When Airplanes Explode in the Sky

excerpted from the book

Unreliable Sources

a guide to detecting bias in news media

by Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon

A Lyle Stuart Book, Carol Publishing Group, 1990

p278

When a Soviet interceptor plane blew up a South Korean passenger jet in September 1983, U.S. media immediately condemned it as a heinous act. Editorials denouncing the KAL shootdown were filled with phrases like "wanton killing" and "reckless aerial murder The day after the incident, a New York Times editorial, titled "Murder in the Air," was unequivocal: "There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner... No circumstance whatever justifies attacking an innocent plane."

But when Iran Air Flight 655 was blown out of the sky by a U.S. cruiser in July 1988, excuses were more than conceivable-they were profuse. Confronted with the sudden reality of a similar action by the U.S. government, the New York Times inverted every standard invoked with righteous indignation five years earlier.

Two days after the Iranian passenger jet went down in flames killing 290 people, the Times editorialized that "while horrifying, it was nonetheless an accident." The editorial concluded, "The onus for avoiding such accidents in the future rests on civilian aircraft: avoid combat zones, fly high, acknowledge warnings."

A similar double standard pervaded electronic media coverage. In the aftermath of the KAL tragedy, America's airwaves carried ritual denunciations by journalists. On CBS, for example, Dan Rather called it a "barbaric act." No such adjectives were heard from America s TV commentators when discussing the U.S. shootdown of a civilian jet.

The Reagan administration exploited KAL 007 for all it was worth. As Nightline host Ted Koppel admitted years later, "This was at a period when the President was very much interested in portraying the Russians as being a bunch of barbarians, was very much interested in getting the Strategic Defense Initiative program going. It all fit very nicely, didn't it, to have this image of the Russians at that time knowingly shoot down a civilian airliner?"

The Soviet shootdown inspired a single-issue focus unparalleled on Nightline since the Iran hostage crisis had given birth to the show in 1979. Nightline aired eight consecutive programs on the story, with titles such as "Korean Air 'Massacre'-Reagan Reaction" and "Punishing the Soviets-What U.S. Options?" On one show, host Ted Koppel was remarkably candid: "This has been one of those occasions when there is very little difference between what is churned out by the U.S. government's propaganda organs and by the commercial broadcasting networks."

Nightline's programs on KAL 007 featured a steady parade of hawks like Richard Viguerie, William Buckley, George Will, William Safire ("a brutal act of murder"), Jesse Helms ("premeditated, deliberate murder") and John Lofton ("sever diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union"). Koppel himself stated there wasn't "any question that the Soviet Union deserves to be accused of murder, it's only a question of whether it's first degree or second degree."

On Nightline "007 Day Three," Koppel promoted an on-air telephone poll asking viewers whether the administration "should take strong action against the Soviets." Over 90 percent said yes. On the same show, right-wing leader Terry Dolan stated that "anyone who would suggest that the U.S. would ever consider shooting down an unarmed civilian plane is downright foolish and irresponsible."

When the U.S. shot down a civilian plane five years later, Nightline's hometeam bias was evident. Instead of eight consecutive shows (followed by two more later in the month), there were only three Nightline programs focusing on the U.S. shootdown. No American foreign policy critics denounced the U.S. for murder; instead the discussion focused on "somber questions" about "the tragedy," occasionally implying that Iranians were to blame.

What can explain the disparity in coverage? In each case, Nightline meshed with the propaganda needs of the U.S. government: the Soviet action was hashed and rehashed as evidence against the Evil Empire; the U.S. action was deftly handled as a tragic mistake.

Debunking relevant comparisons

As soon as the Iranian Airbus crashed into the Persian Gulf, the Reagan administration set out to discourage what should have been obvious comparisons with the KAL incident. The New York Times and other media uncritically quoted the President's July 4 resurrection of his administration's timeworn deceit: "Remember the KAL, a group of Soviet fighter planes went up, identified the plane for what it was and then proceeded to shoot it down. There's no comparison."

