Category Archives: New York Times

Did the New York Times cover up the cause of Anthony Shadid’s death?

When heroes die, the institutions they represent sometimes feel driven to turn an avoidable tragedy into a final act of heroism. That’s what happened to Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Did the New York Times journalist, Anthony Shadid, suffer the same fate?

Shortly after his death in Syria, the Times’ executive editor, Jill Abramson sent an email to the paper’s newsroom saying:

Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces.

The circumstances of Shadid’s death are now being questioned by his cousin, Ed Shadid, a physician in Oklahoma City.

In a speech delivered to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s convention on Saturday, Ed said that in his final phone conversation with his wife, Nada Bakri, Anthony said: “if anything happens to me I want the world to know the New York Times killed me.”

Ed said that in spite of being recently advised that it was unsafe for Anthony and his companion to enter Syria, he was nevertheless sent on the assignment.

John Cook reports:

According to Ed, a Times security consultant reviewed a plan to infiltrate Anthony and his photographer Tyler Hicks across the border between Turkey and Syria in December 2011, but rejected it as too dangerous. “There was a security advisor who said, in no uncertain terms, ‘You are forbidden to enter Syria,'” Ed says. “So Anthony wrote an email to Tyler Hicks and says, ‘Hey man, it’s off. We’re not allowed to go.'” But roughly six weeks later, Ed says, Anthony’s editors reversed course and asked him to go anyway.

“The situation was worse on the ground than it had been in December,” Ed says. “The only thing that had changed was that CNN had gained access to [the rebel stronghold] Idlid. My understanding is that CNN gaining access bothered his editors.”

Anthony further expressed his concern about the challenges involved in getting into Syria but didn’t get support from his editors.

He asked for camping equipment to bring along on the journey through the mountainous border, Ed says, but his editors said no. When the 43-year-old reporter complained about the physical demands of the journey, Ed says, Times foreign editor Joseph Kahn responded, “It sounds like you’re going to get a lot of exercise on this assignment.”

Was what Kahn described as a lot of exercise, enough physical stress to give Shadid a heart attack?

The New York Times claims that Shadid died from an asthma attack but his cousin now asks why the autopsy results — which should have revealed elevated antibody and allergen levels — have never been released.

The emphasis on asthma comes from Hicks, who wrote that Anthony sustained increasingly severe allergic reactions to the horses they travelled with. But according to Ed, Anthony took his young daughter to horseriding lessons once a week without any adverse reactions. “They put out a story that Anthony Shadid died from asthma — according to who? Dr. Tyler Hicks?” Ed says Hicks’ account of Anthony’s final moments — he “stopped and leaned against a large boulder [and] collapsed onto the ground…already unconscious and [not] breathing” — is much more consistent with a heart attack than an asthma attack. He also says an autopsy was performed on Anthony’s body in Turkey, and wonders why he hasn’t seen the results. “We don’t have them,” he says.

New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy told Politico:

With respect, we disagree with Ed Shadid’s version of the facts. The Times does not pressure reporters to go into combat zones. Anthony was an experienced, motivated correspondent. He decided whether, how and when to enter Syria, and was told by his editors, including on the day of the trip, that he should not make the trip if he felt it was not advisable for any reason.

When asked repeatedly by Gawker whether a security consultant had rejected the Syria trip in December, Murphy declined to comment. Kahn didn’t return a phone call.

The New York Times has yet to cover this story on its own pages or offer an explanation about why Shadid’s autopsy results have never been shown to his family.

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New York Times accused of killing Anthony Shadid

Politico reports: Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter who died in Syria this year, had heated arguments with his editors just prior to his final trip into the country, a cousin of Shadid’s says, and told his wife that were he to die the New York Times would be to blame.

“The phone call the night before he left [Turkey for Syria], there was screaming and slamming on the phone in discussions with editors,” Ed Shadid, a cousin to the late reporter, said last night at the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee’s convention in Washington, D.C.

“It was at this time that he called his wife and gave his last haunting directive that if anything happens to me I want the world to know the New York Times killed me,” Ed Shadid said. [Continue reading…]

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Why is the NYT enabling a U.S. govt smear campaign against reporters exposing the drone wars?

John Hanrahan at NiemanWatchdog writes: A human rights lawyer and a group of investigative journalists who have exposed the extensive civilian casualties from CIA drone strikes in Pakistan are being smeared by anonymous U.S. government officials, who have even accused them of being sympathetic to al Qaeda.

Two of the anonymous accusations came in articles in The New York Times, despite the paper’s own rules against personal attacks by unnamed sources.

Pakistani human rights attorney Shahzad Akbar and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) say the campaign is intended to deter mainstream news organizations from reporting that the White House is lying about how many innocent people are being killed by the drone strikes. [Continue reading…]

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Thomas Friedman, all-American pundit: A review of Belen Fernandez, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work

By John Robertson, Professor of History, Central Michigan University

With the publication of Belen Fernandez’s The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, Verso Press inaugurated a new series, called Counterblasts, with the intention of reviving a tradition of polemic that it traces back to the fiery political pamphleteers of the 17th century. Obviously, then, Ms. Fernandez was not supposed to produce an impartial, dispassionate analysis of the collected works of the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning chief foreign affairs correspondent. Rather, she has come up with something that the American public in general (and students of US foreign affairs and public diplomacy especially) undoubtedly need more: a systematic, detailed take-down of the neo-liberal bias, myopic US-Israeli chauvinism, and general intellectual shallowness that almost scream to be noticed in Friedman’s writing. Yet, lamentably, Friedman has been enshrined as a sort of American “Everyman’s” go-to guy for understanding what’s happening in the world, what needs fixing, and how “we” can and should do it.

Fernandez’s take-down is based on an almost exhaustive winnowing of Friedman’s NY Times columns as well as his several best-selling books (starting with his 1989 From Beirut to Jerusalem). She structures her presentation within three principal yet frequently overlapping categories of Friedman’s supposed expertise: America, the Arab/Muslim World, and the Special Relationship (i.e., the US-Israel relationship). Throughout, she bolsters her arguments with detail so profuse and tightly packed that a brief review such as this can hardly do it justice. But from that skein of specifics Fernandez is able to draw out specific tropes, methods, and assumptions that are woven throughout Friedman’s work:

