Richard Keeble

US intervention in Somalia: remembering the disastrous 1992 invasion

2008-11-27T13:20:00.001Z

In analysing current media coverage of the crisis in Somalia, it's
useful to compare it with press reporting of the disastrous US invasion
of 1992. The US intervention in Somalia, soon after the ending of the
1991 massacres in the Gulf, is best seen as an attempt to legitimise US
militarism and its moves to overturn the principles of the sovereign
equality of states and non-interference (the basis of international law
since the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, reaffirmed in the United Nations
Charter of 1945) under the guise of 'peacekeeping' and
'humanitarianism'.

During the Cold War, the authoritarian regime of Mohamed Siad Barre was
a close ally of the United States and the military facility at Berbera
became a significant base for America's Rapid Deployment Force. From the
late 1970s until early 1991, the US spent more than $509 million
annually supplying arms to Somalia in return for the use of its military
bases. In addition, the country became a dumping ground for excess food
produced by US farmers which ended up undermining the domestic economy,
encouraging political corruption and intensifying clan divisions. Once
the Barre dictatorship collapsed in January 1991, chaos and famine
inevitably followed, at least according to dominant voices in the
Western media. And in December 1992, with only weeks left in his term as
President, George Bush ordered 25,000 troops into Somalia as part of
Operation Restore Hope to ensure food aid reached the famine victims.

Yet Philip Hammond's detailed quantitative analysis of coverage by the
Guardian, Independent, Times and Mail (Framing post-Cold War conflicts:
The media and international intervention, Manchester University Press
2007) shows that the famine had peaked in August 1992 and was actually
waning when the marines were sent in November. Most articles lacked
historical background and context: relatively few addressed the history
of foreign involvement in the country despite its relevance to the
crisis. The most frequently cited sources were US officials and military
personnel, appearing in 42.7 per cent of coverage. 'While criticism was
quite extensive, it was limited in its substance. Few articles
criticised the conduct of the US military and any broader questioning of
the rationale for intervention was also limited. Instead, the need for
international action of some sort tended to be assumed.'

For instance, The Times, in its 1 December editorial headlined 'Shoot to
feed', acknowledged that the mission represented a 'radical departure in
international law' but continued: 'If only force will save Somali lives,
force should be used.' On the same day, the Independent's editorial,
titled 'A benign imperium', argued that the intervention would have to
be prolonged and 'on a scale grand enough to signal that a fundamental
change in international attitudes and law has occurred'. The Guardian,
in contrast, was more cautious describing it as a 'complex mission'
deserving 'a qualified welcome'.

The debate over the supposed power of the mainstream media to influence
the direction of foreign/military policy (which became known as the 'CNN
effect') revived during the Somali mission. It became particularly
prominent after 4 October 1993 when 18 US soldiers were killed in a
battle with the militia of a rebel warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, and
some were dragged through the streets of the capital, Mogadishu, under
the glare of the international media. Three days later President
Clinton announced that all US troops would leave Somalia by March 1994
while the hunt for Aidid was abandoned. According to Hammond, the images
of the dead US troops are best seen as 'speeding up the decision [to
quit Somalia] rather than causing it'. On 5 October 1993, the
Independent reported that President Clinton was 'already under intense
pressure to pull American troops out' while The Times, on October 4,
stressed that he had 'already begun to make clear that he intended to
withdraw'.

Thus the US intervention in Somalia (1992-4) is best seen as a defining
moment for the post-Cold War international order and the attempts to
redefine US militarism as an ethical project. Yet these aspects
significantly received virtually no critical discussion in the
mainstream press at the time.

Somalia: the great, hidden US policy failure since 9/11

2008-11-27T12:38:00.001Z

Somalia is one of the great unrecognised US policy failures since 9/11,
according to Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College
in North Carolina. He is quoted in an excellent piece on the 'hidden
Somali war' by Paul Salopek, in the Chicago Tribune.

It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of warlords to
hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and secretly imprison them
offshore aboard US warships, Salopek reports. 'It is a standoff war in
which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a
famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone
terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. (The raids'
success or failure is almost impossible to verify.)'

Buried in the copy is a reference to 'what is probably the worst
humanitarian crisis in the world'. But Salopek does place the current
crisis in the context of the disastrous Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in
December 2006 - backed by the US.

He reports: 'The homegrown Islamic radicals who controlled most of
central and southern Somalia in mid-2006 certainly were no angels. They
shuttered Mogadishu's cinemas, demanded that Somali men grow beards and,
according to the US State Department, provided refuge to some 30 local
and international jihadists associated with Al Qaeda.

'But the Islamic Courts Union's turbaned militiamen had actually
defeated Somalia's hated warlords. And their enforcement of Islamic
religious laws, while unpopular among many Somalis, made Mogadishu safe
to walk in for the first time in a generation.'

Four years ago, the CIA created a mercenary force called the Alliance
for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism in Somalia by
bringing together some of the world's most violent, wily and unreliable
clan militias - including gangs that had attacked US forces in the early
1990s - to confront the rising tide of Islamic militancy in Somalia's
capital, Mogadishu. And as the anarchy spread, the Somalis on the CIA
payroll engaged grim tit-for-tat exchanges of kidnappings and
assassinations with extremists.

Salopek reports on continuing US military intervention in Somalia. 'A US
missile strike in May killed the commander, Aden Hashi Ayro, enraging
Islamist militants who have since vowed to kidnap and kill any outsider
found in the country.'

All this makes it extremely difficult for Western journalists to operate
in Somalia. The bravery of those who remain must be acknowledged -
particularly as now the corporate media cover the inquest into the death
of BBC journalist Kate Peyton, fatally shot within hours of arriving in
Mogadishu in February 2005. It appears that Peyton feared that turning
down the assignment would jeopardise her career opportunities at the
BBC. While not criticising the BBC, the coroner is to recommend that
managers remind staff that refusing dangerous assignments will have no
adverse affect on their future at the corporation.

* See:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-shadow_war2nov24,0,47
20127.story

Silence over Somali humanitarian crisis persists

2008-11-25T19:30:00.001Z

On Saturday, 22 November, Catherine Phelp in The Times, concentrates on the pirates but reports that the Western-backed government headed by Abdullah Yusuf is also deeply involved in piracy. Phelp does mention, en passant, that the Ethiopian troops were backed by the US in 2006 – but this draws no critical comment. US military intervention in countries across the globe is unproblematic and not worthy of any outrage in The Times's worldview.

Then on Sunday, 23 November, in the Sunday Times, the narrow economic angle persists with the report concentrating on security firms spying 'new jobs on the high seas'.

No mention of the humanitarian crisis again in Colin Freeman's report, in the Daily Telegraph, of 22 November. Here the focus is on 'a lawless land where everyone wants to be a Somali pirate'. But this angle seems to be somewhat contradicted by a quote buried in the feature from a businessman: 'Most people here are disgusted by the piracy.'

James Blitz and Robert Wright, in the Financial Times of 21 November, make no mention of the humanitarian crisis and only a token, passing reference to the US support for Ethiopia's 2006 invasion. An editorial in the FT as early as 11 November had called for a UN Security Council to pass a resolution 'more explicit about the military action that can be taken by governments against the pirates' and for the international court at the Hague to bring the pirates to justice. No compassion for the millions facing starvation in Somalia.

The best coverage comes in Peter Beaumont's feature in the Observer of 23 November. He rightly comments: 'If what is happening is a disaster, it is a disaster hardly noticed by the world.' He continues: 'While the world has focused on the rampant piracy problem afflicting the Gulf of Aden, which saw yet another tanker held for ransom last week, the seizing of ships is only a symptom of a much more terrifying malaise. What it points to is the wholesale failure of a state and the international community's abandonment of the Somalia problem except where it affects its interests in terms of shipping trade and the "war on terror" for the West and on a more local scale for the regional interests of Ethiopia and Eritrea.'

There is also a reference to Somalia's appalling humanitarian crisis – though it comes buried in par 12: 'Forty-three per cent of the country is in dire need of humanitarian assistance, about 3.2 million people at the last count. There are 1.3 million internally displaced, 100,000 of them fleeing the fighting in Mogadishu alone since the beginning of September. Inflation is running at 1,600 per cent. One in six children in southern and central Somalia is acutely malnourished.'

But in a separate timeline on Somalia's recent history, the representation of America's imperial aggression in the country, is strangely softened. The US is said to have merely 'encouraged' Ethiopia's invasion of 2006. It did, in fact, do far more. For instance, the CIA had earlier backed with weapons and intelligence the grouping of warlords, known as the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism. This was determined to oust the Islamic Courts Union which, most commentators accept, had managed to bring some desperately needed stability to the country. And then during the actual invasion and for months afterwards, US jets and gunships pounded targets in support of the Ethiopian invaders. How many civilians died in these attacks we will never know.

Silence over Somali humanitarian crisis persists

2008-11-25T19:19:00.001Z

And still the silence over the Somali humanitarian crisis persists in the UK corporate media. Most of the focus remains on the pirates and their threats to global financial interests. Calls for military action to rid them from the seas around the Horn of Africa are growing while little attention is given to the political origins of Somalia's current crisis: the disastrous Ethiopian invasion in December 2006 – backed by the United States.

On Saturday, 22 November, Catherine Phelp in The Times, concentrates on the pirates but reports that the Western-backed government headed by Abdullah Yusuf is also deeply involved in piracy. Phelp does mention, en passant, that the Ethiopian troops were backed by the US in 2006 – but this draws no critical comment. US military intervention in countries across the globe is unproblematic and not worthy of any outrage in The Times's worldview.

Then on Sunday, 23 November, in the Sunday Times, the narrow economic angle persists with the report concentrating on security firms spying 'new jobs on the high seas'.

No mention of the humanitarian crisis again in Colin Freeman's report, in the Daily Telegraph, of 22 November. Here the focus is on 'a lawless land where everyone wants to be a Somali pirate'. But this angle seems to be somewhat contradicted by a quote buried in the feature from a businessman: 'Most people here are disgusted by the piracy.'

James Blitz and Robert Wright, in the Financial Times of 21 November, make no mention of the humanitarian crisis and only a token, passing reference to the US support for Ethiopia's 2006 invasion. An editorial in the FT as early as 11 November had called for a UN Security Council to pass a resolution 'more explicit about the military action that can be taken by governments against the pirates' and for the international court at the Hague to bring the pirates to justice. No compassion for the millions facing starvation in Somalia.

The best coverage comes in Peter Beaumont's feature in the Observer of 23 November. He rightly comments: '

There is also a reference to Somalia's appalling humanitarian crisis – though it comes buried in par 12: 'Forty-three per cent of the country is in dire need of humanitarian assistance, about 3.2 million people at the last count. There are 1.3 million internally displaced, 100,000 of them fleeing the fighting in Mogadishu alone since the beginning of September. Inflation is running at 1,600 per cent. One in six children in southern and central Somalia is acutely malnourished.'

But in a separate timeline on Somalia's recent history, the representation of America's imperial aggression in the country, is strangely softened. The US is said to have merely 'encouraged' Ethiopia's invasion of 2006. It did, in fact, do far more. For instance, the CIA had earlier backed with weapons and intelligence the grouping of warlords, known as the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism. This was determined to oust the Islamic Courts Union which, most commentators accept, had managed to bring some desperately needed stability to the country. And then during the actual invasion and for months afterwards, US jets and gunships pounded targets in support of the Ethiopian invaders. How many civilians died in these attacks we will never know.

If what is happening is a disaster, it is a disaster hardly noticed by the world.' He continues: 'While the world has focused on the rampant piracy problem afflicting the Gulf of Aden, which saw yet another tanker held for ransom last week, the seizing of ships is only a symptom of a much more terrifying malaise. What it points to is the wholesale failure of a state and the international community's abandonment of the Somalia problem except where it affects its interests in terms of shipping trade and the "war on terror" for the West and on a more local scale for the regional interests of Ethiopia and Eritrea.'

Silence over Somali humanitarian crisis persists

2008-11-25T13:23:00.001Z

Silence over Somali humanitarian crisis persists

And still the silence over the Somali humanitarian crisis persists in the UK corporate media. Most of the focus remains on the pirates and their threats to global financial interests. Calls for military action to rid them from the seas around the Horn of Africa are growing while little attention is given to the political origins of Somalia's current crisis: the disastrous Ethiopian invasion in December 2006 – backed by the United States.

On Saturday, 22 November, Catherine Phelp in The Times, concentrates on the pirates but reports that the Western-backed government headed by Abdullah Yusuf is also deeply involved in piracy. Phelp does mention, en passant, that the Ethiopian troops were backed by the US in 2006 – but this draws no critical comment. US military intervention in countries across the globe is unproblematic and not worthy of any outrage in The Times's worldview.

