The Distant Ocean

The new American justice system at work

Some recent news excerpts about Guantanamo and about Australian David Hicks' plea bargain.  First, Robert Gates speaking about Guantanamo before the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee:

He urged Congress to work with the White House to develop a legal framework to look into the concerns "about some of these people who really need to be incarcerated forever, but that doesn't get them involved in a judicial system where there is the potential of them being released".

Yes, God forbid they be brought before a real judge, charged with actual crimes, and given a chance to defend themselves.  After all, Robert Gates already knows they're guilty, so can't we just take his word for it and dispense with all the meddlesome legal formalities?  What we really need is a legal framework that provides more aesthetically pleasing show trials, since Gates acknowledges (in a masterpiece of understatement) that the current ones "lack credibility."

Second, some details of David Hicks' plea bargain:

As part of his agreement which was signed before he appeared in the US military commission on Tuesday he has agreed that he was never illegally treated by any person while in US custody.

It means Hicks can no longer claim he was mistreated by the US after he was captured in December 2001 in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo Bay.

Hicks has formerly said that he was sodomized, beaten, and subjected to forced injections while in U.S. custody.  We won't be bothered by those silly accusations of torture at Guantanamo anymore!

Third, they're not only secret police and thought police but  fashion police now as well:

Hicks, dressed in a tight-fitting charcoal grey suit and sporting a new foppish haircut, parted on the right, was led into the tribunal at about 10.10pm (AEST). He had appeared in court on Monday in thongs, prison garb and with his hair well below his shoulders. It drew a rebuke from the judge.

We can't put up with these long-haired hippies "letting it all hang out"--even if they've only grown their hair long so that they can use it to cover their eyes and sleep despite the lights being kept on all night long in their cells.  Not that Hicks will be talking about that or any of the other mistreatment at Guantamano, thanks to the gag order that threatens him with additional jail time if he exposes some of the methods that were used to obtain his confession.

Doesn't it all just make your heart swell with pride?

The "pollsters" speak again

The BBC just obtained internal British government documents regarding the internal response to the Johns Hopkins study published in the Lancet that estimated that 654,965 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion in 2003 (601,027 due to violence, most commonly gunfire).  The study was immediately dismissed by widely acknowledged statistical experts like Tony Blair and George Bush, of course, as the BBC reports:

Shortly after the publication of the survey in October last year Tony Blair's official spokesperson said the Lancet's figure was not anywhere near accurate.

He said the survey had used an extrapolation technique, from a relatively small sample from an area of Iraq that was not representative of the country as a whole.

President Bush said: "I don't consider it a credible report."

As I mentioned in my last posting on this topic, it was only some know-nothing "pollsters"--like Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who previously worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Frank Harrell Jr., chairman of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University--who deemed the Johns Hopkins study a "rigorous, well-justified analysis of the data" and "the best estimate of mortality we have."  But according to the BBC, the British apparently have some uninformed pollsters of their own:

A memo by the MoD's [Ministry of Defense's] Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, on 13 October, states: "The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to "best practice" in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq."

One of the documents just released by the Foreign Office is an e-mail in which an official asks about the Lancet report: "Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies."

Luckily, this so-called "Chief Scientific Adviser" wasn't allowed to deter Tony Blair from setting the record straight.

Strangely, the lead author of the Johns Hopkins report had much more positive responses from the statistical experts when he was examining mortality in the Congo rather than looking at their own crimes:

Mr. Roberts has studied mortality caused by war since 1992, having done surveys in locations including Bosnia, Congo, and Rwanda. His three surveys in Congo for the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental humanitarian organization, in which he used methods akin to those of his Iraq study, received a great deal of attention. "Tony Blair and Colin Powell have quoted those results time and time again without any question as to the precision or validity," he says.

In the world of the ideologue and the patriot (or is that redundant?), information is to be judged based on how well it accords with your desired world view, and entirely independent of its accuracy or validity.  Take the words I cited recently from Ran HaCohen with a few appropriate substitutions and you see just how universal was the truth that he was expressing: "Iraqi suffering is not perceived as a human catastrophe, but as a political argument. Dead Iraqis are merely an attack on US (and UK) righteousness, and they are confronted as such."

