Mum's the Word

There are topics in the shadows of the Main Stream Media, of which Alicia Shepard proudly proclaims NPR is a part. On topics such as (readers may suggest more)

• 9/11
• Israeli atrocities towards Palestinians
• US military atrocities towards Iraqis
• US military atrocities towards Afghanis
  
• US global empire
• CIA involvement in [fill in the blank]
• War on Drugs as a tool to oppress the poor
  
• Insurance industry control over government
• Fracking
  
• Oil pipelines
  

NPR is generally mum.

In his talk of March 3rd at the Treason in America Conference, Russ Baker addresses the issue of what happened on 9/11, "one of the greatest cataclysms in American and recent world history" and how "the media turned away from this."

Part of this was revulsion and shock to the system. To the individual system and to the body politic. It was so disturbing on every possible level that it simply doesn't compute. What happens with this kind of trauma is you just shut down. [..] It's the same for the media. It's not that the media is in cahoots or is bad or anything like that, it's just that the media is a whole lot of people trying to cope, trying to do their jobs, trying to keep their jobs, trying to stay focused and so on - you've heard the expression "too big to fail" about Goldman Sachs and these sorts of places, well this story was too big to cover.

Dramatic pause here. Which is well placed. "Too big to cover" is, in some sense, a new phrase for the "the big lie." Think of the sinking of The Maine, the attack on Pearl Harbor, Operation Gladio, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the crack cocaine epidemic, the Niger forgeries - all these events have been exploited by opportunistic government propagandists to incite war. The instinct for it in government seems to undeniable. So Baker's assessment is fairly benign. He continues,

What bothers me about that is that no serious journalist should fail to cover [] the big stories. Somebody at the Washington Post was telling me - do you remember the couple that got into the White House dinner? Apparently they put together a team of 30 people to cover that. And this reporter pointed out to me, they said, we never had more than 3 people covering Iraq.

Journalists should always cover the big stories, and no serious journalist should out of hand reject any scenario as completely impossible or implausible, where human nature and power are concerned. It is our job to consider the evidence and to dig in.

[]

When you look at the reporting on things that are not in dispute, it is inadequate. [] You don't have to have a position on 9/11 to want answers. And you don't have to be a kook to wonder if, when the co-chairmen of The 9/11 Commission, a commission that itself has no credibility, basically claim that they were lied to, that there might be something going on.

But, repeatedly, NPR has characterized people who want answers to these questions as kooks and conspiracy theorists. It's akin to believing in Martians and/or that the moon landing was staged in Hollywood.

One of the things you see [in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes] is that most people helped preserve the system, not because they were told to do it but simply because they were afraid. [] This exists in the most insidious form in our society where we bray about how free we are. Because if you're proud of yourself and how green your lawn is and how well you generally do investing and how cool NASCAR is [] you really don't want to hear that everything ain't hunky dory.

To what degree is NPR self-censoring? Do they know there is a cover up of some sort and so they know better than to interfere with it? Do they just not want to know what's being covered up? Or do they assume the same of their audience? Are there any dissenters? How do they justify their own lack of curiosity and failure to investigate unexplained facts like, oh, the collapse of building 7?

Dots Disconnected

Thanks to Otto (also known as Otl) Aicher, (Artist), German, 1922-1991, Artstor.org

NPR reports on March 11th and 12th on a Senate debate over continued involvement in the Afghanistan occupation and the implosion in the public school system in Kansas City, respectively. I'd like to point out how (badly) these stories were presented and to suggest how concurrent reports on Democracy Now provide the connective tissue that would provide context for the public to make sense out of these seemingly disparate phenomena.

First, Dennis Kucinich presented House Resolution 248 on the floor of the House which he prefaced by a video on his web site, a transcript of which follows:

Hi, Dennis here. This week a privileged resolution will be brought to the floor of the House of Representatives. This resolution, which I wrote, requires the president to remove the troops from Afghanistan within 30 days of the time when the resolution was passed and no later than December 21, of 2010. There are many reasons we need to get out of Afghanistan, I just list a few.

