White People Don't Riot: A Manual of Style for Ambitious Young Journalists

Last week, two motorcycle gangs clashed at a restaurant in Waco, TX. They fought with fists, chains, knives and guns. Nine of them were killed, 18 were injured and 170 were arrested.

What is the proper terminology to use when referring to this incident in the corporate media? The New York Times referred to it variously as a “confrontation,” “fight,” “shootout,” “chaos,” and “problems.” To this, CNN added “melee,” “ruckus,” “fracas,” “brawl,” and “brouhaha.” Under no circumstances, however, is it to be referred to as a “riot,” since this term is reserved for the actions of people of color.

How are the participants in this incident to be called? As Charles Blow pointed out, the Times referred to them as “biker clubs” and “outlaw motorcycle gangs,” terms that have positive, even romantic, connotations to some Americans. However, they are not to be referred to as “thugs,” since this term refers to young black men demonstrating against police brutality. Furthermore, it would be ridiculous to assume that biker gangs are representative of white culture generally, or to speculate that their behavior was influenced by heavy metal music. It is equally inappropriate to question whether their fathers were present during their upbringing.

A similar principle applies to the use of the word “terrorist.” Terrorists are Muslims who plot or engage in violent acts against non-combatants. It follows then that white people engaged in similar actions are, by definition, not terrorists. In fact, when white people do these things, one may question whether they are newsworthy at all. Here is a useful case in point.

© Doggart for Congress

Robert Doggart, an ordained Christian minister and former Congressional candidate from Signal Mountain, TN was recently convicted of plotting—on tape and on the internet—to attack the residents of Islamberg, a small, rural Muslim community near Hancock, NY. To implement his plan, Doggart recruited followers and “battle tested” his M4 rifle. His statements, recorded by an informant, included the following:

Those guys [have] to be killed. Their buildings need to be burnt down. If we can get in there and do that not losing a man, even the better.

Yet Doggart was allowed to plead guilty only to interstate communication of threats, is out on bail, and faces a maximum penalty of five years in jail.

You've probably never heard of this case, and rightly so. Attempting to report such a crime in the corporate media would likely end the career of an aspiring young journalist. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting did a search of the Nexis data base looking for media coverage of the Doggart case. It was reported in local Tennessee news media, and by a handful of mostly small newspapers in the US, UK and Pakistan. It was not covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, NPR or any of the national television networks.

Imagine the saturation coverage the corporate media would have given this incident had it been a Muslim group plotting a similar attack on a small Christian community.

Where did Doggart get the idea to attack Hancock, NY?

As the Daily Beast pointed out, one reason for the lack of coverage is that the FBI chose not to put out a press release about Doggart's arrest. This stands in sharp contrast to the extensive publicity given to cases of entrapment in which an undercover agent is able to persuade some hapless Muslim to agree to participate in an FBI-planned terrorist plot. When deciding what is important, journalists are well-advised to follow the lead of the FBI.

Aspiring reporters may question whether there are any exceptions to the “white people don't riot” rule. There are. The term “riot” can sometimes refer to the behavior of groups of predominantly white people, provided they are demonstrating in favor of a liberal cause. Occupy Wall Street is a recent example. A helpful cue for predicting a "riot" is when the police show up in "riot gear."

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Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

A Stroll Down Memory Lane

Pre-Crime

Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was going to be a strong suit of mine.

                                                                                         Barack Obama

We are living in the era of pre-crime. Pre-crime refers to targeting people for arrest and possibly execution on the suspicion that they might, at some possible time in the future, commit a crime. An example is our infamous policy of signature strikes, in which young Muslim men are assassinated by American drones not on the basis of their past behavior, but because they fit a demographic profile, or signature, that the government predicts may result in their participating in future acts of terrorism. Since we have enraged virtually the entire Muslim world by our killing of innocent people, this criterion can be used to justify the execution of virtually any young man from the Middle East.

Two stories broke yesterday. One is a piece of investigative journalism that reveals the carelessness with which drones strikes are carried out. The second is a news item that was planted by the government in an attempt to justify another assassination of an American citizen suspected of terrorist involvement.

Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, along with filmmaker Laura Poitras, have started a new website, The Intercept, which will be devoted to publishing investigative articles about national security policy. Glenn Greenwald is the journalist in whom National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden confided and who is gradually publishing articles based on the files he leaked. Jeremy Scahill is the author of the book and film Dirty Wars, a history of the US “war on terror” since 9/11.

Yesterday, Scahill and Greenwald published their first investigative article, “The NSA's Role in the US Assassination Program.” It describes how NSA metadata are used to locate and kill potential terrorists. President Obama has claimed that an individual is targeted for assassination only if there is a "near certainty" that they have the right person and no innocent people will be killed. This is, of course, absurd given what we know about the number of innocent people who have died. The article puts this claim in a new perspective by explaining why the targeted assassination program is so error prone.

NSA metadata enters the system in two ways. First of all, it targets people for assassination based on the whether a cell phone they are suspected of owning has been in frequent contact with the cell phones of other suspected terrorists. This is the same way US metadata are being used to identify Americans suspected of terrorist involvement. Secondly, once suspects are placed on a kill list, drones are equipped with transceivers which attract signals from their cell phone or its SIM card, which are used to locate the phone and kill anyone who may be nearby. Since it is phones that are being targeted rather than people, there is no guarantee that the target still possesses the phone, resulting in a high likelihood of “collateral damage,” the killing of innocent people. In fact, since the targets are aware of how their phones are used to locate them, they will use multiple phones and give away used phones in order to maximize confusion.

Scahill and Greenwald report that much of their information came from an anonymous informant who previously worked as a drone operator, and that the accuracy of some of his claims was verified with the help of the Snowden data base.

The Scahill-Greenwald article adds a new dimension to the NSA's activities, since it was previously assumed to be only involved in domestic surveillance. According to the Washington Post, the NSA's motto for this relatively new program is “We track 'em, you whack 'em.”

Below is yesterday's interview of Scahill and Greenwald by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. I have placed a link to The Intercept in the right-hand column of the blog.

Yesterday's other breaking news actually made its way into the corporate media. According to an Associated Press report, US officials are debating whether to assassinate another American citizen living abroad who is said to be involved in some unspecified way with al-Qaida. (The New York Times reports that he is living in Pakistan.) The US previously deliberately assassinated Anwar Awlaki, a Muslim clergyman living in Yemen. Three other Americans have been killed, but the government is apparently claiming they were collateral damage.

A good portion of Dirty Wars is devoted to a detailed history of the Awlaki case. There is a good deal of evidence that Awlaki was radicalized by US government harrassment. There was internal debate within the government over whether his assassination was justified, since he was primarily a propagandist known for his sermons denouncing US foreign policy and calling for jihad. There is no evidence that he was involved in direct planning of terrorist attacks. In other words, he appears to have been assassinated for what used to be known as exercising his First Amendment right of free speech.

The AP report suggests that, as in the Awlaki case, American officials were divided over whether there is sufficient evidence to justify killing this new target, but they have decided to go ahead with the assassination. The motive for leaking this story to the press is unclear. It's possible that they hoped to elicit comments from the Right such as those by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:

Individuals who would have been previously removed from the battlefield by US counterterrorism operations for attacking or plotting to attack against US interests remain free because of self-imposed red tape. [These rules] are endangering the lives of Americans at home and our military overseas in a way that is frustrating to our allies and frustrating to those of us who engage in oversight of our classified activities.

Not surprisingly, Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union had a different take on the matter:

Outside of armed conflict zones, the Constitution and international law prohibit the use of lethal force unless it is used as a last resort against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of grave harm. Even in the context of an armed conflict against an armed group, the government may use lethal force only against individuals who are directly participating in hostilities against the United States.

Needless to say, our government's widespread pursuit of pre-criminals falls far short of meeting this standard.

I have two other comments about pre-crime.

• The current policy of stopping and frisking African-Americans and other young people of color can be seen as a variation of the pre-crime model. The goal appears to be to jail as many young men as possible, even if only for minor offenses. Once they have a criminal record, they are usually unable to obtain a job that pays a living wage. They are likely to become either recidivists, permanent residents of the US prison system, or poor people, unable to vote.