The return of the right of return

Jon at A Tiny Revolution deconstructs the absurdity of the "demographic threat" posed to Israel by the return of Palestinian refugees--a favorite talking point of those who spout standard Israeli propaganda. He makes great points, as always.  As I responded in the comments section for the posting, there's also this poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showing that only about 1% of Palestinian refugees would actually opt for residence and citizenship within Israel proper--were Israel to shock the entire civilized world by obeying international law in accepting the right of return for the Palestinian refugees.

Also, the source for the right of return is not just UN General Assembly resolution 194, as he correctly mentions, but also (and more generally) article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  This also happens to be the  handy counterargument when pro-Israel pedants bleat that resolution 194 is just a General Assembly resolution and is therefore non-binding under international law--a fact that doesn't seem to bother them when they regularly cite UN General Assembly resolution 181 (the UN partition plan for Palestine) in their arguments in support of Israel.  But that's a posting for another day.

Ran HaCohen making sense, as always

Ran HaCohen writes about the dismissive responses of Israelis to a UN report on worsening levels of malnutrition and food insecurity among Palestinians (due almost entirely, as he observes, to "Israeli-imposed closures, and the international and Israeli boycott of the PA" [Palestinian Authority]):

Palestinian suffering is not perceived as a human catastrophe, but as a political argument. It's as if the Israeli propaganda machine managed to turn off the most basic human solidarity within the Israelis, replacing it by cynical sophistry devoid of any humanity. Hungry Palestinians are merely an attack on Israel's  righteousness, and they are confronted as such.

One of the arguments he cites that Israelis use to justify this callousness toward Palestinian suffering (which applies in this case but much more broadly as well):

Always use the magic word "Terror" to turn the Israelis  into victims and the Palestinians into "terrorists." "Terrorists" are unworthy of human compassion, not even when they are starving; moreover, their suffering is always their own fault. [...]

Palestinian "terror" is conceived of as an eternal, inherent, never changing, and unmotivated national trait ("No wonder, after 120 years of terrorism," one reader explains), in which all Palestinians equally partake – doctors and nurses, merchants and students, the elderly and children – and for which they all deserve the punishment of starvation, inflicted upon them by an invisible, unnamed, but ultimately just hand.

The entire article is just as dead on as these excerpts.  This kind of clarity and insight is exactly why I make a point of reading everything he writes.

You can see the full UN report here, BTW.

Pulling back the mask

In July of 2006 I wrote about US sponsorship of Israel's murderous assault on Lebanon and the role the US played in blocking a cease-fire.  Now that most odious of Bush henchmen, John Bolton, has verified the pivotal US role in making sure that hundreds more Lebanese civilians died at the hands of the Israelis:

A former top American diplomat says the US deliberately resisted calls for a immediate ceasefire during the conflict in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

Former ambassador to the UN John Bolton told the BBC that before any ceasefire Washington wanted Israel to eliminate Hezbollah's military capability.

Mr Bolton said an early ceasefire would have been "dangerous and misguided".

He said the US decided to join efforts to end the conflict only when it was clear Israel's campaign wasn't working.

During the assault the New York Times quoted a senior Israeli military official as saying: "There's no time limit. We will end when we achieve our goals."  In light of Bolton's comments it's clear what this meant: there is no US-mandated time limit; we have a green light (and even marching orders) from the US to continue.

Bolton went on to give this stomach-turning assessment of the US role in the continued rape of Lebanon:

Mr Bolton, a controversial and blunt-speaking figure, said he was "damned proud of what we did" to prevent an early ceasefire.

Clarifying exactly what it is that John Bolton was "damned proud" of, the article goes on to note that more than 1000 Lebanese civilians were killed by the Israelis (actually well over 1000; in August 2006 the Independent reported that the death toll had hit 1300).

