Scariest Thing I’ve Read All Week
Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said the changes would allow Mr. Negroponte to wield influence and seek information down to the level of each of the F.B.I.’s field offices, though she noted that the attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, would remain responsible for ensuring that intelligence activities in the United States did not violate American law.
I feel so much safer now.
Via Daou Report and Corrente
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Thug Life
It’s bad enough that that hideous little creep Tom Davis (R-jackboot) drops a horsehead in major league baseball’s bed saying that it shouldn’t give the DC franchise to an investment group that includes George Soros. The real insult is that he does it so openly to tilt the field to the president’s friend, fundraiser and former business partner in the Texas Rangers, Fred “count the Jews” Malek.
I know that it does no good to bring up Clinton rules and wonder what the allegedly responsible press would have made of such a thing if it had happened in 1993. We know that it would have been turned into a non-stop feeding frenzy with blond former prosecutors and strange looking Republican men with comb-overs dolefully wringing their hands night after night on Matthews as they bemoaned the corruption of mom, apple pie and Murika’s pastime by Bill and his corrupt hillbilly friends.
But you would think that a Republican congressman (with the clout to haul all the MLB owners in front of his kangaroo steroid committee again and ream them out for another 8 hours) publicly strong-arming them with threats to lift their anti-trust exemption and clearly indicating that he’d prefer they picked a Nixon stooge and Bush pal, would cause a little ripple. The only place I’ve seen any speculation about this is in the WaPo sports section:
You can’t help wondering what’s behind the outrageous attack on Soros, who isn’t even a major partner in the bid for the Nats. (Local entrepreneur Jon Ledecky is the real bidder.) Isn’t it strange that rival bidder Fred Malek, the head of the Washington Baseball club, just happens to be a very big GOP fundraiser? And isn’t it strange that, in a telephone interview, Davis went out of his way to praise Malek’s bid? And isn’t it strange that these attacks on Soros from Republicans came on the very day that Ledecky and his partners were being interviewed by MLB?
Forget Soros (although the irony is so thick you can slice it, considering the “jeweyness” of the whole thing.) Malek is the story. I know that the press thinks this Iraq thing and the whole Bush lying and incompetence thing is so, like, 2004. But can’t they even get it up to complain about baseball being threatened by Republican thugs? Not even that?
Now that I think about it, I’ve long noticed that sportwriters are among the last real journalists around. Whenever politics and sports converge they are the first ones who get to the essence of the story. Costas was tough last night on Larry King. Olbermann is always good. Since the political writers love the horse race stories so much maybe the major dailies should just have them switch places with the sports staff. It could be the answer to everybody’s problems.
Update: Jesse has more on Malek. And I see that TAPPED tilled this soil yesterday.
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Requiem For Jeff Gerth
I thought it was rather strange that Michael Tomasky wrote a column justifiably skewering Ed Klein for his shoddy journalism and then threw in this bit toward the end:
The problem runs deeper even than Klein. Today, with the explosion of Web sites, all sorts of propagandists and provocateurs who aren’t journalists can hide behind the label when it comes to First Amendment protection. Can they write anything they please about public figures, knowing that they can print lies as long as Sullivan is in force?
He explains himself today:
I didn’t mean to impugn the established liberal blogs, which I explained to Duncan Black when I ran into him just a few hours after seeing Markos. My list of bloggers to whom I was definitely not referring includes but is by no means limited to: Josh Marshall, Mark Schmitt, Matt (and all his cohorts, at Tapped of course and at TPMCafe), Markos, Duncan, Kevin Drum (and guests), Jerome Armstrong, Arianna Huffington et alia, Ezra Klein, &c &c &c.
My point, which I think remains valid, was that the blogosphere in general is a milieu that is somewhat more likely than the milieu of traditional journalism to produce reckless error.
I don’t think that’s possible. I’ve read a lot of garbage on-line, but none that had the kind of corporate backing and public relations push that Klein’s book has gotten from a mainstream publisher — and Klein’s book, as Tomasky points out, is just filled with lies. And mainstream news organizations are giving him a national platform with which to spread them.
The only time that I’m aware of outright reckless error is from the rightwing blogosphere during the Rather scandal — and mainstream journalism was just as bad and rewarded them for it.
