The Art of Enhanced Distraction

On Friday I was staying late at work and before leaving heard this promising start to a story on All Things Considered:

"This week, we've been reading a vivid narrative in the New York Times by the journalist David Rohde. He was held captive for seven months by the Taliban. He was moved frequently from house to house all over remote parts of Pakistan. And one detail in this story made us particularly curious."

Holy cow! I thought, NPR is going to allude to the three rather stunning observations contained in Rohde's articles which Glenn Greenwald so aptly wrote about a few days ago:

1. The actions of the US in killing countless civilians (especially Muslims) in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine have "galvanized the Taliban."
2. The US practice of holding detainees in abusive conditions "for years without being charged" has also has strengthened the Taliban.
3. How much more humanely Rohde was treated by his captors compared to the treatment meted out to similarly innocent captives at the hands of US military and intelligence agencies. As Rohde notes, his captives gave him bottled water, let him walk outside, and "never beat me."
   

In my head I was already composing the positive post I'd put up on this blog about NPR taking on this obvious - but still controversial - angle.

Alas, I couldn't have been more wrong. What was that "one detail" which made the collective "us" at NPR so curious?

"Rhode got a letter from his wife through the International Red Cross. How in the world did the Red Cross deliver him a letter when no one knew where he was? Well, the online magazine Slate found out for its "Explainer" column. Here's Andy Bowers with the answer."

Granted, the operations of the Red Cross in trying to contact hostages is pretty interesting - as The Guardian noted way back in 2004 (and MSNBC) and McClatchy detailed in 2008. And it's not a closed issue as this 2009 Newsweek article on ghost detainees reveals. Seems like those stories never gained much traction for the journalists at NPR news.

Interestingly, another Red Cross angle found its way into a Greenwald analysis today - Netanyahu's declaration that hiding prisoners from the Red Cross is a war crime (!?). Could there be two more polar opposite attitudes revealed by comparing Greenwald's work to NPR's? In one the focus is on the hypocrisy of those in power and the ways in which their deceit and misdeeds make the world more violent and dangerous for all of us. In the other, there is a perverse effort to focus on the most trivial and distracting details - even when such details are painfully ironic.

Creative Assassinations - For NPR's Shapiro It's Elementary

Consider these two screen shots from NPR's website:

From a story on Thursday's Morning Edition:

and from Thursday's All Things Considered

Any grade schooler with a rudimentary understanding of the innocent until proven guilty concept could figure out what is wrong with the titles of these web articles: both refer to TERRORISTS, when what is at issue are detainees of the US government suspected of involvement in terrorism (or guerrilla warfare) who have NEVER faced any semblance of legitimate due process that would justify calling them "terrorists." In fact, someone with just a bit more knowledge of recent US detention policies would suspect that most detainees in the US "war on terror" are probably innocent.

Unfortunately, instead of a grade schooler, NPR's two pieces on US rogue detention are led by "a magna cum laude graduate of Yale," Ari Shapiro. During the Morning Edition piece Shapiro claims that "[d]uring one incident late in the Bush administration, OFFICIALS SAY, a terrorist from Somalia was brought to Afghanistan...." Setting up listeners for his ATC follow-up, Shapiro states, "...the Bush administration used Guantanamo, the United States and Bagram to hold detainees. Because all of those possibilities are problematic, the Obama administration is now thinking more creatively about this issue....and we'll explore those possibilities tonight on All Things Considered.

NPR certainly does explore certain possibilities. Ari's Morning Edition story seems positively innocuous compared to his All Things Considered feature which Melissa Block introduces with the observation that "government lawyers are exploring more creative options." In the piece Shapiro completely embraces the terrorist-until-proven-innocent meme:

• "...virtually everyone interviewed for this story agreed: the United States would rather not be in the terrorist detention business."
  
• "President Obama has said that he will continue - rendition...would continue sending terrorists to foreign countries."
• "...says the Obama State Department is playing a major role in finding places to put terrorists..."

and makes his report an apologia for (US government approved) assassinations/extrajudicial executions:

"So if the US picks up twenty al-Qaeda members tomorrow and they cannot be held...where can they go? [Ken Anderson voiceover] 'To be perfectly blunt, I don't think they'll pick them up at all.' Ken Anderson of the Hoover Institution has written about these issues. [Anderson] 'I think we've actually allowed the courts to arrange the incentives to kill rather than capture.' Many national security experts interviewed for this story agree. It has become so difficult for the US to detain people that in many instances the US government is killing them instead."