This just verifies what was already clear at the time--to anyone looking at the issue with an open mind, that is.  But the most the New York Times would venture to say back then is that US actions gave the "appearance" that the US was actively aiding the Israeli attack.  Now that Bolton has so directly verified the US role in preventing peace, how is the Times responding?  They're ignoring it, of course; a Google news search shows no mention of this either by the Times or by any other major US media outlet.

More importantly, though, they won't incorporate this into future coverage either.  When the US sponsors murderous actions by the Israelis (or other allies) in the future, it will be chalked up to inattentiveness or thwarted good intentions or an unwillingness to get involved.  I'm partially quoting here from an expert cited in a representative MSNBC article of July 2006:

"I think it’s really inexplicable,” says James Steinberg, dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. “There’s been some sense that if they get involved and fail, that somehow it will lessen American credibility. But I think the opposite is true. That American credibility has been damaged by our unwillingness to get involved.”

You're only qualified to become dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas (and to be quoted in the mainstream press) if you can look at the mountain of evidence of direct US participation and complicity in the Israeli attack that was available at the time and still manage to come to the conclusion that it's "really inexplicable" that the US would show an "unwillingness to get involved."  I don't doubt that James Steinberg's befuddlement will continue despite Bolton's vile boasts, and that the next time the US actively works to further war and block peace he'll be equally nonplussed by these "inexplicable" actions.

It's tempting to think of Bolton as uniquely evil, but he's really just carrying on a proud tradition of US ambassadors to the UN.  The classic example of this, frequently cited by Noam Chomsky, is former UN ambassador and Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's personal account of how he prevented the UN from taking action in 1975 to protect the Timorese people from the genocidal US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor:

In February the deputy chairman of the provisional government forecast that the Indonesian forces would complete their takeover in three to four weeks, and estimated that some sixty thousand persons had been killed since the outbreak of civil war.  This would have been 10 percent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.
[...]

The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.

This is what the US is about; this is what the US has always been about.  We can at least thank John Bolton and Daniel Patrick Moynihan for pulling back the mask to expose the true face of the US with such clarity.

For those who are willing to see, that is.  The James Steinbergs of this world are incapable of seeing it because they start from the assumption that the US is fundamentally dedicated to lofty, noble causes, and any deviation from that is just a regrettable or inexplicable anomaly--a momentary diversion from the standard path of righteousness.  And no amount of evidence to the contrary will ever make them see otherwise.

Let us now praise Chris Hedges

I've always had a basic level of respect for Chris Hedges, former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times and the author of What Every Person Should Know About War  and (most recently) American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America.  That respect started with his Gaza Diary, in which he describes how Israeli soldiers in Gaza would "entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport"--almost unheard of candor for a reporter working within the relentlessly pro-Israel mainstream media.  I've also respected him because he's that rarity of rarities: a Christian who genuinely believes in (and seems to apply) the teachings of Christ, and a serious, thoughtful, and intellectual Christian to boot.

Based on his professional pedigree, though, I always assumed that Hedges would basically be a standard-issue centrist Democrat, albeit perhaps with some progressive leanings.  But my respect for Hedges increased immeasurably--and I learned once again the danger of facile assumptions--when I saw a recent article he'd written in response to An Unreasonable Man, a new film about Ralph Nader.  An excerpt:

There is a fascinating rage—and rage is the right word—expressed by many on the left in this fine film about Nader.  Todd Gitlin, Eric Alterman and Michael Moore, along with a host of former Nader’s Raiders, spit out venomous insults toward Nader, a man they profess to have once admired, the most common charge being that Nader is a victim of his oversized ego. 

This anger is the anger of the betrayed.  But they were not betrayed by Nader.  They betrayed themselves.  They allowed themselves to buy into the facile argument of “the least worse” and ignore the deeper, subterranean assault on our democracy that Nader has always addressed.

