Then, there was the hint in the piece that the administration was also putting in place a withdrawal strategy, another kind of (fantasy?) “plan.” After the January 2005 election in Iraq, American forces were to be downsized a brigade at a time “if the security situation improves and Iraqi forces show they can maintain order” – a theme Donald Rumsfeld picked up on a weekend visit to a Marine base in Iraq. (“The United States may be able to reduce its troop levels in Iraq after the January elections if security improves and Iraqi government forces continue to expand and improve, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday.”)
Then there was the generally administration-friendly language of the piece in which one of those “senior administration officials” could be quoted without comment as saying, “We're doing kinetic strikes in Fallujah.” Kinetic strikes? Is that what our daily bombing of Fallujah is? Or how about this sentence: “While the broad themes are not new, senior officials now make no secret that those missions have not been carried out successfully during the first year following the end of major combat operations.” Major combat operations? That has an oddly familiar ring to it – not surprisingly, since it was the President's much-quoted phrase in his now infamous Top Gun landing and speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln. But can we any longer believe that the year after the taking of Baghdad saw no “major combat operations”?
Of course, this is not in the normal sense reporting, or rather it's run-of-the-mill access reportage from our imperial capital. “Pentagon Sets Steps to Retake Iraq Rebel Sites” is essentially a stalking horse for the Bush administration, but to grasp fully what this means it's necessary to leave the ostensible news in the piece and turn to the far more interesting subject of the piece's sourcing. Sixteen hundred words and only one person – Lt. Gen. Wallace C. Gregson, the Marine commander in the Middle East-is quoted by name. (“We can start demonstrating that the course that Prime Minister Allawi's government is on, is the one that will bring peace, stability and prosperity to Iraq.”) Poor sucker, he obviously didn't know how this game was meant to be played, and so he alone might someday find himself accountable for what he's quoted as saying.
Last February, perhaps feeling the sting of criticism for its pre-war coverage of the Bush administration and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Times expanded its previous sourcing rules in an official document entitled, “Confidential News Sources.” Essentially, that document instituted a more elaborate version of policies already in use, calling among other things for more extensive descriptive labels for anonymous sources (“The word 'official' is overused, and cries out for greater specificity.”) and more fulsome descriptions of how and why the paper offered its grant of anonymity.
The document began:
The use of unidentified sources is reserved for situations in which the newspaper could not otherwise print information it considers reliable and newsworthy. When we use such sources, we accept an obligation not only to convince a reader of their reliability but also to convey what we can learn of their motivation – as much as we can supply to let a reader know whether the sources have a clear point of view on the issue under discussion …. Exceptions will occur in the reporting of highly sensitive stories, when it is we who have sought out a source who may face legal jeopardy or loss of livelihood for speaking with us. Similarly they will occur in approaches to authoritative officials in government who, as a matter of policy, do not speak for attribution. On those occasions, we may use an offer of anonymity as a wedge to make telephone contact, get an interview or learn a fact.
It also contained the following line, which the Shanker and Schmitt piece would seem to contravene: “We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack.” But perhaps using a new “plan” to gain partisan advantage in an election campaign doesn't come under the category of “partisan attack,” even when the journalists themselves acknowledge this to be the case in their piece. For paragraphs five and six of the article do offer a description of how the piece came about, indicating for one thing that the Times approached the administration, asking for an answer to the question, “Is there a plan for Iraq?” Shanker and Schmitt added the following on the people granted anonymity and on their motivations:
The three military officers who discussed the plan have seen the briefing charts for the new strategy, and the three civilian officials who discussed it were involved in deliberations that resulted in the strategy. The civilians, in particular, agreed to discuss the newest thinking in part to rebut criticism from the campaign of Senator John Kerry that the administration has no plan for Iraq.
In this light, then, let's take a look at the sourcing of this piece of hot “news.” Here are the various anonymous-sourcing descriptive words and phrases used in the piece (with multiple uses in parentheses):
Senior administration and military officials; senior officials; the officials (2); these officials; military officials; administration officials (2); senior administration, Pentagon, and military officials; the three military officers who discussed the plan; the three civilian officials who discussed it; the civilians; one [or a] senior administration official (4); one American official; one Pentagon official; American diplomats and commanders in Iraq; Defense Department and other administration officials; commanders; American commanders; Lt General Wallace C. Gregson.
In other words, 77 words in a 1,600-word piece (not even counting words that naturally go with such sourcing descriptions as “says” or “said”) were devoted to 17 different formulations of anonymity. Even with wings, a Daedalus facing the Times on Friday morning would never have made his way out of this verbal labyrinth. Not only is there no way for a non-insider to tell much about the three senior military officers and the three senior civilian officials who seem to have been the main sources for the paper, but, as the piece goes on, it becomes almost impossible to tell whether “one American official” or “Defense Department and other administration officials” are these six people or other sources entirely.
