[R-G] The AP speaks Newspeak: Reporting on Afghanistan and the 1, 000 civilians killed in '07

[Anthony Fenton]

The AP speaks Newspeak1

Reporting on Afghanistan and the 1,000 civilians killed in 2007  
parrots the Pentagon

by Marc W. Herold
Departments of Economics
Whittemore School of Business & Economics
University of New Hampshire

http://www.cursor.org/stories/apnewspeak.html

     Thought and language, which reflect reality in a way different  
from that of perception, are the key to the nature of human  
consciousness. Words play a central part not only in the development  
of thought but in the historical growth of human consciousness as a  
whole. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness
     -- Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934)

     The ‘plain' English of modern news media has a worrying capacity  
for keeping us in the dark; which is reminiscent of Orwell's 1984.  
For Orwell, the natural partner of Newspeak was Doublethink.2

POSTED DECEMBER 12, 2007 --

In the dead of night, U.S. war planes obliterated a tent alongside a  
road in remote Nuristan Province, killing fourteen Afghan road  
laborers and engineers in their sleep. According to an Associated  
Press (A.P.) wire service report on November 28, 2007,

     "NATO warplanes hunting Taliban fighters in eastern Afghanistan  
mistakenly bombed an Afghan road construction crew sleeping in  
tents....If confirmed that NATO hit the wrong target, the incident in  
mountainous Nuristan province late Monday [November 26, 2007] would  
be the first major blunder in months..."

     "Afghanistan's president has pleaded repeatedly with NATO and  
coalition troops to cooperate closely with their Afghan counterparts  
to prevent civilian deaths, and the number of such incidents has  
dropped significantly in the past few months."3

The wire service story written by the A.P's Amir Shah was predictably  
picked up by the Washington Post, Fox News, Forbes, Guardian,  
Hearst's Times-Union, Houston Chronicle, etc.

As I have documented elsewhere, the Associated Press reporting upon  
Afghanistan has well served the Pentagon and the Bush Administration. 
4 It would not be a stretch of the imagination to say that the  
Associated Press has acted as stenographer of the Pentagon's version  
of reality and more generally speaks for the powerful.5 Such was  
marvelously displayed in the early counting of the Afghan civilian  
dead by Associated Press special correspondent Laura King in  
Afghanistan in early 2002, whose effort was likely inspired to  
counter my own research which had documented some 3,500 innocent  
Afghan civilians having perished under U.S. bombs during October 7,  
2001 -- December 10, 2001.6

Such "bias" by the Associated Press (and naturally other media, e.g.  
talk radio, FOX News, etc.) has important implications for democracy  
as pointed out by Phillips et. al.,

     (The) AP is a massive institutionalized bureaucracy that feeds  
new stories to nearly every newspaper and radio/TV station in the  
United States and the world. They are so large that top-down control  
of single news stories is literally impossible. However, our evidence  
clearly indicates a built-in bias favoring the powerful. ACLU  
evidence on torture is ignored by the corporate press and AP never  
mentions it again. The State Department's position on Haiti becomes  
established history. Cynthia McKinney is bashed and marginalized.  
Coverage of the Israel-Palestine situation has a clear pro-Israel  
bias, and the national impeachment movement is totally ignored. The  
American people absorb these biases and make political decisions on  
skewed understandings. Without media systems that provide balanced,  
fair and accurate reporting democracy is faced with a dismal future.7

On November 12, 2007, U.S. occupation forces on patrol in the Garmser  
district of Helmand Province, came under fire. They fired a grenade  
into a building causing it to collapse, killing all those inside. The  
headlines by the different agencies are revealing with the Associated  
Press as usual burying the story of U.S. troops killing civilians  
(unlike the BBC, Alalam, DPA and Xinhua):

Associated Press: "US-led troops kill 18 in Afghanistan"
Agence France Presse: "22 Killed in new Afghan Clashes"
Deutsche Press Agentur: "Coalition Forces Kill 3 Afghan Civilians, 15  
Taliban in Clash"
Xinhua News: "15 Militants, 3 civilians killed in S. Afghanistan"
BBC: "Afghan civilians die in US raid"
Iran's Alalam news agency: "U.S. Troops Kill More Afghan Civilians"

Unlike the other reports which merely reported on the facts, the A.P.  
news wire report included the usual U.S. propaganda refrain (about  
Taliban hiding amongst civilians, U.S. forces taking extreme measures  
to protect civilians, etc.). The BBC even noted that the Taliban  
spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said 3 militants were killed and the  
15 other victims were civilians.