It was an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party, along with the orchestrated fraud by the Republican Party, that threw the 2000 election to Bush, not Ralph Nader.  Nader received only 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000 and got less than one-half of 1 percent in 2004.  All of the third-party candidates who ran in 2000 in Florida—there were about half a dozen of them—got more votes than the 537-vote difference between Bush and Gore.  Why not go after the other third-party candidates?  And what about the 10 million Democrats who voted in 2000 for Bush?  What about Gore, whose campaign was so timid and empty—he never mentioned global warming—that he could not carry his home state of Tennessee?  And what about the 2004 cartoon-like candidate, John Kerry, who got up like a Boy Scout and told us he was reporting for duty and would bring us “victory” in Iraq?

There's much more, and it's definitely worth reading the whole thing.

I'd have been satisfied just to see Hedges criticize Nader without resorting to the shameful ad hominem attacks and irrational hatred that are so depressingly standard these days, and so I was surprised in the best possible way (shocked, almost) to see that his feelings about Nader, corporatism, and the Democratic Party so closely mirror my own, and that he hasn't succumbed to the bankrupt and self-destructive strategy of accommodation that governs so many progressives.  His viewpoint is all the more persuasive because it's eminently pragmatic and thoughtful, informed by the years of reporting he's done--specifically the two years he just spent researching the links between the Christian Right and corporations in the US.

I'll make a point of reading American Facists now and I'll certainly be more interested to hear Hedges' point of view in the future.  If someone with Hedges' prominence and professional background can stay true to his values, maybe there's hope yet for progressive politics in this country.

"An instrument of propaganda"

In his recent interview with Amy Goodman, Wesley Clark made some extraordinarily frank admissions regarding his conscious manipulation of the US media (in particular CNN) with regard to the bombing of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) by NATO forces under his command in 1999:

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: [...] I was asked to take out that television by a lot of important political leaders. And before I took it out, I twice warned the Serbs we were going to take it out. We stopped, at one news conference in the Pentagon, we planted the question to get the attention of the Serbs, that we were going to target Serb Radio and Television.
[...]

AMY GOODMAN: You told CNN, which was also there, to leave?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I told -- I used -- I think I used CNN to plant the story and to leak it at the Pentagon press conference. But we didn't tell anyone specifically to leave. What we told them was it's now a target.

Read that again: "I used CNN to plant the story and to leak it at the Pentagon press conference."  That's a truly remarkable bit of candor from Clark in describing how he used the supposedly independent media in the US--apparently with their consent, based on his description--to send military warnings to the Serbian leadership.  And his uncertainty about which specific media outlet he'd used implies that that practice wasn't limited to CNN (which wouldn't surprise me in the least based on my monitoring of media outlets at the time).

This is remarkable only for its candor, though, not  its uniqueness.  In February of 2000 there were reports that CNN had allowed military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group to work as interns at CNN headquarters in Atlanta.  According to Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service:

"Psy-ops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program, 'Training with Industry'. They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news."

CNN later verified this story (though it understandably tried to minimize the PR damage by quibbling over the specifics).  And beyond the PSYOPS connection there's also the fact that Christiane Amanpour, CNN's premier correspondent in Kosovo at the time, was married to Jamie Rubin--the US State Department's then spokesman.

The intense irony here is that Clark has repeatedly defended the bombing of RTS because it was "an instrument of propaganda" used by Yugoslavia to further its war aims, and yet he sees no inconsistency between that and his admitted use of a major US media outlet to plant questions at a Pentagon press conference and to act as a conduit for sending military warnings to Yugoslavia.  And sadly, Amy Goodman failed to confront him on this hypocrisy, just as she failed to confront him in general throughout the interview.

At the very least, this should be a warning for anyone who considers the mainstream US media in general and CNN in particular as a reliable or even remotely unbiased source of news.

A low point for Amy Goodman

I've listened to and watched Democracy Now! for years; it's the one news show that I make a point of watching on a daily basis.  I have tremendous respect for Amy Goodman, who has literally put her life on the line in the past to get critical news stories and whose journalistic integrity has largely withstood the blunting of time and increased fame.

