Bradley Manning is currently groveling
in the sentencing phase of his military show trial, apparently in a
bid for mercy. (Maybe his tormentors will let him out of military
prison when he's an old man, if he's “lucky.” Looks like he
signed up for the Army for life, unwittingly.)
[1]
This is as good a time as any to
refute the propaganda line we keep hearing, including at this
“trial,” that Manning (and Julian Assange, and now Edward Snowden
and Glenn Greenwald), “endanger lives” by revealing U.S. crimes,
surveillance, and oppression.
The U.S. power establishment constantly
throws out the demonstrably false claim that the aforementioned
people and their ilk “put lives at risk” by exposing U.S. crimes
against humanity (as well as revealing various tittle-tattle, snarky
comments about “allies,” and dirt from State Department cables
and such). [2]
Of course, for a mass murdering empire
to squeal when its “secrets” are revealed that “You're
endangering lives!!” is the height of hypocrisy and breathtaking
chutzpah (in addition to being calculated bullshit designed to
manipulate ignorant public opinion). [3]
But there's another aspect of the
establishment's hypocrisy that is less obvious. Take the New York
Times, the establishment's self-anointed “newspaper of record.”
Today's print edition (August 16th)
has an article on the top of page one, “In Tense Cairo, Islamists
Look To Next Move.” Subhead: “New Protests Expected After Friday
Prayer.” The background: Two days ago the military oligarchy
attacked the Muslim Brotherhood sit-in protest in Cairo. (The
military overthrew the first democratically-elected president in all
of Egypt's history, the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, who they've kept
in custody since.) Using snipers and other brutal methods, the
military murdered 638 people and wounded almost 4,000. (Those figures
are from the article.)
The author, David D. Kirkpatrick,
interviewed some men outside a mosque being used as a morgue for some
of the bodies. The last sentence of the fourth paragraph says of the
men, “A few argued openly for a turn to violence.”
The next paragraph starts with a quote:
“'The solution might be an assassination list,' said Ahmed, 27, who
like others refused to use his full name for fear of reprisals from
the new authorities. [Actually the same old military “authorities”
who have been in power since Col. Nasser led a military coup that
ended the monarchy.”Authorities” is a term that legitimizes
whoever is in power. {4}] 'Shoot anyone in
uniform. It doesn't matter if the good is taken with the bad, because
that is what happened to us last night.” [That is, on Wednesday,
August 14th.]
Why was it necessary for the NYT
to give Ahmed's age? Couldn't they have said “a young man” or “a
man in his 20s”? What useful information does jeopardizing him with
this detail serve?
But that's nothing. It gets much worse.
The next paragraph goes like this:
“Mohamed Rasmy, a 30-year-old engineer, interrupted. 'That is not
the solution,' he said, insisting that Islamic leaders would
re-emerge with a plan “to come together in protest.”
The NYT fingered the hapless and
naïve Mr. Rasmy with his full name, his age, and his occupation.
Hey, why not publish his ID number too?
It's obvious what happens next. The
secret police [aka “intelligence agents” or “security forces” as the Times calls secret policemen of "friendly" -to the U.S., of course- nations]
pick up Mr. Rasmy for interrogation and torture, which is routine in
Egypt. Kirkpatrick helpfully provided them with avenues of
interrogation. What are your leaders plans? Who is the terrorist
Ahmed?
And what if he
doesn't know who Ahmed is? Then the only way t6o stop the torture is
to finger someone else. And if the secret police decide he lied
about that, then it gets worse.
The NYT knows full well that
that is how things work in Egypt. You don't even have to be
particularly sophisticated to know that.
Yet they named this
man.
What useful
information is imparted to the public by giving a full name, an exact
age, and occupation of a stranger? He could be called “Mohamed, a
professional in his 30s.” We lose nothing of value with that
description. (Ironically, the NYT routinely blacks out very
important information that they think it's better we don't know,
often at the “request” of the government, especially “the White
House.”)
