[Media-watch] FW: "They kill reporters, don't they?": Ed Herman's submission for the January 2005 issue of Z Magazine

[David Miller]

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From: "Ed Herman" 
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 10:31:45 -0500

Subject: "They kill reporters, don't they?": Ed Herman's submission for the
January 2005 issue of Z Magazine

"They kill reporters, don't they?" Yes--as Part of a System of Information
Control That Will Allow the Mass Killing of Civilians

Edward S. Herman

It has long been a problem for the U.S. imperial establishment that using
their ever-improving arsenal of death in projecting power, from Vietnam to
Iraq, kills large numbers of target state civilians, in violation of widely
accepted norms of morality, international law, and in contradiction of the
regular claims of good intentions toward the civilian victims supposedly
being "liberated" (from Communism or rule by a bad man). Even worse, it can
upset people at home, who don't like to know about, let alone see, the
mangled bodies of bombed civilians, or even a GI using a lighter to burn
down the home of a Vietnamese peasant family (as in a famous Vietnam war
photo). The home population may be struck by the incompatibility of these
deaths and destructive acts with the alleged benevolent war aims, with the
result that support for the military venture may fade and even be
transformed into a political opposition.

The imperial establishment has worked hard to prevent this obstruction to
their war-making power. Its leaders have no concern whatsoever over target
country civilian casualties, and may even regard them as useful, except for
the problem of public relations. This is a leadership and establishment that
was able to positively exult over the Indonesian army and paramilitary
slaughter of a million or more civilians in 1965-66, and the even greater
mass killing of Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese civilians by U.S. forces
and U.S. proxies from the time of Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S. puppet leader of
South Vietnam from 1954 to 1963, to the U.S. exit in 1975, was of absolutely
no concern to a string of U.S. administrations--Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson
and Nixon.

It was only the killings in Cambodia by Pol Pot from 1975-78 that elicited
great humanistic indignation from U.S. leaders and mainstream media. The
mass killing of East Timorese by the Indonesian military from 1975, in the
same time frame as the Pol Pot killings, was, like that of the Vietnamese,
of no concern to U.S. leaders or the mainstream media, and produced neither
publicity nor indignation. These victims were "unworthy," or "unpeople" in
Mark Curtis's usage, the criterion shunting civilians into these classes
being that these were OUR or a client state's victims. (A main theme of
Curtis's valuable new book Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses
[Vintage: 2004] is that the British establishment's concern over civilian
victims, except those of enemy states, has long been non-existent. "In the
thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other
books. I have barely seen reference to human rights at all. Where such
concerns are invoked, they are only for public relations purposes" [p. 3]).
 
Full-Spectrum Domination: Including Media Choices of News and Frames
 
A first principle of controlling information in the interest of
"freedom"--to kill civilians without impediment--is that the war-makers must
dominate the frames and factual evidence used by the media. This has become
easier as the media have become more commercial, concentrated and dependent
on the government for favors (e.g., rights to merge, rights to spectrum
allocations, tax and labor policies, protection abroad, information access)
and as the growing rightwing echo chamber has served as an enthusiastic
conduit and enforcer of government propaganda. The government has also
become more efficient at feeding the media suitable information, providing
experts for TV commentary, embedding and coopting journalists, keeping
reporters away from inconvenient scenes and sources, and bullying them and
their bosses into silence on matters that put state policy in an unfavorable
light (helped by the rightwing enforcers).
 
In fact, information policy has become openly recognized as a weapon of war
and is included among the elements of the U.S. official strategy of "full
spectrum dominance," which U.S. military experts Jim Winters and John Giffin
have indicated means both "building up and protecting friendly mediaŠand
degrading information received by your adversary" (quoted in David Miller,
"Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control," Jan.
2004, <http://www.coldtype.net). Friendly media may be subsidized and given
privileged access to information, and some friendly media may even be
created by the state (e.g., the Iraq Media Network, paid for by the
Pentagon). Media deemed hostile may be "degraded" by harassment and even
cruise missile attacks. This policy is hardly new, but reached a new peak in
planning, resort to violence, and extensive usage in the invasion-occupation
of Iraq. 
 
