One leading complaint about the ongoing NSA data-collection scandal from those truly in the know is how the press has focused so much on Edward Snowden’s own story (e.g. his views towards his native land, his struggle to find asylum, etc.) to the detriment of setting out and analyzing for the public just what it is that American intelligence agencies have been getting away with and why that matters.

Unfortunately, we can today see a further example of this from no less than Die Welt. The headline to their particular piece reads “Kofi Annan was also spied upon”, and the lede:

The NSA eavesdropping scandal continues to enrage minds. But the past shows us that large-scale spy-actions are nothing new. Even UN General Secretary Kofi Annan was spied upon.

And sure enough, there he is: a head-shot of Annan looking serious and pensive is right there at the top.

It’s really rather bizarre if you go on and read into the article that reporters Ansgar Graw* and Julia Smirnova actually wrote, though. “Kofi”? Who’s that? It’s Snowden, Snowden, and more Snowden. Will he get asylum? Will he just stay in Russia? What has happened to change Ecuador’s mind about accepting him? Did he himself even write the letter which was recently made public in which he complained about how the US government was treating him? (It is riddled with British spellings which he presumably would not use.)

In short, there is this strange, wide cleft between headline and lede (and picture) on the one hand, and the article’s actual body of information. Of course, it is editors who generally provide the former as a piece is whipped into shape for publication. It’s also true that the fact that Kofi Annan (and all other UN Secretaries-General) were spied upon by US authorities is returned to at the article’s very end (under the section-heading “Eavesdropping happened always and everywhere”).

But that attitude of “nothing new here” itself seriously downplays the sheer ignominy of the new surveillance developments that Snowden revealed, e.g. how wide-ranging the survellance abuse was (including its coverage of leading European allies), to what lengths Obama administration officials were willing to go to lie about them, and the like. As does of course the People magazine-style obsession with Snowden’s own personal tale – we are being let down by our journalists, in whichever language.

* Doesn’t his name seem like it got mangled in a spelling-machine somewhere? Or that perhaps it should really be spelled backwards?

Yesterday the efforts to stop the bloodshed in Syria finally seemed to make some forward progress. The UN Security Council voted to send 30 UN personnel there to enforce, or at least to observe, the cease-fire that is supposed to be in place. That vote was even unanimous, meaning that both Russia and China joined in voting “yes” after many months of obstructing anything to do with Syria at the Council.

Then again, you might recall that “observers” have already been sent there, namely last Christmas and by the Arab League acting alone. Those observers then departed again in fairly short order, as the Arab League formally suspended its monitoring mission on 28 January 2012, citing “a harsh new government crackdown [that] made it too dangerous to proceed and was resulting in the deaths of innocent people across the country.”

Spiegel Beirut correspondent Ulrike Putz has little more confidence that things will be any different this time:

Uno-Beobachter in Syrien: Scheitern mit Ansage… http://t.co/bgK9nAPf

April 15, 2012 12:57 pm via SPIEGEL ONLINEReplyRetweetFavorite

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That Scheitern mit Ansage translates to something like “pre-announced failure.” The key is that, once again and by the UN resolution’s terms, it is to Syrian government forces that the security of the observers is being entrusted. As the December/January observer experience showed, that’s a clear-cut recipe for rendering meaningless the Security Council’s insistence that they be able to travel wherever they want, and interview anyone (individuals only) that they want without those individuals then getting into trouble.

There is another dynamic in play as well. That NYT article referenced above mentions the element of a full 250 observers, also with permission to travel anywhere they want, that was an original part of Kofi Annan’s peace plan, but implies that the Security Council will vote to up the total from 60 to that level of 250 soon and so dispatch reinforcements. But Frau Putz sees the current 60 (first elements arriving in-country tomorrow) as a replacement for those 250, not a down-payment. Furthermore, the Syrian government has won the right to determine the countries those observers will come from.

Finally, there is probably not much of a cease-fire to observe anyway. Anti-government activitists report additional bombardment of Homs; and government media alleges that its soldiers have been attacked.

“So the observer mission in Syria stands ready to fail, before it even has begun,” Frau Putz concludes. Then again, what does she know? After all, her report includes the damning sentence “Above the city [Homs] drones crossed overhead.” But the Syrian regime hardly possesses any drone aircraft capability.

US President George Bush’s fourth address to an opening session of the United Nations was yesterday, but in the European press I’ve surveyed so far there is little in the way of analysis of his remarks, as opposed to articles which more-or-less simply report to readers what it was he said. One paper that did get a jump on that was the Danish Berlingske Tidende, and getting reaction from a country which after all does still have troops engaged in the occupation in Iraq must surely be worthwhile. Berlingske author Ole Damkjær’s very title (Bush Goes Courting at the UN) already gives you some idea that he is willing to cut the American president some slack. (more…)

Both American Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan are now in the Darfur region of Sudan, in order to draw attention to what has been called one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises ever, the assaults on the black Sudanese people there by Arab “Janjaweed” militias has resulted in the deaths of 30,000 people since February, 2003, the displacement from their homes of one million, rape on a massive scale, and similar horrors. And the US government has introduced a UN Security Council resolution calling for international sanctions – an arms embargo, travel restrictions – against those militias.

If nothing else, this bringing-together in one out-of-the-way spot of two of the world’s most prominent and powerful figures is succeeding in attracting press attention to a conflict most of the world has up to now preferred to ignore. Strangely, that also includes countries in what you could call the immediate neighborhood; and in its coverage today (Ethnic Cleansing/Africa Ignores Sudan) the Dutch newspaper Trouw brings to light and examines this attitude. (more…)

A collective Aber was ist denn los?! issued from the German government last Wednesday, the day after the Pentagon’s new policy excluding as primary bidders on Iraqi reconstruction contracts companies from “peace camp” countries was disclosed – not by any formal notification to the countries thus excluded, mind you, but simply by a posting on the Internet, to the “Rebuilding-Iraq.net” site, of the “Determination and Findings” text, signed by Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. That’s why government spokesman Béla Anda (a very Hungarian name, by the way) qualified his qualification of the American action as “not acceptable” with the proviso that what he had been hearing from the press would turn out in fact to be true. We can make our first plunge into the facts of this case with the authoritative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s Wednesday article, Berlin Criticizes Washington: Decision Unacceptable. That’s also why German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer was only willing to say that he had heard the news “with amazement” (“mit Erstaunen zur Kenntnis genommen“), and that he was going to get with his American contacts to find out what the hell was going on. (more…)

Yesterday marked the first day of the two-day Iraq donors’ conference in Madrid. I’ve chosen the German press as the prism through which to review events at and surrounding that conference; it usually gives good, comprehensive coverage, and what’s more, in this situation it represents a country which you suspect doesn’t want to be at that Madrid conference in the first place. (Germany’s delegation there is headed not by a political minister – the Minister for Developmental Aid, Heidemarie Wieczoreck-Zeul, might at least have been appropriate – but by her top civil servant, state-secretary Erich Stather.)

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung covers Madrid thoroughly, in two on-line articles, the lead one of which is entitled At the Construction-Site of an Iraqi Marshall Plan. (more…)

EuroSavant veterans will recognize the following as the latest manifestation of a tried-and-true formula: commentary out of the German newspaper Die Zeit as reflected in Thomas Friedman’s column for the New York Times. I shouldn’t do too much of this, over and over – I don’t like to fall into predictable formulas – but lately commentary on the French and German reaction to America’s need for help in Iraq has come together in a propitious way, to include in addition a contribution today to that same New York Times Op-Ed page (and so in English, of course) from German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. (more…)