Archive for September, 2007

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My tour of duty as a British propagandist

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

The UK government seeks to boost pro-British sentiment in the Middle East through news management at a government-funded TV news agency. Bruce Whitehead told the Journalist about his experience of working there:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Abroad, Editorials, U.K. | 1 Comment »

Media alert: 1.2 million Iraqis dead

Monday, September 17th, 2007

You wouldn’t know it from the British media, but last week a highly respected survey organisation reported that up to 1.2 million Iraqis have died violently because of the conflict, making the 2006 Lancet research that reported 650,000 dead look conservative by comparison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Abroad, Editorials, U.K. | No Comments »

At a glance: what the “surge” means

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Ten-point guide to what the increase of US troops in Iraq has meant in practice:

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

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Sami Al-Haj: ‘I am afraid I will be the next to die’

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj has been on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay for more than 230 days. Clive Stafford Smith tells his story in the Press Gazette.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Abroad | 1 Comment »

Iraq’s crisis worse than Darfur

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

Four years after a US-led invasion that was sold to the public partly on humanitarian grounds, Iraqis are suffering from a man-made catastrophe comparable in scope to the tragedy in Darfur, the Financial Times reports.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in U.K. | 1 Comment »

Murdoch’s neo-con agenda for Islam

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

Right on cue, the Murdoch press comes up with a classic “Muslim preachers of hate” scare on the eve of 9/11. Friday’s Times splashed with “Hardline takeover of British mosques“, plus three full pages inside, while the Sun ran with “Hate sect runs 600 mosques“. The timing was clearly also meant to reinforce a connection in readers’ minds with the arrests in Germany two days before of three Muslims on suspicion of a plan to attack US bases.
The Times’ key accusations were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Editorials, U.K. | 1 Comment »

9/11 journalism: how it is done

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

“Leicester to be first city where whites are minority”, revealed the Independent on September 11. But why carry the story on this particular day?

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

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

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

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

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

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BBC “paralysed by post-Hutton traumatic stress”

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

At last, someone has joined the dots. The Independent’s Matthew Norman (Sept 7) eloquently links the BBC’s “collective loss of nerve” over Planet Relief, Blue Peter and the Queen to the Hutton inquiry into Iraq war coverage. He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Precision strike or reckless bombing?

Thursday, September 6th, 2007

NATO forces say an air strike in Helmand targeted Taliban leaders, but locals say the bombs killed hundreds of innocent civilians, The Institute of War and Peace Reporting reports.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Film: “A cry of national shame”

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

“The true story of the Iraq war has been redacted [i.e. edited out] from the mainstream corporate media,” says Brian De Palma, whose hard-hitting Iraq drama, Redacted, premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week. “If we are going to cause such disorder, then we must face the horrendous images that are the consequences of these events.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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