Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay - Essay Example

Order: 297264 Abu Ghraib Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay Abstract: Mainstream US media, such as Fox and CNN, have lately drawn flak for palming off as news Government-sponsored tendentious reports rigged up to improve the image, especially of the Bush administration, when faced with scandals such as human rights abuse in prisons at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Evidence abounds that while some journalists lapped up such handouts and other Government-supplied material inadvertently, some others did it in good faith, while yet others did that in return for consideration. Understandably, therefore, the message they convey to the American citizens is that the Government is in full control of every situation. However, not many Americans seem to believe such rosy reports; they read between the lines, especially as doubts have been cast on the credibility of such media outlets as work as unofficial spokespersons of the Government. Public opinion in the United States has crystallized against torture in these two detention camps, despite the administration using the media for its own ends. For media outlets like Al Jazeera and Al Arabia, on the other hand, any stick is good enough to beat the United States with, and, as such, they brainwash their essentially Arab audiences against the United States. Their message is that the days of US supremacy are strictly numbered. As such, there is a basic similarity between the mainstream media in the United States and such media outlets in the Arab world, in that for neither are facts sacred. Within the United States, while the liberal traditions of the Democratic Party militate against detention camps and deprivation of the due process of law even to suspected terrorists, the conservative baggage of the Republicans is comfortable with them. Finally, the basic connection between Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo Bay is that both are detention camps that have hit the headlines for human rights abuses. _____ "Federal authorities are investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked of success in the war in Iraq." (Buncombe, Andrew; May 29, 2006) Investigators sought information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items. (Buncombe, Andrew, May 29, 2006) The report, by the non-profit Center for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were using the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs) (Buncombe, Andrew; May 29, 2006). "We know we only had partial access to these VNRs, and yet we found 77 stations using them," said Diana Farsetta, one of the researchers of the group. (Buncombe, Andrew; May 29, 2006) "I would say it's pretty extraordinary. The picture we found was much worse than we (had) expected going into the investigation in terms of just how widely these got played and how frequently these prepackaged segments were put on the air," she added. Public relations companies, commissioned to produce these segments by corporations had, according to her, become increasingly sophisticated in their techniques to get the VNRs broadcast. They were now very good at mimicking what a real, independently produced television report would look like. (Buncombe, Andrew; May 29, 2006). The range of VNRs is wide. Among items provided by the Bush administration to news stations was one in which an Iraqi-American in Kansas City was seen saying "Thank you, Bush; Thank you, USA" in response to the 2003 fall of Baghdad. The footage was actually produced by the State Department, one of 20 Federal agencies that have produced and distributed such items. (Buncombe, Andrew; May 29, 2006). For instance, many of the corporate reports, produced by drug manufacturers such as Pfizer, focus on health issues and promote the manufacturer's products. One example cited by the report was a Halloween segment produced by the confectionery giant Mars, which featured Snickers, M&Ms and other company brands. While the original VNR disclosed that it was produced by Mars, such information was removed when it was broadcast by the television channel, in this case a Fox-owned station in St. Louis, Missouri. The FCC was urged to act by a lobbying campaign organized by Free Press, another non-profit group that focuses on media policy. (Buncombe, Andrew; May 29, 2006). Spokesman Craig Aaron said more than 25,000 people had written to the FCC about the VNRs. Essentially, it is corporate advertising or propaganda masquerading as news, he said, and added that the public obviously expected news reports to be based on real reporting and real information. "If they are watching an advertisement for a company or a government policy, they need to be told," Craig argued. (Buncombe, Andrew; May 29, 2006) Karen Ryan was the "reporter" in several Government-produced segments. (Barslow, et al; the "New York Times", May 4, 2009). A report produced by the Pentagon emphasized military humanitarian efforts. Government agencies have been producing hundreds of prepackaged television broadcasts that local news stations have picked up and almost seamlessly integrated into their news programs. (Barslow, et al; the "New York Times"; May 4, 2009) Released by the Transportation Security Administration in December 2002 and signed off "this is Jennifer Morrow reporting", another report said the Transportation Security Administration had met a Congressional deadline requiring explosives screening for all checked baggage. A quote from the segment said: It is one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history: Thousands leaving impressive careers and good jobs to take up the front line in the war against terrorism." (Barslow, et al; the "New York Times"; May 4, 2009). This was one of several news segments produced by the TSA touting efforts to improve airport security. However, a spokeswoman for the TSA said that Jennifer Morrow was a fictitious name used by an employee of the public relations firm hired to film the segment. Again, released by Army and Air Force Hometown News Service in July 2004, and signed off "Chris Wuerthner, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri", a "report" said the Army's Police Academy at Fort Leonard Wood, MO, had a program for training military prison guards. A quote from the segment said that, "each year, the Army trains