Collateral Damage: Self-Inflicted and Otherwise

counterpunch

Weekend Edition
January 21 - 23, 2011

CounterPunch Diary

Collateral Damage

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

It’s too soon to say of course, but it really does look as though though the Tucson shooter has done Sarah Palin serious damage. A Gallup poll run at the end of last week gives her a 53 per cent unfavorable rating, the lowest level she's sunk to in public esteem since she was first lofted to national prominence as John McCain's vice presidential pick in 2008.

Only 38 per cent now have a favorable view of the former Alaska governor.

Palin has only herself to blame. Against accusations that her bulls-eye campaign map targeted Democrats, including Gabrielle Giffords, she could have countered with measured expressions of sympathy for the dead and wounded, and a more in-sorrow-than-in-anger reproof for the over-hasty accusers.

Instead of which she came out with eight minutes of self-defensive whining on Facebook, and caused great annoyance to Jewish groups by filching the "blood libel" charge on which they have had copyright since the Middle Ages. Since then, she's done nothing to improve her performance, complaining that Obama had given a campaign speech at the memorial in Tucson.

Her charge was true, but the trouble is that most Americans liked Obama’s campaign speech. It was essentially the same speech that got him into the White House in the first place. While Palin was plummeting in the polls, approval for the President's Tucson performance was up in the high 70s percentile.

Before the shootings the Republicans were rearing and plunging as they burst out of the starting gate for the new Congressional session. John Boehner (dry eyed when talking about what happened in Tucson) went through a couple of cambric kerchiefs wiping the tears from his eyes in his “maiden” address as Speaker while down on the floor manly Republicans like Steve King of Iowa exulted that the blood-dimmed tides of payback were about to be loosed.

It was King, back in September, who fretted that the Republican leadership might go soft on reforming Obamacare, and that “a blood oath” of fortitude was necessary. It was King too who talked about the necessity of there being “blood on the floor” in the struggle for America’s future. Their first legislative target, Obama's health insurance bill, which passed into law last summer, was rolled out under the title, ‘Repeal of the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act'. They just couldn’t get enough of blood or killing. One columnist did a search on how many bills have had the word "killing" in the title. He found that "almost no legislation in 20 years used the word".

Then real blood splattered across the parking lot of a Tucson Safeway. The sheriff of Pima Country blamed poisonous rhetoric. Panic-stricken Republicans spent the next two weeks embarking on a fairly successful campaign to persuade the press that two years worth of incendiary, para-homicidal rhetoric could by definition have absolutely no measurable effect on any psychotic in America, including Loughner. Liberal pundits like Jonathan Alter obediently clicked their heels and agreed that putting targets on electoral maps was as influential in measurable consequence as sticking a soft toy on the window of a Volvo.

They may have counter-attacked with some effect in this skirmish, but even now about a third of the country still believes that violent political rhetoric helped provoke Loughner's rampage.

The Republicans have lost their ’mo, at least for a while. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their amplifiers, just like Palin. They're like a couple having a fight at a funeral; politely sotto voce, then suddenly bursting out fortissimo with their plaints and accusations.

Meanwhile Obama is looking more chipper than he has in the whole of the last year, a unifier at last, acting presidential as he triangulates just as Bill did in 95 and the years thereafter. Clinton and Gore “reinvented government” and Obama vows to do away with irksome regulations (like storing long form birth certificates securely) that hold America back.

Where is Monica Lewinsky now that we need her? Coming off the Tucson memorial service and the performance of the intern who may have saved Giffords’ life Slate compiled a list of Great Contributions by Interns in History. Of course it failed to include Monica Lewinsky and her almost single-handed salvation, exclusively reported here in CounterPunch, of Social Security which Clinton was on the very edge of “reforming” before the scandal forced him to drop his plans.

Fawning Piers

Piers Morgan got whacked by the critics for being too fawning in his first outing as CNN’s replacement for Larry King. He was interviewing Oprah Winfrey. It’s true. He did fawn. It seems to come as naturally to him as to a hungry curate in Trollope buttering up a bishop. But he’s not alone. Here’s Kitty Kelley, the great, most definitely non-fawning, biographer of Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, the Bush Family and the British royal family, writing in the December edition of The American Scholar:

“Shortly after my book Oprah: A Biography was published last April, one of Oprah Winfrey’s open-minded fans wrote to her website saying she wanted to read the book. Oprah’s message-board moderator hurled a thunderbolt in response: ‘This book is an unauthorized biography.’ The word unauthorized clanged on the screen like a burglar alarm. Suddenly I heard the rumble of thousands of Oprah book buyers charging out of Barnes & Noble—empty-handed.

