“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” says top American commander.
President Obama’s sneak visit to Afghanistan this weekend, although shrouded in secrecy, still received lots of prime press coverage.
At the same time, an astonishing open admission of possible US war crimes by Obama’s man on the ground in Kabul, senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan General Stanley A. McChrystal, was reported by Richard A. Oppel Jr. in the New York Times… and then promptly ignored by the rest of the mainstream media.
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” McChrystal said during a recent video-conference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.
According to the military’s own figures, American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints have killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 others since last summer, but as McChrystal noted, none of the victims proved to be a danger to the troops.
Despite new rules put in place by McChrystal, aimed at reducing the killing of innocents, such shootings have not dropped off. Although fewer in number than deaths from air strikes or Special Forces operations, their continuance, as the Times noted, “has led to growing resentment among Afghans fearful of Western troops and angry at what they see as the impunity with which the troops operate — a friction that has turned villages firmly against the occupation.”
These persistent “escalation of force” episodes have “emerged as a major frustration for military commanders who believe that civilian casualties deeply undermine the American and NATO campaign in Afghanistan.”
A case in point: the murder of Mohammed Yonus, a 36-year-old imam killed two months ago while commuting to a madrasa where he taught 150 students. As Oppel noted, “a military convoy raked his car with bullets, ripping open his chest as his two sons sat in the car. The shooting inflamed residents and turned his neighborhood against the occupation, elders there say.”
Although General McChrystal has reduced the number of civilians killed overall — deaths from aerial attacks, for example, fell by more than a third last year — shootings from convoys and checkpoints involving American, NATO and Afghan forces continue to plague the coalition. Shooting deaths caused by convoys guarded by private security contractors – not part of the calculation — make the total number of “escalation of force deaths” far higher than just those decried by McChrystal.
As noted by blogger Allison Kilkenny – one media observer who wrote about McChystal’s statement — what the general admitted to may be a war crime:
“Military brass and the warmongering elite usually skirt war crimes accusations by saying the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations aren’t conventional warfare. That is to say, the US is not at war with an official army, so anyone picked up on the battlefield (which is the entire world in the War on Terror) isn’t a POW. They’re an enemy combatant who does not have access to the protections afforded to enemy soldiers under the Geneva Convention.
This is a tricky way to circumvent accountability, but even this clever interpretation of international law can’t cover the stink of McChrystal’s admission. The US is occupying Afghanistan, and while there, they are killing innocent civilians, says the highest ranking military official in the country.
So, to recap: the President of the United States visits Afghanistan to deliver personally “pointed criticism to President Hamid Karzai in a face-to-face meeting,” after flying in “for an unannounced visit that reflected growing vexation with Mr. Karzai as America’s military commitment to defeat the Taliban insurgency has deepened.”
The president’s visit comes only days after his highest ranking military official confirms in the “Paper of Record” that his military forces have killed dozens of people, none of whom posed a threat – and other media doesn’t see fit even to mention that fact?
Testifying at his federal “Death-Threat Trial,” Internet shock jock and FBI confidential informant Hal Turner said federal agents — while asking his help in identifying a white supremacist killer — told him to “ratchet up the rhetoric.”
Turner, on trial for threatening the life of three federal judges who issued rulings supporting gun control, claims he followed the agents’ suggestion immediately, posting a picture of Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow of Federal District Court in Chicago on his blog below the headline “Gotcha!” and later appearing on television to declare the judge “worthy of death.” In exchange, Turner said, he was paid by the F.B.I.
In his five hours on the witness stand, Turner detailed his ascent as a shock jock, as well as his relationship with the F.B.I. , which he says encouraged his seemingly racist rants over the years. Turner’s first trial ended with a deadlocked jury last year, with prosecutors admitting then that he was an F.B.I. informant.
In that trial, Michael A. Orozco, one of Turner’s lawyers, offered as a defense that his client is “nothing but a shock jock.” Turner has long been notorious for making anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, white supremacist remarks and encouraging violence on his Internet radio show and companion Web site. Last June, for example, he posted this message: “The government — especially these three judges — are cunning, ruthless, untrustworthy, disloyal, unpatriotic, deceitful scum.”
