Rick Moran has a long piece up taking me to task for, well, a number of things. I will reply later after work.
Archives for May 2005
The Modern Rorschach Test
This whole Koran flushing incident has, as one of my commenters noted, become nothing more than a Rorschach Test.
If you, as I do, believe that allegations of Koran flushing are entirely plausible and not just bug-eyed speculation by a Bush-hating and military-hating media, I would tend to agree with you. Given the evidence of confirmed torture, confirmed other religous abuses, the reports from detainees, the FBI, some military personnel, some former detainees, the International Red Cross, the ACLU, and Amnesty International, even when you know that the detainees have a reason to lie, I do not think you are being unreasonable, anti-military, anti-administration, or foolish.
There is, however, no way for both sides of this issue to come together if these are the standards of evidence:
Abu Ghraib happened because poorly-trained, unethical soldiers were allowed to supervise prisoners without proper supervision themselves. Gitmo is used to detain suspects with information the government deems important to the war effort, meaning it is under Washington’s eye.
Sorry. Until the press can magic up a document authorizing Koran defacement as an interrogation technique, or pictures surface, or maybe we get a named source, I’m not buying it.
If we can be subjected to pictures from Abu Ghraib or Saddam Hussein doing laundry in his tighty-whities, we can get a picture of Gitmo abuse.
If those are the rules of evidence, and everything else is to fall under a ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ blanket, we are simply an at impasse. I might add, that by these standards, Abu Ghraib only happened because there were pictures.
At any rate, I am done on this subject. People believe what they want to believe, and this isn’t about press bias anymore in my eyes. This is about subjugating the media to nothing more than a propaganda organ of the government.
Good Economic News
It appears the numbers have been updated from the earlier estimates:
The country’s economic performance in the opening quarter of 2005 was better than first thought, logging a solid 3.5 percent annual growth rate in a new sign of a strong springtime business expansion.
The latest reading on gross domestic product, released by the Commerce Department on Thursday, was an upgrade from the 3.1 percent pace initially estimated for the January-to-March quarter.
”The 3.5 percent pace is really a safe and solid pace for the economy to grow. By that I mean, it is not so fast that you can have an inflationary accident and not too slow to create new jobs,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group. ”It is right on the economy’s speed limit.”
The higher estimate for economic growth mostly reflected a slight improvement in the nation’s trade deficit, which was less of a drag on growth than the government previously thought. More brisk spending on housing projects also helped.
Good.
He’s Back…
At least temporarily, the reasonable Hugh Hewitt I used to read every day is back:
What needs to happen is a bipartisan agreement, formalized in a new rule, on how all nominations should be handled –with no blue slips, no “holds,” no endless delays, no last minute witnesses appearing with conjured up tales of harassment, no filibusters. Perhaps more nominees without majority support will lose –and on simple ideological grounds– but at least we can start to drain the swamp.
I think that is all something we can get behind, although it will be impossible. The way the Senate avoided the partisan brinksmanship we have witnessed over the past few years was with blue slips and rule 4 and other maneuvers like this. When we came to power, we stripped the Democrats of all of these things, thus forcing them to resort to the filibuster.
In other words, if you want give and take, you are going to have to go back to the pre-2002 way of businessm or just admit that what you want is majority rule with no exceptions.
At any rate, it is nice to see the normal Hugh back.
Hunh?
What the hell are you talking about, Dean?
Meantime, John Cole says that those of us who are mad at the media should take it all back. Sorry John, none for me. The people in the war-coverage press appear to run a broad spectrum: from those who are not on America’s side to those who outright want us to fail. That impression did not occur in a vacuum. As much as some people would like to believe that impression is all the fault of the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, the truth is that the talk radio people are the symptom–not the disease.
I don’t know what thge hell you are talking about. Legitimate anger at the media is valid. Criticizing them for things they are pretty much getting right is idiotic, which was the point of the whole post below. While you may think it was wrong for the abuse stories to be published, a lot of other people don’t, and don’t think it was that big of a deal to publish that the FBI had confirmed that there were allegations of Koran flushing.
I understand there is a lot of pent up frustration at the media, but it would make more sense to me to attack them when they are actually out of line- like Eason Jordan, Linda Foley, and other egregious acts of abuse. But beating them up because you don’t like the report is dumb.
I am really beginning to think many of you guys out there don’t want an independent media- you want a damned public relations firm.
How wold you have reacted if the media put forth a more forceful story against the Bush administration prior to the war, claiming there were no WMD’s? Because, you know, there didn’t turn out to be any. How many of you can sit there and honestly you would avoided attacking them?