I say "largely", though, because since 9/11/2001 Democracy Now! has soared in popularity, now reaching far more outlets, and as it has I've noticed a corresponding softening and slow but unmistakable "mainstreaming" of the reporting.  It was mostly a nagging feeling up until last Friday, March 2nd, however, when Amy broadcast her interview with former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and retired US general Wesley Clark.  Sadly, I have to say that this interview represents a low point in what I've seen of Amy Goodman's reporting.

Amy spoke casually and convivially with Clark for most of the hour, asking him general, predictable, and non-confrontational questions about Iran, Iraq, and his presidential ambitions.  I kept waiting patiently for her to ask any tough or substantive questions.  Not only didn't she do so, but she even passed over this eye-popping assertion from Clark:

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: [...] We kind of shrugged our shoulders and said [to General John Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], OK, if you want to invade Haiti, I mean, it's not illegal. It's not the country we'd most like to invade. The opposition there consists of five armored vehicles. But sure, I mean, if the President says to do it, yeah, we're not going resign over it.

Invading another country is not only illegal, its illegality is the primary underpinning of the UN Charter, which unambiguously states that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." The Amy Goodman I thought I knew would have jumped on this like a dog on red meat, but in this interview she just let it pass by without comment or followup.

But the indisputable low point of the interview occurred near the end, with the following exchange:

AMY GOODMAN: General Clark, I wanted to ask you a tough question about journalists.

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: [Smiling] Well, now, that would be the first tough question you've asked me tonight. [Audience laughter]

And he was entirely correct.  Clark is best known for directing a massive 78-day bombing attack against Yugoslavia that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Yugoslavian civilians (Serbian, Albanian, and otherwise), including the extensive use of cluster munitions that have continued killing civilians (primarily children) long after the attack, and--most notoriously--for the bombing of Radio Television Serbia (RTS), a war crime (in Amnesty International's estimation as well as my own) in which a civilian target was attacked by NATO, resulting in the deaths of 16 employees of the station.  Yet for 40 minutes Amy had played a cloying game of journalistic footsie with Clark, tossing him softball after softball, smiling and joking with him about his presidential ambitions, and failing to ask this unindicted war criminal and "vain, pompous brown-noser" a single tough question--so much so that he himself scored a point on her when she finally said she would.  What a deeply disappointing departure this was from the tough, fearless journalism that has earned her my respect over the years.

And what about the tough question she was finally asking?  It was in regard to the attack on RTS.  Before Clark even opened his mouth I knew precisely what he would say in response, because he's repeatedly said it before: that RTS was part of the Yugoslav military's "command and control network" and was therefore a legitimate target.  Amy should have known this as well, since she had previously reported exactly this response of Clark's on her program.  But instead of challenging Clark to justify his  characterization of RTS--asking him to show exactly how and when RTS had been involved in any military action, for example--she let him slip away with his standard answer, and in fact let him use the question as a springboard to extoll his own compassion by saying how "very, very sad" he felt about killing civilians and to make mind-bogglingly Orwellian statements like "And that's why you shouldn't undertake military operations unless every other alternative has been exhausted, because innocent people do die" (this in reference to one of the most unnecessary military attacks in modern history).  Her followups were limited to weak protests that RTS was a civilian target, which Clark briskly brushed aside.  There was no question who had the better half of this exchange.

I don't understand what happened in this interview to the scrappy, confrontational, fearless Amy Goodman I've come to know and respect.  Perhaps the forum or audience dictated that she take a softer approach; perhaps she was under the spell of Clark's charm, articulateness, and soft-spoken manner; perhaps the increasing popularity of Democracy Now! has led her to exchange some of her journalistic rigor for increased access (both to public outlets and public figures); or perhaps it's some combination of all of these.  But the first thing I thought of as I watched this was Peter Jennings having the humanity to ask Henry Kissinger, "How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?"  I never thought I'd see the day when Amy Goodman was unwilling to be as direct and confrontational as an establishment media figure like Jennings, but here we are.  I can only hope that this was an exceptional lapse and that she'll return to form in the future.