I didn’t post about Bush’s ridiculous claim, this past weekend, that his administration has never had a “stay the course” policy in Iraq. It just seemed too . . . too obvious a lie, even for this administration, for it to be taken seriously by anyone. The evidence to the contrary is out there, and we’re living in the YouTube age; some industrious teenager has, no doubt, already compiled a series of clips of Bush saying the words “stay the course” over and over again, with “Would I Lie to You?” playing in the background.
But Bush’s assertion has, apparently, gone unchallenged by CBS and the AP (via Atrios). This silence on the part of the mainstream press goes way beyond attack-poodle punditry (poodluntrity?). We have arrived at a point when even the most basic, the most obvious, the most bold-faced of lies is allowed to propagate itself, like a virus, throughout the media landscape, without even so much as an antibody in sight. The sad thing is that we reached that point five years ago.
Lord, November 7th can’t come soon enough, can it?
There is one constituency I worry about, though, in all of this: the Republican pundits. After months — nay, years — of faithfully regurgitating the Republic “stay the course” mantra, these pundits have been left abruptly by the President with no rhetorical ground upon which to stand. The script has been changed at the last minute; all of those perfectly-timed sneers and knowing smiles will now have to be reworked into an entirely new routine.
That’s got to be a hard life, being a Republican marionette whose handlers have started to tangle all of the strings. But, I’ll say one thing for them: those suckers sure know how to dance.
I just wish they’d tango out of the room, already.
Update:Think Progress has a nice collection of “stay the course” clips (second video on that page). Sadly, The Eurythmics do not make an appearance.
It was a cultural moment whose significance (like Oprah’s influence) should not be underestimated. You can read excerpted transcripts from the show on Oprah’s site, which includes a primer on developing critical literacy. Rich, who was, as always, an astute, eloquent, and observant speaker, described the deceptive selling of the War in Iraq and the ways in which those initial untruths have haunted the war (and the Bush Administration) ever since.
Speaking about media coverage of the war, Rich said:
The problem in Iraq is that it is so unsafe. A very brave war correspondent for the Times said two weeks ago that 98 percent of the country—and in Baghdad in particular—reporters can’t go to because it’s just too dangerous. More reporters have been killed in this war than any modern war. At a certain point, a place like the New York Times or ABC News has to say, you cannot get killed for the story. That in itself tells us something that the country is so unsafe that we can’t cover it. We rely on Iraqis to cover it and the Iraqis often are so frightened of being seen working for Americans that they won’t reveal their identities to their own families as journalists.
Oprah’s show was telecast only a day after a new report in The Lancet (free registration required) revealed just how superficial our knowledge of the war in Iraq really is. The Lancet study estimated that 665,000 “excess deaths” (see Majikthise’s post on the methodology) have occurred in Iraq since the U.S. invasion:
We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which, by the Sphere standards, constitutes a humanitarian emergency.
Think about that number for a minute. Or, devote a second to thinking about each one of those deaths.
What, you don’t have 655,000 seconds to spare?
According to this site, a city with a population of 655,000 people would rank as the eighteenth largest city in the U.S. — above Baltimore.
655,000 excess deaths. A city bigger than Baltimore. It boggles the mind.
Rich didn’t mention the Lancet study, which was mostly likely published after the show was taped. But he did talk about the television coverage of the war. He noted that the networks presented us with long shots of bombs exploding, but that we never saw the street-level effects of those bombs. It was like a fireworks display, he said. Another guest, Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute, added that no country would be able to sustain war if citizens were able to see its real consequences.
One woman got up and said that she had never thought about the television coverage in that way — that she had never considered the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and babies who died in those attacks.
655,000 excess deaths: it’s long past time for Americans to start thinking about that.
Postscript:
It’s exactly the type of person who hasn’t thought much about the Iraq War that Oprah’s show is able to reach.
Oprah mentioned during the broadcast that when she did a show, before the beginning of the Iraq War, that asked “Is War the Only Answer,” she got the worst hate-mail of her entire career in television. One correspondent called her an “incredible treasonous bitch.” Another said, “I wish you would choke on the ashes of 9/11.” One person told her to “take your hairy black ass back to Africa.”
