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February
26, 2002
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
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bin Laden and Bush
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Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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The
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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February 26,
2002
American
Journal
Daniel Pearl: Should His Editors
Have Sent Him There?
By Alexander Cockburn
Daniel Pearl's dispatches reminded me somewhat
of Peter Kann's in the days when he was the Journal's most light-heartedly
stylish reporter, before assuming the imperial purple and becoming
the company's CEO. It was Kann, back in the late 1970s, who traveled
to Afghanistan, reported that the place was a dump covered with
flies and that it was hard to understand why any Great Power
would want any truck with the place.
Ironically, since his captors charged
him with being an agent of the American Empire and of Zionism,
Pearl was not afraid to file reports contradicting the claims
of the State Department or the Pentagon or even of the mad dogs
on the Journal's editorial pages whose ravings fulfill on a weekly
basis the most paranoid expectations of a Muslim fanatic. Just
about the time they were killing Pearl, had they paused to buy
a copy of the Wall Street Journal, his killers would have found
a reprint on the editorial pages of a particularly feverish article
from Commentary, in-house periodical of the American Jewish Committee,
stating flatly that to be to be opposed to Israel was to be anti-Zionist,
and to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic. It's the familiar
two-step logic of the Israeli lobby: oppose the sale of Apache
helicopters to Sharon or the bulldozing of Palestinian homes
means you are a co-conspirator in the Holocaust.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page
wrote, the day after news of Pearl's death was confirmed, that
it showed "evil" was still stalking the world, "evil"
being the current term of art for "awfulness beyond our
comprehension". Now, these editorial writers have spent
years writing urgent advisories to whatever US president happens
to be in power that the most extreme reactionary forces in Israel
must be given unconditional backing. It would take any Islamic
fanatic about fifteen minutes in a clips library to demonstrate
that if bombs are to be dropped on Palestinians, peace overtures
shunned, just settlement rejected, then the Wall Street Journal's
editorial page is on board, full throat.
Why was it left to Pearl's wife to offer
herself to the kidnapers in lieu of her husband. Why did not
the WSJ's editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, proffer himself,
or if he had protested that his credentials were not yet sufficiently
seasoned since he has only recently plumped his behind into the
editorial chair, why not bring Robert Bartley out of retirement,
send him to Karachi for discussion of the relationship of editorial
writing in the Wall Street Journal to overall moral responsibility
for US policies in the Middle East and South Asia?
So if that WSJ editorial writer who invoked
"evil" had been honest, he might have written, "it
may well be that Danny Pearl was killed because his murderers
held him responsible for positions on the Middle East conflict
and on Islam oft expressed in these editorial pages. If so, then
he died for principles that we honor and will always uphold",
or something of that sort, while simultaneously emphasizing that
reporters are not editorial writers and that Pearl bore no responsibility
for the editorials.
Might it not have occurred to Pearl's
editors, those who assigned him to South Asia, that the fact
that he was an Israeli citizen might have put him in extra peril,
given the fact that he was seeking to contact an extremely dangerous
crowd of Muslim terrorists in Karachi? . The fact of his citizenship
only emerged after his death, in a report, February 24, in the
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, by Yossi Melman:
"Professor Yehuda Pearl, father
of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, has told
Ha'aretz that he fears that making public his son's Israeli citizenship
could adversely affect investigative efforts by Pakistani police
to apprehend the killers and track down the murdered reporter's
body. In a telephone conversation from his Los Angeles residence,
Professor Pearl expressed regret and anger over the revelation
by the Israeli media of his family's 'Israeli connection.' The
U.S. media, which was aware of the information, complied with
the family's request not to make it public." Then Melman
concluded with this minor bombshell: "The American media
was asked to comply with this request after information was obtained
that confirmed reports that the 38-year-old reporter was dead."
It seems to me almost certain that those
Pakistani terrorists would have killed any reporter for a US
news organization who had the ill-fortune to seeking an interview
at that particular time. Robert Fisk, of the London Independent,
has probably written more pieces sympathetic to the Palestinian
cause than almost any other mainstream reporter. Yet that didn't
prevent him from nearly being beaten to death by Afghans in a
frontier town a few weeks ago.
On February 23, Fisk wrote: "In
Pakistan and Afghanistan, we can be seen as Kaffirs, as unbelievers.
Our faces, our hair, even our spectacles, mark us out as Westerners.
The Muslim cleric who wished to talk to me in an Afghan refugee
village outside Peshawar last October was stopped by a man who
pointed at me and asked: "Why are you taking this Kaffir
into our mosque?'' Weeks later, a crowd of Afghan refugees, grief-stricken
at the slaughter of their relatives in a US B-52 bomber air raid,
tried to kill me because they thought I was an American. .. Over
the past quarter century I have witnessed the slow, painful,
dangerous erosion of respect for our work. We used to risk our
lives in wars - we still do - but journalists were rarely deliberate
targets. We were impartial witnesses to conflict, often the only
witnesses, the first writers of history. Even the nastiest militias
understood this. "Protect him, look after him, he is a journalist,"
I recall a Palestinian guerrilla ordering his men when I entered
the burning Lebanese town of Bhamdoun in 1983."
