© Jim Young/Reuters Hillary Clinton speaks at the Brookings Institution
As I noted on Sunday, the New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan devoted her weekly Sunday column to an excellent critique of her paper's coverage of US drone attacks. While noting that the Times has done some good work in attempting to bring transparency to the Obama administration's secret killings - in particular its May "kill list" article revealing that Obama adopted a ludicrously broad definition of "militant" that skews the "data" on civilian deaths - she then wrote:
"Since the article in May, its reporting has not aggressively challenged the administration's description of those killed as 'militants' - itself an undefined term. And it has been criticized for giving administration officials the cover of anonymity when they suggest that critics of drones are terrorist sympathizers."There are, to put it mildly, numerous reasons for serious skepticism when it comes to administration claims about its drone program and civilian deaths. For one, Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, was conclusively proven to be spouting outright lies about civilian deaths from US drones.
That the Obama administration re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants" by itself demands extreme skepticism of its claims; as the Times put it when revealing that fact: "this counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths." Independently, the fact that the administration has erected such extreme secrecy around the program - refusing to release even the most basic facts in court or elsewhere - further demands great skepticism of its assertions.
Beyond all that, a study jointly issued by NYU School of Law and Stanford Law School last month documented highly misleading public statements from administration officials about its drone attacks. And, as John Glaser reports, this morning, yet another new report has just been issued, this one from Columbia Law School, documenting that civilian deaths are "significantly and consistently underestimated" by pro-drone think thanks such as the New America Foundation (the NYU/Stanford study also harshly impugned the "data" of NAF and its chief administration spokesman, Peter Bergen).
All of this makes Sullivan's call for journalistic challenge to administration drone claims not just unremarkable but self-evident. But her desire for adversarial skepticism very much upset perpetual government defender Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution. At his aptly named blog "Lawfare" - the term of derision used by war cheerleaders to mock the notion that "law" has any role to play in restraining their endless wars and the leaders who fight them - Wittes, in his headline, proclaimed Sullivan's article to be "Very Strange". After quoting her criticism that the paper has insufficiently challenged administration claims on drone deaths, he wrote:
"I find this a bewildering argument. The Times is not an advocacy organization whose job it is to 'aggressively challenge' the government's claims of the rates of civilian casualties - except to the extent that those claims are untrue."It's amazing that someone not only believes - but is willing to say publicly - that it is not the job of a newspaper to "aggressively challenge" government claims on a highly controversial assassination program that is shrouded in secrecy and uncertainty. That, more than anything else, is the core purpose of journalism (at least in theory): the reason "freedom of the press" is protected in the First Amendment. And it's precisely the media's systematic failure - more accurately: its unwillingness - to engage in this function that has produced the last decade's most destructive outcomes.
Wittes' caveat that newspapers should "aggressively challenge" government claims only when "those claims are untrue" is circular and nonsensical. The only way to find out whether government claims are untrue is by aggressively challenging them. A failure to do so ensures that even the most dubious and unproven of government assertions go unchecked. Indeed, Wittes himself has previously argued that secrecy surrounding the drone program is excessive.
More to the point, the presumption Wittes advocates is exactly backward: government claims are not entitled to a presumption of truth by media outlets unless and until they are proven false. The opposite is true: they ought to be treated with extreme skepticism by media outlets unless and until they are proven true. That is what "adversarial journalism" means.
The very idea that government assertions are entitled to a presumption of truth even when they are shrouded in secrecy, subject to no accountability, and unaccompanied by proof, is the mindset of a servile government propagandist. It's astonishing that, even after what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War - when media outlets placed themselves in the supine posture exemplified by Wittes - that anyone is willing to stand up in public and advocate this model of government-subservient "journalism".
Then again, there should be nothing surprising about any of this given that both Brookings and Wittes are classic examples of that sprawling strain of Washington think tank culture that exist for little reason other than to serve and justify government power. They are pure expressions of the courtier Beltway mentality that demands that everyone else be as reverent of royal court prerogatives as they are.
Brookings, of course, was one of the leaders in persuading Americans, especially many American liberals, to support the attack on and eight-year occupation of Iraq, and it remains vocally in the lead in the fear-mongering campaign against Iran. Its national security "experts" have been lavishly funded by billionaire mogul Haim Saban, who has described himself as a "total hawk" and said: I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel."
