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Is the Media an Accomplice in Drone Murders? |
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Monday, 14 March 2016 13:39 |
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Feroz writes: "What is significant regarding most drone attacks is the media coverage. In fact, it practically does not exist. The many victims of drone strikes are nameless and invisible. And if they appear in any media reports, all of them are completely dehumanized and described as 'terrorists,' 'suspected militants' or any other similar euphemism."
The wreckage of a car destroyed by a US drone strike in Azan, Yemen, February 2013. (photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters/Corbis)
Is the Media an Accomplice in Drone Murders?
By Emran Feroz, teleSUR
14 March 16
Since 2001, the United States has been killing people with weaponized drones, most times not knowing the identities of the victims.
 he victims of drone strikes are nameless and invisible, despite the fact that most of them are civilians.
The Pentagon announced this week that more than 150 al-Shabab fighters have been killed by a U.S. drone strike in Somalia. The Pentagon spokesmen repeatedly talked about "fighters" and "terrorists" which "posed an imminent threat to the U.S." But as usual, he offered no proof of his claims.
This kind of language has become normalized when it comes to the U.S. drone war, which is not just taking place in Somalia, but also in countries like Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. What is significant regarding the regular attacks in these countries is the media coverage. In fact, it practically does not exist. The many victims of drone strikes are nameless and invisible. And if they appear in any media reports, all of them are completely dehumanized and described as "terrorists," "suspected militants" or any other similar euphemism.
This was also the case after the latest strike in Somalia, a country the U.S. is officially not at war with. Shortly after the Pentagon's announcement, many news outlets adopted the U.S. government's version of the incident. The New York Times, for example, wrote about the killing of "150 fighters who were assembled for what American officials believe was a graduation ceremony." "Militants" was also the term the Washington Post used to describe all the victims. It is necessary to point out that many other well-known media outlets from all over the world did the very same thing. As usual, there was a huge lack of any critical scrutinizing. Instead, media once again became a mouthpiece of the U.S. government by quoting its military officials and spreading their one-sided views constantly.
Since 2001, the United States has been killing people with weaponized drones, most times not knowing the identity of the victims. As of today, at least 6,000 people have been killed by these drone strikes. According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, only 4 percent of drone victims in Pakistan were identified as a-Qaida members. But vastly more than 2,000 people have been killed there by drones during the last years.
Another country which is suffering heavily under drone strikes is Afghanistan, the most drone bombed country in the world. Between 2001 and 2013, 1,670 drone strikes took place in the country. It was in the city of Kandahar, the Taliban's former stronghold, where the first strike by a weaponized drone took place in October 2001. The target, Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, was not killed on this day, but many other unknown people have been in the years since.
One of these people was Sadiq Rahim Jan, a 21-year-old food vendor from Paktia, eastern Afghanistan. He was murdered by a drone strike in July 2012. A few days later, media outlets in Kabul described him as a "Taliban commander." The family members of Aisha Rashid have also been killed by a drone strike. The Afghan girl was four years old when a missile hit the pick-up of her family in Kunar, also in the east of the country. Fourteen passengers, including Aisha's parents, were murdered. Only she survived – barely – with a ragged face. Initially, all the victims were described as "militants" by Afghan government officials and local media outlets.
Tariq Aziz, from North Waziristan shared a similar destiny. The 16-year-old anti-drone activist was killed by a drone strike in November 2011, together with his 12-year-old cousin Waheed. Unlike the case of Malala Yousafzai, the young Pashtun girl which was nearly killed by a member of the Pakistani Taliban and received a Nobel Peace Prize, Tariq's case is widely unknown.
In all the mentioned cases, as well as many other, significant media coverage was nonexistent – or it described the victims as terrorists, extremists, militants, al-Qaida members, and so on. This is happening on a daily basis and there are also reasons why it is happening.
In the case of Sadiq, for example, his family became outraged after they noticed that local media outlets described their son and brother as a "Taliban commander." On that day, the young Afghan was the only person who has been killed in the area. He never had any connection with any insurgent group, not to mention being a commander of them. One of the media outlets which spread these news was Radio Azadi, an Afghan branch of the US government's external broadcast services. It should be more than obvious that the main aim of such a media platform is not spreading objective information.
Another example for this behaviour is Tolo TV, Afghanistan's leading mainstream television channel. Last year, the channel's news website reported that in July 2015 drone strikes in the eastern province of Nangarhar killed "nearly 250 Taliban and Daesh [Islamic State] insurgents." The main source for this "reporting" was the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan intelligence service, which was built by the U.S. in the first days of the NATO invasion.
