Archive for July, 2007

One-sided Reporting: Tisdall does it again

Thursday, July 26th, 2007


Mehrnaz Shahabi writes for CASMII: The article in the Guardian by Simon Tisdall, “Iran fist-in-glove with Iraqi rebels: America builds its case”, July 24, appears on the same day the second round of Iran-US talks begins, and is the second article in just over two months by Simon Tisdall using unsubstantiated allegations ascribed to anonymous sources accusing Iranian government of complicity in the violence in Iraq.

The increasingly fantastical nature of the Neo-Cons’ propaganda claims regarding the Iranian involvement with such irreconcilable forces from the Shiia militias to the Sunni extremists, to Al Qaeda, does not deter Simon Tisdall, nor does it prompt him to question the sheer implausibility of these accusations, a situation identical to his 22nd May article in the Guardian.

Whilst quoting from the FT’s recent story alleging Al-Qaeda’s use of the Iranian territory with the knowledge of the Iranian authorities to launch attacks in Iraq, and war against US and British forces”, the recent 6th July confession by David Miliband, the British Foreign Minister, to the Financial Times that there was no evidence of Iranian complicity in the violence and instability in Iraq, seemingly is not thought relevant!

Likewise, Simon Tisdall quotes Frederick Kegan, a noted US Neo-Conservative, alleging “a growing body of evidence” that the pattern of Iranian arms and assistance to Shiia militias are being repeated now to Sunni Jihadis of all descriptions, including individual AlQaeda cells, and stating his pessimism that “increased diplomatic contact would bring a change of policy – on either side”. Yet, Mr Tisdall does not find the ultimatum by the alleged leader of an AlQaeda umbrella group in Iraq that Iran’s continued support for the Shiia government in Iraq would be responded to by war, of any relevance.

This alleged announcement by AlQaeda confirms the congruence of interests of the US and AlQaeda over their hostility towards Iran and refutes the myth that Iran is a beneficiary of the continuing mayhem in Iraq. This type of reporting can only serve to benefit those elements in the US who are doing all they can to sabotage the long awaited and extremely sensitive dialogue between the US and Iran which has the potential of securing peace in Iraq and averting a war with Iran with regional and global catastrophic consequences.

War, the media and “legitimate” sources

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

The Guardian’s indispensible Peter Wilby writes (July 23) on why journalists need to take “dissident” sources seriously when covering war:

In the index to Alastair Campbell’s The Blair Years, you will find entries for Kosovo and Afghanistan, but not for Iraq. So if you want to search for the inside story of how Campbell spun the war, you will have to plough through the press supremo’s staccato prose. You will be disappointed. Campbell tells us little about what was, after all, supposed to be his main job: keeping journalists onside. Even the Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh puts in only four appearances, while distinguished commentators such as the Independent’s Steve Richards or editors such as the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger don’t feature at all.

There are, however, a few revealing passages. One, for September 10 2002, reads: “Alex F called, really worried about Iraq . . . really on the rampage about the press as well, said we had to do something, they were out of control.” It took me a while to work out that Alex F was Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager. Somehow, I find his role as a government adviser even more alarming than that of Rupert Murdoch, who also crops up more frequently than almost any working hack.

But what struck me most was the assumption, when the powerful speak to the powerful, that the press should normally be under “control”. The extent to which sports pages are controlled – so that football’s corruption went unremarked until it was investigated by BBC Panorama – is a subject for another day. What concerns me here is control of political news.

From 2002, New Labour got a hard time from newspapers, particularly over Iraq, and in his diaries Campbell never stops whining. Yet the press largely supported the Iraq invasion, and presented it as a success until growing anarchy made such a panglossian interpretation impossible. Even most of the war’s opponents didn’t question the main premise: that Saddam possessed WMDs which would soon include nuclear weapons. To this day, it is said experts were unanimous in believing Saddam posed a serious threat.

That simply isn’t true. Many well-informed people, including former UN weapons inspectors, were saying WMDs had most likely been destroyed (with only battlefield weapons possibly remaining) and Saddam was nowhere near a nuclear capability. The press mostly ignored them, both here and in the US. Why?