Exactly. Objective truth means nothing. If the media had stated, prior to the war, loudly and repeatedly that there are no WMD in Irq, the same people waging their jihad against Nesweek would have been screaming that the media is biased because they ignore the existence of WMD.
So enough, Dean. I don’t want you to take it all back- you have legitimate areas for anger, and I share them with you. I think, all to often, some in the media do launch petty, personal, and partisan attacks.
But does it really make sense to attack them when they are right, or when they are trying to get it right?
Martin Peretz of the New Republic went so far as to draw a general conclusion about the seamy character of all journalists from the Newsweek episode. “All of Newsweek’s penitential protestations notwithstanding,” he said, “what emerges from this episode is the image of a profession that is complacent, self-righteous, and hopelessly in love with itself.”
It’s funny. The only time anyone thinks to blast the use of “unnamed sources” is when the mistake occurs in that rarest of phenomena in mainstream journalism: the dissenting piece of investigative journalism.
The reality is that unnamed sources are used about 10,000 times a day by the more patriotic and upstanding members of our working press, only they’re not used to wonder about the goings-on at places like Guantanamo Bay. Instead, they’re used to kiss ass and make icons out of morons
Shrinks Entering the Culture Wars, Pt. 2
This response by the Family Research Council about the APA decision to back gay marriage, is, by any standard, pretty tepid stuff, and most certainly when compared to some of the things they say:
“The theory that being denied the right to ‘marry’ same-sex partners damages the mental health of homosexuals and the children they raise is a convenient one–but unsupported by research,” Sprigg said.
Sprigg continued, “The mental health benefits of marriage result from the natural union of a man and a woman, not from the granting of government benefits upon any household that demands them.”
At any rate, not much there, but this wording from the newspaper itself is kind of weird:
Throughout its history, APA has taken a progressive stance toward homosexuality. In 1973, APA removed homosexuality from their list of mental disorders, and in 2000, the organization publicly supported same-sex civil unions.
I guess not recognizing something as a disorder is considered progressive.
At any rate, not hing much there, lest I hastily be accused of Christian bashing. I just thought that phraseology was weird. Not as awkward as some of the stuff I write, by any stretch of the imagination, but weird nonetheless.
How ‘Bout Them Apples?
Right now, Isikoff and some folks at Newsweek are ordering a big glass of STFU for their critics:
An FBI agent wrote in a 2002 document made public on Wednesday that a detainee held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had accused American jailers there of flushing the Koran down a toilet.
The Pentagon said the allegation was not credible.
The declassified document’s release came the week after the Bush administration denounced as wrong a May 9 Newsweek article that stated U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down a toilet to try to make detainees talk. The magazine retracted the article, which had triggered protests in Afghanistan in which 16 people died.
The newly released document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary of statements made days earlier by a detainee, whose name was redacted, in two interviews with an FBI special agent, whose name also was withheld, at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects.
The American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and other FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.
“Personally, he has nothing against the United States. The guards in the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet,” the FBI agent wrote.
“It’s not credible,” chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said of the allegation regarding a Koran in a toilet.
I guess that means we need a talking points update:
1.) Newsweek Lied, People Died!
2.) The media hates the military.
3.) Why are they using anonymous sources?
4.) 1.) Why is the media recycling old stories?
5.) 2.) You can’t trust those terrorists.
6.) 3.) Even if it is true, you shouldn’t publish it- we are at war.
7.) 4.) You can’t trust Newsweek and the Washington Post Reuters.
5.) What about the children?
More here.
*** Update ***
I think some of you are really mistaking my position on this. Maybe this will clear things up:
I think you mistakenly believe I want this to be true. I don’t.
To be brutally honest, it wouldn’t really bother me if they flushed the Koran, as the book is essentially meaningless to me. I guess part of me would say- “Gee, you shouldn’t really do that, because many will see it as really offensive,” but that is about it.
That isn’t the way we decided to fuck this football, though. Wiser heads than mine, or at the very least, people in a position to make these decisions, chose to approach the whole Islam issue from a standpoint of extreme sensitivity. We said, from day one, that we wouldn’t violate any of these rules we had just created for religious tolerance and respect for Islamic rituals and artifacts.
Personally, I think degrading the Koran and Islam would be stupid, because it would seem to me you would want to dispel the rumors about the US being a bunch of heathens and gain their support during interrogations. I guess I have the ‘good cop’ mentality. But I don’t know the ins and outs of interrogation, either. And, the logic that this might inflame anti-American sentiments abroad does not escape me.
