WHO Did You Say “Endangers Lives”?

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 16^th) 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 14^th.]

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 16^th, 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.