Syria’s civil war and the bias in Western media
BY GREGORY CLARK
SEP 28, 2016
Regardless of the wrongs of the Syrian civil war — and they are many, with the cruel Assad regime largely responsible — no one should have been allowed to wreck the recent attempt to reach a truce in the fighting there. It was probably the last chance to put an end to the brutal war, and to endorse the impressive personal relationship that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov seems to have established with his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State John Kerry.
But not only was it allowed, in the shape of that U.S.-led airstrike on a Syrian government army base near the town of Deir al-Zour leaving over 60 soldiers dead and 100 injured. Worse, it seemed to confirm earlier reports that the Pentagon was not happy with truce conditions that required coordination with the Russian military.
If true, it amounted to insubordination, with the U.S. military seeking to destroy the policies of its own government. Even worse, the attack allowed besieging Islamic State forces to move into the town and massacre up to 300 citizens before being partially driven out by pro-Assad forces. This in turn has provided grist for Assad regime claims the U.S. is even willing to cooperate with IS to seek its overthrow — a claim that if true has implications too horrible even to think about.
Yet our Western media were able to ignore all this by focusing almost exclusively on Moscow’s alleged responsibility for a subsequent attack on a U.N. aid convoy — an attack far more likely to have been triggered by local anti-Assad forces.
The U.S. military has claimed that the Deir al-Zour bombing was an accident. But the same military has a long record of claiming its improper attacks are accidental — the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, for example. Yet once again we find little media interest in confirming the accident theory. They prefer, as ever, to focus on that alleged Moscow convoy attack.
True, Moscow is sometimes its own worst enemy when it comes to justifications. A Russian Defense Ministry claim that the convoy may have suffered spontaneous combustion had to be sarcastically refuted by Kerry in the U.N. Security Council. In Moscow in August last year, top Foreign Ministry officials assured me they had irrefutable radar evidence Ukrainian fighter jets had shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which crashed over Ukraine territory in July 2014. But today in the face of a report by an international investigation group, they seem to have had no choice but to accept the evidence it was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air Buk rocket, though they claim they can prove it was an older Ukrainian-owned rocket that did the damage.
All governments lie, some more than others. But why do our allegedly independent and fair Western media go along with the lies and even at times work to propagate them, one of the more notorious examples being the way the respected New York Times helped to promote the weapons of mass destruction myth justifying the 2003 attack on Iraq (it later apologized)?
The planting of intelligence people into sensitive positions in cooperating media is one reason. Another is the use of incentives to subvert media people — privileged access to confidential materials, for example, allowing recipients to scoop rivals. Monetary payments may even be involved, according to former senior German editor Udo Ulfkotte. But there are also independent-minded media and media people only too willing to expose domestic wrongdoings. Why are they so reluctant to expose foreign policy wrongdoings?
I blame the demonization effect. Societies, like individuals, are prone to see the world in black-and-white terms. This collective bias makes it easy to summon up collective hatreds or dislikes for regimes that our governments have decided they want to oppose. Japan is an especially bad example of collective thinking. And as in Japan, those who oppose the collective mood can be dismissed as cranks and outsiders.
We all dislike the brutal North Korean regime, for example. But if we look at the record of threats and broken promises made against it, then it has sinned no more than it has been sinned against. It is the U.S., not Pyongyang, that refuses the peace treaty that would put an end to its fears of being attacked. But woe to any Western commentator who tries sympathetically to explain Pyongyang’s occasionally not unjustified phobias.
It was not hard to demonize a Chinese regime responsible for the horrors of its Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and Cultural Revolution policies of the late 1960s. But in the late 1980s, with the regime of Deng Xiaoping clearly bent on reform, did the media and the U.K. intelligence agencies really have to invent a Tiananmen Square massacre myth?
Why did our media manage so relentlessly to ignore the firebombing and brutal killings of regime troops by anti-regime crowds that preceded and led to those revenge killings by out-of-control troops in the streets around Tiananmen? By some inversion of logic the photos of fire-bombed buses are made to support the claims of regime brutality. We never get to see the photos of incinerated soldiers strung up under overpasses by angry crowds.
The New York Times, which seems to have assumed responsibility in exposing alleged Tiananmen atrocities, has long made much of a photo allegedly showing a lone student stopping a row of army tanks entering Tiananmen Square. “Tank Man,” he is called. But AP photographer Jeff Widener, who took the photo, insists Tank Man was someone with a shopping bag crossing the street the day after Tiananmen and the tanks were trying to leave, not enter, the city. The New York Times publishes corrections of even minor mistakes in its articles. But it refuses any admission that it has grossly misused a photo that is still being used to demonize Beijing.
