In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.
Turkey's the product of 500 years of Muslim culture preceded by most of 800 years of trying to fight them off. It's not going to overcome that heritage rapidly, even though Attaturk tried to slice the Gordian knot. The requirement of that slicing was an authoritarian state that would be willing to come down with both feet on the holy men when they tried to make their comeback, which accounts for the peculiar position of the army in Turkish life â a position the Euros demand it abrogate. Mr. Moonbat, of course, lacks any understanding of history that's not couched in dialectics of some sort, so he can't be expected to understand the implications. Turkey's refusal to own up to the slaughter of the Armenians is something they're going to have to work out, but I don't expect they'll be able to actually examine it anytime soon. And if they revert to being proper Islamists they never will.
As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.
[Raises eyes to the heavens. Beats breast. Rends garment. Smears ashes on head.] Properly contrite, Mr. Moonbat continues...
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.
Between 1769 and 1901 there were eleven documented famines in India, of which the author is discussing one, presumably because it was marked by a particularly stupid British administration. But in the 1769 great famine of Bengal, 10,000,000 people, one third of the population, are reported to have died. The British weren't in control then, were they? In 1790-1792, the Doji Bara, or skull famine, killed people in such numbers that they couldn't be buried. It extended over the whole of Bombay into Hyderabad and affected the northern districts of Madras. In 1861 famine killed a million people in Bengal and Orissa, and three years later a famine in Rajputna killed a million and a half. The 1876-78 famine is reported to have killed five million â Mr. Moonbat lumps the death toll from several famines into one to tell a scarier story.
India is susceptible to famine due to its dependence on the monsoons. The monsoons don't come, crops don't grow. The thousand years prior to the arrival of the British saw famines lasting for years. The Durga Devi, in the late 1300s, lasted for 12 years.
Lord Lytton seems to have been an idiot, who didn't realize the extent of the problem and who fiddled with things like price controls that made matters worse. The Banglapedia describes him thus:
His years in India were eventful. A severe famine raged over most of south India including Madras, Bombay, Hyderabad and Mysore for two years from 1876-1878. In the second year the famine also struck parts of Central India and the Punjab, and a heavy toll of lives consequently perished. The relief measures cost over ten crores of rupees and due to the failure of crops there was great loss of revenue. Lord Lytton's government, therefore, appointed a famine Commission under Richard Strachey to enquire into the causes of the famine and relief measures taken to mitigate the sufferings of the people. On the basis of the commission report a famine code was drawn up which laid down certain regulations relating to famine measures in the future. The government efforts to save life proved inadequate yet the viceroy held a magnificent Darbar in Delhi in 1877, to celebrate the assumption of the title of the Empress of India by Queen Victoria
Lytton was also the fellow who brilliantly declared war on Afghanistan. He was dumped and kicked upstairs, dying in Paris in 1891 as ambassador to France. Contrary to Mr. Moonbat's implications, though, Lytton's policies weren't British government policies. Gladstone removed him, and his successor reversed his more onerous measures, while keeping the ones that made sense. So I don't buy it as a holocaust, despite the directions Mr. Moonbat would try to twist it.
Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a million - were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.
I have a pretty hard time with anyone who objects to the lack of gentle treatment of the Mau Maus. Maybe that's because I read Robert Ruark novels when I was a young fellow, or maybe because they were vicious bastards who used to do terrible things to people, starting with each other. The war was the archetype for the anticolonialist revolutions in East Africa, and some (like Angola) in the west, complete with helpful commie advisors. The difference between the Kenyan experience and the others is that Jomo Kenyatta wasn't Bob Mugabe. This was back in the old days, when Euros, especially those who had settled in Africa, still fought back, and the tactics used against the Mau Mau were the same as the tactics the Mau Mau were trying to use against the settlers. They were not allowed to achieve victory in Kenya. Bewteen 1953 and 1957, when Dedan Kimathi was caught and hanged, they were pretty well exterminated. The official death toll was 11,503 Mau Maus. Britain then set about land reform and integrating the black Kenyans into the parliamentary system. Jomo was rehabilitated, much in the manner of Nelson Mandela, and Kenya remains the model for East African stability, despite its obvious faults.
These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.
Nope. Sorry, George. I'm not feeling any guilt palpitations. I suspect our Brit readers aren't, either. Man's inhumanity to man is an old story â ask any Amalekite â and neither the Brits nor the Americans are egregiously guilty.
