01/16/14 – Peter Hart – The Scott Horton Show

Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds.
But you can fight back.
The Tenth Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California, declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is offnow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas, meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to offnow.org, print out that model legislation, and get to work nullifying the NSA.
The hero Edward Snowden has risked everything to give us this chance.
Let's take it. offnow.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
My website is scotthorton.org.
Keep all my interview archives there.
More than 3,000 of them now, going back to 2003.
Also, you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash scotthortonshow.
All right, our next guest on the show today is our friend Peter Hart from FAIR.
That's Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting at FAIR.org.
Welcome back to the show.
Peter, how are you doing?
Good, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Glad to have you back on the show.
And I like reading your stuff, man, and I like having Eric Garris running antiwar.com all the time, too.
Let's start with Ariel Sharon.
All the big papers remember Ariel Sharon.
And, you know, even if you're a very polite grandmother out there and you would never speak ill of the dead under any circumstances, you've got to make an exception for politicians.
I mean, come on, especially brutal warlords and stuff like that, because, well, they're dead, and you don't have to worry about hurting their feelings.
And history is important, and truth, fairness, and accuracy are important, especially, you know, it seems to me, well, it's just a fact, right?
Scientifically speaking.
When the New York Times and the Washington Post get something wrong, society gets it wrong.
I mean, they're the agenda-setting media, as Noam Chomsky called them.
They're the leaders, and everybody else follows them.
And what they lie about today becomes history, you know, a week and a half from now.
And so, you know, it's good to have people correcting them on the record, especially when it comes to topics such as the legacy of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
So, first of all, what was it, you know, that they said about him?
And then you can go on with your correction from there if you want, Peter.
Well, I think the best way to think about the dead is the quote that's always been attributed to Gore Vidal, of the dead, nothing but the truth.
And I think it's a more honest appraisal of anyone's life, but particularly people who have a lot of political power and have really navigated foreign policy in a very profound way.
And that's certainly what you could say about Ariel Sharon.
A lot of the commentary and a lot of the obituaries are kind of curious because he's somebody who's been essentially gone from public life for almost a decade now.
So it wasn't a sudden death, and you get the feeling that a lot of the obituaries were kind of prepackaged, and they could just pull them out of the archives.
And that gave you a good sense of where they situate the important moments of his life.
And in both of the papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, I think a lot of the other coverage, you had references to these very brutal, very bloody incidents and tactics and history, but they were in the background.
In the foreground was the legend of a man who was considered the father in many ways of Israel, a grandfather of Israeli politics.
And in the case of the New York Times and a lot of other coverage, a guy who by the end of his life, according to them, was actually pursuing peace.
So in that context, you hear about some of these incidents that are not peaceful at all, and you think, well, the story that they're trying to tell you is one of someone who changed profoundly.
And there's not a lot of evidence that that was happening.
The Washington Post said that he epitomized the country's warrior past as he became the architect of a peaceful future.
They talked about his brutally effective tactics.
He was named the bulldozer.
Well, why was he named the bulldozer?
Because he would destroy Palestinian homes and refugee camps in order to make room for tanks to roll through.
Why were tanks rolling through?
You don't need to answer that question.
I think you know the answer.
So I think there was a lot of alighting of the history of Ariel Sharon, particularly when it comes to Lebanon, one of the best-known incidents, the Saber and Shatila massacres, which he was held responsible for even by an Israeli commission that was considered somewhat of a whitewash by a lot of observers.
The stories are all there, and the facts need to be rearranged, because when you do that, you come up with a very different assessment of Ariel Sharon's legacy.
And this was true in the obituaries, but then in some of the subsequent coverage, the critics of Sharon's legacy who were allowed to speak in outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post were not the Palestinians who suffered, not the Lebanese who suffered from the invasion in 82 and 83.
It was right-wing Israeli settlers who were still angry about Sharon's decision to withdraw a small number of illegal settlements from the Gaza Strip.
You look at those articles, and you realize that's the debate that we're allowed to see in some of these media outlets.
So you have one guy in the New York Times, a settler, who says he came to make sure Sharon was dead.
That was why he was showing up at one of the memorials.
What did Palestinians, what did Arabs think, what did critics of Israeli foreign policy think?
It didn't matter.
What mattered is we need to hear from people who would lionize Sharon's legacy, and then people who would say he gave up too much.
So it was sort of the right and the far, far right in Israeli politics.