I think it’s important that readers of this site thank Oprah for doing this show. In one hour of broadcast television, she brought Frank Rich’s analysis of “truthiness” into more living rooms than most bloggers could ever hope to reach. Please write to her here.
This bill is a stain on the honor of our nation, a moral and ethical outrage that strains the credibility of our country. I am embarrassed to call myself an American on this day.
I’ve been teaching Frederick Douglass recently. In his famous anti-slavery speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, Douglass writes that “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” Though his subject, in the passage below, is slavery, it is to that institution of the past, and its effects on American society, that the base, outrageous, shameful, and inhumane practice of torture in the present should be compared.
Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength, than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
The “compromise” will, as I predicted, allow the “tough interrogations” by amending the war crimes act. And they will reportedly create a new JAG office to review classified information and determine if terrorist suspects can see it if it’s being used against them in a trial. We already know they have devised some habeas corpus loophole to keep innocent people imprisoned without any due process.
Democrats allowed this to happen by not calling attention to the fact that the McCain-Graham-Warner bill did away with habeas corpus for terror suspects. Interested more in the spectacle of Bush being handed a “defeat” by members of his own party than they were in critiquing the flaws in the actual piece of legislation M-G-W proposed, they stood silent. They forgot that Cheney-Bush-Rove never truly compromise: they ask for everything they want, knowing that they’ll wind up with most of what they want. And, as Digby notes, they look all the better for having “compromised” to get the legislation through.
The words “habeas corpus” were not even part of the public debate.
Now we are going to be, by fact and law, a nation of torturers. The day that bill passes will be a day of infamy not soon forgotten.
Update: Amid the despair we feel today, it’s important to remember this:
The Democrats have largely stood silent and allowed the trio of Republicans to do the lifting. It’s time for them to either try to fix this bill or delay it until after the election. The American people expect their leaders to clean up this mess without endangering U.S. troops, eviscerating American standards of justice, or further harming the nation’s severely damaged reputation.
The bill is not yet law. There is still time for action. What will Democrats do to stop it, and what will we do to support them?
It looks like the McCain Graham Warner version of the military commissions bill is going to pass. While much attention has been paid to the difference between the Bush and these “rebel” Republicans versions, very little notice has been taken of the fact that the McCain version too takes the draconian step of suspending habeas corpus, the linchpin of a free society.
Last Thursday nine former federal judges sent a letter to Congress [pdf text] detailing their opposition to the proposed McCain, Graham, Warner Military Commissions Act of 2006 which would strip US prisoners held outside the United States from their right to habeas corpus.
This is a terrible, terrible bill. What bothers me most is the denial of habeas rights. Denying the right to file for habeas corpus to all people detained outside the US, or who have been found to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant, means that virtually all detainees would have no legal recourse if they felt they had been unjustly imprisoned, or if their legal rights had been violated. As Katherine noted earlier, only ten detainees have been charged under military commissions so far. There are approximately 455 detainees at Guantanamo now; as of May, there were about 560 at Bagram, and who knows how many elsewhere. That means that even leaving aside the question of detainees who have already been released, in most cases after years of confinement, less than one percent of detainees face military commissions. This draft bill would strip the remaining 99% of any right to legally question the government’s right to detain them.
For a provocative take on the philosophy behind the Bush Administration’s efforts to legitimize torture, take a look at this post by Helmut:
Bush’s demand that Congress give him a law regarding “interrogation” practices specifying what is appropriate treatment and what is not for the huge number of people he has locked up is designed to provide a highly specific frame of reference around which an “alternative interrogation” regime would then be constructed. That is, give Bush a legalistic definition of what amounts to torture and he’ll discover the ways to remain true to the letter but entirely unfaithful to the spirit of the law. You say “waterboarding,” I’ll say “bobbing for apples.” This is the so-called problem of defining torture.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.
[. . .]
O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .
Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.
No wonder we’re now digging trenches around Baghdad. . .
But the way the administration went about creating the CPA illustrates everything you need to know about the childlike sciolism of these so-called grown-ups. They insisted on invading a well contained country of 25 million people, ripped its society to shreds, and then put a bunch of low level cronies and inexperienced schoolkids in charge of creating a Club for Growth wet dream in the desert. And they spent billions and billions of dollars failing to do anything but lay the groundwork for civil war. I don’t know if it’s possible to screw up on a grander scale than that.
