[R-G] US Journalists & War-Crime Guilt

[Anthony Fenton]

US Journalists & War-Crime Guilt
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/101408d.html
By Peter Dyer
October 15, 2008

Editor’s Note: This year, the U.S. news media cheered the opening of  
the $450 million Newseum in Washington, a self-congratulatory  
celebration of American journalism.

However, rather than giving themselves that expensive pat on the back,  
the major U.S. media organizations might have done something to show  
remorse for their complicity in the Bush administration’s propaganda  
that justified the invasion of Iraq.

As freelance journalist Peter Dyer notes, prosecutors at the Nuremberg  
Tribunals deemed such journalistic support for war crimes to be a  
capital offense:

October 16 is an anniversary that should hold considerable interest  
for American journalists who have written in support of ”Operation  
Iraqi Freedom” – the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Share this article

Bookmark
Digg!Digg

emailEmail
printPrinter friendly

Sixty-two years ago, on Oct. 16, 1946, Julius Streicher was hanged.

Streicher was one of a group of 10 Germans executed that day following  
the judgment of the first Nuremberg Trial – a 40-week trial of 22 of  
the most prominent Nazis.

Each was tried for two or more of the four crimes defined in the  
Nuremberg Charter: crimes against peace (aggression), war crimes,  
crimes against humanity, and conspiracy.

All who were sentenced to death were major German government officials  
or military leaders. Except for Streicher.

Julius Streicher was a journalist.

Editor of the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, Streicher  
was convicted of, in the words of the judgment, “incitement to murder  
and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed  
under the most horrible conditions clearly constitut(ing) … a crime  
against humanity.”

Presenting the case against Streicher, British prosecutor Lieutenant  
Colonel M.C. Griffith-Jones said: “My Lord, it may be that this  
defendant is less directly involved in the physical commission of the  
crimes against Jews. ... The submission of the Prosecution is that his  
crime is no less the worse … that he made these things possible – made  
these crimes possible which could never have happened had it not been  
for him and for those like him. He led the propaganda and the  
education of the German people in those ways.”

The critical role of propaganda was affirmed at Nuremberg not only by  
the prosecution and in the judgment but also in the testimony of the  
most prominent Nazi defendant, Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering:

“Modern and total war develops, as I see it, along three lines: the  
war of weapons on land, at sea and in the air; economic war, which has  
become an integral part of every modern war; and, third, propaganda  
war, which is also an essential part of this warfare.”

Two months after the Nuremberg hangings, the United Nations General  
Assembly passed Resolution 59(I), declaring:

“Freedom of information requires as an indispensable element the  
willingness and capacity to employ its privileges without abuse. It  
requires as a basic discipline the moral obligation to seek the facts  
without prejudice and to spread knowledge without malicious intent.”

The next year another General Assembly Resolution was adopted: Res.  
110 which “condemns all forms of propaganda, in whatsoever country  
conducted, which is either designed or likely to provoke or encourage  
any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.”

Although UN General Assembly Resolutions are not legally binding,  
Resolutions 59 and 110 carry considerable moral weight. This is  
because, like the United Nations itself, they are an expression of the  
catastrophic brutality and suffering of two world wars and the  
universal desire to avoid future slaughter.

Propaganda Crimes

Most jurisdictions have yet to recognize propaganda for war as a  
crime. However several journalists have recently been convicted of  
incitement to genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for  
Rwanda.

Because there is stiff resistance, especially from the United States,  
the effort to criminalize war propaganda faces an uphill battle.

However in legal terms it seems relatively straightforward: if  
incitement to genocide is a crime, then incitement to aggression,  
another Nuremberg crime, could and should be as well.

After all, aggression – starting an unprovoked war – is “the supreme  
international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it  
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,” in the  
words of the judgment at Nuremberg.

Criminal or not, much of the world now sees incitement to war as  
morally indefensible.

In this light and in light of Goering’s three-part recipe for war  
(weapons, economic war and propaganda) it is instructive to look at  
the role which American journalists and war propagandists have  
recently played in bringing about and sustaining war.

The Bush administration began to sell the invasion of Iraq to the  
American public soon after 9/11.

In order to coordinate this effort President Bush’s chief of staff,  
Andrew Card, established the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) in the  
summer of 2002 expressly for the purpose of marketing the invasion of  
Iraq.

Among the members of WHIG were media figures/propagandists Karen  
Hughes and Mary Matalin.

WHIG was remarkable not only for its recklessness with the truth but  
for the candor with which it acknowledged it was running an  
advertising campaign. A Sept. 7, 2002, New York Times article entitled  
TRACES OF TERROR: THE STRATEGY; Bush Aides Set Strategy to Sell Policy  
on Iraq reported:

“White House officials said today that the administration was  
following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the  
Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam  
Hussein….

'' ‘From a marketing point of view,’ said Andrew H. Card Jr., the  
White House chief of staff who is coordinating the effort, ‘you don't  
introduce new products in August.’ ''

It was as if the “product” – the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign  
state – was a consumer good, like a car or a TV show. The sales pitch  
was the manufactured “imminent threat” of Iraqi weapons of mass  
destruction.

In other words, the business of WHIG was incitement to aggressive war  
primarily through the propaganda of fear.

Along those lines WHIG’s most prominent member, National Security  
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, invoked the specter of an Iraqi-generated  
nuclear holocaust in a Sept. 8, 2002, CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer:

“We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for  
instance – into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are  
only suited to – high-quality aluminum tools that are only really  
suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs. ... The  
problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how  
quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking  
gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

The smoking gun/mushroom cloud images were among the most memorable of  
all the White House war propaganda. They were generated just a few  
days earlier in a WHIG meeting by speechwriter Michael Gerson.

The existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was central to the  
Bush administration’s campaign for war. Other important elements were  
Saddam Hussein’s ties with Al Qaeda and the strongly implied  
association of Iraq with the tragedies of 9/11.

All were false. In propaganda, though, selling the product trumps truth.

Unquestioning Submission

The role played by American mainstream media during the run-up to the  
invasion of Iraq was marked by widespread unquestioning submission to  
the Bush administration and abandonment of the most fundamental  
journalistic responsibility to the public.

This responsibility is embodied not only in Resolution 59 but in the  
Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics as well, which  
states: “Journalists should test the accuracy of information from all  
sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error.”

The failure of influential American journalists, such as the New York  
Times’ Judith Miller, to test the accuracy of information played a  
critical role in the Bush administration’s successful effort to incite  
the American public to attack a country which was not threatening us.

Though she was far from alone in selling the case for war, Miller --  
through her seemingly uncritical reliance on dodgy informants -- was  
probably responsible to a larger degree than any other American  
journalist for spreading the fear of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass  
destruction.

As such she and other influential journalists who failed in this way  
bear a share of moral, if not legal, responsibility for hundreds of  
thousands of deaths, millions of refugees and all the other carnage,  
devastation and human suffering of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Some prominent American media figures, however, went considerably  
further than simple failure to check sources. Some actively and  
passionately encouraged Americans to commit and/or approve of war  
crimes, before and during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Prominent among these was Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly who – regarding both  
Afghanistan and Iraq – advocated such crimes forbidden by the Geneva  
Convention as collective punishment of civilians (Gen. Con. IV, Art.  
33); attacking civilian targets (Protocol I, Art. 51); destroying  
water supplies (Protocol I Art. 54 Sec. 2) and even starvation  
(Protocol I, Art. 54 Sec. 1).

Sept. 17, 2001: "The U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to  
rubble: the airport, the power plants, their water facilities, and the  
roads" in the event of a refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden to the  
U.S.

Later, he added: “This is a very primitive country. And taking out  
their ability to exist day to day will not be hard.  … We should not  
target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal  
government, they starve, period.”

On March 26, 2003, a few days after the invasion of Iraq began,  
O’Reilly said: “There is a school of thought that says we should have  
given the citizens of Baghdad 48 hours to get out of Dodge by dropping  
leaflets and going with the AM radios and all that. Forty-eight hours,  
you've got to get out of there, and flatten the place.” [See Peter  
Hart's “O'Reilly's War: Any rationale—or none—will do” Fairness &  
Accuracy in Reporting, May/June 2003]

Collective Punishment

Another tremendously influential journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner and  
former executive editor of the New York Times, the late A.M.  
Rosenthal, also advocated attacking civilian targets and collective  
punishment in regard to waging war against Muslim nations in the  
Middle East.

In a Sept. 14, 2001, column, “How the U.S. Can Win the War”, Rosenthal  
wrote that the U.S. should give Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria  
and Sudan three days to consider an ultimatum demanding they turn over  
documents and information related to weapons of mass destruction and  
terrorist organizations.

During these three days, “the residents of the countries would be  
urged 24 hours a day by the U.S. to flee the capital and major cities,  
because they would be bombed to the ground beginning the fourth day."

Right-wing media figure Ann Coulter, on the Sean Hannity Show on July  
21, 2006, called for another war and more punishment of civilians,  
this time in Iran:

”Well, I keep hearing people say we can't find the nuclear material,  
and you can bury it in caves. How about we just, you know, carpet-bomb  
them so they can't build a transistor radio? And then it doesn't  
matter if they have the nuclear material.”

This pattern of the major U.S. news figures advocating aggressive wars  
even predated 9/11. Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman  
published a strident call for war crimes including collective  
punishment of Serbs and the destruction of their water supplies over  
the Kosovo crisis:

“But if NATO's only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has  
to get every ounce out of that. Let's at least have a real air war.  
The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or  
going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs  
are ‘cleansing’ Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in  
Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related  
factory has to be targeted.

"Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs  
certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week  
you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by  
pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can  
do 1389 too.” [New York Times, April 23, 1999]

These casual -- even joking -- comments about inflicting war on  
relatively weak countries came from American journalists and media  
figures at the very top of their profession. Each was addressing an  
audience of millions. It is difficult to overstate their influence.

Over the past decade alone, the massive destruction and carnage  
wreaked by American pursuit of “the supreme international crime” of  
aggression has been enabled by negligent, reckless and/or malicious  
use of this influence.

Sadly, the words of Nuremberg Prosecutor Griffith-Jones concerning the  
propaganda of German journalist Julius Streicher hold considerable  
meaning today for some of the most prominent journalists in the  
country which, 60 years ago, provided the guiding light at Nuremberg:

Streicher “made these things possible – made these crimes possible  
which could never have happened had it not been for him and for those  
like him.”

In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 127 in  
which “the General Assembly … invites the Governments of States  
Members … to study such measures as might with advantage, be taken on  
the national plane to combat, within the limits of constitutional  
procedures, the diffusion of false or distorted reports likely to  
injure friendly relations between States.”

Unfortunately, 60 years later, little progress has been made. War  
propaganda is still legal and very much alive – flourishing, in fact,  
as demonstrated by periodic calls for one more invasion of a country  
which has never threatened the U.S.: Iran.

As matters stand today, with the United States still the world's  
preeminent military power, the American propagandists who enabled  
Operation Iraqi Freedom and other wars of aggression have little need  
to worry about their legal responsibilities under the Nuremberg  
principles.

A strong case can be made, though, that they have blood on their hands.

Peter Dyer is a freelance journalist who moved with his wife from  
California to New Zealand in 2004. He can be reached at p.dyer at inspire.net.nz 
  .