---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 08 Dec 2001 13:05:43 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: War Crimes And Media Omissions
War Crimes And Media Omissions
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/
By Danny Schechter
My late and great friend Abbie Hoffman used to open his lectures
with a bet, what he called the Journalist Challenge. He offered
$100 to any reporter present who could file a story on his talk
with less than three errors. He was a chronic gambler all his
life, but he told me that this was one bet he never lost.
Mistakes by reporters are common as we go about the rush of making
deadlines with what is often acknowledged as "the first draft of
history." But sometimes it is more than the facts that get messed
up: Sometimes a whole story gets sanitized or half-told. When that
story involves hundreds of dead people, as the one I am about to
tell you about does, it becomes essential to try to understand why
some in the media avoid or fail to fully investigate odious war
crimes.
How can so much of the world press, now covering the Afghan War,
miss so much of the forest for the trees? I am talking about the
apparent massacre of 600 prisoners in late November. I will
revisit the details in a moment, but permit me a flashback ^ to
another war, the one in Vietnam, and an infamous hamlet called My
Lai, set off in the rice fields of the countryside.
"Q: Babies? A: Babies"
The world can't forget what happened there, how American soldiers,
pressed by their commanders to escalate their "enemy kill rate,"
shot down civilians in a ditch, even as other soldiers in passing
helicopter landed and, at gunpoint, forced the unit, under the
command of Lieutenant William Calley (later pardoned by the even
more criminal Richard Nixon), to stop the massacre. There was a
famous antiwar poster about the event that was briefly plastered
in the subways of New York. It featured a color photo of the
bodies of the victims, men, women and children. Designed by Lee
Baxandall, the poster was memorable for its simplicity. Above and
below the grisly picture was a short question and answer: "Q:
Babies? A: Babies."
That massacre did not go unreported thanks to the late Ron
Ridenhour who, with the help of a young Seymour Hersh, had to set
up their own news agency, the Dispatch News Service, to
disseminate the story of an atrocity that the Pentagon at first
denied happened. Most U.S. media ignored it until they no longer
could. To this day, U.S. military commanders hate most journalists
because of exposs like this, which embarrass them even though the
military did prosecute the crimes later. The truth is that
war-making doesn't always look very good in the light of
independent scrutiny. Significantly, a year ago, CBS's "60
Minutes" went back to My Lai with some of the soldiers who
witnessed what happened, who now say their own government deserves
to be tried for war crimes.
Where are War Crimes Reporters Today?
Where were the U.S. mainstream media outlets when crimes of
similar moral gravitas were being committed right in front of them
today? I am talking about that so-called prison revolt in the old
fort called Qalai Janghi in Mazar-i-Sharif, which was only fully
extinguished by the end of last week. To be sure, these men were
not civilians, but armed combatants. But once in custody, they
must be treated according to the Geneva convention. A fuller probe
is warranted.
Thanks to the British press, the story has received more than the
usual episodic treatment, with a story here or there but no
cumulative impact. While Time and CNN covered it, the UK media
offered in-depth analysis not only of the horror but its meaning
in terms of possible war crimes. The BBC, Times of London,
Independent and Guardian were all over the grisly story in graphic
detail, while most American outlets played it only as more bang
bang.
Justin Huggler wrote in London's Independent last Friday about its
grisly aftermath. "They were still carrying the bodies out
yesterday. So many of them were strewn around the old fortress. We
saw one go past whose foot had been half-torn off and was hanging
from his leg by a shred of flesh. The expression on the face of
the dead man was so clear that it was hard to believe he was dead
until you saw the gaping red hole in the side of his forehead. The
stench of rotting human flesh had become overpowering; at times,
it was hard to breathe. But questions remained as they cleared
away the bodies of slaughtered foreign Taliban fighters believed
to be loyal to Osama bin Laden."
The Media And The Massacre
Let's turn to those questions in a minute since this column is
more about media than massacres. And it is also about how some
journalists performed like modern-day Ridenhours and Hershes,
while most did not. For one thing, few journalists explained the
run-up to the prison outrage, as in how the Taliban prisoners got
there in the first place. On November 25, The New York Times
carried a front page photo showing members of the Northern
Alliance and the Taliban shaking hands in Konduz and appearing to
peacefully resolve a showdown that U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
had predicted would be a bloody fight to the finish, an
eventuality he seemed to relish in the soundbites I saw. At that
time, the Northern Alliance, advised and outfitted by the U.S. and
Britain, had the town surrounded and was moving in for the kill ^
until, that is, talks broke out and a peace of sorts was brokered.