I shall examine A.P. reporting here of the mid-night bombing strike  
in the Nurgaram district of Nuristan Province located in the  
mountainous region of northeast Afghanistan. In its story, the A.P.  
employs key "trigger" words/phrases -- like mistakenly bombed, wrong,  
incident, blunder (or error), coalition, prevent civilian casualties,  
and the number of such incidents has dropped significantly in the  
past few months. These words and phrases get repeated ad nauseum,  
thereby displacing others which might elicit questioning or critical  
thinking. Such trigger words/phrases form part of a deliberately  
constructed narrative akin to Orwell's Newspeak, serving the Pentagon  
and the Bush Administration.8 One of the intents of Newspeak was to  
remove any words or phrases which might elicit rebellion, criticism,  
questioning, opposition, etc.

The A.P. newswire story begins with the well-honed argument that NATO  
warplanes (actually U.S. Warplanes)...mistakenly bombed....killing 14  
workers sleeping in their tents. The phrase mistakenly bombed is  
crucially important to the Pentagon and dominant narrative insofar as  
it connects with collateral damage (which is alleged to be un- 
intentional) and the desired message that if innocent deaths occurred  
this was solely a result of a regrettable mistake, thereby  
exonerating in the public mind all U.S./NATO responsibility. This  
narrative gets further reinforced by the use of such trigger words as  
wrong, blunder, error, etc.

An alternative narrative and language would dwell instead upon how  
the complex tribal politics of the region interface with a U.S.  
occupation presence akin to an isolated island possessing minimal  
"ground intelligence" will inevitably lead to many such "mistakes."  
If a pattern of such "mistakes" gets established, can anyone  
seriously claim lack of responsibility? An alternative narrative  
might be that U.S/NATO forces care little about the lives of Afghan  
civilians because the rewards of bombing and possibly killing a  
"suspected Taliban" far outweigh the efforts and costs of determining  
whether a target is truly a legitimate military one. But all such  
questioning gets displaced in the A.P. story which privileges the  
concept of mistakenly bombed.

Another word repeated ad nauseam is coalition. We are endlessly  
reminded that a coalition is fighting against the Taliban, Hekmatyar  
and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. During the first two years of the Afghan  
war, the U.S. fought largely alone.9 But in 2003 when the U.S. Iraq  
war began, George Bush was successful in getting NATO to enter the  
Afghan fray. This was very important as it served to share the costs  
of the Afghan war and occupation; the two most important costs being  
financial and killed/injured soldiers. The troop casualties could be  
spread over a larger number of countries thereby defusing negative  
political fall-out in any one country. At about that time, as I have  
documented, the Taliban and associates began staging their "second  
coming."10

During the next four years, the involvement of NATO forces has  
deepened, though with significant disputes. While some NATO members  
are unwilling to directly commit forces to do the fighting, another  
group has though with increasing reservations as a military stalemate/ 
quagmire settles in, reconstruction aid fails to make a difference as  
civilian deaths fuel the resistance.11 The former include Great  
Britain, Holland, Denmark, Canada and Australia and some countries of  
"New Europe," whereas the latter include nations of "Old  
Europe" (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). In effect, the coalition  
is fractured and increasingly so. It is comprised less of the willing  
and increasingly of the bribed. The United States and NATO  
desperately seek more fighting troops but pathetically succeed in  
recent months only in recruiting 200 Georgians, 35 Slovakians, 24  
Azerbaijanis, and possibly an Estonian Scout Battalion. Other nations  
have withdrawn, including South Korea and Switzerland. The paucity of  
combat ground forces has in turn meant ever greater reliance upon air  
power in Afghanistan with effects such as that which happened on  
November 26/27 in Nuristan. But all such discomforting realities get  
flattened and displaced by the continuous mantra of a united  
coalition fighting those dastardly Taliban misogynists (but, we  
righteously care so much about those Afghan girls, no?).

