After all, it’s not as if Donohue has been secretive about his motives or desires. In a recent Women’s Wear Daily profile , Donohue bragged about his ability to manufacture controversy:
BILL DONOHUE: THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE’S ATTACK DOG
In December 2005, a reporter from the Washington Post asked the Catholic League’s president, William Donohue, if he was offended that President Bush’s season’s greetings card did not specifically mention Christmas.
“At first, it didn’t bother me,” Donohue recalled in a recent interview. “I said, ‘So what. All presidents have had cards like this.’”
But when told by the reporter that everyone from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Bill Clinton had at least one Christmas card where they mentioned something religious, Donohue pounced.
The following day, in the Post’s page-one story, Donohue rebuked the most conspicuously Christian president in 25 years for not being Christian enough. “This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture,” he said in the article.
“Good Morning America” booked Donohue for an interview. And the next year, the Catholic League’s president received an invitation to the White House Christmas party.
“Basically, I got rewarded for attacking him,” Donohue happily concluded. “Here at the Catholic League, we’ll give you an opinion on the weather if you want it.”
It’s this ability to manufacture controversy that has brought a moribund advocacy group firmly into the black and turned Donohue into catnip for the press. For talk show bookers and reporters on deadline, he’s a never-ending sideshow who comes ever ready to hurl expressions of indignation and opprobrium at anyone who might have offended him. As prejudice against individual Catholics has receded, Donohue has simply turned up the volume, taking aim at everyone who questions the church’s official positions on homosexuality, abortion and birth control, lapsed Catholics included.
Last year, Donohue urged Sony to put a disclaimer at the beginning of “The Da Vinci Code.” Then came Madonna - “Just when I thought we’d gotten rid of her,” he lamented - who yanked his chain when she decided to sing part of her concert against a cross. Just before Christmas, Donohue chewed out the film producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein yet again for their decision to open the horror film “Black Christmas” on Jesus’ birthday. It’s at least the third time he’s attacked the filmmakers, the others being for the movies “Priest” and “Dogma.”
“It’s not so much the plot of ‘Black Christmas’ that bothers us,” Donohue told the New York Post’s Page Six. “It’s the fact that the Weinstein boys are back again, choosing a title and an opening date to make their latest statement.”
Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for the Weinsteins, said of Donohue: “He’s helpful to have. He raises money by getting his name in the paper, the movie gets press and the columnist gets an item. Everyone wins.”
But the same thing that keeps Donohue in the press prevents him from becoming truly respectable within the religious community, where his antics are a source of frequent consternation.
Mark Silk, director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College said, “He’s a thug. He reverts to bullying because he thinks that’s what the job entails.”
Rev. Mark Massa, a Jesuit priest and co-director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University, accused Donohue of being unable to differentiate between healthy debate and real religious bigotry. “Not everyone who criticizes the church is anti-Catholic,” he said.
The editors at the Catholic weekly magazine America seem to agree. In 2000, they chastised Donohue for denouncing movies he hadn’t even watched. “While being first may increase one’s chances of attracting media attention, there is a danger that the Catholic League reinforces the stereotype that the Catholic Church is at best unreflective and at worst unfairly biased and paranoid,” wrote Rev. James Martin. “In the long run, this may do more harm to the church’s reputation than a short-lived movie or play.”
Bitch Ph.D. argues that Donohue’s bullying tactics constitute abuse, and I’m inclined to agree: this episode has all the trappings of a Salem witch-hunt.
At the Frameshop Jeffrey Feldman has some specific suggestions about what we can do to prevent this from happening again the future:
Effective immediately, Frameshop is calling for the following actions to be taken against Bill Donohue and his followers:
All Democratic and Republican Party leaders should jointly condemn the threats to sodomize, rape and murder of Amanda Marcotte by Bill Donohue and his followers.
The IRS should immediately investigate the non-profit status of Bill Donohue’s Catholic League under the suspicion that his organization has violated its 501(c)(3) status.
The Attorney General of the City of the New York should immediately inquire as to the connection between Bill Donohue’s and his followers who threatened to sodomize, rape and murder Amanda Marcotte.
The FBI should track down the men who issued the threats to sodomize, rape and murder Amanda Marcotte .
All media outlets must cease to invite Bill Donohue on the air.