about 5,000 soldiers as M.P.'s; it also teaches some M.P.'s to be prison guards, and one of the most important lessons they learn is to treat prisoners strictly, but fairly." (Barslow, et al; the New York Times, May 4, 2009) "The context of the report was that months before news broke of abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a unit of the Defense Department, called the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service, had produced this news segment which was distributed to 34 stations, and it was one of 50 stories the unit had done to reach an estimated 41 million households." (Barslow, et al; the New York Times; May 4, 2009) This winter, Washington had been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists had written in support of administration's policies without disclosing that they had accepted payments from the Government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. (Barslow, et al; The New York Times; May 4, 2009) At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by TV stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news without revealing the source. Federal agencies are, however, forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. (Barslow, et al; The New York Times; May 4, 2009). The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the Government. Their "reports" generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the Government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration. (Barslow, et al; The New York Times, May 4, 2009) Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, such as the regime change in Iraq. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are carefully scripted and the answers rehearsed. Some of the segments were broadcast in some of the nation's largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta. (Barslow, et al; The New York Times, May 4, 2009). Examination of Government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackages segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world in which Government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs, and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism; it is also a world where all participants benefit. (Barslow, et al; The New York Times, May 4, 2009) Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure Government contracts worth millions of dollars; the major networks, which help distributes the releases, collect fees from the Government agencies that produced the segments, and affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message delivered in the guise of traditional reporting. (Barslow, et al; The New York Times, May 4, 2009) The practice, which also obtained in the Clinton administration, continued despite President Bush's call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and Government publicity efforts. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," he told reporters in January, while explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to support his policies. In interviews, though, press officials for several federal agencies said Bush's prohibition did not apply to Government-made TV news segments, also known as video news releases, as they were "factual, politically neutral, and useful to viewers". They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist, who promoted the administration's chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department. These officials argued that it was the responsibility of TV news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the Government had, in fact, been written by the Government. "Talk to the TV stations that ran it without attribution. This is not our problem. We cannot be held responsible for their actions," said William A. Pierce, an official spokesman. Yet, in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative agency of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that Government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the GAO said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal, or do not clearly identify for the TV viewing audience, that the agency was the source of those materials". It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect: although a few federal agencies have stopped making such news segments, others continue to produce them; and the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memo instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the GAO findings, as the office had failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the Government; such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers. Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily be undone in a broadcaster's editing room. (Barslow, et al; The New York Times, May 4, 2009) Some news organizations, for example, simply identify the Government's "reporter" as one of their own, and then edit any phrase suggesting the segment was not of their making. Fox distributes the video news releases to 130 affiliates through Fox News Edge; CNN distributes releases to 750 stations in the United States and Canada through CNN Newsource; Associated Press Television News does the same thing worldwide through Global Video Wire. In essence, video news releases seek to exploit a growing vulnerability of TV news: Even as news staffs at the major networks are shrinking, many local stations are expanding their hours of news coverage without adding reporters. "No TV news organization has the resources in labor, time or funds to cover every worthy story," TVA Productions said in a sales pitch to potential clients, adding that "90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on video news releases." Little wonder, therefore, that in June 2003, the administration produced a segment that projected American efforts to distribute food and water to the people of southern Iraq. "After living for decades in fear, they are now receiving assistance, building trust with their coalition liberators," an unidentified narrator concluded. (Barslow, et al; The New York Times, May 4, 2009). "Once these products leave our hands, we have no control," Robert A. Tappan, the state department's deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, said in an interview. "The department never intended its segments to be shown unedited and without attribution by local news programs. We do our utmost to identify them as State