“Days before this exchange, I had felt the chill of media disdain when my publisher began booking my promotion tour. Larry King barred the door to his CNN talk show because, he said, he didn’t want to offend Oprah. Barbara Walters did the same thing, proclaiming on The View that the only reason people wrote unauthorized biographieswas to dig ‘dirt.’

“There was no room for me at Charlie Rose’s roundtable and no comfy seat next to David Letterman. The late-night comic had recently reconciled with Oprah after a 16-year rift and did not want to risk another. On my 10-city tour I made few, if any, appearances on ABC-owned-and-operated stations because most of the stations that broadcast The Oprah Winfrey Show are owned by ABC or its affiliates. No one wanted to displease the diva of daytime television.”

End Torture Now!

In our latest newsletter Joann Wypijewski gives CounterPunchers a very important story, not only about the present elevated status of torture in America, but about the church-led campaign led by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) which is striking a match amid the darkness. Five years ago, NRCAT announced its arrival in the form of banners that suddenly festooned churches and other religious institutions, declaring, “Torture Is a Moral Issue.”

“There are reasons for being discouraged, of course,” NRCAT’s Rev. Rich Killmer tells JoAnn, “ but I’ve seen more movement on this issue for a longer time than any other issue I’ve been involved with in all my years of religious social justice work.” That’s 42 years, some of them with the National Council of Churches, working on environmental, peace, justice, anti-nuclear issues.”

NRCAT aims to abolish torture in U.S. prisons as well, meaning eliminating long-term solitary confinement, the internal gulag of 45 SuperMax prisons that hold some 62,500 souls, and other forms of isolation warehousing that hold thousands more in standard prisons.

Subscribe to CounterPunch and read Wypijewski’s very important piece.

Also in this latest newsletter, Diana Johnstone explores the one of the sinister monuments of the Clinton years, when liberal intervention surged to full crest in the onslaughts on Yugoslavia. Her point of departure is the terrifying report to the Council of Europe by Swiss liberal senator Dick Marty.

As Diana begins: “U.S. media have given more attention to hearsay allegations of Julian Assange’s sexual encounters with two talkative Swedish women than to an official report accusing Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, of running a criminal enterprise which, among almost every other crime in the book, has murdered prisoners in order to sell their vital organs on the world market.”

Thaci, now gangster in chief in Kossovo was handpicked back in 1999 by Madeleine Albright and the late Richard Holbrooke. Johnstone paints a searing portrait of Criminal Kosovo: America’s Gift to Europe.

Please, subscribe now! And have this newsletter your inbox, swiftly deliveredas a pdf, or – at whatever speed the US Postal Service first-class delivery system may muster – in your mailbox.

And once you have discharged this enjoyable mandate I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St Clair and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA) and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

Collateral Damage: WikiLeaks In The Crosshairs

by Media Lens / January 21st, 2011

The horrific killing of six people in Arizona, and the wounding of a dozen more, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, generated a wave of discussion on the impact of violent political rhetoric. A leading article in The Times commented:

American politics has a strain of mean-spiritedness that, when it connects to disturbed individuals, can have terrible consequences.

True enough, although Britain certainly has its own “strain of mean-spiritedness”. It is possible to disagree with others “in a reasonable way”, The Times observed, without giving “unintended succour to those on the fringes who harbour extreme views and even worse methods”. ¹

In August 2002, Times journalist Michael Gove – variously, the paper’s comment, news, Saturday and assistant editor – wrote:

We have no alternative but to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to prevent Saddam completing his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Massive military force must be deployed to remove Saddam’s regime. ²

Gove suffered no ill effects from this expression of “extreme views and even worse methods” – he is now Secretary of State for Education.

In January 2003, also gunning for war, David Aaronovitch wrote in the Guardian:

If I were an Iraqi, living under probably the most violent and repressive regime in the world, I would desire Saddam’s demise more than anything else. Or do we suppose that some nations and races cannot somehow cope with freedom?

Again, extremism was given no ”unintended succour” – later that year, the judges of the 2003 What the Papers Say awards made Aaronovitch columnist of the year, commenting:

At a time when most left-leaning commentators were opposing the war in Iraq, he took a brave and consistent stand, presenting the case for action in the most coherent and persuasive manner.

Speech that incites violence against individuals at home is unacceptable. Speech that incites mass death and destruction against entire nations is met with indifference, and/or high office and awards!

