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Inky Notes, September 23, 2009:  Stay Local with Tierney,  Smerconish and John Yoo;  Inky Toes Party Line on Lockerbie at the Expense of  Truth

Edward S. Herman

The Inky has been carrying out a vigorous campaign for support from subscribers and advertisers in connection with its bankruptcy proceeding,  arguing for the preservation of  “local control” and the importance of such  local control for the quality of the paper and well-being of  the community. There are a number of problems with this campaign.  One is that it is important who it is in the local community that controls. If it is controlled by a special interest group with an axe to grind that conflicts with general community interest, this may make local control pernicious. A local conservative ideologue in control is not as good or desirable as a distant control by people without such commitments and political agenda.  In fact, Inky history illustrates the problem: for decades the Inky was controlled by the affluent local Republican business entrepreneur Walter Annenberg. He sold it to the non-local media mogul John Knight. It is a well recognized fact of media history that the locally controlled Inky was a  partisan and otherwise poor newspaper, and that it was drastically improved under the foreign control of  John Knight (and with a later merger, Knight-Ridder).

As it happens, Brian Tierney, the dominant individual in the “local” control of the Inquirer, is much more like Walter Annenberg than John Knight. Tierney is a committed Republican,  a former Bush enthusiast and campaigner, and a man who bullied the Inquirer some years ago on behalf of the local Catholic Church hierarchy (linked to the eventual firing of an Inquirer reporter who had been critical of  Church officials). He is clearly a man who sought control of the paper in good part to influence its political drift. And under his control the paper has brought in as a regular contributor former Senator Rick Santorum, a rightwing political has-been, closely tied to the corrupt K-Street project during the Bush years, who made a fool of himself in the Schiavo case and on Social Security (where he showed he didn’t really understand the issues involved), and who is in no way “local.”  Tierney also brought in John Yoo, another non-local ultra-reactionary who is an excellent candidate for a war crimes trial if  this sorry political system can ever bring genuine war criminals  to justice under a rule of law. In addition to the continuing presence of  Charles Krauthammer, Tierney has also given us regular doses of  the local rightwingers Kevin Ferris  and Michael Smerconish. These are all apologists for human torture, and such apologists constitute a solid majority of  the paper’s regular columnists.

Smerconish, who has bragged about his friendly and collegial  relationships with the far-right talk show demagogues Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, has been greatly helped by Tierney to leverage himself into a position as a CBS radio talk show host. The Inky has not only given Smerconish a regular column, the paper has featured each of his recent books, and helped along his book sales by running a series of excerpts from his book on the Mumia Abu-Jamal case (Murdered by Mumia), written with Maureen Faulkner. And the editors put his picture with that of President Obama on the front page on the occasion of his recent interview with the President (who his friends Glenn Beck and Limbaugh have been denouncing as an anti-white racist). I guess this is another gift to us locals. I will admit, however, that Smerconish has softened a bit lately, and in a recent column he even chides the rightwing—implicitly his buddies Beck and Limbaugh--on the current rampage against Obama and big government , and  he even notes the hypocrisy in their unconcern over big government’s growth during the Bush years  (Smerconish, “Dangerous times again, as hatred flows<http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20090920_Head_Strong__Dangerous_times_again__as_hatred_flows.html>,” Sept. 20).

Of course we have Dick Polman and Trudy Rubin on “the left” as Inky regulars. What a joke! Do you think this left would ever call for a withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan? Or discuss the militarization of  this country and its effects on foreign policy and domestic welfare? Or call Bush and Cheney  war criminals and urge their prosecution? Not a chance. Rubin uses her status as a major paper’s foreign policy commentator to get interviews with establishment celebrities—e.g., General David Petraeus, on both Iraq and Afghanistan--and she always ends up supporting  whatever “surge” the war establishment has in mind. Her great classic from the run-up to the Iraq war was a column expressing worry that Saddam Hussein might use his weapons of  mass destruction--she swallowed that WMD party line whole--against his own people to stop our invasion!!! (“The crime we must prevent,” Rubin,  Dec. 4, 2003).

In short, under Tierney, the Inky has moved to the right and become less informative and with less diversity of  opinion, and it continues to exclude any critical opinion from the left (and associated truth—see the case study of  the Inky on Lockerbie, below).

I should also mention in connection with the “keep the paper local” campaign that the Inky editors for years have been preaching the virtues of  “free trade” and the evils of  “protectionism.”  But “free trade” includes the movement of capital and transfer of ownership, and it denies that constraints on these in the alleged interests of  protecting local labor and other local interests are in the public interest. The local ownership campaign is clearly a form of the dreaded protectionism, but we can be sure the editors won’t permit this argument to be made, and in fact a letter I wrote to them on these historical and theoretical points was not publishable!

