[Peace-discuss] Bribes, bombs, & what the press does free

[C. G. Estabrook]

["Media criticism" seems a somewhat desiccated phrase for the
sort of necessary exposure Alex Cockburn does here. --CGE]

The Bush era has brought a robust simplicity to the business
of news management: where possible, buy journalists to turn
out favorable stories and, as far as hostiles are concerned,
if you think you can get away with it, shoot them or blow them up.

As with much else in the Bush era, the novelty lies in the
openness with which these strategies have been conducted.
Regarding the strategies themselves, there's nothing
fundamentally new, both in terms of paid coverage, and murder,
as the killing in 1948 of CBS reporter George Polk suggests.
Polk, found floating in the Bay of Salonika after being shot
in the head, had become a serious inconvenience to a prime
concern of US covert operations at the time, namely the
onslaught on Communists in Greece.

Today we have the comical saga of the Pentagon turning to a
Washington DC-based subcontractor, the Lincoln Group, to write
and translate for distribution to Iraqi news outlets booster
stories about the US military's successes in Iraq. I bet the
Iraqi newspaper reading public was stunned to learn the truth
at last.

More or less simultaneously comes news of Bush's plan, mooted
to Tony Blair in April of 2004, to bomb the hq of Al Jazeera
in Qatar. Blair argued against the plan, not, it seems, on
moral grounds but because the assault might prompt revenge
attacks.

Earlier assaults on Al Jazeera came in the form of a 2001
strike on the channel's office in Kabul. In November, 2002 the
US Air Force had another crack at the target and this time
managed to blow it up. The US military claimed that they
didn't know the target was an Al Jazeera office, merely "a
terrorist site".

In April 2003 a US fighter plane targeted and killed Tariq
Ayub, an Al Jazeera reporter on the roof of Al Jazeera's
Baghdad office. The Arab network had earlier attempted to head
off any "accidental" attack by giving the Pentagon the precise
location of its Baghdad premises. That same day in Iraq US
forces killed two other journalists, from Reuter's and a
Spanish tv station, and bombed an office of Abu Dhabi tv.

On the business of paid placement of stories in the Iraqi
press there's been some pompous huffing and puffing in the US
among the opinion-forming classes about the dangers of
"poisoning the well" and the paramount importance of
instilling in the Iraqi mind respect for the glorious
traditions of unbiased, unbought journalism as practised in
the US Homeland. Christopher Hitchens, tranquil in the face of
torture, indiscriminate bombing and kindred atrocities, yelped
that the US instigators of this "all-the-news-that's
fit-to-buy" strategy should be fired.

Actually, it's an encouraging sign of the resourcefulness of
those Iraqi editors that they managed to get paid to print the
Pentagon's handouts. Here in the Homeland, editors pride
themselves in performing the same service, without remuneration.

Did the White House slip Judy Miller money under the table to
hype Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? I'm quite sure it
didn't and the only money Miller took was her regular Times
paycheck.

But this doesn't mean that We The Taxpayers weren't ultimately
footing the bill for Miller's propaganda. We were, since
Miller's stories mostly came from the defectors proffered her
by Ahmad Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress, which
even as late as the spring of 2004 was getting $350,000 a
month from the CIA, said payments made in part for the INC to
produce "intelligence" from inside Iraq.

It also doesn't mean that when she was pouring her nonsense
into the NYT's news columns Judy Miller (or her editors)
didn't know that the INC's defectors were linked to the CIA by
a money trail. This same trail was laid out in considerable
detail in Out of the Ashes, written by my brothers, Andrew and
Patrick Cockburn, and published in 1999.

In this fine book, closely studied (and frequently pillaged
without acknowledgement) by journalists covering Iraq the
authors described how Chalabi's group was funded by the CIA,
with huge amounts of money ­­ $23 million in the first year
alone ­- invested in an anti-Saddam propaganda campaign,
subcontracted by the Agency to John Rendon, a Washington pr
operator with good CIA connexions.

Almost from its founding in 1947, the CIA had journalists on
its payroll, a fact acknowledged in ringing tones by the
Agency in its announcement in 1976 when G.H.W. Bush took over
from William Colby that "Effective immediately, the CIA will
not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any
full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any US
news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television
network or station."

Though the announcement also stressed that the text the CIA
would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation
of journalists, there's no reason to believe that the Agency
actually stopped covert payoffs to the Fourth Estate.

Its practices in this regard before 1976 have been documented
to a certain degree. In 1977 Carl Bernstein attacked the
subject in Rolling Stone, concluding that more than 400
journalists had maintained some sort of alliance with the
Agency between 1956 and 1972.

In 1997 the son of a well known CIA senior man in the Agency's
earlier years said emphatically, though off the record, to a
CounterPuncher that "of course" the powerful and malevolent
columnist Joseph Alsop "was on the payroll".

Press manipulation was always a paramount concern of the CIA,
as with the Pentagon. In his Secret History of the CIA,
published in 2001, Joe Trento described how in 1948 CIA man
Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special
Projects, soon renamed the Office of Policy Coordination
(OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence
branch of the Central Intelligence Agency, the very first in
its list of designated functions was "propaganda".

Later that year Wisner set an operation codenamed
"Mockingbird", to influence the domestic American press. He
recruited Philip Graham of the Washington Post to run the
project within the industry.

Trento writes that

    "One of the most important journalists under the control
of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles
appeared in over 300 different newspapers." Other journalists
willing to promote the views of the CIA, included Stewart
Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James
Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time
Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs
(Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles Bartlett
(Chattanooga Times).

    By 1953 Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over
25 newspapers and wire agencies, including the New York Times,
Time, CBS, Time. Wisner's operations were funded by siphoning
of funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Some of this money
was used to bribe journalists and publishers."

In his book Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By
The CIA, Alex Constantine writes that in the 1950s, "some
3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually
engaged in propaganda efforts".

Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner said recently,
apropos the stories put into the Iraqi press by the Lincoln
Group, that it wasn't clear whether traditionally-accepted
journalistic practices were violated. Warner can relax. The
Pentagon, and the Lincoln Group, were working in a rich
tradition, and their only mistake was to get caught.

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