AP
Propaganda About Iraq
By Dahr Jamail
23 September 2006
t
r u t h o u t
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
-George Orwell
On
Monday, September 18, Associated Press (AP) ran a story titled,
"Iraqi tribes fight Insurgency." At first glance,
the average reader cannot be blamed for thinking that this is a story
about how tribes in Iraq have decided to take up arms against the "insurgency."
The reader certainly cannot
be blamed for thinking this, because the first paragraph in the AP story
reads, "Tribes in one of Iraq's most volatile provinces have joined
together to fight the insurgency there, and they have called on the
government and the US-led military coalition for weapons, a prominent
tribal leader said Monday."
Allow me to pause here and
address the use of the word "insurgent." According to Webster's
Third New International Dictionary, an insurgent is "a person who
rises in revolt against civil authority or an established government:
[a] rebel." This of course begs the existence of a legitimately
elected government that the "insurgent" rises in revolt against,
which in Iraq we do not have. How is it possible to have a legitimate
government in a country that was first illegally invaded and today is
illegally occupied?
Yet, AP uses the word unquestioningly.
The story continues: "Tribal
leaders and clerics in Ramadi, the capital of violent Anbar province,
met last week and have set up a force of about 20,000 men 'ready to
purge the city of these infidels,' Sheik Fassal al-Guood, a prominent
tribal leader from Ramadi, told the Associated Press, referring to the
insurgents. 'People are fed up with the acts of those criminals who
take Islam as a cover for their crimes,' he said. 'The situation in
the province is unbearable, the city is abandoned, most of the families
have fled the city and all services are poor.' Al-Guood said 15 of the
18 tribes in Ramadi 'have sworn to fight those who are killing Sunnis
and Shiites and they established an armed force of about 20,000 young
men ready to purge the city from those infidels.'"
At this point, either the
author of this AP story, or the editor, or both, rightly assume that
the reader is not aware that Sheik Fassal al-Guood tried to lead the
local resistance against the occupation in Ramadi, but turned against
the same resistance group when its members rejected him as a leader
because they considered him a corrupt thief. Nor is the reader aware
that today, Sheikh Fassal al-Guood lives in the "Green Zone"
and happily talks to reporters from behind the concrete blast walls,
and that his power in Al-Anbar now equals exactly nothing.
I contacted author and media
critic Norman Solomon and asked him what he thought of this AP story.
"The holes in this story beg for questions that it does not raise,
much less answer," he wrote. "For instance: What are the past,
present and hoped-for financial relationships between the quoted 'tribal
leader' on the one hand and the US and Iraqi governments on the other?
Are there any indications that money has changed hands? Is a mercenary
arrangement being set up? Is this part of the Bush administration's
strategy to get more Iraqis to kill each other rather than have Iraqis
killing American troops - aka 'As the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down?'
Isn't there a good chance that such arrangements will actually fuel
civil war in Iraq rather than douse its already horrific flames?"
He continued, "So, this
AP story agreeably paraphrases an official from the US-backed Iraqi
government's Defense Ministry as saying that 'Iraqi security forces
had met with tribal leaders and had agreed to cooperate in combating
violence.' But how will they be 'combating violence?' With massive violence,
of course, although the article doesn't say so. Many sources are available
to make such a point, but in this story AP availed itself of none of
them."
Solomon, a nationally-syndicated
columnist on media and politics who is also the founder and executive
director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium
of policy researchers and analysts, had this to say about why AP might
get away with this type of "reportage" as consistently as
it does: "AP is providing the kind of coverage that it and other
mainstream US media outlets have provided in the past. The coverage
does not seem conspicuously shoddy to most readers because it fits in
with previous shoddy reportage. From all appearances, this AP article
is based on statements from four sources - and each of them is in line
with US government policies. There's one tribal leader from Ramadi who
is seeking large quantities of material aid from the US and the Iraqi
government; there are two spokespeople for that Iraqi government; and
there's a general from the US military. That all four would present
a similar picture of events is not surprising. But for an article to
rely on only those sources is stenography for one side of the conflict
- which should not be confused with journalism."
