The "Worst of the Worst"? 9/11, Guantanamo and the Failures of US Corporate Media

[Judi Lynn]

The "Worst of the Worst"? 9/11, Guantanamo and the Failures of US Corporate Media
Monday 12 September 2011
by: Andy Worthington, The FAIR Blog | Op-Ed

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush deliberately discarded domestic and international laws, creating an experimental facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There prisoners would be deprived of the protections of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, held without rights as “unlawful enemy combatants” in a world-wide program of extraordinary rendition, secret prisons and torture. Corporate media largely failed to hold the government responsible for this authoritarian response.

From the beginning, the corporate media generally belittled those who raised concerns about the abuses at Guantánamo. Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball (1/17/02) told a guest from Human Rights Watch who had criticized the open-air cages of Camp X-Ray: “Back when I was a kid, I used to go down there and sleep out in places like the Virgin Islands overnight, and I loved it. I slept in tents. I thought it was great. And you’re making it sound like harsh conditions.”

FAIR noted early on (Extra!, 3–4/02) how little criticism U.S. media allowed of the Bush administration’s “enemy combatants” designation, contrasting that with international media’s coverage of critics like the UN’s Mary Robinson and the Red Cross’s Darcy Christen (e.g., Deutsche Presse- Agentur, 1/16/02; CBC-TV, 1/16/02). For the Washington Post editorial page (1/25/02), however, such detractors were just “America-bashers in the European press and human rights community.”

In the spring of 2002, Newsweek’s Roy Gutman (7/8/02), curious about who was being held at Guantánamo, investigated the stories of 12 imprisoned Kuwaitis whose families had hired U.S. lawyers. He established that many were aid workers, not combatants, and found that they, like other innocent men, had ended up at Guantánamo because the Bush administration had refused to hold Article 5 hearings—proceedings to separate combatants from civilians seized by mistake, mandated by the Geneva Conventions and previously used by the U.S. since the aftermath of World War II.

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/worst-worst-911-guantanamo-and-failures-us-corporate-media/1315842715

[midnight]

1. While not all media is owned by Murdoch.... you have to wonder about

a media that could grow a Murdoch...Or an environment that would allow a Murdoch...