New York Times Cairo bureau chief Declan Walsh went to Benghazi, Libya, which is in ruins, to find out how it got that way.
“When I went to Benghazi, I was guided by one main question: How did the city come to this?” he declares in his multimedia presentation (5/3/18), which combines text, audio, video and large-format photography. One thing that’s not conveyed via any medium, though: Seven years ago, the United States and its allies used military force to overthrow Libya’s government. The country has been in almost continual civil war since then, which you would think would be crucial in explaining “how the city came to that.” But apparently you don’t think like a New York Times bureau chief.
The thing is, when President Barack Obama—egged on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—called for an attack on Libya, the justification they offered was that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi would otherwise destroy Benghazi. So the fact that military intervention actually turned out to lead to the destruction of Benghazi seems like something you might want to tell Times readers, or Times consumers of multimedia, anyway.
But Walsh, despite his stated objective, seemed to go out of his way to avoid talking about how Libya has come to be a place where major cities are turned to rubble. Here’s how the piece opens:
When a “mob attack” killed the US ambassador in 2012—”that’s when the real fight began.” In other words, the “real fight” didn’t begin a year earlier, when NATO added its overwhelming military might to a rebel uprising against Gadhafi.
It’s almost as if Walsh thinks that his audience, conditioned as they are by corporate media’s indulgence of the Republican Party’s absurd obsession with whether Clinton accurately characterized the motivations of the militants who killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, can only use that frame of reference to understand Benghazi. So we get assurances that not every Benghazi resident hated the United States—some brought flowers!—but no explanation for why Libyan resentment of the United States might be justified:
“That shouldn’t be forgotten”—unlike the US destroying the government of Libya and leaving the nation to be fought over by warlords.
It’s not like Walsh hasn’t heard of history—he notes the historical trivia that Benito Mussolini once gave a speech from a Benghazi balcony. There’s room in the piece to mention Mussolini, but Obama and Clinton? They don’t come up.
This is not the first time US media, or the New York Times in particular, have erased US responsibility Libya’s travails. Ben Norton wrote a piece for FAIR (11/28/17) about coverage of the return of slave markets to Libya; the Times did better than most outlets by acknowledging that the resurgence of slavery was connected to the chaos following the downfall of Gadhafi—but couldn’t bring itself to remind readers that their own government helped bring about that downfall.
But when a journalist sets out—”guided by one main question”—to understand the roots of devastating violence in a particular city, and fails so utterly to take the overwhelming role of Washington intervention into account…. Well, I’ve been doing this a long time, and I have to say I was startled by the complete erasure of quite recent, utterly relevant events.
You’re left wondering what Walsh does intend to offer as an explanation for Benghazi’s destruction. Perhaps it’s inherent in the Libyan character, as he suggests is illustrated by locals’ enthusiasm for doing “doughnuts” in their cars—a sport that reminded Walsh “of so many young Libyans I met—restless after years of war, impatient to go somewhere and yet turning in circles.”
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
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To: letters@nytimes.com
Hello,
The article Chasing the Ghosts of Benghazi by Declan Walsch was critiqued by Jim Naureckas. If the purpose of this article was to find the reason for the chaos in Benghazi then it should have concluded the cause was due to the American led bombing, but this article doesn’t mention that. I can only conclude that the NYT is either incompetent or complicit. If anyone is reading this they may think that I am no one and that my argument doesn’t matter. That would be a logical fallacy; an ad hominem; this is more than a purely abstract attack. These conclusions are obvious; any and all people who love truth and peace will arrive at the same conclusion. Will you be printing another luke warm apology like you did about supporting the WMD conspiracy in Iraq? If so, how many millions of people will need to die first?
Kind Regards,
Good reporting.
Why do these publications exist in the make or break marketplace of news? Their advertisers are not so much advertising but subsidizing their chamber newsletters, as it were.
But anyway why are people buying it and who are they?
The NyT and main corporate news publications treat their audience like Clorella DeVille would treat innocent kindagarteners.
But readers are educated and worldly – yes ? no ?
How do these institutions have any credibility? The readers know they lie, twist and blackout critical information for the masses. Their stuff gets picked up and quoted as fact by other media constituting a huge echo.
Are their studies done on this amplification? How severe is it?
Do loyal readers and new ones just ignore the constant bs, the lie of the Iraq War for instance, in a state of cognitive denial?
Do they forgive everything and anything to be part of the group think, or excuse the apparent inexcusable because they have overarching blind faith in the nation. They think the violent truth, while it might not be publishable, is anyway secondary to the covert deep state which has their back, and must also have really good classified reason for doing what they do – and for which even the educated commoner can’t understand or be privy to.
Is this kinda faith in authority and the irrational like Christianity and religion?
Maybe they are mostly white, upper income with a mortgage and just do too much cocaine ?
I don’t know where to look for the research here!
Did everyone forget what Gaddafi did? He proposed a new unit of money for Africa based on the gold Libyan Dinar. A standard to be reckoned with since it was backed by Libyan oil that purchased that gold. Better than the U.S. petrodollar & not controlled by Rothschild central banking. It was how he financed the 40 year project known as the Great Man Made River that tapped the world’s largest fresh water aquifer underneath the Sahara. 2 resources that would have placed Africa on level with the industrialized world. The response to the dollar hegemony? A fabricated war leading to his death. If that wasn’t enough, U.S. fighter jets bombed this fabulous engineering marvel to bits with DEPLETED URANIUM. Prior to this, the Libyan People enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world. Hillary, Obama, Sarkozy, & the Rothschilds should be hung from the highest gallows for this war crime based on lies. Is it any wonder why America is so hated by the rest of the world? A financially mighty Africa would have definitely been a threat to the world’s parasites on its northeastern border, Israel.
History is written, rewritten and erased by the “victors” and their scribes
I went to the Times site because I had to see it for myself. Sure enough; not one mention of U.S. military support for the overthrow of Gadhafi. Hard to imagine Walsh could have missed that–being the Cairo bureau chief and all. Choosing when to start and stop a narrative is such a powerful way to spin a story.
But including kids doing doughnuts in a parking lot as some sort of metaphor for the youth of Benghazi? That was just comically stupid.
Is this an example of the New York times being stupid on purpose or was the author employed by a paper that supported that criminal war for oil genuinely dumbstruck and can’t connect his nation’s war and destruction on Libya made it what it is? stunning!