Then on Sunday, 23 November, in the Sunday Times, the narrow economic angle persists with the report concentrating on security firms spying 'new jobs on the high seas'.

No mention of the humanitarian crisis again in Colin Freeman's report, in the Daily Telegraph, of 22 November. Here the focus is on 'a lawless land where everyone wants to be a Somali pirate'. But this angle seems to be somewhat contradicted by a quote buried in the feature from a businessman: 'Most people here are disgusted by the piracy.'

James Blitz and Robert Wright, in the Financial Times of 21 November, make no mention of the humanitarian crisis and only a token, passing reference to the US support for Ethiopia's 2006 invasion. An editorial in the FT as early as 11 November had called for a UN Security Council to pass a resolution 'more explicit about the military action that can be taken by governments against the pirates' and for the international court at the Hague to bring the pirates to justice. No compassion for the millions facing starvation in Somalia.

The best coverage comes in Peter Beaumont's feature in the Observer of 23 November. He rightly comments: '

There is also a reference to Somalia's appalling humanitarian crisis – though it comes buried in par 12: 'Forty-three per cent of the country is in dire need of humanitarian assistance, about 3.2 million people at the last count. There are 1.3 million internally displaced, 100,000 of them fleeing the fighting in Mogadishu alone since the beginning of September. Inflation is running at 1,600 per cent. One in six children in southern and central Somalia is acutely malnourished.'

But in a separate timeline on Somalia's recent history, the representation of America's imperial aggression in the country, is strangely softened. The US is said to have merely 'encouraged' Ethiopia's invasion of 2006. It did, in fact, do far more. For instance, the CIA had earlier backed with weapons and intelligence the grouping of warlords, known as the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism. This was determined to oust the Islamic Courts Union which, most commentators accept, had managed to bring some desperately needed stability to the country. And then during the actual invasion and for months afterwards, US jets and gunships pounded targets in support of the Ethiopian invaders. How many civilians died in these attacks we will never know.

If what is happening is a disaster, it is a disaster hardly noticed by the world.' He continues: 'While the world has focused on the rampant piracy problem afflicting the Gulf of Aden, which saw yet another tanker held for ransom last week, the seizing of ships is only a symptom of a much more terrifying malaise. What it points to is the wholesale failure of a state and the international community's abandonment of the Somalia problem except where it affects its interests in terms of shipping trade and the "war on terror" for the West and on a more local scale for the regional interests of Ethiopia and Eritrea.'

How the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis goes uncovered

2008-11-19T22:22:00.000Z

The world’s biggest humanitarian disaster today is in Somalia. In an unprecedented move recently, 52 international NGOs (including Oxfam and the Danish Refugee Council) called for immediate action to avert a colossal disaster. They reported that almost half of Somalia’s population, or 3.25 million people, were in need of emergency aid. This was a 77 per cent increase since the beginning of the year, having increased dramatically over the past year due to the destructive combination of extreme insecurity, drought and record-high food prices. Fighting in Mogadishu had displaced approximately 37,000 civilians from their homes. Over the previous nine months, 870,000 had fled for their lives while a total of 1.1 million people were currently displaced in Somalia.

One in six children under five (approximately 180, 000) were thought to be acutely malnourished in Southern and Central Somalia; 26,000 were severely malnourished needing immediate treatment. Over the past 18 months, hyperinflation had led to price increases for food and basic non-food items by up to 1,000 per cent. Among the coping mechanism identified in reports to UNHCR in August was forced prostitution. Thousands are desperately fleeing the country on small boats across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. Countless numbers never make it.

Yet all this is hardly covered in the corporate media. In recent days Somalia has been big in the news: but the focus has been on the threat to big international oil companies’ tankers from Somali-based pirates. The Times of 18 November is typical: a double-page spread is devoted to the seizure of a ‘supertanker’ carrying $100m of Saudi oil by Somali pirates. A large, detailed graphic of the Sirius Star highlights its specifications: tonnage 318 dead weight tones; length 330m; crew size 25 and so on. None of the five stories in the feature package mention the famine.

Similarly, in the Guardian of the same day, a big double page spread manages to cover the ‘tanker seizure’ story without mentioning the imminent humanitarian disaster. The Daily Telegraph covers the event and describes Somalia as a war-torn country ‘which Western intelligence services have long seen as a safe have for Islamist terrorist groups’: so no mention of the famine. The Sun highlights the capture of ‘two Brits’ by the pirates: again no mention of the humanitarian disaster.

To his credit, Simon Tisdall, in his column in the Guardian, on 18 November, highlighted the concern of leading nations about safeguarding sea lanes rather than the lives of 3.25 million Somalis. For media and politicians, he concluded, ‘chasing cut-throat pirates is sexier than helping starving Somalis’. Indeed.

And Martin Fletcher, in an interesting piece in The Times, examines the disastrous results of America’s backing for Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in December 2006 and the removal of the Islamic Courts’ government – which had brought some stability to the country. Fletcher does mention the current humanitarian crisis – but it’s buried in paragraph 12 towards the end of the feature.

How the Guardian helped Carter 'maintain his purity'

2008-06-13T19:30:00.000Z

In one of my previous blogs I highlighted the way in which Fleet Street's profiling of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore, had tended to glorify him and ignore 'the blood on his CV'. For instance, he had backed the terrorist Contras against the Sandinistas in the 1980s, backed the neutron bomb, the Gulf massacres of 1991 - and so on.

The Guardian Weekend colour supplement fell into a similar routine in their adulatory profile on former US president Jimmy Carter, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, on June 7. Carter's own assessment of his record in office went like this: 'We established human rights as the basis of our foreign policy, whereas in the past our government had been in bed with every dictator on earth if they supported our economic framework. We normalised diplomatic relations with China. We brought peace to the Middle East, between Israel and Egypt. We kept the peace with the Soviet Union. We told the truth. We kept our country at peace, we never dropped a bomb, we never launched a missile.' And this assessment went unchallenged.

The 'truth' (Carter's word) was very different. He certainly gave the Indonesian dictatorship his full backing after their illegal invasion of East Timor in 1975. According to Noam Chomsky (see him quoted in Understanding Power: edited by Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel: page 295), the worst phase of the slaughtering of the East Timorese was during the Carter administration. 'At that time, the casualties were about the scale of the Pol Pot massacres in Cambodia. Relative to the population they were much greater.' Moreover, Carter sent new supplies of armaments to Indonesia because their army was running out of weapons in the course of the slaughter. On all of this, the mainstream media in the US and UK remained largely silent.

In addition, Carter sent millions in aid to the military dictatorships in El Salvador and Guatemala, ordered the CIA to train the Contra terrorists in Honduras to fight against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and backed the Shah in Iran. He also authorised the covert CIA operation in Afghanistan in June 1979 which ultimately led to the formation of the mojahedin under the leadership of Osama bin Laden: the rest is history.

Another dictator Carter ('the first born-again Christian to serve as president', according to the Guardian profile) supported was Pakistan's Zia ul Haq along with his military and intelligence services. Much of the aid to Pakistan was funded by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International whose head, the Pakistani tycoon Agha Hassan Abedi, enjoyed close ties to Carter. The bank was forced to close down in 1986 following a massive sleaze and corruption scandal involving fraud and bribes.

Carter also helped secretly re-arm Pol Pot and his genocidal Khmer Rouge forces in Thailand after they were destroyed by the Vietnamese army in 1979. John Pilger, writing in Covert Action Quarterly in the fall of 1997 (see http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/UncleSam_PolPot.html <http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/UncleSam_PolPot.html> ), also highlighted Carter's backing for the Khmer Rouge to occupy the Cambodia seat at the United Nations.

Moreover Carter led a campaign for the release of Lt William Calley, head of Charlie Company, after he had been found guilty of the mass murder at My Lai in South Vietnam of more than 200 villagers, old men, women and children on March 18, 1968.

Carter certainly could claim to have brought amity between Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin through the Camp David agreement of 1978. Egypt recognised Israel's existence and Israel gradually withdrew from the Sinai. But as Tariq Ali stresses: 'There was nothing in the accords about the Israeli settlements and while Carter had Begin's word that there would be a freeze, he immediately went against this agreement. The accords actually weakened the Palestinian position since they removed Egypt, its strongest ally, from the equation.'

Carter's claim to have 'kept the peace' also seems to be at odds with his decision to send off Delta Force troops in April 1980 in a bid to rescue the 52 US diplomats held hostage in Ayatollah Khomeini's Tehran. The mission ended in a humiliating fiasco in the desert. The Guardian profile actually raises this issue - but then allows Carter to defend himself by once again playing around with the semantics: '..he branded the Iran hostage rescue effort a humanitarian, rather than a military, mission so as to maintain the purity of his record'. So that's all right.

The newspaper in western art

2007-12-20T11:54:00.001Z

As a Xmas diversion, it's interesting to spend a few moments noting how the representations of newspaper reading in western art significantly reflect the dominant (and competing) ideologies relating to the consumption of media. And given the importance of newspapers in the political culture over the last couple of centuries in the west, it's intriguing to see how their presence in art has been ignored by critics.

Let's focus on just three contrasting images. In 1872 the French Impressionist Pierre-August Renoir painted a portrait of Claude Monet relaxing - reading alone, his face close up to the text. This is the image of the solitary bourgeois male consuming the new professionalized newspaper in isolation but clearly with pleasure. Aesthetic concerns predominate.

Then there's Lyonel Feininger's Newspaper Readers of 1916 which fetched a mere £3.5m at Christie's a few years back. Its vibrant colours and flowing shapes convey brilliantly a real excitement and pleasure in newspaper consumption. But the figures are like you and me - racing about, their heads down, intently reading, far too busy consuming the newspapers (significantly blank) far too superficially. And the readers are separate from each other. Significantly, too, they are all travelling in the same direction (to their right, our left!). Amongst all the bustle and individuality of the consuming public there is still an amazing conformism.

Interestingly, Feininger, an American who became a newspaper cartoonist and illustrator in Germany before concentrating on painting, moved through despair and loneliness to joy and delight during the painting of the piece in 1916. Indeed, beneath the surface jollity (those swirling shapes echoing cubism and futurism) there is a melancholy about the media, of the kind Walter Benjamin evokes in his essay, "The Storyteller", in Illuminations (1970), where he bemoans the decline of storytelling in the face of the media of information.

Finally there's Tina Modotti's 1929 photograph entitled "Campesinos Reading El Machete" which radically confronts the feelings of alienation at the heart of our first two paintings. It shows Mexican peasants with their wonderfully large sombreros, huddled around a copy of the revolutionary newspaper. In an interesting commentary on this work, Jonathan Jones (2003) in the Guardian, focused critically on what he saw as the representation of subservience of the individual to the cause of the working class. "We do not need to see their faces. They are not individuals; they are the proletariat. The future does not belong to the bourgeois self." But what Jones missed was the way in which the newspaper's central position within the composition is so symbolically powerful.

Here is the newspaper shown clearly as the weapon of revolution, educating workers and peasants and inspiring them to revolutionary deeds. And symbolically, too, the reading of the newspaper is a group activity. Politics merges with aesthetics with the photograph, so typical of Modotti's work in general, so beautifully composed: the newspaper, angular and centrally positioned; the hats in the corners contrasting with their beautiful round elegance. And on all of it the sun, hope, shines.

The photograph celebrates the tradition of radical journalism committed to progressive social change which has been marginalised in this country.

If any of this interests you why not dip into the books and article listed at the end? Have a good Xmas and a progressive 2008.

Adorno, T. (1986/1964) The Jargon of Authenticity, translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Adorno, T. (1991) The culture industry, London: Routledge
Albers, P (2000) Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance, Paris: Jean-Michel Place editions
Benjamin, W (1970) Illuminations, London: Jonathan Cape
Jones, J. (2003) Portrait of the week: Tina Modotti's Men reading El Machete, the Guardian, 15 February

The massacre of Musa Qala

2007-12-11T14:22:00.000Z

Take a look at Nick Cornish’s series of photographs in The Times Online of some of the 6,000 UK/American/Afghan forces engaged in the recent assault on the town of Musa Qala, in Helmand province. They show their massive firepower: lines of armoured vehicles; men in full military gear dragging away bare-footed Taliban captives in ragged civilian clothes. An unnamed Taliban is lying sprawled out dead in a field.

Photographs in the press before the attacks on the “strategically significant town” showed rag-tag Taliban forces crammed in battered old trucks desperately clutching their small firearms. Against them, poised to attack, stood the full might of the most powerful nation on the globe: armoured vehicles, infantry, artillery and logistics backed up by “dozens of attack helicopters and ground attack aircraft”, as the Daily Telegraph reported.

