Month: August 2004

Journalistic Malfeasance

American Journalism Review has a very interesting analysis of the media’s coverage of the Abu Ghraib story.

There were stories out there before the pictures, but nobody seemed very interested. The images are what finally woke up the press and even then they were terribly sluggish and slow off the mark. They offer a number of different reasons: intimidation by the administration, lack of resources and access, misplaced post 9/11 “patriotism”, physical danger in Iraq, complaints by conservative readers and others.

One of the things it touches upon but doesn’t really expound on is the fact that most of the sources for these stories, until Joseph Darby’s name became known, were all Iraqis. And, I believe that because of that it was assumed that they were lying. I wrote yesterday about the Center for Constitutional Rights report by the three British prisoners who were released from Guantanamo. I thought for a bit if I should put in some qualifiers about their story because, after all, we only have their word for it. Normally, I would have written something like “even if only half of what they say is true it’s…” I didn’t do that because after a few moments reflection I realized that there was already so much information out there confirming that the US had legally justified torture, had developed systematic torture schemes and had actually perpetrated torture (we’ve all seen the pictures) that the burden of proof was now on the US, not these prisoners. I believed them.

Journalism, however, in its fetish to provide “balance” even when common sense tells you there is no balance, will continue to present these stories with a built in skew to the administration’s side of the story. If it’s covered at all, you have the word of a trio of muslim ex-prisoners against the pentagon. You have the word of petty criminals against the CIA and the Army. Without visual proof, many reporters and many people will simply not take the word of “the enemy” over Americans. Indeed, even with visual proof they find themselves scrambling to excuse behavior that can only be seen as disgusting and sadistic.

And, one cannot ignore the outrageous excess of the news media after 9/11, wallowing in jingoism and signing on to the US “war” effort, no questions asked. In the AJR article I still don’t hear a lot of remorse for having missed the big picture on the torture story. This, despite the fact that the discussion of whether torture should be used was right out and in the open since 9/11. The press was reporting actual incidents of it since December 26, 2002 when Dana Priest and Barton Gellman wrote a story in the Washington Post detailing torture allegations, replete with MP’s “softening up” prisoners beating them and throwing them against walls. When asked why they didn’t follow up, editor Len Downie says,” in part, obviously, because information was not made readily available, and in part because we didn’t always see the tip of the iceberg as clearly as we should have.”

The press not only misses the tips of icebergs these days, they are actively helping to steer the ship into them, cheering and clapping along the way.

This problem with journalism is not simply a problem for the Democratic party. It is a serious national issue that goes beyond politics. The world is more and more fast paced and complicated and we must be able to depend upon at least some parts of the news media to resist the temptation to jump on the entertainment or propaganda bandwagon and see the forest for the trees. These last few years have been a disaster for journalism. And, aside from the predictable mea culpas after the fact, this article and all the others suggest there is little reason to hope that it will change.

Disenfranchisement By P.O. Box

Here’s a new one. Apparently somebody has gotten the bright idea to get a hold of voter registration rolls and send in change of address forms to the registrar of voters. When you go to your polling place you find out you’re not on the roll for that precinct. There’s no way to prevent such things and I’m not sure it’s even against the law.

I know that some places have provisional ballots, but it would probably be a good idea to check with the registrar if you don’t receive your sample ballot in the mail. This person lives in a Democratic leaning area in a swing state, but I wouldn’t dream of drawing any conclusions from that.

Update: It appears that this was atually a misunderstanding rather than a dirty trick. There was a time when I would have assumed that when I read it, but no more.

Rallying ‘Round The Flag

Harold Meyerson has written a fine article in the LA Weekly about the Democrats taking back the flag. Meyerson, it should be noted, is not exactly a flag-waving hawk so this view is representative of something of a sea change. Democrats have truly regained their patriotic voice, extolling real American virtues and strength in ways far more useful than the other side in the wake of 9/11. Republicans used that awful day as an excuse to let go of all civilized restraint. Democrats have seen that awful day as a call to civic duty. We finally got tired of being told that we didn’t love our country.

