Via Instapundit Amid the digitized stream of compelling photographs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a few that are staged, fake or at least misleading. Photo editors struggle to filter them out.
Thanks to digital technology, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most photographed in history. Photographers with digital cameras have provided, almost instantaneously, an enormous flood of accurate, dramatic, and even shocking images to people around the world. But the daily downloads of news photos include some that are staged, fake, or so lacking in context as to be meaningless, despite the Western media's best efforts to separate the factual from the fictional.
On January 14, for example, shortly after unmanned U.S. aircraft fired missiles at several suspected leaders of Al Qaeda who were thought to be staying in the village of Damadola, Pakistan, Agence France-Presse distributed a picture said to be from the scene. AFP is based in Paris, and the picture was sent by one of its locally hired photographers, a stringer. The photo showed a piece of military equipment placed on a damaged stone wall, flanked by a solemn old man and a young boy. Another firm, Getty Images, also distributed the photo to picture editors at newspapers and magazines around the world. The New York Times published it in the paper's January 14 Web edition, and Time magazine ran the picture in its January 23 print edition, along with the caption "Detritus from the latest U.S. raid in Pakistan."
But the caption was wrong, the pose was staged, and the picture was, in essence, untrue. The initial AFP caption said that the military object was a piece of a missile from the U.S. strike. Later, AFP issued a correction, labeling the object an unexploded artillery shell.
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It is not just photographers or their editors who can manipulate images. Terrorists anywhere, and insurgents in Iraq specifically, can and do manipulate photos for their own uses. In Iraq, insurgents have displayed and passed around, for example, pictures said to show U.S. soldiers raping Iraqi women. They have also circulated photos of "giant spiders" supposedly sent by Allah to save Falluja from the Americans. The pictures were, in fact, crude photocopies of an American soldier's souvenir photo of two connected solifugids, also known as camel spiders, which are native to Iraq. In the photo, a soldier was holding up the two connected arachnids before an audience of other soldiers, according to Nir Rosen, a writer and a fellow at the New America Foundation, who stayed with insurgents in Falluja.
"If you went into anyone's house in Falluja, they had pictures of it.... People believed," Rosen said of the camel spiders. In the photograph, the arachnids, which are about the size of a human hand, seem larger than life because the two look like one large insect and because the soldier's hand holding the creatures is unseen. Without the hand as a visual reference, viewers are prompted to compare the camel spiders' size to the soldier's leg in the background, making them look three or four feet long.
The supposed rape pictures were far more important, Rosen said. In a February article for The New York Times Magazine, Rosen quoted a Jordanian Islamist's testimony that the pictures helped to galvanize insurgent activity in Falluja. "In the beginning, [the Fallujans] had said to the insurgents, 'Go make jihad in your own country.' After the rape story, they said, 'OK, we want to start now, or tomorrow we will find our mothers or daughters or sisters raped.' This story exploded the resistance in Falluja. They called us for a meeting and said, 'You were right.'" Rosen told National Journal that the rape pictures resembled those now displayed on a Web site maintained by a radical U.S. Hispanic group, La Voz de Aztlan Communications Network. Go to the Aztlan web link at the sidebar. Read their lame explanation and tell me they are not traitors and should not hanged, drawn and quartered. The men in those pictures have their faces concealed, they are wearing a hodgepodge of military clothing, and they do not carry any weapons or equipment worn by U.S. soldiers. According to a January 2004 article in The Boston Globe, these rape photo claims were repeated in the Turkish Islamist press, possibly contributing to at least one suicide bomb attack in Turkey that killed 11 people. The State Department worked hard, and successfully, to rebut the claims. "It was such an obviously bogus story, we came out pretty well," said a spokesman for the American Embassy in Turkey. Since then, "the atmosphere here is much improved."
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The problem sharpens when no Western reporter is on the scene, but a photographer, usually an Iraqi stringer, is. Photo editors, or even local Western bureau chiefs, have trouble judging the veracity of the images that come from such an event. Last October, for example, The Washington Post printed a striking image of four caskets, purportedly containing dead women and children, and a line of mourning men on a flat desert plain outside the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The photo, provided by the Associated Press, accompanied an article that began this way:
"A U.S. fighter jet bombed a crowd gathered around a burned Humvee on the edge of a provincial capital in western Iraq, killing 25 people, including 18 children, hospital officials and family members said Monday. The military said the Sunday raid targeted insurgents planting a bomb for new attacks.