How many Taliban “forces” were there defending the town? We will never know. According to the British military spokesman, Lt Col. Richard Eaton, just 200. other reports suggested 2,000. Whatever the figure, this was no “battle”. According to the headline in the Observer of 9 December 2007, “Fierce battles rages for Taliban stronghold”. Yet when the firepower of one side so overwhelms that of the other (missing the crucial cover from the air bombardment) is this not better described as a massacre, a form of hi-tech barbarism?

How many casualties did the Taliban suffer? Again, we will never know. Significantly Nick Meo reported in The Times of 11 December, after the Taliban had allegedly fled the town on motorcycles: “Fears were growing that there had been heavy civilian casualties.” Certainly, buried in all the reports was the news that 2007 had proved “the deadliest” in Afghanistan since the US invasion in 2001 with more than 6,200 people estimated to have been killed. All we know, then, is that the many many dead Afghans will remain uncounted, unnamed.

So amidst the din of warfare coverage, the silences and omissions for me are always the most significant, the most troubling.

Horror is mentioned in the coverage but the focus is on the Taliban. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, alleged that an unnamed 15-year-old boy had been burned to death on a stove and the town had to be seized from the Taliban to halt such atrocities. “Taliban horror had to end” is the headline in the Mirror of 11 December 2007. There is no such outrage over “our” atrocities.

In contrast to the silence surrounding the dead Afghans, British casualties are named and celebrated. Sergeant Lee Johnson, of the 2nd Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment, died on 7 December. His commanding officer describes him as “a huge personality and supreme soldier”.

And in the face of the unspeakable horrors, the military mumble the absurdities of massacrespeak. According to Lt Col Eaton, quoted in the Guardian of 10 December 2007: “It is like a game of chess and we are moving the right pieces into the right places so they are where we want them to be when we need them.”

In this way the hi-tech barbarism of the assault on Musa Qala is domesticated and trivialised, reduced to the level of a game of chess in a strange jangle of words.

‘Worst humanitarian crisis in the world’ largely missing from the UK media

2007-12-10T22:12:00.000Z

The British mainstream media’s coverage of Africa has recently been focusing on the humanitarian crisis in Darfur and the controversial decision by PM Gordon Brown not to attend the European Union-Africa summit in Lisbon in protest at the presence there of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. Yet the continent’s biggest humanitarian disaster has gone largely ignored.

In Somalia, according to the United Nations, more than one million people have been displaced from their homes and put on the edge of starvation by the fighting between the occupying Ethiopian troops and the local, largely Islamic resistance movement. The UN describes Somalia as its “worst humanitarian crisis in 16 years”.

The Indian journal, Frontline, in its current issue, quotes the head of UN operations in Somalia, Eric Laroche, as saying that if such a crisis engulfed Darfur “there would be a big fuss”. Somalia, he said, had been a “forgotten emergency for years”. To add to the country’s woes, over the last year it has faced drought, floods and a locust infestation.

Last week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the leaders of the EU and Africa at the Lisbon summit to act to end the atrocities in Somalia where Ethiopian troops were engaged in the indiscriminate and deliberate bombardment of civilian neighbourhoods.

Appalling war crimes
HRW said both sides were responsible for appalling war crimes. But it stressed the Somali government had repeatedly harassed humanitarian organisations trying to help the displaced population. Former warlord Mohamed Dheere, the mayor of Modagishu, detained the head of the UN’s World Food Programme for five days in October causing food distribution to 75,000 people to be temporarily suspended.

Somalia’s most recent tragedy began on 25 December 2006 when Ethiopian troops, with the support of the US air force and navy, entered the capital, Mogadishu, and installed a puppet Transitional Federal Government. An Islamist militia calling themselves the Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC) had seized power in June 2006, ousting the warlords and bringing a much welcomed period of relative peace to the country.

According to Ahmadou Ould-Abdallah, the UN’s top official in Somalia, (quoted in the Frontline report) the short period in which the Islamists were in control in Somalia was the country’s “golden era”. But the US, claiming the SICC were harbouring radical Islamists, resolved to remove them from power. Satellite pictures of the Islamic fighters provided by the US proved vital to the Ethiopian troops in the December 2006 battles.

The country is particularly dangerous for journalists. Eight have already been killed this year. Human Rights Watch reports that the Transitional Government has closed down newspapers and three independent radio stations.
The conflict has also spread to eastern Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State, known as the Ogaden, where a rebel movement, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, has been stepping up its attacks on Ethiopian troops. Both sides are blamed for indiscriminate attacks on civilians.

Chad human rights abuses missed by the media
While calling for EU-AU action on Somalia, HRW also focused on another African crisis which has been ignored by the UK media. Following one of the most remarkable human rights campaigns in recent years, Chad’s former dictator, Hissène Habré, now faces charges of crimes against humanity.

Installed as head of state in Chad following a CIA-backed coup in 1982, Habré was responsible for appalling human rights abuses before being ousted in another coup in 1990. In a rare instance of coverage, on May 21st 1992 the Guardian carried four short paragraphs reporting how 40,000 people were estimated to have died in detention or been executed during the tyranny of Habré. A justice ministry report concluded that he had committed genocide against the Chadian people.

Habré’s victims first looked to Belgium where its historic “universal human rights” 1993 law allowed victims to file complaints in the country for atrocities committed abroad. Following threats from the United States in June 2003 that Belgium risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters, the law was repealed. Yet a new law, adopted in August 2003, allowed for the continuation of the case against Habré – much to the delight of human rights campaigners.

Now Senegal, where Habré lives in exile, has finally responded to an appeal by the African Union (AU) to try the former Chadian dictator. The AU has mandated Senegal to prosecute Habré “on behalf of Africa” while President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal has asked the EU and AU for technical and financial support to carry out the trial. The EU has, in principle, agreed to this request and the AU has named an envoy to the case.
Last week, HRW said Habré’s case provided a unique opportunity for AU-EU co-operation. But HRW’s important plea over Chad was largely ignored by the UK media.

How peaceful is Nobel winner Gore?

2007-11-29T20:26:00.000Z

It’s always interesting to compare profiles in mainstream and non-corporate media outlets to detect political bias. Take, for instance, the media’s recent response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, former US vice-president and current environmental campaigner.

On the website of the Guardian, the UK’s most “liberal” national daily, Jessica Aldred’s timeline celebrates his long career as an environmental activist. It begins, apparently, in 1969 when after our hero graduates from Harvard he “becomes interested in the topic of global warming”. In 1976 he wins a Congress seat and holds his “first congressional hearings on climate change, and co-sponsors hearings on toxic waste and global warming”.

In 1988, while spending time with his son who is recovering from a near-fatal car accident, “Gore begins to write a book on environmental conservation”. In 1997, he helps broker the Kyoto protocol “and pushes for the passage of the treaty which calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions”. In 2002, Aldred reports, Gore “criticises Bush for the war in Iraq”. In 2006, his film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, in which he discusses the politics and economics of global warming, breaks box office records in the United States for a documentary. In January 2007, it receives standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah; in the following month it wins the Oscar for best documentary.

In July 2007, Gore organises Live Earth, a seven-continent, 24-hour sequence of concerts in London, Sydney, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hamburg and New York to raise awareness about climate change.

Finally, after he is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2007, “An Inconvenient Truth” is criticised by a High Court judge for containing “nine scientific errors” (and this is picked up by Ross Clark in an assessment of Gore in The Times). Apart from the judge’s comments, not much criticism in Aldred’s PR-ish piece.

Similarly in the Sun, undiluted praise is heaped on our hero. Gordon Brown is quoted: “Al Gore is inspirational.” In the Independent, columnist Johann Hari defends Gore against the “smears” directed him by global warming denialists of the far right New Party. An editorial in the same paper describes Gore as a “green giant”. In the Daily Telegraph, columnist Damian Thompson questions why a “sanctimonious” global warming campaigner should win a peace prize at all.

Contrast all this with the critical assessment of Gore by Alexander Cockburn in a recent edition of the US-based leftist journal, The Nation (highly recommended to all medialens readers: see http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20071105&s=cockburn). According to Cockburn: “For a man of peace, Gore has plenty of blood on his CV.”

For instance, he backed the contras in their terrorist campaign against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the 1980s, supported the US bombing of Libya in 1986 (primarily aimed at assassinating the country’s president, Col. Muammar Gaddafi); and voted for the neutron bomb, the B2 bomber, the Trident II missiles, the MX missile and the Midgetman. He was a fanatical supporter of the 1991 attacks on Iraq (which, according to Colin Powell’s official record of the conflict, led to the deaths of 250,000 Iraqi troops).

During the 1990s he called for a coup to remove the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, and as the co-ordinator of Iraq policy in the Clinton administration “presided over the sanctions that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them children”. He fully backed Nato’s bombing of Serbia in 1999; during his 2000 presidential campaign he called for the downfall of Saddam Hussein and pledged his support for Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (a leading source for the lies about Iraqi possession of WMD).

He even criticised President Bush’s recent call for cuts in the US nuclear arsenal. “Nuclear unilateralism will hinder, rather than help, arms control…Reductions alone don’t guarantee stability.”

Strange how none of this material appeared elsewhere on Fleet Street. Or did I miss it?

How the deaths of 80 desperate Haiti migrants at sea can go unreported

2007-09-23T09:53:00.000Z

And still on the McCann coverage: while Madeleine disappeared on the night of 3 May 2007, early on 4 May at least 80 people perished when a boat sank in the Caribbean. Some of the victims may have been eaten by sharks; many were women and children. Yet the British media, while giving the McCann story wall-to-wall coverage, have been largely silent over these ‘disappearances’.

Take a look at Peter Hallward’s brilliant exposé of the Haiti disaster and his alternative perspective on the McCann coverage at www.Haitianalysis.com. According to the site’s home page: ‘Haitianalysis aims to provide young Haitian journalists a direct route to English speaking audiences, bypassing the need for corporate intermediaries. To accomplish this we plan to provide monetary, technological, and human/translation resources to young, inspired Haitian journalists from poor backgrounds. We also aim to provide a positive perspective on grassroots civil society and look at the under-reported news and events in Haiti and that affect Haiti.’
As Hallward reports, around 75 per cent of Haiti’s population ‘lives on less than $2 per day, and 56 per cent live on less than $1 per day’. Punitive international trading arrangements mean that Haiti’s poor remain poor. ‘Every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) “from absolute misery to dignified poverty” has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and its allies in the international community. As a result, in a normal year, an average of around a thousand of Haiti’s most desperate or most reckless citizens try to escape this misery by sea.’

Thus, early on Tuesday 1 May, around 160 desperate people crammed into a 30-foot sloop at the northern Haitian city of Cap-Haitien and headed for the neighbouring Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI). What happened early in the morning of 4 May when the sloop was intercepted by a TCI police boat is unclear. Some survivors claim the TCI boat rammed the boat and then tried to tow it further out to sea. The police, however, say the boat sank as they tried to tow it out of ‘heavy seas’.

A report on the tragedy by the UK’s Marine Accident Investigation (MAIB) branch in August concluded there was no evidence to suggest the TCI police launch deliberately rammed the sloop. But it does criticise the police for failing to identify procedures for the safe interception of Haitian migrants. Hallward continues: ‘The MAIB investigators further demonstrate that a whole series of failings in seamanship, communications, logistics and planning severely hampered the subsequent search and rescue operation.’

Yet this disaster has been largely ignored by the British media. Type ‘Caicos’, ‘Haiti’ or ‘Haitian’ into an online search facility of a national newspaper and you are most likely to find some useful tips about Caribbean holidays. As Hallward concludes: ‘This is business as usual. It isn’t very hard to see why most foreign observers of Haiti seem to find fantasy more palatable than fact.’

See http://www.haitianalysis.com/2007/9/4/if-stones-could-float-the-british-press-and-the-turks-and-caicos-boat-disaster

Beyond the distorted news values of the Madeleine drama

2007-09-13T14:30:00.000Z

The massive coverage of the Madeleine McCann drama (with countless column inches and broadcast hours being devoted to the twists and turns of the tragedy) reflects a distorted system of news values which promotes “human interest” and sensation above more significant political, cultural, economic and psychological issues. Even commenting critically on these news values is in danger of further feeding the media frenzy.

So why not let’s shift the focus? Driving to work on Tuesday (September 11, 2007) I listened to “The Choice” on BBC Radio 4. I was transfixed. This was broadcast journalism at its very best. Michael Buerk interviewed a convicted paedophile and his wife who had stuck by him, encouraging him to seek treatment.

Is there any more controversial issue? How quickly the tabloids damn paedophiles as “monsters”, “perverts” “evil”. Yet here was a journalist handling with sensitivity the extraordinarily delicate issues involved. And in response, “Clare” and “Ian” (who had sexually abused his daughter) spoke with remarkable honesty and courage about what they described as their “family disaster”. With the media circus following the story and the eventual imprisonment of “Ian”, we learned how mother and daughter were mocked and ostracised by their local community – and forced to relocate.

