The Daily Grasshopper

Last month, a story about the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre appeared in the New York Times. As some of you will recall, I was struck by a quote from Claudia Sierra Campuzano, a professor from the National School of Anthropology and History in Cuernavaca who is investigating the incident. She asked:

"How can we be citizens if we do not know what happened before, if we don't know why political and economic decisions were made - if we don't understand anything?"

You'll find my original essay here:
http://www.netway.com/~pkeaney/020703history.html

I bring it up again today because it's incumbent upon us as citizens of the U.S. - perhaps now more than ever - to know what our government is doing (and what it has already done, and what it plans to do) in our name. At the risk of repeating myself, the money that gets spent on foreign interventions to protect "our interests" by the U.S. government is your money, and could just as easily be spent repairing roads, or building schoolhouses, or providing health care to the 40 million Americans who have none, or housing homeless people, etc.

Sadly, the mainstream media outlets in this country consistently ignore or play down the U.S. government's complicity (usually, but not limited to, providing funds and training) to governments that perpetrate crimes like the Tlatelolco massacre. Many of us are brought up to believe that our government is the leading force for human rights and democracy around the world. Those curious enough to examine the reality behind the rhetoric, however, will quickly discover that the U.S. record in these matters is mixed, at best, and that a substantial case can be made that our government often plays an opposite role, aligning itself with repressive governments that openly subvert democracy and human rights to protect what our government tells us are "our interests." I have pointed out several examples of this in my "Daily Grasshopper" essays. Be assured that there are many more - though you shouldn't just take my word for it. It's our duty, as Americans, to find out for ourselves.

I can think of a few reasons why the corporate media often turn a blind eye to these unpleasant facts. First of all, to even suspect that the U.S. government's actions and motives are not what they claim they are is to risk being labeled "unpatriotic," even by those whose responsibility it is to be objective observers (i.e., the media). These days, questioning the policies of the Pentagon or the Bush administration, even as they prepare to commit mass murder, is enough to get you arrested - check out what happened in a New York mall the other night to a guy wearing a "Give Peace a Chance" T-shirt:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0305-08.htm

There's a very real sense among mainstream reporters and commentators that the government and its spokespeople should get the benefit of the doubt, especially when dealing with questions of foreign policy, which brings me to the next point.

Foreign policy decisions, with no apparent justification, are made to seem incredibly complex, and beyond the comprehension of "regular people." Only in times of crisis, like right now, do we see the U.N. Security Council's votes exposed to any kind of scrutiny. Typically, the media ignore foreign policy issues because they assume Americans don't care about what goes on around the world. Considering our government's influence and our "business interests" in these matters, and the reaction our foreign policy engenders around the globe, that seems like a questionable assumption. Especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, it takes some serious commitment to get at the facts of what is really going on in the world, and the major news outlets don't make it any easier, probably assuming we'd rather be diverted by stories on Michael Jackson or "The Bachelorette." Or, as I referred to in an earlier essay, the lurid details of Phil Spector's date with Lana Clarkson: http://www.netway.com/~pkeaney/020503arrest.html.

Finally, we can't ignore the fact that giant media corporations are, after all, giant corporations, and the "favorable investment climate" that typically results from U.S.-backed government repression around the world is good for business - banks, the "defense" industry, textiles and manufacturing, telecommunications, oil and mineral concerns, etc. The media rely on these people for revenue, in the form of advertising dollars, so a "see no evil" approach makes good economic sense, as well.

Take NBC, for example. They're owned by General Electric, one of the world's most powerful corporations. To maintain its dominant global position, GE resorts to exploiting low-wage labor in sweatshops around the world - so much so that former CEO Jack Welch once commented that "Ideally, you'd have every plant you own on a barge." Such mobility would then allow investors to exploit the latest repressive, low-wage environment, most of which are maintained by threat of violence by local (U.S.-trained) police and militaries using foreign (U.S.-supplied) machine guns. Do you think NBC is going to do a lot of reporting on that? Me neither. And that's just one example.

Now, some of you out there might be thinking, "Well, OK, so MSNBC is lying to me, but at least there are good, 'liberal' sources of news, like the New York Times and their subsidiary, the Boston Globe, that can be relied upon to give us 'All the News That's Fit to Print.'" Not so.

