Shameless

Quote of the day month year.

Referring to Newsweek’s retraction of its Koran-down-the crapper story:

"People lost their lives, people are dead and that's unfortunate…People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be careful about what they do."

                                                                    -- Don Rumsfeld 5/16/2005

It would be nice is Rummy could work up the same level of feigned outrage:

For the systematic religious degradation and humiliation employed at Gitmo as explained by former military translator Eric Saar in his book Inside The Wire.

For the abuse his department presided over at Abu Ghraib.

For the 108 people who have died while in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the estimated 150 prisoners that the Bush administration has “rendered” to foreign governments for the purpose of torture.

For the thousands who have needlessly died in Iraq after the Bush and Blair administrations colluded to “fix" the intelligence to justify a war that had already been pre-determined.

That said -- and all shameless hypocrisy aside -- Newsweek did screw up badly. Much the same way The New York Times and its reporter Judith Miller did when they used the same sort of anonymous sourcing to act as a megaphone and amplifier for the administration's cooked intel in the run -up to the war.

For a nio-nonsense, non-politicized take-down of Newsweek's faux pas, please see the great Tim Porter.

Comments

[reg]

Andrew Sullivan has one of the best takes on this Koran story I've seen to date - clipped from his blog -

THE HYSTERIA MOUNTS: We have yet to see what's at the root, if anything, of the Newsweek story. But I think it's telling that some bloggers have devoted much, much more energy to covering the Newsweek error than they ever have to covering any sliver of the widespread evidence of detainee abuse that made the Newsweek piece credible in the first place. A simple question: after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to "Fuck Allah," after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran? Yes, Newsweek bears complete responsibility for any errors it has made; and, depending on what we now find, should not be let off the hook. But the outrage from the White House is beyond belief. It seems to me particularly worrying if this incident further intimidates the press from seeking the truth about what the government is doing in the war on terror. It is not being "basically, on the side of the enemy," as Glenn Reynolds calls it, to resist the notion of government-sanctioned torture and to report on it. It is patriotism...

[reg]

From conservative website GOPUSA, May 13:
Referring to the rioting in Jalalabad, Myers said the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Army Lt.-Gen. Karl Eikenberry, had called into question a link between the violence and the Koran issue, saying it seemed to be related to that country's political process and "not at all tied to the article in the magazine."

From Rev. Moon's Washington Times, May 13:
Gen. Myers said senior U.S. military officials in Afghanistan reported that the violence was "not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran but more tied up in the political process" involving actions by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Army Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, thought one of the demonstrations, which occurred in Jalalabad about 80 miles east of Kabul, "was not at all tied to the article in the magazine," Gen. Myers said.

[The_DC_Sniper]

"It would be nice is Rummy could work up the same level of feigned outrage"

You, Steve, and myself should get together this Midsummer. I know a nice grove of trees in Angeles National Forest where, underneath the cold pale moon and in the crisp night air, we can cast the circle, call the quarters, and invoke the Triple God of Gambling (Boyd-Wynn-Hilton) by playing some blackjack with a deck of Rider-Waite cards. We empaths really need to stick together.

[Chris Baldwin]

"It is not being "basically, on the side of the enemy," as Glenn Reynolds calls it, to resist the notion of government-sanctioned torture and to report on it. It is patriotism..."

It's more than that, it's a moral necessity.

[Marc Davidson]

Juan Cole ( http://informedcomment@juancole.com/ ) commented yesterday about the veracity of the Newsweek story. He quotes from a reader of his blog who has military experience.

"I'm a former US [military officer], and had the 'pleasure' of attending SERE school--Search, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.
"The course I attended . . . [had] a mock POW camp, where we had a chance to be prisoners for 2-3 days. The camp is also used as a training tool for CI [counter-intelligence], interrogators, etc for those running the camp.
"One of the most memorable parts of the camp experience was when one of the camp leaders trashed a Bible on the ground, kicking it around, etc. It was a crushing blow, even though this was just a school."

There is far too much evidence of widespread abuse of prisoners to fully discount this story. We may never know with absolute certainty what is going on in Guantanamo (or other such facilities) due to the extremely high level of security there, but this story is credible and fits in, as others have noted, with the prison abuse scandals of the past two years. Moreover, it seems clear that this abuse is officially sanctioned unlike what the White House would have us believe especially through the show trials of subordinates during the last few months.

