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June 24, 2002
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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June 24,
2002
The Only Thing "Generous"
is the Propaganda
by Tom Gorman
For almost two years, the mainstream media have
repeated the notion that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
made a "generous" offer to Yasir Arafat at Camp David
in July 2000. With little or no analysis of what constituted
this "generous" offer, media outlets in the US created
a self-fulfilling prophecy about Barak's proposals. The durability
of this unfounded characterization is testament to the power
of the mainstream media to construct reality.
Journalist
or Spokesperson?
Lally Weymouth, journalist and commentator
for Newsweek and the Washington Post, softballed Barak in an
interview: "You offered Arafat a generous deal at the Camp
David summit last July. Why is he turning to violence?"
(Newsweek, 10/23/00). (Weymouth, it should be noted, is the daughter
of late Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, part of the
family that owns Newsweek.) While Weymouth's loaded "so
when did he stop beating his wife?" style of questioning
was critiqued by a sole letter writer three weeks later (Newsweek,
11/13/00), it was even more apparent in an interview with Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak in March 2001. "It appears that
Barak made Arafat an extraordinary offer: a Palestinian state
in all of Gaza, 95 percent of the West Bank, a Palestinian capital
in East Jerusalem and an international presence in the Jordan
valley. Why didn't he take it?" Sounding more like a spokesperson
for the Israeli government than an objective American journalist,
Weymouth continued with a string of loaded questions: "Whether
it was 90 or 95 percent it was still, in my view, a very generous
offer that Barak made, and an offer that won't come again for
a long time," "There were billions of dollars in international
aid that would have accompanied the package. And now, what has
Arafat produced for his people after all these years?" "But
why can't Arafat ever take responsibility for anything?"
"Many in the United States now believe that Arafat never
wanted a deal. Is this so?" and "Couldn't he have accepted
[the 'generous offer'] if he wanted to?" (Newsweek, 3/31/01).
Undeterred by time-honored standards
of journalistic impartiality, Weymouth, in an interview with
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, began sounding like a broken
record: "Speaking of the peace process, didn't you think
that former Israeli prime minister Barak made a generous offer
last year to the Palestinian Authority, and that Arafat made
a mistake by rejecting it?" (Newsweek, 3/31/01).
Comparatives
and Superlatives
In its "conventional wisdom"
section, Newsweek (10/23/00) offered this aphorism: "Barak_Went
extra mile for peace and punished for it. His new offer won't
be half as generous." A few months later, Barak's offer
was "more generous than any made by previous Israeli leaders"
(Newsweek, 2/6/01). While this thought may be conventional, it
is hardly wisdom. Many other media sources echoed this "comparative
view"_the notion that Barak's offer was "more"
generous than any that the Israelis had, or were likely ever
again to, put on the table_taking it to the superlative. The
Los Angeles Times cited "independent experts" who said
Barak's plan was "the most generous ever proposed by an
Israeli leader to the Palestinians" (7/16/00), and that
"the Israeli prime minister brought to the summit the most
generous package ever offered by Israel to the Palestinians"
(7/23/00). "[The] Israeli government [is] willing to offer
the most generous compromise terms possible under current political
circumstances," argued a New York Times editorial (9/30/00).
Commentator Jim Hoagland wrote of "the most generous peace
terms ever contemplated by an Israeli leader" (Washington
Post, 12/3/00). The problem with such comparisons is that they
are objectively true_the supposed offer was indeed the "most"
generous the Palestinians could expect from the intransigent
and begrudging Israelis.
The Adverb
and the Adjective
While most mainstream media stories repeated
the idea of a "generous" offer, there were many for
whom this adjective was too weak, and in need of further modification.
In a Los Angeles Times commentary (7/9/00), Yossi Klein Halevi,
wrote of the "astonishingly generous compromise" of
control of Jerusalem. "Israeli critics simply find that
plan recklessly generous" concluded a Washington Post editorial
(7/11/00). George Will agreed that the offer was indeed "recklessly
generous" (Newsweek, 4/8/02), which, ironically, would make
him an "Israeli critic" to his colleagues at the Post.
U.S. News & World Report told of "extremely generous"
"concessions [that were] dramatic" (7/24/00). Rep.
Tom Lantos (D-CA), speaking to the Los Angeles Times (10/15/00),
chided Arab leaders for not "expressing support for the
incredibly generous proposals Barak made." Washington Post
columnist Charles Krauthammer gushed, "Ehud Barak offered
the Palestinians an astonishingly generous peace"(10/13/00).
