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02 March 2011
By Jonathan Cook Last
week the Guardian, Britain's main liberal newspaper,
ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of
an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed
"Curveball" by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played
a key behind-the-scenes role -- if an inadvertent one
-- in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His
testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration
that Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, had developed
an advanced programme producing weapons of mass
destruction.
Curveball's account included the details of mobile
biological weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell,
the US Secretary of State, to the United Nations in
early 2003. Powell's apparently compelling case on WMD
was used to justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks
later. Eight
years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that he
had fabricated the story of Saddam's WMD back in 2000,
shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum.
He told the paper he had lied to German intelligence
in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam,
though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure
his asylum case was taken more seriously. For
the careful reader -- and I stress the word careful --
several disturbing facts emerged from the report. One
was that the German authorities had quickly proven his
account of Iraq's WMD to be false. Both German and
British intelligence had travelled to Dubai to meet
Bassil Latif, his former boss at Iraq's Military
Industries Commission. Dr Latif had proven that
Curveball's claims could not be true. The German
authorities quickly lost interest in Janabi and he was
not interviewed again until late 2002, when it became
more pressing for the US to make a convincing case for
an attack on Iraq.
Another interesting disclosure was that, despite the
vital need to get straight all the facts about
Curveball's testimony -- given the stakes involved in
launching a pre-emptive strike against another
sovereign state -- the Americans never bothered to
interview Curveball themselves. A
third revelation was that the CIA's head of operations
in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, passed on warnings from
German intelligence that they considered Curveball's
testimony to be highly dubious. The head of the CIA,
George Tenet, simply ignored the advice. With
Curveball's admission in mind, as well as these other
facts from the story, we can draw some obvious
conclusions -- conclusions confirmed by subsequent
developments.
Lacking both grounds in international law and the
backing of major allies, the Bush administration
desperately needed Janabi's story about WMD, however
discredited it was, to justify its military plans for
Iraq. The White House did not interview Curveball
because they knew his account of Saddam's WMD
programme was made up. His story would unravel under
scrutiny; better to leave Washington with the option
of "plausible deniability".
Nonetheless, Janabi's falsified account was vitally
useful: for much of the American public, it added a
veneer of credibility to the implausible case that
Saddam was a danger to the world; it helped fortify
wavering allies facing their own doubting publics; and
it brought on board Colin Powell, a former general
seen as the main voice of reason in the
administration. In
other words, Bush's White House used Curveball to
breathe life into its mythological story about
Saddam's threat to world peace. So how
did the Guardian, a bastion of liberal journalism,
present its exclusive on the most controversial
episode in recent American foreign policy? Here
is its headline: "How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist
looking to topple Saddam".
Did the headline-writer
misunderstand the story as written by the paper's
reporters? No, the headline neatly encapsulated its
message. In the text, we are told Powell's
presentation to the UN "revealed that the Bush
administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed"
Curveball's account. At another point, we are told
Janabi "pulled off one of the greatest confidence
tricks in the history of modern intelligence". And
that: "His critics -- who are many and powerful -- say
the cost of his deception is too difficult to
estimate." In
other words, the Guardian assumed, despite all the
evidence uncovered in its own research, that Curveball
misled the Bush administration into making a
disastrous miscalculation. On this view, the White
House was the real victim of Curveball's lies, not the
Iraqi people -- more than a million of whom are dead
as a result of the invasion, according to the best
available figures, and four million of whom have been
forced into exile. There
is nothing exceptional about this example. I chose it
because it relates to an event of continuing and
momentous significance.
Unfortunately, there is something depressingly
familiar about this kind of reporting, even in the
West's main liberal publications. Contrary to its
avowed aim, mainstream journalism invariably
diminishes the impact of new events when they threaten
powerful elites. We
will examine why in a minute. But first let us
consider what, or who, constitutes "empire" today?
Certainly, in its most symbolic form, it can be
identified as the US government and its army,
comprising the world's sole superpower.
Traditionally, empires have been defined narrowly, in
terms of a strong nation-state that successfully
expands its sphere of influence and power to other
territories. Empire's aim is to make those territories
dependent, and then either exploit their resources in
the case of poorly developed countries, or, with more
developed countries, turn them into new markets for
its surplus goods. It is in this latter sense that the
American empire has often been able to claim that it
is a force for global good, helping to spread freedom
and the benefits of consumer culture. Empire
achieves its aims in different ways: through force,
such as conquest, when dealing with populations
resistant to the theft of their resources; and more
subtly through political and economic interference,
persuasion and mind-control when it wants to create
new markets. However it works, the aim is to create a
sense in the dependent territories that their
interests and fates are bound to those of empire. In our
globalised world, the question of who is at the centre
of empire is much less clear than it once was. The US
government is today less the heart of empire than its
enabler. What were until recently the arms of empire,
especially the financial and military industries, have
become a transnational imperial elite whose interests
are not bound by borders and whose powers largely
evade legislative and moral controls.
Israel's leadership, we should note, as well its elite
supporters around the world -- including the Zionist
lobbies, the arms manufacturers and Western
militaries, and to a degree even the crumbling Arab
tyrannies of the Middle East -- are an integral
element in that transnational elite. The
imperial elites' success depends to a large extent on
a shared belief among the western public both that
"we" need them to secure our livelihoods and security
and that at the same time we are really their masters.