Virtually ignored was a key finding of Seymour Hersh's 1986 book The Target Is Destroyed-that the Reagan administration knew within days of the KAL shootdown that the Soviets had believed it to be a military aircraft on a spy mission. Soviet commanders had no idea that they were tracking a plane with civilians on board. The Times acknowledged this years later in an editorial, "The Lie That Wasn't Shot Down"; yet when Reagan lied again, the Times again failed to shoot it down. ,

Instead, Times correspondent R.W. Apple weighed in with an analysis headlined, "Military Errors: The Snafu as History." In his lead, Apple observed that "the destruction of an Iranian airliner...came as a sharp reminder of the pervasive role of error in military history." The piece drew many parallels to the Iran jetliner's tragic end-citing examples from the American Revolution, World War II and Vietnam-while ignoring the most obvious analogy. About the KAL 007 shootdown, Apple said not a word.

In certain ways, the Iran Air tragedy was less defensible than the KAL disaster. The Iran Air jet went down in broad daylight, well within its approved commercial airline course over international waters, without ever having strayed into unauthorized air space. In contrast, the KAL jet flew way off course deep into Soviet territory above sensitive military installations, in the dead of night.

But, as with Washington's policy makers, journalists were intent on debunking relevant comparisons rather than exploring them. The government's PR spin quickly became the mass media's-a tragic mishap had occurred in the Persian Gulf, amid puzzling behavior of the passenger jet. Blaming the victim was standard fare, as reporters focused on the plight of USS Vincennes commander Captain Will Rogers, whose picture appeared on tabloid covers with bold headlines-"Captain's Anguish" (Newsday) and "Captain's Agony" (New York Post).

An ABC News-Washington Post poll released three days after the Iran Air jet's demise found a lopsided majority of Americans believed that Captain Rogers had taken appropriate measures. Having presented events in such a way as to load sympathy and justification on the side of the attackers, the media proceeded to survey the population's response; the polling results were then cited to certify widespread public support for the Navy's action. At the same time, U.S. journalists asserted that the Iranian government was eager to exploit its new propaganda advantage.

While much of the coverage amounted to breathless summaries of U.S. government news conferences and press releases, there were some exceptions: Newsday editorialized that Reagan gave "the impression that his overwhelming desire is to preserve Persian Gulf policy, not to discover what went wrong. And his attitude reflects a regrettable tendency to demonize the Iranians."

Day-by-day comparisons of news articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post, during the crucial first days of the crisis, reveal the Times coverage to be softer and more biased. On July 6, 1988, as the Times continued to echo government perspectives, the Post was beginning to raise doubts about the official fable that the U.S. Navy had reason to fear an attack on a warship by Iranian F-14 jets. The Post front-paged an investigative piece by George C. Wilson headlined ``Pilots Question Threat Posed by F-14," with the sub-head: "Warplane Designed to Attack Air Targets, Not Ships."

But media scrutiny of Pentagon accounts came days after the basic parameters of the story had been set. Even the better reportage tended to focus on technical questions while avoiding fundamental issues. Mass media coverage skirted the aggressive character of the U.S. military's presence in the Gulf, and rarely mentioned that for a year the Soviet Union had been urging the withdrawal of all foreign military vessels from the region. The Soviet proposal would have dispatched ships under the U.N. flag to the Persian Gulf to keep the shipping lanes open-the supposed purpose of the enormous (and deadly) U.S. presence there.

Sorely lacking from the outset was any semblance of soul-searching about the holier-than-thou Soviet-bashing that followed the KAL accident. The last thing that White House officials wanted was a national self-examination of this sort. U.S. media allowed their proclaimed precepts to spin 180 degrees in an instant, while discarding basic insights like the one expressed in a New York Times editorial six days after KAL 007 exploded: "To proclaim a 'right' to shoot down suspicious planes does not make it right to do so." Commenting on this journalistic dual standard, the Toronto Globe and Mail (Canada's newspaper of record) described the Times editorials on the KAL and Iran Air shootdowns as "jingoism" in an article headlined, "Is It Really All The News That's Fit To Print?"