  • “USA! USA!” : The United States is almost always (and, in Friedman’s view, most obviously) the right model for the rest of the world, and “we” have the right and obligation to fix the world – the Middle East, in particular – whenever and wherever we choose. Just as obviously the right model is Neoliberal free-market capitalism and globalization; just ask the countless factory owners and local elites who tend to be Friedman’s go-to people for sourcing his analyses.
  • “They” can “Suck.On.This”: Especially when it comes to the Middle East, Friedman’s prescriptions (all too often posited as what “we should do”) frequently combine the aforementioned assumption that America has the right “to do” something with the swaggering machismo that comes with knowing that “we” have the biggest and shiniest tools in the military box. Teddy Roosevelt spoke of America walking softly and carrying a big stick. Thomas Friedman, on the other hand, has been too eager for “us” to whomp someone (usually a Middle Eastern someone) with that stick, and in the aftermath trumpet “Suck on This” (as he did so infamously during an interview with Charlie Rose after the US invasion of Iraq).
  • When push comes to shove, Israel good, Arabs bad. Surely, Friedman has written critically of Israeli policies at times, and he deserves credit for doing so. But over the long haul, he has maintained an almost bred-from-birth conviction in the rightness of Zionism and Israel that he seems completely unable to examine or question. Individual Israelis whom he singles out tend to be heroes, in his estimation. Unfortunately, Friedman consistently couples that with a tendency (which Fernandez is able to spotlight consistently in Friedman’s work) toward a homogenizing reductionism and essentializing of Muslims, Arabs, and “their” culture that would make Bernard Lewis or Fouad Ajami proud. Nor does Friedman’s work tend to demonstrate much breadth or real depth in his understanding of Middle Eastern history. That’s surprising – and disappointing – in the work of someone who undertook Middle East studies at both Brandeis and Oxford. It’s also why the vast majority of mainstream scholars of modern Middle Eastern history cite his work only as a target for criticism.
  • Collateral damage. Friedman’s work all too often reflects his seeming refusal to recognize – or inability to empathize with – the suffering and human toll taken by US and Israeli military action. In Friedman’s world view, death and destruction (unless it happens to Americans or Israelis) is all collateral damage for the greater good. This stands in stark contrast to the work of other journalists (such as Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, Robert Fisk, and Nir Rosen, all of whom Fernandez recognizes) whose work reflects not only their long experience “on the ground” in the Middle East, but also their much greater capacity to bring basic humanity to bear in their commentary and analyses.

Ironically, among the foremost in this regard was Friedman’s late colleague at the New York Times, Anthony Shadid. (One wonders if they had much contact with each other; it surely doesn’t show in Friedman’s work.) Shadid possessed a remarkable ability to connect with people on the ground, and seemingly in their souls, and then to share those encounters in lyrical, moving prose. Fernandez’s prose, though surely not as lyrical as Shadid’s, is in its own way very moving. It is more precise and intense – and often searingly sarcastic. It is also suffused with impassioned conviction that sometimes bleeds into anger and even ad hominem put-downs that, one might argue, detract from the incisiveness of her analysis.

Nonetheless, what Belen Fernandez makes plain as she scalpels into Friedman’s opus is that his position atop the pyramid of the American foreign-affairs commentariate rests more on attitude than on intellect. Moreover – and much more troubling – it is symptomatic of biases that widely infect the American mainstream media’s coverage of the US’s actions, policies, and attitudes toward the rest of the world in general, and the Middle East in particular.

Fernandez’s book deserves to be read widely and discussed in depth. After doing so, one may be much less prepared to say the same for the work of Thomas Friedman.

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All the lies fit to print

Clay Shirky writes: Thursday, Arthur Brisbane, the public editor of the New York Times, went to his readers with a question:

“I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

Brisbane (who, as public editor, speaks only for himself, not the Times) referred to two recent stories: the claim that Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial reporting form when he left out key information, and Mitt Romney’s assertion that President Obama gives speeches “apologising” for America. Brisbane asked whether news reporters should have the freedom to investigate and respond to those comments.

The reaction from readers was swift, voluminous, negative and incredulous.

“Is this a joke? THIS IS YOUR JOB.”

“If the purpose of the NYT is to be an inoffensive container for ad copy, then by all means continue to do nothing more than paraphrase those press releases.”

“I hope you can help me, Mr Brisbane, because I’m an editor, currently unemployed: is fecklessness now a job requirement?”

Brisbane had clearly not been expecting this excoriating and one-sided a reaction. Brisbane has since tried to clarify his views twice. The first was on the media blog JimRomenesko.com:

“What I was trying to ask was whether reporters should always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing. I was hoping for diverse and even nuanced responses to what I think is a difficult question.”

The second was on the NY Times site:

“My inquiry related to whether the Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut ‘facts’ that are offered by newsmakers when those ‘facts’ are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.”

This only added fuel to the fire.

Now, it’s worth noting that Brisbane’s question makes perfect sense, considered from the newsroom’s perspective. Romney’s claim that Obama makes speeches “apologising” for America isn’t readily amenable to fact-checking. Instead, Romney relied on what are sometimes called “weasel words”, in which an allegation is alluded to, without being made head-on. (Romney, for instance, never quotes any of the president’s speeches when making this assertion.) For Brisbane, the open question was whether a hard news reporter should be calling out those kinds of statements, or should simply quote the source accurately.

This is what was so extraordinary about his original question: he is evidently so steeped in newsroom culture that he does not understand – literally, does not understand, as we know from his subsequent clarifications – that this is not a hard question at all, considered from the readers’ perspective. Readers do not care about the epistemological differences between lies and weasel words; we want newspapers to limit the ability of politicians to make dubious assertions without penalty. Judging from the reactions to his post, most of us never understood that this wasn’t the newspapers’ self-conceived mission in the first place.

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The parasites in the belly of the beast of American capitalism

Robert Scheer writes: It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration, according to a New York Times editorial; “Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the federal budget and all foreign aid and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

That last item, along with the decade-old racist comments in the newsletters Paul published, is certainly worthy of criticism. But not as an alternative to seriously engaging the substance of Paul’s current campaign—his devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.

Paul is being denigrated as a presidential contender even though on the vital issues of the economy, war and peace, and civil liberties, he has made the most sense of the Republican candidates. And by what standard of logic is it “claptrap” for Paul to attempt to hold the Fed accountable for its destructive policies? That’s the giveaway reference to the raw nerve that his favorable prospects in the Iowa caucuses have exposed. Too much anti-Wall Street populism in the heartland can be a truly scary thing to the intellectual parasites residing in the belly of the beast that controls American capitalism.

It is hypocritical that Paul is now depicted as the archenemy of non-white minorities when it was his nemesis, the Federal Reserve, that enabled the banking swindle that wiped out 53 percent of the median wealth of African-Americans and 66 percent for Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.

Why does the newspaper of the Establishment feel the need to knock down the Paul campaign?

Up until recently, the mainstream media treated Paul as the invisible candidate — a man supposedly so marginal that “serious” pundits could ignore him. But his growing popularity means he can no longer be dismissed and thus the Times editorial writers feel driven to try and swat this persistent irritant.

Even so, given that the Times will undoubtedly endorse Obama and given that the odds are at this point stacked quite heavily in the incumbent’s favor, why the need to attack Paul?

Because the New York Times thinks it is entitled not only to endorse its favored presidential candidate but also choose his opponent and that most likely would be Mitt Romney.

In a contest between Obama and Romney, the president can cast his opponent as the representative of Wall Street and present himself as a man of the people. And the newspaper that represents the status quo can disingenuously pose as an agent of change.

Paul has the power to upset that scenario and turn this into an election about issues instead of the usual beauty contest. The candidate who we are repeatedly told can’t be taken seriously threatens those whose vested interests are served by the trivialization of the electoral process.

