#THE SWEENEY, THE SWEENEY, DER DER DER DER DER DER...# posted by Richard Seymour

A rightist blogger provides links to a series of articles related to a John Sweeney "J'accuse" against John Pilger. I responded as follows:

Sweeney is an utterly contemptible and debased figure. I can cite you personal correspondence with the man that proves he is an absolute liar and completely untrustworthy. Moreover, his evidence is feeble, his attempts to associate his nemesis John Pilger with dictatorship utterly pathetic. Sweeney, I suggest, and the following will confirm it, is simply pursuing a vendetta against the man who has made a fool of him more than once. In particular, John Pilger was slandered mercilessly by Sweeney during the Balkans war because Pilger said the figure of 10,000 Kosovars killed by the Serb authorities was almost certainly inflated by the West. In Philip Knightley's book on war journalism, "The First Casualty", we learn that not only is the evidence on Pilger's side, but US officials publicly admitted that the figure was much lower.

However. To the sanctions and the DU.

The evidence that Sweeney adduces to suggest that John Pilger 'cheated the public and favoured a dictator' is that he hired as his researcher a woman named Felicity Arbuthnot, a journalist for the Scotsman, who had said in a previous article that ‘By early 1992, doctors in Iraq were bewildered by the rise in birth deformities — some so grotesque and unusual that they expected to see them only in textbooks and perhaps once or twice in a lifetime. They compared them to those recorded in the Pacific Islands after the nuclear testing in the 1950s. Cancers, too, were rising, especially among the young, the most susceptible to radiation.’

Now, at no point has John Pilger stated that the cancers started happening exclusively because of the West's bombings, or that they began in 1992. In fact, Pilger makes this explicit in his e-mail to Sweeney. Indeed, what John Sweeney says - while entirely credible - in no way militates against anything that Pilger himself has said or written. So, the 'art' is all on Sweeney's side. He wants Pilger to make proclamations about the verity of points made in an article by Felicity Arbuthnot simply because he once used her as a researcher.

Sweeney's other point is that Pilger has not had a great deal to say about the impact of Saddam's own actions on the population. One would have thought that the reason for this is that he wanted to avoid too much of the obvious. It isn't as if we, in the post-Gulf War climate, are ignorant of Saddam's brutality. On the other hand, many people remain ignorant to some level of the extent and depth of Western involvement and complicity with crimes in Iraq. John Sweeney has not had a single word to say about this. In his BBC 2 'documentary' on the matter, he paused to give us footage of George Galloway uttering some obsequies to Hussein - even though it was not even vaguely connected to his subject matter - but never once showed the photographs of British government ministers shaking Saddam Hussein's hand, or perhaps the infamous one of Donald Rumsfeld (linked below) greasing the hand of the Big Moustache.

So, if you encounter someone who spends their time making false claims about the writing of an anti-war critic, who spends their time trying to hold them accountable for the words of others and who disseminates false information (more to follow on that in a post-script), you can't really call them modern day Zolas. But you could call them 'apologists'. Apologists in the most devious and dubious sense of that word - smearing, lying, cynically distorting the truth. Such people, of course, can always find a home in the pages of the Spectator and the Observer.

ps:

Sweeney's record of handling evidence on the sanctions is dubious to say the least. His 'documentary' on BBC 2, which is very much part of this argument, alleged that far from the sanctions crippling Iraq, Saddam had been receiving more than enough money, that he had staged mass baby funerals and had tortured babies himself. He also alleges that the UNICEF figures which show sanctions having a devastating effect on the children of Iraq were propaganda from the Ba'athist regime.

Here's how he does it.

He says "I report by getting on the road and listening to people. All of the Iraqis in our film spoke their own words. We did not script them. Northern Iraq is the only part of Iraq where people can speak freely. They spoke about Saddam and what his regime did."

Which means to say, he gathers anecdotal evidence from people with every reason to be hostile to the Southern half of Iraq. Anecotal evidence is important, and its credibility has to be weighed. But one would hope he doesn't expect us to rely on such stories alone.

Moreover, his sources include a taxi driver, a representative of the PUK and a doctor. And that's 90% of his information.

He doesn't interview Hans von Sponeck or Denis Halliday. The reason he gives me is:

"Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck are not Iraqi."

Neither is he, of course, so I don't know why he expects us to rely on him for information on Iraq. Unless, of course, his point is a worthless evasion.

Perhaps the more empirically sound method of gathering statistics and constructing a general idea of the situation would seem more appropriate.

Nah:

"On the UNICEF figures, if a government tortures children - and Saddam's
does
- then is it impossible to imagine that it doesn't torture figures? The
raw
data came from the Iraqi Ministry of Health."

Apart from being a rather tasteless joke, this is blatantly untrue. The figures were gathered by UNICEF who went out into Iraqi communities and households and conducted their own tests. Sweeney is either ignorant or a liar, but whichever he is, he is an apologist for mass murder.

Why does he address only the figures of UNICEF? There are countless aid agencies, human rights agencies and so on who have conducted their own studies and found... Well, for example:

"Most" excess child deaths between August 1990 and March 1998 were "primarily associated with sanctions"? (Garfield, 'Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children from 1990 Through 1998: Assessing the Impact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanctions', March 1999, available on-line at this website ).

Or:

The death rate of children in Iraq is unique, as "there is almost no documented case of rising mortality for children under five years in the modern world". (John Mueller and Karl Mueller, 'The Methodology of Mass Destruction: Assessing Threats in the New World Order', The Journal of Strategic Studies, vol.23, no.1, 2000, pp.163-87)

Or he could have cited Save the Children Fund UK, who have described the economic sanctions against Iraq as "a silent war against Iraq's children"? (Quoted, Voices in the Wilderness UK, March 2002: click here )

Or indeed The Catholic Relief Agency, CAFOD, who have described the economic sanctions against Iraq as "humanly catastrophic [and] morally indefensible"? (Ibid)

Additionally, Human Rights Watch, who have said: "the continued imposition of comprehensive economic sanctions is undermining the basic rights of children and the civilian population generally" and "the [Security] Council must recognise that the sanctions have contributed in a major way to persistent life-threatening conditions in the country"? (August 2000, ibid)

In short, Sweeney accumulates details based on rumours, counterposes them to comprehensive factual analysis based on UNICEF's detailed and methodological work, and then libels UNICEF as auxilliaries to a dictatorship by claiming they got their figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health.

And John Pilger is supposed to take lessons in morality, accuracy or journalistic responsibility from THIS man?