The truth is that after watching the three ring circus known as the Whitewater scandals remain uncorrected even after all this time — and reading pathetic explanations like this from top Washington reporter John Harris — it’s clear that mainstream news constantly commits reckless errors, on both the micro and macro level, and then rationalizes them with all the aplomb of a second grader caught with his hand in the cookie jar:
People tend to forget, for understandable reasons because the Lewinsky scandal was such a sensational affair, that 1997 was in its own way a very sullen, snippy, disagreeable year in the relationship between the White House and the press. Most news organizations — the Washington Post included — were devoting lots of resources, lots of coverage, to the campaign fund-raising scandal which grew out of the ’96 campaign, and there were a lot of very tantalizing leads in those initial controversies. In the end they didn’t seem to lead anyplace all that great. But there were tons of questions raised that certainly, to my mind, merited aggressive coverage.
The White House was unbelievably resentful — they thought it was much ado about nothing, they thought that this was a scandal-obsessed press corps. Mike McCreary — and he’s a really great guy — even before Lewinsky he was in a really pissy mood and I don’t blame him for him for it, and I don’t doubt that it was unpleasant and that his feelings of resentment were genuine, but he was snapping back at us, angry phone calls and whatnot. From the White House’s vantage point the whole thing was not on the level, they thought this was standard political fund-raising that was undeniably a little sloppy but wasn’t that big a deal, and we were trying to turn it into the next Watergate.
It was much ado about nothing. The fund-raising scandals didn’t rise from the 96 campaign. They rose from the right wing noise machine like all the rest. And what he fails to mention is that this was after four long years of one David Bossie/American Spectator bullshit spoonfed psuedo-scandal after another.
In a cluttered office tucked away in one of the many red-brick office condominiums that ring Washington, D.C., David Bossie, source par excellence to journalists dredging the Whitewater swamp, handles one of the eighteen calls he says he gets each hour. This one is from Bruce Ingersoll, a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The discussion centers on bonds. “I have a whole file on bond transactions,” Bossie tells Ingersoll. “I will get a report on what I find. I know you are trying to move quickly on this. You want to come out before they come out.” A few minutes later Bossie says, “I don’t know what I have to give you,” but promises to spend the next couple of hours going through materials. “You’re on deadline, I understand that.” He then points Ingersoll in another direction. “Have you done anything on Beverly? [Presumably that is Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former Arkansas Securities Commissioner.] You guys ought to look into that. There will be lawsuits against the Rose law firm,” he adds.
All that has been known since the above article was written for Columbia Journalism Review in 1994 and was fully explored by 1996, when Gene Lyons published the articles that became “Fools For Scandal” in Harper’s magazine.
The press performed abominably throughout that period and all the way through the 2000 election, using the same methods of accepting Republican gossip and smears as the basis for their stories:
In the film we see RNC glee as AP accepts their oppo research on a Gore misstatement during the first debate . During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC’s Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material. This was apparently normal trading on both sides.
RNC researcher Griffin comments in the film: “It’s an amazing thing when you have topline producers and reporters calling you and saying ‘we trust you…. we need your stuff.'”
And it’s not like it’s exactly covered itself with glory since then. (Got WMD?)
Really, the blogopshere is the least of journalism’s credibility problems. And while I’m sure that it’s quite frightening to think of rogue character assassins running around the internet smearing people, it’s very hard to see how they could be any worse than the mainstream press already is.
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God Told Him
Kevin writes here about how the administration short-changed the VA budget and says:
It’s one more piece of evidence that the Bushies really did expect a cakewalk in Iraq and didn’t bother planning for additional casualties.
We have a witness who says that Bush absolutely didn’t count on casualties. remember this?
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he warned President Bush before U.S. troops invaded Iraq that the United States would sustain casualties but that Bush responded, “Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.”
White House and campaign advisers denied Bush made the comment, with adviser Karen Hughes saying, “I don’t believe that happened. He must have misunderstood or misheard it.”
[…]
Robertson, in an interview with CNN that aired Tuesday night, said God had told him the war would be messy and a disaster. When he met with Bush in Nashville, Tenn., before the war Bush did not listen to his advice, Robertson said, and believed Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant who needed to be removed.
“He was just sitting there, like, ‘I’m on top of the world,’ and I warned him about this war,” Robertson said.
“I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, ‘Mr. President, you better prepare the American people for casualties.’ ‘Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s the way it’s going to be.’ And so, it was messy. The Lord told me it was going to be, A, a disaster and, B, messy.”
The evidence suggest that Bush really did believe that there wouldn’t be any casualties. But, of course, the evidence also suggests that Pat Robertson is a delusional head-case. So which religious conman was lying?
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Sophisticated
Not wanting to risk remaining in Russia, Vakhitov went to stay with relatives in Tajikistan. Then events became even more fantastic. Vakhitov and his friends were taken hostage by militants from the Islamist “Uzbekistan” movement, and took them to Afghanistan. In Kabul, the hostages were accused of collaborating with the FSB. The tortures and interrogations began anew.
