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What you heard here first – and didn’t

Thursday, July 29, 2010

JOURNALISTS LOOK forward at their peril – as opposed to doing their main job of reporting and interpreting what’s already happened.

But I have to admit it’s been gratifying to see mainstream US journalism pile in, however belatedly, on the Somalia story that this column has long been venturing predictions about, much of the time in some degree of journalistic isolation.

This week valuable media real estate was cleared to accomodate two sizeable OpEd pieces tackling the reality of Al Shabaab, the Al Qaeda-following Islamist guerrillas based in Somalia. The space that finally opened up was in The New York Times and it was of course was a sound decision by Andy Rosenthal who heads that area of the paper.

 

It makes up somewhat for some unfortunate timing - purely accidental, of course - by July 11th's edition of the Times' Sunday Magazine, which boldly proclaimed in its cover-feature not Somalia but Yemen (across the waters of the Gulf of Aden) as "The Next Afghanistan” – this on the very day that Al Shabaab suicide bombers ventured devastatingly out from Somalia and killed crowds of soccer-watchers in Uganda. 

 

Elsewhere print, web and broadcast outlets galore have been freshly demonstrating (in the wake of those international attacks by Al Shabaab) their awareness of Somalia's status as the simmering cauldron of anti-western terrorism that THE MEDIA BEAT has concentrated on. These outlets have included, perhaps with the greatest journalistic assuredness, the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor – definitely smack in “the mainstream media” despite its oddball name and provenance, and rightly so given its professionalism and standards, in overseas reporting above all. The Monitor sharply made many of my points for me again, and included an online opinion piece headlined  “Why Somalia would make Afghanistan seem like Mr. Rogers' neighborhood.”

 

And CBS News, though no longer the international reporting giant it once was, did make a creditable contribution by dwelling a bit (guided by its national security analyst, and former Bush staffer, Juan Carlos Zarate) on the role played by American-born and -educated Somalis in the ranks of Al Shabaab.

Of the Times’ two OpEd writers, the one cutting more to the heart of things was Aidan Hartlety, who happens (and it’s only a coincidence) to be, like I once was, an Africa-seasoned reporter for Britain’s Channel Four television network. With his regional nouse and experience (he’s actually Kenya-born) he was able to underscore persuasively the development of Al Shabaab from a sub-contracted, but not entirely trusted, African affiliate of Osama bin Laden’s into a force more closely entwined with Al Qaeda, and much more seriously to be reckoned with.

How seriously? I wish the Times had been more editorially interventionist with its other contributor, Bronwyn Bruton of the Council on Foreign Relations (pictured above left). We readers needed some better travel guidance between the opposing poles of her bald, simplistic summation of Al Shabaab (as “a vicious mob of teenage radicals”) and her later, more judicious acknowledgement that “Al Shabaab also includes many of the same Somali religious leaders who controlled the Union of Islamic Courts in 2006, the people the Bush administration once hoped to draw into the transitional government.”

There’s more - much more - to watch for from Al Shabaab.

 

 

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THE REAL WAR OF AFGHANISTAN –  by no means a neighborhood like Mr Rogers’ – has been revealed in enormous detail by those 90,000–plus documents handed over to the Times, Britain’s The Guardian, and Germany’s Der Spiegel by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.org, ahead of publishing them in its own right (bug holding back a batch of 15,000 items it says it wants to review further before releasing).

Something big has expected for a while from the site, but I had no idea that its sometimes reckless, sometimes simply swashbuckling Australian founder Julian Assange (pictured above right) had made this particular deal.

The tactic of letting the mainstream press, or at least carefully selected parts of it, in on a major scoop like this - and doing so early enough that they can do their mainstream work of due diligence on the material - makes perfect sense. WikiLeaks’ impact with previous leakages has never fully matched Assange’s expectations, and the respectable cover he’s gained with the partnerships has gone some way (though for some critics it can never go all the way) to counter charges that he is irresponsibly revealing military secrets.

Two simple, clear indicators have arisen rapidly to illuminate the influence on global and national affairs that has been achieved by this neat leak-management.

One: the United States and Britain have now both now publicly called on Pakistan to break all ties with the Taliban - links which the WikiLeaks documents captured revealingly (- and which, significantly, the Times took further with its own reporting and clearly implicated Pakistan’s supposedly retired intelligence chief Hamid Gul). Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron went so far as to make his demand - very undiplomatically - while being hosted by Pakistan’s most fervent international foe, India. And the US Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen called such links with terrorism “just completely unacceptable”.

Two: a large slice (102 members) of President Barack Obama’s own party – facing elections in just over 3 months’ time – refused to support his funding of the Afghan war in the House of Representatives this week. That’s nearly half the number of Democrats in the House, and it’s more than three times as many as voted in this anti-war fashion a year ago. Such measurable shifts on Capitol Hill are a traditional journalists’ touchstone and they remain their handiest guide – though not always totally reliable – to measuring the public mood on the subject of war.

I haven’t been able to reach the WikiLeaker-in-Chief to ask (that modern-day Scarlet Pimpernel identity that Assange has long cultivated now appears essential to his operation) but I suspect he feels some wry comfort in having so much of the mainstream piling in with him.

 

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