But behind every such tragedy lie human frailty, guilt, hopelessness, confusion. And in this case there emerged, as Buerk kept on probing gently (whilst never denying the seriousness of the abuse), the profoundly moving desire of “Clare” and “Ian” to survive and re-affirm family life.
The interview, then, showed how journalism can move beyond the sensational and throw light on to the dark side of the human psyche: it did not condemn but acknowledged the essential humanity of a man widely demonised as a “monster” – and the wife who stuck by him.

Beware anonymous sources behind latest ‘cyberwarfare’ scares

2007-09-13T09:45:00.000Z

So the big news now is that the West is facing a major new threat – cyberwarfare from China. I’m concerned. The newspapers are carrying prominent, lengthy articles about Chinese hackers (“cyberwarriors”), some from the People’s Liberation Army, attacking computer networks of British and German government departments. These latest disclosures come after reports that the Chinese military had hacked into the Pentagon military computer network in June.

Predictably the Chinese authorities have been quick to deny all the allegations. Equally predictably, these denials are swiftly dismissed in the news reports. Coverage by Clifford Coonan, in a double page spread in the Independent of 6 September 2007, is typical. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman’s comments (“China and the US are now devoted to constructive relations and co-operation…”) are buried in paragraph 25. Immediately afterwards, undaunted, Coonan returns to his main theme of China’s growing cyberwarfare threat. “In 2003, a cyber espionage ring code-named Titan Rain by US investigators was tracked to Guangdong province after a network break-in at Lockheed Martin.”

Equally worrying is the way in which so many of these features are dominated by anonymous sources. We know, for instance, how anonymous “intelligence”, “Whitehall”, “defence ministry” sources were used to promote the lies about those imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction in the lead-up to the criminal US/UK assault on Iraq in 2003 and so have become highly suspicious whenever they reappear. But take a look at Coonan’s double-page spread. In 32 paragraphs, there is not one named Western source. Instead, we have authoritative statements from sources such as “one security expert who did not wish to be named”, an “analyst”, “computer security experts”, “a security analyst” and speculating “webheads”.

Michael Evans, Defence Editor, in The Times of 6 September, under the headline “China ‘tops list’ of cyber-hackers seeking UK government secrets”, quotes simply “Whitehall” sources. And he reports: “MI5 has told the Government that at least 20 foreign intelligence services were operating some degree against British interests and that China and Russia were of greatest concern.”

The previous day, Bernhard Warner, former Reuters’ internet correspondent, built a 10-paragraph feature in The Times on “the ongoing digital struggle between China and the West” around quotes from a single source, Roberto Preatoni. But take a look at Wikipedia on Mr Preatoni. In a brief entry, he is described, strangely, as “class 1967” and co-author “with a mysterious person going by the handle of Evil Angelica (named after the infamous web-defacer) of the hacker comics Hero-Z”. Certainly Wikipedia needs to be always handled critically – but surely there are more authoritative sources available on such a serious issue?

A Guardian feature on China’s “informationised army” by Ed Pilkington and Bobbie Johnson, on 5 September, relies in its opening paragraphs on reports in the Financial Times, Der Spiegel and on un-named “internet security experts”. Quotes towards the end come from Sami Saydjari, “who worked as a Pentagon cyber expert for 13 years and now runs a private company, Cyber Defence Agency” and Jody Westby, of “CyLab based at Carnegie Mellon University”. But these sources don’t supply any new information drawn from any original research; they merely rhetorically support the underlying theme of the feature.

A report in the Daily Mail of 5 September similarly relies almost entirely on anonymous sources. Just one named source, Alex Neill, “an expert on the Chinese military and head of the Asia Security Programme at the Royal United Services Institute” is quoted as saying cyberattacks had been emanating from China for four years. The same source is quoted in Richard Norton-Taylor’s front page splash on “Titan Rain” in the same day’s Guardian.
So, folks, if these “cyberterrorist” scare stories proliferate, let’s see if anonymous (and hence rather dodgy) quotes continue to dominate the coverage. Are the sources transmitting information – or disinformation?

Richard Keeble has just co-edited, with Sarah Maltby, Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military (Arima), a collection of essays on the media’s handling of war and terrorism. And with Sharon Wheeler he has also just co-edited The Journalistic Imagination: Literary Journalists from Defoe to Capote and Carter (Routledge).

Human rights abuses ignored as Blair flits across Africa on his ‘glory’ tour

2007-06-01T17:16:00.000Z

May 31, 2007

Interesting to see how Fleet Street’s coverage of dictators always shifts when they move from being Britain’s ‘enemies’ to ‘friends’ (or vice versa). Remember how Saddam Hussein, former President of Iraq, was fêted during the 1980s in Fleet Street – just as the West backed his country in its war with Iran – but then was suddenly transformed into a global monster in 1990, particularly following the invasion of Kuwait in August of that year.

Now as out-going PM Tony Blair travels Africa shaking the fists of the assembled big-wigs in Libya and Sierra Leone, the appalling human rights abuses (both past and present) in these countries are suddenly marginalised in Fleet Street.

Let’s take as an example President Mu’ammar al-Gaddafi, of Libya. He was demonised as ‘mad dog’ by President Reagan for daring to challenge the United States in the 1970s and ‘80s. Gaddafi’s expansionist ambitions in Chad, lying to the south of Libya and with substantial oil reserves, were of particular concern to Washington, Paris and London. Thus the eleven-and-a-half minute attack by US jets on 14 April 1986 on Tripoli and Benghazi represented a deliberate attempt to assassinate the head of a foreign state. The first bomb to drop fell on Gaddafi’s home. Hana, his adopted daughter aged 15 months, was killed; his eight other children and wife Safiya were all hospitalised, some with serious injuries. The president escaped.

Reports of US military action against Libya disappeared from the media after the 1986 assault. But away from the glare of publicity, the CIA launched its most extensive effort yet to spark an anti-Gaddafi coup. A secret army was recruited from among the many Libyans captured in border battles with Chad during the 1980s. And as concerns grew in M16 that Gaddafi was aiming to develop chemical weapons, Britain funded various opposition groups in Libya. In 1996, as former intelligence official David Shayler revealed, an MI6 plot was hatched to assassinate Gaddafi in a car bomb attack. It failed. Significantly, at his trial in November 2003 for leaking ‘official secrets’, Shayler was denied the right (under the European Convention of Human Rights) to speak out about the 1996 anti-Gaddafi plot. Since it is obvious there are a lot of shady secrets from the years of the dirty, anti-Gaddafi war to conceal, such a decision by the court must have come as a relief to the government.

Recently, relations between the US, UK and Libya have thawed, with Gaddafi pledging support for the “war against terrorism” and agreeing to pay compensation to the victims of the 1988 Flight 103 Lockerbie bombing, for which a Libyan intelligence agent was jailed. And thus, as Blair travels Africa meeting his new-found friends, no mention of the appalling attempts at “regime change” in Libya in 1986 and 1996 appears in Fleet Street’s coverage.

Also missing from the coverage are reports of the appalling human rights abuses in Libya. Remember Robin Cook’s much heralded “ethical foreign policy” in which concerns for human rights were supposedly prioritised? The policy is clearly dead and buried. According to Amnesty International, while acknowledging a few recent human rights improvements in Libya, the overall situation remains bleak. AI’s newly published annual report comments: “Law enforcement officials resorted to excessive use of force, killing at least 12 demonstrators while breaking up a protest and one detainee during a prison disturbance.” It continues: “Freedom of expression and association remained severely restricted. Several Libyans suspected of political activism abroad were arrested or otherwise intimidated when they returned to the country. Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death by firing squad for a second time. There were continuing concerns about the treatment of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. No progress was made towards establishing the fate or whereabouts of victims of enforced disappearances in previous years.”

Similarly Human Rights Watch comments on Libya: “The government still restricts freedom of expression and bans political parties and independent organisations. It continues to imprison individuals for criticising Libya’s political system, the government, or its leader. Due process violations and torture remain concerns as do disappearances unresolved from past years.”

Little mention of this in Fleet Street. Reporters were more concerned to hail BP’s return to Libya – with the company granted the right to explore for gas in a deal worth $900 (£450) – and Gaddafi’s decision to buy British missiles and air defence systems in a new military co-operation agreement.

Then in Sierra Leone, Blair was pictured smiling again as he was ‘made an honorary chief by a grateful African nation’, as the Guardian reported. Britain’s military intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 is universally applauded on Fleet Street as helping to bring peace to a war-ravaged country. The Guardian continued: “The British intervention is seen as both a decisive moment in the restoration of democracy in Sierra Leone and the high water mark of Tony Blair’s interventionist foreign policy.” Likewise, the Independent reported on May 31:

“For Britain, the Sierra Leone intervention was a demonstration of that now long-forgotten concept, the ethical foreign policy. It was also the fulfilment of a Blairite African fantasy, born out of his father Leo's memories of visiting Fourah Bay College several times in 1960 to lecture in law and mark papers. On a previous visit to Lungi on 10 February 2002, he recalled: ‘My father always told me what friendly people the Sierra Leoneans are.’ Yesterday, he again recalled his father, but also elevated Britain's role in Sierra Leone to the rank of an example for others to follow.”

Mark Curtis, in his book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses (Vintage, 2004) seriously challenges the official story on Sierra Leone. He suggests that the unilateral intervention (ignoring the UN) in May 2000 was undertaken more as an attempt to demonstrate Britain’s “great power status” and influence in West Africa than out of any concern for human rights. As Curtis comments: “If Britain had been serious about human rights, perhaps it might not have exported 7,500 rifles to Sierra Leone as part of a £10 million package in 1999.

The country was already awash with weapons, whose availability contributed to the phenomenon of child soldiers. If Britain were serious about human rights now, perhaps it would try to weed out from, rather than absorb into, the reconstituted army it is currently training those past human rights abusers.”

The current reports by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Sierra Leone are damning. HRW comments: “Since the end of Sierra Leone’s brutal armed conflict in 2002, few improvements have been made in the dynamics that contributed to the emergence of the conflict in 1991 – rampant corruption, gross financial mismanagement, inadequate distribution of the country’s natural resources and weak rule of law.“

AI is equally bleak: there has been little progress in strengthening the justice system or in reforming laws that discriminate against women. Several suspected political opponents were recently arrested and tried. Sierra Leone remained one of the poorest countries in the world with 70 per cent of the population living on less than US$1 a day and high illiteracy rates. Rates of mortality and disease were at crisis levels due to the inadequate health infrastructure.

A report in The Times by Africa correspondent Jonathan Clayton highlighted these appalling statistics but added: “Nevertheless, the country is at peace and, though corruption is endemic, there are signs of a mini economic boom.” In contrast, and more realistically, HRW comments: “The government’s failure to address crushing poverty despite massive international aid and alarmingly high unemployment rates among youth, render Sierra Leone vulnerable to future instability.”

Richard Lance Keeble is Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln. His two latest co-edited books Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military (Abramis) and The Journalistic Imagination: Literary Journalists from Defoe to Capote and Carter (Routledge) are to be published shortly.

Frontline: a journal carrying a serious critique of US/UK militarism

2007-04-14T21:25:00.000Z

And so to New Delhi – to interview Indian journalists hoping to join a British Council-sponsored programme we are running at the University of Lincoln next term. The visit gives me the opportunity to catch up on India’s flourishing leftist print media.

For instance, Frontline, edited by N. Ram, has maintained a consistently rigorous critique of US/UK militarism for many years and is always worth a read. In the current issue, John Cherian examines the Bush administration’s recent military adventures in Africa, highlighting the announcement in February of the creation of a US military command for Africa, “Africacom”.

This comes soon after the American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. As Cherian reports: “There are credible reports of US troops participating in special operations inside Somalia after a gap of more than a decade. The Americans provided the Ethiopian army with satellite pictures of Somali militia positions, and American planes bombed parts of southern Somalia. Seventy civilians were killed and more than a hundred wounded. More than 1,500 American troops have been based in nearby Djibouti since 2002. They played a key role in the planning and execution of the invasion of Somalia.” And significantly last year, Bush announced plans to expand the Camp Lemonier base in Djibouti from 88 acres to over 600 acres.

Also according to Cherian, the US is backing the secessionist movements in southern Sudan. “The subterfuge of ‘humanitarian intervention’ could be resorted to in the ongoing bid for regime change. The American preoccupation with Darfur is a case in point. Darfur, which is the size of France, is known to have vast oil and gas reserves…Neighbouring Chad is already exporting huge quantities of oil to the West. The US is also unhappy that the oil from southern Sudan is flowing to China, India and other emerging nations.”