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In December, The Post did a follow-up story about the differences in accounts of civilian casualties in Anbar province during the U.S. Marine offensive there. Ellen Knickmeyer, The Post's Baghdad bureau chief, who wrote both the October and December stories, went back to the Marine Corps, whose officials insisted that the October air raid had not killed civilians but had in fact destroyed a cell of insurgents responsible for setting off roadside bombs. The December story included this passage: "Analysis of video footage shot by the plane showed only what appeared to be grown men where the bomb struck, [Marine Col. Michael] Denning said. After the airstrike, he said, roadside bombs in the area 'shut down to almost nothing. That was a good strike, and we got some people who were killing a lot of people,' Denning said."
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In an interview, Santiago Lyon, AP's New York-based, Irish-born, director of photography, said of AP photographers in Iraq and Afghanistan, "For the most part, they were journalists before the war." i.e. Saddam's Mulhabarat agents that kept tabs on Western journalists are now employed by them. When checking into prospective employees' bona fides, he said, AP applies "the same standards as we apply to the rest of the world." Once a stringer is employed, "we make it very clear that we expect them to maintain journalistic standards" and to act professionally, even under possible pressure from family and friends. Lyon said he did not know of any episodes where AP editors had fired stringers for improper behavior or rejected their photos as staged or fake.
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In 2005, the U.S. military announced that it had arrested an Iraqi stringer for CBS, whose videotapes showed his presence at several bomb strikes against U.S. forces. The cameraman was acquitted on all charges on April 5 by an Iraqi court after being held at Abu Ghraib prison for exactly a year. The exact charges were never made public, but the U.S. military accused him of siding with insurgents. When hiring locals, "you look for recommendations from people you have worked with ... and you make the best judgment you can," said CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius.
Clearly, terrorists and insurgents know the value of images. In an undated letter from Osama bin Laden to the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, bin Laden wrote about how important the media was in Al Qaeda's war with the West. "It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its share may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles." The translated letter was provided by the U.S. Army's Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point.
Baz said that, today, unlike in wars past, journalists are constantly pressured to choose sides, and that many combatants on either side don't believe that journalistic neutrality exists. This wartime pressure on photographers is "terrible," Baz said. "It is absolutely unbelievable that you are automatically branded East or West, Muslim or Christian, and you have [to] go on one side or the other." The Post's Elbert echoed the lament: "We're part of the story, and that's wrong."
Still, the flawed, faked, and staged photos are only a small slice of the daily download. Harried editors and photo directors will continue trying to filter them out, yet inevitably they won't catch them all. Read it all.
Posted by: ed ||
04/11/2006 01:40 ||
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Q. What do the following have in common:
MSM editors with photos that make the US or Military or Bush look bad, and...
Teenage boys with nudie magazines of girls with big hooters.
A:
They both get excited over the photos, and they dont care if they are fake.
#4
They have also circulated photos of "giant spiders" supposedly sent by Allah to save Falluja from the Americans."If you went into anyone's house in Falluja, they had pictures of it.... People believed.
Just as I expected.. it was a fake photo! - have the natives stopped pointing at planes yet btw?
Posted by: Howard UK ||
04/11/2006 4:48 Comments ||
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Of just as much interest are the real photos they suppress.
National Review. EFL'd a touch, boldface emphasis added.
I see that George Conway, another NRO blogger, appears to have come to the end of his rope regarding the current Republican Party leadership . . . First, get that man a good sandwich or other comfort food and a Guinness. Save some room for dessert. Let's get the blood sugar up.
Second, there are two things that conservatives can do right now. They can push for the ideas that they believe strongly in, and take their message to the people. . . . Or conservatives can throw up their hands and say, "I'm through with this, I'm leaving the party, all of this is pointless."
With option one, conservatives may win, or they may lose. On option two, they will definitely lose.
Third, let's not recall previous administrations through rose colored glasses.
Thinking back to the Clinton administration, do we look back fondly at their "foreign and military policy competence" in the way they handled the growing al-Qaeda threat? The cruise missiles fired, once, at the training camps and empty tents? Those decisive, responses to the first World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, the embassy bombings, the U.S.S. Cole?
Do we look back fondly at their "foreign and military policy competence" in the way they handled Iraq? The collapse of the U.N. inspections, periodic cruise missile attacks that had little impact, the leaky sanctions that hurt the Iraqis more than the regime and that the world was ready to repeal?
Do we look back fondly at their "foreign and military policy competence" with, say, their approach to China? Loral? Madeline Albright's champagne toast in North Korea to "friendship between our peoples" with Kim Jong Il?