In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for "the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good ... the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions" (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that "the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe". (Compare this to Mike Davis's central finding, that "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", or to Prasannan Parthasarathi's demonstration that "South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that "the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic". The Victorians "set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".
Really galls you, doesn't it, George? You can look in all the corners and twist things every way you want, but somehow you can't quite come up with anything to match the most hideous crimes of the Europeans, much less those of the less civilized world. There aren't any pyramids of skulls. There aren't any people wiped from the face of the earth using fire and sword.
There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ...
Could it be that a country that sees itself as benevolent tries to live up to the standard it sets for itself?
Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence".
The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. But if you use evil intent you've got a six-lane speedway.
This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.
[George hang head. Wipes tear. Blows nose loudly into blue bandana. The rest of us — those who've managed to read this far, anyway — wait expectantly for the punchline.]
Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.
Or perhaps Turkey should begin describing itself to itself as a benevolent nation that's learned from the mistakes of its past. Civilization, looked at from that angle, is all about self-image.
www.monbiot.com
Posted by: john ||
12/28/2005 00:00 ||
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Great comments John. Could have sworn I was reading Fred.
#3
Seems you left out the Brit's scorched earth policy in South Africa and the killing of thousands of Boer women and children in the camps they were then incarcerated in, through hunger and disease.
And then the ethnic cleansing by sending scores of their countrymen to Argentina.
But in those days there was only the Times for news.
btw, my favorite Monbiot article is from last year.. a tirade against the WTO. My jaw dropped reading it. I kept thinking, he doesn't live on the same planet that I do.
"Moonbat" is right...
Posted by: john ||
12/28/2005 11:59 Comments ||
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"Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened."
What a disgusting filthbag. The name "Walter Duranty" should be branded in reverse on his forehead, so that every time his loathsome face stares into a mirror, it'll stare right back at him.
These Moral-Equivalence Morons are spiritually bankrupt fools with compost for brains.
Posted by: Ernest Brown ||
12/28/2005 13:14 Comments ||
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Hey, Ernest, watch your mouth!
There's no need to go and insult compost like that. ;-p
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
12/28/2005 20:14 Comments ||
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Has The New York Times declared itself to be on the front line in the war against the War on Terror?
The self-styled paper of record seems to be trying to reclaim the loyalty of those radical lefties who ludicrously accused it of uncritically reporting on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
Yet the paper has done more than merely try to embarrass the Bush administration these last few months. It has published classified information â and thereby knowingly blown the covers of secret programs and agencies engaged in combating the terrorist threat.
The most notorious example was the paper's disclosure some 10 days ago that, since 9/11, the Bush administration has "secretly" engaged in warrantless eavesdropping on U.S.-based international phone calls and e-mails.
It's not secret anymore, of course â though the folks who reacted to the naming of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative aren't exactly shrieking for another grand jury investigation. On the contrary: Democrats and their news-media allies â particularly on CNN and CBS â are openly suggesting that the president committed an impeachable offense and could (read: should) be removed from office.
In fact, the Times managed only to blow the lid off of what President Bush rightly calls "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists" â one that already has uncovered several terrorist plots.
Is it legal? The administration insists so, and notes that congressional Democrats got repeated briefings on the program, with few objections. Sure, the legality can be debated â but the case against it is far from a slam-dunk.
As for taking action without court-issued warrants, both the last two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, used warrantless searches â and strongly defended them as fully justified under the authority granted the president by the Constitution. In fact, the Washington Times reports that Clinton expanded their use to purely domestic situations â such as violent public-housing projects.
The Times says it held the story for more than a year, provoking a predictable uproar on the left. So why did it finally go ahead? According to a Los Angeles Times report, New York Times editors knew that a book by the article's author was to be published in just a few weeks â and they feared losing their "exclusive" to their own reporter's outside work.
But the exact timing is highly suspect. The article appeared on the very day that the Senate was to vote on a Democratic filibuster against renewal of the anti-terrorist Patriot Act â a vote the Bush administration then lost. At least two previously undecided senators said they voted against the act precisely because of the Times piece.
BUT it's not just the National Security Agency story.
Last May, the Times similarly "exposed" â in painstaking detail â the fact that the CIA uses its own airline service, posing as a private charter company, as "the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism." In fact, as the Times itself reported, "the civilian planes can go places American military craft would not be welcome." In an unconventional war, like the one against terrorism, the ability to move personnel around quickly and inconspicuously â or to deliver captured terrorists to a third country â is indispensable.