The Lockerbie Case

The Inquirer was put to the quality and integrity test by the recent release of  the Libyan Abdelbasset al-Megrahi, convicted in 2001 in  the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 shootdown case. And the paper  failed this test abysmally. The case was easy to flunk because there was an establishment consensus on this subject, based in good part on a long-standing demonization of Kadaffi and strenuous government propaganda claiming Libyan guilt. In fact, that propaganda was so intense before the 2000-2001 trial--with the State Department even putting out a “Fact Sheet” listing the evidence that the man still to be tried was guilty--that the possibility of a fair trial was badly compromised. It was also compromised by the fact that within two hours of  Pan Am 103’s downing at Lockerbie in September 1988, the CIA and FBI were on the scene and effectively took over from the Scottish police in gathering evidence, in violation of Scottish law and international protocol. (See the chapter on “An Old Fashioned Police Investigation,” in John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, Cover-Up of Convenience [Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2001]). The CIA, FBI and State Department personnel were also very actively present with the prosecution at the 2000-2001 trial in the Netherlands, again in violation of protocol.

The New York Times, while covering this case very poorly, at least finally cited one of the three Scottish trial judges admitting that “There was great pressure on the Court to get a conviction” (Aug. 26, 2009). Nothing like this was ever acknowledged in the Inky, and Trudy Rubin is now entirely satisfied that “a neutral Scottish court found him [Al-Meghari] guilty.” (“How Brits got ‘compassion’<http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/trudy_rubin/20090826_Worldview__How_Brits_got__compassion_.html>,’’ Aug. 26).  Scotland is a part of  Britain,  a close ally of the United States and its partner in pursuing Kadaffi and Libya in this Pan Am case. Even apart from explicit and implicit pressures, could such a court be said to be assuredly neutral? A related problem is this: the prosecution argued consistently that al-Megrahi had worked in close coordination with his Libyan colleague Lamin Khalifa Fhimah in carrying out the crime, yet the court found Fhimah innocent. The UN official observer at the trial, Hans Köchler, pointed out the illogic of this, and he and others have suggested that it happened because the judges knew the case was a fraud but the pressures on them required at least one guilty party. The Inky of course never discusses this question and neither its news nor editorial department has ever cited Köchler.

Another problem with the case is that there was never any hard or even plausible evidence that a bomb had gone via a suitcase in a plane from Malta, to another plane in Frankfort, and then to Heathrow and onward. The Malta airport is noted for security, and all its 55 bags on the Air Malta flight that supposedly fed into the deadly flight, were accounted for and tied to individual travelers. It was also near Christmas and sending a timed bomb via Malta-Frankfort-Heathrow would have been foolish. The identification of al-Megrahi by a clothing salesman in Malta was badly compromised, and even the judges admitted that it was “not absolute” (a great understatement). The case was found by the judges to be “circumstantial.” But Scottish law calls for a finding of guilt only on the basis of evidence that is corroborated. Scottish lawyer Robert Black, who helped organize the trial, and followed it closely, found the result “astonishing,” and “the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for a hundred years.” Black has never been cited in the Inky.

There is also the problematic fact of the shift in villains to Libya from Iran, Syria and the paid hit men of the  Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a shift that seemed closely tied to political interest. There was an initial strong belief that Iran had underwritten the bombing of  Pan Am 103 as revenge for the U.S. downing of  Iranian Air Flight 655 just six months earlier, with 290 dead. “Definitive proof” here was suddenly shifted to “definitive proof”  of Libyan involvement when a hostage crisis in Lebanon and then the Iraq war in 1990-1991 called for accommodating Iran and Syria. This has never concentrated the minds of  the mainstream media or made them at all doubtful of the official party line.

 In her 1993 memoir The Downing Street Years, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote that after the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya, which used British airbases and in which Kaddaffi’s two-year old daughter was killed, “There were revenge killings of British hostages organized by Libya, which I deeply regretted. But the much vaunted Libyan counter-attack did not and could not take place.”  Ms. Thatcher seems to have forgotten Pan Am 103, or could she have momentarily forgotten that Libya was supposed to have been guilty of this act, and, writing honestly but carelessly for the historical record implicitly acknowledged here that this was a fraud that she had helped perpetrate? This nugget was reported in South Korea’s OhMyNews, but was somehow overlooked by the Inky and its journalistic colleagues.