Bush’s tone during this press conference has been well-limned by Ezra (who deems him “furious”), Digby (who calls him “angry and petulant”), and Barbara (who writes that he is “wound a little too tight”).
But what strikes me even more than Bush’s typical peevishness is his complete inability to grasp even the basic substance of David Gregory’s simple question, which boiled down to this: Do you agree to allow other countries to treat American soldiers in the way that you have treated, and propose to treat, enemy combatants?
It was a question that asked Bush to step outside himself, to view himself and his country from another perspective. And we all know that this is something that he is almost constitutionally incapable of doing. That rigidity has been, indeed, the only thing that has allowed him to maintain his belief in himself and in his self-appointed mission, despite the objections of much of the world. Like a horse wearing blinders at a racetrack, he can look neither to the side nor behind him, but only straight ahead, to the path directly in front of him. He has come to believe that that path is the only path; and why wouldn’t he, when he can see no other?
It seems to me that the only possible retort to Gregory’s question would have been an assertion of American exceptionalism, based on a claim of its inherent moral superiority: we should be allowed to treat others worse than we wish to be treated ourselves because our values are superior to those of other countries.
But that moral superiority was shredded when the Bush Administration did away with the Geneva conventions. We can no longer condemn other countries for torturing people because we now torture people. We can no longer condemn the unfair treatment of prisoners by brutal dictatorships because we have proved ourselves worthy of comparison to the worst despots.
And so Bush is left to stammer and steam and evade, and to practice, in spectacularly half-assed fashion, every known debate trick in the book as he tries to avoid the question before him.
But none of those tricks worked, and the fact is that if you look at what he actually said, rather than what The New York Times wants to interpret him as having said, it was, as Barbara noted, that “the world would be a better place if enemies who capture U.S. soldiers could torture them, try them on secret evidence, and execute them.” [that quote is Barbara’s, not GWB’s]
I’m sure that will bring great comfort to our soldiers serving overseas.
Update:More from Billmon (via Susie), who hits on the loss of moral superiority I was trying to get at above:
We are, in a sense, at the moment of truth. The sadistic and/or bizarre acts committed in Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s secret prisons can be written off as the crimes of a few bad apples with names like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld — or, more charitably, as the consequences of a string of bad and brutal decisions made under emergency conditions by men who were terrified by all the things they didn’t know about Al Qaeda. Either way, they were not acts of national policy, endorsed and approved by Congress after open, public debate. But, thanks to the Hamdan decision, the question is now formally on the table.
[. . .]
So now we’ll find out, I guess, what we’re really made of as a nation — down deep, in our core. Would the Geneva Conventions themselves start to unravel if the global superpower disavowed its obligations under them? Balkin seems to think this is possible. At best, the United States would add another big asterisk to its place on the list of civilized nations, and forfeit forever its ability to chastise the human rights abuses of others without triggering a global laughing fit.
[. . .]
What will be on the table then is the question of whether a nation as powerful and potentially dangerous to others as America (the proverbial bull in the china shop) can survive on brute force alone — without moral legitimacy or political prestige, without true allies (save for the world’s other leper regimes) and without “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”
It was an examination of a new article in the Columbia Journalism Review called Failures of Imagination. The article provides more evidence that U.S. newspaper editors buried important news stories about torture that, had they been given adequate attention in 2003, might possibly have prevented the later abuses at Abu Ghraib:
[New York Times reporter Carlotta] Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.”
Gall’s story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”
Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.)
“Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.”
Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline “U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody.” (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)
Gall, who is British, chalks up the delay to reluctance to “believe bad things of Americans,” and in particular to a kind of post-9/11 sentiment. “There was a sense of patriotism, and you felt it in every question from every editor and copy editor,” she says. “I remember a foreign-desk editor telling me, ‘Remember where we are — we can smell the debris from 9/11.’”
[. . .]
The skepticism back in 2003 about Gall’s findings wasn’t limited to the Times. The evidence of homicides got only a short mention on CNN and a brief write-up inside The Washington Post. The biggest follow-up came not in any American paper but in the Sunday Telegraph of London.
“There was no great urge to follow up,” Gall says. “Nobody went to the doorstep of the pathologist or anything like that, until of course Abu Ghraib. And I don’t know why.”
