Is Murdoch’s Media Empire a Cult?

Posted on 07/13/2011 by Juan

The scandals besetting billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s British properties simply cannot be ignored in the United States. Murdoch owns a newspaper of record, the Wall Street Journal, and his Fox Cable News dominates US television news and opinion with regard to cable (and it has a global reach despite its supposed American-nativist emphases). He also owns the Weekly Standard, which has carried numerous attacks attempting to smear American thinkers and politicians, including attacks on my integrity (I’ve also occasionally been dissed by name at Fox Cable News; you’d think they’d go after bigger fish). The Weekly Standard was used to help promote the Iraq War, absurdly tried to tie secular dictator Saddam Hussein to Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, and promotes militarism in general. One senator, John Rockefeller, is calling for an investigation of whether Murdoch’s media properties have broken any laws here.

Murdoch’s acquisition of the venerable old News of the World, founded in the Victorian England of Charles Dickens, proved fatal for the newspaper. Under his ownership some of its editors and journalists went rogue, hacking into the telephone messages of some 4,000 persons in search of personal dirt.

Now it is being alleged by former British prime minister Gordon Brown that other Murdoch-owned organs hacked into his family’s medical records, and others allege that even the royal family was not immune to this illegal prying. The newspapers named have denied the charges. There are also charges that when Murdoch journalists’ bribes to police came under scrutiny, the former interfered with the police investigation by leaking information.

It seems increasingly likely that the techniques of bullying, coercion, spying, and the politics of personal destruction common at the News of the World were not limited to this one piece of the Murdoch media empire. Even short of hacking, Murdoch’s properties often behave like cults, not news organizations. We have known for a long time that Fox Cable News instructs reporters on how to spin the news and promotes fascist demagogues in the evening magazine shows. Fox also has a history of ambushing its guests and disrupting their lives. Bill O’Reilly has had liberal bloggers, including one young woman, followed around and more or less stalked. Keith Olbermann maintains that Fox essentially blackmailed him into accepting a much reduced salary when he reported to his bosses that he was suffering from strained health. It has been noted that despite the obviously unprofessional practices within NewsCorp media, there are never tell-all books by former employees, and columnist Jason Easely wonders if it is because Murdoch has such a fearsome reputation for playing hardball.

Under the old Fairness Doctrine abolished by Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s, Fox “News” would have had its license pulled by the Federal Communications Commission. But the FCC is now toothless, and American mass media are vulnerable to the vicious techniques of cultist Murdoch, who attempts to use his media empire to push world politics to the far right.

It should not be forgotten that Murdoch played an important role in getting up the Iraq War, which he maintained would provide us with $14 a barrel petroleum (August Brent crude futures are about $117 a barrel as I speak). He pressured then British Prime Minister Tony Blair to support the war. Former Blair government workers have alleged that Murdoch was a ghostly presence at all British cabinet meetings. All of this raises the question of why Murdoch wanted the Iraq War so much (how much stock did he have in weapons concerns?), and what possible dirt he had on Blair, and how he got it if he had it.

As someone who has myself been targeted for spying and personal destruction, by the Bush White House, I sympathize with all those whom Murdoch’s empire has harmed and whose consciences his minions have attempted to coerce. (See this recent piece and this one, which refers to this inquiry.

In the US, we need the Fairness Doctrine reinstated and we need the FCC to serve the people, not cult-like corporations that are about distorting news, not providing it, and destroying experts, not interviewing them.

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Ahmad Wali Karzai Killing Points to More Instability

Posted on 07/12/2011 by Juan

The murder Tuesday of Ahmad Wali Karzai, the behind-the-scenes authority over Qandahar province and brother of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, shows the continued instability in that country. It is not entirely clear the killing was a political assassination. The bodyguard who pulled the trigger is rumored just to have had a personal grudge with his boss.

The Telegraph carries an insightful analysis that points out that the Taliban will likely make political hay with the incident, though it is not clear they will claim credit if they weren’t behind it. It also raises questions of what will happen to A.W. Karzai’s various businesses, licit and illicit. He had a private security company, which cooperated with US troops in operations, but on the other side was accused in State Department memos revealed by Wikileaks of running a drug smuggling operation.

