This Week: Corruption

"Quote" of the Week: War reporting in the 21st Century.

Corruption in Afghanistan 1: "A Threat to the American Mission"

Corruption in Afghanistan 2: It IS the American Mission
Corruption in Afghanistan 3: Bad Apples and The Whole Bunch
FBI Raids in Minneapolis

Greetings,

Astute readers may notice that this issue is labeled Nygaard Notes #464. You may recall, also, that the previous issue was labeled #464. I seem to have forgotten #463! So, my apologies to those few of you who actually care about the number on the issue you are reading. On the paper edition and on the website the September 22nd issue was correctly labeled.

Speaking of Issue #463, I got lots of good response to the essays in that one about Social Security. I thought I might have some news this week about the secretive deficit reduction commission that is threatening Social Security, but it looks like that will be coming in November. Their report is due December 1.

This week I look at "corruption," and how some Propaganda sleight-of-hand has many of us seeing the trees but missing the forest. Let me know what you think.

Note to the new readers this week: The last issue was about Social Security, this one is about Afghanistan. Who knows what's next? I certainly don't! That's how it is with Nygaard Notes, as you'll see. Welcome aboard!

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week: War reporting in the 21st Century.

Here are three "quotes" from two articles in the New York Times of October 15, 2010. The first one is the opening paragraph of a front-page story headlined "U.S. Uses Attacks to Nudge Taliban Toward a Deal." It said:

"Airstrikes on Taliban insurgents have risen sharply here over the past four months, the latest piece in what appears to be a coordinated effort by American commanders to bleed the insurgency and pressure its leaders to negotiate an end to the war."

The article continues on page eight, where we find a second article headlined "U.S. Seeks Opportunities In Easing Taliban Talks." This is from the 12th paragraph of that article:

"[F]ew military experts think the Taliban's ability to fight has been degraded at this stage."

Now, back to the front-page article, paragraph 5:

"In recent weeks, American officials have spoken approvingly in public of new contacts between Taliban leaders and the Afghan government."

So there you have it: U.S. leaders are claiming credit for "nudging" the Taliban toward a peace agreement by "bleeding" the "insurgency." Except that "military experts" say there's not much "bleeding" going on. But the Taliban is negotiating anyway.

And so goes war reporting in the 21st Century.

Corruption in Afghanistan 1: "A Threat to the American Mission"

It seems like every article we read about Afghanistan in recent months tells us that the big problem standing in the way of the "success" of the U.S. "mission" in that country is something called "corruption." One news article in particular got me thinking about "corruption," and how the term is manipulated in such a way as to obscure our understanding of what is going on in Afghanistan and beyond.

The article appeared on the front page of the New York Times of August 26th under the headline "Key Karzai Aide in Graft Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A." The lead paragraph told us that "The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials." The article mentions that the aide—Mohammed Zia Salehi—"appears to have been on the payroll for many years." It then adds "It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money," but that his "relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration's policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it."

At first glance this has the appearance of hard-hitting journalism, but let's look a little closer.

Excerpts Dealing with Corruption

Here are seven paragraphs from the article that speak specifically about "corruption," with emphasis added by Nygaard:

"Mr. Salehi was arrested in July and released after Mr. Karzai intervened. There has been no suggestion that Mr. Salehi's ties to the C.I.A. played a role in his release; rather, officials say, it is the fear that Mr. Salehi knows about corrupt dealings inside the Karzai administration."

"‘We are pushing some high-level public corruption cases right now, and they are just constantly stalling and stalling and stalling,' [an] American official said of the Karzai administration."

"The ties underscore doubts about how seriously the Obama administration intends to fight corruption here. The anticorruption drive, though strongly backed by the United States, is still vigorously debated inside the administration. ... Some administration officials argue that any comprehensive campaign to fight corruption inside Afghanistan is overly ambitious..."

"Mr. Karzai denies any monetary relationship with the C.I.A. and any links to the drug trade."

"An American official said the practice of paying government officials was sensible, even if they turn out to be corrupt or unsavory. ‘If we decide as a country that we'll never deal with anyone in Afghanistan who might down the road—and certainly not at our behest—put his hand in the till, we can all come home right now,' the American official said. ‘If you want intelligence in a war zone, you're not going to get it from Mother Teresa or Mary Poppins.'

