Assassinating English: Belligerent Signals

A Belligerent Signal - from The Mirror (UK)

As usual, Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post on the distorted coverage by the US mainstream media [including NPR] regarding the latest assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist.  In spite of official US denial and condemnation of the murder - most experts agree that Israel - and possibly - the US were responsible for the killing (although at this time there is no conclusive proof).

However, as Glenn Greenwald points out, the murder allows us to see how the term "terrorism" is worthless as a factual term, but - in the US mainstream press - is a politically loaded term of propaganda applied ONLY to states and individuals deemed hostile to the US government/corporate interests.  By comparing the coverage of this actual terrorist attack against a civilian scientist to the coverage of the ludicrous US claims regarding Iran's supposed plot to kill a Saudi ambassador, one can see how the term "terrorism" is distorted and misused in most major news organizations in the US.  And NPR is no exception.

If you have any doubts that NPR is somehow distinct from other corporate news organizations, this latest story offers firm evidence to the contrary.  A simple search on NPR's site will reveal the way the NPR aligns its coverage:

Search "Iran terror assassination" on NPR's site and limit it to "Heard on Air" and you get FIVE stories (3-Morning Edition and 2-All Things Considered) on the flimsy, alleged Iranian assassination plot from October 2011, but NONE on this actual terrorist act against Iran. Among the stories from October is this chestnut featuring State Department "intellectual" Ray Takeyh throwing around various forms of the word "terror" (in relation to Iran) 13 times!

To find anything aired on NPR regarding the actual political murder of a civilian in Iran you have to drop "terror" from your search and simply query NPR with "Iran assassination" and limit it to "Heard on Air".  Doing this gives you ONE story on All Things Considered. Not only does this January 11, 2012 story not mention terror or terrorism, it features Peter Kenyon normalizing this assassination as a legitimate tool of statecraft.  Paraphrasing nuclear analyst David Albright, Kenyon says, "Tehran must be feeling the pressure." Albright then speaks,

"It knows that some of its scientists are under threat by assassination. There's been cyberattacks. There's efforts to get Iranians to defect. And we've called it kind of a third way. All those things are continuing, and that's added to the pressure."

If there is any doubt that Kenyon and NPR share this criminal attitude, Kenyon adds,

"This is the latest in a series of increasingly belligerent signals between Tehran and Western capitals."

That's interesting because I don't recall the "plot" to kill the Saudi ambassador described as a "belligerent signal," and I would wager a Romney-sized $10,000 that the assassination of a US or Israeli scientist by Iranian-backed killers would never be called a "belligerent signal" on NPR.

One can not help but listen to this rubbish from NPR and recall the previous Ombudsman's defense of NPR's refusal to call torture "torture" when the US committed it.  NPR could not call waterboarding torture  because, as she put it, "the problem is that the word torture is loaded with political and social implications for several reasons."  And of course, the exact same twisted reasoning must be motivating NPR to avoid using any form of the word terror to describe actions that serve US government interests - no matter how clearly they fit any basic understanding of the term.

Natural Born Killers

NPR gives the tiniest blip of airtime to dissenting views of the blatantly anti-Constitutional and illegal assassination of US citizen, and terrorist suspect, Anwar al-Awlaki.  Most of NPR's coverage is decidedly favorable US security establishment - such as Friday afternoon's summary by CIA spokesperson Dina Temple-Raston and Pentagon Sock Monkey, Rachel Martin's Saturday defense of the murders of al-Awalki and Samir Khan.  

Friday afternoon and evening's 5-minute news summary featured Abu Ghraib criminal interrogator/and trainer for the Iraqi Torture Interior Ministry - Professor Matthew Degn - plugging the glorious successes of the endless War on Terror:

[Jack Spear] "In what US officials are deeming a significant blow to al-Qaeda's most active affiliate...the man believed to directed the attempt to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas day among other plots was killed in a missile strike in Yemen today.  Matthew Degn is Director of Intelligence Studies at American University he says the attack is significant in the ongoing war with al-Qaeda.  [Degn] 'You win a war by defeating its leaders. You win a war by defeating the organization, and to do that you have to eliminate its leaders - capture or kill the leaders and that's what we're doing right now in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere around the world.'" [Now you know WTF we are doing in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere!]

The little squeak of dissent permitted occurred during Friday's ATC promisingly titled piece "Debate Erupts Over Legality of Awlaki's Killing." Carrie Johnson ran the briefest little clip of Hina Shamsi from the ACLU: 

[Shamsi] "The government should not have the unreviewable authority to carry out the targeted killing of any American, anywhere whom the American president deems to be a threat to the nation."

That was it for the dissenting viewpoint on Johnson's report.  The rest of the time was given to apologists for the assassination.  First was the Justice Department who Johnson tells us "responded that Awlaki wasn't just any American....[but] an operational leader who helped equip terrorist plotters with bombs." Next was Bushist lawyer, John Bellinger, who weighed in with this brilliant analysis: "The requirements of the Constitution with respect to due process for killing an American are not clear." [I swear I'm not making this crap up.]  To deliver a coup de grace to the concept of due process, Johnson found Ken Anderson, a professor who, according to Johnson, "says the analysis starts with whether Awlaki amounted to a lawful target, U.S. citizen or not." 

Probably the most grotesque defense of the assassination came from Rachel Martin on Saturday morning with Scott Simon.  Scott opens the discussion with an evidence free conviction of al-Awalki: "he was a key operative for al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen," and it's downhill from there.  Here are quotes from Martin - essentially her talking points - and they are indistinguishable from those of the Obama administration, the CIA, and the Pentagon:

• "...this was a man directly linked to several high profile terrorist attacks over the last couple of years." 
• "...part of why he was so important - because he INSPIRED others to violent action with his message." 
• "...he was the architect of that plot [Xmas day underwear bomber] against the United States.  This is what al-Awalki was all about...
• "one one side there is an argument that he is a US citizen, he has legal rights...but the US government is clear here Scott, they say this was legal..."
• "the US government argues that when someone, even an American citizen, joins the enemy in an ongoing war against the US that person becomes a legitimate target."