As Richard Blair points out at The All-Spin Zone, “Republican smear attacks against one Democratic candidate are attacks against all Democratic candidates.”
That this particular attack involved a widespread, misleading, defamatory personal campaign of harassment against two women whose positions Donohue routinely distorted, and that mass media outlets publicized without correction or contextualization, is an outrage.
I first saw the work of photojournalist Stuart Isett in a December, 2004 The New York Times article about the Millau Bridge in France. Like most newspaper photographs, the image was meant to illustrate the story, but this one overwhelmed it. My eyes were drawn again and again to Isett’s image of a bridge that is “higher than the Eiffel Tower, longer than the Champs-Élysées”:
Strangely, however, this image of the monstrous bridge floating amid layers of thick, cottony clouds — a picture that seemed to place the bridge not in France, but rather in a vast, fantastical realm of mist and myth — was not representative of Isett’s work as I would later find it on the photo-sharing site Flickr. There, I would see most often among Isett’s photographs not towering shots of massive architectural objects, but rather street-level images of everyday life in Asia — images such as this one, which Isett took in Nanjie, a model Communist village in China:
As I combed through Isett’s work on flickr, I began to trace the outlines of the man behind the camera. Isett’s work is dominated by a strong social, empirical vision that manages to be both empathetic and investigative at the same time. His captions disclose the political and humanitarian interests that underpin his photography.
I wanted to know more about Isett, and to find out why this man, who had the ability to publish his photographs in the pages of The New York Times and on the cover of Time magazine, felt a need to publish his work on Flickr. I contacted Stuart and asked him for an interview; he gracefully acceded to my request.
on your formative years as a photographer
Q. When did you first become interested in photography?
A. When I was about 13. My Grandfather was a hobby photographer and he let me use one of his old 35mm, Zeiss cameras from the 1940s. With such a simple camera, I was really forced to learn quickly about camera basics which helped spark my interest in photography.
Q. What was the first photograph that you remember making an impression on you?
A. I think was amazed at all my first photos. Not amazed because they were great photos, but amazed by the mechanics of capturing the world and then having that world permanently stored onto paper. I like photos because of their sense of time and place, how they remind me of the time I took them.
Q. Can you describe the first photograph you took that made you, or someone else, think that you might have a calling as a photographer?
A. The first photo that made me think I wanted to do this as a professional was taken at the Statue Of Liberty of all places. I was 19 at the time and taking a intro photo class at university. I was looking for a different angle on the statue so I stood underneath and shot up.
It taught me early on to try and look at the world differently, see beyond what is normal, what is standard and what is expected.
Q. Do you feel that your identity changes when you lift the camera to your eye? Do you act differently?
A. I’ve always felt that being a documentary photographer requires that you ‘act’ to a certain amount. Whether I’m with gang bangers in Chicago, Yakuza in Japan or Khmer Rouge guerillas in Cambodia, you have to take on a certain personality that helps you to blend in and work. Maybe it’s being quiet and discreet, maybe I’ll be in your face and more aggressive. I’ve also described the process as being like dancing—sometimes you lead, sometimes you’re led, but you always have to be aware of the rhythm, tempo and form of the music. I’m a lousy dancer but when I photograph, I try to keep a finely tuned sense of what is going on around me at all times.
Q. When you’re on assignment, and have submitted shots to an editor, do you find that you have differences of opinion over which shots should run in the paper? Or is it usually pretty easy to agree on the strongest images?
A. It’s never easy and deadline pressure often makes it impossible to have much say. Depends on whether I’m working with newspaper editors or magazine editors. The latter give you more time to have input. My editors at The New York Times are good and often go with my lead image when I file. When shooting, though, ultimately I photograph for myself. If an editor butchers the work there’s not much I can do besides look at the work myself and find its strengths and weaknesses.
Q. What’s the wildest thing you’ve done to gain better access for a shot?
A. Well, I’m not paparazzi so when I climb walls or take motorcycle taxis to a war zone, it’s usually to cross a simple physical barrier. I find talking is the best way to get any kind of access and sometimes that requires a certain ‘creativity’.
Q. What types of assignments attract you most?
A. Long term, documentary projects. The ones that sadly don’t exist much these days so I usually self finance them. I enjoy working at night, with shady characters in dingy cities. Something about Weegee’s style of work, showing the dark underbelly of life appeals to me.
A Manila policeman points to a man arrested after a drug raid.