Thanks to the Times, that ability has been irrevocably compromised â costing Washington yet another vital tool in the War on Terror.
Then, not content to merely sabotage the federal government, the Times last week blew the whistle on the fact that the New York Police Department has been using plainclothes officers during protest demonstrations. In particular, the cops have been exercising their vigilance on the group called Critical Mass, which the Times refers to benignly as "a monthly bicycle ride."
Not quite. Yes, it began as peaceful, law-abiding rides â orderly protests. But it deteriorated last year into mass disruptions of traffic.
A federal judge unwisely refused the city's demand that the riders obtain a police permit in advance â but still admitted that the monthly protests were "spawning potential dangers."
All along, the NYPD has not been trying to shut the Critical Mass protests down or abridge anyone's First Amendment rights. It has only insisted on safeguards â like permits â to guarantee that no laws are broken and traffic disruptions are held to a minimum.
Unable to get the courts to agree, the cops instead used plainclothes cops "to prevent and respond to acts of violence and other unlawful activity."
In other words, to protect the people of New York.
Now, the Times has "exposed" this police work â and not just in words, but by splashing the pictures of these undercover officers across the pages of the newspaper, without making even the slightest effort to protect their identities. And make no mistake: The result will be to compromise the ability of the NYPD to work undercover at a time of increasing danger to the city from back-pack-toting terrorists â a la Madrid and London.
Does The New York Times consider it self a law unto itself â free to subversively undercut basic efforts by any government to protect and defend its citizens?
The Times, it appears, is less concerned with promoting its dubious views on civil liberties than with undercutting the Bush administration. The end result of the paper's flagrant irresponsibility: Lives have been put in danger on the international, national and local levels.
The ability of the nation to perform the most fundamental mission of any government â protection of its citizens â has been pointlessly compromised.
The Jayson Blair and Judith Miller fias coes were high-profile embarrass ments for The Times, but at the end of the day mostly damaged the newspaper alone. The NSA, CIA and NYPD stories are of a different order of magnitude â they place in unnecessary danger the lives of U.S. citizens.
The New York Times â a once-great and still-powerful institution â is badly in need of adult supervision.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/28/2005 13:17 ||
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Ultimately, I read this situation as the US stealing a play right from the Soddy playbook...mouthing unctuous, meaningless platitudes to the opponent in public; actively undermining the opponent's offensive abilities in secret.
It also shows me the US gov't isn't quite as dhimmi as I thought, but I still want those Paki scholarships back and for Harvard/G'town to tell ol' Prince Talaweel to stick his dirty cash where the sun don't shine. Pfeh.
Wouldn't it be delicious if one of the scholars supported by the $20M actually leaves G-Town or Harvard and then honestly writes what they actually learned about Islam.
#4
mhw, I certainly hope so, but it won't be for another 15 years at least. And whichever scholar it might be may have to publish from a safe house as he or she will likely be branded an enemy of Islam.
It has been said that 80 percent of all the mosques and Islamic centers inside the United States are financially and spiritually tied to a radical form of Islam originating from Saudi Arabia. This ideology, identified as Wahhabism, does not promote the inclusion of persons into democratic society.
One of the American locations that Wahhabi influence has been overtly prevalent is the Tampa-St. Pete area of Southwest Florida. It is here that Sami Al-Arian, a college professor, created a wide-ranging operation that assisted in terrorist activity abroad, through Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Within Al-Arianâs universe lies a little known mosque, which has been fomenting hatred and violence. Recognized as the Islamic Society of Pinellas County (Islamic Society as in the predecessor of Hamas) or by its less publicized name Al-Farooq (the same title as Al-Qaedaâs former headquarters in Brooklyn), the mosque has been in existence since 1988.
The congregationâs most prominent member is Ahmed Bedier, who is currently involved with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group whose parent organization was created by the number two leader in Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. Bedier is the Spokesman for the Florida chapter of CAIR and the Director of CAIRâs Tampa office. Prior to joining CAIR, Bedier had the position of Outreach Director for the Islamic Society of Pinellas County (ISPC). In September of 2002, Bedier represented the mosque when he spoke at an event held in Davie, Florida, entitled, âA United and Secure Florida for All.â Also speaking at that event was a fairly large panel of Islamist radicals, including Rafiq Mehdi, the imam of the mosque where âDirty Bomberâ Jose Padilla was said to have converted to Islam and where terror fundraiser Adham Hassoun worshipped. Recently, Bedier -- the mediaâs âgo toâ man for answers to questions concerning Al-Arian -- stated that, prior to 1995, there was ânothing immoralâ about Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Rest at link.