The future importance of West African oil reserves to the US cannot be under-estimated. As Cherian reports: “Senior American officials have expressed the hope that the Gulf of Guinea on the West African coast would be able to meet a quarter of the US’s oil needs within a decade.”

America already supplies more than $1 billion worth of military equipment to Egypt every year. US troops help train anti-terrorism forces in Algeria, Chad, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda while the US has spent over $500 million on the Trans-Sahel Counter-Terrorism Initiative. And as the US expands its ring of permanent military bases on the continent, plans are being developed to set up a naval base on the small West African island state of Sao Tome. Cherian comments: “Sao Tome, along with Nigeria, controls huge off-shore oil reserves. Washington installed a friendly ruler in Sao Tome after a stage-managed coup in 2002.”

Elsewhere in the same edition, Aijad Ahmad examines the mass revolts against imperialism and neo-liberalism in Latin America and argues that “for the first time since its rise as a superpower the US is facing a serious threat to its hegemony”. And Vladimir Radyudin, in Moscow, argues that Russia’s geopolitical resurgence is causing major shifts in the international balance of power. He reports on the formation of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum in Doha, Qatar, on April 9 uniting Russia, Iran and Qatar. “The idea of a gas OPEC has rattled the US and Europe as it would shift the alignment of forces in the energy markets and leave them out in the cold.”

It’s hard to find such well-researched, incisive reporting of American militarism in the UK print market. So why not check out Frontline at www.frontline.in?

France wages war in Chad – away from the glare of the media

2007-01-11T21:23:00.000Z

While US jets pound villages in Somalia, away from the glare of the international media, French aircraft are attacking towns in Chad and north-eastern Central African Republic bordering Sudan’s Darfur region.

Even in France, the war has gone largely unnoticed. The headline in the current Politis, the radical left weekly, is blunt: La France en guerre (France at war). But elsewhere the mainstream media (Le Monde, Libération, Figaro and the television channels) are silent on the conflict.

The French Mirage F1 jets are intervening in support of two beleaguered dictators. Idriss Déby, of Chad, was installed by a French-led coup in 1990. His predecessor, Hissène Habré, is now to be tried in Senegal for crimes against humanity during his rule from 1982 to 1990. Déby’s rule has proven equally oppressive – but while rebels increase their hold over large parts of the impoverished country and threaten the capital N’Djamena, the French government of Dominique de Villepin remains loyal to Déby. Chad, after all, is strategically crucial lying just south of Libya and to the west of Sudan while its oil reserves are likely to become increasingly important in the US-led “war on terror”.

In the Central African Republic, French operations are aimed at repelling rebels which the government of François Bozizé claims are backed by the Sudanese. But the rebels of the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement (UFDR) deny any links with Sudan and claim Bozizé, whom the French helped into power in a 2003 coup, is ruling the country along ethnic lines.

The French backed Bozizé on the understanding he would introduce reforms – but while these have never been introduced the support continues. In the Politis article, Dante Sanjurjo highlights the way in which the war is being waged without any debate in either parliament or the media. Roland Marchal, an African specialist at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (Ceri), claims that French society reacts more to humanitarian than political crises. “Why do the French need to intervene like this? And what will it achieve? No one asks these questions.”

See www.politis.fr

Newspeak, nukespeak and Fleet Street’s silencing of the real Trident debate

2006-12-07T21:22:00.000Z

Richard Keeble explores the links between George Orwell’s concept of newspeak, Paul Chilton’s notion of nukespeak and Fleet Street’s current coverage of the Trident debate

The personal and the political
I’ve always been interested in silence. The first pamphlet I wrote was for the
Peace Pledge Union back in May 1983 and I called it A language of silence. I looked at the way in which our culture, individual thought processes and language were dominated by militarism. Militarism had become a core defining reality of our society. And our language, in preparing us for the possibility of the ultimate horror – the destruction of the globe in a nuclear confrontation – was moving in a process of self destruction towards silence. Or so I argued.

Significantly, I called my book on the coverage of the 1991 Gulf conflict in the US and UK press Secret State, Silent Press: New militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare. Why silent press? I liked the alliteration with secret state to be frank. But my essential thesis was that the mainstream press had silenced what in reality was a series of US-led massacres beneath the fiction of heroic warfare. US military chief Colin Powell, in his 1995 account of the conflict, estimated that 250,000 Iraqi soldiers had perished. The reality of that horrific explosion of hi-tech barbarism was silenced in the British and American press which represented the conflict as largely bloodless: a triumph of clean, precise, surgical weaponry. In the book I call the US/UK military media system – with its pools and self censoring journalists – along with the complex workings of ideology the apparatus of silence.

Newspeak and the destruction of language
Significantly, George Orwell was preoccupied with the potential shift of language towards silence. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell described a Big Brother state in which the authorities controlled thought and language by inventing a new one – newspeak. In the Appendix titled “The principles of newspeak” he wrote: “The purpose of newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In other words, the dominant language served above all to silence all dissident modes of thought. And newspeak was inherently moving towards silence. Syme, Winston Smith’s colleague, admonishes him like this: “You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”

Newspeak’s clone: nukespeak
During the Cold War, Paul Chilton coined the term nukespeak. The seminal text (of 1985) he edited was titled Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today. He had earlier provided a chapter “Nukespeak: nuclear language and propaganda” to a text Nukespeak: The Media and the Bomb (edited by Crispin Aubrey 1982).

In coining the term nukespeak, Chilton was making three main claims. Firstly there existed a specialised vocabulary for talking about nuclear weapons together with habitual metaphors. Secondly that this variety of English was neither neutral nor purely descriptive but ideologically loaded in favour of the nuclear culture. And finally that nukespeak was massively important since it affected how people thought about the subject and largely determined the ideas they exchanged about it.

But there was no massive conspiracy to inject this vocabulary into the culture: there were no Orwellian grammarians munching their sandwiches at the Ministry of Truth and rewriting the English language. The atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were, indeed, weapons of mass destruction. Their deployment represented according to Chilton a revolutionary jump in military strategy. And inevitably it heralded a new order of experience in science, politics and the everyday. Chilton commented: “The language used to talk about the new weapons of mass extermination was partly an attempt to slot the new reality into the old paradigms of our culture. It was also no doubt a language that served the purpose of those who were concerned to perpetuate nuclear weapons development and deployment.”

Nukespeak then, as a specific linguistic register, drew on deep patterns of symbolic thought, on myths, religious beliefs, symbols, stereotypes and metaphors which we use to organise and normalise our everyday experiences. In August 1945 politicians together with the mainstream press spoke of the bomb mainly in terms of religious awe. For instance while Truman was meeting Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam an official report on the Hiroshima explosion was rushed to him. It said: “It was the beauty the great poets dream about….Then came the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare to tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.” The Times reported eye-witnesses: “The whole thing was tremendous and awe-inspiring,” said a Captain Parsons of the US Navy.

The names given to these horrific bombs are also very telling. They are strangely humanised. They become familiar parts of our normal everyday lives. The Hiroshima bomb was called “Little Boy”, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki “Fat Man”. Edward Teller is known as the father of the H-Bomb.

Brian Easlea in his seminal, feminist history Fathering the Unthinkable (1983) highlights the creation of nuclear weapons in the context of the masculinity of science. He sees the development of science as a process of domination over both nature and women. According to Easlea, men create science and weapons to compensate for their lack of the “magical power” of mothering. In other words, the distorted psyche at the heart of masculinity and the “technical, phallic rationality” it promotes gives birth not to life but death. Easlea quotes a note slipped to Truman at the Potsdam conference on 17 July 1945 after a successful test of the plutonium bomb that said simply: “Babies successfully born”. And the President knew precisely what it meant.

The Trident debate and the language of silence
This context helps explain some of Fleet Street’s current coverage of the Blair government’s moves to replace the Trident nuclear missile system. The Cold War, pro-nuclear consensus in Fleet Street may have fractured but still the “humanising” language of nukespeak (with its emphasis on everyday domesticity and consumerism) persists – amongst both supporters and opponents of the bomb. For nukespeak has become such a “natural”, unproblematic feature of our “civilised” society.

Thus Mary Riddell, in the Observer of 3 December, while rightly calling for Britain to renounce the bomb, still slips effortlessly into the jargon of nukespeak. Upgrades of Trident are humanised and dubbed “the new generation”; US missiles are “souped up” while, on the global proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, she comments: “In this nuclear Wal-Mart, every aspiring dirty bomber can hope for crumbs.”

In the Observer of 3 December, former home secretary Charles Clarke is said to be raising doubts about the need to replace the country’s “ageing” weapons system. And in the Independent on 5 December, Blair is reported to be backing a submarine-based “son of Trident” system. Max Hastings, in a Daily Mail commentary on 5 December, backs the case for replacing Trident “when it reaches the end of its useful life”. In the Sun of 5 December, George Pascoe-Watson and Tom Newton Dunn manage to compare the obscene cost of Trident (“around £1 billion for 15 years”) with a child’s pocket money! They report: “Officials say that [the cost of Trident] is less than the £1.5 billion British kids get in pocket money a year.”

In the Guardian of 4 December, Labour Ministers are said to have “embraced the insurance policy” argument in favour of the “deterrent” since it is impossible to predict the shape of the threats over the next 20 years. And the religious “awe” expressed by the early commentators on the Hiroshima/Nagasaki explosions is echoed in the Guardian’s description on 4 December of Sir Michael Quinlan, former top official at the Ministry of Defence, as the “high priest of nuclear deterrence”.

Perhaps the most predictable aspect of Fleet Street’s coverage is the silencing or marginalising of the views of the massive, global peace movement. So often the debate is confined to the narrow parameters of party politics. In the face of the unthinkable horror of nuclear holocaust, the banal chatter of political banter emerges. Thus, in the Independent of 4 December, Ben Russell previews Blair’s White Paper on Trident “replacement” but quotes only Labour MPs (both pro and anti) and a Nottingham University professor, described as the “leading analyst of backbench rebellions” on Trident.

Ned Temko, in the Observer of 3 December, highlights the views of Blair, Labour opponents, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. No reference to the scores of peace groups campaigning against the bomb. Mention of the Campaign Against Nuclear Disarmament’s protest comes only in the last paragraph of the Guardian’s front page, lead story (“Blair opts to cut 20% of warheads”) of 4 December; on the same day, the Independent’s Ben Russell confines his reporting of the protests of anti-nuclear campaigners to a 13-word final paragraph. And on 5 December, the Independent’s Andrew Grice and Colin Brown devote just the last of their 14 paragraphs on Blair’s White Paper statement to the views of CND. Chair Kate Hudson is allowed a jibe (she was “very, very disappointed” with the PM) but no room to develop a coherent argument.

Significantly, the views of the “high priest” Sir Michael Quinlan appear in a vox pop in the Guardian: all ten “experts” are male; only three speak at all critically of the move to replace Trident. Representatives of the scores of peace groups in the country are clearly not considered “expert” enough to qualify for inclusion.

Coverage on Fleet Street is never one-dimensional; significant variations from the norm can appear. Thus, on 5 December, the Guardian highlighted the opposition of the various Christian churches to nuclear weapons. But, in general, the major function of the mainstream media – to silence (or marginalise) dissident views – can be seen to have operated in the recent Trident reporting.

• Richard Keeble is Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln

The Origins and Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland 1920

2006-09-19T21:21:00.000Z

The Origins and Organisation of British Propaganda in Ireland 1920
Brian P Murphy; Aubane Historical Society and Spinwatch; ISBN 1 903497 24 8; pp 90. £4

In August 1920, Basil Clarke arrived in Dublin as director of government publicity with the specific task of countering Sinn Fein propaganda. As Brian Murphy shows in this concise, fascinating and important study, Clarke was ideally suited to his new job. A highly experienced and widely travelled journalist with the Manchester Guardian and Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, Clarke ended the 1914-18 war as special correspondent for Reuters and the Press Association at the GHQ of the British army in France. In his reporting Clarke admitted that “he broke laws and orders innumerable” with “no remorse; not the slightest”. In 1918 he became director of special intelligence branch of the Ministry of Reconstruction and in 1920 (just before moving to his Dublin post) director of public information at the Ministry of Health.

Working alongside Clarke was Captain H.B.C. Pollard, press officer of the Police Authority’s information section. Another experienced journalist with many years’ service at the Daily Express, he had been staff officer in the intelligence section of the War Office from 1916-18. Murphy highlights Pollard’s outrageously racist views of the Irish people. In his 1922 book, The Secret Societies of Ireland: Their Rise and Progress, Pollard wrote on the IRA: “…there is nothing fine about a group of moral decadents leading a superstitious minority into an epidemic of murder and violent crime; yet this is what has happened of recent years in Ireland, it is what has happened time and time again in the past, and it will happen again in the future; for the Irish problem is a problem of the Irish race, and it is rooted in the racial characteristics of the people themselves.”

