The Independent
The farcical end of the American dream
The US press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war
By Robert Fisk
03/18/06 "The Independent"–It is a bright winter morning and I am sipping
my first coffee of the day in Los Angeles. My eye moves like a radar beam
over the front page of the Los Angeles Times for the word that dominates the
minds of all Middle East correspondents: Iraq. In post-invasion, post-Judith
Miller mode, the American press is supposed to be challenging the lies of
this war. So the story beneath the headline "In a Battle of Wits, Iraq's
Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of US" deserves to be read. Or does
it?
Datelined Washington – an odd city in which to learn about Iraq, you might
think – its opening paragraph reads: "Despite the recent arrest of one of
his would-be suicide bombers in Jordan and some top aides in Iraq,
insurgency mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded capture, US authorities
say, because his network has a much better intelligence-gathering operation
than they do."
Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis – along, I have to admit,
with myself – have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that
al-Qai'da's Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of
"insurgency mastermind", the words that caught my eye were "US authorities
say". And as I read through the report, I note how the Los Angeles Times
sources this extraordinary tale. I thought American reporters no longer
trusted the US administration, not after the mythical weapons of mass
destruction and the equally mythical connections between Saddam and the
international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. Of course, I was
wrong.
Here are the sources – on pages one and 10 for the yarn spun by reporters
Josh Meyer and Mark Mazzetti: "US officials said", "said one US Justice
Department counter-terrorism official", "Officials … said", "those
officials said", "the officials confirmed", "American officials complained",
"the US officials stressed", "US authorities believe", "said one senior US
intelligence official", "US officials said", "Jordanian officials … said"
– here, at least is some light relief – "several US officials said", "the US
officials said", "American officials said", "officials say", "say US
officials", "US officials said", "one US counter-terrorism official said".
I do truly treasure this story. It proves my point that the Los Angeles
Times – along with the big east coast dailies – should all be called US
OFFICIALS SAY. But it's not just this fawning on political power that makes
me despair. Let's move to a more recent example of what I can only call
institutionalised racism in American reporting of Iraq. I have to thank
reader Andrew Gorman for this gem, a January Associated Press report about
the killing of an Iraqi prisoner under interrogation by US Chief Warrant
Officer Lewis Welshofer Jnr.
Mr Welshofer, it transpired in court, had stuffed the Iraqi General Abed
Hamed Mowhoush head-first into a sleeping bag and sat on his chest, an
action which – not surprisingly – caused the general to expire. The military
jury ordered – reader, hold your breath – a reprimand for Mr Welshofer, the
forfeiting of $6,000 of his salary and confinement to barracks for 60 days.
But what caught my eye was the sympathetic detail. Welshofer's wife's
Barbara, the AP told us, "testified that she was worried about providing for
their three children if her husband was sentenced to prison. 'I love him
more for fighting this,' she said, tears welling up in her eyes. 'He's
always said that you need to do the right thing, and sometimes the right
thing is the hardest thing to do'".
Yes, I guess torture is tough on the torturer. But try this from the same
report: "Earlier in the day … Mr Welshofer fought back tears. 'I deeply
apologise if my actions tarnish the soldiers serving in Iraq,' he said."
Note how the American killer's remorse is directed not towards his helpless
and dead victim but to the honour of his fellow soldiers, even though an
earlier hearing had revealed that some of his colleagues watched Welshofer
stuffing the general into the sleeping bag and did nothing to stop him. An
earlier AP report stated that "officials" – here we go again – "believed
Mowhoush had information that would 'break the back of the insurgency'."
Wow. The general knew all about 40,000 Iraqi insurgents. So what a good idea
to stuff him upside down inside a sleeping bag and sit on his chest.
But the real scandal about these reports is we're not told anything about
the general's family. Didn't he have a wife? I imagine the tears were
"welling up in her eyes" when she was told her husband had been done to
death. Didn't the general have children? Or parents? Or any loved ones who
"fought back tears" when told of this vile deed? Not in the AP report he
didn't. General Mowhoush comes across as an object, a dehumanised creature
who wouldn't let the Americans "break the back" of the insurgency after
being stuffed headfirst into a sleeping bag.
