Getting What We Deserve

In "Into the Buzzsaw" Kristina Borjesson has exposed the collusion between our government and their corporate backers to kill controversial stories and destroy reporters' careers. Her book merely tells what most of us know already-- that in the past ten years our Fourth Estate has become little more than a mouthpiece for the powerful. What few of us realize or admit is that we also have ourselves to blame for the travesty.

The reporters quoted in "Into the Buzzsaw" largely view the 1997 legal judgment against ABC News as the beginning of investigative journalism's tragic decline.
(In 1992, reporters from ABC went undercover in a Food Lion grocery story where they filmed how, in unsanitary conditions, old fish were repackaged and redated, expired beef was ground together with fresh beef, and barbecue sauce was put on chicken in order to mask the smell.

Food Lion’s response was not to condemn the events and work to improve conditions — instead, it sued ABC for fraud claiming the journalists had lied on their job applications in order to get access. In a verdict that could only happen in America-- a North Carolina jury rather than criticize the company and laugh it out of court awarded Food Lion $5.5 million in damages.)

Needless to say this had a chilling effect on ABC which had already been targeted by the CIA. In 1984 the agency had attempted to have the network's broadcast license revoked for allegedly violating the FCC's Fairness Doctrine. While it was unsurprising that the CIA under the Reagan administration would attempt to undermine the First Amendment, what Casey and then attorney-general, Ed Meese intended by loudly pleading their "case" before the highest court was to frame the press in general as having a "liberal bias".

For over two decades their tactic has borne fruit. As witnessed in the Food Lion lawsuit, the American public, rather than respond to the facts its being presented, is quite ready to charge the media with "bias" and side with the powerful against its own interests.

Then there is the jailing of Judith Miller for refusing to reveal her confidential sources. Here it was the so called "left" that chose to side (if somewhat tacitly) with the government. No matter that Miller had been a willing abettor in the Bush Administration's fraudulent case for war-- if we expect to learn the far-reaching and often secret decisions being made by the high and mighty it demands that we protect and support the men and women committed to getting us the story. At the end of the day, unless the public holds them to account station and newspaper editors will choose the path of least resistance ... whether we like it or not.

An Almighty Mess

Ronald Reagan's ascent to the presidency was the CIA's final payback to Jimmy Carter. Carter had doomed his presidency by having the temerity to suggest that they act within the boundaries set by Congress and the White House.

If Carter was naive, Reagan was a Hollywood rube. The extent of his understanding of the intelligence services amounted to what he'd seen in the movies. Nevertheless Reagan pledged to untie the agency's hands and appointed his campaign manager Bill Casey as director. Casey shared the view of his hero Wild Bill Donovan that the CIA's mission was to be devious, global and totalitarian. Unfortunately it appears Casey did not also stress that it should be prudent or intelligent.

Nowhere has the legacy of the Reagan caused more damage than in Central Asia. No today we learn that the Pashtun under the banner of the reconstituted "Taleban" are poised to takeover Islamabad. I do not need to elaborate on the gravity for Pakistan should the fighters succeed.

For years Pakistani officials have been urging Nato to accept the Taliban in Afghanistan and work towards building a new coalition government in Kabul that would exclude Hamid Karzai. To appreciate the wisdom of that proposition it is vital to understand that there is a rift in the Pashtuns vis a vis the Taliban who have come to realize how they have been cynically exploited by both Pakistan and the Anglo/Americans.

The Pakistan-based Taliban represents that new movement, but its roots are old. These roots can be found in the isolation of the tribal areas and in the rupture of tradition caused by the import of a new Islamist ideology in the 1980s when Reagan allowed the Saudis to arm and indoctrinate the tribesmen in waging jihad against the Soviets.

According to Pashtun nationalist, Afrasiab Khattak, as many as 500,000 young men were thus socialized during the Afghan wars. Overwhelmingly Pashtun, they were bound by tribal codes of honor, loyalty and revenge. But, uprooted from their villages, they were also susceptible to new idioms of Islam, whether the Deobandi strain peddled by the Pakistani madrassas or the austere Wahhabism of the Saudi Arabians and other “Afghan Arabs” who had come to fight the Soviets.

For the first 50 years of Pakistan’s existence, the government’s policy toward the FATA was the same as that of the British Raj. Tribal leaders, or maliks, were granted semi-autonomous powers in exchange for fealty to the crown or, post-independence, the regime. In return for recognizing the British-drawn Durand Line as Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, the maliks were granted access to their tribal lands.

For the last 30 years, FATA’s isolation has served another purpose: The state has used the region as the launching pad for Pakistan-inspired insurgencies in Afghanistan, with the first coming after the communist coup in Kabul in 1978.

Fueled by CIA and Saudi money, but engineered by Pakistan’s premier Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) directorate, the militias incubated in the tribal areas became national, regional and ultimately global Islamist movements, of which al-Qaeda is only the most notorious. Amidst penury grew a war economy driven by opium, guns and God, while jihad was first taught, then waged, by generations of young men, dislocated and orphaned in Afghan refugee camps, but schooled in madrassas allied to one or another of Pakistan’s Islamist parties or sponsored by states like Saudi Arabia.

