"I don't battle anymore! I uplift motherfuckers!" - GZA
Monday, July 07, 2008,11:12 AM
Mann sentenced for E Guinea plot
Former British soldier Simon Mann has been sentenced to 34 years and four months in jail by an Equatorial Guinea court for his role in a 2004 coup plot.
The verdict followed Mann's trial in the capital Malabo last month in which he admitted conspiring to oust President Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
The former special forces officer, 56, had expressed remorse, saying he was not the most senior coup plotter.
Mann was held in 2004 with 64 others in Zimbabwe before being extradited.
He served four years in a prison in Zimbabwe for trying to purchase weapons without a licence.
Eleven other men, including South African arms dealer Nick Du Toit - who testified that he had been recruited by Mann - are already serving sentences in Equatorial Guinea in connection with the coup attempt.
Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich former Spanish colony, has been ruled by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema since he seized power from his uncle in 1979.
Pardon hint
Mann, wearing a grey prison uniform, stood impassively as the verdict was read out by presiding judge Carlos Mangue in the heavily-guarded courtroom in Malabo, according to Reuters news agency.
During the trial, prosecutors had asked for about 31 years in prison - but in the end a three-judge panel gave him an even longer sentence.
Mann's lawyer had asked for leniency, saying his client was a pawn of powerful international businessmen and saying he had been "not a co-author" of the coup plot but "an accomplice".
President Nguema has not ruled out the possibility of Mann serving part of his sentence in a British jail, the BBC's West Africa correspondent Will Ross.
He adds that Mann's best hope of freedom is a presidential pardon.
'Organisers'
Mann has implicated Sir Mark Thatcher, son of UK former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and London-based millionaire Eli Calil as organisers of the plot.
Sir Mark was fined and received a suspended sentence in South Africa in 2005 for unknowingly helping to finance the plot. He strongly denies any direct involvement. Mr Calil also denies involvement.
Du Toit has said that he was told they were trying to install an exiled opposition politician, Severo Moto, as president.
Mr Moto, who is currently in Spain, has denied involvement in the failed coup.
The verdict followed Mann's trial in the capital Malabo last month in which he admitted conspiring to oust President Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
The former special forces officer, 56, had expressed remorse, saying he was not the most senior coup plotter.
Mann was held in 2004 with 64 others in Zimbabwe before being extradited.
He served four years in a prison in Zimbabwe for trying to purchase weapons without a licence.
Eleven other men, including South African arms dealer Nick Du Toit - who testified that he had been recruited by Mann - are already serving sentences in Equatorial Guinea in connection with the coup attempt.
Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich former Spanish colony, has been ruled by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema since he seized power from his uncle in 1979.
Pardon hint
Mann, wearing a grey prison uniform, stood impassively as the verdict was read out by presiding judge Carlos Mangue in the heavily-guarded courtroom in Malabo, according to Reuters news agency.
During the trial, prosecutors had asked for about 31 years in prison - but in the end a three-judge panel gave him an even longer sentence.
Mann's lawyer had asked for leniency, saying his client was a pawn of powerful international businessmen and saying he had been "not a co-author" of the coup plot but "an accomplice".
President Nguema has not ruled out the possibility of Mann serving part of his sentence in a British jail, the BBC's West Africa correspondent Will Ross.
He adds that Mann's best hope of freedom is a presidential pardon.
'Organisers'
Mann has implicated Sir Mark Thatcher, son of UK former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and London-based millionaire Eli Calil as organisers of the plot.
Sir Mark was fined and received a suspended sentence in South Africa in 2005 for unknowingly helping to finance the plot. He strongly denies any direct involvement. Mr Calil also denies involvement.
Du Toit has said that he was told they were trying to install an exiled opposition politician, Severo Moto, as president.
Mr Moto, who is currently in Spain, has denied involvement in the failed coup.
Labels: Empire
Thursday, June 19, 2008,5:03 PM
Taliban ambassador wielded power within Guantanamo
By Tom Lasseter
KABUL, Afghanistan — When U.S. guards frog-marched Abdul Salam Zaeef through the cellblocks of Guantanamo, detainees would roar his name, "Mullah Zaeef! Mullah Zaeef!"
Zaeef, in shackles, looked at the guards and smiled.
"The soldiers told me, 'You are the king of this prison,' " he later recalled.
Zaeef is the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, famous for his defiant news conferences after 9-11, in which he said the militant Islamist group would never surrender Osama bin Laden.
Pakistani intelligence officers dragged him out of his house in Islamabad in late December 2001 or January 2002 and took him to Peshawar. "Your Excellency, you are no longer Your Excellency," he recalled one of them saying.
The Pakistanis handed him over to U.S. troops, who he said threw a sack over his head and pushed him into a helicopter. The Americans flew him to a warship, where he was held for about a week in a small cell that reminded him of a dog kennel, he said.
"I was afraid about what would happen to me," Zaeef said in an interview in Kabul, wearing slightly crooked gold-rimmed glasses and speaking in a near-whisper. "I didn't know if it was a dream or not. I never imagined this would happen to me."
Yet from mid-2002 till September 2005 at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Zaeef became a leader again. He helped orchestrate hunger strikes and exploit the missteps of a U.S. detention system that often captured the wrong men, mistreated them, then incarcerated them indefinitely without legal recourse.
The insurgency he helped launch in Guantanamo capitalized on the Americans' ignorance of Islamic customs and a pattern of interrupting prayers, shaving off prisoners' beards and searching their copies of the Quran.
U.S. officials didn't respond to repeated requests for comments about Zaeef's role at the camp, but former detainees from Europe to Central Asia spoke of him with reverence that bordered on hero worship.
"People would scream when they saw him: They said, 'We will send you our prayers,' " said Munir Naseer, a Pakistani.
A Kuwaiti bragged that he once lived in a cell next to Zaeef and touched his hand. An Afghan said that men in his cellblock relied on Zaeef's advice about everything from prayer to protest. A Jordanian said that Zaeef often brokered deals between the American military and angry detainees. A Chinese Uighur called Zaeef the "president of Guantanamo."
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, WINTER 2002
His back hunched, Zaeef clomped through the cold mud that surrounded the detainees' tents, lugging the plastic buckets the men used as toilets. He'd get to a large metal drum, heft a bucket in the air and pour out the excrement and urine, trying not to let it splash him in the face.
"Every time the buckets filled up with urine or feces, the guards told Mullah Zaeef to go empty it," said Mohammed Omar, a teenage Pakistani who was held at Kandahar in early 2002. "They made him and another big Taliban guy do this."
If U.S. soldiers could make a Taliban mullah lug everyone else's feces to the "burn buckets," the foul-smelling drums used to dispose of human waste, there could be no question about who was in charge.
To many of Zaeef's fellow detainees, he looked old and tired, sloshing around in the mud with the rest of them and sleeping in a tent with more than a dozen other men, surrounded by bales of concertina wire and soldiers.
Asadullah Jan, a Pakistani who was imprisoned at Kandahar in early 2002, said the guards zeroed in on Zaeef.
"One time, Abdul Salam was leading prayers," Jan said. "A guard came over and started talking with him. Abdul Salam said, 'Come back in 10 minutes; we're praying.' The guard called on his radio and said that Abdul Salam wouldn't talk. A group of soldiers came down, and in the middle of prayers they came behind him, put their boots on his neck and beat him."
Before he was sent to Kandahar, Zaeef spent a month or two in detention at Bagram Air Base, and he said he was treated brutally there, too.
"The cursing, the punching, the kicking, it was continuous," he said.
It was at Kandahar, however, that Zaeef began to learn how to run a prison from the inside.
At first, the detainees weren't allowed to pray aloud, but then camp officials decided to let each tent have a prayer leader.