Tolo TV was created in 2004 by Saad Mohseni, an Afghan businessman who is being called an "Afghan Rupert Murdoch" and is considered one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan. The channel's creation was mainly funded by the notorious United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is widely known as one of the most important foreign policy tools of the White House.
In general, one can assume that many media outlets in Afghanistan were not created to support journalism and press freedom but to install media institutions who can be useful to represent particular interests. This is also the case in other countries which suffer from drone strikes.
Noor Behram, an investigative journalist from Northern Waziristan, is known for taking pictures of the drone murder scenes and spreading the victims' faces. After Behram talked with journalists from Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, he experienced that for them, a beard, long hair and a turban or a pakol, a traditional Afghan cap, is enough to describe male drone victims as “terrorists.” But nearly every man in this area looks like that. According to this logic, everyone, even myself when I am staying there, must be a terrorist.
Besides, Behram's results fit into Washington's practice that all military-aged males in a strike zone are considered as "militants."
The U.S. and its allies needed propaganda organs to construct and justify their war on a medial level. Despite the question if this is moral or not, one should agree that it is also very logical because every war is based on propaganda – it was always like that and probably will never change.
But what remains is the question why so many people still believe such a biased media coverage and its constructed narrative of a good war which is only hitting the bad guys.
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Fukushima Should Have Served as Wake-Up Call for US Nuclear Regulatory Commission |
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Monday, 14 March 2016 13:38 |
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Negin writes: "Fukushima raised an obvious question: How vulnerable are those reactors - and the rest of the U.S. fleet for that matter - to comparable natural disasters?"
A worker in a protective suit at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (photo: Toru Hanai/AP)
ALSO SEE: Chernobyl and Fukushima: Side by Side
Fukushima Should Have Served as Wake-Up Call for US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
By Elliott Negin, EcoWatch
14 March 16
 n March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and 50-foot tsunami triggered meltdowns at three of six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan. It was the one of the worst accidents in the nuclear industry’s 60-year history, contaminating thousands of square miles, displacing more than 150,000 people and costing Japanese taxpayers nearly $100 billion.
The disaster was a wake-up call for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). After all, nearly a third of the 104 U.S. reactors operating at the time were General Electric Mark I or Mark II reactors, the same as those in Fukushima. The accident raised an obvious question: How vulnerable are those reactors—and the rest of the U.S. fleet for that matter—to comparable natural disasters?
The NRC set up a task force to analyze what happened at Fukushima and assess how to make U.S. reactors safer. In July 2011, the task force offered a dozen recommendations to help safeguard U.S. nuclear plants in the event of a Fukushima-scale accident.
Unfortunately, the NRC has since rejected or significantly weakened many of those recommendations and has yet to fully implement the reforms it did adopt, according to a new Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report. UCS also found that the agency abdicated its responsibility as the nation’s nuclear watchdog by allowing the industry to routinely rely on voluntary guidelines, which are, by their very nature, unenforceable.
“Although the NRC and the nuclear industry have devoted considerable resources to address the post-Fukushima task force recommendations, they haven’t done all they should to protect the public from a similar disaster,” said report author Edwin Lyman, a UCS senior scientist and co-author of the 2014 book, Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster. “If the NRC is serious about protecting the public and plant workers, it should reconsider a number of recommendations it scrapped under pressure from the industry and its supporters in Congress.”
Half-Baked Reforms
The post-Fukushima task force’s top priority was overhauling what it called a “patchwork” of NRC regulations and industry voluntary guidelines for “beyond-design-basis” events—incidents that plants were not designed to withstand. The task force argued that both regulators and plant owners would benefit from a coherent set of standards that would guard against severe events like Fukushima and provide a framework for implementing its other recommendations. After several years of deliberation, however, the NRC ultimately passed on making any fundamental changes, maintaining that its regulatory framework doesn’t need fixing.
Lyman said this was a critical mistake. “By rejecting the task force’s top recommendation,” he said, “the NRC regulatory regime will remain full of holes, leaving the public at risk from potential accident scenarios that regulators may overlook.”
The NRC then relied heavily on its vaguely worded “backfit” rule to reject many of the other recommended post-Fukushima safety upgrades. The rule limits the agency’s ability to require new safety rules if a proposed upgrade’s cost is deemed to exceed its benefits. Many important safety recommendations failed to pass this test, despite the fact that they would have made plants safer.
“The post-Fukushima, lessons-learned process provided the NRC a golden opportunity to reform its inconsistent approach to regulating the industry,” Lyman said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t take advantage of it.”
