Halter on Siegel

Zounds, on Thursday evening's ATC, Mr. Heft and Humanity himself, Robert Siegel, was even more jazzed for the dazzling "accuracy" of our air-war toys than his guest, General Halter. And who is this Halter fellow? I'll let Siegel describe him: "Irv Halter. That's retired U.S. Air Force Major General Irving Halter Jr., who is now with the applied technology group of the defense contractor, CSC. " CSC? Oh them...ka-ching!

Here are some of Siegel's laser-guided questions for the Halter:

"Does a pilot who is flying over Libya today have a very different and clearer sense of what his targets are than a pilot who was flying over, say, the Balkans back in the early '90s?"

-or-

"Is the result of all this that when a plane goes out and it's hoping to hit a tank on a highway, that the odds of hitting the gas station alongside the highway are far, far, far less than they might have been, say, 15 or 20 years ago."

To which Halter gleefully answers:

"Absolutely. We had pretty good precision 20 years, 15 years ago. We have much better precision now. But at the end of the day, something can occur, for instance, you know, during the Serbian fight there was a situation where an individual was getting ready to drop a bomb on a bridge and he noticed that there was a train coming for that bridge. And so, he had to steer the weapon away at the last minute. That was a decision that the pilots made. If he hadn't have seen that, then something bad could have happened."

Let's just say that "pretty good precision" depended on whether you were on the delivering or receiving end of NATO's humanitarian operation, and that BS about not hitting the train is pure Reaganesque making-crap-up - but since NPR seems to do so little research for these pieces, there is no attempt at correcting the record. Then again NPR never lets facts get in the way of selling the idea that US airpower is the most compassionate in the world.

A Militant Funeral

NPR may struggle mightily with what to call torture - "the problem is that the word torture is loaded with political and social implications for several reasons, including the fact that torture is illegal under U.S. law and international treaties the United States has signed" - but when it comes to human beings killed by the US military, be they civilians or irregular forces, there's no hesitation: they are militants plain and simple.

This morning David Greene introduces another drone attack story by claiming that the "US has struck again at militants near the border with Afghanistan. The American airstrikes yesterday killed at least 45 militants...." Greene then turns things over to Julie McCarthy who says, "The details of the assault on the remote tribal area of South Waziristan - known as Pakistan's badlands - are still emerging, but local media report that dozens of militants were killed when three drone missiles were fired on Taliban fighters as they gathered for a funeral of fellow militants."

There are a few problems with Greene and McCarthy's reporting. Despite the heavy civilian toll of past drone attacks, Greene asserts as fact that "at least 45 militants" were killed. So where is the evidence? How does he know any of them were "militants." McCarthy notes that details "are still emerging," but that doesn't stop her from claiming that "local media report that dozens of militants were killed," that they were "Taliban fighters," and that it was a "funeral of fellow militants." So what local media is McCarthy referring to, and just how were the dead identified as "Taliban fighters"?

It's interesting to look at other reports of the same attack. According to the BBC

"At least 43 people have died in missile strikes by a US drone aircraft in a militant stronghold of Pakistan, a Taliban spokesman has told the BBC."

Pretty basic journalistic practice. "People" get killed, and the allegations are sourced. The Guardian goes even further noting that "one local security official, who could not be identified as he was not authorised to speak to media, said that more than 60 had died of whom 'half are civilians'." Civilians? What do you know, another detail that NPR somehow missed.

In addition to the factual vagaries of the report, Greene and McCarthy's casual attitude about unmanned killing machines and attacks on a funeral is really disturbing. So now it's acceptable military practice to bomb funerals? It's telling that when the word is torture NPR is concerned about "the fact that torture is illegal under U.S. law and international treaties," but when they are using language favorable to the US military there is no such concern.

Chickens and Eggs

(Cross-posted at Corrente)
As mentioned in an earlier post on the most recent Afghan carnage from US air strikes, NPR presents heaps of skepticism when the US military is accused of any wrongdoing. This drumbeat was maintained by the "liberal" Dan Schorr on Saturday morning:

"...although military sources say they believe that the Taliban itself may have been responsible for at least some of those. The real problem there is that because we don't have enough troops in Afghanistan - that they do a lot of their work from the air, and if you are working from the air...clearly if we go on being blamed for, whether or not we did it, being blamed for the civilian casualties - it's not going to help our cause very much."

You've just got to love that phrase "work from the air" - Schorr is certainly doing his work on the air!