"Under the excuse of azzam" — the Muslim call to prayer — "they would spread information between detainees," said Khalid Pashtun, who served as a liaison between the local Afghan government and U.S. forces at the camp. "The prayer leaders (such as Zaeef) would be saying, 'Be careful in interrogation; keep to your story until the end.' "
Zaeef wasn't like many of the other prisoners whom the U.S. and its Afghan allies had swept up. A few years earlier, he'd flown into the Kandahar Airfield as a senior government official. Now he was there as a prisoner.
He was born in Kandahar province in the late 1960s and adopted by his uncle after he was orphaned at age 7. Zaeef's family fled to Pakistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but he returned to Kandahar as a teenager to fight the Soviets with the mujahedeen, Islamic holy warriors. He was known for taking textbooks to the trenches.
Zaeef returned to Quetta, Pakistan, to finish his studies in a madrassa, an Islamic religious school. He focused on Islamic banking and sharia, Islamic law, then went to work as a bookkeeper for a local trading company.
In the early 1990s, Zaeef said, former mujahedeen fighters enlisted his help to fight corrupt warlords in Kandahar, and he took part in the initial meetings of the Taliban. He became a trusted counselor to senior Taliban leaders after the Islamist movement took control of Kandahar in 1994.
Wahid Mujdah, a former Taliban diplomat, said Zaeef was "very, very close" to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "who had a lot of confidence in him."
As Zaeef told a reporter: "I did not join the Taliban, I helped start it."
After the Taliban swept north to Kabul and seized control of most of the country in 1996, Zaeef helped organize the country's Islamic courts in Kandahar, then moved to Herat to oversee the banking system. He then was brought to Kabul for a succession of Cabinet jobs, such as deputy minister of mining and minister of transportation.
The U.S. military claimed that he'd played a role in directing al Qaida and the Taliban on the battlefield. "In the beginning of the Taliban's rise to power, operational commanders of the Taliban and al Qaida forces in the Shomali and Kabul regions of Afghanistan reported to the detainee (Zaeef) as the deputy of defense for the Taliban," said a summary of evidence prepared for Zaeef's military tribunal.
GUANTANAMO, SUMMER 2002
When he arrived at Guantanamo in the spring or summer of 2002, Zaeef was exhausted from the harsh treatment he'd received at Kandahar and Bagram.
He slept as often as he could and was just another detainee, Internment Serial Number 306. He got up when the guards came, and shuffled off in his orange prison clothes and flip-flops to answer questions about the Taliban leadership.
"He was very weak, physically, when I saw him at Guantanamo," said Mohammed Saduq, an Afghan who'd commanded Zaeef during the fight against the Soviets. "It is very difficult to know the inside of a man, and it's hard to say how it affected him — going from an ambassador to being in a cage — but he told me in Guantanamo that he was suffering badly."
The rules at Guantanamo, Zaeef said, reminded him of Bagram. The men weren't supposed to talk in their cells. They were supposed to say "please" and "sir" when they addressed the guards. In Guantanamo, however, the guards weren't beating the men, he said, and prisoners could speak up.
"After a month, we decided we could not accept these extremist measures. We must react," Zaeef said. "So we began shouting to each other. The soldiers came and asked if we were talking to each other. We said, 'Yes, we are not dogs.' We began throwing water at them, spitting at them; we said, 'If you want to kill us, fine.' "
A high-ranking officer came and spoke to the detainees, Zaeef said. The rules were rescinded. It was a victory in a game of inches.
As the months passed, Zaeef recovered his strength. He said that he began to look around the camp more on his daily trips to interrogations or medical checkups.
In a way, Zaeef said, he was encouraged by what he saw. Interrogators raised their voices from time to time, but they never hit him. Detainees were able to pass messages from one end of a cellblock to the other, and to call out greetings and reports of their last interrogations, none of which the guards could understand.
Slowly, Zaeef realized that it was the sort of place where a man could wage a campaign.
"The soldiers who pushed us got spit at, peed on or had (feces) thrown at them," said Adil Kamil al Wadi, a Bahraini. "It would scare them. They would run to the medic for a shot."
When the soldiers came back from the medic, Wadi said, they'd go to the cell of the detainee and beat him until he no longer could stand.
Zaeef joined a small group of Taliban and al Qaida leaders who were issuing orders and gathering reports; because he spoke fluent Arabic, Pashto and Dari, he could serve as a conduit among Arab, Pakistani and Afghan detainees. His English gave him further power, allowing him to represent those groups in conversations with U.S. military officers.
"We chose the leaders of the blocks," Zaeef said. "If the detainees had any problems, they had to speak with the block leader, who would talk with the block NCO" — the senior enlisted military-police soldier on duty — "and if they could not resolve the issue, they would send a message to us, the leaders of the camp."
U.S. military officers at Guantanamo acknowledged that detainees organized themselves into groups.
Zaeef knew the script. In the 1980s, a central rallying cry for the Islamic warriors who battled the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan — with crucial American support — was that the Soviets were brutal infidels.
Cellblock leaders began spreading messages to the men around them: We must not tolerate these conditions; it's time for a hunger strike. Rumors that guards had mistreated the Quran often accompanied the messages.
Zaeef claimed to a reporter that he'd witnessed several instances of Quran abuse. However, an Afghan former detainee who was at Guantanamo said the stories that Zaeef and others spread — such as soldiers stomping on a Quran — were lies.
The hunger strikes were reported all over the world. Aid groups and defense lawyers pointed to them as proof of Guantanamo's appalling conditions.
Eventually, officials at Guantanamo handed out surgical masks for detainees to hang from the walls of their cells as cradles for their Qurans, to keep them off the floor. Guards were ordered to be quiet during prayers, and orange cones with the letter "P" were placed in corridors during prayer time. Detainees were allowed to wear skull caps, as prescribed by Islamic tradition. Guards were told never to touch prisoners' Qurans and to log every allegation of abuse.
Men such as Zaeef responded by growing more assertive. They wanted more than small wins.
GUANTANAMO TO KABUL, SEPTEMBER 2005
In June 2005, detainees at Guantanamo staged their biggest hunger strike yet: As many as 100 men refused to eat.
Prison authorities gathered detainee leaders and discussed their demands. Zaeef represented Afghans and Pakistanis, joining detainee representatives from several other nations.
After consulting with detainees in the cellblocks, Zaeef and the other leaders produced a list of demands that included Geneva Convention rights, court trials, less time in isolation cells, better treatment from the guards and so on.
However, the meetings among the detainees broke down before negotiations with U.S. authorities could proceed, Zaeef said, because the detainees worried that the Americans were eavesdropping to find out who their cellblock leaders were.
Zaeef was released that September.
He's been home for more than two years now, under house arrest by the Afghan government, which relaxes and tightens its control according to his public remarks. Calling on a radio program for the Taliban to regain at least part of their ruling power, for instance, meant that he wasn't permitted to receive visitors for several weeks.
Two guards usually stand out front, next to a faded red door and a sentry house.
Sitting in his reception room, Zaeef sometimes brags about his years at Guantanamo.
He likes to tell about the time guards came to have his beard shaved.
"I refused. I was punching them; I was fighting them," he says. "Then they threw gas (canisters) into my cell. I put my clothes to my mouth and fought them when they came in."
The guards overtook him, dragged him off and shaved him. But for Zaeef, that wasn't the point: He'd resisted.
Asked whether his time at Guantanamo had changed him, Zaeef said that it only further convinced him that America was the enemy of Islam.
He gets regular news reports about the Taliban's brutal campaign to reassert itself in southern Afghanistan.
So, as he did for more than 1,000 days in Guantanamo, he sits and waits for his next chance at power.
KABUL, Afghanistan — When U.S. guards frog-marched Abdul Salam Zaeef through the cellblocks of Guantanamo, detainees would roar his name, "Mullah Zaeef! Mullah Zaeef!"