Posted by: ed ||
12/28/2005 08:39 ||
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Please move this to the opinion page. Thanks.
Posted by: ed ||
12/28/2005 9:11 Comments ||
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SHORTLY after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush ordered surveillance of international telephone communications by suspected members of Al Qaeda overseas, even if such calls also involved individuals within the United States. This program was adopted by direct presidential order and was subject to review every 45 days. Judicial warrants for this surveillance were neither sought nor obtained, although key members of Congress were evidently informed. The program's existence has now become public, and howls of outrage have ensued. But in fact, the only thing outrageous about this policy is the outrage itself.
The president has the constitutional authority to acquire foreign intelligence without a warrant or any other type of judicial blessing. The courts have acknowledged this authority, and numerous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have espoused the same view. The purpose here is not to detect crime, or to build criminal prosecutions - areas where the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirements are applicable - but to identify and prevent armed attacks on American interests at home and abroad. The attempt, by Democrats and Republicans alike, to dismantle the president's core constitutional power in wartime is wrongheaded and should be vigorously resisted by the administration.
After all, even the administration's sternest critics do not deny the compelling need to collect intelligence about Al Qaeda's plans so we can thwart future attacks. So instead of challenging the program on policy grounds, most have focused on its legal propriety, specifically Mr. Bush's decision not to follow the framework established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
In an effort to control counterintelligence activities in the United States during the cold war, the surveillance act established a special court, known as the FISA court, with authority to issue wiretapping warrants. Instead of having to show that it has "probable cause" to believe criminal activity is taking place (which is required to obtain a warrant in an ordinary investigation), the government can get a warrant from the FISA court when there is probable cause to believe the target of surveillance is a foreign power or its agent.
Although the administration could have sought such warrants, it chose not to for good reasons. The procedures under the surveillance act are streamlined, but nevertheless involve a number of bureaucratic steps. Furthermore, the FISA court is not a rubber stamp and may well decline to issue warrants even when wartime necessity compels surveillance. More to the point, the surveillance act was designed for the intricate "spy versus spy" world of the cold war, where move and countermove could be counted in days and hours, rather than minutes and seconds. It was not drafted to deal with the collection of intelligence involving the enemy's military operations in wartime, when information must be put to immediate use.
Indeed, it is highly doubtful whether individuals involved in a conflict have any "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their communications, which is the touchstone of protection under both the Fourth Amendment and the surveillance act itself - anymore than a tank commander has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his communications with his commanders on the battlefield. The same goes for noncombatants swept up in the hostilities.
Even if Congress had intended to restrict the president's ability to obtain intelligence in such circumstances, it could not have constitutionally done so. The Constitution designates the president as commander in chief, and Congress can no more direct his exercise of that authority than he can direct Congress in the execution of its constitutional duties. As the FISA court itself noted in 2002, the president has "inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance."
In this instance, in addition to relying on his own inherent constitutional authority, the president can also draw upon the specific Congressional authorization "to use all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks "in order to prevent any future attacks of international terrorism against the United States." These words are sufficiently broad to encompass the gathering of intelligence about the enemy, its movements, its abilities and its plans, a core part of the use of force against Al Qaeda and its allies. The authorization does not say that the president can order the use of artillery, or air strikes, yet no one is arguing that therefore Mr. Bush is barred from doing so.
The fact that the statutory language does not specifically mention intelligence collection, or that this matter was not raised by the White House in negotiations with Congress, or even that the administration had sought even broader language, all points recently raised by former Senator Tom Daschle, is irrelevant.
Overall, this surveillance program is fully within the president's legal authority, is limited in scope (involving communications to or from overseas related to the war against Al Qaeda), and is subject to stringent presidential review. The contretemps its revelation has caused reveals much more about the chattering classes' fundamental antipathy to strong government in general, and strong executive power in particular, than it does about presidential overreaching.
The Constitution's framers did not vest absolute power in any branch of the federal government, including the courts, but they did create a strong executive and equipped the office with sufficient authority to act energetically to defend the national interest in wartime. That is what President Bush has done, and nothing more.