• As Jeremy Scahill notes, our previous history tells us that methods and technologies previously used against enemies abroad are eventually brought home and used against the domestic population. For a variety of reasons, it's likely that most Americans will suffer a steep and permanent decline in their standard of living in the next couple of decades, which will lead to considerable unrest. The NSA infrastructure will be available for use against political dissidents (“pre-criminals”) in this country.

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Catch-22

Why This? Why Now?

At the top of the front page of this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is a reprint of a Washington Post article by Craig Whitlock (“Missteps by U. S. in Africa revealed”) reporting that in 2003, the U. S. had an opportunity to assassinate Mokhtar Belmokhtar, alleged mastermind of last month's attack on an Algerian natural gas facility in which 38 hostages were killed. The attack was “vetoed” by the U. S. ambassador to Mali, Vicki Huddleston.

“I'm really frustrated right now because I think we blew it,” said retired Air Force General Charles Wald, exhibiting perfect 20/20 hindsight. If you read far enough into the article, you find that Ms. Huddleston gave three reasons for blocking the proposed air strike: (1) Belmokhtar had never attacked Americans; (2) ten years ago, he was considered only a “minor figure;” and (3) it was “unclear” whether he was actually in the proposed target area. I'm not a terrorism expert, but those sound like three very good reasons not to bomb somebody. The article, however, presents this as a huge blunder by Ms. Huddleston.

The first thing to note about this article is that it is unlikely to have resulted from an independent investigation by the Post reporter. It is there because somebody leaked it. The Pentagon is proposing to expand American strikes into Africa by unmanned aircraft (drones). The article implies that our only mistake is not doing targeted assassinations of Africans soon enough. This story is a public relations triumph for the Pentagon under any circumstances, but it appears in the context of several recent developments related to American military policy.

• A memo giving a “legal defense” of the American policy of assassinating U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism has been leaked to NBC reporter Michael Isikoff. The defense can be charitably described as inadequate, and raises more questions than it answers. Here is Rachel Maddow interviewing Isikoff. It is well worth watching.
  
  
  
  
• President Obama has claimed the right to unilaterally engage in acts of cyberwarfare (computer sabotage) against American enemies, including the right to carry out preemptive cyberstrikes.
  
  
• The Senate will hold a confirmation hearing Thursday on the President's appointment of John Brennan to head the CIA. Brennan is strongly identified with support for drone strikes against enemy targets. He will almost certainly be questioned about the policy—but probably not very aggressively.

This Just In . . .

The British government has just awarded a $31 million contract to Prox Dynamics of Norway for development of a nano-drone, to be used for surveillance in Afghanistan. The miniature helicopter is four inches long and weighs 16 grams. It is part of a trend toward ever smaller drones.

Use of a nano-drone for surveillance is outrageous enough, but equipping them with powerful nano-bombs is said to be only months away. How long will it be possible to keep these devices out of the hands of private citizens? Will a future U. S. president be assassinated by a nano-drone?

Zero Thirty Darkness

I've seen Zero Dark Thirty. The first and last 45 minutes were intensely involving for all the wrong reasons. As for the rest, it was actually fairly dull, showing that real police work doesn't necessarily translate into an interesting movie.

I come down squarely on the side of those who believe the film takes the position that torture was effective in gathering the information that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, and the screenwriter, David Boal, argue that the film does not support or endorse torture. They claim to be merely presenting the facts, and that it is up to viewers to draw their own conclusions. Boal says, “It doesn't surprise me that people bring political agendas to the film but it doesn't actually have a political agenda. It's agenda is to tell these people's stories in the most honest and factual way we know how . . .”

First of all, the film doesn't report everything that happened during those ten years. It is necessarily selective. One of the things it completely leaves out is any debate over either the efficacy or morality of torture. (You could argue that an even more significant omission is it failure to present events that occurred before 9/11, which would reveal bin Laden and al-Qaeda to be “blowback” from previous CIA activities in Afghanistan.)

