Former Guardian and Observer journalist, Jonathan Cook, shares our incredulity:

It really is astounding that we still need to talk about this as though it is controversial – though, of course, we do.

Everyone accepts that the mainstream media are businesses. As such they are out to maximise profits, increase their brand visibility and market share, and to develop the best possible public image they can (though this last aim usually takes a back seat to the other commercial imperatives if they conflict). This is true for all large businesses…

With that context, we can see that Seumas Milne – however nice, open-minded, progressive he is as an individual – cannot speak honestly about the media or his role in it. It’s rather like the scene in Ricky Gervais’ film The Invention of Lying when the Cola rep tastes his company’s drink in a TV promotional ad and admits (because he is incapable of lying), “Oh, that’s rather sweet”. it’s funny precisely because we know that’s exactly what no Coca Cola employee could ever dare do publicly. It would be career suicide. Milne and Monbiot’s situation is no different.  (Email to Media Lens, January 25, 2012)

Further support for our attempt to boost public discussion came from a rather surprising source: Michael White, the Guardian’s assistant editor. In a piece titled, “Media Lens shows it doesn’t get the whole picture”, White wrote that our latest alert “is largely devoted to badmouthing the Guardian.”

The pejorative use of ‘badmouthing’ signalled that however reasoned and well-referenced our criticism of the Guardian might be it was, as usual, to be dismissed as angry invective. The familiar litany of stock mainstream responses to our work was rolled out: We don’t “do subtle”. Rather, we exhibit ‘strident conceit’, “narcissism”, and “mean-spirited nit-picking”. We are also “naïve”’, guilty of  “artlessly framing” our own narrative “as truth”. Ours is a “childishly apocalyptic polemic”. We think we “know how the world works” but we “may grow out of that”. Affable, but, in fact, effortlessly patronising, White noted that Media Lens was set up in 2001 by “a couple of bright and determined young graduates”. Mature students, perhaps, given that we were both a year shy of 40 at the time. As with so much mainstream reaction over the years, White saw what he wanted to see – nothing really meriting serious attention. But as many readers observed, he was paying us attention at some length – something didn’t add up!

“This week’s attack,” White continued, “focuses on colleagues of mine, specifically George Monbiot and Seumas Milne, two of the Guardian’s more radical leftwing contributors. In effect, Media Lens is saying, they trim their sails and pull their punches to accommodate their paymasters, their presence in the paper’s Comment columns little more than a gesture to pluralism or dissent.”

He added:   “OK, if you say so. Most people have to trim their views at one time or another, though I have watched journalists smuggling dissenting opinions into even the Murdoch press with admiration for years.”

Yes, most people have to trim their views. But media omissions and bias go far beyond trimming, and far beyond the self-restraint required in everyday life. As we will see below, our point is that whole areas of thought and discussion are demonstrably off the agenda for corporate journalists with disastrous consequences for our species. If this is a grand claim, it is one that predicts that it will be perceived as grandiose by journalists and media consumers trained to view even the most pathological aspects of our society as ‘normal’.

It seems our “nit-picking” focus also ignores the blocks on reactionary views. Describing himself as “an elderly herbivore of moderate opinions”, White complained that it had been difficult to place a defence of Blair in the paper when the former prime minister first gave evidence to the Chilcot inquiry:

There was a distinct lack of pluralism in the media that day, but I doubt if Media Lens spotted it.

This could be a sign of the Guardian’s intolerance. Or a sign that even it has abandoned its attempts to defend the indefensible (having urged citizens to vote for Blair, even after his worst crimes had been thoroughly exposed, in 2005).

This, White’s solitary red-herring, was supposed to undermine our detailed argument that the corporate nature of the mass media tends to produce performance that defends and furthers the goals of the corporate system. Apropos of nothing much, White completed his fairy tale account of mainstream radicalism with the estimation that Channel 4′s Jon Snow “does more good for progressive attitudes than half a dozen Pilgers”. Ironically, it was our own unpleasant confrontation with the reality of Snow’s self-professed ‘pinko-liberalism’ that helped motivate us to start Media Lens.

But White’s real ‘worry’ about Media Lens “which disinclines me to seek wisdom on its site very often is that it betrays the narcissism of small difference that is so destructive on the left.”

Again, despite serious evidence supplied over ten years, White dismisses our critique as trivial – the “narcissism of small difference,”

Jonathan Cook concluded his reaction to White’s article:

What to do when an “irritant” unsettles you? Unleash the ad hominems – lots of references to how “childish” you are – while trying to shore up his and the Guardian’s credentials as worldly and self-deprecating. It’s a master-class in how to belittle an argument and avoid dealing with it entirely.

As for the “they may grow out of it”, doesn’t that cut both ways? I was one of the lentil-eating Guardianistas in my early 20s and a devoted Michael White wannabee in my 30s, when I was working there. I’m now 46, seen a bit of the world, and sense I may be nearly all grown-up. And my verdict: they’re starting to run scared.

Keep up the good work.  (Email to Media Lens, January 27, 2012)

Readers Respond – And The Return Of Monty Python

Scores of readers responded in the Guardian Comments section below White’s online article. To his credit, White also joined in, describing the responses as ‘a decent spread.’  In truth, White received a pummelling – responses favoured our position by about 10 to 1.

While White’s five follow-up posts elicited a grand total of four ‘Recommend’ clicks from readers, by far the most popular comment, recommended by 82 readers, is this one:

If medialens are so “wrong” and naive and “don’t get it” then why the long article?

The reason is that they are right.

Assange smears, Iran nukes lies, Chavez smears, silence on the sky high obscene pay of the guardian executives and editor, the tax avoidance of the gmg [Guardian Media Group], all examples of Guardian hypocrisy.

The guardian gives the impression of being radical yet it is just a slightly less right wing media outlet publishing pro war establishment propaganda.

Why didn’t the guardian call the illegal Bombing of Libya, the terrorism we support and create in Syria, the war crimes in iraq, the war crimes of Israel, the war crimes in Afghanistan, the illegal murders and torture in Pakistan by the USA, all by the name they are. War crimes. And call for those that carried them out and those who printed propaganda about them, to be tried for crimes against humanity? Because it was and is complicit.

The guardian is yet another establishment outlet and medialens exposed you and you don’t like the truth. Hence the smear article here.

In one post, White responded to a reader who had challenged him to justify his use of “nit-picking” to describe Media Lens:

Nit-picking”? This started with my surprise that ML thinks it helpful to go after two Guardian colleagues whose views are more closely aligned with ML’s own that most of us are. I’m not the only person posting on this thread who has had this feeling.

That strikes me as both “naive” and lacking “the bigger picture” though it is common enough among small groups – left, right and centre – who feel they have a unique and righteous insight into virtue. It’s the Popular Front of Judea joke in the Monty Python sketch in Life of Brian.

The Monty Python sketch did provide an amusing satire on left infighting. But like the standard association of ‘Big Brother’-style thought control with totalitarian regimes, the idea that toxic infighting is the preserve of leftists – a sign of their naïve, unworldly idealism – is an ironic product of mainstream propaganda. Thought control is far more important in ostensibly free societies like our own, while totalitarian regimes rely far more on force. Similarly, mainstream intolerance is such that progressive, compassionate ideas and aims are efficiently shredded and thrown out. Thus, for all its disagreements, the left has made far more progress in developing enlightened, compassionate analyses than the mainstream.

Consider, for example, that the left does not simply seek and demand more for the poor as a response to the insatiable greed of elite bankers. Rather, it calls for a society based on respect and compassion for all, rooted in the enlightened position that the suffering of every individual is of exactly equal importance (some, rightly, extend this compassion to all sentient beings).

Note also that while petty infighting based on rivalry, clashing egos and the like, is, of course, needlessly destructive, some disagreements on key issues can be a vital part of a process of development and maturation.

Imagine if three characteristics follow from the fact that the mass media is corporate in nature; i.e., that it is profit-maximising, owned by parent corporations and/or wealthy individuals, heavily dependent on corporate advertising, on subsidised state and business news sources, and so on. Imagine if this means that:

1) The corporate media are deeply dependent on, and closely allied to, other corporations responsible for promoting environmental and human rights disasters, tyrannies, wars and other horrors around the world.

2) Profit-maximising within this fiercely competitive media system – requiring, as it does, that the business be sold hard to both readers and advertisers, and to corporate and state allies with the power to heavily punish and reward – makes any criticism from vulnerable, employed journalists extremely threatening, unpopular and unlikely.

3) As a result, even ‘liberal’ journalists avoid criticising the corporate product in any way in front of the all-important customers and advertisers. Moreover, they feel reluctant to criticise other ‘liberal’ media corporations (potential future employers). They also feel reluctant to criticise the corporate media system as a whole for fear of being tarred as a liability, ‘one of them’, by all potential employers.

Theory is one thing, but if we are to test the truth of these claims honestly, we simply have to do so in reference to the performance of the best journalists. In this case, to ask if even Milne, Fisk and Monbiot have seriously discussed whether a corporate media system is able to report honestly on the corporate system is not ‘nit-picking’ or ‘naïve’ infighting at all. It is an important attempt to show that discussion on key issues is currently shut down right across our culture.

In an age of impending climate disaster – when corporate media are doing such a good job of presenting the suicidal status quo as ‘normal’, and all but ignoring the astonishing and massive corporate efforts to prevent vital action on climate change – this discussion might actually be considered crucial to human survival.

If we are right, then Milne and Monbiot are making a terrible mistake in encouraging readers to perceive this pathological – even anti-life – media system as a source of hope. To lead hope down a blind corporate alley at this late stage may prove to be the final nail in the coffin.

Post Script

Seumas Milne has responded to an email from us asking whether Michael White speaks on his behalf. Milne told us: “of course he doesn’t”, adding that he didn’t know White would respond. He also told us, and a number of readers, that he is still some way off full fitness, that he still intends to answer our original points and he apologises for not having done so. We sent him our sincere best wishes for a full recovery. We note, however, that Milne’s failure to respond to our challenges pre-dates his recent health problems, stretching back to 2001.

George Monbiot has not responded to our alert.

One of the aspects of journalism that we find particularly fascinating is the extent to which even the best, most honest, or most radical journalists can push back the mainstream walls enclosing media debate. How dissenting are they really permitted to be? And how might their presence in the media underpin the public’s perception of a “free press”?

As we noted in Newspeak in the 21st Century, the journalist Jonathan Cook addressed these points in an eye-opening reply to one of our media alerts. Cook, who previously worked for the Guardian and the Observer, agreed with us that the most consistently challenging voices are systematically filtered out of the mainstream. He asked:

How is it then, if this thesis is right, that there are dissenting voices like John Pilger, Robert Fisk, George Monbiot and Seumas Milne who write in the British media while refusing to toe the line?

But as Cook himself observed, this tiny group almost entirely exhausts the list of writers who can be said to confront the established consensus from a progressive perspective.

Cook continued:

That means that in Britain’s supposedly leftwing media we can find one writer working for the Independent (Fisk), one for the New Statesman (Pilger) and two for the Guardian (Milne and Monbiot). Only Fisk, we should further note, writes regular news reports. The rest are given at best weekly columns in which to express their opinions.

With the exception of Pilger, none of these journalists “choose, or are allowed, to write seriously about the dire state of the mainstream media they serve”. It is important, Cook added, that we recognise both the positive and negative roles these individuals play:

However grateful we should be to these dissident writers, their relegation to the margins of the commentary pages of Britain’s “leftwing” media serves a useful purpose for corporate interests. It helps define the “character” of the British media as provocative, pluralistic and free-thinking – when in truth they are anything but. It is a vital component in maintaining the fiction that a professional media is a diverse media.

Consider Seumas Milne, for example. Since September 2011, we have been trying to engage with him to debate these vital issues. Milne is a regular high-profile Guardian columnist and an associate editor of the paper. Indeed, he was the paper’s Comment editor at the time of the September 11 attacks, motivating his Guardian retrospective as the 10-year anniversary approached last year. (“9/11: A “babble of idiots”? History has been the judge of that”.)

The thrust of Milne’s proud boast was that the Guardian had bravely hosted a ‘‘full range of views” that had been “blanked” by most other media, attracting hostility and even vitriol from right-wing quarters. But this was a selective and conveniently self-serving assessment, closer to corporate marketing than honest accounting, as we put to him in an email two days later:

Hello Seumas,

Hope things are good with you. I thought your article on Monday was well-written and made good points. But it was also highly contentious in places and it can’t go unchallenged. I hope you’ll be willing to respond openly to this email, please.

You wrote that, following 9/11, the Guardian ‘comment pages hosted the full range of views the bulk of the media blanked; in other words, the paper gave rein to the pluralism that most media gatekeepers claim to favour in principle, but struggle to put into practice. And you said that you published “articles joining the dots to US imperial policy or opposing the US-British onslaught on Afghanistan”.

It may well be that you were able to do a better job of including voices of dissent than any other trusted pair of hands at the Guardian would have managed. But how many of these dissenting voices really ‘joined the dots’ in the way that Noam Chomsky does so well and so consistently? How many critical pieces in the Guardian portrayed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq accurately as wars of aggression, as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg trials? How many pointed out that Bush, Blair, senior government politicians and military commanders should, by those agreed standards, be tried for ‘the supreme international crime’? How many analysed the invasions and wars as an integral part of the West’s longstanding attempts at global control and subjugation of peoples and natural resources, consistent with the demands of corporate-led capitalism? How many joined the dots by examining the role of the corporate news media, including the BBC and the Guardian, in enabling these wars of aggression? How many questioned the core assumption promoted by Western states that ‘we’ are the ‘good guys’?

Perhaps you’d be able to point to a handful of such comment pieces. But sadly they were swamped by a deluge of news propaganda, complacent ‘journalism’ and supine commentary elsewhere in the Guardian.

As I said at the start, your article was not totally wide of the mark. But it also fits with the relentless marketing of the Guardian as a supposedly open and power-scrutinising flagship newspaper of fearless journalism. The evidence that we’ve presented in two books (Guardians of Power and Newspeak) and hundreds of media alerts in the past ten years clearly shows otherwise.

Best wishes
David (Cromwell)
(Email, September 7, 2011)

The issue of marketing is highly relevant here. As Milne himself noted, “the most heartening response to the breadth of Guardian commentary after 9/11 came from the US itself where there was a dramatic increase in readership of the Guardian’s website. In fact, “traffic on the Guardian’s website doubled in the months after 9/11, driven from the US.” This is highly attractive to advertisers wishing to target relatively affluent and educated consumers. Indeed, ironically, the Guardian appears far more comfortable publishing the views of US dissidents writing on US issues, rather than their UK counterparts writing on UK issues. This makes good business sense, attracting US readers without stepping on too many powerful domestic toes here in the UK.

Almost three weeks later we still hadn’t heard back from Milne, so we nudged him. He apologised and said that he’d been on holiday “and then came straight back into party conferences. Will reply when have a window.” (Email, September 27, 2011)

Almost two months later, during which time he’d continued to publish articles in the Guardian, we asked him when he might reply. He told us that he’d been “operating a bit below capacity” after recovering from an operation, “so everything takes longer than usual, but will try and send something in next week or two”. (Email, November 22, 2011). We replied at once, sincerely wishing him a full recovery.

Just over two weeks later, and not having heard from him, we emailed Milne again following a piece he’d published on the rising threat of war against Iran:

Hi Seumas,

Hope you’re recovering well from your recent op. Good to see your new article on Iran. But a glaring omission is the media’s own role in stoking the flames; not least your own newspaper, the Guardian. Here’s a tiny sample:

• A recent Guardian editorial asserting: ‘It really is time to drop the pretence that Iran can be deflected from its nuclear path.’
• Julian Borger’s blog, with an appalling accompanying photograph helpfully depicting a giant mushroom cloud.
• Julian Borger again, giving prominence to a quote from an unnamed ‘source close to the IAEA’.
• And let’s not forget Simon Tisdall, in a disgraceful Guardian front page story in 2007.

Did you see our recent media alert on Guardian (and other) coverage [on Iran]?

It’s pretty clear why, as a Guardian regular, you’re not at liberty to criticise your own paper’s dismal record. It’s another example of the media silence that you’ve yet to address in my initial challenge [of September 7, 2011].

Why does this abysmal media performance appear to feature so low down in your list of priorities? It brings to mind the four-month wading through treacle, when you were the Guardian’s comment editor, to finally publish our piece that was critical of the Guardian over Iraq.

I hope you’ll be able to engage with this argument soon. (Email, December 8, 2011)

Four days later, with no response from Milne, we emailed him again and asked when he might be able to tackle the points we’d been trying to raise with him over the previous three months.

Still no response.

In the meantime, on December 19, 2011, Milne published a good historical analysis titled, “The “Arab spring” and the west: seven lessons from history”.

Milne’s case studies of British imperialism and media propaganda focused on the 1930s (Libya and Palestine), the 1950s (Iraq, Libya, Iran, Tunisia, Syria and Egypt) and the 1960s (Aden).

Welcome as this article was, we have yet to see an equivalent Guardian piece from Milne, or anyone else on the paper, examining the West’s recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, how they fit into the age-old imperialist framework and, crucially, the role played by corporate news media, including the Guardian, in paving the propaganda path; and then allowing politicians to get off the hook afterwards. Readers may recall, for example, the Guardian’s shameful editorial calling for Tony Blair to be re-elected in 2005.

We recognise that Seumas Milne was no doubt under pressure after a recent operation (although he was continuing to publish articles regularly). But even bearing this in mind, not to respond to the issues in our initial email after four months, despite repeated promises to do so, is disappointing.

George Monbiot As Don Quixote: Tilting At Safe Target

As we saw at the beginning of this alert, the Guardian’s George Monbiot is one of very few mainstream journalists who is regarded as fearlessly honest and progressive. His many supporters would surely expect that he would be willing and able to tell the unadorned truth about the media.

As he launched into a recent article under the stirring title, “The corporate press are fighting a class war, defending the elite they belong to”, it looked like readers were in for something special:

Have we ever been so badly served by the press? We face multiple crises – economic, environmental, democratic – but most newspapers represent them neither clearly nor fairly. The industry that should reveal and expose instead tries to contain and baffle, to foil questions and shut down dissent.

Monbiot continued:

The men who own the corporate press are fighting a class war, seeking, even now, to defend the 1% to which they belong against its challengers. But because they control much of the conversation, we seldom see it in these terms. Our press re-frames major issues so effectively, it often recruits its readers to mobilise against their own interests.

It’s not just Rupert Murdoch and his crooks, we were told. All the corporate barons who corrupted our political system must be unmasked.

And – alas – there was the fatal flaw in his approach. Perching on a horse and pointing a blunt lance at “corporate barons”, while overlooking the systemic failings of the whole corporate media system, is symptomatic of many a failed quest. The knight-errant Monbiot is no different in this regard from a multitude of other commentators writing for the corporate press.

Thus, Monbiot was happy to make jabs at the Mail, Express and Telegraph newspapers for their puff pieces on celebrities and pathetic attacks on the weak in society. And he was keen to hurl deprecations at the weekly Spectator magazine for its ignorance on climate change. These are all easy right-wing media targets. But with just a passing comment about the BBC, and nothing at all about the supposedly “liberal press” – not least his own paper, the Guardian – the valiant adventurer missed the most important targets.

There was not a single word in Monbiot’s article about the Guardian’s scandalous 2005 support for Blair’s re-election; the paper’s war-mongering over Iran (take a special bow, Simon Tisdall); Monbiot’s thoughts on Western intervention in Libya and Syria (his mutism on these vital issues has been stunning); the Guardian’s crippling dependence on advertising (which he has, to his credit, discussed in the past, albeit in limited fashion: see here and here); and the paper’s corporate and establishment links.

One astute reader, somehow evading the over-zealous censoring Guardian ‘moderators’ on the ‘Comment is Free’ website, noted accurately:

And just like Ed Miliband, the Guardian merely pretends to confront the elite in the silly Kabuki theatre of British politics.

The truth is, at bedrock ,you are all pro capitalist market fundamentalists. Some of you are open about it. Others, like the Guardian and Ed Miliband, fake opposition.

We asked the experienced journalist and film-maker John Pilger for his response to Monbiot’s article. He told us candidly:

Since George Monbiot completed his Damascene conversion and decided the likes of Fukushima were good for the planet, and that smearing those who challenged other orthodoxies might be fun, he has barely drawn breath. His latest crusade is journalism itself — the corruption of “the entire corporate media”. The headline over his Guardian piece on 13 December read: “The corporate press are fighting a class war, defending the elite they belong to.” A given, surely. As the public has become more and more media savvy, many people understand this, just as they understand that articles like Monbiot’s are part of the problem.

He attacks Murdoch, the Mail, the Telegraph, the “sleazy crooks”, but not a splenetic word is directed towards the most influential corporate media in modern Britain: the BBC and the Guardian, the “new establishment”, as Max Hastings wrote.

Not a word reminds us of how the greatest, wanton slaughter of the new century – in Iraq – was so often subtly (and not so subtly) supported and apologised for in the pages of his own newspaper. (“The remarkable extent,” opined a Guardian leader on 25 March 2003, “to which US and British forces are attempting to reduce the risk of civilian casualties in the Iraq campaign is probably unprecedented.”)

Not a word from Monbiot reminds us that two credible studies found that the BBC — despite the Gilligan episode — had been virtually a Blair government mouthpiece in the run up to the bloodbath. In fact, both the BBC and the Guardian used their reputations to maintain Blair at a level of respectability long after his lies and high crimes were evident.

When Monbiot complains that the “corporate press” has “hobbled progressive politics, he is dead right. His omissions serve the same purpose. (Email, December 24, 2011)

Far from being an “unreconstructed idealist, a professional trouble-maker”, as his Twitter bio would have it, Monbiot is a Guardian man, a corporate lightning rod conducting the raw energy of outrage and dissent down to the safe little ‘box’ of the Guardian website. There his readers are regaled with state propaganda, corporate adverts and assailed by the poisonous, system-supportive beliefs of his corporate colleagues. The corporate system got us into this disaster and the corporate media is the last place to encourage people to look for answers.

Patrick Cockburn noted in the Independent:

While the identity of those carrying out the assassinations remains a mystery, it is most likely to be Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad…

The Sunday Times published a meticulous account of the planning and execution of the attack provided by “a source who released details’ on the actions of ‘small groups of Israeli agents” operating inside Iran.¹

Julian Borger’s article in the Guardian warned against “Goading a regime on the brink”.

We wonder if the Guardian would have described the Iranian assassination of scientists on US or Israeli streets as ‘goading’. We also wonder if Borger would have described these as terrorist attacks.

Using the media database Lexis-Nexis we have been able to find just one example of a UK journalist describing Roshan’s assassination as an act of terror – New Statesman‘s senior political editor Mehdi Hasan writing in the Guardian. Otherwise, almost all references have been limited to the use of the word by Iranian officials behind scare quotes. (After challenges from Media Lens and other activists, Borger did publish a rare example of non-Iranian use of the term.)

By contrast, in October, the US accused Iran of recruiting a used car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, as part of a terrorist plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant in Washington, DC. In that case, journalists had no qualms about using the word terror without inverted commas. Karen McVeigh reported in the Guardian:

Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalised US citizen, was arrested last month, and stands accused of running a global terror plot that stretched from Mexico to Tehran.

The Daily Mail:

An extraordinary terrorist plot has been foiled – which would have seen the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. murdered on American soil.

The Telegraph:

Iranian government officials were accused by the Obama administration of plotting a string of deadly terrorist attacks on American soil.

On Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald posted numerous similar examples from the US media. The alleged Arbabsiar plot was subsequently debunked by analyst Gareth Porter.

As Greenwald observed, “accusing Israel and/or the U.S. of Terrorism remains one of the greatest political taboos”. Responding to a Media Lens reader who had suggested, not unreasonably, that “a terrorist is one who brings terror to another person”, Channel 4′s Alex Thomson wrote:

Your definition of a terrorist as one bringing terror is nonsensical as it would encompass all military outfits’ including ‘the Royal Fusilliers [sic].²

Is that really so absurd? After all, following the murderous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill wrote to Bomber Command:

It seems to me that the moment has come that the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.³

Presumably, then, one can argue that the RAF is a terrorist organisation.

Returning to last week’s assassination, while no-one has yet suggested that Iran is now obliged to bomb Washington, Borger argued:

If Americans had been killed in the Georgetown restaurant that was supposedly the target [of the debunked Arbabsiar ‘plot’], the Obama administration would have been obliged to respond militarily.

In similar vein, the aptly-named James Blitz asked in the Financial Times:

But even if an immediate military conflict… is averted, this still leaves a wider question: how much longer can Israel and the US wait before they bomb Iran’s nuclear sites?

The day after Roshan’s killing, Andrew Cummings, formerly an adviser on the Middle East and US affairs in the UK cabinet office national security staff, commented in the Guardian on ‘the risks’ of ‘this audacious approach’ – he meant the murdering of scientists. The sub-heading explained:

The death of another Iranian scientist has led to criticism of such actions, but Tehran’s refusal to co-operate leaves little alternative.

Cummings clarified:

What many people fail to recognise, though, is that a covert campaign, while rife with physical, diplomatic and legal risks, is the lesser of many evils.

And yet, as Patrick Cockburn noted:

The US has found no evidence

Tehran is trying to make a nuclear bomb, though US politicians [and US-UK journalists] often speak as if this was an established fact…

The US National Intelligence Estimates on Iranian nuclear progress, the collective judgement of all the US intelligence organisations, said there was no evidence Iran had been trying to build a bomb since 2003. The Defence Intelligence Agency concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons programme at that time was directed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and when he was overthrown by the US, it was ended.

