Television Two weeks in the war
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
On Nov. 12, the soldiers of the
Northern Alliance on the way to Kabul found a wounded Taliban soldier cowering
in a ditch by the side of the road. The helpless man begged for his life, but,
as the New York Times photographer snapped away, the Alliance men
dragged him along the road, pulled him to his feet, shot him in the chest, beat
him with a rifle butt and grenade launcher, pulled his pants off leaving him
naked from the waist down, then filled his corpse with bullets.
Another victory in the war against terrorism.
Thus our allies -- really our surrogates -- consummated their
victory by routinely shooting the wounded, executing Taliban prisoners and
those who tried to surrender, and looting the corpses and property of the
liberated towns.
In a rare dissenting voice, New York Daily News columnist
E.R. Shipp said in a Dec. 2 piece: Beware. Our allies are shysters,
thugs, thieves and debasers of women. We ignore their atrocities at our
moral peril.
Yes, I know war is brutal. But if we want to call it just, we must
accept responsibility for whatever is done in our name, with our money and with
our planes, tanks and guns.
As usual, the media have both published and buried our crimes.
Much coverage of the war is weak because the Bush administration
has intensified the policy begun after Vietnam, tightened in Panama and Iraq,
of keeping the press and the country in the dark. As John MacArthur wrote in
The Nation Nov. 19, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld turns
Pentagon briefings into joke sessions, the government is prosecuting its
military campaign in near-complete secrecy, confident that journalists will
salute without the slightest irony.
For example, the Nov. 27 Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks briefing
was interrupted 11 times by laughter and yielded little new information.
Rumsfeld repeated the mantras: tightening the noose, campaign
far from over, tough work lies ahead, against our adversary
that has declared war on our way of life. To one feeble question
about some looting, some other things, he replied blandly that this
behavior was not out of the ordinary.
Oddly, as the press becomes more supine, said The
Washington Posts Howard Kurtz Nov. 29, it has gained respect. A
Pew Research Center survey said 77 percent of respondents rate coverage as
excellent to good.
Perhaps the respect comes deservedly from the marvelous way, as
the funerals and memorials continue and the Times publishes its
sensitive mini-biographies, the newspapers have helped the nation grieve.
Perhaps because the TV networks and cheerleading tabloid headlines
spin the news into propaganda.
The day after Nightline did a story on how careful and
accurate our bomber pilots are, we killed three of our own men with a
misdirected bomb. The tabloids have called the victims heroes. When
the British Independent News reported Dec. 3 that U.S. bombs had killed a total
of at least 170 Afghan civilians in two days, the United States said it was
looking into it. The administration will reply that the figures are wrong, but
will not say how many civilians we have really killed. We dont even read
estimates of how many Taliban we have killed.
Meanwhile the public has still not been inconvenienced by the war
itself. Besides those killed and wounded by friendly fire, one
American soldier has taken a bullet in the shoulder. One has killed himself
with a bullet to the brain.
Affluent New Yorkers interviewed on the radio have said they
contribute to the war effort by buying expensive SUVs and patronizing Broadway
shows and restaurants to boost the limp economy.
The week that began with E.R. Shipps Beware
column ended with Palestinians and Israelis killing more of each other, with
our victorious allies in Kandahar fighting among themselves and the bizarre
video of the mad bin Laden chortling over his crimes on TV. Initially reluctant
to release the tape, the administration wanted to make its evidence public
without putting the culprit on trial.
Meanwhile the weeks told the strangest and saddest stories of the
war: the mysterious prison revolt, the young John Walker emerging from his
hole, and the pre-Christmas disintegration of the peace process in the Holy
Land.
* * *
First, the mystery: What really happened in the last week of
November during the bloody prison-fort revolt at Qala-e-Jhangi, which left --
estimated from various sources -- between 400 and 600 prisoners dead, some with
their hands tied and bullet holes in their heads? Amnesty International and the
U.N. Human Rights Commission have called for investigations.
Press critic Danny Schechter, whose valuable Web site,
mediachannel.org, surveys the world press, has pieced together from the
BBC, the Times of London, the Independent, and The
Guardian, a narrative that, in his judgment, suggests our complicity in a
war crime comparable to My Lai.
The Taliban prisoners, mostly foreign soldiers, surrendered at
Konduz, somehow expecting a fair trial. Inexplicably, a number of them were
allowed to keep their weapons, and, on Saturday, Nov. 24, two blew up
themselves and two captors with grenades. The next day prisoners, their hands
tied, were herded into an interrogation with CIA agent Mike Spann and a
colleague -- an interrogation that somehow exploded into a fight during which
the other agent shot three prisoners dead and Spann, according to one of
several accounts, was beaten, kicked and bitten to death. Things got worse.
American advisers called in air strikes, and our planes bombed the fort for
four days.
Schechter quoted the Independents veteran
correspondent, Robert Fisk: Most television journalists, to their shame,
have shown little or no interest in these disgraceful crimes. Cozying up to the
Northern Alliance, chatting to the American troops, most have done little more
than mention the war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports.
What on earth has gone wrong with our moral compass since Sept. 11?
Next, the crazed, castaway face of 20-year-old John Walker
appeared on our TV screens. We saw his father on Larry King and read his
adolescent e-mails on Page 3. He knelt dazed, bound and silent during
Spanns interrogation. His gaze became a Rorschach test for our value
system. Is he a poor fellow, as Bush says, a rat as the
New York Post proclaims, or the product of his permissive Marin County,
Calif., upbringing?
For Bill Maher, the now patriotic host of the
late-night talk show Politically Incorrect, who was suspended for saying
the Taliban pilots who crashed into the World Trade Center were not
cowards, it was one more chance to indulge his hatred of
Christianity. Joke: Walker had joined the Taliban because he wanted a
less rigid structure than the Catholic church.
* * *
Defenders of Israels policy of assassinating Palestinian
leaders suspected of terrorism offer Israels bomb-and-bulldoze
retaliation as a model for American behavior: Israel has lived with terrorism
and knows what to do about it, their logic goes.
But if the Hamas suicide bombers are immoral and insane, the
Israeli assassinations are both immoral and stupid.
Look at the record. The daily bombings of Gaza, refugee camps, the
West Bank, and Arafats headquarters and so-called targeted
assassinations from helicopters have left a pile of Palestinian corpses -- many
of them innocent bystanders.
News stories have reported the bombings as if they were justified
retaliations and buried the dead children in paragraph 15. According to
The New York Times (Dec. 4), Palestinians had killed 222 Jews,
and Jews had killed 742 Palestinians.
If this were a basketball game, Israel might call that winning,
but it certainly isnt either justice or peace.
Taking a page from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld book on bin Laden,
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon apparently feels he has the authority to have
Arafat killed. After all, if, in his weakness and irrelevance,
Arafat is responsible for failing to control Hamas, and he deserves to die.
Right? For weeks the Arafat-has-to-go columns in the American press have set
the climate for the rocket that will take him out.
And in a recent understandable outburst, Arafat, reacting to
reported American impatience with him, said that America, having given Israel
the tanks, planes and guns to crush Palestine, had little credibility as a
Mideast intermediary.
By the time this article sees print, both bin Laden and Arafat may
be dead. If so, we will congratulate ourselves on another victory. But we will
have become what we despised.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroths new book is Dante to
Dead Man Walking: 50 Essays on Spiritual Classics (Loyola Press).
National Catholic Reporter, January 11,
2002
|