Category: News

Via Peter Van Buren, this recent study of medical records kept at Guantanamo Bay concludes:

The findings in these nine cases from GTMO indicate that medical doctors and mental health personnel assigned to the DoD neglected and/or concealed medical evidence of intentional harm.

As the story slowly becomes clearer and more established, more heed should be paid to this Human Rights Watch report calling for the prosecution of Bush administration officials overseeing the torture chambers in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. See my previous post on this.

The anecdote is a useful device in broadcast journalism. To illustrate the ongoing recession and a recent spike in unemployment, NBC Nightly News made the effort, as they’ve done a million times before, to expose their viewers to the reality of the economic struggle millions of Americans are enduring. Sharon Tatra, Brian Williams’s voiceover told us, has been out of work since January 2010. Her unemployment benefits run out in six months. Once that happens, “she doesn’t know how she’ll pay rent or buy food.” The segment ends with Sharon in tears, frightened about her future and rueful at the crumbling of her American Dream.  It’s a rending portrait of an honest woman in hardship.

But while the media often work to make these hardships a reality for Americans, broadcasting the worst of things is out of the question. Sharon Tatra is made human for us. The victims of our empire are kept nameless, faceless, and quiet.

Take Indochina, for example. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were virtually destroyed by the time the war ended over 30 years ago. From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos during 580,000 bombing missions—equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years. Over 20,000 Laotians have been killed or injured since the end of the war because of the over 75 million units of unexploded ordnance in Laos left behind. This past June, Mr. Seng (25) and Mr. Thon (20)were walking together on a plantation they keep to support themselves when Mr. Thon stepped on an unexploded grenade. Mr. Thon died of his injuries and Mr. Seng was left with severe arm, leg, and back injuries. How about something on the nightly news about how this already poor family, struck with this undeserving violence, will sustain themselves? Will they starve? Do they have any available tears for the camera? Do Americans have any notion that the leftovers of American Empire are still murdering innocent people? Are there any lessons Americans might benefit from by broadcasting this anecdote alongside Sharon Tatra’s?

It’s not that the media establishment is heartless. It’s just that the people of Indochina don’t meet the criteria for pity and awareness. The criteria for broadcasting the suffering of people abroad is generally to keep to the crimes of our enemies, white-washing our own. The people suffering famine in Somalia qualify, probably because it draws attention to the state’s new boogie man, al Shabaab, and how cruel they’re being to Somalians. Or, judging from this CBS News segment lamenting the reluctance to intervene in Somalia- entitled “Memories of 1993 Hamper Response to Somalia” – perhaps it’s adding justification for intervention. We hear a lot less about about the 23 civilians killed last February in a “mistaken” airstrike in Afghanistan, or about Noor Mohammed, 10 years old, who “lost both eyes and both arms” back in 2001 when our bombing campaign was still thought of as retaliatory. There’s a lot on the news about the hated Syrian regime‘s crimes, but much less about the beloved friend and allied regime in Bahrain. Hardly any Americans know about the terror war being fought in their name in Colombia and all the violence and tragedy that results, or about the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed in East Timor by U.S. supported militias, just as the thousands in Indochina still dying from chemical warfare and unexploded munitions are simply ignored. The media is inherently subservient to power in Washington and rarely explores tragedies caused by the overlords in government.

To a certain extent, the reason the U.S. is permitted to continue to be a leading terrorist state is because the vast majority of the public is clueless. Insofar as that is the case, the subservient media is as guilty as the imperialists.

Addendum: I should say that this is beginning to change with the decentralized nature of the internet and personal media-sharing devices and the like. At present though, the mass media is still concentrated in a few hands with close relationships with those in government, thus this subservience is still the predominant feature of news media in America.

Moqatda al-Sadr, the Shia, anti-imperialism cleric, just announced that American “trainers” will be targeted if they stay in Iraq behind the 2011 withdrawal deadline. Barring a 180 degree shift in Barack Obama’s foreign policy, American troops will stay in Iraq for many years to come.

“But,” the average American asks, “why would he want to attack troops that are only serving in an advisory capacity and are not combat troops?” Doublespeak from the Obama administration, as well as a general sense of apathy and ignorance amongst the American public, gives rise to questions such as these. Anyone who follows the debacle in Iraq closely knows that the deadlines are far from being met, and that any “advisory capacity” includes such things as kicking down doors and launching full on assaults against Iraqi insurgents. What is even more disheartening, however, is that Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact lacks the spine and journalistic integrity to call the Obama administration’s bluff by considering his promise to withdraw combat troops as a “Promise Kept.” The parallels between Politifact and the Obama administrations’ dereliction of duties that came along with their world renowned prizes are amusing.

But the answer to Politifact’s and the average American’s confusion is that Moqtada al-Sadr is vowing to attack American “trainers” because they are doing much more than training: they are conducting assaults, raids, and acting as the muscle for D.C. in order to retain the diminishing American influence in Iraq, which the armchair generals and policymakers in Washington hope to use as leverage against Iran. Sadr’s intentions were clear and simple,

“Whoever stays in Iraq will be treated as an unjust invader and should be opposed with military resistance.”
…
“A government which agrees for them to stay, even for training, is a weak government.”

Sadr is perhaps also engaging in some form of doublespeak. With a largely demobilized Mehdi Army, much of Sadr’s control has been weakened by rival factions and splinter groups. Most attacks in recent months have been credited to these groups who are uncontrolled by Sadr. Gareth Porter, however, questions whether or not Sadr is bluffing:

If tensions between the U.S. military and Sadr continue to rise, Sadr may reverse course and drop the covert inside game he is said to have adopted. Ironically, the U.S. inability or unwillingness to play along with a Sadr double game on a U.S. troop presence could help Iran stymie the U.S. effort to preserve a rapidly dwindling influence in Iraq.

The Iraqi New Year could end up being a fireworks show to rival the 4th of July show in New York City. Or, like many towns across the United States saw this 4th of July, it could end up being pitch black.

Listen to Antiwar.com’s Angela Keaton on the radio with Matthew David talking about Antiwar.com, libertarian foreign policy, and the new peace movement!

One tribal sheik, Youseff Ahmad, spoke about the debate about the future role of United States forces here that has dominated Iraqi public life of late. “We want them to leave, even before the end of this year,” Mr. Ahmad said. “They’ve destroyed us. They’ve only brought killing and disaster.”

This (via Greenwald) is what was said to American journalists following a botched night raid in Iraq this week which resulted in the death of three men and five people seriously wounded, among them two young girls. The targeted suspect was nowhere to be found. Almost a decade of invasion, occupation, murder, destruction, humiliation, and oopsie-daisies like this and yet Americans still can’t grasp the justified hatred of America swelling up in the Iraqi heart.

This comes after weeks of what everyone implicitly recognizes as U.S. officials badgering the Iraqi government into keeping a large contingent of American troops there indefinitely. Prime Minister Maliki has been playing politics on who this is actually up to, deferring to parliament and then quickly revoking said deference, understanding full well what his overlords in Washington expect in a troop level decision while simultaneously aware of the domestic revulsion against keeping a single occupier there past the December deadline.

According to the New York Times piece reviewing the aftermath of the night raid gone wrong, the U.S. government conducts public opinion polls in Iraq and refuses to publish them. Why might they do that? The only possible reason is that they know the vast majority of Iraqis want an end to the occupation, but don’t want that coming up as a part of the equation on a status of forces agreement. It is the most irrelevant feature of the entire political landscape what might be the preferences of the people we occupy. Only two constituencies of folks matter in that decision: an American public kept intentionally ignorant about the facts, and the imperialists in charge. Which policy is likely to win out?