Now let's praise the AP. On an equally bright summer's morning in Australia
a few days ago I open the Sydney Morning Herald. It tells me, on page six,
that the news agency, using the Freedom of Information Act, has forced US
authorities to turn over 5,000 pages of transcripts of hearings at the
Guantanamo Bay prison camp. One of them records the trial of since-released
British prisoner Feroz Abbasi, in which Mr Abbasi vainly pleads with his
judge, a US air force colonel, to reveal the evidence against him, something
he says he has a right to hear under international law.
And here is what the American colonel replied: "Mr Abbasi, your conduct is
unacceptable and this is your absolute final warning. I do not care about
international law. I do not want to hear the words international law. We are
not concerned about international law."
Alas, these words – which symbolise the very end of the American dream – are
buried down the story. The colonel, clearly a disgrace to the uniform he
wears, does not appear in the bland headline ("US papers tell Guantanamo
inmates' stories") of the Sydney paper, more interested in telling us that
the released documents identify by name the "farmers, shopkeepers or
goatherds" held in Guantanamo.
I am now in Wellington, New Zealand, watching on CNN Saddam Hussein's attack
on the Baghdad court trying him. And suddenly, the ghastly Saddam disappears
from my screen. The hearing will now proceed in secret, turning this
drumhead court into even more of a farce. It is a disgrace. And what does
CNN respectfully tell us? That the judge has "suspended media coverage"!
If only, I say to myself, CNN – along with the American press – would do the
same.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Think Again: Mr. Fitzgerald'’s Unanswered Questions
by Eric Alterman
November 3, 2005
According to this week's Newsweek, the nation enjoyed two historic moments last Friday. The first was special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference outlining his perjury case against "Cheney's Cheney," I(rve) Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The second – occurring simultaneously – was that "in the small dining room adjoining the Oval Office, [President Bush] was doing something uncharacteristic: watching live news on TV." Apparently, the president only watched the first 20 minutes or so of the press conference, but for a guy who famously avoids both print and broadcast news, any small step toward engagement with the "reality-based community" may be a giant step for mankind.
Alas, Fitzgerald's press conference proved a disappointment to many, in part owing to the attending reporters’ inability to ask him questions he might be likely to answer. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to speculate about where his ongoing investigation might lead, and made clear early on that he wouldn't discuss certain topics, but numerous reporters appeared more intent on creating sound bites than in garnering whatever information might be available, and instead, inspired repeat after repeat of the special prosecutor’s non-response.
Since Fitzgerald has said he has no intention of issuing a final report about this complicated matter, it remains the responsibility of the reporters themselves to fill in the many holes he left in the story. Americans still need to know just what kind of conspiracy was launched here – not merely to attack the credibility of Joe Wilson and blow the cover off his CIA agent wife, but also to fool the nation into going to war. Here are just a few of them:
Where’s Dick?
As The Washington Post’s Bart Gellman reported in his excellent exegesis of the known story so far, "Libby and Cheney made separate inquiries to the CIA about Wilson's wife, and each confirmed independently that she worked there. It was Cheney, the indictment states, who supplied Libby the detail ‘that Wilson's wife worked . . . in the Counterproliferation Division’ – an unambiguous declaration that her position was among the case officers of the operations directorate." The question we still need to ask is, "Do we know the extent of Cheney's involvement in his subordinate's decision to leak classified information and lie about it to a Grand Jury?" We know part of the answer from the indictment itself, and as Josh Marshall pointed out, "Libby had consulted with Cheney about how to handle inquiries from journalists about the vice president's role in sending Wilson to Africa in early 2002."
What's more, on the now-infamous July 12, 2003 Air Force Two flight from Washington to Norfolk, Virginia, according to the indictment, "LIBBY discussed with other officials aboard the plane what LIBBY should say in response to certain pending media inquiries, including questions from Time reporter Matthew Cooper." Who, exactly, are these "other officials?" Is one of them the vice president? As Gellman wrote in the Post, on that flight "the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson's credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source." The question we need to answer is: What else did Cheney "instruct his aide" to do? And are any of these actions indictable? Has Anybody Pled Guilty?
Another thing we still don't know is if anyone pled guilty in the case. As TNR's Ryan Lizza reported over the weekend, he asked Fitzgerald's spokesman Randall Samborn just that question. Samborn partially dodged the question, telling Lizza that there was no "public record" of any pleas. Not satisfied, Lizza put the question to "a white collar criminal defense attorney," who told him that "Guilty pleas can be taken under seal – and often are – when the person entering the plea is cooperating with the government and they do not want to tip off the other targets or there is a safety concern. Also, plea agreements could have already been reached but not formally entered in court." Where’s Phase II?
