SYNDICATED COLUMN: EXCLUSIVE! Why Are 6000+ Reporters Keeping the Government’s Non-Secret?
I know a secret.
I know the identity of the man who was CIA Chief of Station in Kabul until one month ago.
The name of the top spook in Afghanistan was disseminated via email to 6,000+ reporters as part of an attendance list of senior U.S. officials participating in a meeting with President Obama during his surprise visit with U.S. troops. The government spotted the error and asked journalists not to post it.
They agreed. Still, it’s all over the Internet.
What I found via Google during a few hours of searching made me 98% sure it was him; sources in Kabul covered the two percent of doubt.
Until last week I was working this story for Pando Daily, where I was a staff writer and cartoonist. We intended to publish the name — not to endanger him (which in any case would not have been possible since Langley had yanked him off his post), but to take a stand for adversarial media.
Journalists ought to publish news wherever they find it, whatever it is, damn the consequences. Credible media organizations don’t protect government secrets. They don’t obey spy agencies. Real journalists don’t cooperate with government — any government, any time, for any reason. My editor and I believed that, by demonstrating a little fearlessness, we might inspire other media outfits to grow a pair and stop sucking up to the government.
There is no longer a “we.” Pando fired me over the weekend, along with the investigative journalist David Sirota.
Stripped of the institutional protection of a media organization willing to supply legal representation and advice, I cannot move forward with our/my original plan to reveal the name.
Nevertheless, I think it valuable to draw attention to an absurdity: thousands of journalists representing hundreds of press and broadcast media outlets, all of whom agreed to keep a secret that wasn’t much of a secret in the first place, which ceased being secret the second they received it, which remains easily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection — in order to curry favor with a government that routinely lies to reporters like them.
On May 25th President Obama paid a visit to the U.S. airbase at Bagram, north of Kabul, which includes an expanded torture facility for Muslim detainees. Sixteen “senior” U.S. officials were invited to Bagram to give Obama a briefing on the military situation. Among them was the Kabul Chief of Station (COS) — the CIA’s top man in occupied Afghanistan.
An Obama Administration PR flack mistakenly included the COS’ name on a list of meeting attendees that was emailed to more than 6,000 journalists around the globe.
From The Washington Post:
The list was circulated by e-mail to reporters who traveled to Afghanistan with Obama, and disseminated further when it was included in a “pool report,” or summary of the event meant to be shared with other news organizations, including foreign media, not taking part in the trip.
In this case, the pool report was filed by Washington Post White House bureau chief Scott Wilson. Wilson said he had copied the list from the e-mail provided by White House press officials. He sent his pool report to the press officials, who then distributed it to a list of more than 6,000 recipients.
What happened next is notable both for farcicality worthy of the movie “Brazil,” and what it reveals about the slavishly submissive posture of reporters and their editors and producers to the U.S. government in general and the CIA in particular.
Though CIA Chiefs of Station are secret agents, in practice they often maintain such a high profile — working out of the local U.S. embassy, being seen at ex-pat hangouts and coming and going from major events (c.f., meeting with the president) that their identities are widely known in their host countries. They may be “secret” — but their names aren’t. The predecessor of the Kabul COS outted in May, for example, had previously been identified on Facebook.
The Taliban and other adversaries have superb access to intelligence throughout Afghanistan, including widespread infiltration among the police and Afghan military. They are sophisticated Internet users. They can target a COS any time they feel like it. But they probably won’t. Like other guerilla armies, tracking such figures reveals years of useful information that is far more valuable than the one-off propaganda value of assassinating him.
The CIA recognized that its Station Chief’s cover had been blown and pulled him out of Kabul. According to Senator Rob Portman, he is safe.
Now things get ridiculous: the White House asked 6,000+ reporters — reporters! — to forget what they’d learned. And all 6,000+ did.
“The name and title of the station chief were removed in a later pool report that urged reporters to ‘please use this list’ of attendees at the president’s briefing instead of the previous one,” reports The New York Times.
Such is the state of America’s fierce free press: All 6,000+ reporters and their media employers adhered to the White House request to redact the outted COS’ name from their reporting.
All.
It’s not that the former Kabul Station Chief’s name isn’t out there. It’s on a bunch of websites, particularly blogs that specialize in coverage of spy agencies.
Meanwhile, corporate media has spent the last month playing online Whack-a-Mole, censoring the outted COS’ name whenever it pops up. Whenever his name appears in an aggregated piece copied from an original version of the White House email by a bot, or in a comment thread, it stays up a few days before vanishing down the memory hole.