In Mediaspeak, the word ‘violence’ actually refers to crimes committed by the ‘bad guys’ against the ‘good guys’, ‘us’. ‘We’ do not commit violence, ‘we’ deploy ‘assets’ to ‘neutralise’ ‘targets’. ‘We’ ‘intervene’ to bring ‘security’ and ‘humanitarian relief’.

Because ‘we’ don’t commit violence, it is fine for ‘us’ to non-violently kill ‘our’ enemies. Thus, columnist, Jeffrey T Kuhner, wrote in the Washington Times last month:

We should treat Mr Assange the same way as other high-value terrorist targets: Kill him.

William Kristol, former chief of staff to vice president Dan Quayle, pleaded:

Why can’t we act forcefully against WikiLeaks? Why can’t we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are? Why can’t we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible?

The net hosts numerous articles with titles like ’5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange.’

On the BBC website, Matt Frei praised Barack Obama’s mollifying response to the Arizona massacre:

The president kept it personal and poignant. He reined in the attack dogs on all sides and called for a more civil, gentle tone. The tragedy has allowed him to play the role of consoler-in-chief with conviction.

Perhaps not on all sides. The “consoler-in-chief” had nothing to say about the crosshairs hovering over Julian Assange.

Of Wikiblokesphere And Lying Feminist Slags

Responding to the killings in the Independent, Joan Smith lamented the state of political debate, recalling “a concept I’m very keen on but haven’t heard much in recent years: civility”. The abuse is rampant:

Among the online-abuse community, it’s beyond question that Julian Assange’s accusers are lying feminist slags.

There was precious little civility in this ugly distortion. If a minority of bigots do perceive Assange’s accusers this way, they have not been contributing to the rational, awesomely well-informed discussions we have seen.

John Pilger has commented on the playing of what might be called ‘the feminist card’ in the WikiLeaks debate. The gambit has form. In December 2007, we found that, over the previous 12 years, the terms ‘Taliban’ and ‘women’s rights’ had been mentioned in 56 Guardian articles. Of these, 36 had appeared after the September 11, 2001 attacks. As Pilger noted last month in the New Statesman:

The invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was supported by leading feminists, especially in the US, where Hillary Clinton and other false tribunes of feminism made the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women the rationale for attacking a stricken country and causing the deaths of at least 20,000 people while giving the Taliban new life.

Something similar is happening now, Pilger writes, “as a group of media feminists joins the assault on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks… From the Times to the New Statesman, apparent feminist credence is given to the chaotic, incompetent and contradictory accusations against Assange in Sweden”.

Some of the worst examples have appeared in the Guardian, one of WikiLeaks’ “media partners”. Libby Brooks identifies an “unlikely alliance between leftwingers and the misogynists of the Wikiblokesphere,” which has seen them “indulge in the basest slut-shaming and misogyny”.

Again, if this is true somewhere, it is not true of serious, left online debate, where words like “slut” are simply abhorred. In a similarly one-sided Guardian report, Amelia Gentleman quoted Swedish tabloid journalist Oisin Cantwell, who argued, quite outrageously, that the “celebrity support for Assange was similar to the support offered by Hollywood stars to Roman Polanski when he was arrested last year, accused of raping a 13-year-old…”

Nick Davies, the leading Guardian reporter who originally organised the Guardian-WikiLeaks partnership with Assange, before the two sides fell out, wrote a piece titled: ’10 days in Sweden: the full allegations against Julian Assange.’

This included salacious tidbits such as:

Another friend told police that during the evening Miss A told her she had had ‘the worst sex ever’ with Assange: ‘Not only had it been the world’s worst screw, it had also been violent’.

And:

Police spoke to Miss W’s ex-boyfriend, who told them that in two and a half years they had never had sex without a condom because it was ‘unthinkable’ for her.

Bianca Jagger noted in Huffington Post that Davies had published “selective passages from the Swedish police report, whilst omitting exculpatory evidence contained in the document”.

Assange was, Jagger wrote, being “subjected to a ‘trial by newspapers,’ in an effort to discredit him”.

Assange’s former barrister James Catlin commented:

The complete absence of due process is the story and Davies ignores it. Why does due process matter? Because the massive powers of two arms of government are being brought to bear against the individual whose liberty and reputation are at stake.

With “media partners” like these, WikiLeaks hardly needs enemies.

Blood On The Guardian’s Hands?

Worse was to come from the Guardian. On December 27, Africa correspondent David Smith reported:

Zimbabwe is to investigate bringing treason charges against the prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, and other individuals over confidential talks with US diplomats revealed by WikiLeaks.