If you're upset with the current Bush administration's stance on illegal immigration, how did you like the Clinton administration's "Citizenship USA" program, unveiled in August 1995, designed to deal with an INS backload that ended up naturalizing 1.1 million immigrants in time for Election Day 1996?
We are righteously outraged with Abramoff and Duke Cunningham, and ought to be. But let's not forget Henry Cisnero's guilty plea about lying to the FBI, Hazel O'Leary's apology to Congress for her travel expenses, John Huang, James Riady, and Maria Hsia, the Marc Rich pardon, the grant of clemency to FALN bombers in 1999... I'm not even getting into that scandal, or Jocelyn Elders' "hands-on" proposal for sex education.
In Congress, the opposition party had Jim Wright, Dan Rostenkowski, the post office scandal, the Keating Five (with McCain), Tony Coehlo's resignation. By the way, it's not like the post-1994 Republicans had avoided any perception of scandal until recent years. We've had Gingrich's book deal, Bob Livingston's resignation, Rep. Nick Smith's claim that someone offered a bribe on the Medicare bill, the guilty plea of a New Hampshire GOP official and a consultant to using the phones to "jam" the lines of the New Hampshire State Democratic Party's phone bank on Election Day 2002.
Let's go beyond Clinton, and think back to the first Bush administration. Perhaps we were happy at the time with the decision to leave Saddam in power in Iraq, but it certainly left a festering problem. The military deployment to Somalia represented a major commitment of U.S. armed forces to a part of the world where we had no compelling national interest; the subsequent withdrawal (on Clinton's watch) is cited by jihadis as a major victory. Do we look back fondly on Bush's economic policies, the retraction of "read my lips, no new taxes," the "Chicken Kiev" speech, the well-oiled communications machine that was the 1992 campaign? How about Justice David Souter?
Regarding the Reagan administration, many of us have fond memories because the Gipper, God bless him, got so many big things right. But do we think back on Iran-Contra, or the quiet-at-best reactions to the bombing of the embassy in Lebanon and the Marine barracks months later? The handling of Robert Bork's nomination, the 35 percent approval rating in January 1983, the revelation of the astrologer? And if you don't like our current immigration policy, what do you think of Reagan's 1986 mass amnesty for illegal aliens?
Any administration is going to have its mistakes, and sometimes, they're going to be big ones. Let's be honest about where the current president and cabinet have botched things, but let's not fool ourselves into nostalgia for some golden age of political and substantive skill.
I like the attitude described by Tony Robbins (cant find his quote online, so Im paraphrasing). If youre a gardener, and youre worried about weeds, the answer is not to panic because you know the weeds will crop up and grow and take over your garden. The answer is also not to be excessively positive, and declare, there are no weeds, there are no weeds. The answer is to say, I know there are going to be weeds, and Im not going to panic when I see them, because if I see them, I can do something about it.
Yes, the Republicans have problems right now. But its better that they see them and can do something about it.
Posted by: Mike ||
04/11/2006 12:33 ||
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Right....
So, no matter how pissed I am with the Republican's on immigration, I'm supposed to just vote Republican anyway 'cause the alternative is worse.
I'm sorry. This immigration problem is so big and so problematic that I can't ignore the failure of Congress and the President to address them.
Off with their heads! (figuratively on election day - unless the Senate gets their rectal-cranial inversion resolved to my satisfaction before then.)
#3
Well, Leigh, you'll have about four more years of the problem getting much worse than it is now, along with many other problems, before you get a chance to repent.
Voting for Perot didn't do anyone any good in the 90's, except for the Dems.
Posted by: Phil ||
04/11/2006 13:53 Comments ||
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Actually, I wasn't as upset at Clinton. I didn't expect any better from him. I had hopes for Bush though.
Posted by: Formerly Dan ||
04/11/2006 14:53 Comments ||
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Phil,
I'm actually prompted to work against the Republican incumbents in their primarys rather than selling my soul to the Democrats in the general election.
#7
I'm actually prompted to work against the Republican incumbents in their primarys rather than selling my soul to the Democrats in the general election.
And that's exactly what you would be doing by working against the Republican incumbents.
I'm amazed at the amount of foolishness members of my own party manage to express from time to time. I'm amazed at the amount of foolishness coming out of the Republican Party and Republicans on the Hill and in the White House. I'm amazed at the complete lack of organization and organizational capability within the Republican Party as a whole.
But does that mean I'll simply drop trousers and bend over for the reaming I'm all too likely to get under a Democratic administration?
