STATE LAWLESSNESS
Will Terrorism Dictate the Standards of our Civilization?
By Hans Boes
[This article published in the German-English cyber journal Telepolis, 4/30/2006 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.telepolis.de/r4/artikel/22/22536/1.html.]
The secret services are increasingly falling into disrepute for exceeding their authority in the course of fighting terror. This was very clear in the case of the German Khaled al-Masri kidnapped by the CIA [“Herr Lehmann vom BKA” (1)].
The practices of the American government have long been inconsistent with a liberal democratic order. People are simply kidnapped from their home, dragged to a third country and tortured there. All this happens without any judicial resolution or control of state organs. For a long time, this was inconceivable for many. The CIA has long built a network of pseudo- and camouflage firms to veil its actions [Journeys by air in law-free zones (2)].
European governments silently tolerated these practices. All the achievements of the last century that constitute our contemporary constitutional state are upset all of a sudden. Every uncomfortable unconventional thinker can now be simply locked up and tortured. What about proofs? Only technical errors occur! State lawlessness has free rein. British foreign minister Reid even asks whether or not the rules of the Geneva Convention must be changed [Geneva Conventions are Antiquated (3)].
The media to the extreme exaggerates the actual danger through terror. If one looks at the statistics, the air pollution in Europe is a far greater killer than the terrorism that is allegedly so dangerous. Every year ten million infants and small children under 5 die worldwide of malnutrition, poor hygiene and lack of clean water. Altogether 24 million people die annually of chronic diseases, 17 million of infectious diseases.
Traffic deaths far surpass the victims of terror. Worldwide 1 million people die yearly in traffic. Three quarters of all the children killed in Europe are victims of traffic accidents. The EU-commission estimates (4) that 370,000 premature deaths through ozone pollution and microscopic dust are added every year to the 50,000 traffic deaths in Europe. Through the increased climate warming, the number of heat deaths in Europe in the summer of 2003 climbed to 20,000.
The number of casualties through terror doubled worldwide in 2005 to just over 5,000. This number is now increasing again through the terror in Iraq initiated by the illegitimate “war against terror” of the US. This “war against terror” in Iraq according to some estimates already has over 100,000 casualties [“No Body Counts” (5)].
If one really wanted to do something against the death risk in this world, poor drinking water and poor hygiene in the third world must be overcome. In western industrial countries, a “war against obesity and too little exercise,” a “war against sugar,” a “war against air pollution” or a “war against the auto mania” must be declared to really counter the potential danger for the population and the high number of casualties.
LATE AWAKENING OF THE MEDIA FROM ITS DEEP SLEEP
In Europe, the Bush administration has been unpopular for a long time. In the US, the critics of present government policy are becoming louder. Fewer people still believe the incessant lies of the Bush regime. The public mood against Bush has long reached the rather tame media. One important reason is the publication of the secret interrogation practices of the Bush administration, above all the increasingly blatant inability of the American government to get a grip on the debacle in Iraq [“Incompetent, Idiot and Liar” (6)]. The Australian Prime Minister John Howard, one of the most vigorous supporters of the Iraq invasion in the past, is expressing his doubt (7).
Helen Thomas, the grand lady of the American press corps in the White House, recently criticized the president’s incompetence with unparalleled sharpness (8):
I’d like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war?
This was the first time in three years that president Bush accepted a question from Helen Thomas at one of his press conferences. He will not do this again so quickly. Bush stumbled, lost his footing, interrupted her repeatedly in her further questions, stifled her and turned to a more harmless reporter.
Shortly before, she bitterly deplored the reserve of the press on the eve of the Iraq war. In her article [Lap Dogs of the Press (9)], she blamed the Iraq debacle on the tame attitude of the press:
Of all the unhappy trends I have witnessed - conservative swings on television networks, dwindling newspaper circulation, the jailing of reporters and “spin” - nothing is more troubling to me than the obsequious press during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. They lapped up everything the Pentagon and White House could dish out – no questions asked.