As I discovered from the Sunday New York Times, the two sides had
worked out a deal. The Taliban forces believed they would be
treated fairly if they gave up. A photo underscored the point. The
caption: "Northern Alliance troops near Amirabad watched as a
convoy of surrendering Taliban soldiers from Konduz passed through
the front lines." These men were on their way to the Northern
Alliance fort at Mazar-i Sharif as part of what the Times called,
"a script for surrender." The Times correspondent also reported
that General Rashid Dostum had promised to turn them over to the
UN and international courts.
This was reported without clarification. What "international
courts" were not specified. I shook my head. The Times knew there
were no international courts in place. They also knew the UN had
no provisions to accept prisoners. Why didn't the newspaper of
record mention this? Was this some scam? Had the Taliban's feared
foreign troops been suckered? The Times then added, rather
obliquely, "It was unclear if his (Dostum's) view would hold." The
next sentence seems to reflect the "catch 'em and kill 'em"
orientation of the Alliance and the Pentagon, which was cheering
them on: "Other Northern Alliance Leaders say they want to try the
men in Afghan criminal courts and possibly put them to death."
Again, the Times failed to point out that there were no such
courts functioning either.
That was Saturday. The foreign troops surrendered presumably with
the expectation that they would be turned over to the UN. Maybe
they didn't know better. Maybe they believed Dostum, who has
fought on every side over the long years of combat in that
country, with the Russians against the Mujadids and then with the
Mujadids against the Russians, with the Taliban and now against
it. He is known as a killer par excellence. His forces slaughtered
50,000 people between l992 and '96 in Kabul, leading to many
Afghans welcoming the Taliban as saviors. Now he was wheeling and
dealing with the Taliban, cajoling them to stop fighting. Those
fanatical fighters believed they had a deal. The next day, when
they discovered they didn't, the world would find out that it had
a problem. A deadly one.
A Revolting Revolt
What happened next? Here is the reconstruction by the
Independent's Huggler, published five days later:
"Bound to one another, the prisoners were taken in pickup trucks
to Qalai Janghi, the 19th-century mud-walled fortress that Dostum
had used as his headquarters after the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif to
his Northern Alliance forces three weeks previously.
"It was on Saturday that what started as the relatively peaceful
surrender of the northern Afghan Taliban stronghold of Konduz
suddenly started to go out of control inside the fort. Before the
eyes of Western reporters, two foreign Taliban prisoners, in the
process of being registered by the Red Cross, detonated hand
grenades, killing themselves and two senior aides to General
Dostum and slightly injuring the ITN news reporter Andrea
Catherwood.
"It was not the first time that we had heard of bin Laden's
'foreigners' committing suicide rather than be taken alive. The
Northern Alliance claimed that a group of around 60 of them jumped
into a river and drowned themselves. Another group were found
kneeling in positions of prayer, each with a single bullet wound
from behind. A Northern Alliance commander alleged that one of
them had killed all of the others in a suicide pact before turning
the gun on himself.
"But there were always fears that the stories might have been
invented to cover up Northern Alliance massacres of the foreign
fighters. Nor was it the first time that surrendering Taliban had
not been properly disarmed. Over the past few weeks, journalists
in Afghanistan have watched repeatedly as Taliban who had
surrendered were allowed to head into Northern Alliance-held
towns, waving their Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers triumphantly
in the air. This time, however, defiance grew into mayhem,
culminating in the scenes of trucks piled high with human bodies
that we saw heading out of Qalai Janghi yesterday."
The Plot Thickens
OK. So far we have two Taliban prisoners, allowed to take arms
into a prison ^ how crazy is that? ^ and then attack their
jailers. Time magazine reported that they were outraged when they
saw Western reporters. Perhaps they thought the UN would be there.
But that was just one, contained incident.
Huggler continues: "The next day, Sunday, the prisoners ^ many of
them with their arms tied behind their backs ^ were being herded
into a room for interrogation before two CIA agents [Mike Spann
and one identified only as Dave]. Did they fear retribution for
the previous day's murder of the two Northern Alliance commanders?
Or was it, as another account suggests, the mere sight of two
Americans ^ from the foreign fighters' point of view, sworn
enemies of bin Laden ^ that provoked the bloodbath that followed?
"The incompetence of the Northern Alliance soldiers ^ who, guided
by the U.S. and British special forces, failed to search the
prisoners properly and thus allowed them to smuggle in knives and
grenades hidden in their clothes ^ must be seen as a key factor in
the disaster. The men were also housed next to the fortress's
well-stocked armory."
