Sunday, August 15, 2021

Look back in Anger - Afganistan November 25, 2001 to August 15, 2020

 

Ah, how it all comes back!

Long before “fake news” was a cry to rally the yahoos at presidential candidate rallies, it was a quite m.o. of the media during the Bush golden years. My blog, limited inc, which goes back twenty years, contains a treasure of fools gold culled from the asinine, warmongering, fakin’ and lyin’ press – mostly in the realm of print. I am not and never have been a listener to news on the radio or a viewer of news on tv. Eccentrically, I consider tv one of the worst platforms for news, and radio is, to me, best when playing music, second best when doing drama or standup or some funky shit, and bottomlessly bad doing news. Of course, I’ve heard that in its time, Pacifica radio was primo, but that’s hearsay.

NPR, though, I did hear enough of in the Bush golden years to realize that it viewed its job as transforming hysterical America ueber alles-ism into dulcet toned America ueber alles-ism.

So much of news is in the non-reporting. What were the headlines on November 24, 2001? For the NYT, it was a curious headline: Pakistan again said to evacuate allies of Taliban.  The story, by Dexter Filkins, begins with a graf that tells us that Pakistani airplanes are evacuating Pakistani soldiers who fought with the Taliban. Not exactly a warshaking scenario, right? What Filkins didn’t say, and what was not headlined and burned into the American psyche, with all its peppy get up ‘n kill them Taliban, is that the evacuation was not just of Pakistani soldiers.

Here's a long quote from an intelligent assessment of what happened in Kunduz:

“The request was made by Musharraf [Pakistan’s president] to Bush, but Cheney took charg- a token of who was handling Mussharraf at the time. The approval was not shared with anyone at State… until well after the event. Musharraf said Pakistan need to save its dignity and its valued people. Two planes were involved, which made several sorties a night over several nights. They took off from air bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan’s northern areas, and landed in Kunduz, where the evacuees were waiting on the tartmac. Certainly hundreds and perhaps as many as one thousand people escaped. Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commandos and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU (Islamic movement of Uzbeckistan) and Al Qaeda personnel boarded the planes. What was sold as a minor extraction turned into a major air bridge.” - from 102 Days of War by Yaniv Barzilai

Well, the selling went down all right, signed by Dexter Filkins and the NYT. The voices that told us that Afghanistan’s Taliban was not down for the count, as its central commanders were saved, weren’t just mocked – the news didn’t give enough information to make mocking possible. Still, some got it. Ted Rall, writing in the Village Voice in December, 1981, under the headline “How we lost Afghanistan” already got it right by doing basic research. But the mainstream press had its story. And, as America is always just,naturally it attracts the best and brightest as its allies. Thus, when Musharraf retired as Pakistan’s president in 2008, he was given a tongue washing by the NYT:

“A commando at heart, and a man of often impetuous decisions, Pervez Musharraf ended Pakistan’s support of the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan after 9/11 and pledged to help the United States, becoming one of Washington’s most crucial allies in the campaign against terrorism.”

This is fake news with a bullet, my friends. Even the NYT knows it, so in one of those “walks with a schizo” that tells you that the editors at the paper are nervous about leaving reality for neverneverland entirely, they quote journalist Ahmed Rashid, whose words are modified to the format. Best not shock the Americans entirely:

“Musharraf continued to provide cover to the Taliban, but still managed to convince the Americans for many years that it was not a double game,” said Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani expert on the Taliban and the author of “Descent into Chaos,” a book that details the relationship between Mr. Musharraf and Washington. “It was a remarkable feat of balancing on the tightrope.”

Definitely that. And a remarkable feat of ensuring that the leadership of the Taliban escape unharmed and have the territory and supplies to go back. But that the U.S. is that pig ignorant, that Bush was a disaster on every level, that the slimy administration lied and lied with the help of the shiny centrist press – well, that is not a story anybody wants to headline, surely.

Ah, the memories! Rarely do you catch the NYT and the pseudo-liberal media in real lies, since they hedge the falsification. Thus, fake news instead of lying liars news. But sometimes they have to admit to lies in the interest of empire. From my blog, I reach back to the interesting case of Robert Levinson, which occurred at the end of the Golden Bush years. Levinson “disappeared” in Iran in 2007. The NYT was on the case, and for seven years kept up the heat: Iran had captured an innocent American businessman! And like all evil Islamicists, they put him in a dungeon. A businessman who made a border crossing mistake!

Well, after seven years the AP reported that Levinson was no businessman, but was a CIA agent. It was rather obvious that he was one: his family was in fact suing the CIA in court. So the public editor of the NYT, which was back when they had one, went into the case and found that the NYT had not had the wool pulled over their eyes. In fact, they’d always known the man they labelled an innocent American businessman was a CIA agent. But they held back the info not because they are in the service of the American establishment’s foreign policy – no, the answer will bring tears to your eyes, its so romantic and sweet.  As explained by the editor at the time, Jill Abramson:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/public-editor/a-missing-spy-and-the-right-to-know.html?ref=thepubliceditor&_r=0,

Holding a story entirely is “a very rare thing,” she said. “The more usual situation is to withhold a level of detail, and those decisions are excruciating.”

“In this case, Ms. Abramson said, the reason for holding back the story was not because of a government request about national security, but in deference to Mr. Levinson’s family. “What caused us to hold the story was their profound worry that he would be killed.”

Of course, that profound worry didn’t prevent them from outing dear old dad themselves. At the same time, Levinson’s disappearance, as Abramson might have known, was being used as yet another reason to attack Iran. But come hell or high water, the NYT, which would never ever ever ever ever hold back information because the government told them to – after all, the whole point is to inculcate a set of responses so the government doesn’t have to do that – but only for sweet reasons of family love.

Ah, the memories. And the forgetting – the long forgetting I’ve tried to do of America in the 2000-2010 period. Alas, what you forget can kill you – or others. In droves.

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