As seen from Just Above Sunset

Tuesday, 4 May 2004

Topic: Iraq

"Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." - George W. Bush, September 20, 2001

If you didn't catch clips on the news, Donald Rumsfeld had a press conference today that I suspect he found unpleasant. A typical news item covering it, with video clips if you're so inclined (and if your have a high-speed connection) is here (NBC). I saw a bit of it and he did seem grumpy.

The best analysis of what he said is here from Tom Schaller:

The main points?

We are shocked and outraged. Even though we've known since January that something wrong was happening.

We will get to the bottom of this. CNN correspondent Jamie McIntyre reported this afternoon that there are or were 35 separate investigations underway, 25 that involve prisoner deaths, including two that are homicide investigations -- not to mention at least one male soldier who is alleged to have raped a female Iraqi prisoner, thereby restoring the "rape rooms" the president told us had been banished forever thanks to the invasion. Is that the bottom, Secretary Rumsfeld, or will there be news of something yet worse?

"The system works. The system works." Direct Rummy quote that sounds eerily like Nigel Tufnel's "but these go to 11" Spinal Tap moment... yet according to members of both parties on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who say that in countless meetings and appearances by Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, their deputies, and representatives from private contractors in the past few months, the system didn't work because DoD made no mention, not even a whiff, of potential prison problems.

Put it all together -- feigned outrage only after the story is public; the assurance that the matter will now be handled appropriately which means it was therefore bungled up until this point; the insistence that nothing improper or "unsystemic" has occurred -- and you get a nice capsule of how the Bush Administration manages so much of its policy.

Which begs the question that always puzzles me about Republicans, and that is this: Aside from the fact that they are more concerned about running for and winning office than running the government itself (other than into the ground), given that good management makes for good policy, and that both combine to make for good politics, how is it that the Bushies manage, time and again, to prove their ineptness?

Gee, I don't know. It must be a kind of gift.

Schaller offers this explanation of Rumsfeld's discomfort today -

But more puzzling is the fact that, even if he cared not one whit about good war management for management's sake, Cheshire Cat Rummy should have been clever enough to know that this would get out eventually, and had the sense to at least alert somebody in Congress during closed session so he and Bush would now be insulated... which can only lead to this conclusion: Deep down, Rumsfeld thought, if not hoped, it would never get out.

Yeah, well, it did get out.

Reuters actually is reporting - Two Iraqi prisoners were murdered by Americans and 23 other deaths are being investigated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States revealed on Tuesday as the Bush administration tried to contain growing outrage over the abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Oops.

Who says? Our own Army says -

Army officials said the military had investigated the deaths of 25 prisoners held by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and determined that an Army soldier and a CIA contractor murdered two prisoners. Most of the deaths occurred in Iraq.

An Army official said a soldier was convicted in the U.S. military justice system of homicide for shooting a prisoner to death in September 2003 at a detention center in Iraq.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a private contractor who worked for the CIA was found to have committed the other homicide against a prisoner.

Yeah, well, we're on it. The Pentagon has sent Major General Geoffrey Miller to Iraq to assess the prison system. You know, he's the former chief of the US detention center at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba. Just the right guy.

"We were enormously proud of what we had done in Guant?namo, to be able to set that kind of environment where we were focused on gaining the maximum amount of intelligence," said General Miller, who added that he recently emphasized the message in meetings with American soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

"What I told them was, we are here to be able to enable our forces to win this fight that is ongoing," he said. "Everything we do, we'll do. At the end of the day, you better make sure that what we've done will make America proud."

Well, one wonders.

But Miller may straighten things out at Abu Ghraib, or, as with Guant?namo, we'll just never know anything about anything that happens there from now on.

And maybe "the few bad eggs" will get their punishment.

But consider this from another commentator with history on his mind -

The United States does not have a terrifically good record when it comes to punishing our military personnel for crimes committed in the course of service. Lieutenant William Calley, who ought to be rotting in a small cell even now, runs a jewelry store in Columbus, Georgia; the Marine aviators who killed the cable-car riders in Italy a few years back were (to my mind, incredibly) acquitted; and of course Okinawa natives have more than their share of horror stories pertaining to marauding off-duty Americans. I don't mean to paint an unjustly negative picture of American military justice, nor imply that we are somehow worse than other militaries in this respect. We're not. But that in itself is not good enough, really: there are glaring deficiencies which shine forth on their own, and they ought not be judged solely in comparison to those of others.

I state this as I consider the affair at Abu Ghraib. The first historical parallel that springs to mind is that of the French torture scandals of the Algerian war. And in this sense, the import of Abu Ghraib seems to recede somewhat: torture in Algeria didn't cost France the war ...

And this will cost us this war? Maybe so. Or maybe not.

The line on Fox News (Hume) and on Rush Limbaugh and in many places on the right is that this is not a big deal. Many are suggesting they've seen worse at fraternity hazing sessions - and I'd guess George Bush thinks back to his initiation into the Yale Skull and Bones Club and wonders what the problem is. Just mindless high jinks. Frat boy stuff. What's the problem?

