This Week:

Quote of the Week

Recommended Wartime Information Sources

This Is What Propaganda Looks Like

Greetings,

This week I comment on the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, and how to attempt to learn the real story of the likely victims. More than seven million Afghans are already starving, and for many of them the United States war has likely signed a grisly death warrant. (See the "Quotes" of the Week this week for details.) So many tears have been shed—and should be shed—over the tragic and senseless deaths of 7,000 Americans on September 11th. How many tears will be shed over the tragic and senseless deaths of millions of Afghans?

Some housekeeping: The "Free Speech" website that Nygaard Notes had been using is no longer free, so for budget reasons Nygaard Notes had to move to a new address. You may want to change your bookmark for it. The new one is http://www.nygaard_notes.org.

Everything on the site still looks and functions the same. As always, please let me know if you find any links that are no longer functional, or other problems on the site. I will be taking next week off from publication, as we are going on a whirlwind 6-day trip to the East Coast, three cities in six days. Nygaard Notes #129 will come out on October 26th.

In peace and justice,

Nygaard

"Quotes" of the Week:

"Even if no bombs are dropped on Afghanistan and no bullets fired at Osama bin Laden or the Taliban, 1 million Afghans may die in what United Nations agencies warn will be a humanitarian crisis of ‘stunning proportions.' Afghanistan, already shredded by such man-made disasters as decades of war and years of Taliban rule, is suffering a major natural disaster in the form of severe drought and famine. Some 3.8 million Afghans were already dependent on food aid from the international agencies that withdrew after the September 11 attacks. Without new shipments, 320,000 Afghans will run out of food within a week; 1.6 million will exhaust their food supply by December, said UN World Food Program spokesman Khaled Adly. When the harsh winter descends, 7.5 million very poor Afghans will face starvation and lethal cold, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance. The most vulnerable will die as surely as if they had been ripped apart by bombs."

-- freelance reporter Terry J. Allen, reporting on the ZNet website. For more details, see the website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at http://www.unhcr.org/.

"Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed."

-- Arundhati Roy, in an essay appearing in the Guardian of London on September 29th entitled "The Algebra of Infinite Justice." ("Infinite Justice" was the original name that the Pentagon assigned to its military attack on Afghanistan.)

Recommended Wartime Information Sources

There are some things that I think any compassionate person would want to know in following news of this, or any, war: Who is dying? What is being destroyed? What are the threats to the civilian population and how can they be minimized? What actually happens when the most powerful nation in the world attacks one of the weakest? These questions are unlikely to be answered by reporters who rely only on "official" sources who are a party to the conflict or on "anonymous" sources who likely have the same interests, but that's pretty much all you will get in the corporate media, as I discuss in a separate essay in this issue of the Notes.

Do you remember the "smart bombs" used when the U.S. attacked Iraq in 1991? I'll bet most people do. Do you remember the reports that came out many months later revealing that they weren't as "smart" as reported, many missing their intended targets, and that the vast majority of the bombs used were not "smart" at all? I'll bet most people do not. That's how it works with a passive media: the initial self-serving reports by those in power tend to make the front pages, and the truth comes later and is relegated to a much-less prominent position in the media, if it appears at all. The result? Ten years later we bomb another poor Arab country and Americans are still able to believe that we can somehow target only the "bad guys" and not victimize innocent civilians. And thus the corporate media contributes to the maintenance of the cycle of violence.

In order to understand the nature of the war we are actually conducting, you'll have to do a little work to get outside of the box constructed by our domestic media. In that spirit, here is a list of some websites that I have looked at recently that may offer some sorts of alternatives to the Official Version that seems to be dominating the corporate press in the United States.

The nerve center of the anti-militarist response to the United States "War on Terrorism" seems to be a group of students at Wesleyan University in Connecticut who quickly started a group called "Peaceful Justice: Coalition for Justice Without War." Their website, at http://www.peacefuljustice.cjb.net/ includes great links, a list of resources, and an organizing guide. Check out their simple, four-point mission statement. This is a good starting place for people who want to find out about an alternative approach to dealing with the events of September 11th.

In order to learn about the progression of any conflict, about the last place you should go for information is to either of the parties to that conflict. In that spirit, I recommend looking at some news sources that originate outside of the United States. Even the Guardian of London, hardly a neutral source, has some stuff that you'll rarely see in the media in this country. For example, the U.S. press did report that the American military has begun using cluster bombs in Afghanistan, but you have to go to the foreign press to learn that humanitarian agencies have "condemned" the use of these diabolical killers, or that "The Red Cross last year called for a ban on cluster bombs." The Guardian online version can be read at http://www.guardian.co.uk.

To go further afield than the British press, you could check out a list of links to English-language newspapers published in more than 100 countries around the world at http://www.ecola.com/news/press/. Not found on this site, but rather interesting in a certain way, is an electronic newspaper called the Afghan Daily. It's mostly reprints from international news sources like Reuters and The Economic Times of India, but it's still a different perspective. Go to http://www.afghandaily.com to read it.