No. Thanks very much. I think I'll keep my trousers up and not drop any soap around any Dems if you don't mind. I think I'll continue to donate to the Republican Party and support my Republican incumbents (not that there are any out here in the 10th US House District of California where I live) and not desert the Party when the chips are down and I'm ticked off because people on the Hill and in the White House don't seem to be listening.
So, Leigh, if you want to stick your head in the sand, be careful who's standing behind you because you might just get what you deserve.
The alternative is simply too frightening to consider - higher taxes, disengagement worldwide, a for-sure amnesty, corruption, down-sizing of the military during time of war, corruption, higher taxes, cradle-to-grave government interference, socialism, corruption, and higher taxes, etc., ad infinitum...
#8
Groan! i so tire of this!! I've never heard of Leigh before. Probably just one of those trolls that always seems to come out with "wisdom for dummies" whenever there's an opportunity to sow seeds of discontent.
Leigh, Leigh, honey. My apologies if you are just dumb. But you are wasting your time here, look a the headlines being read here, this isn't a watering hole for those in need of identity assistance.
Here's a tip, go to one of the sights that discusses the lipstick color Jennifer wears and maybe you'll actually pick up a vote or two. It's a sad way to spend your day - mistakenly thinking you have enlightened someone when you are really just annoying them with your stupidity. Go outside, get a life.
#9
Screw that I may have to hold my nose but I will NEVER EVER vote for a Dhimicrat EVER again. If it's between the Devil running as Republican against a Demoncrat then maybe I would change my mind. Short of that I can't stand any of the Democrats.
#10
It's possible to have one's cake and eat it, too. Phil Graham stopped Hillary Care, but I doubt that even HE could have stopped the prescription for disaster drug bill.
#12
Write, donate to the correct congresscritters - I have Duncan Hunter, who's on our side - if you have Donk - look elsewhere, even Tancredo can use your help, and if he builds a big warchest from small donations, he can spread it to proper picks. Don't give up. I have Boxer (lost cause - dumb as a bag of rocks) and Feinstein (she's not stupid, just wrong a lot of times - she does respond to pressure tho') as my Senators. The border states need to rise up and DEMAND enforcement. Legal Latinos will join in, believe me
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/11/2006 19:17 Comments ||
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2b - Bite me. I've been reading and posting (infrequently) at Rantburg since 9/11.
Just because I don't think supporting incumbents who seems more interested in sucking up to illegal voters doesn't mean I don't support general party objectives. Dieing of old-age in office before considering replacement of a incumbent representative isn't anywhere in the constitution that I've read.
I'm suggesting that putting incumbents to a primary challenge is a better alternative than either:
a) slavishly supporting somebody who doesn't represent my interests (and seems intent on subverting/minimizing the value of US citizenship.) or
b) voting for democrats who actively want to socialize our country.
Jeez... what are you? An incumbent? You'd think I suggested selling my soul because I disagree with incumbents (like Mccain.)
#15
Dieing (sic) of old-age in office before considering replacement of a incumbent representative isn't anywhere in the constitution that I've read.
Brilliant! How do you do it Holmes? The insight, the clarity. Where are my shades to protect my eyes from the illumination.
By the way, Leigh, just exactly which district primary races are you talking about? Which Reps are you referring to and which replacements will provide us with the salvation you seek? Who exactly do you plan to vote for to achieve a better result? Oh, I see, you're deep and insightful wisdom is simply an overall vague "Republican primary" in a general vague congressional or Senate race. So deep. So helpful to the discourse. Do you plan on just sending your vast sums of money to various races nationwide or do you have specific primary races in mind with specific concrete goals in mind? Do you even know what district you live and vote in? Hmmm, why do I doubt that that you do?
But let me give you the benefit of the doubt, Please share. I'm all for replacing incompetent incumbents with someone who can do a BETTER job. Please let me know specifically which races and candidates you plan to support to make the world a better place. Otherwise, STFU and stop boring us with you childish demands for imaginary white knights to appear out of nowhere to save the day.
#16
When that phone rings and the talker at the other end announces that he/she is calling for the Republican Senatorial Reelection Committee, just laugh your head off before hanging up. They do understand money. When that solicitation shows up in the mail from the Republican National Committee, just stuff this in the return envelope.
#18
Hmmm, I think a more effective fund raiser would be for the Republican committee to put similar bills with Ted Kennedy (D-Margaritaville) in their fund raising material.
You know why many Republicans who actually deserve the boot will get reelected this year? Because the Democrats just suck so bad. They are a party of incoherent moonbats with no goals, a campaign slogan that consists of "vote for us because having no plan means that we don't have a plan that sucks".