On Monday morning we get to hear from Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson who tells us

"There are very widely diverging accounts about what happened. You have the US military saying that the Taliban in fact may have caused these casualties. You have the human rights commissions saying these were caused by bombs, although they're basing this on second hand accounts....villagers that in fact the attacks did come from the Americans. BUT WHAT SEEMS TO BE CLEAR is that the Taliban instigated these attacks, that basically they had gone into these two remote villages and tried to collect taxes, behead people, or just take over the villages depending on who you talk to..."

How's that for logic? This is not a defense of the Taliban, but - seriously - because they are fighting the puppet of Kabul and the US/NATO occupiers they "instigated" the slaughter of civilians? But wait, shouldn't Nelson have said that the US instigated the deaths when it attacked Afghanistan in 2001? No, wait, maybe it was the Taliban who instigated the deaths when it hosted al-Qaeda who attacked the US in 2001...no, wait, it was the US who helped extremists come to power by funding the mujaheddin...no, wait, it was the Soviets who invaded Afghanistan in 1979...no wait it was the US who baited the Soviets into invading Afghanistan in the first place, no, wait....

Was it the chicken or the egg? On NPR, definitely the chicken...

Same Slaughter, Same Reporter

I think it's time to drug test JJ Sutherland - the man seems to be hyped up on testosterone in a big way. I was going to pass on last week's clipped-sentence tough-guy narration of an Air Force Cross won by a US airman for a firefight and assault in Afghanistan - until I heard him again this morning using the uber-macho style to sing the praises of the the US air-war machine again.

Here's a sample of last week's Sutherland:

"They came in at first light. Giant helicopters swooped into Shak Valley....'kind of trapped ourselves,' he says. Their mission had changed; now it was all about getting out alive....calling in air strikes from above: F-15s, Apaches, A-10s; it goes on for hours....had to call in air strikes practically on top of his own position: rockets, cannons, bombs. Nothing worked. Finally, they had only one option left....a TWO THOUSAND POUND BOMB."

Interestingly, in Sutherland's wargasmic homage he didn't mention a bit of information I found buried in an Air Force write-up of the attack:

"By the end of the fight, between 150 and 200 insurgents were killed, according to reports." We all know how accurate the US military has been about killing "insurgents" (i.e. If they kill you, you're an insurgent).

I also found that Afghans had a bit of a different take on the "mission."

That was last Tuesday, and then there was this Monday morning's quasi-religious worship of the fighter pilot, or as NPR titled it "Same Swagger, Different Jets."

Sutherland was at it again, chopping his sentences into manly Hemingway-size chunks:

"Fighter pilot: confident, swagger, ego...those who survive the competition are supremely confident. Ask any fighter pilot and he'll tell you a dogfight is no place for self-doubt. Results are what matter. Everyone in your squadron knows whether you succeeded or choked....the swagger's the same as it was when Yeager was flying P-51 Mustangs over Germany....at 9-Gs the blood is forced from your brain. It's hard to breathe, let alone talk, let alone be twisting around in your seat looking for someone trying to kill you....It's hard to imagine hearing this ['I feel the need, the need - for speed - ow!'] coming from a cubicle."

Yeah, nothing like all that supreme confidence when you're napalming peasants, cluster bombing Afghan villages, and flattening cities in Iraq. No place for questioning orders, no place for morality, just swagger - like JJ, radio warrior.

What They Carry

Talking about US air power in Afghanistan on Thursday's ATC Tom Bowman informs us,

"Those Predators can carry two 100-pound bombs. There's also a jumbo version, the Reaper, which holds three 1,000-pound bombs."

What he modestly failed to mention is that - when it comes to carrying water for the Pentagon - nothing can compete with the Tom Bowman drone (except maybe Mary Louise Kelly).

According to Bowman drones are going to be VERY important in Afghanistan:

"...it's not just helicopters that commanders are demanding, they also want more drone aircraft — the kind President Bush bragged about in a speech this week at West Point." We actually get to hear the Bragger-in-Chief say, "We're arming Predator drones. We're using them to stay on the hunt against the terrorists who would do us harm."

As Bowman notes, "Besides hitting targets, the drones also see the battlefield, which in this case is the entire country of Afghanistan." I think we can all guess that there will be a few civilian casualties when the entire country is the battlefield.

Civilian casualties? Not to worry with the super-vision, high resolution, extra-humane Reaper. According to Air Force Col. Eric Mathewson, who works on a special task force at the Pentagon, the Reaper is so precise that "from five miles away I can pick out what color clothes you're wearing." (I wonder if that means they'll be able to tell when folks are dressed up for a wedding...) If you're still not convinced, the NPR website of the story has a little snuff video of the US "on the hunt" which you can watch - compliments of the Department of Defense.