Treason charges could mean the death penalty, which, one would guess from this article, could mean blood on WikiLeaks’ hands.

One week later, on January 3, James Richardson, an “account services director for Hynes Communications”, wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian claiming: “now, with the recent release of sensitive diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder, upending the precarious balance of power in a fragile African state and signing the death warrant of its pro-western premier…”

WikiLeaks, Richardson argued, should just shut up:

Before more political carnage is wrought and more blood spilled – in Africa and elsewhere, with special concern for those US-sympathising Afghans fingered in its last war document dump – WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.

Political analyst Glenn Greenwald commented on Salon:

There was just one small problem with all of this: it was totally false. It wasn’t WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it. It was The Guardian that did that.

In fact the Guardian decided to publish the cable about Tsvangirai, not WikiLeaks, which only published the leak after the Guardian had done so.

The reaction in the US press was predictable enough. An article in the Wall Street Journal was titled, ‘Julian Assange’s reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe’s leading democrat his life.’ Who was to blame? “Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.” A piece in the Atlantic observed: “WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world” and so “provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy”. ³

Responding to criticism, the Guardian amended Richardson’s opinion piece, noting:

This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks.

The Guardian’s deputy editor, Ian Katz, worked hard to explain why David Smith had reported that WikiLeaks, rather than the Guardian, had published the Tsvangirai cable. Katz wrote: “it would be fair to describe us as joint publishers of any cables we have selected, with joint responsibility for any consequences of their release”. Using the WikiLeaks name was “a piece of widely understood journalistic shorthand. The material was routinely referred to as a ‘WikiLeaks revelation’”.

If the term “WikiLeaks revelation” is “shorthand” that is “widely understood” to refer to the Guardian’s status as joint publishers with WikiLeaks, why did David Smith not turn to his own editor for comment on the Guardian’s shared responsibility in the news piece reporting that Morgan Tsvangirai faced a treason inquiry? Has any Guardian journalist ever turned to the Guardian editor for comment on allegations that the Guardian-WikiLeaks partnership had endangered life? We asked Ian Katz on Twitter but he failed to reply. It seems clear that the Guardian has not rushed to advertise its shared responsibility – we suspect it will be news to many people.

The crucial point, in light of the Guardian’s amendments, is that mainstream media outlets have shown flat zero interest in accusing the Guardian of having blood on its hands for publishing the Tsvangirai cable. But why? There is only one explanation: the earlier media outrage was motivated, not by a desire to protect life in Zimbabwe, but by a desire to demonise and destroy Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

A related propaganda theme is that WikiLeaks has recklessly “dumped” a “flood” of diplomatic cables on the web, so endangering lives. Arch-war monger John Bolton wrote in the Guardian:

WikiLeaks has yet again flooded the internet with thousands of classified American documents, this time state department cables” which was the “third document dump.

The Daily Mail reported: “Then this week he [Assange] disclosed around 250,000 cables from U.S. embassies, many containing sensitive information.”

This, also, is nonsense. In reality, WikiLeaks has, so far, slowly and carefully released only about 2,000 documents in close cooperation with its media partners.

Greenwald explains the rationale behind the selective outrage and false claims:

To justify this assault, the U.S. Government needs to claim that WikiLeaks is somehow distinct from what other press outlets do. So it invents outright falsehoods to do so: unlike newspapers, WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumps diplomatic cables without editorial judgment; unlike newspapers, they refuse to be transparent about their methods (nobody is less transparent about what they do than large newspapers); and now, WikiLeaks endangers people’s lives by recklessly publishing a cable which leaves democratic leaders in Zimbabwe vulnerable to attack, even though it wasn’t published by them at all, but by The Guardian.”

Once again, the mainstream media has distorted and deceived to manufacture, isolate and target a ‘threat’ for destruction. Certainly WikiLeaks is embarrassing the powers that be much more effectively than mainstream journalism. But mainstream outlets also publish government leaks, including ‘Top Secret’ information, which the diplomatic cables are not. Assange is a journalist and he is engaging in journalistic activity. The “collateral damage” of his destruction might well involve the freedoms enjoyed by the very journalists currently seeking that outcome.

1. Leading article, ‘A Mean Spirit,’ The Times, January 10, 2011 [↩]
2. Gove, ‘We need Bush and not Saddam calling the shots,’ The Times, August 28, 2002 [↩]
3. Ibid [↩]

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The second Media Lens book, NEWSPEAK in the 21st Century by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2009 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

This article was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 7:01am and is filed under Disinformation, Media, Obama, Sweden, Wikileaks, Zimbabwe.