chlamor
07-30-2010, 06:32 AM
NYT’s Ignores Documents Showing Large Numbers of Unreported Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan: “We Know All That.”
PostMan
http://www.news-gate.info/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/28390_WoundedAfghanChild_daweiding-flickr-300x200.jpg
Afghan man holding wounded boy
July 28, 2010
The New York Times continues to downplay the human rights abuses, amounting in some instances to war crimes, documented in classified reports that were released to them by Wikileaks. In contrast to the Guardian and Der Spiegel, the NYT’s failed to highlight the many accounts of atrocities committed by U.S. and coalition troops in the paper’s recent coverage.
The Guardian’s article on the Wikileaks’ document release begins:
A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency.
In contrast, the New York Times’ article begins by stating the release, "offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal." It is not until the tenth paragraph that it briefly refers to special ops raids that "claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment." There is no mention of the revelations of widespread civilian casualties caused by U.S. or coalition forces.
This failure has lead British journalist and Guardian editor, David Leigh, to assume that Americans are apparently less disturbed by civilian casualties in our multiplying police actions around the globe than Europeans, since our newspaper of record did not think revelations of even larger numbers of civilian casualties than previously reported was important enough to emphasize in their coverage.
In an interview on Democracy Now, he remarked on the difference between the Guardian’s and Der Spiegel’s coverage and that of the New York Times, the three publications to which Wikileaks released its trove of documents casting a harsh light on the course of the war in Afghanistan. (cont’d.)
Here is David Leigh commenting on the the Times’ decision not to emphasize the revelations of much greater than previously reported number of civilian casualties (emphasis mine):
What we do see is quite a different political perspective. From the New York Times’ point of view, addressing their own American audience, it was interesting to see that the relationship with Pakistan was a political priority … With us, we’re more concerned about the casualties, I think. We’re troubled more, a European audience, by the toll this war is taking on innocent people.
AMY GOODMAN: And this issue of more concern for casualties, civilian casualties, in Britain than in the United States? Why do you think that is?
DAVID LEIGH: … The New York Times said, I think, "We know all that. We’ve reported very extensively on that already." And they seem to feel that they’ve said and done enough about it. In Britain, I think we felt we haven’t said enough about it. We’ve concentrated so much on the deaths and woundings of the British troops, but we haven’t had a lot of information to put out about the effect on innocent civilians.
The Times uses the same pathetic excuse — "we’ve reported on this so many times already" — to defend itself against criticism that it refuses to use the word torture to describe detainee abuse by the U.S. military. (emphasis mine)
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that "I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious."
In reality, The New York Times has not over-reported the ongoing horror of civilian deaths in the military escapades it has so steadfastly championed, or, for that matter, the use of torture by US forces. It has a sordid history of hyping lies told by our government, first, in justifying the invasion of Iraq and then of repeating Pentagon lies regarding civilian casualties in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Glenn Greenwald writes about the New York Times and the rest of the American media and its slavish regurgitation of US military propaganda obscuring the slaughter of civilians in air strikes:
…no matter how many times these claims prove to be false, American media outlets not only dutifully and mindlessly print them without challenge or skepticism, but also allow these claims to dictate their headlines and the overwhelming focus of their "reporting" on the attacks…
In a devastating take-down of the Times’ refusal to report on the large number of civilian casualties in Fallujah, FAIR concludes, "the Times has signed up on the side of the Pentagon," by refusing to tell the truth about the war crimes committed there against defenseless civilians. They state, "the Times treats credible reports of hundreds of civilian casualties in Fallujah as 'unconfirmed.’"
No wonder, then, that the NYT’s has been silent about the important new study documenting the huge increase in birth defects, cancer and leukemia in Fallujah since the 2004 assault, where U.S. military spokesmen later admitted that our military had used white phosphorus, depleted uranium and other munitions against the civilian population.
The Times did not report on the study done by the distinguished medical journal, The Lancet, given wide coverage by the press in Europe and elsewhere, about the true number of people killed in the Iraq War, which the study determined was much higher than reported, around 655,000. The only mention of the study in the New York Times, was an angry op-ed, repeating dishonest claims about the study’s reliability.
As Glenn Greenwald points out, in contrast to the New York Times and the rest of the MSM, the press in the Middle East has covered civilian casualties caused by U.S. and coalition forces quite extensively. He writes:
Americans are inundated with false claims about things that never actually happened — pure myths and falsehoods — while the actual consequences of our actions (the corpses of innocent Muslim men, women and children being pulled from the rubble) are widely disseminated in the Muslim world, yet are barely mentioned by our media. And then we walk around, confounded and confused, about how there could be such a grave disparity in perception among our rational, free and well-informed selves versus those irrational, mislead, paranoid, and primitive Muslims.
The willingness of the Times to further American empire building while participating in the MSM black-out of ongoing US atrocities abroad, not only endangers our safety, it diminishes our humanity. The press of the country that once declared "all men are created equal," and claimed that they possess "certain unalienable rights," now no longer seems to believe that self-evident truth. Apparently, not all deaths are equally important — some are insignificant enough to be ignored. In their coverage of our senseless, ongoing wars, The New York Times and the rest of the media perpetuate the fiction that American lives are more important than the lives of the persons in the countries we brutally invade and occupy.
http://www.news-gate.info/fdl/nyt%E2%80%99s-ignores-documents-showing-large-numbers-of-unreported-civilian-casualties-in-afghanistan-%E2%80%9Cwe-know-all-that-%E2%80%9D/
PostMan
http://www.news-gate.info/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/28390_WoundedAfghanChild_daweiding-flickr-300x200.jpg
Afghan man holding wounded boy
July 28, 2010
The New York Times continues to downplay the human rights abuses, amounting in some instances to war crimes, documented in classified reports that were released to them by Wikileaks. In contrast to the Guardian and Der Spiegel, the NYT’s failed to highlight the many accounts of atrocities committed by U.S. and coalition troops in the paper’s recent coverage.
