Q: Please supply more detail on what you call the Rendon Group's "padding the truth" and "neutering journalists" to ensure a "military-friendly and subservient media" in Afghanistan.
A: An August 29, Stars and Stripes story titled "Army used profiles to reject reporters" reported that the U.S. military used secret profiles to deny disfavored reporters access to American fighting units and influence press coverage in order to guarantee that only favorable stories would be written about their operations. If your intel experts are already admitting that they can't trust their own intel and need independent news reports to get down to the ground truth, then what you're doing by filtering out the bad news is polluting your only valid system for gaining information at the source.
Again we're back to assumptions. Does the U.S. military really think that a journalist, screened and approved by a public relations firm hired by the U.S. military and escorted into the field alongside U.S. military units is going to be one hundred percent objective? This was an enormous issue for us when we went to Kabul in 1981 and again in 1983 with Roger Fisher. We had to constantly fight to get clear of the communist government's censorship and control. We had to get the foreign minister's pledge on tape that we would not be censored or stopped from filming what we wanted on the streets of Kabul and still had to fight the censor when we left. It almost became an international incident. And then we were repeatedly challenged by CBS and ABC whether what we saw had been sanitized for our benefit by the communists. So we caught flak at both ends of the job at the time. It's tough to maintain your integrity and stick to the story, but that's what you're supposed to do as a journalist and you take the consequences. But I don't see that kind of standard being applied to reporters embedded with the U.S. military today. In fact, we get the impression that if you're not embedded, you're somehow disloyal or not getting the story right. And that's just 180 degrees from where American journalism should be.
It's the kind of psychological approach more akin to what the Soviets demanded of their journalists back in the 70s and 80s. They were expected to tow the party line or face expulsion from the privileged ranks. The U.S military already has a problem with self-serving intelligence as well as a marked inability to tell friend from foe or fact from fiction. Pressuring reporters to embed only adds to a system already sickened by its own self-created narrative and dooms the war effort to failure. Things were supposed to get better under the Obama administration, not worse. But the Rendon Group's practice of grading potential embedded journalists is not a change we can believe in.
Q: Speaking of PR, you reference the rather infamous US
Information Agency effort to train Afghans in journalism at Boston
University. How did this program come about? How was it flawed? Were
there other, similar ones?
A: The main program was run out of the School of Public Communication at BU and spearheaded by Dean Joachim Maitre, who was a defector from the East German Air Force. This was done under the leadership of John Silber, who had come to BU from Texas and turned the left-liberal orientation of the university into a flagship for a pro-business right wing ideology. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hesb-i-Islami was the primary beneficiary of the program. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented a field day for this group and BU acted as a kind of incubator. We found that a lot of the exile community had been brought in to service the anti-Soviet narrative, but no objective analysis of what was really going on was being done.
It wasn't really academic at all. It was a flat out bogus propaganda operation intended to win support from foreign audiences through the Voice of America. Of course some of it eventually fed back into the American media and was aired as legitimate news stories. The narrative was framed as black and white while focused on hurting the communists as much as possible. So the whole project was grounded in ideology and not journalism from the start. It was important to train Afghans and get the word out about what was going on. It was extremely dangerous to arm a whole cadre of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's radical followers in the nuances of political disinformation. This flawed approach helped embed a deliriously false narrative during the Reagan years and it refuses to go away.
The University of Nebraska also took part in training Afghans for Jihad under a USAID contract reportedly worth about $60 million. Although run by USAID, the CIA helped to design and implement the program.
Q: Why was the American press so fawning in its coverage of Hekmatyar?
A: Hekmatyar was the go-to guy for the U.S. beginning in 1973 when Mohammed Daoud and Marxist Babrak Karmal overthrew King Zahir Shah. Hekmatyar won friends in the Pakistani military and Saudi elite for his radical religious views and continues to find support within their ranks. As we remarked before, the American press seems to fall in line when it comes to accepting the official line on Afghanistan. When it comes to Hekmatyar they simply don't challenge the rhetoric -- we assume because the CIA and Pakistan continue to see a role for him to play in a post-Karzai era. Much to our amazement he has a PR guy in Los Angeles that goes around challenging anything bad said about him.
The U.S. media won't touch the fact that Hekmatyar, (who's been officially labeled a terrorist), has free access to threaten people who challenge him. We saw this kind of thing back in the 1980s when the U.S. was actively funding Islamic extremists to kill Russians, bringing them to the U.S. and putting them on shows like Nightline to espouse their cause. But now we're supposed to be on the other side of that issue. So why is the U.S. still letting them roam free?
Q: Do you agree with people like Tom Johnson and Chris Mason that
the MSM's reporting is "no longer just misinformed or misguided" but
"has crossed the line into being completely out of touch with reality?"
A: Johnson and Mason have done a lot of fieldwork to back up their opinions and have seen the narrative grow ever more delusional over the years. We've seen it as well in pieces written by some of Washington's instant experts who know nothing of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but get front page and top billing regurgitating pro-Pakistani or anti-Afghan opinions that were baked in a Washington think-tank and paid for by lobbyists.
So much of what the U.S. consumes on the AfPak war is invented in Washington for Washington and has absolutely nothing to do with what is really going on, on the ground. This is a result of a process that has been broken for a very long time and cannot reform itself. But the moment has arrived where the drawbacks to this approach outweigh the benefits. In crossing zero line the U.S. has fed itself its own policy and may just now be realizing that its efforts over the last ten years add up to nothing more than zero. Not to realize that this moment has arrived and adjust to the new realities can only result in catastrophe.
Q: Finally -- on page 106, you speak of the "military/industrial/media/academic complex." Why do you include the media?
A: The medium IS the message. Marshall McLuhan's theories have become Marshall McLuhan's Law. We now live in a world where we pay for reality by the gigabyte. Nobody really knows what Barack Obama and his handlers say or do when they sit down with other world leaders. We only know what the official media feeds us and what they feed us is dictated by a complex set of instructions defined by academia for our banking industry and enforced by our military. Specifically the media has not only become the delivery system of the prevailing order, it has become the all encompassing 24-7 environment of cell phones, GPS, twitter, Facebook, email and web that cocoons us within their agenda, whether we like it or not.
(Editor's Note: Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire as well of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story, both published by City Lights. Visit their website here.)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
2
2