[Michael Turner]

Admit it: your eyes are glazing over about this Toileted Koran issue. If any of you have fresh eyeballs, don't waste them on Tim Porter's call for a New Age of Journalism. (Maybe there's something going on there, but I can't figure it out.) Rather, take a look at the Pew report he links to:

http://pewresearch.org/trends/trends2005-media.pdf

Yeah, that's a whole lotta numbers. But it's worth a close reading. The apparent general dearth of respect for MSM news sources tabulated there disguises a couple of different trends, some of them indicating *greater* trust in *specific* sources.

(1) Lots of Americans implicitly believe Fox News and the not-much-less-biased Wall Street Journal editorial page.

See p.43, tables on "Cable Audience More Politicized" and especially "Gap in Most Trusted News Sources", the latter with a footnote saying "Percent who believe all or most of what the organization reports." Fox News (#1 for Republicans) is, of course, not among the top 6 for Democrats, but more telling is that it doesn't appear among the top 6 for Independents either. Fox has 35% of the GOP audience -- outranking ALL other network news for any other political demographic. (The runner-up is CNN, with Democrats, at 28%.) Skip down to p.50 and start reading from "Credibility ratings more partisan." It's illuminating.

(2) Of course Americans are increasingly doubtful of the news -- a lot of it is about what our government is (supposedly) doing, and a lot of the rest of it is about what people in other governments said yesterday. Duh.

Here, Tim Porter may be onto something. "Objectivity" and "he-said-she-said" will lend themselves to jaundiced views when there's so much bullshit out there. Both "he" and "she" are pretty full of it these days. The lack of credibility in journalism today may not be so much a lack of credibility for journalists as it is the unfortunate fact that journalists have to report on a lot of stuff that's hard to credit these days. In the good-news-bad-news section entitled "Signs of engagement" (p. 48), the Pew study points out an increased interest in foreign news (good!) but that most of the increase is focused on Iraq and the War on Terror (i.e., stuff with high BS-factor content.) The Pew report also covered an election year that featured an unusual amount of bullshit (I think.) Were the people polled responding to the he-said-she-said, or were they responding to how that he-said-she-said was reported? If it was the former, than the poll results are deceptive. As the Pew reports puts it, there's may be a shoot-the-messenger syndrome at work.

(3) As a sub-category of the above, there's something I might call "The Jon Stewart Effect": the young (and especially young males) are getting an MSM-news-is-bullshit message from The Daily Show. It feels better to laugh than to frown. And it's good for you - science has proved it!

The Pew study provides evidence that this is a significant effect in attitudes about news among the young. Surprising to me, but I'm getting over it. Fast. ;-) If, as a recent best-seller ("On Bullshit") concludes, sincerity is a form of bullshit, then Jon Stewart's irony may be perceived as fundamentally more honest to the young than the earnest-to-a-fault furrowed-brow delivery of announcers on CBS or CNN, on matters of import. I'm too old to be as exuberantly cynical as I was when I was 25. If I were only *10* years younger ....

One of the roots of this recent Newsweek uproar may be a profound change in American attitudes about criticism of the military: "In 1991,
just 34% said press criticism of the military
weakened defenses, but 12 years later
that number had grown to 63%." (p. 54)

Again, I'm not too sure what Tim Porter's going on about here, but it seems to me that Newsweek's explanatory article on this incident is pretty close to the kind of reporting he prescribes as "New Age," even if the Periscope article that started it all might be more typical of what he's complaining about. If nothing else, Newsweek put it in context, and Tim likes context, right? But how well does context work? Not very well: Newsweek editors and bureau chiefs seem to have just sighed disconsolately and thrown in the towel. While our Roger L. Simon gets away with calling the use of anonymous government sources "totalitarian" and nobody in his comment section so much as complains.

[reg]

If right-wing bloggers were anything more than drooling hacks seeking to reify virtue within the Bush administration and destroy the credibility of any and all of its critics, I would be reading a discussion of the following news item on Roger L. Simon's bog. Simon fancies himself a source of inside info on the "Oil for Food Scandal". Also nothing on these revelations at Instapundit or Little Green Footballs. These clowns huffing and puffiing about the alleged "bias" of the mainstream media is nothng more than partisan politics. They care no more for the truth than does Scott McConnell or Washington Times publisher Sun Myung Moon. In fact, these trolls are part and parcel of the same machinery. (Note that Roger L. Simon is currently collaborating on a screenplay with neocon nut, NRO regular and AEI fellow Michael Ledeen. Since Ledeen is a made man in the world of neo-con institutional and extracurricular funding, no doubt Roger's conversion will ultimately pay off as well as Whorowitz's.)