The Guardian’s article on the Wikileaks’ document release begins:
A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency.
In contrast, the New York Times’ article begins by stating the release, "offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal." It is not until the tenth paragraph that it briefly refers to special ops raids that "claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment." There is no mention of the revelations of widespread civilian casualties caused by U.S. or coalition forces.
This failure has lead British journalist and Guardian editor, David Leigh, to assume that Americans are apparently less disturbed by civilian casualties in our multiplying police actions around the globe than Europeans, since our newspaper of record did not think revelations of even larger numbers of civilian casualties than previously reported was important enough to emphasize in their coverage.
In an interview on Democracy Now, he remarked on the difference between the Guardian’s and Der Spiegel’s coverage and that of the New York Times, the three publications to which Wikileaks released its trove of documents casting a harsh light on the course of the war in Afghanistan. (cont’d.)
Here is David Leigh commenting on the the Times’ decision not to emphasize the revelations of much greater than previously reported number of civilian casualties (emphasis mine):
What we do see is quite a different political perspective. From the New York Times’ point of view, addressing their own American audience, it was interesting to see that the relationship with Pakistan was a political priority … With us, we’re more concerned about the casualties, I think. We’re troubled more, a European audience, by the toll this war is taking on innocent people.
AMY GOODMAN: And this issue of more concern for casualties, civilian casualties, in Britain than in the United States? Why do you think that is?
DAVID LEIGH: … The New York Times said, I think, "We know all that. We’ve reported very extensively on that already." And they seem to feel that they’ve said and done enough about it. In Britain, I think we felt we haven’t said enough about it. We’ve concentrated so much on the deaths and woundings of the British troops, but we haven’t had a lot of information to put out about the effect on innocent civilians.
The Times uses the same pathetic excuse — "we’ve reported on this so many times already" — to defend itself against criticism that it refuses to use the word torture to describe detainee abuse by the U.S. military. (emphasis mine)
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that "I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious."
In reality, The New York Times has not over-reported the ongoing horror of civilian deaths in the military escapades it has so steadfastly championed, or, for that matter, the use of torture by US forces. It has a sordid history of hyping lies told by our government, first, in justifying the invasion of Iraq and then of repeating Pentagon lies regarding civilian casualties in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Glenn Greenwald writes about the New York Times and the rest of the American media and its slavish regurgitation of US military propaganda obscuring the slaughter of civilians in air strikes:
…no matter how many times these claims prove to be false, American media outlets not only dutifully and mindlessly print them without challenge or skepticism, but also allow these claims to dictate their headlines and the overwhelming focus of their "reporting" on the attacks…
In a devastating take-down of the Times’ refusal to report on the large number of civilian casualties in Fallujah, FAIR concludes, "the Times has signed up on the side of the Pentagon," by refusing to tell the truth about the war crimes committed there against defenseless civilians. They state, "the Times treats credible reports of hundreds of civilian casualties in Fallujah as 'unconfirmed.’"
No wonder, then, that the NYT’s has been silent about the important new study documenting the huge increase in birth defects, cancer and leukemia in Fallujah since the 2004 assault, where U.S. military spokesmen later admitted that our military had used white phosphorus, depleted uranium and other munitions against the civilian population.
The Times did not report on the study done by the distinguished medical journal, The Lancet, given wide coverage by the press in Europe and elsewhere, about the true number of people killed in the Iraq War, which the study determined was much higher than reported, around 655,000. The only mention of the study in the New York Times, was an angry op-ed, repeating dishonest claims about the study’s reliability.
As Glenn Greenwald points out, in contrast to the New York Times and the rest of the MSM, the press in the Middle East has covered civilian casualties caused by U.S. and coalition forces quite extensively. He writes:
Americans are inundated with false claims about things that never actually happened — pure myths and falsehoods — while the actual consequences of our actions (the corpses of innocent Muslim men, women and children being pulled from the rubble) are widely disseminated in the Muslim world, yet are barely mentioned by our media. And then we walk around, confounded and confused, about how there could be such a grave disparity in perception among our rational, free and well-informed selves versus those irrational, mislead, paranoid, and primitive Muslims.
The willingness of the Times to further American empire building while participating in the MSM black-out of ongoing US atrocities abroad, not only endangers our safety, it diminishes our humanity. The press of the country that once declared "all men are created equal," and claimed that they possess "certain unalienable rights," now no longer seems to believe that self-evident truth. Apparently, not all deaths are equally important — some are insignificant enough to be ignored. In their coverage of our senseless, ongoing wars, The New York Times and the rest of the media perpetuate the fiction that American lives are more important than the lives of the persons in the countries we brutally invade and occupy.
http://www.news-gate.info/fdl/nyt%E2%80%99s-ignores-documents-showing-large-numbers-of-unreported-civilian-casualties-in-afghanistan-%E2%80%9Cwe-know-all-that-%E2%80%9D/