A problem for the mind control managers is the brazenness with which the
United States has projected power since the fall of the Soviet Union, with
three major wars of aggression, even more aggressive support for Israel's
ultra-ethnic cleansing, and an openly publicized plan for global domination
by force and threat of force. This has contributed to the growth of more
alert dissident communities, helped along by the Internet and the rise of
alternative media, of which Al Jazeera is the most important (on Iraq, it
reaches far more people than CNN). Mind control works best at home, with its
reliable mainstream media cooperation, but the U.S. managers are working
hard to extend its influence globally.

In frame domination a regular feature of government assaults on foreign
targets is demonization of target country leaders, who, like Manuel Noriega
and Saddam Hussein, were often allies treated gently by the media prior to
their fall from grace (i.e., failure to take orders, not human rights
abuses). This permits a steady focus on the abuses of the target country
leadership rather than on the real reasons for the attack and the pains
inflicted on target country civilians. It is also easier to use extreme
force because the civilian population can be declared "willing executioners"
who put the demon into power and/or have failed to remove him. This argument
is used even against civilian populations allegedly ruled by a "dictator"
against whom civilians may have limited power of removal. It goes almost
without saying that the U.S., Indonesian and Israeli populations are never
declared "willing executioners" although at least in the U.S. and Israeli
cases the populations do have the power to remove murderous regimes.

The Fraud of Allegedly Minimizing Civilian Casualties

Another part of the official arsenal is to claim a sincere effort to
minimize civilian casualties, helped by "precision bombing" and "surgical
strikes" aimed solely at military targets.  There is absolutely no reason to
believe these claims as regards either intent or result, as in each recent
U.S. war of aggression--Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq--there is evidence
that non-military sites have been regularly targeted, that bombing raids
often hit strictly civilian sites because of poor or no evidence of military
relevance, and that sites are regularly attacked where civilian casualties
are highly probable even if there is a valid military target (in violation
of international law). It is a huge fraud that hundreds of bombing attacks
on sites where civilians are sure to be killed, even where they are not
specifically targeted, does not constitute a "deliberate" killing of
civilians (for a good legal and substantive discussion, see Michael Mandel,
How America Gets Away With Murder [Pluto: 2004], pp. 46-56).
 
In Yugoslavia, the United States, under NATO cover, openly extended targets
to civilian sites like power stations, factories producing only consumers
goods, farms, and even hospitals, museums, churches and monasteries, with
the clear and sometimes acknowledged aim of making civilians suffer to force
an early surrender. In Afghanistan bombing raids were often carried out
against civilian sites based on unverified rumor, and pilots regularly
bombed in response to a flash that might have been the firing of a weapon
(the wedding party at Krakak; the killing of four Canadian soldiers), and
pilots shot at and killed numerous unidentified individuals in flight, and
even a tall man with a beard who ³might² have been Bin Laden, along with
five other peasants (for examples, see my "'Tragic Errors' As An Integral
Component of Policy," Z Magazine, Sept. 2002.). Targets included nine
mosques (with at least 120 civilians killed) and three hospitals--the latter
a regular U.S. target in Vietnam as well. Afghanistan was a "free fire
zone," to use the parlance of the genocidal U.S. operations in Vietnam.
 
Fallujah has also been a free fire zone, both in the April assault and that
in November, with few if any restraints on targeting. As in Afghanistan,
targets have included hospitals, mosques, power facilities, ambulances, and
fleeing civilians--young, old, male and female. In Fallujah the phrase for
the "liberal rules of engagement" is "weapons free," and reporter Kevin
Sites, who spent some days with the marines in Fallujah, says that "Weapons
free means the marines can shoot whatever they see--it's all considered
hostile." 
 
