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interviews that Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld and his inner circle of civilian advisers,
who had been chiefly responsible for persuading
President Bush to lead the country into war, had
insisted on micromanaging the war’s operational
details. Rumsfeld’s team took over crucial
aspects of the day-to-day logistical planning traditionally,
an area in which the uniformed military
excels and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled
the senior Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff,
the operating arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
”He thought he knew better,’ one senior planner
said. ‘He was the decision-maker at every turn.’”
Al-Jazeera roasts U.S. media
GEORGE STEPHANOPOLOUS has raised Hersh’s
point with Rumsfeld on ABC’s This Week, which
seems even more hawkish than its competitors
this week. Rumsfeld denied it, and that was that.
No follow-up. And so it goes, as TV shifted to
more pictures of Baghdad burning and the light
show resulting from a stepped-up bombing campaign.
Commentators prattled on about how the
Ministry of Information was under assault, and
that Iraqi TV had been taken off the air. Imagine
my surprise then to click on CNN this morning
to see none other than Iraqi Foreign Minister
Sabri holding forth from the Ministry of Information,
claiming that the foreign invaders were
being defeated. An earlier report on the “most
trusted” TV news net showed that what you saw
depended on where you lived and which TV stations
you relied on. The Arab World is watching
Al-Jazeera.
And Al-Jazeera,whose website is back in
action, says it’s doing a better job than its western
counterparts. Faisal Bodi offers the station’s
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rationale in The Guardian: “I do not mean to
brag – people are turning to us simply because
the western media coverage has been so poor.
For although Doha is just a 15-minute drive from
central command, the view of events from here
could not be more different. Of all the major
global networks, Al-Jazeera has been alone in
proceeding from the premise that this war
should be viewed as an illegal enterprise. It has
broadcast the horror of the bombing campaign,
the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements,
the screaming infants and the corpses. Its
team of on-the-ground, unembedded correspondents
has provided a corrective to the official
line that the campaign is, barring occasional
resistance, going to plan.
“Last Tuesday, while western channels were
celebrating a Basra ‘uprising’ which none of them
could have witnessed since they don’t have
reporters in the city, our correspondent in the
Sheraton there returned a rather flat verdict of
‘uneventful’ – a view confirmed shortly afterwards
by a spokesman for the opposition
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq. By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream
media had simply mirrored the Blair/Bush
fantasy that the people who have been starved by
U.N. sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium
since 1991 will greet them as saviors.”
Peter Arnett back on the hot seat
AS the Arab media challenges western media,
some in the western media are targeting one of
their own. The New York Post, part of the Murdoch
media empire (owners of Fox News) now
has Peter Arnett to kick around some more.
Arnett, who was the right’s favorite target during