Zaeef, in shackles, looked at the guards and smiled.
"The soldiers told me, 'You are the king of this prison,' " he later recalled.
Zaeef is the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, famous for his defiant news conferences after 9-11, in which he said the militant Islamist group would never surrender Osama bin Laden.
Pakistani intelligence officers dragged him out of his house in Islamabad in late December 2001 or January 2002 and took him to Peshawar. "Your Excellency, you are no longer Your Excellency," he recalled one of them saying.
The Pakistanis handed him over to U.S. troops, who he said threw a sack over his head and pushed him into a helicopter. The Americans flew him to a warship, where he was held for about a week in a small cell that reminded him of a dog kennel, he said.
"I was afraid about what would happen to me," Zaeef said in an interview in Kabul, wearing slightly crooked gold-rimmed glasses and speaking in a near-whisper. "I didn't know if it was a dream or not. I never imagined this would happen to me."
Yet from mid-2002 till September 2005 at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Zaeef became a leader again. He helped orchestrate hunger strikes and exploit the missteps of a U.S. detention system that often captured the wrong men, mistreated them, then incarcerated them indefinitely without legal recourse.
The insurgency he helped launch in Guantanamo capitalized on the Americans' ignorance of Islamic customs and a pattern of interrupting prayers, shaving off prisoners' beards and searching their copies of the Quran.
U.S. officials didn't respond to repeated requests for comments about Zaeef's role at the camp, but former detainees from Europe to Central Asia spoke of him with reverence that bordered on hero worship.
"People would scream when they saw him: They said, 'We will send you our prayers,' " said Munir Naseer, a Pakistani.
A Kuwaiti bragged that he once lived in a cell next to Zaeef and touched his hand. An Afghan said that men in his cellblock relied on Zaeef's advice about everything from prayer to protest. A Jordanian said that Zaeef often brokered deals between the American military and angry detainees. A Chinese Uighur called Zaeef the "president of Guantanamo."
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, WINTER 2002
His back hunched, Zaeef clomped through the cold mud that surrounded the detainees' tents, lugging the plastic buckets the men used as toilets. He'd get to a large metal drum, heft a bucket in the air and pour out the excrement and urine, trying not to let it splash him in the face.
"Every time the buckets filled up with urine or feces, the guards told Mullah Zaeef to go empty it," said Mohammed Omar, a teenage Pakistani who was held at Kandahar in early 2002. "They made him and another big Taliban guy do this."
If U.S. soldiers could make a Taliban mullah lug everyone else's feces to the "burn buckets," the foul-smelling drums used to dispose of human waste, there could be no question about who was in charge.
To many of Zaeef's fellow detainees, he looked old and tired, sloshing around in the mud with the rest of them and sleeping in a tent with more than a dozen other men, surrounded by bales of concertina wire and soldiers.
Asadullah Jan, a Pakistani who was imprisoned at Kandahar in early 2002, said the guards zeroed in on Zaeef.
"One time, Abdul Salam was leading prayers," Jan said. "A guard came over and started talking with him. Abdul Salam said, 'Come back in 10 minutes; we're praying.' The guard called on his radio and said that Abdul Salam wouldn't talk. A group of soldiers came down, and in the middle of prayers they came behind him, put their boots on his neck and beat him."
Before he was sent to Kandahar, Zaeef spent a month or two in detention at Bagram Air Base, and he said he was treated brutally there, too.
"The cursing, the punching, the kicking, it was continuous," he said.
It was at Kandahar, however, that Zaeef began to learn how to run a prison from the inside.
At first, the detainees weren't allowed to pray aloud, but then camp officials decided to let each tent have a prayer leader.
"Under the excuse of azzam" — the Muslim call to prayer — "they would spread information between detainees," said Khalid Pashtun, who served as a liaison between the local Afghan government and U.S. forces at the camp. "The prayer leaders (such as Zaeef) would be saying, 'Be careful in interrogation; keep to your story until the end.' "
Zaeef wasn't like many of the other prisoners whom the U.S. and its Afghan allies had swept up. A few years earlier, he'd flown into the Kandahar Airfield as a senior government official. Now he was there as a prisoner.
He was born in Kandahar province in the late 1960s and adopted by his uncle after he was orphaned at age 7. Zaeef's family fled to Pakistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but he returned to Kandahar as a teenager to fight the Soviets with the mujahedeen, Islamic holy warriors. He was known for taking textbooks to the trenches.
Zaeef returned to Quetta, Pakistan, to finish his studies in a madrassa, an Islamic religious school. He focused on Islamic banking and sharia, Islamic law, then went to work as a bookkeeper for a local trading company.
In the early 1990s, Zaeef said, former mujahedeen fighters enlisted his help to fight corrupt warlords in Kandahar, and he took part in the initial meetings of the Taliban. He became a trusted counselor to senior Taliban leaders after the Islamist movement took control of Kandahar in 1994.
Wahid Mujdah, a former Taliban diplomat, said Zaeef was "very, very close" to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "who had a lot of confidence in him."
As Zaeef told a reporter: "I did not join the Taliban, I helped start it."
After the Taliban swept north to Kabul and seized control of most of the country in 1996, Zaeef helped organize the country's Islamic courts in Kandahar, then moved to Herat to oversee the banking system. He then was brought to Kabul for a succession of Cabinet jobs, such as deputy minister of mining and minister of transportation.
The U.S. military claimed that he'd played a role in directing al Qaida and the Taliban on the battlefield. "In the beginning of the Taliban's rise to power, operational commanders of the Taliban and al Qaida forces in the Shomali and Kabul regions of Afghanistan reported to the detainee (Zaeef) as the deputy of defense for the Taliban," said a summary of evidence prepared for Zaeef's military tribunal.
GUANTANAMO, SUMMER 2002
When he arrived at Guantanamo in the spring or summer of 2002, Zaeef was exhausted from the harsh treatment he'd received at Kandahar and Bagram.
He slept as often as he could and was just another detainee, Internment Serial Number 306. He got up when the guards came, and shuffled off in his orange prison clothes and flip-flops to answer questions about the Taliban leadership.
"He was very weak, physically, when I saw him at Guantanamo," said Mohammed Saduq, an Afghan who'd commanded Zaeef during the fight against the Soviets. "It is very difficult to know the inside of a man, and it's hard to say how it affected him — going from an ambassador to being in a cage — but he told me in Guantanamo that he was suffering badly."
The rules at Guantanamo, Zaeef said, reminded him of Bagram. The men weren't supposed to talk in their cells. They were supposed to say "please" and "sir" when they addressed the guards. In Guantanamo, however, the guards weren't beating the men, he said, and prisoners could speak up.
"After a month, we decided we could not accept these extremist measures. We must react," Zaeef said. "So we began shouting to each other. The soldiers came and asked if we were talking to each other. We said, 'Yes, we are not dogs.' We began throwing water at them, spitting at them; we said, 'If you want to kill us, fine.' "
A high-ranking officer came and spoke to the detainees, Zaeef said. The rules were rescinded. It was a victory in a game of inches.
As the months passed, Zaeef recovered his strength. He said that he began to look around the camp more on his daily trips to interrogations or medical checkups.
In a way, Zaeef said, he was encouraged by what he saw. Interrogators raised their voices from time to time, but they never hit him. Detainees were able to pass messages from one end of a cellblock to the other, and to call out greetings and reports of their last interrogations, none of which the guards could understand.
Slowly, Zaeef realized that it was the sort of place where a man could wage a campaign.
"The soldiers who pushed us got spit at, peed on or had (feces) thrown at them," said Adil Kamil al Wadi, a Bahraini. "It would scare them. They would run to the medic for a shot."
