I was intrigued to see this in a New York Times editorial yesterday (12/18/08):

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the "war on terror"--the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.

I doesn't seem like the paper generally puts the concept of the "war on terror" at arm's length. Looking at the last few months, the most popular editorial construction seems to be something like this (11/16/08):

Troops and equipment are so overtaxed by President Bush's disastrous Iraq War that the Pentagon does not have enough of either for the fight in Afghanistan, the war on terror's front line, let alone to confront the next threats.

The description of Afghanistan as "the front line of the war on terror" (sans scare quotes) comes up a lot. There was also this codswallop from an op-ed by Philip Bobbitt (12/13/08), from the National Security Council:

The ''war on terror'' is not a nonsensical public relations slogan, however unwelcome this conclusion may be to Pentagon planners or civil-liberties advocates. The notion of such a war puzzles us--after all, who would sign the peace treaty? -- because we are so trapped in 20th-century expectations about warfare. But success in war does not always mean the capitulation of an enemy government (as we have seen in Iraq); rather, it varies with the war aim.

In a war against terror, the aim is not the conquest of territory or the advancement of ideology, but the protection of civilians. We are fighting a war on terror, not just terrorists.

Man, we must suck at it, then! Bobbitt went on to claim that "Mexico is potentially our Pakistan...."

Then there's book critic Michiko Kakutani (10/6/08), terkeling John le Carre:

Although the story is enlivened by Mr. le Carre's intimate knowledge of tradecraft and his psychological insights into the reasons people become spies, informers and believers in a cause, the novel is flawed, like his 2004 book, Absolute Friends, by an overly schematic narrative devised to drive home the author's contempt for the take-no-prisoners methods employed by the United States in the war on terror.

Seems like the folks at the New York Times are pretty comfortable bandying the term about--unless it's time to look thoughtful on torture.

The corporate media template for explaining Mideast violence can be summed up like this: Palestinians attack, Israel retaliates.

It wasn't surprising, then, to read this lead in today's New York Times (12/19/08):

JERUSALEM — Rockets are flying from Gaza into southern Israeli communities again. Israeli warplanes are firing missiles back, and Israel is closing the crossings through which food and fuel are supplied.

Same old, same old--the Palestinians started it. Interestingly, though, the piece doesn't really provide evidence of that; in fact, readers are more likely to conclude that the lead is just wrong:

It took some days, but they were largely successful. Hamas imposed its will and even imprisoned some of those who were firing rockets. Israeli and United Nations figures show that while more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10.

But the goods shipments, while up some 25 to 30 percent and including a mix of more items, never began to approach what Hamas thought it was going to get: a return to the 500 to 600 truckloads delivered daily before the closing, including appliances, construction materials and other goods essential for life beyond mere survival. Instead, the number of trucks increased to around 90 from around 70.

And:

In addition, Israeli forces continued to attack Hamas and other militants in the West Bank, prompting Palestinian militants in Gaza to fire rockets. The Israeli military also found several dozen improvised explosive devices used against its vehicles on the Gaza border and about a dozen cases of sniper fire from Gaza directed at its forces.
While this back-and-forth did not topple the agreement, Israel’s decision in early November to destroy a tunnel Hamas had been digging near the border drove the cycle of violence to a much higher level. Israel says the tunnel could have been dug only for the purpose of trying to seize a soldier, like Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli held by Hamas for the past two and a half years. Israel’s attack on the tunnel killed six Hamas militants, and each side has stepped up attacks since.

In his introduction (12/12/08) to an Arundhati Roy analysis of how "our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching 'India's 9/11'" in the Mumbai attacks, Tom Engelhardt recalls that

the single omnipresent historical reference in the American media immediately in the wake of September 11, 2001, was, of course, "Pearl Harbor"--and those code words for it, "infamy" and "day of infamy," splashed in mile-high letters across the front pages of papers. What we had experienced, it was commonly said then, was "the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century."...