Unfortunately, this hawking of the Afghanistan air war is just "the second of a three-part series on the American military strategy in Afghanistan." Yesterday it was the buildup of ground troops, today the ramped up air war, and tomorrow will be about supply routes. Dronin' Tom Bowman is working overtime to spiff up and sanitize the bloody, ugly "aimless absurdity" of the Afghanistan war and sell it to us from the Pentagon's perspective. What he'll never tell us is how this rattle-trap, illegal junker of a war is just the latest retread of a Soviet retread of an fine, old British wreck of imperial map stabbing:

Seriously, on Wednesday Bowman talked to Brig. Gen. Mark Milley, a senior American officer in Afghanistan, who said that the incoming US troops "will change the nature of the game in the particular areas we're going to employ them." Bowman noted that "Milley stabbed at a point on a map — a spot near Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, where Taliban forces are blowing up bridges and attacking buses and trucks heading to the city."

NPR's three part series so far has done nothing to indicate the moral cesspool that the US effort in Afghanistan has been from the beginning and the quagmire that it may well become. One only hopes that the incoming Obama administration will have more sense than Team NPR....

More Than Ten Militants

This morning (Friday) during the news summary Giles Snyder reads this from his script:

"In eastern Afghanistan US led forces have killed more than ten militants. The military says in a statement that the militants were killed during fighting that targeted the network of a veteran Taliban commander northeast of the capital of Kabul. Separately coalition troops detained two militants in a raid."

You have to love that forceful (should we say Northful?) opening sentence - not a shred of doubt there. Which is odd, given that the source of the "facts" has a long and proven track record of lies and cover-ups when it comes to killing "militants" who turn out to be women, children and wedding parties.

Given the very recent little horror of slaughter that the US committed and tried to hide, this blurb from NPR comes off as their giving the finger to listeners. I've written NPR over and over again complaining about their unquestioning repetition of Pentagon claims regarding "militants" being killed, but they obviously feel no compunction to maintain even the barest standards of journalism when it comes to repeating the claims of the US military - how Foxy of them...

Militant Radio

Definition 2 from Merriam Webster online's entry for militant is useful: aggressively active (as in a cause) : combative <militant conservationists> militant attitude>

During the hourly news summaries this morning Jackie Northam simply read out a US military statement regarding the killing of several dozen human beings in Afghanistan. By afternoon Craig Wyndam had dropped any reference to the dubious source and was presenting the propaganda if it were established fact:

"In the southern part of the country clashes between militants and Afghan and US-led troops led to a coalition airstrike that killed 25 militants, but also 8 civilians who were being held hostage."

I'm not saying that the information is definitely untrue. It might be true, but - given the record of our high flying wedding crashers - it might well be a flat-out lie. Simply rebroadcasting the US/NATO version of events is sloppy at best, criminal at worst. NPR could simply tell us briefly what the US/NATO version is and then state, "At the current time we have no way of verifying the claims." Or God forbid, they could unembed Jackie Northam who is covering US special forces and their "ambitious training project expected to pay dividends" and send her off to investigate the scene, interview witnesses and report on the findings.

An Endless Supply of Militants

Sickened and frustrated, I sent the following to the Ombudsman:

Dear Ombudsman,

This morning at 8am ET, your newscaster Giles Snyder read the following report during the hourly news summary:

"In eastern Afghanistan, airstrikes have killed at least 22 militants. The US led coalition says Afghan police called for help when Taliban gunmen attacked government offices in two separate towns in Paktika province last night. A provincial governor says surviving militants fled toward the Pakistani border."

As a member of my local NPR affiliated station, I am requesting NPR to be more professional in its reporting and stop its usual practice of repeating as fact claims that are made by US military authorities in Iraq and by US-NATO authorities in Afghanistan.

You must know that the credibility of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan has been proven to be lacking. The McClatchy News service has recently confirmed that the US military practiced the systematic use of torture for nearly two years early in the Afghanistan War. Also the Afghanistan War has been marked from the start by high levels of civilian casualties from US airstrikes, numbers which the US military has denied. It was only last May and June that media attention was focused on the extremely high numbers of civilian deaths in Afghanistan and the US and NATO's reluctance to admit their responsibility.

You also must know that disputes over US-NATO claims about its airstrikes in Afghanistan have not diminished. A brief look at RAWA, a respected Afghan women's advocacy group, reveals stories on June 11, 2008, June 14, 2008, and June 23, 2008 that call into question the credibility of US-NATO authorities regarding their actions in Afghanistan.

