Trump confuses tamed media into erasing killing of American child
A January raid in Yemen ended in the deaths of a Navy SEAL and an eight-year-old American girl, but White House press corps only followed up on one of them.
In its coverage of a deadly raid on an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen, the American media failed the public and let the Donald Trump administration steer the story for its own ends, according to experts and a member of the White House press corps.
Two Americans died in the fighting on January 29. One was a US Navy SEAL named Chief Petty Officer William Owens, and the other, an eight year old girl named Nawar Al Awlaki. As many as 30 other civilians, including ten children, also perished during the raid.
But between the raid and Trump’s first address to congress on February 28, mentions of Nawar’s death disappeared from the discussion in the American media. The media’ focus turned to Owens. The SEAL’s distraught widow, hailed by Trump during his live, televised speech, took center stage, and overshadowed criticism of US policy in Yemen that lead to the attack.
“That moment sealed the case for this guy, and his mission, being untouchable,” said Alex Ameter, a former army captain and researcher at a foreign policy think tank. “So by being access shills who are trying to conduct business as usual, the media has helped cover up the raid and failed that little girl who will never get justice or even an independent inquiry.”
Ameter, who served in Afghanistan working in civil affairs, said failing to ask questions about Nawar’s death represented a dereliction of duty on the part of the American press corps. Civilian deaths in US military raids put American lives at risk, especially as the definition of legitimate targets expands.
“The definition of enemy combatants and acceptable collateral damage keeps expanding and because when you kill someone’s child, you make your own child fair game for targeting,” he added. “If you don’t start out with a black and white moral line you will not allow, you’re probably not going to suddenly develop one.”
For the media, Trump’s speech was a chance to discuss the ghastly consequences of the raid and broader US policy in Yemen. Reporters chose not to seize that opportunity, focusing instead on Trump’s responsibility for the death of Owens and how it would affect his political standing. Nawar disappeared from the discussion. The military had blamed Al Qaeda for using women and children as human shields.
The life of Nawar’s father, Anwar Al Awlaki, loomed over coverage of her death. Awlaki was a US-born militant cleric killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011. His assassination raised concerns about the legality of killing an American citizen without a trial, a policy President Barack Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder defended. Two weeks later in 2011, another US drone strike killed his son, Nawar’s brother Abdulrahman, also an American. The Obama White House described the boy’s death as accidental.
‘The fog of war’
With three Americans from one family, two of them children, killed by the US military in Yemen, what could have diverted the attention of the press from this story? One veteran journalist believes the consistent chaos of the executive branch itself played a role in distracting reporters from the civilians who died.
“The Trump administration has an unusual knack for launching so many things in the air that it’s very difficult to stay focused on any one thing, even if that one thing is important,” said Al Tompkins, a professor of journalism at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The distraction of the press corps made it easy for White House press secretary Sean Spicer to turn them away from the question of the mission’s civilian casualties. Responding to one of the few questions raised by a reporter about Nawar’s death, Spicer said “no American citizen would ever be targeted” by the US military.
Even publications that have been critical of Trump seemed to fall in line with absolving his administration of responsibility for Nawar’s death, deferring from discussing the wider humanitarian consequences of US strikes in Yemen. One article in The Atlantic stands out. It described Nawar’s death in terms of its value as propaganda for Al Qaeda, an unfortunate mistake and not a reason in itself for moral outrage.
“Photos of the bright-eyed girl soon appeared online, often accompanied by a quote from her grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, describing how she was shot in the neck and ‘suffered for two hours,’” states a February 9 article entitled “The Yemen Raid and the Ghost of Anwar al-Awlaki. “Trump’s pre-election suggestion that the families of terrorists were fair game notwithstanding, there is no reason to believe that the raid deliberately targeted civilians or the Awlaki child. In the fog of war, civilian deaths do occur.”
The New York Times, which recently started an advertising campaign that boasts of its being a guardian for truth against Trump’s lies, only managed to devote two sentences to civilian deaths in a piece entitled Raid in Yemen: Risky From the Start and Costly in the End. The article does not mention Nawar by name, nor state that she was an American citizen. Indeed, the loss of a $75 million helicopter appears a few lines farther up the story than the civilian deaths.