Pakistan’s original motive for planting this “volcano on both sides of the border” was as simple as it was myopic, says Khattak. Regionally, the regime of Gen. Zia ul Haq viewed the tribal areas as Pakistan’s bridge to a client state in Afghanistan, supplying the “strategic depth” necessary for resisting India, the “external” enemy to the east. Domestically, the socialization of so many in political Islam would produce an endless stream of foot soldiers for jihad. They, in turn, could be mobilized against the demand for Pashtunistan, the “internal” enemy.

What Zia and Reagan did not foresee was that once the Russians withdrew, some fighters would hand back their power but others like Mullah Omar, would not. They said, ‘We are the ones who defeated the Russians, not the earls.’ (This is why many Pashtun elders deserted the Taliban when it came to power and supported the American invasion -- it was seen as a restoration of the old tribal order.)

This is what is happening now on the Pakistan side of the border. The younger tribesmen ask: "why was it jihad to resist the Russians, but now it is terrorism to resist the Americans?’ Why not indeed when they have made such an almighty mess.

Obama's Oxymorons

"You Americans are Crazy"-Ahmed Shah Massoud

In "Legacy of Ashes, a History of the CIA," Tim Weiner exposes how through an astonishing combination of arrogance, incompetence and criminal deceit American intelligence agencies have been masterful at creating enemies and wreaking chaos.

In one chapter Weiner describes how CIA station-chiefs in Latin America would regularly harrass their local hires, appropriate govt. funds and run "counternarcotics" operations which saw millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs funneled to Miami streets. Known torturers and criminals were frequently discovered on secret CIA payrolls. But perhaps no intelligence blunder will ever rival the mayhem that has been foisted upon half the world as a result of America's boneheaded actions in Afghanistan.

In their zeal to destroy the Soviet Union, during the Carter and Reagan presidencies the CIA and other US intelligence agencies made a Faustian bargain with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) along with Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department, and a myriad of Afghan warlords to help the Islamists desperate to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.

Afraid that overt U.S. action might lead to a superpower clash and WW III the CIA conspired to remain the invisible puppet master and placed responsibility for the covert operation in Pakistan’s hands. Even the most cursory knowledge of that country's unstable beginnings and fractious politics should have made it clear this was a truly bad idea. The rest, as they say, is history.

Obama seems to share the neocon delusion that even now that the entire region has been destabilized the genie can somehow be put back in its bottle and the riled-up hornets pacified by force. As the increasing eruptions of murder and violence in Pakistan attest I strongly suggest he ignore the oxymorons called America's "military intelligence" and think again.

Murder, Rape and Plunder INC.

Anglo/American covert operations intended to destabilize uncooperative governments is nothing new. Ever since the U.S./British-backed coup in 1953 that toppled Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, former colonies have understood that their continued "independence" relied on their remaining obedient little client states. This of course has proved quite unsatisfactory for the countries' citizens who imagined that their resources were finally going to be exploited for their benefit.

Faced with this dilemma, many adopted the approach of the Shah of Iran who to tamp down the rising discontent after Mosaddeq's removal formed a cadre of secret police, the notoriously brutal and hated SAVAK. The barely-known twist to Iran's sad story is that when the Ayatollah Khomeini took power after the country's 1979 "Islamic" revolution he rehired the very thugs that the CIA trained to run SAVAK.

Less cynical "third-world" leaders, lacking the stomach to torture their own people, are forced to try and run their cash-strapped governments in an atmosphere of threats and virtual anarchy. A situation that makes their first world masters not the least bit unhappy.

The more mayhem the easier it is to steal.

As former U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan said in 2003:

“The economic dimensions of armed conflict ... should never be underestimated. [P]rivate companies operate in many conflict zones or conflict-prone countries… private enterprises and individuals are involved in the exploitation of, and trade in, lucrative natural resources, such as oil, diamonds, narcotics, timber and coltan... Governments and rebel groups alike have financed and sustained military campaigns in this way. In many situations, the chaos of conflict has enabled resources to be exploited illegally or with little regard for equity or the environment.”

A darkly ironic aside is that while the West remains largely indifferent to the human slaughter taking place in the Congo, a coalition of U.S. zoos has launched a cell-phone recycling campaign to save the country's endangered gorillas.

Clearly the purpose of these ostensibly "political" covert missions is in direct contradiction to the Western press' trumpeted refrain that they are absorbed with "spreading democracy and supporting freedom." As Seymour Hersh points out in his latest New Yorker expose on the secret war being waged against Iran, "one possible consequence of the operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush administration a reason to intervene,"



So when one reads that the Iranians have executed a Balochistan journalist for supposedly committing treason, without knowing whether or not the charge is true one can say with a measure of assurance that it was meant to send a message.

The vicious consequence of this cynical conundrum is that the very places, like Balochistan and the Congo, that deserve much more coverage have become too dangerous for even the bravest reporters.

And so the victims are left to languish or be sacrificed to the interests of either side who in the meantime are quietly sharing their ill-gotten gains. All the while another forgotten people die with their anger and frustration and we're left to showily wring our hands and pretend that good comes from doing great evil.