That was in the fall of 2001. Afghanistan was attacked by the Americans. The regime in the country was overturned, while the prison where Vakhitov was being held had its flag changed.
Vakhitov and his friends were waiting to be rescued from day to day. But the U.S. military instead acted exactly like their Russian counterparts. After September 11, they needed culprits. And all Muslims became suspects.
Especially valuable were Arabs. According to Vakhitov, they were bought in Afghanistan for $5,000 each and taken to Guantanamo.
“They sold everyone. Beggars off the street, the deaf, dumb, and blind. I had a 104-year-old man along with me. And once again, no court investigation,” Vakhitov says. And that was how he ended up in Cuba at the Delta camp.“In Russia the torture is primitive. They mostly just beat me. They would hang me up, and burn me with cigarettes. At Guantanamo, the torture was more sophisticated than in Russian prisons. Our special forces are way behind in that sense. There was more psychological pressure: you couldn’t be left alone for a minute. We fought to have the toilet covered with a blanket. We went on hunger strikes to protest against officers trampling on the Koran and throwing it in the toilet.”
Gradually, Russians are beginning to use the experience of their Western colleagues. Vakhitov says that after the Americans handed him over to Russian prosecutors, he was blindfolded and kicked, then forced to kneel and told to “pray to Jesus Christ like a Christian.” Vakhitov said that the Americans honestly admitted that because they have a democracy, they could not use all the possible methods to draw out confessions, but that their Russian colleagues would be able to get to work on him.
I know this will come as a shock, but it turns out that the Russians eventually concluded that he wasn’t a terrorist after all:
After several months in a detention center, Vakhitov was found not guilty — once again without any trial — and released.
When I first started reading these stories from released Guantanamo prisoners I was skeptical. They sounded too strange, too bizarre, too freakishly sexual and sadistic. Then came Abu Ghraib and the pictures of forced masturbation. And it was revealed that female interrogators were smearing fake menstrual blood on prisoners and that interrogators were using fierce dogs to threaten naked men. And we know that prisoners were held in “stress positions” for many hours on end in sharply hot and cold temperatures.
It has been known for years now that many of the prisoners were sold to the US by Afghan warlords for $5,000 a piece. It is clear that three years after they were captured that none of the prisoners in Guantanamo have any intelligence to offer. And it is a proven fact that we imprisoned and roughly “interrogated” many people for years who were completely innocent.
It’s interesting that this ex-prisoner says that the Americans are much more sophisticated in their methods. Perhaps this is true in comparison to the Russians, although that’s quite a statement, if true. I wrote a post some months back in which I discussed these sophisticated techniques in some detail. Here are reports from prisoners who underwent them:
Many men were handcuffed or tied to a stool as a means of slow torture. The [detainee] sat in one position, day and night. Each time he would fall over, the guards would sit him upright. He was not allowed to sleep or rest. Exhaustion and pain take their toll. When the [detainee] agreed to cooperate with his captors and acquiesced to their demands, he would be removed. Here, I have pictured a guard named “Mouse,” who liked to throw buckets of cold water on a man on cold winter nights.
You’re always sitting either on the floor or on a stool or concrete block or something low. The interrogator is always behind a table that’s covered with cloth of some kind, white or blue or something. And he sits above you and he’s always looking down at you asking you questions and they want to know what the targets are for tomorrow, next week, next month. You don’t know. You really don’t know. But he doesn’t — he’s going to have to have an answer of some kind. Now the back of the room comes the — the torture. And he’s a — he’s a big guy that knows what he’s doing. And he starts locking your elbows up with ropes and tying your wrists together and bending you.
[…]
Some men were tied to their beds, sometimes for weeks at a time. Here, I have drawn a picture showing the handcuffs being worn in front, but the usual position was with the wrists handcuffed behind the back. A man would live this way day and night, without sleep or rest.
The guards come around the middle of the night just rattling the lock on your door. That’s a terrifying thing because they may be taking you out for a torture session. You don’t know.
“… obviously this is an emotional thing to me, was listening to the screams of other … prisoners while they were being tortured. And being locked in a cell myself sometimes uh, in handcuffs or tied up and not able to do anything about it. And that’s the way I’ve got to spend the night.”