Letting the Industry Make the Rules
The NRC and the nuclear industry’s main response to the Fukushima accident is what they call the “diverse and flexible coping capability” program or FLEX for short, which will provide extra backup emergency equipment to cool reactors and spent fuel pools during a prolonged power loss.
The FLEX program is a prime example of the industry jumping out ahead of the NRC. In this case, the industry purchased backup emergency equipment—pumps, compressors, generators, batteries and the like—before the NRC had the chance to develop guidelines for the program. To cut costs, the industry bought commercially available equipment that may not weather a severe accident and the industry-initiated FLEX guidelines hinge on ambiguously worded, hard-to-enforce directives that, for example, mandate “reasonable protection” of safety equipment. Regardless, the NRC largely approved the industry’s plan instead of developing its own standards.
Likewise, the NRC decided to continue to allow plant owners to develop their own voluntary plans for managing a core-melt accident, rejecting a task force recommendation to require them to do so. If plans are voluntary, the NRC has no authority to review them or issue citations when they are deficient.
“Once again, the NRC is ignoring a key lesson of the Fukushima accident: Emergency plans are not worth the paper they are printed on unless they are rigorously developed, maintained, periodically tested and subject to NRC inspection and enforcement,” said Lyman. “When it comes to many critical safety measures, the NRC is allowing the industry to regulate itself.”
Saying No to Filtered Vents
When three of the six Fukushima Daiichi reactors overheated, plant workers scrambled to lower reactor core pressure by depressurizing the containment building so they could inject cooling water. They couldn’t open the containment vents from the control room, however, because there was no electric power. Without enough cooling water, the reactors melted down.
To avoid the possibility of this happening at the 30 currently operating U.S. reactors that share the same containment design as those at Fukushima, the NRC staff recommended that the agency not only require plant owners to install reliable, “hardened” vents that could be easily opened during an electricity outage, but also compel owners to add filters to avoid releasing radioactive material into the surrounding community. Four countries with the same type of GE reactors—Finland, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland—require filtered vents and Japan is planning to do so.
The nuclear industry, however, argued that the FLEX program obviated the need for filtered vents, despite the fact that filters would be more dependable than relying on plant workers to perform complex tasks under very trying circumstances. After years of analysis, the NRC staff reversed its original recommendation, asserting that that neither vent filters nor the industry’s proposed alternatives were justified. Last August, NRC commissioners voted to do nothing.
“As a result,” the UCS report states, “in the event of a severe accident, the NRC is leaving plant operators with a horrible dilemma: … open the vents and deliberately release radioactivity into the environment or … allow the reactor containment to overpressurize and potentially rupture, resulting in an even greater release of radiation.”
Either way, we’re talking about contaminating a vast area with high levels of radioactivity and increasing the cancer risk for nearby residents.
NRC Should Reconsider Safety Recommendations
The UCS report pulls back the curtain on a post-Fukushima reform process that has largely played out behind the scenes. Hopefully its findings will raise some eyebrows—if not sound the alarm—on Capitol Hill and in the Obama administration, because public safety depends on federal oversight. Elected officials should insist that the NRC reconsider the safety measures it rejected, especially replacing its hodge-podge of vaguely written rules and voluntary guidelines with a rational regulatory approach and establishing a transparent process that allows the public to assess the effectiveness of its reforms.
“The NRC and the nuclear industry have taken steps to address some of the safety vulnerabilities revealed by the Fukushima disaster,” said Lyman. “But so far, the agency has failed to fully learn the lessons of Fukushima. It needs to go back to the drawing board and reconsider critical safety recommendations that it dismissed without good justification. And let me stress: This is not an academic exercise. The health and safety of more than 100 million Americans who live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant hang in the balance.”
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FOCUS: The Rise of Trump Shows the Danger and Sham of Compelled Journalistic "Neutrality" |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Monday, 14 March 2016 10:41 |
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Greenwald writes: "Under the framework of corporate journalism, to denounce Trump, or even to sound alarms about the dark forces he's exploiting and unleashing, would not constitute journalism. To the contrary, such behavior is regarded as a violation of journalism."
Donald Trump describes how he was ready to punch a person who rushed the stage during an election rally. (photo: Nati Harnik/AP)
The Rise of Trump Shows the Danger and Sham of Compelled Journalistic "Neutrality"
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
14 March 16
 s Donald Trump’s campaign predictably moves from toxic rhetoric targeting the most marginalized minorities to threats and use of violence, there is a growing sense that American institutions have been too lax about resisting it. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan on Sunday posted a widely cited Twitter essay voicing this concern, arguing that “Trump’s rise represents a failure in American parties, media, and civic institutions — and they’re continuing to fail right now.” He added, “Someone could capture a major party [nomination] who endorses violence [and] few seem alarmed.”