‘Corruption matters to us,' a senior Obama administration official said. ‘The fact that Salehi may have been on our payroll does not necessarily change any of the basic issues here.'

"Others in the administration view public corruption as the single greatest threat to the Afghan government and the American mission; it is the corrupt nature of the Karzai government, these officials say, that drives ordinary Afghans into the arms of the Taliban."

And so is the picture drawn of "corruption" in Afghanistan. The next article also looks at corruption in Afghanistan, but from a different perspective.

Corruption in Afghanistan 2: It IS the American Mission

In the previous essay we looked at a specific news article to see how it frames the issue of "corruption" in Afghanistan. What did we see? First the headline refers to "graft," which the dictionary defines as "the acquisition of gain (as money) in dishonest or questionable ways; also: illegal or unfair gain" (Merriam Webster). Or, "The obtaining of profit or advantage by dishonest or shady means; the means by which such gains are made, esp. bribery, blackmail, or the abuse of a position of power or influence." (Oxford English Dictionary). The Times article underscores that particular understanding of corruption, referring to the problem as one of "putting one's hand in the till."

Readers of the Times article are led to understand that the U.S. stands steadfastly against corruption. After all, "a senior Obama administration official said" that "Corruption matters to us." It's clear to the Times reporter that "the Obama administration intends to fight corruption [in Afghanistan]," and an Afghan-run "anticorruption drive" is "strongly backed by the United States," even while the exact manner of conducting it "is still vigorously debated inside the administration."

"Mr. Karzai denies any monetary relationship with the C.I.A.," reports the Times, which adds that the current revelation proves that there is still some corruption "inside the Karzai administration." It's precisely because such "public corruption" is "the single greatest threat to the Afghan government and the American mission" in Afghanistan that the U.S. is "pushing some high-level public corruption cases right now." Because we realize that "it is the corrupt nature of the Karzai government... that drives ordinary Afghans into the arms of the Taliban."

"Into the Arms of the Taliban"

What you have just read is a summary of the basic context that readers of the Times are expected either to accept, or to already "know" about corruption in Afghanistan and the U.S. relation to it. Now let's add one more fact to that context and see what happens.

Suppose someone told you that there is an Afghan intelligence agency that has been arbitrarily detaining people, including journalists and health workers, holding them in secret prisons and torturing them over a period of years. And what if that same someone told you that this secret prison/torture network was financed and, indeed, operated by the United States of America? You might conclude that there could be something besides "the corrupt nature of the Karzai government... that drives ordinary Afghans into the arms of the Taliban."

Well, it's all true, and it's been public knowledge in this country for a while now. In fact, it was even mentioned in the very same front-page NY Times article I've been discussing. Here's paragraph number 21 of that article:

"Over the course of the nine-year-old war [in Afghanistan], the C.I.A. has enmeshed itself in the inner workings of Afghanistan's national security establishment. From 2002 until just last year, the C.I.A. paid the entire budget of Afghanistan's spy service, the National Directorate of Security"

Not only did the U.S. pay the entire budget of this secretive agency but, as the Times reported back in July, "For years, the C.I.A. had essentially run the N.D.S. as a subsidiary." (I don't know why anyone thinks this arrangement has ended, but we'll leave that aside for now.)

The National Directorate of Security (NDS)

What was this "subsidiary" of the CIA doing in the years when the CIA was in charge? Well, one wouldn't know if one received one's news from the U.S. press, but it was up to secret detentions and torture, among other things. A report just last month in the National Security Blog of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association says that "torture by the NDS has been well documented. Reports from independent observers like Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the U.S. State Department, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), and even Canada's own Foreign Service have all confirmed abuse in NDS facilities."

I went and looked, and it's true. A special report from Amnesty International released on November 13, 2007 (during the time that the CIA was in charge) said that "Amnesty International has received reports of torture, other ill-treatment, and arbitrary detention by Afghanistan's intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS)... The UN reiterated its concerns about the NDS as recently as September 2007... The full mandate of the NDS is not made public but appears to include powers to arrest, charge, prosecute and judge individuals for a variety of security-related offences. It also operates its own detention facilities."

The AI report never mentions the United States, but the third paragraph of the report mentions that "Concerns about the NDS first emerged in 2002, shortly after it was reformed from the previous Afghan intelligence institution..." As we saw above, 2002 is when the CIA began running the show. Coincidence?

