolish but trivial misjudgments over that Queen documentary and those “live” TV phone in competitions.

Thirty years ago, when the snow fell freely over London, our elders and betters routinely referred to British institutions with stereotypical English smugness. The Royal Family, the NHS, the police, the judicial system, Lloyds of London and the BBC … each and every one was, to the ever nostalgic inhabitants of a fading post-imperial power, “the best in the world”.

Of the above, only the BBC deserved that reputation then, and only the BBC retains it now. Quite suddenly it is in jeopardy, however, not because there is another broadcaster on this planet fit to lick the boots of a corporation which, for all its foibles and errors, remains peerlessly trustworthy in the facet of public service broadcasting that matters most – the reporting and interpretation of fact. The BBC’s reputation is imperilled because those who run it, still paralysed by post-Hutton traumatic stress, lack the balls to eschew grovelling for every trivial cock-up in favour of telling its critics that they won’t take lectures on ethics and bias from tabloid newspapers and disgraced government propagandists.

The one memorable thing widely known about Mark Thompson, Mr Dyke’s successor as director general, is that one day in 1988, for reasons that remain opaque, he bit a newsroom colleague on the arm. How the Beeb needs him to relocate his incisors and that latent attack dog instinct now.

It was 3 pm on a Thursday afternoon in the small town of Bughni, located in the Baghran district of Helmand province. Hundreds of people has gathered for the traditional weekly market, or “mela,” where locals trade and haggle over everything from cows to carpets.

Suddenly the bombs came, causing panic and reportedly killing upwards of 200 civilians and injuring many more. If the reports are confirmed, it would be the highest single casualty figure in Afghanistan this year.

That is the residents’ version of events in Bughni on 2 August. Eyewitnesses tell gruesome tales of headless bodies piled high waiting for identification. Many say they lost children, brothers, fathers.

“The bombing by foreign forces started when all the villagers were gathered for the traditional mela, where they buy all their requirements for the week,” said Sultan Mohammad, a local man. “This mela is close to a holy shrine. At three in the afternoon, the planes came and dropped bombs on the people, killing more than 200 and injuring 150.

“There were children and old people there. How are we at fault? Why are we being killed?”

But Combined Joint Task Force-82, the US-led Coalition force which carried out the bombing, told a very different story.

“Coalition forces conducted a precision air strike against two notorious Taliban commanders conducting a leadership meeting in a remote area of the Baghran district,” read the press release. “Coalition forces employed precision guided munitions… after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area.”

The gulf between the two accounts is a telling reflection of the situation in Helmand, where local people and the foreign forces often seem to be inhabit alternate universes.

One problem is lack of local knowledge. While there were reports that the Taliban were carrying out public executions of people they deemed spies that Thursday afternoon, it seems certain that the bulk of the people gathered there had come for the weekly market.

In the absence of normal shops, most communities mount a weekly trade fair, bringing handicrafts, livestock, farm produce and clothing along to barter or sell. In Bughni, market day falls on a Thursday, the start of Afghanistan’s weekend.

NATO has made much of the fact that those assembled were all, or mostly, fighting-age males. But the absence of women in public places is simply a fact of life in the Pashtun-dominated south, particularly in areas under Taliban control. Women are closeted at home while their men go out to do the shopping.

There were, however, children and old men among the dead and injured, as photographs taken at the hospital in the provincial capital Lashgar Gah attest.

But amid the barrage of accusations and counterclaims, the truth remains elusive.

As an obviously frustrated Defense Ministry spokesman told reporters, “They do not carry ID cards to show who they are. While they are fighting they are Taliban, but when they are killed they are suddenly civilians.”

Mohammad Hussein Andiwal, chief of police in Helmand province, confirmed that some two dozen injured had been brought to the Bost Hospital in Lashkar Gah.

“I can’t say whether they are civilians or not,” he told IWPR. “As for those who were killed, they might have been civilians or they might have been Taliban.”

The injured were taken to various hospitals in the area. Some were transferred to Musa Qala, a Taliban stronghold about 100 kilometers from Bughni. Others were taken to Kandahar, about 150 kilometers away, and more still went to Lashkar Gah, over 200 kilometers from the scene of the bombing.

“Many died on the way,” said Abdul Karim, a resident of Baghran. “One of my sons is in Bost Hospital. I don’t think he will survive. Two other sons are in Musa Qala. Two of my cousins were killed, and two more were injured.”

There were so many dead, he added, that the survivors were just stacking the bodies.

“We piled about 50 bodies up for relatives to come and identify,” he said. “Most were missing their heads or other body parts. We hoped their relatives would know them by their clothes, tattoos, shoes or something.”

The scenes he described were horrific. “It was a day of blackness,” he said. “Almost everyone had lost someone. People did not know where their family members were. I saw people just sitting on the ground, staring at nothing. There was mourning everywhere.” “We grew tired of collecting the dead,” said Hafizullah, another resident. “In the hospital in Musa Qala, there was not a single empty bed.”

One young man in hospital in Lashkar Gah was so badly injured he could barely speak. Through burned and swollen lips, he said, “We were at the mela and suddenly the bombs came. They brought us here because there was no space in Musa Qala.”

