Courtesy Daily Dawn

Moral certitude aside, should a hard-nosed writer embrace as gospel truth what the American mainstream media oozes out about his country and announce it to much hoopla back home without commenting and analyzing it or should he challenge its contents to present a fair and balanced view? That there are always three sides to a story: your story, their story and the real story goes without saying.

Why then call the leaked exposes "investigative" that are revved up in screaming headlines anchored to the national security interests of, say, Pakistan, India or even America? Lately, The Los Angeles Times imploded with facts alleging Pakistan helping North Korea with its nuke programme and accusing Dr A.Q. Khan as the facilitator.

When the story broke, US-based Indian and Pakistani reporters routinely reported the contents back home while some South Asian Internet and E-mail discussion forums reflexively designated the Pakistani nuclear scientist as the punching bag. As was expected, the Indians salivated at such a 'scoop' dropping right in the middle of their laps giving grist to the Indian lobby on Capitol Hill to demand sanctions against Pakistan. Oddly, a New-York based Pakistani forum hosted by well-heeled but self-righteous liberals repeated the Indian encore by pouring yet more scorn on President Musharraf.

Pummelling the army properly, the forum moderator wryly commented: "I have no idea why "patriotism" and "nuclearized Pakistan" go together. In any case the whole concept of "patriotism", which conservatives all over the world appear to hijack as their cause celebre (and we know whose last refuge that is) has an easy answer: The army remains the first cause of wrecking disaster on Pakistan."

However, another New York-based think tank that executes strategies for engaging the American media and the US government in a more informed and educated view of Pakistan, known as the Association of Pakistani Professionals (AOPP) riposted to drown out the sanctimonious chatter eddying among Indians and Pakistanis, who wanted Pakistan's national security compromised.

India was next on The Los Angeles Times hit list. The world woke up recently to the news of an Indian firm having sold chemicals to Iraq over the last four years to produce or deliver weapons of mass destruction. New Delhi's abysmal failure in its export controls stood roundly exposed. But shielding India, the Bush administration's go-soft approach was clearly evident despite, the State Department imposing sanctions against the company's founder, Hans Raj Shiv, making him the first and only person cited under the Iran-Iraq Arms Nonproliferation Act of 1992. The soporific Pakistanis failed to seize this damning evidence, while the American media let it go, much to the relief of the Indians.

Is this not aiding and abetting terrorism at its starkest? Yet not a squeal from the self-appointed custodians of Pakistan here who are too busy flagellating their own army and its chief to take note of what mischief India has up its sleeve against Islamabad in the months to come.

Meanwhile, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who writes on the failure of US intelligence and American policy toward Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, has handed Indians a composite of newly invented body of evidence incriminating A.Q. Khan and Islamabad. In The New Yorker issue of January 27, Hersh quotes CIA sources on Pakistan "helping North Korea build the bomb."

Interestingly, a heft of Hersh's conclusions spring from his two Pakistani sources: an unnamed "former senior Pakistani official" and "a Web-based Pakistani-exile newspaper opposed to the Musharraf government". Sums up Hersh, "Right now Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world" and "if we're incinerated next week, it'll be because of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) that was given to Al Qaeda by Pakistan."

The Editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest London, Eric Margolis has dismissed the story as "biased" and "not credible". He says the CIA, because of its human intelligence resources, relies heavily on foreign intelligence services, particularly India's RAW intelligence service and Israel's Mossad. Was Seymour Hersh suborned by his Pakistani and CIA sources?

When it comes to America's own security issues, its skittish mainstream media, renowned for journalistic high jinks, shuck off the sensitive bits and pound on the banal. Take the case of the intelligence machismo Scott Ritter, former UN arms inspector, who has proved to be a one-man demolition squad for Bush on Iraq. Well, finally the spooks have found a way to shut the loudmouth forever: they have dug up a two-year-old sexual misdemeanour charge against Ritter where he had solicited a sixteen-year old girl for sex over the Internet. Although the case was sealed off, it has now been leaked to the media and properly publicized to the world at large. Ritter's face has fallen and his tongue is tied.

Russ Baker, an award-winning journalist covering media and politics, gives us a helicopter view of what the foreign journalists think of American media. Quoting Serbian journalists who had just returned from the United States where, on the invitation of the US government, they were able to observe 'freedom of the press' at work. To them it comprised the Bush administration's stirring up of patriotic fervour around security issues which was "unpleasantly reminiscent of the way Slobodan Milosevic incited nationalist sentiment among the Serbs".

The media here is manipulated by the establishment and it has to play by its rules. The leaks provided by the State Department or other powerful agencies on Pakistan and India appear alternately in their national press - more like a "media calendar" where various themes/concepts are rolled out to coral the two.

The problem begins when our press faithfully reproduces these leaks without reservation or comment. For all the negative reportage on Dr A.Q. Khan, did anyone consider the question: what would Pakistan's position be today without a nuclear deterrent? When India had a million troops on our border, would they have tamely retreated as they have done?