The American Bear

› As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point | Matt Taibbi

Well, the Bradley Manning trial has begun, and for the most part, the government couldn’t have scripted the headlines any better.

In the now-defunct Starz series Boss, there’s a reporter character named “Sam Miller” played by actor Troy Garity who complains about lazy reporters who just blindly eat whatever storylines are fed to them by people in power. He called those sorts of stories Chumpbait. If the story is too easy, if you’re doing a piece on a sensitive topic and factoids are not only reaching you freely, but publishing them is somehow not meeting much opposition from people up on high, then you’re probably eating Chumpbait.

There’s an obvious Chumpbait angle in the Bradley Manning story, and most of the mainstream press reports went with it. You can usually tell if you’re running a Chumpbait piece if you find yourself writing the same article as 10,000 other hacks.

The CNN headline read as follows: “Hero or Traitor? Bradley Manning’s Trial to Start Monday.” NBC went with “Contrasting Portraits of Bradley Manning as Court-Martial Opens.” Time magazine’s Denver Nicks took this original approach in their “think” piece on Manning, “Bradley Manning and our Real Secrecy Problem”:

Is he a traitor or a hero? This is the question surrounding Bradley Manning, the army private currently being court-martialed at Fort Meade for aiding the enemy by wrongfully causing defense information to published on the Internet.

The Nicks thesis turned out to be one chosen by a lot of editorialists at the Manning trial, who have decided that the “real story” in the Manning case is what this incident showed about our lax security procedures, our lax of good due diligence vetting the folks we put in charge of our vital information.

“With so many poorly protected secrets accessible to so many people, it was only a matter of time,” Nicks wrote. “We can be grateful that Bradley Manning rather than someone less charitably inclined perpetrated this leak.”

Dr. Tim Johnson of the Telegraph took a similar approach, only he was even less generous than Nicks, calling Manning the “weirdo [who] tried to bring down the government,” a man who was “guilty as hell” and “deserves to do time.”

“Private Manning was a self-absorbed geek who should never have enjoyed the level of access that he did,” Johnson wrote. He went on to argue that Manning’s obvious personality defects should have disqualified him for sensitive duty, and the fact that he was even hired in the first place is the real scandal of this trial:

His personality breakdown was there for all to see – criticising US policy on Facebook, telling friends, “Bradley Manning is not a piece of equipment”, and even entertaining “a very internal private struggle with his gender”. He told hacker Adrian Lamo that he “listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” You go, girl.

All of this shit is disgraceful. It’s Chumpbait.

If I was working for the Pentagon’s PR department as a hired press Svengali, with my salary eating up some of the nearly five billion dollars the armed services spends annually on advertising and public relations, I would be telling my team to pump reporters over and over again with the same angle.

I would beat it into the head of every hack on this beat that the court-martial is about a troubled young man with gender identity problems, that the key issue of law here rests inside the mind of young PFC Manning, that the only important issue of fact for both a jury and the American people to decide is exactly the question in these headlines.

Is Manning a hero, or a traitor? Did he give thousands of files to Wikileaks out of a sense of justice and moral horror, or did he do it because he had interpersonal problems, because he couldn’t keep his job, because he was a woman trapped in a man’s body, because he was a fame-seeker, because he was lonely?

You get the press and the rest of America following that bouncing ball, and the game’s over. Almost no matter what the outcome of the trial is, if you can convince the American people that this case is about mental state of a single troubled kid from Crescent, Oklahoma, then the propaganda war has been won already.

Because in reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the “classified” materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.

This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal. [continue]

› The Food Stamp Fight | Dean Baker

Congress is debating whether to cut the Food Stamp program, the government’s main nutrition program for low-income families. The coverage of this debate is a great example of “fraternity reporting,” that is reporting that shows you are a member of the reporters fraternity but has nothing to do with informing the audience.

We see this by the convention of referring to the $80 billion annual budget for the program (here for example). It is standard practice to refer to the dollar amount being spent on the program, pretending that this is actually providing information to readers.

As a practical matter, almost no one has a clear sense of how much much $80 billion a year is. They don’t have their heads in budget documents. (Yes, I know the Post has a well-educated readership, but it doesn’t matter.) It would mean pretty much the same thing to the vast majority of readers if the number was $8 billion or $800 billion. Often budget numbers appear without even telling the readers the number of years being covered.

