A cure for the cancer in journalism

Balance propaganda with facts

By Daniel Simpson

LONDON, Nov 18 - Earlier this year, the Financial Times landed a scoop so hot it didn’t print it. Neither did anyone else.

That’s not quite the whole story though: the exclusive still languishes online, in the transcript of an interview with David Miliband. And a handful of activists have circulated the Foreign Secretary’s admission that Britain was accusing Iran of acts of war on the basis of nothing but hot air.

“I chose my words carefully,” Miliband said, as if this explained away his comment that Tehran shouldn’t be “fomenting discord, never mind death” in Basra, even if it wasn’t. “Just to be clear, there is evidence?” a correspondent enquired. Miliband’s reply was unequivocal: “Well no.” But the FT didn’t think this was newsworthy, so the quotes didn’t feature in either of the paper’s write-ups.

Even when these sorts of revelations are reported, rather than buried, they rarely rouse the press into feral beastliness, for all Tony Blair’s pretence to the contrary. If they did, they’d be recycled as essential background, and in questions to officials on television.

How many times have you heard about the U.S. death squads in Iraq, for example, or their role in fomenting discord? A couple of years ago, Newsweek revealed the revival of “the Salvador option” of arming militias to kill adversaries. The retired commander of U.S. Special Operations promptly popped up on NBC’s Today show to defend what he called “a very valid tactic”. Moreover, General Wayne Downing continued, “it’s actually something we’ve been doing since we started the war back in March of 2003.”

Weeks later, Lieutenant-General William Boykin told Congress it was “a legitimate mission” to assassinate targets from a hit list, as the CIA did in Vietnam under Operation Phoenix. Special forces were “doing a pretty good job of that right now,” the New York Times quoted Boykin as saying. “I think we’re doing what the Phoenix program was designed to do,” he elaborated, “without all of the secrecy.”

Astonishing facts can appear and vanish within a news cycle. Last year, an investigation by Amnesty International found the U.S. had shipped at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Baghdad. “Though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military,” the Guardian reported, “there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.” Where they went is as unclear as what happened to $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, which the U.S. airlifted to Iraq and doled out without an audit trail.

As for why the Americans invaded, most pundits still seem baffled, even if the former central banker Alan Greenspan says “it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” It’s certainly not been journalistically convenient to investigate what Tony Blair called “one of the most absurd conspiracy theories ever”. Newsnight only mentioned it once a group of activists called Platform had documented how Western multinationals are trying to control Iraqi crude.

The other great unmentionable is a network of permanent bases, the biggest of which, Balad, handles almost as much traffic as Heathrow. Here, U.S. troops and mercenaries are digging in, not preparing to pull out of a country they’ve helped to Balkanise, leaving hundreds of thousands of dead civilians and millions more refugees.

“The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it,” wrote the American journalist Jim Holt, in an essay that’s since been picked up by the FT, “but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth.”