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LETTER TO CNN: "A THOUSAND DOLLARS GOES A LONG WAY IN THAT PART OF THE WORLD" To: Mr. Walter Isaacson, CEO of CNN Dear Mr. Isaacson, Watching CNN's reportage of "America's New War" these last 6 months, a war that CIA head George Tenet stated today on your network was in fact an old war that has been in progress "for five years", it once again occurred to me to stress how damaging it is that CNN appears to be broadly supportive of America's most recent military intervention in the Middle East, from the flag and byline that frames your reporting of the war, to the language and attitude of your anchors. This situation has presumably come to pass because CNN anchors and other employees in Atlanta, being both American and human, have been swept up (as has much of the country) in a jingoistic, rage-motivated response to the September 11th attacks. American journalists are not generally known for their depth of coverage or their grasp of the historical or international background of world events. However, it's time to take stock. There is a line and today it was crossed severely. Bill Hemmer's [pictured above and below] comment while wrapping up today's story which revealed the CIA has been paying $1,000 to the families of Afghani villagers killed in the US bombing was just one recent example of CNN's pro-war editorialising. Hemmer's comment and reassuring nod, "a thousand dollars goes a long way in that part of the world," echoed the old colonialist mantra, "they don't feel pain like we do." 
Let me suggest that Hemmer (cc-ed a copy of this mail), with his neatly pressed suit, coiffured hair, and $10,000 in visible dental work has no place implying -- in either word, tone, or body language -- that Afghani families are 'lucky' to receive $1,000 as compensation after surviving the unimaginable terror of being at the receiving end of high altitude bombing in their own little ground zeros, emerging from the rubble only to be confronted with the death and maiming of friends and loved ones. The crass offensiveness of Hemmer's 'lucky bereaved darkies' comment was compounded by the shameful fact that CNN has yet to even offer us the most basic information required from the media of a democracy at war -- an estimate of the number of casualties among Afghani civilians caught between the Taliban, Al-Qaida, the US, and the various alliance forces. We, the viewers -- bombarded with war coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 6 whole months -- have been left without any clue of the real cost. If honesty and forthright reporting of the whole story is to be the first casualty of war, it is clear that the patriotism that justifies this silence has no place in war journalism. Sincerely, Nigel Parry Note: Following the above letter to CNN's CEO Walter Isaacson, cc-ed to CNN anchor Bill Hemmer, Mr. Hemmer kindly responded. Below is his reply and my response -- NP 
To: Mr. Nigel Parry Mr. Parry, Thank you for taking the time to share your feelings with me and CNN. I respect your opinion.I also regret that you have taken my comments in such an offensive manner. For that, I apologize. Let me reassure you that any insult I have leveled against you, or others, is something I regret. Now it's my turn. First, no amount of money can compensate for the loss of human life. Second, hold your fire on calling me a racist (see: "lucky bereaved darkies"). After spending more than a month on the ground in Kandahar, I harbor no ill thoughts about Afghans, or others. In fact, I admire more than ever their dogged determination to get though a tragic chapter in their country's history. Third, the facts of what happened on the ground 60 miles north of Kandahar are still being sorted. In short order, we will know most of them. In addition, the magnitude of this story has engulfed all of us in a very emotional way. It is our job to remove ourselves from being too close to a tragedy, but his story is nearly inescapable. Believe it or not, we are human, too. Thank you for watching. By the way, I thank God for blessing me with beautiful teeth. They are the real deal. Sincerely,
To: Mr. Bill Hemmer, CNN Anchor Date: 7 February 2002 Dear Mr. Hemmer, Thank you for your e-mail. I understand that you are busy and appreciated your response. I acknowledge what you say about your time in Kandahar and your feelings about the Afghani people. I understand that you did not intend to offend anyone. I myself lived and worked in the Palestinian West Bank for four years in the second half of the 1990s and am familiar with the region. May God both continue to bless your teeth and may he excuse me for hyperbole. I should clarify that I did not call you a racist. Rather, I implied that your comment was itself racist on the grounds that you and I both know that no CNN anchor is likely to comment that the $300,000 to $2.5 million[1] being offered to the WTC victims' families is "a lot for this part of the world." For the same considerations not to guide a comment about Afghanis getting a mere $1,000 as 'compensation' is the very thing racism is all about, is it not? Sometimes it really isn't about intent, but rather about the simple context offered by the viewpoint of "our culture" looking at "the other". The problem your comment posed is that I cannot imagine we will see Afghanis giving their opinion about this anytime soon on CNN, so its framing effect will be the last thing most viewers remember when thinking about the