Some of the necessary illusions perpetuated by the
transnational elites include: --
That we elect governments whose job is to restrain the
corporations; --
That we, in particular, and the global workforce in
general are the chief beneficiaries of the
corporations' wealth creation; --
That the corporations and the ideology that underpins
them, global capitalism, are the only hope for
freedom; --
That consumption is not only an expression of our
freedom but also a major source of our happiness; --
That economic growth can be maintained indefinitely
and at no long-term cost to the health of the planet;
-- And
that there are groups, called terrorists, who want to
destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and
personal improvement. These
assumptions, however fanciful they may appear when
subjected to scrutiny, are the ideological bedrock on
which the narratives of our societies in the West are
constructed and from which ultimately our sense of
identity derives. This ideological system appears to
us -- and I am using "we" and "us" to refer to western
publics only -- to describe the natural order. The
job of sanctifying these assumptions -- and ensuring
they are not scrutinised -- falls to our mainstream
media. Western corporations own the media, and their
advertising makes the industry profitable. In this
sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of
watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is
the power of the globalised elite to control and limit
the ideological and imaginative horizons of the
media's readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that
imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of
the corporations, are not threatened. The
Curveball story neatly illustrates the media's role. His
confession has come too late -- eight years too late,
to be precise -- to have any impact on the events that
matter. As happens so often with important stories
that challenge elite interests, the facts vitally
needed to allow western publics to reach informed
conclusions were not available when they were needed.
In this case, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as
are their neoconservative advisers. Curveball's story
is now chiefly of interest to historians. That
last point is quite literally true. The Guardian's
revelations were of almost no concern to the US media,
the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A
search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that
Curveball's admissions featured only in the New York
Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a
news round-up in the Washington Times. The dozens of
other major US newspapers, including the Washington
Post, made no mention of it at all.
Instead, the main audience for the story outside the
UK was the readers of India's Hindu newspaper and the
Khaleej Times. But
even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in
taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in
such a way as to deprive Curveball's confession of its
true value. The facts were bled of their real
significance. The presentation ensured that only the
most aware readers would have understood that the US
had not been duped by Curveball, but rather that the
White House had exploited a "fantasist" -- or
desperate exile from a brutal regime, depending on how
one looks at it -- for its own illegal and immoral
ends. Why
did the Guardian miss the main point in its own
exclusive? The reason is that all our mainstream
media, however liberal, take as their starting point
the idea both that the West's political culture is
inherently benevolent and that it is morally superior
to all existing, or conceivable, alternative systems.
In
reporting and commentary, this is demonstrated most
clearly in the idea that "our" leaders always act in
good faith, whereas "their" leaders -- those opposed
to empire or its interests -- are driven by base or
evil motives. It is
in this way that official enemies, such as Saddam
Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, can be singled out as
personifying the crazed or evil dictator -- while
other equally rogue regimes such as Saudi Arabia's are
described as "moderate" -- opening the way for their
countries to become targets of our own imperial
strategies. States
selected for the "embrace" of empire are left with a
stark choice: accept our terms of surrender and become
an ally; or defy empire and face our wrath. When
the corporate elites trample on other peoples and
states to advance their own selfish interests, such as
in the invasion of Iraq to control its resources, our
dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the
events honestly. The continuing assumption in liberal
commentary about the US attack on Iraq, for example,
is that, once no WMD were found, the Bush
administration remained to pursue a misguided effort
to root out the terrorists, restore law and order, and
spread democracy. For
the western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are
naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil.
Our media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at
the Hague as war criminals. This,
of course, does not mean that the western media is
Pravda, the propaganda mouthpiece of the old Soviet
empire. There are differences. Dissent is possible,
though it must remain within the relatively narrow
confines of "reasonable" debate, a spectrum of
possible thought that accepts unreservedly the
presumption that we are better, more moral, than
them.
Similarly, journalists are rarely told -- at least,
not directly -- what to write. The media have
developed careful selection processes and hierarchies
among their editorial staff -- termed "filters" by
media critics Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky -- to ensure
that dissenting or truly independent journalists do
not reach positions of real influence. There
is, in other words, no simple party line. There are
competing elites and corporations, and their voices
are reflected in the narrow range of what we term
commentary and opinion. Rather than being dictated to
by party officials, as happened under the Soviet
system, our journalists scramble for access, to be
admitted into the ante-chambers of power. These
privileges make careers but they come at a huge cost
to the reporters' independence.
Nonetheless, the range of what is permissible is
slowly expanding -- over the opposition of the elites
and our mainstream TV and press. The reason is to be
found in the new media, which is gradually eroding the
monopoly long enjoyed by the corporate media to
control the spread of information and popular ideas.
Wikileaks is so far the most obvious, and impressive,
outcome of that trend. The
consequences are already tangible across the Middle
East, which has suffered disproportionately under the
oppressive rule of empire. The upheavals as Arab
publics struggle to shake off their tyrants are also
stripping bare some of the illusions the western media
have peddled to us. Empire, we have been told, wants
democracy and freedom around the globe. And yet it is
caught mute and impassive as the henchmen of empire
unleash US-made weapons against their peoples who are
demanding western-style freedoms. An
important question is: how will our media respond to
this exposure, not just of our politicians' hypocrisy
but also of their own? They are already trying to
co-opt the new media, including Wikileaks, but without
real success. They are also starting to allow a wider
range of debate, though still heavily constrained,
than had been possible before. The
West's version of glasnost is particularly obvious in
the coverage of the problem closest to our hearts here
in Palestine. What Israel terms a delegitimisation
campaign is really the opening up -- slightly -- of
the media landscape, to allow a little light where
until recently darkness reigned. This
is an opportunity and one that we must nurture. We
must demand of the corporate media more honesty; we
must shame them by being better-informed than the
hacks who recycle official press releases and clamour
for access; and we must desert them, as is already
happening, for better sources of information. We
have a window. And we must force it open before the
elites of empire try to slam it shut.
This is the text of a talk entitled "Media as a Tool
of Empire" delivered to Sabeel, the Ecumenical
Liberation Theology Centre, at its eighth
international conference in Bethlehem on Friday
February 25.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are "Israel and the
Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to
Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and
"Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair" (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net. |
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