Offering that opinion was certainly Turner’s right — but going on to say, “These judges deserve to be killed” may not be. “That is not just political rhetoric,” said the prosecutor, assistant United States attorney William R. Hogan. “It is not O.K. — very definitely not O.K. — for him to call for their execution and their murder.”
That’s when Orozco chimed in. Not only was Turner just a “shock jock” offering constitutionally-protected “opinion,” he was also speaking and acting in accordance with guidelines the F.B.I. had set out for him as a confidential informer, Orozco noted. In fact, he added, the F.B.I. had even requested that Turner turn up the heat and the volume of his remarks to impress — and perhaps infiltrate — certain shadowy groups the Bureau was looking into. Turner’s “hand was guided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Orozco said. “He was providing a service. This is betrayal.”
Prosecutor Hogan acknowledged in his opening statement that Turner was an informer for the government, beginning in 2004 and culminating in 2007.
In his retrial, Mr. Turner has claimed he is opposed to the racist views he expounded, and said he never wanted anyone to get hurt.
Instead, he says, he is a a patriot who worked on behalf of the government to infiltrate the white supremacist movement, and never believed the messages he put forth supposedly at the behest of the feds. As proof, he offered a letter he wrote to an F.B.I. agent that noted, “the person you hear [or hear about] on radio is not real life.”
Turner also faces state charges in Connecticut, for telling his followers to “take up arms” against state lawmakers who voted to give Catholic lay members more control over church finances.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg has finally done the right – and democratic – thing in reversing a previous boneheaded decision by the New York Police Department to deny official ‘working press’ passes to reporters at online or nontraditional news outlets – such as this one!
The turnabout came as a result of a lawsuit filed by three such reporters — Rafael Martinez Alequin, Ralph E. Smith and David Wallis. There was never any real doubt that all were “legitimate” reporters. Wallis, for example, had been issued a valid NYPD press identification card for many years, beginning in 1994. He is a noted journalist whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and numerous other prominent publications, and is also well known as the founder of featurewell.com, a professional syndication service that provides news coverage to 1,500 publications worldwide. (Disclosure: Featurewell has syndicated many of my blog posts and articles in the past.) Smith is publisher of The Guardian Chronicle, a Web site for black law enforcement workers, and Martinez Alequin published The Brooklyn Free Press for years, followed by the online New York City Free Press and then the blog Your Free Press. All were credentialed as working journalists by the NYPD —until 2007, when they were suddenly deemed illegitimate and denied press passes without explanation. As a direct result, their ability to engage in professional activities was hampered –which may well have been the aim. The New York Times has identified Martinez Alequin, for example, as “a longtime City Hall gadfly” and “persona non grata in City Hall.”
As I wrote in November 2008:
“the decision to hold back official recognition of his role as a journalist is blatantly stupid… Why is the Mayor opening himself up to charges that police permits are denied to journalists who may have viewpoints considered controversial? Is the problem perhaps that Martinez Alequin has been insufficiently reverential of powerful politicians? (He once angered [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani by noting that the NYPD was “trigger-happy when it comes to blacks and Latinos,” and was later publicly chastised by the current mayor for referring to his autobiography “Bloomberg by Bloomberg” as “Bloomberg on Bloomberg.” Whatever!) In any event, Martinez Alequin has it right when he says, “There are many questions that have to be asked to the mayor or to any elected official that I think the mainstream media very seldom asks.”
After exhausting other means of appeal, the ‘New York Three’ literally made a federal case out of it, filing a lawsuit asserting that the NYPD violated their constitutional rights and contending that the city’s regulations governing press credentialing were “unconstitutionally vague.”
This week they won. The City of New York settled with them and announced proposed new rules for issuing press passes to members of the media. If adopted by the Police Department, as is likely, the new rules will modernize the City’s credentialing system to reflect the recent seismic changes to the media industry and, for the first time, will expressly include online-only media such as blogs.
“This is a press credentialing system for the online age that can serve as a model for governments around the country,” said Administrative Law Division Chief Gabriel Taussig. “The rules were drafted in a collaborative process with input from numerous interested participants.”