• We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars: a total waste, because the Afghanistan central government of is totally corrupt.
• We have a thousand troops whose lives have been lost, and many more injured, some of them permanently.
  
• Countless individual Afghanistan citizens have been killed or injured as a result of this conflict.
• We should take heed of the Russian's experience in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not going to be conquered. We have to understand that the weight of history has been against our efforts from the start.

Now we have to determine whether or not America will take a new direction in Afghanistan. Not to go in deeper with a surge, but to get out. That's what's going to be discussed this week in Washington. Please help us. Please get the word out. Please contact anyone who you think will be influential in getting members of Congress to pay close attention to this vote.

C-SPAN captured testimony from the debate, some of which is excerpt at Truth-Out. Donna Edwards points out that, "As national security director Jim Jones has told us, there are only 100 Al Quaeda left in Afghanistan. Who are we fighting?" But we didn't hear that on NPR.

Kucinich's estimate for the cost of the war is quite conservative compared to nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stieglitz, whose estimate is more like three thousand billion, but this doesn't fool Robert Siegel or Andrea Seabrook who covered the event for NPR. The Reagan era propaganda machine invested much in discrediting "liberal" ideas, and NPR is quick to cash in. After being teed up (discredited) by Robert Siegel as, "one of the most liberal members of Congress," (the transcript changes this to "more liberal"), Seabrook echoes the theme with a libertarian variation:

It wasn't just liberals arguing this; they found an ally in libertarian Republicans such as Texas Rep. Ron Paul.

After some audio of Rep. Paul arguing convincingly against occupation (see the TruthOut clip for more of this) and feeling scared nearly to death, we are reassured by Seabrook that

Ultimately though, these liberals and libertarians are outnumbered by members of Congress who support the president and the war.

Pffew. For example, Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton, chair of the House Committee on Armed Services, (right - no liberal, he) is heard to ask

"Have we forgotten? Have we forgotten what happened to America on 9/11?"

To which the answer screams, "No! We have not forgotten. How can you forget something you've never known?!"

In case the listeners are at all unclear about the events of 9/11, they receive the following wisdom from Ms. Seabrook:

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, it provided a haven to al-Qaida, which orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Well, that settles that. And in case the listener feels at all unsettled, a sequence of vacuous truisms ensue: Ted Poe of Texas saying that "War is hard," and California Democrate Bob Filner advising that "Peace is harder," and the article concludes with the reassurance by Prof. Siegel that,

Congress had an open, bipartisan debate about war and peace.

This hermetically insulates the issue and so, ultimately, strident Kucinich's quixotic flail against the war machine is twisted by NPR into effectively sealing the deal: war's on, 'nuff said.

So when the next day (March 11th) NPR broadcasts Schools Across U.S. Grapple With Closures, we hear how $2bn has been lavished upon the Kansas City School District over twenty years, but not a mention is made of the opportunity costs of the occupations overseas. Robert Siegel passes the baton to Michelle Norris who passes it to Silvia Maria Gross of KCUR--Kansas City's NPR station.

Here's a transcript of the story that aired:

Almost every school year West Port High School junior [Jane Doe] has seen change. A new principal, a different curriculum, even a new superintendent.

Every year it's changing the system's changing, or they're trying to put us in a predicament. It's kinda hard to just stay focused.

This year comes the biggest change of all, her school is one of 26 in the school district that will be boarded up. This follows one of the most ambitious attempts in the country to integrate schools. A court-ordered desegregation plan in the 1980's and 90's poured two billion dollars into the district to fix the schools. It created elaborate bus routes, magnet programs and some of the best facilities in the country including an Olympic sized swimming pool and a planetarium.

But families continued to flee to the suburbs and to private and charter schools. The district's population has plummeted from 70000 in the 1960's to about 17000 now. The new superintendent John Covington [below] proposed closing about half the buildings, and laying off about 700 employees.

Right now we're failing students in large percentages, in large numbers, and that doesn't have to be.

It's all an effort to redeploy resources. Covington calls it right-sizing. But opponents say it's anything but [voice (low volume) of Ajamu Webster in call and response with a crowd]:

I said the "right size plan" is the wrong fit. I say the right size plan [response] is the wrong fit.