Pan Am Flight 103

Media coverage of terrorism is dominated by some of the most extreme-and in light of Iran-contra revelations, most hypocritical-foreign policy rhetoric, often at the expense of examining the complexities of the issue. As soon as it was learned that a bomb destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing all 271 people on board, reporters began asking all the usual questions: How can we punish those responsible? Will we retaliate against any government that protects terrorists who bomb civilian jets?

Reagan and Bush responded with stern language. Said Reagan: "We're going to make every effort to find out who was guilty of this savage thing and bring them to justice." Bush promised to "seek hard and punish firmly, decisively, those who did this, if you could ever find them."

What was wrong with this predictable rhetoric? As many journalists knew, the U.S. government had harbored an accused jet-bombing terrorist without doing anything to bring him to justice. This was the case with Luis Posada, a right-wing Cuban exile who worked for the CIA for many years since the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. Trained by the CIA in the use of explosives, Posada was the reputed mastermind of the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines passenger jet that killed all 73 people on board.

Posada and other members of the anti-Castro terror group, Command of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), were charged in Venezuela with the crime. Two CORU operatives who admitted planting the bomb fingered Posada as a pivotal figure behind the plot.

In 1985 Posada escaped from a high-security Venezuelan prison. Instead of hunting him down, U.S. government agents offered Posada a job at Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador. There he played a key role in overseeing efforts to resupply the Nicaraguan contras. In May 1986, a Venezuelan TV journalist interviewed Posada from "somewhere in Central America." "I feel good here," Posada exulted, "because I am involved once again in a fight against international Communism."

While based at Ilopango, Posada served as the right-hand man of longtime CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, who reported directly to Vice President Bush's office. During this period, Rodriguez met with Bush on three occasions to brief him on the illegal contra resupply operation.

What did the U.S. government do after leading U.S. dailies exposed Posada as a contra operative in El Salvador? American officials let him slip away and vanish. And the U.S. media quietly dropped the matter.

As Jeff Cohen of FAIR noted shortly after the Pan Am bombing: "Instead of clamoring for hypothetical responses to as yet unidentified terrorists behind the Pan Am explosion, journalists would do better to ask Bush some probing questions. Why has the U.S. protected Posada and his friends? If it's terrorism to blow up innocent civilians in the fight against 'Western Satanism' and 'international Zionism,' isn't it also terrorism to do the same in the struggle against 'international Communism'? And if it's justified for the U.S. to retaliate against a foreign country linked to the Pan Am terrorists, does Cuba have the right to launch an air strike against Washington because of U.S. relations with Posada and his colleagues? If U.S. officials are serious about punishing terrorists, shouldn't they start with their own?"

The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 received a lot of media coverage, but certain aspects of the case have been downplayed, including the fact that at least six U.S. intelligence agents died during the blast. Among them were Mathew Gannon, a high-ranking CIA Middle East expert, and his two bodyguards, Ronald Lariviere and Daniel O'Connor, all of whom were working under State Department cover. Another Pan Am victim was Charles McKee, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer specializing in Middle East counterterrorist operations; at the time of his death, McKee was on a CIA assignment.

A special 27-page report commissioned by Pan Am in the wake of the attack confirmed that CIA officials were killed aboard Flight 103. The shocking contents of this report-prepared by a New York consulting firm called Interfor-were summarized in a November 1989 Toronto Star article headlined "Pan Am bomb linked to double-dealing CIA drug plot." According to the Star, the group of CIA agents who died on Flight 103 were en route to the U.S. to personally inform their superiors about another CIA clique (dubbed "CIA-I" in the Pan Am report) involved in an illegal arms and drugs operation to secure the release of American hostages held in Lebanon.

A pivotal figure in the hushed-up affair was Manzar Al-Kassar, the Syrian heroin dealer who supplied weapons to the Nicaraguan contras (at Oliver North's behest) and to Arab terrorists. This was the person CIA-I was relying on to help free the hostages. Al-Kassar, the Star reported, also had close links with Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, an anti-Arafat extremist group allegedly hired to conduct a retaliatory attack against the U.S. for shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf.