And it gives you a sense of, I think, how far the political discourse on Israel-Palestine has drifted in the direction of favoring a very militaristic Israeli approach, that we cannot have even a reasonable, fair-minded discussion of an extraordinarily bloody legacy of someone like Ariel Sharon.
Yeah, and you know, I don't know, maybe it's just me, or maybe, I don't know, with a little bit of help from you, Peter, people are starting to do better about stuff like this.
Because it looks to me, it's such, you know, the language here is just too cute by half.
Oh yes, well, you know, it was a very ambitious invasion of Lebanon.
Yeah, in other words, he violated his orders and went all the way to Beirut, and, you know, ruined everything and occupied the place for 20 years, and sowed the seeds, you know, created Hezbollah, and the Party of God grew up in reaction to his doings there.
Oh, you know what, let's just call that ambitious.
Good.
And then brutal tactics?
We'll change brutal tactics to brutally effective tactics.
Oh, they were terribly effective, meaning just very, that's all.
You know, no question about, you know, who is actually on the receiving end of the brutality anymore.
And for me, anyway, and, you know, maybe I don't get to speak for everybody, but it just seems so easy to see right through cutesy, coy, little, Washington Post language like that, that I start to hope that maybe that it starts becoming that apparent to other people.
They start rebelling a little bit, that like, come on, just say brutal tactics when you mean brutal tactics, you know?
Why lie to me?
I think so, and, you know, I'm hopeful about that.
I'm also hopeful about the fact that there are places where people can have a more frank discussion of these things, and that the venues to have that discussion are much greater and, I think, more powerful than they were 5, 10, 15 years ago.
I think it's obvious to anyone, if you apply the simple moral test, would another foreign leader with Sharon's record be treated the same way by the United States, particularly of a country that was not allied with the United States so closely?
And the obvious answer is no, not in a million years.
So that, I think, is the most important test for how we have this kind of conversation.
Foreign leaders who die who are much less controversial are treated far more critically.
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was loathed by everyone in the American political establishment, certainly many people in the U.S. media, and the obituaries for him were written very differently.
He was not invading other countries and was responsible for the killing of hundreds of civilians.
But the criticism of him, I think, was much more direct and much more fervent than what you heard about Sharon.
The other storyline that I think is so obviously bizarre is the idea that Sharon was pursuing peace.
Well, what's the evidence for this?
The legacy that he leaves beyond Lebanon and beyond some of the other massacres are Israeli settlements in Gaza, in the West Bank, the West Bank Wall.
And most importantly, you have the withdrawal from Gaza.
And I think that is the area where people are suggesting, well, he had a mind for a peaceful negotiation.
Removing a few thousand settlers from Gaza was a simple tactical move.
It was, I think, pretty obvious at the time and obvious to most people now that that was not done because he had an intention of creating a Palestinian homeland that included the Gaza Strip.
It was a more effective way of controlling that population and removing a small number of Israeli settlers in order to do that, and relocating them elsewhere where he wanted to consolidate power.
I don't think he ever stopped being a military man, in a sense.
And this was a tactical retreat to win somewhere else.
The idea that what has happened in Gaza since then was the path to peace, I think, is laughable.
It's worse than that, I mean.
Yeah, and that's the only evidence that anyone has.
So when you see it, the current state of the Gaza Strip is his legacy.
The current settlement construction patterns in the West Bank, that's his legacy.
I'm sorry, Peter, I've got to interrupt you.
We've got to go.
It's a break.
We're going to pick it back up on the other side of the break, still on the subject of Sharon's legacy.
There's a couple more questions I want to ask you about.
And then I also want to talk about media coverage of Iraq and Iran this week, too.
So it's Peter Hart from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
That's fair.org.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make this show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by ScottHorton.org first.
And just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
And it's not just books.
Amazon.com sells just about everything in the world except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at ScottHorton.org or go to ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Peter Hart from Fair.
That's Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting at fair.org.
And we're talking about Sharon's legacy and the media's whitewashing.
And so I'm sorry I had to interrupt you for the hard break there.
I'll let you finish what you were saying about Sharon's legacy of settlements on the West Bank and how the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza had absolutely nothing to do with guaranteeing a Palestinian state or anything like the spin in the Times and the Post you were talking about there.
But then also I wanted to ask you to talk about the way they tried to spin Shabra and Satilla, the massacres in Lebanon there, on Sharon's watch as though he had been acquitted after the fact and found by some jury to have been not guilty.
Yeah, you know, both of these stories I think are instructive because the reporters who are writing these pieces are not unaware of this history.
