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Being lied to | Mar 31, 2003 08:26
Over the weekend, spokesmen for Tony Blair put word about that Saddam had sacked his commander of air defences after a series of surface-to-air missiles landed on Baghdad. This, they said gave reason for "scepticism" over claims that the bombing of two marketplaces in Baghdad this week were the result of coalition attacks on the city.
And then this Robert Fisk story turned up in the Independent on Sunday. Fisk, on the scene of the second blast - which has so far killed 62 civilians - and able to converse with survivors, sighted a missile fragment with western lettering on it, apparently retrieved from the scene by an elderly man who lived nearby ("Even the Iraqi authorities do not know that it exists.")
"The missile was guided by computers and that vital shard of fuselage was computer-coded," Fisk wrote. "It can be easily verified and checked by the Americans - if they choose to do so. It reads: 30003-704ASB 7492. The letter 'B' is scratched and could be an 'H'. This is believed to be the serial number. It is followed by a further code which arms manufacturers usually refer to as the weapon's 'Lot' number. It reads: MFR 96214 09."
Actually, the "96214" sequence is a CAGE code - part of a system of supplier codes used by the US military, in procurement documents like this. So far as I can tell, it relates to the huge US arms manufacturer Raytheon, which, among other things, makes the Patriot missile system and is set to be a major player in the "Star Wars" missile defense scheme proposed by the White House.
The same supplier code has turned up on fragments found after US air attacks in Serbia, Kosovo and Southern Iraq in 1999. All of those attacks with air-to-surface missiles killed civilians.
So what are we to make of this? I suppose we should grant the faint possibility that Fisk's elderly bystander is an Iraqi government stooge, although it seems unlikely. As does the idea that the Iraqis are using American anti-aircraft missiles.
So by far the most likely explanation is that these 62 civilians were in fact killed by missiles from a US aircraft, and that coalition command knows this very well, but rather than admit it, is raising a smokescreen with allegations about wayward Iraqi missiles based on unverifiable "intelligence".
Would they lie to us? Would Tony Blair lie to us to cynically gain political advantage? Well, he has already in the past week. During his visit to the US for meetings with Bush, Blair spoke at length and with passion about the "execution" by Iraqis of two British soldiers.
"If anyone needed any further evidence of the depravity of Saddam's regime, this atrocity provides it. It is yet one more flagrant breach of all the proper conventions of war. More than that, to the families of the soldiers involved, it is an act of cruelty beyond comprehension. Indeed, it is beyond the comprehension of anyone with an ounce of humanity in their souls."
But the lead story in Friday's Daily Mirror quoted the sister of one of the soldiers, Luke Allsop, who was clearly appalled at what Blair had said. Her brother had not, she said, been executed:
"The Colonel from his barracks came around to our house to tell us he was not executed. Luke's Land Rover was ambushed and he died instantly. The Colonel told us he was doing what he could to set the record straight. We are very angry. It makes a big difference to us knowing that he died quickly. We can't understand why people are lying about what happened."
Blair's official spokesman later admitted there was "no conclusive proof" that the soldiers had been executed.
What was that about moral authority, Tony?
UPDATE: The Australian conservative blogger Tim Blair and his readers have trawled up quite a bit more information on the weapon in question - and despite the fact that they hate Fisk with a passion beyond all reason, have been decent enough to concede that he's right. On the other hand, their conclusions appear to show that the Iraqi leadership has radar facilities positioned in civilian areas. Thanks to NZPundit for the tip (yes, really!).
Bad Internet | Mar 28, 2003 11:49
Al-Jazeera is to move its web servers out of the US to a place - somewhere in Europe - where freedom of speech is held in higher regard.
The independent Arab channel's new English-language website has been hit by denial-of-service attacks ever since it launched on Monday. The attacks appear to have been directed both at the web servers and at the DNS servers at al-Jazeera's US hosting company, mynet.net.
The DNS attacks mean that the al-Jazeera site essentially disappears from the Internet. Attempts to access it draw a number of different error messages, including: Could not open the page "http://english.aljazeera.net/" because the server english.aljazeera.net could not be found. Al-Jazeera has now been told by its upstream provider in the US that its service will be terminated within days.
The Melbourne Age story suggests that some DNS records (including those for the Iraqi state ISP) may actually have been altered.
Vik Olliver, who has been exploring the problem with the New Zealand Linux Users Group, drew a similar conclusion after attempts to reach www.aljazeera.info late yesterday (it had been reachable up till about 4pm) returned the message: connection timed out; no servers could be reached.
"Note that a DDoS attack will not remove an entry from a DNS server," she says. "There is a different error if a domain server cannot be contacted at all. It looks like someone actually pulled the files from the DNS server - the error was returned by the server after all, so it could be reached - and that would involve a US domain server security breach of serious proportions. Unless it was deliberate.
"This seems to be the case in the US too, not just NZ, as I found out when attempting to use the http://crit.org proxy.
"Google is also refusing to display cached pages from Al Jazeera. I have asked colleagues in the New Zealand Linux User's Group to repeat this in New Zealand on different ISPs, and we all get the same problem."
If this is what it appears to be, it's awful. The Internet and its accompanying culture are the great American achievement of my lifetime. The attacks strike at its very ethos.
Meanwhile, Wellington-based Scoop has explained its decision to continue to publish grisly pictures from the war, including those from al-Jazeera. In a passionate editorial deputy editor Selwyn Manning says:
"To sanitise the reality of warfare is abhorrent to those serving the public interest. To censor images of capture, of death, as a consequence of war, is wrong. If Scoop were to do so, it would be subscribing to the glitzy rah rah top-gun Hollywood-façade-style of reportage that the mainstream United States based media has become obsessed with."
Scoop's average daily traffic has roughly doubled to around 50,000 visits a day since the war began, with much of the traffic coming from the US.
Meanwhile US Central Command appears to have had a great deal of trouble getting its story straight on the missile attack that killed 17 civilians in a Baghdad marketplace. After initially claiming that there had been no US missiles used in the area - and strongly implying that the Iraqi regime had, either accidentally or deliberately, killed its own civilians - spokesmen have now admitted that US warplanes had been targeting Iraqi missile sites near the market and had been responsible for the deaths.