David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey are lawyers who served in the Justice Department in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/28/2005 00:00 ||
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Can any Rantburger explain to me why FISA was enacted in the first place? What was it supposed to accomplish? From all I have read, all it did was set up a process of review that admins were free to ignore-- and every subsequent admin has ignored!-- under the war-making power vested in the executive by the Constitution. So what the heck was FISA supposed to accomplish?
#4
Is this some sort of apology? First they let it out that the US is doing it, stirr up all the hate and dicontent, and now they publish it was all legal??? These asshats that call themselves journalists are seitious morons who's Sophmoric acts need to face a judge and jury.
Posted by: 49 pan ||
12/28/2005 8:24 Comments ||
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This was an op-ed, not an opinion written by the NYT editorial board. You'll note it was written by Reagan/Bush 41 appointees.
#6
Puzzled - FISA was set up as an expedited process for National Security search/surveillance warrants that came short of completely abandoning the principle of judicial review. In exchange for the shortcuts and lower probable cause burden in the FISA system, the information obtained under these warrants was supposed to be excluded from the criminal justice system.
It was pretty much a rubber stamp until 2002, when the court started to second guess what I'm guessing were more "ambitious" requests from the administration post 9/11.
#7
Look again: this is a Fig leaf piece written, not by NYT opinion editors, but by lawyers from the Bush I and Reagan Justice departments.
Sure, it's lacking in some pertinent facts, and could be a bit more fiery, but if they did, the NYT editors would have nixed it and looked for someone more tame and accomodating: Ann Coulter got dismissed from covering the democratic national convention because she was BETTER at poking fun at the democrats SACRED COW than Moore at the Republican convention.
They probably let this out very reluctantly, and only after making a promise to spike any other pro-bush commentary for the next two weeks.
Experts say it might help, but almost three-quarters of Americans dislike the idea.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
In a USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey released just before Christmas Day, 72 percent of Americans thought that it was "wrong for the US to pay Iraqi newspapers and journalists to publish and write stories about US efforts in Iraq." USA Today reported earlier this month, however, that the US actually plans to continue with the program and expand it to other countries, spending more than $300 million in the effort. Smart move, I heard recently that the Simpsons now has an Arab counterpart called the Shampshons. But no bacon + no beer = no Simpsons in my book.
As Alan Pusey of The Dallas Morning News reports, these incidents have reignited the debate over the value and limits of propaganda in an age of global communications and "perpetual political spin." This isn't a new debate in the world of counterinsurgency campaigns, it's just a fact of life.
"Propaganda gets a bad rap," said P.J. Crowley, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former senior director of public affairs for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. "The issue is not whether it's good or bad; it's a fact of life. ... It's whether or not it hurts or helps." Finally an applicable comment.
"There is really a misconception about the value of propaganda, particularly in wartime. But it's an indispensable tool of modern war," said Aaron Delwiche, an expert on the subject at Trinity University in San Antonio. "There's no way any responsible commander would go to war without propaganda in the tool kit." True to fact, these guys have my ear.
The Morning News reports that the problem with the payment of money to Iraqi journalists, according to many experts, is that the US military deliberately obscured its role in producing the material. The program also is a reflection of government action earlier this year, when some federal agencies "paid journalists to write stories or columns that were sympathetic to the Bush administration's efforts to support traditional marriage and 'No Child Left Behind.'" Government investigators found these efforts inappropriate. As long as they keep the propoganda out of the US, its fine in my book. Wars require killing, maiming, destroying, suspending rights, etc...domestic policies are in a different cart altogether.
Victoria Clarke, a former Pentagon spokeswoman and now media consultant, says it's a good thing that the US Defense Department has said it will halt payments to Iraqi journalists.
Clarke says the revelations have undermined the goal of the overall mission: to create a free Iraq and free Iraqis. That can't happen if burgeoning Iraqi newspapers are seen as tools of the United States or anyone else. It's a good thing that they say they will halt payments, set up some shell non profits that recieve funding from the DoD through back door channels and then pay these dudes anyway. Problem solved, plausible deniability done, lets move forward.
"I understand the frustration of the military. They thought they weren't getting the kind of good press they deserved," Clarke said. "But that is short-term thinking. You might have a good story for one day, but you aren't going to instill in the society you're hoping to create the kind of independent values that you want." Follow Elvis's advice hun!
