[Peace-discuss] News notes, Feb. 17 (Part 3 of 3 parts)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[continued from part 2]

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2002

HAND-WRINGING IN DC. The Washington Post runs an article by media reporter
Howard Kurtz on increasingly negative war coverage [SEE NEXT PIECE]. It
then "balances" that with (a) a piece by "ombudsman" Michael Getler
defending charges that the paper is bashing the military and being
unpatriotic (according to Getler, the Post has recently received e-mails
and phone calls of that nature); and (b) puttin on the front page the
first in an "occasional series" detailing Sept. 11 marines, those
"inspired recruits" who took "up arms for the new fight." [SLATE]

MISTAH KURTZ, HE DEAD TO CRITICISM. When US soldiers conducted a raid
north of Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Jan. 24, it was initially reported as
an American victory. "US Special Forces got into a fight with the Taliban.
. . . Fifteen Afghan fighters were killed and 27 taken into custody," said
ABC's Peter Jennings. "Army Special Forces stormed two Taliban compounds,"
said NBC's Jim Miklaszewski. Newspapers carried similar stories, adding
such caveats as "Defense Department officials said." Days later, however,
a few reporters in Afghanistan began challenging the official accounts,
eventually prompting the Pentagon to acknowledge that those captured were
not Taliban members after all. On balance, though, some journalists say
the news business has been too passive during a war in which the first,
often lasting impressions are left by military briefers at the lectern.
"We are the auditors of this operation," said Mark Thompson, Time
magazine's defense correspondent. "Sometimes you get the feeling there's a
little too much Arthur Andersen going on." After five months in which the
Bush administration drew consistently upbeat coverage for a successful
military campaign, the media climate has turned sharply negative.
Suddenly, the issues of civilian casualties, military mistakes and the
Pentagon's own credibility have been dragged into the national spotlight.
Perhaps there was lingering resentment among journalists over their
limited access during the war while Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
was hailed on magazine covers like a rock star. Perhaps the tales of
innocents slain in remote Afghan villages became too heart-rending to
ignore. Perhaps there was a news void as the fighting largely subsided and
the Osama bin Laden trail went cold. Or perhaps it is easier for reporters
to raise uncomfortable questions about military blunders now that the
Taliban regime has been toppled and the threat to American troops greatly
eased. Whatever the cause, war coverage now resembles a kind of time-lapse
photography, with journalists revisiting the scene of past bombing raids
for the kind of up-close-and-personal reporting that was all but
impossible while the ground war was raging. On Monday, the Los Angeles
Times, The Washington Post and the New York Times reported allegations by
some of the 27 Afghans captured in last month's raid that American forces
had beaten and kicked them - prompting Rumsfeld to order an investigation.
A day earlier, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece on civilian deaths
in several raids in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, The Post, the New York
Times and the Los Angeles Times examined civilian casualties in a raid in
October. But the Pentagon still controls access in some areas where
journalists want to dig for information. One dramatic clash took place
last weekend when Washington Post reporter Doug Struck tried to visit the
site of the Jan. 24 raid. He was turned away at gunpoint by US soldiers
who threatened to shoot him if he went farther. Struck said from
Afghanistan that "the important thing isn't whether Doug Struck was
threatened. It shows the extremes the military is going to to keep this
war secret, to keep reporters from finding out what's going on." Pentagon
spokeswoman Victoria Clarke defended the department's dealings with the
media. "I think it's a reflection of the often confusing and shifting
nature of a very unconventional war," she said. "It's always a balance. We
want to put out as much information as we can, and we want that
information to be as accurate as it can be. We can't always do that as
quickly as some reporters would like." Since the Persian Gulf War, the
military and the media have been arguing over the degree to which
journalists can accompany battlefield troops without jeopardizing their
safety. These complaints grew louder after the United States began bombing
Afghanistan Oct. 7 without activating previously designated pools of
reporters. At the same time, Rumsfeld threatened to prosecute anyone
caught leaking classified information. Now that journalists are relatively
free to invade Afghanistan on their own, the war's latest phase has
produced a spate of murky, conflicting accounts of whether US troops
sometimes targeted the wrong people. CBS correspondent David Martin said
Rumsfeld's crackdown has meant that "the real story does not seem to
bubble up from below in the reporting chain the way it used to. People who
care about their credibility with you no longer trust all the information
they're getting. They've become more cautious because they don't want to
be made to look the liar when some other report comes up two days later."
Thompson said the military itself frequently has incomplete information
about the impact of its bombing. "The Pentagon was pretty much as blind as
we were," he said. "As painful as it was to watch, the Pentagon has
provided us with their changing assessment as it occurred. Frankly, I
don't know how they screwed up so bad." ... The day after the Jan. 24
raid, National Public Radio introduced a report from Mike Shuster by
noting that "there have been many accusations of errant bombs that killed
civilians and civilians who died because they were too near military
targets." ... On Jan. 28, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times,
Knight Ridder and London's Guardian reported claims by Afghan villagers
that those killed in the raid four days earlier were, as the Los Angeles
paper put it, "pro-government local residents, not hard-line Taliban
holdouts as described by the US military." The Pentagon opened an
investigation Jan. 30, even as Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there was no evidence that US forces had
struck the wrong target. The military later released the 27 captives. In
the incident involving Struck, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon
spokesman, said the reporter was turned back "both for his safety and that
of the soldiers who were there doing that work." Although Struck presented
his credentials, Quigley said, he was accompanied by armed Afghan guards
and "we had no idea who these guys were." Struck called that explanation
"an incredibly specious excuse on the part of the Pentagon." He said his
guards, who remained at the bottom of a hill where the soldiers were
stationed, "were clearly no threat to the Americans and clearly going
nowhere." Struck said the soldiers' commander, after consulting by radio
with his superiors, told him: "If you go further, you would be shot."
Quigley challenged the reporter's version, saying the commander had told
Struck: "For your own safety, we cannot let you go forward. You could be
shot in a firefight." Struck said: "That's an amazing lie. Those words
were not spoken. With all due respect, Admiral Quigley was not there; I
was." The question of access has come up in other settings. At Camp Rhino,
the US Marine base in Afghanistan, military spokesmen repeatedly told
reporters last month that they could not see, interview or photograph the
detainees because of Geneva Convention rules - even though the
administration was then arguing that the detainees were not formally
covered by the international agreement. [KURTZ, WASH POST]