The about-face may have been prompted by the publication of a series of news stories, such as this one and this one, which consistently quoted eyewitnesses as having seen a US fighter overhead (the Iraqis have no air power) and witnessed two explosions. The Sydney Morning Herald reporter was able to verify that he had heard the explosions himself.
Incredibly, CNN is still leading with a senior US officer's claim that "we may never know what happened …We think it's entirely possible that this may have been in fact an Iraqi missile that either went up and came down, or given the behaviors of the regime lately, it may have been a deliberate attack inside of town."
To be fair, CNN couldn't have found its own eyewitnesses - for the simple reason that its reporters have been turfed out of Baghdad by the Iraqi leadership. The truth is a victim of both sides in this war.
The SMH says the Pentagon has now adopted a policy of blaming all civilian casualties on Saddam Hussein.
It appears that both British and US prisoners of war have been executed by the Iraqi military. Perhaps this was always on the cards in a war against desperate men - who are themselves dying by the thousand - but it is still ghastly. It's hard not to feel that it will get worse.
Meanwhile, one of the Bush administration's other shameless assaults on the rules-based world - its illegal tariffs on foreign steel - has been knocked back by the WTO. The voodoo economics won't go away for a while yet, unfortunately - a likely appeal will see the tariffs stay for at least another six months.
Anyway, I want to end the week on a happier note. With some help from Robert Sinton, I found and deleted the corrupted file that was causing Microsoft Entourage to fail (it was none of the usual suspects) and my email is fixed. Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, and no thanks whatsoever to the reader who advised me to buy a Windows PC. Uh, it was a Microsoft application that failed …
I've secured a highly desirable corporate blag for the Blues versus Brumbies game at Eden Park tonight - let's hope the recent trend of there being less rain than forecast holds - and I'm excited about that. (Extra bonus: we're currently downwind from Western Springs, where Bruce Springsteen is playing tonight, but I won't be at home to hear it.)
And, finally, some stuff I really like about America lately:
- The New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, Harper's and Vanity Fair, etc. The Americans make the best magazines, and they are still home to great writing (in the case of the Review, really great).
- The Onion. Bloody funny right now.
- Wired's 10th anniversary. No, the Conde Nast version of Wired isn't the wild, engaging, bright-eyed tribute to the future that Wired was in its early days, but it fills a hole that no one else does. Anyway, the old Wired - like many good indie media ventures - was a kind of conversation between an extended group of friends. That kind of thing can never last long.
- Angel. Witty, dry as a sandstorm and set in LA. Really good pop culture, and therefore consigned to TV4.
- The Donnas, Spend the Night: So down-to-a-tee that you feel there's faint chance that it might all have been created by a very clever advertising agency, but, dude, they pull it off. The Ramones meets The Breakfast Club.
- The Internet. Still.
Yet more on the Russians | Mar 27, 2003 10:26
Letters in from two readers on the owner of the site that hosts the iraqwar.ru translations (I'm still not clear on the extent of his involvement with the original Russian-language posts), a Russian nationalist and military buff (aeronautics a specialty) who calls himself "Venik".
It's useful to get some perspective on where this is coming from. I'm still inclined to sit back and judge the merit of the site by the accuracy of its predictions.
Interestingly, this somewhat startling story just posted on the (pro-war) Washington Post website seems to largely bear out what is being said on the Russian site - disgruntled senior officers, overstretched resources, an enemy unexpectedly inclined to stand and fight and a war that might take months to conclude.
Anyway, on with the caveats:
"Venik" who runs the site has been a contributor to various military newsgroups for years (search for him under Google Groups).
In the past his contributions have ranged from the mildly probable to the wildly improbable and been treated as a semi troll.
I wouldn't hold his site as being authoritative of what the Russians think/know or of what is going on in Iraq. Especially if he reports verbatim from a newsgroup of all sources!
As always, make sure you treat everything with a healthy dose of cynicism until proven otherwise.
Michael Jar
As a long-time reader of your blogs I finally have to send you my concerns about a particular link that appeared in your recent article on hardnews.
The site you mentioned is well known to me. But please do also note that it is not written in the interest of peace but rather carries worrying links to weapons-pages and to a serbian nationalist page.
This page is obviously run by a bunch of nationalists. As if Russia was not involved in a bloody war itself. As if Milosevich was really the angel he is being portrait on the linked page.
The actual war coverage reads like the a pamphlet by military freaks. Even if they publish maybe even more truth than Anglo-American media, it is obvious for what purpose. At least to me.Why dont you link to French of German media? They are doing a reasonably good job on balanced and responsible war coverage. OK, maybe hard to find online and all in German or French. And dont look at non-public TV-sites, they suck pretty much.
Since the war broke out I had to completely change my mind about BBC world, which used to be my main television news source. But since they turned really ignorant and show pictures of tanks and missiles, of allied troops, with a soundtrack of the technoid BBC World music, I switched back to ARD and also arte (French-German TV) which turn out the to live up to the former BBCs standards of well balanced information.By the way: You should be able to watch Deutsche Welle in Auckland, it seemed to reach as far as Devonport, so maybe it reaches West Auckland too ... ;)
Please check back with the page that you suggested and maybe add a note that that site may carry on to extreme and brainwash nationalism. Which in many cases is the source of todays wars.
Greetings from Berlin,
Sebastian
Still with the Russians | Mar 27, 2003 09:55
Is it a crisis for the coalition? The authors of the most recent post to be translated from the iraqwar.ru site are in no doubt that that is the case.