When the soldiers came back from the medic, Wadi said, they'd go to the cell of the detainee and beat him until he no longer could stand.
Zaeef joined a small group of Taliban and al Qaida leaders who were issuing orders and gathering reports; because he spoke fluent Arabic, Pashto and Dari, he could serve as a conduit among Arab, Pakistani and Afghan detainees. His English gave him further power, allowing him to represent those groups in conversations with U.S. military officers.
"We chose the leaders of the blocks," Zaeef said. "If the detainees had any problems, they had to speak with the block leader, who would talk with the block NCO" — the senior enlisted military-police soldier on duty — "and if they could not resolve the issue, they would send a message to us, the leaders of the camp."
U.S. military officers at Guantanamo acknowledged that detainees organized themselves into groups.
Zaeef knew the script. In the 1980s, a central rallying cry for the Islamic warriors who battled the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan — with crucial American support — was that the Soviets were brutal infidels.
Cellblock leaders began spreading messages to the men around them: We must not tolerate these conditions; it's time for a hunger strike. Rumors that guards had mistreated the Quran often accompanied the messages.
Zaeef claimed to a reporter that he'd witnessed several instances of Quran abuse. However, an Afghan former detainee who was at Guantanamo said the stories that Zaeef and others spread — such as soldiers stomping on a Quran — were lies.
The hunger strikes were reported all over the world. Aid groups and defense lawyers pointed to them as proof of Guantanamo's appalling conditions.
Eventually, officials at Guantanamo handed out surgical masks for detainees to hang from the walls of their cells as cradles for their Qurans, to keep them off the floor. Guards were ordered to be quiet during prayers, and orange cones with the letter "P" were placed in corridors during prayer time. Detainees were allowed to wear skull caps, as prescribed by Islamic tradition. Guards were told never to touch prisoners' Qurans and to log every allegation of abuse.
Men such as Zaeef responded by growing more assertive. They wanted more than small wins.
GUANTANAMO TO KABUL, SEPTEMBER 2005
In June 2005, detainees at Guantanamo staged their biggest hunger strike yet: As many as 100 men refused to eat.
Prison authorities gathered detainee leaders and discussed their demands. Zaeef represented Afghans and Pakistanis, joining detainee representatives from several other nations.
After consulting with detainees in the cellblocks, Zaeef and the other leaders produced a list of demands that included Geneva Convention rights, court trials, less time in isolation cells, better treatment from the guards and so on.
However, the meetings among the detainees broke down before negotiations with U.S. authorities could proceed, Zaeef said, because the detainees worried that the Americans were eavesdropping to find out who their cellblock leaders were.
Zaeef was released that September.
He's been home for more than two years now, under house arrest by the Afghan government, which relaxes and tightens its control according to his public remarks. Calling on a radio program for the Taliban to regain at least part of their ruling power, for instance, meant that he wasn't permitted to receive visitors for several weeks.
Two guards usually stand out front, next to a faded red door and a sentry house.
Sitting in his reception room, Zaeef sometimes brags about his years at Guantanamo.
He likes to tell about the time guards came to have his beard shaved.
"I refused. I was punching them; I was fighting them," he says. "Then they threw gas (canisters) into my cell. I put my clothes to my mouth and fought them when they came in."
The guards overtook him, dragged him off and shaved him. But for Zaeef, that wasn't the point: He'd resisted.
Asked whether his time at Guantanamo had changed him, Zaeef said that it only further convinced him that America was the enemy of Islam.
He gets regular news reports about the Taliban's brutal campaign to reassert itself in southern Afghanistan.
So, as he did for more than 1,000 days in Guantanamo, he sits and waits for his next chance at power.
Saturday, March 15, 2008,3:34 AM
Media Fear Tactics
By G Becker
It would be interesting if the standards of Truth in Advertising were applied to television news as they sometimes are to television commercials. In that unlikely situation, TV news writers would be required to use phrases and words that convey accurate information – as opposed to the phrases and words they use today.
I want to help you break the code of alarming newspeak so that you can more easily find the valuable information that may (or may not) be part of a story.
Given the disturbing reasons we’ve all been watching so much TV news, it would be understandable to overlook the sheer ridiculousness that is inherent in some of the sensationalism. Occasionally, the way TV news is delivered can be downright funny, and indeed, the ability to laugh at something indicates that we are beginning to gain perspective on it. Accordingly, some of what follows is funny, and I have a very clear purpose in offering it: I want to help change your experience of television news, help you actually watch it differently. I want to provide some tools you can use to ensure that when you watch TV news, only actual information gets through.
Though not offered as a comprehensive glossary, here are some examples of words and phrases I think you’ll quickly recognize:
POSSIBLE: As in “Next Up: Possible links between Saddam Hussein and tooth decay…”
The word “possible” doesn’t really have the specificity one hopes for in journalism, given that it is completely accurate when applied to anything anyone can possibly imagine. “A possible outbreak of…” means there has been no outbreak. “A possible connection between memory loss and the air you breathe…” means there in no confirmed connection.
“Officials are worried about possible attacks against…” means there have been no such attacks.
Anytime you hear the word possible, it’s probably not happening right now.
LINKS:
“Next up: Possible links between convicted murderer Charles Manson and yesterday’s traffic jams in the downtown area.”
Are these two things linked? Absolutely, if you loosen your criteria enough, everything is linked by its presence on the same planet at the same moment in time – but only a very few links are instructive or meaningful.
Links are a great news trick, because you can tie a remote, unconfirmed, or even unimportant story to something that’s really pushing buttons. “Next up: Possible links to Bin Laden” is all you have to say to get attention these days.
Almost always when you hear the word link, there is no confirmed link.
“OUR NATION’S…”
“...our Nation’s water supplies…”
“...our Nation’s roadways…”
“...our Nation’s shipping ports…”
They use this trick to imply some large scale to a story. “A new threat to our nation’s water supplies” won’t be a threat to our nation’s anything. Our nation is enormous. Nothing, not even nuclear bombs, poses a threat to all of any system in our society at the same time. When they say “our nation’s” anything, they are usually trying to give grand significance to something that doesn’t have grand significance. We might not perk up as much if they said, “A new threat to Klopp County’s water supply…” The incident in which old Doc Ames truck leaked oil into the reservoir just isn’t gonna scare up enough ratings. But it could: “Next up, a new threat to our nation’s water supply. An alarming incident that experts say could happen anywhere!”
SHOCKING NEW DETAILS:
“Shocking new details when we come back.” Well, first of all, the details are not likely to be new, and if so critical, why are we waiting till after the commercial, and anyway, what does shocking mean at this point? Unless the news anchor reaches through the screen and pulls my hair, I don’t imagine he could shock me. They’ve ruined another word for themselves.
AUDITORS
OBSERVERS
ANALYSTS
INSPECTORS
LOOPHOLES
“Auditors cite loopholes in security at our nation’s libraries.”
That’s right, anytime you have an audit or an inspection, you’re going to find something. Auditors are people who’ve been hired to write reports identifying deficiencies. Have you ever heard of a one-line audit report? “The auditors didn’t a find one damn thing that could possibly be improved.” Did you ever hear of an inspector who said: ‘We’ve wasted six months on this inspection, because the place is bloomin’ perfect. Whoever’s running this show sure thought of everything.”
The implication projected in a story about a security loophole is that someone will come crashing through the loophole – but that is not necessarily so. They tell you (and the terrorists) about the loophole because it is frightening, not because it’s enlightening.
“IN A CAREFULLY WORDED STATEMENT…”
“In a carefully worded statement, the President said…” Is this as distinct from those statements that world leaders just have the kids throw together? “Carefully worded” is often used to imply that something is being hidden.
SERIOUS…
“Officials consider the threat to be serious.” Is that to distinguish this threat from the threats they laugh about over lunch? Taking something seriously does not mean the risk is great or imminent. It just means officials are doing what anyone would do.