Later that month, Krauthammer would qualify the "peace"
still further: Barak offered Arafat a generous final peace_and
Arafat told him to go to hell" (10/27/00). Now, the offer
was not only "generous," it was also "final."
A Washington Post article paraphrased Israeli Jews, who felt
that "Barak had offered breathtakingly generous terms to
Arafat at the Camp David negotiations (10/31/00). Time (10/23/00)
chimed in: "Barak felt he was going way beyond his own political
brief when he proffered what Israelis considered a dangerously
generous proposal." During the February 2001 Israeli elections,
the Los Angeles Times reported that many Israelis "reject
Barak because they believe that he made overly generous offers
to Palestinians" (2/5/01). Stephen S. Rosenfeld wrote in
the Washington Post that "many, with reason, found [Barak's
bargaining] unprecedentedly generous to Palestinians" (5/3/01).
Los Angeles Times commentator Uri Dromi laments the Palestinians'
"rejection of Ehud Barak's unbelievably generous offers
and their current violent conduct" (6/17/01). Another Los
Angeles Times commentator, Walter Reich, speaks of the "daringly
generous territorial offer" at Camp David (12/7/01). The
use of such words as "astonishingly," "recklessly,"
"extremely," "incredibly," "breathtakingly,"
"dangerously," "overly," "unprecedentedly,"
"unbelievably," and "daringly" is no accident.
They are intended to leave the impression that it would be impossible
to reason with anyone who had "rejected" such extreme
"generosity."
Not "Generous";
Not Even an "Offer"
Perhaps the most insightful analysis
of the Camp David talks received almost no attention in any mainstream
American media, print or broadcast. Referred to, only recently,
in one letter to an American newspaper (Rocky Mountain News,
6/3/02), the essay, "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,"
appeared in the New York Review of Books (8/9/2001). (There was
no mention of the article on any news broadcast). It was written
by two high-level negotiators at the 2000 Camp David summit:
Robert Malley, special White House assistant on Arab-Israeli
affairs, and Hussein Agha, an Oxford senior research associate
and an adviser to the Palestinian delegation. Malley and Agha
talk of how Barak's offer_far from being "generous"_was
actually a reneging on interim agreements already made by Israel.
"Unfulfilled interim obligations did more than cast doubt
on Israel's intent to deliver; in Arafat's eyes, they directly
affected the balance of power that was to prevail once permanent
status negotiations commenced," i.e., it was difficult to
trust the "generosity" of Barak when his failure to
abide by previous agreements made the Palestinians feel bullied.
In addition, Malley and Agha recount how the Palestinians requested_in
accord with an offer made by Clinton_that "the US remain
neutral in the event the summit failed and not blame the Palestinians."
Malley and Agha, echoing the silence
in almost all of the mainstream media, fail to mention, however,
that the use of the term "generous" in describing Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations is rather odious. If a terrorist gives up four hostages
instead of three, few would call it "more generous."
The Taliban's offer to turn over Osama bin-Laden to a third party_if
the US would provide evidence of his involvement in the September
11 attacks (New York Times, 9/18/01)_was not considered "generous."
When, during his occupation of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein floated
offers of a withdrawal in exchange for certain territorial concessions
on the Persian Gulf (New York Times, 1/11/91) certainly no one
in the American media called it "generous." In other
words, Israel meeting its obligations under international law
(such as Security Council Resolution 242, which emphasized "the
inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,"
and specifically called for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed
forces from territories occupied in the" 1967 war) is no
more "generous" than anyone who refrains from breaking
the law. Indeed, that is the least expected of a civilized individual
or nation.
Perhaps most instructive as to why this
cogent analysis fell under the media radar is its contention,
not only with the terming of Barak's offer as "generous,"
but also with the idea that it was any kind of an "offer"
at all. "Had any member of the US peace team been asked
to describe Barak's true positions before or even during Camp
David_indeed, were any asked that question today_they would be
hard-pressed to answer. . . . The tension, and the ambiguity,
were always there. . . . The final and largely unnoticed consequence
of Barak's approach is that, strictly speaking, there never was
an Israeli offer." This, then, is the true genius of the
rhetorical construction of Barak's "generous offer"
at Camp David. Not only was the offer not generous, there was
never even an offer to be so described.
"Generous" implies the giving
of a gift, or the relinquishing of a right. "Generous"
might better describe the relationship between the American media,
the US government and its favored ally, Israel. What is "generous"
is continued US support for Israel, for which the US seems to
seek nothing in return, not even compliance with American law
which requires American military aid not be used to violate human
rights. Now that's generosity.
Today's
Features
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
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