Today's Washington Post meanwhile fronts a big Enron-related headline:
"Moral Crisis in Capitalism?" And then hastily takes it down on its
web-site. [CGE]

BEST NEWS OF THE WEEK. The peace movement in Israel is gathering momentum
again in defiance of expectations. Thousands took part in a rally in Tel
Aviv's Rabin Square last night to demand that the government withdraw from
the occupied territories ... The demonstration was the largest by Israel's
peace movement since Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister a year ago.
It represents another breach in the so-called 'consensus of fear' he has
marshalled behind his military solutions for ending the Palestinian
intifada. Last night Sari Nusseibeh, a leading Palestinian official, told
the rally of 20,000 that Yasser Arafat remained committed to the idea of a
Palestinian state living in peace beside Israel. In January, 52 Israeli
reserve officers publicly refused to serve in the occupied territories.
Insisting that they were 'raised on Zionism and ready to serve in the
defence of Israel', they vowed 'not to continue to fight beyond the Green
Line [Israel's pre-1967 border with the West Bank and Gaza] for the
purpose of dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire
people'. A month later, their ranks have swelled to 231, with polls
showing 26 per cent of the Israeli public supporting them, a colossally
high figure in a political culture where the refusal to serve is often
equated with treason. It is not difficult to fathom the cause of Sharon's
decline in support. 'No Israeli seriously believed by electing Sharon it
would bring peace. But they did believe he would deliver security. He
hasn't,' said Lily Galili, who covers the Russian community for the
liberal Haaretz . Instead, according to Israel's chief of police, Shlomo
Aharonishky, he has brought 'a year of violence and terror the likes of
which we have not seen in the history of the state'. Last week the
Islamist Hamas movement fired two home-made rockets into Israel, despite
warnings from Sharon that such an 'escalation' would be deemed 'an act of
war'. He responded by dispatching F-16 fighter jets to drop 1,000lb bombs
on Gaza City (home to about 500,000 Palestinians) and tanks to reconquer
areas in the Gaza Strip controlled by the Palestinian Authority. The
Israeli Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, pledged that the army
would stay until there was no more risk of rocket fire. But 24 hours later
the forces left, with officers and politicians admitting the invasions had
resulted in neither the capture of those who fired the missiles nor the
disabling of their capacity to do so. On Thursday, Palestinian guerrillas
killed three Israeli soldiers in Gaza by blowing up a tank with a roadside
bomb, as 'sophisticated' and deadly as those once planted by Hizbollah
against Israel in Lebanon, said army officials. In retaliation, Israeli
aircraft bombed a Palestinian Authority police post and tanks entered
Gaza's Bureij refugee camp, killing two Palestinians and leaving 33
injured, including a four-year-old girl. Within hours a Palestinian rocket
was again fired from Gaza into Israel. Yesterday a leading Hamas activist
was killed when his car exploded in the West Bank town of Jenin. Hamas
said it was an Israeli assassination and vowed revenge. Hours later two
Israelis died and 27 were injured when a suicide bomber exploded his
device among diners in a pizza restaurant favoured by teenagers in the
settlement of Karnei Shomron, 24 miles north-east of Tel Aviv. This
endless cycle of armed combat is not the only reminder of Lebanon. Last
week the Palestinian death toll from the intifada reached 1,000, 248 of
whom have been children. The Israeli death toll reached 256. As Israeli
analysts noted, this is the same number of Israelis who lost their lives
during Israel's post-1985 occupation of southern Lebanon. The difference
is the Lebanon war lasted 15 years, and most of the Israeli casualties
were soldiers. The intifada has lasted 15 months, with the death toll
including 164 Israeli civilians. If the 'national consensus' behind Sharon
is starting to fracture, so too is the consensus of the Israeli peace
camp. For years movements like Peace Now - which called last night's
demonstration - made full withdrawal from the occupied territories
conditional on a peace agreement with the Palestinians. But many among the
protesting reservist officers - as well as new grassroots movements, like
'The Green Line - students for a border', are championing more
unilateralist solutions. 'They believe the priority for Israel is to leave
the occupied territories, with or without an agreement with the
Palestinians,' said Arie Arnon, a leader of Peace Now. He said the call
for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal was gaining ground within the peace
movement and Israeli society, akin to the protest movement that helped
pull Israel out of Lebanon. [OBSERVER UK]