In addition, Major Cecil John Charles Street, director of the Irish Office in London, was engaged in many aspects of propaganda work, in particular building up cosy contacts with Fleet Street editors. All three (Clarke, Pollard and Street) worked closely with Basil Thomson, head of Special Branch in London

Drawing on a wide range of sources -- including Colonial Office files in the National Archives, Kew, reports of the mainstream and Republican press, memoirs and histories -- Murphy argues convincingly that the activities of these British propagandists in 1920 marked a significant (though, to date, largely ignored) moment in the development of the national security state apparatus.

Through a daily news sheet titled Summaries of Official Reports and Outrages and the police journal, the Weekly Summary, which began publication in August 1920, the mainstream British press was fed disinformation, lies and distortions which highlighted the alleged success of the Crown Forces and portrayed the IRA as a “murder gang”. Moreover, Murphy shows that by shaping and refining the news in the British interest, Clarke not only produced a propaganda message for his time but also provided a historical narrative for all time.

In impressive detail, Murphy, a member of the Benedictine Community at Glenstal Abbey, County Limerick, examines a series of critical events – such as the execution of Kevin Barry after a failed attack on a British military lorry in Dublin and the ambush of British forces by the IRA at Kilmichael on 28 November 1920. And he shows how the official line was swallowed wholesale by the mainstream press -- though vigorously challenged by the Republican press such as the Irish Bulletin.

For instance, after the shooting in Dublin Castle of the IRA fighters Dick McKee, Peader Clancy and Connor Clune, Clarke’s “official” account asserted (falsely) that the three men had been shot while trying to escape. It was this account which appeared in the mainstream press, with The Times’s headline on 24 November proclaiming “Desperate fight in guard room – murder gang members”. In addition Clarke published fake photographs to show that an escape had been attempted by the prisoners.

In an extremely useful foreword, Professor David Miller argues that the 1920 Dublin milieu “produced the public relations industry in Britain”. Clarke, for instance, left government service in the early 1920s and established one of the first PR agencies, Editorial Services. And between 1929 and 1931 he worked as PR official for the Conservative Party. Pollard, on the other hand, played a significant role in bringing General Franco back to Spain in 1936 to launch his murderous coup against democratic Spain.

Miller also draws parallels between the torture techniques used on IRA captives and on Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. For instance, Tom Hales and Patrick Harte were viciously attacked, kicked, punched, hit with revolver butts and tortured with pincers. In addition, they were threatened in a mock execution and made to hold the Union Jack while photographs were taken of them.

As Miller concludes: “One of Murphy’s most extraordinary revelations is that the techniques, which shocked the world in Abu Ghraib, have a history longer than perhaps anyone outside the military and their political masters has suspected.”

For copies of the book contact jacklaneaubane@hotmail.com or wwws.spinwatch.org

Coverage of a king and the ‘Venezuelan boss’: a study in ‘human interest’ bias

2006-05-12T21:20:00.000Z

It’s always useful in identifying the bias of the corporate media to compare the way they cover leaders of countries generally close to the US and UK with those considered “enemies”. Take for instance, the Guardian profile of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (24 March 2006). According to the latest Amnesty International annual report, the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia is “dire” despite the government’s advocacy of “political reform”. Concerns are expressed over the torture and ill-treatment of people arrested in the course of the government’s “war on terror”. Flogging remains a routine corporal punishment imposed by courts while killings by security forces are “escalating”. Human Rights Watch highlights the “serious” problems in the country – with all political parties banned, strict limits on freedom of expression and arbitrary detention.

None of this is mentioned in the profile. Rather the language throughout is respectful and affectionate – appropriate for the ruler of an oil-rich country so crucial to dominant US/UK economic and military/strategic interests. He is described in the second paragraph as “the majestic ruler of one of the richest countries”. Later on the focus moves to a book of photographs of the king taken by his son-in-law Prince Faisal. “They portray a rather homely man, swigging from a can of Diet 7-Up, teasing his youngest children, wearing a colourful Hawaiian shirt, scrabbling for truffles in the desert with a long-handled trowel…” and so on. A Riyadh-based diplomat is quoted as saying: “He’s a thoroughly nice bloke.”

Only a hint of a “balancing” critique comes at the end. Reporter Brian Whitaker writes: “Most observers agree that the king has reforming instincts but, at 81, there are doubts about how far he will push them.” And he concludes: “Although he has opened up debate about the kingdom’s problems, there is little sign that King Abdullah intends to challenge the religious principles that lie at the core of an archaic system.”

Compare this with the feature on Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, a vehement critic of US imperialism, in the Observer (7 May 2006). Here the entire coverage is framed around a comment (appearing just under the headline on page one of the Review section) by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice describing him as “one of the most dangerous men in the world”.

“Enemies” of the US/UK (such as the former President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein) tend in the mainstream media to be dubbed “Hitlers” and are described as psychologically unstable and unpredictable. So, all too predictably, this same process of demonisation is at work here. Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary, is quoted on Chavez: “He’s a person who was elected legally – just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally.” One of the accompanying photographs shows a demonstrator with a colourful placard representing Chavez as the devil with a massive swastika above his head. “Observers” (presumably objective) describe his personality as “elusive” and “deeply unpredictable”.

Yet the reporter, Peter Beaumont, cleverly presents a “balanced”, “questioning” approach. The feature asks: Is the Castro-loving Bush-hating head of state a revolutionary democrat or a dictator in the making? So the case for Chavez is presented. But then so too is the case for him being a “dangerous dictator”. Beaumont even manages to mix the two views in his own commentary: “…Chavez appears to be pulled in contrary directions – between the authoritarianism of the classic South American caudillo (strongman) and democrat.”

Yet significantly the question of King Abdullah being an authoritarian abuser of human rights, closely linked to one of the most dangerous men in the world, President Bush, is never even considered in his profile. No critical quotes from Human Rights Watch, from people tortured by the security services, or from women denied their civil rights appear.

Thus through the use of conventional journalistic “balance” (in the case of the Chavez coverage) and through the elimination of even critical questioning (in the king coverage) the pro-elite bias of the mainstream media is revealed.

Richard Keeble is the joint editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. A collection of papers from the first volume appears in Communication Ethics Today, to be published later this month by Troubador. See http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=296 for details.

Hacks And Spooks - Close Encounters Of A Strange Kind

2006-04-03T21:19:00.000Z

And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference organised by the city's Student Peace Movement. And what a great event it turns out to be! Lots of excellent speakers - including author and peace activist, Milan Rai, Alan Simpson MP, Dr Meryl Aldridge, of Nottingham University, and a representative of Notts Indymedia. And there's lots of excellent, lively and constructive discussions.

I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services:

While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.

As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented: "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.

In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career".

Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.

A brief history

Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer -- probably as a cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them. Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.

The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body -- which even Orwell aided by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.

According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour of the British intelligence agencies was hidden. And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret service then controlled large parts of the press - just as they may do today

In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives' Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists. And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll. David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody in every office in Fleet Street"

Leaker King

And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications". Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction". Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot" King was also closely involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten

Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper. David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Maxwell and Mossad

According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the 1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents - with great success. In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6 were equally as strong.

Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight - and many of the leaks were fascinating. For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse during the Cold War."

The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms of first-hand knowledge."

And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain. Lawson strongly denied the allegations.

Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not being used." (http://www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)

Growing power of secret state

Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US. But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation - such as the Official Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on - and as intelligence moves into the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.

Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats. According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by the Rockingham cell within the MoD. A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant attempts to scare people - and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.

Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists. Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group, the Iraqi National Congress.

Sexed up - and missed out

During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government (in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq. The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition? But those facts will be forever secret. Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was ignored by the inquiry.

Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.

Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."

Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Why the Iraq air war remains secret

2006-01-12T21:11:00.000Z

Most of US/UK military adventures are conducted in secrecy. The attacks are mainly led from the air, and since no journalists are allowed on to jets, the essential features of any conflict remain hidden.

Today in Iraq as steps are being made to begin the withdrawal of US/UK ground troops, the air campaign is being stepped up. Yet media coverage remains minimal.
A rare exception was Seymour Hersh’s report “Up in the air” in the December edition of the New Yorker. He reports a US Air Force press release indicating that, since the beginning of the conflict, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than 500,000 tons of ordnance. And he continues: “In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border. As yet neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion about the air war.”

Another report on the hidden air war appeared on Tom Engelhardt’s excellent blog (www.tomdispatch.com) on 13 December. Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who has spent eight months reporting bravely from occupied Iraq (and whose website at www.dahrjamailiraq.com is well worth checking out), stresses that the “air war” does not merely involve massive deployments by the US Air Force. Navy and Marine aircraft flew more than 21,000 hours of missions during the Operation Phantom Fury assault on Fallujah in November 2004.

Jamail quotes the bland Air Force statements released on November 24 and November 27: “Coalition aircraft also supported Iraqi and Coalition ground forces operations to create a secure environment for upcoming December parliamentary elections.” And he comments: “Such formulations, of course, tell us, as they are meant to, next to nothing about what may actually be happening – and, as the air war is virtually never covered by American reporters in Iraq, these and other versions of the official language of air power are never seriously considered, questioned, explored or compared to events on the ground.”

The Air Force claims that nearly 70 per cent of all munitions used by aircraft since the start of the conflict has been “precision guided” and “every possible precaution is taken to protect innocent Iraqi civilians, friendly Coalition forces, facilities and infrastructure”. But Jamail points out that the Lancet report in December 2004 estimated that 85 per cent of all violent deaths in Iraq are generated by Coalition forces - with many due to US air attacks.

Engelhardt, in his opening comments, quotes a journalist who wrote to him: “My own experience of Iraq is that while we are all aware of air power, we are rarely nearby when it’s deployed offensively. One does ‘hear’ the air power all the time, though: fighters and helicopters used to protect convoys, helis shipping people back and forth to bases or hunting in packs across towns; AWACS high up. I’ve even watched drones making patterns in the sky. So why don’t we film it?”

In the Sunday Times of 1 January, another rare report on the air war highlighted all the limitations of mainstream coverage. The story (headlined “US forces step up Iraq air strikes”) focuses on the dry “facts” of official military statistics: that the number of air strikes in 2005, running at a monthly average of 25 until August, surged to 120 in November and an expected 150 in December. No attention is directed at the human consequences of these air strikes. Instead, the military’s focus on its “humanitarian” mission and “precision bombing” is stressed. Casualties are referred to as “collateral damage” in the impersonal language of militaryspeak.

Thus the newspaper reports: “Determined to reduce ‘collateral damage’, the American military is relying on laser or satellite-guided bombs that can strike rooms or buildings without killing large numbers of civilians.”

As an example of the strategy it provides the recent example of two US F16 fighters which dropped two 500lb laser-guided bombs at “three men planting roadside explosives in Kirkuk province”. Yet even this example appears to contradict the military’s claims about “precision” since the report says that the bombs killed not only the three men but “seven others” (presumably innocent people nearby).

And on what basis did the Americans conclude those three men were actually “planting explosive”? Jamail highlights concerns that Shia and Kurdish militia members in Iraqi army uniforms may well be calling down air strikes in Sunni neighbourhoods, settling old scores and sending civilian casualty rates through the roof.

Chad’s genocide – missed by the media

2005-12-08T21:10:00.000Z

Masses of information from the media constantly bombard us yet, paradoxically, often the most important goes uncovered. Take for instance, Africa. A country like Sudan suddenly comes under the spotlight. Reports of rape, massacre and corruption in the Darfur region reinforce all the stereotypes about the “dark continent” of savage aliens. And then, just as quickly, Sudan will fall from view.

However, while thousands of refugees from the Darfur conflict have fled to Chad, just to the west of Sudan, this country remains largely off the British and American media map. And so one of the most remarkable contemporary human rights campaigns goes largely unreported in the UK as the Belgium courts seek to try the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré for crimes of genocide during his rule from 1982 to 1990 – even in the face of the Belgium Parliament’s decision to repeal its landmark “universal human rights jurisdiction” statute.

Following threats from the United States in June 2003 that Belgium risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters, the 1993 historic law, which allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad, was repealed. Yet a new law, adopted in August 2003, allowed for the continuation of the case against Habré – much to the delight of human rights campaigners.

And finally last month, Senegal, where Habré has been under house arrest, arrested the former dictator to face an extradition request from Belgium over the genocide charges.

Formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, Chad gained its independence in 1960 and since then has been gripped by civil war. In a rare instance of coverage on 21 May 1992, the London-based Guardian carried four short paragraphs reporting how 40,000 people were estimated to have died in detention or been executed during the tyranny of Habré. A justice ministry report concluded that Habré had committed genocide against the Chadian people.