Q. Have you ever not taken a photograph because you didn’t want to embarrass the person in front of you? Have you ever destroyed any of your shots for similar reasons? Has anyone else sought to destroy or confiscate them (or your camera) because they didn’t like the shots you took?
A. I’ve been detained and questioned a few times (China, Burma and in Cambodia) and have been forced to hide film in a few situations. Again, if there’s a problem I often try to politely talk my way out of it. Plenty of times I’ve not taken images because I could tell the subject did not want their photo taken. When people are in a tough situation I always make it clear what I’m doing—I will never just jump in, snap a shot and then take off.
A. Nonsense. Trying to blame the press for failed policies never works for any government but we make a handy scapegoat. Joao’s doing his job, showing us the reality of what is happening in Iraq. People who want to hide this kind of information are simply divorcing themselves from reality, an attitude which seems to sum up pretty well our failed policies in Iraq.
on flickr
Q. The first time I viewed your flickrstream, I was amazed by your photos. But my incredulity doubled when I saw that you had taken a photo that I had noticed in The New York Times. Why post your photos on flickr when you’re already reaching such a wide audience?
A. Two reasons. I never get any feed back from my work in the New York Times. People rarely write letters to the editor about the images!! Also, I don’t even get much feed back from my editors beyond a ‘great’ or ‘thanks’ so it’s nice to here from people to hear what they think of my work. I’ve always preferred that kind of one on one feedback, shooting for a newspaper is a way to make a career but personally I sometimes don’t find it satisfying for the very reason that I don’t learn how my images affect people.
A surgeon at Sisophon Hospital prepares to amputate the leg of a soldier who stepped on a landmine.
Q. What do you think of Flickr? What are some of the good and bad things about it? What have you gotten out of posting your work there?
A. Well, what’s good and bad about the Flickr is the same as what’s good and bad about any public space. You get clowns but you also get people passionate about photography and passionate about the subjects I shoot. People use it for different reasons, for me it’s to see which of my images are affecting people and in what ways. I hope it helps my work.
Q. Can you name some photographers you’ve encountered on flickr who deserve a wider audience?
Q. Two of your photo sets on flickr are particularly stunning. Let’s start with Japan’s Far Right.
My sense is that many Americans don’t know much about his movement. Can you tell us a little about it, and what led you to cover it?
A. Americans don’t know much about what happened in Japan after the war and complicity of the US government in resurrecting many of the same war criminals who started the war. The uyoko are an ever present force in Japan and are very effective at limiting democracy and debate in Japan. Opponents to the Imperial Family, apologists for the war, union leaders, pacifists, ethnic minorities, all kinds of ordinary Japanese have been attacked and murdered (and many more silenced) by the right-wing extremists in Japan.
Young right wingers harass opponents on the streets of Tokyo.
A. For many it’s simply a job. For many, it’s also a place to find a home. Many come from broken homes and tough backgrounds so the uyoko can provide them with a sense of importance and power that they feel they lack. It’s why young people do stupid things in many countries and it’s how older people manipulate young people to do stupid things for them.
Q. Were you in physical danger while taking these shots?
A. None at all. They were actually quite nice. Being a foreigner helps, you’re kind of an oddity so they enjoyed having me around, if only to watch my odd foreign ways. I obliged them by playing the role of the dumb ‘baka na gaijin’ or foreigner. I generally find that people in any society or situation are usually motivated by the same things. Show some kindness, be genuine and polite and there’s rarely a problem. I often find humor is the best way to disarm people in difficult situations.
A Japanese yakuza gangster in the door of an extremist’s group sound truck.
Q. I found this photograph to be amazingly striking. The man’s style seems to come right out of Dick Tracy. He’s obviously posing for you, which leads me to wonder whether or not he saw you as a vehicle for promoting his message. Would it bother you if one of the effects of this photograph was to spread that message?
A. Actually he wasn’t posing but he briefly froze in the door when he saw me.
A. For the same reason you said ‘wow’. It’s actually a well photographed event but something I wanted to try. It wasn’t easy. It was extremely hot and there was lots of blood flying around from the whips. By the time I got to the crucifixions I was so exhausted I don’t think I even noticed the nails being pounded in. The crowds and the crush were crazy so getting up front for to photograph required a lot of shoving. It’s not something for the faint of heart.