Enter the CIA agent, now being celebrated as America's first dead
hero in many media outlets. Why is he there? Not to hand the
prisoners over to a nonexistent UN presence, to be sure. He is
there as an interrogator, and you can perhaps imagine what
interrogation means in these circumstances.
Now we have an account from the Taliban side. One of those feared
"foreign" troops turned out not to be so foreign. He is
20-year-old American citizen John Walker, a.k.a. Abdul Hamid, now
in a military hospital as a POW in U.S. hands. He told Newsweek's
Colin Soloway, "Early in the morning, they began taking us out,
slowly, one by one into the compound. Some of the Majahdeen
(Taliban) were scared. They thought we were all going to be
killed. I saw two Americans there. They were taking pictures with
a digital camera and a video camera. As soon as the last of us was
taken out, someone either pulled a knife or threw a grenade at the
guards and got their guns and started shooting." (My hunch is that
the fight in the prison will be nothing compared to the fight by
agents, studios and TV companies for the rights to his story.)
Who Fired First?
BBC's "Newsnight" interviewed Oliver August, correspondent for The
Times, London, in Mazar-i-Sharif, who said that Spann and his CIA
colleague, Dave, were thought (by reporters on the scene) to have
set off the violence by aggressively interrogating foreign Taliban
prisoners and asking, "Why did you come to Afghanistan?" This
really pissed off the Taliban captives, who probably wanted to ask
them the same thing. August said their questions were answered by
one prisoner jumping forward and announcing, "We're here to kill
you." The Guardian's Mazar-i-Sharif correspondent blamed the CIA
for failing "on entering the fort to observe the first rule of
espionage: keep a low profile." Rashmee X. Ahmed of the Times of
India reported that "August said Spann subsequently pulled his gun
and his CIA colleague shot three prisoners dead in cold blood
before losing control of the situation." This report was filed by
a member of a Murdoch-owned outlet hardly sympathetic to Islamic
militancy. Other would-be observers like Amnesty International and
the Red Cross, which has a duty to insure that prisoners of war
are treated according to law, asked to observe. They were denied
entrance.
According to Ahmed, "Spann was then 'kicked, beaten and bitten to
death,' the journalists said, in an account of the ferocity of the
violence that lasted four days, leaving more than 500 people dead
and the fort littered with 'bodies, shrapnel and shell casings.'"
The fort was bombed, U.S. air strikes called in by the Northern
Alliance's U.S. advisors. One of them killed Northern Alliance
troops. All of this was detailed on British TV and in the media
there. But not in the USA. On December 3, the New York Post
reported that "Northern Alliance forces slaughtered more than 600
prisoners." Somehow the U.S. role was omitted in a blatant rewrite
of the incident. The possibility that these men had revolted
because they feared execution without trial ^ a not unreasonable
fear given the Northern Alliance's track record in the past and as
recently as their bloody "liberation" of Mazar-i-Sharif with
hundreds killed ^ wasn't cited anywhere. I am not rationalizing
their fanaticism, just noting that their motives and the larger
context needed more explication. The Western media had already
demonized them, but the circumstances of this incident were
reported but unexplained.
What We Saw
On Tuesday night we saw the bodies on ABC's World News Tonight and
other outlets. We saw front pages stories in the New York Post and
Daily News honoring Spann, but no details of why this revolt
started. As news of this incident ^ without any reference to the
fact that massacring prisoners is a violation of international
law ^ started getting airplay on CNN, it triggered my memory of an
atrocity closer to home, the massacre at Attica Prison in upstate
New York in 1971, which I covered back in my radio days. It was
also initially blamed on the bloodthirsty prisoners who slashed
the necks of the guards. That claim was later disproved and it was
shown to be an execution by the New York State Police. I wondered
if Qalai Janghi would become an Afghan Attica. (Incidentally, last
year, almost 30 years later, the state was forced by the courts to
pay compensation to the survivors.)
But issues of responsibility and allegations of war crimes had
still not become a major U.S. media focus as of Friday. The New
York Times downplayed the suggestion that this was a war crime by
reporting, "No major human rights group has its own monitors in
Afghanistan, and their officials agree that in a war with few
credible witnesses, and with some of the Taliban soldiers clearly
fanatical, the exact circumstances of such killings are murky."
Later, Amnesty in London would call for a full probe but Human
Rights Watch in New York was more wishy-washy: "Any summary
execution of prisoners is a clear violation of the Geneva
Convention, but there are a lot of gray areas," said Sidney Jones,
the Asia director for Human Rights Watch. "For example, there has
been a lot of concern raised that dozens of the dead prisoners in
the fort had their hands bound. But that doesn't mean they were
summarily executed, and we have nobody on the ground to
investigate." I saw reports of men with bullet holes through their
heads, execution-style, and later, heard an account of at least
one Northern Alliance soldier prying gold teeth out of a corpse's
mouth.
