CNN's Capitulation
(The Times of India - 11 July 1998) - In the demonology of the new world order, poison gas is something only 'madmen' from 'rogue states' use, not 'civilised' leaders of the free world. So when a CNN broadcast last month accused the US army of using nerve gas during the Vietnam War, all hell broke loose. The allegations focussed on an incident which occurred in Laos in September 1970. In the programme, former members of the Studies and Observation Group (SOG) -- a secret US army outfit -- confessed to dropping sarin on Vietcong fighters and even suggested that non-combatants might have been gassed. The programme featured corroborative statements by Admiral Thomas Moorer, the US armed forces chief at the time, and the evidence of other retired officers who declined to be identified.
That the US deliberately killed a large number of civilians in Vietnam is an established fact, even if the details have subliminally been erased from public memory by decades of official amnesia, psychological denial and filmic distortion. But while its use of napalm and Agent Orange is well-known, no one had ever accused Washington of using nerve gas.
As the implications sunk in, Pentagon media managers launched a guerrilla operation to discredit the CNN programme. In response to the pressure, channel executives asked a consultant to review it. He in turn hired former intelligence officers from a private investigative agency to try and confirm the account through their own military sources. Though the programme was based on eight months of research, the consultant took just two weeks to reach the rather predictable conclusion that the nerve gas allegation could not be sustained.
CNN's chairman issued an abject apology for having cast aspersions on the US military. However, the programme's producers, Ms April Oliver and Mr Jack Smith, stood by their story and were summarily fired while an executive producer was forced to resign.
The channel's retraction and subsequent dismissal of the staff involved raises disturbing questions about media freedom. While US journalists routinely speculate about the crimes of other governments on the flimsiest of evidence, they are evidently not free to point fingers at their own. Two years ago, Mr Gary Webb, a reporter with the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a series of articles on the way in which the CIA and the contras had smuggled crack cocaine into the US. Eventually, his newspaper was forced to issue a cringing apology and he too was dismissed.
CNN's retraction highlights the symbiotic relationship between the US government, especially the Pentagon, and major media organisations. If the Gulf War became known as 'CNN's war', this was largely due to the way in which the channel and the armed forces made use of each other. This relationship was underwritten by a tacit understanding that CNN would not do anything to damage the reputation of the US. During the Gulf War, CNN collaborated with the Pentagon in covering up the bombing of the Amiriya civilian shelter in Baghdad in which 400 people died. By broadcasting the nerve gas story, however, CNN transgressed the rules. It was an act of treachery that could only be expiated by capitulation that was unconditional and absolute.
In Deciding What's News, Herbert Gans has described how US atrocities in Vietnam were underreported "for even when reporters had collected evidence that convinced them, New York considered the stories sufficiently unbelievable to reject them as 'atypical'." When CBS finally carried a story about American soldiers collecting the ears of dead North Vietnamese soldiers, for example, "the reporter's text was almost entirely devoted to an apologetic statement explaining the incident was atypical".
In February 1968, the then US secretary of state Dean Rusk told a group of newsmen covering the Vietnam War exactly what was expected of them. "None of your papers or your broadcasting apparatuses are worth a damn unless the US succeeds," he said. "They are trivial compared to that question. So I don't know why, to win a Pulitzer Prize, people have to go probing for things one can bitch about when there are 2,000 stories on the same day about things that are more constructive in character."
The My Lai massacre occurred a few weeks later, on March 15, 1968. The next day the New York Times -- whose reports last month fuelled the lynch mob against the CNN producers for their "incorrect" nerve gas report -- front-paged the following dispatch about My Lai, an operation it labelled a significant success: "American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting".
Only on November 13, 1969 did the true facts finally pierce the fog of ignorance and incredulity. All the several hundred victims were children, women, old or infirm men, and they were gunned down mercilessly, in cold blood. When the details about My Lai became known, no newspaper or TV channel apologised for having reported wrongly. No executives looking grave and penitent came on air to confess Uncle Sam had taken them for a ride.
The terrible truth about My Lai emerged because of Ronald Ridenhour, a former GI who was tormented by the accounts of the massacre he had heard from soldiers who had participated in it. Though the army top brass knew about the killings and was even in possession of photographs taken by its official photographer, an investigation was ordered only when it seemed that Ridenhour would go public. My Lai itself got written into official history as an aberration. The Pentagon was careful to ensure that the discourse of war crimes was kept out of all discussions about the massacre. The accused soldiers were dispersed to army bases across the country so that there would be no mass trial suggestive of Nuremberg. Finally, only one person -- First Lieutenant William Calley -- was ever convicted, and he too received a suspended sentence.
This is not to suggest that the reality of My Lai is proof enough that the US used nerve gas. In any investigative report about events shrouded in official secrecy, mistakes can and do occur. Often journalists have to make judgment calls about the accuracy of their sources and tend to do so in by weighing what is probable. While there is no sure way yet of concluding whether the sarin story is true or false, any journalist basing herself on the facts assembled -- and the record of US criminality during the Vietnam War -- would be justified in wanting to alert the world to the possibility that nerve gas might have been used. The sacking of journalists for raising such troubling questions only serves to intimidate reporters and editors into staying away from subjects the US government considers too sensitive. And suggests that Washington may really have something to hide.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
[posted July 23, 1998]
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