appropriateness of the CIA $1K payoffs. Black American writer Ralph Ellison titled his classic 1952 novel the 'Invisible Man' for good reason. That said and done, I would like to revisit one point from my original letter to Mr. Isaacson, cc-ed to you. The reference you made in your reply to "what happened on the ground 60 miles north of Kandahar" was worrying and is endemic of the lack of depth that informed viewers have come to expect from CNN. While it is true that the US administration has attempted to spin its concern for civilian casualties at every opportunity [cf. http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01102503.htm], surely you don't think that the one instance of bombing you allude to was the only instance in which civilians might have been killed? I'm not even referring to the incidents that I do I remember hearing reported (mostly not on CNN), such as the Red Cross warehouse, the Al-Jazeera office, the villages of Chowkar-Karez, Qalaye Niazi and Kama Ado, or the outskirts of Kabul. The fact is that an enormous amount of munitions have been dropped on Afghanistan from high altitude, just as in the Gulf War a decade ago, during which we dropped more poundage of bombs in the first 45 days than during the entirety of WWII. Something in the region of 90 percent of those bombs were not 'smart' but rather 'dumb' bombs. John Pilger's book "Distant Voices" (the source of both these statistics, albeit from memory) additionally cited aid agencies (the cited source for his figures) as estimating somewhere in the region of 200,000 killed, half of which were Iraqi civilians, the other half Iraqi military (also human, of course). In the approximately four months of bombing Afghanistan, the US has by its own admission dropped around 18,800 'smart' and around 12,500 'dumb' bombs, ie. over 31,000 bombs.[2] The dumb ones, dropped by bombers from high altitude are what killed the 200,000 Iraqis during the Gulf War.
The substantive of yesterday's letter to Walter Isaacson, that there is a pervasive sense from CNN's coverage that the network appears to support the war, remains unanswered. Fair enough, as perhaps it is not your place to comment about that. Indeed CNN CEO Walter Isaacson was already busted by the Washington Post[3] for memoing CNN reporters with the instruction that any focus on Afghan civilian casualties would be "perverse", quote, unquote, as if the killing of Afghan civilians is qualitatively different from the killing of American civilians to the civilians in question. What is truly perverse is CNN's willingness to become a propaganda tool for the state. Gone are the days when Peter Arnett stood firm in the face of Pentagon intimidation and CNN's own anchors' incredulity and reported the bombing of the Iraqi baby milk factory. These days, the CEO of CNN made one of the first acts of his office meeting with the right wing to ask how CNN can please them more.[4] According to one US academic, a conservative figure of Afghani civilians killed by U.S. bombing would fall in the region of 3,500.[5] It remains shameful that CNN, with all its resources, can not even bring the public this basic information. It is hard to maintain basic human hope in a world where the official governmental response to unimagined violence and tragedy is to multiply one death into two, and a world in which one of the official chroniclers of this period of history try to pretend it that isn't happening. The "eerie, out-of-focus sensation of a dream," described by Ellison, indeed. Sincerely, Nigel Parry Footnotes: [1] Source: http://www.usdoj.gov/victimcompensation/vc_matrices.pdf [2] Talking about the current bombing of Afghanistan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers stated before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Service, on February 5, 2002, that, "...we were using almost 3,000 [global-positioning system-guided weapons] a month during this [Afghanistan] conflict. Laser-guided bombs as well -- about 1,700 a month for those." At the same briefing Myers went on to say, "upwards of 90 percent of our munitions were precision munitions [...] let me correct my number. It's a little greater than 60 percent precision munitions, not 90 percent, as I stated." [Source: http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2002/s20020205-secdef2.html] [3] According to the Washington Post of 31 October 2001, Isaacson "ordered his staff to balance images of civilian devastation in Afghan cities with reminders that the Taliban harbors murderous terrorists, saying it 'seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.'" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14435-2001Oct30.html [4] http://www.fair.org/activism/cnn-gop.html [5] Marc Herold, as reported in "Afghanistan's civilian deaths mount", BBC News Online, 3 January 2002 available at http://nigelparry.com/after911/BBCMarkHerold.pdf (PDF format, 60K). See also "Daily Casualty Count of Afghan Civilians Killed in U.S. Bombing Attacks from 7 October 2001 to 24 January 2002," raw data from research by Marc Herold, available at http://nigelparry.com/after911/afghan-civ.pdf - PDF format, 202K.
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The host of Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume" (11/5/01) recently wondered why journalists should bother covering civilian deaths at all. "The question I have," said Hume, "is civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, really. Should they be as big news as they've been?"