Yawn. Do your best to divide and conquer. But ultimately the Republicans, no matter how repugnant, are offering more than a vote of "sticking it to the man" with the expectation that we will be delusional enough not to realize that they are the man.
#19
Fortunately for the GOP, every time I decide I'm not voting for another ####### RINO again, some Donk like Dean, or Feingold, or McKinney opens their mouth. I vastly prefer stupidity and incompetence to insanity, cowardice, and treason.
#20
Move the government from DC to somewhere else every 8 years and don't permit the current workers to move with their departments or congress critters...
If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Irans neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islamthe Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If theres going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.
That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: Irans hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies. Hmm. Im not a professional mullah, so I cant speak to the theological soundness of the argument, but it seems a religious school in the Holy City of Qom has ruled that the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia. Well, theres a surprise. How do you solve a problem? Like, sharia! Its the one-stop shop for justifying all your geopolitical objectives.
The bad cop/worse cop routine the mullahs and their hothead President Ahmadinejad are playing in this period of alleged negotiation over Irans nuclear program is the best indication of how all negotiations with Iran will go once theyre ready to fly. This is the nuclear version of the NRA bumper sticker: Guns Dont Kill People. People Kill People. Nukes dont nuke nations. Nations nuke nations. When the Argentine junta seized British sovereign territory in the Falklands, the generals knew that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power, but they also knew that under no conceivable scenario would Her Majestys Government drop the big one on Buenos Aires. The Argie generals were able to assume decency on the part of the enemy, which is a useful thing to be able to do.
But in any contretemps with Iran the other party would be foolish to make a similar assumption. That will mean the contretemps will generally be resolved in Irans favor. In fact, if one were a Machiavellian mullah, the first thing one would do after acquiring nukes would be to hire some obvious loon like President Ahmaddamatree to front the program. Hes the equivalent of the yobbo in the English pub who says, Oy, mate, you lookin at my bird? You havent given her a glance, or him; youre at the other end of the bar head down in the Daily Mirror, trying not to catch his eye. You dont know whether hes longing to nut you in the face or whether he just gets a kick out of terrifying you into thinking he wants to. But, either way, you just want to get out of the room in one piece. Kooks with nukes is one-way deterrence squared.
Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no surgical strike in any meaningful sense: Irans clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the countrys allegedly pro-American youth. This shouldnt be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishmentand incarceration. Its up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regimebut no occupation.
The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year its postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.
A quarter-century ago, there was a minor British pop hit called Ayatollah, Dont Khomeini Closer. If youre a U.S. diplomat or a British novelist, a Croat Christian or an Argentine Jew, hes already come way too close. How much closer do you want him to get?
Posted by: Steve ||
04/11/2006 09:16 ||
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This shouldnt be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishmentand incarceration. Its up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regimebut no occupation.
Sounds familiar.
The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.
We owe the Danes a huge debt of gratitude. Additionally, as I have said many times: A nuclear armed Iran will go down in history as one of the greatest strategic blunders of this new century.
#3
IOW, what Steyn is saying is that "regime change" is only way to handle Iran, and Russo-Chinese/International anti-US interventionism andor threat of regional nuke war be damned. WILL SAY AGIN THAT NO AMERICA SHOULD BE AFRAID OF NUKE WAR OR THE DRAFT, becuz the Policrats and wagffling Lefties will always be around, and espec becuz iff America doesn't stand and fight, it, its Allies, and Western democracy, Western DemoCapitalism, and Western civilization will be defeated iff not destroyed. NO MATTER HOW MUCH APPEASIN', CONCEDIN', COMPROMISIN', OR ISOLATIN' AMERICA AND WASHINGTON DOES, OUR ENEMIES INEVITABLY INTEND TO KILL AND DESTROY US ANYWAYS. THEY'RE ALREADY TELLING US OUR DEFEAT, DESTRUCTION, AND HOLOCAUST IS GOOD FOR PLANET EARTH AND FOR US - no [clear]mention of themselves, however.
From Texas History via University of Texas via NRO
OPERATION WETBACK (actual title)
Operation Wetback was a repatriation project of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove illegal Mexican immigrants ("wetbacks") from the Southwest. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the majority of migrant workers who crossed the border illegally did not have adequate protection against exploitation by American farmers. As a result of the Good Neighbor Policy, Mexico and the United States began negotiating an accord to protect the rights of Mexican agricultural workers. Continuing discussions and modifications of the agreement were so successful that the Congress chose to formalize the "temporary" program into the Bracero program,qv authorized by Public Law 78.