The truth is, no
one in a dangerous situation should even talk to the NYT. Secret
police infiltrators could see you talking to them, as also may well
have happened on this occasion. It would be quite incompetent of the
Egyptian “security forces” to NOT have plants in that crowd, and
also to not be shadowing the likes of Kirkpatrick, which doubtlessly
they are. (Just as the FBI and CIA tails many foreign journalists in
the U.S, and abroad too in the case of the CIA.)
The NYT consistently shows this
callous indifference to the well-being of “nobodies” they use.
They have done it during the Syrian uprising against Assad,
endangering people rebelling or living in areas under siege. They did
it to Libyans during the revolution against Qaddafi. Those are just
the most recent examples.
They do this sort of thing all the
time, with lowly average people in foreign lands. (They do it in the
U.S. too, with the poor, the persecuted, the dissident. But many poor
people are wised up enough to not give their names to such
disreputable people as the NYT. For example, in the same issue
of the NYT, in “Teenager's Errant Gunfire at Project In
Bronx Leads to His Fatal Beating,” on page A21, not everyone in a
public housing project will give the Times their names, which the
Times attributes to fear of retaliation, probably correctly in
this case. Fear of the police is another good reason for poor blacks
to avoid mention in the establishment's media.)
The only people the
NYT is
interested in protecting is other members of the power elite. Daily,
unnamed “officials” appear in their stories whispering alleged
facts into the ears of
Times reporters. Oftentimes the
“information” is obviously “classified,” as I have pointed
out elsewhere. [See “
The New York Times Breaks the Law Again Today.”]
Might as well mention one other bad
(and deceitful) habit of the NYT, which predictably occurred
in the Kirkpatrick article. They like to hide the most important or
damning to “authority” information that they are deigning to
report (they refuse entirely to report even more important or
critical info) in the third-to-last paragraph of articles. In this
case, that's paragraph 26 of a 28 paragraph story. It describes what
Kirkpatrick apparently saw in a mosque where victims of the slaughter
were brought. Here is what it reveals:
“Many [bodies] were charred beyond
recognition by the fires that Egyptian security forces set to
eradicate the tent city.” It goes on. The important information,
that the Egyptian military dictatorship burned people alive (or after
shooting them) is deeply buried near the end of a long story. The
rest of the U.S. media, especially broadcast, has virtually refused
to report this detail at all, or tap-danced around the facts. At
least Kirkpatrick tells it straight. My advice when reading the NYT:
if you're pressed for time, just read the few and last couple of
paragraphs of stories. The rest is mostly filler and repetition, many
times.
1] A
few words are in order here
about
that oh-so-fair “trial,” military court martial, technically. No
transcripts, no recording devices allowed, reporters (real ones, not
the establishment propagandists who only showed up on the first and
last days) forced to act like spies to try and get info and report,
military goons standing behind them in the press pen and spying on
their computer screen, secret “evidence,” and so on. The officer
acting as “judge” was promised a promotion to an appeals tribunal
during the “trial.” A not so subtle message to her to make sure
she reaches the expected decisions, in which case she will be
rewarded. In other words, blatant bribery of the judge on behalf of
the prosecution side, the military and government. Like I said, a
real fair
trial.
There's
an old saying: military justice is to justice as military music is to
music.
Of
course, there is plenty of precedent for the government bribing
judges. Most cases stay secret. One that didn't is the offer of the
FBI directorship to the judge presiding over the prosecution of
Daniel Ellsberg for exposing the Pentagon Papers. When it was
revealed during the trial, the judge insisted it didn't influence
him. Contrary to myth, the charges were not dismissed because of
this. Rather, the egregious misconduct of the Nixon regime
(burglarizing Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to find dirt on
Ellsberg, having Cuban fascist exile goons beat him up, and so on) is
what led to the dismissal of charges by the judge. So Ellsberg wasn't
“exonerated” by the courts, as a not guilty verdict would have
done. Not that he needs exoneration from a criminal system.
