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CounterPunch
February
28, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
Hacks
and Heroes: Meet the New Yorker's Goldberg; Israeli Draft Resisters;
Bulworth Screenwriter Lashes New York Times; Are Drunks' Dreams
Corrupt?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Who's the hack? I nominate The New Yorker's Jeffrey
Goldberg. He's the new Remington, though without the artistic
talent. Back in 1898, William Randolph Hearst was trying to
fan war fever between the United States and Spain. He dispatched
a reporter and the artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to send
back blood-roiling depictions of Spanish beastliness to Cuban
insurgents. Remington wired to say he could find nothing sensational
to draw and could he come home. Famously, Hearst wired him, "Please
remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."
Remington duly did so.
I wouldn't set The New Yorker's editor,
David Remnick, in the shoes of a Kong-sized monster like Hearst.
Remnick is a third-tier talent who has always got ahead by singing
the correct career-enhancing tunes, as witness his awful reporting
from Russia in the 1990s. Art Spiegelman recently quit The New
Yorker, remarking that these dangerous times require courage
and the ability to be provocative, but alas, "Remnick does
not feel up to the challenge."
That's putting it far too politely. Remnick's
watch has been lackluster and cowardly. He is also the current
sponsor (Marty Peretz of The New Republic was an earlier one)
of Goldberg, whose first major chunk of agitprop for The New
Yorker was published on March 25 of last year. Titled "The
Great Terror," it was billed as containing disclosures of
"Saddam Hussein's possible ties to al Qaeda."
This was at a moment when the FBI and
CIA had just shot down the war party's claim of a meeting between
Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before
the 9/11 attacks. Goldberg saved the day for the Bush crowd.
At the core of his rambling, 16,000-word piece was an interview
in the Kurdish-held Iraqi town of Sulaimaniya with Mohammed
Mansour Shahab, who offered the eager Goldberg a wealth of detail
about his activities as a link between Osama bin Laden and the
Iraqis, shuttling arms and other equipment.
The piece was gratefully seized upon
by the Administration as proof of The Link. The coup de grâce
to Goldberg's credibility fell on February 9 of this year in
the London Observer, administered by Jason Burke, its chief reporter.
Burke visited the same prison in Sulaimaniya, talked to Shahab
and established beyond doubt that Goldberg's great source is
a clumsy liar, not even knowing the physical appearance of Kandahar,
whither he had claimed to have journeyed to deal with bin Laden;
and confecting his fantasies in the hope of a shorter prison
sentence.
Another experienced European journalist,
whom I reached on the Continent at the end of this week and who
visited the prison last year agrees with Bourke's findings. "I
talked to prisoners without someone present. The director of
the prison seemed surprised at my request. With a prison authority
present the interview would be worthless. As soon as we talked
to this particular one a colleague said after 30 seconds, 'this
is worthless. The guy was just a story teller.'"
The European journalist, who doesn't
want to be identified, said to me charitably that Golbberg's
credulity about Shab "could have been a matter of misjudgment
but my even stronger criticism is that if you talked, as we did
and as I gather Goldberg did, to anybody in the PUK [the Kurdish
group controlling this area of northern Iraq] about this particular
Islamic group all of them would tell you they are backed by Iran,
as common sense would tell, you. Look where they are located.
It's 200 meters across one river to Iran. That's what I find
upsetting. Misjudging a source can happen to all of us, but Goldberg
did talk to generals in the PUK. I think it's outrageous that
New Yorker ran that story."
Finally, I hear that a New York Times
reporter also concluded after talking to the prisoners that there
was one who was obviously lying and who would say anything anyone
would like to hear about Al Ansar and Saddam, Saddam and Al Qaeda.
I have not been able to talk to this reporter, though it would
not have been surprising for the Times to have tried to check
up on Goldberg's "scoop".
An American with a lot of experience
in interviewing in prisons adds, "It's tricky interviewing
prisoners in the first place -- their vulnerability, etc --
and responsible journalists make some sort of minimal credibility
assessment before they report someone's statements. but the
prisoner said exactly what Jeffrey Goldberg wanted to hear, so
Goldberg didn't feel that he needed to mention that the prisoner
was nuts."
On February 10, amid widespread cynicism about the Administration's
rationales for war, Remnick published another Goldberg special,
"The Unknown: The C.I.A. and the Pentagon take another look
at Al Qaeda and Iraq." This 6,000-word screed had no pretensions
to being anything other than a servile rendition of Donald
Rumsfeld's theory of intelligence: "Build a hypothesis,
and then see if the data supported the hypothesis, rather than
the reverse." In other words, decide what you want to hear,
then torture the data until the data confess.
This last piece of Goldberg's was a truly
disgraceful piece of brown-nosing (of Rumsfeld, Tenet et al.),
devoid of even the pretensions of independent journalism. "Reporter
at Large"? Remnick should retire the rubric, at least
for Goldberg, and advertise his work as "White House Handout."