This isn’t an endorsement for Ron Paul — simply a statement of what should be obvious: he has a positive role to play in 2012.

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New York Times implies anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic

Rutenberg

When Jim Rutenberg and Serge Kovaleski refer to “books like The Invention of the Jewish People and March of the Titans: A History of the White Race,” should we assume that these are just ignorant journalists making a grossly inappropriate association, or are they purposefully trying to mislead their readers?

In their New York Times hatchet job on Ron Paul we are told that “white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy have not exactly been warmly welcomed.”

White supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists? In the minds of these reporters, anyone who promotes the idea that Israel should become a state of all its citizens — Jews, Arabs and others — apparently looks like a political bedfellow of the likes of Stormfront or the Militia of Montana.

Kovaleski

The article reports on the appeal that Ron Paul has among some white supremacists and survivalists and yet says nothing on the anti-Zionist element. Rutenberg and Kovaleski were apparently content to merely insinuate that there is a link between criticism of Israel and racism.

The closest they come to providing evidence of such an association is the article’s opening sentence where the two books are linked.

March of the Titans: A History of the White Race is by Arthur Kemp, an advocate of white separatism and foreign affairs spokesman for the ultra-right and racist British National Party. Kemp is a Holocaust denier and was “linked to the murderer of the South African Communist party and ANC leader Chris Hani in 1993,” The Guardian reported in 2009.

The Invention of the Jewish People, first published in Hebrew in Israel with the title, Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi?, is by Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University. The book was a bestseller in Israel for several months before being translated into French and English.

Tony Judt wrote: “Shlomo Sand has written a remarkable book. In cool, scholarly prose he has, quite simply, normalized Jewish history. In place of the implausible myth of a unique nation with a special destiny – expelled, isolated, wandering and finally restored to its rightful home – he has reconstructed the history of the Jews and convincingly reintegrated that history into the general story of humankind. The self-serving and mostly imaginary Jewish past that has done so much to provoke conflict in the present is revealed, like the past of so many other nations, to be largely an invention. Anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Middle East should read this book.”

Of course Rutenberg and Kovaleski would be unlikely to attach much weight to Judt’s assessment of Sand’s book — Judt was after all one of those dubious anti-Zionists.

The irony about linking anti-Zionists with anti-Semities is that Zionism is a philosophy that has obvious appeal to anti-Semites. Encourage all the Jews to move to Israel — why would the anti-Semites object?

Indeed, the emerging political convergence on the extreme right has been between anti-Semites and Zionists and that’s an unholy alliance that probably finds Ron Paul the least appealing among the GOP presidential hopefuls.

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Obama administration considers censoring Twitter

With millions of websites & newspapers disseminating their propaganda, the #US couldn't endure to hear the real truth. What a travesty!

Tweet from Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen, Somalia's Islamist insurgent movement.

How dangerous can 140 characters be?

Apparently if those 140 characters are being fired onto the web through the Twitter account of al Shabib, Somalia’s militant jihadist movement, then the national security of the United States could be in jeopardy.

The New York Times reports:

American officials say they may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close the Shabab’s account, @HSMPress, which had more than 4,600 followers as of Monday night.

The most immediate effect of the Obama administration’s threat appears to have been that @HSMPress (which has so far only made 114 tweets) has subsequently gained hundreds of new followers.

Is Twitter itself about to take a stand in defense of freedom of speech?

A company spokesman, Matt Graves, said [to a Times reporter] on Monday, “I appreciate your offer for Twitter to provide perspective for the story, but we are declining comment on this one.”

Last Wednesday, the New York Times reported from Nairobi in Kenya:

Somalia’s powerful Islamist insurgents, the Shabab, best known for chopping off hands and starving their own people, just opened a Twitter account, and in the past week they have been writing up a storm, bragging about recent attacks and taunting their enemies.

“Your inexperienced boys flee from confrontation & flinch in the face of death,” the Shabab wrote in a post to the Kenyan Army.

It is an odd, almost downright hypocritical move from brutal militants in one of world’s most broken-down countries, where millions of people do not have enough food to eat, let alone a laptop. The Shabab have vehemently rejected Western practices — banning Western music, movies, haircuts and bras, and even blocking Western aid for famine victims, all in the name of their brand of puritanical Islam — only to embrace Twitter, one of the icons of a modern, networked society.

On top of that, the Shabab clearly have their hands full right now, facing thousands of African Union peacekeepers, the Kenyan military, the Ethiopian military and the occasional American drone strike all at the same time.

But terrorism experts say that Twitter terrorism is part of an emerging trend and that several other Qaeda franchises — a few years ago the Shabab pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda — are increasingly using social media like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. The Qaeda branch in Yemen has proved especially adept at disseminating teachings and commentary through several different social media networks.

“Social media has helped terrorist groups recruit individuals, fund-raise and distribute propaganda more efficiently than they have in the past,” said Seth G. Jones, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation.

The Times reporter, Jeffrey Gettleman, sounds quite indignant that al Shabib should have the audacity to be using Twitter, so he can hardly have been surprised that his article prompted this exchange between @HSMPress and one of their followers:

@gettleman Where do people get their facts nowadays? I've been to Nairobi & I couldn't see what was going on in Somalia from the hotel roof
An elaborate, sentimental piece of writing accentuating the oft-repeated canard that passes for #Journalism these days!
Assumptions, rumors, opinion, first-hand witnessed events - journalists are writing as if they had front row seats on everything @HSMPress
@habtom Indeed many Journalists appear self-opinionated and act as opinion-manipulators.Their pinion, in my opinion, needs a second opinion!
Somalia is not the only front in the new war on Twitter.

The Washington Post reports on Twitter battles in Afghanistan:

U.S. military officials assigned to the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, as the coalition is known, took the first shot in what has become a near-daily battle waged with broadsides that must be kept to 140 characters.

“How much longer will terrorists put innocent Afghans in harm’s way,” @isafmedia demanded of the Taliban spokesman on the second day of the embassy attack, in which militants lobbed rockets and sprayed gunfire from a building under construction.

“I dnt knw. U hve bn pttng thm n ‘harm’s way’ fr da pst 10 yrs. Razd whole vilgs n mrkts. n stil hv da nrve to tlk bout ‘harm’s way,’ ” responded Abdulqahar Balkhi, one of the Taliban’s Twitter warriors, who uses the handle ­@ABalkhi….

U.S. military officials say the dramatic assault on the diplomatic compound convinced them that they needed to seize the propaganda initiative — and that in Twitter, they had a tool at hand that could shape the narrative much more quickly than news releases or responses to individual queries.

“That was the day ISAF turned the page from being passive,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Badura, a military spokesman, explaining how @isafmedia evolved after the attack. “It used to be a tool to regurgitate the company line. We’ve turned it into what it can be.”

So how’s @isafmedia exploiting the power of Twitter? With tweets like this?

A we’re-winning-the-war tweet like this might sound good inside ISAF’s Twitter Command Center, but I don’t think it’s going to impress anyone else.