Why do they do it? Because the Obama Administration asked nicely. And in order to avoid offending the CIA.
Even though the name is not secret. In this case, kowtowing to the government has no practical effect. The guy is no longer in Kabul. Anyway, America’s enemies knew/know all about him.
They know, as I do, about the ex-COS’ previous postings. They know, as I do, about the cars he drives, the sports he enjoys, his address history in the States and overseas, the names of his family.
Everyone leaves a digital trail — even spies. No one has privacy — not even spies.
Anyone can find this stuff.
We should be holding the Fourth Estate accountable for their failure to hold government accountable. The Kabul Chief of Station fiasco exposes the subservience that shows why corporate media can’t be trusted to challenge the powers that be.
Why isn’t one journalist out of 6,000 — unlike me, protected by lawyered-up media organizations — willing to publish a government secret that the government gave away?
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and cartoonist, is the author of “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan,” out Sept. 2. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
“Abrupty Fired” by Pando
It’s a fiasco: embarrassing for Pando Daily and for me as well. So it wasn’t my intention to write about getting “let go,” as they say, but rather to let it fade away.
But someone at Pando leaked the story.
It’s out now. Valleywag has a story about it. David Sirota, one of Pando’s most prominent reporters — perhaps the most prominent — was also fired.
Needless to say, I’m ready, willing and able to kick cartoon and editorial ass for any cool website that needs me, whether as a cartoonist, writer or editor.
A sneak peek at my next book
So the first two copies of my book, “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests,” due out September 2, 2014, have arrived in my hot little hands. Here are some images of the new book.
You can pre-order it here.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama Starts Gulf War III — And His Pet Media Is Helping
They can’t help themselves.
Whatever the situation, the reaction of U.S. policymakers is more war.
Weak economy? War will get things going. Strong economy? Military spending will cool it off.
Two wars in the Middle East (Afghanistan and Iraq) finally winding down (because we’ve lost and people are sick of them)? Time to ramp up secret arms sales to a pair of pipsqueak insurgencies (Libya and Syria).
Other superpowers love militarism. But only the United States would send troops, rather than aid workers, to people devastated by natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes…even within the United States.
As Joel Andreas put it in his seminal graphic novel-format comic, American politicians are addicted to war. And we — even those who identify with the antiwar left — are like an addict’s long-suffering spouse, trapped in a dysfunctional relationship where we enable the militarism we claim to deplore.
The ruling elite’s addiction to militarism is fully visible in President Obama’s announcement that he plans to re-invade Iraq. He’s starting small, with a few hundred military advisers and maybe (i.e., probably) airstrikes via the precise, never-fails, cares-so-much-about civilians technology of drones. Sending a few hundred military advisers was, of course, how JFK initiated America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
But we’ve already been through all that in Iraq. We invaded. We propped up a wildly unpopular pro-U.S. puppet regime. We fought. We lost — and lost big. We withdrew. Now our pet autocracy is collapsing. In Vietnam time, it’s 1975 in Iraq. This is supposed to be the part where we burn stacks of $100 bills, push Hueys into the sea, shove desperate locals off the roof of the embassy in Saigon/Baghdad and get out. Twenty or so years later, we come back and invade the right way — as obnoxious tourists and predatory sneaker company executives.
What’s up with Obama? Why is he treating Iraq like it’s Vietnam in 1962 — as though this were one of those hey, let’s just send a little help and see what happens affairs, as in there’s no way, no how “combat troops” (as opposed to non-combat troops) are going in (again), unless they do?
Even by presidential standards, Obama’s behavior is bizarre. Somewhere in the multiverse there must be one version of this story in which a half-dozen cabinet members, steeled in their resolve by the support of the Secret Service, rush into the Oval Office and bundle the President off to an institution that can give him the treatment he seems to require.
Alas, we live here.
In this weirdass country, the President’s re-invasion of Iraq is supported by 320 million enablers — not least of whom is the media.
It’s not just the sickening worship of all things soldierly, as when so-called journalists say “thank you for your service” to armchair generals who will never be on the wrong end of a shot fired in anger. The media drowns us in so much misinformation that it’s impossible for all but the most dedicated between-the-lines readers to come to an intelligent assessment of the facts.
Consider, for example, The New York Times. Given how often the paper has gotten burned by its pro-militarist establishmentarianism (supporting the failed right-wing coup attempt against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, not returning Edward Snowden’s phone call), you’d think its editors would be reluctant to support Gulf War III.