I should note that Goldberg once served in Israel's armed forces,
which may or may not be a guide to his political agenda. At all
events, mention of the IDF allows me to shift from the polluted
stream of Goldberg's disingenuous fantasies to purer streams.
Draft Resisters
in Israel: Now the Crackdown
Now the heroes.
There are certainly some brave young
souls these days who take their moral duty seriously. For months
the Israeli military authorities and the Sharon government have
been quietly worried by the specter of serious civil disobedience,
most notably from conscientious objectors. Now the Israeli government
is really turning up the heat on the refuseniks. Neve Gordon,
a professor at Ben Gurion University, says the authorities worry
that resistance to military service, either for reasons of pacifism
or abhorrence at the prospect of committing war crimes in the
occupied territories, might spread to more draft-age kids.
Among those who face possible court-martial
is Yoni Ben-Artzi, nephew of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. Ben-Artzi, sentenced to multiple thirty-day terms,
has been in jail now for more than 200 days. He is a conscientious
objector, a status that has standing in international law,
signed by Israel. Nonetheless, the military prosecutor refuses
to recognize his status as a CO, even though in the case of Uri
Yakobi, held in jail as a CO for almost half a year, the IDF
acknowledged on February 25 that he was unfit for military
service and released him.
Yakobi is more fortunate than the other
high school seniors who have refused to be drafted. Despite the
fact that the COs have announced their willingness to serve the
state through some kind of civil service, Chief of Staff Moshe
Ya'alon and military prosecutors are punishing the young men
again and again for the same "offense," as noted above
in the case of Ben-Artzi.
Although political refuseniks are punished
severely, thousands of yeshiva students are routinely exempted
from military service, as are some women refuseniks (such as
the daughter of Ya'alon, the aforementioned chief of staff, a
man who recently described Palestinians as a cancer needing "chemotherapy").
The authorities are being rough on some
of the political resisters. Take the case of Haggai Matar,
who helped initiate the high school refusenik movement in 2001
and who has been in jail for more than 130 days. Matar, now facing
court-martial and a possible three years in prison, has denounced
the occupation, speaking last year in a number of cities across
the United States.
Instead of court-martialing kids who
refuse to commit war crimes in the territories, Israel should
court-martial the war criminals themselves, as Belgium recommends.
Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter recently canceled a trip to Belgium,
fearing the Belgians would try to arrest him because of Israel's
conduct in the territories. Dichter was scheduled to deliver
a lecture on international terror at a conference. For more
information on the campaign to release the conscientious objectors
email matar@post.tau.ac.il
or visit www.refusersolidarity.net
Bulworth
Screenwriter Lashes New York Times
Screenwriter Jeremy Pikser, a stalwart
CounterPuncher, sends us this bulletin on his dealings with an
insitution recently hailed by one servile courtier of the Fourth
Estate (yes, we mean Eric Alterman) as a shining example of indy
journalism.
"I don't know if you were able to
attend the spectacular evening of poetry and genuinely exciting,
inspiring spirit of resistance at Avery Fisher Hall on Monday,
where 20 orso major poets and/or actors braved the blizzard and
were cheered by over 2,000 in the audience, or if you saw the
disgustingly fraudulent account of the evening in today's (weds)
New York Times, but here is a letter I sent to the Times. I'm
sending it to you, since no letter I've ever sent to the Times
has ever been published, and I doubt this one will either. I
could have gone on for pages about the lies and inaccuracies
in the Times article, but that would have only made its chance
of publication smaller." -- Jeremy
Herewith Pikser's Letter to the NYT's
Frank Rich:
To the Editor:
Re: Ambiguity is a Guest at a Reader's Evening Feb, 19.
Poetry is often ambiguous and open to
differing interpretations, but only a willfully perverse misreading
of "Poetry Not Fit For the White House" could produce
such a shamefully inaccurate and distorted report as the one
tendered by Kalefa Sanneh. Sanneh claims "hardly any of
the poets read poetry of their own," while, in fact, of
the twenty poets who were able to brave the blizzard or send
poems to be read by others, fifteen read their own poetry. Those
who did not were hardly "passing the buck" or "ducking,"
but, in the spirit of Sam Hamill's original appeal, giving voice
to others who oppose war in poetry. WS Merwin, sent a poem written
specifically for the occasion, part of which said: "I think
of the frauds in office at this instant devising their massacres
in my name." Every participant in the evening was clearly
standing up and saying, "Not in my name."
Jeremy Pikser
Screenwriter and member of the working group of the Not In Our
Name Statement of Conscience, sponsors of "Poetry Not Fit
For the White House."
Sleep, Not
Sottish Stupor, Knits Up Raveled Sleeve of Care
This just in from Martin Maloney.