Q. As I look at shots like this, I wonder what you were thinking as you stood so close to someone about to have a nail driven through his hand. So . . . what was going through your mind when you took this shot?
Annual crucifixions are held by devout Filipino Catholics to celebrate Easter in San Fernando, north of Manila. Before being crucified participants whip themselves, or are whipped by locals, for penance.
A. I swear, I was so tired I didn’t notice until I got the film back that I caught that moment. It happened very quickly and I only got 2-3 frames. This one just worked out perfectly.
Q. Was this man aware of you when you took this shot? How did he react to you?
A. There were all in a trance basically so I’m sure they didn’t notice us.
Q. What was the toughest part about taking these pictures?
A. Heat, blood, dust, crowds. I’d never do it again.
on the profession
Q. What do you wish you’d known about the profession before you entered it?
A. I’d never get rich. Just kidding. I wish I had some staff work at a paper somewhere, I think it would have taught me more discipline. I’ve always freelanced so had to learn a lot of things the hard way.
Q. Do you enjoy your work? What are the best and worst things about it?
A. Enjoy isn’t a strong enough word. I’m lucky to do what I do and know there’s not much else I can do at this point.
Q. What techniques do you use to photograph people on the street without making them aware that you are shooting them?
A. I don’t sneak up on people or use long lenses. Quite often I enjoy the reaction I get with the camera but most often if I want a more unaffected scene I simply wait and shoot slowly until the people get bored of me and carry on doing what they do.
Q. What cameras and lenses do you use most often?
A.Nikon F100 35mm, small and compact, and a Nikon D2X for digital assignment work. I have all the Nikon F1.4 lenses so can never really leave Nikon, I love these lenses so much.
Q. What’s the most important quality a photographer needs to have?
A. Perseverance.
Q. What goes into a good crop?
A. I rarely crop my images so can’t really say. I have no problem with slight crops (less than 10%) to clean up an image a little, maybe clear off the edges but never more than that.
Q. What books do you recommend to people hoping to learn more about photography?
A. Actually I think the best way to be a good photographer is to have interests other than photography so I’d recommend reading anything other than photo books but about subjects you want to photograph. You have to be careful to see that photos are simply a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
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.
You can try to find the word “torture” in this New York Times article on the Republican “Detainee Bill,” but you won’t be able to locate it. You’ll see only vague wording about “a new approach” and “wring[ing] information from terrorists.”
Hey — if the senators voting on this bill aren’t going to think about what it really entails, why should journalists have to?
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.
Former British Ambassador Craig Murray has put together a post that casts further doubts on the viability of the recent British terror plot (via reader RG). Murray writes:
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.
[. . .]
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.
Murray’s post is directly in line with the suspicions I raised in last Sunday’s post about the timing of the arrests. After reading NBC’s report, in which sources claimed that the attacks were not imminent, that the suspects had neither passports nor plane tickets, and that the Bush administration pressured the U.K. government to make the arrests before the investigation was complete, I argued that the entire affair had been politically motivated:
This goes way beyond what we understood previously — that the Bush Administration knew about the arrests ahead of time, and timed a PR offensive against the Democrats around it.
It turns out that it was the other way around: the Bush Administration orchestrated the timing of the arrests to coordinate them with the PR offensive, which attacked Democrats after Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary.
For the GOP, the short term political importance of getting the Lamont victory, and the developing sense that America had fully turned against the Iraq War, off the news was reason enough to disrupt an active terror investigation. The disruption hurt the legal case against the terrorists — it will be much harder to convict them without passports or airline tickets. The GOP was so insistent on the timing that they threatened to “render” the lead suspect if the British did not comply with their wishes.
It’s looking more and more possible that this terror plot was a blatant attempt by the U.S. and U.K. governments to alter the news cycles in their respective countries. It’s long past time for journalists to start investigating these stories more fully before beginning their feeding frenzies.
Or, as Atrios puts it, “It’s increasingly likely that the whole British plot wasn’t much more of a big deal than the idiotic nonsense in Florida awhile back. Certainly as of yet there’s nothing to indicate that FULL PANIC MODE AT THE AIRPORTS and cable news’ return to 24 hour OH MY GOD THEY’RE GOING TO BOMB THE SHOPPING MALLS mode had any justification whatsoever.”