We then get to one of the most flagrant canards of the whole Afghan  
imbroglio: the U.S/NATO takes only actions with great care for  
civilians. The initial sales pitch to see this idea to the Euro- 
American publics involved hyping so-called precision weapons alleged  
to have been developed at great cost to spare innocent lives (and  
reduce "collateral damage"). But upon closer inspection as I have  
written about in numerous publications, precision weapons were  
developed in order to reduce the costs of bombing (the need for fewer  
bombs and bombing runs) and to save lives of pilots (fewer bombing  
runs).12 Moreover, a comparison of civilian deaths in U.S. wars in  
which aerial bombing figured prominently from the Rolling Thunder  
campaign in Vietnam (1964-67) up through the first three months of  
the Afghan war (2001) shows that as the share of precision bombs in  
total tonnage dropped rose, the rate of civilian casualties increased.13

The U.S has pursued a least-cost strategy of carrying out its Afghan  
war - seeking to carry out the war "on the cheap" financially and in  
terms of U.S. military casualties -- getting bought warlords'  
militias to do the heavy lifting in 2001-2 and rely on heavy aerial  
bombing. This involved pushing costs onto NATO as of 2003. In 2004,  
U.S. military fatalities accounted for 97% of total occupation force  
deaths; in 2006, the ratio was only 51%.14 The non-US occupation  
soldiers in Afghanistan by later 2007 had a 37% greater chance of  
being killed than U.S. occupation soldiers. But, the aim of running  
the empty space at least cost is foundering upon a resurgent Taliban  
resistance15, which has developed their own very effective least cost  
insurgency weapons (e.g., improvised explosive devices and suicide  
bombings) and is putting them to good use.

But least-cost considerations by the US and NATO militaries directly  
translates into tens of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties. How?  
During the initial phases of the U.S. bombing campaign but still  
today, U.S. warplanes dropped powerful bombs in civilian-rich areas  
with little concern for Afghan civilians. The killing of civilians by  
the United States has long been excused away as "tragic errors." The  
U.S/NATO war managers dredge out the tired old "intent" argument. As  
Edward Herman noted,

     ...it is claimed by the war managers that these deaths and  
injuries are not deliberate, but are only "collateral" to another  
end, they are treated by the mainstream media, NGOs, new  
humanitarians, and others as a lesser evil than cases where civilians  
are openly targeted. But this differential treatment is a fraud, even  
if we accept the sometimes disputable claim of inadvertence  
(occasionally even acknowledged by officials to be false, as  
described below). Even if not the explicit target, if collateral  
civilian deaths are highly probable and statistically predictable  
they are clearly acceptable and intentional. If in 500 raids on  
Afghan villages alleged to harbor al Qaeda cadres it is likely that  
civilians will die in 450 of them, those deaths are an integral  
component of the plan and the clear responsibility of the planners  
and executioners. As law professor Michael Tonry has said, "In the  
criminal law, purpose and knowledge are equally culpable states of  
mind."16

But the A.P. ignores such analyses and instead ceaselessly quotes  
some U.S. major or lt.-colonel in Afghanistan who offers the scripted  
pabulum about how U.S/NATO militaries go to extreme lengths to  
protect Afghan civilians. The A.P. as stenographer of the Pentagon's  
Newspeak?