Compare this with Blitz’s version:

Some western intelligence agencies believe Iran will bide its time a little longer and enrich more uranium – but will not take the big strategic decision to race for the bomb in 2012. Still, in every other respect, the auguries are not good.

Again by contrast, Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst, told veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh last year: ‘there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb’.

Readers might respond that Cummings and Blitz are entitled to their baseless views, and the Guardian and FT are perfectly entitled to publish them – that’s what free speech is all about. We agree.

But a problem arises when we try to imagine the Guardian publishing a piece justifying the Iranian killing of a US scientist on a US street one day after he had been murdered. And try imagining the FT hosting an opinion piece that asked: ‘How much longer can Iran wait before launching its bombers against the US and Israel?’

Tawergha – ‘Get Out, Black Animals’

One might think that a corporate media system would act independently of the state – there is no formal mechanism of control. But as the ingrained bias sampled above indicates, this often turns out not to be the case. With regard to human rights, for example, corporate media typically do not simply pick a subject and lavish it with attention. Rather, political power selects an issue, frames the coverage, and media corporations jump on the bandwagon.

Type a household name like ‘Halabja’ into the UK media database search engine Lexis-Nexis, for example, and it produces more than 1,800 references to Saddam Hussein’s 1988 gassing of Kurds. Similarly, the words ‘Srebrenica’ and ‘massacre’ generate nearly 3,000 hits. Both issues have been afforded vast, impassioned coverage.

In truth, for Western commentators, the importance of these horrors is most often rooted, not in the scale of suffering inflicted, but in their utility for justifying the West’s military interventions. Thus an editorial in the Independent observed of Libya:

Concern was real enough that a Srebrenica-style massacre could unfold in Benghazi, and the UK Government was right to insist that we would not allow this.⁴

A Times editorial commented:

Without this early, though sensibly limited, intervention, there would have been a massacre in Benghazi on the scale of Srebrenica.⁵

Of course, media concern for human rights could be sincere – journalists are human beings, after all, and human beings often do care about the killing of civilians. But then the record requires some explanation.

Consider the massacre of 53 Libyans at the hands of ‘rebel’ fighters in Sirte last October. The Daily Telegraph reported:

Human Rights Watch said 53 people appeared to have been shot dead in a hotel in the centre of the city when it was under the control of fighters from Misurata. The badly decomposed bodies, some with their hands bound behind their backs, were found in a garden of Hotel Mahari.⁶

According to Lexis-Nexis, the word ‘Mahari’ generates a total of eight articles mentioning the massacre across the entire UK press, with one mention since October. Widening the search to ‘Sirte’ and ‘killing’ produces a few additional mentions.

Or consider the fate of the dark-skinned Tawergha people, former slaves brought to Libya in the 18th and 19th centuries. Until recently, some 31,000 of them lived in a coastal town, also named Tawergha, 250 km east of the capital Tripoli. The UN news agency IRIN reported the ethnic cleaning of the town by Nato-backed forces:

Their town sits empty – doors hanging open and homes burned; the sign leading to the city has been changed to New Misrata and its population told not to return.

As for the people:

In an abandoned Turkish company compound on Airport Road in Tripoli, more than 1,500 displaced Tawergha spend their days brushing away flies and watching their children play with toy guns amid piles of rubbish.

Here, women and children have huddled around on the uncovered mattresses they sleep on, weeping. They arrived in early November after a physically and emotionally draining journey from Tawergha, having been displaced by armed men every time they settled somewhere new.

Every one told of a father, son or brother who is either dead or in jail…

[One] young woman told stories of Tawergha detainees receiving electric shocks, having cold water poured on them and being burned with cigarettes by the revolutionaries from Misrata who were holding them. “This is Abu Ghuraib, not Libya!… We have done nothing wrong. If they continue to beat us and attack us for no reason, it will become a cycle,” she said.

A rare, excellent mainstream article by Åsne Seierstad in The Times supplied additional details:

“Slaves,” says graffiti on a wall. On a road sign, the town’s name has been scribbled over. “Misrata,” it says now. The commander of the local victors, Ibrahim al-Halbous, had already said it: “Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata.”

The article continued:

“Brigade for cleansing of black slaves,” proclaims one scribbled message on a wall along the road to Misrata. “Hairdresser. Free haircut,” says another. Large sections of the town are in ruins after the battles.

Seierstad found that Tawerghans were still not safe even in Tripoli:

Seven or eight people live in each room, in corridor after corridor, barrack after barrack.

But the construction site has no guards, and the avengers from Misrata can enter even here. They arrive at night. The men sleep fully clothed, ready to flee. Some nights earlier, an armed gang arrived at 2am. “You are all going to die,” they shouted. “Get out, black animals.”⁷

Last summer, the then Prime Minister of Libya’s National Transitional Council, Mahmoud Jibril, said:

When it comes to Tawergha, in my view, this is nobody’s business but the people of Misrata’s. This cannot be dealt with according to theories and textbooks about national reconciliation in South Africa, Ireland or Eastern Europe.⁸

Using a different spelling, the Telegraph has so far supplied one sentence:

Tawarga has been forcibly emptied of residents by rebels and looted.⁹

The sentence doesn’t appear in the online version.

A Guardian article barely hinted at the ethnic cleansing, reporting merely that Tawarga’s “mostly black population fled in August when rebel forces captured it”.

Chris Stephen described the ethnic cleansers’ attitude towards Tawargans as a “gripe”.

Seumas Milne mentioned Tawerga in a single sentence.

According to Lexis-Nexis, the Independent has published two articles focusing on the atrocity – a substantial piece in September and a further 102 words in November, totalling 867 words.

Curiously, The Times has published the most significant mentions. In addition to Seierstad’s piece, Andrew Gilligan published a substantial report: ‘The ghost town where rebels took their revenge’ in September. ¹⁰  A later article reported ‘The expulsion of the entire 30,000 population of Tawarga, a satellite town of Misrata…”¹¹

James Hider also commented briefly in October:

The town of Tawarga was accused by neighbouring Misrata of siding with Gaddafi’s forces, and is now all but deserted and largely ruined.¹²

Since Seierstad’s article on December 3, there have been no mentions in any UK newspaper of this clear case of ethnic cleansing by Western-backed forces. As ever, media outrage splutters and falls away when the West is implicated in a crime against humanity. And as ever, this could hardly contrast more starkly with the incandescent “something must be done!” outrage in response to the crimes of official enemies. Lexis-Nexis finds no mention of any British or American politician commenting on Tawergha’s fate, and finds no mentions in any editorials. Now imagine the coverage if Iran, or Syria, or North Korea had been responsible.

Commentators sometimes lament the fact that the “mainstream” media system is “controlled” by profit-seeking corporations. It is not; it is made up of corporations. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Media companies are key elements of a corporate system that utterly dominates politics.  In reality, US-UK military interventions are state-corporate military interventions. It ought to come as no surprise that the corporate media propagandises on behalf of its own interventions and works hard to hide the ugly consequences from a public with the power to resist.

1. Marie Colvin and Uzi Mahnaimi, “Israel’s secret war,”  Sunday Times, January 15, 2012
2. Forwarded to Media Lens, February 25, 2005
3. Blitz, Bombing and Total War, Channel 4, January 15, 2005
4. Leading article, “The mission that crept,” Independent, July 29, 2011
5. Leading article, “Death of a dictator,” The Times, October 21, 2011
6. Ben Farmer, “Libya will be a “moderate” Muslim nation, country’s interim leader insists,” Telegraph, October 25, 2011
7. Åsne Seierstad, “Four months ago, 30,000 people lived in this town. So where did they go?” The Times, December 3, 2011
8. Seierstad, ibid
9. Richard Spencer; Ruth Sherlock; Rob Crilly, “Gaddafi’s son flees to Niger as rebels make more gains,” Telegraph, September 12, 2011
10. The Times, September 11, 2011
11. Libya Tom, “Murder and rape campaign brings revenge to ghost town,” The Times, September 29, 2011
12. James Hider, “Where there was unifying hatred, now there is a vacuum,” The Times, October 22, 2011

With the Kyoto Treaty due to expire in 2012, the so-called ‘international community’ has failed abysmally to fulfil its commitments to protect the planet. This should surprise no-one. As senior NASA climate scientist James Hansen pointed out after the previous climate summit in Mexico in 2010, UN talks are “doomed to failure” since they do not address the fundamental physical constraints of the Earth’s climate system and how to live within them.

Public concern about climate change continues to rise. According to the latest Eurobarometer opinion poll (October 2011), 68% of Europeans polled consider climate change a very serious problem (up from 64% in 2009). Altogether 89% see it as a serious problem (either “very serious” or “fairly serious”). On a scale of 1 (least) to 10 (most), the seriousness of climate change is ranked at 7.4, against 7.1 in 2009.

Meanwhile, media interest in the subject has crashed. Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University describes a “collapse of any significant coverage of climate change in the [US] media. We know that 2010 was a record low year, and 2011 will probably look much the same. If the media doesn’t draw attention to the issue, public opinion will decline”.

In his authoritative Climate Progress blog, Joe Romm notes, for example, that the New York Times “cut coverage sharply since its peak in 2006 and 2007”.

Equally disturbing is the variation in media performance across the globe. A wide-ranging Reuters study on the prevalence of climate scepticism in the world’s media – Poles Apart – The international reporting of climate scepticism – focused on newspapers in Brazil, China, France, India, the UK and the USA. The periods studied were February to April 2007 and mid-November 2009 to mid-February 2010 (a period that included the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and “Climategate”). Remarkably, the study concluded that climate scepticism is “predominantly an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon”, found most frequently in US and British newspapers:

In general the UK and the US print media quoted or mentioned significantly more sceptical voices than the other four countries. Together they represented more than 80% of the times such voices were quoted across all six countries.

The study concluded:

In general, the data suggests a strong correspondence between the perspective of a newspaper and the prevalence of sceptical voices within it, particularly in the opinion pages. By most measures (but not all), the more right-leaning tend to have more such voices, the left-leaning less.

But in all ten UK newspapers studied, there was an increase “both in the absolute numbers of articles with sceptical voices in them and the percentage of articles with sceptical voices in them”.

And so we find that Britain and the US – the two countries responding most aggressively to alleged “threats” to human security in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – are also the two countries least interested in responding to the very real threat of climate change.

“Capitalism Is Trampling On Journalism”

As the Reuters study suggests, media reporting is heavily influenced by editorial stance which, in turn, is heavily influenced by commercial interests. In October, the former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt told the Leveson inquiry into the culture and ethics of the British press the truth about the UK’s newsroom culture:

In approximately 900 newspaper bylines I can probably count on fingers and toes the times I felt I was genuinely telling the truth, yet only a similar number could be classed as outright lies. This is because as much as the skill of a journalist today is about finding facts, it is also, particularly at the tabloid end of the market, about knowing what facts to ignore. The job is about making the facts fit the story, because the story is almost pre-defined.

Laid out before you is a canon of ideologically and commercially driven narratives that must be adhered to. The newspaper appoints itself moral arbiter, and it is your job to stamp their worldview on all the journalism you do… The ideological imperative comes before the journalistic one – drugs are always bad, British justice is always soft.

Peppiatt noted:

Tabloid newsrooms are often bullying and aggressive environments, in which dissent is simply not tolerated. It is difficult to stand up and walk out the door with a mortgage to pay, knowing another opportunity is unlikely to be waiting beyond.

The issue that is not being discussed by Leveson is the extent to which these observations generalise to the “quality” corporate media, and why. By contrast, in soft-pedalling the level of interference from owners and advertisers, the Guardian’s Nick Davies wrote:

“Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference.”¹

Compare this with corporate escapee Peppiatt’s unfettered conclusion:

Capitalism is trampling on journalism.

A prime example of this trampling was supplied by the high-profile BBC series Frozen Planet, narrated by David Attenborough, focusing on life and the environment in the Arctic and Antarctic. British viewers will see a total of seven episodes, the last of which, “On Thin Ice”, deals with the threat of climate change.

However, viewers in some other countries will only watch six episodes. This is because the BBC packaged the series in such a way that the climate change episode was an “optional extra” that foreign networks could choose to reject. And reject it they did – of 30 networks across the world that have bought the series, 10 have opted not to buy the episode on climate change. Most notable among them is the United States, the world’s leading contributor both to climate crisis and disinformation about the problem.

A spokesman for Greenpeace said:

It’s a bit like pressing the stop button on Titanic just as the iceberg appears.

Climate change is the most important part of the polar story, the warming in the Arctic can’t be denied, it’s changing the environment there in ways that are making experts fearful for the future.

The BBC’s helpful packaging of “Frozen Planet” generated little interest in the media, although some praise. Lord Leach of Fairford, the Tory peer and former director of the British Library, commented:

I don’t think what Attenborough has to say about climate change is worth listening to. He’s very endearing but I don’t think there’s any truth to what he says – he has no idea about it. The fact is you can be jolly nice to monkeys but it isn’t the same as knowing what you’re talking about on climate change.

Leach added: “It’s quite right to cut the episode.”

Journalist John Gibbons covered the issue of climate change for the Irish Times for two years. He wrote his last, damning column in February 2010:

Ireland’s most senior climate expert, Prof John Sweeney of NUI [National University of Ireland] Maynooth, acknowledged last week that climate-change deniers were “winning the propaganda war”. Chief among them, he added, were deniers from the ranks of journalism and lobbying.

Hang on a minute, you might ask, aren’t journalists supposed to be the good guys, the ones who investigate, not propagate, scams? Well, yes and no. “A media and telecommunications industry fuelled by advertising and profit maximisation is part of the problem,” [Justin] Lewis and [Tammy] Boyce [of the Cardiff School of Journalism] point out.

Gibbons stated the obvious:

Millionaire “journalists” have a profound yet undeclared personal vested interest in the consumption-driven economic status quo upon which their wealth is predicated. As, of course, do billionaire media proprietors. They in turn seek out affirmation of their own biases, and ridicule dissenters.

While The Media Fiddles, 2010′s Monster Increase Burns

While public concern grows and media coverage collapses, the climate change problem is going through the roof. According to a recent study by the US Department of Energy, the global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record in 2010. The world pumped about 564 million more tons of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009, an increase of 6 per cent. The latest figures mean that levels of greenhouse gases “are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago”, USA Today reports.

Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past, said:

It is a “monster” increase that is unheard of.

Granger Morgan, head of the engineering and public policy department at Carnegie Mellon University, said of the new figures:

Really dismaying. We are building up a horrible legacy for our children and grandchildren.

So why is nothing being done about the problem? In a new study, Who’s Holding Us Back?, Greenpeace reports:

The corporations most responsible for contributing to climate change emissions and profiting from those activities are campaigning to increase their access to international negotiations and, at the same time, working to defeat progressive legislation on climate change and energy around the world.

While making public statements that “appear to show their concern for climate change”, these corporations are fighting fiercely to prevent action. This helps explain, Greenpeace notes, “why decisive action on the climate is being increasingly ousted from the political agenda.

They add:

These polluting corporations often exert their influence behind the scenes, employing a variety of techniques, including using trade associations and think tanks as front groups; confusing the public through climate denial or advertising campaigns; making corporate political donations; as well as making use of the “revolving door” between public servants and carbon-intensive corporations.

In the US alone, approximately $3.5 bn is invested annually in lobbying activities at the federal level. In recent years, Royal Dutch Shell, the US Chamber of Commerce, Edison Electric Institute, PG&E, Southern Company, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips all made the top 20 list of lobbyists. The climate campaign organisation 350.org estimates that 94 per cent of US Chamber of Commerce contributions went to climate denier candidates.

Groups like the American Petroleum Institute, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Australian Coal Association, often campaign directly “against measures that would cut greenhouse gas emissions, or run campaigns in support of unfettered fossil fuel energy”.

Attempts by the EU to increase its emissions reductions target for 2020 from 20 per cent to 30 per cent has been undermined by the heavy lobbying of carbon-intensive interests, including BASF, ArcelorMittal and Business Europe.

Tzeporah Berman, Co-director of the Climate and Energy Program at Greenpeace International, says that this latest study “shows beyond a doubt that there are a handful of powerful polluting corporations who are exerting undue influence on the political process to protect their vested interests”.

Two years ago, we challenged James Hansen to sum up governments’ responses to the threat of climate change in a single word. He chose “misleading”. Why misleading? Because “it’s mostly greenwash”, he told us. (Email, June 18, 2009)

We then asked him to give a rough figure to indicate how far he felt governments had moved towards tackling climate change. Would he say that governments were 1%, 20%, 50%, 70%,… of the way there? We knew this was imprecise, but we wanted to get an idea of his gut feeling. He responded:

0%, because they are starting down a wrong track, requiring 1-2 decades to reset. “Goals” for emission reduction, cap-and-trade with offsets, while continuing to build more coal-fired power plants and developing unconventional fossil fuels is a disastrous path. It is meant to fool people, even themselves. A strategic approach would instead recognize the geophysical boundary conditions, specifically that coal emissions must be rapidly phased out.

He added some disturbing analysis:

“The fundamental economic requirement concerns the price of (cheap, subsidized) fossil fuels relative to alternatives (energy efficiency, renewables, and other carbon-free energies) — there must be a rising price on carbon emissions (a fee, at the coal/oil/gas source or port of entry). As that price rises and the competition ensues we would reach a point where alternatives suddenly take off and we move beyond the dirty fossil fuel era. The fear that this will in fact occur is what drives the fossil interests who have totally taken control of our governments’ actions.

Even the cautious and conservative International Energy Authority has now warned that under currently planned policies “rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.”

Be in no doubt, the corporate takeover of government policy really has taken humanity to the very edge of the climate abyss.  Naturally enough, the corporate media is keen to avoid honestly addressing an issue that so violently conflicts with its profit-maximising agenda, its need for endless economic growth, its heavy dependence on corporate advertising.

We need to Occupy Wall Street, of course – we need to win back our governments from corporate control. But we also need to occupy the media space that for so long has been monopolised by Wall Street’s propaganda arm. We need to occupy the corporate media system that is fiddling the same idiotic tune even as our world – this precious, threatened planet on which we depend for our very survival - burns.

1. Davies, Flat Earth News, Vintage 2008, p.22

BBC News reported the UN chairperson saying that the talks had ‘saved tomorrow, today’.

But nothing substantive had changed. Carbon emissions, already at their peak, will continue to increase for at least the next eight years, pushing humanity closer to the brink of climate collapse. Rather than address the madness of a global system of corporate-led capitalism that is bulldozing us to this disaster, the corporate media mouthed deceptive platitudes.

A Guardian editorial assured readers that the Durban deal is ‘better than nothing’, and that:

There are times when inching forward can look like progress [...] a moment when it is cheerier to think of how bad things might have been than to rate the success of the final outcome.

Adopting the standard, but discredited, establishment framework to explain the treacly mire hindering serious action on climate, this vanguard of liberal journalism opined: ‘There is an unvarying conflict of interest in the fight against climate change between developed and developing economies.’

No hint there that the conflict is, in fact, between the elite corporate 1% and the 99% of the global population that are their victims.

The Independent, another great white hope of liberal journalism, told its diminishing band of readers that the Durban outcome is ‘an agreement that gives new cause for optimism.’ Indeed, it ‘is an enormous advance on the position now.’

An editorial in The Times (‘A Change of Climate’, December 12, 2011) conformed along similar lines while also taking care to kick the forces of rationality in the teeth:

Scientists and activists will complain that Durban’s only commitment is to more talks and that any agreement will not become operational until 2020. But these campaigners have often proved poor advocates, either exaggerating or misusing data to make their case or showing an unwise disdain for the realpolitik and compromises essential for any deal.

Climate scientists will be dismayed that an ostensibly responsible paper like The Times would make a sneering reference to the unfounded ‘Climategate’ claims of climate data manipulation. But perhaps readers will appreciate the irony that The Times is itself, of course, an enthusiastic practitioner of corporate ‘realpolitik’.

‘A Crime Of Global Proportions’

We are not suggesting that critical comment was entirely missing from press coverage. That would take absurd levels of totalitarian media control. The Guardian managed to find space on its website, if not in the print edition, for the Guardian’s head of environment, Damian Carrington, to write in his blog:

Unlike the economic debt currently transfixing the attention of world’s leaders, it appears possible to them that we can put our climate debt on the never-never.

The loans in euros, dollars and pounds will be called in within days, weeks, and months. But the environmental debt – run up by many decades of dumping carbon dioxide waste in the atmosphere – won’t be due for full repayment before 2020, according to the plan from Durban.

This ‘ecological debt’, Carrington added, ‘will inevitably transform into a new economic debt dwarfing our current woes. [...] Cleaning up the energy system that underpins the global economy is inevitable, sooner or later. If not, true economic armageddon awaits, driven by peak oil, climate chaos and civil unrest.’

Friends of the Earth were permitted their token quote in the Guardian, scant reward for decades of soft-pedalling its criticism of the corporate media: ‘This empty shell of a plan leaves the planet hurtling towards catastrophic climate change.’

Unfiltered by corporate news editors, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a statement pointing out that, in Durban, the world’s governments

by no means responded adequately to the mounting threat of climate change. [...] It’s high time governments stopped catering to the needs of corporate polluters, and started acting to protect people.

UCS added:

Powerful speeches and carefully worded decisions can’t amend the laws of physics. The atmosphere responds to one thing, and one thing only – emissions. The world’s collective level of ambition on emissions reductions must be substantially increased, and soon.

In a powerful article on Independent Online, based in South Africa, there were stronger messages still. The environment group Earthlife Africa said the decisions resulting from the Durban summit would result in a 4^oC global average temperature rise which would mean an average increase of 6^oC-8^oC for Africa. This would lead to an estimated 200 million deaths by 2100.

No wonder that Nnimmo Bassey, chairman of Friends of the Earth International, said: ‘Delaying real action until 2020 is a crime of global proportions.’

He continued:

An increase in global temperatures of 4ºC, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apartheid, whereby the richest 1 percent of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99 percent.

Karl Hood of Grenada, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, responded to the Durban deal with damning words: ‘Must we accept our annihilation?’

Aubrey Meyer, originator of the ‘contraction and convergence’ policy that would, if adopted by the UN, reduce greenhouse gases to safe levels, was also scathing: ‘The islands are being annihilated and we all are now become their assassins. We have informally known this but with this “Durban-Deal” we all have now formally crossed that threshold.’

Janet Redman, of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, spoke the unadorned truth that is so painful, if not impossible, for the corporate media to acknowledge: ‘What some see as inaction is in fact a demonstration of the palpable failure of our current economic system to address economic, social or environmental crises.’

The Eightfold Nay: The Great Unmentionables Of Climate Coverage

In our book, Newspeak in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009), we listed the key issues that would be at the heart of debate on the climate crisis in a truly free press:

1. The inherently biocidal, indeed psychopathic, logic of corporate capitalism, structurally locked into generating maximised revenues in minimum time at minimum corporate cost. Because corporations are legally obliged to maximise profits for shareholders, it is in fact illegal for corporations to prioritise the welfare of people and planet above private profits. How can this simple fact of entrenched corporate immorality not be central to any discussion that is relevant to the industrial destruction of global life-support systems?

2. The proven track record of big business in promoting catastrophic consumption regardless of the consequences for human and environmental health. Whether disregarding the links between smoking and cancer, junk food and obesity, exploitation of the developing world and human suffering, fossil fuel extraction and lethal climate change, factory farming and animal suffering, high salt consumption and illness, corporations have consistently subordinated human and animal welfare to short-term profits.

3. The relentless corporate lobbying of governments to introduce, shape and strengthen policies to promote and protect private power.

4. The billions spent by the advertising industry to sell consumer products and ‘services’, creating artificial ‘needs’, with children an increasing target.

5. The collusion between powerful companies, rich investors and state planners to install compliant, often brutal, dictators in client states around the world.

6. The extensive use of loans and tied aid that ensnare poor nations in webs of crippling debt, ensuring that the West obtains or deepens control of their resources, markets and development.

7. The deployment of threats, bribery and armed force against countries that attempt to pursue self-development, rather than economic or strategic planning sanctioned by ‘the international community.’

8. The lethal role of the corporate media in promoting the planet-devouring aims of private power.

One searches in vain for any sensible and sustained discussion of any of these issues in the corporate media; never mind all of them taken together.

No wonder then that, for all the warm words of political ‘commitment’, we are headed for unprecedented desperate times ahead.

Relying on ‘evidence provided by more than 10 member states as well as its own information’, the IAEA said Iran had carried out activities ‘relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device’.

Having looked deeply into the claims, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh commented this week in an interview with Democracy Now!:

But you mentioned Iraq. It’s just this — almost the same sort of — I don’t know if you want to call it a “psychosis,” but it’s some sort of a fantasy land being built up here, as it was with Iraq, the same sort of — no lessons learned, obviously.

Indeed, informed skepticism in the corporate media has been muted or non-existent – the image of Iran as a ‘nuclear threat’ has yet again been imposed on the public mind. Any reasonable news reader and viewer would find it extremely difficult to question the emphatic declarations offered right across the media ‘spectrum’.

Thus, a Guardian editorial asserted:

It really is time to drop the pretence that Iran can be deflected from its nuclear path.