Now, "9/11" has become the "Pearl Harbor" of the 21st century, the antecedent and analogy of choice, and so, not surprisingly, it was on all but a few media lips, during the recent massacre and siege in Mumbai, India.

In the piece that follows, Roy "explains just why using 9/11 as the analogy of choice there, as we once used 'Pearl Harbor' here, will lead in no less terrible directions."

Recalling that "during the mid-1960s, the conventional wisdom was what everyone with a modicum of smarts kept saying: higher U.S. troop levels in Vietnam were absolutely necessary," FAIR associate Norman Solomon is distressed to find (AntiWar.com, 12/9/08) that "today, the conventional wisdom is that higher U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan are absolutely necessary." Responding to news that "'the Pentagon is planning to add more than 20,000 troops to Afghanistan' within the next 18 months," Solomon writes that

right now, the basic ingredients of further Afghan disasters are in place--including, pivotally, a dire lack of wide-ranging debate over Washington's options. In an atmosphere reminiscent of 1965, when almost all of the esteemed public voices concurred with the decision by newly elected President Lyndon Johnson to deploy more troops to Vietnam, the tenet that the United States must send additional troops to Afghanistan is axiomatic in U.S. news media, on Capitol Hill, and--as far as can be discerned--at the top of the incoming administration.

Solomon finds that "bedrock faith in the Pentagon's massive capacity for inflicting violence is implicit in the nostrums from anointed foreign-policy experts. The echo chamber is echoing: The Afghanistan war is worth the cost that others will pay."

See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "‘Accidents Will Happen: Excusing Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan" (8/07) by Peter Hart

Noticing how "the U.S. press slowly accepted that this wasn't an attack on Westerners, that Indians weren't merely collateral damage" in the Mumbai attacks, Alexander Cockburn is reminded (Nation, 12/3/08) of Victorian novelists' "scores of selfless characters" for whom "the only thing was to protect the guests." Other aspects of colonial attitudes have changed--though not necessarily for the better:

In the old days the Western press had absolutely no comprehension of fatalities among Asians in numbers less than 50,000--the lower benchmark for newsworthy fatalities. Now it's the other way round. In Western news reports, Indians are individually categorized as among the 188 dead in the Mumbai attack. These days, the larger the number of dead, the less visible they become. The nature of the catastrophe makes a big difference too. No Western journalist chose to bewail a huge human catastrophe when [an Indian minister] supervised the destruction of 84,000 homes in Mumbai in 2004-05, nearly three times the number rendered homeless in Nagapattinam by the tsunami.

Wondering whether "the Times and Washington Post and their leading journalists... ever... admitted that their economic analyses of the past two decades have been lethally wrong," Cockburn recalls that

there was no talk of "moral responsibility" in the Western press about the barbarism of making 84,000 families homeless.... 2006 figures issued by [Indian government] bureaucrats recorded 1,400 suicides (undoubtedly a huge underestimate) of Indian farmers in six districts in the Vidarbha region of his state, driven to death by a carefully planned "liberalization" of the farm economy.... That state terrorism was of Western origin, promoted by economists, World Bank officials and journalists like the New York Times' Thomas Friedman and Keith Bradsher, stepping onto Indian soil armed with Friedmanite recipes.

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "World's Worst Disasters Overlooked: Survey Identifies Biggest 'Forgotten' Crises" (5-6/05) by Carole J.L. Collins

Writing on the propensity for "shoveling it all ['responsibility' for increased terrorism 'in the post 9/11-era'] off on the administration that is leaving, while exonerating our culpable media," Salon's Glenn Greenwald takes (11/28/08, ad-viewing required) as his lead example of realpolitik journalism

the New York Times editorial page, today, on poor U.S./Latin American relations: "The Bush administration did enormous damage to American credibility throughout much of the region when it blessed what turned out to be a failed coup against [democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo] Chávez."

Indeed it did. But what the Times fails to mention, and is apparently eager to erase, is that "the Bush administration" was far from alone in blessing that coup attempt:

The New York Times editorial page, April 13, 2002--one day after the coup:

With yesterday's resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened....