For knowledgeable Washington media or political insiders, perhaps it's not terribly difficult to sort out more or less who was speaking to Shanker and Schmitt. The question is: why is it important that the rest of us not know? What made this piece worthy of such a blanket grant of anonymity, except the fact that “Important Administration Figures” were willing to speak on conditions of anonymity about a subject they were eager to put before the public? Under these circumstances, what anonymous sourcing offers is largely a kind of deniability. The “sources” will remain unaccountable for policy statements and policy that may soon enough prove foolish or failed. We're clearly not talking of the leaking of secrets here, but of the leaking of advantageous publicity material.
This is, of course, an every day way of life in the world of the Washington media. My own feeling is that anonymity should generally be confined to protecting the physical or economic well-being of someone, usually a subordinate and/or a whistleblower, who might otherwise suffer from publicly saying something of significance to the rest of us. Hardly the situation of a group of high government and military officials trying to spin the public via a major newspaper. If you read the Times, the Washington Post or another major paper (the Wall Street Journal largely excepted) and want to check out the anonymity game, just pick up your morning rag and start counting. The practice is startlingly widespread, once you start to look for it, and was roundly attacked in the pages of the New York Times last June by the paper's own Public Editor or ombudsman, Daniel Okrent. In “An Electrician From the Ukrainian Town of Lutsk,” he called for turning “the use of unidentified sources into an exceptional event.”
Jack Shafer of the on-line magazine Slate wrote a sharp follow-up column on the subject of anonymity (“Journalists have become so comfortable with anonymous sourcing that they're often the first ones to propose it”), suggesting that Washington's reporters felt comfortable as “kept men and women.” On the off-chance that this wasn't true, he extended the followin
g offer: “If you cover a federal department or agency and want to drop a dime on your manipulative handlers, send me email at [email protected]. Name your anonymous briefer and point me to a press account of the briefing, and I'll do the rest.” Two weeks later, Okrent issued a challenge of his own to the five largest papers and the Associated Press to “jointly agree not to cover group briefings conducted by government officials and other political figures who refuse to allow their names to be used.” And then life went on.
The Shanker and Schmitt piece was certainly typical of a modern form of yellow journalism, a good example of the sort of front-page “access” articles you're likely to find any week at any of our major papers. Space on the front-page of the New York Times is, after all, a valuable commodity. As we saw before the invasion of Iraq, it's been particularly valuable for the Bush administration, since the Times is considered a not-so-friendly outlet – and, as a consequence, confirmation of anything on its front page can be useful indeed.
Undoubtedly, a stew of factors helps explain the appearance of pieces like this. The urge of reporters to make the front-page with a scoop is powerful and easily played upon by administration officials who can, of course, hand the same “story” off to, say, reporters from the Washington Post, if conditions aren't met. These are, in other words, bargaining situations and our imperial press, paper by paper, is seldom likely to be in the driver's seat as long as its directors set such an overwhelming value on anything high officials might be willing to say, no matter under what anonymous designations. That much of this is likely to fall into the category of lie and spin can hardly be news to journalists. But it's a way of life. In this context, what the grant of anonymity represents, if you think about it for a moment, is a kind of institutional kow-tow before the power of the imperial presidency.
Under these circumstances, that the Times approached the administration and not vice-versa on the question of a “plan” for Iraq hardly matters. Imagine, for a minute, a tourist approaching a three-card monte game on the streets of New York and suggesting to the con man running it that perhaps they should all play cards. After all, if you can spot your mark coming, all the better that he approaches you.
This would obviously have been a very different story if it had said, for instance, that Paul Wolfowitz and/or Condoleezza Rice and/or Donald Rumsfeld and/or Joint Chiefs head Gen. Richard Myers and/or any of their underlings had by name made such statements. Without the grant of anonymity, the statements in this piece would, ironically enough, have looked far more like what they are: spin, lies, and fantasy.
What does anonymity actually do, other than counter-intuitively establish the authority of sources who would have far less authority in their own skins? Through anonymity of this sort, what the press protects is not its sources, but its deals. For all of us locked out – and we are locked out of our own newspapers – there's no way of knowing what those deals were. But behind an article like this are house rules (and we're talking White House here), whether explicit or implicit.
For administration figures, this is an all-gain, no-pain situation. For reporters, it gets them on the front page and in line for the next set of “stories,” some of which might even be real. It keeps them in the game. Shanker and Schmitt are old pros. They normally do good, solid work. But they, like the rest of the press, live in the imperial capital of our planet. They play by the rules because their newspaper plays by (and dictates) those rules. And the rules driving them are not only cowardly but set up to drive them into the arms of any administration.
What the Shanker and Schmitt piece about the Pentagon's “plan” did was to put this bit of Bush-spin into circulation for the administration in the election season. As it turned out, it wasn't a major matter. It didn't play a part in the second presidential debate. It just proved a small, passing part of the administration's scene-setting for its version of a presidential campaign. At this moment, with so many angry bureaucrats, officials, and military officers in Washington and parts of the CIA – to take but one example – at war with the administration, Washington is a sieve with a tidal basin of information leaking out of every hole. Given that this is a wounded administration, its story right now is but one – still powerful – competing version of the news in our press.