Five years ago, in a case inspired by the one against Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet, several human rights organisations, led by Human Rights Watch, filed a suit against Habré in Senegal (his refuge since 1990). They argued that he could be tried anywhere for crimes against humanity and that former heads of state were not immune. However, on 21 March 2001, the Senegal Court of Cassation threw out the case. And so human rights campaigners turned their attention to Belgium where one of the victims of Habré’s torture now lives.

Extraordinary events but all of them hidden behind a virtual wall of silence in the West. Yet also hidden is the massive, secret war waged by the United States and Britain from bases in Chad against Libya. British involvement in a 1996 plot to assassinate the Libyan leader, Colonel Mu’ammar Gadafi, as alleged by the maverick M15 officer David Shayler, was reported as an isolated event. Yet it is best seen as part of a wide-ranging and long-standing strategy of the US and UK secret states to remove Gadafi.

Grabbing power by ousting King Idris in a 1969 coup, Gadafi (who, intriguingly, had followed a military training course in England in 1966) soon became the target of covert operations by the French, Americans, Israelis and British.

Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of M16, records how in 1971 a British plan to invade the country, release political prisoners and restore the monarchy ended in an embarrassing flop. Nine years later, the head of the French secret service, Alain de Gaigneronde de Marolles, resigned after a French-led plan ended in disaster when a rebellion by Libyan troops in Tobruk was quickly suppressed.

Then, in 1982, away from the glare of the media, Habré, with the backing of the CIA and French troops, overthrew the Chadian government of Goukouni Wedeye. Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame), in his semi-official history of the CIA, reveals that the Chad covert operation was the first undertaken by the new CIA chief William Casey and that, throughout the decade, Libya ranked as high as the Soviet Union as the bête noir of the White House. A report from Amnesty International, Chad: The Habré Legacy, records massive military and financial support for the dictator by the US Congress. It adds: “None of the documents presented to Congress and consulted by AI covering the period 1984 to 1989 make any reference to human rights violations.”

US official records indicate that funds for the Chad-based covert war against Libya also came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel and Iraq. The Saudis, for instance, gave $7million to an opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (also backed by French intelligence and the CIA). However, a plan to assassinate Gadafi and seize power on 8 May 1984 was crushed. In the following year, the US asked Egypt to invade Libya and overthrow Gadafi but President Mubarak refused. By the end of 1985, the Washington Post had exposed the plan after congressional leaders opposing it wrote in protest to President Reagan.

Frustrated in its covert attempts to topple Gadafi, the US government’s strategy suddenly shifted. For 11 minutes in the early morning of 14 April 1986, 30 US air force and navy bombers struck Tripoli and Benghazi in a raid code-named El Dorado Canyon.

The US/UK mainstream media were ecstatic. Yet the main purpose of the raid was to kill the Libyan president – dubbed a “mad dog” by Reagan. In the event, the first bomb to drop on Tripoli hit Gadafi’s home killing Hana, his adopted daughter aged 15 months – while his eight other children and wife Safiya were all hospitalised, some with serious injuries. The president escaped.

Reports of US military action against Libya disappeared from the media after the 1986 assault. But away from the glare of publicity, the CIA launched its most extensive effort yet to spark an anti-Gadafi coup. A secret army was recruited from among the many Libyans captured in border battles with Chad during the 1980s. And as concerns grew in M16 that Gadafi was aiming to develop chemical weapons, Britain funded various opposition groups in Libya.

Then in 1990, with the crisis in the Gulf developing, French troops helped oust Habré in a secret operation and install Idriss Déby as the new President of Chad. The French government had tired of Habré’s genocidal policies while George Bush senior’s administration decided not to frustrate France in exchange for co-operation in its attack on Iraq. Yet, even under Déby, abuses of civil rights by government forces have continued.

Recently, relations between the US, UK and Libya have thawed, with Gadafi pledging support for the “war against terrorism” and agreeing to pay compensation to the victims of the 1988 Flight 103 Lockerbie bombing, for which a Libyan intelligence agent was jailed. But significantly, at his trial in November 2003, David Shayler was denied the right (under the European Convention of Human Rights) to speak out about the 1996 anti-Gadafi plot. Since it is obvious there are a lot of shady secrets from the years of the dirty war to conceal, such a decision by the court must have come as a relief to the government.

And a report in the Guardian of 15 March 2004 said US troops were arriving in several African countries, including Chad, as the Pentagon warned that the region runned the risk of becoming an al-Qaida recruiting ground. Giles Tremlett reported (“US sends special forces into North Africa”): “…US navy P-3 Orion aircraft guided Chad troops during a two-day battle on the border with Niger last week in which 43 suspected members of Algeria’s Salfist Group for Preaching and Combat were killed.” Oil reserves in North and West Africa are drawing increasing attention from the US. West Africa supplies the US with 15 per cent of its oil while the US National Intelligence Council has projected the figure will grow to 25 per cent by 2015.

Richard Keeble is Professor of Journalism at Lincoln University. His publications include Secret State, Silent Press (John Libbey; 1997), a study of the US/UK press coverage of the 1991 Gulf conflict.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 21:20

And so to Manchester University...

And so to Manchester University to give a talk titled “Translation and the Languages of Silence: Newspeak, nukespeak and the massacrespeak of New Militarism” at the Centre for Translation Studies and Intercultural Studies. I look first at Orwell’s newspeak, reminding the audience that one of the major themes of Nineteen Eighty Four is the political role of translators.

In his novel Orwell described a Big Brother state in which the authorities controlled thought and language by inventing a new one – newspeak. Significantly those who translate oldspeak into newspeak play the most crucial political and ideological roles in Oceana constantly re-translating history to conform to the demands of the present.

In the Appendix to Nineteen Eighty Four titled “The principles of newspeak” Orwell wrote: “The purpose of newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In other words the dominant language served above all to silence all dissident modes of thought. And newspeak was inherently moving towards silence. Newspeak was, in effect, a language in a process of self-disintegration. Adjectives and adverbs were being cut. There was little need for them since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived by adding –ful to a noun-verb. Thus speedful meant rapid. Adverbs were created by adding –wise - so speedwise meant quickly. And so on.

I then examine Paul Chilton’s concept of nukespeak to explain the specific language of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. Chilton made three main claims. Firstly there existed a specialised vocabulary for talking about nuclear weapons together with habitual metaphors. Secondly that this variety of English was neither neutral nor purely descriptive but ideologically loaded in favour of the nuclear culture. And finally that nukespeak was massively important since it affected how people translated their thoughts and feelings about the subject and largely determined the ideas they exchanged about it.

The atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were, indeed, weapons of mass destruction. Their deployment represented, according to Chilton, a revolutionary jump in military strategy. And inevitably it heralded a new order of experience in science, politics and everyday discourse.

The names given to these horrific bombs are very telling. They are strangely humanised drawing on familiar parts of our normal everyday lives. The horror is silenced. The Hiroshima bomb was called “Little Boy”, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki “Fat Man”. Edward Teller is known as the father of the H-Bomb.

Finally I examine the dominant (though contested) language of the mainstream media’s coverage of current US/UK military adventures. I argue that US/UK militarism is best understood as having three major strands each of them with a significant mediacentric dimension:

The totally secret activities with no media coverage. This will include the destabilisation by intelligence agencies and covert forces of countries and ruling elites: not just through the CIA but a range of clandestine forces. Other secret activities include the manipulation of elections, assassination of “enemy” military and political leaders, the arms trade, economic sanctions and diplomatic pressures. US covert intervention in Chad during the 1980s (organising two coups in 1982 and 1990 and imposing a series of ruthless dictators on the country) would provide an archetypal case study here.

Low Intensity Conflicts (LICs in the jargon). These are conflicts that are conducted mainly in secret but with occasional brief media coverage. Pentagon adviser John M Collins, in his seminal analysis of the United States’ LIC strategy, isolated just 60 US examples during the 20th century. These included Iran 1951-53, Bolivia 1980-86; Lebanon 1982-84. For the UK, the Irish Troubles/War (1967-1998) has been an archetypal LIC given only spasmodic coverage in the mainstream media. Currently US/UK operations in Afghanistan and Iraq can be defined as Low Intensity Conflicts. Recent massacres of civilians in Fallujah, Mosul and Ramadi in Iraq have gone largely uncovered in the mainstream media.

Finally, manufactured, media-hyped, quickie attacks against puny third world opposition usually largely celebrated by the mainstream press. These New Militarist attacks provide the spectacular theatres in which the US/UK can gain rapid “victories”. Recent examples include 1982 The Falklands; 1983 Grenada; 1986 Libya; 1989 Panama; 1991, 1993, 1998, 2001, 2003 Iraq; 1992-1993 Somalia; 1999 Serbia/Kosovo; 2001 Afghanistan.

And all of these conflicts resulted in massive civilian casualties – though the media represent them as largely “heroic”, “clean”, “precise” and “humanitarian”. Colin Powell, in his account of the 1991 Gulf conflict, estimated that 250,000 Iraqis perished. Thousands died during the Kosovo attacks; many more were traumatised and military sites, broadcast stations, hospitals, homes were bombed. Hundreds of thousands were left jobless. Up to 10,000 civilians died during the Iraq invasion of 2003 with more than 100,000 Iraqis reported killed since May 2003.

Thus the essential function of the mainstream media in New Militarist wars, I argue, is no longer to naturalise and humanise the possibility of nuclear holocaust as during the Cold War but to acclimatise the public to the acceptability of mass slaughters of the nameless “enemy”. In place of nukespeak we have the massacrespeak.

After my talk, Prof Mona Baker, of Manchester University, shows me a fascinating paper she has written on activist translators. She examines the work of committed translators and interpreters in such bodies at Peace Brigades International (www.peacebrigades.org), Front Line Defenders (www.frontlinedefenders.org), Babels (www.babels.org) and Translators without Borders (www.tsf-twb.org).

Baker writes: “Today, the worldwide web has become a symbolic space in which peace activists and marginalised groups who wish to challenge dominant discourse can elaborate and practice a moral order in tune with their own narratives of the world. Translation enables such groups to elaborate their alternative narratives across national and linguistic boundaries.” In other words, Baker is arguing that translators need to translate a political analysis into political activism. I agree. And I incorporate some of Baker’s ideas when I repeat the talk to a meeting organised by the translation department at City University, London, later in the week.

Those interested in seeing the full text of my talk can email me at

Orwell and the secret state: close encounters of a strange kind?

2005-10-10T21:08:00.000Z

George Orwell, journalist, political commentator, activist and novelist, has always fascinated me. However, his decision in 1949 (just months before he died) to submit a list of 35 names of alleged Communist fellow travellers to the newly formed, top secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department, has provoked mixed responses from the Left. For many it represents his ultimate betrayal of the cause.

Virtually all commentators assume this was Orwell’s only flirtation with the secret state. On 18 July 2005 the Guardian reported on a newly-released special branch file which suggested Orwell had been subject to surveillance – at least from 1936 (when he travelled north to research The Road to Wigan Pier) until 1942 (when he was working at the BBC). Big Brother clearly took a close watch on Orwell over this period. But, more intriguingly, could Orwell’s own links with the secret state have grown more substantial in later years?

Take, for instance, his reporting assignment on the Continent for the Observer and Manchester Evening News at the end of the Second World War in 1945. The assignment (from 15 February to the end of May) was interrupted briefly when Orwell became so ill he had to enter hospital in Cologne on 24 March. Then he suddenly had to quit the hospital to return to England following the death of his wife, Eileen, on 29 March. By 8 April he was back in Paris, moving on then to Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Austria. These were, indeed, traumatic times for Orwell which makes his completion of the assignment all the more remarkable. In all he despatched 14 articles (each roughly 1,000 words long) to the Observer (though the final two, of 27 May and 10 June, were composed on his return to London) and five to the MEN.

Could Orwell have been on an intelligence mission? He is certainly known to have met in Paris two men working for British intelligence at the time. One of them was Malcolm Muggeridge who introduced him to P.G.Wodehouse. Muggeridge had been assigned to keep a watch on Wodehouse who was suspected of having Nazi sympathies following his broadcast in the summer of 1941 from Berlin for the American CBS network. Orwell had written an article in defence of Wodehouse in February just before leaving for France (though it was not published until July 1945 in the Windmill magazine) and may simply have wanted to express his admiration to the creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. Orwell also met the philosopher (and old Etonian) A.J.Ayer, in Paris for the Secret Intelligence Service (M16) who were particularly concerned over the danger of a Communist coup. Ayer’s biographer Ben Rogers records that the two found they shared a devotion to the works of Kipling and Dickens and immediately became friends.

