Howard Friel and Richard Falk’s The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports Us Foreign Policy (Verso, 2004) is a blistering indictment of the New York Times coverage of foreign policy over the past fifty years, with particular emphasis on the years following September 11, 2001, the invasion and subsequent occupation and torture of Iraq, up until the manuscript’s deadline of June 2004. The book also examines the US backed coup attempt of Hugo Chavez, the World Court case of Nicaragua versus the US, the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam war. It chronicles the paper’s record of ignoring international law (from September 11 2001 to March 21 2003, the editorial page never mentioned the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in the seventy editorials on Iraq), the consequences of it’s editorial policy of “non-crusading” journalism (as “former reporter and a former editor [John L. Hess and Aurthur Gelb, respectively] at the Time have pointed out, the Times applied its ‘non-crusading’ standard of editorial policy equally to housing corruption in New York City and to Hitler’s campaign in Europe”), and its legacy of “impartial” news coverage, which leaves the Times ideological on both sides of any given issue (see the chapter on Michael Ignatieff’s case for and against torture before and after Abu Graib for a devastating example of this).But more importantly, Friel and Falk highlight the relevant facts and considerations that necessarily become unspeakable by extension of the Times’ neglect of international law. For example, the following facts could not be uttered in regards to the US invasion of Iraq without appeal to international law, paraphrasing from the text:

• The US and UK repeatedly threatened the use of force against a UN member state without Security Council authorization in violation of UN Charter Article 2(4), which stipulates, “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state […]”.
• No Security Council resolution issued since 1991 has authorized the threat or use of force against Iraq.
• Iraq has not attacked any state since 1990; it has never attacked or threatened to attack the US or UK.
• Claims that Iraq intended to attack the US or any state indirectly by providing WMD to terrorist networks were speculative and self-serving and lacked credible evidence.
• The “preventive” use of force, including an armed attack against Iraq, as a response to prospective terrorist threat from Iraq violated the UN Charter and fundamental principles of international law with respect to the prohibition of the use of force.
• Failure to comply with disarmament obligations is insufficient as cause for threat or use of force according to UN Charter Article 51.
• No Security Council resolution has stipulated failure to comply with disarmament obligations as being sufficient as cause for threat or use of force.
• The resort to force in the absence of a resolution and any credible evidence of an imminent threat of armed attack violated not only the UN Charter; it also constituted a war of aggression and, thus, a crime against peace under the Nuremberg precedent.

All of these points, of course, are central to any evaluation of US policy towards Iraq, and even though the US “in large part established [the Nuremberg] precedent as an expression of global condemnation of Nazi aggression, the Bush administration not only violated Nuremberg-related law by invading Iraq, it do so without even a mention from the New York Times that such laws were violated or even existed.” Thus the Times is guilty of “not only a conspiracy but the commission of a war of aggression under international law.”

So, dual to their exposition on the Times is a full measure of US foreign policy against the rubric of international law. As they state in the Introduction:

It is our judgment, supported by a consensus of international law experts from around the world, that the United States government has repeatedly violated international law with respect to its war-making over the past half-century or so, resulting in unjustifiable death and destruction, as well as diminishing the quality of world order.

The exposition of a case against the last fifty years of US foreign policy according to international law makes the book worth reading in and of itself. The authors first citation is to a privately circulated memorandum by the international law expert, Howard N. Meyer, “On Not Taking International Law Seriously”. The essay lays out the book, more or less, in miniature, both in terms of the US violation of international law and the Times silence. I was able to find an expanded small collection of letters by Meyer, “No Regrets About Ignoring International Law”, which is available as a doc from the Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions. I’ve made it available in pdf and html on ideological criminal. If you only have a minute, read the essay. If you have a couple hours (and you should), read the book, it’s good.

One can tell that the book was put together in a fairly hasty manner. It’s clear that the book is covering events up until the final moments of publishing. There are typographical problems. There are editing problems. The two authors never seem to find a common voice. There are very clearly two tones in the book, the predominant one of international legalese and another more impolitic one that shoots from the hip with awkward analogies (you decide which is which). There is a fair amount of copy & paste from previous critiques by the author with regards to US foreign policy and international law, but none if it is unwelcome or unnecessary. Friel and Falk have a companion volume, Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East, and I would expect a fair amount of redundancy (or perhaps it is more accurate to say “scaffolding”) in this volume. But so what? The books are interesting beyond any superficial flaws. Moreover, the framework of international law is essential to our understanding of current events yet completely absent from mainstream analysis. Friel and Falk are able to speak comprehensively about current events and their context in a timely way. They offer a view of what newspapers could look like if they upheld their mandate.

Friel and Falk conclude by suggesting an editorial policy to replace its current “non-crusading” one with one borrowing language from the federal judiciary, which applies “strict scrutiny” on issues of fundamental Constitutional rights, whereas a criteria of “rational basis” is applied for limiting non-fundamental rights for the sake of public health and safety. So for example,

[T]he Times applied, at best, only a ‘rational basis’ test to whether the United States should bomb North Vietnam in response to the reported attacks on US ships in the Tonkin Gulf, when a ’strict scrutiny’ test would have showed that bombing North Vietnam violated international law under these circumstances. Applying a strict scrutiny standard journalistically to the US involvement in Vietnam, beginning at least since 1954, might have prevented, or at least discouraged, the full-blown war in Vietnam that followed, because it might have made the government’s twenty-year record of violating international law and misrepresenting important facts with respect to Vietnam impossible to sustain, or even initiate.

In short, an editorial policy of “strict scrutiny” would apply the most rigorous standards of journalistic review to news events and conditions that implicate war and peace, human survival, human rights, the global environment, and fundamental principles of the UN Charter and US Constitution.

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?