Two days earlier, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Julian Borger, anticipated the report’s publication on his ‘Global Security Blog’ with a piece titled ‘Iran “on threshold of nuclear weapon”’. The accompanying photograph helpfully depicted a giant mushroom cloud during a 1954 nuclear test over Bikini Atoll. His article was linked prominently from the home page of the Guardian website.

In a later article, Borger gave prominence to a quote from an unnamed ‘source close to the IAEA’:

What is striking is the totality and breadth of the information [in the IAEA report]. Virtually every component of warhead research has been pursued by Iran.

Presumably all-too-aware of increased public skepticism in the wake of Iraq, the anonymous source continued in the Guardian:

The agency has very, very, high confidence in its analysis. It did not want to make a mistake, and it was aware it had a very high threshold of credibility to meet. So it would not be published unless they had that high level of confidence.

In similar vein, a New York Times report opened with:

United Nations weapons inspectors have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,” and that the project may still be under way.

The Daily Telegraph declared its version of the truth unequivocally in a leader titled ‘Iran’s nuclear menace’. It noted that the IAEA report ‘has for the first time acknowledged that Tehran is conducting secret experiments whose sole purpose is the development of weapons.’

Presumably drawing on clairvoyant powers, the editors added:

Indeed, the IAEA has known for years that Tehran was building an atomic weapon, but has been reluctant to say so.

The title of an editorial (November 10, 2011) in The Times was similarly categorical and damning: ‘Deadly Deceit; Iran’s bellicose duplicity is definitively exposed by an IAEA report’:

Tehran’s decade-long nuclear programme is obviously not intended purely for generating electricity. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed this week that it has credible evidence that Iran has worked on the development of nuclear weapons.

The editorial stamped this with the required emphasis:

This will sound, and is, a statement of such banality that it ought not to need saying.

And then continued without a shred of uncertainty:

The IAEA report is extensive and understated. Founded on intelligence sources from ten countries, it explains in detail how Iran has established a programme to develop the technologies for a nuclear weapon. Its findings are entirely consistent with all that has been known and exposed before. Indeed, the IAEA is late in stating them.

For anyone relying solely on corporate news media coverage, the case against Iran was closed. All that remained was to decide the necessary course of international action: ramped-up ’diplomacy’, international sanctions and perhaps – the threat was left ‘lying on the table’ – war.

What is so breathtaking is that the apparent consensus on Iran, like the case against Iraq, is a fraud.

Burying The Cable – WikiLeaks And IAEA Chief Yukiya Amano

One of the stunning omissions in corporate media coverage of the IAEA report are the WikiLeaks disclosures concerning IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano. According to a US Embassy cable from a US diplomat in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, Amano described himself as “solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program”.

Amano’s predecessor as IAEA chief was Mohammed ElBaradei who had refused to bow before US war-mongering, and who was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As ElBaradei came to the end of his term in 2009, the Americans sensed an opportunity to work with someone more compliant. They lobbied successfully on Amano’s behalf. Following his election as IAEA chief, a US cable reported on a meeting with him:

This meeting, Amano’s first bilateral review since his election, illustrates the very high degree of convergence between his priorities and our own agenda at the IAEA. The coming transition period provides a further window for us to shape Amano’s thinking before his agenda collides with the IAEA Secretariat bureaucracy.

This ‘very high degree of convergence’ would presumably be useful in hyping the alleged ‘nuclear threat’ of Iran.

A US mission cable from Vienna commented that Amano was ‘DG [Director-General] of all states, but in agreement with us.’

The Guardian reported the Amano cable in a blog back in November 2010, but not in the paper itself. Our newspaper database search revealed that not a single UK national newspaper has mentioned the WikiLeaks cable revealing that Amano is ‘solidly in the U.S. court’ in coverage of the latest IAEA report. The sole exception we could find anywhere in the UK print media was an article in the New Statesman by Mehdi Hasan.

Rather than report this vital evidence from WikiLeaks, the British media have either tried to silence or vilify its founder, Julian Assange. This is a truly damning indictment of the ‘free press’.

By contrast, Seymour Hersh is a rare voice of rationality exposing this latest propaganda hype. On Democracy Now!, Hersh commented of former US Vice-President Dick Cheney:

Cheney kept on having the Joint Special Operations Force Command, JSOC — they would send teams inside Iran. They would work with various dissident groups — the Azeris, the Kurds, even Jundallah, which is a very fanatic Sunni opposition group — and they would do everything they could to try and find evidence of an undeclared underground facility. We monitored everything. We have incredible surveillance. In those days, what we did then, we can even do better now. And some of the stuff is very technical, very classified, but I can tell you, there’s not much you can do in Iran right now without us finding out something about it. They found nothing. Nothing. No evidence of any weaponization. In other words, no evidence of a facility to build the bomb. They have facilities to enrich, but not separate facilities for building a bomb. This is simply a fact. We haven’t found it, if it does exist. It’s still a fantasy.

Hersh said that Iran did look ‘at the idea of getting a bomb or getting to the point where maybe they could make one. They did do that, but they stopped in ’03. That’s still the American consensus. The Israelis will tell you privately, “Yes, we agree.”’

He described the new IAEA report as ‘not a scientific report, it’s a political document’, noting that ‘Amano has pledged his fealty to America.’

Amano had been ‘a marginal candidate’ for the position of IAEA chief but the US wanted him in place:

We supported him very much. Six ballots. He was considered weak by everybody, but we pushed to get him in. We did get him in. He responded by thanking us and saying he shares our views. He shares our views on Iran… it was just an expression of love. He’s going to do what we wanted.

In a blog on The New Yorker website, Hersh added that one of the classified US Embassy cables from Vienna described Amano as being “ready for prime time”. The cable also noted that Amano’s “willingness to speak candidly with U.S. interlocutors on his strategy … bodes well for our future relationship”.

In his Democracy Now! interview, Hersh pointed out that his blog piece was thoroughly researched and checked by The New Yorker, and that it included expert testimony shunned by the major newspapers:

These are different voices than you’re seeing in the papers. I sometimes get offended by the same voices we see in the New York Times and Washington Post. We don’t see people with different points of view… And I get emails, like crazy, from people on the inside saying, “Way to go.” I’m talking about inside the IAEA. It’s an organization that doesn’t deal with the press, but internally, they’re very bothered by the direction Amano is taking them.

Hersh cited Robert Kelley, a retired IAEA director and nuclear engineer who previously spent more than thirty years with the US Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons programme:

He noted that hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the I.A.E.A. by a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established. Those materials, and others, “were old news,” Kelley said, and known to many journalists. “I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’ by the same reporters.” ’

An assessment of the IAEA report was published by the Arms Control Association (ACA), a non-profit organisation campaigning for effective arms control. Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst, who was one of the authors of the ACA assessment, told Hersh:

There is troubling evidence suggesting that studies are still going on, but there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb. Those who want to drum up support for a bombing attack on Iran sort of aggressively misrepresented the report.

The BBC ‘Notes’ Privately That There Are Dissenting Views

On November 9, 2011, a BBC news piece carried a side bar ‘analysis’ by James Reynolds, the BBC’s Iran correspondent. We wrote to him the same day:

I hope you’re safe and well there. In your analysis which is included in the BBC News article ‘UN nuclear agency IAEA: Iran “studying nuclear weapons”’, you note that:

‘The agency stresses that the evidence it presents in its report is credible and well-sourced.’

You then add:

‘Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dismissed the IAEA as puppet of the United States. His government has already declared that its findings are baseless and inauthentic.’

You attribute such views to Iran, an officially-declared enemy of the West. A more balanced approach might be to report that a US Embassy Cable published last year revealed that Yukiya Amano, the IAEA director general, is ‘solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision’.

And according to a recent New York Times report: ‘the Obama administration, acutely aware of how what happened in Iraq undercut American credibility, is deliberately taking a back seat, eager to make the conclusions entirely the I.A.E.A.’s, even as it continues to press for more international sanctions against Iran.’

Shouldn’t these crucial facts be noted in your analysis?

The NYT report continues:

‘When the director of the agency, Yukiya Amano, came to the White House 11 days ago to meet top officials of the National Security Council about the coming report, the administration declined to even confirm he had ever walked into the building.’

Isn’t all this relevant in assessing the context, realpolitik and implications of the IAEA report? Can you not find critical commentators outside the Iranian government whom you can quote?

Given the stakes involved, would you perhaps consider addressing the above points in your analysis in future, please?

Many thanks.

Rather than address any of the above points, Reynolds emailed back:

thanks for your message. I appreciate your comments and insight.

(Email, November 9, 2011)

Just over a week later, a new BBC piece appeared in which the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany claimed to have ‘deep and increasing concern’ over Iran’s nuclear programme. We emailed Reynolds again (November 18, 2011):

Have you considered interviewing sceptical and informed commentators?

For example, you could approach the experienced investigative journalist Gareth Porter. He says that the recent IAEA report’s ‘dubious intelligence [is being] used as pretext for tougher sanctions’:

Porter’s analysis is backed up by Robert Kelley, a nuclear engineer who has carried out IAEA inspections. Kelley believes that ‘the report misleads and manipulates facts in [an] attempt to prove a forgone conclusion.’

He also says that the IAEA report ‘recycles old intelligence and is meant to bolster hard liners.’

Shouldn’t you also be including such important and informed views in your reporting for BBC News?

Not hearing from him, we nudged Reynolds on November 21 when he again avoided addressing the points made:

I received your message – thanks. I shall reflect on the points you raise.

It is always important for me to hear from licence-fee payers – the lifeblood of the BBC.

(James Reynolds, email, November 21, 2011)

We tried once more to elicit a response from the BBC’s Iran correspondent that actually addressed the points put to him:

I appreciate your reply.

But with the resources of the BBC at your disposal, you surely cannot be unaware of the informed commentators and important points presented to you [in the previous emails]. It is notable that you do not appear to have included them in any of your BBC reports to date. Why not?

Nor have you reported – although I may have missed it -  that IAEA chief Yukiya Amano is regarded by the US, according to a WikiLeaks cable, as ‘solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.’

Why remain silent about this astonishing fact? Isn’t this crucially relevant for public understanding of what is happening over Iran? Perhaps there are editorial reasons that are making it difficult for you to properly report these vital issues? (Email, November 22, 2011)

To no avail.  The response was even more terse this time:

points noted. (James Reynolds, email, November 22, 1011)

Curiously, ‘the lifeblood of the BBC’ deserves no better than this.

Can journalists really have forgotten the propaganda offensive that predated the March 19, 2003 invasion of Iraq – a tsunami of disinformation in which they were accomplices? Have they really learned nothing? What gives them the right to absolve themselves and to start with a clean slate now that Iran is the next hyped ‘threat’?

Surely now more than ever – as the spectre of yet another war in the Middle East looms, perhaps the greatest conflagration yet – it is vital that journalists should be wary of repeating propaganda claims over Iran.

The title of an article in the Sun declared: ‘Dead dog.’ (October 24, 2011)

The Daily Star reported that Gaddafi’s son Mutassim had been filmed smoking a cigarette and drinking water shortly after being captured. The paper took up the story:

But in graphic images that have baffled UN investigators, he is then shown dead, lying next to Mad Dog, with bullet holes in his neck and stomach.

In his report, “Mad Dog” “was the name journalist Gary Nicks used to refer to the executed Libyan leader. Nicks continued: ‘New footage emerged yesterday of Mad Dog’s dying words to a baying mob.’

Gaddafi and his son were not the only victims of the mob. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that between six and ten people appeared to have been executed at the scene of the Libyan leader’s capture. Around 95 bodies were found in the immediate vicinity, many of them victims of Nato air strikes. In fact, it is clear that NATO, with the assistance of special forces (although ground troops were strictly forbidden by UN resolution 1973), had maintained a no-drive zone around Sirte: a crucial factor facilitating the murder of Gaddafi.

CBS reported 572 bodies ‘and counting’ in Sirte, including 300, ‘many of them with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head’, collected and buried in a mass grave.

HRW reported the massacre of 53 people by anti-Gaddafi fighters at the Mahara hotel in Sirte. Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at HRW, commented on the atrocity:

This latest massacre seems part of a trend of killings, looting, and other abuses committed by armed anti-Gaddafi fighters who consider themselves above the law.

The BBC covered the massacre on its News at Ten (October 24). Wyre Davies reported:

Some say Gaddafi’s home town is where transitional government forces took their revenge; collective punishment for Gaddafi’s own crimes. A vivid and graphic example of that in Sirte today. The bodies of 53 Gaddafi supporters, discovered shot with their hands tied.

The segment lasted 20 seconds, with commentary on the massacre and footage of the bodies lasting 10 seconds. As one surviving resident of Sirte asked:  “What would people in Europe and America say if Gaddafi was doing this?”

The answer is hardly in doubt — wall-to-wall coverage and volcanic outrage. Gaddafi was certainly a vicious tyrant responsible for gross human rights abuses. But callous indifference to human suffering was supposed to be the reason he was so beyond the pale, so unlike “us”.

Channel 4 anchor Matt Frei responded to the massacre in a style familiar from his years as the BBC’s Washington correspondent:

You could say even about this regime, this government, that they don’t have a second chance to make a first impression. So just how worried are they?

When “our side” is responsible, even a massacre becomes, first and foremost, a PR problem.

The response from Ian Black, the liberal Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, to the torture and extrajudicial killing of Gaddafi was a stark:  “good riddance”.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, giggled with CBS journalists as she joked about Gaddafi’s murder:  “We came, we saw, he died.”

Incongruous laughter appears to be a trait.

British prime minister David Cameron also found mirth amid the gore in a speech celebrating the Hindu festival of Diwali:

Obviously, Diwali being the festival of a triumph of good over evil, and also celebrating the death of a devil [audience laughter], perhaps there’s a little resonance in what I’m saying tonight.¹

One of our regular message board posters, Chris Shaw, expressed his “despair and horror at the footage of a 69 year old man being beaten, tortured and murdered by a mob”.² The natural response of a feeling human being, one might think.

By contrast, Andrew Gilligan wrote in the Telegraph: “the one thing Gaddafi retained to the very end was his ability to put on a show… [His] demise was as box-office as his 42-year rule”.

We suspect that most journalists are not actually unfeeling brutes. They are conformists wary of the high price they can be made to pay for even the suspicion that they might be ’apologists’ for an official enemy. A risk that has increased markedly in our age of ‘political convergence’, deprived as it is of any established mainstream political dissent.

Cameron’s First Military Victory

As ever, the broadcast media rushed to vindicate their warrior-leaders. Indeed, on August 22, the BBC’s deputy political editor, James Landale, was a month early in describing Downing Street’s satisfaction “that all David Cameron’s critics, who said that this couldn’t be done – that aerial bombardment would not work – have been proved wrong”.³

Last week, Landale’s senior colleague, Nick Robinson, brought viewers up to date, assuring them that Downing Street “will see this, I’m sure, as a triumphant end”. (News at Six, October 20, 2011) Robinson added:

Libya was David Cameron’s first war. Colonel Gaddafi his first foe. Today, his first real taste of military victory.

We are living in strange times when a senior BBC journalist can portray the fighting of endless wars as the normal way of things, as though Cameron had taken some kind of prime ministerial rite of initiation.

In an interview with new UK defence secretary, Philip Hammond, BBC ‘rottweiler’ John Humphrys asked:

What apart from a sort of moral glow – and there’s nothing wrong with that – have we got out of it?⁴

The BBC’s chief political correspondent, Norman Smith, commented:

I imagine, privately, David Cameron must surely feel vindicated because the Libyan enterprise was a big political risk.⁵

As ever, an ostensibly neutral BBC reporter endorsed what he was supposed only to be reporting: Cameron “must surely feel vindicated”. How could he possibly feel otherwise?⁶

In Washington, the BBC’s Ian Pannell thought hard and joined the mainstream herd:

I think President Obama is feeling that his foreign policy strategy has been vindicated – that his critics have been proven wrong.

An editorial in the Telegraph agreed:

His death vindicates the swift action of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy in halting the attack on Benghazi and supporting the rebellion.

A Tweet from someone called Micah Zenko made more sense to us: “Qaddafi summarily executed is apt conclusion to false narrative of Libya intervention. No arms embargo, selective NFZ, boots on the ground.”

Zenco might also have mentioned the unnoticed irony that UN resolution 1973, which authorised the misnamed ‘no-fly zone’, was among other things: ‘Condemning…torture and summary executions.’

As though concluding a bed-time story, the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall commented: “The Arab spring had claimed another infamous scalp. The risky western intervention had worked. And Libya was liberated at last.”

Andrew Grice, political editor of the Independent, applauded: “Mr Cameron took risks on Libya – but they paid off… Mr Cameron proved the doubters wrong… By calling Libya right, Mr Cameron invites a neat contrast with Tony Blair.”

Murdoch’s Times observed that only the ‘political courage’ of Sarkozy and Cameron had prevented disaster at ‘the beginning of another genocide’.⁷

In Murdoch’s grim fantasy world, any nation obstructing Western corporate control is, by happy coincidence, either perpetrating or planning ‘genocide’.

Jesus And Buddha – Hang Your Heads In Shame!

The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once commented on a striking feature of modern propaganda:

It’s been largely based on denigrating somebody over there and saying we’ve got to go in and knock them out. The main awakening of the human spirit is in compassion and the main function of propaganda is to suppress compassion, knock it out. Well, it’s in public journalism all the time now, too.⁸

Compassion is a threat because it is politically incorrect, resistant to robotic demonising by the cheerleaders of hate. Compassion is a spontaneous trembling of the heart based on an awareness of shared humanity, shared suffering, shared Being. And yet, even the normally insightful Glenn Greenwald, clearly appalled by the murders in Libya, reminded readers of something he had previously written:

No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi, just as none harbored any for Saddam.

We Tweeted him: “Jesus and Buddha hang your heads in shame!”

Greenwald replied:

I had this debate when I first wrote that – it doesn’t mean you don’t object to what’s done to them: they’re just not sympathetic.

How easily we forget that compassion - even for a vicious, hated enemy -has long been recognised as one of the highest, most precious achievements of human civilisation.

As the Buddhist sage Je Gampopa commented:

Those who are hurt by others in return for the goodness they show them, yet, despite this, still act beneficially towards them, are the finest humans in the world: people who can return good for bad.⁹

Does anyone doubt that a Jesus or a Buddha would not merely have harboured sympathy for Gaddafi but would have intervened to save his life? And who would dare claim that doing so would make them ‘apologists’ for tyranny?

Philosopher A.C. Grayling sounded a rare note of dissent:

In accepting the pragmatic case for shooting malefactors, just as we shoot mad dogs, we state that we do not wish to pay the high cost of living according to law and civil liberties. We champion our Western principles about the rule of law and the rights of individuals, we thus say, only until they become a burden and an inconvenience; and, when they do, we summarily shoot people in the head instead.

The “inconvenience” requires explanation. In truth, if they are to survive, ‘Third World’ leaders are most often obliged to prioritise Western corporate interests over the needs of local people (see our discussion of John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man). This rankles with the victims, of course, and so Western clients typically have numerous skeletons in their human rights cupboard – hidden with Western military, financial and diplomatic help. These skeletons can be brought to light in a moment, if the client strays. A compliant media is always on hand to declare the crimes “Hitlerian”, “genocidal”, “exceptional”, and surely justifying whatever violent measures Western governments deem fit for the preservation of civilisation: in reality, the preservation of their control of the target nation.

In the rush to celebrate Cameron’s ‘first taste of military victory,’ the UK media ignored or downplayed a whole host of problems with the war, including:

– The fact that even establishment think tanks like the International Crisis Group reported that NATO and the ‘rebel’ Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC), rather than the Gaddafi regime, had rejected all peace initiatives out of hand:

UNSC resolution 1973 emphatically called for a ceasefire, yet every proposal for a ceasefire put forward by the Qaddafi regime or by third parties so far has been rejected by the TNC as well as by the Western governments most closely associated with the NATO military campaign… neither the TNC nor NATO has made a ceasefire proposal of its own and there has yet to be a meaningful attempt to test Qaddafi’s seriousness or pose conditions on acceptance that would subject a putative ceasefire to effective independent supervision.¹⁰

– The fact that there was no UN mandate for regime change, even though this was very obviously NATO’s illegal aim.

– The striking lack of evidence - not least from other towns recaptured by pro-government forces - that Gaddafi planned to commit a massacre in Benghazi.

– “Rebel” estimates of 50,000 dead as a result of the war as far back as the end of August. The Guardian’s Seumas Milne is a rare, honest voice in noting that “while the death toll in Libya when NATO intervened was perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than ten times that figure.” Milne added:

If the purpose of western intervention in Libya’s civil war was to “protect civilians” and save lives, it has been a catastrophic failure.

– The bombing of Libyan state TV by British aircraft in July, which reportedly killed a number of journalists and was condemned as a war crime by Reporters Without Borders, UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists.

– The reduction of Sirte, previously a city of 100,000 people, to a smoking ruin as a result of several weeks of siege. The assault included daily indiscriminate bombing, the cutting off of water, food, medicine and electricity supplies, the shelling of a hospital, widespread looting and massacres. Aid agencies described how the attack had created a humanitarian crisis.

– The widespread racist persecution of black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans by anti-Gaddafi forces. Amnesty International reported that ‘black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans are at high risk of abuse by anti-Gaddafi forces’. (Many thanks to Peter, for providing much of this list on the Media Lens message board. A longer list is archived here)

Any horrors to come are likely to be reported in brief as the media eye swivels inexorably towards the next target of “humanitarian intervention”.

1. BBC News at Ten, October 20, 2011
2. Media Lens message board, October 24, 2011
3. Landale, BBC News at Six, August 22, 2011
4. Humphrys to Hammond, BBC Radio 4 Today, October 21, 2011; go to 3:13
5. BBC News Online, 16:34, October 21, 2011
6. Ibid.
7. Campbell, The Hero’s Journey, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, p.220
8. Leading article, Death of a Dictator, The Times, October 21, 2011
9. Gampopa, Gems of Dharma, Jewels of Freedom, Altea, 1994, p.155
10. ICG, Popular Protest In North Africa and the Middle East, (V): Making Sense of Libya, Middle East/North Africa Report N°107 – 6 June 2011, pp.28-29

The war is costing Britain £12 million per day. The same amount could employ 100,000 nurses (at £21,000 annually) and 150,000 care workers (£15,000).

A study by Brown University in the United States estimates an unimaginable combined sum of up to $4 trillion to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Afghanistan, “cautious estimates” of the total civilian death toll exceed 40,000 people, of which:

25.6%  killed by ISAF forces.

15.4%  killed by anti-government forces.

60%  killed by poverty, disease and starvation.

In particular, the horrendous killing of Afghan children in US air strikes and night raids gets scant coverage, if any, before the Western media swiftly looks away.

There are now three million refugees from Afghanistan: 30.7% of the world’s total, exceeding the figures of 16.9% from Iraq, 7.7% from Somalia and 4.8% from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

74% of the British public want the occupation to end either “immediately” or “soon”.

Very little of this reality made it into the largely uncritical coverage of the ten-year anniversary of the West’s aggression against Afghanistan.

In the conclusion to a new report for Stop the War, David Swanson provides a stunning example of the media’s systematic bias:

On August 6, 2011, numerous US media outlets reported “the deadliest day of the war” because 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, had been killed when their helicopter was shot down.

But compare that with the day of May 4, 2009, discussed in this report, on which 140 people, including 93 children, were killed in U.S. airstrikes. We are denying to each other through silence and misdirection every day that the children of Afghanistan exist. But their deaths are rising.

But the deaths of Afghan children, and the suffering of the people of Afghanistan, are seemingly of little consequence for most Western journalists who would rather focus on the “progress” and “achievements” of the Nato “campaign”.

Exchange With The BBC’s Afghanistan Correspondent, Paul Wood

In the run-up to the ten-year anniversary of the West’s invasion of Afghanistan, star presenter Fiona Bruce and her editors on the BBC News at Ten excelled themselves, as we mentioned in Part 1 of this alert:

It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what’s been achieved in that time? (BBC One, October 4, 2011, italics added)

Bruce then introduced a segment from Paul Wood, former embedded BBC correspondent in Iraq, and now firmly embedded in the NATO establishment in Afghanistan. His report, later posted online, typified the media’s unquestioning acceptance of the official line on Afghanistan. We emailed him the following day (October 5, 2011):

Hello Paul,

I hope you’re safe and well there. Thank you for your report from Afghanistan on last night’s BBC News at Ten.

You introduced your report:

“Stabilising Afghanistan has cost Britain 382 lives.”

Portraying the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as “stabilising” the country echoes NATO rhetoric. How can this constitute news “balance”?

And later you ask:

“What, then, has the British army’s engagement in Helmand been for?”

In answer, you chose to include this from Lt General James Bucknall, deputy NATO commander:

“Yes, there’s been considerable sacrifice by many, many courageous people. But actually I would say, you know, look at what we’re trying to achieve, and it is to enhance our own national security. And that is, you know, a price worth paying.”

What about the views of those who do not believe it is a ‘price worth paying’? In fact, more fundamentally, why ignore those who argue, including within Britain’s own intelligence services, that UK foreign policy has endangered “national security”?

In short, where is your journalistic scepticism of the official line? Are you really so unaware of the longstanding realpolitik: namely the Western push for geostrategic dominance over the valuable resources of this region? Shouldn’t the ample evidence for this be reflected somewhere in your reporting?

If you continue to echo state propaganda, then you are emulating Pravda and Izvestia when they reported the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in comparable terms.

I hope to hear back from you, please.

