Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (25 page)

On the other hand, most of the people at the
Times
who make it to be correspondent or editor or whatever tend to be either very obedient or very cynical. The obedient ones have adapted—they’ve internalized the values and believe what they’re saying, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have made it that far. But there are also some plain cynics. James LeMoyne at the
Times
is a perfect example: James LeMoyne is an absolute crook, he’s one of the most dishonest journalists I’ve ever seen. The dishonesty of his reporting is so extreme, in fact, that it can’t
just
be indoctrination in his case. Actually, LeMoyne’s tenure as a correspondent in Central America ended up with an exposure so bad that even the
Times
had to publish an admission about it. Did you follow that?

In 1988 LeMoyne had written a story which talked about two people in El Salvador who he claimed were tortured by left-wing guerrillas trying to undermine the elections; it was one part of a whole effort in the American press at the time to maintain support for the U.S. client regime in El Salvador despite its atrocities.
  ¹⁹
Well, a freelance journalist in Central America, Chris Norton, saw LeMoyne’s article and was surprised by it, because the atrocities LeMoyne described were supposed to have taken place in an area of the country reporters couldn’t get to, because it was under military occupation. Norton wanted to figure out just how LeMoyne knew about these people being tortured, so he went up as close to that region as he could, and he talked to the mayor, and to the priest, and to people in the community—and he discovered that one of the alleged victims didn’t exist, and the other was perfectly fine. He then went back to San Salvador and did some more checking—and he discovered that LeMoyne had simply taken the story straight from a San Salvadoran newspaper, where it had been attributed to an army officer. It was in fact just straight army disinformation of a standard sort, which LeMoyne then reported in the
New York Times
as if he knew something about it. Then the State Department picked it up from the
New York Times
and distributed it to Congress to show that the Salvadoran guerrillas were undermining the election.

Well, Norton uncovered this, then another freelance journalist, Mark Cooper, picked up Norton’s story and published something about it in the
L.A. Weekly
, an alternative weekly in Los Angeles. The piece then appeared in the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting journal,
Extra!
—F.A.I.R. is a very good media analysis group in New York. Still no reaction from the
Times
. Finally, Alex Cockburn got ahold of it, and mentioned it in his column in
The Nation
.
  ²⁰
Well, by that time word was sort of getting around about this, so the
Times
figured they had to react, and they published a correction—I think it’s the longest correction they’ve ever published, it’s several paragraphs long. It said, our usual high standards were not met in this case, one thing or another like that.
  ²¹

Well, that’s kind of an extreme example—but it’s by no means the only case like that. In fact, just let me mention one other one, which was even more important—here LeMoyne really plied his trade.

Journalism LeMoyne-Style: A Sample of the Cynical Aspect

As you know, for years it was necessary for the U.S. government to maintain the pretense that the contras in Nicaragua were a guerrilla force, not a U.S. proxy army. Now, it’s perfectly obvious that they were
not
a guerrilla force—there are no guerrillas in history that have had anything remotely like the degree of support we gave the contras: there are no guerrillas in history that had three supply flights a day bringing them food and supplies and weapons, and who complained that they didn’t have enough airplanes, and that they needed more helicopters. I mean, the whole thing was completely ridiculous: these guys had armaments that some units of the American army didn’t have, they had computer centers, they had communications equipment. And they needed all of that, because Nicaragua was under constant surveillance by high-performance American reconnaissance aircraft to determine where Sandinista troops were being deployed, and the contras had to have some way of receiving that information.
  ²²

But the point is, it was necessary for the propaganda system to pretend that the contras were like the F.M.L.N. in El Salvador—just a regular indigenous guerrilla force opposing the government. And part of the method for claiming that these two forces were equivalent was to say that the F.M.L.N. guerrillas also had outside support from a foreign government—in other words, from the government of Nicaragua—and that was the only reason they could survive. Well, it’s
conceivable
that the F.M.L.N. was getting outside support, but if so, it would have been some kind of a miracle—because it was undetectable. I mean, it’s not that the United States is a primitive, stone-age society: there are technological means around to discover evidence of such things, but they never were able to detect any support coming from Nicaragua at all.

According to the State Department propaganda, the main arms flow from Nicaragua to the F.M.L.N. was across the Gulf of Fonseca.
  ²³
Well, David MacMichael, who was the C.I.A. analyst in charge of analyzing this material in the early 1980s and then quit the Agency, testified at the World Court and pointed out what this meant. He described the situation: the Gulf of Fonseca is thirty kilometers wide; it’s completely patrolled by the U.S. Navy; there’s an island in the middle of it which had a super-sophisticated U.S. radar system that could pick up boats up and down the Pacific Coast; there were U.S. Navy S.E.A.L. teams running all around the place—yet they never even picked up a canoe. So if Nicaragua were sending arms across the Gulf of Fonseca, they had to have had some super-sophisticated methods.
  ²⁴
I mean, the
Nicaraguans
had no problem whatsoever detecting the U.S. arms flow to the contras—they told reporters exactly where it was coming from; it was unreported in the United States, because the reporters chose not to report it, but the Nicaraguans had no problem detecting it.
  ²⁵
Anyway, that was the propaganda line that had to be maintained in the American press, that was the official story. Now we come back to James LeMoyne.