A DIFFERENT ACCOUNT. With the opening of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic
in The Hague, the international community has at last brought to bear its
combined legal authority against the so-called 'Butcher of Belgrade'. The
result is proceedings with all the majesty and gravitas of a social
security appeal tribunal. The trial is taking place in something
resembling a school classroom. It is presided over by a British provincial
trial judge. Second-rate prosecutors have been hamming it up shamelessly
for the cameras, recounting second-hand atrocity propaganda culled from
the Western press, secret services and the Bosnian Government's
advertising agency. But then at the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia such stories will be evidence. The procedure and
rules of evidence at the Hague are more than one-sided, they are a parody
of justice. The defendant Milosevic was not allowed a defence lawyer of
his own choice - but fearful that he would simply refuse to put up a
defence at all, the court appointed a 'friend of the court' to make his
defence for him. Backstage, Judge and prosecutor share the same office,
but defence lawyers are barred. The Hague court allows secret witnesses,
and hearsay and double hearsay evidence that would be shot down in flames
in any real courtroom. In other words, unidentified witnesses may make
allegations not only about events that they did not witness but were only
told about by someone else, but even about events that the person who told
them did not witness but only heard about from yet another person. If
evidence linking Milosevic to genocide cannot be found, then rumours of
genocide will just have to do. And if the judge should still somehow fail
to convict, then the prosecution can always appeal. The court procedures
appear to based upon Peter Cook's skit for Amnesty International, the
Secret Policeman's Ball, where the judge announces that he will hear the
evidence before pronouncing the defendant guilty, or a farce by Dario Fo.
These crankier features of the Hague Tribunal, though, are not incidental.
Rather they flow from its underlying character. Though it is performed as
if it were a court of justice, the show-trial is in fact a political act,
masquerading as a legal process. The aim of the performance is to justify
the Western powers' breaking up the old Yugoslav federation by making
Milosevic the scapegoat for all the slaughter there. In fact the West
wilfully provoked the war, promoting separatist ethnic movements in Bosnia
and Kosovo. To the palpable irritation of Western commentators and the
judge, the trial format means that Milosevic is allowed put his side of
the story, at least in opening statements - though even here, he was
interrupted and badgered. Pointedly, even an East European nationalist
like Milosevic managed to look convincing next to the shabby court
proceedings. The Serb leader's strategy is to address the underlying
political case against Yugoslavia, by turning the tables on the Western
powers that started the war. Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte will argue that
these are not the issues being tried, and have his evidence ruled
inadmissible. Procedurally, the lawyers have Milosevic where they want
him. But in the end the great goal of the West in the Yugoslav conflict -
the trial of Milosevic - is proving to be a failure. His unwillingness to
kow-tow makes the prosecution look like what it is, a political argument
dressed up as justice. More importantly, the trial will not satisfy the
need of those Western intellectuals who clamoured for it in the first
place. No imitation court proceedings could make the Yugoslav conflict
into a just war, any more than they could make a silk purse out of a sow's
ear. The world's media instinctively sense the unsatisfactory character of
the trial, pushing it down the front pages to make way for the Enron
hearings, the revelations in the Naomi Campbell case, and even the
skeletons in Jacques Chirac's closet. [THIS WEEK]