Best wishes

David Cromwell

Wood replied on 7 October:

David, sorry about the delay; it has been a bit busy.  I do try to answer emails personally (and quickly) and, as you know, we do have also a complaints unit, reachable through the website.

Anyway, you could regard “stabilising” as being read with inverted commas, or without, depending on your point of view.  Let me deal at greater length with your other point, about the use of a clip by General Bucknall, who said that Britain was in Afghanistan to “enhance our own national security”.

It is certainly an argument that Britain’s national security was damaged rather than enhanced by invading Afghanistan — and one that, rightly, gets a hearing on our output.  But a report cannot go in all directions at once, and in this piece, General Bucknall was used to reply — or balance — a series of earlier criticisms of the way the Afghan campaign is going.

In Helmand, the piece showed a police chief saying that he couldn’t survive  without Nato — and bear in mind that the whole strategy is to hand over to people like him — and also a long-serving aid worker, who had reached the pretty damning conclusion that all the blood shed in Helmand had simply been to return the place to its condition before British troops arrived.

This is hardly Izvestia style propaganda in the service of the British state — as I hope any dispassionate observer would agree.

You raise a number of good points about western motives, worthy of further debate, though I hope you will forgive me if I don’t enter into a protracted correspondence.

Yours sincerely

Paul Wood
BBC Afghanistan correspondent

We replied the same day:

Thanks Paul,

I appreciate you getting back to me. Many of your BBC colleagues are all too quick to duck direct challenges, and instead divert the public into the arcane depths of the hopeless BBC complaints system.

You claim that: 

“…you could regard “stabilising” as being read with inverted commas, or without, depending on your point of view.”

I’m afraid that comes across as a cop-out in defence of poor journalism. To add ‘inverted commas’ in a spoken report on BBC News at Ten, you would have had to insert a word like “claimed” or”alleged” and say something like:

“The UK government’s alleged goal of “stabilising” Afghanistan has cost Britain 382 lives.”

You also say that:

“It is certainly an argument that Britain’s national security was damaged rather than enhanced by invading Afghanistan — and one that, rightly, gets a hearing on our output.”

But why did you not include such a relevant and crucial argument in this report? You claim that Lt General Bucknall’s assertion that Britain is in Afghanistan “to enhance our own national security” is the “balance” for criticisms of “the way the Afghan campaign is going.” That’s a revealing admission. The argument is not that there are criticisms of “the way the Afghan campaign is going“, but that you have excluded the more fundamental criticism that the invasion-occupation cannot be justified. Instead, you deploy a standard cop-out: 

“A  report cannot go in all directions at once.”

But a report like this could, and should, have been balanced on its own. Instead, you’ve decided to rely on a hand-waving appeal to balance having been achieved in some other report, somewhere else on the BBC. This is the eternal refrain from BBC journalists when challenged with serious biases and omissions. In fact, there can be no BBC news “balance” when it consistently buries the argument that the British role in the invasion-occupation of Afghanistan is wrong.

The “good points about western motives” that I made in my earlier email should be central to responsible news reporting from Afghanistan; not merely pushed aside as “worthy of further debate”.  Otherwise, you are indeed performing a useful role “in the service of the British state.”

I understand that you’re a busy reporter and that you may prefer not to become involved in a “protracted correspondence”. Or, more optimistically, you will see that there are fundamental and serious issues here that need to be addressed.

Best wishes

David

Imagine Britain had been invaded and occupied by armed forces from another region of the world with China, for example, as a significant “partner” in the “coalition”. Imagine tens of thousands of Britons had been killed, and millions had fled as refugees. This is how the Chinese state broadcaster might report the invasion ten years hence:

It’s ten years this week since Chinese forces first became involved in Britain, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for south-east England. So what’s been achieved in that time?

These were the actual words that presenter Fiona Bruce used on the flagship BBC News at Ten:

It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what’s been achieved in that time? (BBC One, October 4, 2011, italics added)

This is BBC ‘impartiality’ in action. These words were a prelude to a piece by Paul Wood, the BBC’s Afghanistan correspondent, that was a model of Pravda-style propaganda which we will examine further in Part 2.

Meanwhile, in a shameful editorial, the Guardian burnished its credentials as a hand-wringing liberal supporter of the war. Readers were told that the war that had been “unavoidable” and that “we’ had then stayed in the country ‘through all the twists and turns imposed by events”, struggling with “the incoherence of our own changing policies, for reasons which have become less and less understandable.” The paper sighed that “an anniversary of this kind has a sobering effect” in that “we hugely overestimated the capacity of our military, diplomatic and intelligence establishments to change other societies.” This “hubris was most evident in the United States, but it was not absent in Britain.”

“The trouble”, claimed the editorial, “was that, once in that obscure corner, whether Iraq or Afghanistan”, coalition forces “were confronted by shrewd and ruthless opponents.” Historically, invaders do tend to be resisted by those “shrewd and ruthless” people in “obscure corners” whose land is being occupied, and whose lives, livelihoods and resources are at risk.

“Some Afghans”, however, “were indeed ‘like us’, recognisably middle class or western in their beliefs and aspirations, and the effect of our intervention may well have been to increase that number.”

The white man’s burden is surely lightened by that happy realisation. Especially because some of these people ‘like us’ – yes, the Guardian really did say that – “may have a more important role to play” in the future. Thus reassured, “we can hope we have planted seed that will bear fruit later.”

The tragedy of the Afghanistan war, asserted the Guardian, is that “we” stumbled into an age-old conflict not of our making:

The problem is not that Afghanistan is unconquerable, as some claim. It is that we, like the Russians before us, joined an ongoing conflict between different ethnicities, between modernisers and traditionalists, between social classes, and between newer and older forms of religiosity.

Now, “after 10 years of muddle and mayhem”, our “minimal common interest” – indeed, “our remaining duty”  – must be to aim at “a power-sharing settlement” involving the Taliban.

There was no hint from this supposed vanguard of critical and liberal journalism that “our remaining duty” should involve an immediate withdrawal of our forces. No hint that this country should make some attempt at restitution for the decade of “muddle and mayhem” that “we” have inflicted on yet more victims of the West’s grasping and destructive foreign policy.

The Independent’s editorial derived from a similarly tortured perspective of perplexed liberalism: “questions about what has been achieved yield far from encouraging answers” and “what little progress there has been is looking increasingly vulnerable.”

However, the editors added, “it would be a mistake to overlook the real advances that have been made”, such as “democratic elections, a written constitution and a degree of social freedom”. The paper also appealed yet again to “the issue of women’s rights – or the lack of them” as “one of the most convincing” supposed “justifications for international involvement in Afghanistan.”

There was token acknowledgement in the editorial of “Afghanistan’s vast natural resources” which, we are to believe,”could still be a source of funding and stability.” But there was only silence about the realpolitik underlying Western foreign policy; namely, that control of these huge resources was, in fact, ‘one of the most convincing’ reasons for the invasion-occupation of Afghanistan.

Instead, the editorial makes a benign-sounding but pathetic plea for the “international community” to “help realise the potential.” But for whose benefit? The corporate media would have us believe that the interests of the Afghan people would be paramount, and that they would be allowed to prosper. For the truth, we have to look elsewhere.

Turning Afghanistan Into A ‘Hub’ And ‘Conduit’ For US Interests

For example, energy analysts Shukria Dellawar and Antonia Juhasz note in a recent article in Foreign Policy in Focus, that:

Unknown to most Afghans, in January 2009 the government implemented a new Hydrocarbon Law that transforms its oil and natural gas sectors from fully state-owned to all but fully privatized.

In April 2011, the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines launched the first of what is expected to be a number of tenders for the country’s oil and gas resources. As in Iraq, the contracts include production-sharing agreements that have been strongly rejected by other major oil-producing countries in the Middle East. Why have such agreements been rejected? Because they heavily favour Western oil corporations, granting extremely long-term contracts (45 years or more in the case of Afghanistan) and greater control, ownership, and profits to the companies compared to the far more common contracts that are used for the bulk – around 88 per cent – of the world’s oil.

Dellawar and Juhasz warn that:

The Afghanistan contracts, moreover, would not require foreign companies to invest earnings in the Afghan economy, partner with Afghan companies, or share new technologies.

Crucially, Afghanistan is not only important as an energy producer, but also as a potential “energy conveyer”. Negotiations are proceeding rapidly for the vital Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline which would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India. The pipeline has long been an important objective of Western governments and fossil fuel corporations that have had their sights on the energy-rich countries of the Caspian region. Indeed, the Bush administration made completion of the TAPI a core part of its Afghanistan war strategy.

As then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said in 2007:

One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.

Dellawar and Juhasz conclude:

If the pipeline is constructed and U.S. companies begin producing in Afghanistan, its importance to the West will only intensify, as will the desire to keep Afghanistan ‘open for business’. If Afghanistan does not have the internal capacity to provide this ‘openness’ itself, the United States and other foreign governments may feel forced to do so on its behalf – utilizing their own troops.

As ever, then, Western states and corporations are striving relentlessly to maintain control of resources and global markets, and to maximise profits for themselves, with as much force and skullduggery as they can muster. And Western media will provide intellectual cover by selling the resultant theft, slaughter and misery as “stabilisation”, “‘investment” and “the protection of human rights”.

As former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges writes:

The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality and virtue it does not possess. Liberals posit themselves as the conscience of the nation. They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.

Supine Reporting In Service To The State

Regular readers may recall an alert in 2007 which compared Soviet and recent US/UK reporting on Afghanistan. The alert was a collaboration with Nikolai Lanine, who had fought with the Soviet Army during its 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan. He had subsequently spent several years trawling through Soviet-era newspaper archives comparing the propaganda of that time with modern Western media performance.

As we pointed out then, if the claims of  impartiality and balance in modern professional journalism are to be believed, the similarities should have been few and far between. After all, Soviet-era media such as Pravda – meaning, ironically, “The Truth” – are a byword for state-controlled mendacity in the West. Instead, as the alert showed, the similarities were painfully precise.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was an unalloyed act of aggression, an attempt to crush a perceived threat to Soviet security and power. But it was portrayed by the Soviet government, and compliant Soviet media such as Pravda and Izvestia, as an act of humanitarian intervention “to prevent the establishment of… a terrorist regime and to protect the Afghan people from genocide”, and also to provide “aid in stabilising the situation and the repulsion of possible external aggression.”  Once the “terrorists” had been defeated by the Soviet army, Afghanistan would be left to become “a stable, friendly country”. Soviet “involvement” was presented as being in the best interests of the Afghan people: the focus of the Soviet government’s benevolent concern. ¹

The parallels to the media’s coverage of Western “involvement” in Afghanistan today are obvious.

Western media support for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September, was steadfast from the beginning. Ten years ago, as the bombs and missiles rained down, an Independent editorial described the “war”  — in reality, a massive attack on aThird World Country by the planet’s most powerful military force –  as “ultimately inevitable”. Moreover, “Washington had the right – indeed, the duty – to respond” and ”there was no question that the United States was justified in using armed force.” Piling up the insults to readers’ intelligence, the paper said that it was ”to the immense – and unexpected – credit of America that it approached the business of retaliation with such method, caution and responsibility.”

In fact, the US launched its brutal assault despite dire warnings by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) that more than seven million people were facing a crisis that could lead to widespread starvation if military action were initiated. In September 2001, the US government had demanded that Pakistan stop convoys of food on which much of the already starving Afghan population depended. The FAO warned of a likely ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ unless aid convoys were immediately resumed and the threat of military action terminated. Compare the grim reality with the Independent’s claim of  “caution and responsibility” underpinning the US “business of retaliation”.

Three months into the war, a rare report in the Guardian highlighted the desperation of Afghan people:

The village of Bonavash is slowly starving. Besieged by the Taliban and crushed by years of drought, people in this remote mountain settlement have resorted to eating bread made from grass and traces of barley flour. Babies whose mothers’ milk has dried up are fed grass porridge. The toothless elderly crush grass into a near powder. Many have died. More are sick. Nearly everyone has diarrhoea or a hacking cough. When the children’s pain becomes unbearable, their mothers tie rags around their stomachs to try to alleviate the pressure. “We are waiting to die. If food does not come, if the situation does not change, we will eat it [grass] … until we die,” said Ghalam Raza, 42, a man with a hacking cough, pain in his stomach and bleeding bowels.

But on the eve of war, the Guardian had told its readers:

It needs to be said as clearly and as unemotively as possible at the outset that the United States was entitled to launch a military response.

The invasion was “an act of legitimate self defence to protect our nations from further attack”.

The paper offered token words of hope that Bush and Blair’s promises of food, medicine and other supplies to Afghan civilians would be honoured. Blair tried to sweet-talk the Afghans by saying that, in the past, the West had simply “walked away” from its people. But not now:

This time round we must not repeat that mistake. This conflict will not be the end… once the conflict is over we’ve then got to sit down with people in Afghanistan and try and work out a stable and coherent way for the future… We are not going to walk away again.

This is the standard, patronising rhetoric beloved of all triumphant invaders.

As defenceless Afghan civilians were being slaughtered, the Guardian editors asserted that “nothing in the world is more important right now than that [Bush and Blair] succeed”.

The Guardian even claimed that Afghanistan had brought the storm of destruction upon their own heads:

Offered the opportunity to hand over Bin Laden and to act against his networks, and pressured to do so even by those closest to them, including Pakistan, the Afghan regime has refused. There is no question, therefore, but that a monstrous injustice against America remains unassauged [sic].

In fact, even before 11 September 2001, the Taliban had offered to present bin Laden for trial following attacks on US targets in the 1990s, “but the US government showed no interest”.

Following the 11 September atrocities, the US refused to present evidence of bin Laden’s culpability to the Taliban “presumably because”, as Noam Chomsky said in an interview at the time, “that would have suggested some limit on the imperial prerogative to act without any authority”.

How genuine the Taliban offer was may never be known. But, as Chomsky points out, the brutal US stance could be put succinctly as follows:

Hand him [bin Laden] over, or else; and if you do, we may leave you alone (overthrowing the Taliban regime was a late afterthought). No government, surely not the U.S., would ever accept such a demand, unless compelled to by the threat of extreme violence. There was, then, no alternative to such [a] threat, if that was the demand, as it was. But that offers no justification for the threat of violence, or its implementation.

As for the editorial cheerleaders, press stenographers and armchair-warrior commentators who abased themselves before Western state power, they would do well to heed the cogent summary offered by WikiLeaks:

If a journalist hides the truth they are not journalists; they are partners in the crime they are hiding.

•  Part 2 will follow shortly…

1. Lyahovsky, A.A., & Zabrodin, V.M., 1991, Taini Afganskoi Voini [Secrets of the Afghan War]. Moscow: Planeta

It was widely reported that two young men acting independently – Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22 – had been sentenced to four years in prison for trying to incite riots via Facebook in the Manchester area. This ‘despite both being of previous good character’, and despite the fact that their Facebook entries – viewed by a few hundred people – failed to generate a single rioter. Farcically, the only people waiting for Blackshaw at his gathering point were the police.

The four-year jail sentences were harsh indeed, as the Guardian noted:

If the two Cheshire men had left home and actually taken part in a riot, it is likely they would have been charged with violent disorder. The average sentence passed on the 372 people convicted of violent disorder in 2010 was just over 18 months. The 1,434 people convicted of public order offences last year got, on average, two months inside.

Normally, to qualify for a four-year sentence, a convict would have to kidnap somebody (average sentence 47 months in 2010), kill someone while drink driving (45 months), or carry out a sexual assault (48 months).

Clearly, judges felt that even failed attempts to incite disruption via social media were worse than actual participation in the riots.

Writing in the Daily Mail, columnist Melanie Phillips located the cause of the riots in:

… fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them.

This vicious behaviour is fostered by ‘a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos. A world where a child responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to violence.

And who can doubt that compassion and restraint in the face of disagreement offer the best hopes for a peaceful world? The 11th century Buddhist poet Ksemendra recalled the wise counsel offered to one enraged king:

Lord, do not talk like this. If you return anger for anger, anger increases. If you give hate in return for hatred, you will never be rid of your enemies. Would you put out a fire by covering it with wood? It will always rekindle… If you meditate on tolerance to overcome anger, all will become your friends. ¹

Earlier this month, Phillips commented on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks:

The real problem with the US and UK reaction to 9/11 was that they did not follow through… we should have gone on to deal with Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Saudi as well.

Did she mean ‘deal with’ their concerns and grievances in a just and even-handed way? Should the US and UK have recognised their own wrongdoing, their own responsibility for generating hatred? In clarification, Phillips quoted herself from September 2002:

The US hopes that sorting Saddam will deliver to these other states the simple message: unless you desist from terror, you’re next.

A world ‘without any boundaries or rules’, in other words, where unilaterally ‘resorting to violence’ and ‘lashing out’ is the natural response.

Journalists like Phillips, who use national media platforms like the Daily Mail (circulation 2 million) to agitate for war at a time when the decision lies in the balance, are typically garlanded with awards, not sent to the slammer.  After two years spent cold-selling Blair’s war on Iraq, David Aaronovitch, then of the Guardian, won the What the Papers Say Columnist of The Year Award for 2003. In the same year, following a similar pro-war performance, the Independent’s Johann Hari was made Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards (to his credit, Hari has since recanted his support for the Iraq war). Phillips was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.

Politicians do even better, of course. Last month, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Tony Blair, now the Middle East Quartet’s Special Envoy, was to receive an award ‘to express Israel’s appreciation for his efforts toward Middle East peace’. A decision worthy of a different kind of Orwell Prize. Meanwhile, Channel 4 reports:

Since resigning in June 2007 Tony Blair has financially enriched himself more than any ex-Prime Minister ever. Reporter Peter Oborne reveals some of the sources of his new-found wealth, much of which comes from the Middle East.

Michael White And ‘The Big Bloke On The Next Floor’

In the immediate aftermath of the riots, Michael White, assistant editor of the Guardian, savoured the prospect of the hardship awaiting jailed rioters, including the Facebook Two mentioned above. Why?

People write all sorts of really ugly and stupid things on Facebook, Twitter, email and other anti-social media platforms (including this one), and it’s time they realised that they matter.

True enough, although the same can be said of journalists, as we have seen, including White himself. At a crucial time in January 2003, he co-authored a Guardian piece that hailed Blair as he ‘gave MPs a bravura performance in defence of his [Iraq] policy’.²

The reporters failed to mention that, ‘bravura’ or not, Blair’s speech was spectacularly dishonest. They added instead: ‘it was noticeable that when Mr Blair delivered a powerful peroration in the Commons the cheers of Labour loyalists greatly exceeded the heckling he had earlier got from his own side’.

Certainly, the Facebook Two sought to inspire social disorder, but this kind of stenography to power habitually performed by mainstream journalists has facilitated the destruction of literally hundreds of thousands of human lives. Is this mere hyperbole? Do journalists really have that kind of power? It is clear to us that they are able to shape public opinion and so make war possible. George Monbiot wrote in 2004 that ‘the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job.  ³

White’s outrage was directed at small fry reaching a tiny audience: ‘every time I see a nasty piece on new pix, CCTV footage or film of brutal incidents on the street… I hear the R-word [retribution] tip-toeing across my brain.

I want to see riot louts punished and, if punishment also helps them turn around their otherwise futile lives, then good.

He recognised that the punishment was sometimes harsh:

… four years in prison for trying to organise a riot in Northwich or Warrington (no one turned up) is a bit excessive… Yet I’m not sorry at the thought that Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan… and Jordan Blackshaw woke up in the slammer on Thursday remembering that, no, it’s not all a bad dream. It could be like this for the next 18 months, lads. And what if that big bloke on the next floor takes a shine to you?

This gleeful hand-rubbing at the threat of male rape as welcome punishment surely also qualifies as ‘ugly and stupid’.

A reader, Murau, commented beneath the article:

Men in prison. Only subject area where jokes about rape are considered acceptable.

Another reader, Forthestate responded:

You’re quite right. It’s also disturbing that in these not infrequent, rather gloating references, there is an almost tacit assumption that rape is an acceptable part of the punishment. If it’s so widespread that it regularly produces this unseemly speculation perhaps there should be some proper journalistic attention devoted to it.

On September 14, Channel 4 News reported:

Those jailed following the riots are being victimised by existing inmates because of the decline in comfort, according to the relative of a teenager detained in Portland prison for an offence unrelated to the riots.

Channel 4’s source added:

People are having their association time cut down to an hour a day – or possibly less. I’ve heard that some of the rioters have been attacked out of sight of the wardens – in the showers.’

We asked White to comment on these reports. He responded:

Sorry to hear that, but they did think they’d get away with looting unpunished. There’s a lesson in that.

The US human rights organisation Justdetention.org works to challenge the idea that rape, including male rape, in prisons is somehow normal and even acceptable. Their website comments:

Cases of sexual abuse in detention are not rare, isolated incidents, but the result of a systemic failure to protect the safety of inmates. Victims of prisoner rape are left beaten and bloodied, contract HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and suffer severe psychological harm. Once released – and the vast majority of prisoners do eventually get out – they return to their communities with all of their physical and emotional scars.

The Italian activist and film-maker Gabriele Zamparini invited Justdetention.org to respond to White’s comments. They replied:

As you point out it is a very disturbing example of the tendency to joke publicly about and diminish the problem of prisoner rape. (Forwarded to Media Lens, August 22, 2011)

The corporate media evaluate the actions of the powerful and the powerless by different and conflicting moral standards. The powerful are judged on the basis of who they are rather than of what they do. No matter how plainly individual leaders and parties have lied, no matter how cynical their motives, no matter how many deaths they have caused, they continue to be treated as fundamentally respectable and trustworthy.

This ‘respectability’ is a function of media power as it interacts with state power. It is a form of propaganda support that is structural, all but unconditional, in essence guaranteed. The results were described by  Greek historian Thucydides:

The strong do as they can, while the weak suffer what they must.

1. Leaves of the Heaven Tree, Dharma Publishing, 1997, p.333
2. Michael White and Julian Borger, ‘Blair wins time over party divisions on Iraq with bravura performance to MPs,’ The Guardian, January 16, 2003
3. Monbiot, Our lies led us into war, The Guardian, July 20, 2004

Thus, on the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an editorial in the Independent on Sunday gushed about ‘Bush’s desire to spread democracy as an end in itself’. It was, the paper said, ‘the germ of a noble idea’. There was  ‘an idealism’ about Blair’s support for Bush. The drawback was that the execution of the righteous vision had been ‘naive, arrogant and morally compromised by torture and the abrogation of the very values for which the US-led coalition claimed to fight’.

But now we have Nato’s ‘successful’ mission in Libya to help wipe the slate clean. The paper writes that ‘the deserts of North Africa … turned out to be more fertile soil for democracy than could have been imagined.’ Libya is the great cause ‘where the idea of liberal intervention could be rescued and to an extent redeemed from the terrible mistake of Iraq.’

Note that the invasion-occupation of Iraq is described as a ‘mistake’, not the supreme international crime as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg Trials.

The horrendous murder of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian, by British soldiers ‘was a reminder of how much the Iraq war tarnished Britain’s reputation abroad.’ The implication is that Britain’s ‘reputation’ is fundamentally decent, only occasionally ‘tarnished’.

The paper concludes:

There is a hope that Britain, with a more realistic understanding of its capability, could regain some of the ethical role in the world that it lost after its mistaken response to 9/11.

In the wake of all that has happened in the past ten years (and more), it takes a committed form of self-deception to cling to the shredded image of Britain’s ‘ethical role in the world’.

In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis has laid bare the motivations and realpolitik of British foreign policy. Ethics and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. Curtis observes:

A basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes. ¹

But the myth of benevolence must be maintained, even to the extent of active deception of the British public:

In every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.  (Ibid., p. 3)

In his political work, Noam Chomsky often cites a definition of terrorism from a US army manual as:

The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.

By this definition, Chomsky points out, the major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States.

As for Britain, Curtis says:

The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture.  ²

In Unpeople, Curtis estimates the number of deaths in the post-WW2 period for which Britain bears significant responsibility, whether directly or indirectly. He tabulates mortality estimates for all the wars and conflicts in which Britain participated or otherwise played a significant role, for example in covert operations or diplomatic support for other governments’ violence. The examples include: war in Malaya (1948-1960), war in Kenya (1952-1960), the Shah’s regime in Iran (1953-1979), Indonesian army slaughters (1965-1966), the Indonesian invasion of East Timor (1975), US aggression in Latin America (1980s), the Falklands War (1982), the bombing of Yugoslavia (1999), the bombing of Afghanistan (2001) and the invasion of Iraq (2003).

As Curtis acknowledges, estimates of deaths in any conflict often vary widely and he does not pretend to be offering a ‘fully scientific analysis’. But erring on the side of caution, he arrives at a figure of around ten million deaths in the post-war period for which Britain bears ‘significant responsibility.’ Of these, Britain has ‘direct responsibility’ for between four and six million deaths. These are shocking figures, and essentially unmentionable in corporate news and debate.

The Doublespeak Of Terror/Counterterror

One of the golden rules propping up the required self-deception of the West’s fundamental goodness is that whenever violence is inflicted by the state it is only in retaliation for violence perpetrated by our enemies. This is straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Edward Herman explains:

[An] important doublespeak device for rationalizing one’s own and friendly terrorism is to describe it as “retaliation” and “counter-terror.” The trick here is arbitrary word assignment: that is, any violence engaged in by ourselves or our friends is ipso facto retaliation and counter-terrorism; whatever the enemy does is terrorism, irrespective of facts. ³

The notion is so pervasive in news reporting that it is virtually invisible, like the oxygen breathed by the journalist; it is simply taken for granted. Even raising the topic for discussion in mainstream circles is beyond the pale.