At one point, said the Star, CIA-I learned from Al-Kassar of a plot by Jibril to bomb Pan Am Flight 103, but CIA officials, fearing they might blow Al-Kassar's cover and jeopardize the hostage rescue scheme, never conveyed this information to the appropriate authorities. Congressman James Trafficant disclosed on CBS Saturday Night With Connie Chung that the bomb was smuggled on to the aircraft in a suitcase that was supposed to contain heroin. Ironically, CIA-I knew about this drug smuggling network but did not interfere because it was Al-Kassar's operation.

The American spies who died on the plane flight over Scotland were on their way to the United States to discuss what they had learned about the AlKassar situation with other CIA officials, concludes the report-which absolves Pan Am of legal responsibility for the mishap and shifts the blame to an off-the-shelf branch of U.S. intelligence. Whether or not its findings were accurate, the Pan Am report should have stimulated some independent inquiry on the part of U.S. journalists. But the American press dropped the story like a hot potato. Major media displayed little curiosity even when Congressman Trafficant announced his intention to conduct an investigation after Pan Am had subpoenaed the CIA, FBI and the State Department.

WHO'S A TERRORIST, AND WHO'S NOT?

Over the years, U.S. media have promoted a simplistic view of the world, where North Americans in white hats police the globe of black hats-usually worn by Arab terrorists. By applying the terrorism label only to anti-Western political activity and violence, mass media foster the illusion that "terrorism is alien to American patterns of conduct in the world, that it is done to us, and that what we do violently to others is legitimate counter-terrorism," said Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton University.

The U.S. government's selective definition of terrorism is echoed throughout the media. In January 1989 the Pentagon released a slick, 130-page report-with photos and bar charts-called Terrorist Group Profiles. Praising it as "an effort to raise public awareness," CBS Evening News correspondent Terrence Smith noted that the Pentagon spent $71,000 to produce and distribute the report. "Cheap by Pentagon standards," Smith concluded, "and few are likely to question its value."

The CBS segment featured a sound bite from "terrorism expert" Ray Cline, who endorsed the Pentagon's "consciousness raising among our own people." Cline, a former CIA deputy director, is a close associate of the World Anti-Communist League, whose Latin American affiliates include unsavory characters linked to death squads and neo-Nazi violence.

A.M. Rosenthal puffed the Pentagon report as a compilation of "all known terrorist groups" in his New York Times column. But a cursory glance at the report's table of contents should have been enough to discern the Pentagon's slant. The section on African terrorism lists only one organization: the anti-apartheid African National Congress. Latin American terrorists are all left-wing revolutionaries; right-wing death squads aren't mentioned. The roster from Western Europe features the defunct Direct Action from France (supposedly a leftist group), while omitting any reference to numerous neo-Nazi terror gangs that are still active on the Continent. And El Fatah, the main PLO faction, is included among Mideast terrorist organizations, despite Yasir Arafat's renunciation of terrorism.

That major U.S. news media should give their stamp of approval to such a blatantly biased Pentagon report underscores an essential point. "The American understanding of terrorism," said Professor [Richard] Falk, "has been dominated by recent governmental efforts to associate terrorists with Third World revolutionaries, especially those with Arab countries... The media have generally carried on their inquiries within this framework of selective perception. As a result, our political imagination is imprisoned, with a variety of ugly and unfortunate consequences."

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As told by mass media, only America's enemies practice terrorism. When the battleship New Jersey lobbed mortars into Lebanese villages in 1984, causing numerous civilian casualties and arousing intense anti-American feelings, few journalists suggested that this was also a form of terrorism. The idea that terrorist attacks against Americans might be a response to actions by the U.S. government seemingly never crosses the minds of most reporters. Instead, news stories depict terrorism as random madness, with neither roots nor origin. In so doing, mass media promote the officially sanctioned view that the U.S. is unfairly targeted by bloodthirsty fanatics who deserve swift retribution.