There are of course regular official efforts to deny civilian casualties,
and lying about them is standard operating procedure, often brazen lying to
the point of laughability (some samples are provided in "'Tragic Errors' As
An Integral Component of Policy"). But when denial is impossible and the
lies are exposed too authoritatively, there are regrets, assurances that the
"tragic errors" and "collateral damage" were all sad mistakes and certainly
not deliberate, and if enough publicity attaches to the sad mistake there
are announcements that an "investigation" is underway. We rarely hear the
results of these investigations, and sometimes there is evidence that they
never took place. Thus, after British ITN journalist Terry Lloyd was killed
by U.S. marines in Iraq, Colin Powell promised an investigation, but some
time later when ITN investigators spoke with the marines involved, the
investigators were told that the marines had never been questioned in any
investigation (see Tim Gopsill, "Target the Media," in David Miller, ed.,
Tell me lies [Pluto: 2004], pp. 253-4). There are never any costs attached
to these tragic errors and collateral damage--to the attackers--unless we
include the building up of a huge reservoir of hate based on de facto
murders for which there is no legal remedy in the present world order.

It was acknowledged during the war against Yugoslavia that the turn to the
bombing of civilian sites was for the purpose of inflicting pain on
civilians, and it has occasionally been admitted as regards both Afghanistan
and Iraq that killing civilians has its merits--because the civilians were
sometimes suspected of supporting the Taliban or Iraqi resistance, and
because killing civilians and its threat would instill fear and help render
the population quiescent as well as less willing to help insurgents. In
Iraq, a  "senior Bush administration official" is quoted in the New York
Times saying that the bombing of Fallujah was helpful in that it would push
the "citizenry" of Fallujah to deny sanctuary and assistance to the
insurgents, adding "that's a good thing." A "Pentagon official" was also
quoted as saying: "If there are civilians dying in connection with these
attacks, and with the destruction, the locals at some point have to make a
decision. Do they want to harbor the insurgents and suffer the consequences
that come with that?"

Attacking civilians directly or with assured collateral damage is a war
crime, as "The Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish
between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects
and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only
against military objectives" (Protocol 1, Article 48 of the Geneva
Conventions, 1977 supplement). Attacking hospitals and deliberately
depriving civilians of access to medicines and doctors are war crimes.
Deliberately depriving civilian populations of food and water is a war
crime. Shooting anybody that walks into the street or tries to cross a river
seeking refuge is a war crime. The "wanton destruction" of a city is a war
crime. These are all features of the U.S. assaults on Fallujah, so that U.S.
authorities and their Iraqi puppet ("Saddam without a moustache²) are
violating these articles on a continuing and large scale.
 
Avoiding Body Counts of Civilians Killed

Another weapon in the public relations arsenal of the death-machine managers
is negative: don't count bodies. The political and racist double standard
here is staggering. In Kosovo, after the 78-day bombing war, the Clinton
administration allocated $25 million to the Tribunal for a search for
bodies, and of course the body searches in Bosnia have been going at it for
years; whereas in the aftermath of the Indonesian massacres of East Timorese
in the run-up to the 1999 East Timorese vote for independence, the
justice-loving Western powers were uninterested in body-counts, and so were
the mass media. 
 
U.S. body counts are known in detail and reported, whereas Vietnamese,
Afghan and Iraqi civilian tolls are not, at least from official and
mainstream media sources. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war Colin Powell
stated that "Body counts don't interest me," and during the current
aggression-occupation General Tommy Franks has acknowledged: "We don't count
bodies." He meant Iraqi civilian bodies. The number of U.S. personnel
missing in action or prisoners of war in Vietnam was constantly harped upon
in the U.S. mainstream, but the number of Vietnamese missing in action and a
count of the vast civilian toll in Vietnam were of no interest, and as Noam
Chomsky has pointed out that civilian toll in Indochina is not even known
within the range of millions (and estimates run up to four million). In Iraq
today, the media reported at one point that 38 GIs had been killed in the
November U.S. assault on Fallujah, but no figures are given for the Iraqi
civilians killed--unworthy victims, or unpeople, by rule of political-racist
bias, but serving the function of protecting the U.S. onslaught from adverse
information. 
 