Meyerson writes:

Coming out of the convention, they march for Kerry, too – and, for many of them, for the first time. They march for him because in his speech, he successfully took the fight to the enemy – not merely suggesting that his own credentials and perspectives would make him a better commander in chief than Bush, but because, in conjunction with a number of speakers who preceded him to the podium, he reclaimed patriotism from the right.

Back in April of 03, before Sleepless in Seattle blogging and after Bush’s midterm “triumph of the will” tour and the invasion of Iraq, I like every other political junkie Democrat was trying to figure out a strategy to win this election. I was convinced then and remain so that the election would be won or lost on the terrorism issue and that patriotism would be the underlying theme. I wasn’t the only one by far, and now it has actually come to fruition. In my opinion, it’s long overdue.

Mindless jingoism is often mistaken for patriotism in this country and that’s wrong. I’m not much of a sentimentalist, but I really am fond of the Bill of Rights and all that flowed from them and I’m sick of right wing morons telling me that I’m not patriotic because I refuse to goosestep to their tune.

I wrote back then:

I believe that Democrats should give no ground on this. We represent real American values and we have every right to use the traditional language and symbols of patriotism to express that. We are the ones who stand for the constitution and the American system of justice, which we hold so dear that even in times of war we do not waver. We are the ones who believe in the sacred American values of Liberty, Equality, Opportunity and Democracy and we are the ones who work to ensure that every American, not just the privileged, share in them. We are the ones who have faith that America is strong enough to survive any challenge without sacrificing those values. The flag and Sousa and apple pie and love of country are not the exclusive property of the Republican Party; they belong to all Americans. We should take them back.

Or, much better, as the inimitable farmer wrote in the comments section:

So, as Digby is getting at, its now up to liberals to restablish their dominance in the political marketplace. To market a high quality product in a highly visible high quality package. A better deal, more for your money, at a better price. Something that you can plant and it will grow for you. A real live perennial tree of liberty that you can plant in your own back yard. Not a nut tree either. Too many nut trees already. Rather, a big sprawling sugar maple, or a big blue atlas cedar. Or an apple tree, the kind you can make your own fresh pies from for years and years. Mom will love it. Mom and her apple pie tree. Its a patriotic American living thing and it arrives in a traditional hoop bound oak stave barrel half all ready to be planted in Washington DC. Ships in 2004, order today.

In stock now. Tell a friend.

Scumbags For Truth Redux

So, professional John Kerry character assassin John O’Neill and his cronies are out there with a new ad, condemned by John McCain, claiming that Kerry didn’t deserve his medals — and conveniently rolling out O’Neill’s new book. (Those Republican marketers sure understand synergy.) John O’Neill has always travelled in high Republican circles as a Kerry specialist. He’s been associated with two of the greatest smear artist presidents in Republican history — Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

I posted this earlier, but it’s due for a repeat. Here’s O’Neill with his mentors, the convicted felon Charles Colson and the pardoned Tricky Dick back in the day:

Colson was Nixon’s point man against Kerry, and he found a weapon in another veteran: John O’Neill. He was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, which backed Nixon administration policy in Vietnam, and in turn was supported by the White House.

Fresh out of the Navy like Kerry, O’Neill was angry at Kerry for saying U.S. servicemen in Vietnam routinely committed war crimes. The weekend before the Washington protests, Kerry made the accusations on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying, “I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed, in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones.” And, Kerry claimed, “I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All this is contrary to the laws of warfare.”

John O’Neill hit back at Kerry with administration-orchestrated press appearances of his own, including a news conference that June. O’Neill asked rhetorically, “Shall Mr. Kerry and his little group of one thousand or twelve thousand embittered men be allowed to represent their views as that of all veterans, because they can appear on every news program? I hope not, for the country’s sake.”