The New York Times reported Monday on how former Bush advisor Karen Hughes is handling the tough job of promoting the image of the US abroad without using 'propaganda.' Ms. Hughes admits it is not an easy sell. Plausible deniability, need I repeat this again?
"This is a big job with a lot of different moving pieces," Hughes, President George W. Bush's confidante and former communications director, said in an interview four months after taking office. "Ed Murrow once famously said that there's no cash register that rings when a mind is changed. But I think over the long haul we can begin to shape a better perception in the Middle East."
Hughes received a fair amount of criticism for her first trip to the Middle East this past fall, where she was accused of just repeating talking points and had to listen to a lot of criticism about the US's role in Iraq and the world. But the Times reports that Hughes gained respect for her willingness to listen to her critics. The times reports it, so it must be true huh?
I think she's doing far better than her predecessors," said Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland. "Because of her closeness to the president, she has real influence on policy. The problem is that she and her staff still lack real expertise in the Middle East." He's lobbying for a job in this statement. The University of Maryland is a non profit, so they need a new department, so this guys wants to be an expert? So again, where there's a will, there's several ways.
Hughes has made some changes. She recently cancelled the glossy magazine 'Hi,' a pro-US lifestyle magazine aimed at Mideast audiences, and has appeared on the Qatar-based Arab news channel Al Jazeera to argue the US viewpoint, despite advice from others in the Bush administration that she should avoid such appearances.
Meanwhile, some commentators challenge the notion that Arab and Middle East media always provide biased coverage of the region and the war in Iraq. Rami Khoury, the editor of The Daily Star of Lebanon and a former Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard Unversity, writes that he has spent hours watching Arab satellite TV and talking to Arab media staff and senior administrators to "better understand their view of the world." He says the result is that he believes any useful, accurate analysis of the Arab media must separate "professional conduct from their political impact." So who funded this fellowship at Harvard? He sounds like he'd like another, have a CIA agent pay him a visit and make a deal.
In the past three years, covering the Anglo-American led war in Iraq and its messy aftermath, I've made it a point to regularly watch Arab, European and American television services in order to compare their coverage. On the basis of what I have witnessed during the past 1,000 days, I would like to bet Donald Rumsfeld a double cheeseburger with cheese, and Karen Hughes two tickets to a Yankees-Rangers baseball game on a balmy July evening, that the overall coverage of Iraq on the mainstream Arab satellite services has been more comprehensive, balanced and accurate than the coverage of any mainstream American cable or broadcast television service. We'd like you to continue criticizing us, while you say what we're doing is right, the Arabs love that shit, and it makes you more believable. Oh, and about that fellowship.
Also, not everyone believes that the Pentagon is playing by the rules, even in the US. The Chicago Tribune reported earlier this month that in a lengthy study in 2003, former US colonel and Pentagon adviser Sam Gardner said he found 50 stories in US publications based on information disseminated by the Pentagon even though it knew the information was false. "It's a culture that believes that it's OK to manipulate the story," Gardiner said. "It goes all the way from the senior leaders down to the battalion commanders." We call that good training.
The Pentagon has denied this charge, calling the allegation "absurd, wrong, misguided, pick your adjective. Someone at the Pentagon knows how to spell plausible deniability I see. Good hire.
Who gives a shit what "regular" people like or dislike. Propoganda is a significant part of any counter insurgency campaign. "Regular" people don't like to kill people, even when they have to, that's why we have trained military personnel to take care of business when necessary. I am a political scientist and a student of propoganda myself, and think our guys are doing a stand up job on this counterinsurgency war on the hearts and minds side and propoganda is among the fine jobs they are doing. Most "regular" people don't have beyond a 5th grade reading level according to recent studies I've seen, so why must we give a shit what they think or do or say in regards to this matter. Leave it to the experts kiddies and enjoy your double vanilla latte frappachinos.
This is a root link to a 13 part Chicago Tribune series on the road to war in Iraq. The article shown was published today, entitled, Judging the case for war; it's a summary with a verdict on each of the issues examined. Down the left-hand side you'll see the links to previous stories, starting Nov. 20th.
The key point here: when you examine the evidence carefully, you see that the Bush administration was right to remove Saddam, even if it inartfully or inaccurately presented some evidence. The critics come off looking poorly because they have no answers to the root questions of how to respond to Saddam, how to keep him in check if left in power, and how to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people.
This is very, very good MSM reporting and analysis; it's too bad the usual defenders of the MSM are nowhere to be found in support.