The problem the Obama administration is up against is not the threat posed by its adversaries on Twitter; it is that its own ventures into social media are predictably inept. Official tweets lack wit and tend to sound like the clumsy propaganda. But when losing an argument, the solution is not to look for ways to gag your opponent — that’s how dictators operate.

The Pentagon prides itself on its smart bombs. Can’t it come up with a few smart tweets?

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Israel — still an embarrassment to its friends

Joe Klein writes: My friend and colleague, the great war photographer Lynsey Addario, has been through a lot this year — kidnapped by the Libyans, difficult assignments in Afghanistan, Somalia and Gaza, and a much less taxing three weeks hanging with me on my annual road trip, all while pregnant… and now she has been utterly humiliated at a checkpoint by the Israeli army while on assignment for the New York Times.

Lynsey asked not to pass through the x-ray machine at the border, since she is nearly 8 months pregnant — and obviously so — but she was forced to pass through the machine 3 times while being verbally abused and then strip-searched for good measure.

This is completely outrageous, of course. It is another indication that Israel has been brutalized by its occupation of Arab territories since 1967. For those of us who feel strongly about the need for Israel to exist–especially those of us who love the place, warts and all–this incident is yet another reason to fear for Israel’s future.

There’s something not quite right about Klein’s phrasing: “Israel has been brutalized by its occupation of Arab territories since 1967.”

Israel, the eternal victim, is now the victim of its own behavior.

I doubt that this was Klein’s intention. To be more blunt and precise he should have said, Israel has brutalized itself by its occupation of Arab territories since 1967.

What Klein and Israel’s other friends still refuse to acknowledge is that this institutional brutality did not begin in 1967 but was already fully evident in 1948. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was no accident.

Meanwhile, the New York Times itself apparently regards Addario’s treatment by Israeli soldiers as an issue more appropriately dealt with through written correspondence with Israeli officials than by giving it the weight of a front page news item (or even any page in print), nor deeming it worthy of editorial comment. (This has been its only coverage so far.)

Is this out of deference to the Palestinians? An implicit acknowledgment that the occasional affronts that foreign journalists suffer at the hands of Israelis are everyday occurrences for the population that for 44 years has lived under Israeli military rule?

Unlikely. Much more likely is that the New York Times wants to minimize the embarrassment of its friends and staff reporters in Israel.

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Israeli soldiers treat New York Times photographer like a Palestinian

After Lynsey Addario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer working for the New York Times, was forced by Israeli soldiers to pass through an X-ray machine three times in spite of her protests that it might harm her unborn child, Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner expresses shock:

The Times remains shocked at the treatment Lynsey Addario received and shocked at how long the investigation has taken since our complaint was lodged a month ago. The careless and mocking way in which she was handled should not be considered accepted security procedure.

What Bronner and everyone else knows is that there is nothing shocking about the brutal treatment Addario received — unless the shock is not at the treatment itself but the fact that it was dished out to a New York Times journalist. But Bronner makes it clear that that is not what he means. He goes on to say: “We welcome the announcement by the Defense Ministry of plans to hone that procedure.”

This is how the Times reported what happened:

In a letter to the Israeli ministry last month, Ms. Addario wrote that soldiers at the Erez Crossing in northern Gaza had treated her with “blatant cruelty” when she arrived there on Oct. 24 and asked not to have to pass through the X-ray machine. Because she was seven months pregnant at the time, she had been advised by her obstetrician to avoid exposure to radiation.

Ms. Addario had phoned an official at the border crossing in advance to make her request and had been assured that there would be no problem. When she arrived at checkpoint, however, she was told that if she did not pass through the X-ray machine, she would have to remove all of her clothes down to her underwear for a search. To “avoid the humiliation,” Ms. Addario decided to pass through the X-ray machine.

“As I passed through,” she wrote, “a handful of soldiers watched from the glass above the machine smiling triumphantly. They proceeded to say there was a ‘problem’ with the initial scan, and made me pass through two additional times as they watched and laughed from above. I expressed each time that I was concerned with the effect the radiation would have on my pregnancy.”

She added:

After three passes through the X-ray, I was then brought into a room where a woman proceeded to ask me to take off my pants. She lifted up my shirt to expose my entire body while I stood in my underwear. I asked if this was necessary after the three machine checks, and she told me it was “procedure” — which I am quite sure it is not. They were unprofessional for soldiers from any nation.

In an e-mail to The Times on Monday, the Defense Ministry wrote that, after “a deep and serious investigation into the matter of Ms. Addario’s security check last month,” it had concluded that her request to avoid the machine had not been passed on to the security officials at the checkpoint because of “faulty coordination between the parties involved.”

So it was a bureaucratic mix-up. It was a “mishap in coordination,” the ministry says and now it has “sharpened” its inspection procedures. And at the same time, a vacuous apology was offered, the Jerusalem Post reports:

“The Defense Ministry employs strict security measures in order to prevent attacks by terrorist groups. We expect people to understand this. Nevertheless, we have apologized to the New York Times and the photographer,” the statement read.

But maybe the apology should not have come from the Israeli Defense Ministry and instead should be made by the New York Times to its readers.

Why go in search of a worthless apology instead of using the incident as an opportunity to provide a graphic, first-hand report on the way Israeli soldiers abuse the civilians under their control? The Times reporters seem to have been busier writing letters to Israeli officials than doing their own jobs: reporting.

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NYT bureau chief to appear on panel for Islamophobic organization’s film

Eli Clifton reports: The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Ethan Bronner, has stirred up controversy over recent speaking engagements. But an announcement on the 92nd St. Y’s website shows that Bronner is now scheduled to appear on a panel hosted by the Clarion Fund, an Islamophobic organization, to discuss the “threat of a nuclear Iran.”

The invitation, as it appears on the Clarion Fund’s website, reads:

On Monday, November 7, 2011, at 7:30 PM, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, NY will host a panel discussion about the threat of a nuclear Iran, interspersed with clips from the award-winning documentary Iranium. The panel will be moderated by the film’s director, Alex Traiman, and will be simultaneously broadcasted in over 20 communities throughout the U.S. (details below).

Panelists include:

John R. Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem Bureau Chief, The New York Times
Nazie Eftekhari, Director, Iran Democratic Union
Richard Green, Executive Director, Clarion Fund
Richard Perle, former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Bush administration

Click HERE for details and to order tickets.

Bronner and the 92nd Street Y are free to associate themselves with whatever organizations they choose. But the fact that the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief is lending his name to a Clarion Fund event, and the promotion of a film which advocates for military action against Iran, raises further questions about Bronner’s growing record of engaging in activities which could produce the appearance of a conflict of interest or undermine the impartiality of his reporting.

The Clarion Fund, which was profiled in the Center for American Progress’ Islamophobia report, “Fear, Inc.,” distributed the inflammatory anti-Muslim documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against The West to 28 million swing state voters before the 2008 presidential election.

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Ethan Bronner and the art of owning up without paying a price

The newspaper that wasn’t willing to fire Judith Miller — even though she played a key role in propagating bogus information that led to the war in Iraq — can hardly be expected to give harsh treatment to Ethan Bronner, its Jerusalem bureau chief, just because of a few pesky conflicts of interest.