I know you must be very busy and I'm not assuming you will have a chance to read all the links I've included in this letter, but I felt it was important to convey to you that this is not just a matter of opinion and perception. NPR is practicing poor journalism and doing its listeners a grave disservice by repeatedly restating the statements of US-NATO military authorities as if they were factual.

If NPR is going to persist in broadcasting the statements of NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, it is essential that these statements be qualified by disclaimers such as "Previous coalition assertions frequently have been inaccurate or disputed by witnesses," or "Our staff were unable to independently confirm any of these figures through observation or interviews."

Thank you for your time, and you should be aware that I am posting this letter, and any response I receive, on my blog, NPR Check.

We'll see what comes of it...

It's So Cool

Andrea Seabrook talks to "Colonel John Forsythe, call sign 'Ripper'" about the retirement of the US stealth bomber, F-17A, called "the Nighthawk." Seabrook gets really excited about this bomber. Here's a taste of this love fest:

Seabrook: "It's the plane that I always call the Batman symbol."
Ripper: "It does look like the Batman symbol."

Seabrook: "This plane the Nighthawk has had a big role in many US conflicts over the past thirty years: both Iraq wars, Serbia, the Panama invasion just to name a few, how is it used in combat?"
Ripper: "...allows us to go right to downtown Baghdad, downtown Belgrade, any target set within a country we can get to..."

Seabrook: "Do you think there's anything you'll miss though, about the Nighthawk?"
Ripper: "One thing about the Nighthawk, particularly because of its physical appearance, It's really etched in the national psyche."
Seabrook: "Yeah, it's so cool."
Ripper: "It is."

I agree, there is just something so cool about bombing cities whether in Panama, the first Gulf War, or Serbia; it's like seeing the Bat Light bouncing off the clouds.

Two Thousand Bucks

There is something truly grotesque about a nation that spends $12 billion a month on wars in two countries and then offers a few of the families of local victims of its wars $2000 a piece for those killed. There is an ugly racist math involved, too, when one considers the compensation given to US victims of 9/11. However, equally grotesque is a "public" media outlet - NPR - praising this crass use of blood money to supposedly win hearts and minds.

Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports from Afghanistan on Wednesday's ATC with Michele Norris introducing the story. "Deaths from NATO raids and air strikes have badly damaged relations with the Afghan people, so the US is trying to make amends" Norris assures us.

Nelson then comes on to say how one US raid killed six people, "including a mother and two children." The local governor, she tells us "is not happy...but he's determined to help the military right this wrong, lest the insurgents gain from the tragedy." She describes how US military teams meet with locals who lost family in the raid:

"And so begins a tough 40 minute meeting, a meeting that under international law doesn't have to take place. Nor do American payments need to be made to relatives of the dead which in this case amounts to $2000 for each of the six people killed, but the Americans believe such meetings and payments help keep Afghanistan from ending up back in the hands of the Taliban."

In case you're like me, and thinking that our government and Pentagon leaders are really sick and soulless individuals, Nelson props up the morality of such payoffs by tagging them with an endorsement from Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. Nelson also includes a bit of justification for the killings by touching base with Col. Martin Schweitzer, head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and noting that "he says in this case some of the dead...were insurgents linked to hundreds of Afghan deaths."

To be fair, Nelson did convey the weight of the losses suffered by the local people in this Afghan village - and relates their anger. She mentions that one adolescent boy at the meeting lost both parents and that his uncle must now raise him and several orphans. But the human tragedies were undermined by her insistence on the overall morality and noble intentions of the US military.

Merchant of Death, Lord of War

Thursday evening Melissa Block reports on weapons dealer, Viktor Bout, who was arrested in Thailand. She says he is "known as the Merchant of Death and the Lord of War." Oooooh, imagine that! Block notes that "starting in the 1990s Viktor Bout made a business of providing arms to fuel wars from Sudan to Sierra Leone to Rwanda to Afghanistan...." I can't imagine what kind of sick, disgusting warmongering profiteers would flood the developing world - and especially the continent of Africa - with weaponry.

Block interviews Doug Farah, an investigative journalist, who coauthored a book about Bout. She expresses great surprise that "he fueled conflicts all over the world, [but]...also did a lot of work for the US military it seems." What's the surprise? Has she ever heard of Dick Cheney? Does she ever read any independent articles about US arms exports?

Farah responds, "He did, ironically, after helping to inflame conflicts in Africa throughout the 1990s and even working with the Taliban in Afghanistan and indirectly al-Qaeda...he then flipped and began working with the US military and also for private contractors in Iraq."

