Thursday, January 02, 2003

Sean Penn's peace mission guru

By Mark Hand

The man who orchestrated Sean Penn’s recent fact-finding mission to Iraq understood that certain media outlets in the United States would deride Penn’s visit to an enemy nation in the crosshairs of Pentagon military strategists. But Norman Solomon, founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, also calculated that Penn’s willingness to meet Iraqi officials and citizens would generate enough neutral or positive reporting to control the risk from the expected dose of adverse coverage.

The Institute for Public Accuracy goes beyond the traditional media watchdog role carried out by Solomon’s colleagues at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting; IPA proactively works to capture media access for opinions often ignored by the establishment media.

The usual suspects in the news media followed the Iraqi trip script flawlessly, lampooning Penn for serving as a propaganda tool for Saddam. “The vilification began immediately from jingoistic media outlets like Fox News Channel and the New York Post,” Solomon wrote upon returning to the United States after accompanying Penn on the trip.

In step with their reporter brethren, pro-war columnists used Penn’s visit to Baghdad to dissect the naiveté of peaceniks. In one of the more muted pieces against Penn, Roger Carstens wrote on National Review Online that Penn was playing into the hands of Saddam and by doing so was contributing to the oppression of a tortured people.

“How much different is that from an actor visiting a 1938 Germany and declaring his opposition to war against Hitler?” Carstens wrote. “Or visiting a murderous Stalin or Mao and giving them a clean bill of health?”

On Carsten’s first point, the U.S. government was keeping its war plans against Hitler quiet, if in fact it had any anti-Nazi strategy at the time, compared to the Bush administration’s public relations campaign since the Sept. 11 attacks to generate public support for an attack on Iraq. U.S. business officials — and almost certainly American entertainers — routinely visited Nazi Germany through 1941 without ever denouncing the regime. On the second point, contrary to Carsten’s suggestion, not once during Penn’s trip did he give Saddam a clean bill of health on either weapons of mass destruction or oppression.

Solomon recounts how he accompanied Penn to Baghdad and joined him on a wide range of visits, including with UNICEF workers, Iraqi officials, patients in hospitals and young children in schools. “I sat with Penn as he wrote on a pad at a restaurant inside the Al-Rashid Hotel,” Solomon wrote in the article. “Hours later, he was reading his words aloud at a news conference overflowing with reporters, photographers and TV crews from all over the world.”

By going on the record as publicly and categorically condemning the tyranny of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Solomon said that Penn “avoided the kind of behavior that Jane Fonda engaged in 30 years ago when she traveled to North Vietnam. Penn went to Iraq not to posture or to serve any propaganda interests but ‘to find my own voice on matters of conscience.’”

Penn wasn’t the first public figure that the Institute for Public Accuracy had escorted to Iraq. Former Sen. James Abourezk and Rep. Nick Rahall, a Democrat from West Virginia, traveled to Iraq in the fall as part of an IPA-organized delegation. In a statement released upon his return to the United States, Abourezk said the “real act of patriotism is not to fall into line behind a president who is desperately trying to get us into a war — but to raise questions to save lives and our national morality.”

The institute has been around since 1997, the brainchild of Solomon, who has written numerous books and countless articles on the U.S. media. “The Institute for Public Accuracy has made a lot of progress with helping to get progressive voices into a range of media, especially radio and national cable television,” Solomon told Press Action. “It’s hard to be very satisfied given the bulk of what’s on the air and in the news media generally, but we’re making headway.”

IPA opened its national office in San Francisco in the fall of 1997 and its media office in the National Press Building in Washington the following spring. As a nonprofit organization, its funding comes primarily from foundations; current funders include the Arca Foundation, Solidago Fund, Schumann Foundation, Glaser Progress Foundation, Veatch Foundation, Stewart Mott Charitable Trust, New World Foundation and Threshold Foundation.

The institute has a four-member board of directors: Peggy Law, Robert McChesney, Gwendolyn Mink, Deborah Toler. Law is the founder of the International Media Project, a nonprofit group whose flagship project is the National Radio Project, which produces public affairs radio programs. McChesney is a professor of communications at the University of Illinois and the author of eight books on the media and politics. Mink is a professor of women’s studies at Smith College and the author of several books on feminist issues. Toler writes on racial issues.