But then again, I imagine Bronner got blindsided when he saw the letters about him that just appeared in the paper (reprinted below).

Direct communication is not the forte of the New York Times, so I guess it’s possible that both the paper and its much rebuked reporter could still attempt to weather this storm.

Keep in mind that in these readers’ comments, criticism is being leveled just as much at the public editor as it is at Bronner. As two experts on the subject point out, Arthur Brisbane needs a lesson on how to identify conflicts of interest.

The fact that the public editor engages in a mea culpe of kinds by allowing readers to educate him about how he needs to do his own job, suggests that in a circuitous way both Brisbane and Bronner may be attempting to perform a ritual of accountability in the form through which accountability has in recent years become stripped of meaning: the art of owning up without paying any price.

Conflicts and Appearances
By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE

Re “Tangled Relationships in Jerusalem” (Sept. 25):

“Conflict of interest” is not the issue at stake here. The basic question is: How can your readers take anything that Ethan Bronner writes on the Middle East seriously, given his associations with a right-wing Israeli public relations firm and his son’s service in the Israel Defense Forces?

I, for one, will automatically assume a bias, conscious or unconscious, in his articles, and discount them accordingly.

FRANK RETTENBERG
San Rafael, Calif.

•

Reporters should not have a business relationship with any third party that could figure, directly or indirectly, in their reporting. This is a simple, clear standard, and Mr. Bronner violated it. Every time such relationships are rationalized, the credibility of the reporter and the newspaper suffers.

BRAD SWANSON
Vienna, Va.

•

It’s obviously past time for Mr. Bronner’s reassignment. The only thing keeping him there — I hope — is management’s stubborn disinclination to be seen to be reacting to public pressure.

Oversights, misreading of guidelines, appearances of conflicts of interest, etc. At this point, The Times itself, not just Mr. Bronner, has a credibility problem.

MARTIN DALY
Wappingers Falls, N.Y.

•

When I consider the balanced and informative articles from Mr. Bronner and the rest of the Jerusalem bureau, I have to wonder at the constant targeting of them by the right, the left, the Jews, the Palestinians, and, it seems, everyone else. The reporting from that quarter is superb and more than the equal of the best that The New York Times has to offer. Let’s give this one a rest.

ALAN POSNER
East Lansing, Mich.

•

Your distinction between an actual conflict of interest and the appearance of a conflict is wrong. The appearance is the actual conflict.

Compare judges. If a judge previously received a free vacation from a litigant, we say she has an actual conflict that undermines public trust in her ruling, not the appearance of one. If the trip does in fact influence the judge’s ruling, it’s no longer a conflict, but a crime.

So with journalists. If the public reasonably believes that a reporter’s independence is compromised by a personal interest, he has an actual conflict. If the reporter in fact changes a story because of his personal interest, it’s no longer a conflict, but a breach of trust.

STEPHEN GILLERS
Manhattan

The writer teaches legal ethics at New York University School of Law.

•

Your otherwise thoughtful column perpetuates the confused and mischievous distinction between the appearance of a conflict of interest and an actual conflict. You give aid and comfort to those like Mr. Bronner who try to defend themselves against the charge of a conflict of interest by claiming that they are not actually influenced by the financial gain. That is beside the point.

The purpose of conflict-of-interest rules is precisely to avoid an inquiry into the motives of individual reporters (and other professionals). The rules are meant to maintain the trust of readers, who are not in a position to investigate the motives of reporters.

The rules in effect tell reporters to avoid circumstances that we know from experience create a substantial risk that professional judgment may be unduly influenced by improper considerations like financial gain. It is about the circumstances, not about the individual. To say that a reporter has violated the rule is not to say anything about his actual motives. It is to say that he has failed to respect the reasonable expectations of his readers and the public. That is a serious offense, but it is not the same offense as biased reporting.

When a reporter’s judgment is actually distorted by gifts, payments, promise of speaking engagements and the like, the violation is no longer simply a conflict of interests but emphatically the victory of the wrong interest.

DENNIS F. THOMPSON
Cambridge, Mass.

The writer teaches government at Harvard.

•

However ideologically biased he may be vis-à-vis Ethan Bronner, Max Blumenthal has performed a public service by exposing Mr. Bronner’s questionable business relationship with the pro-Zionist Lone Star Communications.

Having already ignited an ethical firestorm over his son’s enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces, Mr. Bronner behaved maladroitly in accepting paid speaking engagements with a public relations firm whose head agitates against the Palestinian cause.

The dispossession of the Palestinian people cannot be divorced from the security of the Jewish state. But neither issue will receive a fair hearing in the paper of record if an avoidable perception of impropriety hardens into a bedrock belief.

ROSARIO A. IACONIS
Mineola, N.Y.

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The New York Times’ conflicts of interest

The New York Times has a “public editor” — currently Arthur S. Brisbane — who is described as “the readers’ representative.” His job is to respond to complaints and comments from the public and to monitor the paper’s journalistic practices.

Readers’ representative? Is he selected by the paper’s readers? No. Is he employed by the paper? Yes. So, let’s be clear then: the public editor represents the newspaper — not its readers.

The existence of a public editor is an exercise in self-policing and like most other forms of self-policing, the function of the public editor is to create the appearance of institutional integrity in order to improve the newspaper’s image. In other words, the public editor is regarded as having commercial value as a component in the New York Times’ brand management.

Having said that, I have no doubt Brisbane is a decent guy but he’s as tough as the newspaper wants him to be — which isn’t much.

Of his predecessor, Byron Calame, Jack Shafer at Slate once wrote:

Calame possesses a mandate that would allow him to boil the journalistic ocean if he so desired, but he usually elects to merely warm a teapot for his readers and pour out thimblefuls of weak chamomile.

If the executives at the New York Times actually wanted a public editor intent on boiling the journalistic ocean, they wouldn’t appoint characters like Calame and Brisbane.

Which brings us to today’s column in which Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, gets a slap on the wrists for his own conflicts of interest. Bronner comes out badly not because he gets rough treatment from Brisbane but because he’s a serial offender who’s working on borrowed time.

What both Brisbane and Bronner supposedly don’t understand is that there is no real difference between an “actual” conflict of interest and the appearance of a conflict of interest — conflicts of interest are by their very nature all about appearance.

Here’s the column:

CONFLICT of interest, or the appearance of it, is poisonous in journalism. This is particularly so when it relates to reporting on Israel and the Palestinians, a subject that draws a steady stream of skepticism about New York Times coverage from readers and partisans on all sides.

So it is troubling that, just before the Palestinians brought their case for statehood to the United Nations last week, an American writing for The Columbia Journalism Review accused The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief of appearing to give favorable treatment to his speaking agent’s other clients.

The article by Max Blumenthal on Sept. 14 set off a chain of follow-up pieces by others and by Mr. Blumenthal himself, hammering away at the allegation that Ethan Bronner, the Times bureau chief, was compromised by his relationship with a public relations firm that arranged paid speaking engagements for him.