Compared to the right-wing blogosphere, the mainstream media is a paragon of journalistic integrity. Of course, that's not saying much. Anyway, the clip below is more important than my rant:

US 'backed illegal Iraqi oil deals'

Report claims blind eye was turned to sanctions busting by American firms

Julian Borger and Jamie Wilson in Washington
Tuesday May 17, 2005
The Guardian

The United States administration turned a blind eye to extensive sanctions-busting in the prewar sale of Iraqi oil, according to a new Senate investigation.

A report released last night by Democratic staff on a Senate investigations committee presents documentary evidence that the Bush administration was made aware of illegal oil sales and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime but did nothing to stop them.

The scale of the shipments involved dwarfs those previously alleged by the Senate committee against UN staff and European politicians like the British MP, George Galloway, and the former French minister, Charles Pasqua.

In fact, the Senate report found that US oil purchases accounted for 52% of the kickbacks paid to the regime in return for sales of cheap oil - more than the rest of the world put together.

"The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions," the report said. "On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.

[reg]

Something's happening here...and it's getting pretty goddam clear.

I don't have a lot of love for the Main Stream Media and I'm increasingly disappointed by NPR, but maybe it's time to start defending what they do relatively well (compared to the vast bulk of their detractors) against what looks like an increasingly coordinated onslaught to undermine their ability to do much of anything at all except reprint government press releases.

WASHINGTON, May 15 - Executives at National Public Radio are increasingly at odds with the Bush appointees who lead the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In one of several points of conflict in recent months, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates federal funds for public radio and television, is considering a plan to monitor Middle East coverage on NPR news programs for evidence of bias, a corporation spokesman said on Friday.

The corporation’s board has told its staff that it should consider redirecting money away from national newscasts and toward music programs produced by NPR stations.

Top officials at NPR and member stations are upset as well about the corporation’s decision to appoint two ombudsmen to judge the content of programs for balance. And managers of public radio stations criticized the corporation in a resolution offered at their annual meeting two weeks ago urging it not to interfere in NPR editorial decisions.

The corporation’s chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, has also blocked NPR from broadcasting its programs on a station in Berlin owned by the United States government.

[Delia True]

Why has the political commentary community been so hush hush about this story?

If you care at all, please take a look at my collective letter to all the Assholes in the Bush Administration at:

http://thenewgoo.blogspot.com/2005/05/truth-is-child-of-time.html

[reg]

Andrew Sullivan continues to shed sense on the Newsweek story and the White House response from varius angles. Check him out for some pretty decent continuing conversation. I give extra props to Sullivan because he has consistently supported the decision to go to war, and a lot of those folks seem to have an incentive to flush anything that raises doubts about the strategy or tactics of BushCo down the toilet. Sullivan knows that's a terrible disservice to his own best intentions in supporting the policy - which is inarguable, although I would argue about his original judgement.

Meanwhile, what does Comrade Christopher Hitchens have to offer in the midst of it all ? His last word on these issues - and I dare say for someone who's such a voluble wordslinger, his commentaries on Iraq have become pretty sparse and thin over the past year - is to take The New York Times to task for calling the Iraqi insurgents..."insurgents". (Isn't that what Condi calls them, incidentally ?) So the Son of Orwell thinks calling the anti-government forces in Iraq "insurgents" is anti-Bush rhetorical spin but calling his invasion "regime change" is sheer linguistic accuracy. I was somewhat sympathetic to the "Iraq liberation" very early on, but when I see how most of them have played themselves out my patience has been worn very thin and the bullshit level just seems staggering. I'd never paid much attention to Hitchens prior to 9/11. When there was controversy and trepidation in some circles more trad lefty than myself about taking down the Taliban, I believed I had discovered an eloquent spokesman in Hitchens and began reading him avidly. Then came Iraq. I gave him a fair shake as the arguments played out, but what a disappointment... What a pompous, empty man...

[reg]

Corr...."I was somewhat sympathetic to the "Iraq liberation" CROWD very early on, blah, blah."

[rosedog]

Shameless is the word for it.