After discussing the trend whereby journalists
clamber into uniforms (as US correspondents did in Vietnam,)
Fisk continues:
"When the Palestinians evacuated
Beirut in 1982, I noticed that several French reporters were
wearing Palestiniankuffiah scarves. Israeli reporters turned
up in occupied southern Lebanon with pistols. Then in the 1991
Gulf war, American and British television reporters started dressing
up in military costumes, appearing on screen--complete with helmets
and military camouflage fatigues--as if they were members of
the 82nd Airborne or the Hussars. One American journalist even
arrived in boots camouflaged with painted leaves although a glance
at any desert suggests that this would not have served much purpose.
In the Kurdish flight into the mountains of northern Iraq more
reporters could be found wearing Kurdish clothes. In Pakistan
and Afghanistan last year, the same phenomenon occurred, Reporters
in Peshawar could be seen wearing Pushtun hats. Why? No one could
ever supply me with an explanation. What on earth was CNN's Walter
Rodgers doing in US Marine costume at the American camp outside
Kandahar? Mercifully, someone told him to take it off after his
first broadcast. Then Geraldo Rivera of Fox News arrived in Jalalabad
with a gun. He fully intended, he said, to kill Osama bin Laden.
It was the last straw. The reporter had now become combatant.
"Perhaps we no longer care about
our profession. Maybe we're all to quick to demean our own jobs,
to sneer at each other, to adopt the ridiculous title of "hacks"
when we should regard the job as foreign correspondent as a decent,
honourable profession... Can we do better? I think so. It's not
that reporters in military costume Rodgers in his silly
Marine helmet, Rivera clowning around with a gun, or even me
in my gas cape a decade ago--helped to kill Daniel Pearl. He
was murdered by vicious men. But we are all of us--dressing up
in combatant's clothes or adopting the national dress of people--helping
to erode the shield of neutrality and decency which saved our
lives in the past. If we don't stop now, how can we protest when
next our colleagues are seized by ruthless men who claim we are
spies?"
Pearl's style was totally alien to the
bloodthirsty rantings of his editorial colleagues. He sent excellent
dispatches questioning the claims of the Clinton administration
that it had been justified in the 1998 destruction via cruise
missile of the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries plant in the
Sudan. Again, he and fellow WSJ reporter Robert Block entered
some effective reservations about allegations of Serbian genocide
in Kosovo. In fact Slobodan Milosevic might make use of them
in mounting his vigorous defense in the US-sponsored kangaroo
court in the Hague against charges of genocide. Pearl and Block
stigmatized the Serb armed forces as having done "heinous
things", while also writing that "other allegations-indiscriminate
mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums, mutilation of the dead-haven't
been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo.
Ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and
the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility.
Now, a different picture is emerging."
The killing of Pearl was just as monstrous
as the September 11 onslaughts that killed 3,000 innocent people
who bore no responsibility for the actions of their government.
But as David North, of the Trotskyist Fourth International wrote
on the World Socialist website on February 23: "On the very
day that Pearl's murder was confirmed, US Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld admitted that US troops had mistakenly killed
16 anti-Taliban Afghan fighters, but refused to apologize. It
does not require exceptional political insight to realize that
in the decision to murder Pearl, the desire for revenge was a
major subjective factor."
North then remarked that the outlook
of the Pakistani terrorists is not so different from that of
that Thomas Friedman, the repellent columnist of the New York
Times, also recently recruited as a kind o Kuralt of globalization
by PBS's Lehrer News Hour. North cited a recent Friedman column
which praised Bush's Axis of Evil speech in these terms: "Sept.
11 happened because America lost its deterrent capability. We
lost it because for 20 years we never retaliated against, or
brought to justice, those who murdered Americans ...innocent
Americans were killed and we did nothing. So our enemies took
us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened...
America's enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid a
huge price for that."
North very properly comments: "By changing only a few words,
the Pakistani terrorists could use Friedman's argument to justify
their murder of Pearl: "We have failed to retaliate against
America ... innocent Arabs, Afghans and Moslems were killed and
we did nothing ... America took us less and less seriously and
became more and more emboldened." The thought patterns of
the pompous and belligerent American columnist and the Islamic
terrorist have far more in common than either imagine. Both think
in terms of ethnic, religious and national stereotypes. Both
believe in and are mesmerized by violence."
Leave the last beautiful, true words
to Daniel Pearl's widow:
"Revenge would be easy, but it is far more valuable in my
opinion to address this problem of terrorism with enough honesty
to question our own responsibility as nations and as individuals
for the rise of terrorism. My own courage arises from two facts.
One is that throughout this ordeal I have been surrounded by
people of amazing value. This helps me trust that humanism ultimately
will prevail.
"My other hope now -- in my seventh
month of pregnancy -- is that I will be able to tell our son
that his father carried the flag to end terrorism, raising an
unprecedented demand among people from all countries not for
revenge but for the values we all share: love, compassion, friendship
and citizenship far transcending the so-called clash of civilizations."
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