“Officials here are taking no chances when it comes to school safety.” Sort of. More likely, they’re taking no chances that reporters will broadcast a report accusing them of taking chances.
OFFICIALS ARE CLOSELY MONITORING…
Implies that something is imminent, and worthy of being closely monitored. “Closely monitoring” is like “Officials are on the lookout for…” Both phrases suggest that something bad is surely coming, as if officials are standing outside looking around with binoculars.
COULD
PERHAPS
POTENTIAL
MIGHT
“NASA reports that a large piece of space junk -PERHAPS as big as a freighter– COULD enter the Earth’s atmosphere sometime tonight over North America. Experts warn that it is could potentially slam into the earth.”
What are we to do with this report? Move a little to the left or right? They don’t say, of course, that every night, thousands of pieces of space junk enter the Earth’s atmosphere and completely burn up before ever hitting the ground, or that no person on Earth has ever been struck and killed by a piece of space junk. Or that if something’s as big as a freighter before entry, it might end up as small as a grain of sand – but it could potentially hit your house, I suppose.
AN ALARMING PERCENTAGE…
15%, 20%, 25%…
“15% of Americans are at risk of being seriously injured in car accidents on our nation’s highways this year.” Whenever you see a percentage cited, reverse it and think about the other share in the equation. For example, from the story above you can conclude that 85% of Americans are not at risk of being seriously injured in car accidents this year. Sort of good news, all things considered. Also, phrases such “a sizeable percentage,” or “an alarming percentage” can be applied to just about any percentage. Get the actual number, and then you decide if it’s sizeable or alarming to you.
AS MANY AS:
“Experts warn that as many as 25,000 people in America may be carrying the deadly gene…” or “As many as twenty states may be susceptible to radiation leakage disasters.”
“As many as” means somewhere between zero and the number given.
“IN A DEVELOPING STORY…”
A phrase used when they don’t really have the story yet.
FORMER EMPLOYEES:
“But one former employee at the doomed refinery reveals shocking new information…”
What does he reveal? That they fired him because he was too ethical, or because they didn’t want to hear the truth? Or that he knew all along? Anyway, he wasn’t there the night of the fire, so is he the best source of information? Truth in advertising would require the reporter to say: “We interviewed one man who hasn’t been to the refinery in three months – his opinion, next.”
LANGUAGE FROM ONE STORY BEING USED IN ANOTHER:
As certain words and phrases become symbolic or evocative from one type of story, they’ll use them in another. In the days after 9/11 I saw a TV news report about a tropical storm making “a direct hit” on a tiny coastal community, as if the hurricane were aiming. (And the word tiny is used because it implies vulnerability. Storms that make direct hits on tiny places are frightening bullies.) A story about a flight that experienced extreme turbulence is headlined “Terror in the Sky.”
DEADLY:
As in the popular “deadly virus;” this word is used to imply that everyone who gets the virus perishes, when the truth is that very few people die from the virus. If a really serious virus ends up being fatal for 20 percent of the people who contract it, then truth in advertising would require language such as: “Next up, a local man is stricken with a highly survivable virus.”
It’s quite a bit shy of deadly when someone tests negative for anthrax, yet in the weeks after 9/11, even a negative test for a “deadly” virus was presented as a frightening thing.
To put this into perspective, flu-related disorders killed 5000 times as many people as anthrax in 2001. Is anthrax still scary? Yes, and all the more so because of the implication that it was everywhere (colored maps showing the places in the U.S. where anthrax was found or suspected). It wasn’t everywhere. Reports were everywhere. And the same report repeated seventy-five times is still the same report. But you wouldn’t know that by the excited delivery: “New details emerge in that anthrax case.” Details maybe, but not new – far more likely when you watch TV news, they’ll be the same “new” details for the tenth time that day.
A storm is described as deadly: “We’ll have new information on that deadly hurricane that’s heading up the coast.” A hurricane qualifies for the word “deadly” when someone, somewhere on the hurricane’s round-the-hemisphere journey dies as a result of the storm. That does not mean the hurricane tries to kill all people it encounters, but that’s the implication – that something dangerous is coming. You’ll note that the people who die are usually in a situation far different than yours: They are on a small fishing boat at night off the coast of Peru, and you’re at home 1200 feet above sea level.
“IN A LAST MINUTE DEVELOPMENT…”
“IN A SURPRISE DEVELOPMENT…”
Usually means they didn’t get a news crew there in time. Or they didn’t warn you about it yet, which actually is interesting, since there’s only two or three possible awful outcomes involving human beings and they haven’t warned us about yet.
DISTURBING QUESTIONS:
As in “Disturbing questions have been raised about the safety of our nation’s…” Yes, the questions are disturbing. They’re disturbing everyone. Please stop raising them.
“A NEW STUDY REVEALS…”
“A NEW REPORT WARNS…”
“EXPERTS FEAR…”
“EXPERTS WORRY…”
Yes, reports and experts do seem to warn, fear, and worry a lot.
“EXPERTS SAY IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE…”
They sure do.
BUT NEW YORKERS FEEL…
Global conclusions drawn from man-on-the-street interviews represent literally nothing. You can edit a story into “New Yorkers feel terrified,” or “New Yorkers are ready to move on” – and it all depends upon which of the five interviews you cut into the piece broadcast.
Here are two quotes brought back by one NBC News crew:
“I think if you change your life, they’re winning,” says Captain Frank Carver. “So the more we continue our daily routine, better off we all are.”
At Pat’s Country Bakery nearby, Joann Charters concedes she’s still apprehensive. “It’s a really scary feeling with kids in school. You don’t know what’s gonna happen,” says Charters.”
To accurately summarize these quotes you’d have to say: “Some people feel one way and some other people feel another way. Back to you, Tricia.”
Joann Charters citing that it’s scary because “you don’t know what’s going to happen” is right on. That’s why it’s scary: because you don’t know what’s going to happen – not because you do know, not because danger is advancing toward you, but because it is not.
TV news stories like this are filler, background, static, irrelevant. You don’t need a reporter and a video crew to bring you man-in-the-street opinions. There are men on your street you can get opinions from. Or you could just talk to your friends and family.
WARNING SIGNS…
Any list of warning signs implies great risk. I recall a rash of reports about car-jacking in Los Angeles, and this list of warning signs:
Armed stranger approaches car;
Taps on closed window;
Looks around suspiciously.
And then they offered the checklist of precautions, given by an “expert on car-jacking.” (Is there a college course on that?) The checklist:
Keep doors locked;
Don’t let strangers into your car;
Drive away.
This is tantamount to:
“NEXT UP: CRIMINALS WHO HIDE OUT IN YOUR PURSE AND ROB YOU WHEN YOU GET HOME!”
Warning Signs:
Purse feels extra heavy;
Strange noises coming from purse.
OFFICIALS ADMIT…
“Officials admit that the incident could have developed into a full-fledged riot…” In this context, admit means that when a reporter asked, “If police had never reached the scene, and if a hundred other factors had fallen into place in an extraordinarily unlikely way, couldn’t this have developed into a full-scale riot?” Yes, it could have – an admission.
EXPERTS…
It may seem you are getting expert advice on the news, but that’s far from so. The moment you edit what an expert says, it’s just words you might as well put in the blender. Would you let a TV news crew mediate your doctor’s advice? Imagine being challenged by a difficult illness and your doctor’s compassionate and complete 30-minute presentation was edited down to 23 seconds.
That’s what the local news brings you: expert opinion edited, mediated, and minimized by non-experts who ask questions designed to elicit the most alarming responses. “Yes, yes, Dr. Stevens, but if it did happen, it would be terrible wouldn’t it?