Consider a recent report on the BBC News at Ten. On September 7, 2011, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reported from outside the Houses of Parliament:

When these anti-terrorist crash barriers went up outside Parliament back in 2003, a lot of people were shocked at the time. But we’ve got used to them. They’re a part of the world we live in.

Gardner continued:

There is no clear answer as to whether we’re safer now in Britain from terrorism than we were ten years ago. We know more about the threat we’re facing but those threats have multiplied and diversified.

The mass hostage-taking and murder in Mumbai three years ago has led to joint police-SAS training and a major boost in police firepower.

Gardner granted that ‘counterterrorism is also about foreign policy’, pointing out the obvious fact that ‘Britain’s part in the Iraq invasion helped recruit countless young men to al-Qaeda’s cause, increasing the danger to Britain.’ Indeed, this was a known risk before the invasion: Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that al-Qaeda and associated groups were ‘by far the greatest terrorist threat’ to this country and that the risk would be ‘heightened by military action against Iraq’. Gardner’s report neglected to mention this.

His news item, and an accompanying article the next day at BBC News online, was framed in the necessary traditional convention: that terrorism is what they do, while ‘we’ undertake counterterrorism.

On September 8, 2011, we wrote to the BBC’s security correspondent:

Dear Frank Gardner,

I hope you’re doing well. Thank you for your report on last night’s BBC News at Ten. You rightly referred to the attacks on Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai and Oslo as examples of terrorism. But you neglected to mention any examples involving US killings of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Here is but one example from 2006 in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi. At least ten civilians – including four women and five children – were bound and executed with shots to the head.

Nor did you mention the Israeli offensive against Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, with the deaths of around 1,400 civilians (including 300 children), or the attack on a peaceful convoy led by the Mavi Marmara.

Why do you follow a script that says that violence conducted by officially-decreed enemies is ‘terrorism’, while violence inflicted by Western states or our allies is ‘counter-terrorism’?

I hope to hear from you, please.

Regards

David Cromwell

Not hearing anything back, we nudged Frank Gardner gently on September 12 via email and again two days later.  We then received an email from someone at the BBC called Paul Rasmussen:

Hello David

I understand you have been in touch about some BBC News reporting.  If you wish to make a complaint – you will need use the BBC complaints procedure – if you are not familiar with how to do this please let me know.

Yours,  Paul Rasmussen
(Email, September 14, 2011)

We responded the same day:

Hello Paul,

Many thanks for your email. Has Frank Gardner been in touch with you?

I asked Mr Gardner to respond to a perfectly fair challenge about a report he made on last Wednesday’s BBC News at Ten, and I hope he’ll feel able to do so.

Best wishes,

David

We received no reply. The following day, still not having heard from Gardner, we emailed the BBC correspondent again:

Dear Frank Gardner,

I know how busy you must be. But it’s now one week on, and it’s disappointing that you are seemingly reluctant to reply to a serious, polite and reasonable email from a member of the public. I’m not seeking to make an official BBC complaint about your report; I’m simply asking you to respond to a straightforward query.

If you would rather remain silent, it lends credence to the point that your reporting does have an ideological stance: namely, that the UK state and its allies cannot be charged with terrorism, only counter-terrorism.

I’d be grateful if you would at least try to respond to this charge directly, rather than meet it with silence or any attempt to divert it into the BBC complaints system [see here and here].

Regards,

David Cromwell (Email, September 15, 2011)

This was clearly too much for any self-respecting journalist to resist. A reply duly arrived that day from ‘Frank Gardner OBE’:

Dear Mr Cromwell

You rightly guess that I am too busy to answer the many people who write in with interesting and often excellent questions. The online version of my 9/11 report is attached. I believe it is fair, accurate and balanced but if you disagree then do please feel free to file a complaint to the BBC, backing it up with evidence. Im afraid that as with other members of the public I am not in a position to enter into a correspondence.

Yours sincerely

Frank Gardner OBE
BBC Security Correspondent

Gardner’s dismissive response, seemingly squeezed out of him, is poor fare indeed. There is no meaningful attempt to debate the serious point we put before him. If we were to respond in the same offhand way to polite challengers, and tried to shepherd them towards a Media Lens complaints department, we would be justly ridiculed.

Recall that the BBC – which is state-funded, managed by state-approved appointees, and overseen by a cosy club of establishment worthies – is always declaring itself to be scrupulously ‘impartial’. Fundamental criticism of the state is protected by this shield of  ‘impartiality’. How?  By taking for granted that ‘we’ in the West are, by definition, the ‘good guys’.

As we said at the start of this alert, the prevailing ideology holds that the West may be guilty of occasional ‘lapses’, but that it endeavours with a good heart to export democracy, uphold human rights and keep the global peace. This false and poisonous propaganda image – carefully cultivated and assiduously pushed by powerful interests – can never be seriously challenged by the state broadcaster and the corporate media generally. And certainly not when the state broadcaster’s ‘security correspondent’ has had an honour bestowed upon him by the same state.

If this was the old Soviet Union, or perhaps present-day Iran, there would be howls of mirth and outrage from respectable commentators in Britain. That it is happening right here, in this ‘beacon of democracy and free speech’, is apparently no cause for concern or even comment in ‘mainstream’ circles.

1. Unpeople, Vintage, 2004, p. 3
2. Web of Deceit, Vintage, 2003, p. 94
3. Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, South End Press, 1992, p. 44

In a piece that recalled the iconic scene from The Usual Suspects, Monbiot lined up Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Peterson, John Pilger, and Media Lens, as political commentators who ‘take the unwarranted step of belittling the acts of genocide committed by opponents of the western powers’.

According to Monbiot, Herman and Peterson are guilty of something called ‘genocide denial.’ Media Lens got off on the lesser charge of ‘supporting genocide denial’. As for Chomsky, Monbiot Tweeted: ‘And, to my great distress, as I rate him very highly, #NoamChomsky doesn’t come out of it too well either.’

The ‘it’ in question was Monbiot’s own investigation: think a one-man Chilcot Inquiry.

‘Genocide belittling’ and ‘genocide denial’ may sound like neutral terms, but in fact they are loaded, and aimed, in a particular direction by mainstream journalists.

Typically, someone is adjudged guilty of ‘genocide denial’ only when they question accounts of crimes committed by official enemies of the West. No-one is accused of ‘genocide denial’ if they present Iraq Body Count’s (IBC) figure of 100,000 reported civilian deaths by violence since 2003 as the likely total number of Iraqis who have died through all causes. No-one is accused if they favour IBC’s current figure over the Lancet study which estimated 655,000 Iraqi dead as a result of the war way back in 2006. The same applies to the many commentators who have rejected, or ignored, claims that US-UK-led sanctions killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children under five between 1990-2003.

Journalists can go as low as they please in estimating numbers killed in Western or Western-backed bloodbaths in, for example, Indonesia, East Timor, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yemen, Iran and Afghanistan. No-one would dream of charging them with ‘genocide denial’.

In his article, Monbiot initially focused on right-wing ‘deniers’. He then turned to the opposite end of the political spectrum:

But genocide denial is just as embarrassing to the left as it is to the libertarian right. Last week Edward Herman, an American professor of finance best known for co-authoring Manufacturing Consent with Noam Chomsky, published a new book called The Srebrenica Massacre. It claims that the 8,000 deaths at Srebrenica are “an unsupportable exaggeration. The true figure may be closer to 800.”

These words do appear in the book, but they are taken from the foreword by Phillip Corwin, formerly the UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Curiously, then, Monbiot began his criticism of Herman by focusing on someone else’s words. Different contributors to a book, even editors compiling the contributions, are not normally held to have collectively asserted what any one contributor has asserted.

Monbiot added: ‘The leftwing website Media Lens maintained that Herman and Peterson were “perfectly entitled” to talk down the numbers killed at Srebrenica.’

One might, of course, debate what ‘talk down’ means. But this is what we actually wrote about what Herman (rather than Corwin) has argued:

Herman and Peterson have also written:

“There is a good case to be made that, while there were surely hundreds of executions, and possibly as many as a thousand or more, the 8,000 figure is a political construct and eminently challengeable.” (Herman and Peterson, ‘Milosevic’s Death in the Propaganda System,’ ZNet, May 14, 2006)

Herman and Peterson, then, are not denying that mass killings took place at Srebrenica. They also do not accept the figure cited by Kamm and others, but that they are perfectly entitled to do. (Media Alert, ‘Dancing On A Mass Grave,’ November 25, 2009)

Arguing that someone is entitled to debate the facts is not the same as arguing that they are entitled to falsify, mislead, wilfully deceive, or whatever ‘talk down’ was intended to suggest. Monbiot could simply have written: ‘Media Lens maintained that Herman and Peterson were “perfectly entitled” to debate the facts.’

Readers may be surprised to learn that we have never written about the Srebrenica massacre – which took place six years before we started Media Lens – other than to affirm that it was a massacre. The whole emphasis of our November 4, 2005 alert, for example, was to show that Noam Chomsky had affirmed, and not denied, as the Guardian claimed, that there had been a massacre at Srebrenica.

With regard to Herman and Peterson’s work, we checked our archives – after ten years of work on Media Lens, we found a grand total of two articles by them discussing Srebrenica posted on our website (a third mentions it in passing).

The practical implications of Monbiot’s criticism were not spelled out. Were we wrong to post the two articles? Should we delete them? What threat does our posting of Herman and Peterson’s work pose, as against the threat to free speech of banning their work from our website? After all, if taken seriously, accusations of ‘genocide denial’ could be extended to suppress other views that are unpopular with powerful interests.

We found that the US website ZNet hosts literally dozens of articles by Herman and Peterson mentioning Srebrenica. Presumably, then, it is a world-leader in ‘supporting genocide denial.’ We asked Monbiot why he has not complained to ZNet (to which he is a regular contributor), or even mentioned their role. He chose not to respond on this issue.

To be clear, we reject the right of any court, any government, indeed anyone, to apply labels like ‘genocide’ to historical events and then, not merely argue but demand that they be accepted. The assumption that human institutions are in possession of Absolute Truth belongs to the era of The Inquisition, not to serious debate. There are rare cases when hate speech which is motivated by racism and likely to lead to violence can be condemned. But presumably Monbiot was not suggesting that Herman, Peterson, Chomsky and Pilger are trying to promote hatred and violence. We asked Monbiot, but again he did not respond. Please click here to see our email to him, and here to see the response he sent on June 17.

Distinguishing Deaths From Executions

Even putting aside concerns with the term ‘genocide denial’, Monbiot’s article contains some major gaffes. For example, as indicated above, Herman does not argue ‘that the 8,000 deaths at Srebrenica are “an unsupportable exaggeration”‘. Rather, he argues that the 8,000 executions at Srebrenica are an exaggeration. Monbiot wrote to us: ‘Given that 6,500 of the victims have already been exhumed and identified, and that there is very strong evidence (as there has been for years) to suggest that a further 1,500 or so await discovery, this statement is demonstrably wrong and without justification.’

But the 6,500 victims ‘exhumed and identified’ have been identified by DNA profiling that does not identify the cause of death – Herman and Peterson are questioning how many people were executed.

Freelance journalist Jonathan Rooper worked for the BBC for some 20 years. He was a journalist in TV current affairs before moving to BBC TV News where he became head of the News Features department. Rooper wrote to us:

DNA-based identifications of persons reported missing in wartime does not and cannot address the manner of death in any of those identified. So even if the ICMP [The International Commission on Missing Persons] claimed in an email to George Monbiot on 13 June that it, the ICMP, had positively identified “6,595 of the 7,789 Bosnians [sic] reported as missing” from the Srebrenica “safe area” population after the date of its capture by the Bosnian Serb forces (i.e., after July 11, 1995), this does not support, and cannot be used to support, Srebrenica-massacre allegations [of 8,000 shot dead].’ (Email to Media Lens, June 24, 2011)

And yet Monbiot insists that the figure of 8,000 executions is ‘accepted by everyone except some extreme Serb nationalists and a small group of wilful deniers as the correct total…’

In his response to us, Monbiot was adamant: ‘To describe it as “talking down” the number of deaths [sic – executions] is in fact an understatement: it amounts to the outright disavowal of cast-iron evidence.’

Again, this is simply wrong. Even if we accept that there is ‘cast-iron’ evidence of 6,500 deaths, there is not ‘cast-iron’ evidence of 6,500 executions. Some of the dead may have been regular battlefield casualties – the point Herman and Peterson are making.

Note, also, that the standard claim for Muslim deaths in Bosnia from 1993 and for many years thereafter was about 250,000 – a figure offered by the Bosnian Muslim authorities and accepted by many journalists. However, in Bosnian Book of the Dead: Assessment of the Database, Patrick Ball et al., estimate 96,895 deaths in total for the period of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, of which 57,696 (59.6%) were military and 39,199 (40.5%) were civilian. Does that make Patrick Ball et al. guilty of the charge of ‘revisionism’ or ‘belittling’, or even ‘genocide denial’?

The ‘Inverted Commas Problem’

A second gaffe is even more remarkable. Shortly after noting that ‘genocide denial is… embarrassing to the left,’ Monbiot wrote: ‘Worse still, he places the Rwandan genocide in inverted commas throughout the text…’ The ‘text’ in question is The Politics of Genocide. The ‘he’ is Edward Herman, although the book was actually co-authored with David Peterson.

At face value, this does indeed look awful. Are Herman and Peterson denying that there was any kind of genocide in Rwanda? This recalls the worst kind of apologetics arguing that there was no Nazi Holocaust, no gas chambers, no policy to exterminate Jews.

But even a glance at The Politics of Genocide reveals that the authors are using quote marks to refer to what they call ‘the standard model’ (p.53) of the Rwanda genocide – that there was a conspiracy by Hutu to eliminate the Tutsi from Rwanda. Herman and Peterson claim that this account is ‘a propaganda line’ (p.51) that ‘turned perpetrator and victim upside-down’ (p.51). Thus, in writing of ‘the Rwanda genocide’ using inverted commas, they are referring to a particular version of what happened and proposing an alternative version of events which, they claim, better fits the known facts.

What they are not doing is suggesting that there was no genocide in Rwanda. As Peterson commented to us, if they are to be ‘accused’ of anything, it should be ‘genocide reallocation’, not ‘genocide denial’. That Monbiot could even make the accusation, which could hardly be more damning, calls into question how seriously he had studied the material he was citing.

This error closely echoes Emma Brockes’ infamous comment about Noam Chomsky in the Guardian:

Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.

The Guardian was forced to accept that Chomsky had never put the Srebrenica massacre in quotation marks. Brockes’ article was deleted from the Guardian website (which Chomsky, rightly, considered unnecessary). See here.

The prize-winning former Guardian journalist, Jonathan Cook, sent us this comment on the inverted commas:

It is worth noting that Norman Finkelstein did something identical in his book “The Holocaust Industry”. He states in the Introduction:

“In the pages that follow, I will argue that ‘The Holocaust’ is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust.” (p3)

He also says in a footnote on the same page:

“In this text, Nazi holocaust [his italics] signals the actual historical event, The Holocaust [his italics] its ideological representation.”

In Monbiot’s opinion, does this make Finkelstein, whose parents were survivors of the Nazi holocaust and many members of whose family were killed in the death camps, a Holocaust denier?’ (Email to Media Lens, June 17, 2011)

Cook added:

I thought his response to you was preposterous. He’s either suddenly become remarkably dimwitted (eg. not being able to understand the distinction being made by Herman and Peterson between combat casualties and executions) or he’s not playing straight. His rationalisations are now such a mess it’s actually difficult to disentangle his various arguments and to know whom he’s accusing of what.

As discussed, Monbiot also included John Pilger as part of the ‘malign intellectual subculture’. Pilger commented:

A common recipe for smear is half or quarter truth, conflation, misrepresentation, a pinch of sneer and a dollop of guilt-by-association. Stir briskly. Chef Monbiot is a curiously sad figure. All those years of noble green crusading now dashed by his Damascene conversion to nuclear power’s poisonous devastations and his demonstrable need for establishment recognition – a recognition which, ironically, he already enjoyed. Predictably, the born-again attack as “denialists” those who continue to point out Western propaganda’s mendacious constructions and omissions. Goodbye George. (Email to Media Lens, June 29, 2011)

Conclusion

People who care about freedom of speech use the term ‘genocide denial’ with extreme caution (as discussed, on rare occasions, political commentary that promotes racism and violence can be condemned). It is most often used as a crude device to taint commentators with a version of ‘Holocaust denial’ employing a similar term.

As used in the current debate, it amounts to little more than saying: ‘I charge you with disagreeing with me. How do you plead?’ The question has no meaning because it is not a crime to disagree with someone, not least because, Enlightened Beings aside, other people can never claim to be in possession of Absolute Truth (and Enlightened Beings have nothing to fear from open debate).

So why has Monbiot turned on us rather than, say, ZNet in this way? The reason, we believe, is that we have repeatedly challenged his journalism. In November 2002, at a crucial time in a key newspaper, Monbiot advanced a preposterous scheme for overthrowing the Iraqi government. He added:

But if this option is tried and fails, and if war turns out to be the only means of removing Saddam, then let us support a war whose sole and incontestable purpose is that and only that…’ (Monbiot, ‘See you in court, Tony,’ The Guardian, November 26, 2002)

We pointed out that this was as damaging as it was absurd. There was no way for the British public to ‘support’ some kind of ‘just war’ on Iraq in this way – there were no mechanisms for applying that kind of public pressure. Moreover, there was no justification for urging the public to support war on any basis – Britain and the US had no legal or moral right whatever to wage war on Iraq. The only hope in November 2002 was to encourage as many people as possible to oppose war in all circumstances.

Monbiot responded by attacking us in his Guardian column, and we believe he has never forgiven us for pointing out his disastrous error of judgement and for our subsequent challenges of his work on Iran and the media.

Postscript

It took fully five weeks for the Guardian to publish a response to the claims Monbiot made on June 13. Herman and Peterson submitted separate pieces to different sections of the Guardian, including Comment Is Free (Katharine Viner and Matt Seaton), the op-ed page (Becky Gardiner, Gwyn Topham, Libby Brooks), the response column (Joseph Harker), as well as the Guardian‘s editor Alan Rusbridger and its ombudsman Chris Elliott. On June 21, response column editor Joseph Harker told Peterson:

‘You make a number of assertions, so we’ll look into them and get back to you.’

In the lengthy period of ‘review’ that followed, Herman was told by Becky Gardiner, editor of the Guardian comment pages, ‘that too much time has elapsed’ to publish his response to Monbiot. Natalie Hanman, the editor of the online Comment is Free (CiF) section, told Herman that there was no space to publish his 760-word response.

On July 5, Harker finally responded with five reasons explaining why he had rejected Herman and Peterson’s submissions (see here together with Peterson’s detailed responses to each of these points). These five points were presumably supplied by ‘experts’ on Srebrenica and Rwanda, possibly the same two sources that Monbiot had previously cited in his response to Media Lens. Harker invited Herman and Peterson to submit a joint response under 550 words that would fit ‘within our editorial guidelines’.

In the meantime, the Observer had published another critical piece by Nick Cohen on the ‘Chomskyan self-delusion’ of ‘west-hating’ leftists, with pointed reference to Srebrenica.

After further Guardian edits and under the slanted headline, ‘We’re not genocide deniers’, Herman and Peterson’s response finally appeared on July 19. On the same day, Herman and Peterson posted copies of their original, rejected responses on ZNet.

Guardian readers posted comments below the truncated response from Herman and Peterson, with the majority in support and several providing links to the fuller rebuttals posted at ZNet. The CiF moderators swiftly got to work playing ‘whack-a-mole’ to remove these comments whenever they popped up. Even a comment by Peterson himself, linking to these longer pieces, was removed. Unusually, this was later restored, most likely in response to public complaints.

Less than a week after Herman and Peterson’s condensed response had appeared in the Guardian, a speedy rejoinder was published by James Wizeye of the Rwanda high commission in London. Apparently no extensive Guardian investigation was required for the Rwandan official’s claims.

By this point, the Guardian had grudgingly allowed Herman and Peterson 500 words to defend themselves against the ugly and false charges of ‘genocide denial’ in several thousand words printed by the Observer/Guardian.

Jonathan Cook summarised the debacle:

This whole episode really has been a fabulous case study of how our most liberal media ensure that certain reasonable views are beyond the pale of respectable discourse. The Guardian has allowed Monbiot to misrepresent the positions of the people he defamed as genocide deniers; then, despite prolonged lobbying, the Guardian has denied DP and EH a proper platform on which to defend themselves; then it has censored those on the talkbacks who tried to inform the wider readership of the pair’s much fuller defence, published elsewhere, and the Guardian’s role in trying to stop the two from responding; and now it has allowed the pair to be misrepresented again.

This isn’t an isolated stitch-up; this is a strategy. this is how the media – from Murdoch to the Guardian – operate when they want to severely limit the framework of a debate. The Guardian is doing everything possible to ensure its wider readership is not exposed to DP and EH’s ideas, and is doing it by labelling and dismissing them as genocide deniers. No one is winning this argument because no argument is taking place. The Guardian is not presenting reasoned criticisms or allowing DP and EH to present their arguments properly. Instead the Guardian is winning the non-debate because it is the one able to dictate the terms of the non-debate. This is trickery, dressed up as a free media.

That Monbiot is at the heart of this deception reflects very poorly on him. (Email, July 26, 2011)

Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV channels have supported all the US-UK wars over the past 30 years, from Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands war in 1982, through George Bush Senior and the first Gulf War in 1990-91, Bill Clinton’s war in Yugoslavia in 1999 and his undeclared war on Iraq in 1998, George W Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Tony Blair on his coat tails, and up to the present, with Barack Obama continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now adding Libya to his tally of seven wars.

The consequences in Iraq include a million dead people, four million refugees, a devastated country and the West’s corporate capture of huge oil resources.

David Swanson observes correctly that ‘Murdoch has blood on his hands’ and reminds readers of Article 20 of the UN International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights: ‘Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.’

Murdoch admitted his complicity during a televised debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he said that his media empire had tried to shape public opinion in support of the Iraq war. That he largely failed in his aim, thanks to the scepticism of the public towards the incessant war-mongering, does not detract from the scale of his wrongdoing.

The Hall Of Shame: Samples From The Archives

Consider some of the evidence of the Murdoch empire’s attempts to manipulate the public. The Sun screamed ‘BRITS 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM’ on its front page following Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ of September 2002. When UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix found no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Sun’s hysterical headline was ‘HE’S GOT ‘EM. LET’S GET HIM’. Once the war was underway, the Sun and News of the World were full of propaganda about the need to get behind ‘our boys’ (and girls). In the United States, Fox News was perhaps even worse: a primitive mix of ‘patriotism’ and vitriol directed against even mild dissenters.

The Times could be relied upon to put a more genteel sheen on the propaganda. Michael Gove, then a Times journalist, now Secretary of State for Education, wrote:

We have no alternative but to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to prevent Saddam completing his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Massive military force must be deployed to remove Saddam’s regime. (Gove, ‘We need Bush and not Saddam calling the shots,’ The Times, August 28, 2002)

Gove remains in close contact with his former colleagues. George Eaton reports in the New Statesman this week:

The Education Secretary listed 11 meetings at which executives from the company [News Corp] were present, including seven with Rupert Murdoch. Gove met the News Corp head more times than any other minister and had dinner with him twice last month.

Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, works for News International.

In 2004, after Fallujah had been subjected to a brutal US onslaught leaving at least 800 civilians dead, a Times editorial declared: ‘the US military had to act decisively or fail those entitled to its protection.’ (Leading article, ‘Taking Fallujah,’ The Times, November 10, 2004)

In 2006, the prestigious Lancet journal published a paper estimating the Iraq war death toll at around 650,000. The study was led by researchers from the world-renowned Johns Hopkins University and followed standard epidemiological practice for estimating mortality in war. John Tirman, who commissioned the Lancet study, notes in a recent article that ‘the Murdoch media machine did its part in attempting to discredit the household surveys’ which formed the basis of the paper:

The reaction to the Johns Hopkins estimate of 650,000 “excess deaths” came in for savage treatment, trashed as a “political hit” in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. This campaign against the scientists had a chilling effect.

The ‘chilling effect’ meant the corporate media failed to give the study the prominence it deserved. But awkward silences and embarrassed shoe-gazing is standard behaviour when we, the good guys, are doing the killing.

Like most newspapers, The Times and Sunday Times have published good journalism: Michael Smith’s excellent investigative reporting on the Downing Street Memos springs to mind. So too does Jerome Starkey’s work to expose the horrific killing of Afghan schoolchildren in night-time raids led by US forces. The Times editors were, however, on hand to portray the atrocity in the required context of a ‘just war’: ‘The legitimacy of the cause in Afghanistan is called into question by civilian deaths. The conflict needs to be conducted with regard for the native population.’

Not content to justify war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Murdoch press has lined up Iran in its crosshairs. In 2006, Times columnist Gerard Baker donned his fatigues and boots to declare: ‘The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran.’

In 2008, The Times once again came under the Media Lens spotlight for its unbalanced coverage on Iran. Our analysis of the output of the paper’s then chief foreign commentator, Bronwen Maddox, did not go down well. In fact, we received threats of legal and police action from Alastair Brett, then legal director of Times Newspapers Limited. This was the first time we had been subjected to such outrageous threats. Peter Wilby, former News Statesman editor, suggested it was ‘an extraordinary reaction’ from the giant newspaper group, while Noam Chomsky said pithily that the Times reaction was ‘pretty sick’.