Orwell also saw Ernest Hemingway whom he had previously met in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war. The American novelist, who was serving as a war correspondent and staying at the Paris Ritz, had close links with members of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) and his son, Jack, was a member of the OSS. Carlos Baker's account of the meeting in his 1969 biography of Hemingway, based on a letter he wrote to the critic Harvey Breit on 16 April 1952, only adds to the mystery: "Orwell looked nervous and worried. He said that he feared that the Communists were out to kill him and asked Hemingway for the loan of a pistol. Ernest lent him the .32 Colt that Paul Willerts had given him in June. Orwell departed like a pale ghost."

Orwell's possible links with the intelligence service (MI5) were explored in detail by W.J. West in his 1992 text The Larger Evils: Nineteen Eighty Four – the Truth behind the Satire. He reports a "retired CIA officer in Washington" asserting that Orwell worked for MI5 and suggests that he could have developed contacts with Maxwell Knight, head of MI5's Department B5(b) counter-subversion unit and a former pupil of Orwell's prep school, St Cyprian's, in Eastbourne. Yet Anthony Masters makes no reference to Orwell in his 1984 biography of Knight.

The editor of the Observer, and Orwell’s great friend, David Astor, was also deeply immersed in the intelligence world. He served with the Special Operations Executive during the war and thereafter maintained close links with intelligence. Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, published in 2000, reports that in 1944 Astor was transferred to a unit liaising between SOE and the resistance in France, helping the French underground in London spread the word to groups throughout Europe. While on the reporting assignment in Paris, perhaps inspired by Astor, Orwell attended the first conference of the Committee for European Federation bringing together resistance groups from around Europe.

Does this point to Orwell’s deeper links with the secret state? I would be interested to hear your views. My analysis of Orwell’s war reporting from a critical journalistic perspective appears in Journalism Studies Vol 2 No 3 pp 393-406.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005, 02:14

Why we have to remove all these meaningless militaristic metaphors

George Orwell was always keen to stress journalists’ responsibility to preserve high standards of English. In a series of celebrated essays he explored the links between politics and language and he constantly used his “As I please” column (a sort of proto-blog) in Tribune to harangue the perpetrators of bad grammar. In Politics and the English Language (which appeared in Horizon of April 1946) he called for an end to “dying metaphors”, “pretentious diction”, “meaningless words” and the jargon of political writing. He wrote: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible…Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” He called for us all to “jeer loudly” whenever we heard or read some “worn-out and useless phrase”.

Today, along with the militarisation of our politics and culture goes the militarisation of our language. Time after time, Fleet Street trots out the dull, all too predictable, unimaginative metaphors of warfare, fighting and battle. And each time we see them we should jeer! Looking at just a recent crop of mainstream newspapers there are countless examples – across all the sectors, tabloid, mid-market and “up-market” and in all areas: sport, politics, business, arts reviewing, travel writing.

Obscenely, the metaphor of “carpet-bombing” (which, in reality, brings such horrific, indiscriminate horrors to so many innocent people) appears everywhere. For instance, in the Independent of 25 July 2005 John Walsh, reporting on a new $100m TV epic in ancient Rome writes: “ …it will invade your living room for 12 weeks in the autumn, carpet bombing British audiences with togas, triumvirates and troilism, backstabbing and betrayal, slavery and sexual excess, in a visual assault rarely seen since , well, since the last episode of I Claudius in 1976.”

Then, in the Independent of 10 August 2005, Michael Harrison reports in the business section on Britain moving away from its “carpet bombing approach” to regulation in areas such as health, health and safety and employment protection. On 14 June 2005 Dominic Mills, in the Daily Telegraph, describes the media strategy behind Crazy Frog “the equivalent of carpet bombing”. In the Sunday Times of 29 May 2005 Kate Butler describes the Bud Rising Festival as “carpet bombing” Dublin’s venues with gigs over seven days. And in his obituary of the Indian film maker Ismail Merchant, Hugh Davies in the Daily Telegraph of 26 May 2005 describes him as “carpet bombing” journalists with invitations to parties. In a profile of the Penguin paperback, celebrating its 70th birthday, John Sutherland, in the Times of 7 May2005 describes the publishing company “carpet bombing” the market with quality goods.

In a review of The Importance of Being Earnest, Robert Gore Langton, in the Independent of 17 May 2005, describes it as a “visual assault on the chuckle muscles”. On 22 May 2005, Tony Glover in the Business, describes Nintendo’s new revolution console as its “secret weapon”. And of Bill Gates Xbox, he says it is “a Trojan horse to invade living rooms and lay siege to the residential telecoms market”.

Similarly newspaper “circulation wars” are everywhere. The Guardian’s Media Monkey Diary of 22 August 2005 speaks of a circulation war of attrition between The Times and the Telegraph entering a new black ops phase. And in the Sun of 13 January 2005, Dr Keith Hopkirk, in talking about blood circulation amongst “blokes” speaks of the “circulation war”.

A headline in the Guardian of 22 September 2005 runs: “Clubs ready for war after RFU votes to withhold tour payments.” And Paul Rees reports: “English rugby was placed on a civil war footing last night. What’s wrong with English rugby was in crisis last night…” In the same issue, Jonathan Watts’ report from Beijing on a campaign against designer drugs is headlined “War declared on designer drugs as Chinese middle class gets high”. On the Guardian’s Financial pages, in a profile of the chief executive of J Sainsbury, the headline runs: “Sainsbury’s chief opens up a new front in the stores war – land”. The headline accompanying the “Notebook” section on the same page is “Europe’s battle of the champions”.

In the Independent of 22 September, Chris Hewett reports that rugby’s management board signalled their readiness to “fight to the finish with the Guinness Premiership clubs” while the headline screamed “RFU declares war on top clubs over player releases”. The Guardian G2 section of 23 September profiles Tom Hunter and carries a standfirst reporting Bill Clinton’s “war on poverty”. The media business section has a headline “Sony fights losses with 10,000 job cuts” while a subhead goes “Electronic arts: A battle on four fronts”. Significantly Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive, is quoted as saying: “We must be Sony United and fight like the Sony warriors we are.”

A headline in the Daily Mail of 23 September runs: “Legal aid for travellers in battles with planners” while in the Guardian of 24 September the controversy over a new Nelson Mandela statue in Trafalgar Square is headlined: “Sculptors at war over statue” with a strapline “Gloves off at inquiry into Mandela figure as old rivals clash”.

The 29 September Guardian story about the Education Secretary’s campaign against junk food at schools is headlined: “Kelly’s junk-food war” while a feature in the Femail section on women at work is headlined “Are career women at war?” On October 4, the Guardian’s art critic Charlotte Higgins suggests that “a new exhibition at Tate Britain shows English artists putting up a decent fight against their counterparts in Paris”. On the Guardian2 cover of 6 October 2005 a feature comparing the cultural offerings of the two capitals is headlined: “London v Paris, the art war” And so on and so on. In all of these cases, a non-militaristic metaphor is possible. Only a lack of imagination and a dull conformity to journalistic conventions prevents reporters from searching out the alternatives.

Orwell was always optimistic in his language campaigning. In Politics and the English Language he argued that “the decadence of our language is probably curable” and he highlighted the way in which a few “silly words and expressions” had been discarded from the language through “the conscious action of a minority”. So is it not important now to jeer every time we see a crass, militaristic metaphor -- and work in every possible way to eliminate them from the language? Who’s going to join me?

Interesting to see how the mainstream media...

2005-05-06T21:07:00.000Z

Interesting to see how the mainstream media constantly reaffirm the myth of al-Qaeda as an organized, international threat to elite western interests. Today (5 May), the media celebrate the recent capture of the Libyan Abu Faraj al-Libbi – and all describe him as number three in al-Qaeda’s hierarchy. This, the media report, is the most important “terrorist” captured since the arrest of the then al-Qaeda number three Khalid Shaikh Mohammed two years ago. Al-Libbi has been accused of involvement in two assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharaff, of Pakistan, in December 2003 and of recently co-ordinating “Islamist” cells in the US and UK.

Predictably, confusion and contradiction dominate the coverage of the arrest. The Independent reports that al-Libbi has been held for the past five weeks and is being questioned by Pakistani and American agents. The Guardian reports he was seized on Monday (2 May) only after a “fierce firefight”. However, Chris Johnson in The Times reports: “Pakistan security forces claimed that they seized the al-Qaeda third in command after a two-day gun battle at a farmhouse in the Waziristan region. In fact, it appears that the chase lasted only a few minutes, as secret agents -- some of them disguised in burkas -- chased the terror mastermind over back walls.”

The Pakistan daily, Dawn, reports Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao telling a press conference that no US agency was involved in the arrest. But the Daily Telegraph reports: “US officials indicated that their intelligence had been involved in the swoop, staged in recent days, which led to the arrest of at least five other al-Qa'eda men in Pakistan's North West Frontier province.” (see http://www.dawn.com/2005/05/05/top1.htm)

Only the last two paragraphs of the Guardian report dare to raise important questions about the arrest. Unnamed “analysts” suggest that al-Libbi’s importance has been overplayed “to mask the failure of US and Pakistani forces to find Osama bin Laden”. The FBI certainly do not include him on their list of the world’s most wanted terrorists (see http://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/terrorists/fugitives.htm).

Significantly, these hunches about the shifts amongst the al-Qaeda hierarchy come from prominent politicians and the US/UK and Pakistani intelligence services – all with a distinct interest in promoting the notion of a coherent al-Qaeda threat. But as Jason Burke, of the Observer, writes in Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (Penguin Books 2004: 8): “To see it [al-Qaeda] as a coherent and tight-knit organization, with ‘tentacles everywhere’ with a defined ideology and personnel, that had emerged as early as the late 1980s, is to misunderstand not only its true nature but the nature of Islamic radicalism then and now. The contingent, dynamic and local elements of what is a broad and ill-defined movement rooted in historic trends of great complexity are lost.”

And so to Budapest...

2005-04-11T21:06:00.000Z

And so to Budapest for an international conference on journalism ethics. We are dropped by the airport bus at the headquarters of the Hungarian Journalists Union and, since we have a few hours spare, walk down the Andrássy út avenue towards the Millennium Monument (built in 1896 to mark the 1,000th anniversary of the arrival of the Magyars in Hungary) at the end. Behind is a park and in the distance lots of Hungarian national flags are flying. Could it be a market? We head off.

But as we approach we see not market stalls but line upon line of tractors, up to 1,000 of them. How odd. What is probably the biggest ever exhibition of tractors doing in the centre of Budapest on a freezing cold March day? We see a massive tent and enter. Inside, hundreds of farmers are busy chatting away; tables are piled high with food; hundreds of posters, newspaper cuttings, slogans and maps have been stuck on the walls.

And the farmers are keen to talk. They claim payments of EU subsidies under the Common Agriculture Policy have been subjected to unacceptable delays by the government. Their patience has run out and so they are striking, setting up roads blocks around Budapest and another massive display of tractors in front of the grandiose, neo-Gothic parliament building overlooking the Danube. Residents of Budapest are sending donations, food and offering them places to sleep at night.

Later on that night, I see the lead story in the English-language weekly, the Budapest Sun, focuses on moves to negotiate a settlement between the farmers’ association and the government. Out of nine paragraphs in the story, only one and a half are given over to the farmers’ case; in the rest government spokesmen are quoted. Interestingly, a quick Google search shows owner of the Budapest Sun is Northcliffe Newspapers, chaired by Lord Rothermere. And the Budapest Sun is just one of a string of media outlets in Hungary owned by Northcliffe.

So I’m left pondering that my stroll down Andrássy út through a chilling March wind has brought me face to face not only with the extraordinary courage of the Hungarian farmers – but also with the importance of challenging the distorted news values of an increasingly globalised mainstream media.

I see in today's Guardian...

2005-04-03T21:05:00.000Z

I see in today's Guardian (2 March 2005) a profile of the Bangladeshi reporter Sumi Khan, in this country to receive the Index/Guardian/Hugo Young award for fearless journalism. Recently at Lincoln University where I teach, my students "adopted" three reporters under threat around the globe - and Sumi Khan was one of them. The others were Paul Kamara jailed for writing an article criticising the president of Sierra Leone and Hafnaoui Ghoul, imprisoned in Algeria since May 2004 for criticising local officials. The adoptions followed a well-attended public meeting at the university when Umit Ozturk, chair of Amnesty International's Journalists Network, and Trevor Mostyn, of the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN, highlighted some of the dangers facing journalists who dared to expose corruption.

One of the units I teach is International Human Rights for Journalists. It includes theory, history, contemporary political controversies, human rights legislation, women's and workers' rights, US/UK military strategies and the promotion of "humanitarian" warfare - as well as basic journalistic issues such as privacy, confidentiality, censorship and freedom of expression. .

But it's also important to translate that study into positive action. Hence the letter writing campaign to support jailed journalists.