Just published, in the September 2011 issue of Extra!, the monthly magazine of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), is an article I wrote about the US mainstream media’s response to the 9/11 attacks and the establishment of Guantánamo, which, of course, has been, for the most part (but with shining exceptions), a disappointment.
In the article, “The ‘Worst of the Worst’?: 9/11, Guantánamo and the failures of US corporate media,” which is available here on FAIR’s website, I examine the unwillingness of the media to criticise the Bush administration’s “war on terror” until after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004, and how the treasure trove of documents about the Guantánamo prisoners that were released under duress by the Pentagon in 2005 and 2006 were only adequately analyzed by the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey and by myself, in my book The Guantánamo Files and my subsequent work.
I also examine how, under Obama, the media have allowed themselves to be seduced by Pentagon propaganda about the numbers of alleged “recidivists” released from Guantánamo, which has contributed enormously to the skewed debate about he closure of the prison, dominated by Republicans cynically using Guantánamo as part of their political campaigning.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has, since 1986, been challenging media bias and censorship, and back in 2009, I was delighted to be asked to contribute an article about Guantánamo, “Dangerous Revisionism Over Guantánamo: Citing dirty evidence to defend dubious detentions,” dealing with the New York Times‘ reporting on Guantánamo, to their monthly magazine, Extra!
FAIR had leapt to my defense when, in February 2008, the New York Times (after pressure was exerted on its editors) apologized for giving me a byline on a front-page sorry that I had written with Carlotta Gall about the death of an Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo (because I had “a point of view”). That article was particularly critical of the authorities’ disregard for the prisoners, and whether or not there was actually any reason to hold them, and I was grateful for the support shown by FAIR and by others, including Scott Horton. I am also pleased to have been interviewed on a few occasions on FAIR’s radio program, CounterSpin (see here, here and here).
On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I am delighted to have been approached by FAIR to write a brief review of the media’s response to 9/11 and the “war on terror” over the last ten years. As I explain in the article, the media “bear a large responsibility for having allowed cynical lawmakers to portray Guantánamo as a prison holding ‘the worst of the worst,’ despite so much evidence that Bush administration officials were lying when they first coined that phrase.”
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.