In other words, the lap dogs of the press “devoured” everything thrown at their feet.
That the documents about Iraq’s alleged possession of nuclear weapons were forgeries (10) was clear before the Iraq war to the attentive Internet user. Several websites revealed that a doctoral thesis from the 1990s was simply passed off as new secret service information [Secret Cut-and-Paste-Information (11)]. Even the grammatical errors in the doctoral thesis were accepted. The American press hardly noticed this.
Then the Downing Street memo was unbearably embarrassing for the American mass media [Behind the Stage (12)] but the American press did not take up the theme.
The Downing Street memo was a bombshell when discussed by the bloggers, but the mainstream print media ignored it until it became too embarrassing to suppress any longer. The Post discounted the memo as old news and pointed to reports it had many months before on the buildup to the war. Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley decided that the classified minutes of the Blair meeting were not a “smoking gun.” The New York Times touched on the memo in a dispatch during the last days leading up to the British elections, but put it in the tenth paragraph.
Helen Thomas
While the memo revealed that the American and English governments falsified the alleged evidence for the possession of nuclear weapons to invade Iraq, the news was rated in the US as old or unimportant. The American press degraded itself from a control organ to an accomplice of the government.
In the meantime, the page has turned. People are interested in actual background information and no longer want to be fed only selected positive tidbits about their governments. The American mass media also notice this after suffering an acute decline in subscriptions and dramatic losses in advertising revenues. This is true for both the press and the television. In contrast, the advertising market on the Internet booms and government-critical bloggers have several hundred thousand visitors daily. The web logs and websites on the rightwing conservative side are also booming. In the meantime the American mass media has begun offering more government-critical articles and have even taken up their own debacle.
The Pentagon paid Iraqi journalists to write positive reports about the occupation army and the rebuilding success in Iraq. He pentagon made available $300 million [Happy Iraq (13)]. In one article (14) in the Salt Lake Tribune, Molly Ivins made fun of the praxis of the Pentagon’s manipulation of the media. Once again the pentagon concluded the pentagon did nothing wrong.
The Pentagon has once again investigated itself! And – have a seat, get the smelling salts, hold all hats – the pentagon has once again concluded the Pentagon did absolutely nothing wrong and will continue to do so.
She concludes that the reasons for the Iraq war were simply manipulated in the media.
When reality does not suit the Bush administration, it is simply made suitable by the press. Karl Rove, Bush election campaign strategist, showed that he masterfully understood how to use the press for his goals. He has now fallen in the headlines in connection with the affair around the fabricated evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq [Bush’s Sorcerer (15)].
The opinion manipulation is especially crass with the soldiers in Iraq. In Iraq, the US government has an absolute media monopoly. Government-critical articles hardly appear. The Internet is censored and soldiers may not voice critical opinions. Thus a large part of the soldiers believe they fight in Iraq because they are avenging September 11. This connection was propagated repeatedly by Cheney and then was denied again and again. However the denials often disappear (16) as marginal notes and are no longer headline news.
The media are not only manipulated in Iraq. The Bush administration has brought government-friendly reports and announcements in the American media on a large scale. At least $1.6 billion was spent in 30 months according to the reports of a government commission [Expensive Image Design of the US Government (17); Hidden Propaganda (18)].
In an article about this praxis, Sanho Tree from the institute for Policy Studies is quoted as follows (19):
When elected public servants use taxpayer dollars to manipulate or deceive the very people whose consent they require for their legitimacy, our public servants then become our masters.
A democratic system is endangered when the media’s control function is sabotaged or manipulated by politics. Fortunately the Internet has contributed to a new abundance of information that was unknown in the past. Eyewitness accounts can be transmitted within a few hours; critical discussions can span the globe in a few days. The reader must seek after this information. He or she does not receive predigested news any more as with the mass media.
The American system of checks and balances still functions somewhat. However voices increasingly warn of the American republic slipping toward a dictatorship.