Terrorism and counter-terrorism are often two ways of describing the same activity. As Richard Falk wrote in Revolutionaries and Functionaries: The Dual Face of Terror, "The terrorist is as much the well-groomed bureaucrat reading the Wall Street Journal as the Arab in desert dress looking through the gunsights of a Kalashnikov rifle." Indeed, the activities of both are symbiotically linked, with U.S. officials invoking the specter of revolutionary violence in Third World countries as a pretext to preserve "national security" through state terrorism.

Selective definitions of terrorism

Because the U.S. government dominates the media agenda, Third World revolutionary violence continues to exert a distracting hold on the American imagination, while U.S.-backed state terrorism in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, the Philippines and Indonesia is downplayed. Consider the headline of a December 1988 New York Times article by Lindsey Gruson: "Salvador Rebels Step Up Terrorism." The lead reported on the leftists' "use of terrorism"-a reference to the killing of eight mayors in the previous eight months. One learned only in the last paragraph (of a 22-paragraph story) that Americas Watch, an independent human rights organization, found the U.S.-backed government was responsible for two out of every three civilian deaths in El Salvador during this period.

When tracking abuses of civilians by rebel groups in Central America independent human rights organizations long identified the Nicaraguan contras as the worst offenders. A once-secret 1982 Pentagon report explicitly described the contras as a "terrorist" group. A CIA-authored assassination manual actually instructed the contras to target elected mayors in Nicaragua Despite this evidence, the New York Times never referred matter-of-factly in a news story to "contra terrorism" or ran a headline like "Nicaraguan Rebels Step Up Terrorism"-a blatant double standard in light of Times reporting on El Salvador. Instead, an October 1989 Times editorial used the word "pinpricks" to describe contra terrorist attacks, which had killed over 140 Nicaraguan civilians since a cease fire supposedly went into effect 18 months earlier.

As government-allied death squad murders escalated in El Salvador, the Times whitewashed U.S. responsibility for the violence. "Despite U.S. training programs," read a Times editorial, "the Salvadoran military played into leftist hands with indiscriminate attacks on peasants [emphasis added]." As Allan Nairn documented in The Progressive, it was U.S. intelligence that organized and tutored the Salvadoran security forces involved in death squad activity that killed tens of thousands since the 1960s.

Jude Wanniski, former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and author of the annual Media Guide, is an ardent defender of Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, widely believed to be the mastermind of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980. Wanniski dismissed the notion that D'Aubuisson has anything to do with the death squads, calling it "one of the most successful hoaxes of the decade." Those like former U.S. ambassador Robert White and ex-Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, who have linked D'Aubuisson to the death squads, were guilty, in Wanniski's words, of "a McCarthyist tactic, pure and simple." Wanniski didn't mention D'Aubuisson's admiring comment about Adolf Hitler told to a German reporter and another European journalist: "You Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism, and you began to kill them."

The kind of terrorism the U.S. media pay most attention to is committed by small groups on planes, ships, or at airports-what Edward S. Herman has described as "retail terror"-compared to "wholesale terror" that occurs with U.S. financial assistance and military support in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and the Philippines (where human rights abuses have persisted under Corazon Aquino's government at a level rivaling, if not exceeding, the Marcos era). Although their numbers are much smaller, the victims of Third World revolutionary violence often receive far more news coverage than victims of U.S.-backed state terror.

A notable exception occurred when Salvadoran soldiers murdered six Jesuit priests and two associates in November 1989. Although depicted as an aberration, this incident was actually part of a long-standing pattern of religious persecution by U.S.-backed regimes, which have kidnapped, tortured and murdered scores of progressive church activists in Latin America during the past decade.

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Corporate pushers

Few subjects evoke more hypocritical media tirades than drugs. Although countless editorials and news reports wail about international drug trafficking, massive U.S. exports of cigarettes get restrained coverage-even while tobacco companies wage enormous campaigns to sell their lethal product abroad. A former chairperson of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has lamented that in the Third World, "toward which the cigarette companies have directed the full force of their advertising prowess, and where cigarette ads dominate the media, the amount of cigarette smoking is rapidly increasing."

