The Pentagon Vs. Journalists

Kevin Gosztola at Shadowproof:

Pentagon War Manual Gives Military License To Target & Attack Journalists

The Pentagon has adopted a “law of war manual” [PDF], which enables commanders to treat journalists as “unprivileged belligerents.” It suggests that correspondents who report some information about combat operations may be taking “direct part in hostilities,” a disturbing argument for justifying the killing of reporters in war zones. There also is a part of the manual that encourages journalists to submit to censorship of news reports that might aid enemies.

On July 31, the Committee to Protect Journalists published an analysis on the Pentagon’s weak justifications for treating journalists as spies. The New York Times Editorial Board also condemned the guidelines in an August 10 editorial.

...

Here we go again; the Obama administration, like the GeeDubya Bush administration before it, has repeatedly treated American journalists like the enemy. Now they merely assert the right to f^<king kill the enemy. What nation did I wake up in this morning? China? Nazi Germany circa W.W. II?

Please read Mr. Gosztola's piece and then the NYT condemnatory editorial, both linked above. Then take some comfort: this is a war game the military ultimately cannot win, although they can certainly leave a lot of journalists' bodies beside the road in the process of realizing that in a genuinely free and open society,

• the press is more powerful than even the overwhelmingly powerful military, and
• between the press and the military, the press is more essential to the survival of openness and of democratic government.

Yes, you read that right: the press tops the military. Think about it for a moment. If the course of action reflected in this manual is indeed pursued, the military can successfully physically protect a society which, thanks to that very military, is neither free nor open. Ya pays yer money 'n' takes yer choice... takes yer chances, too.

The US has been through literally dozens of wars, "police actions," etc. from W.W. II to the present, and not once has the military been granted a leash on the press, let alone a whip and a chair, in wartime. In turn, the press has been largely cooperative except on those occasions in which the military has deliberately squelched things the press had every right to publish. (Obama has been as bad as Bush in trying to shut down the press.) The NYT editorial gets that part just right: the new manual is not aimed at reinforcing the unavoidably uneasy relationship between the press and the military, but rather at giving the military the authority to silence the press when it finds them inconvenient. That is not how a free society is supposed to work. I have no desire to learn military secrets or to see them exposed in the popular media, but I see no justification in America for accomplishing that protection by nailing journalists' feet to the floor. That's not merely unnecessary: it's unacceptable.

The NYT editorial asserts that "[t]he White House should call on Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to revise this section, which so clearly runs contrary to American law and principles." As I see it, that is the focus of the matter. Will the White House do that? I'm not holding my breath...

(courtesy freepress.net)

Right-Wing Ideology A ‘Shape-Shifter’ — Naomi Klein

In my ongoing (and probably never-ending) effort to ingest the complete works of Naomi Klein, more or less in reverse order (I finished reading This Changes Everything last month), I have begun the formidable task of absorbing The Shock Doctrine, Klein's work on how some governments, many corporations and some leaders both corporate and governmental leverage the public's response to major disasters... acts of terror, natural disasters such as storms or earthquakes, unconventional changes of government, etc. ... to exercise, even in a democracy, a far greater degree of executive and corporate control than previously possible. Klein's term for it is "disaster capitalism," and even a couple dozen pages into the book she makes a compelling case not only for the existence of such a phenomenon but also that the US (among many other nations) is experiencing it, from no later than 2001 forward, possibly from as early as the mid-20^th century.

What captured my attention at the moment was her observation about how the terminology changes to obscure what is really being done to us, and to the citizens of other nations (p. 14-15, first [hardcover] edition, 2007):

Naomi Klein

In the attempt to relate the history of the ideological crusade that has culminated in the radical privatization of war and disaster, one problem recurs: the ideology is a shape-shifter, forever changing its name and switching identities. [Milton] Friedman called himself a "liberal," but his U.S. followers, who associated liberals with high taxes and hippies, tended to identify as "conservatives," "classical economists," "free marketers," and, later, as believers in "Reaganomics" or "laissez-faire." In most of the world, their orthodoxy is known as "neoliberalism," but it is often called "free trade" or simply "globalization." Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think tanks with which Friedman had long associations — Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute — called itself "neoconservative," a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.

The ideology I grew up with at least through childhood and part of adolescence was unmistakably "liberal," no bloody "neo-" prepended, a direct descendant of the political and economic philosophies of FDR, JFK and (in some matters) LBJ. No shape-shifter I! May I add a cross-lingual pun to the terms listed in the previous paragraph: "laissez‑unfaire"?

Klein's book looks likely to prove a satisfying if massive read. Take a look, at least; it should be in your public library, now that it is no longer her most recently published book. Or do an excellent activist-writer a favor and buy it; we need to encourage such people to dedicate themselves to the serious issues of our day.

Have We Not ISIS, Can We Not See? Or, Here We Go Again

Once more, off to war... this time against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also ISIL). Why? Ask the President. Ask the goddam Republicans in Congress.

What kind of war? An air war, of course! no American troops on the ground! Read the disclaimer carefully; they all start off with no American ground troops but they never end up that way. Sooner or later, depending on your age, you or your sons and daughters will die in this conflict.

Who ordered a war? Did you order a war? I didn't order a war! Why does the kitchen keep serving up wars for decades on end when none of us ordered a war? Could it be Daddy Warbucks who really ordered a war, to shovel more profits to the "defense" industry?

When I was a child, I was taught in school that America had won every war it ever engaged in. Unless we're willing to redefine "win" according to some very loose criteria, it's getting harder and harder to make that argument.