NAMES
MONIKERS
When the news media assign a nickname to a wanted criminal (e.g., The Night-stalker, The Hillside Strangler) or to a disease (Legionaire’s or Flesh-Eating Diseases), it is indicative of a hoped-for series of reports. When it’s a type of crime (Follow-home Robberies), a trend is not far behind.
For example, freeway shootings and “Road Rage” led to all these headlines: “AGGRESSIVE DRIVERS TURN FREEWAYS INTO FREE-FOR-ALLS,” “ROAD RAGE: DRIVEN TO DESTRUCTION,” “HIGHWAY VIOLENCE SPREADING LIKE AN EPIDEMIC.”
Next comes “Officials are concerned,” and soon enough –as with Road Rage, you’ve got hearings before the House Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, and somebody (in this case, committee staff member Jeff Nelligan) calling the issue, “A national disaster.” Presumably, Mr. Nelligan would tone that down a bit today – all of us having found a new meaning for the words “national disaster.”
I TOLD YOU SO…
An NBC News story quotes a member of a university task force on weapons of mass destruction: “We’ve been talking about this for years and people in general have not been interested.” Is there some surprise there – that someone on a task force about weapons would be talking about weapons? The intended implication of these stories is that if someone had just listened, this could all have been prevented. How could discussions at some college task force have been used to prevent anthrax scares? If we had listened, what would be different? This is like an earthquake happening and earthquake experts saying, “We warned you.” Yes, you did; you said there’d be an earthquake sometime. If only we’d listened.
DISASTER UNREADINESS…
These are stories where TV news people cannot lose. They ask hospitals or public health officials or the utility company or the fire department if they can handle a disaster of X magnitude. If the response is yes, they just keep upping the disaster magnitude until the response is no.
Here’s an example from NBC News: “A survey of 30 hospitals in four states and Washington, D.C., found them ill-equipped to handle a widespread biological disaster.” A guaranteed fear-inducer, pokes right at our insecurity. First off, just asking the question implies that a “widespread disaster” is coming, and it’s even better if the survey was part of a “new study,” because that implies that the question itself is well founded.
Either way, the basic premise of the story is true: If hospitals currently able to handle 500 patients an hour get 5000 patients in some terrible hour, they will be unprepared. The standard of care will drop. Is there something surprising about that? Do TV news writers think Americans assume there is some extra team of 200 doctors and an extra 5000 fully-equipped hospital beds waiting in their community somewhere just out of sight?
Indeed, hospitals are unprepared for that which they have never had to be prepared. Being able to deal with what predictably comes down the pike and putting your resources where they are most likely to be needed is good planning. An emergency room would have to trade some daily-used resource to be ready for mass casualties that don’t appear to be coming. Yes, as the world changes and events change, so does preparation – but expecting hospitals to be fully prepared, for example, to treat thousands of inhalation anthrax casualties when there’s been a few lethal cases in 30 years would constitute bad planning.
One can make an “unprepared” story about anything; America’s police are unprepared for a “widespread crime disaster;” our supermarkets are unprepared for a “widespread food shortage.” It all depends upon how you define the word widespread. Put a microphone in some official’s face and ask if he’s adequately prepared for an attack on the harbor by Godzilla, and you’ve got an unreadiness story.
WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN…
“Being stuck in the elevator for six days is an experience Betty Hamilton will never forget.” This is used as a measure of how serious an incident it was, but did anyone imagine she was going to forget it? “I think I was stuck in an elevator for six days, but I can’t quite remember.”
THE WRAP-UP…
Pay attention to the very last line in news reports. They are rarely summaries, but rather are designed to keep the story open for more reports. Most often, the closing line takes a last bite at the fear apple, one final effort to add uncertainty and worry. “Many here are left wondering if it will ever be safe.” “Fear continues its tight grip on this tiny community.” “Whether more will die remains to be seen.” In the world of TV news, frightening stories never end. We never hear the words “And that’s that.”
Let’s put a few of these newsroom strategies together into a story and see how it looks. As the basis for our mock TV news report, I’ll draw on something that actually happened to my assistant. Earlier this year, her wrist was injured when a dog bit her.
THE TEASER:
“NEXT UP: DOGBITES! THE BONE-CRUSHING POWER OF DOGS. Experts warn that even friendly dogs can bite, sometimes without provocation. And they’re everywhere. A new Government study estimates as many as 300 dogs per square mile, with the numbers climbing each year. How many backyards in your neighborhood are hiding a deadly menace? We’ll tell you what experts say – when we come back.
THE STORY:
A shocking bite from the dog everyone described as “a little angel” leaves one area woman nursing her wounds. Dog-jaw experts say that even a small dog can produce as much as 500 pounds of biting force, and given the rate at which dogs breed, it’s just a matter of time before more people are placed at risk. A former employee with the Department of Health says hospitals are unprepared for a major increase in dogbites, and officials are closely monitoring this situation that could pose a deadly threat to our nation’s neighborhoods. Disturbing questions have been raised about loopholes in the licensing system, and observers point out that dogs who bite can receive licenses and be released into neighborhoods.
THE WRAP UP:
It’s no surprise that many local residents are living in fear: “You never know when somebody is walking their dog right behind you. We’re scared.” Officials say links between the recent dogbite and one that occurred in the tiny town of Ames, Iowa have not been confirmed, but either way, it’s a nightmare few will ever forget. And one that many fear will not be over in the morning.”
Coming to understand these popular phrases and strategies, and being able to see around them has made me appreciate those news reports that are direct, clear, and informative. Since many news people use these tricks, those who do not stand out as all the more special and valuable.
If you watch TV news, you’re probably going to spot lots of sensationalizing tactics I’ve missed, and maybe even start a list of your own. If finding them becomes an occasionally enjoyable part of your news-viewing experience, that in itself will be great news.
It would be interesting if the standards of Truth in Advertising were applied to television news as they sometimes are to television commercials. In that unlikely situation, TV news writers would be required to use phrases and words that convey accurate information – as opposed to the phrases and words they use today.
I want to help you break the code of alarming newspeak so that you can more easily find the valuable information that may (or may not) be part of a story.
Given the disturbing reasons we’ve all been watching so much TV news, it would be understandable to overlook the sheer ridiculousness that is inherent in some of the sensationalism. Occasionally, the way TV news is delivered can be downright funny, and indeed, the ability to laugh at something indicates that we are beginning to gain perspective on it. Accordingly, some of what follows is funny, and I have a very clear purpose in offering it: I want to help change your experience of television news, help you actually watch it differently. I want to provide some tools you can use to ensure that when you watch TV news, only actual information gets through.
Though not offered as a comprehensive glossary, here are some examples of words and phrases I think you’ll quickly recognize:
POSSIBLE: As in “Next Up: Possible links between Saddam Hussein and tooth decay…”
The word “possible” doesn’t really have the specificity one hopes for in journalism, given that it is completely accurate when applied to anything anyone can possibly imagine. “A possible outbreak of…” means there has been no outbreak. “A possible connection between memory loss and the air you breathe…” means there in no confirmed connection.
“Officials are worried about possible attacks against…” means there have been no such attacks.
Anytime you hear the word possible, it’s probably not happening right now.
LINKS:
“Next up: Possible links between convicted murderer Charles Manson and yesterday’s traffic jams in the downtown area.”
Are these two things linked? Absolutely, if you loosen your criteria enough, everything is linked by its presence on the same planet at the same moment in time – but only a very few links are instructive or meaningful.
Links are a great news trick, because you can tie a remote, unconfirmed, or even unimportant story to something that’s really pushing buttons. “Next up: Possible links to Bin Laden” is all you have to say to get attention these days.
Almost always when you hear the word link, there is no confirmed link.