President Karzai’s own hand in Qandahar has been much weakened, and he has lost a key asset in his struggle against the Taliban for control of that key western Pashtun province. It is hard to know whether this development is positive or negative politically (obviously a murder is negative in and of itself but I am speaking of the larger canvas). Ahmad Wali Karzai was a warlord of sorts, and his demise could open the way to more consultative governance. And, since he stole the last presidential election, Hamid Karzai has put on increasingly regal airs and tried to gain authoritarian powers, which may have just been somewhat checked in one part of the country. And if it is true that Ahmad Wali was engaged in the narcotics trade, his fall could lead to less corrupt government.

The killing comes just after Canada withdrew its troops from Qandahar, leaving over-stretched US troops in charge, and could point to the sort of instability that lies ahead as other NATO forces, such as Britain’s, plan steep drawdowns in the next 3 years.

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Clinton: al-Asad has lost Legitimacy after Mobs Storm US, French Embassies

Posted on 07/12/2011 by Juan

The mob attacks on the US and French embassies by ‘pro-regime elements’ in Damascus on Monday provoked a heated response from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said that President Bashar al-Asad had now “lost legitimacy” by neglecting to live up to his obligations in international law to protect foreign diplomats. She warned him that Washington does not consider al-Asad “indispensable.”

The US has ratcheted up financial sanctions on the Syrian elite, some members of which have seen bank accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere frozen, and has repeatedly called for al-Asad to meet his people’s demand to democratize.

Any background analysis must begin with the plain fact that the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein failed to produce an Iraq more favorable to Israel (indeed, the Shiite minions of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr are substantially more anti-Israel than had been Saddam). The general view in the Middle East had been that this failure convinced the Israeli security establishment that the al-Asad regime is preferable to a Sunni fundamentalist one. The latter is widely thought likely to come to power if al-Asad falls, though of course that prediction is speculative. Al-Hayat even ran a story to this effect in 2004 as I remember.

Al-Asad may have therefore concluded that while the US is making noises critical of his authoritarianism, ultimately Washington actually wants him around and will therefore take a lot of guff from him with no real practical consequences.

Clinton seemed to be warning al-Asad not to rely too much on US fear of the Muslim Brotherhood, and she signalled that Washington is increasingly complaisant about the possibility that the Baath will fall from power. Her remarks on Monday are the strongest ones yet directed at Damascus since the Obama administration came into power determined to improve relations with Syria (that is why there is a US ambassador in Damascus to attack– the Bush administration used to like to pretend that Syria did not actually exist).

The attacks themselves raised many questions. First, it seems likely that the regime itself put the crowds up to the attacks, since very little happens in Damascus that the Baath Party does not want to happen. This thesis is supported by the poor police response (to say the least) and the consequent need of US and French embassy troops to defend their buildings. The French fought off the attackers, but mobs got through for a while into the US embassy and ransacked it before being driven off by the Marines. They also made an attempt to reach the residency of the US ambassador, according to al-Hayat writing in Arabic.

The attacks protested the visits on Saturday to Hama by US Ambassador Robert S. Ford and his French counterpart Eric Chevallier, which may well have given the inhabitants a reprieve from a harsh Syrian crackdown in response to the estimated 300,000 who demonstrated there on Friday. Syrian President Bashar al- Asad fired the governor of Hama for having urged the regime to approach the city with a light touch, given the regime’s massacre there of some 10,000 residents in 1982, accusing them of fomenting a Muslim fundamentalist uprising.

Even before the embassy attacks, according to an earlier report in al-Hayat, crowds had been pelting the embassy with tomatoes and eggs over the weekend. The regime had spread a rumor that Ambassador Ford had been recalled by Washington because of his Hama visit, which Syria decried as an infringement against Syrian sovereignty and interference in local affairs. The US State Department denied the rumor.

AP has raw video of the attack

and

Euronews has a report

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Today’s Top 5 Crises in the 2011 Arab Revolutions

Posted on 07/11/2011 by Juan

1. The protest movement in Egypt, which started up in earnest again last Friday, is expanding. Thousands were camped out in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo throughout the weekend, and people streamed there Sunday evening. The crowds closed the Mugamma` administrative building. They are demanding a cleaner break with the old regime, trials for security police accused of murdering protesters, trials for the deposed president, Hosni Mubarak, and his sons, reparations for the families of the martyrs, and more and swifter democratization. There are plans for marches this week and a campaign of strikes and civil disobedience. Many in the protest movement were deeply disappointed with Saturday evening’s speech by interim prime minister Essam Sharaf, which was short on specifics, in response to Friday’s demonstrations.