Hmm, what other dastardly crew of individuals helped inflame conflicts in Africa and even helped to build al-Qaeda? So why does Farah considers it "ironic," and call it a "flip" when Bout starts working with the US military?

Block's surprise and Farah's framing of Bout's lethal business help to buttress the narrative that in the world there are "bad guys" and then there is the US military establishment and its allies, the "good guys." Even when a story concerns negative behavior of the US (in this report Farah discusses the US government's close work with Bout in Iraq) the report is always based on the assumption that US military and foreign policy is at its core decent, humane and moral.

The Bal(l)ad of Raz

Air Strikes? What Air Strikes?

A series of three otherworldly, bizarre pieces came from Guy Raz this week on NPR news. He was reporting from the Balad Air Base, which as he put it on Friday afternoon is a "16 square mile fortress that's right in the heart of Iraq." If Raz hadn't already shown that he can be a blatant liar in his reporting, has a quasi-erotic hankering for high-tech lethal weaponry, and has got more spin in him than Dana Perino - then I might think that Raz' report from Balad was a sophisticated operation where he plays stupid in order to let the details of the permanent Balad megabase speak for themselves, but...

On Wednesday morning it was a painfully ironic piece about how in spite of the massive base and activity there, the role of air power in Iraq is actually minimal! Raz tells us that "Lt. General Gary north says [the war in Iraq] doesn't lend itself to the use of heavy air power...limits what the Air Force can do from the sky..." Of the F-16s in Iraq, Raz notes that according to one of the pilots "F-16s do sometimes drop bombs, but they're mainly used now to harass suspected insurgents or unruly crowds on the ground..." Of course the terrible irony of the piece was brought home the next day when the US "harassed" an "unruly crowd" of 15 civilians into their graves. (Of course this is nothing new.)

The New World Order

Wednesday afternoon was interesting for the report on the use of dirt cheap labor inside Balad. The piece was presented as rather matter-of-fact about how many foreign workers are used in US bases and work for substandard wages. Kind of gives you a sense of what the template for US hegemony in the world really means.

Harleys and the Long Haul

Friday afternoon fills out the picture of Balad as a permanent base with Guy giving us the nonsense about the US being in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government: "Pentagon officials insist that the U.S. military is in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government, and will depart when asked to do so." (Does anyone buy this line anymore?)

Ras begins this report begins with a really offensive set up: "16 square mile fortress that's right in the heart of Iraq. And all of it with an eye toward the next few decades. And as the President has said the US is establishing a long term relationship with the government in Baghdad (Bush voice comes in) 'We have done this kind of work before in Europe; we have done this kind of work before in Japan; we have done this kind of work before and it can be done again.' " This is presented in all seriousness...holy cow!

Then we hear about how Balad is like a little piece of America with Subways and even Harley motorcycles for sale (where the hell does one ride a motorcycle in Iraq? I was picturing a kind of Motorcycle Diaries from Hell movie in the making.)

For pieces on the air war in Iraq take a look at Tomgram, Mother Jones, or Project Censored.

It's a Guy Thing

This morning Guy Raz gives us a peak into his soft-porn obsession with military aircraft. He begins by bragging "so in the past few weeks alone, I've ridden in an Army Black Hawk helicopter in Kuwait...hovered over Paris in a twin-rotor [sic] Marine CH-53 helicopter...flown around the world on the E-4B which is basically the most secretive and classified 747 in the world...been over Afghanistan in a Chinook helicopter...but nothing I've seen, no aircraft can quite compare to the F-22...there is nothing quite like it on earth; it looks like something out of the future....

The F-22 has caught his fancy: "...the plane is called The Raptor and there are only about 70 of them in existence, most of them at Langley...there are only 100 F-22 pilots in the world. The Air Force likes to call the plane America's insurance policy...sometimes I dream of going up in an F-22, but alas, I never will, there's only room for the pilot."

America's insurance policy! That's rich.

Given the utter non-coverage of the current escalating death-from-the-air being waged in Iraq, and the slaughter that the USAF has unleashed in places a widespread as Panama, Cambodia, Iraq (in 1991), and Afghanistan there is something positively necrophilic about Raz's panting aircraft fantasy.

Raz opens his report by describing the little windowless room that NPR has deep inside the Pentagon. He says, "It's NPR's Pentagon office and working in that windowless room under the hum of fluorescent lighting can be soul destroying..." I hate to break it to him, but it's going to be hard to destroy something that he's already sold.