By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 22 September 2006
*But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.*
-George Orwell
On Monday, September 18, Associated Press (AP) ran a story titled,
"Iraqi tribes fight Insurgency
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060918/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_tribes>." At
first glance, the average reader cannot be blamed for thinking that this
is a story about how tribes in Iraq have decided to take up arms against
the "insurgency."
The reader certainly cannot be blamed for thinking this, because the
first paragraph in the AP story reads, "Tribes in one of Iraq's most
volatile provinces have joined together to fight the insurgency there,
and they have called on the government and the US-led military coalition
for weapons, a prominent tribal leader said Monday."
Allow me to pause here and address the use of the word "insurgent."
According to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, an insurgent
is "a person who rises in revolt against civil authority or an
established government: [a] rebel." This of course begs the existence of
a legitimately elected government that the "insurgent" rises in revolt
against, which in Iraq we do not have. How is it possible to have a
legitimate government in a country that was first illegally invaded and
today is illegally occupied?
Yet, AP uses the word unquestioningly.
The story continues: "Tribal leaders and clerics in Ramadi, the capital
of violent Anbar province, met last week and have set up a force of
about 20,000 men 'ready to purge the city of these infidels,' Sheik
Fassal al-Guood, a prominent tribal leader from Ramadi, told the
Associated Press, referring to the insurgents. 'People are fed up with
the acts of those criminals who take Islam as a cover for their crimes,'
he said. 'The situation in the province is unbearable, the city is
abandoned, most of the families have fled the city and all services are
poor.' Al-Guood said 15 of the 18 tribes in Ramadi 'have sworn to fight
those who are killing Sunnis and Shiites and they established an armed
force of about 20,000 young men ready to purge the city from those
infidels.'"
At this point, either the author of this AP story, or the editor, or
both, rightly assume that the reader is not aware that Sheik Fassal
al-Guood tried to lead the local resistance against the occupation in
Ramadi, but turned against the same resistance group when its members
rejected him as a leader because they considered him a corrupt thief.
Nor is the reader aware that today, Sheikh Fassal al-Guood lives in the
"Green Zone" and happily talks to reporters from behind the concrete
blast walls, and that his power in Al-Anbar now equals exactly nothing.
I contacted author and media critic Norman Solomon and asked him what he
thought of this AP story. "The holes in this story beg for questions
that it does not raise, much less answer," he wrote. "For instance: What
are the past, present and hoped-for financial relationships between the
quoted 'tribal leader' on the one hand and the US and Iraqi governments
on the other? Are there any indications that money has changed hands? Is
a mercenary arrangement being set up? Is this part of the Bush
administration's strategy to get more Iraqis to kill each other rather
than have Iraqis killing American troops - aka 'As the Iraqis stand up,
we'll stand down?' Isn't there a good chance that such arrangements will
actually fuel civil war in Iraq rather than douse its already horrific
flames?"
He continued, "So, this AP story agreeably paraphrases an official from
the US-backed Iraqi government's Defense Ministry as saying that 'Iraqi
security forces had met with tribal leaders and had agreed to cooperate
in combating violence.' But how will they be 'combating violence?' With
massive violence, of course, although the article doesn't say so. Many
sources are available to make such a point, but in this story AP availed
itself of none of them."
Solomon, a nationally-syndicated columnist on media and politics who is
also the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public
Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts, had
this to say about why AP might get away with this type of "reportage" as
consistently as it does: "AP is providing the kind of coverage that it
and other mainstream US media outlets have provided in the past. The
coverage does not seem conspicuously shoddy to most readers because it
fits in with previous shoddy reportage. From all appearances, this AP
article is based on statements from four sources - and each of them is
in line with US government policies. There's one tribal leader from
Ramadi who is seeking large quantities of material aid from the US and
the Iraqi government; there are two spokespeople for that Iraqi
government; and there's a general from the US military. That all four
would present a similar picture of events is not surprising. But for an
article to rely on only those sources is stenography for one side of the
conflict - which should not be confused with journalism."