As American academics argue in When the Press Fails, a book published by the University of Chicago Press this year, newspapers favour “simple, dramatic narratives”. Governments are best placed to provide these, particularly on foreign policy where secret intelligence material and diplomatic manoeuvring are crucial.

When a body of opinion inside government – or inside the mainstream political process – challenges the official version of events, journalists will present competing analyses. But dissidents from outside the establishment lack the standing and resources to sustain an alternative narrative. Unless they have a leading position in a significant opposition party, anyone who is out of office, even if they were once in office, can be depicted as out-of-touch, deranged and embittered. American journalism’s greatest triumph, Watergate, merely proves the point. Deep Throat, without whom the story would have died, turned out to be No 2 at the FBI.

The US press, which critics such as John Lloyd of the Reuters Institute would like our papers to emulate, has the bigger problem. It propagated bigger lies – for example, that Saddam was linked to 9/11 – with greater success and, because it lacks the competitive spur of the UK market, presents a more homogeneous view. To some extent, the US press is a victim of its virtuous insistence on rigour. American journalists have it drummed into them from youth that everything they write must be properly sourced. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, newspapers tend to assume, on most subjects, that official sources are the most “proper” ones.

Even the best British papers have no cause for complacency, however, and unlike the New York Times and Washington Post, they haven’t apologised for misleading readers. What was going on at Abu Ghraib, for example? Most Iraqis – and they should know – would call it torture. So would most continental newspapers. But analysis by American academics shows the term was used far less frequently by the British press (including the Guardian) and hardly at all by the US press. In both countries, official sources insisted incidents at Abu Ghraib were “abuses”, committed by “rogue elements”.

None of this would matter so much if the press showed signs of learning lessons. But the official narrative on Iran – that it is striving to acquire nuclear weapons while arming terrorists in Iraq – is as unchallenged now as the narrative about WMDs before the Iraq war. So is the narrative that all violence in Iraq is caused by a combination of al-Qaida, Iranian meddling, sectarian fanaticism and Saddamite fascism. The possibility that much of it involves an authentic nationalist uprising, which just wants a united Iraq with the Americans out, is ruled inadmissible. Seumas Milne’s report in the Guardian last week was a rare exception.

I do not know enough about Iraq to be sure the official narratives are untrue, any more than I could be sure the WMD claims were untrue – though, on the latter, my instincts proved correct. What I do know is that I would like to read the rival narratives more often. Whatever Campbell and Ferguson think, the more the press is out of control, the better.

A glimpse of the Iraqi resistance

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

Sami Ramadani of Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation, and a member of Media Workers Against the War’s steering group, analyses the prospects for united action by the Iraqi resistance in light of the Guardian’s interviews with representatives of Sunni groups:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video: Shooting taxi drivers in Baghdad

Friday, July 20th, 2007

ABC News has aired this short news item by cameraman Sean Smith of the Guardian. It will sicken you and anyone who watches it, and will make you ask why the British media hasn’t broadcast it.

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

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

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

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

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

Phone-ins are not the main problem at the BBC

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

The BBC says a small number of its production staff are undermining public trust in the organisation. The government and the Murdoch press are using Blue Peter and a documentary on the Queen to renew their relentless attacks on public service broadcasting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear colleagues,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Thompson

Director-General

Iran experts admonish the Financial Times

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

The Financial Times has refused to publish the following letter:

Dear Sir,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signatures:

Dr. Mehri Honarbin-Holliday, Canterbury Christ Church University

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

Dr. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, London Middle East Institute

Professor Haleh Afshar, OBE, University of York

Professor Abbas Edalat, Imperial College, University of London

Terror and the media’s “useful idiots”

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

What is the media’s responsibility during a terror alert? Should it whip up fear to attract more readers, listeners and viewers? Should it exploit the incident to foment xenophobia, suspend civil liberties and seek revenge on ethnic groups vaguely linked to the incident? Should they assist the terrorists in creating mass panic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newsnight: “There was no explosive in this car”

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

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

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

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

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

We have been here before

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

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

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

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

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

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