After the news conference, O’Neill met with Charles Colson at the White House, where the attack on Kerry was seen as a public relations coup. In a conversation with the president, Haldeman gave the credit to Charles Colson, and raved about John O’Neill:

Haldeman: — crew cut, real sharp looking guy who is more articulate than Kerry. He’s not as eloquent; he isn’t the ham that Kerry is. But he’s more believable. [edit]

Haldeman: This guy now, is gonna, he’s gonna move on Kerry.

The White House encouraged O’Neill to challenge Kerry to a debate. Kerry agreed and before the event, President Nixon called O’Neill into the Oval Office for a pep talk. “It’s a great service to the country,” declared the president.

Nixon: Give it to him, give it to him. And you can do it, because you have a pleasant manner, too, because you’ve got — and I think it’s a great service to the country. [edit]

Nixon: You fellows have been out there. You’ve got to know, seeing the barbarians that we’re up against, you’ve got to know what we’re doing in that horrible swamp that North Vietnam is. You’ve got to know from all our faults of what we have in this country that, that what we’re doing is right. You’ve got to know too, people are critics. Critics of the war, critics of [unint], run America down. [edit] You’ve gotta know that you’re on the winning s-that, that you’re on the right side.

Two weeks later, the veterans squared off on the popular Dick Cavett show:

O’Neill: Mr. Kerry is the type of person who lives and survives only on the war weariness and fears of the American people. This is the same little man who on nationwide television in April spoke of, quote, crimes committed on a day to day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

Kerry: We believe as veterans who took part in this war we have nothing to gain by coming back here and talking about those things that have happened except to try and point the way to America, to try and say, here is where we went wrong, and we’ve got to change.

Later that year, even as the war continued, Kerry left the increasingly radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But the Nixon White House kept after John Kerry. It’s said that when Kerry ran for Congress in 1972, Nixon stayed up late on election night until he knew for sure that Kerry had been defeated.

You can’t have better character references than Haldeman, Colson and Nixon. That association speaks for itself. John O’Neill has done nothing noteworthy in his life except oppose John Kerry. Indeed, he barely exists as a human being being except for his opposition to John Kerry.

And the fact that John Kerry has been keeping Republicans up nights for more than 30 years also speaks for itself. That election Nixon was so worried about was the first and only election John Kerry lost.

So Much For Justice

Here’s Crusader Codpiece assuring the Iraqi people that “democracy” and American goodness and rightness would ensure justice in the Abu Ghraib matter:

It’s also important for the people of Iraq to know that in a democracy, everything is not perfect, that mistakes are made. But in a democracy, as well, those mistakes will be investigated and people will be brought to justice. We’re an open society. We’re a society that is willing to investigate, fully investigate in this case, what took place in that prison.

That stands in stark contrast to life under Saddam Hussein. His trained torturers were never brought to justice under his regime. There were no investigations about mistreatment of people. There will be investigations. People will be brought to justice.

Here’s reality, from an interesting piece by Philip Carter on Slate:

The Army’s official Inspector General report on Abu Ghraib—in stark contrast to the Taguba report, which found systemic problems with detainee treatment in Iraq, or the reporting of Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, which traced the blame chain from Iraq all the way to Washington—blames a few individuals and leaders for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Never mind that 94 separate incidents of abuse were uncovered by the report—with most happening at the time and place of capture, not at some central prison locations where a few bad apples happened to work. The Army was “unable to identify system failures that resulted in incidents of abuse.”

It defies both reason and common sense to cite 94 separate incidents of detainee mistreatment, yet determine there were no systemic issues (like training, insufficient troop strength, and unclear legal rules) to fault.

[…]

Instead of promoting responsibility and the rule of law, the Army appears to care more for the Washingtonian principles of damage control and spin.

Meanwhile our vaunted regard for justice, fairness and the rule of law hasn’t kept them from undermining the ruling of the Supreme Court in the Guantanamo cases either:

… the administration announced its intention to deny Guantanamo Bay detainees full access to counsel to prepare their habeas corpus petitions and signaled that it would resume its relentless legal tactics to fight the detainees in the courts on a host of procedural issues. The administration also started to move forward with two sets of legal proceedings—Combatant Status Review Tribunals and military commissions—to adjudicate the status of Gitmo detainees. These hearings purport to benefit the detainees, but may, in fact, end up hurting more than helping them.