Russia is another demonization target. It is accused of aggression in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. But in that case the governments of France and Germany are equally guilty since they also signed the 2015 Minsk agreement endorsing Moscow’s goal of autarky for eastern Ukraine, a goal that another signatory, Kiev, now refuses to accept. We do not hear much criticism of Kiev for trying to break the agreement.
And so it continues. Moscow’s not unjustified effort peacefully to regain control of the mainly Russian-speaking Crimea which it gifted to Ukraine in 1954 for administrative convenience is supposed to be gross violation of international sovereignty law. And the vicious NATO bombing attacks to force Belgrade to give up its sovereignty over Kosovo? Or NATO’s partner in Ankara using ethnic cleansing to create a pro-Turkey sovereign state in northern Cyprus?
Western opinion is stirred up by the way Moscow’s intelligence organs seem to have targeted one or two critics for assassination. Meanwhile the many CIA attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro are regarded as some kind of joke. Is there one standard of morality for our friends and another for those we choose to demonize?
BY GREGORY CLARK
SEP 28, 2016
Regardless of the wrongs of the Syrian civil war — and they are many, with the cruel Assad regime largely responsible — no one should have been allowed to wreck the recent attempt to reach a truce in the fighting there. It was probably the last chance to put an end to the brutal war, and to endorse the impressive personal relationship that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov seems to have established with his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State John Kerry.
But not only was it allowed, in the shape of that U.S.-led airstrike on a Syrian government army base near the town of Deir al-Zour leaving over 60 soldiers dead and 100 injured. Worse, it seemed to confirm earlier reports that the Pentagon was not happy with truce conditions that required coordination with the Russian military.
If true, it amounted to insubordination, with the U.S. military seeking to destroy the policies of its own government. Even worse, the attack allowed besieging Islamic State forces to move into the town and massacre up to 300 citizens before being partially driven out by pro-Assad forces. This in turn has provided grist for Assad regime claims the U.S. is even willing to cooperate with IS to seek its overthrow — a claim that if true has implications too horrible even to think about.
Yet our Western media were able to ignore all this by focusing almost exclusively on Moscow’s alleged responsibility for a subsequent attack on a U.N. aid convoy — an attack far more likely to have been triggered by local anti-Assad forces.
The U.S. military has claimed that the Deir al-Zour bombing was an accident. But the same military has a long record of claiming its improper attacks are accidental — the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, for example. Yet once again we find little media interest in confirming the accident theory. They prefer, as ever, to focus on that alleged Moscow convoy attack.
True, Moscow is sometimes its own worst enemy when it comes to justifications. A Russian Defense Ministry claim that the convoy may have suffered spontaneous combustion had to be sarcastically refuted by Kerry in the U.N. Security Council. In Moscow in August last year, top Foreign Ministry officials assured me they had irrefutable radar evidence Ukrainian fighter jets had shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which crashed over Ukraine territory in July 2014. But today in the face of a report by an international investigation group, they seem to have had no choice but to accept the evidence it was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air Buk rocket, though they claim they can prove it was an older Ukrainian-owned rocket that did the damage.
All governments lie, some more than others. But why do our allegedly independent and fair Western media go along with the lies and even at times work to propagate them, one of the more notorious examples being the way the respected New York Times helped to promote the weapons of mass destruction myth justifying the 2003 attack on Iraq (it later apologized)?
The planting of intelligence people into sensitive positions in cooperating media is one reason. Another is the use of incentives to subvert media people — privileged access to confidential materials, for example, allowing recipients to scoop rivals. Monetary payments may even be involved, according to former senior German editor Udo Ulfkotte. But there are also independent-minded media and media people only too willing to expose domestic wrongdoings. Why are they so reluctant to expose foreign policy wrongdoings?
I blame the demonization effect. Societies, like individuals, are prone to see the world in black-and-white terms. This collective bias makes it easy to summon up collective hatreds or dislikes for regimes that our governments have decided they want to oppose. Japan is an especially bad example of collective thinking. And as in Japan, those who oppose the collective mood can be dismissed as cranks and outsiders.
We all dislike the brutal North Korean regime, for example. But if we look at the record of threats and broken promises made against it, then it has sinned no more than it has been sinned against. It is the U.S., not Pyongyang, that refuses the peace treaty that would put an end to its fears of being attacked. But woe to any Western commentator who tries sympathetically to explain Pyongyang’s occasionally not unjustified phobias.
It was not hard to demonize a Chinese regime responsible for the horrors of its Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and Cultural Revolution policies of the late 1960s. But in the late 1980s, with the regime of Deng Xiaoping clearly bent on reform, did the media and the U.K. intelligence agencies really have to invent a Tiananmen Square massacre myth?