Solomon has been a political activist since his youth in the Washington suburbs of Montgomery County, Md. In the 1960s, he was involved with the Montgomery County Student Alliance, an educational reform group working for change in the county’s school system.

The alliance caught the attention of the FBI. Documents obtained by Solomon through the Freedom of Information Act showed that FBI agents from the agency’s offices in Washington and Baltimore spied on the student group. The documents also stated that the FBI was passing its information on the alliance to other government agencies, including the Secret Service and interested military intelligence agencies.

FBI spokesman William Carter told United Press International that the investigation of the student group would have been under the agency’s COINTELPRO program. The alliance in early 1969 published a report criticizing the school system as rigid and authoritarian and one that didn’t encourage free inquiry or discussion. “Somehow, the FBI must have felt there was something threatening in all that,” Solomon told UPI. “We were so straight, not only in the way we dressed, but politically. There was nothing very revolutionary about our activities.”

Based on his FOIA request, Solomon learned that the earliest FBI document on him was from June 1966, when he was 14.

While living in Portland, Ore., in the 1970s, Solomon worked as a writer and became active in the antinuclear power and weapons movement. He served as chief researcher for the Committee for Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group that worked to track down veterans serving in Japan at the end of World War II. The committee found that the veterans had high incidences of blood disorders and cancers, possibly contracted during their work in Japan following the war.

In November 1981, Solomon and prominent British journalist Duncan Campbell published an article in the New Statesman magazine charging that a U.S. Poseidon missile accident at a Scottish naval base on Nov. 2, 1981, could have caused an explosion that would have produced a large radioactive cloud. The missile dropped about 12 feet while it was being moved aboard a U.S. Navy submarine.

The U.S. Navy insisted there was no possibility of an explosion but would not say whether the missile was armed with nuclear warheads. Solomon and Campbell said in their article that the missile’s normal complement of 10 nuclear warheads was attached.

The next year, Solomon collaborated with Harvey Wasserman on the book, Killing Our Own, which documented the effects of radiation from bomb tests, weapons production, waste storage and power reactors.

In September 1984, Solomon, who was working at the time as disarmament director for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith peace organization, was sentenced by a Clark County (Wash.) District Court judge to a 10-day jail term for delaying a train reportedly carrying nuclear warheads for Trident submarines. Solomon and 30 other protestors sat down on Burlington Northern railroad tracks in Vancouver, Wash., blocking the train carrying U.S. Energy Department cargo from a weapons manufacturing plant in Amarillo, Texas, to the Navy’s Trident submarine base in Bangor, Wash.

Perhaps Solomon’s most celebrated act as an antinuclear activist occurred in February 1986 when he and U.S. military veteran Anthony Guarisco staged a sit-in at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, urging the U.S. government to join the Soviet Union in banning nuclear testing. Two Marines eventually carried Solomon out of the embassy, while Guarisco walked out on his own.

During their trip to the Soviet Union, Solomon and Guarisco met with the government-run Soviet Peace Committee and Soviet Veterans’ Committee and also with the independent Committee to Establish Trust Between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.

In 1988, Solomon moved back to the D.C. area, served as a spokesman for Guarisco’s Alliance of Atomic Veterans and in August of that year was named head of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting’s new Washington office.

After a brief stint in Washington, Solomon relocated back to the West Coast to settle in the Bay Area. Since then, he has written eight books on media and politics.

Among the many articles of media criticism that Solomon has penned over the past 15 years, one that stands out is a July 2001 piece in which he proved to be one of the few mainstream or leftist writers to sympathize with Carlo Giuliani, a protester who was gunned down by Italian police during the G8 protests in Genoa. Solomon skewered U.S. journalists for essentially endorsing Giuliani’s murder.

“The sanctimonious tone, etched with gratification, was not unique to the largest newsmagazine in the United States. Quite a few commentators seemed to accept — or even applaud — the killing of Giuliani as rough justice,” Solomon wrote. He highlighted the comments of Houston Chronicle columnist Cragg Hines who wrote: “Excuse me if I don’t mourn for the young man who was shot dead by police during the economic summit. It was tragic, but he was asking for it, and he got it.”

Through the work of the Institute for Public Accuracy and his prolific output of media criticism, Solomon continues a personal crusade to rally the U.S. public against the political establishment, actions that caught the attention of federal authorities as early as his teenage years.

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