Human Rights watch reported in December of last year that there have been "numerous credible allegations of torture in NDS detention" and that "The agency continues to operate without a transparent legal framework that defines its powers to investigate, arrest, and detain."

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) reported in June of this year that "torture and degrading treatment in detention centers and prisons is one of the most serious concerns regarding places of custody. Torture and cruel treatment, especially of individuals in the custody of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), is much more than what has been identified and reported by AIHRC."

Even the U.S. State Department has noted the problem. For example, here's a comment from the Department's 2005 Human Rights Report: "During the year, members of the intelligence service intimidated and threatened journalists. Threatening calls and messages against media organizations also were common." The unnamed "intelligence service" would be the NDS. The State Department, in its report, never mentions the CIA, despite the fact that this was right in the middle of the period when the NDS was being run as a CIA "subsidiary."

It's worth noting here that a group called Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) did a survey earlier this year about corruption in that country, which was virtually ignored in the U.S. media. That survey found that Afghans themselves consider the NDS to be among "the most corrupt government departments" in the country.

IWA noted that "The survey is focused on petty or administrative corruption, which has the most direct and widespread effects on Afghan citizens." It is precisely such "petty or administrative corruption" that U.S. news consumers are asked to see as "the single greatest threat to the Afghan government and the American mission."

Now it's time to look at another kind of corruption, not "petty or administrative corruption" but another variety, the variety that is rarely mentioned in the United States.

Corruption in Afghanistan 3: Bad Apples and The Whole Bunch

In this issue of Nygaard Notes I'm using as a case study an August 26th New York Times article on corruption in Afghanistan. As we've seen, the understanding of "corruption" in the Times, as in most media, focuses on "petty or administrative corruption," mostly bribery and straightforward graft. For the media, that is, it all boils down to individual people "putting their hands in the till." The problem, we are told, is that a few bad apples might spoil the whole bunch. But it's not a matter of bad apples; it's the bunch itself that is rotten.

I chose to use this Times article because it is so typical of the individualized thinking about "corruption" that we see in the agenda-setting media. How typical is it? A search of major news sources in the U.S. (using the Lexis/Nexis database) for the past six months finds over 1,000 articles that mention "Afghanistan" and "corruption." (1,241, to be precise.) I haven't read all of them (!) but virtually all of the ones at which I have looked share the basic premises of this NY Times article.

On the other hand, if we search the Lexis/Nexis database again, this time looking for newspaper stories in the past six months that mention "National Directorate of Security" and "CIA," we find a total of three articles.

While the self-enrichment that characterizes "petty or administrative corruption" is no doubt a big problem in Afghanistan, there is another, larger, meaning for the word "corruption" in the dictionary. Merriam Webster speaks of an "impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle; depravity." Oxford refers to "A making or becoming morally corrupt; moral deterioration or decay." And, again, "depravity." Depravity, in turn, is defined in part as a "Perversion of the moral faculties... viciousness... wickedness."

And here we get back to the U.S.-funded "subsidiary" of the CIA, the National Directorate of Security. Is it not "vicious" for a government to torture its own citizens? Is it not "perverted" to have an intelligence agency that runs secret prisons to which people are spirited away for no stated reason? And whose "integrity" is more "impaired": The Afghans who take money illegitimately in exchange for services? Or the U.S. government, whose policy it is to not only occupy a sovereign nation, but also to fund and manage an agency that detains and tortures members of that nation?

Seeing the Forest, Not Just the Trees

Once we begin to notice that it is only particular kinds of corruption that are on the agenda of the powerful, we can begin to think—as we did in the previous paragraph—about the corruption that is not on the agenda. And that is the institutional, systemic corruption that comes with power. As the British Lord Acton famously said in his 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The effect, if not the intent, of focusing on petty corruption—important though it is—is to prevent us from seeing the greater, if not absolute, corruption that comes with being The World's Only Superpower. The occupation of a small, weak country by a fantastically powerful country—with little regard for the citizens of the smaller country—represents an enormous "impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle" on the part of the United States, one that dwarfs the petty corruption that we read about every day.

Such a focus on individuals serves to divert the attention from the behavior of the institutions of an Empire that is in decline and that is trying to use its remaining power to impose its will on the world: Illegal wars, illegitimate occupations, secret prisons, torture, erosion of our own Constitution, and more.

