A new media outlet has spilt the beans about the conduct of the US-led war in Afghanistan. Not that it was breaking news as such; for regular news agencies and newspapers have irregularly been carrying news of indiscriminate killings, torture, drone attacks and civilian deaths ever since the US launched its military offensives in Afghanistan, Iraq and later Pakistan in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
There has, however, been a growing debate in the Western media, especially in the US and Britain, whose troops are engaged in combat abroad about the role the media plays in times of war. The debate centres on whether the Western mainstream media has got soft in recent years. Have they forgotten that they are a different discipline from the politicians, and that their duty to the people is different?
The debate goes back to the days when the George W. Bush Administration launched its 'war on terror' and any American journalist who was not for the war effort was branded a 'traitor'. The phrase 'embedded journalist' entered the lexicon of journalism and the dissemination of information was carefully choreographed by the military. It was only when the coffins started coming home and the US Government was unable to show any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq that the public wrath boomeranged on the media for dereliction of their duty. They were asked why they too lied to the public just like the politicians.
To a lesser extent, the same happened to the British media, though newspapers like The Guardian and The Independent took a decisively more unbiased line.
Media analysts have observed that it is not only the political reporter or the war correspondent who took this new line of merging his or her interests with that of the politician. It happened even to the showbiz journalist or the sports journalist. The new credo seemed to be not to lose access to people in authority and lose your contacts merely by publishing a negative story. The term 'spin-doctors' was coined for those in high places who would leak a story selectively to favoured reporters.
This has now come to be termed 'client journalism' and become a worrying trend; with more and more journalists becoming co-conspirators for business, intelligence or political groups. These journalists often use the privileged access as the representative of a reputed media organisation to not only withhold information but also pass on false information to the reader. He or she does not feel an over-riding loyalty to the readers, colleagues or even his or her newspaper. His or her duty — to report — has a different personal agenda.
It is this trend that has given rise to a new breed of writers who have no commitments to keeping regular contacts and are in the search of announcing their arrival with the break of a big story the mainstream newspapers may not touch. Others, rely on Citizen Journalism, encouraging 'whistleblowers' to expose Government misdeeds by sending their material to their outlet on the worldwide web (internet).
Thus we saw the other day, one such journalist writing in the Rolling Stone magazine quoting the US General who was in charge of operations in Afghanistan making derogatory remarks on how the war was conducted . This led to his immediate removal. Clearly, President Barack Obama took it seriously enough. This week, we find 'the website WikiLeaks.com breaking the explosive news from secret logs containing minute details of certain aspects of US military involvement in its 'war on terror'. The crimes mentioned in the logs could be better described as 'US terror on war'.
The divulgence of these logs, 92,000 of them, has severely embarrassed the US Government, and Western mainstream media that is quick to write of human rights excesses by soldiers of other countries is now crying foul asking whether WikiLeaks wants to promote terrorism by the Taliban 'terrorists' instead.
While the debate on the merits and the demerits of such exposures and questions on national security vs. public interest will continue for some time, the stark truth of the matter is that everyone knows that the military will play any 'dirty trick' to win a war; and that the 'dirty tricks' played by the US are well chronicled since World War II.
For the US to make any major reversal of its policies as a result of these revelations is simply not possible, for it is too deep in the quagmire in West Asia (Mid-East). The best its Commander-in-Chief President Obama can do in the circumstances is to find excuses to defend his troops. The dichotomy between the Pentagon's world-view and what it does, and the world-view of the State Department in the US and what it says, has put President Obama at the cross-roads.
Most Sri Lankans, having gone through the rigours and trauma of a bloody war themselves until recently, would, however, empathise to a point with the US soldiers, even though one cannot fully justify human rights violations and one can ask legitimate questions as to what on earth the US is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place. The famous oft-quoted Latin phrase 'inter arma silent legis' or 'in the clash of arms (i.e. in times of war), laws are silent' is as old as warfare and law. That is why war is so terrible.
The hemming and hawing of Ministers of the European Union to these new revelations on the conduct of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is amusing, to say the least. The silence of the UN Secretary General and all his Special Rapporteurs, and the human rights NGOs like the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International is deafening. Their voices, alas, cannot be heard - these are the same voices that whip Sri Lanka blue, paint it black and make it look like a country where the barbarians are at the gates.
But the only silver lining in the WikiLeaks exposure is that there is no effort to 'kill the messenger', however embarrassing or damaging the disclosures may have been to the US Government. Investigations there will be but no white vans are after the publishers nor are the offices of WikiLeak.com raided in the middle of the night and gutted by 'un-identified gunmen'.
Meanwhile, there is much for the US and the West to reflect upon. What gets the goat of the public in Sri Lanka is the humbug of the US and the West when it comes to preaching human rights, what are war crimes, torture and the like at a time when there was a war here. With egg all over their face now, one would hope for a re-think of their holier-than-thou attitude; or is it a case of 'do as we say not as we do'. |
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