A close examination of the facts leads me to conclude that the case for an actual conflict of interest is slender. But the appearance of a conflict clearly exists, and that is a problem in and of itself. The Times’s “Ethical Journalism” (PDF) guidelines state that staff members “may not accept anything that could be construed as a payment for favorable coverage or as an inducement to alter or forgo unfavorable coverage.”

Mr. Bronner has now severed his ties to the public relations firm. “In my view, it is all about appearances,” he told me. “I am not denying they matter. There is nothing of an actual conflict.”

The matter revolves around Mr. Bronner’s engagement, beginning in 2009, with Lone Star Communications, a firm operated by Charley Levine, a prominent public relations executive in Israel. Mr. Levine added a speakers bureau to his firm that year, and Mr. Bronner signed on to be represented by him.

The core of Mr. Blumenthal’s critique was that Mr. Levine is a figure of the Israeli right, who counsels prominent Zionists and serves as a reservist in the Israeli Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit. Mr. Blumenthal, a writing fellow at the Nation Institute, said it was improper of Mr. Bronner to have a business relationship with Mr. Levine while covering stories that Lone Star promoted.

In The Columbia Journalism Review article, Mr. Blumenthal never explicitly accused Mr. Bronner of providing favorable coverage as a quid pro quo for receiving speaking engagements from Mr. Levine’s firm. He objected that Mr. Bronner “takes paid speaking engagements from a firm that also pitches him stories.” Elsewhere in the article, he wrote: “On the one hand, it might be hard to cover Israel without stumbling across Lone Star’s many clients. On the other, however, that might be a good reason not to have a business relationship with the firm.”

In an interview, Mr. Blumenthal said, “It is a question of appearances and his ability to be taken seriously because he says he is an objective reporter.”

Mr. Blumenthal’s article enumerated six cases in which Mr. Bronner had written about, or at least mentioned, Lone Star clients. Mr. Bronner walked me through those cases. Of the six, he said, only one involved an instance in which he had received a pitch from Lone Star and, on that basis, decided to write about it. The article concerned the Jewish National Fund and was about a fortified play area for children in the Israeli border town of Sderot.

In the rest of the cases except one, he said, he did not receive a pitch from Lone Star and was unaware that the story involved a Lone Star client. The exception involved Danny Danon, a conservative member of the Israeli Parliament. Mr. Bronner said he has covered Mr. Danon but the coverage decisions were influenced not by Lone Star but by the prominence of Mr. Danon, who is deputy speaker of Parliament and chairman of World Likud.

The Blumenthal piece creates the implication of a corrupt arrangement. In my view, the arrangement was ill-advised and created an appearance that could be construed by some as corrupt, but was not in actuality.

I consulted two journalism ethics experts on this, who reached the same conclusion. Stephen Ward, who heads the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said: “Has there been an actual conflict of interest? I don’t find it in this case. What about the perception of a conflict? That is where I think some might see the relationship between him and the public relations firm and have some reason to doubt.”

Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, said Mr. Bronner’s decision to sever ties to Lone Star was the “appropriate” action.

For his part, Mr. Bronner is kicking himself over the episode. “I allowed myself to be in a situation where someone could come after me this way,” he said. “I feel pretty bad about it.”

He said Lone Star had booked only a half dozen speeches for him, out of 75 that he had given since he became bureau chief three and a half years ago. He speaks only to nonprofit organizations and, in Israel, typically receives fees of less than a thousand dollars, he added.

He did not tell his editors about his relationship with Lone Star, he told me, because he did not think joining a speakers bureau had to be disclosed. Indeed, the ethics guidelines do not specifically require it. But the guidelines do require Times staff members to provide an accounting to editors if they earn more than $5,000 of speaking fees in a year. Mr. Bronner acknowledged he was “delinquent” in failing to do this, saying he believed he was obligated to account only for any single speech for which he was paid more than $5,000, another requirement of the policy.

(Mr. Bronner faced criticism previously when his son joined the Israeli military, prompting The Times’s public editor then, Clark Hoyt, to recommend that Mr. Bronner be reassigned because of the appearance of a conflict. Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time, supported Mr. Bronner, and he remained in his post. Mr. Bronner’s son has since completed his service and returned to the United States.)

Mr. Bronner was pointed in arguing that the attack by Mr. Blumenthal, who writes critically of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, was ideologically motivated and designed to discredit Mr. Bronner.

Mr. Blumenthal’s piece may well have been influenced by an animus toward Mr. Bronner’s reportage for The Times. But the fact remains that the Lone Star engagement created a problem and stands as a reminder that The Times must be fastidiously independent, in reality and in appearance, or face attacks like this one.

Here’s the irony: if the New York Times was to have a public editor worthy of the name, he’d do nothing to insinuate that criticism of the kind delivered by Max Blumenthal was in some way unfair, but on contrary acknowledge the fact that the most rigorous criticism of the paper’s practice of journalism is most often going to come from those who take the deepest interest in the issues — not those who practice the mealy-mouthed art of balanced impartiality.

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The mainstreaming of Walt and Mearsheimer

Glenn Greenwald writes:

There were numerous reasons that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer were accused in prominent venues of all sorts of crimes — including anti-Semitism — when they published The Israel Lobby, but the most common cause was the book’s central theme: that there is a very powerful lobby in the U.S. which is principally devoted to Israel and causes U.S. political leaders to act to advance the interests of this foreign nation over their own.  In The New York Times today, Tom Friedman — long one of Israel’s most stalwart American supporters — wrote the following as the second paragraph of his column, warning that the U.S. was about to incur massive damage in order to block Palestinian statehood:

This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.

Isn’t that exactly Walt and Mearseimer’s main theme, what caused them to be tarred and feathered with the most noxious accusations possible?  Indeed it is; here’s how the academic duo, in The Israel Lobby, described the crux of their argument as first set forth in an article on which the book was based:

After describing the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel, we argued that his support could not be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds  Instead, it was due largely to the political power of the Israel lobby, a loose coalition of individuals and groups that seeks to influence American foreign policy in ways that will benefit Israel . . . We suggested that these policies were not in the U.S. national interest and were in fact harmful to Israel’s long-term interests as well.

Is that not exactly the point which The New York Times‘ most “pro-Israel” columnist himself just voiced today?

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On Israel, the New York Times is perniciously one-sided

At Adbusters, Matthew A. Taylor writes:

Although the spin is hard to detect for the average reader, New York Times reportage of Middle East affairs is perniciously biased. In their seminal book, Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East, Princeton professor Richard Falk and media critic Howard Friel argue that “the Times regularly ignores or under-reports a multitude of critical legal issues pertaining to Israel’s policies, including Israel’s expropriation and settlement of Palestinian land, the two-tier system of laws based on national origin evocative of South Africa’s apartheid regime, the demolition of Palestinian homes, and use of deadly force against Palestinians.” In other words, what is not said by the New York Times may be even more important than what is said.