In 2010, Times propaganda over the Iranian nuclear ‘threat’ was ramped up yet again when the paper published documents which, it confidently asserted, showed Iran’s intention to develop a trigger for a nuclear weapon. In fact, the authenticity of the documents was highly questionable, with some intelligence experts claiming they were forgeries most likely created as part of an attempt to further boost war fervour against Iran.

Meanwhile, The Times continued to shore up Western foreign policy in its attack on WikiLeaks in an editorial last October:

Nowhere in WikiLeaks’s self-serving self publicity is there a judgment of what the organisation is achieving for the Iraqi nation, and what it hopes to achieve… Its personnel are partisans intervening in the security affairs of Western democracies and their allies, with a culpable heedlessness of human life. (Leader, ‘Exercise in Sanctimony; The release of military files by WikiLeaks is partisan and irresponsible,’ The Times, October 25, 2010)

The Times managed to miss the target by a full 360 degrees. It is the corporate media, not WikiLeaks, which demonstrates a ‘culpable heedlessness of human life’ in its endorsement of the West’s fixed foreign policy: to attack, bomb, invade, torture and steal based on any pretext that can be fed to the public.

The above is but a tiny sample of the abysmal historical record of News International. Journalist Neil Clark correctly noted of Murdoch’s papers that ‘no other newspaper group has as much blood on its hands when it comes to propagandising for illegal and fraudulent military conflicts.’

His Master’s Voice: Cues From The Boss

In 2001, reporter Sam Kiley left The Times following ‘pro-Israeli censorship’ of his reporting. Why the censorship? Kiley believed the explanation lay in Murdoch’s heavy investment in Israel and close friendship with the then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Indeed, Murdoch has travelled to Israel numerous times and met many of its leaders. Kiley said:

In the war of words, no newspaper has been so happy to hand the keys of the armoury over to one side than the Times.

The Times foreign editor and other middle managers flew into hysterical terror every time a pro-Israel lobbying group wrote in with a quibble or complaint and then usually took their side against their own correspondent.

He added: ‘No pro-Israel lobbyist ever dreamed of having such power over a great national newspaper.’

Robert Fisk, now at the Independent, explained that he too left The Times after interference with his reporting on the Middle East:

The end came for me when I flew to Dubai in 1988 after the USS Vincennes [a US Navy guided missile cruiser] had shot down an Iranian passenger airliner over the Gulf. Within 24 hours, I had spoken to the British air traffic controllers at Dubai, discovered that US ships had routinely been threatening British Airways airliners, and that the crew of the Vincennes appeared to have panicked. The foreign desk told me the report was up for the page-one splash. I warned them that American ‘leaks’ that the IranAir pilot was trying to suicide-crash his aircraft on to the Vincennes were rubbish. They agreed.

Next day, my report appeared with all criticism of the Americans deleted, with all my sources ignored. The Times even carried an editorial suggesting the pilot was indeed a suicider. A subsequent US official report and accounts by US naval officers subsequently proved my dispatch correct. Except that Times readers were not allowed to see it.

Fisk said that he believed Murdoch did not personally intervene. However: ‘He didn’t need to. He had turned The Times into a tame, pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence.’

In March 2009, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) honoured Murdoch with their ‘National Human Relations Award’. In his speech, Murdoch declared his own version of Middle East reality, including this gem: ‘In Iran, we see a regime that backs Hezbollah and Hamas now on course to acquire a nuclear weapon.’

So Murdoch’s editors and columnists can be in no doubt of where the boss stands on the ‘threat’ of Iran. News Corp employees would also do well to heed the master’s views on Israel, made clear in the same speech: namely, that the state is an integral part of the West as ‘defined by societies committed to freedom and democracy’. Only weeks after the brutal onslaught by Israeli forces in Gaza, with around 1400 Palestinians killed including over 400 women and children, Murdoch had this to say to his audience:

My friends, I do not pretend to have all the answers to Gaza this evening. But I do know this: The free world makes a terrible mistake if we deceive ourselves into thinking this is not our fight.

In the end, the Israeli people are fighting the same enemy we are: cold-blooded killers who reject peace … who reject freedom … and who rule by the suicide vest, the car bomb, and the human shield.

Against such an enemy, I will not second-guess the decisions of a free Israel defending her citizens. And I would ask all those who support peace and freedom to do the same.

Murdoch’s pro-Israeli position is reflected in his newspapers. According to Isi Liebler, an Australian Jewish community leader who now lives in Israel, Murdoch’s ‘affection’ for the state ‘arose less out of his conservative sensibility than from his native Australian sympathy for the underdog fending off elites seized by conventional wisdoms’. Liebler added: ‘He’s met Israelis, he’s been to Israel, he’s seen Israel as the plucky underdog when the rest of the world saw Israel as an occupier.’

But the pro-Israel lobby is now ‘warily watching the unfolding of the phone-hacking scandal that is threatening to engulf’ his media empire. ‘Murdoch’s sudden massive reversal of fortune’ has ‘supporters of Israel worried that a diminished Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.’

One recent article in the Jewish Chronicle was even headed, ‘Is this curtains for pro-Israel Murdoch?’

The Farcical Faustian Pact

Andrew Neil, a former Murdoch editor, once said that although the media mogul would not intervene directly at The Times or the Sunday Times, ‘he does regard himself as someone who should have more influence on these papers than anyone else.’

During his time as Sunday Times editor, Neil ‘was never in any doubt what the News Corp boss thought about issues.’ It obviously helped that Neil and Murdoch ‘share[d] a common worldview’; indeed this is a requirement for all editors and proprietors: ‘An editor has to be on the same planet [as the paper’s owner]. You don’t have to be on the same continent or the same country for all of the time but you need to be on the same planet.’

When it came to Murdoch’s tabloid press, direct intervention by the owner did take place: ‘If you want to know what Rupert Murdoch really thinks read the editorials in the Sun and the New York Post because he is editor-in-chief of these papers.’

Neil continued: ‘There is no major geopolitical position that the Sun will take whether its attitude to the euro or to the current European treaty or to whom the paper will support in the upcoming general election. None of that can be decided without Rupert Murdoch’s major input.’

In 1999, News of the World exposed the former Tory MP Jeffrey Archer as a liar and perjurer, which led to him being imprisoned. But Murdoch had not wanted the Archer scoop to be published and sacked the editor Phil Hall for defying him. It was a clear example of what happens to editors who step out of line.

The threat of proprietorial interference, then, is always present; whether directly (Murdoch’s tabloid press) or by knowing exactly what the owner’s views are and conforming to them (Murdoch’s ‘quality’ press). Denying or downplaying all of this, even in defiance of the clear ‘evidence’, is ‘in everyone’s interests’, said Neil, adding: ‘It suits the editors and proprietors to continue this farce.’

This is not limited to the Murdoch press. Throughout the corporate media, editors and proprietors enter a ‘Faustian pact’ to pretend that interference does not happen; editors do not want to be seen ‘as puppets of proprietors.’ But, in effect, that is what they are.

Thus, it is important to look beyond the Murdoch media empire at the wider context of the scandal engulfing News International, a corrupt police force and a supine political establishment. Seumas Milne made some good observations along these lines in the Guardian recently:

These revelations [of phone hacking] should ram home the reality that Britain has become a far more corrupt country than many realise. Much of that has been driven by the privatisation-fuelled revolving door culture that gives former ministers and civil servants plum jobs in the companies they were previously regulating.

Milne notes that several ‘opportunities’ to clean up this corruption ‘have come and gone’:

First the official deception of the Iraq war, then the collapse of a deregulated banking system, then the exposure of systematic sleaze in parliament revealed a growing crisis in the way the country is run. Now that crisis has been shown to have spread to the media and police. Official Britain isn’t working. Sooner or later, pressure for change will become unstoppable.

It is hard to argue with Milne’s article. But he is silent, for obvious reasons, about the Guardian’s important role as a liberal gatekeeper that helps preserve the established order. As we have repeatedly pointed out in our media alerts and books, this role is a crucial missing ingredient in any serious discussion of the nexus of power, politics and the media. As ever, we have to look to someone commenting from beyond the confines of the self-regarding Guardian for the unvarnished truth. John Pilger is one such voice:

the truth is, Britain’s system of elite monopoly control of the media rests not on News International alone, but on the Mail and the Guardian and the BBC, perhaps the most influential of all. All share a corporate monoculture that sets the agenda of the “news”, defines acceptable politics by maintaining the fiction of distinctive parties, normalises unpopular wars and guards the limits of “free speech”. This will be strengthened by the illusion that a “bad apple” has been “rooted out”

Even if Murdoch’s empire were to collapse, there would still be no free press, no responsible corporate news agenda and no brave new world of media democracy. For these to take root, the stranglehold of corporate media and corporate politics needs to be broken. That will happen only when enough people demand change.

There’s no doubt that a body blow has been delivered to Rupert Murdoch’s mighty News Corporation empire. Leading politicians, who until very recently had been both obsequious and fearful, now want to put themselves at least a bargepole’s length away from the media mogul. As Media Lens reader ‘Keith-264’ noted on our message board:‘Rupert’s down and is getting a tabloid handbagging from lots of people who hitherto hid under a stone at the mere sound of his name.’ (July 14, 2011)

The power of the public is the prime reason for the shift. There had been near-universal revulsion at the phone hacking involving murdered children, victims of the 7 July 2005 bombing in London, and the families of servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. News International payments to police officers and pay-offs to phone-hacking victims, together with feeble and curtailed police investigations, make up a toxic mix with rumours of even worse to be exposed in the near future. In this atmosphere of public disgust, the main political parties had finally shown some mettle and stood up to Murdoch’s long-time bullying.

Tory leader David Cameron desperately tried to keep his head above water, seemingly unable to comprehend the extent of a rapidly escalating anger throughout an appalled country. He was engulfed by fallout from his shoddy judgement in employing Andy Coulson, a former editor of News of the World, as his director of communications.

Spreading around the blame in an attempt to dilute his own culpability, Cameron stated: ‘The truth is, we have all been in this together—the press, politicians and leaders of all parties—and yes, that includes me.’

There was no sign that he, far less the government, would resign over the matter.

A Guardian team lead by investigative journalist Nick Davies did much to stoke up the heat on Rupert Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, as well as the Metropolitan Police in London. While recognising the good journalism undertaken here, the Guardian has not been entirely convincing about its role in ‘warning’ Cameron about Coulson’s connections to a private investigator with a criminal record. As John Hilley asks:

Is it the role of this country’s ‘leading liberal’ newspaper to act as a ‘vetting agent’ for top politicians?

We asked Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, deputy editor Ian Katz (who actually placed the phone call to the Tory inner circle) and the ‘unreconstructed idealist’ George Monbiot. Not one of them responded. It appears that Monbiot is a ‘professional troublemaker’ so long as it does not entail asking questions of his own corporate employer.

We must also bear in mind that it makes good business sense to put media competitors under the spotlight; The Times and Sunday Times are, after all, in the same ‘quality press’ market as the Guardian and the Observer. Weakening the grip of News International on the UK media would have many benefits for the other corporate media players. But the notion that a more honest media would thus emerge, one capable of systematically challenging official propaganda that facilitates military ‘interventions’ and abuses of planet and people, is highly suspect. The same structural constraints ensuring propaganda services on behalf of elite state-corporate interests remain in place.

Downplaying or overlooking these constraints, with talk of a Hippocratic Oath for journalists and a new manifesto for media ethics, is little more than a fresh lick of paint to a towering press edifice.

Freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke says the ‘root cause’ of ‘the corrupt relationship between the power elites’ is ‘the secretive system of information patronage.’ Access to public records in the US is far better protected than here in the UK which still veers towards secrecy. One might ask then: why is it that journalism in the US is arguably even more supine to power than it is here in the UK? In fact, the barriers to genuine fourth-estate journalism are much more systemic than Brooke recognises, in common with other commentators now blathering away in the corporate media.

Equally oblivious to the structural realities that crush any real prospects of journalism holding power to account, the Independent asserted: ‘Britain still has a free, independent and ethical press, and it remains as essential to the nation’s wellbeing as ever.’

In his book, Flat Earth News, the Guardian’s Nick Davies had written:

Owners and advertisers are only part of the reason for the ideological problems in the mass media; and ideology is only part of the total problem of the retreat from truth-telling journalism. Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference. (p. 22)

The inference was that even Murdoch at most constitutes a 5 to 10% hindrance in honest journalism: a very modest ‘statistic’ – in fact, more of a thumb-sucking number – at odds with the hyperbolic wave of rhetoric and self-congratulation sweeping over the Guardian and the rest of the liberal media at the sight of Rupert Murdoch apparently stopped in his tracks. Could this really be the dawn of a new ‘changed’ world of ‘media plurality’, ‘stronger democracy’ and dismantled Berlin Walls?

The ‘Wake-up Call’ That Rang for Thirty Years and More

We are to believe that our leaders have suddenly come to their senses about the collusion between powerful media, corrupt police and the political establishment. David Cameron declared the current scandal was a ‘wake-up call’. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said:

I think what we’ve seen, what’s come to light over the last week or two is a symptom if you like of a much wider problem. And that problem is that different bits of the British system; the press, the police, the politicians just became too close to one another, became too cosy, became too tied up with each other.

Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow mewled plaintively into the Twitter sphere: ‘We knew it was happening … all of it in a sense, why didn’t we do more about it?’

Indeed, why didn’t you? You and your media colleagues had the resources to uncover it all. You just didn’t have the cojones. Instead, you shamefully let down the public that pays your salary.

Somehow this all ‘just’ happened and only hit senior politicians over the head in ‘the last week or two’. Journalists bemoan the fact they couldn’t speak out about it before. All of this is deceptive, self-serving nonsense. The public has seen the reality for years, if not decades. Why else the widespread scepticism and even deep cynicism towards politicians and the corporate media?

Many people know all too well that we are kept away from meaningful input to major government policies. Excluded from the ship’s bridge, we are largely captive passengers on a supertanker that is sailing on a destructive course set by the convergence of state and corporate power.

Julie Hyland injected some much-needed perspective:

What is being exposed is not simply the moral and political depravity of one man or one corporation, but the putrefaction of an entire social and political system. Nothing the Labourites or Tories say can conceal the fact that for more than 30 years Murdoch has been the power behind the throne of British politics—and indeed, the politics of countries all over the world. This includes the US, where Murdoch’s Fox network, New York Post and Wall Street Journal largely set the reactionary agenda for the two big business parties [i.e. both the Republicans and the Democrats].

Turning back to Britain, Hyland provided further context so glaringly absent from ‘mainstream’ media coverage:

The relationship between the two main parties and Murdoch is based on a common economic and political agenda—one forged in the early 1980s, as the ruling class set out to destroy the social rights won by working people in order to give free rein to the corporations and the City of London.

Murdoch backed Thatcher to launch the anti-working class offensive, then switched to Tony Blair and Labour to deepen it, and switched back to the Tories and Cameron to finish the job of destroying the social gains of a century of working class struggle.

Or if you prefer Clegg’s propaganda version of the truth, uncritically relayed by the Guardian:

This whole episode has cast a spotlight on that sort of murky world of the British establishment, the police, the press and politicians and we must now take this opportunity to clean things up and make sure that the public once again trust those institutions.

Just as when Tony Blair’s New Labour swept into Downing Street in 1997, and when the sainted Barack ‘Yes we can!’ Obama ascended to the US presidency in 2009, it is crucial that the slate is once again wiped clean, and public confidence in power restored, so that the establishment can get on with doing pretty much whatever it likes. Or if we decide that this is unacceptable, as we should, then we can rip up the endlessly repeating script and rewrite it in our favour.

And then the opening line launched into a barrage of spin: ‘Hugo Chávez has long considered Noam Chomsky one of his best friends in the west. He has basked in the renowned scholar’s praise for Venezuela’s socialist revolution and echoed his denunciations of US imperialism.’

The ironic sneer directed at the Venezuelan president apparently basking in Chomsky’s ‘praise’, and the sly hint of robotic ‘echoing’ of his buddy’s rants, were indicative of the bias, omissions and deceptions to follow.

Reporter Rory Carroll, the Guardian’s South America correspondent, had just interviewed Chomsky and set about twisting the conversation into a propaganda piece. (For non-UK readers who may not know: the Observer is the Sunday sister publication of the Guardian newspaper).

Carroll’s skewed view was clear and upfront in his article: ‘Chomsky has accused the socialist leader of amassing too much power and of making an “assault” on Venezuela’s democracy.’

As we will see shortly, this was a highly partial and misleading account of Chomsky’s full remarks, leading him to declare afterwards that the newspaper had displayed ‘extreme dishonesty’ and that Carroll’s article was ‘quite deceptive’.

The news hook was the publication of an open letter by Chomsky pleading for the release of Venezuelan judge María Lourdes Afiuni who is suffering from cancer. Afiuni, explains Carroll, ‘earned Chávez’s ire in December 2009 by freeing Eligio Cedeño, a prominent banker facing corruption charges.’ After just over a year in jail, awaiting trial on charges of corruption, the Venezuelan authorities ‘softened her confinement to house arrest’.

In the open letter, prepared together with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, Chomsky says:

Judge Afiuni had my sympathy and solidarity from the very beginning. The way she was detained, the inadequate conditions of her imprisonment, the degrading treatment she suffered in the Instituto Nacional de Orientación Femenina, the dramatic erosion of her health and the cruelty displayed against her, all duly documented, left me greatly worried about her physical and psychological wellbeing, as well as about her personal safety.

He concludes with the plea: ‘I shall keep high hopes that President Chávez will consider a humanitarian act that will end the judge’s detention.’

Towards the end of Carroll’s article, the journalist injected some token balance:

The Chávez government deserved credit for sharply reducing poverty and for its policies of promoting self-governing communities and Latin American unity, Chomsky said. “It’s hard to judge how successful they are, but if they are successful they would be seeds of a better world.”

But the blatant spin of the headline and the article’s lead paragraphs had already done the required job – President Chávez is so extreme that even that radical lefty Noam Chomsky, one of his best friends in the West, has now denounced him.

Chomsky Responds: ‘Extreme Dishonesty’ And A ‘Quite Deceptive’ Report

Activists and bloggers were quick to email Noam Chomsky to ask for his response to Rory Carroll’s article in the Observer. In particular, Chomsky replied as follows to one aggressive challenger who made a series of personal attacks on him:

Let’s begin with the headline: complete deception. That continues throughout. You can tell by simply comparing the actual quotes with their comments. As I mentioned, and expected, the NY Times report of a similar interview is much more honest, again revealing the extreme dishonesty of the Guardian.

I’m sure you would understand if an Iranian dissident who charged Israel with crimes would also bring up the fact that charges from Iran and its supporters cannot be taken seriously in the light of Iran’s far worse abuses. If you don’t understand that, which I doubt, you really have some problems to think about. If you do understand it, as I assume, the same is true. That’s exactly why bringing up [the jailed US soldier Bradley] Manning (and much more) is highly relevant.

Joe Emersberger, an activist based in Canada, also approached Chomsky for a reaction to the piece:

The Guardian/Observer version, as I anticipated, is quite deceptive. The report in the NY Times is considerably more honest. Both omit much of relevance that I stressed throughout, including the fact that criticisms from the US government or anyone who supports its actions can hardly be taken seriously, considering Washington’s far worse record without any of the real concerns that Venezuela faces, the Manning case for one [Manning is the alleged source for huge amounts of restricted material passed on to WikiLeaks], which is much worse than Judge Afiuni’s. And much else. There’s no transcript, unfortunately. I should know by now that I should insist on a transcript with the Guardian, unless it’s a writer I know and trust.¹

In fact the very next day after Carroll’s article appeared, and no doubt stung by the rising tide of internet-based criticism, the Guardian took the unusual step of publishing what is presumably a full transcript of the interview. (Also unusually, the Guardian did not allow reader comments to be posted under the transcript.)

But the transcript only served to prove Chomsky’s point about the ‘deceptive’ nature of the printed article. His comparisons to the justice system in the United States – in particular, the torture and abuse of Bradley Manning – were edited out. Carroll had asked him about the intervention of the Venezuelan executive in demanding a long jail sentence for Judge Afiuni. Chomsky replied:

It’s obviously improper for the executive to intervene and impose a jail sentence without a trial. And I should say that the United States is in no position to complain about this. Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is. The president in fact intervened. Obama was asked about his conditions and said that he was assured by the Pentagon that they were fine. That’s executive intervention in a case of severe violation of civil liberties and it’s hardly the only one. That doesn’t change the judgment about Venezuela, it just says that what one hears in the United States one can dismiss.

Chomsky added:

Venezuela has come under vicious, unremitting attack by the United States and the west generally – in the media and even in policy. After all the United States sponsored a military coup [in 2002] which failed and since then has been engaged in extensive subversion. And the onslaught [...] against Venezuela in commentary is grotesque.

Nothing of that appeared in the published Observer article.

Also given scant notice were Chomsky’s observations about positive developments in Venezuela and Latin America generally in trying to overcome the horrendous impacts of over five centuries of European, and latterly also US, colonialism and exploitation:

I think what’s happened in Latin America in the past 10 years is probably the most exciting and positive development to take place in the world. For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence. Furthermore internally there was a model that was followed pretty closely by each of the countries: a very small Europeanised, often white elite that concentrated enormous wealth in the midst of incredible poverty. And this is a region, especially South America, which are very rich in resources which you would expect under proper conditions to develop far better than east Asia for example but it hasn’t happened.

The above quotes by Chomsky are only extracts of the longest answers, by far, that he gave in his interview with Carroll. But they didn’t fit the journalist’s agenda of setting up Chomsky in ‘denouncing’ Chávez’s supposed ‘assault’ on democracy.

Carroll once accurately declared that he is ‘not a champion of impartiality’. Indeed, Joe Emersberger has done much sterling work, exposing and challenging Carroll’s biased journalism from Latin America. Carroll and his editors clearly have supreme difficulty in answering Emersberger’s cogent emails, judging by their repeated failure to respond.

Readers may recall that the Guardian has a dubious track record in recording and accurately reflecting the views of Noam Chomsky; that is, when it doesn’t conform to the usual pattern of completely ignoring him. The Guardian’s smear of Chomsky in 2005 marked a real low in the history of this ‘flagship’ newspaper of ‘liberal’ journalism.²

Perhaps what is most noteworthy about this whole episode is best summed up by Emersberger:

This is not the first time Rory Carroll has taken a highly selective interest in Chomsky’s views on Latin America. When Chomsky signed an open letter in 2008 critical of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Rory Carroll also jumped all over it. At about the same time, Chomsky signed an open letter to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe about far more grave matters but it was ignored by the Guardian. At the time, I asked Rory Carroll and his editors why they ignored it but they never replied to me. They also ignored an open letter to Uribe signed by Amnesty International, Human Rights watch and various other groups. I asked Carroll and his editors why that open letter was ignored and – as usual – no one responded.

Concluding Remarks

Noam Chomsky was once famously described by the New York Times as ‘arguably the most important intellectual alive’. And yet, as mentioned earlier, the Guardian is normally happy to ignore him and his views. But when Chomsky expresses criticism of an official enemy of the West, he suddenly does exist and matter for the Guardian. That indicates what we already knew: that the liberal press is perfectly aware of the importance of Chomsky’s work. They just ignore it because it undermines the wrong interests.

Rory Carroll’s article is a wonderful glimpse of the kind of status Chomsky would enjoy if he promoted the myth of the basic benevolence of the West, and focused on the crimes of official enemies. He would be feted as one of the most insightful and brilliant political commentators the world had ever seen. He would be far and away the world’s number one political talking head. His face would be all over the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the BBC, the New York Times and so on.

There is a humbling lesson here also, of course, for those people who are all over the media. In important ways, the media is a demeritocracy.

1. Joe Emersberger, ‘Chomsky Says UK Guardian Article “Quite Deceptive” About his Chavez Criticism,’ Z Blogs, July 4, 2011.
2. See ‘Smearing Chomsky – Guardian in the Gutter,’ ‘Smearing Chomsky – The Guardian Backs Down, and the external ombudsman’s report.

Human rights organisations have cast doubt on claims of mass rape and other abuses perpetrated by forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, which have been widely used to justify Nato’s war in Libya.

Nato leaders, opposition groups and the media have produced a stream of stories since the start of the insurrection on 15 February, claiming the Gaddafi regime has ordered mass rapes, used foreign mercenaries and employed helicopters against civilian protesters.

Amnesty and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have checked the claims and found flat zero evidence.

And yet, earlier this month, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told a press conference: ‘we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government. Apparently he [Colonel Gaddafi] used it to punish people’.

Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was ‘deeply concerned’ about reports of widespread rape in Libya by Gaddafi’s forces.

By contrast, Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty, who spent three months in Libya after the start of the uprising in February, said: ‘we have not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped’.

Liesel Gerntholtz, head of women’s rights at HRW, said of the rape claims: ‘We have not been able to find evidence.’

The Amnesty investigation also found no evidence of mercenaries fighting for Gaddafi. Rovera commented:

‘Those shown to journalists as foreign mercenaries were later quietly released. Most were sub-Saharan migrants working in Libya without documents.’

And what about the massacres? Cockburn writes:

‘During the first days of the uprising in eastern Libya, security forces shot and killed demonstrators and people attending their funerals, but there is no proof of mass killing of civilians on the scale of Syria or Yemen.’