The United States government opposed the Central American peace accords that were signed in 1987 [Esquipulas II, the so-called “Arias plan”], so it was therefore necessary to demolish them. And one of the ways of demolishing them was to increase aid to the contras. The press committed itself with great passion to helping this effort along; LeMoyne was right up front. Right after the accords were signed, LeMoyne published an article in which he wrote: there is “ample evidence” that the Salvadoran guerrillas are being supplied with arms by Nicaragua in violation of the peace accords, and without that support the guerrillas couldn’t survive.
  ²⁶
Alright, that had always been the necessary story, but just then it was especially important to drive it home—because right then the United States was tripling its supply flights to the contras in response to the accords, and of course in violation of the accords.
  ²⁷
So the press wouldn’t report that we were escalating our support for the contras, but they kept reporting that the Nicaraguans were illegally arming the F.M.L.N. in El Salvador—and now James LeMoyne says that there is “ample evidence” of it.

Well, when that story appeared, F.A.I.R. wrote a letter to the
New York Times
, asking them to please have James LeMoyne enlighten their readers about the “ample evidence” of this arms flow to the F.M.L.N.—since the World Court couldn’t find it, and no independent investigator’s been able to find it, and the guys who worked on it in the C.I.A. didn’t know about it: could they please do that? Well, the
Times
didn’t publish their letter, but F.A.I.R. did get a personal response back from the Foreign Editor, Joseph Lelyveld, who said, yes, maybe LeMoyne’s report was a bit imprecise this time, it didn’t meet his usual high standards, and so on.
  ²⁸

Then followed a period in which the
Times
had plenty of time to correct the “imprecision”—but instead article after article appeared by LeMoyne, George Volsky, Steven Engelberg and others, repeating exactly the same falsehood: that there was ample evidence of an arms flow from Nicaragua.
  ²⁹
But F.A.I.R. just kept after them, and finally they got another letter back from Lelyveld, the Foreign Editor—this was around March now, their first letter was in August. Lelyveld said he had recently assigned LeMoyne to do a major story on the arms flow to the F.M.L.N., to really nail the thing down once and for all, and that they should wait for that story. Okay, they waited. Nothing happened. Six months later, they figured nothing was
going
to happen, so they published this interchange of letters with Lelyveld in the F.A.I.R. newsletter, and said: we don’t see the story, what’s going on?
  ³⁰

Two months after that, a story did finally appear in the
Times
—I think it was LeMoyne’s last story before he left the
Times
, or whatever he did, took a leave or something. This is now fifteen months after his original story about the “ample evidence,” nine months after he was assigned to do the follow-up. And if you take a look at the article the
Times
finally published, you’ll discover that the “ample evidence” had turned into
no
evidence. LeMoyne said: well, there really is no direct evidence of any supply of arms from Nicaragua; some people say this, some people say that, but there’s nothing concrete, there’s nothing to point to. So that’s the end of the story: it turns out the “ample evidence” is no evidence.
  ³¹

Now, that’s no joke—this is fabrication in the service of the state that has led to tens of thousands of people being killed, because maintaining this pretense over the years has been one of the ways in which the U.S. government has supported the terror in El Salvador and extended the war against Nicaragua. It’s not a small point. This is serious lying, very serious. And it’s just one of thousands of cases demonstrating that the media in the United States serve the interests of state-corporate power, they are organs of propaganda, as in fact one would expect them to be.
  ³²

Rethinking Watergate

M
AN
: But how do you explain Watergate, then? Those reporters weren’t very sympathetic to power—they toppled a President
.

And just ask yourself
why
he was toppled—he was toppled because he had made a very bad mistake: he had antagonized people with power.

See, one of the serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the
government
is the power—and the government’s
not
the power, the government is one segment of power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the state-managers are usually just servants. And Watergate is actually a perfect illustration of the point—because right at the time of Watergate, history actually ran a controlled experiment for us. The Watergate exposures, it turns out, came at exactly the same time as the COINTELPRO exposures—I don’t know if you know what I mean.

M
AN
: COINTELPRO?

See, you probably don’t—but that already makes my point, because the COINTELPRO exposures were a thousand times more significant than Watergate, Remember what Watergate
was
, after all: Watergate was a matter of a bunch of guys from the Republican National Committee breaking into a Democratic Party office for essentially unknown reasons and doing no damage. Okay, that’s petty burglary, it’s not a big deal. Well, at the exact same time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive F.B.I. operations to undermine political freedom in the United States, running through every administration back to Roosevelt, but really picking up under Kennedy. It was called “COINTELPRO” [short for “Counterintelligence Program”], and it included a vast range of things.

It included the straight Gestapo-style assassination of a Black Panther leader; it included organizing race riots in an effort to destroy the black movements; it included attacks on the American Indian Movement, on the women’s movement, you name it. It included fifteen years of F.B.I disruption of the Socialist Workers Party—that meant regular F.B.I. burglaries, stealing membership lists and using them to threaten people, going to businesses and getting members fired from their jobs, and so on.
  ³³
Well, that fact alone—the fact that for fifteen years the F.B.I had been burglarizing and trying to undermine a legal political party—is already vastly more important than the fact that a bunch of Keystone Kops broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters one time. The Socialist Workers Party is a legal political party, after all—the fact that they’re a
weak
political party doesn’t mean they have less rights than the Democrats. And this wasn’t a bunch of gangsters, this was the national political police: that’s very serious. And it didn’t happen once in the Watergate office complex, it was going on for fifteen years, under every administration. And keep in mind, the Socialist Workers Party episode is just some tiny footnote to COINTELPRO. In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea party.