2]
The same day as the NYT
printed
Kirkpatrick's report (the
16th,
probably a day after it went
up online),
the former State Department Chief Flack, P.J. Crowley, was on
Democracy Now,
pushing the propaganda lines that Manning “endangered people” and
he “violated his oath” and deserves severe punishment,
3] I'll just touch
briefly on the most obviously galling aspect of this: namely that
this power establishment caused the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis (at
a minimum) with an unprovoked war of aggression, falsely and
cynically portrayed as self-defense against an imminent threat from
non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of Saddam
Hussein. (Hussein never made any threats to attack the
U.S., so the propaganda was doubly false. The Bush regime used the
9/11/01 suicide airliner attacks, which were carried out under the
watchful eyes of the CIA and FBI, which deliberately allowed them to
proceed, as a golden political opportunity to carry out a long-held
desire among the right wing of the power establishment to emplace a
client regime in Iraq. In fact, back in the 1990s they'd even written
a paper saying that “another Pearl Harbor” would be a perfect
opportunity to carry out their scheme.)
Or take that the trove of military
documents exposed by Manning and Assange.*
The military records provided plenty of incriminating
evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq. (See:
“
Dispatches – Iraq'sSecret War Files” a
powerful documentary
produced by Channel 4 (UK)
and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, that
mined the Manning trove to great effect. Naturally, it wasn't on U.S.
television. There is also
the “collateral murder” video, taken
in Baghdad, Iraq, and viewable
in various forms on youtube.com and elsewhere, which you should watch
if you haven't already. That video shows a murderous U.S. helicopter
crew champing at the bit to slaughter a group of obvious civilians
just walking in the street below, unaware of their imminent deaths at
the hands of flying barbarians. Two
Reuters photographers were among those slaughtered, as well as a
father of young children who, seeing the bodies in the street,
behaved like a decent human being and stopped his van to help. When
they shot his children, the helicopter crew laughingly sneered that
that's he gets for being so dumb as to take his kids to a “combat
zone.”
By
the way, when the U.S. military murders civilians, they call it
“engaging the enemy” or “the target.” As these murderous
goons did. Engage
is their antiseptic euphemism for “gun down” or “blow to
smithereens” human beings.
Putting
this evidence of murder into the public domain is probably Manning's
greatest “crime,” in the minds of the U.S. rulers.
For
this service to humanity, Bradley Manning is going to be imprisoned
for the rest of his life. (They would execute him if they hadn't
calculated it would be politically unwise.)
*
To
a lesser extent establishment newspapers in several countries,
including the New
York Times
in the U.S., also revealed some of what is contained in the Manning
trove. The NY
Times
showed its gratitude to Assange with a long term campaign of
character assassination and juvenile sniping, including a ludicrous,
junior high school dissing of Assange in a NYT
Sunday magazine cover
story
by former executive editor William “Bill” Keller, who seems to
have psychological problems of his own. [See:
“Bill Keller's Character Assassination Hatchet-Job on Julian Assange.”]
Another ingrate was the Guardian (U.K.)
Apparently personality is more important than issues to these high
level hacks. If you don't charm them, they'll knife you. Or maybe it
was a political decision to erect a wall between “real”
journalists, namely made members of the establishment, and outsiders
who are anti-establishment. In short, like the World War II alliance
between the capitalist West and the Soviet Union against the Axis
powers, this was a temporary and uncomfortable compact of convenience
which the poohbahs of establishment propaganda found distasteful,
especially the NY Times.
4] The word
“authorities” to refer to those in power places an aura of
legitimacy around them. It also presumes that one should submit to
them. We are all trained from childhood to submit to “authority.”
The word “authority” also means one with superior knowledge, as
in “Professor X is an authority on the use of political euphemisms
to shore up structures of power.” This sense of the word bleeds
over into its usage to refer to those with power. Authoritative,
derived from authority, means that which can be relied on as true,
the last word on something, the truth that must be accepted and
deferred to. An authoritative source is one that trumps your
worthless opinion, jack. This meaning too subliminally rubs off on
“the authorities.”
That's not to say that all ideas are
equal, or that there are no facts. It just means be skeptical,
verify things, and think for yourself. That is the
rational, human way.
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