	* * *

NOAM CHOMSKY ON THE DRUG-TERROR LINK by Philip Smith, DRCNet February 14,
2002

MIT professor Noam Chomsky has long been one of the nation's most
implacable critics of US foreign policy and domestic inequity, as well as
its highly-concentrated mass media. Lauded by the New York Review of Books
as "America's leading radical intellectual," Chomsky has authored dozens
of books on US policy in the Middle East, Latin America, the former
Yugoslavia and East Timor, among others, as well as "Manufacturing
Consent," a scathing critique of propagandistic corporate media.

A proud anarchist -- he defines anarchism as "a tendency in the history of
human thought and action which seeks to identify coercive, authoritarian,
and hierarchic structures of all kinds and to challenge their legitimacy,
and if they cannot justify their legitimacy, which is quite commonly the
case, to work to undermine them and expand the scope of freedom" --
Chomsky is a legendary American political dissident whose campus
appearances regularly bring out thousands of students. We spoke with the
distinguished linguist and essayist from his office at MIT.

Philip Smith: During Sunday's SuperBowl, the drug czar's office ran a
series of paid ads attempting to link drug use and the "war on terrorism."
If you use drugs, the ads said, you support terrorism. What is your take
on this?

Noam Chomsky: Terrorism is now being used and has been used pretty much
the same way communism was used. If you want to press some agenda, you
play the terrorism card. If you don't follow me on this, you're supporting
terrorism. That is absolutely infantile, especially when you consider that
much of the history of the drug trade trails right behind the CIA and
other US intervention programs. Going back to the end of the second world
war, you see -- and this is not controversial, it is well-documented --
the US allying itself with the French Mafia, resulting in the French
Connection, which dominated the heroin trade through the 1960s. The same
thing took place with opium in the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War,
and again in Afghanistan during the war against the Russians.

Smith: The cocaine trade is the primary given reason for US intervention
in Colombia's civil war. In your opinion, to what degree is the drug angle
a pretext? And a pretext for what?

Chomsky: Colombia has had the worst human rights record in the hemisphere
in the last decade while it has been the leading recipient of US arms and
training for the Western Hemisphere and now ranks behind only Israel and
Egypt worldwide. There exists a very close correlation that holds over a
long period of time between human rights violations and US military aid
and training. It's not that the US likes to torture people; it's that it
basically doesn't care. For the US government, human rights violations are
a secondary consequence. In Colombia, as elsewhere, human rights
violations tend to increase as the state tries to violently repress
opposition to inequality, oppression, corruption, and other state crimes
for which there is no political outlet. The state turns to terror --
that's what's been happening in Colombia for a long time, since before
there was a Colombian drug trade. Counterinsurgency has been going on
there for 40 years; President Kennedy sent a special forces mission to
Colombia in the early 1960s. Their proposal to the Colombian government
was recently declassified, and it called for "paramilitary terror" --
those are their words -- against what it called known communist
proponents. In Colombia, that meant labor leaders, priests, human rights
activists, and so on. Colombian military manuals in the 1960s began to
reflect this advice. In the last 15 years, as the US has become more
deeply involved, human rights violations are up considerably.

On a more serious point, suppose that the drug pretext were legitimate.
Suppose that the US really is trying to get rid of drugs in Colombia. Does
Colombia then have the right to fumigate tobacco farms in Kentucky? They
are producing a lethal substance far more dangerous than cocaine. More
Colombians die from tobacco-related illnesses than Americans die from
cocaine. Of course, Colombia has no right to do that.