Let's take today's Boston Globe (March 6, 2003). Despite its being widely hailed as one of the most "liberal" papers in the country, the Boston Globe is often as guilty of whitewashing U.S. complicity in human rights violations as any source. Here are three separate examples from just a single edition of the paper:

In their editorial today, "Tempering Turkey," the Globe refers to a briefing paper that Human Rights Watch issued yesterday. Here's how the Globe's editors concluded:

"In a briefing paper released yesterday, Human Rights Watch evoked Turkey's ghastly record of torturing, killing, and 'disappearing' Turkish Kurds and destroying more than 3,000 of their villages. The human rights organization warned: 'If Turkish operations in northern Iraq bear any resemblance to those in southeastern Turkey, we can expect to see a human rights disaster.'

If he truly wishes to create an opening for democracy and human rights in a liberated Iraq, President Bush should heed Human Rights Watch's warning to 'keep past abusers out of northern Iraq.' Bush has to convince Ankara that being a good ally means not sending Turkish soldiers or security forces into Iraq."

Besides ignoring the fact that Bush is not in much of a bargaining position vis-a-vis Ankara right now, nowhere in the editorial do you see mention of the critical U.S. support that the Turkish government got when it was racking up its "ghastly record of torturing, killing, and 'disappearing' Turkish Kurds." The Clinton administration provided as much as 90 percent of the arms that Turkey used in its genocidal effort to stamp out the Kurds, at the same time it was bombing Kosovo in order to prevent "ethnic cleansing" there. These inconvenient facts are simply whited-out of the Globe's commentary. And the Globe is about as liberal a paper as you're going to find.

You can read the editorial here:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/065/editorials/Tempering_Turkey+.shtml

Next example is a story by reporter John Donnelly, "Report says 2m Palestinians impoverished," which focuses on the collective punishment being imposed on the Palestinians in the "Occupied Territories." The occasion for the piece is a World Bank report showing that "the number of Palestinians in poverty has tripled over the last two years due to closures imposed by Israel both across borders and in areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip."

What's important for Americans to understand is that this occupation is the subject of near-unanimous international condemnation and is underwritten almost entirely by the U.S. taxpayer. Neither of these unwholesome facts enters into Donnelly's article, for some reason. The closest the story comes to revealing the U.S. role is to talk about Israel's request to "the Bush administration for a supplement aid package of $4 billion in security assistance and $8 billion in loan guarantees." It makes no mention of the fact that Israel has been recieving similarly huge amounts of American aid, on an annual basis, since about 1967, when the occupation began, or the fact that the U.S. has wielded its U.N. Security Council veto on numerous occasions to blunt criticism of the Israeli government's policies.

You can read Donnelly's article here:

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/065/nation/Report_says_2m_Palestinians_impoverished+.shtml

It's possible the reporter assumes that most people are aware of the record levels of U.S. government's support for Israel (all-time leading recipient of U.S. military and economic aid) and its protection of that country's international reputation, but when the subject is the devastating effects of the sanctions on the people living in the Occupied Territories, these facts should not be left unstated. The New York Times, the Globe's parent company, also carries an article on the World Bank report, and also fails to mention the U.S. government's crucial role in underwriting and providing diplomatic support to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

The third example is an Associated Press story out of Colombia: "Bombing at mall kills 7 in Colombia," by Susannah Nesmith. The story is accompanied by a photo of schoolchildren scattering in the aftermath of the blast, and lays the blame for the attack on "suspected rebels." Here's how the article ends:

"The ELN and the nation's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are battling outlawed paramilitary groups for control of Cucuta. The city has one of the highest murder rates in Colombia.

Colombia is torn by a 38-year civil war that pits the leftist rebels against the government and right-wing paramilitary groups. About 3,500 people, mainly civilians, are killed in the fighting each year."

You can read the whole thing here:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/065/nation/Bombing_at_mall_kills_7_in_Colombia+.shtml

While there is nothing technically inaccurate about what the reporter wrote, once again, it's what's left out (as in the editorial on Turkey and the article on the Occupied Territories) that's important. And what's left out is, you guessed it, the U.S. role in the conflict. Colombia's military, which has been linked time and again with the right-wing paramilitary groups, the "death squads," recieves billions of dollars in aid from the U.S. government. As some of you know, I traveled to Colombia last year, and wrote a fairly lengthy report for the Boston Phoenix upon my return about what I saw as our government's complicity in violating, not defending, the human rights of the Colombian people. You can read the article here:

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multipage/documents/02161797.htm

Of course, none of that is mentioned in the Associated Press article. And you can quibble and say that the Globe editors don't control the content of the wire service reports, but the fact is the Globe usually glosses over U.S. involvement in the Colombian civil war, and rarely publishes anything but AP stories on the conflict. And that is significant, because more than 80 percent of the civilian deaths are at the hands of the paramilitaries, who have been shown to work closely with the U.S.-backed Colombian Armed Forces. Interestingly, the Times makes no mention of the bombing in today's New England final edition.