It floored me to transcribe reread this. Shapiro and Anderson are blaming the courts (!) because some have actually upheld the law. Well, given those harsh restrictions, when the US suspects people of involvement in terrorism outside the US, what "creative" options does it have - except to kill them. Though appalling, it's not surprising that these NPR stories have such a mafia ethic; consider the sources that Shapiro assembled for his ATC work:

1. "Columbia law professor Matthew Waxman handled detainee affairs at the Pentagon UNDER PRESIDENT BUSH."
2. "CIA SPOKESMAN Paul Gimigliano"
3. "Cardozo law professor Vijay Padmanabhan was an attorney adviser at the State Department IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION."
4. "John Bellinger, who was legal adviser to State UNDER PRESIDENT BUSH."
5. "Ken Anderson of the Hoover Institution"
6. "University of Michigan law professor Monica Hakimi worked at the State Department IN THE LAST ADMINISTRATION."

Now that is some creative journalism.

NPR and the Pragmatic Police State

This morning NPR features "an exclusive first look at a legal proposal....a detailed plan for holding terrorism suspects without trial, and it comes from two experts outside of the government." Inspite of the two "experts" mentioned by David Greene, Ari Shapiro only interviews one of them, Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution.

According to Shapiro "Wittes occupies a relatively unique position in national security. He has studied and written books on pragmatic approaches to fighting terrorism." [Actually he has written only one book on terrorism - Law and the Long War.]

I don't have any problem with NPR interviewing Wittes. Unfortunately, he is an important fish in circles of state power in Washington, DC, though - not surprisingly - his ideas are not particularly fresh or inspiring, and he heartily supports for projections of US military and foreign policy hegemony. Consider the Publisher's Weekly and Booklist reviews of his book:

• PW: "Both a defense and critique of the Bush administration, the book argues in favor of many of the measures taken by the executive branch while condemning its failure to secure congressional cooperation and the necessary legal architecture to back policies that were bound to be unpopular."
• Booklist: "Wittes remains highly sympathetic to the administration’s aims, giving them the benefit of the doubt on matters that other critics of the administration have not. Ultimately, his hope is that innovative legal structures will be forthcoming and seen as legitimate in a way that current efforts are not."

As Wittes himself states in an article on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, "we have no choice but to continue the war on terror in some form."

My problem with NPR's coverage of Wittes is that it is an endorsement of Wittes' viewpoint. In spite of his utter lack of credentials in the area of human rights, international, or Constitutional law and his rather conventional apologist approach to torture, he is a "expert" with "pragmatic approaches." As Glenn Greewald notes, Wittes can't even get the most basic Constitutional points correct when he argues for "legal" dictatorial powers for the President.

And what is the thinking behind Wittes' expert, pragmatic approaches? Consider this excerpt of the report:

(Shapiro) "So why push for indefinite detention at all? Well, Wittes says we already have it. People have been at Guantanamo for years. There are thousands more in Afghanistan...." (Wittes) "And so there's no question that we're detaining people outside of the criminal justice system. The question is what the rules are for those detentions and who makes those rules."

Look closely at the logic of this.

So why push to codify and legalize practice __________?
Because __________ is already being done!

All you have to do is put any debased government abuse of power in the blank - torture, rape, murder, rendition, illegal surveillance, etc. to see where this can lead. In Wittes' world (and NPR's by extension) the problem is not with the practice itself and a craven and complicit Congress that refuses its constitutional role of holding the executive office perpetrators accountable. Instead, the problem is that Congress has been slow to enact legislation to codify the practices. And according to Wittes, this reluctance to legislate away basic Constitutional values - and this is where he becomes a hero of the Weekly Standard security state devotees - opens up the possibilty of serious judicial oversight -OMG!

As Grumpy Demo points out on his blog - this is the kind of logic would please anyone who is hoping that our three branches of government would get "pragmatic" and realize that what we really need in the "war on terror" is a Unitary Benevolent Authoritarian Strong Man in the mold of Pinochet, Peron, or Castro.