At forums across the city over the past few months many parents and community members protested plans to close schools. The superintendent was determined that all schools would need to consolidate, even some of the district's better performing ones.

Ajamu Webster, who founded the district's three Afrikan Centered [Education] schools, (ACE) disagreed:

Our campus is a growing institution, and a growing institution needs space.

The district's flagship, Lincoln College Prep, was recently named among the top 150 public high schools in the country by Newsweek. But even Lincoln Prep is slated to merge its middle and high schools.

Dan Domonitch is director of the American Association of School Administrators. He says districts and cities like Washington D.C., Cleveland and Chicago are all closing under the old schools [sic - weird editing glitch in audio, I think].

The economy being what it is, and school districts having to make major cuts, increasing class size, eliminating sports programs, cutting back on transportation - they don't have the luxury of maintaining a facility open unless it is 100% occupied.

In Kansas City, civic institutions, the Chamber of Commerce, and even the teacher's union supported the school closure plan, though almost 300 teaching positions will be lost.

This morning Superintendent Covington laid out more details. Such things as longer school days, an extended year and an end to social promotion. He wants to use evaluations and early retirements to keep only the best teachers.

I think in 5 years the Kansas City Community, I think they'll beam with pride as to where our schools have come.

As for the buildings, the school board hopes to sell them, or some could be razed to make way for city parks. Either way, residents here hope that this radical public schools plan leads to radical change.

It looks like the teachers' Union has been backed into a corner after not receiving much of a voice. In any case, as Sasha Abramsky points out in The Guardian,

If there are lessons to be learned from Kansas City's dismal experiences, they are about the importance of holistic thinking: of looking for ways not just to desegregate schools but to preserve integrated, economically diverse urban cores; of providing middle-class families with reasons to continue using public services; of building up the notion of common community again so that the public sector flourishes rather than withers. Absent this, Kansas City might well represent a glimpse of a depressing American future: one in which those with resources opt out, en masse, from any and all public services, leaving the public sector to stumble drunkenly from one crisis to the next, a miserable-looking shadow of once-great glories.

To practice holistic thinking, consider the Kansas City public schools story not only in the context of prioritizing foreign occupations over public schools, but also in the context of poverty, the War on Drugs, and the costs to the public sector of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps.

Listen, for instance, to legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander on Democracy Now on the same day as the NPR KC story (and part II of that interview). She describes in detail how the discriminatory application of drug laws has been used as a tool to destroy inner city communities. She argues that the racial control functions of Jim Crow laws now persist through the criminal justice system.

Then listen to the next day's DN coverage of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development report on the "wealth gap." The report found nearly half of all single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth, and the median wealth for single black women is only $100; for single Hispanic women, $120. This compares to just over $41,000 for single white women.

Count on NPR to not connect the dots.

Talking Gates

Gareth Porter recently had an excellent piece explaining how the Mighty Marja Offensive was more mirage-ah! than Marja - turns out that "Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley." Of course a little detail like reality is not about to deter the Pentagon stenographers working for NPR. Take a look at an NPR search of "marjah" and "city" for on-air stories:

(click for detailed view)

The battle for farmland was so successful that Secretary of War, Robert Gates decided it was time for him to lead the Afghanistan PR campaign himself - while bringing along some press corp dummies to repeat whatever he tells them. For NPR the honor of mastering Gatespeak went to Mary Louise "Two Clocks" Kelly. The highlight of the trip for Kelly was a Potemkin village stroll with Gates through a market in Now Zad. After repeating Gates' comments to troops about being "the tip of the spear" Kelly describes this "unthinkable" miracle:

"We are driving past adobe mud huts and on our way for Secretary Gates to do something that, until a few months ago, might've been unthinkable.

We're in a town market. Afghan men sit before small stalls selling pomegranates and potatoes, oranges and eggs. And what might have been unthinkable, not so long ago, is the sight of the U.S. secretary of Defense walking down the middle of the road. No body armor, just khakis and a buttoned down shirt and a Camp Lejeune baseball cap on his head. Marines are swarming the roofs of the mud huts around us, machine guns in hand, watching for trouble, but all is calm. And Gates chats politely through a translator with a couple of the locals."