And yet.
A June 17th piece bearing the headline “Your Iraq Questions, Answered,” in which Times reporters reply to readers, is illustrative.
One reader asks: “ISIS [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Islamist insurgent militia threatening the U.S. puppet regime of Nouri al-Maliki, currently in control of half the country] seems to have legit online following. Is this reflective of support on the ground?”
Rod Nordland, Kabul bureau chief but reporting from Iraq, replies: “ISIS has a huge and very aggressive social media operation, but I don’t know how anyone could characterize that as a legitimate following. I suspect a lot of their followers, clicks and retweets are voyeuristic because the material posted is so bloody and savage, and ISIS is completely unapologetic about it. Hopefully, most of their following is aghast.”
So much for any smidge of journalistic objectivity.
Then things turn really stupid:
“Most people in the territory ISIS controls do not seem terribly supportive of them, but they hate the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government far more, and ISIS takes pains to treat the Sunnis in their dominions with consideration — at least at first. That is the central challenge that the Iraqi government faces, to convince people in ISIS-dominated areas that their government wants to include them, and has more to offer than the ISIS extremists.”
Anyone who has studied history or read Che Guevara — which you’d hope an employee of The New York Times might have done — knows that ISIS, as a guerilla army outgunned and outmanned by the central government it seeks to overthrow, would never have gotten as far as it has without substantial support among civilians.
Even more egregious than Nordland’s failure to convey this truism to Times readers is his closing combination of childlike naiveté and taking sides. Maliki has been in office for eight years. If he were interested in building a pluralistic post-sectarian political coalition, rather than ruthlessly excluding all but his own Shiites from positions of influence, he would have done so by now. Even with ISIS on the road toward Baghdad, he hasn’t shifted his Shiite-centric approach.
With the most respected news source in the United States spoon-feeding such nonsense, it’s no wonder we can’t break free of the militarist traps laid for Pentagon generals by defense contractors, for the President by his generals and for us by the President.
When’s the last time you read an uncompromising antiwar opinion on the op-ed page of a major newspaper? Have you ever seen someone completely against war interviewed on network television news — even on “liberal” MSNBC? Even the state radio for the intellectual elite, NPR, rarely grants airtime to experts who oppose militarism. I’m an addict — to news — and I can honestly say that it’s rare to see more than one antiwar talking head on TV in a year…and that’s on daytime shows with low viewership.
As long as the alternatives to war aren’t allowed a voice, our addiction to war is safe.
(Ted Rall, Staff Cartoonist and Writer for Pando Daily, is the author of the upcoming “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Drones falling out of the sky like flies
The Washington Post is reporting that US military drones have crashed more than 400 times. Yes, such a great, precise, carefully targeted technology. I’m so proud to be an American taxpayer paying to kill civilians willy-nilly with these things.
First Review of “After We Kill You”
Kirkus Reviews has issued the first official review of “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan“:
AFTER WE KILL YOU, WE WILL WELCOME YOU BACK AS HONORED GUESTS
Unembedded in Afghanistan
Author: Ted RallReview Issue Date: July 1, 2014
Online Publish Date: June 19, 2014
Publisher:Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages: 240
Price ( Hardcover ): $26.00
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-8090-2340-0
Category: NonfictionA political agenda can’t undermine the author’s credibility as an observer who gets close to the Afghan people and sees what otherwise goes unreported.
As a cartoonist, alternative-weekly correspondent, and author of previous books on American imperialism and international intervention (Silk Road to Ruin: Why Central Asia is the Next Middle East, 2014, etc.), Rall lays his cards on the table at the beginning. His subject is “the war against Afghanistan” rather than “the war in Afghanistan”—“Like all choices of language, this is a political choice.” The author is not one of the reporters with big rolls of bills and accommodations at the best hotels, subsidized by major news organizations, nor is he embedded with the soldiers, a position he finds hopelessly compromised: “The Taliban are right: American journalism has been reduced to rank propaganda.” Through cartoons, dispatches and contextual analysis, Rall shares what he has learned through two trips to an Afghanistan that Americans rarely see and comes to conclusions that invite readers to share his outrage: “We have spent $229 billion here. Meals cost less than a dollar. No Afghan should be starving—yet millions are.” He argues that America’s longest war is unwinnable, since “Afghan resistance forces live there. We don’t. Sooner or later, U.S. troops will depart. All the Afghan resistance has to do is wear us down and wait us out….All occupations ultimately fail.” Talking with Afghans and staying in their villages has allowed the author to understand their puzzlement and resentment at an occupying force with so many resources but so little expenditure in terms of infrastructure support in comparison with military spending. There’s a particularly telling photograph of a “children crossing” sign in which the caricatures are practically stick figures: “In Afghanistan, even abstract symbols are emaciated.”