Besides trying to "prevent (incidents of) civilian deaths" in  
Afghanistan, we are informed by the A.P. on November 28, 2007 that  
the number of such incidents has dropped significantly in the past  
few months. Presumably, the more relevant data is the number of  
civilian deaths (rather than incidents). A.P. wire reports refer to  
alleged "counts" carried out by the A.P., but the raw data is never  
published, thereby violating one of the basic rules of research:  
verifiability and reproducibility. We are implicitly asked to believe  
and have faith.

The following Table 1 is reconstructed from my Afghan Victim Memorial  
Project data base available in the Internet.17 It counts Afghan  
civilians who have died directly (that is, at the point of impact) at  
U.S. and NATO hands during the past six months (June-November 2007).  
While it is true that during October and November, the number of  
civilians killed by U.S/NATO actions dropped below the previous  
month's averages (Table 1), the total figure for six months of  
553-679 remains the highest for any half year since January 2002.  
During January 1 -- June 30, 2007, the totals were 427-619.18 The  
United Nations, on the other hand, put the civilian death toll of  
Afghans caused by U.S/NATO troops at only 314 for the first six  
months of 2007 (though did not provide disaggregated data and  
therefore the claim could not be independently assessed).19 Put in  
another way, during 2007, my data on the Afghan Victim Memorial  
Project indicates that over 1,000 innocent Afghan civilians have  
perished at the hands of the U.S/NATO militaries.
Table 1. Afghan Civilian Impact Deaths Caused by U.S/NATO Actions
Month during 2007 	Low count 	High count 	# of incidents in which  
civilians were killed
June 	167 	234 	12
July 	125 	158 	10
August 	83 	89 	8
September 	103 	109 	10
October 	41 	41 	12
November 	34 	48 	6
Total for 6 months 	553 	679 	58

Source: derived from disaggregated data at the Afghan Victim Memorial  
Project data base.

Not many hearts and minds were won in Afghanistan by these documented  
actions of the U.S. and NATO occupation armies.

By way of closing, a contrast of two photos taken in Afghanistan on  
November 26, 2007, the one by Reuters and the other by the Associated  
Press, reveal the very different intended messages.

Two photos were taken on November 26, 2007 in Afghanistan. The top  
photo published by Reuters (taken by Rafiq Shirzad) shows an  
ambulance in Jalalabad on Wednesday holding the bodies of Afghans  
killed by NATO in Nuristan. The bottom photo by the A.P depicts  
Afghan girls waiting to receive toys distributed by the U.S. 413th  
Civic Affairs Battalion in Paktika on November 26, 2007 (photo by  
Rafiq Maqbool).
Conclusion

An analysis of the language employed in the Associated Press news  
wire report of November 28, 2007 reveals a narrative compatible with  
the priorities of the Pentagon and powerful U.S. interests. The A.P.  
news writer Amir Shah employed terms/phrases found on the left side  
of Table 2 below, whereas an alternative more plausible version of  
reality (as I have argued herein) would emphasize the phrases and  
words on the right. The A.P. words/phrases are the Newspeak  
recommended ones which fit with the dominant master narrative.
Table 2. The A.P. Narrative and an Alternative Narrative
The A.P. narrative -- recommended official use of words/phrases 	An  
alternative narrative -- not recommended for official use
Mistakenly bombed, wrong, blunder, error 	Direct result from  
ignorance of local social complexities and reliance upon air war
Coalition 	A fragmenting, divided, diminishing grouping
Great care for civilians 	Careless killing of valueless civilians
Number of civilians killed now dropping 	Fact check: number has been  
rising

A re-write of the original Associated Press report would emphasize  
that the 14 Afghan road workers were killed in what amounts to an act  
of manslaughter by U.S. (not a unified "coalition's") pilots, that  
they died because their lives are worth next to nothing20 and that  
they are part of a growing number of Afghan civilians killed by U.S./ 
NATO actions.

Three days after the deadly attack, the NATO-led force outright  
denied killing 14 Afghan workers.21 The phrase "NATO killing" had  
simply been banned in the Pentagon's Newspeak.