Why did our media manage so relentlessly to ignore the firebombing and brutal killings of regime troops by anti-regime crowds that preceded and led to those revenge killings by out-of-control troops in the streets around Tiananmen? By some inversion of logic the photos of fire-bombed buses are made to support the claims of regime brutality. We never get to see the photos of incinerated soldiers strung up under overpasses by angry crowds.
The New York Times, which seems to have assumed responsibility in exposing alleged Tiananmen atrocities, has long made much of a photo allegedly showing a lone student stopping a row of army tanks entering Tiananmen Square. “Tank Man,” he is called. But AP photographer Jeff Widener, who took the photo, insists Tank Man was someone with a shopping bag crossing the street the day after Tiananmen and the tanks were trying to leave, not enter, the city. The New York Times publishes corrections of even minor mistakes in its articles. But it refuses any admission that it has grossly misused a photo that is still being used to demonize Beijing.
Russia is another demonization target. It is accused of aggression in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. But in that case the governments of France and Germany are equally guilty since they also signed the 2015 Minsk agreement endorsing Moscow’s goal of autarky for eastern Ukraine, a goal that another signatory, Kiev, now refuses to accept. We do not hear much criticism of Kiev for trying to break the agreement.
And so it continues. Moscow’s not unjustified effort peacefully to regain control of the mainly Russian-speaking Crimea which it gifted to Ukraine in 1954 for administrative convenience is supposed to be gross violation of international sovereignty law. And the vicious NATO bombing attacks to force Belgrade to give up its sovereignty over Kosovo? Or NATO’s partner in Ankara using ethnic cleansing to create a pro-Turkey sovereign state in northern Cyprus?
Western opinion is stirred up by the way Moscow’s intelligence organs seem to have targeted one or two critics for assassination. Meanwhile the many CIA attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro are regarded as some kind of joke. Is there one standard of morality for our friends and another for those we choose to demonize?
シリア、そしてメディアの偏向
シリア内戦の不正は数多くあり、大半は残忍なアサド政権の責任あるが、最近の停戦合意が実現しなかったことは非常に残念だ。それは残虐な件の戦争にけりをつけ、ロシアの外務相であるセルゲイ・ラブロフがアメリカの相手方であるジョン・ケリー国務長官と印象的な個人的関係を結べる可能性のあったおそらく最後のチャンスであった。
しかし、それがダメになっただけでなく、デリゾールの街の近くにあるシリア軍キャンプをアメリカ主導による空爆の過程で６０人以上の政府軍兵士が死亡し100人が負傷した。さらに悪いことに、このことは、ロシア軍との対等な関係を盛り込んだ停戦条項を米国国防省が気に入らなかったという過去の報告を裏付けることになったようだ。もし本当なら、アメリカ軍が自国政府の政策を反故にする模索に対する不服従につながっていただろう。