[…]
The ten months that I spent in the blacked out cell I went into panic. The only thing I could do was exercise. As long as I could move, I felt like I was going to — well, it was so bad I would put a rag in my mouth and hold another one over it so I could scream. That seemed to help. It’s not that I was scared, more scared than another other time or anything. It was happening to my nerves and my mind. And uh, I had to move or die. I’d wake up at two o’clock in the morning or midnight or three or whatever and I would jump up immediately and start running in place. Side straddle hops. Maybe four hours of sit ups. But I had to exercise. And of course I prayed a lot.
My original post has much more detail.
Of course, these are all quotes from American POW’s who were held in North Vietnam.
“When word of torture and mistreatment began to slip out to the American press in the summer of 1969, our public-relations-minded captors began to treat us better. I’m certain we would have been a lot worse off if there had not been the Geneva Conventions around.” John McCain
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Fight Back
From Liberal Oasis:
The Minneapolis Star Tribune (which has kindly published a few pieces from LiberalOasis) offers an editorial page that, of all the nation’s major dailies, is arguably the most devoted to the truth and the least afraid of the Bush White House.
And it is under attack from the Right for just that reason.
Last week, the Strib not only ran an editorial defending Dick Durbin when Durbin lacked the courage to defend himself, it also ran a lengthy excerpt of Durbin’s speech so readers could examine his words in context and make up their own minds.
Since then, the right-wing Hugh Hewitt has launched a campaign encourage people to cancel their subscriptions to the Strib, in hopes of pressuring the paper to end its defense of real American values.
And Hewitt’s allies at the blog Powerline are trying to keep up the pressure by directly attacking the top editor.
These thuggish attempts to silence brave American voices must be countered.
The best way to do so is to show that speaking truth to power sells.
So if you live in Minnesota and don’t subscribe, now’s the time!
Click here to subscribe, and then email the publisher, Keith Moyer at kmoyer@startribune.com to let him know you’re subscribing because you support the paper’s editorial policy.
Even if you don’t live in Minnesota, you can subscribe and receive the paper via mail, or digitally on your computer.
The Strib is one of the very few unabashed big city liberal papers in the country. The idea of Unctuous High and the Highpockets boys intimidating them is somewhat laughable, but everybody has to answer to the man on some level. This is a paper worth supporting — particularly since the geek squad are after them.
Update:
A couple of commenters tell me that cancelled subscriptions are unnerving the publisher and that some advertisers are suing because of what they say are false circulation numbers. I suspect that this last is thuggery on the part of the wingnut cabal that is coordinating this effort to get the editorial page director fired for his political beliefs.
I would suggest that people start looking around for some “advertisers” to sue all the conservative papers that inflate their advertising numbers. I’d start with the Washington Times. This is a very ugly genie that rightwingers should probably not want to let out of the bottle.
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Inside Knowlege
NEW YORK (CNN) — A Republican congressman from North Carolina told CNN on Wednesday that the “evidence is clear” that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.
“Saddam Hussein and people like him were very much involved in 9/11,” Rep. Robin Hayes said.
Told no investigation had ever found evidence to link Saddam and 9/11, Hayes responded, “I’m sorry, but you must have looked in the wrong places.”
Hayes, the vice chairman of the House subcommittee on terrorism, said legislators have access to evidence others do not.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said that Saddam was a dangerous man, but when asked about Hayes’ statement, would not link the deposed Iraqi ruler to the terrorist attacks on New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.
“I haven’t seen compelling evidence of that,” McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN.
I have heard this from others. I think it must be a wingnut e-mail talking point or something. I’ve been told more than once, as a conversation ender, that the government has the proof but they can’t share it because it would endanger civilians. And it’s used as evidence of Bush’s selflessness that he won’t provide the proof even though he has to take shit from liberals like me.
I kid you not.
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Same Old Same Old
This makes Nixon sound like Cicero. The only news here is that he forgot to say “and then I had a choice to make: take the word of a madman, forget the lessons of September the 11th, or do what’s necessary to defend this country. Given that choice, I will defend America every time,” and “we will form a coalition of the willing and we WILL disarm Saddam Hussein.” We’ve heard all the rest before. Ad nauseum.
I notice the props are having a hard time keeping their eyes open, though. Poor guys.
CNN UPDATE:
Is anybody watching Joe Biden saying that the president has leveled with the American people tonight (as opposed to Cheney and Rummy) and he hopes that it has bought him some time? Nice. Paula Zahn has been very skeptical of the speech, particularly all the 9/11 talk, but Joe very helpfully told her that Bush really did a pretty good job and that hopefully he’ll now have the time to fix the problems in Iraq. He was actually more supportive than David Gergen who was personally “offended” by the evocation of 9/11 but made the political judgment that it would work.