Actually, many people are alarmed, but it is difficult to know that by observing media coverage, where little journalistic alarm over Trump is expressed. That’s because the rules of large media outlets — venerating faux objectivity over truth along with every other civic value — prohibit the sounding of any alarms. Under this framework of corporate journalism, to denounce Trump, or even to sound alarms about the dark forces he’s exploiting and unleashing, would not constitute journalism. To the contrary, such behavior is regarded as a violation of journalism. Such denunciations are scorned as opinion, activism, and bias: all the values that large media-owning corporations have posited as the antithesis of journalism in order to defang and neuter it as an adversarial force.
Just this morning, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik published a story describing the concern and even anger of some NPR executives and journalists over a column by longtime NPR commentator Cokie Roberts — the Beacon of Washington Centrism — that criticizes Trump. “NPR has a policy forbidding its journalists from taking public stances on political affairs,” he wrote. For any NPR reporter, Roberts’s statements — warning of the dangers of a Trump presidency — would be a clear violation of that policy.
An NPR vice president, Michael Oreskes, published an internal memo to NPR staff this morning highlighting Roberts’s non-reporting and non-employee role as a reason she would not be punished, but he pointedly noted, “If Cokie were still a member of NPR’s staff we would not have allowed that.” And in an interview that Oreskes “directed” Roberts to do this morning with Morning Edition host David Greene about the matter, the NPR host chided Roberts for expressing negative views of Trump, telling her:
Objectivity is so fundamental to what we do. Can you blame people like me for being a little disappointed to hear you come out and take a personal position on something like this in a campaign?
Imagine calling yourself a journalist, and then — as you watch an authoritarian politician get closer to power by threatening and unleashing violence and stoking the ugliest impulses — denouncing not that politician, but rather other journalists who warn of the dangers. That is the embodiment of the ethos of corporate journalism in America, and a potent illustration of why its fetishized reverence for “objectivity” is so rotted and even dangerous. Indeed, Roberts herself agreed that it was justified for her to speak out only because she’s in the role of NPR commentator and not reporter: “If I were doing it in your role” as a reporter, Roberts told Greene, “you should be disappointed.”
This abdication of the journalistic duty inevitably engendered by corporate “neutrality” rules is not new. We saw it repeatedly during the Bush years, when most large media outlets suppressed journalistic criticism of things like torture and grotesque war crimes carried out by the U.S. as part of the war on terror, and even changed their language by adopting government euphemisms to obscure what was being done. Outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR refused to use the word “torture” to describe techniques long universally recognized as such — which were always called torture by those same media outlets when used by countries adversarial to the U.S. — because to do so would evince “bias,” lack “neutrality,” and “take sides” in the torture debate.
Contrary to what U.S. media corporations have succeeded in convincing people, these journalistic neutrality rules are not remotely traditional. They are newly invented concepts that coincided with the acquisition of the nation’s most important media outlets by large, controversy-averse corporations for which “media” was just one of many businesses.
Large corporations hate controversy (it alienates consumers) and really hate offending those who wield political power (bad for business). Imposing objectivity rules on the journalists who work for their media divisions was a means to avoid offending anyone by forcing journalists to conceal their perspectives, assumptions, and viewpoints, and, worse, forcing them to dishonestly pretend that they had none, that they float above all that. This framework neutered journalism and drained it of all its vitality and passion, reducing journalists to stenography drones permitted to do little more than summarize what each equally valid side asserts. Worse, it ensures that people who wield great influence and power — such as Donald Trump — can engage in all sorts of toxic, dishonest, and destructive behavior without having to worry about any check from journalists, who are literally barred by their employers from speaking out (even as their employers profit greatly through endless coverage).
This corporate, neutrality-über-alles framework is literally the exact antithesis of how journalism was practiced, and why it was so valued, when the U.S. Constitution was enacted and for decades after. As Jack Shafer documented in 2013, those who claim that journalism has always been grounded in neutrality demonstrate “a painful lack of historical understanding of American journalism.” Indeed, “American journalism began in earnest as a rebellion against the state”: citizens using journalism to denounce in no uncertain terms the evils of the British Crown and to agitate for resistance against it. He cites Judith and William Serrin’s anthology, Muckraking: The Journalism That Changed America, which “establishes the primacy of partisan, activist journalism from the revolutionary period through the modern era.” That is the noble journalistic tradition that has been deliberately suppressed — outright barred — by our nation’s largest corporate media outlets, justifying their meek and impotent codes under the banner of an objectivity and neutrality that are as illusory and deceitful as they are amoral.