There's a remarkable degree of detail here, but the question, of course, is whether it's for real. Would the Russian government share its intelligence in this way? Probably, yes, for political reasons (it also appears to tally with yesterday's blast from the Russian foreign minister)
Has it been accurate? On a number of key questions - such as the real state of Basra and the imminent arrival of many more US troops - yes. More accurate, it appears than the official coalition line. Anyway, given that connections to Russia seem a bit ropey this morning, here's an excerpt:
A particular point of concern for the US command is the huge overuse of precision-guided munitions and cruise missiles. Already the supply of heavy cruise missiles like the "Tomahawk" has been reduced by a third and, at the current rate of use, in three weeks the US will be left only with the untouchable strategic supply of these missiles. A similar situation exists with other types of precision-guided munitions. "The rate of their use is incompatible with the obtained results. We are literally dropping gold into the mud!" said Gen. Richard Mayers during a meeting in Pentagon yesterday morning. [reverse translation from Russian]
The US experts already call this war a "crisis". "It was enough for the enemy to show a little resistance and some creative thinking as our technological superiority begun to quickly lose all its meaning. Our expenses are not justified by the obtained results. The enemy is using an order of magnitude cheaper weapons to reach the same goals for which we spend billions on technological whims of the defense industry!" said Gen. Stanley McCrystal during the same Pentagon meeting. [reverse translation from Russian]
Since the early morning today the coalition high command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in an online conference joined by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. This meeting immediately follows an earlier meeting last night at the White House. During the night meeting with President Bush emergency actions were outlined to resolve the standstill in Iraq. The existing course of actions is viewed as "ineffective and leading to a crisis". The Secretary of State Collin Powell warned that, if the war in Iraq continues for more than a month, it might lead to unpredictable consequences in international politics.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Mayers reported on the proposed actions and corrections to the plan of the operation in Iraq. George Bush demanded that the military breaks the standstill in Iraq and within a week achieves significant military progress. A particular attention, according to Bush, should be paid to finding and eliminating the top Iraqi political and military leadership. Bush believes that Saddam Hussein and his closest aides are the cornerstone of the Iraqi defense.
During today's online meeting at the coalition headquarters Gen. Franks was criticized for inefficient command of his troops and for his inability to concentrate available forces on the main tasks.
According to [Russian military] intelligence Pentagon made a decision to significantly reinforce the coalition. During the next two weeks up to 50,000 troops and no less than 500 tanks will arrive to the combat area from the US military bases in Germany and Albania. By the end of April 120,000 more troops and up to 1,200 additional tanks will be sent to support the war against Iraq.
A decision was made to change the way aviation is used in this war. The use of precision-guided munitions will be scaled down and these weapons will be reserved for attacking only known, confirmed targets. There will be an increase in the use of conventional high-yield aviation bombs, volume-detonation bombs and incendiary munitions. The USAF command is ordered to deliver to airbases used against Iraq a two-week supply of aviation bombs of 1-tonn caliber and higher as well as volume-detonation and incendiary bombs. This means that Washington is resorting to the "scorched earth" tactics and carpet-bombing campaign.
Yes, if it's true, that is bad news at the end there. A move to conventional carpet-bombing means, inevitably, many more civilian deaths. The nice war is definitely over.
Meanwhile, al-Jazeera continues to cop it from an angry America for failing to conform to official ideas about news. Here's a story on the denial of service attacks mounted against its new English-language website (which may still be the reason the site is very hard to reach). And the Nasdaq Exchange has followed the NYSE in banning its reporters from its trading floor.
"In light of al-Jazeera's recent conduct during the war, in which they have broadcast footage of US POWs in alleged violation of the Geneva Convention, they are not welcome to broadcast from our facility at this time," said a Nasdaq spokesman.
Al-Jazeera has, of course, grievously upset almost every government in the Middle East since it began broadcasting, and has been intimidated in the past by the US government. But hey, who needs state censorship when the private sector will do it for you?
Here's an alternative view of the CNN-versus-al-Jazeera debate from the Arab News.
An interesting story from the Wall Street Journal on soldiers' weblogs. Cyberjournalist.net has tons of good stories on the Internet angle of the war, including links to some fascinating reporters' weblogs - the BBC correspondents are being encouraged to blog, but at least one CNN reporter has been ordered to stop blogging.
Oh, and my email response may be less than optimum until I can sort out my first really major problem in a year and a half's use of MacOS X. Microsoft Entourage has started crashing on launch, 100% of the time. The crash log indicates a kernel panic:
Command: Microsoft Entourage
PID: 824Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000000
The strange thing is, Entourage works now I've copied the Microsoft User Data folder to the home directory of another account on my system. But that means I have to log out and log into the alternative account every time I want to read my email. It's a clunky and irritating workaround, but it's the best I can do at the moment.
I've run Disk Utility (including repair privileges), TechTool and Norton (from the CD), and I've tried rebuilding the Entourage database and copying it back to my original home directory. Do any of the 9.25% of Public Address readers who run Mac systems have any idea what I can do here?
What the Russians are seeing | Mar 26, 2003 13:18
Official Iraqi information on the war seems to have been a mixture of the familiar grand fantasy and apparently reliable body counts. The coalition side, meanwhile, seems desperately keen to reassure us that it's all going to plan, when in some respects it quite clearly isn't.
Longtime Hard News correspondent Adam Bogacki has turned up what appears to be a useful source of information on what is actually going on - the Russians. This site provides an English translation of material posted to iraqwar.ru, a site established by Russian journalists and military analysts to provide information based on Russian intelligence reports.
It appears things aren't going as well for coalition command as the official noises indicate, especially as regards casualties. If the excerpts below are accurate, Umm Qasr appears to have been flattened in order to save it:
"The situation around the borderline town of Umm Qasr (population 1,500) still remains unclear. Radio intercepts and satellite images show that the town was under constant bombardment throughout out the night. The morning photos indicate its complete destruction. This shows that the coalition command, fed up with the Iraqi's stubborn resistance, ordered the complete destruction of the town using aviation and artillery. However, according to reports by the British troops ordered to "clean up" Umm Qasr the town still contains many pockets of resistance. The overall coalition losses at Umm Qasr during the past four days amounted to up to 40 killed and up to 200 wounded. Currently it is impossible to estimate the Iraqi losses at Umm Qasr. As of yesterday's morning the Umm Qasr garrison consisted of 1600 troops.
"The units of the British marine infantry have failed to establish control over the strategically important Fao peninsula. After yesterday's counterattack by the Iraqis the British forces have been thrown back some 3 to 5 kilometers and were forced into defensive positions. Intercepted radio communications indicate that today the British command will attempt to regain the lost ground after spending the night reinforcing their units on Fao with two additional marine infantry battalions. The overall British losses on the Fao peninsula during the past four days of fighting include up to 15 killed and up to 100 wounded. The Iraqis lost here up to 100 killed and around 100 captured …
"Any further advances by the coalition within the next 12 hours are unlikely. The coalition command in Qatar has been in meeting since the early morning and is expected to come up with significant changes to the overall operational plan. According to most experts the coalition command made a most serious strategic error by starting the ground phase of the operation nearly at the very start of the war. The Americans have violated their own doctrine where the ground phases of a military operation coincide in time with the destruction of the enemy from the air.