[…]

The Justice Department’s lawyers make no attempt to hide this legal strategy. In footnote 14 of their filing before the federal district court in Washington, D.C., in Al-Odah v. United States, the administration’s lawyers explicitly reserve the right to litigate niggling procedural issues, such as whether this is the proper defendant in a habeas corpus action, and the proper location for such suits. There is some irony here, because those are the two grounds the Supreme Court used to kick back the lawsuit by Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held as an enemy combatant in South Carolina. Even though the Justice Department lost in the other two terrorism cases before the Supreme Court, it now hopes to use the same procedural tactics it used to defeat Padilla’s claim to avoid petitions for habeas corpus from detainees at Guantanamo. The strategy appears the same: deny every right, and fight every claim, for as long as possible, so that interrogations and intelligence collection at Gitmo can continue unimpeded by legal process.

(May I just say here that the legal beagle Talking Dog had this one pegged from the get-go. He said immediately that it would be Padilla that would rule, with the military and the justice department using every niggling procedural rule they could to keep any of these guys from ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.)

Carter finds an interesting (and apt) analogy to the administration’s legal strategy with the reactionaries’ response to the segregation cases. Drag your feet kicking and screaming in every court in the land for as long as you can.

But, he also points out that the bigger issue — if there is a bigger issue than craven immorality — is that it is vitally important the the US demonstrate at least some of what Junior was spouting in that completely insincere interview on Arab TV. That is our alleged committment to the rule of law. There are people in the world, specifically non-radical muslims who are following this story a lot closer than Americans are. This could be a chance to tip them in our direction by showing them something in our system that truly is superior to the autocratic rule under which they currently live.

Instead, we are, once again, playing into bin Laden’s hands. The prisoners at Gitmo are useless for intelligence at this point. It would be so easy for us to simply do the right thing and reap the benefit of showing our system to have some real corrective aspects. But, we won’t under Bush. Like the segregationists, they would rather eat nails than admit they lost.

“New” Information?

Does anyone notice anything unusual about this?:

Sources: al Qaeda linked to bank threat

April 20, 2002 Posted: 6:15 AM EDT (1015 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The FBI announced Friday that the government has received a new, unsubstantiated terrorist threat against U.S. financial institutions — a threat, sources said, that was to be carried out by al Qaeda operatives.

‘Unspecified terrorists are considering physical attacks against U.S. financial institutions in the Northeast, particularly banks, as part of their campaign against U.S. financial interests,’ the FBI said.

Sources said the information indicated a possible mode of attack was suicide bombing.

The information that led to the alert, the sources said, came from a variety of intelligence sources, including al Qaeda detainees captured as part of the ongoing war against terrorism. Law enforcement learned the information in the last couple of days, the sources said. “

According to this very handy timeline done by Julius, this information didn’t merit a full fledged terror alert at the time. It appears that they like to keep a threat or two in reserve in case they need to change the subject really fast.

Article via Buzzflash

“…Where The Sun Don’t What?”

The Horrors of Gitmo

This (pdf) report from the Center for Constitutional Rights regarding the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo will make your hair stand on end. The Abu Ghraib torture photos are terrible and shocking, but this is so systematic, so methodical so Kafkaesque that it makes you wonder if this country can redeem itself. It is only a matter of scale that differentiates this camp from the gulags and the concentration camps of the twentieth century.

It is a long detailed account by three of the British prisoners who were held for more than two years and have since been released and are back home, free and presumably not considered dangerous since they were released by the authorities within 24 hours of landing. The story of their treatment, most particularly the cold and calculating, relentless mental torture combined with harsh conditions and regular bouts of physical abuse is difficult to read.