All this was wrought, in the end, by the administration's use of faulty intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In a bit of crystal ball gazing this past Sunday, Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times about the Senate Intelligence Committee's failure to issue the "Phase II" section of its report on the administration's use of that intelligence, calling it a "scandal in its own right." It is, although it has largely been ignored until Murray Waas reported in The National Journal last week that Cheney and Libby were refusing to hand over to the committee certain documents, which included "the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. ‘evidence’ to the U.N. on the eve of war." As we know, Harry Reid threw this in the face of the nation on Tuesday, when he invoked Rule 21 and forced Senate Republicans to agree to form a bipartisan committee to find out why we haven't seen this "Phase II" report.
Where’s Novak?
Enough said.
Will we ever have fully satisfactory answers to questions that initially inspired the Fitzgerald investigation, as well as those it has raised in its wake? Likely not. But if reporters and news organizations decide to invest the time and money in trying to find the answers to these and other key questions, they might at least make a start at making amends to their readers, viewers and listeners for accepting administration claims at face value in the first place, and allowing the nation to be led by lies into war.
Just one request to Bill Keller and the folks at the Times, however: Could you please keep Judy Miller off the story? She’s done her part….
Eric Alterman is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of six books, including most recently, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, just published in paperback by Penguin.
www.americanprogress.org
From the Los Angeles Times
Moussaoui Case Is Latest Misstep in Prosecutions
'There have been a lot of flubs,' a law professor says of the U.S. record in terrorism trials.
By David G. Savage and Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writers
March 14, 2006
WASHINGTON — The botched handling of witnesses in the sentencing trial of Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is the latest in a series of missteps and false starts that have beset the Bush administration's prosecution of terrorism cases.
The government has seen juries reject high-profile terrorism charges, judges throw out convictions because of mistakes by the prosecution and the FBI suffer the embarrassment of wrongly accusing an Oregon lawyer of participating in the 2004 Madrid train bombings.
"There have been a lot of flubs," said George Washington University law professor Stephen A. Saltzburg. "I think most observers would say they were underwhelmed by the prosecutions brought so far."
On several occasions, top administration officials have promised more than they delivered. For example, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced in 2002 that Jose Padilla, a Bronx-born Muslim, had been arrested on suspicion of "exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States."
Padilla was held nearly four years in a military brig without being charged. This year, as his lawyers appealed his case to the Supreme Court, the administration indicted him in Miami on charges of conspiring to aid terrorists abroad. There was no mention of a "dirty bomb."
In May 2004, the FBI arrested Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer and Muslim convert, saying that his fingerprint was on a bag containing detonators and explosives linked to the Madrid train bombings that had killed 191 people two months before. The former Army officer was held as a material witness even though officials in Spain considered the fingerprint evidence inconclusive.
Mayfield was freed after almost three weeks in custody and received an apology from the FBI, which blamed the misidentification on a substandard digital image from Spanish authorities.
In other instances, prosecutors took cases to court that proved to be weak:
• A computer science student in Idaho was accused of aiding terrorists when he designed a website that included information on terrorists in Chechnya and Israel. A jury in Boise acquitted Sami Omar Al-Hussayen of the charges in June 2004.
• A Florida college professor was indicted on charges of supporting terrorists by promoting the cause of Palestinian groups. A jury in Tampa acquitted Sami Al-Arian in December.
• Two Detroit men arrested a week after the Sept. 11 attacks were believed to be plotting a terrorist incident, in part based on sketches found in their apartment. A judge overturned the convictions of Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi after he learned that the prosecutor's key witness had admitted lying to the FBI, a fact the prosecutor had kept hidden.
David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has been critical of such prosecutions, blamed pressure from the top. "The government in the war on terrorism has generally swept broadly and put a high premium on convictions at any cost," he said. "That puts pressures on prosecutors — to overcharge, to coach witnesses, to fail to disclose exculpatory evidence."
But Andrew McBride, a former federal prosecutor in Virginia, said it was unfair to blame prosecutors for the apparent witness tampering in the Moussaoui case.