Department-produced products," Tappan explained. Have these efforts of the administration to palm off propaganda as news or at least to increase the propaganda quotient of "news" had the desired effect on public opinion "Public opinion polls now show the country decisively against the (Iraq) war and the Bush administration. The war in Iraq has revealed the hypocrisy of the war on terrorism." (Zinn, Howard; December 2005). But it has not all been a one-way street. "It has become fashionable to be anti-American." (Hilton, Dominic; www. Open.Democracy.net; December 29, 2005) But this writer seemed to be plowing a lonely furrow. As 2004 faded into history, the "Financial. Times" said in an article under the headline "Tarnished Image: Is the World Falling Out of Love with US Brands": "A net incline in Abu Ghraib scandals= a net decline in Pepsi sales" About the same time, in an article in "The Nation" under the headline "The I-Word is Gaining Ground", Katrina vanden Heuvel said: "In the past months, several organizations have (been) formed to urge Bush's impeachment. Even a moderately liberal columnist like Newsweek's Alter sounds like 'The Nation', observing 'we are seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator." Another is: "When the American media published photographs of American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration assured the world that the abuse was isolated and aberrational. But hundreds of Government's documents, including interrogation directives, FBI emails, autopsy reports, and investigative files, obtained by the ACLU and its partners through the Freedom of Information Act, show that abuse of prisoners was not limited to Abu Ghraib but was pervasive in American detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay. Even more disturbing, the documents reveal that senior officials endorsed the abuse of prisoners as a matter of policy. These documents constitutea profound indictment of the Bush administration's policies with respect to treatment of prisoners in US custody abroad." (American Civil Liberties Union; www.administrationoftorture.html) In 2003, few people outside the Pentagon knew what was happening at Guantanamo. Shortly after 9/11, thousands of Muslims and Arabs, all allegedly very dangerous terrorist, had been rounded up, and hundreds from more than forty countries were transported to Guantanamo. Aside from a few prisoner letters, and an unusual International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report describing the mental state of the prisoners there as "in despair", there was little direct information about the treatment the prisoners had received. But between March and May of 2004, the world was confronted with the photos of the sadistic torture and mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Allegations became facts. Initial denials of any systematic misconduct began to dissolve in a swirl of contrary evidence. In the fall of 2003, Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, at that time the commander of Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, was sent to Iraq by the Pentagon's intelligence chief to Gitmoize Abu Ghraib prison there.. This meant facilitating interrogations by having low-level military police guards 'soften up' the prisoners, 'enabling' the intelligence interrogators to get confessions, apparently by any means necessary, ignoring the Geneva Conventions. The connection between Abu Ghraib and what many suspect had gone on at Guantanamo became clearer as the military was forced to release some of those detained at Guantanamo, whose subsequent accounts echoed the Abu Ghraib abuses. The Supreme Court granted review of the lower court cases relating to the legal rights of the prisoners at Guantanamo and the two US citizens being held in military prisons as "enemy combatants" (Ray, Ellen; Introduction to the Book, "Guantanamo: What the World Should Know") In January 2002, "when I read that the first prisoners from the Afghan war and from Bush's War on Terror were being sent to Guantanamo, I know that it meant absence of check on treatment on the treatment of those detained." (Ratner, Michael; "Officials in the US Government Have Committed War Crimes"; The Narco News Bulletin, Issue 35, May 4, 2009). No Charges had been specified against them. The administration was painting all of them (falsely as it turned out) as the "worst of the worst." The President, acting unilaterally, did not have the right, even as commander in chief in a war, simply to designate people for their detention. With the USA itself thus resembling Prospero's isle, full of voices, it was hardly surprising that media outlets like Al Jazeera and Al Arabia, for the likes of which any stick is good enough to beat the USA with, should have gone to town about the abuse of human rights in one or two cases, unfortunate though they were. Al Jazeera, widely believed to be patronized by none other than Osama bin Laden himself, came out with the "story" under the headline: "Guantanamo Detainee Claims (not alleges!) Abuse", saying that an inmate of the prison, Mohammad al-Qurani, a Chadian, had telephonically told the media outlet that he had been beaten up while in custody for refusing to leave his cell. (Http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/4/20094142334311533: April15, 2009). Parenthetically, Lorne Craner, deputy assistant secretary for democracy and human rights, had told reporters that Arab TV network Al Jazeera was inciting violence against US troops in occupied Iraq (www.antiwar.com/ips/mekay.phparticleid=2666; May 26, 2004) Bibliography Buncombe, Andrew in Washington; The Independent, May 29, 2006; www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush/planted-fake/html Barslow, David; Stein, Robin; Kornblut, Anne E; "The Message Machine: How the Government Makes News; Under Bush a New Age of Prepackaged News; The New York Times, May 4, 2009. Zinn, Howard; www. Adam. Ash. Htm; December 2005 Hilton, Dominic; "Fashionable Anti-Americanism"; www.Open.Democracy.net; December 29, 2005. "Financial Times"; December 2005 Heuvel, Katrina vanden; "The I-Word Is Gaining Ground"; The Nation; May 30, 2006 American Civil Liberties Union; www.administrationoftorture.html Ratner,, Michael; The Narco News Bulletin; May 4, 2009; Issue 35 Ray, Ellen; "Introduction to the book 'Guantanamo: What the World Should Know' Read More