On The Third Hand

Tuesday, 29 Jan 2002

New Sontag award nominee

John Pilger's latest article in the London Daily Mirror, THE COLDER WAR, is misleading at best -- and more probably deliberately disingenuous. I decided to follow Ken Layne's direction and fact check his ass (or arse, since he's an Aussie living in the UK). He has so much nonsense that I would like to quote it sentence by sentence, but that would take two weeks, and would probably be a copyright violation besides. So, I'm picking out the worst of his statements. If you go to read the whole article, you might want to take a tranquilizer first. Pilger says:

"The recent statements of British Ministers about the "vindication" of the "outstanding success" in Afghanistan would be comical if the price of their "success" had not been paid with the lives of more than 5,000 innocent Afghani civilians and the failure to catch Osama bin Laden and anyone else of importance in the al-Qaeda network."

Five thousand? I must assume he thinks Al Qaida and Taliban fighters are innocent civilians. Even the discredited figuring of Marc Herold only came up with 4,000. Later in the article, he comes up with some more interesting figures:

"In 1993, in the last days of George Bush Senior's presidency, 18 American soldiers were killed in Somalia after the US Marines had invaded to "restore hope", as they put it.
A current Hollywood movie, Black Hawk Down, glamorises and lies about this episode.
It leaves out the fact that the invading Americans left behind between 7,000 and 10,000 Somalis killed."

Now this one is interesting. I love the quotes around "restore hope" and the way he just snuck in the word "invading" without supporting it. I went to look up the casualty figures for Somalis during the incident. I found estimates ranging between 300 and 500 dead, with a total of about 1000 casualties. I found an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer that gave a bit of detail on the death estimates:
"Official US estimates of Somalian casualties at the time numbered 350 dead and 500 injured. Somalian clan leaders made claims of more than 1,000 deaths. The United Nations placed the number of dead at ``between 300 to 500.'' Doctors and intellectuals in Mogadishu not aligned with the feuding clans say that 500 dead is probably accurate."
That is no where near "7000 to 10,000 Somalis killed".

I became curious about where he found the figures he used, assuming he didn't make them up (a big assumption). The only figures I could find that were close were from a 1993 NY Times article quoted on this site, plus a couple of interviews with Noam Chomsky, in which he quoted the same NY Times article (the article is not available on the web). The site mentioned above says:
"During the weeks from June 5 to October 3, 1993, U.N./U.S. forces inflicted 6,000 to 10,000 casualties on the Somali resistance, said Eric Schmitt in the the December 8, 1993, New York Times. Schmitt confirmed the account with US military intelligence, relief workers, UN officials and the US special envoy to Somalia. US Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni estimated that two-thirds of the casualties were women and children."
Chomsky also used these figures, and the word "casualties". Casualties are not the same as "killed", which Mr. Pilger should know, since he has been a war correspondent. He also fails to mention that it was both UN and US. I can find no online figures at all on how many of those casualties were deaths.
Pilger also makes this claim:

"Brzezinski not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and "destabilise" the Soviet Union.
The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and in the following years poured $4billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means "student")."

I looked up Operation Cyclone but could only find it mentioned on anti-war sites, some referencing an article in the UK Independent from 1998 (not online). It appears to have been the "operation" involved in funding and arming the mujahideen against the Soviet Union. Here's a typical example of anti-war coverage (I link, you decide). I'm fairly sure this is as slanted as Pilger's article, but I don't have the information necessary to figure out which parts are dead wrong and which have some truth to them. If he -- or they -- want me to believe this, I'd like some proof from a neutral party.
Pilger continues with some partial information:

"At that time, the late 1970s, the American goal was to overthrow Afghanistan's first progressive, secular government, which had granted equal rights to women, established health care and literacy programmes and set out to break feudalism.
When the Taliban seized power in 1996, they hanged the former president from a lamp-post in Kabul."

Mr. Pilger somehow forgot to mention that the government was also communist and that it -- and the President -- had been installed by the Soviets. He also fails to acknowledge that the Soviets (and American influence) been out of Afghanistan for several years when the Taliban took over. The US did not back the Taliban, or even recognize them as a government when they took over.

The rest of the article continues... mentioning: that the stock in armament companies went up after the attacks of September 11 (duh), oil pipelines, the School of the Americas, and lots and lots of things (presented as fact, with no information sources) that he says the US has done wrong. Undoubtedly some of the things he lists are US faults, but after finding all his faults in the beginning of the article, I am not going to believe anything more he says. Or bother hunting any more information.
[Thanks to an alert forum member --and fellow Bellicose Woman -- for the heads up on this article]
12:50 EST Start or join a forum discussion!

Short stuff

• It is interesting to note that I have seen nothing about the US ending the arms sale ban on India in any US media.
• Samizdata is engaging in a picture-orgy. My favorite is still the earlier referenced "sexy picture", but I think that the picture of Natalije will get most of the attention. I could hate a woman with legs like that... if I didn't like her writing so much.
• Unremitting Verse has been added to the blog list. If you would like a chuckle, go read "Jonah Goldberg's Dictionary".
• There's another new e-mail virus going around. "The e-mail arrives with the subject line, "new photos from my party," and purports to contain the URL to a Web page containing pictures of a friend's party. But what appears to be the URL www.myparty.yahoo.com is in fact an executable attachment capable of infecting a local machine with a copy of the virus."
• If you use the ICQ chat program... there has been an e-mail going around supposedly from "support@icq.com" asking you to fill in your user number and password in order to keep using ICQ. Don't do it -- the e-mail is not from ICQ and the user number/password gets sent to someone at a free server.
• NRO's blog, "The Corner" has an interesting discussion over the whether the detainees should be considered prisoners of war or unlawful combatants. Start at the link and work up. [Just an aside -- from the links, it appears The Corner group uses blogger to post...]
• Happy Birthday to Megan McArdle.
  
11:32 EST Start or join a forum discussion!