Golly, puts me in mind of a "market in Indiana in the summertime." After leaving the market, Kelly informs us that Gates reflected, "It has been a useful day." No kidding, even a dummy could have figured that out.

Guilt by Association Fun: From Old Europe to the Village and Emerging Markets

From Washington Life Magazine that includes Sid and Mercedes Bass, John and Diana Negroponte.

Let's play Guilt by Association, both as a diversion from the yuckiness of day-to-day NPR programming and as a way of investigating the coziness of the village people. Start with Diana Villiers Negroponte, who in the above picture (far right) is shown paired with her (they are the Muckety 2009 Power Couple) charming husband, John. It is reported that they have 5 adopted children from Honduras, where John and Diana inhabited the US ambassador's mansion during the Reagan years - the years when the School of the Americas graduates such as General Reinaldo Andino Flores were known for arbitrary detention, torture, and rape.

Guilt by association? I'd say! Though John and Reinaldo are almost never associated in the US press - where John and Diana are treated as royalty. There is, of course, much more evidence of guilt for Negroponte's involvement with Battalion 3-16, among a host of other vile atrocities. Negroponte was even involved in the recent coup d'etat in Honduras.

Her Royal Highness Diana hails from thoroughly British corporatist and royalist stock. She is a descendant of King Charles, II and a daughter of Sir Charles Villiers, a merchant banker who was the chairman of British Steel from 1974 until 1988. Of course, for those to whom much is given, much is expected, and her many philanthropic causes include service as a trustee of Freedom House, whose web site claims, "Freedom House has opposed tyranny around the world, including dictatorships in Latin America...". Really now. Gilded irony?

Robert Parry has reported that veteran CIA officer Walter Raymond Jr. was recruited to lead Ronald Reagan's National Security Decision Directive 77, which called for "the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists [] to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies." Parry documents how the lost chapter of the Iran/Contra Report was deleted as part of a compromise to appease house Republicans such as Dick Cheney. We see how Freedom House both lends HRH Diana an air of do-goodedness and becomes an avenue for propagating the very repression they purportedly oppose. Parry writes,

In line with its clandestine nature, Raymond also suggested routing the “funding via Freedom House or some other structure that has credibility in the political center.”

Ok, now for the association with NPR. I know this is a loose association, since the Brooking institute is so huge, but I find it incriminating all the same: Ms. Negroponte is a senior visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute where Antoine W. van Agtmael is a trustee. Mr. Agtmael is president and CIO of Emerging Markets Management, LLC and a great advocate for exploiting opportunities of ballooning numbers of new consumers in Asia and other "emerging markets," a phrase he claims to have coined. It so happens that Antoine is also, wouldn't you know, chair of the NPR Foundation.

More significantly (perhaps ), Mr. Agtmael is a trustee at the Washington National Opera, where HRH Negroponte was pictured above at their Golden Gala. Also in attendance were Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

Dronespeak: Temple-Raston Goes Radical

[cross-posted at NPR Check]

Running a series called "Going Radical," NPR claims the mantle of "investigative journalism" as it works to shore up the military and foreign policy interests of the United States. Instead of investigating how - under the rubric of a "war on terrorism" -

• the tradition of Constitutional law in the US was chucked in favor of unrestrained surveillance, illegal detention, disappearances, assassination and torture, or
  
• an unsuccessful businessman/crook of low to middling intelligence became so radicalized that he lead the US into two wars of aggression against two predominately Muslim states based on propaganda and manufactured intelligence, or
  
• the state of Israel was brazenly supported by the US government through two massive military assaults (Lebanon & Gaza) targeting civilians and in enacting policies against Palestinians that are tantamount to genocide, or
• how someone goes from a position of privilege to one of radically bragging about committing an international crime for which the penalty on conviction is death or life imprisonment,
  

NPR throws its resources into supposedly explaining the radicalization of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas bomber of Flight 253. What this "investigation" dutifully refuses to explore is any detailed assessment of the grim human toll of US foreign policy in Central Asia and the Middle East and why this policy continues to win recruits to extremism and terror. Daring journalism also would seek answers as to why Abdulmutallab was allowed onto a US bound flight even thought the "intelligence community" had it's eye on him, and would want to find out exactly who helped Abdulmutallab get on Flight 253 in the first place. But if you are a believer in the exceptional goodness of US foreign policy and the nobility of the US war on terror, then NPR won't disappoint.