Even readers who do not share Rall’s politics will find his reporting powerful and convincing.
One nit: Who doesn’t have a political agenda, especially when it comes to Afghanistan? I simply believe in wearing my agenda on my sleeve. Obviously, this is a very positive review. I’m happy and relieved.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Why So Depressed?
After a court-appointed monitor for California’s state prisons told a panel of judges that about three dozen inmates on death row are so mentally ill that they require 24-hour care, state prison officials have announced that they will build a 40-bed hospital at San Quentin prison to house them.
“This is the only place on Earth where you’d be talking about building a psychiatric hospital for condemned prisoners,” U.C. Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring told Times reporter Paige St. John. “It is a measure of American greatness and American silliness at the same time…We are curing them to make them executable.”
Until recently, states that frequently execute prisoners, like Texas and Florida, did not carry out executions on inmates with IQs under 70. The idea was that the punishment loses its meaning if victims of capital punishment are too mentally disabled to understand to them.
Take, for example, the case of Andre Thomas, a Texas schizophrenic who gouged out his right eye and then, several weeks later, stabbed his estranged wife and two young children to death, dropped their organs in his pocket and went to the police station to confess — and used his phone call to call the dead wife. (He gouged out his left eye in prison, and ate it.) He was sentenced to death — but to what end?
Recognizing the absurdity of the live-or-die cutoff, on May 26th the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the practice. “Florida seeks to execute a man because he scored a 71 instead of 70 on an IQ test,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.
States have gone to extreme lengths to make their prisoners sane enough to kill.
In 2012 Texas obtained permission from a judge to force Steven Staley, a murderer and armed robber, to be force-fed antipsychotic medications because “the State has an essential interest in ensuring that the sentence of this Court [execution] is carried out.”
Emily Bazelon described Staley’s mental state in Slate: “Doctors who have examined Staley on death row have said that he talks in a robot-like monotone yet has ‘grandiose and paranoid’ delusions, including the beliefs that he invented the first car and marketed a character from Star Trek. He has given himself black eyes and self-inflicted lacerations and has been found spreading feces and covered with urine. Medicated with the anti-psychotic drug Haldol, Staley complained of paralysis and sometimes appeared to be in a catatonic state. He has worn a bald spot on the back of his head from lying on the floor of his cell.”
An appeals court stayed the forcefeeding order in 2013.
If you think about it, this can make your brain hurt:
A guy commits a terrible crime, probably because he is mentally ill.
The state cures his mental illness, or mitigates it enough so that he qualifies for execution.
The saner man is executed for a crime he wouldn’t commit now — because he’s sane now.
Or conversely:
A guy commits a terrible crime, probably because he is mentally ill.
The state fails to cure his mental illness, or mitigate it enough so that he would qualify for execution.
The insane man, who would remain a threat to society were he to escape somehow, lives out his life — not that he’s much aware of it.
It’s not just the prisoners who are nuts.
Pando Daily: My Week in Review
Here, in reverse chronological order, is a summary of art and writing I’ve produced for Pando Daily over the last couple of weeks.
Essay: In print or on dead trees, there’s money in long-form journalism
Essay: Going after Bergdahl: Why don’t more soldiers walk away?
America’s “moderates” are wild, crazy — and more extreme than any “extremist”
This one made noise on social media: Essay: Iraq is the ultimate startup everyone knew was doomed
Sketches: Meet today’s Southland startup competitors (in cartoons)
Sketches: Bonobos CEO and co-founder Andy Dunn now on stage at Southland
Essay: The $90,000 question: Uber’s salary lie harder to kill than a garlic-immune vampire
Sketches: Ted Rall’s Southland Startup Contest Highlights
Essay: Yes, Jimmy Wales, There Is a Right To Be Forgotten’
Essay: As sinister dealers in mass death, the CIA could at least spare us its snarky tweets
Blog: Melt is a social media app I don’t hate yet
Blog: Tech companies still awful on diversity, but AirBnB and AOL less awful than Quantcast and Box
Essay: Jeff Bezos has apparently taught this old newspaper how to write Internet headlines
Blog: Disrupting Darwinism: AT&T offers $50,000 to stop cellphone users getting hit by cars
