“THE US media’s gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission,” William Blum, historian and fierce critic of US foreign policy, once astutely observed. “It’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies.”
Blum’s evergreen maxim very much applies to the British media, too.
Take the press response to Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently appointing Jonathan Powell to be his new National Security Adviser.
After reading the reports of the recruitment in the Financial Times, Guardian and i newspapers on November 9, I also accessed the news stories that appeared in the Telegraph and Times via the LexisNexis online database.
All of these established news organs note Powell was Tony Blair’s chief of staff from May 1997 to June 2007.
Their reports make much of Powell’s diplomatic work. All mention his role in brokering the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. The Guardian notes he is the chief executive of Inter Mediate, a British-based charity working on resolving international conflicts, and “since leaving office [he] has been a prominent advocate of negotiating with enemies to bring about peace, writing a book called Talking to Terrorists.”
The Telegraph reports Powell has “a wealth of foreign policy and government experience,” while several of the reports quote Starmer: “He [Powell] is uniquely qualified to advise the government on tackling the challenges ahead and engage with counterparts across the globe to protect and advance British interests.” The Financial Times notes Powell will have a “key role” in “shaping Britain’s position on the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.”
Given the job description for his new position, amazingly, none of the five newspapers thought it pertinent to mention Powell’s central role in the illegal and aggressive invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and Britain’s subsequent military occupation. Or, for that matter, Powell’s role in Britain’s (also illegal) 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent occupation.
If we judge Powell’s political career in the 2000s using the limited, liberal framing endemic to these newspapers, his record is a disaster.
The British military interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan are now widely understood to have been catastrophes, leading to the deaths of hundreds of British soldiers. The presence of British troops in both countries energised the armed resistance.
The Taliban are now back in control of Afghanistan, and Iraq’s social fabric was torn asunder to such an extent that Isis was able to take control of around 40 per cent of the country in the mid-2010s.
Far from protecting UK interests, the interventions significantly heightened the terrorist threat to Britain, with Iraq and Afghanistan a key factor in many attacks in Britain, including the July 7 2005 suicide bombings in London.
Politically, the war in Iraq and the attendant political controversy back in Britain fatally wounded Blair — and New Labour to boot.
If we judge Powell’s career using a moral lens, then he arguably becomes a blood-soaked, criminal political figure. He was, after all, one of the key individuals in Blair’s inner circle in the run-up to the invasion when this cabal repeatedly misled the cabinet, parliament, media and British public.
He attended the infamous July 23 2002 meeting recorded in the leaked minutes which have become known as the Downing Street Memo.
Summarising recent talks Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, had had in Washington, the minute’s note: “Military action was now seen as inevitable” but “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
The minutes also note foreign secretary Jack Straw said the “case [for war] was thin” as “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his [weapons of mass destruction] capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
Powell was at Blair’s side when the September 2002 dossier was compiled, with little regard for the actual evidence, to strengthen the case for war. In fact, Powell “instructed intelligence chiefs to change the … dossier to make it appear that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was much greater than they believed,” the Guardian reported in September 2003.
“I think the statement … that ‘Saddam is prepared to use chemical and biological weapons if he believes his regime is under threat’ is a bit of a problem,” Powell told John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
“It backs up … the argument that there is no CBW [chemical and biological warfare] threat, and we will only create one if we attack him. I think you should redraft the para.”
And Powell stood by Blair when Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy legal adviser at the Foreign Office, resigned just before the war, writing in her resignation letter that invading Iraq without UN authorisation would be “an unlawful use of force on such a scale” that it “amounts to the crime of aggression.”
As a leading figure in Britain’s rush to war, Powell bears partial responsibility for the approximately 500,000 men, women and children killed in the conflict, according to a 2013 PLOS Medicine journal study, and for the 4.2 million people displaced by the invasion and occupation by 2007, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
And let’s not forget Afghanistan; Brown University’s 2021 Costs Of War study estimated the total number of conflict deaths since the US-British invasion in 2001 to be approximately 176,000, with 5.9 million people displaced.
Considering such appalling facts, no doubt a censor working in an authoritarian regime would be deeply impressed by British media’s Swiss cheese-style coverage of Powell’s appointment.
Which is all the more remarkable when you consider the omissions of the Guardian, i, Financial Times, Times and Telegraph were not forced on them by pressure or outright threats but freely chosen by teams of journalists who no doubt believe themselves to be independent, discerning and fearless professionals.
An aside: it is worth noting that the Independent, now an online-only publication, does briefly mention Powell’s email about the September 2002 dossier in its coverage of his appointment and how he “came under intense scrutiny during the Hutton Inquiry into the death of scientist David Kelly.”
Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised by the performance of the rest of the so-called quality press. British media has long gone above and beyond in boosting the careers of key architects of the slaughter in Iraq, such as Alastair Campbell and Gordon Brown.
Blair’s former spin doctor is now presented as an affable political commentator and popular podcaster, while the former prime minister often writes articles for the Guardian on topics such as education for girls and putting Russian President Putin and “his colleagues” on trial for the crime of aggression. Yes, you read that last bit correctly.
Frustratingly, prominent figures on the progressive left have long worn Iraq-blocking blinkers when it comes to Brown.
In August 2022, Anna Yearley Carreira, joint executive director of human rights NGO Reprieve, tweeted about Brown: “I am so bloody proud to have worked for this man.” The same month, the Guardian’s leftist economics commentator Aditya Chakrabortty described him as “the last serious prime minister.”
And when I tweeted the great investigative journalist Ian Cobain in April the same year about an article I had written for the Morning Star arguing Brown should be put on trial for war crimes, this was his response: “I can barely believe you’ve asked this question. Gordon Brown, a war criminal? That’s bonkers.”
No matter: the ramifications of the historical record are clear. Rather than returning to Downing Street, Powell — like Blair, Campbell and Brown — should be heading to The Hague.
Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.