During the whole time that we were in Guantanamo, we were at a high level of fear. When we first got there the level was sky-high. At the beginning we were terrified that we might be killed at any minute. The guards would say to us “we could kill you at any time.” They would say “the world doesn’t know you’re here, nobody knows you’re here, all they know is that you’re missing and we could kill you and no one would know”. After time passed, that level of fear came down somewhat but never vanished. It was always there. We were in a situation where there was no one we could complain to and not only could they do anything to any of us but we could see them doing it to other detainees. All the time we thought that we would never get out. Most especially if we were in isolation there would be a constant fear of what was happening and what was going to happen. If it hadn’t been for the Arabs knowing by the position of the sun when to pray, we wouldn’t have known even that. We didn’t know the time. We know the dates we do know because we counted for ourselves and some soldiers would tell us enough to let us slightly keep track, otherwise there was no way and there was never meant to be any way.

These men had already been through that horrible shipping container massacre in Afghanistan. Then they were held at Bagram and Kandahar, where their treatment was unspeakably harsh and cruel. (This, of course, is where certain “contractors” are alleged to have beaten prisoners to death.) By the time they got to Gitmo, they had already been brutalized.

Now, if one were to have some sort of sympathy for the soldiers in Afghanistan who were gathering up “Taliban” and “al Qaeda” with virtually no knowledge of the country, the terrain or the various tribal and political feuds that went on there, you could say that they,at least,expected that Guantanamo would sort out the real bad guys from the innocent guys. That never happened. Apparently, it was assumed that if they put you on a plane for Gitmo you were a terrorist, period.

That’s why, as an American, it is also difficult to face the fact that nobody down there had the first clue about what they were doing in terms of interrogations and intelligence. It sounds as if every third rate intel guy from the FBI to MI5 to the CIA to Navy intelligence got a crack at these guys, basically asking them stupid useless questions over and over again, all the while torturing them until they falsely implicated themselves. Then the cycle would begin again. Millions of dollars and man hours have been wasted on useless intelligence gathering turning the entire project into a self perpetuating cycle of sadism and insane ass covering. It is a disgrace.

I am not surprised to learn that much of the truly malignant psychological torture was brought to the camp by artillery officer in charge of sadism, General Geoffrey D. Ripper who is, as we speak, streamlining the torture operations in Iraq so as not to be so sloppy and obvious. He did a fine job of that in Guantanamo. The ERF goon squad was a particularly nice touch.

“We had the impression that at the beginning things were not carefully planned but a point came at which you could notice things changing. That appeared to be after General Miller around the end of 2002. That is when short-shackling started, loud music playing in interrogation, shaving beards and hair, putting people in cells naked, taking away people’s “comfort” items, the introduction of levels, moving some people every two hours depriving them of sleep, the use of A/C air. Isolation was always there. “Intel” blocks came in with General Miller. Before when people were put into isolation they would seem to stay for not more than a month. After he came, people would be kept there for months and months and months. We didn’t hear anybody talking about being sexually humiliated or subjected to sexual provocation before General Miller came. After that we did. Although sexual provocation, molestation did not happen to us, we are sure that it happened to others. It did not come about at first that people came back and told about it. They didn’t. What happened was that one detainee came back from interrogation crying and confided in another what had happened. That detainee in turn thought that it was so shocking he told others and then other detainees revealed that it had happened to them but they had been too ashamed to admit to it. It therefore came to the knowledge of everyone in the camp that this was happening to some people. It was clear to us that this was happening to the people who’d been brought up most strictly as Muslims. It seemed to happen most to people in Camps 2 and 3, the “intel” people, ie the people of most interest to the interrogators. In addition, military police also told us about some of the things that were going on. They would tell us just rather like news or something to talk about. This was something that was happening in the camp. It seemed to us that a lot of the MPs couldn’t themselves believe it was happening.