The electronic daily AlterNet has set up a special set of pages focused on September 11th. Visit their site at http://www.alternet.org.

As always, for the most comprehensive set of materials giving the context and history needed to make sense of any current crisis, I recommend the ZNet website at http://www.zmag.org/ Here can be found essays by an incredible array of thinkers, activists, and historians. One of the best essays that I have seen, for example, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice" by Indian activist Arundhati Roy (one of this week's "Quotes" of the Week), can be read on this site, as well as other essays that are even harder to find. Go to this site to hear the voices of Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Ariel Dorfman, Edward Herman, Tim Wise, and many others commenting on the events of September 11th.

This is What Propaganda Looks Like

Much as many people would like to believe that the United States is unique in the world, in very many ways we are just like any other country. Especially when it comes to our leaders, their behavior is—at least for those paying attention—quite predictable. Isn't it entirely predictable, for example, that any leader would want to present, in a time of crisis, a version of events that would be most likely to build support for their actions and least likely to erode support? Why would our leaders be any different?

At the current moment, the news most likely to build support would be news that we are attacking parties whom we know to be guilty and making it more difficult for them to do whatever it is they are supposedly doing. And the news at present that would seem to be most likely to erode support would be news that innocent civilians were being killed in our name.

Sure enough, if you look at the patterns of news in the major media, what do you find? Endless reports of attacks against "Taliban sites," "terrorist camps," and "ground forces of the Taliban." It is important to note that, horrible as the Taliban is, they have been horrible for years without being subjected to attacks by the U.S. military. Even today, there is no known evidence linking them directly to the events of September 11th. They are clearly allied with Osama bin Laden, but remember that we have not seen any actual evidence linking him to the recent attacks on the U.S., either. As George Monbiot puts it in commenting on the need for actual evidence against bin Laden in order to assure that we take effective action, "There's no question that he's dangerous, and there's convincing evidence connecting him to previous attacks, but if the West starts chasing the wrong man across the Hindu Kush while the real terrorists are planning their next atrocity, this hardly guarantees our security."

Perhaps the news most likely to erode support for our current military escapade is the inescapable effect that it is having on the incredible numbers of displaced people in Afghanistan. These innocent victims of the Taliban (and, in many ways, of the United States) are already in danger of starving or freezing to death. Now they are in danger of becoming "collateral damage" as they wander into the path of U.S. bombs or get blown to bits as they go after a "humanitarian" aid package dropped by U.S. planes into the middle of an active minefield.

A Secret War

This is perhaps the most secret war I've ever been witness to. Despite the fact that our newspapers and airwaves are filled with reports on what normally would be called a war but so far seems to have no actual name ("campaign" seems to be the word of choice at the moment), you have to look closely to see that any and all media have essentially been forbidden from getting anywhere near the front lines, or even getting near any of the actual combatants.

I took a look at the media's performance in the few days since the war began, and found that the information on what is actually happening in South Asia is coming basically from two sources.

The first source is the ever-popular "Anonymous." A responsible news organization should give the names of any sources they quote, allowing their readers to judge for themselves the credibility of that person. That is not what we have seen in the past week.

In a sampling of a half-dozen major articles in the nation's paper of record, the New York Times, and the most influential regional newspaper in my part of the country, the Star Tribune, I found repeated citations of important information from the following sources: "intelligence officials;" "officials;" "Pentagon sources;" "two senior Pentagon officials;" "Defense officials;" "law enforcement officials;" "congressional leaders;" "other officials;" "authorities;" "Taliban sources;" "Afghan officials, speaking on condition of anonymity;" and somebody who was "contacted by telephone Tuesday night" claiming to be a "Taliban soldier" who "refused to give his name." Who are these people, and what is their agenda in talking to the media? We don't know, and that's exactly the problem with "anonymous" sources. That's why good journalists try not to use them.

Virtually every source of information in my informal survey of media coverage this week that was not anonymous was a party to the conflict. Reporters quoted President Bush, Secretary of State Powell, NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "Army spokesman" Col. Bill Darley, Senator John McCain (identified as "a former Navy pilot"), Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, and House Minority Leader Richard Gephart. I also saw a few references attributed to a "spokesman" for bin Laden's group al-Qaida, and a "spokesman" for the anti-Taliban "Northern Alliance." It is good that all of these sources are named, since thoughtful people can see that they are all parties to the conflict with an obvious interest in how the war is reported.

As you read the papers or watch the news about the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, keep your eyes peeled for citations from anyone who might have an anti-war position. I wouldn't expect to see many, but they do crop up occasionally. Short of that, listen for the voices of people who might have a clue about the context in which this war is being fought: Middle East and Asian scholars, Arab news services, peace and justice activists, historians, or independent journalists and writers. You probably won't find many of them in the corporate press, either, so elsewhere in this issue of Nygaard Notes I give you a list of ideas on where you might find them.