To the New York Times, this was unfortunate, but nothing to fret about. While noting that "many people in these countries will now die because they smoke American cigarettes," a Times editorial shrugged off the issue: "As long as cigarettes are legal in America, it will remain legal to export them." The newspaper said it was "hard to object" to spreading U.S. cigarette sales to still more countries. The Times' solution: "Wherever the U.S. Trade Representative opens a market, let the Surgeon General follow, issuing his annual report on smoking, and nagging and scolding foreign governments as well as his own."

Just below that editorial was another one. But suddenly the Times had lost its tone of tolerance for pushers of addictive substances: "America pays a terrible price for cocaine addiction..." In other words, promoting cigarettes that kill millions in countries around the world is somehow okay, but cocaine causes the U.S. to pay a "terrible price." The Times editorial writer didn't mention that for every cocaine-related fatality, hundreds of people die from tobacco and alcohol-related causes.

Aside from tobacco and alcohol, many legal pharmaceuticals cause physical and psychological damage due to over-prescription by doctors and overuse by patients. "Newspapers are full of stories about huge profits made in the illegal drug trade, and about aggressive acts that drug dealers commit to protect their turf," wrote a Sacramento-based columnist, Dan Walters. "But there's big money to be made in the legal drug trade as well. Drug companies are no less anxious to protect and enhance those profits, even if it ,~ means bulldozing public officials into doing their bidding. Their methods may be a little more genteel, but their motivations are precisely the same."

While Dan Rather and other famous reporters may spend 48 hours on crack street, they haven't been very inquisitive about spending 48 hours on Wall Street to see who is profiting from government-approved addictive chemicals.

Hidden agenda of the War on Drugs

While corporate pushers were given license to kill, reporters and pundits echoed sounds of "Charge!" in the anti-drug battle. Military metaphors were bipartisan and virtually across the mass media spectrum. Consigned to the margins were those who feared that the call to arms might be an excuse to justify armed intervention abroad, particularly in Latin America, as well as closer to home. "In the Bush era," warned Village Voice journalist James Ridgeway, "dope is replacing communism as both the rationale for American hegemony abroad and for a crackdown against minorities and dissidents here at home. Where 'national security' and 'terrorism' once were enough to get an FBI investigation going against U.S. citizens, now it's all in the name of epidemiology."

Colombia is one of the Latin American countries in which U.S. intervention has deepened as a result of the "war on drugs." Nearly every time someone is murdered in Colombia, U.S. journalists automatically blame the drug cartels. But as Amnesty International has documented, narco-traffickers have forged deadly links with sectors of the Colombian military; together they've been waging a dirty war against left-leaning politicians, social justice activists and other law-abiding civilians. Human rights violations by the Colombian military are rarely mentioned in the drug-crazed U.S. media.

When a Colombian death squad led by a military commander committed a massacre in November 1988, the Los Angeles Times described it this way: "Colombian guerrillas, firing on anything that moved, killed 42 civilians and wounded 57 in an attack on the northern mining town of Segovia, military authorities said. It was an indiscriminate attack on the population, whatever its age or sex... They were just intent on sowing blood, terror."

Compare this description to Amnesty International's account of the same event, which was not sourced to "military authorities," and contained no reference to guerrillas: "Fifteen heavily armed men...opened fire on people in the streets. Grenades were thrown into bars and the church and one group of assailants went from house to house searching for political opposition and union leaders. A bus was intercepted close to the military battalion 'Bombona,' based just outside the town and several passengers were killed. The regular garrisons of police and military stood by while the gunmen moved freely through the town for over an hour... Not only [did] the armed forces fail to intervene, but army and police personnel, including the battalion commander, directly participated in the preparation of the massacre. Forty-three people, including three children, were killed."

According to major media, the U.S. government has been sending military assistance to Colombia and neighboring countries to help them fight against the narco-traffickers. Reporters haven't written much about the Colombian death squads composed of military personnel allied with the drug cartels-death squads that utilize U.S.-supplied weapons to murder nonviolent political opponents. This is part of the untold story behind the so-called war on drugs in Latin America.

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