[R-G] US Colonel Advocates US 'Military Attacks' on 'Partisan Media' in Essay for Neocon, Pro-Israel Group JINSA

[Anthony Fenton]

> http://rebelreports.com/post/110980714/us-colonel-advocates-us-military-attacks-on-partisan
>

>
> “The point of all this is simple: Win,” writes Col. Ralph Peters.  
> “In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win  
> dirty. But win.”
>
> By Jeremy Scahill
>
> In the era of embedded media, independent journalists have become  
> the eyes and ears of the world. Without those un-embedded  
> journalists willing to risk their lives to place themselves on the  
> other side of the barrel of the tank or the gun or under the  
> airstrikes, history would be written almost entirely from the  
> vantage point of powerful militaries, or—at the very least—it would  
> be told from the perspective of the troops doing the shooting,  
> rather than the civilians who always pay the highest price.
>
> In the case of the Iraq invasion and occupation, the journalists who  
> have placed themselves in danger most often are local Iraqi  
> journalists. Some 116 Iraqi journalists and media workers have been  
> killed in the line of duty since March 2003. In all, 189 journalists  
> have been killed in Iraq. At least 16 of these journalists were  
> killed by the US military, according to the Committee to Protect  
> Journalists. The network that has most often found itself under US  
> attack is Al Jazeera. As I wrote a few years ago in The Nation:
>
> The United States bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001, shelled  
> the Basra hotel where Al Jazeera journalists were the only guests in  
> April 2003, killed Iraq correspondent Tareq Ayoub a few days later  
> in Baghdad and imprisoned several Al Jazeera reporters (including at  
> Guantánamo), some of whom say they were tortured. In addition to the  
> military attacks, the US-backed Iraqi government banned the network  
> from reporting in Iraq.
> A new report for a leading neoconservative group which pushes a  
> belligerent “Israel first” agenda of conquest in the Middle East  
> suggests that in future wars the US should make censorship of media  
> official policy and advocates “military attacks on the partisan  
> media.” (H/T MuzzleWatch) The report for JINSA, the Jewish Institute  
> for National Security Affairs, was authored by retired US Army  
> Colonel Ralph Peters. It appears in JINSA’s “flagship publication,”  
> The Journal of International Security Affairs. “Today, the United  
> States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the  
> battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the  
> fight,” Peters writes, calling the media, “The killers without guns:”
>
> Of course, the media have shaped the outcome of conflicts for  
> centuries, from the European wars of religion through Vietnam. More  
> recently, though, the media have determined the outcomes of  
> conflicts. While journalists and editors ultimately failed to defeat  
> the U.S. government in Iraq, video cameras and biased reporting  
> guaranteed that Hezbollah would survive the 2006 war with Israel  
> and, as of this writing, they appear to have saved Hamas from  
> destruction in Gaza.
>
> […]
>
> Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require  
> censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the  
> partisan media.Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists  
> have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But  
> freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and  
> strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a  
> media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism  
> may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
>
> The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else  
> matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories  
> are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish  
> monsters.
> It is, of course, very appropriate that such a despicable battle cry  
> for murdering media workers appears in a JINSA publication. The  
> organization has long boasted an all-star cast of criminal  
> “advisors.” Among them: Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, James Woolsey,  
> John Bolton, Douglas Feith and others. JINSA, along with the Project  
> for a New American Century, was one of the premiere groups in  
> shaping US policy during the Bush years and remains a formidable  
> force with Obama in the White House.
>
> Reading Colonel Peters’s sick and twisted essay reminded me of the  
> report that emerged in late 2005 about an alleged Bush  
> administration plot to bomb Al Jazeera’s international headquarters  
> in Qatar, which I covered for The Nation:
>
> Britain’s Daily Mirror reported that during an April 2004 White  
> House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, George W. Bush  
> floated the idea of bombing Al Jazeera’s international headquarters  
> in Qatar. This allegation was based on leaked “Top Secret” minutes  
> of the Bush-Blair summit. British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith  
> has activated the Official Secrets Act, threatening any publication  
> that publishes any portion of the memo (he has already brought  
> charges against a former Cabinet staffer and a former parliamentary  
> aide). So while we don’t yet know the contents of the memo, we do  
> know that at the time of Bush’s meeting with Blair, the  
> Administration was in the throes of a very public, high-level temper  
> tantrum directed against Al Jazeera. The meeting took place on April  
> 16, at the peak of the first US siege of Falluja, and Al Jazeera was  
> one of the few news outlets broadcasting from inside the city. Its  
> exclusive footage was being broadcast by every network from CNN to  
> the BBC.
>
> The Falluja offensive, one of the bloodiest assaults of the US  
> occupation, was a turning point. In two weeks that April, thirty  
> marines were killed as local guerrillas resisted US attempts to  
> capture the city. Some 600 Iraqis died, many of them women and  
> children. Al Jazeera broadcast from inside the besieged city,  
> beaming images to the world. On live TV the network gave graphic  
> documentary evidence disproving US denials that it was killing  
> civilians. It was a public relations disaster, and the United States  
> responded by attacking the messenger.
>
> Just a few days before Bush allegedly proposed bombing the network,  
> Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Falluja, Ahmed Mansour, reported live  
> on the air, “Last night we were targeted by some tanks, twice…but we  
> escaped. The US wants us out of Falluja, but we will stay.” On April  
> 9 Washington demanded that Al Jazeera leave the city as a condition  
> for a cease-fire. The network refused. Mansour wrote that the next  
> day “American fighter jets fired around our new location, and they  
> bombed the house where we had spent the night before, causing the  
> death of the house owner Mr. Hussein Samir. Due to the serious  
> threats we had to stop broadcasting for few days because every time  
> we tried to broadcast the fighter jets spotted us we became under  
> their fire.”
>
> On April 11 senior military spokesperson Mark Kimmitt declared, “The  
> stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and  
> children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and  
> that is lies.” On April 15 Donald Rumsfeld echoed those remarks in  
> distinctly undiplomatic terms, calling Al Jazeera’s reporting  
> “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable…. It’s disgraceful what that  
> station is doing.” It was the very next day, according to the Daily  
> Mirror, that Bush told Blair of his plan. “He made clear he wanted  
> to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere,” a source told the  
> Mirror. “There’s no doubt what Bush wanted to do—and no doubt Blair  
> didn’t want him to do it.”
> Lest people think that the views of people like Col. Ralph Peters  
> and the JINSA/PNAC neocons are relics of the past, remember that the  
> Obama administration includes heavy hitters from this world among  
> its ranks, as well as fierce neocon supporters. While they may no  
> longer be literally calling the shots, as they did under Bush/ 
> Cheney, their disproportionate influence on US policy endures.