And I think that's the most important test of what kind of propaganda you're consuming.
And in the case of the Times story, I think you could argue that it was a little better than the Post's because it has to reference these things.
Near the bottom you'll read about a massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in a refugee camp in Lebanon that Ariel Shrum was instrumental in carrying out.
Now, were his forces the ones who did the killing?
No.
But that is not the issue, and I think that was the confused characterization of these stories.
There was a Khan Commission official Israeli inquiry into this.
The story was that these militias that were affiliated with the Israeli military carried out the assaults.
The Israeli military was firing flares into the air to illuminate the refugee camps.
Sharon, you know, this will sound very similar to some of our current political discussions.
Sharon's case was that the camps were full of terrorists.
You know, when you say the T word, then suddenly you're emboldened to act as you wish.
And, you know, we have internal documents from the Israeli intelligence that have been written up in the past year or so showing that the discussions between the U.S. government and the Israeli government and Sharon himself were, I think, a lot more substantive as this was happening and right before it than we thought.
And you get the sense that there was a very keen awareness of what was likely to happen when you unleashed these forces in this Palestinian refugee camp.
It was not a surprise, and Sharon could have stopped it.
That was even what the Israeli commission found.
So the idea that he was humiliated by this, I think, was the way the New York Times put it.
You cannot think of another political or military leader who would be found personally responsible for a massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians.
And it being written up deep into an obituary as a personal humiliation.
But that's the treatment of someone like him in the U.S. media.
Yeah, that's crazy.
And I'm sorry, because I think I said it wrong.
I'm blaming the Benadryl, but it's my only chance.
It's hay fever time in Austin.
Sabra and Shatila are the refugee camps where the innocents were butchered there.
I didn't mean to screw that up.
Sorry about that.
Now, let's talk about Iraq.
The question of why did America invade Iraq 14 years later?
It's, I guess, surprising but not shocking, or the other way around.
Why did America invade Iraq?
Well, this is all coming back into the media.
And I think if you were paying attention to the press over the last week or so, you'd be kind of confused by this.
But the story was that there were some al-Qaeda-linked fighters who had taken over part of the city of Fallujah.
And reporters who were paying attention to Iraq at the time, of course, remember Fallujah as the place where those Blackwater contractors were killed and hung from a bridge.
Less well-known, I think less well-remembered, are the two very brutal sieges of Fallujah that happened in 2003 and 2004.
The U.S. military from the outside of the city.
It's really never been, to my mind, investigated very fully by the U.S. media.
But the stories at the time were horrific.
You had stories about half the buildings being flattened, hundreds of innocent deaths, the prevention of medical personnel from getting in, on and on.
Because this was considered a kind of payback mission, directed at hitting at what they thought of as the most important insurgent-controlled territory in Iraq at the time.
So you have all of these look-back kind of pieces, and they're dancing around the issue of why we went to Iraq in the first place and whether or not the war was worth it.
And what I found so intriguing is that this is all written from the perspective of the U.S. military and of veterans of that particular fight, whether or not they feel like their sacrifice was worth it.
Nothing said about the hundreds of people who lived in Fallujah who were killed for absolutely no reason.
Nothing about depleted uranium, nothing about white phosphorus, nothing about cluster bombs.
All of this happened, but it's been disappeared from the memory of the Iraq war.
Most shockingly, I think, is the failure to come to grips with the fact that the war was fought over a completely false story about weapons of mass destruction.
So you actually had on ABC last week stories about the effort to plant democracy in Iraq being the reason we were there.
They say that journalism is the first draft of history.
I don't know what draft we're on now when it comes to Iraq, but it pains me to think when we're sitting around and we're 70 years old and we're listening to people recount the history of the Iraq war, what's it going to be at that point?
I feel like the possibilities are sort of endless, but I can't imagine sitting around with my grandchildren talking with them about the Iraq war to spread democracy in the Middle East.
Will this all be forgotten?
It seems so implausible to us right now, but propaganda can be very effective.
And when 10 years later the memory of why we went to Iraq and what happened there, when that is basically erased, what's to say that's not going to happen 10 years from now, 20 years from now?
So it's a very, I think, frightening concept and one that suggests that even at this point U.S. political leaders and certainly U.S. media don't want to come to terms with the fact that the war was fought on false pretenses and those people died essentially for nothing.
There was a big controversy.
The CNN host Jake Tapper, who was interviewing a veteran of the Afghan war, and he got into a lot of trouble with some critics on the right because he phrased a question and made it sound like what he was saying was these deaths were senseless.
