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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Iraq : Media : Political-Economy : Regime |
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N.Y. Times Has Really Bad Day On Torture, The Constitution, & Pentagon Mendacity |
Current rating: 0 |
by Doug Ireland
(No verified email address) |
07 Mar 2005
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In any case, what isn't in today's Times says a lot about what a sluggish, bureaucratic entity that newspaper has become, how much it rather consistently misses stories that need to be brought to light for the health of our democracy, and how little its coddling attitudes toward the centers of power in Washington have changed since Noam Chomsky began referring to the Times a number of years ago as part of the "business press" -- indeed, it appears that, since 9/11, they've actually gotten worse on national security issues. |
Sunday's New York Times lead front-page story out of Washington is headlined "Rule Change Lets CIA Freely Send Suspects Abroad." It's nice to see the Times finally catching up to the story that the Bush administration has been routinely sending people of being accused of terrorism to despotic allies of Washington, where physical torture is commonplace and will be visited on those suspected terrorists (although the word "torture" only made it into the subhead in the Times story, not the main headline.) A significant number of other major news outlets -- from the WashPost to the Guardian, not to mention the major European dailies and the BBC -- have been reporting this story for months. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about it a year ago. So did my friend Tom Engelhardt, in a particularly tough and prescient piece. However, better late than never, I suppose, where the arteriosclerotic Times is concerned.
But the Times and its reporters, Doug Jehl and David Johnston, missed a hugely significant aspect of this story that strikes at the very heart of our democracy--a story which luckily can be found on the front page of the Sunday Baltimore Sun (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.bang06mar06,1,5225849.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines). Says the Sun, "The Bush administration is aggressively wielding a rarely used executive power known as the state-secrets privilege in an attempt to squash hard-hitting court challenges to its anti-terrorism campaign....
"The government is invoking the privilege in an attempt to wipe out the heart of a lawsuit that seeks to examine rendition, the secretive and controversial practice of sending terrorism suspects to foreign countries where they might be tortured....
"Use of the secrets privilege could also eliminate a suit by a former FBI contract linguist who charges that the bureau bungled translations of terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11 attacks....
"The secrets privilege is an especially powerful weapon because federal judges, reluctant to challenge the executive branch on national security, almost never refuse the government's claim to confidentiality.
"That is true even though a growing body of declassified documents suggests that in the past, at least, the privilege has been used to protect presidential power, not national secrets, according to Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/) at George Washington University, which works to expand public access to government documents....." There's a lot more to this enormously significant story, and you should read all of it by clicking here (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.bang06mar06,1,5225849.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines).
What this story in the Sun means is that, in yet another Constitution-shredding assault on the separation of powers enshrined in that document, the imperial Bush administration is attempting to castrate the third branch of the federal government, the judiciary, by deploying this national security ukase. With the judiciary increasingly stacked with conservatives, and with even so-called liberals on the courts largely cowed whenever the bloody flag of the national security state's "war" on terrorism is waved, asserting this secret privilege steals from the citizenry of our Republic, and even from the Supreme Court, the right to challenge both liberticide administration projects, and the White House's violations of international law in delivering women and men who've never been convicted of anything to the torture cells of countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and even to, of all places, Syria.
But here's what makes the Times having missed this mammoth Bush mugging of our Constitution utterly inexcusable: the Baltimore Sun picked up its front-pager today from the Chicago Tribune, where the excellent Andrew Zajac's report was published three days ago!
Not only that, the Times served as an uncritical transmission belt for the Pentagon's laughable excuse for its rendition policy -- that it was too expensive to send prisoners to, and hold them in, Guantanamo (even though the Bush administration, at great cost, had constructed the prison for precisely that purpose), the paper failing to provide the slightest context for, or qualification of, the Pentagon's absurd claim.
Another major story today's Times also missed: how Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist wounded and nearly killed by U.S. troops in Iraq after she was liberated by her Islamo-fascist kidnappers, had basically said the Pentagon's version of how and why U.S. bullets needlessly riddled the car she was riding in was a bald-faced lie.