The next time you hear a conservative talking about “the liberal media,” ask him or her whether newspaper editors were right to bury reports of torture in 2003. Not that it will make any difference . . . the conservative fantasy of “the liberal media” is antithetical to everything we know about the reality of coverage of the War in Iraq.
“9th ward diagonal car 1″ Matt Cohen, August 26, 2006
Broken bottles, broken plates,
Broken switches, broken gates,
Broken dishes, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts.
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken.
Last year, I posted the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken,” and linked various phrases to images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The degree to which Dylan’s words fit the events unfolding before us was uncanny.
Of course, only a fool would think that that has been an accident. Bush put Karl Rove in charge of the administration’s post-Katrina strategy, an act of bad faith of such magnitude that one recoils from the sheer monstrosity of it. As Dan Froomkin noted at the time:
Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush’s image.
That is Rove’s hallmark.
And that is exactly what has come to pass: a bungled recovery process that has allowed the wreckage of the storm to fester under the hot Louisiana sun. And it’s all being done with political objectives in mind, as Frank Rich noted in the The New York Times this past Sunday:
Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”
All across the media landscape, the Bush administration is being shown for what it is: a callous political machine that cares only for its own survival.
That is going to be brought home over the next two days, as President Bush attempts to whitewash his response to the storm with a series of PR stunts. After all, you don’t introduce new products in August: you just shine up the old lies and put them out on the shelf in some new packaging.
As noted here a few days ago, Matt Cohen, who blogs at 1115.org, decided to take a first-hand look behind the Bush administration’s spin. Traveling down to New Orleans with his camera, Matt has posted a powerful set of pictures on flickr that document the all-too-slow recovery of New Orleans (I thank him for granting me permission to use a few of his images here), and he has just written a searing account of his trip through the 9th Ward.
But all of that is just the least bad part. What remains of Lakeview and the Lower 9th Ward is a national embarrassment. One year after Katrina, and some houses rest off their foundations and in the streets. Cars sit upside down or crushed, some even under buildings washed away by flood waters. Water-damaged and mud-caked objects are distributed inside houses and in yards. Block after block, the damage appears infinite. The fact that $44 billion has been released for recovery, yet the ruins of the 9th ward are allowed to stand almost frozen in time, is nothing short of disgusting. With so many of our ruling Republican majority subscribing to the “Broken Window” theory, it’s amazing that the ultimate broken window is the flood damage allowed to remain across New Orleans.
It’s an amazing post that showcases the best of what blogs can do. Please go and read it.
Of all of the images that Matt has posted, the one below struck me most deeply:
“HOME This was HOME,” the spray-painted eulogy reads. The house still stands, but the home inside it is gone, for now. It will be vanquished permanently, if the Bush administration has its way.
And that is something that we will never forget.
Update: Please visit Shakespeare’s Sister for many more perspectives on the first anniversary of Hurrican Katrina. In her post, Shakes argues convincingly that “Katrina was the inevitable failure in the wake of Bush Conservatism’s success.”
This is the paradox of waging an unpopular, morally ambiguous war.
What happened to 19-year-old Lance Cpl. Matt Solowynsky at the beginning of this year shows another aspect of the strain. The process of dehumanizing the enemy — the sine qua non of every war in human history, and crushingly obvious when a war grinds on without a clear strategic objective — sooner or later backs up on itself.
Part of the toxic waste of war embeds itself in the emotions and the soul of the combatants. That Guantanamo energy, that gusto to terrorize helpless detainees, to humiliate unarmed civilians, isn’t so easily contained, and begins corrupting the whole system. When a designated enemy isn’t available, anyone — a new recruit, say — will do.
“He didn’t do anything but be a gung-ho Marine,” said Tod Ensign of Citizen Soldier (citizen-soldier.org), the organization that eventually came to Solowynsky’s aid. Indeed, he was the highest ranked recruit in his class when he graduated from Marine Corps Basic Training last September. How odd that, a few months later, he was AWOL, fleeing Camp Pendleton, Calif., as though he were a POW.
It’s an unbelievable story, and Koehler is exactly right that it is the inevitable blowback of the Bush administration’s championing of torture. Read that Wikipedia definition and try to tell me that that is not what is going on here.
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