Aljazeera English reports:

2. Syrian Vice-President Farouk al-Sharaa chaired a nationally televised debate at Damascus University between regime supporters and a few dissidents over the future of the country. (Most in the opposition boycotted the meeting, but a few joined in.) Dissidents called for a pull-back of troops from protesting cities and the release of prisoners of conscience. As regime officials have done before, Sharaa spoke of the country moving to a pluralistic, multi-party democracy. Dear Baathist Regime in Syria: It is easy to move to pluralistic democracy. You announce the date for elections, and let other parties freely contest them. Talking about it as a far-future ideal in the absence of practical steps will only enrage your citizens. And having a debate in which those who speak on the opposing side are likely to go to jail and be tortured is a farce.

3. President Obama’s national security council aide in charge of counter-terrorism, John Brennan, met with Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh in Riyadh and urged him to step down under an agreement brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council of small oil states between his government and the opposition, which Saleh kept saying he would sign but always wriggled out of. He says he has had several operations for burns and injuries sustained in a rocket attack on the mosque courtyard in his presidential palace weeks ago.

4. In an embarrassing rift within NATO over Libya, French defence minister Gerard Longuet called for the Transitional National Council in Benghazi to open direct negotiations with the government of Muammar Qaddafi, while the US stuck to its position that Qaddafi must go. In the French system cabinet members seldom have much discretion to carve out their own positions, so Longuet’s remarks almost certainly simply conveyed the current sentiments of President Nicolas Sarkozy. French backpedaling comes as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a close friend of Qaddafi’s, complained about having been forced into a war he does not support by his own parliament. Likewise, the head of the Transitional National Council, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, had signaled last week that Qaddafi might not have to leave the country, but then was forced to retract. The French and the British, along with the Saudis, dragged a reluctant Obama administration kicking and screaming into the Libya war, so right about now the White House and Pentagon must be having a fit about the French remarks. Turkey, which was pressured into abandoning its own earlier support for negotiations and into recognizing and funding the TNC, must also be bewildered. Wars are in part psychological, and the chief hope for a quick end to the conflict was that Tripoli’s elites would see that Qaddafi’s prospects were dim, and would bundle him out of the country or to internal exile. But instead of showing its poker face to enhance this prospect, NATO member states keep giving Qaddafi loyalists new hope. If the US is indeed committed to the UN charge to protect Libyan civilians from Qaddafi’s murderous minions, now would be a good time for President Obama to play a leadership role instead of ‘leading from behind.’

5. Sunday saw renewed small protests in Morocco by members of the February 20 movement, who are not satisfied with the minor changes instituted by a recent referendum, and want to see the government become substantially more transparent and less corrupt. 8,000 are said to have come out in Casablanca, and 2000 in Rabat, provoking much smaller counter-demonstrations by conservatives supporting the referendum.

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Posted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, US Politics, Yemen | 14 Comments

On Panetta and Defeating al-Qaeda

Posted on 07/10/2011 by Juan

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said on his arrival in Kabul that the US could be on the verge of defeating al-Qaeda, and could do so in the wake of the killing of Usama Bin Laden by keeping the pressure on in Afghanistan, northwest Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

According to the Department of Defense, Panetta

‘…explained his reasoning saying there are between 10 to 20 key al-Qaida leaders in areas like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa and tracking them down would mean the defeat of the terror organization. “We have undermined their ability to conduct 9-11-type attacks,” he said. “We have them on the run. Now is the moment, following what happened to [Osama] bin Laden to put maximum pressure on them, because I do believe if we continue this effort we can cripple al-Qaida as a threat. Panetta said al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is most likely in hiding in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area. ‘

Panetta’s way of thinking about al-Qaeda is welcome in the sense that he is depicting it as a small network with only a few capable leaders (10 to 20). After years of getting the scale of al-Qaeda wrong, we should by now realize that despite its widespread tiny cells, it is a miniscule organization, if it can even be called an organization.

