I spent this past weekend buried in an avalanche of student papers (I’m still picking a few dangling modifiers out of my hair). When I did take a break to watch some Eagles football, my enjoyment was marred not only by the inability of the Eagles coaching staff to count to twelve, but also by a number of Republican attack ads.
More than one of them came from the campaign of Mike Fitzpatrick, a loathsome Bucks-county congressman trying to hold on to his seat against the wildy popular campaign of Patrick Murphy. Faced with increasingly disturbing poll numbers, Fitzpatrick has taken the ultimate low road: he has attempted to “swiftboat” Patrick Murphy’s military service.
Have they no shame?
Don’t answer that.
Patrick is not one to take such insults lying down. On his blog, he responds:
There is nothing that I hold more pride in than my service to our country. From the halls of West Point to the streets of Baghdad, I served honorably, and my record reflects my service. There is camaraderie among veterans - we understand that everyone who wears the uniform of the United States military has sacrificed, some much more so than others. That is why I was so shocked that Congressman Fitzpatrick, who never wore a military uniform, would hold a press conference to question my service.
Murphy’s campaign has just released a new commercial that manages to convey Patrick’s positive, winning attitude, while also condemning Fitzpatrick’s slimy tactics:
As John Kerry, who knows a thing or two about swiftboating, said when he defended Murphy against these charges:
I won’t stand for the “swift boating” of Patrick Murphy. It disgusts me that a congressman who has never worn the uniform of our country stands there in silence as a veteran home from Iraq has his service disparaged. . . . What is it these Republicans who never served have against Democrats who did? . . . .
You know why Mike Fitzpatrick is engaged in the lowest form of smear and fear politics? Because he’s afraid of actually debating Patrick Murphy about the disastrous war in Iraq. He’s afraid to debate a veteran who lives and breathes the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor. He’s terrified of actually leveling with the American people about the way the administration misled America into war, and admitting their stay the course slogans just guarantee more Americans die for a stand still and lose strategy.
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?
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.
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.”
Spike Lee’s documentary and the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina will put New Orleans and the Gulf Coast back on TV for a short while. But it won’t take long for them to disappear again.
Yahoo caption: A sign in the Lower Ninth Ward was nailed to a pole in front of a partly demolished home in New Orleans on Monday, July 24, 2006. Hurricane Katrina struck this neighborhood hard last August.
Whether we like it or not, terrorist attacks on Americans are now part of the global reality. They will continue to happen. Many places around the globe have had to deal with a similar reality for years: India, Ireland, England, Spain, Russia, to name a few. In many cases, these societies have pulled together and not allowed isolated acts of violence to tear at their fiber. Like disease and the forces of nature, it’s a risk that we have to rationally come to terms with.
The government’s responsibility is to make sure that fear and terror are not disproportionate to the reality of the situation. Today the President said “this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom to hurt our nation.” Generalized statements like this, which instill nebulous fear without specific information, are exactly in line with the goals of terror.
I don’t have cable television at home, a doleful economic fact that has often been a source of sadness for me. But, on a day like this, when the cable news stations parade rank speculation as sure knowledge, I’m more than willing to live without my MTV.
Fate is cruel, however, and so I spent part of my morning in the waiting room of a medical office, watching CNN anchors who seemed to have spent entirely too much time looking up synonyms for terror. When a nurse finally called my name, I fairly jumped at whatever private terrors the good doctor had in store for me — they could not have been more painful than the mind-numbing broadcasts I had just witnessed.
As I sat in that waiting room, my reaction to the news of the latest threat to our collective safety was not one of fear, anxiety, or dread; instead, I felt skeptical and angry: skeptical that this latest terror bonanza would turn out to be any less fake than the last one, and angry to see the television networks again fanning the flames of fear with so much enthusiasm.
I’m far from alone in having that that reaction. And how could I be, considering the number of times the Bush Administration has cried wolf on terror?
No, as sad as it is to say so, I and many others greet terror warnings, and news of alleged terror plots, with distrust. That’s because, as Buzzflash notes, when it comes to such warnings, the Bush Administration and its allies have precision timing:
The pattern continues. A terrorist plot is uncovered just as the masses start to question national security strategy. The day after Senate Democrats brought a vote to pull out of Iraq, we catch a few idiots in Miami who were supposedly trying to blow up the Sears Tower, despite the fact that they lacked the means and ability to do so. Then there were the guys busted for supposedly plotting to blow up a New York subway exactly a year after the London bus bombings. Today, a few men in England were arrested for a plan to blow up planes flying to America, just a day after Connecticut voters flatly rejected Joe Lieberman and the war in Iraq.
We certainly can’t deny that there may have indeed been plans to commit these acts. But the timings of the arrest announcements are awfully suspicious. All three were still in the works and had been monitored for several months by very capable intelligence agencies. While the exact nature of today’s arrests is still unclear, none of the plans seemed to have been immediate or imminent threats. The decision of when to intervene has been arbitrary, making the coincidental timings pretty convenient. (And the question of whether some of them are “real threats,” such as the Liberty City “Insane Clown Posse” remain to be seen.)
The accumulated evidence has made it clear that the Bush Administration uses terror warnings politically, in the most cynical way possible. But, even so, a worried CNN viewer might counter, aren’t we safer knowing about these threats?
That is exactly question addressed in a new report, A False Sense of Insecurity (pdf), that the Cato Institute released on Monday. A old friend of mine pointed it out to me; he had found the link on Boing Boing. There, Cory Doctorow introduced the report with these words:
In this mind-blowing, exhaustively researched Cato institute paper by Ohio State University’s John Mueller, the case against being afraid of terrorism is laid out in irrefutable logic, backed with credible, documented statistics about terrorism’s risks. From the number of fatalities produced by terrorism to the trends in terrorism death to the fact that almost no one has ever died from a military biological agent to the fact that poison gas and dirty bombs in the field do only minor damage — this paper is the most reassuring and infuriating piece of analysis I’ve read since September 11th, 2001.
The bottom line is, terrorism doesn’t kill many people. Even in Israel, you’re four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.
One need only turn on the television today to see the truth of that last statement.
The Cato report (pdf) is definitely worth a read; here are a few excerpts:
Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.
[. . .]
HYPERBOLIC OVERREACTION For example, there is at present a great and understandable concern about what would happen if terrorists were to shoot down an American airliner or two, perhaps with shoulder-fired missiles. Obviously, that would be a major tragedy. But the ensuing public reaction to it, many fear, could come close to destroying the industry. Accordingly, it would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researches Michael Sivak and Michael Flannegan, in an article last year in American Scientist wrote that they determined there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate than an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads — rural interstate highways — one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.
So: yes, let’s hear about those terror plots, but let’s put them into a realistic context, and treat them with the same sense of bravery we find within ourselves when we get in the car for a Sunday drive, dig into a bowl of peanuts, or wander outside during a thunderstorm. Perhaps, then, we will find it within ourselves to temper our fear with bravery, if not indifference.
Leaking the names of CIA agents is not politics; it is a crime. Lying to congress about evidence for a war is not politics; it is a crime. Failing to tell a grand jury that you met with a reporter and talked about the CIA agent is not forgetfullness; it is a crime. Deceiving your entire nation and frightening children and adults with images of nuclear explosions in order to get them to support a bloody invasion of another country is not politics; it is a crime.
Two other important reads, also via ASZ: Firedoglake, for continuing analysis of the documents released today, and Senator Kennedy’s powerful statement, posted on Eschaton.
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