"The US made serious errors in their estimates of the Iraq's army strength and combat readiness. The US military intelligence and the CIA failed to uncover the true potential of the Iraqi forces and, in essence, misinformed the top military and civilian leadership of the coalition member countries."
Behind the lines | Mar 26, 2003 09:06
Al-Jazeera has launched an English-language website - but heavy traffic and a denial-of-service attack launched from the US have made it hard to reach so far.
The site is simple but the stories are notably crisp. One illustrated story, headed 'US remembers Geneva Convention' notes that "Images of surrendering Iraqi soldiers being forced to kneel down and body-searched by US-troops stirred few emotions in the Western world."
The rather poor climate for free speech in the US has hit the Qatar-based news channel in other ways this week. The New York Stock Exchange has "indefinitely" banned al-Jazeera reporters from its trading floor, explaining that it is restricting access to "responsible" networks.
Only hours after Tony Blair refused to promise a group of his own MPs that cluster bombs would not be used in Iraqi cities, it became clear that cluster bombs are already in use in civilian areas of Basra and Nassiriya. The Guardian has an interesting report from the Nassiriya hospital, among other places. Ironically, Human Rights Watch yesterday released a new briefing paper, warning against the use of cluster bombs in Iraq. Amnesty International also strongly opposes the use of these weapons, in part because they tend to hang around and kill and maim long after military action is over.
The coalition forces will presumably feel they have no choice to pull out the nasty weapons after taking casualties in the cities. The nice war may be over, which is not good news for the people the coalition has gone in to save.
Michael Wolff has a fascinating feature column about the media, war and the aftermath in New York Metro.
Factualities | Mar 25, 2003 11:17
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines actuality as "reality; realism", or, in plural, "existing conditions".
This, said the communications manager of the Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera, Jihad Ali Ballout, to Paul Holmes last night, is the essence of al-Jazeera's job.
Ballout was on New Zealand television because al-Jazeera picked up and screened Iraqi television's pictures of dead and captured US troops. And he wasn't apologising:
"It reflects exactly what's happening on the ground," he told Holmes. "I think it's incumbent on us to reflect facts as actualities."
He repeated the point later in the brief interview, but tripped and conflated the two words as "factualities", which is, in some ways, a better word.
The interview left a strong impression of an organisation that is at the very frontline of news, one which grapples with misinformation from all sides. The pictures from Iraqi TV were brutal, but, now more than ever, al-Jazeera operates in a brutal part of the world. Loftier Arab minds dismiss it as sensationalist, but sensation makes people watch.
(If you want to see this interview, you can get around NZoom's scripting bumf by copying the following URL and pasting it into Real Player: http://203.98.20.20/www-g2/tvnz/tvone/holmes/jazeera_240303.rpm )
If nothing else, the furore forced CNN and its western rivals to make some genuine editorial decisions: CNN showed some of the pictures, presaged with a good deal of mumbling about why it was doing so. And, after showing indentifiable close-ups of surrendering Iraqi soldiers all weekend, its presenters suddenly started explaining why, in accordance with the Geneva Convention, it could only show long shots of the unfortunate Iraqis. It was almost funny.
But the pattern remains: it is the Arab media that gets the (literally) killer pictures and the American media that nobbles itself. Even the fantastical official Iraqi channel is strangely compelling when it breaks into the rest of the world's war coverage: last night's looping scene in which an excitable host interviewed the peasants who had apparently brought down a $US14 million Apache helicopter verged on satire.
Meanwhile, not being embedded appears to be a very dangerous status for war correspondents. British ITN journalist Terry Lloyd was killed by "friendly fire", and not Iraqi bullets as originally reported. I sincerely hope this doesn't become a trend.
No actual chemical weapons at the captured chemical weapons plant, it seems.
Slate looks at the Washington Post and New York Times stories on disgruntled CIA staff, alleging they were pressured by the White House to distort the truth on Iraq.
Salon talks to General Wesley Clark, the boring CNN analyst who thinks Bush bungled the case for war and who might just seek the Democratic presidential candidacy.
Jim Lobe at AlterNet reckons one faction of the White House hawks was deeply relieved when the "decapitation" attack failed. Only total war will do, apparently.
Back home in Dubya's home state of Texas, two brave gay men are challenging the actions of state police in bursting into their bedroom to arrest them for having sex. And Texas' ludicrous "homosexual conduct" law isn't some ancient holdover - it was passed in 1973. Hey, Denis Dutton and all the other self-declared defenders of modernism, plurality and secular values, where the hell are you on this one? Is this what we're fighting for?
You can still get a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad - but it'll cost ya.
And, finally, John Paul Hansen chips in with the happy news that Google and Blogger have created a fully protocol-compliant mirror of Salam Pax's Baghdad blog, Where's Raed?
NB: Earlier today this post contained a link to an ABC radio transcript covering the death of ABC camerman Paul Moran, which I misread (it said his death was "followed by" a friendly fire incident not "followed" a friendly fire incident). Just to make it clear: it was a suicide bombing.
This just in ... | Mar 24, 2003 10:26
All weekend, as CNN reporters respectfully pointed their microphones at US Army PR men, al-Jazeera was showing a very different image: the body of a child with the back of its head blown off, absent brain.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the Arab world is seeing a very different war than are the consumers of American-based media. That dead child became a signature image of the war without ever being seen by Western audiences. It's hard to know where this will go but it is probably not anywhere good.
CNN's coverage is not, as some would have it, propaganda - it's a bit more complex than that. But what is clear already is that CNN, with its omnipresent but anaemic coverage of the war, is losing the journalistic battle. It presents the strange combination of a constant flow of information and a raging lack of curiosity.
Half-hourly bulletins routinely begin with unchallenged statements from the Pentagon or the Whitehouse; presenters in Atlanta throw to correspondents in Kuwait who throw to reporters "embedded" with army units. Few of them say anything worth hearing - indeed the embedded reporters have sign up and agreed not to report without the permission of their military hosts. Meanwhile, there's a war on and Arab television is getting all the best pictures.