The failure to condemn this outrageous conduct infuriated The
Independent's veteran Middle East watcher Robert Fisk, who was
equally scornful of the media and the military. His words deserve
more than brief quotation:
Are We War Criminals?
"We are becoming war criminals in Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force
bombs Mazar-i-Sharif for the Northern Alliance, and our heroic
Afghan allies ^ who slaughtered 50,000 people in Kabul between
1992 and 1996 ^ move into the city and execute up to 300 Taliban
fighters. The report is a footnote on the television satellite
channels, a 'nib' in journalistic parlance. Perfectly normal, it
seems. The Afghans have a 'tradition' of revenge. So, with the
strategic assistance of the USAF [U.S. Air Force], a war crime is
committed.
"Now we have the Mazar-i-Sharif prison 'revolt,' in which Taliban
inmates opened fire on their Alliance jailers. U.S. Special
Forces ^ and, it has emerged, British troops ^ helped the Alliance
to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN tells us some
prisoners were 'executed' trying to escape. It is an atrocity.
"The Americans have even less excuse for this massacre. For the
U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, stated quite
specifically during the siege of the city that U.S. air raids on
the Taliban defenders would stop 'if the Northern Alliance
requested it.' Leaving aside the revelation that the thugs and
murderers of the Northern Alliance were now acting as air
controllers to the USAF in its battle with the thugs and murderers
of the Taliban, Mr. Rumsfeld's incriminating remark places
Washington in the witness box of any war-crimes trial over Konduz.
The U.S. were acting in full military cooperation with the
Northern Alliance militia.
"Most television journalists, to their shame, have shown little or
no interest in these disgraceful crimes. Cozying up to the
Northern Alliance, chatting to the American troops, most have done
little more than mention the war crimes against prisoners in the
midst of their reports. What on earth has gone wrong with our
moral compass since 11 September?"
The Need For Continuing Coverage
What indeed? This atrocity may come to stand for this war that the
U.S. seems to be "winning" (if wars are ever fully won) in the
same way that My Lai came to symbolize the war we lost. At My Lai,
there was a journalist on the ground with the courage to blow the
whistle. Only the British press has done so this time. As Amnesty
International and the UN's Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson
demand an investigation, let's hope this issue will receive better
coverage here in the States.
There are laws governing the treatment of prisoners. Imagine the
outcry in the U.S. if U.S. prisoners in a Taliban jail had
revolted and been bombed or fired upon. As Human Rights Day
approaches on December 10, Washington must be held accountable for
its abuses just as we demand that the Taliban and the terrorists
be punished for theirs.
Let me be clear: In upholding the primacy of international law, I
am not excusing Taliban crimes. Scenes of splattered bodies of men
in captivity make better recruiting videos for bin Laden than all
his in-cave pronouncements combined. They erode the idea that
somehow America's technologically advanced campaign for "justice"
is morally superior to the Taliban or Al Qaeda's cruder terror
tactics.
Trying To Kill The Survivors
What is amazing is that despite all the bombardments and the
killings, 60 prisoners survived in the fort's subcellar. When they
were first discovered, Newsweek reports, "Alliance soldiers poured
diesel fuel into the basement and lit it, on the assumption that
any remaining Taliban would be killed by the fire and the fumes.
When this incineration strategy failed, they were washed out when
their basement bunker was flooded with freezing water. (Now
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says that the U.S. may use gas to
"smoke out" bin Laden if U.S. troops find him hiding in any of the
caves they are blasting, amidst fears of significant collateral
damage from folks living in the vicinity.)
Coverage of these attacks and crime is trickling out, largely
because an American was among the captives. The lack of careful,
thorough coverage by the U.S. media is a crime in its own right
against the public's right to know. Today's "Turbanators," as one
satirist recently characterized President Bush in a mock movie ad
modeled on Schwartzenegger's "Terminator," might play more by the
same international rules of war if they knew that the media would
hold their feet to the fire if they didn't. The lack of government
information about the war is bad enough. The U.S. media's failure
to fully investigate this alleged war crime makes them complicit
in a cover-up.
^ Danny Schechter is executive editor of MediaChannel.org and
author of News Dissector, which reports on how a citizens' war
crimes commission was reported derisively during the Vietnam War.
(Akashic Books and electronbooks.com).
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