In June of 2010, a year and a half after the Israeli military launched what a United Nations investigation described as “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” the New York Times sent a photographer into Gaza to capture a slice of daily life. Ethan Bronner, the Times Jerusalem bureau chief, wrote the narrative for the photo essay entitled “Gaza, Through Fresh Eyes,” in which he gushes about “jazzy cellphone stores and pricey restaurants … endless beaches with children whooping it up … the staggering quality of the very ordinary.” Seemingly lifted from an apolitical travel magazine, Bronner’s article merely alludes to families who have been “traumatized,” and omits any mention of the UN allegations of recently committed Israeli war crimes and human rights violations. Other than an oblique reference to “destroyed buildings” and “rubble,” Bronner’s travelogue also elides the vast civilian infrastructure Israel destroyed during the onslaught, including chicken farms, a flour mill, a sewage treatment plant, a UN school, vast tracts of civilian housing, government buildings, a prison, police stations, TV stations, newspapers … and between 600 and 700 factories, workshops and businesses. The impression left by Bronner? Gaza is an OK place; nothing remarkable to see there, least of all evidence of Israeli war crimes; move along, move along.

(H/t Mondoweiss)

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When Truman opened the nuclear era — with a lie

Greg Mitchell writes:

On August 6, 1945, President Harry S. Truman faced the task of telling the press, and the world, that America’s crusade against fascism had culminated in exploding a revolutionary new weapon of extraordinary destructive power over a Japanese city.

It was vital that this event be understood as a reflection of dominant military power and at the same time consistent with American decency and concern for human life. Everyone involved in preparing the presidential statement sensed that the stakes were high, for this marked the unveiling of both the atomic bomb and the official narrative of Hiroshima.

When the astonishing news emerged that morning, exactly sixty-six years ago, it took the form of a routine press release, a little more than a thousand words long. President Truman was at sea a thousand miles away, returning from the Potsdam conference. Shortly before eleven o’clock, an information officer from the War Department arrived at the White House bearing bundles of press releases. A few minutes later, assistant press secretary Eben Ayers began reading the president’s announcement to about a dozen members of the Washington press corps.

The atmosphere was so casual, and the statement so momentous, that the reporters had difficulty grasping it. “The thing didn’t penetrate with most of them,” Ayers later remarked. Finally, they rushed to call their editors, and at least one reporter found a disbeliever at the other end of the line. The first few sentences of the statement set the tone:

“Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.… The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold.… It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”

Although details were modified at the last moment, Truman’s four-page statement had been crafted with considerable care over many months. If use of the atomic bomb was inherent in its invention, an announcement of this sort was inevitable. Only the timing was in doubt.

From its very first words, however, the official narrative was built on a lie. Hiroshima was not an “army base” but a city of 350,000. It did contain one important military base, but the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city (and far from its industrial area). This was a continuation of the American policy of bombing civilian populations in Japan to undermine the morale of the enemy. It was also to take advantage of what those who picked the targed called the special “focusing effect” provided by the hills which surrounded the city on three sides. This would allow the blast to bounce back on the city, destroying more of it, and its citizens.

The vast majority of the dead in Hiroshima would not be military personnel and defense workers but women and children.

There was something else missing in Truman’s announcement: because the president in his statement failed to mention radiation effects, which officials knew were horrendous, the imagery of just a bigger bomb would prevail in the press. Truman described the new weapon as “revolutionary” but only in regard to the destruction it could cause, failing to mention its most lethal new feature: radiation.

Many Americans first heard the news from the radio, which broadcast the text of Truman’s statement shortly after its release. The afternoon papers quickly arrived with banner headlines: “Atom Bomb, World’s Greatest, Hits Japs!” and “Japan City Blasted by Atomic Bomb.” The Pentagon had released no pictures, so most of the newspapers relied on maps of Japan with Hiroshima circled.

By that evening, radio commentators were weighing in with observations that often transcended Truman’s announcement, suggesting that the public imagination was outrunning the official story. Contrasting emotions of gratification and anxiety had already emerged. H.V. Kaltenhorn warned, “We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us.”

It wasn’t until the following morning, August 7, that the government’s press offensive appeared, with the first detailed account of the making of the atomic bomb, and the Hiroshima mission. Nearly every US newspaper carried all or parts of fourteen separate press releases distributed by the Pentagon several hours after the president’s announcement. They carried headlines such as: “Atom Bombs Made in 3 Hidden Cities” and “New Age Ushered.”

Many of them written by one man: W.L. Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the New York Times, “embedded” with the atomic project. General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, would later reflect, with satisfaction, that “most newspapers published our releases in their entirety. This is one of the few times since government releases have become so common that this has been done.”

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Was New York Times’ Ethan Bronner duped by an Israeli Facebook fraud?

Al Abunimah writes:

RAMALLAH, West Bank – Moad Arqoub, a Palestinian graduate student, was bouncing around the Internet the other day and came across a site that surprised and attracted him. It was a Facebook page where Israelis and Palestinians and other Arabs were talking about everything at once: the prospects of peace, of course, but also soccer, photography and music.

“I joined immediately because right now, without a peace process and with Israelis and Palestinians physically separated, it is really important for us to be interacting without barriers,” Mr. Arqoub said as he sat at an outdoor cafe in this Palestinian city.

That is how an article in today’s New York Times by Ethan Bronner begins. But much of Bronner’s article is misleading and possibly false, as The Electronic Intifada discovered.

The Facebook page Bronner profiles is called YaLa-Young Leaders and is founded by Uri Savir, a former Israeli diplomat and head of the Peres Center for Peace. It is supposed to be a forum for interaction and normalization between Israeli and Palestinian youth in particular, and Israeli and Arab youth in general.

It is endorsed by Israeli President Shimon Peres, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, and Tony Blair – figures more likely to repel than attract Palestinian youth.

But Bronner’s story reads more like a promotional piece than a report. He appears to have relied only on the page’s creators for information, and presented people involved in managing the project as if they were unaffiliated users. Whether he was duped, careless or engaging in advocacy, Bronner’s report raises many questions about his standards of reporting from Palestine.

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The fight for Libya

The New York Times reports:

As the military operation continued over Libya on Monday, there was some confusion about which country or organization is actually leading it, and for how long. France, Britain and the United States are in charge of their own operations, which each have different code names.

The participants are being “coordinated” by the United States, but not commanded by it, according to the French Defense Ministry. The Americans, with the most assets, seem to be the lead coordinator, but Washington has said it wants to step back after the initial phase and have NATO take charge of maintaining a no-fly zone and arms embargo.

Britain wants NATO to take over but France does not, and Italy is threatening to rethink its participation unless NATO takes command.

The Guardian editorial:

George Bush assembled coalitions of the willing, a euphemism for his failure to get the UN to back his invasion of Iraq in 2003. Barack Obama has UN cover for a no-fly zone in Libya, but he has paradoxically produced a coalition of the unwilling to enforce it. US commanders expected that Nato would announce yesterday that it was taking over. That was blocked by Turkey, whose prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for immediate talks. Neither Germany nor eastern European members are keen on Nato heading an operation that has nothing to do with the defence of Europe. That might leave Britain or France carrying the can, “using Nato machinery”.