Rationalising civilian casualties as a regrettable cost of doing the bloody business of fighting terrorists is an old habit in Washington. It’s helped along by reporters forgetting the human consequences of war and thinking only of how horrors abroad sway politics inside D.C., said one member of the White House press corps who spoke to TRT on condition of anonymity.
“I think the it’s very easy in the White House to get engulfed in US politics, and every item you want to report has to do with Donald Trump. I’m guilty of it myself,” the reporter told TRT World.
“It’s really easy forget that there are humans who can’t eat or can’t sleep because they’re at war.”
The reporter attends daily White House press conferences, working for a television news channel, and said the notion of following up on the civilian casualties was not part of the behind-the-scenes banter in the White House briefing room. Rather, journalists focused on how the SEAL’s death reflected on Trump’s political standing, and not whether the deaths of civilians were worthy of moral outrage in their own right.
“The White House press corps failed to acknowledge the great loss of human life,” the reporter said. “At the direction of the administration, they shaped the narrative on what happened, and other than the death of the Navy SEAL there were not a whole lot of questions asked about the civilian casualties. The press corps was pressing on the legitimacy of the raid and not the fact that a dozen children died.”
Even when one of the dead was an American citizen, this did not seem to excite further examination from the reporters’ whose job it is to hold the executive branch to account.
‘What are we doing there?’
The raid comes amid a significant increase in American strikes on Yemen, operations which have not been at the top of the hour on cable news programs. The US is supporting a Saudi-led campaign against Iranian-backed rebels there. The two countries are regional rivals.
And amid this surge, the front pages of major newspapers and discussions on Sunday morning talk shows are consumed by talk of Trump administration officials ties to Russia; Trump’s own Twitter tirades and Republicans sharpening their knives to take apart Obamacare.
“Practically everything else has taken a backseat,” said Tompkins, the professor at Poynter.
Tompkins said that congress is not likely to challenge Trump on the outcome of the raid, and especially not on what happened to civilians there or what US policy in Yemen is.
“If congress isn’t going to do it, and I don’t see any real evidence that they are, then it’s certainly the journalists’ role to raise those questions. “I think it would be right for us as journalists to ask what it is we are doing there, and where this is going and what care is being taken not to kill these civilians. Yemen is a country that is already in the process of a humanitarian crisis,” he added.
The United Nations recently declared that Yemen was undergoing a famine as the war drags on, Tompkins noted. Doomed by geography, Yemenis have no direction to flee, with the barren Saudi desert to the north and hostile, impoverished regimes across the Gulf of Aden to the south. They are trapped in ways even Syrians fleeing warfare are not.
Tompkins said that the particular failure of the media was due in part to lacking resources in Yemen. There was video of Owens widow crying, but no video of the raid happening. There are only two photos in circulation of Nawar, but more of Owens.
A lack of authentic images from the scene in Yemen meant that journalists have a tougher time selling the story to audiences.
Tompkins argues that journalists don’t have to give up on Nawar’s story in favour of Owens’. They can tell both by asking question about the purpose of America’s military involvement in Yemen. Zooming in on their stories and out onto the wider context is what would serve the public interest the best.
“There’s a tender dance that goes on here,” Tompkins said. “You have a grieving widow whose husband died in service of country on the one hand, and you don’t want to disrespect his service, but on the other hand what are we doing there? That should have been asked, and to do that is a totally legitimate question that doesn’t delegitimize his work at all.”
Tompkins said that there was a compelling story to be told that could have focused on both of the Americans who died.
The White House press corps correspondent had a sobering final verdict about why Owens story got more attention than Nawar’s.
“I think the press corps not only failed the American people, they failed the global community. Our role as journalists to not decide whose life is more valuable but to report accurately and fully on the facts at hand,” the correspondent said. “I think in this situation the US media valued the life of the Navy SEAL more than the lives of the civilians that died during the raid.”
Ameter, the former army officer, had an even more bleak take on the case. He said that the scourge of gun violence in the US has rendered Americans numb to the deaths’ of children, even those close to home. He referenced a 2012 mass shooting in Connecticut that claimed the lives of 20 small children and six teachers. Although the horror of the American public at the killings appeared to provide political momentum for more restrictions on firearms, a lack of political will in congress soon dashed hopes for reform of gun laws at a federal level.
“We got through Newtown without really changing anything,” he said. “Why would we care about this?”
Wilson Dizard is a deputy editor at TRT World.
The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.