There's little excuse for the Times having missed this story, either. The story broke in European media and on European wire services like Italy's Ansa at mid-day Saturday, Eastern Standard Time. It was the lead story on most European nightly TV newscasts, which--like that of France2, the largest froggie public television network--air at 2:00 PM E.S.T. (I caught the international francophone channel TV5's presentation of the Fr2 Sgrena segment in a newsflash a few minutes later). If the linguistically challenged inhabitants of the Times' 42nd St. headquarters couldn't read French or Italian, they could have read this story on DIRELAND, where I posted translations (http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/03/more_pentagon_l.html) of the principal elements of this story yesterday at 2:45 PM E.S.T. Bloomberg News had some, but not the most important, part of Sgrena's statements up on its website by 'noon yesterday as well. Thus, the information of Sgrena's challenge to the Pentagon's mendacity was widely available well before the Times' deadline for its Sunday print edition (moreover, at 9:00 AM this Sunday morning, you still can't find a reference to Sgrena's statements even on the Times' website). CBS, incidentally, didn't do any better: the first two lead segments on Saturday's CBS Evening News were on Sgrena, but her account of her shooting didn't get so much as a mention. It would seem that TV's capacity for instant response is exaggerated, as CBS had six hours to take note of and mention Sgrena's rejoinder to the Pentagon.
Just to make it perfectly clear that the Good Gray Lady's editors shouldn't have any credible deadline excuses for missing this blockbuster rebuttal of Rummy and Company's Big Lie, the Los Angeles Times--which has a much earlier West Coast deadline than their New York homonym--managed to get an original story (by its Rome staffer Tracy Wilkinson) into its Sunday edition, by that time providing new quotes from Sgrena that had been broadcast last night in an interview with her on Italian television. Today's Washington Post also has a story on Sgrena's Pentagon-contradicting revelations.
In Sunday's Il Manifesto, Sgrena writes an account of her capture, liberation, and wounding by U.S. soldiers that provides more details that suggest even more strongly that the shooting might well not have been accidental: she writes that her chauffeur "had communicated twice -- one to the embassy, once to Italy -- that we were en route to the airport." Given the assiduity with which the Italian government had been working on freeing Sgrena, it is really inconceivable that it would not have instantly notified the U.S. authorities that she was to travel the dangerous road to the Baghdad airport so as to assure her safe passage. Moreover, Sgrena writes that she is sure she was deliberately attacked. (Sgrena's article is available on the Il Manifesto website today only in PDF form to those with a subscription--but two lengthy resumes of the article appear today in French and have been posted on the Nouvel Observateur's website.)
Perhaps the establishment-think editors at the Times didn't find Sgrena credible, since she's a proud left-winger and works for the daily Il Manifesto, which is on the left of the left. Ah, but that excuse won't wash either, since Sgrena's version recounting the unnecessary and inexcusable nature of the shooting was confirmed by one of the agents of ultraconservative Bush buddy Silvio Berlusconi's own secret services, which have long had an incestuous relationship with the U..S. intelligence community ever since the days of the super-secret Operation Gladio at the height of the Cold War, and aren't therefore suspect as hotbeds of anti-Americanism.
(An aside: Gladio, as I wrote (http://www.citypages.com/databank/18/846/article3267.asp) some eight years ago, was a "CIA-NATO operation...which used neo-fascist elements of the military and intelligence communities in Italy and a dozen other Western European countries to undermine the left." I also wrote a series of columns over a decade ago for the Village Voice on Gladio--about revelations which the Times then, too, refused to cover; these columns are not available online, unfortunately. This little-known chapter in Cold War history, whose effects lasted well into the '70s and beyond, was finally recounted in detail in Nato's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, by Daniele Ganser, published in 2001 and based on extensive research conducted by the Center for Security Studies at Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology. But I digress....)
In any case, what isn't in today's Times says a lot about what a sluggish, bureaucratic entity that newspaper has become, how much it rather consistently misses stories that need to be brought to light for the health of our democracy, and how little its coddling attitudes toward the centers of power in Washington have changed since Noam Chomsky began referring to the Times a number of years ago as part of the "business press" -- indeed, it appears that, since 9/11, they've actually gotten worse on national security issues.
I'd like to think there'd be a few red faces and a little embarrassment at the Times for having missed these two major stories that were easily available, and that perhaps there might even some soul-searching on 42nd St. as to why it happened twice in the same day. But I won't hold my breath....
© 2005 Doug Ireland
http://direland.typepad.com/direland/ |
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