If the standard practice was to write the numbers as a percent of total spending it would be providing actual information to a large percentage of its readers. In this case, current spending on Food Stamps is a bit over 2.2 percent of total spending. This figure is bloated by the downturn, since people qualify for benefits based on their income and many of the unemployed or underemployed qualify. (Contrary to Republican claims, President Obama did not ease the eligibility rules for food stamps.) The projections show that spending on food stamps will fall to 1.2 percent of the budget over the next decade as unemployment falls back to more normal levels.

It would be useful if we had a debate based on an informed public, with the country actually having a sense of how much food stamps and other programs cost. However, as long as fraternity reporting is the norm, large segments of the public will continue to believe that half of the budget is going to pay for food stamps.

› War Crimes as Policy | Douglas Valentine and Nicolas J.S. Davies

In February the Guardian and BBC Arabic unveiled a documentary exploring the role of retired Colonel James Steele in the recruitment, training and initial deployments of the CIA advised and funded Special Police Commandos in Iraq.

The documentary tells how the Commandos tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi men and boys. But the Commandos were only one of America’s many weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Along with US military forces – which murdered indiscriminately – and various CIA funded death squads – which murdered selectively – and the CIA’s rampaging palace guard – the 5,000 man strong Iraq Special Operations Forces – the Commandos were part of a genocidal campaign that killed about 10% of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq by 2008, and drove about half of all Sunnis from their homes.

Including economic sanctions, and a 50 year history of sabotage and subversion, America and its Iraqi collaborators visited far more death and destruction on Iraq than Saddam Hussein and his regime.

For the last few weeks, American pundits have been cataloguing the horrors. They tell how the Bush and Obama regimes, united in the unstated policy of war crimes, probably murdered more than a million Iraqis, displaced around five million, and imprisoned and tortured hundreds of thousands without trial.

A few have further explained that the dictatorial administrative detention laws, torture, and executions that characterize the occupation are still in place under Prime Minister Maliki. The prime minister’s office, notably, is where the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau is currently ensconced.

All of this meets the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, and violates multiple articles of the Geneva Conventions, which guarantee protection to civilians in time of war. But the responsible Americans have gone unpunished for their war crimes, not least of which was falsifying intelligence about Iraq’s non-existent weapon of mass destruction as a pretext for the invasion. British legal advisors repeatedly warned their government that invading Iraq would be a crime of aggression, which they called “one of the most serious offenses under international law.”

For anyone familiar with the CIA, this was predictable. But the US Government, through secrecy and censorship, destroyed much of the hard evidence of its war crimes, making it harder to prove. And the media is content to revise history and focus public attention on front men like Steele, rather than the institutions – in particular the CIA – for whom they work.

History, however, provides contextual evidence that what happened in Iraq amounts to a policy of carefully planned war crimes.

[…] Another problem, apart from historical amnesia, is that each war crime is viewed as an isolated incident, and when the dots are connected, the focus is on some shadowy character like Steele. The Guardian made an attempt to connect Steele to Petraeus and Rumsfeld, which again, is commendable. But the fact is that the entire National Security State has been designed and staffed with right-wing ideologues who support the unstated US policy of war crimes for profit.

We know who these security ideologues are. The problem is, they regularly have lunch with the reporters we trust to nail them to the wall. [READ]

› We Are So Disappointed With the Corrupt Afghan Government | A Tiny Revolution

I’m sure it’s tough for many reasons to work for the Sulzbergers and Carlos Slim at the New York Times. But I’d have an especially hard time coming into the office every day and being forced to write paragraphs like this in today’s story about Afghanistan:

American and NATO officials in Kabul…said that [development] aid would continue, although the amounts given were likely to be reduced over time. And the Afghan government would have to live up to its commitments to battle corruption and run a more open government for the aid to keep flowing.

It’s not just that the New York Times itself uncovered the story of the CIA giving the Karzai government millions in bags of cash one week ago. It’s that the bags of cash article was written by the same reporter, Matthew Rosenberg.

Yet here he is today, faithfully passing along the news about how anonymous American officials sincerely want Karzai to be less corrupt. It’s like breaking the Eliot Spitzer prostitution story, and then quoting him a week later explaining how he’s going to continue paying Ashley Dupré as long as she lives up to his longstanding demand that she be less of a prostitute.

(I have much more sympathy for the payee in both situations. In Karzai’s case, he likely remembers that after the Soviets left, their last puppet was castrated, dragged through the streets of Kabul behind a jeep, and then publicly hanged. So you can understand if he wants to keep some cash on hand.) [read]

› U.S. Militarism and Perpetual War | Jeff Cohen

I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV – at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated. Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to exist.

Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem – a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).

That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.

In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – and said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Nowadays MSNBC hosts yell at Fox News hosts, and vice versa, about all sorts of issues – but when the Obama administration expanded the bloody war in Afghanistan, the shouting heads at both channels went almost silent. When Obama’s drone war expanded, there was little shouting. Not at MSNBC, not at Fox. Nor at CNN, CBS, ABC or so-called public broadcasting.

We can have raging debates in mainstream media about issues like gun control and gay marriage and minimum wage, but when the elites of both parties agree on military intervention – as they so often do – debate is nearly nonexistent. Anyone in the mainstream who goes out on a limb to loudly question this oversized creature in the middle of the room known as militarism or interventionism is likely to disappear faster than you can say ‘Phil Donahue.’ [++]

› The Day That TV News Died | Chris Hedges

… The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil. These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable. And when there is war these news personalities assume their “patriotic” roles as cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews—who makes an estimated $5 million a year—did, along with the other MSNBC and Fox hosts.

It does not matter that these celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or government officials, got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter that Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and globalization. What mattered then and what matters now is likability—known in television and advertising as the Q score—not honesty and truth. Television news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying.

› Death of a Bogeyman: The Corporate Media Bury Hugo Chavez | Dissident Voice

Following the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez on March 5, the BBC reported from the funeral:

More than 30 world leaders attended the ceremony, including Cuban President Raul Castro, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.

A message was read out from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

A rogues’ gallery of the West’s “bad guys”, in other words. To the side of the main article, the BBC quietly noted that, in fact, “Most Latin American and Caribbean Presidents” attended the funeral, not just the Bond villains.

Following the same theme, a BBC article appeared beneath a grim photo montage of Osama bin Laden, Chávez, Kim Jong-il, Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein. The report asked: “Is the era of the anti-American bogeymen at an end?”

Like many independent nationalists, Chávez was not “anti-American”, although he was anti-empire. US foreign policy, on the other hand, was certainly anti-Chávez, “variously portrayed as a six-times elected champion of the people or a constitution-fiddling demagogue”, the BBC piece noted.

Similar “balance” was offered by the Guardian’s Rory Carroll, lead author of the newspaper’s Venezuelan coverage between 2006-2012:

To the millions who revered him – a third of the country, according to some polls – a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral. To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.

Fair comment, one might think, until we try to imagine a UK journalist writing anything comparable to the second sentence in response to the death of a US president or UK prime minister.

And yet, unlike so many US and UK leaders of recent times, Chávez did not invade nations, overthrow governments, commit mass murder, mass torture, or mass starvation through sanctions. Indeed, in his years as president from 1999-2013 he was not credibly accused of a single political murder.

If it is to be considered fair, condemnation of Chávez should be proportionate to the extent of his alleged crimes and consistent with the level of condemnation directed at US-UK leaders’ far worse crimes. If Chávez gets much more for doing far less, we are in the realm of propaganda, not journalism. [continue]

› How to Cover Syria from Beirut, Lebanon | As'ad AbuKhalil

› MSNBC boldly moves to plug its one remaining hole | Glenn Greenwald

… [O]ne does not need to be a veteran cable news executive to see what MSNBC has been so sorely lacking: people who loyally defend President Obama. Thankfully, MSNBC is now boldly fixing that glaring problem; they began two weeks ago with this:

“Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has become a contributor for MSNBC. Rachel Maddow introduced Gibbs as a new member of her network’s stable in the final minutes before President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night… . Gibbs was White House press secretary from 2009 to early 2011, when he left to become a senior campaign adviser for Obama’s re-election.”

I wonder: does someone who goes from being an Obama White House spokesman and Obama campaign official to being an MSNBC contributor even notice that they changed jobs?

But MSNBC wasn’t content merely to hire Obama’s former Press Secretary; today they did this:

“David Axelrod, the former White House senior advisor and senior strategist for President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, has joined NBC News and MSNBC as a senior political analyst, the networks announced today… . Like Gibbs, Axelrod will appear across the networks’ programming.”

Impressively, David Axelrod left the White House and actually managed to find the only place on earth arguably more devoted to Barack Obama. Finally, American citizens will now be able to hear what journalism has for too long so vindictively denied them: a vibrant debate between Gibbs and Axelrod on how great Obama really is.

› The BBC Spins the Truth on Iran's New Centrifuges | Nima Shirazi

The BBC published an impressive piece of scaremongering disinformation on February 13. In an article entitled, “Iran upgrades uranium enrichment despite US warning,” the news outlet reports that new, upgraded uranium enrichment centrifuges are now being installed at Iran’s primary enrichment facility in Natanz.