An appeal of his conviction by al-Megrahi’s lawyers finally led to a June 2007 decision by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Board  that gave and discussed six separate grounds on which the 2001 decision might have been a miscarriage of justice. That’s a lot of grounds, and the report itself  quotes some telling U.S. documents that never made it to the trial—in one, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency memo of September 24, 1989,  stated that the bombing was "conceived, authorized and financed by Ali-Akbar Mahotashemi-Pur, Iran's former Interior Minister. The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad [Jabril] Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General command (PFLP-GC) for a sum of $1 million" (quoted in Jason Allardyce and Mark Macaskill, "US blamed Iran for lockerbie bomb<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6797831.ece>," Sunday Times, August 16, 2009). But while this can be quoted in the British and Scottish media, it can’t make it into the Inky (or any other mainstream U.S. media publication).

Following the SCCRB decision of June 2007 it took  till April 2009 to get the case back in the courts. But by that time al-Megrahi was terminally ill and the arrangement was made for him to be released, but in exchange for  his dropping the case. The charge that the release was designed to help Britain strike an oil deal with Libya was widely discussed in the U.S. media, and is of course swallowed by Trudy Rubin in the Inky, but the idea that pursuing the case would be embarrassing to the Western system of justice, while common in the Scottish press, is seldom mentioned here, and not once in the Inky.

The only Inky writers to deal with the release of  al-Megrahi all took it as a given that the trial was not political, was fair, and that he was a killer. Two of them, Matthew Spolar (“Bomber’s possible release opposed” [Aug. 14] and Monica Yant Kinney, “Justice, closure evaporate for local Flight 103 family” [Aug. 23]), engage in a cheapshot exploitation of  the emotions of  victims’ family members. Neither of them even hint at the possibility that al-Megrahi was the victim of injustice, a political fall guy. Both are completely devoid of  substance about the serious issues of the case. The Inky editorial, “No room for this Libyan” (Aug. 26), also accepts Libyan guilt without  a word of  debate, and it gets on a moralistic high horse about Kadaffi. There is not a word by any of these moral folks about the  U.S. shooting down of  the Iranian airliner with 290 casualties in July 1988, nor the fact that the Rambo captain of the U.S. ship that did it, while we were helping Saddam Hussein fight Iran, got a real hero’s welcome and a Legion of Merit award for “exceptionally meritorious service” on his return to the United States.

Trudy Rubin’s article features the political interest of Britain in Libyan oil as the basis of the phony “compassion.” (“How Brits got ‘compassion,’” Aug. 26).  She says not a  word about the issues that led Black and Köchler to decry the decision as “incomprehensible,” nor a word about the “six grounds” that led the SCCRB to call for a new  trial, and nothing about the trial abuses documented by Köchler and many others. She does mention the alternative model of  Iran-PFLP guilt, but dismisses it on the say-so of  Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official who led the CIA’s Lockerbie investigation. This is pure Rubin: retreat to a high U.S. government official for the truth, and stop right there. That the CIA was deeply involved in the case, was accused of  violating many legal rules in gathering evidence and dealing with the trial, and has been known to prevaricate is of no interest to her. But neither is the truth.

The Inky had one other opinion column on the case, by  Robert P. George (“Killer’s release demands answers,” Aug. 30). The author is a lawyer who worked on behalf of one of the victim’s families in suing Libya. The long piece features an emotional recounting of  the qualities of  the victim and other families, and berates the U.S. government for failing to prevent the release of the killer. Like the other opinion pieces in the Inky it fails to discuss any substantive issue.

The paper did run half  dozen news articles, a few of which mention the SCCRB decision in passing without delving at all into its substance. All of them focus on the reactions to the Megrahi release by victim families and politicians, or on the imminence of  his release or his arrival and greeting in Libya. None deal with the substance of the case. So both in their news and editorial pages the Inky fails to provide its readers with any  balance in opinion or a factual basis for understanding the real and controversial issues of the case. There is an establishment consensus on the case in the United States (but not in say Scotland), and the Inky editors do not allow any deviationism from that consensus.

For alternative views, I urge readers to look at the following:

"Statement by Dr. Hans <http://i-p-o.org/Megrahi-statement-Koechler-IPO-nr-21Aug2009.htm> Köchler<http://i-p-o.org/Megrahi-statement-Koechler-IPO-nr-21Aug2009.htm>," International Observer appointed by the United Nations, at the Lockerbie Trial in the Netherlands, Vienna, August 21, 2009.  (Also see the documents archived at the website of the International Observer Mission for the Lockerbie Court<http://i-p-o.org/lockerbie_observer_mission.htm>.)

John Pilger, "Megrahi was framed<http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/09/pilger-megrahi-justice>," New Statesman, September 3, 2009

Gareth Peirce, "The framing of al-Megrahi<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/peir01_.html>," London Review of Books, September 24, 2009