Analysis is wretched: retired generals point at interactive maps and dutifully explain White House battle plans without a breath of scrutiny. Coverage dives further when the hapless Aaron Brown - never without a homily, a kind word for the troops or a bit of patriotic commentary - is on watch in Atlanta. It is simply embarrassing journalism.
Ironically, the most punchy, concise and useful strategic analysis I saw all weekend was delivered on the officially charter-friendly TVNZ flagship, Sunday. Hosking, having assembled some good questions for a change, spoke to Auckland University's former US Defense Department analyst Paul Buchanan and it was positively lucid. Indeed, the whole programme was good. (I'm kind of fascinated by Sunday, because I can see what they've tried to do and I wonder how they've managed to underperform so often.)
The Arab stations eventually replaced their pictures of dead children with pictures of killed and captured US servicemen - pictures that several US channels quickly declared they would not show. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld invoked the Geneva Convention - which "indicates that it's not permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war" - as did Bush.
"Needless to say, television networks that carry such pictures, I would say, are doing something that's unfortunate," Rumsfeld warned.
Not one of the US networks that dutifully carried these admonishments was inclined to point out that the US continues to deny even the most basic Geneva Convention rights to more than 650 men it captured in Afghanistan and still holds in legal limbo at Guantanamo Bay.
The British Court of Appeal described the detention without charge of those prisoners - at least some of whom appear to have been innocently scooped up - as "legally objectionable" and "in apparent contravention of the fundamental principle of law".
They're not only still there at Camp X-Ray, the US is continuing to shift new inmates there, still without charge or Geneva Convention rights. And the White House is complaining because US Marines are appearing on television?
Iraqis, much as they wish to be freed of Saddam's rule, cannot be expected to enjoy seeing their soldiers surrender to an invading army either. As the Baghdad blogger Salam Pax put it this weekend:
"On BBC we are watching scenes of Iraqis surrendering. My youngest cousin was muttering 'what shame' to himself, yes it is better for them to do that but still seeing them carrying that white flag makes something deep inside you cringe."
(Incidentally some people are having trouble reaching Salam's blog, Where's Raed?. This is because of the underscore in the URL, which is not a permitted character in the protocol used by many Squid caches, including the one at Ihug. There doesn't seem to be a workaround, although you could try turning off proxies in your browser setup.)
We can expect quite a bit more officially-sponsored tosh in the next few weeks: much talk of "human shields" and Iraqi dirty pool. In Baghdad, Republican Guards will surely disguise themselves as civilians and stage sneak attacks. But this was always going to happen - it is their only sensible strategy. War is not nice and the Iraqi Army is not going to obligingly march out into the desert so that it can be conveniently incinerated without its civilians.
Meanwhile, the neighbouring Arabs the neocon fantasists insist will roll over and embrace democracy once Iraq is conquered are protesting in their tens of thousands, staging firefights with their own police forces and, in the case of an 11-year-old boy, joining the list of victims. This presumably was not in the plan.
PS: Mediawatch's Web-only feature Wide Area News this week covers the curious case of the Dominion Post's big apology to the Bushes.
Early days | Mar 21, 2003 12:23
One criticism that cannot so far be levelled against the new Kim Hill TV vehicle Face to Face is that it is dull.
Having galloped through an interview last week with an American military strategist, Dear Kim hooked up this week with Saint John Pilger of the Parish of Sydney. And by the end of the programme he was shouting that the interview was a "disgrace" and she, eyebrow arched like an angry Siamese, ventured that it had been "interesting" talking to him.
It was hard to see what got Pilger's goat so badly. Sure, she interrupted his flow a few times, and got a bit catty herself towards the end, but does he do this every time an interviewer fails to go down on bended knee? Does he seriously expect to be interviewed without having his views challenged?
But it is, by any standard, an unusual week for the media. As war began and CNN entered its element, its British anchors got on with the job in their usual slightly eccentric fashion. But in Atlanta, they seemed gripped by mortal fear of appearing unpatriotic.
After Saddam (following a positively Pythonesque little sequence with the Iraqi national anthem) appeared (if that really was him) on TV to play the Palestine card, the American CNN anchor noted that "Arab leaders say that the US has not done enough in the region to help solve that dispute," then, in a slight panic. "They would say that, we're not saying that …"
Yes. We understand that perfectly well, thank you.
It is interesting the way the public in combatant nations have swung in behind their leaders as the shooting starts. Bush suddenly has 75 per cent support for war and Blair around 50 per cent. The exception: poor old John Howard, who (despite the raging support of the Murdoch papers) has been unable to convince Australians for the very sound reason that Australians perceive themselves to have been led by the nose, which sits ill with their considerable national pride.
The International Herald Tribune reported on a survey of public opinion in Europe and Russia, which indicates that public perceptions of America have plummeted in the past year. But most of those polled insisted they weren't against America per se - or even the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein - they just really didn't like or trust George W. Bush.
Bush doesn't appear yet to be bothering to play to a world audience: his war speeches have been tailored for the home crowd, with all their preposterous appeals to "peace" and "freedom", desperate running tallies of the "coalition of the willing" (I mean, they're counting Germany?) and shameless inference that taking out Iraq would prevent another September 11.
But, as his Daddy warned recently, the administration must get over its weird habit of turning allies into enemies or the whole world will suffer.
And yet, the attenuation of public opinion outside America has not been for nought. Without it, this war would probably have been fought much less carefully. The White House is desperate to avoid pictures of dead civilians and a siege of Baghdad. Maybe it will get lucky. Maybe there will be a quick war, without a siege. Maybe there won't be a wave of terrorist attacks, or terrible internecine bloodletting or a showdown between the Turks and the Kurds. Maybe.
In the meantime, here's a great blog from Baghdad. I hope this guy can hang in there and keep posting over the next week or two.
All the news | Mar 20, 2003 08:45
Having given John Campbell a mild sort of a serve on Sunday, it would be remiss of me not to note that he really has stepped up this week.
Campbell is very good at conveying a sense of event. In weeks like this he probably couldn't not look excited if he tried. Monday night's interview with the American ambassador was a classic.
Many Al Qaeda operatives have taken refuge in Bagdhad, said the ambassador, trying to make the frankly hopeless case that Saddam and Bin Laden have been in bed together.
Name one, said Campbell.
The ambassador could not oblige.