And an apology by me: I should have been linking each part in the series as they were published.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/28/2005 12:55 ||
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As penance, Steve, I expect 3 "Hail Mary's," 2 "Our Father's" and a partridge in a pear tree.
Posted by: Tibor ||
12/28/2005 16:04 Comments ||
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"Intelligence agencies warned the Clinton and Bush administrations that Hussein was reconstituting his once-impressive program to create nuclear weapons. In part that intel reflected embarrassment over U.S. failure before the Persian Gulf war to grasp how close Iraq was to building nukes."
I like this line because it poses the dilemma neatly. 'Certainty' about that which one shouldn't claim 'certainty' leaves the country exposed. 'Certainty' that you have an amount of time before you really have to worry, or 'certainty' that unseen weapons exist-'certainty' in either direction is foolish. 'Possibility'' is more interesting.
2005 was a banner year for the nation's Idiotarian newspaper of record, The New York Times.
What's "Idiotarian"? Popular warblogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com) and Pajamas Media (pajamasmedia.com) coined the useful term to describe stubborn blame-America ideologues hopelessly stuck in a pre-September 11 mindset. The Times crusaded tirelessly this year for the cut-and-run, troop-undermining, Bush-bashing, reality-denying cause. Let's review:
On July 6, Army reserve officer Phillip Carter authored a freelance op-ed for the Times calling on President Bush to promote military recruitment efforts. The next day, the paper was forced to admit that one of its editors had inserted misleading language into the piece against Carter's wishes. The "correction":
"The Op-Ed page in some copies yesterday carried an incorrect version of an article about military recruitment. The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, 'Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday,' nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a 'surprise tour of Iraq.' That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error."
Carter told Times ombudsman Byron Calame: "Those were not words I would have said. It left the impression that I was conscripted" when, in fact, Carter volunteered for active duty.
Funny how the "production errors" of the Times' truth doctors always put the Bush administration and the war in the worst light.
Not content to meddle with the words of a living soldier, the Times published a disgraceful distortion of a fallen soldier's last words on Oct. 26. As reported in this column and in the news pages of the New York Post, Times reporter James Dao unapologetically abused the late Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr, whose letter to his girlfriend in case of death in Iraq was selectively edited to convey a bogus sense of "fatalism" for a massive piece marking the anti-war movement's "2,000 dead in Iraq" campaign. The Times added insult to injury by ignoring President Bush's tribute to Starr on Nov. 30 during his Naval Academy speech defending the war in Iraq.
After Starr died, Bush said, "a letter was found on his laptop computer. Here's what he wrote. He said, '[I]f you're reading this, then I've died in Iraq. I don't regret going. Everybody dies, but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we're in Iraq; it's not to me. I'm here helping these people so they can live the way we live, not to have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. Others have died for my freedom; now this is my mark.'"
Stirring words deemed unfit to print by the Times.
The Times did find space to print the year's most insipid op-ed piece by paranoid Harvard student Fatina Abdrabboh, who praised Al Gore for overcoming America's allegedly rampant anti-Muslim bias by picking up her car keys, which she dropped while running on a gym treadmill:
" . . . Mr. Gore's act represented all that I yearned for -- acceptance and acknowledgment. . . . I left the gym with a renewed sense of spirit, reassured that I belong to America and that America belongs to me."
I kid you not.
In June, Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of downed American Airlines Flight 77, blew the whistle on plans by civil liberties zealots to turn Ground Zero in New York into a Blame America monument. On July 29, the Times editorial page, stocked with liberals who snort and stamp whenever their patriotism is questioned, slammed Burlingame and her supporters at Take Back the Memorial as "un-American" -- for exercising their free speech rights.
Yes, "un-American." This from a newspaper that smeared female interrogators at Guantanamo Bay as "sex workers," sympathetically portrayed military deserters as "un-volunteers," apologized for terror suspects and illegal aliens at every turn, enabled the Bush Derangement Syndrome-driven crusade of the lying Joe Wilson, and recklessly endangered national security by publishing illegally obtained information about classified counterterrorism programs.
So, which side is The New York Times on? Let 2005 go down as the year the Gray Lady wrapped herself permanently in a White Flag.
Posted by: Steve ||
12/28/2005 11:54 ||
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Wrong. A white flag indicates surrender. The NY Times is on the other side
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/28/2005 15:25 Comments ||
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Michelle forgot the other color that alongside white makes for the colors of Jihad/Islam: Green.
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.