But thinking about al-Qaeda as an organization to which entrepreneurial leadership is key is itself problematic. Most al-Qaeda plots have been relatively low-tech and frankly have been mediocre, such as the plan to attack tourist hotels in Jordan in fall of 2000, which was finally undertaken in fall 2005. What did that accomplish? It redoubled the insistence of the Jordanian government on cooperating with the US in the fight against al-Qaeda. It made al-Qaeda deeply unpopular in Jordan, and that unpopularity attached also to some other Muslim fundamentalist groups. It may well have helped lead to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the self-proclaimed Jordanian “al-Qaeda” leader active in Iraq, on whom US military men implausibly blamed a majority of attacks in Iraq in that period.

When Zarqawi was killed in spring, 2006, in Iraq it had no effect whatsoever on the rate of the bombings and other killings claimed by radical Muslim organizations in that country. Indeed, the rest of 2006 was the most violent period in 21st century Iraqi history. This outcome was because there were many angry Sunni Arabs in Iraq perfectly willing and able to take up the kind of plots and attacks that were Zarqawi’s trademark.

So here is how you really defeat al-Qaeda:

1. Stop over-estimating it. The organization, despite having one big success at mass murder, is tiny and full of marginal personalities. It should be a concern of the FBI and Interpol, not of the US Secretary of Defense.

2. Don’t depend on private armies, including ‘contractors’. Ronald Reagan’s deployment of the Mujahidin and their Arab allies against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s created al-Qaeda in the first place. Likewise Reagan used right wing death squads in Nicaragua. He seems to have liked to make an end run around the constitution that way. Panetta showed pride in the supposedly apolitical and professional American military in his talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But the US is increasingly willing to mobilize private rightwing militias and mercenaries for military purposes, which likely will create more al-Qaedas. Military actions should be the province of the Department of Defense.

3. Keep a light US military footprint in places where the US is unpopular. Al-Qaeda began with its fight against the Soviet Union, then occupying Afghanistan, and with an alliance with the US. The illegal US invasion of Iraq and subsequent military occupation of that country gave an opening for violent and unscrupulous men to create an al-Qaeda branch in that country of some significance, and created a recruitment tool for manipulative al-Qaeda recruiters.

4. Support Palestinian statehood and immediate full human rights for Palestinians. The Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1948 now have millions of descendants, millions of them lacking citizenship in any state and therefore lacking ‘the right to have rights.’ Some 40 percent of the people of Gaza are refugees from what is now Israel, many of them still living in camps. On top of all that, the Israelis won’t even let them export their made goods, keeping them down economically. Most Muslims sympathize with the Palestinians and resent the way they have been treated, and the unresolved character of this dispute is a major driver of radicalism. This resentment is a potent recruitment tool for the radicals. Al-Qaeda itself is manipulative and insincere, but it has had some success in recruiting from among ordinary young men..

Instead of doing the above, the US is unwisely pressuring Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq to allow thousands of US troops to stay after next January, despite the obvious prospect that their presence will further destabilize Iraq. If you wanted to destroy al-Qaeda, getting out of Iraq militarily would be an excellent first step. Arranging for a just settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict would be the nail in the coffin of such recruiting.

There were never many radicals in the Muslim world, and what little success they have had depended on being able constantly to recruit new blood, preferably from the educated classes. The US should not allow itself to be blackmailed by these small cells of monsters with C4 explosives. But where doing the right thing anyway also has the side effect of reducing resentment, that is yet another reason to do it. The resentments generated by the clear injustices done to the Palestinians, and by big US military footprints in Arab and Muslim lands set the US off on the wrong foot with many in the region. That rift is reparable, but Americans and their regional friends have to recognize it and want to repair it.

The way to defeat al-Qaeda is not to kill 20 leaders. It is not to create an atmosphere in which such hothouse movements thrive.

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Posted in al-Qaeda | 40 Comments

Egyptian Revolution 2.0?

Posted on 07/09/2011 by Juan

Thousands of protesters came back to Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday. Despite the sometimes dark depictions of continuing unrest in the Western press, from all accounts the atmosphere was light and carnivalesque.

Crowds chanted, “No parties, no Muslim Brotherhood! The Egyptian people are in the square!” (La ahzab, la Ikhwan! Al-Sha’b al-Misri fi al-Maydan!” according to al-Ahram. That is, these activists were worried about the revolution being coopted by the parties and fundamentalists active before January.