"Although it is obvious that Jack
McCarthy enjoyed entirely too much writing his biting criticism
of Christopher Hitchens' self-serving and self-delusional "functional
alcoholic" article, he was right on point. (BTW, I enjoyed
entirely too much reading it, too!)
"There is a sound scientific basis
for the conclusion in this sentence from Alexander Cockburn:
'And as I've said, I do think his gargantuan levels of drinking
affect his journalism, and his grip on the truth and that's a
public issue too.' Sleep, real sleep, is essential to mental
health. When we sleep, we dream, and dreaming is the way that
we update ourselves to recent events. Dreaming is the way that
we resolve conflicts between what has just happened with what
we already knew about the world around us.
"People who pass out from high doses
of narcotic drugs (alcohol included) don't sleep. Rather, they
lapse into unconsciousness, which differs from real sleep, and
they don't dream. On occasions when they don't actually pass
out, the dreams that they have are corrupted by the fact that
the events that they've experienced occurred in a drug-induced
fog.
"People who don't accurately remember
things as they happened, and then who subsequently integrate
those faulty memories into their personality, lose their 'grip
on the truth.' In short, it would not be a gratuitous ad hominem
attack to call Christopher Hitchens a bona fide nut case."
Yesterday's
Features
Dr. Richard Lichtman
Psychologists
and War
John Stanton
Life
in a Barrel of Oil
Carol Norris
George Bush's War on Himself: the World is His Battlefield
Wayne Madsen
The
First Shots of the War
Pablo Mukherjee
Orwell's
Bastards: Lies and Shameless Pretence
Larry Mosqueda
A Duty to Obey All Unlawful Orders
Behzad Yaghmaian
Scarf and Make-Up: the Modern Face of Islam
Jason Leopold
Hell-Bent for War: the Six Year Campaign by Right Wing Think
Tanks to Promote Takeover of Iraq
Anthony Gancarski
Bush's Divine Inspiration:
What If Jesus Were a Gunslinger?
Ellen Cantarow
The
Day of the Barricades: New York City Against the People
Sam Bahour & Michael Dahan
Snow Covered Rubble
Website of the Day
Bush
and Blair: the Duet
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February 22
/ 23, 2003
Laura Flanders
Security Threat?
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey Barred Entry to US
Alexander Cockburn
The Trouble with E-Bombs
Kathy Kelly
Letter from Baghdad
Tight Squeeze
Subcomandate
Marcos
A Universal
No to the War of Fear
William Cook
Armageddon Anxiety
Jo Freeman
Conservative Women
Michael Colby
Howard Dean is No Green
Ben Tripp
Fact-Checking the Constitution
Joanne Mariner
Pets Unite!
Richard Falk and David Krieger
Iraq and the Failures of Democracy
Uri Avnery
War Crimes and Sharon
Ian Williams
John Bolton in Jerusalem
Michael Wolff
How Sanctions Destroyed Iraqi Education
William Hughes
The Zev and Ari Show
Susanna Sonnenberg
Boxing Missoula
Michael Ortiz Hill
Peace and Humility
Anis Shivani
When Kafka Aligns with Orwell
John Mihelich
The Hidden History of Butte's
Working Class
Rich Procter
Bush and His Fabled Gut
Adam Engel
Voice of the Nation
Becky Johnson
The Hopscotch Rebellion
Krieger, Tripp, Ashley
Poets' Basement
Website of
the Weekend
The
Pedro Martinez of Palestine
February 15
/ 16, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Colin
Powell and the Great "Intelligence Fraud"
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
The Whole World is Watching
Edward Said
A Monumental Hypocrisy
Wouter Hijink
Report from Amsterdam
"War: Do Not Feed!"
Linda Heard
At Last! Proud to be British
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Taking a Stand on Iraq
Robert Fisk
The Case Against War
Lev Grinberg
Lessons from Israel
A War Without Legitimacy
Chris Floyd
Cold Fronts:
Bush War Profits
Ahmad Faruqui
Stepping Back from the Brink of War
Norman Madarasz
French Kisses from the Citizens of France
Adam Lebowitz
Scott Ritter in Tokyo
Kurt Nimmo
Bring Us the Head of Osama bin Laden
Forrest Hylton
The Revolt in Bolivia
Col. Dan Smith
Irrelevance and Credibility:
Bush, NATO and the UN
Wayne Madsen
The Lies of Tom Lantos
Ranjit Hoskote
The Invisible Modernities of the Islamic World
Emily Zitter-Smith
Who's Safe Now?
An American in Cairo
Rich Procter
Anybody Remember the Powell Doctrine?
Poets Basement:
Eliot
Katz, Scott Handleman, and Bruce Tomczak
Website of the Weekend
Anti-War
Posters
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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