Venezuela urgently needs a leader with a strong democratic mandate to clean up the mess, encourage entrepreneurial freedom and slim down and professionalize the bureaucracy.

Greenwald goes so far as to call the 2002 piece "one of the most Orwellian editorials written in the last decade."

Read FAIR's newsletter Extra! Update: "U.S. Papers Hail Venezuelan Coup as Pro-Democracy Move" (6/02) by Rachel Coen

Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman reminds us (TruthDig, 11/25/08) that, "as President-elect Barack Obama focuses on the meltdown of the U.S. economy, another fire is burning: the Israeli/Palestinian conflict":

You may not have heard much lately about the disaster in the Gaza Strip. That silence is intentional: The Israeli government has barred international journalists from entering the occupied territory.

Last week, executives from the Associated Press, New York Times, Reuters, CNN, BBC and other news organizations sent a letter of protest to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert criticizing his government's decision to bar journalists from entering Gaza. Israel has virtually sealed off the Gaza Strip and cut off aid and fuel shipments. A spokesman for Israel's Defense Ministry said Israel was displeased with international media coverage, which he said inflated Palestinian suffering and did not make clear that Israel's measures were in response to Palestinian violence.

For a more realistic take on the "inflated" nature of military "responses" in the Middle East, see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Lives in the Balance: Media 'Vexed' by Civilian Deaths in Lebanon" (9-10/06) by Peter Hart

At a screening of the film Frost/Nixon, Fox News Channel's Chris Wallace defends George W. Bush against the assertion--which doesn't seem to have been made by anyone present--that Bush's crimes were worse than Richard Nixon's (Salon, 12/2/08):

It trivializes Nixon's crimes and completely misrepresents what George W. Bush did. Whatever George W. Bush did was after the savage attack of 9/11, in which 3,000 Americans were killed, it was done in service of trying to protect this country. I'm not saying that you have to agree with everything he did, but it was all done in the service of trying to protect this country and keep us safe. And the fact is that we sit here so comfortably, and the country has not been attacked again since 9/11.

Of course, Nixon would have argued that everything he did was in the service of trying to protect America from enemies. (In fact, if I remember correctly, he does make this argument in the theatrical version of Frost/Nixon, which draws heavily from transcripts of actual interviews.) The enemies the U.S. faced then were much better armed than the ones it faces now--and they never attacked us, so, hey, Watergate must have worked!

Interviewed by Democracy Now!'s Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman (12/1/08) on the Mumbai attacks, Tariq Ali has a "point I would make about this whole business, which is, of course, ghastly, terrible":

I think it should be stated that if images were shown of the killings that were going on in Afghanistan or in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province as a result of state terrorism carried out by the United States and its allies or in Iraq--let's imagine that every single atrocity being committed in Iraq and Afghanistan were broadcast like this by the world media--the effect would be electric, but it isn't. So we see these images, horrific though they are, from Mumbai... and we don't contextualize what is going on in the world as a whole. And that, I think, can be dangerous.

But then contextualization never has been corporate media's strong point; read the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "'Accidents' Will Happen: Excusing Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan" (8/07) by Peter Hart

"Piecing Together the Story" (12/1/08) of the horrific attacks in Mumbai, AlterNet editors see "a lot more to the Mumbai attacks than CNN and the New York Times have been reporting." Among the news "nowhere to be seen in the American mainstream media" are crucial bits like this:

Saikat Datta of Outlook India writes that by mid-September, Indian agencies knew that the attack would come from the sea; by mid-November, they knew that the Taj hotel would be targeted. And yet the attacks still happened. A blow by blow account of how the plan to attack Mumbai by sea was hatched and executed.

The part that's not news here is the general myopia of insular U.S. media reportage. See, for instance, the FAIR magazine Extra!: "'Tribal' Label Distorts African Conflicts: Ethnic Framing May Obscure Political Contexts" (5-6/08) by Julie Hollar