Wittes is not only a reflexive defender of the use of US military force, including drones, but recently supplied one of the creeper and more revealing episodes when he gathered with a former Bush Homeland Security official and their children to simulate "drone warfare" for fun, all while NPR giggled, watched and reported:
"It started as trash talk between two contributors to a national security blog. They decided to host a drone smackdown to see if one guy's machine could take down another. . . .This is what people do who spend their lives cheering for American military force and violence and killing but refuse to get anywhere near the fighting they adore: they play-act as tough-guy warriors, having some nice Sunday fun playing with weapons that routinely kill innocent people, including children, as they provide the intellectual justification and apologia from a safe distance. (After describing all of the fun drone festivities, NPR justified itself by adding on as a cursory afterthought: "To a lot of people, drones are no laughing matter. U.S. machines equipped with deadly missiles have killed al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan and Yemen. They've also killed some innocent civilians").
"The first contestant was a drone with interlocking black loops to protect the rotors, shaped like the burners on your stove top. The machine, nicknamed Stux2bu, belonged to [Ben] Wittes, co-founder of Lawfare, the blog that sponsored the contest. . . . .
"They pointed out the name of their drone derived from the word Stuxnet, the infamous real-world computer virus discovered in June 2010 that targeted Iran's nuclear enrichment efforts."
Although it may seem repellent, the view that media outlets should dutifully amplify rather than "aggressively challenge" government claims is quite pervasive, especially among establishment journalists themselves. Indeed, that is more or less what it means to be an "establishment journalist", and it is this mindset, more than any other, that explains how the attack on Iraq was able to be launched based on a mountain of falsehoods.
In 2004, Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote: "the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job." In a 2004 Guardian Op-Ed on the role played by the western media in enabling that attack, David Edwards and David Cromwell traced the last century's structural history of journalism in order to argue that mindlessly conveying government claims is no longer an abandonment of the purpose of modern journalism but rather a core fulfillment of it.
Edwards and Cromwell quoted ITV News political editor, Nick Robinson - responding to criticisms of his pre-war reporting - this way: "It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking . . . That is all someone in my sort of job can do." Countless American journalists, including the most influential ones, have expressed similar sentiments.
Those who believe that media institutions should serve as an adversarial check on government power will find Sullivan's column utterly uncontroversial and obvious. About Wittes attack on Sullivan, the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said this morning to Lawfare: "Now you are parodying yourselves."
But for those who devote themselves to serving, venerating and justifying the acts of those in power - like the Brooking Institutions' Wittes - Sullivan's view is "very strange" indeed, even offensive. To them, the very idea that government claims should be "aggressively challenged" is virtually blasphemous, a total contradiction of the goals to which they are devoted.As Kade Crockford put it today: "'aggressively challenging' the government on its claims has a way of helping the facts come out." That's precisely why Wittes and friends find it so distasteful.
The drone program is popular in part because US media outlets parrot US governments assertions and thus reflexively claim that the victims are "militants" - even though they have no idea who was actually killed, even though the term itself is wildly propagandistic, even though the Obama administration refuses to disclose basic evidence, and even though there is ample evidence proving how unreliable those claims are. Only by having media outlets refrain from "aggressively challenging" government claims can those claims, and thus support for drone attacks, be sustained. That's why Sullivan's call - made in the pages of the New York Times itself - is so threatening to some.
There really is no point in having media outlets that do anything other than "aggressively challenge" the claims of those in power. Actually, there is a point in having that: it allows government assertions to be glorified as true even when there is no evidence that they are. That is why so many power-serving Washington mavens are so eager to defend that model and demand adherence to it. And their success in that mission is why so many destructive government falsehoods are able to flourish without real scrutiny.
The "drone war" is secret because it constitutes a war crime. Crime has to be committed in secret, because if you did it in public you would be seen as a criminal and arrested.
Perhaps Wittes would find the phrase "war crime" an oxymoron. But for him to defend such a position, he would have to assert that war itself is a crime.
Rather, Brookings "experts" and their ilk seem to come down more on the side of "all is fair in ... war." It should be noted that this sentiment is attributed to a contemporary of Shakespeare and was doubtless written to make a dramatic point, not necessarily a legal one.
That Wittes feigns no apparent knowledge of the actual purpose of journalism belies either his ignorance or his arrogance. I would guess the latter.
It is, I hope, a final bluster of an "elite" system now doomed. Do they really think they have won? God help us if they have!