For those of us who reside in the United States, it is important to see our own role in supporting this Great Corruption, as we are responsible for the ways in which our country uses its power around the world. On a moral level, this should be the starting point—the organizing principle, one might say—for coverage of "the world" by the media in The World's Only Superpower. First and foremost, U.S. citizens should be made aware of the activities of our country's institutions and how they are behaving in the places where they exercise their power. It's easy to focus on the corruption of others—"inside the Karzai administration" or wherever—but our responsibility is to focus on the Great Corruption paid for with our tax dollars.

Instead of accepting the premise in the U.S. media that "corruption [is] the single greatest threat to ... the American mission" in Afghanistan, we need to understand that the "American mission"—in Afghanistan and beyond—is itself the threat. And the threat is that it will corrupt us all if we don't resist. The next essay looks at some people who have been resisting, the actions our own intelligence service has taken to shut them up, and how we can act in solidarity with some of these victims of repression right here at home.

FBI Raids in Minneapolis

On September 24th the FBI raided a number of homes here in the Nygaard Notes hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, breaking down doors and serving subpoenas to the residents to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago this month. All of the people whose homes were thus violated are long-time activists who have organized numerous events and activities in support of peace and in opposition to U.S. imperialism. The FBI also raided the Minneapolis office of the Anti-War Committee, long at the center of anti-imperialist and peace organizing in the area.

The FBI seized computers, cell phones, notebooks, address books, photos and maps, as well as personal financial records.

The headline in the local newspaper, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, carried a strong bias. It read: "Terrorism Probe Prompts FBI Raids." That's the official line, you see. The official FBI statement had it that the agents were "seeking evidence related to an ongoing Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation into activities concerning the material support of terrorism."

Since we do not and cannot know what actually motivated the raids, it is irresponsible to place one side's opinion in the headline. Other opinions abound, after all. Some have speculated that the FBI operation was a "giant fishing expedition" intended to intimidate the anti-war and solidarity movements. The attorney for one of those whose homes were raided was even quoted in the Star Trib article stating his belief that the FBI action was "a probe into the political beliefs of American citizens and any organization anywhere that opposes the American imperial design."

It's so easy to do straight reporting without editorializing. The St. Paul Pioneer Press headlined its story on the raids like this: "FBI Raids War Protesters' Homes." Straight-up fact: The FBI DID raid some homes, and the residents frequently protest war. There's plenty of room to quote people speculating as to WHY they raided the homes, but one version shouldn't get the headline.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my life experience leads me to sympathize with the subjects of the FBI raids. First of all, each and every one of them are friends and allies of mine. But it's more than that.

The charge of "material support of terrorism" has to do with some court rulings that say that one is guilty under U.S. law if one has any dealings with organizations designated by the U.S. government as "terrorist organizations." In the 1970s and 1980s I was quite active in groups that opposed South African apartheid, and our work included strong support for Nelson Mandela and his group the African National Congress. At the time, the Reagan administration had designated the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela as "terrorists," so I guess I am as guilty as those whose homes were raided last month.

At this point in this essay I had prepared a list of things we could all do to show support and solidarity for the victims of these raids. But, much to my surprise, on October 13th it was reported that "The grand jury subpoenas against more than a dozen activists in Minneapolis, Chicago and Michigan have been dropped." I don't think this is the end of it, by any means, but we don't really know at this point what might happen next. We do know that none of the confiscated items have been returned to the activists, and we do know that they could use your support in carrying on their good work.

Local activists remind us to "Continue to inform yourself, and check out upcoming events." And now there is a new local website: The Minnesota Committee to Stop FBI Repression.

Anybody who is doing, has done, or might do any work in opposition to U.S. foreign policy should know something about how Grand Juries work in the United States. Here's what the Grand Jury Resistance Project has to say about the modern Grand Jury:

"Today, FBI, police harassment and secret grand juries are being used to attack Muslims and other immigrants, Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Native, anti-war, anarchist, environmental and animal rights activists and movements. These incidents are not isolated, and they are not happening because the government wants to ‘solve crimes.' They are an attack on all our movements: an attempt to divide us, isolate outspoken individuals, create fear and distrust among us, and rewrite our history of resistance as ‘criminal.'"

Check out the Project here.