Not quite the impression given by the flood of media propaganda.

Cockburn followed up his June 24 piece with another excellent report on June 26: ‘Don’t believe everything you see and read about Gaddafi.’

At time of writing, there has been a single low-profile response to Cockburn’s reports in Roy Greenslade’s Guardian blog.

Greenslade quoted Cockburn, adding only that these findings of course do not mean that Gaddafi’s forces have not committed crimes.

There have been no other mentions in the UK media that we can find of this credible information challenging key claims justifying the war on Libya.

But shouldn’t a media system that so eagerly advanced these claims against the latest target of Western violence be equally willing to publicise counter-evidence?

Media Performance – The ‘Gut-Churning Atrocities’

For once, let’s sample from the performance of The Sun, which hosted a piece by TV celebrity and chat show host Lorraine Kelly:

Of all the gut-churning atrocities to come out of Libya, the use of mass rape as a weapon of war is the most horrific.

Over the years despot Gaddafi has been accused of many heinous crimes. But now he has been charged with procuring container loads of Viagra-like pills which are given to his troops so they can rape their victims more “efficiently”.

The thought of civilians being terrorised by troops on drugs who are being positively encouraged to rape is utterly monstrous and chills the blood.

Amnesty’s Rovera noted that rebels meeting with the foreign media in Benghazi showed journalists packets of Viagra, claiming they came from burned-out tanks. Cockburn commented ‘it is unclear why the packets were not charred’.

The Daily Mail and numerous other media repeated the same claims ad nauseam.

A leading article in the Guardian expressed some caution in mentioning the presence of mercenaries on February 21: ‘If the widespread reports of African mercenaries being used to shoot Libyans are accurate, he has few qualms about mowing down his own people.’

The caution had vanished from a leading article on March 10: ‘air activity is not the deciding factor in the firefights between the rebels and regime loyalists and mercenaries’.

The Times went even further, claiming that Gaddafi depended on mercenaries: ‘his regime imposes ever greater atrocities against Libya’s people (not, incidentally, “his” people, for he leads no legitimate government and relies on foreign mercenaries)’.¹

A leading article in the Independent, Cockburn’s own paper, observed on February 21: ‘Colonel Gaddafi is said to have deployed heavy weapons and African mercenaries in an effort to reassert his rule.’

Cockburn wrote on the alleged mercenaries: ‘The Amnesty investigation found there was no evidence for this.’

On the use of ‘heavy weapons’, there was also ‘no evidence that aircraft or heavy anti-aircraft machine guns were used against crowds. Spent cartridges picked up after protesters were shot at came from Kalashnikovs or similar calibre weapons’.

Rovera commented: ‘The politicians kept talking about mercenaries, which inflamed public opinion and the myth has continued because they were released without publicity.’

No Lessons Learned (Again!)

It ought to be surprising that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch exposed US-UK propaganda in a way that the entire pack of Western media hounds was unable or unwilling to do. But as we have described many times, with rare exceptions, journalists function as stenographers to power. Arguably, as democracy has rapidly eroded in Britain – with all main political parties increasingly serving the same privileged interests – journalists have become even less inclined to challenge the powerful.

The tales of mass rape and vicious mercenaries recall the infamous claim in 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had stormed a Kuwait City hospital, taken hundreds of babies out of incubators, and left them to die on the floor. Journalist John MacArthur, author of The Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, commented:

Of all the accusations made against the dictator [Saddam Hussein], none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.

In their book, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton described how the most powerful testimony came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, initially known only as Nayirah:

Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City… “I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital,” Nayirah said. “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where… babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

In fact, Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s Ambassador to the US. Stauber and Rampton noted that Nayirah had been coached by US PR company Hill & Knowlton’s vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado ‘in what even the Kuwaitis’ own investigators later confirmed was false testimony’. The story of the 312 murdered babies was an outright lie.

Needless to say, the mainstream media have learned nothing from this and numerous similar cases.

However appalling media performance has been in facilitating yet another bloody war on yet another defenceless country – just a few years after the great Bush-Blair deception on Iraq – the failure of the media to report Amnesty and HRW’s claims is almost beyond belief. These are highly credible sources making highly controversial claims (which means they will have been extremely careful to check their facts) about alleged crimes that have been used to help justify war. And the media have responded with a single mention in a blog.

It seems oddly appropriate, as we approach our ten-year anniversary next month, that we should be witnessing one of the most striking examples of media servility to power we have seen.

1. Leading article, ‘Essence of Indecision,’ The Times, March 4, 2011.

So reported the Washington Post on June 11, in a rare mainstream article which, as we will see, revealed how WikiLeaks exposed the real motives behind the war on Libya.

So what happens when you search UK newspaper archives for the words ‘WikiLeaks’, ‘Libya’ and ‘oil’? We decided to take a look.

From the time prior to the start of Libya’s civil war on February 17, and of Nato’s war on Libya on March 19, we found a couple of comments of this kind in the Sunday Times: ‘Gadaffi’s children plunder the country’s oil revenues, run a kleptocracy and operate a reign of terror that has created simmering hatred and resentment among the people, according to the cables released by WikiLeaks.’¹

The Telegraph described political wrangling over the alleged Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi:

The documents, obtained by the WikiLeaks website and passed to this newspaper, provide the first comprehensive picture of the often desperate steps taken by Western governments to court the Libyan regime in the competition for valuable trade and oil contracts.²

From the time since Nato launched its war, we found this warning from Jackie Ashley in the Guardian:

…cast aside international law, and there is nothing but might is right, arms, oil and profits.

Well, you might say, but isn’t that where we are already? Not quite. Many of us may feel great cynicism about some of the west’s war-making and the strange coincidence of military intervention and oil and gas reserves. I do.³

This hinted in the right direction, but no facts were cited in support of the argument, certainly none from the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables.

The Guardian‘s Alexander Chancellor managed to discover a leaked cable revealing that Libya ‘sometimes demands billion-dollar “signing bonuses” for contracts with western oil companies’.⁴

Other cables offer more significant insights, but Chancellor made no mention of them.

George Monbiot’s March 15 Guardian article contained all three search terms – his sole mention of Libya in the past 12 months – but he was writing about Saudi Arabia: ‘We won’t trouble Saudi’s tyrants with calls to reform while we crave their oil.’ The article had nothing to say about the looming assault on Libya, just four days away. Monbiot has had nothing to say since.

Johann Hari wrote about the Libyan war in his sole article on the subject in the Independent on April 8, commenting:

Bill Richardson, the former US energy secretary who served as US ambassador to the UN, is probably right when he says: “There’s another interest, and that’s energy… Libya is among the 10 top oil producers in the world. You can almost say that the gas prices in the US going up have probably happened because of a stoppage of Libyan oil production… So this is not an insignificant country, and I think our involvement is justified”.

This was a rare affirmation of the role of oil as a motive, albeit one that emphasised the specious claim that the US concern is simply to keep the oil flowing (Hari did mention, vaguely, that results were intended to be ‘in our favour’). And again, Hari appeared to be innocent of any relevant information released by WikiLeaks. A lack of awareness which perhaps explains why he had ‘wrestled with’ the alleged moral case for intervention before rejecting it.

Soured Relations: Gaddafi And Big Oil

Remarkably, then, we found nothing in any article in any national UK newspaper reporting the freely-available facts revealed by WikiLeaks on Western oil interests in Libya. And nothing linking these facts to the current war.

By contrast, in his June 11 article for the Washington Post, Steven Mufson focused intensely on WikiLeaks exposés in regard to Libyan oil. In November 2007, a leaked State Department cable reported ‘growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism’. In his 2006 speech marking the founding of his regime, Gaddafi had said: ‘Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.’

Gaddafi’s son made similar comments in 2007. As (honest) students of history will know, these are exactly the kind of words that make US generals sit up and listen. The stakes for the West were, and are, high: companies such as ConocoPhillips and Marathon have each invested about $700 million over the past six years.

Even more seriously, in late February 2008, a US State Department cable described how Gaddafi had ‘threatened to dramatically reduce Libya’s oil production and/or expel… U.S. oil and gas companies’. The Post explained how, in early 2008, US Senator Frank R. Lautenberg had enraged the Libyan leader by adding an amendment to a bill that made it easier for families of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing to ‘go after Libya’s commercial assets’.

The Libyan equivalent of the deputy foreign minister told US officials that the Lautenberg amendment was ‘destroying everything the two sides have built since 2003,’ according to a State Department cable. In 2008, Libyan oil minister Shokri Ghanem warned an Exxon Mobil executive that Libya might ‘significantly curtail’ its oil production to ‘penalize the US,’ according to another cable.

The Post concluded: ‘even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies’.

Similarly, compare the chasm in rational analysis separating the mainstream UK media and the dissident Real News Network, hosted by Paul Jay. Last month, Jay interviewed Kevin G. Hall, the national economics correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers. Jay concluded with a summary of their conversation discussing oil shenanigans in Libya:

So you’ve got the Italian oil companies already at odds with the US over Iran. The Italian oil company is going to, through its deals with Gazprom, allow the Russians to take a big stake in Libyan oil. And then you have the French. As we head towards the Libyan war, the French Total have a small piece of the Libyan oil game, but I suppose they would like a bigger piece of it. And then you wind up having a French-American push to overthrow Gaddafi and essentially shove Gazprom out. I mean, I guess we’re not saying one and one necessarily equals two, but it sure – it makes one think about it.

Hall responded:

Yeah, it’s not necessarily causation, but there’s – you might suggest there’s correlation. And clearly this shows the degree to which oil is kind of the back story to so much that happens. As a matter of fact, we went through 251,000 [leaked] documents – or we have 250,000 documents that we’ve been pouring through. Of those, a full 10 percent of them, a full 10 percent of those documents, reference in some way, shape, or form oil. And I think that tells you how much part of, you know, the global security question, stability, prosperity – you know, take your choice, oil is fundamental.’ (Our emphasis)

Jay replied with a wry smile:

‘And we’ll do more of this. But those who had said it’s not all about oil, they ain’t reading WikiLeaks.’

Hall replied: ‘It is all about oil.’

In March, we drew attention to a cable released by WikiLeaks sent from the US embassy in Tripoli in November 2007. The cable communicated US concerns about the direction being taken by Libya’s leadership:

Libya needs to exploit its hydrocarbon resources to provide for its rapidly-growing, relatively young population. To do so, it requires extensive foreign investment and participation by credible IOCs [international oil companies]. Reformist elements in the Libyan government and the small but growing private sector recognize this reality. But those who dominate Libya’s political and economic leadership are pursuing increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector that could jeopardize efficient exploitation of Libya’s extensive oil and gas reserves. Effective U.S. engagement on this issue should take the form of demonstrating the clear downsides to the GOL [government of Libya] of pursuing this approach, particularly with respect to attracting participation by credible international oil companies in the oil/gas sector and foreign direct investment. (our emphasis)

The US government has certainly been ‘demonstrating the clear downsides’ since March 19.

US analyst Glenn Greenwald, asks:

Is there anyone – anywhere – who actually believes that these aren’t the driving considerations in why we’re waging this war in Libya? After almost three months of fighting and bombing – when we’re so far from the original justifications and commitments that they’re barely a distant memory – is there anyone who still believes that humanitarian concerns are what brought us and other Western powers to the war in Libya? Is there anything more obvious – as the world’s oil supplies rapidly diminish – than the fact that our prime objective is to remove Gaddafi and install a regime that is a far more reliable servant to Western oil interests, and that protecting civilians was the justifying pretext for this war, not the purpose?

‘The Urge To Help’

It does seem extraordinary that anyone could doubt that this is the case. But the fact is that the WikiLeaks cables cited above, the Washington Post’s facts, and Greenwald’s conclusions, have been almost completely blanked by the UK media system. Notice that they have been readily accessible to us, a tiny website supported by public donations.

As though reporting from a different planet, the BBC reported last week: ‘Nato is enforcing a UN resolution to protect civilians in Libya.’

Is this Absolute Truth? Holy writ? In fact, no. But it does reflect the mainstream political consensus and so the BBC feels content to offer it – by way of a service to democracy – as the only view in town. And yet, we need only reflect on three obvious facts: while UN Resolution 1973 did authorise a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians, Nato is now openly seeking regime change and rejecting all peace overtures out of hand. The UN did not authorise regime change.

An Observer leader entitled, ‘The west can’t let Gaddafi destroy his people,’ told the same tale in March:

‘the only response that matters now is a common position which brooks no more argument… to pledge, with the honest passion we affect to feel that, whether repulsed in time or not, this particular tyranny will not be allowed to stand’.⁵

Like a cut and paste from Orwell, the paper insisted:

This is a regional uprising of young people seeking freedom, remember? Do you recall all the power of the tweet, as lauded only a fortnight ago?

The millions who began this revolution won’t be much impressed by a democracy defined only by inertia. They won’t thank the west – or China, India, Russia, the African Union – for letting this Arab spring die in a field of flowery promises.

The Guardian also focused on the ‘ethical’ motivation. In a February 24 leading article entitled, ‘Libya: The urge to help,’ the editors simultaneously mocked and reversed the truth:

‘It is hard to escape the conclusion that European leaders are advocating these moves in part because they want to be seen by their electorates at home to be doing something, and in part because they want to be seen by people in the Middle East as being on the right side in the Arab democratic revolution. They may hope that a dramatic line on Libya will go some way toward effacing the memory of the dithering and equivocation with which they greeted its earlier manifestations in Tunisia and Egypt, France being particularly guilty in this regard.’

Compared to the analysis discussed above this reads like a bed-time story for children. The deceptive words ‘dithering and equivocation’ refer to the West’s iron-willed resolve to protect tyrannical clients and to thwart democratic revolution in the region while appearing (the key word) to be ‘on the right side’.

The conclusion: ‘a no-fly zone should become an option. Lord Owen was therefore right to say that military preparations should be made and the necessary diplomatic approaches, above all to the Russians and the Chinese, set in train to secure UN authority for such action’.

The Guardian‘s argument was shorn of the political, economic and historical facts that make a nonsense of the idea that Western military action ‘should become an option’. There may indeed have been a moral case for action by someone. But not by Western states with a bitter history of subjugating and killing people in Libya, and elsewhere in the region, for the sake of oil. But then it is a trademark of Guardian liberalism that Britain and its allies are forever Teflon-coated, forever untainted by the evident brutality of ‘our’ actions. This is the perennial, vital service the paper performs for the establishment.

We are asked to believe that the facts sampled in this alert are somehow unknown to the hard-headed corporate executives who write of ‘The urge to help’ and the ‘common position which brooks no more argument’. And yet, the Guardian was one of WikiLeaks’ major ‘media partners’ at the time the cables were published – it is well aware that ‘a full 10 percent of those documents, reference in some way, shape, or form oil’. Like the rest of the corporate media, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper knows but is not telling.

1. Michael Sheridan, ‘Libya froths at plundering by junior Gadaffis,’ February 6, 2011, Sunday Times.
2. Christopher Hope and Robert Winnett, ‘Ministers gave Libya legal advice on how to free Lockerbie bomber,’ The Daily Telegraph, February 1, 2011.
3. Ashley, ‘Few would weep for Gaddafi, but targeting him is wrong: In war, international law is all we have. If we cast it aside there’ll be nothing left but might is right, arms, oil and profits,’ The Guardian, May 2, 2011.
4. Chancellor, ‘The bonanza of kickbacks and corrupt deals between Libya and the west have helped Gaddafi cling on to power,’ The Guardian, March 25, 2011.
5. Leading article, ‘Libya: The west can’t let Gaddafi destroy his people,’ The Observer, March 13, 2011.

In November 2004, the UN’s Integrated Regional Information Network reported the impact of Operation Phantom Fury, a combined US-UK offensive, on Iraq’s third city, Fallujah:

‘Approximately 70 per cent of the houses and shops were destroyed in the city and those still standing are riddled with bullets.’¹

An Iraqi doctor, Ali Fadhil, reported of the city:

It was completely devastated, destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. Falluja used to be a modern city; now there was nothing. We spent the day going through the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I didn’t see a single building that was functioning.²

Main battle tanks, bombers, attack helicopters and thousands of assault troops were flung into the attack. But this was no Stalingrad. ‘Coalition’ forces faced young fighters in tracksuits armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. A US Marine sergeant told a British news team: ‘We’ll unleash the dogs of hell, we’ll unleash ‘em… They don’t even know what’s coming – hell is coming! If there are civilians in there, they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.’³

A health centre was bombed, killing 60 patients and support staff. The Independent reported claims that ‘a large number of people, including children, were killed by American snipers’. Refugees also accurately reported that the US had used cluster bombs and white phosphorus weapons. A Red Cross official estimated that ‘at least 800 civilians’ were killed in the first nine days of the assault. Dr Rafa’ah al-Iyssaue, the director of Fallujah’s main hospital, said that more than 550 of 700 bodies recovered were women and children.

Last year, the Independent reported:

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study. (See our media alert for details)

At the time of the offensive, a Times leader was unmoved by the devastation:

This is not a struggle that, contrary to how it has been presented in some quarters, the Americans were very gung-ho about. It has, nonetheless, become evident that those either loyal to the old Baathist order or keen volunteers for Islamist terrorism would not cease to use the city as the centre of their operations.

In this context, the US military had to act decisively or fail those entitled to its protection.⁴

The Telegraph applauded Britain’s contribution:

The men of the Black Watch are on their way home, their mission accomplished. We should congratulate them not only for their successes in Fallujah and in Operation Tobruk, which they have just completed, but also for their pragmatism and courage in the face of the unknown.⁵

On ITV, anchors Nick Owen and Andrea Catherwood talked over animations depicting the high-tech equipment deployed in Fallujah:

‘The marines can call on some of the latest technology, like The Buffalo, that can locate and destroy mines and booby troops using a robot arm.’⁶

An animated Buffalo was shown approaching a cartoon car, which exploded as the Buffalo’s extendable arm touched:

They’ve also got the Packbot. It’s a small remote-controlled robot fitted with a camera which can climb stairs and even open cupboards to search houses and other buildings for explosives.

The slaughter inspired a ‘shooter’ video game for Xbox, Six Days In Fallujah. Too much even for the British press, the game was dropped, but seems to have been resurrected by a different company.

No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. There was no evidence of a link to al Qaeda. And yet few in the media questioned the right of the Western army of occupation to destroy a major Iraqi city in the name of ‘protection’.

Massacre In Misrata

By contrast, last month, The Times published a leader with the title, ‘Revealed: The full horror of Misrata’:

‘While the suppression of dissent is commonplace in Libya, the bombardment of Misrata’s estimated 300,000 inhabitants has been exceptionally cruel.’⁷

The editors added:

‘Two Sunday Times journalists – the first from Britain inside the besieged city – find Colonel Gadaffi’s pitiless troops slaughtering civilians and leaving children to die.’

This week, Murdoch’s humanitarians again lamented Misrata’s grim fate:

Colonel Gaddafi’s forces are still bombarding Misrata, a city that has seen terrible human suffering as the besieged inhabitants, without food, medicine or shelter from the artillery and missiles, endure daily casualties.’⁸

The Telegraph has shared the Times’ outrage: ‘Not content with deploying tanks, rockets, and snipers, the Libyan dictator has now taken to using cluster bombs – a weapon banned in most countries because of the risk they pose of indiscriminate injury.’

Back in 2005, Aljazeera reported:

Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli, an official at Iraq’s health ministry, said that the U.S. military used internationally banned weapons during its deadly offensive in the city of Fallujah.’ The official reported evidence that US forces had “used… substances, including mustard gas, nerve gas, and other burning chemicals in their attacks in the war-torn city.”‘⁹

Despite this and copious other evidence, the BBC’s director of news, Helen Boaden, told Media Lens in March 2005 that her reporter in Fallujah, Paul Wood, had seen ‘no evidence of the use of such weapons’. The issue is much more clear cut in Misrata, it seems. The BBC commented recently:

The wounded arrive with horrific injuries – the result of mortars, grenades, and snipers. An increasing number have lost limbs – which may be the result of cluster bombs.

The use of what look like cluster bombs explains some of the horrific injuries doctors are seeing. We found remnants of these widely banned weapons attached to a makeshift barricade in a district near the front line. The rebels there told us they had been used on homes and a supermarket.

The BBC’s Lunchtime News of April 27, referred to unspecified ‘reports’ that ‘put the death toll at over 450′ in Misrata. Curiously, a piece in the same broadcast put the toll at 400. But then there is no need to make sense of the figures or to provide sources – or to consider arcane issues of methodology – when the bad guys are doing the killing.

Elsewhere, Campaign Against Arms Trade asks: ‘Why is the British Government surprised at what Colonel Gaddafi has done with the weapons it has sold him?’ Kaye Stearman comments:

UKTI DSO [UK Trade & Investment Defence & Security Organisation, the Government's arms export unit] set up a permanent office in Tripoli to facilitate arms company activities. Libyan top brass were invited to attend Farnborough International Airshow in 2010 and Defence Security Equipment International arms fair in London in 2009.

In turn, British arms companies exhibited at arms fairs in Libya. Britain had the largest pavilion at Tripoli’s Libyan Defence and Security Exhibition in 2010.

In 2009, EU arms exports to North Africa doubled from 985 million euros to two billion euros. In Libya, they reached 343 million euros (compared to 250 million euros the year before). The main suppliers in the five years 2005-09 were Italy, France and the UK…

Cluster Bombs – Some Awkward Facts

The US website Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) noted that the New York Times had reported:

Military forces loyal to Col. Moammar el-Gadhafi have been firing into residential neighborhoods in this embattled city with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world.

The NYT strongly suggested that the use of cluster bombs helped justify Nato’s cause:

The use of such weapons in these ways could add urgency to the arguments by Britain and France that the alliance needs to step up attacks on the Gadhafi forces, to better fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

The newspaper mentioned as an aside: ‘At the same time, the United States has used cluster munitions itself, in battlefield situations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in a strike on suspected militants in Yemen in 2009.’

The reality is far uglier, as FAIR noted:

The U.S. was criticized by Human Rights Watch for using cluster bombs in populated areas in Afghanistan, killing and injuring scores of civilians (Washington Post, 12/18/02). Amnesty International (4/2/03) called the U.S.’s use of cluster bombs in civilian areas of Iraq “a grave violation of international humanitarian law.” (See FAIR Action Alert, 5/6/03.) NATO employed cluster bombs in its bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo War, with one attack killing 15 civilians in the town of Nis (BBC, 5/7/99); more than 2,000 unexploded munitions from cluster bombs are estimated to remain on Serbian territory, continuing to endanger civilians (AFP, 3/10/09).

The “suspected militants” attacked by a cluster bomb in Yemen in 2009 turned out to be “21 children and 20 innocent women and men” (NewYorkTimes.com, 12/9/10)–all killed in the U.S. attack.

FAIR added, ‘You can be sure that none of these examples of U.S. use of cluster bombs in civilian areas prompted the New York Times to suggest that they justified military attacks on the United States in order to protect civilians.’

There is also the embarrassing fact that British and American officials colluded in a plan to hoodwink parliament over a proposed ban on cluster bombs. WikiLeaks revealed that David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary under Labour, approved the use of a loophole to manoeuvre around the ban and allow the US to keep the munitions on British territory.

In a straightforward propaganda piece in the Guardian, Xan Rice wrote: ‘In their attempt to end the uprising, Gaddafi’s forces have killed at least 1,000 people. Around 90% are civilians who have died because of indiscriminate shelling or shooting, doctors here say.’

Again, no need to provide serious evidence for the figures.

Having previously lauded ‘a war in Libya with the noble aim of protecting civilians,’ the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn now looks on as ‘Justifiable action against impending massacre turns into imperial intervention.’ The notion that the war has suddenly turned ‘into imperial intervention’ might salve Cockburn’s conscience, but in fact there has been no change, no turn, because there never was a ‘noble aim’. As Richard Keeble reported in a recent guest media alert, the West has been trying to topple Gaddafi for four decades. Likewise, over many decades, the West has been utterly ruthless in using violence to secure the region’s natural resources. It makes no sense to view the current war in isolation from the long, abysmal historical record, and the obvious drivers and goals of US-UK foreign policy. Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, blogged the point that matters:

Bahrain is putting 47 doctors and nurses on trial for treating wounded and dying protestors. Again there is total silence from the UK and US governments at this sickening human rights abuse by our “ally” in the Gulf. There is no discussion of sanctions against Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. There no longer seems to be even the slightest attempt to disguise the double standards. Human rights are merely an excuse to attack those who oppose UK and US interests, meaning corporate wealth; those who promote those interests can rape, kill and pillage whosoever they please.

On April 20, we challenged the BBC’s Jonathan Marcus on his coverage of the war in Libya:

Hi Jonathan

I’m sure you believe your reporting is completely neutral. You write: “there seems to be a general sense that something more must be done…” to help rebels “defeat their government opponents on the ground”. You ask “But what? None of the options are quick or simple”. You then provide three military options: [Nato ‘boots on the ground’, ‘equip and train’ rebels and ‘advice and support’ for rebels].

Can you see that, to be neutral, you would have to pen a companion article outlining military options that would help pro-Gaddafi forces defeat the rebels and Nato? Inconceivable, of course.

Best wishes

David

Marcus responded the same day:

Sorry I disagree with your logic. I don’t believe my reporting is neutral – I know it is. We must leave it at that – we are not going to agree.
JM

He added: “I am paid precisely not to have strong views but to try to analyse events fairly which I have done.”