The fact that several hijackers had neither passports nor plane tickets seems to have come as a surprise to Andrew Sullivan, but it’s nothing that readers of this site didn’t already know.
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Having patted myself on the back for one post, I must give myself a demerit for another. My last piece, “Sugarcoating Torture,” which criticized a Malkin guest-blogger for using euphemisms to describe torture, nevertheless accepted too readily the claim that the London arrests challenged the widely held belief that information gleaned from torture cannot be trusted. Having already detailed the ways in which the arrests were politically motivated, I should have put two and two together and realized that if the alleged plot was uncovered using torture, that was all the more reason to doubt it.
Over the last few years, there have been several occasions when — for all my skepticism about the Bush administration’s politicization of terror alerts — I’ve been surprised at how my skepticism, even cynicism, about terror alerts just can’t keep pace with the administration’s bad faith.
I’m not ready to say the London bomb plot is another bamboozlement. It at least seems clear the Brits were involved in a serious investigation. But even this case now seems to be turning out to be less than met the eye. And there are real grounds to question whether Bush and Blair jumped the gun for reasons other than counter-terrorism. We’ll see.
New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame has confirmed that the paper had the NSA Wiretapping story days before the November 2004 Presidential race was decided, but sat on it because editors thought that its publication could affect the outcome of the election.
According to Calame, Executive Editor Bill Keller has provided a shifting series of rationales for the publication delay:
Internal discussions about drafts of the article had been “dragging on for weeks” before the Nov. 2 election, Mr. Keller acknowledged. That process had included talks with the Bush administration. He said a fresh draft was the subject of internal deliberations “less than a week” before the election.
“The climactic discussion about whether to publish was right on the eve of the election,” Mr. Keller said. The pre-election discussions included Jill Abramson, a managing editor; Philip Taubman, the chief of the Washington bureau; Rebecca Corbett, the editor handling the story, and often Mr. Risen. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, was briefed, but Mr. Keller said the final decision to hold the story was his.
Mr. Keller declined to explain in detail his pre-election decision to hold the article, citing obligations to preserve the confidentiality of sources. He has repeatedly indicated that a major reason for the publication delays was the administration’s claim that everyone involved was satisfied with the program’s legality. Later, he has said, it became clear that questions about the program’s legality “loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood.”
[. . .]
Holding a fresh draft of the story just days before the election also was an issue of fairness, Mr. Keller said. I agree that candidates affected by a negative article deserve to have time — several days to a week — to get their response disseminated before voters head to the polls.
Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings argues that, while it might have been reasonable for the paper to give the Bush administration a day or two to respond, it had an ethical, moral, and journalistic obligation to publish the story before the election:
The press has obligations not just to the administration, but also to their readers. If a story seems likely to affect an election, that’s presumably because a lot of readers think that it’s important — the sort of story that would actually affect their vote. That being the case, newspapers have an especially strong obligation to get their facts right. But it also means that it is especially important to publish those stories — at least if you believe in democracy. If a newspaper does not have “several days to a week” to get a response from the administration, then both the paper and the administration should make do with a day. If the administration can’t give a response within whatever time frame they are given, the paper should run the story while noting that fact. But to adopt a policy that essentially guarantees that literally nothing a President or his administration do during the last week of a campaign will be covered if it’s damaging to them would be insane.
In this particular case, the Times could have given the administration ample time to respond. It could have consulted outside legal experts to determine whether the NSA program was legal, and if it had doubts it could have explained them. It had every opportunity to publish the story fairly. It did not do so. And by failing to do so, it failed in its duty to inform us of facts relevant to one of the most important decisions we make as citizens. The Times was wrong to think that holding the story was required by “fairness” to the administration, and wrong again not to recognize that publishing it was required by fairness to its readers.
Obviously, the Times was unwilling to put itself, and its reporters, in the crosshairs of the Republican attack machine. At the moment of truth, it shrunk from the spotlight and kept its head down. By sitting on the story, the paper chose to commit a powerful act of journalistic weakness, rather than a powerful act of journalistic courage.
But that hasn’t stopped the paper from crowing about its integrity. Consider this claim, from a June 2006 editorial:
Our news colleagues work under the assumption that they should let the people know anything important that the reporters learn, unless there is some grave and overriding reason for withholding the information. They try hard not to base those decisions on political calculations, like whether a story would help or hurt the administration.
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Stuart Isett
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