Begala says he made progress on the question of credibility. But by the same token it was probably not so good to evoke 9/11 so much since it had nothing to do with Iraq. It’s a good thing for Democrats to support our commander in chief, though. But we do have a few questions.
Democrats are so helpful to the president. They’re still stinking traitors and all, but they are very nice people. They’ve managed to convince Blitzer and Zahn that their own reactions to the speech were too harsh.
Really?
This morning the research shop at the Republican National Committee sent out an email headlined “Democrats Still Wrong on Iraq.”
Yeah. Find any of those WMD yet, flyboy?
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Chickenhawkery
I think that Kevin is wrong on this:
I actually agree with the overall gist of Christopher Hitchens’ latest column in Slate. He argues that it’s absurd to think you’ve scored some kind of withering putdown of war supporters by pointing out that most of them (and their sons) haven’t volunteered for duty. Since I support police, fire, and social welfare programs despite the fact that I’m not a police officer, a firefighter, or a social worker, I think he’s right on this.
Joining up to fight a war you support is quite different from these other things. A war is a temporary emergency while police work and firefighting are ongoing necessities to deal with everyday occasions of individual misconduct or accident. If there was an earthquake in Kevin’s neighborhood and they called for able bodied men and women to volunteer to help dig bodies out of the rubble, I suspect he’d be there.
But this war in Iraq, like Vietnam, presents an even more obvious illustration of why this is true. Any nation that wages a war of choice wholly for ideological and political reasons, particularly when it is opposed by large numbers of its own citizens, should require that those who share those ideological and political goals help with the physical fighting. In fact, they should lead the fighting. It is unfair in the extreme that stop loss orders and extended tours are being forced upon the “volunteer” army when those who support the war are unwilling to put themselves in physical danger. Self defense is one thing. Requiring others to die for your crusade is another.
This is a bad argument for the right and I hope they keep making it. There is something quite primal and instinctive about the old “put your money where your mouth is” logic of expecting people who support a war to be willing to lay down their lives to fight it. People get this one in their gut. It most certainly is a withering put-down and the the put-downees know it very well.
UPDATE: Max Blumenthal in The Nation
I chatted for a while with Collin Kelley, a senior at Washington State with a vague resemblance to the studly actor Orlando Bloom. Kelley told me he’s “sick and tired of people saying our troops are dying in vain” and added, “This isn’t an invasion of Iraq, it’s a liberation–as David Horowitz said.” When I asked him why he was staying on campus rather than fighting the good fight, he rubbed his shoulder and described a nagging football injury from high school. Plus, his parents didn’t want him to go. “They’re old hippies,” Kelley said.
Munching on a chicken quesadilla at a table nearby was Edward Hauser, a senior at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas–a liberal school in a liberal town in the ultimate red state of Texas. “Austin is ninety square miles insulated from reality,” Hauser said. When I broached the issue of Iraq, he replied, “I support our country. I support our troops.” So why isn’t he there?
“I know that I’m going to be better staying here and working to convince people why we’re there [in Iraq],” Hauser explained, pausing in thought. “I’m a fighter, but with words.”
At a table by the buffet was Justin Palmer, vice chairman of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, America’s largest chapter of College Republicans. In 1984 the group gained prominence in conservative circles when its chairman, Ralph Reed, formed a political action committee credited with helping to re-elect Senator Jesse Helms. Palmer’s future as a right-wing operative looked bright; he batted away my question about his decision to avoid fighting the war he supported with the closest thing I heard to a talking point all afternoon. “The country is like a body,” Palmer explained, “and each part of the body has a different function. Certain people do certain things better than others.” He said his “function” was planning a “Support Our Troops” day on campus this year in which students honored military recruiters from all four branches of the service.
Standing by Palmer’s side and sipping a glass of rose wine, University of Georgia Republican member Kiera Ranke said she played her part as well. She and her sorority sisters sent care packages to troops in Iraq along with letters and pictures of themselves. “They wrote back and told us we boosted their morale,” she said.
By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. “The people opposed to the war aren’t putting their asses on the line,” Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn’t he putting his ass on the line? “I’m not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country,” he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, “and I wasn’t going to pass that up.”
And besides, being a College Republican is so much more fun than counterinsurgency warfare. Bray recounted the pride he and his buddies had felt walking through the center of campus last fall waving a giant American flag, wearing cowboy boots and hats with the letters B-U-S-H painted on their bare chests. “We’re the big guys,” he said. “We’re the ones who stand up for what we believe in. The College Democrats just sit around talking about how much they hate Bush. We actually do shit.”
I’m very impressed with their contribution, aren’t you?
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