It was the Shipley interview all over again, only you would expect the country's senior American diplomat to have been more competently briefed. Asking a subject to provide an element of detail on a sweeping allegation is standard interviewing practice. "Name one," isn't exactly the Spanish Inquisition. But the ambassador couldn't, and it was not a very good look.
Anyway, the name the ambassador was searching for was that of Jordanian al Qaeda member Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is believed to have received medical treatment in Baghdad after being injured in fighting in Afghanistan, and having been refused treatment in Iran. And that, frankly, is about it.
Mike Hosking could have tried something similar with John Howard last week, as the Australian PM was belting on about the terrible threat of weapons of mass destruction. He could have asked him:
"How many other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including those known to have some association with terrorism, have these weapons?"
Howard, in all probability would not have known and might even have become amusingly flustered. (Other TV interviewers can avail themselves of the handy Hard News cheat-sheet on this question.)
Anyway, back to the news. While Campbell was flexing, his opposite (if you think of the TV news rivalry as a sort of cross between a rugby scrum and mixed doubles) Richard Long looked quite unnerved every time I flicked over, even fluffing his lines (did he have to do an interview or something?).
It was the same story with the foreign correspondents: Mike McRoberts was bounding around the Kuwaiti border, bonding with local army officers and getting exclusive pictures of sand, mostly. On the other channel, you could barely hear Ian Sinclair's piece to camera for the sound of his knees knocking. Perhaps TV3 could replace its current controversial campaign with: "3 National News: We promise not to freak out."
Anyway, the libertarian economic and social think-tank The Cato Institute has a very impressive collection of (largely) anti-war commentary here. And a story in Wired magazine suggests the aftermath of the use of depleted uranium in Iraq is going to be much worse than last time:
"Depleted uranium has a few drawbacks. It is 40 percent as radioactive as pure uranium and has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. In addition, the very volatility that makes it blaze like an atomic furnace upon impact converts a large percentage of the spent projectile into microscopic radioactive oxides that, when borne by the wind, may be inhaled by civilians miles from the battlefield."
According to the current chest-beating noises, most of this substance will be released in the first day or two, in the form of super-dense, bunker-busting warheads.
UPDATE: Hard News reader Carig Marshall says:
"I noted in your weblog of March 20 a quote from Wired Magazine regarding uranium weapons likely to be used in Iraq. The quote was I think rather misleading on a couple of accounts. Firstly, as it is noted, natural uranium decays with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. That is a long time and it means that lump of natural uranium emits relatively little radiation. Depleted uranium emits even less radiation since the shorter half-life isotopes have largely been removed (and mostly used in nuclear reactors). Secondly, and more importantly, your quote contains the line "makes it blaze like an atomic furnace upon impact". This is just silly. What is an atomic furnace and how does it blaze? What happens is that the uranium burns, just like magnesium, producing much heat and light, along with the particles of uranium oxide mentioned in the article. Releasing such compounds in to the environment hardly seems to be a good idea, but the Wired article seems to want to make a connection with nuclear weapons that doesn't exist."
And he's quite right. I do understand the basic principle of radioactive half-life and I ought to have scrutinised the story more closely before posting the link. Fair cop.
The Empire Strikes | Mar 18, 2003 11:18
When United Nations inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they did so because Saddam's regime was not co-operating on access to certain sites, including presidential palaces, and because of the fear of consequent US and British airstrikes.
This week, the inspectors will leave, even though they have unfettered working access to the palaces and other sites, because Iraq will soon be subject to an unprecedented military assault from US and British forces.
So the Americans have their war. It is clear now, if it wasn't before, that it's not really about the weapons, at least in so far as allowing the inspectors to do their jobs is concerned. The French, however murky their deeper motives, are quite right: the inspections had not finished, the inspectors wished to continue, disarmament, however grudging, was taking place.
But it's not about the French either, however convenient a scapegoat they might be. It is simply that the US has not only failed to make a moral case for war to its fellow members of the Security Council, it hasn't even been able to get the swinging nations into line by threatening or bribing them. And it's no use complaining about the promised veto either: the US essentially established that system and has fully expected its own vetoes to be honoured for the last five decades.
The stark truth is that almost no one is convinced by the American case for war now. Those few world leaders to publicly endorse it have done so in the face of huge opposition from their own people - and, in Tony Blair's case, a party rebellion and potentially fatal political damage.
This is not surprising. It defied reason to implement an inspections process then kill it because it began to bear fruit. The Americans did not seek the counsel of other nations; merely a pretext for war to satisfy a decade-old doctrinaire plan for US strategic dominance.
They lied and dissembled as much the evil man they want to unseat - using forged documents, repeating claims already dismissed by inspectors, waving satellite photographs of trucks that proved to carry nothing more than food.
The idea that Resolution 1441 explicitly authorises war is a convenient fantasy - would the naysayers have voted for it in the first place if they believed it did?
But still they have their war, at the cost of destabilising the United Nations, the European Union, Nato, the Arab League, Nafta (dimwit US congressmen are already blustering about retaliatory trade sanctions against Mexico and Chile) and the political future of their closest ally. I wouldn't put money on a successful WTO round any time soon, either.
And, of course, the next Stalinist toyboy (sorry, US "ally") in Uzbekistan has moved on from fixing elections and torturing and killing his citizens to threatening his neighbours. But, hey, he's a good guy, for now.
Meanwhile, al Qaeda is already on a recruiting drive and the US economy is sliding down the toilet. Bush and his chums have already committed their citizens to 10 years of fiscal deficits. And that official figure, unbelievably, doesn't count the cost of war.
In a way, it's the global incompetence, the bone-headed arrogance and stupidity, that annoy me most about this. With even a little genuine diplomacy - or leadership - they could probably have achieved most of what they set out to do. Instead, they showed contempt, and it was not always veiled.
The war probably won't take long - US military leadership is, fortunately, vastly more competent than its political leadership - but it will be nasty. It will be interesting to see whether the US media, which has finally shown signs of waking up, will play along when innocent civilians are killed, as they inevitably will be.
I think Norman Mailer's right: Bush and the neoconservatives behind him are seeking to turn American into a mega-banana republic, and it is worrying in the extreme.
Still, there has been some stout stuff written this week, notably by economist Paul Krugman, who vented admirably in the New York Times about the stupidity and arrogance of his leaders. Fareed Zakaria's backgrounder for Newsweek covers similar ground at greater length and today's New Zealand Herald editorial is justifiably angry in tone. A wealth of other writing about the Bush administration's appalling behaviour at home and abroad is collected at the excellent Crisis Papers.