But, at any rate, regardless of what I thought, our position was that we would not do anything of this sort and that the military would not tolerate it. Thus, it shouldn’t happen.
But, apparently, it is. And, yes, I know that many of these people are trained to lie. Many criminals in the United States are similarly liars, and as someone who worked as a Probation Officer, I have seen it up close and personal. But, just because criminals tend to also be liars doesn’t always mean that they are lying all the time. Liars that they may be, inmates do get abused and beaten. Cops do step over the line.
And, as we have seen, so do military personnel. Right now, the overwhelming evidence is that some sort of this was and may be still going on, and it doesn’t offend me that it is happening so much out of the fact that they are doing it (the alleged and actual acts of Koran and religious abuses- not the torture. The torture infurtiates me.), but the fact that we said we would not be doing it and yet it appears to be happening anyway. In other words, we set up the rules and then went ahead and broke them.
Many of you still wish to cling to the idea that it never in any way, shape, or form, occurred. That just doesn’t fit the overwhelming evidence that some religious-type abuses did occur. That means we would have to disbelieve all of the following:
1.) The detainees and their lawyers
2.) Military personnel themselves
3.) FBI reports and experiences
4.) The ACLU
5.) The International Red Cross
6.) Amnesty International
And yes, I know the track records of all of those organizations, particularly the last three. I know that International Red Cross ambulances have been used by murderers and bomb smugglers in Israel. But, at some point, even if you have 400 known liars gathered together, when they all have the same damned story to tell, only a fool would dismiss their claims.
Add ot that all the other circumstantial evidence and facts, to include the confirmed and documented reports of actual torture and the documented other acts of abuse of religious principle (see menstrual blood and other psyops interrogation procedures that have been documented), all of which would lead a reasonable person to believe that desecrating the Koran by putting in the toilet JUST ISN’T THAT FUCKING EXTRAORDINARY A CLAIM.
Then, we have the silly mentality of those attacking the media because Isikoff, as the stories linked above show, was right about the allegations but wrong about the exact source, who lied to them. Then, that is used as a bludgeon to in effect attempt to censor the media in what really is just another saga in the age old battle of the right versus the media. It is enough to make a man insane.
A reasonable person, and all the unreasonable people overseas, are very right to suspect that this sort of religious abuse has happened. Attempting to bully the media over this is pointless and absurd, and it most certainly is not anti-military to document it and demand that it be investigated. After all, we agreed to play this game this way. Koran flushing may not necessarily offend me (and I would in no way consider it to be torture), but they do, and the government and military agreed with them that it is offensive.
Regardless, attacking the media over this is wrong and stupid, because anyway you look at it, the street is going to believe it. They have other ways of getting out the word than through the American media:
So, while they may be lying, most of the evidence would lead us to believe some level of what they are saying is true. Regardless, they are going to believe it, so attacking the damned media to attempt to cover it up or not talk openly about it is just stupid and counterproductive. And it doesn’t mean I hate the military. It doesn’t mean I believe every accusation against the United States and our boys. It does mean I have looked around and I see what I see.
So, please. Cut the crap. It isn’t unreasonable to suspect this stuff happened, and it isn’t in any way helpful to launch this petty jihad against the media. Not to mention the administration’s cynical behavior in aiding the anti-Newsweek and general anti-media cause.
And, I might add, that when it comes to defendant’s rights, many of you are aware I am a pretty limp-wristed weenie when it comes to the rights of the accused. I went along with Gitmo and everything in the beginning. But if I were in the jury box today, presented all the evidence about the alleged Korand flushing and other nonsense, I would be hard pressed not to convict. In my view of things, we are beyond a reasonable doubt.
Does that clear things up?
*** Update ***
The General in charge of Gitmo held a press conference, and provided a preliminary report on the allegations. Some abuses were found, som were not, and, most importantly, the Koran flushing was not found to be true.
Good. I was wrong to believe all those reports, but I still don’t think, given all the reports and the other actual misconduct, it was unreasonable to suspect that it had happened. At any rate, I have to ask- what did the media do wrong? I actually watched the press confernce held live in the mainstream media. It will be reported widely tomorrow thee is no factual basis for these claims.
Why is that a bad thing- dispelling rumors with clear and transparent media coverage? Why the need to villify the press, to resort to talking points when you don’t have any more facts than I did- just suspicions (which, in this case, turned out to be true).
How did the system not work? Our soldiers, far from being sullied by scurrilous reports, have been vinidcated. This is good, no?