Preventing Others From Counting Civilian Bodies
 
Equally important, and a complement of the official policy of not counting
bodies, is preventing others from counting bodies (or reporting such
counts). This involves buying up, intimidating, or destroying the media,
journalists, and even hospitals and doctors in hospitals, who might testify
to civilian casualties. Actions along these lines have been carried out on a
large scale.
 
Most recently, the media reported that among the first actions of the U.S.
forces in Fallujah was to bomb out of existence a clinic and take over the
main General Hospital. One of the stated purposes of the takeover was to
"shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants:
Fallujah General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian
casualties" (Eric Schmitt, "A Goal is Met. What's Next?," NYT, Nov. 15,
2004). "Propaganda" is used here in the Orwellian sense of information that
does not serve OUR propaganda needs. There is no suggestion in this article,
or elsewhere in the paper or mainstream media, that this one of "several
accomplishments" by U.S. forces in Fallujah was immoral and a
straightforward violation of international law (see further, David Peterson,
ZNet Blogs, Nov. 8, 2004;
http://blog.zmagazine.org/index.php/weblog/entry/iraq5/).

In Afghanistan, the Pentagon bought exclusive rights to all photos made by
Denver-base Space Imaging, the only commercial operator collecting high
resolution images by satellite, thereby preventing possible public access to
satellite photos of some of the several hundred villages bombed by the U.S.
Air Force.

In another notorious case, a soldier even threatened to shoot Doug Struck, a
Washington Post reporter who was trying to visit a just-bombed site in
Afghanistan. The Pentagon didn't want anybody looking at the results of
those bombings.

The Pentagon's and other official U.S. attacks on media entities that might
disclose inconvenient information has been extensive. In Afghanistan, the
Pentagon went after all known indigenous radio stations, and some that
didn't exist any more, displaying their imperfect information sources: On
October 8, 2001, naval ships fired four cruise missiles at an unused radio
mast east of downtown Kabul. The radio station, which hadn't been in
operation for a decade, was hit by three missiles, but a fourth went astray
and completely destroyed a United Nation's-funded de-mining agency, Afghan
Technical Consultants (ATC), instantly killing four Afghan night watchmen
and injuring two other UN staff persons and two other Afghans (a case
described in Marc Herold's forthcoming Afghan Bodies Don't Lie: Faces of
'Collateral Damage').
 
It is well-known that Colin Powell pressed officials of Qatar to crack down
on Al  Jazeera, and Al Jazeera (and the web site Arabia.com) were subjected
to major hacker attacks that caused brief Al Jazeera  web site closures and
intermittent interruptions throughout the war. The level of the most serious
attack suggested government involvement (Faisal Bondi, "Al Jazeera's War,"
in David Miller, ed., Tell me lies [Pluto: 2004], pp. 248-9).  The
U.S.-chosen Allawi government of Iraq raided and closed down Al Jazeera's
office in Baghdad. One condition insisted on by the United States in the
April negotiations for a truce fire in Fallujah was that Al Jazeera agree to
move its cameras and personnel out of the city, where that broadcaster had
been able to transmit hostile "propaganda" (i.e., photos of and interviews
with civilian victims; pictures of ambulances under fire, etc).
 
The United States bombed and destroyed the main broadcasting station in
Belgrade during the 1999 bombing war (while killing 16 people); it bombed
all of the regional radio stations of Radio Shuriet in Afghanistan, and it
bombed the Al Jazeera broadcasting facilities in Kabul.  Shortly after the
start of the Iraq invasion, on March 25, 2003, U.S. forces bombed the Iraqi
TV station. On April 8, the day after their entry into Baghdad, U.S. forces
attacked Al Jazeera's broadcasting facilities there, despite the fact that
Al Jazeera officials had told the U.S. military the precise coordinates of
their offices in the hope that this would make it more difficult for them to
make another "tragic error." This anti-media warfare was hardly noticed by
the U.S. mainstream media.
 