Chief among those “interested participants,” of course, are Wallis, Smith and Martinez Alequin. “We have streamlined and improved New York City’s Rules for Press Credentials,” said Norman Siegel, their attorney in the lawsuit. “The new rules will enable journalists to gather and report news in a more successful manner than before. Online journalists will now be considered as 21st century journalists and be treated equally to print, television and radio journalists.”
Perhaps this decision will finally put an end to one of the longest-running (and frankly dumbest) debates in the history of modern media: “Are bloggers journalists?” There can be no doubt that people like David Wallis, Rafael Martinez Alequin, and Ralph E. Smith are practicing journalism – and that makes them, de facto, practicing journalists. Nuff said?
Note: A public comment period on the proposed new rules extends through April 7, 2010. On that day, a hearing on the rules, open to the public, will be held at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
– Bob Dylan 
In their new book The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert McChesney and John Nichols make what they like to frame as “the patriotic case for government action” as a proposed remedy for “the malaise of the media.”
In a recent Manhattan forum sponsored by The Nation magazine, Nichols and McChesney discussed and debated the linked crises of hope, vision and lost revenue models currently afflicting American journalists – and by extension every other citizen. Other “media experts” on the panel included Pamela Newkirk of New York University Journalism School and columnist David Carr of the New York Times. To my surprise, I found myself more in agreement with the Timesman than with Nichols and McChesney, founders of the advocacy group Free Press.
The notion that a free society requires a free press is almost universally acknowledged. So is the fact that many legacy media outlets – the New York Times and The Nation among them – now face a resource emergency. The industry’s “lost revenue model” – the subject of seemingly endless posts, articles, speeches, books and above all industry conferences — has made it increasingly difficult to pay for newsgathering. But the question raised by the Nation forum – “So how do we save journalism?” — and the specific solutions offered by Nichols and McChesney – massive government subsidies to the tune of thirty billion dollars, a number they say correlates in today’s dollars with what was spent on media subsidies in the 1800s — are revealing new fault lines and dividing journalists and media-reform activists into sometimes unlikely camps.
As Nation editor/publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel noted, she and many others like Nichols and McChesney have been trying to raise the twinned issues of media and democracy for years.
And the notion that what Nichols dubbed “enlightened public subsidies” for mediamakers like myself is, on first blush, undeniably attractive. After all, when the building is on fire, it can be awfully hard to question where the water should come from…
It’s also hard to question the McChesney/Nichols assertion that “creating a viable free press is the first duty … of the democratic state.” But can a vibrant press be kept free of government interference and censorship while being sustained by massive government subsidies? And even if the answer is yes—should it be? Increasingly media practitioners are weighing in on the subject – and many are saying “No.”
Among them are two former colleagues of mine, media critic and journalism professor Dan Kennedy and Open Source host Christopher Lydon. Writing in the Huffington Post, Lydon noted that “the Internet is already the government’s accidental gift” to journalism, “worth much more than $30 billion to have wiped out the cost of paper, printing, delivery and all the capital barriers to a worldwide marketplace of ideas.” For good measure Lydon added, “My guess is that Thomas Jefferson, a blogger in retirement, would be reading and reveling in the digital miracle that has enabled kindred spirits like Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Joshua Micah Marshall and Arianna Huffington… not to mention Robert McChesney, John Nichols and their admirable creation, FreePress.Net.”
Meanwhile Kennedy, one of new media’s most astute observers, also questioned the McChesney/Nichols prescription. “What role should the government have in preserving public-interest journalism? If you’re a First Amendment absolutist (and I consider myself to be pretty close), you might immediately respond with a resounding ‘none,’” Kennedy wrote on his Media Nation blog.
As Kennedy concluded, “the real problem with government assistance” may well be that “once you start relying on it, you are forever subject to the vagaries of the political moment.”
David Carr made much the same point during the Nation panel discussion. “Government versus market—which is more dependable and efficient?” Carr asked, adding that giving government money to the press at a time when “we can’t fund schools, hospitals or infrastructure” might be a tough sell. He concluded by denouncing as “preposterous” the notion that “great journalism will come from government subsidies.”
Instead of depending “on Uncle Sam for handouts,” Carr opined, we would all be better off asking –and answering – the following question: “What are our cultural priorities?”
Makes sense to me—what do you think?
“And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”
