December 2004 (II): Watch Your Words

Ministry of Homeland Security poster: The Propaganda Remix Project

The family friends who have lived under fascism find current events fighteningly familiar. One is Spanish and grew up under Franco—since last month, he's been busy planning his return to Spain early next year. er:

Another friend has been a frequent point of reference, as she compares her past experience with what she observes now. As in, "That's just like the Soviet Union!"

She also worries about her 8-year old son speaking his mind, as Clever Sister notes when forwarding this—

When the two plainclothes Loudoun County sheriff's investigators showed up on her Leesburg doorstep, Pamela Albaugh got nervous. But when they told her why they were there, she got angry: A complaint had been filed alleging that her 11-year old son had made "anti-American and violent" statements in school.

Albaugh, her Israeli husband, and their children previously lived in several other countries. Yishai, an outspokenly anti-war 11-year old who was upset by a Veterans' Day assignment to write a letter to marines, burst out with some words to the effect that he didn't care if all the marines died.

His mother thought that the matter had been resolved by conferences with the school, followed by a day of in-school suspension for Yishai. Then investigators showed up for "two hours of polite but intense and personal questioning"—

They asked how she felt about 9/11 and the military. They asked whether she knows any foreigners who have trouble with American policy. They mentioned a German friend who had been staying with the family and asked whether the friend sympathized with the Taliban. They also inquired whether she might be teaching her children "anti-American values," she said.

"It was intimidating," [Albaugh] said. "I told them it's like a George Orwell novel, that it felt like they were the thought police. If someone would have asked me five years ago if this was something my government would do, I would have said never."

Finally, of "lessons learned"—

Albaugh said that Yishai is not violent and that the school could have used the classroom incident as a "teachable moment," helping him learn to say what he was feeling in a less offensive manner.

Instead, Yishai said he has learned that it is not worth challenging authority. "At the end of the day, you lose," he said, adding: "All of these freedoms and things they're supposed to uphold, they bash them."

Our free press can hand-wring about Ukraine, while steering clear of Ohio.

As unwelcome as truth-tellers are, one slipped through in 1996, via a new-fangled news source, "The Internet." The ensuing years of professional frustration ended in Gary Webb's suicide this month.

Jeff Cohen's obit: R.I.P. Gary Webb -- Unembedded Reporter.

America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb is the piece by former AP and Newsweek reporter, Robert Parry. He recalls Webb's 1996 investigative reports on the CIA's links to Nicaraguan Contra drug trading of the 1980's, how this introduced crack into the U.S., and how the Reagan-Bush administration protected those involved. And how a 1998 CIA Inspector General's report largely confirmed Webb's reporting.

And as to how this reflects on the gatekeepers of news—

Unintentionally, Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the mid-1990s. The big news outlets were always hot on the trail of some titillating scandal – the O.J. Simpson case or the Monica Lewinsky scandal – but the major media could no longer grapple with serious crimes of state.

Marc Cooper:

First the L.A. Times helped kill off Gary Webb’s career. Then, eight years later, after Webb committed suicide this past weekend, the Times decided to give his corpse another kick or two, in a scandalous, self-serving and ultimately shameful obituary. It was the culmination of the long, inglorious saga of a major newspaper dropping the ball journalistically, and then extracting relentless revenge on an out-of-town reporter who embarrassed it.

Parry notes that instead of using Webb's death to set the record straight, "the Times acted as if there never had been an official investigation confirming many of Webb's allegations."

And—

To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-drug story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, many of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb’s career never recovered.

Of Webb's contribution, says Parry—

...it should be noted that his great gift to American history was that he – along with angry African-American citizens – forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any American administration: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.

Cooper quotes Webb, in his interview—

...for a book [Into the Buzzsaw] profiling 18 journalists who found themselves discredited or censored. Let his own words be a more fitting epitaph than the hack-job L.A. Times obituary:

"If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me . . . I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests . . .

"And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job . . . The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress."

Still, at times there are small cracks in the arrangements that have been made—as when Yes Men Hoax on BBC Reminds World of Dow Chemical's Refusal to Take Responsibility for Bhopal Disaster.