The star of NPR's Going Radical series is Dina Temple-Raston (NPR's resident FBI spokesperson). She hosts three of the features in the series:

• Her Thursday morning piece is a thing of twisted beauty. In a matter of minutes she is able to conflate anti-Guantanamo, anti-torture activism with terrorist extremism. She notes that ex-GITMO detainee Moazzam Begg spoke at a University College London 2007 "Terror Week" event. First she ties Begg to Abdulmutallab by stating, "People who attended the conference say Begg and Abdulmutallab were sitting next to each other" and concludes that "when Abdulmutallab started meeting people like Moazzam Begg, he was exposed to vitriolic and very anti-American views." What is it with these people who've been kidnapped and tortured by the US being so vitriolic and anti-American? - sheesh!

• On Thursday afternoon Temple-Raston is back to highlight a character who features in all three of her reports, a Hitchenseque fellow named Shiraz Maher who used to recruit for Islamic extremism, but is now firmly in the camp of rationalizing Western exceptionalism, state repression and aggressive Zionism. His writing can be sampled in Standpoint Magazine where he takes a stand on Israel's annexation wall:

  "We tend to hear only about Israel's because of the news coverage and hippy activism it attracts. No other security fence has attracted quite as much attention and theirs - that despite Israel suffering a torrent of terrorist attacks from 2000-2003....where is the ‘fairness' and ‘consistency' that Islamists and their leftist cheerleaders continually complain about?"

  It is telling that there actually is another former recruiter with a similar story to Mr. Maher's. His name is Maajid Nawaz, but instead of excusing the "western" security state or Israeli aggression - he brings a far more compassionate, nuanced approach to the lessons he's learned.

• Finally on Friday afternoon Temple-Raston - like our President - plays the role of judge, jury and executioner. Remember Anwar al-Awlaki, the US citizen targeted for assassination by the US government (see post below)? Speaking of al-Awlaki as if she were discussing him receiving a traffic ticket, Temple-Raston explains that

  "The U.S. has been trying to bring him in for questioning for years. After the Fort Hood attack, it even launched a missile strike on one of his houses in Yemen, but he survived the attack."

  Hey, but he deserves extrajudicial execution because Robert Siegel opens the piece with the damning evidence that

  "He's admitted to knowing Abdulmutallab. But their relationship, according to intelligence officials, goes far deeper than that. In fact, NPR has learned that al-Awlaki may have been in charge of a small terrorist cell and that Abdulmutallab may have been his first al-Qaida recruit."

  Still not convinced? Temple-Raston lays it on:

  "He is the same radical imam who was implicated in the Fort Hood shootings last year. He was in email contact with the suspected shooter, Major Nidal Hasan. And, apparently, he blessed that attack and then called Hasan a hero"

  and

  "Al-Awlaki has always been a propagandist. If he actually mentored Abdulmutallab while he allegedly trained to bomb a U.S. airliner, that would mean al-Awlaki had moved into an operational role in the organization."

  Still not ready to lynch? Nothing like a huge dose of fear to nail the case: "What's more, officials tell NPR that they believe al-Awlaki was put in charge of more people than just Abdulmutallab. They believe he trained an entire cell of English-speaking recruits. Apparently, Abdulmutallab named names and provided locations to authorities. Law enforcement officials are looking for those young men now. Officials say they don't believe the young men are in the U.S."

A final note about Temple-Raston's choices of "experts" in these pieces. As mentioned she leans heavily on Shiraz Maher, and she also features a man of similar politics in the reports - Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion which focuses only on Islamic radicalization - not Euro-American radical militarism. Interestingly, the other former-recruiter I mentioned above Maajid Nawaz - also runs a center against radicalism that is well worth exploring and highlighting - unless your main interest is in promoting the US "war on terror."