As a result, nobody should be looking to our nation’s largest media outlets to serve as a bulwark against Trumpism or any other serious menace. The rules they have imposed on themselves, by design, ensure their own neutrality even in the face of the most extreme evils.
* * * * *
The debate over “objectivity” and “neutrality” in journalism has been, as I noted, quite relevant and pressing since long before the emergence of Donald Trump. I had a long exchange with former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller about this in 2013 in the context of the founding of The Intercept, where the arguments are laid out in full, and, as Folkenflik noted this morning, I spoke with him about this issue on CNN after that exchange with Keller:
UPDATE: Regarding whether “neutrality” and “objectivity” are new journalistic concoctions, note that the two most revered figures in American broadcast journalism history – Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite – would have been fired from NPR and multiple other contemporary media outlets for their most notable moments: Murrow when he used his nightly news broadcast to repeatedly denounce Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Cronkite when he did the same about the Vietnam War.
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Encryption: The Precedent Is the Voting Rights Act |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 14 March 2016 08:31 |
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Ash writes: "FBI v Apple is not just an isolated case or an attempt by the government to target one device, or even the world's leading technology company, it's actually quite a bit bigger than that."
March 1, 2016: Bruce Sewell, senior vice president and general counsel for Apple Inc., testifies before the House Judiciary Committee. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: Snowden on FBI's iPhone Claims: “Respectfully, That’s Bullshit”
Encryption: The Precedent Is the Voting Rights Act
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
14 March 16
 an, should law enforcement be able to look anywhere, search anything to solve or prevent a serious crime?
Almost any judge in America would rule yes. U.S. District Court Magistrate Sheri Pym did. Or at least she thought she did. What she really ruled was a bit different, more complicated, and at least for the moment more legally contentious.
However ultimately the future of data encryption, and with it digital privacy in the U.S., will come down to two simple questions: “What reasonable tools and powers should law enforcement be allowed in the pursuit of public safety.” And of equal importance, “What reasonable privacy protections are users of electronic devices entitled to?”
Right now the centerpiece of the government’s case against Apple is the “All Writs Act,” (AWA) a component of the Judiciary Act of 1789. A good breakdown of the AWA and how it might apply to the government’s case against Apple is available in the form of an audio lecture by Stanford University’s Jonathan Mayer. As Mayer points out, the law is remarkably broad and, having been written in the 18th century, unproven in this application.
Apple’s defenses seem to be coalescing around the First Amendment, and their counter argument is that being asked to author a digital operating system tailored to federal law enforcement’s current objectives creates an unreasonable burden. But the AWA was never intended to address or even envision complex 21st century digital-era law. So there’s a square peg, round hole problem on many levels.
FBI v Apple is not just an isolated case or an attempt by the government to target one device, or even the world’s leading technology company, it’s actually quite a bit bigger than that. Enter Edward Snowden and his cache of documents.
What the Snowden documents reveal, actually confirm, is a much larger effort by the U.S. government’s law enforcement and security players to convert personal computing into the most invasive form of private citizen monitoring the world has ever known. More to the point, according to the documents, they have already succeeded. Encryption really functions as an antibody, a challenge to the U.S. government’s vast “Total Information Awareness” process.
It is the pattern of abuse that draws on the Voting Rights Act for precedent. What Congress said in the VRA, among other things, was that there was a pattern of abuse of voting rights specifically targeting minorities in specific states and jurisdictions. Further, congressional lawmakers asserted that a legal remedy was required to offset the pattern of abuse in the affected jurisdictions. The key takeaway there is a documented, systemic pattern as establishing cause for legal remedy.
What the Snowden documents did was illustrate a massive pattern of civil rights abuse by the NSA and federal law enforcement on a scope affecting the vast majority of Americans. Not only did the Snowden documents establish, in many cases for the first time, that these abuses were taking place, but they confirmed accusations and reports by civil liberties experts that the abuses had been taking place for years.
The civil rights that were denied Americans affected by the government’s excesses were specifically those guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment. By using a catch-all rationale and broad self-granted authorities, the NSA and participating federal law enforcement agencies trampled upon the Fourth Amendment protections, according to the documents placed in the public record by Snowden, of practically every American who uses an electronic computing or communication device or financial instrument. The scope is staggering.
Applying the VRA standard, the actions of the NSA and associated federal law enforcement agencies, as illustrated by the Snowden documents, are pernicious, persistent violations of the civil rights of every American affected.
Against that backdrop, consumer personal encryption is not only a reasonable remedy but, until the government can demonstrate conclusively that the violations have ceased, a necessity and a right.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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