Colombia weighs heavily on my mind today because one of the leaders of their public sector union, a soft-spoken man who spent the last six months working here in Boston, and whom I had the fortune of meeting, returns to his native country today. He is a marked man. You may recall that two of the conditions that the International Monetary Fund imposes on developing countries, as reported in yesterday's New York Times, are "laying workers off at state-owned enterprises and cutting back on big and popular public works projects." When Colombian state employees protest the layoffs and cutbacks, they wind up dead (and often worse, as you know if you read my article from the Phoenix). They, and their supporters in Colombia's civil society, die at the hands of the death squads, who operate in collusion with the armed forces, who are backed by the U.S. government. Colombia weighs heavily on my mind today.

What's remarkable about today's Boston Globe is that, while there are these stark examples of efforts to ignore U.S. complicity in human rights violations on the editorial page and in the reporting, there's a more critical assessment offered on the op-ed page - by none other than Jeff Jacoby, one of the Globe's token "conservative" commentators. The title of the piece is "US should act on Iraq, despite dirty hands," the "dirty hands" being a reference to the fact that, as Jacoby concedes:

"In the 1980s the United States supported Saddam's totalitarian regime and showed little concern for its victims. American exports helped launch Iraq's biological weapons program. Saddam's horrific violations of international law, such as his use of poison gas on the battlefield, had minimal effect on US-Iraqi cooperation. And while the tilt toward Saddam began with Jimmy Carter ('We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the US and Iraq' - National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, April 1980), it was the Reagan and Bush I administrations that brought it to full flower."

You can read the entire piece here:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/065/oped/US_should_act_on_Iraq_despite_dirty_hands+.shtml

He states in the middle of the piece that our government's support of Saddam Hussein has "long been a matter of public record." But, as Jacoby surely knows, there's a big difference between facts existing in the public record and facts getting a full airing before the American people. The latter is the job of the media (at least in any democratic society worthy of the name), and Jacoby and his colleagues fail on a regular basis to expose the links between U.S. foreign and economic policy and the crimes against humanity perpetrated by our client states. Only when such incidents bolster his arguments does Jacoby venture to lay bare the "public record" about how "the United States supported Saddam's totalitarian regime and showed little concern for its victims." You can bet your bottom dollar Jacoby wasn't writing about it at the time (at least not critically), the fact that it was "a matter of public record" notwithstanding.

Jacoby is very selective in his condemnation of U.S. government policy. Because he favors attacking Iraq, he now condemns our support for Hussein during the Reagan/Bush years, even as he twists it into a rationale for taking him out now:

"If America played a role in entrenching Saddam's dictatorship, isn't that all the more reason for it now to take the lead in toppling that dictatorship? If US foreign policy for too long disregarded the suffering of the Iraqi people, is it not good news that US policy now makes that people's liberation a priority? Are American presidents forever barred from denouncing a vicious oppressor and leading a war against him because some of their predecessors neglected to do so?"

The problem with this approach is that it would provide the U.S. with the necessary pretext to pursue its policy of "regime change" in literally dozens of countries where we have either "entrenched" a dictator (or cleared his path to power via a CIA-backed coup), "disregarded the suffering" of the oppressed (or contributed materially to it), or "neglected to denounce vicious oppressors" (or cheered them on and provided aid as they committed their worst crimes). A whole lot of the world's governments fall into those three broad categories - Turkey, Israel, and Colombia, just for starters. Of course, you can never rule out the possibility that this is what Bush, and his ardent backers like Jacoby, have in mind.

The "dirty hands" that Jacoby rightfully perceives when he looks at the U.S. government's role in Iraq can be found elsewhere in the "public record," if you have the time and resources. And it's important that we make the effort, for as Claudia Sierra Campuzano reminds us, we can not be citizens "if we do not know what happened before, if we don't know why political and economic decisions were made - if we don't understand anything."

I should point out that the leading recipients of U.S. military aid are (in descending order) Israel, Egypt, Colombia, and Turkey. Regrettably, as we've seen, those who rely on the "liberal" Boston Globe for these and other facts about our government's role in the world will be left clueless about "what happened before" and "why political and economic decisions were made."