Meanwhile, deluded millennium-fanciers can also chew on disease and apocalyptic prophecy from a dead fish. The plague of locusts must surely be only just around the corner. What a wonderful world.
Hostilities | Mar 16, 2003 10:15
Ian Fraser is right. The new TV3 News campaign is a cheap shot.
Fraser vented his anger to the Sunday Star Times, declaring himself "disappointed that a pair of journalists would lend themselves to a campaign in which they denigrate the independence, the courage and tenacity of other journalists when they know perfectly well there is no basis whatever to those claims."
The two journalists are, of course, John Campbell and Carol Hirschfeld, who according to the Star Times story wrote the copy they deliver in the new campaign, which advances 3 News's pitch for viewers by implying that TVNZ journalists cannot be trusted. It goes thus:
From Wellington to Washington to Baghdad. In uncertain times who can you trust?
Not anyone who works for TVNZ, it appears.
Yes, it's important to remember that propaganda can come from all sides …
And TVNZ will deliver it on command?
… so, our job is to be independent, to tell the truth as well as we are able.
While TVNZ tells lies?
At 3 News we are not cheerleaders
Unlike the journalists at TVNZ.
We're not state-owned.
Public broadcasters are not to be trusted.
We are journalists
And they're not, presumably.
We should not be afraid of anyone.
And they are.
Our job is to ask the questions - no matter who we might offend.
But they don't, because they're under the thumb of the government thought police.
I would be furious if another journalist implied these things about me, and, indeed, I have been in the past.
Lingering in the background, of course, is the Corngate story, which was certainly evidence of fearlessness in the face of official wrath. But TV3 would have fared better on the story had it spent less time trumpeting about "our investigation" and more time - or any - actually conducting one. But it didn't. It got the story on a plate (as did the entirely state-funded Radio New Zealand, albeit with much less notice) and the nature of the deal meant it came up short as the story developed.
RNZ's journalists revisited the story, and Steven Price (who vetted Seeds of Distrust for legal issues) has provided what is thus far the definitive account of the affair, in a thorough and nuanced feature in Metro magazine (he finds himself "not that far" from Nicky Hager's account). TV3 really hasn't returned to its killer story.
What also makes the 3 News campaign a bit rich is that although 3 News has long provided a welcome alternative to the smothering format of the market leader, it has become more like One News in the past two years, and can attribute at least some of its audience gains to that fact. 3 News's growth hasn't been amongst Auckland smarties, but churchgoing couples, residents of the Waikato and unemployed mechanics in Taupo (well, that's basically what the last research I saw said).
A deeper irony is that John and Carol work for a company owned by CanWest Global, whose proprietors, the Asper family have (when they haven't been campaigning against public broadcasting) practised some of the most egregious editorial interference seen anywhere in the democratic world in recent years.
Among other things, they have forbidden any criticism of the Israeli government in any of their Canadian newspapers, which account for most of the newspaper market in that country. (This story was broken here by the state-funded Mediawatch, but you won't have heard it on TV3 or Radio Pacific.)
There is no evidence that the Aspers' unpleasant meddling with editorial independence extends to their TV channel in New Zealand. Just as there is no evidence that journalists at TVNZ are beholden to ministers and officials.
Personally, I've gone from being a 3 News loyalist to more of a swinging viewer in the last year or two. The mum-and-dad schtick and incessant use of teasers on One News still irritate me, but so do those flimsy mid-bulletin entertainment stories on 3 News. (Doubtless on account of its much tighter budgets, 3 News can be unwatchable at the weekends.)
TVNZ is making a conscious effort to improve and innovate in its news and current affairs offerings. Some of what has resulted is a bit pompous (the "One News Centre"), some of it is excellent (Tsehai Tiffin's voluntary euthanasia story on Sunday) and some of it is awful (the Hosking-Howard interview in the same show).
Fraser needs to keep a check on his outbursts - they tend to become longer-running stories than the original offence, and it was silly of him to have a crack at Campbell and Hirschfeld personally - but I wouldn't rule out an angry response this week to industry grumblings about the new head of commissioning, Tony Holden.
TV3, in the meantime, ought to be wary of believing its own hype.
Morning dreads | Mar 14, 2003 10:36
Are you waking up with the morning dreads? Every day, I get up, wake up the G4 and click Google News, gloomily, for rumours of war. It depresses me but I can't help it.
Helping a close friend through a ghastly personal situation hasn't improved my disposition either. And then this morning there was the 6.55am flyover, the dank, pooky smell of Foray 48B and the sharp, brief, inevitable headache on stepping out the door.
It is no more than an inconvenience for me. But a new survey on the painted apple moth spray campaign has turned up an array of self-reported symptoms amongst people in the spray zone.
Some - especially reported gastro-intestinal complaints - are surprising and not easily explained. Some of the responses seemed conflicting - few people felt their overall health had been affected and visits to the doctor hadn't risen.
But why did National Radio, in this morning's bulletins and reports, insist on saying the researchers found the spray had "triggered" the symptoms when, in their own audio, the study leader said he could not confidently attribute the reported ill effects to the spray? Science needs to be reported carefully.
Still, it could be worse. I played some tennis with my lawyer yesterday (actually, he's the kind of lawyer I hope never to have to use, but I would trust him if I did). We were enjoying a Heineken afterwards and got talking, as we all do, of war. He mused about the message the US stance on North Korea was sending out to rogue states.
"And then you had John Howard saying we had to show our will on Iraq or how else would we reign in North Korea? Right. You're gonna line up your troops on their borders? And the North Koreans go, sure …"
He mimed the pushing of a button.
He was right. The message the US is now officially sending out - that North Korea, with its nuclear weapons and long-distance missiles and officially ordained place in the "Axis of Evil", is now a "regional issue" - says to every other aspiring power in the world that the way to get the US off your back is to develop a nuclear capability as quickly as possible.
Such is the dirty, dangerous world in which we find ourselves this year.
A fascinating insight into the dirt and the danger came with the debut of TVNZ's new Kim Hill vehicle, Face to Face - the long-awaited longform interview show. Her guest was Richard V. Allen, who, as a member of the US Defence Policy Board and advisor to Rumsfeld, is thoroughly in the loop.