It is also important for
the reader to note that, according to an August US Defense Intelligence
Agency assessment, of 1,666 bombs exploded in Iraq in July, 90% were
aimed at US-led forces. Along with this fact, attacks against US forces
have increased dramatically in recent months, and the US military itself
has admitted that less than 6% of the attacks against them are from
foreign fighters (i.e., "terrorists"). Thus, at least 94%
of all attacks against US forces in Iraq are from the Iraqi Resistance,
as opposed to "terrorists."
It is time, too, that readers
of mainstream news knew that any "tribal meeting" that discusses
fighting "the insurgents" is currently being held secretly
inside American military bases or inside the "green zone."
Iraqi people who are trying to lead that operation are well known to
Al-Anbar citizens. These leaders did succeed in some cases in recruiting
certain groups to fight resistance fighters by paying considerable sums
of money, but it was only temporary success.
A case in point would be
Al-Qa'im last spring. A tribal fight occurred between local resistance
fighters. Sheik Osama al-Jadaan was involved in engineering it by paying
members of his tribe to take up arms against local resistance groups.
Yet this conflict was settled, and when it was, al-Jadaan had to flee
to the "green zone." He lived there for a short time before
his work as a collaborator with occupation forces caught up with him,
and he was killed in Baghdad.
Yet the AP story has this
to say about al-Jadaan: "In late May, a prominent Sunni Arab tribal
leader, Sheik Osama al-Jadaan, who provided fighters to help battle
al-Qaeda in Anbar, was assassinated in Baghdad."
There are the usual token
scraps of truth in the AP story, lending it a hue of credibility. The
story quotes a US military spokesperson who goes out on a limb to say
that tribal leaders in Anbar "very much want to see security brought
back to that area."
Another scrap of truth came
earlier in the story where Al-Guood is quoted as saying that most of
the tribes of Ramadi "have sworn to fight those who are killing
Sunnis and Shiites and they established an armed force of about 20,000
young men ready to purge the city from those infidels."
This is true throughout Iraq,
where even the US military has documented several cases of resistance
groups fighting foreign terror groups that have infiltrated Iraq's porous
borders in order to carry out attacks against Iraqi civilians.
The most disconcerting portion
of this AP story, however, is the melding of the word "insurgent"
with the word "terrorist." Clearly there is a flippancy, and
I believe a malicious intent in this misuse. I have witnessed this melding
repeated in AP stories from Iraq in which "insurgent" replaces
"terrorist."
We can see the melding in
a
recent AP story, which states: "Attacks against US
troops have increased following a call earlier this month from al-Qaeda
in Iraq's leader to target American forces, the top US military spokesman
said Wednesday."
Another example of this melding
is in an AP story from September 17th about Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi
citizen of Fallujah who has been held by the US military without charges
for five months. Part of the story reads, "The military said Hussein
was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged
leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq."
Regarding the reference to
al-Qaeda (read "terrorism"), Solomon had this to say: "The
word 'terrorism' is clearly a pejorative. And it's an unwritten rule
of US media coverage that the 'terrorism' label can only be used, or
quoted with credence being given to the sources, if 'terrorism' applies
to murderous violence opposed by the US government - in contrast to
murderous violence inflicted or otherwise supported by the US government,
in which case that violence is routinely presumed to be positive."
It is a melding that has
the power to change minds.
A melding that may have prompted
Orwell to say, "... language can also corrupt thought."
It is important to note that
the board of directors of AP is composed of 22 newspaper and media executives
that include the CEOs and presidents of ABC, McClatchy, Hearst, Tribune
and the Washington Post. Two of the directors are members of very conservative
policy councils that include the Hoover Institute. The Hoover Institute
is a Republican policy research center that has been referred to as
"Bush's brain trust." Its fellows include Condoleezza Rice
and Newt Gingrich, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow, along with George
Shultz.
Douglas McCorkindale, also
on the board of directors at AP, is on the board of Lockheed Martin,
the world's largest defense contract company. One does not require crystals
to see that the board of AP displays a clear tilt toward right-wing
conservative views, and comprises representatives of a huge corporate
media network of the largest publishers in the US.
It is not difficult to demolish
the myth of the liberal media and its prominent arms like AP.
Political language ...
is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and
to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. - George
Orwell