The report states that Iran itself announced the upgrade to the IAEA back on January 23 and quotes the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, as saying, “We have produced the machines as planned and we are carrying out the installation gradually… to complete the tests relevant to the new generation.”

The BBC ominously notes, “Monitors say the new machines could significantly reduce the time needed to make a nuclear bomb” and reveals that this routine and much-needed technological advancement of an consistently monitored and safeguarded nuclear program has been referred to by the U.S. government as an “escalation.”

Yet this assessment is not only deceivingly broad, it deliberately omits readily available information that would undercut such unnecessary alarmism.

First, as Reuters reported on February 13 – but the BBC curiously didn’t – AEO chief Abbasi-Davani affirmed that the newly installed centrifuges “were specifically for lower-grade enrichment of uranium to below 5 percent purity.” In other words, these upgraded and more efficient machines cannot, by design and configuration, produce weapons-grade nuclear material. Rather, the level to which they will enrich uranium is well below the nearly 20% enrichment level used for cancer treatment and far from the over 90% required for a nuclear warhead.

Further, as the Christian Science Monitor explained last month after the upgrade to the Natanz facility was first announced, most of the enrichment technology currently used by Iran “is from the 1970s, and Iran has had difficulty in getting the centrifuges to run properly, perhaps in part due to the sabotaging effects of the Stuxnet computer worm thought to have been introduced into the plant by the US and Israel.”

Another factor left out of the BBC report is that Iran has also been actively converting quantities of its 20% enriched uranium into fuel rods for use in the Tehran Research Reactor – another IAEA safeguarded site – thereby reducing its amount of stockpiled material and precludes the possibility of potentially further enriching such material to higher, weapons-grade levels in the future.

By claiming only that the new centrifuges Iran is installing at Natanz “could significantly reduce the time needed to make a nuclear bomb,” the BBC is feeding unfounded fears while deliberately downplaying facts. That Iran’s nuclear program is anything but nefarious and clandestine still appears to be an unfathomable and inadmissible conclusion in the Western media.

› “State-run propaganda”: Why does the press protect drone secrecy? | David Sirota

In the last 24 hours, events in Congress have shown how leaders of both political parties have worked together to create a new extra-constitutional precedent — one allowing the occupant of the White House to execute American citizens without judicial oversight or even concrete incriminating evidence. Indeed, in a capital city where the most petty spats create the illusion of divided parties, we are now seeing a senior Republican U.S. senator proposing a formal resolution congratulating a Democratic president for claiming that imperial power.

This is exactly the kind of thing that rightly sows suspicion that for all the politicians yelling at each other, and for all the media handwringing about polarization, in many cases both parties collude to guarantee certain outcomes — especially on national security issues. Yet, as evidenced by an equally troubling revelation, that collusion is not limited to elected officials. It also extends to the media that is supposed to provide a check on those officials.

“Supposed to” is the key phrase — because, as the U.K. Guardian shows, that’s not what’s actually happening. Instead, the British paper reports that major U.S. newspapers “bowed to pressure from the Obama administration not to disclose the existence on a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia despite knowing about it for a year.”

Publicly, the newspapers are citing the age-old “national security” trope to justify their decision to suppress the story at the request of the White House. But that catch-all phrase is designed to obscure the real motivation — the one that one of the papers, The New York Times, let slip out.

In a stunning interview with the paper’s ombudsman, managing editor Dean Baquet admitted that the Times decided not to censor the story because it would pose any kind of imminent danger to Americans, but because it might result in the drone program being curtailed. Here’s the key excerpt of that interview (emphasis added):

The government’s rationale for asking that the location be withheld was this: Revealing it might jeopardize the existence of the base and harm counterterrorism efforts. “The Saudis might shut it down because the citizenry would be very upset,” he said.

Mr. Baquet added, “We have to balance that concern with reporting the news.”

It is not overstatement to call this a genuine watershed moment for American journalism.

Here you have one of the most powerful news organizations in the world publicly admitting that it refused to report a story not because it was concerned about the safety of Americans (aka “national security) but because it believed that doing so might result in people finding out about what’s going on and consequently forcing a change in government policy. Put another way, one of the world’s most powerful news organizations — an organization that is supposed to be a check on governmental power, mind you — literally refused to publish a story in order to keep Saudi citizens from finding out exactly how their dictators were working with the United States to intensify a global military action. [continue]