もっと悪いことに、この攻撃をきっかけとしてイスラム国が街に侵入し300人の市民を殺害してしまったと言われていて、アサド政権支持派により部分的に掃討されたが間に合わなかった。このことが、逆に、アメリカはアサド政権の転覆を目論み、そのためにはイスラム国との提携も辞さないのだとアサド政権に思わせる証左になってしまった。この主張が本当なら、考えただけでもあまりに恐ろしい内容を含んでいる。
我々西側メディアは、ロシアの国連護衛隊に続く攻撃に対する責任に焦点を当てることで、これらすべてを無視することもできた。この攻撃は地元の反アサド勢力によって引き起こされた可能性が非常に高いと考えられる。
アメリカ軍はデリゾール空爆は事故だったと主張している。しかし同軍は過去にも同軍の不適切な攻撃に関して事故であると主張してきた実績がある。例えば、1999年の在ベルグラード中国大使館爆撃である。もう一度言うが、それでも、事故であるという論法の確認に関心を持つメディアは少ない。西側メディアはこれまで同様、ロシア政府による例の国連の人道援助隊攻撃に焦点を当てたがるのだ。
確かにロシアは、正当化に関しては時々自国の利益に反することをする。国連の援助隊が急な爆撃に苦しんだかもしれないというロシア国防省の主張は国連安全保障理事会のジョン・ケリーによって皮肉にも拒否されなくてはならなかった。去年の8月モスクワで外務省高官は、ウクライナ戦闘機がマレーシアエアライン17便を打ち落とし2014年７月にウクライナ領内に墜落した反論できないレーダーの証拠を持っていると証言した。しかし今日、国際調査団の報告を見て、ロシア外務省は、ロシア製の地対空ブークロケットによって撃ち落とされたという証拠を受け入れるしかなかったようだ。しかしロシア外務省は被害を与えたのはウクライナ所有の古いロケットであったと証明できると主張しているが。
どこの政府も嘘つきだが、幾つかの国はとりわけひどい。しかし、独立公正を謳うとされる我が西側メディアがそういう嘘に歩調を合わせ、時には誇大宣伝に加担するのか、とりわけひどい例は、かの誇り高きニューヨークタイムズが2003年のイラク攻撃を正当化する大量破壊兵器神話の推進に加担したこと（のちに謝罪した）？
メディアとの協力において、諜報担当者を重要なポジションにつかせていることも一つの理由だ。また、メディアの人間をインセンティヴを使って操る手法もある。例えば、機密情報を優先的に得られるようにし、情報を得たものにスクープを取らせることを可能にする。ドイツの元ベテラン編集者であるウド・ウルフコットによれば、金銭的な支払いが含まれることもある。しかし、国内の不正問題にばかり関心を持って取り組む独立志向のメディアやメディアの人間もいる。なぜ彼らは外交政策の不正をあばくことに対して消極的なのか？
私は悪人に仕立て上げることが原因と考えている。社会は、個人同様、白か黒かの次元で世の中を見るきらいがある。この集合的なバイアスが、私たちの政府が対決すると決めた政権に対する集合的な憎しみや憎悪を簡単に呼び起こす。そして日本でそうであるように、集団の空気に反対する人は変人かよそ者として相手にされなくなってしまう。
例えば、私たちは皆、野蛮な北朝鮮政権が嫌いだ。しかし、これまで北朝鮮に対して破られた約束や脅しの歴史を見れば、北朝鮮はそれを上回るほどの罪は犯していない。攻撃されてしまうのではないかという北朝鮮が持つ恐怖に終止符を打つ平和条約を拒絶しているのはアメリカであり、北朝鮮ではない。しかし、時々正当化できなくはない北朝鮮の恐怖症に共感して解説する西側の評論家にとっては悩ましい。
50年台後半の大躍進政策や60年台後半の文化大革命政策に関する恐怖の責任で中国政権を悪者にするのは難しいことではない。しかし、80年台後半の鄧小平政権において明確な改革に乗り出したが、このことで、メディアやイギリス諜報機関は天安門広場虐殺神話を本当にでっち上げなければならなかったのか？
我々メディアはなぜ、のちに天安門広場の周囲の道路で制御を失った軍隊が引き起こす報復殺人へとつながった、反政府群衆による政府軍の爆撃や残虐な殺戮を無下に無視しようとするのか。逆の論理をあてはめれば、火炎瓶乱用の写真は政権の野蛮さの主張を後押しするために作られたのだ。怒った群衆によって高架交差路の下で絞首刑にされた焼死した兵士の写真を私たちが目にすることは決してないのだ。
ニューヨークタイムズ紙は伝えられた天安門大虐殺報道に関して責任があるとされ、伝えられるところによる、軍隊の戦車の列が天安門広場に入るのを止める一人の少年の写真を長年利用してきた。彼はタンクマン（戦車男）と呼ばれた。しかし、AP通信のカメラマンでこの写真を撮ったジェフ・ワイドナーは、戦車男は、天安門事件の翌日に、買い物袋を持って道路を横切る人の写真であり、戦車は街に入るのでなく、出て行くところであったと証言している。ニューヨークタイムズは記事のささいな間違いに関しても訂正記事を出す。しかし、ニューヨークタイムズは写真の大きな誤用であったということを認めることを拒否し、今でも中国政府を悪者扱いするために使われているのだ。
ロシアはもう一つの悪魔化の標的だ。ロシアは、ウクライナ東部のロシア語を話す地域へ侵攻したことを非難されている。しかし、そうであるなら、フランスドイツ両政府は、2015年のミンスク合意に違反したことで同罪である。ミンスク合意において、東部ウクライナの自立を目指すロシアの目標を是認するもので、この目標に関してウクライナ政府も合意していたのに、今は拒否している。この合意を破棄しようとしたウクライナ政府の批判はあまり聞かれない。
そして同様のことは続く。主にロシア語を話し、行政上の利便性を考慮してロシアがウクライナに1954年に割譲した、クリミアの支配権を平和的に取り戻すという、正当化できないとは言えないロシア政府の努力は、国際統治権法に対する大いなる違反であるとされる。そして、ベオグラード（セルビア政府）にコソボの主権を諦めさせることを目的とした、忌まわしいNATOの空爆攻撃はなんなんだ？あるいは、NATO加盟のトルコ政府が北キプロスに親トルコの支配地域を作るために民族掃討をしていることはどう解釈するのか？
西側の主張はロシア政府諜報機関が1人か2人の批評家を暗殺の標的にしたようだということで、かき乱された。それでも、キューバのフィデル・カストロを暗殺しようとしたCIA（米中央情報局）の多くの試みは冗談として片付けられた。私たちの友人に対してのモラルの基準と、悪魔視の対象に選ぶ人たちに当てはめたい他のモラルの基準があるのだろうか？