Last Thursday, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon that rioting in Afghanistan was related to the on-going political reconciliation process, as apposed to some half-paragraph piece about Holy Book Flushing in Newsweek's Periscope section. Oh, yeah, and the head of the after-action report following the disturbances in Jalalabad, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, said as much as well.

But, why believe those guys we've got that renowned middle east expert---SCOTT MC CLELLEN ---to clarify things and to let us know it was all those bad, bad, mendacious, lying, unprofessional, murder-provoking Newsweek people who are responsible for all manner of death and destruction.

[rosedog]

Meanwhile, as Reg notes above, we have the devastating spectacle of Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, pushing to insert partisan conservative programming into PBS…..even though the actual listening/viewing public has repeatedly indicated in surveys that they DON’T see Public Broadcasting as slanted now, that they see it as more balanced than conventional network or cable news. And so it is that, after 40 years of non-governmental interference--- Tomlinson is actively wielding his power to insert his personal personal political agenda into public broadcasting.....the one media that's actually owned by you and me, WE THE PEOPLE, conservatives and liberals alike.

Here are some edited snippets from what Bill Moyers had to say on the issue in an address given at the National Conference for Media Reform this past Sunday:.

“….I want to tell you about another fight we're in today. The story I've come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I've been living it. It's been in the news this week, including reports of more attacks on a single journalist -- yours truly -- by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

"As some of you know, CPB was established almost forty years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing and yes, even too dangerous for a gathering like this not to address.

"We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

"Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. …. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

"….One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

"….I decided long ago that this wasn't healthy for democracy. I came to see that 'news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.'

"I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

”This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today…..

.”…[Here is how]. correspondent and historian, Richard Reeves, answered a student who asked him to define real news. 'Real news," Reeves responded, 'is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.'

“Ideologues don't want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a worldview that can't be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn't, God forbid….

THEN MOYERS TALKS ABOUT THE ATTACKS ON HIS OWN SHOW, “NOW..”

“….Strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held off "unless Moyers is dealt with." The Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be quite agitated.

“…When Senator Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting "has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers," a new member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halperin, who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of penalty she would like to see imposed on malefactors like Moyers...."

******
I urge every one of you, right or left…..no actually, I respectfully PLEAD with you….to read it all.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/17/moyers/print.html

[rosedog]

BTW, here's the text of what General Meyers said:

Q: Do either one of you have anything about the demonstrations in Afghanistan, which were apparently sparked by reports that there was a lack of respect by some interrogators at Guantanamo for the Koran. Do either one of you have anything to say about that?

GEN. MYERS: It's the -- it's a judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eikenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran -- and I'll get to that in just a minute -- but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his Cabinet is conducting in Afghanistan. So that's -- that was his judgment today in an after- action of that violence. He didn't -- he thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.

******

Yet now it's universally accepted that the Newsweek story caused the riots.

So what's the real truth?

[Woody]

Marc, with all respect to you--when you review your take on the failures and abuses of our country in a post that finally gets to the point of considering Newsweek's gross failure, it sounds as if you believe that the publication's poor standards for accuracy and responsibility are justified as long as they don't reach down to the lowest levels of others. Is that the standard for journalists today?

[Marc Davidson]

Woody, let's not compare the failures and abuses of the administration with those of the media. Newsweek "failed" by not getting the story right when it relied on an anonymous source who later acknowledged some technical errors in his facts. They've retracted the story without saying that it definitely did not happen as reported. Although it was a reputation-damaging error, it is not clear that there are any other consequences. This administration clearly is looking for a scapegoat to blame for it's own much larger and more consequential failures. Don't hold your breath for any retractions from this bunch.

Josh Marshall ( http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ ) has some interesting insights on this today. A couple of paragraphs:

"But make no mistake about it: were it not for the use of unnamed sources, we would know virtually none of what we currently know about the inner workings of our government. The same goes for almost any powerful institution in our society. And, as you might imagine, that's a result some find quite attractive.
....
What you would have would be news produced by press secretaries and the powerful, with the occasional addition of snippets from folks happy to lose their jobs to make a given story see the light of day."

[richard lo cicero]

First of all this was no "scoop." There were at least four other stories going back a year saying that the Koran was being desicrated so why the outragte now? Does anyone think that Muslims in Afganistan or Pakistan will now say "Oh well, NEWSWEEK recanted, so it must be false"? Of course not, Andrew Sullivan is absolutely right this time and its too late to change this opinion. By the way, compare this with the incident in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN where a report was true but the source was never asked about a slush fund at the grand jury. Here it turns out that the desecration story was not in the report cited by NEWSWEEK. Anyway7 can anyone on this thread really say that they found this story incredible when they first heard of it?