Gul Wali, 18, was also among the injured. “Bombs were falling from the sky into the trees, and I saw pieces of flesh and bone,” he said. “These were our villagers, they were innocent people. They had just come to the mela to buy food for their families. Instead, they ended up looking for their loved ones among piles of bodies.”

According to Major Chris Belcher, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-82, the strike was an unqualified success.

“This operation shows that there is no safe haven for insurgents,” he said, in an official press release.

An officer with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed that the strike had been justified.

“We are confident that we hit a high-level meeting of the Taliban,” he told IWPR.

Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry also issued a press release claiming victory.

“At 4:23 in the afternoon of 12th Asad [2 August], terrorists who spread panic among the people wanted to hang six civilians on charges of collaboration with the government. This happened at Bagh-e-Nahi, near the Shah Ibrahim Baba shrine.

“In that meeting were Mullah Dadullah Mansoor, Mullah Abdurahim Akhund, Mullah Bulbul Kajaki, and other high-ranking Taleban warlords as well as some foreign terrorists. They were targeted from the air. According to initial reports, dozens of terrorists were killed or injured.”

Afghan forces, the US-led Coalition and ISAF all claim that several Taliban commanders were among the dead. One of the main targets was Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, brother of commander Mullah Dadullah Akhund, who was killed by foreign forces in May. Others listed among the slain were Mullah Rahim Akhund, the Taleban “governor” of Helmand, his brother Mullah Majid, and Mullah Bulbul Kajaki.

Mansoor Dadullah has, however, given several media interviews since he was declared dead, and insists that the others are also alive and well. According to one report, he claimed to be drinking tea with Mullah Bulbul and Mullah Majid as he spoke to reporters.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yusuf echoed Dadullah’s statements in a telephone interview with IWPR.

“There was not a single Talib in that area,” he said. “There was no hanging, and no big meeting. The Taliban are not so stupid as to gather in such a vulnerable place. It was a Thursday mela, and all of those killed and injured were civilians.”

Despite this, locals said there had been executions under way. “Armed Taliban were hanging three people on charges of spying for foreign forces,” said one man, Khan Mohammad. “Then the planes came, so I ran away.”

Another man, who had come to Lashkar Gah with an injured relative, also told of the executions. Dressed in long traditional Afghan clothes, with eyes red from rage and grief, he was only too eager to open his heart to a reporter.

“We went to watch the execution at the mela place. The Taliban were hanging people. There were seven spies to be hanged, but after the first two, the bombing started.”

It is almost impossible to unravel the contradictory claims of the various sides in the conflict.

ISAF, with the British in the lead, generally get most of the blame when air strikes kill civilians. Its spokespersons insist that ISAF does all it can to minimize civilian casualties. But the peacekeeping force has little control over the American troops in the area.

Coalition troops and US Special Forces, which are not under NATO command, are mentoring the Afghan National Army during what are termed “kinetic” operations in Helmand. Time after time, the air strikes attributed to ISAF have been carried out by American forces.

Over the past few months, in Sarwan Qala, Hyderabad and now Baghran, hundreds of people have been killed or injured in American-led air strikes. Precise figures are hard to obtain, not least because most families bury their dead immediately as custom requires.

All parties – foreign forces, the Taleban, and civilians too – have an interest in advancing their point of view, leading to wildly conflicting claims of casualties.

In this latest incident, the Taliban claim that not a single insurgent was killed or injured, which, given the degree of control they claim to exert over Baghran, seems unlikely. As Qari Yusuf put it, “There are no Afghan forces there. The entire district is controlled by the Taliban.”

But, if the dozens of eyewitnesses are to be believed, it cannot be true that the strike was as precise and clinical as the Coalition claims.

The dispute over basic facts is unlikely to be resolved, and all sides remain entrenched in their positions.

“[The Taliban] are sore that we hit them, which is why they are putting out these claims of civilian casualties,” said the ISAF officer. “But we know what we did there was right.”

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).

Walsh writes: “For a chilling display of the awesome power of American air strikes, look no further than the internet.

“A nine-minute clip on YouTube offers a terrifying glimpse of the way the war is being won and lost in southern Afghanistan. The video, filmed from the belly of a Spectre AC-130 gunship, shows an attack on an alleged insurgent camp, rendered through a quivering black and white screen and the pilot’s mechanical monotone.

“The crosshairs wander across a cluster of buildings, seeking out targets and shredding them to pieces. The bombs blitz mud dwellings, turn vehicles into fireballs, and mow down dozens of small white figures – people – as they sprint hopeless for their lives. ‘You are clear to level the building,’ says the voice. The only sop to local sensitivities is that the Americans avoid hitting a mosque.

“This is the death-dealing air power that has allowed Nato and US troops to spread deep into Afghanistan’s most remote and hostile territory.”

Walsh also notes that “Human rights groups estimate that 230 civilians were killed in combat in southern Afghanistan last year; another 300 have died in Helmand this year, according to one estimate. The majority perished in air strikes. Last December Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, wept as he spoke of his frustration to stop coalition forces ‘killing our children’.”