An operation no one wants to lead reflects deeper unease about the scale of the air strikes and confusion about their strategic purpose. The Arab League is meeting in an emergency session today after its outgoing secretary general, Amr Moussa, called for an immediate halt to the military action and for talks. He clearly believes that the attacks have gone far beyond their stated purpose in protecting civilian lives. Mr Moussa’s position is important for two reasons. Not only have Qatari planes yet to become involved, but Mr Moussa himself is a participant in the democratic revolution in his native Egypt. As a possible presidential candidate of a country that will one day resume leadership of the Arab world, he has a personal interest in what he puts his name to.

In Britain, the government appeared increasingly at odds with its defence chiefs over whether Muammar Gaddafi was a legitimate military target. General Sir David Richards said the Libyan leader was “absolutely not” a target, while Downing Street appeared to side with the view of the defence secretary, Liam Fox, that the Libyan leader was a legitimate target if his forces continued to threaten civilian lives. Three days into this mission, these are not insignificant questions. While much was made of the fact that China and Russia abstained in the security council vote, the fact remains that a large part of the world – including India, Brazil and much of Africa – is against this operation. The Arab League, whose support was so essential to the argument that military action had regional backing, is plainly wavering. Mr Cameron may say until he is blue in the face that it will be up to the Libyans to choose their leader once this is all over, but history in this part of the world is against him.

The longer the bombing campaign goes on, the sooner the real issue will have to be confronted: where is it leading? The answer matters on a day-to-day basis. Yesterday, as our correspondent’s account made clear, an ad hoc motorised cavalry of scores of youth fighters on pick-up trucks charged at Ajdabiya, only to retreat in disarray when Gaddafi’s tanks, which were dug in around the town, fired back. The fighters thought that air strikes had knocked out the enemy’s tanks and rockets. And they were surely entitled to think that what was good for Benghazi was also good for Ajdabiya, or Tripoli for that matter. Some had families trapped behind Gaddafi’s tanks, and in other loyalist-held towns there were reports of civilians being used as human shields. If the rebels lack the military means to take these towns back, are coalition warplanes going to fight their battles for them? And if not, would the revolutionary council in Benghazi accept partition? As things stand, the answer to both questions is no. So even if Gaddafi’s forces accepted the ceasefire, the rebels would keep on fighting.

Members of the council have already said they fear the result of a limited air campaign will be a military stalemate and have called for an escalation of air strikes to wipe out Gaddafi’s army. This is the logic of intervention, but it is not in the remit of the UN resolution. Three days ago, air strikes launched to save innocent lives looked simple enough. Very quickly, they have become part of the war.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Barack Obama Monday formally notified Congress the U.S. had begun military attacks on Libya, prompting complaints from lawmakers that the president waged war without congressional consent, appearing to contradict his own previous position.

In a letter to congressional leaders, the president said the U.S. had “commenced operations to assist an international effort authorized by the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council” and “to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and address the threat posed to international peace and security by the crisis in Libya.”

Presidents over the decades have conducted military operations without prior congressional approval, including Harry Truman in Korea, George H.W. Bush in Iraq and and President Bill Clinton in Serbia. Congress in 1991 approved the Iraq military action, five months after Mr. Bush deployed forces to the region in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The military action in Libya, which Congress wasn’t asked to approve, irked lawmakers.

Sky News reports:

More than 8,000 Libyan rebels have been killed in the revolt against Muammar Gaddafi’s rule, it has been claimed.

“Our dead and martyrs number more than 8,000 killed,” said Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, spokesman for the National Transitional Council rebel group.

He criticised Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa over comments that appeared to be critical of military action by the United States and its allies against Libya.

The Arab League had called for the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians from Gaddafi’s forces but Moussa on Sunday condemned “the bombardment of civilians”.

“What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians,” Egypt’s state news agency quoted Moussa as saying.
Ghoga said: “Today, when the secretary general spoke, I was surprised.

“What is the mechanism that stops the extermination of the people in Libya, what is the mechanism, Mr Secretary General?

“If the protection of civilians is not a humanitarian obligation, what is the mechanism that you propose to us?”

After Turkish diplomats were able to secure the release of Stephen Farrell, Tyler Hicks, Lynsey Addario and Anthony Shadid, four New York Times journalists who had been captured by Gaddafi forces six days ago, they have now provided an account of their capture and captivity.

The four had been covering fighting near Ajdabiya when they decided that the battle had grown too dangerous for them to continue covering it safely. Their driver, however, inadvertently drove into a checkpoint manned by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi. By the time they knew they were in trouble, it was too late.

“I was yelling to the driver, ‘Keep driving! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’ ” Mr. Hicks recalled in a telephone interview from the hotel where he and the three others were recuperating. “I knew that the consequences of being stopped would be very bad.”

The driver, Mohamed Shaglouf, is still missing. If he had tried to drive straight through, Mr. Hicks said, the vehicle certainly would have been fired on. In any event, the soldiers flung the doors to their gold four-door sedan wide open so quickly that they had little chance to get away.

As they were being pulled from the car, rebels fired on the checkpoint, sending the four running for their lives.

“You could see the bullets hitting the dirt,” Mr. Shadid said.

All four made it safely behind a small, one-room building, where they tried to take cover. But the soldiers had other plans. They told all four to empty their pockets and ordered them on the ground. And that is when they thought they were seconds from death.

“I heard in Arabic, ‘Shoot them,’ ” Mr. Shadid said. “And we all thought it was over.”

Then another soldier spoke up. “One of the others said: ‘No, they’re American. We can’t shoot them,’ ” Mr. Hicks said.

Marc Lynch writes:

The intervention is a high-stakes gamble. If it succeeds quickly, and Qaddafi’s regime crumbles as key figures jump ship in the face of its certain demise, then it could reverse the flagging fortunes of the Arab uprisings. Like the first Security Council resolution on Libya, it could send a powerful message that the use of brutal repression makes regime survival less rather than more likely. It would put real meat on the bones of the “Responsibility to Protect” and help create a new international norm. And it could align the U.S. and the international community with al-Jazeera and the aspirations of the Arab protest movement. I have heard from many protest leaders from other Arab countries that success in Libya would galvanize their efforts, and failure might crush their hopes.

But if it does not succeed quickly, and the intervention degenerates into a long quagmire of air strikes, grinding street battles, and growing pressure for the introduction of outside ground forces, then the impact could be quite different. Despite the bracing scenes of Benghazi erupting into cheers at the news of the Resolution, Arab support for the intervention is not nearly as deep as it seems and will not likely survive an extended war. If Libyan civilians are killed in airstrikes, and especially if foreign troops enter Libyan territory, and images of Arabs killed by U.S. forces replace images of brave protestors battered by Qaddafi’s forces on al-Jazeera, the narrative could change quickly into an Iraq-like rage against Western imperialism. What began as an indigenous peaceful Arab uprising against authoritarian rule could collapse into a spectacle of war and intervention.

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