We replied, again on the same day:

Thanks Jonathan. It’s not about agreeing; it’s about providing reasonable arguments to justify important positions. To be balanced, the BBC would have to outline options that might enable pro-Gaddafi forces to win the war. This the BBC would never do because it would be seen as an endorsement for Gaddafi’s cause. And this is why your report was not neutral – it’s fine to offer a de facto endorsement for the rebels’ cause, even though the BBC doesn’t just believe, but knows it’s neutral.

It’s just a rational argument – you’re free to ignore it, of course.

Best wishes

David

Our point – an obvious one, we would hope – is not at all to suggest that we support Gaddafi’s tyranny or his atrocities. Our point is that, time and again, our ostensibly independent mass media fall into line when the state declares war. When the official enemy attacks civilians our media howl with righteous outrage. But when our own governments, the people we elected, do the same or much worse – when they reduce a major city to utter ruins – our media applaud the tough choices made by a ‘warrior president’, or celebrate the clever, high-tech tools that make the task that bit easier.

As long as our compassion is filtered through a screen of self-interest, so that we notice suffering when it suits us and ignore it when it does not, our world will be filled with violence and the lucrative industries it spawns.

1. ‘Fallujah still needs more supplies despite aid arrival,’ http://www.irinnews.org, November 30, 2004.
2. Fadhil, ‘City of ghosts,’ The Guardian, January 11, 2005.
3. Channel 4 News, November 8, 2004.
4. Leading article, ‘Taking Fallujah,’ The Times, November 10, 2004.
5. Leading article, ‘Mission accomplished,’ Telegraph, December 6, 2004.
6. News at 18:30, November 10, 2004.
7. Leading Article, ‘Revealed: The full horror of Misrata,’ The Times, April 10, 2011.
8. Leading article, ‘The cost of stalemate,’ The Times, May 2, 2011.
9. ‘US used banned weapons in Fallujah – Health ministry,’ March 3, 2005, www.aljazeera.com.

Even today, Curtis notes, the files are heavily censored: ‘probably more so than in any other foreign-policy episode I have looked at.’ The official reason for the secrecy is ‘national security’. The actual reason is to protect the reputations of ‘the people with blood on their hands’: the leading politicians of the day, including Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, Alec Douglas-Home and numerous other officials.¹

Curtis describes how, in September 1962, the Imam of North Yemen was overthrown in a popular coup. Until then, 80 per cent of the population had lived as peasants under a feudal system of government, with control maintained by graft, a coercive tax system, and a policy of divide and rule. The coup was led by Arab nationalists within the Yemeni military who supported Egypt’s reformist president Gamal Abdel Nasser. In turn, Nasser sent troops to bolster the new Republican government. Royalist forces supporting the deposed Imam fled to the hills and began an insurgency backed by Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Curtis notes that Britain ‘soon resorted to covert action to undermine the new Republican regime, in alliance with the Saudis and Jordanis’. British officials privately recognised that they were thus supporting a ‘monopoly of [royal] power’ that was ‘much resented’ by the Yemenis. But the Foreign Office’s ‘pragmatic’ concern was that the nationalist uprising might spread to neighbouring Aden, then a UK colony, where Britain was ‘supporting similarly feudal elements against strong popular, nationalist feeling.’

Why? For longstanding reasons of ‘national interest’. Curtis explains: ‘The military base at Aden was the cornerstone of British military policy in the Gulf region, in which Britain was then the major power, directly controlling the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf and with huge oil interests in Kuwait and elsewhere.’

Aden was surrounded by a ‘protectorate’, the Federation of South Arabia: feudal fiefdoms controlled by autocratic leaders like the overthrown Yemeni Imam, and all ‘kept sweet by British bribes.’ Britain feared that a progressive, republican, Arab nationalist Yemen would act as an inspiring example and so threaten other feudal sheikdoms in the region and throughout the wider Middle East. British ministers feared ‘a collapse in the morale of the pro-British rulers of the protectorate,’ putting ‘the whole British position in the area … in jeopardy.’ The rulers of oil-rich Saudi Arabia were similarly concerned about the possible domino effect of neighbouring monarchies being overthrown by Arab nationalist forces.

Early in 1963, working with the Saudis, Jordan and Israel, Britain began covertly arming and supplying the Yemeni royalist forces against the new Yemen Republican government. A British mercenary operation was set up, funded by the Yemeni royalist foreign minister, the Saudi prince Sultan, the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. SAS volunteers were given temporary leave from official duties and French mercenaries were also recruited.

In early 1964, SAS forces undertook their first clandestine air-drop of arms and ammunition, with the discreet backing of MI6 and the CIA. UK Defence Secretary Peter Thorneycroft spoke of the need to organise ‘tribal revolts’ in the frontier areas and to initiate ‘deniable action … to sabotage [pro-Yemeni Republican] intelligence centres and kill personnel engaged in anti-British activities.’

Curtis adds that a top-secret document in the government files went even further. Entitled ‘Yemen: The range of possible courses of action open to us,’ it considered ‘assassination or other action against key personnel’ involved in subversion in the federation. As these options were being debated in private, Prime Minister Douglas-Home lied to parliament on 14 May 1964: ‘Our policy towards the Yemen is one of non-intervention in the affairs of that country. It is not therefore our policy to supply arms to the Royalists in the Yemen.’

Curtis notes that the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in October 1964 ‘seems not to have upset the covert operation.’

Secret RAF bombing took place in retaliation for Egyptian attacks on camel trains supplying weapons to French and British mercenaries. As part of an arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Britain agreed a £26 million contract with a private company, Airwork Services, for the training of Saudi pilots and ground crew. Airwork also recruited former RAF pilots as mercenaries on missions against Egyptian and Yemeni targets along the Yemeni border. And by 1965, MI6 had a secret agreement with Israel to use its territory for launching attacks against the Yemeni Republicans.

Following Egypt’s defeat by Israel in the 1967 war, Nasser withdrew his troops from Yemen. In November, Britain withdrew from Aden. Then, in March 1969, the Saudis cut off supplies to the Yemeni Royalists. A treaty was signed, and hostilities ceased. As mentioned, a total of around 200,000 people had died.

As far as current reporting on Yemen is concerned, none of this exists. On March 29, we conducted searches using the LexisNexis newspaper database for mentions of ‘Yemen’ in UK national newspapers since the start of the Yemeni protests in January. We found 898 articles. Apart from two reviews of a new book from an imperialist perspective (see next section), not one of these articles contained any mention of the key names from this grim episode of British history. Nor was there any mention of Mark Curtis. The war has been effectively erased from the record.

It is the same phenomenon of media blindness and adherence to state ideology that would have us believe that Iran’s history began with the Islamic Revolution in 1979. This also neatly and conveniently omits the UK-US role in the 1953 overthrow of the democratically-elected leader Mossadeq after he nationalised Iran’s Western-controlled oil industry. History is reduced to an elite-friendly script that minimises public understanding of the background to current events.

An Exchange With The BBC’s Sarah Montague

A segment of the Radio 4 Today programme on February 16, 2011 was a rare exception in even referring to this shameful history of British involvement in Yemen. But its cavalier treatment of the events was telling, as the exchange below reveals.

The radio piece comprised a discussion between Today presenter Sarah Montague, author Duff Hart-Davis and the former British mercenary Kerry Stone. It was conducted in an almost light-hearted tone of ‘look at the scrapes these old boys got into back in the days of empire.’

We emailed Montague the same day:

Dear Sarah Montague,

I listened to your interview with author Duff Hart-Davis and the former mercenary Kerry Stone this morning about Britain’s ‘secret war’ in Yemen in the 1960s.

You said to Stone: ‘And was it an adventure because I mean it sounds exciting?’

Duff Hart-Davis’s biased account is summed up in the subtitle of the book [‘The War That Never Was’] he was promoting: ‘The heroic true story of Britain’s greatest secret victory’. He told us that British colonel Jim Johnson ran the [mercenary] operation from a basement in Sloane Street. And then you indicated to listeners that this secret war took place:

‘Purely because he [Johnson] looked across [to the Gulf] and didn’t like the loss of empire.’

This assertion, and your ill-advised use of ‘adventure’ and ‘exciting’, is a misleading description of a war which was motivated by longstanding UK ‘national interests’ in the region. It was not merely the personal mission of a few disgruntled imperialists or greedy mercenaries.

There was no mention in the Today piece of the realpolitik that natural resources in the region were a prime motivation, and that profits were being made in arms deals. The serious diplomatic historian Mark Curtis has presented the evidence of all of this from previously secret government files (see pp. 288-301 of ‘Unpeople’, Vintage, 2004). As Curtis notes, the war cost up to 200,000 lives with British complicity in those deaths.

There was surely time in the 4 min : 30 sec piece to provide some serious account of these crucial facts and thus proper balance?

Perhaps you could invite Mark Curtis on to the Today programme to provide the balance that was so lacking this morning?

There was no response for a few days, so we nudged her gently on February 22 and she then responded that day:

Apologies for not replying sooner.

You may very well have a point. It occurred to me during the interview that I may have been making too light of it. I shall have a word with our planning editor and forward your email, but he may judge that given the way the story was told and the time elapsed since it happened it was not too serious an error.

I am on holiday at the moment but shall follow it up when I get back next week.

Thank you for the email.

Despite a couple of gentle nudges in the month since then, we have not heard back from Montague, her editor or anyone else on the Today programme.

Curtis notes in Unpeople that Yemen and the other case studies he examined in declassified government files illustrate the three basic principles that guide British foreign policy.

The first is the systematic deception of the public by British ministers, which is ‘deeply embedded in British policy-making.’² Blair’s lies about Iraq fit comfortably as part of this trend.

The second principle is that policy-makers are typically open and frank about their real goals in secret documents. The glaring gap between state realpolitik and government claims of benevolence is rooted in a fundamental contempt for the general population. As Curtis says:

‘The foreign-policy decision-making system is so secretive, elitist and unaccountable that policy-makers know they can get away with almost anything, and they will deploy whatever arguments are needed to do this.’²

The third basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not feature in the rationale for foreign policy. Curtis observes bluntly:

‘In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes.’²

When such concerns are not evoked for PR purposes, it is because a focus on human rights would throw an unwelcome light on the West’s support for oppression. Saudi Arabia is a classic example, of course – as is modern-day Yemen, where Saleh’s thirty-year record of oppression has been facilitated by Western ‘defence’ companies and soft-pedaled by Western diplomats. As noted in Part 1, Saleh has been a ‘useful tyrant’ for the West. He, or an acceptable replacement, will remain a favoured figure – unless democratic forces become uncontainable, both in Yemen and in the West.

The framework for understanding Britain’s war in Yemen in the 1960s, then, remains valid for the situation there today as it does for much of the world: namely, that control and geostrategic dominance – routinely sold to the public as ‘humanitarian intervention’ and maintenance of global ‘security’ – continue to be the key concerns guiding Western policy.

1. Mark Curtis, Unpeople, Chapter 16: ‘Arabians: Dirty Wars’, Vintage, 2004.
2. Curtis, Unpeople, p. 3.

‘[T]here can be no accommodation with a man like Gadaffi or any of his family who aspire to succeed him.’¹

Seven years earlier, Alan Massie wrote in the same newspaper:

The sight of Tony Blair shaking hands with Colonel Gadaffi last week will have disgusted many… One may sympathise with these sentiments but, pushing emotion aside, Blair has shown courage. It would be lovely if international politics could be conducted so you were always dealing with decent people. It might be nice if governments were able consistently to pursue the “ethical foreign policy” of which Robin Cook used to speak so enthusiastically but the world isn’t like that.²

Sometimes, then, there can be accommodation with a man like Gaddafi. It was important not to overstate the extent of his crimes: ‘Of course, Libya remains essentially a dictatorship, even if not as repellent a one as that of Saddam’s.’

And democracy was far more likely to take root in the Middle East ‘in an atmosphere of friendship than of hostility’. Thus Blair was ‘bringing Libya into the fold of the community of nations’.

Like a skilled conjuror, the media slips effortlessly, and without explanation, between the obvious need for ‘positive engagement’ and the obvious need to ‘confront tyranny’.

The previous day, a Telegraph headline had read: ‘Shell fills its boots in the desert sun. The oil major’s deal with Libya is a welcome distraction from weeks of turmoil.’³

Christopher Hope commented: ‘Libya’s re-emergence as a place to do business looks well-timed for Western oil companies concerned about dwindling reserve levels. Like Iraq last year, it shows that on occasion politicians are not deaf to the necessity of driving through geo-political change to find more oil which will keep Western economies on the road.’

Reviewing the same rapprochement in 2004, a Guardian leader nodded quiet approval: ‘We should congratulate the Foreign Office for its quiet and effective diplomacy… Col Gadafy should be encouraged, but not at such a forced pace.’L⁴

An Independent editorial described Gaddafi as merely ‘the Arab world’s most eccentric and unpredictable leader’, adding: ‘Mr Blair is right to argue that there is real cause for rejoicing in a sinner that repenteth. However distasteful to the families of those murdered, an engagement and reconciliation with Libya that leads to the admission of guilt and compensation is better than continued isolation of the North African country.⁵

Again, it was important not to exaggerate Gaddafi’s crimes: ‘It is many years, also, since the Colonel has been actively engaged in supporting terror groups in Europe.’

Seven years later, on March 19, an Independent editorial exalted:

The international community has managed to come together over Libya in a way that, even a few days ago, seemed impossible. The adventurism [sic] of Bush and Blair in 2003 looked as if it had buried the principle of humanitarian intervention [sic] for a generation. It has returned sooner than anyone believed possible.

We have found not a word in that editorial, or any other, on why ‘engagement and reconciliation with Libya’ was advisable and possible in 2004, but completely impossible now. Might the explanation in fact lie in the WikiLeaked cable from November 2007 cited in Part 1:

But those who dominate Libya’s political and economic leadership are pursuing increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector that could jeopardize efficient exploitation of Libya’s extensive oil and gas reserves. Effective U.S. engagement on this issue should take the form of demonstrating the clear downsides to the GOL [government of Libya ] of pursuing this approach…’?

In 2004, Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Observer that ‘Tory attacks’ on Blair’s deal with Gaddafi looked ‘clumsily opportunistic’. And anyway: ‘Our poll today indicates that a substantial majority of voters support the visit.’

Rawnsley drew attention to the positives: ‘It will be an ultimate gain if engagement with the West gradually draws Libya towards more democratic values. It is a start that Amnesty International has at last been allowed into Libya to monitor human rights.’

He added brightly: ‘This is a very British coup. In the eyes of the Prime Minister, this is also a quintessentially Blair coup: a vindication of his own approach to the world, a reassertion of his belief that Britain plays a pivotal role in global affairs.’

Seven years later, Rawnsley shudders at the prospect of ‘a pariah, highly dangerous Gaddafi regime on the southern borders of Europe. The people of Libya will never be truly safe from him until he no longer has the power to do them harm’.

No-one could accommodate this maniac:

At the heart of the perils ahead stands Colonel Gaddafi, the great survivor among tyrants. He may be mad, but that doesn’t mean he is entirely stupid… He declared a ceasefire as if he had suddenly become a reformed character who would not hurt a hair on a civilian’s head. We can be justified in regarding that possibility as being about as likely as discovering that Elvis Presley is alive and well living in the stomach of the Loch Ness monster.

Ironically, echoing his earlier article, Rawnsley commented: ‘Public opinion is broadly behind confronting Colonel Gaddafi.’

The Guardian has been more sceptical of the intervention, although for pragmatic reasons: ‘The moment the US intervenes militarily, even under a UN banner, Gaddafi gets what he wants – to be the defender against the foreign aggressor. Libya’s rebels are unanimous in their opposition to a ground intervention.’

Media Irrationalists

In adapting so flexibly to the claims of the powerful, the media’s framework of understanding might best be described as irrationalist. Typically, the media does not look for rational causes or systemic motives. It does not explain how leaders clearly emerging from a corporate power base can so often agitate for ‘humanitarian intervention’, and so often in resource-rich countries. It does not learn from history, even very recent history. It does not return to reflect on the credibility of previous claims (‘not news’), or on the testimony of credible witnesses countering such claims (‘no news hook’). It lives in a version of ‘now’ woven from government spin. If evidence drops in their laps, journalists will report, and quickly forget the significance of, the comments of an Alan Greenspan or a John Norris. But to actively seek out such material is to be deemed ‘crusading’, ‘biased’ and, ultimately, ‘radioactive’ (that is, unemployable).

Western journalists are reporting essentially the same Perpetual War being fought against the same ‘rogue states’ using the same means over and over again. This is why, in replying to one emailer, the BBC’s Jonathan Marcus wrote: ‘I think the clear military logic is that until Colonel Gaddafi issues a definitive order to halt offensive operations, Iraqi ground forces will be seen as targets.’⁶

We have seen numerous slips of this kind.

The BBC’s Mark Mardell, wrote of the latest attack by the latest ‘coalition’ on Libya:

They felt it was their duty to intervene. We don’t focus on this nearly enough. The Chinese didn’t feel that way. Neither did the Russians. Nor the Indians. Or Brazilians…

Why does the West feel this way, when no one else does? Is it a legacy of the enlightenment, a sense of responsibility and shared humanity? Or does it follow from colonialism, a feeling that it is their role to rule, that there is still a version of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”, – the “savage wars of peace” – even if it is defined by geography, not colour.

The media is good at telling us what our leaders really, truly feel. This time they ‘felt it was their duty to intervene’; that is, their moral duty. In the absence of counter-balancing scepticism, this is just outrageous in ostensibly neutral journalism. When a reader emailed Mardell advising that we had entered him in ‘The Hall of Propaganda Infamy’ for these remarks, he replied: ‘Staggering. It is so sad, when there is a real need for such an organisation that they are so thick and self absorbed.’⁷

We responded to Mardell:

Hi Mark

Sorry if you found our comments annoying…. The suggestion that the West perhaps feels it should take up the ‘White Man’s Burden’ can also be read as positing a positive motivation. Kipling’s words are often used to refer to the idea that the West, presuming intellectual and moral superiority, feels obligated to rule ‘lesser races’ for their own good. In other words, your comments can easily be interpreted as offering a choice between two benevolent motivations for Western actions: compassion and a sense of moral duty. A more appropriate counterpoint to a possible motivation of ‘shared humanity’ would be ruthless greed for power and profit regardless of the consequences for the people themselves. [We then cited Alan Greenspan’s comments – see Part 1]

Best wishes

David Edwards⁸

Mardell replied on March 21:

Yes I do see that point. I guess I should have been clearer. My presumption was that the reference to Kipling would reinforce the notion of an arrogant sense of mission. Personally, and these are my views not the BBC ..blah blah …, I think that this veneer was always important to Victorian colonialism, while the looting and exploiting went on underneath the moral justification. I think how this translates these days is a pretty important debate to have, and that is what annoyed me : I was trying to get a debate going that I wasn’t seeing much in the general media, not trying to justify the action.
Thanks, Mark

Underneath Mardell’s blog, a poster had noted: ‘I think you mean that cruise missiles are exploding in Libya, not Iraq. To my knowledge America is not launching missiles there.’At 2:56pm on 20 Mar 2011, Will wrote, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markmardell/)

Mardell must have made the same Freudian slip as Jonathan Marcus and many others, with the mistake subsequently being corrected.

Also on the BBC’s website, political editor Nick Robinson declared: ‘David Cameron will feel a sense of vindication tonight. An idea which was condemned as sabre-rattling, unworkable and unnecessary has been agreed after days of intense diplomacy.’

Once again, a senior BBC journalist had found instant vindication for a leader he was supposed to be holding to account.

The Anti-Iraq Model

Writing in the Independent, Mary Dejevsky comments: ‘President Obama was elected on a platform that included not just a pledge to withdraw from Iraq, but a renunciation of everything the Iraq debacle stood for: the rush to military force, the idea of the US as the global gendarme, the proselytising of Western-style democracy, and the demonisation of Islam…’

This is pure fantasy, but let’s run with it. Dejevsky continues: ‘Such considerations led him to hold back over Egypt, despite much urging that he jump in sooner.’

The real reason, of course, was that Mubarak was ‘our man’. No heroics were demanded of Obama; he just needed to cut off the supply of billions of dollars of weapons to the tyrant. As even the BBC observes, ‘this supposedly anti-war president looks almost as warlike as President George W Bush’.

Dejevsky adds: ‘Supporters of intervention will breathe a sigh of relief and hail this as the anti-Iraq model.’

The ‘Iraq model’: mass violence and mass killing, with war as the first resort.

The ‘anti-Iraq model’: mass violence and mass killing, with war surely not the last resort.

Dejevsky ends: ‘And it is easy to conclude that eight years ago George Bush picked the wrong fight. If you want to foster democracy, why not invest in a country where opposition forces are already championing it on their own? But it is a bit late for such regrets now.’

It takes a special kind of mind to believe that Bush aimed to ‘foster democracy’ in Iraq.

The nation’s most progressive mainstream newspaper, the Guardian, takes a similarly benign view of Western motives: ‘Obama, who made reform and democratisation in the Arab world a key plank of his foreign policy when he spoke in Cairo in 2009, could not stand by and watch as Gaddafi crushed the uprising.’

And yet, as discussed in Part 1, Obama clearly can stand by while allied dictators kill numerous pro-freedom protestors with American weapons in Bahrain and Yemen. Again, there is precious little evidence that the US is interested in real ‘democratisation’, as opposed to pro-Western ‘guided democracy’, which is not democracy at all.

A Guardian blog found that the UN vote to take ‘all necessary measures’ to protect civilians in Libya ‘is little short of a personal triumph’ for David Cameron. The ‘obvious parallel’ is with the Kosovo crisis, the blog noted: ‘Blair prevailed and the NATO military campaign was a success.’ In fact, the campaign led to a major increase in atrocities, as Nato generals predicted in response to a ‘genocide’ that turned out to be a fraud. Is that success?

Also in the Guardian, Simon Tisdall argues that if the air campaign is successful, ‘the revolution will have been salvaged’. As the magnificent Michael Moore Tweets on Twitter: ‘Let’s hear from the “liberals” who say this is a just war because we’re protecting innocent Libyans–like that’s what we do!’ (http://twitter.com/MMFlint, 5:31 PM Mar 20th)

Tisdall adds: ‘If Libya falls to democracy, then like-minded reformers in Bahrain and elsewhere will be greatly heartened.’

If Libya falls to non-guided democracy, a new ‘rogue state’ will have risen from the ashes of the old.

In a condition of near-total unawareness, Tisdall writes of our dear leaders: ‘It’s a story, as they would prefer to write it, with a happy ending, producing a newly independent country, and another friend for the west.’

A ‘newly independent country’ would naturally be ‘a friend for the West’. This helps us translate ‘independent’ and ‘friend’, which actually mean tied and subordinate to Western power.

The Independent has serious concerns about the war: ‘The West must be careful not to lose the propaganda war’:

The regime in Tripoli is claiming that 48 civilians were killed and a further 150 wounded by the initial Western strikes. Those figures have not been verified and the Gaddafi regime is likely to be exaggerating the numbers killed. Something similar took place in the 1999 Kosovo war, when Nato planes, enforcing a no-fly zone, were accused of killing a large number of Serbian civilians in the process.

Unfortunately, the ‘bad guys’ are always making stuff up in this way. But what about the’ good guys’, including the media knights in shining karma? US Defence Secretary, William Cohen, said during the Kosovo war: ‘We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing… They may have been murdered.’⁹

In their book, The Politics of Genocide, Edward Herman and David Peterson reported that US newspapers used the word ‘genocide’ 323 times in reference to the Kosovo conflict, in which some 4,000 people are estimated to have died on all sides.¹⁰ The death toll in Iraq, by contrast, has been consistently undercounted by a factor of ten.

The Independent added: ‘Allied to dangers of a reversal in the propaganda war is the threat of mission creep on the part of the Coalition.’ The possible loss of the propaganda war is a ‘danger’ for the independent Independent – by which they mean, ‘we’ are backing the ‘good guys’.

In 2004, former Nato chief General Wesley Clark put the ‘good guys’ in perspective. In a filmed interview with Democracy Now!, Clark recalled a conversation with a Pentagon general in September 2001:

He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” (Transcript)

Clark added:

The truth is, about the Middle East is, had there been no oil there, it would be like Africa. Nobody is threatening to intervene in Africa. The problem is the opposite. We keep asking for people to intervene and stop it. There’s no question that the presence of petroleum throughout the region has sparked great power involvement.

• Read Part 1.

• Related: “Is Robert Fisk a Psychologist?“

1. Leading article, ‘Allies need a rapid victory to outwit Gadaffi,’ Sunday Times, March 20, 2011.
2. Massie, ‘Keeping Gadaffi close is the safest option,’ Sunday Times, March 28, 2004.
3. Christopher Hope, Daily Telegraph, March 27, 2004.
4. eading article: ‘Colonel Gadafy: The prodigal son returns,’ The Guardian, March 26, 2004.
5. Leading article, ‘The ethics of shaking hands with a tyrant, and the reality of Mr Blair’s foreign policy,’ The Independent, March 26, 2004.
6. Email, forwarded to Media Lens, March 21, 2011 – our emphasis.
7. Email, forwarded March 21, 2011.
8. Email to Mark Mardell, March 21, 2011.
9. Quoted, Degraded Capability, The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, edited by Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, Pluto Press, 2000, p.139.
10. Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p.35.