Sample Tweet:

‘_safi__ Safi: Excellent! Numbers still up in #Tahrir this is officially a sit in, people singing, smiling :) #july8 ‘

and:

’25Egypt يوم الحرية
ائتلاف شباب الثورة: محاكمات علنية وشفافة وتطهير وزارة الداخلية شرطان لفض الاعتصام #Egypt #July8 #Jan25 #Tahrir

That is to say, the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth [demands] open trials, transparency and cleansing the ministry of the interior, as two conditions for ending the demonstration.

Or this, from early morning Saturday:

‘ sarrahsworld Sarrah
#tahrir still closed,no traffic. Thousands sitting in. Post midnight,the square is very much lively. More ppl coming to join the sit in :)
‘

Many tents were set up, and tweets such as “this time we are here to stay” made clear the organizers’ intention to remain in the square and to put pressure on the interim military government of Air Marshal Husain Tantawi to move to democracy more quickly and to try corrupt officials.

Sympathy demonstrations were held in Alexandria, Suez, Sohag Kafr Shaikh and Aswan, according to al-Ahram–i.e. up and down the Nile Valley.

The huge demonstrations show that the sentiments and spirit that animated the revolution last winter against Hosni Mubarak yet survive, and now challenge the Tantawi caretaker government. If you compare this moment to the changes in Tunisia, it is clear that the Tunisia elite is further ahead than the Egyptian one. They brought in a prime minister who is widely respected and was not close to the old regime and have already tried the former dictator, Zine El Dine Bin Ali, and convicted him in absentia. Similar processes in Egypt are taking so long that many Egyptians are infuriated with the transitional government in a way that most Tunisians are not.

In Egypt, the trade unions are essential actors and potential partners for the other revolutionaries.

Aljazeera English has a video report:

The Egyptian Revolution is not over, and we could still see major changes.

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Anthony Case Index

Posted on 07/08/2011 by Juan

Number of murders in US in 2009: 13,636
Number of murders committed by firearm: 9,146
Number of alleged murders discussed for past 3 years by t.v. “news”: 1
Number of most-talked-about accused murderers convicted of murder: 0
Number of extended profiles of any of 4,471 US troops killed in Iraq in a war fought on false pretenses, including 2 killed yesterday, on television “news”: 0

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Posted in US Politics | 24 Comments

Yemen’s Saleh Addresses Nation from Hospital Bed

Posted on 07/08/2011 by Juan

Badly wounded and burned Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh appeared on Yemeni television on Thursday in a pre-recorded address that reiterated his intent to hold onto power even as he made vague noises about including the opposition. Saleh still speaks as though his leadership were robust enough to allow for opposition participation in government, something the opposition contests.

Saleh’s appearance delighted and gave heart to his not inconsiderable number of supports, who fired their arms in the air in Sanaa in celebration, wounding several innocent bystanders. (Those who enjoy engaging in celebratory fire don’t usually understand basic physics, what goes up must come down, and bullets fired from guns come back down with deadly velocity).

Dr. Abd al-Malik Mansour, the permanent Yemeni delegate to the Arab League, criticized Saleh for choosing to come on television at this delicate political moment, and slammed his supporters for killing innocents with their celebrations.

Opposition leader Dr. Abdullah Awbal (Obal) of the Assembly Union Party [al-Tajamu` al-Wahdawi] told al-Akhbar that the Yemeni opposition rejected the idea of Saleh returning to power, continued to ignore Saudi letters to them urging negotiation with Saleh, and said it had held a joint meeting with US ambassador Gerald Feierstein on the possibility of setting up a transitional government. The opposition told al-Akhbar that Feierstein was maddeningly vague, giving no sign that the US would oppose the establishment of a transitional council, but also declining to indicate that Washington would recognize it if it were formed. Also, deputy national security adviser John O. Brennan will visit Yemen shortly to get a sense on the ground of the security situation.

The coalition of socialist and Muslim fundamentalist political parties calling itself the Joint Meetings Parties has been accused of hijacking a revolution that began with spontaneous anti-government protests against the government by youth.

Awbal said that the opposition was undeterred by the criticisms launched against the idea of a transitional council, and that it was determined to establish a civil state that was modern and under the rule of law.

Aljazeera English analyzes Saleh’s speech:

Aljazeera also reports on several recent defections to the opposition by members of the elite Republican Guard:

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