“OUR NATION’S…”
“...our Nation’s water supplies…”
“...our Nation’s roadways…”
“...our Nation’s shipping ports…”
They use this trick to imply some large scale to a story. “A new threat to our nation’s water supplies” won’t be a threat to our nation’s anything. Our nation is enormous. Nothing, not even nuclear bombs, poses a threat to all of any system in our society at the same time. When they say “our nation’s” anything, they are usually trying to give grand significance to something that doesn’t have grand significance. We might not perk up as much if they said, “A new threat to Klopp County’s water supply…” The incident in which old Doc Ames truck leaked oil into the reservoir just isn’t gonna scare up enough ratings. But it could: “Next up, a new threat to our nation’s water supply. An alarming incident that experts say could happen anywhere!”
SHOCKING NEW DETAILS:
“Shocking new details when we come back.” Well, first of all, the details are not likely to be new, and if so critical, why are we waiting till after the commercial, and anyway, what does shocking mean at this point? Unless the news anchor reaches through the screen and pulls my hair, I don’t imagine he could shock me. They’ve ruined another word for themselves.
AUDITORS
OBSERVERS
ANALYSTS
INSPECTORS
LOOPHOLES
“Auditors cite loopholes in security at our nation’s libraries.”
That’s right, anytime you have an audit or an inspection, you’re going to find something. Auditors are people who’ve been hired to write reports identifying deficiencies. Have you ever heard of a one-line audit report? “The auditors didn’t a find one damn thing that could possibly be improved.” Did you ever hear of an inspector who said: ‘We’ve wasted six months on this inspection, because the place is bloomin’ perfect. Whoever’s running this show sure thought of everything.”
The implication projected in a story about a security loophole is that someone will come crashing through the loophole – but that is not necessarily so. They tell you (and the terrorists) about the loophole because it is frightening, not because it’s enlightening.
“IN A CAREFULLY WORDED STATEMENT…”
“In a carefully worded statement, the President said…” Is this as distinct from those statements that world leaders just have the kids throw together? “Carefully worded” is often used to imply that something is being hidden.
SERIOUS…
“Officials consider the threat to be serious.” Is that to distinguish this threat from the threats they laugh about over lunch? Taking something seriously does not mean the risk is great or imminent. It just means officials are doing what anyone would do.
“Officials here are taking no chances when it comes to school safety.” Sort of. More likely, they’re taking no chances that reporters will broadcast a report accusing them of taking chances.
OFFICIALS ARE CLOSELY MONITORING…
Implies that something is imminent, and worthy of being closely monitored. “Closely monitoring” is like “Officials are on the lookout for…” Both phrases suggest that something bad is surely coming, as if officials are standing outside looking around with binoculars.
COULD
PERHAPS
POTENTIAL
MIGHT
“NASA reports that a large piece of space junk -PERHAPS as big as a freighter– COULD enter the Earth’s atmosphere sometime tonight over North America. Experts warn that it is could potentially slam into the earth.”
What are we to do with this report? Move a little to the left or right? They don’t say, of course, that every night, thousands of pieces of space junk enter the Earth’s atmosphere and completely burn up before ever hitting the ground, or that no person on Earth has ever been struck and killed by a piece of space junk. Or that if something’s as big as a freighter before entry, it might end up as small as a grain of sand – but it could potentially hit your house, I suppose.
AN ALARMING PERCENTAGE…
15%, 20%, 25%…
“15% of Americans are at risk of being seriously injured in car accidents on our nation’s highways this year.” Whenever you see a percentage cited, reverse it and think about the other share in the equation. For example, from the story above you can conclude that 85% of Americans are not at risk of being seriously injured in car accidents this year. Sort of good news, all things considered. Also, phrases such “a sizeable percentage,” or “an alarming percentage” can be applied to just about any percentage. Get the actual number, and then you decide if it’s sizeable or alarming to you.
AS MANY AS:
“Experts warn that as many as 25,000 people in America may be carrying the deadly gene…” or “As many as twenty states may be susceptible to radiation leakage disasters.”
“As many as” means somewhere between zero and the number given.
“IN A DEVELOPING STORY…”
A phrase used when they don’t really have the story yet.
FORMER EMPLOYEES:
“But one former employee at the doomed refinery reveals shocking new information…”
What does he reveal? That they fired him because he was too ethical, or because they didn’t want to hear the truth? Or that he knew all along? Anyway, he wasn’t there the night of the fire, so is he the best source of information? Truth in advertising would require the reporter to say: “We interviewed one man who hasn’t been to the refinery in three months – his opinion, next.”
LANGUAGE FROM ONE STORY BEING USED IN ANOTHER:
As certain words and phrases become symbolic or evocative from one type of story, they’ll use them in another. In the days after 9/11 I saw a TV news report about a tropical storm making “a direct hit” on a tiny coastal community, as if the hurricane were aiming. (And the word tiny is used because it implies vulnerability. Storms that make direct hits on tiny places are frightening bullies.) A story about a flight that experienced extreme turbulence is headlined “Terror in the Sky.”
DEADLY:
As in the popular “deadly virus;” this word is used to imply that everyone who gets the virus perishes, when the truth is that very few people die from the virus. If a really serious virus ends up being fatal for 20 percent of the people who contract it, then truth in advertising would require language such as: “Next up, a local man is stricken with a highly survivable virus.”
It’s quite a bit shy of deadly when someone tests negative for anthrax, yet in the weeks after 9/11, even a negative test for a “deadly” virus was presented as a frightening thing.
To put this into perspective, flu-related disorders killed 5000 times as many people as anthrax in 2001. Is anthrax still scary? Yes, and all the more so because of the implication that it was everywhere (colored maps showing the places in the U.S. where anthrax was found or suspected). It wasn’t everywhere. Reports were everywhere. And the same report repeated seventy-five times is still the same report. But you wouldn’t know that by the excited delivery: “New details emerge in that anthrax case.” Details maybe, but not new – far more likely when you watch TV news, they’ll be the same “new” details for the tenth time that day.
A storm is described as deadly: “We’ll have new information on that deadly hurricane that’s heading up the coast.” A hurricane qualifies for the word “deadly” when someone, somewhere on the hurricane’s round-the-hemisphere journey dies as a result of the storm. That does not mean the hurricane tries to kill all people it encounters, but that’s the implication – that something dangerous is coming. You’ll note that the people who die are usually in a situation far different than yours: They are on a small fishing boat at night off the coast of Peru, and you’re at home 1200 feet above sea level.
“IN A LAST MINUTE DEVELOPMENT…”
“IN A SURPRISE DEVELOPMENT…”
Usually means they didn’t get a news crew there in time. Or they didn’t warn you about it yet, which actually is interesting, since there’s only two or three possible awful outcomes involving human beings and they haven’t warned us about yet.
DISTURBING QUESTIONS:
As in “Disturbing questions have been raised about the safety of our nation’s…” Yes, the questions are disturbing. They’re disturbing everyone. Please stop raising them.
“A NEW STUDY REVEALS…”
“A NEW REPORT WARNS…”
“EXPERTS FEAR…”
“EXPERTS WORRY…”
Yes, reports and experts do seem to warn, fear, and worry a lot.
“EXPERTS SAY IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE…”
They sure do.
BUT NEW YORKERS FEEL…
Global conclusions drawn from man-on-the-street interviews represent literally nothing. You can edit a story into “New Yorkers feel terrified,” or “New Yorkers are ready to move on” – and it all depends upon which of the five interviews you cut into the piece broadcast.
Here are two quotes brought back by one NBC News crew:
“I think if you change your life, they’re winning,” says Captain Frank Carver. “So the more we continue our daily routine, better off we all are.”
At Pat’s Country Bakery nearby, Joann Charters concedes she’s still apprehensive. “It’s a really scary feeling with kids in school. You don’t know what’s gonna happen,” says Charters.”