But the Shanker and Schmitt piece should remind us, whether for the second Bush administration or any other administration, that the way of life that made much of pre-war mainstream journalism a stalking horse for the administration's mad policies and outlandish interpretations of reality is still alive and kicking. The rules of the house and the way of doing business are deeply embedded in the journalistic way of life. The allure of the imperial presidency is still powerful. Official lies, official spin, and anonymous officials are the entwined axis of evil of imperial journalism.
2. Which War Is This Anyway?
“Every country and every people has a stake in the … resistance, for the freedom fighters … are defending principles of independence that form the basis of global security and stability.”
“The war … was in itself criminal, a criminal adventure. This crime cost the lives of about a million [people], a war of destruction was waged against an entire people …. This is what lies on us as a terrible sin, a terrible reproach. We must cleanse ourselves of this shame that lies on our leadership.”1
Freedom Fighters and Rebels
Consider this as a description:
The “rebels” or “freedom fighters” are part of a nationwide “resistance movement.” While many of them are local, even tribal, and fight simply because they are outraged by the occupation of their country, hundreds of others among the “resistance fighters” – young Arabs – are arriving from as far away as “Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan,” not to speak of Saudi Arabia and Algeria, to engage in jihad, ready as one of them puts it, to stay in the war “until I am martyred.” Fighting for their “Islamic ideals,” “they are inspired by a sense of moral outrage and a religious devotion heightened by frequent accounts of divine miracles in the war.” They slip across the country's borders to fight the “invader” and the “puppet government” its officials have set up in the capital in their “own image.” The invader's sway, however, “extends little beyond the major cities, and even there the … freedom fighters often hold sway by night and sometimes even by day.”
Sympathetic as they may be, the rebels are badly overwhelmed by the firepower of the occupying superpower and are especially at risk in their daring raids because the enemy is “able to operate with virtual impunity in the air.” The superpower's soldiers are sent out from their bases and the capital to “make sweeps, but chiefly to search and destroy, not to clear and hold.” Its soldiers, known for their massive human rights abuses and the cruelty of their atrocities, have in some cases been reported to press “on the throats of prisoners to force them to open their mouths while the guards urinate into them, [as well as] setting police dogs on detainees, raping women in front of family members and other vile acts.”
On their part, the “guerrillas,” armed largely with Russian and Chinese rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers, have responded with the warfare of the weak. They have formed car-bombing squads and use a variety of cleverly constructed wheelbarrow, bicycle, suitcase, and roadside bombs as well as suicide operations performed by volunteers chosen from among the foreign jihadists. They engage in assassinations of, for example, university intellectuals and other sabotage activities in the capital and elsewhere aimed at killing the occupying troops and their sympathizers. They behead hostages to instill fear in the other side. Funding for the resistance comes, in part, from supporters in sympathetic Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia. However, “if the Mujahideen are ever to realize their goal of forcing [the occupiers] out, they will need more than better arms and training, more than their common faith. They will need to develop a genuinely unified resistance…. Above all, the analysts say, they will need to make the war … even costlier and more difficult for
the [occupiers] than it is now.”
It's easy enough to identify this composite description, right? Our war in Iraq, as portrayed perhaps in the Arab press and on Arab websites. Well, as it happens, actually not. All of the above (with the exception of the material on bombs, which comes from Steve Cull's book Ghost Wars, and on the beheading of hostages, which comes from an Amnesty International report) is from either the statements of American officials or coverage in either the Washington Post or the New York Times of the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, fostered, armed, and funded to the tune of billions of dollars by the Central Intelligence Agency with the help of the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services.
Well, then try this one:
Thousands of troops of the occupying power make a second, carefully planned “brutal advance” into a large city to root out Islamic “rebels.” The first attack on the city failed, though it all but destroyed neighborhoods in a “ferocious bombardment.” The soldiers advance behind “relentless air and artillery strikes.” This second attempt to take the city, the capital of a “rebellious province,” defended by a determined “rebel force” of perhaps 500–3,000, succeeds, though the fighting never quite ends. The result? A “razed” city, “where virtually every building has been bombed, burned, shelled beyond recognition or simply obliterated by war”; a place where occupying “soldiers fire at anything that moves” and their checkpoints are surrounded by “endless ruins of former homes and gutted, upended automobiles.” The city has been reduced to “rubble” and, for the survivors, “rebel” fighters and civilians alike, it and surrounding areas are now a “killing field.” The city lacks electricity, water, or much in the way of food, and yet the rebels hold out in its ruins, and though amusements are few, “on one occasion, a … singer came and gave an impromptu guitar concert of patriotic and folk tunes [for them].”
Neo-Conned! Again Page 79