Smith: Domestically, state, local, and federal governments have spent tens
of billions of dollars on the "war on drugs," yet illicit drugs remain as
available, as pure, and as cheap as ever. If this policy is not
accomplishing its stated goal, what is it accomplishing? Is there some
sort of latent agenda being served?

Chomsky: They have known all along that it won't work, they have good
evidence from their own research studies showing that if you want to deal
with substance abuse, criminalization is the worst method. The RAND report
did a cost-effectiveness analysis of various drug strategies and it found
that the most effective approach by far is prevention and treatment.
Police action was well below that, and below police action was
interdiction, and at the bottom in terms of cost-effectiveness were
out-of-country efforts, such as what the US is doing in Colombia.
President Nixon, by contrast, had a significant component for prevention
and treatment that was effective.

US domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and
policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance
abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions
and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when
they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the
criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.
The economic policies of the last 20 years are a rich man's version of
structural adjustment. You create a superfluous population, which in the
US context is largely poor, black, and Hispanic, and a much wider
population that is economically dissatisfied. You read all the headlines
about the great economy, but the facts are quite different. For the vast
majority, these neoliberal policies have had a negative effect. With
regard to wages, we have only now regained the wage levels of 30 years
ago. Incomes are maintained only by working longer and harder, or with
both adults in a family working. Even the rate of growth in the economy
has not been that high, and what growth there is has been highly
concentrated in certain sectors.

If most people are dissatisfied and others are useless, you want to get
rid of the useless and frighten the dissatisfied. The drug war does this.
The US incarceration rate has risen dramatically, largely because of
victimless crimes, such as drug offenses, and the sentences are extremely
punitive. The drug war not only gets rid of the superfluous population, it
frightens everybody else. Drugs play a role similar to communism or
terrorism, people huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection
from the menace. It is hard to believe that these consequences aren't
understood. They are there for anyone to see. Back when the current era of
the drug war began, Senator Moynihan paid attention to the social science,
and he said if we pass this law we are deciding to create a crime wave
among minorities.

For the educated sectors, all substance abuse was declining in the '90s,
whether we're talking about cocaine or cigarette smoking or eating red
meat. This was a period in which cultural and educational changes were
taking place that led the more educated sectors to reduce consumption of
all sorts of harmful substances. For the poorer sectors, on the other
hand, substance abuse remained relatively stable. Looking at these curves,
we see that what will happen, it is obvious you will be going after poor
sectors. Some legal historians have predicted that tobacco would be
criminalized because it is associated with poorer and less-educated
people. If you go to McDonald's, you see kids smoking cigarettes, but I
haven't seen a graduate student who smoked cigarettes for years. We are
now beginning to see punitive consequences related to smoking, and of
course the industry has seen this coming for years. Phillip Morris and the
rest have begun to diversify and to shift operations abroad.

Smith: Many ardent drug reformers are self-identified Libertarians. As an
anarchist -- I assume it is fair to call you that -- what is your take on
libertarianism?

Chomsky: The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite
different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of
the world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the
anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. Socialist anarchism was
libertarian socialism. In the US, which is a society much more dominated
by business, the term has a different meaning. It means eliminating or
reducing state controls, mainly controls over private tyrannies.
Libertarians in the US don't say let's get rid of corporations. It is a
sort of ultra-rightism.

Having said that, frankly, I agree with them on a lot of things. On the
drug issue, they tend to oppose state involvement in the drug war, which
they correctly regard as a form of coercion and deprivation of liberty.
You may be surprised to know that some years ago, before there were any
independent left journals, I used to write mainly for the Cato Institute
journal.

Smith: What should be done about drug use and the drug trade?

Chomsky: I agree with RAND. It is a problem. Cocaine is not good for you.
If you want to deal with substance abuse, the approach should be
education, prevention, rehabilitation and so forth. That is what we have
successfully done with other substances. We did not have to outlaw tobacco
to see a reduction in use; that is the result of cultural and educational
changes.

One must always be cautious in recommending social policy because we can't
know what will happen, but we should be exploring steps toward
decriminalization. Let's undertake this seriously and see what happens. An
obvious place to begin is with marijuana. Decriminalization of marijuana
would be a very sensible move. And we need to begin shifting from
criminalization to prevention. Prevention and treatment are how we should
be addressing hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

Philip Smith edits The Week Online for http://www.DRCNet.org

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