To accurately summarize these quotes you’d have to say: “Some people feel one way and some other people feel another way. Back to you, Tricia.”
Joann Charters citing that it’s scary because “you don’t know what’s going to happen” is right on. That’s why it’s scary: because you don’t know what’s going to happen – not because you do know, not because danger is advancing toward you, but because it is not.
TV news stories like this are filler, background, static, irrelevant. You don’t need a reporter and a video crew to bring you man-in-the-street opinions. There are men on your street you can get opinions from. Or you could just talk to your friends and family.
WARNING SIGNS…
Any list of warning signs implies great risk. I recall a rash of reports about car-jacking in Los Angeles, and this list of warning signs:
Armed stranger approaches car;
Taps on closed window;
Looks around suspiciously.
And then they offered the checklist of precautions, given by an “expert on car-jacking.” (Is there a college course on that?) The checklist:
Keep doors locked;
Don’t let strangers into your car;
Drive away.
This is tantamount to:
“NEXT UP: CRIMINALS WHO HIDE OUT IN YOUR PURSE AND ROB YOU WHEN YOU GET HOME!”
Warning Signs:
Purse feels extra heavy;
Strange noises coming from purse.
OFFICIALS ADMIT…
“Officials admit that the incident could have developed into a full-fledged riot…” In this context, admit means that when a reporter asked, “If police had never reached the scene, and if a hundred other factors had fallen into place in an extraordinarily unlikely way, couldn’t this have developed into a full-scale riot?” Yes, it could have – an admission.
EXPERTS…
It may seem you are getting expert advice on the news, but that’s far from so. The moment you edit what an expert says, it’s just words you might as well put in the blender. Would you let a TV news crew mediate your doctor’s advice? Imagine being challenged by a difficult illness and your doctor’s compassionate and complete 30-minute presentation was edited down to 23 seconds.
That’s what the local news brings you: expert opinion edited, mediated, and minimized by non-experts who ask questions designed to elicit the most alarming responses. “Yes, yes, Dr. Stevens, but if it did happen, it would be terrible wouldn’t it?
NAMES
MONIKERS
When the news media assign a nickname to a wanted criminal (e.g., The Night-stalker, The Hillside Strangler) or to a disease (Legionaire’s or Flesh-Eating Diseases), it is indicative of a hoped-for series of reports. When it’s a type of crime (Follow-home Robberies), a trend is not far behind.
For example, freeway shootings and “Road Rage” led to all these headlines: “AGGRESSIVE DRIVERS TURN FREEWAYS INTO FREE-FOR-ALLS,” “ROAD RAGE: DRIVEN TO DESTRUCTION,” “HIGHWAY VIOLENCE SPREADING LIKE AN EPIDEMIC.”
Next comes “Officials are concerned,” and soon enough –as with Road Rage, you’ve got hearings before the House Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, and somebody (in this case, committee staff member Jeff Nelligan) calling the issue, “A national disaster.” Presumably, Mr. Nelligan would tone that down a bit today – all of us having found a new meaning for the words “national disaster.”
I TOLD YOU SO…
An NBC News story quotes a member of a university task force on weapons of mass destruction: “We’ve been talking about this for years and people in general have not been interested.” Is there some surprise there – that someone on a task force about weapons would be talking about weapons? The intended implication of these stories is that if someone had just listened, this could all have been prevented. How could discussions at some college task force have been used to prevent anthrax scares? If we had listened, what would be different? This is like an earthquake happening and earthquake experts saying, “We warned you.” Yes, you did; you said there’d be an earthquake sometime. If only we’d listened.
DISASTER UNREADINESS…
These are stories where TV news people cannot lose. They ask hospitals or public health officials or the utility company or the fire department if they can handle a disaster of X magnitude. If the response is yes, they just keep upping the disaster magnitude until the response is no.
Here’s an example from NBC News: “A survey of 30 hospitals in four states and Washington, D.C., found them ill-equipped to handle a widespread biological disaster.” A guaranteed fear-inducer, pokes right at our insecurity. First off, just asking the question implies that a “widespread disaster” is coming, and it’s even better if the survey was part of a “new study,” because that implies that the question itself is well founded.
Either way, the basic premise of the story is true: If hospitals currently able to handle 500 patients an hour get 5000 patients in some terrible hour, they will be unprepared. The standard of care will drop. Is there something surprising about that? Do TV news writers think Americans assume there is some extra team of 200 doctors and an extra 5000 fully-equipped hospital beds waiting in their community somewhere just out of sight?
Indeed, hospitals are unprepared for that which they have never had to be prepared. Being able to deal with what predictably comes down the pike and putting your resources where they are most likely to be needed is good planning. An emergency room would have to trade some daily-used resource to be ready for mass casualties that don’t appear to be coming. Yes, as the world changes and events change, so does preparation – but expecting hospitals to be fully prepared, for example, to treat thousands of inhalation anthrax casualties when there’s been a few lethal cases in 30 years would constitute bad planning.
One can make an “unprepared” story about anything; America’s police are unprepared for a “widespread crime disaster;” our supermarkets are unprepared for a “widespread food shortage.” It all depends upon how you define the word widespread. Put a microphone in some official’s face and ask if he’s adequately prepared for an attack on the harbor by Godzilla, and you’ve got an unreadiness story.
WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN…
“Being stuck in the elevator for six days is an experience Betty Hamilton will never forget.” This is used as a measure of how serious an incident it was, but did anyone imagine she was going to forget it? “I think I was stuck in an elevator for six days, but I can’t quite remember.”
THE WRAP-UP…
Pay attention to the very last line in news reports. They are rarely summaries, but rather are designed to keep the story open for more reports. Most often, the closing line takes a last bite at the fear apple, one final effort to add uncertainty and worry. “Many here are left wondering if it will ever be safe.” “Fear continues its tight grip on this tiny community.” “Whether more will die remains to be seen.” In the world of TV news, frightening stories never end. We never hear the words “And that’s that.”
Let’s put a few of these newsroom strategies together into a story and see how it looks. As the basis for our mock TV news report, I’ll draw on something that actually happened to my assistant. Earlier this year, her wrist was injured when a dog bit her.
THE TEASER:
“NEXT UP: DOGBITES! THE BONE-CRUSHING POWER OF DOGS. Experts warn that even friendly dogs can bite, sometimes without provocation. And they’re everywhere. A new Government study estimates as many as 300 dogs per square mile, with the numbers climbing each year. How many backyards in your neighborhood are hiding a deadly menace? We’ll tell you what experts say – when we come back.
THE STORY:
A shocking bite from the dog everyone described as “a little angel” leaves one area woman nursing her wounds. Dog-jaw experts say that even a small dog can produce as much as 500 pounds of biting force, and given the rate at which dogs breed, it’s just a matter of time before more people are placed at risk. A former employee with the Department of Health says hospitals are unprepared for a major increase in dogbites, and officials are closely monitoring this situation that could pose a deadly threat to our nation’s neighborhoods. Disturbing questions have been raised about loopholes in the licensing system, and observers point out that dogs who bite can receive licenses and be released into neighborhoods.
THE WRAP UP:
It’s no surprise that many local residents are living in fear: “You never know when somebody is walking their dog right behind you. We’re scared.” Officials say links between the recent dogbite and one that occurred in the tiny town of Ames, Iowa have not been confirmed, but either way, it’s a nightmare few will ever forget. And one that many fear will not be over in the morning.”
Coming to understand these popular phrases and strategies, and being able to see around them has made me appreciate those news reports that are direct, clear, and informative. Since many news people use these tricks, those who do not stand out as all the more special and valuable.
If you watch TV news, you’re probably going to spot lots of sensationalizing tactics I’ve missed, and maybe even start a list of your own. If finding them becomes an occasionally enjoyable part of your news-viewing experience, that in itself will be great news.