-- 30 --

Footnotes

1. Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen  
Eighty-Four. See also R.M. Keils, "Pentagon English is a Sort of  
Newspeak," College Composition and Communication 24, 5 (December  
1973): 386-391, and Timothy Lynch, "Doublespeak and the War on  
Terrorism," Cato Institute Briefing Papers No. 98 (September 6, 2006).

2. Roger Nunn, "The 'Unknown Unknowns' of Plain English," Asian EFL  
Journal 6, 10 (December 2004).

3. In Amir Shah, "Afghans: NATO Airstrikes Kill 14 Workers,"  
Associated Press (November 28, 2007).

4. See my "Truth about Afghan Civilian Casualties Comes only through  
American Lenses for the U.S. Corporate Media (Our Modern-Day  
Didymus)," in Peter Phillips & Project Censored (ed), Censored 2003.  
The Top 25 Censored Stories 2002 (New York: Seven Stories Press,  
2002): 265-294. Naturally, some individual journalists working for  
the A.P. exhibit the expected independent, critical thinking; Kathy  
Gannon comes to mind here. Gannon's book (2005) on Afghanistan, I is  
for Infidel, remains one of the very best analyses of the Taliban and  
the subsequent U.S. war in Afghanistan.

5. As argued in Peter Phillips, Sarah Randle, Brian Fuch, Zoe  
Hoffman, and Fabricio Romero, "A Study of Bias in the Associated  
Press," in Peter Phillips & Project Censored (eds), The Top 25  
Censored Stories 2007 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007). The A.P.  
maintains a decidedly pro-Israel stance in the Palestinian conflict.

6. In her "Review: Afghan Civilian Deaths Lower," Associated Press  
(February 11, 2002). I have examined the issue in my essay, "Dead  
Afghan Civilians: Disrobing the Non-Counters," Cursor.org (August 20,  
2002).

7. Phillips, Randle et. al. (2007), op. cit.

8. See also Gareth Porter, "Newspeak and the New War in Iran," the  
Huffington Post (October 25, 2007) and especially Tom Engelhardt,  
"Words to Die For: The Devil's Dictionary in Iraq," Tomdispatch.com  
(April 25, 2007).

9. Some minimal assistance was provided by Great Britain, Australia,  
and France.

10. In my "The Taliban’s Second Coming," Cursor.org (February 29, 2004).

11. Well argued in Conn Hallinan, "The Algebra of Occupation,"  
Foreign Policy in Focus (November 27, 2007).

12. See my "'Collateral Damage'? Civilians and the U.S. Air War in  
Afghanistan," in Aftab Ahmad Malik (ed), Shattered Illusions.  
Analyzing the War on Terrorism (Bristol, England; Amal Press, 2002):  
209-246.

13. See Table 17.2 in my "Urban Dimensions of the Punishment of  
Afghanistan by U.S. Bombs," in Stephen Graham (ed), Cities, War, and  
Terrorism. Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing  
Ltd., 2003): 316

14. Data from iCasualties.

15. In a propaganda coup, any armed opposition to a standing  
government is now labeled terrorist. By such criterion, of course,  
the American revolutionaries of the 1770s and the Vietnamese National  
Liberation Front soldiers of the 1960s were terrorists.

16. See Edward S. Herman, "'Tragic Errors' in U.S. Military Policy.  
Targeting the civilian population," Z Magazine 15, 8 (September 2002).

17. See here.

18. Derived from Afghan Victim Memorial Project.

19. The U.N. figure is mentioned in Peter Bergen and Katherine  
Tiedemann, "Losing Afghanistan, One Civilian at a Time," Washington  
Post (November 18, 2007).

20. See my essay, "The Value of a Dead Afghan: Revealed and  
Relative," Cursor.org (July 21, 2002).

21. "NATO force denies 14 Afghan workers killed in strike," Agence  
France Press (November 29, 2007), and Donna Miles, "Pentagon  
Official: Afghanistan Air Strike Hit Legitimate Targets," Family  
Security Matters.org (November 30, 2007).