And he immediately had to walk that back and say, no, no, no, no.
I would say the heroes who died in these particular instances, in these battles, were anything other than heroes.
I didn't mean to suggest that the war was over nothing.
And I thought it was a great moment because you cannot, in polite elite journalism, you cannot say these things, even though I think by any reasonable standard what he was accused of saying is more accurate.
And I think it's a painful reality that people need to confront, but our media should be able to look that square in the eye and say, what is the point of the war in Afghanistan right now?
And if you can't come up with an answer, then you have to come to the conclusion, I think, that there might not be one.
Well, and you know, the thing of it is there is no accountability outside of Faraday, Oregon, and a few other places.
And that's why these people, they can't help but get it wrong.
They couldn't possibly get it right because they don't have the first idea what happened in the Iraq war.
Yeah, you know, at one time some heroes went this way, and at another time some heroes went that way.
But they don't know who they were fighting, who they were fighting for, who the hell this Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who happens to be the most powerful Shiite cleric in the world is, or any of this crap.
They don't know.
Diane Sawyer doesn't know the first thing about it.
So if the line reads, yeah, they were there giving people happiness or whatever, then that's what she's going to repeat, like on State Class of San Diego, or Anchorman, whatever the teleprompter says.
And that's because all the same reporters who lied us into war on behalf of the government, none of them were fired.
And all the people who got it right, like you, or like Eric Margulies, or whoever, before the war were trying to say, hey, here's the truth, and here's why not to do it.
We already know that the aluminum tubes thing is debunked.
Why do you keep saying that and whatever?
Y'all didn't ever get the job.
I didn't ever get the job to replace all the people who got it wrong.
And so they all just keep on going.
It's the very same people.
So I think it is going to be the history that the Iraq War was a sad case of trying really, really hard to help some people out of pure love and selflessness, but it just didn't take, because you know what beasts those Arabs are.
Not to link the two, but it's the same tendency that can write an obituary of Ariel Sharon and stress the fact that he was an architect for peace in the Middle East.
Yes, whatever they call it.
It sounds completely implausible, but we're looking at it right now.
And so I think the two stories are alike in some ways.
And the fact that you look at people like Bill Kristol, the neocon pundit, who was basically confined to Fox News Channel through all of these years.
He's a free agent now.
You see him on ABC.
You see him on CBS.
This is somebody who was completely wrong about the Iraq War, and he's asked to come on television and is likely paid nice sums of money to do this to talk about foreign policy.
What on earth would you want to listen to him for?
But this is the way the establishment works, and someone like him cannot be knocked off that perch no matter how wrong they are.
Right.
And then like your latest on the site, and we're almost out of time here, but same thing happens when CBS writes a story about Iran's nuclear weapons program.
They don't have a man in the newsroom to say, actually, you know, that line isn't right.
You should rewrite that and get it correct.
They're all wrong, so they get it wrong and they tell it wrong, too.
It's not just that they're liars.
It's that they believe lies.
Yeah, and I think the list of media outlets that have made the same mistake is basically all of them, and it completely pollutes the American understanding of what's happening with Iran and with our Iran policy, and it contributes to the idea that, you know, a group of U.S. senators, perhaps a majority of them, could call for additional economic sanctions right now and basically torpedo what is a tentative deal to try to do something about Iran's enrichment program.
This is the political establishment that we have right now, and they're aided and abetted in this by the media.
They sure do weave a tangled web, but thanks for setting us straight.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you.
That's Peter Hart, everybody, at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Fair.org.
And follow him on Twitter, too.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com.
So you're a libertarian, and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at ScottHorton.org, we'll make a donation to support The Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for CashIntoCoins.com.
So you want to buy some bitcoins?
CashIntoCoins.com makes it easy and 100% anonymous.
Just deposit the money into their account at any Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or credit union with shared branching, and then just email them a picture of the receipt with your bitcoin address, and you get your bitcoins.
A simple, clean, anonymous way to get bitcoins.
In a tough, competitive new market, CashIntoCoins.com has the advantage.
A great system and great customer service to keep you coming back.
That's CashIntoCoins.com.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of The Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
Since 1989, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty, and free markets.
Sign up now for The Future of Freedom, featuring founder and president, Jacob Horenberger, as well as Sheldon Richmond, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and many more.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, 15 per year to read it online.
That's FFF.org slash subscribe.
Until next time, I'm Scott Sencha.