"You can't really lay this at the door of the prosecution," he said. "This is a lawyer at the TSA [Transportation Security Administration] who screwed up. The rule of witnesses is pretty well known. You would think she would know you are not supposed to discuss the earlier testimony with your witnesses."
In a recent report on its terrorism prosecutions, the Justice Department called Moussaoui's decision last year to plead guilty to conspiracy charges one of its leading successes.
But U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema already has questioned whether the French citizen deserves the death penalty; Moussaoui was in jail in Minnesota on a visa violation when hijackers seized four passenger jets and caused almost 3,000 deaths by crashing them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. the Supreme Court has said the death penalty should be reserved for murderers and "major participants" in murder plots. Prosecutors are pushing for the death penalty under the theory that Moussaoui could have prevented the terrorist attacks by telling the FBI about the plot.
Terrorism cases have proved to be especially difficult for prosecutors because investigators need to disrupt plots before they come to fruition. That leaves prosecutors to make a decision on whether to bring a thin case to court. By contrast, in drug cases, police and drug agents can track suspects and arrest them when they take possession of large quantities of narcotics.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, officials feared there were terrorist "sleeper cells" throughout the nation, ready to spring into action. Since then, the determined pursuit of Al Qaeda members and sympathizers has turned up relatively few terrorists.
"The good news may be that there are not as many threatening people out there as we once thought," law professor Saltzburg said.
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
Fri Mar 3, 12:07 PM ET
The Nation — Cheaters never win, my mom said. And it looks like she was right.
This week the fur flew when senior associate editor Nick Sylvester was suspended from his gig at the Village Voice. Turns out the boy wonder/music critic had fabricated reporting for his cover story "Do You Wanna Kiss Me?" on the pick-up artist's guide The Game by Neil Strauss. (You might remember Strauss from other literary merits such as ghost-writing porn star Jenna Jameson's memoir.)
The story's been pulled from the site, but it's not really worth reading, anyway. It's a pretty thin piece of trend-reporting that doesn't hold much water. Basically, Sylvester interviews a few women who have read The Game and can use it against the would-be players who try to pick them up. He then attempts to extrapolate that into something–it's not clear what–about the state of dating in New York. He interviews Strauss and uncritically swallows a lot of his garbage about picking up women–for one, he fails to be very critical of the whole "art" of picking up women at all, let alone Strauss's basic assumption that social success is measured by belt notches.
Given how flimsy the journalism is, one can't help but wonder why the whole piece wasn't cast as a short diary from a woman's perspective–but wait, guess what? Dolly, a New Yorker who writes a blog about her love life, and had recognized men running The Game on her, did pitch the Voice, in January, and never heard back. Then Sylvester was assigned the story.
Golden boy Sylvester has nothing to worry about. "I just adore that kid," acting Voice Editor Doug Simmons told Gawker . "The thought of firing him is a painful one for me. I hope this review can bring an understanding to the paper — and to Nick — about the boundaries of journalism."
Yes, cause the boundaries of journalism were so unclear before. Thank goodness Simmons cleared that one up!
What happened here doesn't quite add up. First, Sylvester's lie was painfully obvious, violating the cardinal rule of fake journalism: Don't quote real people who you've never met. (Make them up!) And stranger still is why he bothered with lying at all. He claims to have met one especially colorful pick-up artist at Bar 151 in New York, but in fact the scene he related was a "composite" of anecdotes told to him by others. So why lie? Why not just quote the people you interviewed in real-life?
Usually Sylvester writes pretentious, garbled, mumbo-jumbo name-dropping music reviews, and some have speculated that the poor kid just got in over his head. It was a Jayson Blair-esque case of too much, too soon. But even that doesn't make sense. It doesn't take genius to know that you don't make up facts in a reported story. Sylvester, who was yanked from the stage at this year's Plug Awards for reading Malcom Gladwell's New Yorker essay on profiling in lieu of presenting the award he was there to give, seems to have a problem with taking anything seriously. Maybe he thought the Voice piece was supposed to be a prank. For now, the joke's on him. He's not only been suspended from the Voice, but yesterday he was fired from his gig as an editor at indie rock go-to site Pitchfork .
But the really outrage-inducing part of all this is that Sylvester won't be up at night sweating out the difference between "fact" and "fiction" in our topsy-turvy, no-holds-barred post-modern world where right is left and up is down. He's more famous than he was before, and in the long-run, his career will be just fine. He has Simmons. He's young. He'll still get a book deal.