In the early 1940s, while the program was being viewed as a success in both countries, Mexico excluded Texas from the labor-exchange program on the grounds of widespread violation of contracts, discrimination against migrant workers, and such violations of their civil rights as perfunctory arrests for petty causes.
Oblivious to the Mexican charges, some grower organizations in Texas continued to hire illegal Mexican workers and violate such mandates of PL 78 as the requirement to provide workers transportation costs from and to Mexico, fair and lawful wages, housing, and health services. World War IIqv and the postwar period exacerbated the Mexican exodus to the United States, as the demand for cheap agricultural laborers increased.
Graft and corruption on both sides of the border enriched many Mexican officials as well as unethical "coyote" freelancers in the United States who promised contracts in Texas for the unsuspecting Bracero. Studies conducted over a period of several years indicate that the Bracero program increased the number of illegal aliens in Texas and the rest of the country. Because of the low wages paid to legal, contracted braceros, many of them skipped out on their contracts either to return home or to work elsewhere for better wages as wetbacks.
Increasing grievances from various Mexican officials in the United States and Mexico prompted the Mexican government to rescind the bracero agreement and cease the export of Mexican workers. The United States Immigration Service, under pressure from various agricultural groups, retaliated against Mexico in 1951 by allowing thousands of illegals to cross the border, arresting them, and turning them over to the Texas Employment Commission,qv which delivered them to work for various grower groups in Texas and elsewhere.
Over the long term, this action by the federal government, in violation of immigration laws and the agreement with Mexico, caused new problems for Texas. Between 1944 and 1954, "the decade of the wetback," the number of illegal aliens coming from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent. It is estimated that in 1954 before Operation Wetback got under way, more than a million workers had crossed the Rio Grande illegally. Cheap labor displaced native agricultural workers, and increased violation of labor laws and discrimination encouraged criminality, disease, and illiteracy.
According to a study conducted in 1950 by the President's Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas, the Rio Grande valleyqv cotton growers were paying approximately half of the wages paid elsewhere in Texas. In 1953 a McAllen newspaper clamored for justice in view of continuing criminal activities by wetbacks.
The resulting Operation Wetback, a national reaction against illegal immigration, began in Texas in mid-July 1954. Headed by the commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization Service, Gen. Joseph May Swing, the United States Border Patrol aided by municipal, county, state, and federal authorities, as well as the military, began a quasimilitary operation of search and seizure of all illegal immigrants.
Fanning out from the lower Rio Grande valley, Operation Wetback moved northward. Illegal aliens were repatriated initially through Presidio because the Mexican city across the border, Ojinaga, had rail connections to the interior of Mexico by which workers could be quickly moved on to Durango.
A major concern of the operation was to discourage reentry by moving the workers far into the interior. Others were to be sent through El Paso. On July 15, the first day of the operation, 4,800 aliens were apprehended. Thereafter the daily totals dwindled to an average of about 1,100 a day. The forces used by the government were actually relatively small, perhaps no more than 700 men, but were exaggerated by border patrol officials who hoped to scare illegal workers into flight back to Mexico. Valley newspapers also exaggerated the size of the government forces for their own purposes: generally unfavorable editorials attacked the Border Patrol as an invading army seeking to deprive Valley farmers of their inexpensive labor force.
While the numbers of deportees remained relatively high, the illegals were transported across the border on trucks and buses. As the pace of the operation slowed, deportation by sea began on the Emancipation, which ferried wetbacks from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, and on other ships. Ships were a preferred mode of transport because they carried the illegal workers farther away from the border than did buses, trucks, or trains.
The boat lift continued until the drowning of seven deportees who jumped ship from the Mercurio provoked a mutiny and led to a public outcry against the practice in Mexico. Other aliens, particularly those apprehended in the Midwest states, were flown to Brownsville and sent into Mexico from there. The operation trailed off in the fall of 1954 as INS funding began to run out.
It is difficult to estimate the number of illegal aliens forced to leave by the operation. The INS claimed as many as 1,300,000, though the number officially apprehended did not come anywhere near this total. The INS estimate rested on the claim that most aliens, fearing apprehension by the government, had voluntarily repatriated themselves before and during the operation.
The San Antonio district, which included all of Texas outside of El Paso and the Trans-Pecos,qv had officially apprehended slightly more than 80,000 aliens, and local INS officials claimed that an additional 500,000 to 700,000 had fled to Mexico before the campaign began. Many commentators have considered these figure to be exaggerated.