But let's stick to what is in the film. As filmmakers, Bigelow and Boal should be well aware of the basic elements of the cinematic code. A film is a visual argument. Montage—that part of the film that takes place during editing, the arrangement of successive shots—can suggest relationships between people and events that may or may not exist in reality. As Russian director and teacher Lev Kulashov pointed out, A + B can equal something entirely different. Kulashov showed viewers an identical shot of a man's face and asked them to describe his emotional state. When intercut with shots of a plate of soup, a woman in a coffin and a little girl playing, his emotion was described as hunger, sadness and joy, respectively.

Zero Dark Thirty contains a scene in which a prisoner, Ammar, is having lunch with two CIA agents, Dan and Maya. He gives them valuable information that eventually leads to bin Laden's courier and bin Laden himself. Prior to this, we saw scenes in which Ammar was brutally tortured—waterboarded, hung by ropes, and locked in a small box—by Dan as Maya watched. It is virtually automatic that an experienced media consumer will to draw a causal connection between the two scenes—that Ammar gave them the information because of the torture, and to avoid further torture. In fact, Dan reminds him that he could be tortured again. (Boal claims that a scene of Maya in her research room shows that all the important information was already available from detainees who were not tortured, but I would suggest that this scene is not very salient and its meaning is unclear.)

Another Russian filmmaker, V. I. Pudovkin, said montage is “the method which controls the 'psychological guidance' of the spectator.” It is possible, if you have the necessary information, to counterargue with this natural tendency—to tell yourself that the filmmaker's implication that torture is effective is false. However, it is unrealistic to expect very many viewers to draw this conclusion. The film could impact public opinion, as some would argue the fictional television drama already 24 has. Although the reasons are unclear, the percentage of Americans who say torture is rarely or never justified has shown a small but steady decline, from 53% in 2004 to 42% in 2011.

Filmmaker Michael Moore defends Zero Dark Thirty, arguing that the average viewer “will be repulsed” by the torture scenes: “After watching the brutal behavior of CIA agents for the first 45 minutes of the film, I can't believe anyone of conscience would conclude that this is morally NOT right.” But Moore is ignoring the possibility that we have already been desensitized to torture scenes by years of fictional programming. He is also making the egocentric assumption that other people will have the same reaction to the film as he did. But the torture scenes are embedded in a narrative in which the torturers are the heroes and their goal of killing bin Laden is one of which the audience strongly approves. To make things worse, the heroine, Maya, who the film suggests may have been responsible for the death of one prisoner, is is ignored and patronized by her CIA colleagues, making her ultimate triumph a victory for feminism as well.

Below is a discussion of some of these issues that appeared on the PBS News Hour.  

There has been little comment about last 45 minutes in which the Navy Seals fly by helicopter to bin Laden's compound, break into the buildings, and kill bin Laden and several other people. Here again, the problem is omission. No one raises the question of whether the U.S. government had the right to execute bin Laden and several others suspected of lesser crimes without due process of law. Zero Dark Thirty implies, however, that the alternative of bring him back alive for trial was never seriously considered.

Glenn Greenwald maintains that Zero Dark Thirty is U. S. government propaganda directed at American citizens. Peter Maass refers to it as “a troubling new frontier of government-embedded film-making.” Unlike other branches of government, the CIA is forbidden to distribute propaganda in this country. However, this is nothing new for the Defense Department. As David Robb argues in Operation Hollwood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, film studios usually require military cooperation in order to produce technically realistic-looking war movies. In exchange, the Pentagon is given script approval—veto power over points it disagrees with and the right to insert its own ideology into the films. The predictable result is films that arguably distort history, i.e., Blackhawk Down, or function as recruiting videos for the services, i.e., Top Gun.

But Zero Dark Thirty takes this process a step further. The opening title claims that the film is “based on first hand accounts of actual events.” That is, they received privileged access to classified information of the type that the CIA usually prosecutes people for revealing. But the CIA's claim that torture was instrumental in the hunt for bin Laden is at odds with conclusions drawn by other branches of government, such as the FBI and Congress, and may conflict with the views of a minority of CIA employees. We are getting not the government's point-of-view, but that of a subgroup within the government. The effect is to empower the most brutal and reactionary ideology within the “defense” establishment—the Cheney-Rumsfeld plan for fighting terrorism. The film propagandizes the American people in an effort to get them to accept war crimes by their own government.