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Saudi Dictator’s Death Shows NYT as Pawn of Power [1]
['Keane Bhatt']
Date: 2015-03-01 20:58:12+00:00
“I always valued King Abdullah’s perspective and appreciated our genuine and warm friendship,” President Barack Obama pronounced in an official statement (White House, 1/22/15) that praised the late Saudi Arabian dictator’s dedication to “greater engagement with the world.”
An honest rendering of this “greater engagement” would include Abdullah’s record of bellicosity throughout the region. In 2011, the country deployed troops to Bahrain to quell mass demonstrations against the Bahraini monarchy (New York Times, 3/14/11). In Syria, Saudi weapons shipments to jihadists have aggravated the country’s bloody civil war (New York Times, 10/14/12). Abdullah’s $5 billion in economic aid to Egypt helped bolster the recently installed coup government of fellow dictator Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi (Reuters, 7/9/13).
As Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (1/23/15) observed, in addition to fomenting religious extremism and sectarianism—his regime routinely flogs dissenters and beheads those guilty of “sorcery”—Abdullah participated in various US crimes throughout the Middle East and encouraged the United States to commit more. George W. Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq relied upon secret, extensive Saudi military assistance (AP, 4/24/04). And a classified cable from the US embassy in Riyadh (Wikileaks, 4/20/08) noted “the king’s frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran.”
Another aspect of this US/Saudi partnership was revealed by the New York Times (2/5/13): “The CIA began quietly building a drone base in Saudi Arabia to carry out strikes in Yemen” in 2010, reported the paper. The first attack from this Saudi base killed US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without due process, far from any battlefield; other US drone strikes killed Yemeni women and children, a cleric vocally opposed to Al-Qaeda and a popular Yemeni politician.
However, until the publication of that piece, the Times had, at the urging of a high-ranking CIA official, withheld for over a year the name of the country that hosted the US drone base. Then–managing editor of the Times Dean Baquet (New York Times, 2/6/13) recalled the government’s rationale for nondisclosure: “The Saudis might shut it down because the citizenry would be very upset.”
Today, Baquet (Der Spiegel, 1/23/15), now executive editor of the Times, flatly admits, “I was wrong,” and the decision “was a mistake.” Baquet’s apology for acquiescing to the US government did not appear to change the paper’s reverence for the US/Saudi relationship, however. The very day that Baquet’s remarks were published, the New York Times (1/23/15) printed an obituary that adopted the US government’s dishonest official narrative of the Saudi despot.
Originally headlined “King Abdullah, Who Nudged Saudi Arabia Forward, Dies at 90,” the Times article claimed that the dictator had “earned a reputation as a cautious reformer.” Under the subheading “Moves of Moderation,” reporters Douglas Martin and Ben Hubbard unironically noted that Abdullah, a “force of moderation,” had “hundreds of militants arrested and some beheaded.”
To put into context the paper’s impressive feat—laundering the Saudi dictator into a forward-thinking reformer—consider the Times’ treatment of an actually elected leader who was not a stalwart US ally, but rather the target of ongoing US attempts at regime change. In 2013, the New York Times (3/5/13) published a harsh portrait upon the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. “A Polarizing Figure Who Led a Movement,” by Times reporter Simon Romero, posthumously characterized Chávez as a man who had been “consolidating power,” “strutting like the strongman in a caudillo novel.”
Chávez “was determined to hold onto and enhance his power,” continued Romero, arguing that he “grew obsessed with changing Venezuela’s laws and regulations to ensure that he could be re-elected indefinitely and become, indeed, a caudillo.” Romero even devoted a paragraph to quotes from Chávez’s former psychiatrist, who painted the late president as “a hyperkinetic and imprudent man, unpunctual, someone who overreacts to criticism, harbors grudges [and] is politically astute and manipulative.”
Missing from Romero’s look back at Chávez was the fact that, unlike genuine autocrats such as Abdullah, Chávez had repeatedly won free and fair elections that were characterized by former US President Jimmy Carter as “the best in the world.” Unlike Abdullah, who had supposedly “nudged” Saudi Arabia forward, Chávez had presided over enormous reductions in income inequality, poverty, food insecurity and infant mortality (Extra!, 12/12).
The paper’s comically charitable treatment of Abdullah is the most recent example of the persistent and undue influence of the US government’s foreign policy priorities on the paper’s coverage, and should disabuse anyone of the notion that the New York Times operates independently, whatever its executives’ public vows, protestations and apologies.
Keane Bhatt is a Washington, D.C.–based activist for social justice and community development.
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