Rich Galen is on our Top Ten Douchebags In D.C. http://www.mullings.com/
Air America Continues Flight With Flagship WLIB NY
WLIB New York will continue to be the New York home of Air America Radio, under an agreement announced by Air America and Inner City Broadcasting. The companies report that over the next several months, Air America and Inner City will seek to enhance and extend their long-term relationship.
“We are happy to reiterate that our New York listeners will be able to continue to hear our programming,” said Air America Radio CEO Danny Goldberg.
“Inner City has always had faith in the mission of Air America,” said Vice Chairman of ICBC Broadcasting Holdings, Inc. Skip Finley.
Google Storage:
http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/6173/Google_to_Offer_Online_Storage
http://meteor-blades.dailykos.com/
Meteor Blades's diary :: ::
I'm clueless as to how many of those could qualify as political. Not to mention how many of those would call themselves progressive or politically left. Nor how many frequently have something worth reading, something original, inspiring, revelatory or investigatory. Thousands, for sure.
For someone as obsessed as me, it's maddening. Speed-reading can only get you so far. But it's simultaneously wonderful. For an antique journalist and Op-Ed junkie like myself, what could be more liberating than this plethora?
Liberating and essential. We've got Guckertgate, Plamegate, Torturegate, Coingate and Spygate. We've got corruption and incompetence and unconstitutionality spread from sea to shining sea. We've got a foreign policy that makes Manifest Destiny look altruistic. With mercenaries, propagandists and lily-livered chicken-hearts dominating the megamedia, how could we have put so many pieces together without the blogs?
Not that a few good journalists haven't alerted us to a smidgen of what's going on. But, until recently, supine has been the usual position in which we've found our supposedly watchdog media. Worse still in the opinion sections. Worst of all on television. Anyone who has wanted something other than the same old talking points, something more than the same shy obeisance to an Administration out of control, something even close to a reading between the lines, has turned to blogs.
On the Op-Ed pages of the old Los Angeles Herald Examiner, I used to buy maybe 50 "citizen" pieces a year and fill the rest with the same, publisher-approved, mostly sad collection of syndicated columnists that the rest of America's newspapers published. At the Los Angeles Times, we maybe managed to get 250 citizen pieces onto the Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion pages each year, and filled the rest with syndicated writers.
For 11 years before it was absorbed by Tribune Media Services, I contributed to this narrow little world of pre-packaged opinion as editor at the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, where a staff of salespeople worked to cram 21 political columnists – including Cal Thomas, Arianna Huffington, Robert Reno, Henry Kissinger, Jesse Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Press and Armstrong Williams – into as many of the nation's 1,500 daily newspapers as possible. Foreign sales were big, too.
Three major syndicates and a handful of minor ones still run their own stables of political columnists. Ultimately, with 125 or so syndicated columnists available, about 10 dominate the dead-tree media. Right or left, they're treated like commodities. Check out the TMS page. You need a liberal or a libertarian on your Op-Ed? Just click on the mini-window.
You can depend on almost every one of these columnists never to break the formula. Never too long. Never too colorful. Definitely nothing to upset the brand. They're sold as a conservative, they'd damn sure better stay one, or they'll wind up pissing off client editors the way Huffington did when she started making her move from right to left. Predictability is essential.
Which is why I love political blogs. Unpredictable. Fresh. Unique. The standard Op-Ed is 700 words per entry. If it suits a blogger, s/he'll write 7,000 words. Or 70, plus a link to somebody's else's 7,000 words. Or a 7-word caption on a picture . Or just the picture with a comment thread so you can write your own caption. Rant, rave, rumination, reminiscence, reflection, review, rehash, research, reverie, revolt – there are simply no limits to form or style or substance. The political blogger can create a smackdown that is pure poetry, as well as exposés, dot-connections or raw speculation. S/he can write a diatribe or a dissertation. Or serve as focal point for activism. Nobody can tell the blogger what to say, what conclusions to draw. No editor is on the phone suggesting the latest effort be toned down or started over. Of course, this free-for-all means some wild-ass nonsense gets posted. And a few typos.
It also means an abundance so rich that if you're at all like me, you can't even keep up with the names of all the new progressive blogs, much less their substance. Happily, each year at this time, the folks over at Wampum help us all out by hosting the Koufax Awards.
::Tullycast:: 