Various groups opposed any form of temporary labor in the United States. The American G.I. Forum,qv for instance, by and large had little or no sympathy for the man who crossed the border illegally. Apparently the Texas State Federation of Laborqv supported the G.I. Forum's position.
Eventually the two organizations coproduced a study entitled What Price Wetbacks?, which concluded that illegal aliens in United States agriculture damaged the health of the American people, that illegals displaced American workers, that they harmed the retailers of McAllen, and that the open-border policy of the American government posed a threat to the security of the United States. Critics of Operation Wetback considered it xenophobic and heartless.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carl Allsup, The American G.I. Forum: Origins and Evolution (University of Texas Center for Mexican American Studies Monograph 6, Austin, 1982). Arnoldo De León, Mexican Americans in Texas: A Brief History (Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1993). Juan Ramon Garcia, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980). Eleanor M. Hadley, "A Critical Analysis of the Wetback Problem," Law and Contemporary Problems 21 (Spring 1956). Saturday Evening Post, July 27, 1946. Julian Samora, Los Mojados: The Wetback Story (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971).
Refreshing read. Do the Us majority of RB readers agree with that optimism?
Ray Lyman
The U.S, military is the one great bargain that the American people still get and they are paying less for it now than at any time since Pearl Harbor. When President Eisenhower made his farewell speech in January 1961 warning of the influence of the military industrial establishment in America, defense spending was a whopping ten percent of the national GDP and almost 50 percent of the Federal budget. Today it is 3.7 percent of the GDP and 16 percent of the Federal budget. That's right. The Military budget for fiscal year 2006 is around 450 billion in a 2.7 trillion dollar Federal budget. You do the math. It is the ONLY part of the Federal budget that has actually shrunk in the last 20 years. Factoring inflation, Defense is a little more than half of what it was in 1990 before the Bush41/Clinton demobilization of the 1990s. That is reflected in the fact that the Navy has fewer than 300 ships in commision versus almost 600 in 1988 and 1200 in 1961 and the Air Force has reduced the number of its fighter wings from 35 to 20 in the same period and the Army has reduced its combat divisions from 16 to 10 and its manpower from 750,000 to fewer than half a million. That being said the military can do more now with less than at any other time in its history. It is indeed the most extraordinary fighting organization since Roman times, capable of logistical and power projection efforts that will continue to astonish the world in the 21st Century.
That is only part of the story, of course. The Defense budget of the United States is unlike any other in the world, with the possible exception that of Great Britain. More than 60 percent of it is devoted to personnel costs, everything from veterans pensions to child care for military families. The last Civil War widow to receive her pension died just a few years ago, so these costs are with us for a long, long time. It is estimated that we will be paying World War II pensions and costs until the middle of this century and Vietnam costs until the end of it. When the Army builds a school in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they have built more than a hundred of them, that is part of the Defense budget, when a U.S. military hospital is opened to Iraqi civilians and provides health care to thousands, that is part of the Defense budget, when a public park is created in the Presidio of San Francisco, that is part of the Defense budget, when food and medical supplies are brought to victims of the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, that is part of the Defense budget. Even aside from the hundreds of pork riders that are attached to the Defense appropriations, the Defense Department does many things that are not directly related to the national defense of the United States.
Now, if I may paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, we are engaged in a great conflict to determine whether a civilization commited to individual freedom and tolerance can long endure in the face of a challenge from a hostile civilization commited to its destruction. There are those who would say that this war is the result of our quest for empire and domination of others. If this is so, we are the most benign of history's empires for wherever our armies have marched they have brought freedom, an end to brutal oppression, usually prosperity and the first taste of justice that many people have ever experienced. We have not brought about perfect societies anywhere and until the Second Coming, I don't expect to see any. France is hardly a perfect society, beset with riots, high unemployment, anti-semitism, illegal immigration, Islamic radicalism, economic malaise and popular anti-American feelings. Does that mean we should not have mounted the Normandy invasion and sacrificed 90,000 American lives to liberate the country?
I have been critical of some American decisions in Iraq. For example, I think it was a strategic error to disband the Iraq Army after the fall of Baghdad. It takes the U.S. Army 20 years to train a man to lead a battalion in battle and it takes even longer to build an army from the ground up. That we have accomplished this much in just three years is an astonishment to me. We will probably be in that country for the rest of the decade and when we do leave, I do not expect that we will leave it looking like Switzerland, but the tyrant Saddam Hussein will by then be a fading memory and sectarian violence will probably have abated to the level of say India. Even, if I were to concede that the invasion of Iraq in and of itself was strategic error, and I do not, then it still would not diminish my conviction that victory in this great conflict against Islamic terrorism is essential to our national security and survival.