It is also important for the reader to note that, according to an August
US Defense Intelligence Agency assessment, of 1,666 bombs exploded in
Iraq in July, 90% were aimed at US-led forces. Along with this fact,
attacks against US forces have increased dramatically in recent months,
and the US military itself has admitted that less than 6% of the attacks
against them are from foreign fighters (i.e., "terrorists"). Thus, at
least 94% of all attacks against US forces in Iraq are from the Iraqi
Resistance, as opposed to "terrorists."
It is time, too, that readers of mainstream news knew that any "tribal
meeting" that discusses fighting "the insurgents" is currently being
held secretly inside American military bases or inside the "green zone."
Iraqi people who are trying to lead that operation are well known to
Al-Anbar citizens. These leaders did succeed in some cases in recruiting
certain groups to fight resistance fighters by paying considerable sums
of money, but it was only temporary success.
A case in point would be Al-Qa'im last spring. A tribal fight occurred
between local resistance fighters. Sheik Osama al-Jadaan was involved in
engineering it by paying members of his tribe to take up arms against
local resistance groups. Yet this conflict was settled, and when it was,
al-Jadaan had to flee to the "green zone." He lived there for a short
time before his work as a collaborator with occupation forces caught up
with him, and he was killed in Baghdad.
Yet the AP story has this to say about al-Jadaan: "In late May, a
prominent Sunni Arab tribal leader, Sheik Osama al-Jadaan, who provided
fighters to help battle al-Qaeda in Anbar, was assassinated in Baghdad."
There are the usual token scraps of truth in the AP story, lending it a
hue of credibility. The story quotes a US military spokesperson who goes
out on a limb to say that tribal leaders in Anbar "very much want to see
security brought back to that area."
Another scrap of truth came earlier in the story where Al-Guood is
quoted as saying that most of the tribes of Ramadi "have sworn to fight
those who are killing Sunnis and Shiites and they established an armed
force of about 20,000 young men ready to purge the city from those
infidels."
This is true throughout Iraq, where even the US military has documented
several cases of resistance groups fighting foreign terror groups that
have infiltrated Iraq's porous borders in order to carry out attacks
against Iraqi civilians.
The most disconcerting portion of this AP story, however, is the melding
of the word "insurgent" with the word "terrorist." Clearly there is a
flippancy, and I believe a malicious intent in this misuse. I have
witnessed this melding repeated in AP stories from Iraq in which
"insurgent" replaces "terrorist."
We can see the melding in a recent AP story
<http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp?Section=WORLD&ID=564808338794480636>,
which states: "Attacks against US troops have increased following a call
earlier this month from al-Qaeda in Iraq's leader to target American
forces, the top US military spokesman said Wednesday."
Another example of this melding is in an AP story from September 17th
about Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen of Fallujah who has been held by
the US military without charges for five months. Part of the story
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060917/ap_on_re_mi_ea/photographer_detained>
reads, "The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents,
including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq."
Regarding the reference to al-Qaeda (read "terrorism"), Solomon had this
to say: "The word 'terrorism' is clearly a pejorative. And it's an
unwritten rule of US media coverage that the 'terrorism' label can only
be used, or quoted with credence being given to the sources, if
'terrorism' applies to murderous violence opposed by the US government -
in contrast to murderous violence inflicted or otherwise supported by
the US government, in which case that violence is routinely presumed to
be positive."
It is a melding that has the power to change minds.
A melding that may have prompted Orwell to say, "... language can also
corrupt thought."
It is important to note that the board of directors of AP is composed of
22 newspaper and media executives that include the CEOs and presidents
of ABC, McClatchy, Hearst, Tribune and the Washington Post. Two of the
directors are members of very conservative policy councils that include
the Hoover Institute. The Hoover Institute is a Republican policy
research center that has been referred to as "Bush's brain trust." Its
fellows include Condoleezza Rice and Newt Gingrich, a Distinguished
Visiting Fellow, along with George Shultz.
Douglas McCorkindale, also on the board of directors at AP, is on the
board of Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contract company.
One does not require crystals to see that the board of AP displays a
clear tilt toward right-wing conservative views, and comprises
representatives of a huge corporate media network of the largest
publishers in the US.
It is not difficult to demolish the myth of the liberal media and its
prominent arms like AP.
*Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
*- George Orwell
More writing, commentary, photography, pictures and images at http://dahrjamailiraq.com
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