As our Constitution withers in the face the assaults of US corporate/security state with its promotion of endless war, NPR has made it clear which it is on.  To anyone still supporting NPR with donations, you do so at your own peril...

Zone of Cooperation

On Thursday's ME, finishing up a series (see Tues. ATC & Wed. ATC) of cooperative reports on "enhanced" and "harsh" interrogations (known under US domestic and international law as torture) - Tom Gjelten was on with his handler, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, to set the record straight on the "debate" about "enhanced interrogations."

In the Thursday piece, Gjelten is explaining how some of the first leads in tracking down Osama Bin Laden's courier came "from detainees who were interrogated while in CIA custody." Gjelten tells us that "about a third of the CIA detainees were subjected to what the agency euphemistically called enhanced interrogation techniques." So far, so good. It's helpful that he describes CIA spin as euphemism. A listener might expect that the next step would be to have someone from the ACLU or Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch come on to detail just what these now-admitted techniques (and unadmitted ones) were and how many detainees didn't make it through the enhanced care of the CIA.

The CIA and US military need not fear that Tom Gjelten or NPR would dare shed any light on the gruesome details of US torture. For an unbiased description of the techniques, Gjelten turns to - guess who? - former head of the CIA, Michael Hayden, who gently explains,

"They range from something as innocuous as something called the attention grasp or the facial grasp. You know, grabbing somebody by the lapels or grabbing them by the chin, to a variety of things that had to do with sleep and diet or stress positions."

God, and to think I used to think that US POWS in Vietnam were tortured...silly me, now I know they were just subjected to "a variety of things" like "stress positions."

Just to be sure that you can't accuse NPR of not being "fair and balanced," Gjelten tosses out that old NPR sop of some say: "Critics of enhanced interrogation techniques say they're tantamount to torture." See, it has nothing to do with law, treaties, or actual facts - it's just some anonymous "critics" who allege that its kind of like torture. In case these unnamed "critics" might undermine the very serious and important Michael Hayden, Gjelten notes that critics have also pointed out that real information came from detainees "after the harsh interrogations stopped. And General Hayden says he wouldn't be surprised by that."

And here's where Gjelten really enters his zone of cooperation, handing the microphone to the good General Hayden himself: "

I'm willing to concede the point that no one gave us valuable or actionable intelligence while they were, for example, being waterboarded. The purpose of the enhanced interrogation techniques was to take someone who was refusing to cooperate with us and to accelerate the process by which we would move from a zone of defiance to a zone of cooperation."

Well, I hope NPR will now do a piece (or two or three) debating the positive and negative effects of the enhanced interrogation sessions that the North Vietnamese applied to US POWs. Given that the civilian slaughter waged against Vietnam by the US military makes the events of 9/11 look like nothing more than a disturbing footnote in the history of atrocities, and given that the North was successful, then maybe all that enhanced treatment to move US prisoners from "a zone of defiance" to "a zone of cooperation" helped them win the war and was justifiable after all.

Reciprocity Anyone?

Certain things often get discussed on NPR that make my skin crawl. On Saturday's ATC Guy Raz talks with Richard Clarke about "probing" Bush-era crimes by ignoring US laws and international obligations and instead holding a "kind of truth and reconciliation commission." Why NPR thinks it's adequate to have a legal no-nothing like Guy Raz interview Clarke on such matters is beyond me, but one part of the interview really jumped out - the endorsement of extrajudicial executions.

Raz says, "...a few weeks ago, of course, the CIA director Leon Panetta shut down a program to assassinate members of al-Qaeda - a program that was actually never implemented..." [Raz just accepts that the program was never implemented because CIA officials said so to the New York Times - even though Seymour Hersh reported a strikingly similar implemented program back in March].

Clarke eventually gets around to talking about the assassination program. The conversation proceeds as follows:

[Clarke] "The other issue is should we have a hit squad to go out after the leadership of a terrorist organization that's trying to kill us. I think most Americans would say yes we should under very tight controls, and frankly CIA is not the right place to do that..."
[Raz] "...who should do it?"
[Clarke] "the best way to do it is to give it to a well-trained, well disciplined unit in the US military."
[Raz] "Forgive me, this may sound terribly naive, but why should the United States government be in the business of doing this at all?"
[Clarke] "Only because we have enemies out there who do wish to do us harm and we do need to act in our own self defense against terrorists."

That's it: a pathetic "Forgive me, this may sound terribly naive..." whimper is the only challenge offered to a US Government program of assassinations. Missing is any discussion of international laws and human rights issues, including the recent UN concern. Also missing is any history on any similar US assassination programs - even by "well-trained, well disciplined units." If in some ideal world the US actually had reliable, actionable intelligence (which it often does not) then why not arrest and prosecute? In Pakistan the US military use of drone assassinations highlights the rampant slaughter that almost always follows a policy of supposed "targeted killings."

Finally, Raz's deafening silence after Clarke's justification for carrying out extrajudicial killings ["because we have enemies out there who do wish to do us harm and we do need to act..."] begs the question of reciprocity. Why doesn't he ask, "So by your standard, countries - let's say Cuba, Nicaragua, or Iran - that have experienced state terror from the United States would have the right to launch assassination programs against US officials and agents, wouldn't they?"

Unfortunately, on NPR it never enters the newsreaders' or reporters' heads to apply a standard good enough for the rest of the world to the United States - because we are so exceptional.