[Mark A. York]

Hiding the truth from the press is an administration tactic. It makes anonymice all the more necessary. They're not all as good as the other. The press didn't cause all of these problems. If the rest of the world wasn't so willing to see us as capable of this sort of thing there'd be a more level playing field. Since enough things have been done to give them that impression they've got a head start.

[Woody]

Marc Davidson wrote: "Woody, let's not compare the failures and abuses of the administration with those of the media."
_______________

Marc, my sentence was so long and rambling, I'm not sure that anyone could remember the first of it by the time they got to the last of it. Well, as Reagan said, there I go again.

My point was that Marc C. brought up the failings of the administration and military leading up to his criticism and offer of some cover for Newsweek; and I felt, as you seem to, that those issues are totally unrelated. Journalistic standards and ethics exist independently of what others do. However, I'm still trying to determine what those standards are.

I agree with you about unnamed sources. I have no problem with that at all. It's just that the press needs to be very careful with the information they provide--in fact, information from any source.

Motive isn't important, but I believe that Newsweek jumped the gun on this because it was bad news for this administration and its military and foreign policies. I believe that more caution would have been taken for a Democratic administration, but Newsweek believes that anything bad about Republicans just has to be true and, thus, require less verification.

...and, I'm not biased.

[Sergei]

Reg: "Meanwhile, what does Comrade Christopher Hitchens have to offer in the midst of it all?"

One also wonders what Michael "Tater" Tots has to say about the rank hypocrisy emanating from the domains of the "respectable" bloggers (like his buddy Glenn Reynolds) over this.

Or is he still too busy palling it up with his Druze and Maronite/Phalangist buddies in Lebanon and writing pieces on the glories of Lebanon's Gucci Revolution for the LA Weekly?

[reg]

Woody, I think that everyone who read the Newsweek story who's been awake for the past 18 months saw it not as some incredible new scandal but more of the same after Abu Ghraib and stuff that's already been verified. It had all of the "scandal-worthiness" of reading about Clinton getting ANOTHER round of blowjobs, but maybe the reporter got the time and place wrong. I think more caution would have been taken about the details of this reported instance if this administration had not already disgraced itself and shred its own credibility on these issues. General Eikenberry has clearely debunked the idea that the Newsweek story was anything more than a thin layer of icing on a cake that was already out of the oven. Also, why the hell didn't the Pentagon deny this to Newsweek when they went to them prior to publication ???? That's just incredible to me. The only logical assumption is that they didn't deny it because it's true and they didn't realize that Newsweek's sourcing wasn't rock solid.

[Mark A. York]

"I believe that more caution would have been taken for a Democratic administration, but Newsweek believes that anything bad about Republicans just has to be true and, thus, require less verification.

...and, I'm not biased."

This statement unless it's rongue in cheek is an admission of bias. It's completely refuted by the facts during the Clinton administration. Blinders man; you and a host of others have them firmly in place. But you don't give a shit so who else should? Case dismissed.

[reg]

Still nothing on Roger L. Simon, Instaputzit or Little Green Footballs mentioning the most recent information on the U.S. being deeply implicated in the "Oil for Food scandal". A bit about Brit MP George Galloway testifying, but nothing...nada...not a single note that really would matter to an interested American who actually gives a shit about what their government was up to in the midst of it all.

Also, for a lefty media critic whose focus on the Isikoff story is more the implications of Newsweek's mediocrity than the contextual political sewer, give a look at Eric A. over Altercation. I like that anti-war Alterman is taking Newsweek to task and pro-war Sullivan is taking his fellow bloggers and the Bushies to task. Nice symmetry. (How the fuck does one spell that ?)

[reg]

I've had a couple of shots of Ezra Brooks so I'm going to go out on a limb here. This is not a political endorsement - God Forbid! - but Woody's doing a nice job of blogging over at GM's Corner. Lot's of his characteristic humor - very funny post re: Kinky Friedman just up. He's still got his head in that awkward posture when he discusses politics, etc. but I've got to give him credit. He's a natural...

He's also a major pain in the ass, but what else is new ?

[jim hitchcock]

Second that, Reg. I'm thinking Woody's Woodshed here...