One of the things that becomes clear in this is that they carefully used each prisoner’s weak points to get them to confess. Sexual humiliation was not considered useful with these British guys, they used isolation and mind games on them. Others, it seemed, responded to pain. The torture was very individualized. (At Abu Ghraib, after Miller passed on the techniques, they let things get out of hand and Lynndie and the gang started to have “fun” with the sexual sadism. But, there is little doubt that the whole system came from Miller.)

These three guys were very lucky that they came from a country that was closely allied with the US and had some favors to call in. They’d been forced to confess to being in a video with bin Laden even though two of them were in British police custody at the time the video was filmed and the other was working in an electronics store in his home town of Tipton. (They were fingered as being the ones in the video by one of the many mentally ill prisoners in the camp who have been driven around the bend by the conditions there.) British Intelligence found the proof that they were nowhere near bin Laden at the time which explains why these allegedly vicious terrorists who had been held in appalling conditions for years were allowed to just get off the plane from Gitmo and walk right back into Britain as free citizens. The poor damned Afghans, Pakistanis,Africans and Chinese(?) who’ve been sold to the Americans by various members of the northern Alliance and others for CIA money aren’t so lucky.

I urge you to read the whole thing even though it’s quite long. It details stories, some of which we’ve heard from other sources, of prisoners being forcibly injected with unknown substances, denial of urgent medical treatment, brutal beatings, sexual humiliation and psychological torture that is beyond outrageous.

These men were never charged with a crime. Indeed, they never even fought against the United States. Even in the worst cases of prison abuses in America before the reform movement of the 1930’s, prisoners had at least had a chance to appear before a hanging judge before they were locked up in “the hole.”

I am sick that this happened in my country’s name. The men who signed the orders allowing this, Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, are war criminals.

Update:

Moral Malpractice

Via TalkLeft and Body and Soul, I am glad to see that the New England Journal of Medicine has weighed in the rather stunning spectacle of doctors, medics and nurses participating in or overlooking torture. I wrote about this a couple of times in the past. It was right there in the papers.

At Gitmo psychiatrists willingly gave the interrogators access to the medical files which they used in very special ways to torture the prisoners with their own worst fears.

So, What’s The Problem?

Karzai Courts Former Taliban Officials

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is seeking the support of former Taliban officials in an effort to stabilize the democratic process. The U.S.-backed Karzai has been fighting insurgents, some of them Taliban, since he took office.

Hey, maybe he can get bin Laden to help him with his campaign. I hear he’s quite an excellent planner.

Logical Conclusion

I know that rules of logic have been suspended for the duration, but this continues to drive me so nuts that I can’t help but mention it from time to time.

Josh Marshall posts a quote from Tommy Franks:

With respect to WMD, … I’ve had a couple reporters ask me the same question, ‘Do you think that since we didn’t find this WMD, do you think it’s a mistake?’ And I look and hopefully give a wry smile and say “Do you think it would be better to have left this regime to build it?” I think we are far better served that the regime of Saddam Hussein no longer stands in Iraq.

Here’s the thing. Logically then, we have the right to invade and occupy any country in the world, since the criteria are simply that someone might someday build weapons of mass destruction and use them against us. In other words, this is like some comic book recipe for taking over the world. We could justify taking over Canada tomorrow under this doctrine, or New Zealand or Brazil. Who knows who might, maybe, could be thinking about someday, perhaps, down the road building something we don’t like right this very minute? Japan? France? (of course) South Korea? Not to mention the ones we supposedly know are doing it, Iran and North Korea. And, if we add up the list of those which have populations that now hate our guts and fear that we are going around the bend, you have virtualy the entire world on the list.

I don’t mind it so much when typical Joe spouts this line because he may not have thought it through and it has a certain emotional resonance. Even Republicans saying it is at least understandable because they are covering their asses. But, members of the officer corp of the US Military should never say such things. Ever. It’s Strangelovian in the extreme. Maybe he’s just covering for his pal, Junior, but there are many better (if still lousy) reasons to justify the invasion than that Saddam might have built weapons in the future so we had to take him out on March 16, 2003 and not a day later.