The press and politicians for the most part keep the people of this country in ignorance of the real treatment meted out to the natives,” Keir Hardie noted in 1906.
While much has changed in the intervening 119 years, this quote from the Labour Party’s first parliamentary leader remains an astute observation about much of the British media today.
The British military and their political masters are, of course, still keen to keep the often dirty and deadly reality of British foreign policy from the public. For example, in his 2021 book The Changing Of The Guard, author Simon Akam explains the British army’s “highly restrictive media policies meant that much of the fighting” during the British occupation of Iraq “went unreported.”
But beyond media organisations largely accepting military restrictions, there isn’t a media conspiracy. Journalists do not consciously scheme to censor themselves or their colleagues, or deliberately stop information reaching the general public.
“There is a certain discourse that becomes normalised, in which certain views are acceptable and others not,” Andrew MacGregor Marshall, the former Reuters bureau chief in Iraq, admitted in 2014. In this atmosphere “if you make obvious factual statements… you are often marginalised as some sort of looney figure,” he noted. “It is through this process that the mainstream media basically becomes a tool of misinforming people, rather than informing people.”
The great unmentionable truth is that a huge swathe of journalists, who generally see themselves as independent, truth-seeking, disputatious professionals, are actually extremely incurious and soft on established power.
You think I’m exaggerating? Take Keir Starmer’s visit to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus last month, where he gave a speech to British service personnel. “Although we’re really proud of what you’re doing, we can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here,” the Prime Minister said.
Footage of the speech was broadcast live on Sky News, and published on the BBC News website. But from what I can tell there has been next to nothing in terms of mainstream media journalists following up on Starmer’s mention of secret operations. Luckily, Declassified UK has been doing real journalism, reporting that US planes, generally used by special forces, have been flying from RAF Atkrotiri to Israel, and that Britain has been flying hundreds of surveillance flights from the base over Gaza.
This lack of interest shouldn’t be surprising when you consider the British media’s (non)reporting of key aspects of US-British intervention in Syria since the 2011 uprising against president Bashar al-Assad.
The dominant media narrative is that Western intervention was minimal to non-existent. As the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall wrote in October 2018: “Western democracies” have been “hovering passively on the sidelines in Syria.”
In reality “Washington did provide aid on a large scale to Syrian armed opposition,” as Steven Simon, the senior director for Middle Eastern and north Africa affairs on the US National Security Council during the Obama administration, wrote in the New York Times in December 2018.
The US Central Intelligence Agency initiative supporting the rebels — codenamed Timber Sycamore — was “one of the agency’s largest covert operations,” according to the Washington Post, which estimated in June 2015 the programme was spending $1 billion a year and had trained and equipped 10,000 rebels.
More broadly, in June 2013 the Los Angeles Times noted that arms shipments from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries to Syrian armed rebels were “provided with assent from the US.”
The US gave the green light knowing full well that arms provided by Qatar and Saudi Arabia were going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, as shown by the October 2012 New York Times front page headline “Rebel Arms Flow Is Said To Benefit Jihadists In Syria.”
Why is all of this a problem? Well the 2013 warning from two former Nato secretary-generals, Javier Solana and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, was sadly proven accurate: “Rather than secure humanitarian space and empower a political transition, Western military engagement in Syria [such as arming Syrian rebels] is likely to provoke further escalation on all sides, deepening the civil war and strengthening the forces of extremism, sectarianism and criminality gaining strength across the country.” Many experts have highlighted the US’s covert action programme facilitated significant gains by rebels, which was a key factor in Russia’s decision to enter the fight on the side of the Assad government in 2015.
It’s important to remember Britain has been involved too. In September 2013 the New York Times reported: “Saudi Arabia, quietly co-operating with American and British intelligence and other Arab governments, has modestly increased deliveries of weapons to rebels fighting in southern Syria.”
This co-operation with Saudi Arabia was covert, the US newspaper explained, because “American and British intelligence and Arab governments… do not want their support publicly known.”
Note that most of the reports above, including about Britain’s participation, were from US news sources, something that should shame all British journalists.
Then there is the memory holing of the effects of US-British bombing of the Iraqi city of Mosul (2016-17) and Raqqa in Syria (2017) in their war against Islamic State. British media coverage of the impact of the air strikes on civilians was minimal, especially when compared to the coverage of the Russian and Syrian government bombing of Aleppo in 2016.
“Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely,” Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK, reported after visiting Raqqa. “Think Dresden and you’d be close.”
In October 2020 Airwars, a British not-for-profit organisation which monitors the air campaigns in the Middle East, published a damning report into the US-British attacks, finding: “The great majority of both the urban destruction and civilian harm in Raqqa resulted largely from the actions of just one party to the fighting: the United States.”
I asked Chris Woods, the founder and director of Airwars, about the level of coverage the report has received in the British media. He replied on November 11 2020: “As far as I understand no UK news organisation picked it up.”
Ditto the media indifference to the US forces that have been occupying eastern Syria since 2016 — approximately 2,000 troops spread over several bases.
Ditto the media indifference to the prison camps run by the Syrian Democratic Forces in the US-controlled areas of Syria, which hold an estimated 56,000 men, women and children. With most inmates arbitrarily and indefinitely detained, in April Amnesty International reported “many are held in inhumane conditions and have been subjected to torture, including severe beatings, stress positions, electric shocks, and gender-based violence.”
According to Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary-general, “The US government has played a central role in the creation and maintenance of this system.” Amazingly, the Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh recently wrote about the prison camps but neglected to mention the barbaric conditions, or the US’s key role.
Ditto the media indifference to the US-led sanctions on Syria, which “have been exacerbating Syria’s humanitarian crisis,” Alena Douhan, the United Nations special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, said in 2022.
And ditto the voluminous human rights abuses — including imprisoning children — of Abu Mohammed al-Julani, which have been brushed under the carpet in the rush by the US and Britain to remove his organisation Hayat Tahrir al-Sham from the designated terrorist list. Having drunk large quantities of Kool-Aid, in a recent editorial the Guardian referred to Julani overseeing “a semi-technocratic government in Idlib.”
The media’s shocking lack of interest in US-British involvement in Syria means it has effectively been a secret war.
Dr Florian Zollmann provides the essential context to understand this propagandistic non-coverage in his 2017 book Media, Propaganda And The Politics Of Intervention.
“If countries designated to be ‘enemy’ states of the West conduct human rights violations, the news media highlights these abuses and conveys demands for action to stop human rights abuses,” noted the senior lecturer in journalism at Newcastle University after analysing media reporting of various atrocities in recent conflicts.
“If, on the other hand, Western states or their ‘allies’ are the perpetrators of human rights violations the news media employs significantly less investigatory zeal in its reporting and virtually no measures to stop abuses are conveyed.”
The media’s systematic non-reporting is not just academic. It has very real consequences. The lack of scrutiny and public debate about Britain’s clandestine intervention allowed Britain a relatively free hand in Syria, with all the dire consequences this produced — see the prescient warning from the two former Nato secretary-generals above.
Moreover, the media’s amnesia about the history of US-British actions in Syria is having a dangerous impact on current policy-making. The deceptive narrative that the West didn’t intervene enough in Syria is resurgent in the media and Westminster, with Starmer recently proclaiming Britain will play a more active role in the Middle East in the future — a deeply worrying prospect for people living in the region.
Source: Morning Star