Thursday
Aug132009
UPDATED Israel's War of Words: The Times of London, Iran's Bombs, and Hezbollah
Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 5:07
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Co-written with Ali Yenidunya:
UPDATE 13 August, 0630 GMT: A good psychological warfare campaign can't go silent for long. Reuters reported on Wednesday: "Under a photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sitting the previous day in the cockpit of an F-15I long-range fighter-bomber, mass-selling [Israeli newspaper] Ma'ariv quoted the official as saying Israel could carry out such a strike without U.S. approval but time was running out for it to be effective. The official said, ""The military option is real and at the disposal of Israel's leaders, but time is working against them."
You have to hand it to The Times of London: when it comes to propaganda, their reporters never run the risk of subtlety.
On 3 August, an article signed by no less than three intrepid reporters, including the Defence Correspondent, proclaimed, "Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb." A research programme to create weaponised uranium had been completed in the summer of 2003, and Iranian scientists "could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order" from Khamenei.
Two days later, Foreign Editor Richard Beeston, one of the three authors of the Bomb Is Imminent piece, found another angle in a pair of articles, one co-written with Nicholas Blanford, "Tehran is investing...in its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah", which had "amassed tens of thousands of rockets and missiles capable of bombarding half [of Israel]".
The threat of an Iranian nuclear attack, coupled with its sponsorship of a regional war on Tel Aviv? Where could Beeston and his companions have discovered these master plans? According to one of the articles, "Western intelligence sources".
Which is absolutely right, if by "Western" you mean "Israeli".
We have written for months about how The Times is a leading channel for stories put out by Israel's military and intelligence services. This time, however, the paper went a step further. Rather than taking the information fed to the normal outlet, Tel Aviv correspondent Uzi Mahnaimi, it sent Beeston to Israel where he was given the material for the articles by Israeli officials. As Amos Harel subsequently reported in Ha'aretz, "At a Knesset [Israeli Parliament] Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee briefing on Tuesday [5 August], the head of the Military Intelligence Research Brigade, Brig. Gen. Yossi Baidatz, used almost identical terms to those of The Times" on the state of Iran's nuclear programme.
For the Hezbollah report, the Israeli military escorted Beeston to the Lebanese border where he met Brigadier-General Alon Friedman, the deputy head of the Israeli Northern Command, who laid out the line that the situation could “explode at any minute”. This followed an earlier Times claim of "surveillance footage" (source not identified) which "showed Hezbollah fighters trying to salvage rockets and munitions" from an ammunition bunker which exploded.
OK, it's far from rare for a newspaper to turn briefings by officials into an "exclusive" investigative report. It's not unusual to imply multiple sources to cover up the campaign of a single Government. What is distinctive about the reports in The Times is that Beeston and his colleagues cannot be bothered to cite information and analysis that cuts the other way. It is far from a deep secret that the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate of US services had concluded that Iran had ended its nuclear arms research programme in 2003. In the same week of The Times' report, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research issued an assessment that Iran could not produce a nuclear bomb even if it wanted to do it right now:
Now perhaps the Israelis have some specific piece of intelligence that refutes the American assessment. Possibly there is some document somewhere that establishes that Iran is commanding a Hezbollah political and military forces with "40,000" rockets. Rest assured, however, that these articles are not based on such tangible evidence. They are press releases masquerading as investigative journalism.
To paraphrase one of the best guides to propaganda, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "This is Israel and Iran, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
Buy Us A Cup of Coffee? Help Enduring America Expand Its Coverage and Analysis
Co-written with Ali Yenidunya:
UPDATE 13 August, 0630 GMT: A good psychological warfare campaign can't go silent for long. Reuters reported on Wednesday: "Under a photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sitting the previous day in the cockpit of an F-15I long-range fighter-bomber, mass-selling [Israeli newspaper] Ma'ariv quoted the official as saying Israel could carry out such a strike without U.S. approval but time was running out for it to be effective. The official said, ""The military option is real and at the disposal of Israel's leaders, but time is working against them."You have to hand it to The Times of London: when it comes to propaganda, their reporters never run the risk of subtlety.
On 3 August, an article signed by no less than three intrepid reporters, including the Defence Correspondent, proclaimed, "Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb." A research programme to create weaponised uranium had been completed in the summer of 2003, and Iranian scientists "could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order" from Khamenei.
Two days later, Foreign Editor Richard Beeston, one of the three authors of the Bomb Is Imminent piece, found another angle in a pair of articles, one co-written with Nicholas Blanford, "Tehran is investing...in its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah", which had "amassed tens of thousands of rockets and missiles capable of bombarding half [of Israel]".
The threat of an Iranian nuclear attack, coupled with its sponsorship of a regional war on Tel Aviv? Where could Beeston and his companions have discovered these master plans? According to one of the articles, "Western intelligence sources".
Which is absolutely right, if by "Western" you mean "Israeli".
We have written for months about how The Times is a leading channel for stories put out by Israel's military and intelligence services. This time, however, the paper went a step further. Rather than taking the information fed to the normal outlet, Tel Aviv correspondent Uzi Mahnaimi, it sent Beeston to Israel where he was given the material for the articles by Israeli officials. As Amos Harel subsequently reported in Ha'aretz, "At a Knesset [Israeli Parliament] Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee briefing on Tuesday [5 August], the head of the Military Intelligence Research Brigade, Brig. Gen. Yossi Baidatz, used almost identical terms to those of The Times" on the state of Iran's nuclear programme.
For the Hezbollah report, the Israeli military escorted Beeston to the Lebanese border where he met Brigadier-General Alon Friedman, the deputy head of the Israeli Northern Command, who laid out the line that the situation could “explode at any minute”. This followed an earlier Times claim of "surveillance footage" (source not identified) which "showed Hezbollah fighters trying to salvage rockets and munitions" from an ammunition bunker which exploded.
OK, it's far from rare for a newspaper to turn briefings by officials into an "exclusive" investigative report. It's not unusual to imply multiple sources to cover up the campaign of a single Government. What is distinctive about the reports in The Times is that Beeston and his colleagues cannot be bothered to cite information and analysis that cuts the other way. It is far from a deep secret that the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate of US services had concluded that Iran had ended its nuclear arms research programme in 2003. In the same week of The Times' report, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research issued an assessment that Iran could not produce a nuclear bomb even if it wanted to do it right now:
While Iran has made significant progress in uranium enrichment technology, the State Department’s intelligence bureau (INR) continues to assess it is unlikely that Iran will have the technical capability to produce HEU [highly enriched uranium] before 2013.
Now perhaps the Israelis have some specific piece of intelligence that refutes the American assessment. Possibly there is some document somewhere that establishes that Iran is commanding a Hezbollah political and military forces with "40,000" rockets. Rest assured, however, that these articles are not based on such tangible evidence. They are press releases masquerading as investigative journalism.
To paraphrase one of the best guides to propaganda, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "This is Israel and Iran, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."