All of our wars from the Revolution to the present have been filled with sacrifices, disappointments and failures that have produced needless loss of life and treasure. One of the greatest Allied efforts of the Second World War could be characterized as such and I am speaking of an Italian resort city 30 miles south of Rome called Anzio. It was a conceived by Winston Churchill as a means to outflank the German defense line in Italy and capture Rome in a coup de main, but the results were far different. An Allied army larger than the coalition forces in Iraq today was bottled up on a small beachhead about the size of New York's Central Park for four months from January 22 to May 17, 1944. The U.S. Army suffered 29,000 casualties and the British about 9500 for virtually no result. The cost in munitions, vehicles and supplies must have been incalculable. Four times as many Americans died there in four months as have died in Iraq in three years. Yet today, no historian will say the war itself was a failure and a wasted sacrifice because Anzio was a failure. And because the Second World War did not produce a perfect world and universal peace and justice, we do not say it was not worth fighting. I suspect the same will be said about this great struggle.
Ther are those who see a future of bankruptcy and decline for America. As an investor and entrepreneur, I believe that is quite simply dead wrong. When Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower moved into the Whiet House the GDP of the United States was 358.6 billion in 1998 dollars and Federal spending was about 68 billion in 1998 dollars per year. In 2006 that GDP is projected to be in the 14 trillion dollar range and the Federal spending will be 2.7 trillion of that. No nation I can think of in recorded history has become wealthier to such an extent in such a short period. This does not mean we will not have recessions, housing bubbles, energy shortages, high deficits and fiscal crisis, but I think it means that only a fool will sell America short in the next century. General Motors may declare bankruptcy or employ far fewer workers, but KIA Motors, a butt-kicking South Korean auto manufacturer, has just anounced plans to open a plant in Atlanta that will employ 4500 people. This will always be the place to find opportunity and invest capital. The road to economic success will always be a rough road with plenty of pot holes, but the only things that can slow us down or stop us are more regulations and government management of the economy. As long as we embrace the free market, the economic success of our nation is assured. For that reason I am a happy American indeed.
"If Communist tyranny ever comes to America, it will be called fairness and social justice."
#1
Ray nails it. The dollar is strong because no military can beat us, thus making our dollar a secure investment. Making the dollar an even better investment is our commitment to free markets, freedom of thought, and the rule of law. Therefore, barring foolish changes of our own accord, we are the currency to buy, enabling us to finance our present government and military with bargain level deficit spending.
The only rule we must follow as we enjoy the international bankrolling of our government is this: we must continue to invest in improvements, be they technological, legal, or social. The market and its parallel, "the marketplace of ideas", will provide for most of that investment in improvement. A little advanced research will have to be the purview of the government.
#4
hmmm... I don't know much about this writer, but should this be filed under Someone Gets a Clue?
Sure, its optimistic but and he makes great points we rarely get to see in print, but I have a problem when someone tries to make a point with misleading information like this: The last Civil War widow to receive her pension died just a few years ago, so these costs are with us for a long, long time. It is estimated that we will be paying World War II pensions and costs until the middle of this century
He makes it sound like we've been paying mega bucks in civil war pensions up until recently, but there were just a very few child brides to very old soldiers left to pay. And most of the WWII pensions will not be left to pay into the middle of the next century, but again, very few.
And I don't get the last line either. So nice article thanks, but color me skeptical of the author.
#5
And God bless you and your family, HB. Thank you for your service!
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I'm with Lyman: I have CEASED to bitch about the Income taxes I have paid since 9/12/01. Chalk up another American happy about the performance of his nation's armed forces. God bless 'em all.
#6
It was a conceived by Winston Churchill as a means to outflank the German defense line in Italy and capture Rome in a coup de main, but the results were far different. An Allied army larger than the coalition forces in Iraq today was bottled up on a small beachhead about the size of New York's Central Park for four months from January 22 to May 17, 1944
The campaign at Anzio can't be discussed without the mention of its sister battle in Cassino, where "multinational" forces couldn't break through the defenses of several rivers and entrenched German forces that had been allowed to escape from Sicily. American Generals wee in sharp disagreement with Churchill on the value of "sucking resources" down to the medditeranean while the "real game"- the Normandy invasion, was being planned. It can be said that even if viewed as a "bad campaign", Anzio still kept the Nazi's logistiaccly tied up on a third front, as well as took the Italian Army out of play.
Anzio was signed off on by Eisenhower mostly to placate Churchill.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