The two of them hit the war issue running, and there unfolded a pacy, intelligent interview that - unlike the ghastly Hosking encounter with John Howard on Sunday - was both entertaining and informative.
The most fascinating element of the discussion was the fact that Allen barely mentioned the banned weapons and the dark threat to the world that Howard devoted an entire speech to yesterday.
Allen's pitch: war would secure "stability" of oil supplies. No, the case wasn't "so clear" as that for the first Gulf War. It might all go horribly wrong afterwards, but the people of Iraq were "entitled" to a shot at democracy (so are the people of Pakistan, Uzbekistan, etc, presumably). Yes, New Zealand support for the US war plans would "accelerate" progress on a free trade agreement. It was pragmatic bordering on cynical, but the honesty - after the tosh that has been serially served up by Allen's bosses - was refreshing.
The other new TVNZ offering, Foreign Assignment, followed up nicely with a rare on-the-ground look from Australia's publicly-owned ABC at who actually lives in Baghdad. Even allowing for the fact that the subjects had obviously been vetted, it was a useful demonstration of the fact that nice, educated, middle-class people are leading lives where the bombs will fall. The tendency to view entire nations through the personality of their leaders is as common, and dangerous, as ever.
So, two good new programmes. And as if that weren't enough, Spin Doctors returned for a third series this week and was, at times, very funny indeed. It's still not without its clunkers, but a programme written, shot and screened over a few days will never be perfectly even. It is a miracle enough that a local comedy is funny at all, let actually improving in its third season.
Anyway, if this is Charter television, bring it on. And you can quote me on that.
Electrifying | Mar 10, 2003 10:24
It was one of the most electrifying things I have ever seen on a sports field. Two minutes into the match, the ball is cleared to Spencer from a ruck in his own half. He runs, makes the advantage line, then glides easily between tacklers. A desperate hand grabs him, he unloads to Howlett, running from fullback, who draws another tackle and feeds Caucaunibuca. History.
I've seen big wingers go fast before but I've never seen anyone accelerate like Caucau does. What a bugger he's already played for Fiji.
So anyway, the Blues remade the Super 12 orthodoxy on Saturday night, not merely ending the Crusaders' 15-game winning streak, but demolishing the team that provided most of last year's All Blacks, 39-5. This is why you pay money to see sport.
Fortunately, the game was good enough to make up for the less pleasant aspects of attending a game of rugby at North Harbour Stadium. Sightlines at the stadium are great, but it has several gross design flaws that make it unsuitable for running at capacity. Among them: mens' toilets with only one door, meaning an in-and-out crush at half time that is at best frustrating and at worst plain dangerous, especially for children.
But that wasn't the worst of it. A deafening PA system ran the length of our "premium" section of the stand, a few feet above our heads. I don't just mean annoyingly loud, I mean a genuine health and safety issue. I suggest that someone from OSH drops in on the next home game. My ears were still hurting the next day, and I imagine some older and younger punters were in greater distress than I was.
And it never let up. If it wasn't ear-splitting soundtracks from TV ads, it was some certifiable idiot conducting banal, badly rehearsed interviews with puzzled children, or boorishly encouraging the crowd to jeer the Crusaders as they took the field. (I clapped them sportingly - it's the Auckland way.)
So the opening whistle was a relief as much as anything. But, after that thrilling first try, the certifiable idiot turned on the music again - he played the same George Thorogood song all night - and appeared to be trying to sing or rap along with it, playing with the faders, while Carlos was lining up his first conversion. It was excruciating, wrong and insulting to the players and the crowd.
I wonder if the problem is that putting a PA system on the far side of the ground was part of the phase-two development that never took place because the stadium has been such a financial lemon - so they try and throw sound right across the ground.
Look, I don't mind music at games. It can create atmosphere, make it seem a real night out. But North Harbour administrators appear to have lost all common sense [NB: Looks like it's not North Harbour Rugby to blame here, but the stadium management and the Blues organisation - see update below]. They make the people who run Eden Park look like geniuses, and that's saying something.
Anyway, having grumped at the managing editor last week, I guess I ought to cast an eye over the revamped New Zealand Herald. The Herald, for all the moaning that people do about it, is the best and most substantial paper in the country. Its rise from the days of Peter Scherer's time-warped editorship (and any paper that could keep a ban on the word "lesbian" through to the 1990s was surely in a time warp) has not been smooth or uniform, but it has been impressive.
Last week's revamp amounted to a reshuffle of some key features - TV listings on a back page - and a what appears to be a conscious effort to modernise its design: they even bleed the text off strapheads like we used to do on Planet in 1992. It looks quite good.
Saturday was the debut of the Weekend Herald's new glossy magazine, Canvas, which seems curiously out of phase with the redesign of the rest of the paper: it should have looked like the Observer magazine but it looks like the Sunday Times magazine. And it's thin. The bean-counters aren't cutting any slack on page ratios here. (I talked to someone last week who's convinced there's a O'Reilly end-game on here - cut costs, fatten the bottom line and sell APN and the Herald with it. Who knows?)
In theory, Canvas, with its impressive editorial team, should wipe the floor with the Sunday Star Times' magazine (after all, we're talking Carroll du Chauteau versus Jo McCarroll here), launched last week as a pre-emptive strike and really little more than parts of the SST reformatted to tabloid. But it doesn't, and it appears that it won't until its sales team can wrench some ads away from the new Metro, or the management is prepared to give a little away now to build the brand.
UPDATE: A polite and prompt response from Doug Rollerson, CEO of North Harbour Rugby. Looks like it's down to the Blues and North Harbour Stadium management:
Hi Russell
Thankyou for your letter and indeed for attending that fantastic game of rugby at NH Stadium on Saturday night.
The speaker system you mentioned at NHS has had a lot of upgrade work done to it in recent months and the ground announcer is reputably one of NZ's best. However as the entertainment was controlled by the Blues management and the speaker system is under the control of the NHS I have forwarded your email to the appropriate people at the Blues and at the NHS for their attention.
I am sure that you will agree that NHS is as good as any other stadium in the World to watch rugby at and we look forward to seeing you back here in the near future
Kind regards
Doug Rollerson
CHIEF EXECUTIVE
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