Intimidating and Killing Reporters

The U.S. bombing of the Al Jazeera station in Kabul in 2001 was explained by
U.S. officials as a result of detection of a satellite uplink indicating an
interview with a Taliban member, and U.S. officials have gone farther,
stating publicly that any uplink from enemy territory if detected by U.S.
planes could be the basis for an attack, without differentiation between
journalism and enemy communications (see Gopsill, "Target the Media," pp.
251-3). This threat to bomb even "friendly" journalists and stations would
be a strong deterrent to placing them in enemy territory, and the threat
helped induce CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox to pull out of Baghdad before the March
2003 invasion. Gopsill notes that "This exodus was pleasing to the
Pentagon," causing the U.S. public to be "ignorant of what their forces were
doing to the city."

The policy of encouraging the embedding of journalists, complemented by
warnings, threats and occasional attacks on "unilaterals," had a similar
affect of diminishing the likelihood of reporting outside U.S. military
control. Unilateral journalist Terry Lloyd, traveling with several others in
a vehicle with huge markings of TV, was shot and killed by U.S. marines, but
a Marine general in charge of public relations had warned that "having
independent journalists wandering the battlefield is fraught with lots of
problems." Unilaterals were consequently sparse, leaving the reporting to
the "embeds" and Arab media. Faisal Bodi points out that "From the outset of
the war the news followed two tracks: the 'Embed' line laid by Centcom, and
the independent line by news providers like Al Jazeera who had the courage
to locate hacks in the war zone." ("Al Jazeera's War," in Miller, Tell me
lies, p. 245). The Embed line was not concerned with civilian casualties.

On April 8, 2003, U.S. forces not only bombed the Al Jazeera facilities in
Baghdad, they also attacked Abu Dhabi TV facilities located there. On the
same day a tank shelled the media facilities and personnel at the Palestine
Hotel, killing two journalists and seriously injuring three others. The
assault on the hotel is interesting in part because once again U.S.
officials engaged in serial lying in "explaining" the attacks--the numerous
media personnel in the Hotel, and their video shots, uniformly contradict
the official claims of shooting or other action or threat from the Hotel;
all of them agree with Robert Fisk's statement that the U.S. response was "a
straightforward lie."
 
The day after this attack on the journalists in the Palestine Hotel, the
U.S. invaders, using an armoured personnel carrier, pulled down the statue
of Saddam Hussein right outside the hotel, passing it off as an Iraqi
celebration of the victory. The journalists from the hotel filmed this
charade, and as Tim Gopsill says, reported it "as the coalition's greatest
moment of triumph. Such magnanimity on the part of people who had just been
shot at is remarkable."
 
Concluding Note 
 
This "magnanimity" flows from structure and internalized bias that causes
the media to performs miracles of apologetics for state policy. They can
report with great indignation false stories of Saddam's alleged removal of
babies from incubators in Kuwait, but the destruction of a clinic and
seizure of the main hospital in Fallujah, cutting off of the water supply to
this and two other cities, leveling Fallujah with advanced weaponry, and
Madeleine Albright's remark that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through the
"sanctions of mass destruction" was "worth it," are treated at best with
brevity and with no detectable indignation. What the U.S. military is doing
to Iraqi civilians is largely unreported in the U.S. media, and documentary
evidence collected by outsiders is kept out of sight. A tape of U.S.
soldiers badly mistreating Iraqi civilians caught by Swedish journalist
Urban Hamid was not saleable here: Hamid says "It's obvious that the
mainstream media exercise some kind of self-censorship in which people know
this is a hot potato and don't touch it because you are going to get burned"
(Quoted in Michael Massing, "Iraq, the Press, and the Election":
http://alternet.org/mediaculture/20569/  )
 
In short, the mainstream media are "willing collaborators" in imperial
policies that involve the mass killing of civilians-their leaders and many
of their journalists are spiritual "Embeds" who hardly need coercion and
threats to see their government's view of things, but they and their
associates are also under pressure from the media leaders, the government,
and the private enforcers to stay away from such "controversial" matters as
the killing of unworthy victims or unpeople. The media serve as an arm of
the state, and do a better job of state propaganda than systems of explicit
government control and crude propaganda. This is state propaganda
voluntarily provided, though from parties with symbiotic connections to the
state and deriving substantial benefits from this relationship.


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