As Rush Limbaugh says, this is no big deal -

Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

Well, Christopher Hitchens - a fellow I've come to detest - does put things in different perspective here.

Just consider for a moment what this bunch of giggling sadists has done, with its happy snaps and recreational cruelties:

~ It has defiled one of the memorials of regime change. I was a visitor to Abu Ghraib last summer, and the stench of misery and evil was still palpable in those pits and cellars. It is as if British or American soldiers had not only executed German prisoners of war, but had force-marched them to Dachau in order to commit the atrocity.

~ It has been like a shot in the back to the many soldiers (active front-line duty, not safe-job prison guards) who were willing to take casualties rather than inflict them and who fought selectively and carefully. What are the chances of the next such soldier who is captured by some gang of Saddamists or Wahabbists or Khomeinists?

~ It seems, at least on its face, to have profaned the idea of women in the military. One does not have to concede anything to Islamist sexism in order to know what the impact of obscene female torturers will have in the wider society.

This is only the rehearsal for one's revulsion. One of two things must necessarily be true. Either these goons were acting on someone's authority, in which case there is a layer of mid- to high-level people who think that they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders. Or they were acting on their own authority, in which case they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot.

Gee, Hitchens is rather unhappy.

Oh heck, catch the Charlie Rose show where he interviews Seymour Hersh who broke the story of the Army Report that set off the firestorm - the report prepared by Major General Antonio Taguba on alleged abuse of prisoners by members of the 800th Military Police Brigade at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad - ordered by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of Joint Task Force-7, the senior U.S. military official in Iraq, following all these persistent allegations of human rights abuses at the prison. It's now available for anyone - Complete text of Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba - should you wish to read it.

The Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker that broke the story that we've been investigating all this since January, and explains this report, is here.

Isn't Seymour Hersh the same fellow who broke the story of the My Lai "massacre" over in Vietnam way back when? The man is a troublemaker.

Anyway, Kevin Drum tells us the topic on Charlie Rose's show was the Iraqi prisoner photographs and two "very intriguing points" came out toward the end of the conversation.

Seymour Hersh indicated that there was one entire wing in Abu Ghraib devoted to women and another one for juveniles. He left the impression that the story involving these women and children prisoners would really go way beyond the story as we know it right now.

Dr. Bernard Haykel revealed that the attack on the prison ten days ago was triggered by widespread rumor that women and children were being molested in there and death would be better than the humiliation for these prisoners.

Both gave the impression that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg and there is much more to come.

Yeah, great.

NBC now reports (Tuesday) that the Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd published four photographs appearing to show U.S. soldiers raping at least two women and forcing them to give oral sex, one of them at gunpoint. The newspaper, apparently not the most reliable around, ran the photos under a banner headline reading, "The Democracy of the American Empire of Evil and Adultery: Gang Rape by Occupation Soldiers of Iraqi Women Under Gunpoint."

Probably not true - a fabrication. But who is buying our denials now?

CBS news reports we're now going for broke on this one -

President Bush's national security adviser said Bush "will speak directly to the Arab world," and a White House official said the president is planning to do interviews with Arab television to underscore his feelings about photographs of naked prisoners and gloating U.S. soldiers.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday that Bush will conduct two 10-minute interviews with the U.S.-sponsored Al-Hurra television network and the Arab network Al Arabiya.

"This is an opportunity for the president to speak directly to the people in Arab nations and let them know that the images that we all have seen are shameless and unacceptable," McClellan said.

One would hope he doesn't smirk too much.

But then again, for the second time in two years, our chief diplomat in charge of improving our image around the world, particularly in the Arab world, resigned last Thursday - in a little noticed announcement from the State Department. Margaret Tutwiler, the Under Secretary of State For Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, quit her post to take a senior vice president position with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) effective July 1st. She's no dummy. And with Maggie gone, well, Bush will have to go chat up the Arabs himself.

This does not bode well.

___

And a little recent history, from the April 19, 2002 edition of The Christian Science Monitor
US finds strange bedfellows in UN vote on torture
A proposal including prison inspections is set for a vote today, but Washington says it conflicts with US law.
Peter Ford - Staff writer

PARIS - The United States has aligned itself with some of its fiercest and least democratic enemies in opposing efforts to strengthen an international treaty that outlaws torture, according to diplomatic sources.

Washington has found itself on the same side as Cuba, Libya, and Syria, among other states, in trying to block a proposal before the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva designed to give more teeth to the Convention Against Torture.

US diplomats insist they are not opposed to beefing up the 1987 UN convention, to which Washington is a party, but say they disagree with the international prison-inspection regime being proposed by their Latin American and European allies.

... Washington has opposed the idea since it was first raised 10 years ago, arguing that the fourth amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting "unreasonable searches and seizures" meant it could not allow foreign prison inspectors to go where they pleased. "As a matter of principle, unrestricted authority granted to a visiting mechanism is incompatible with the need for checks and balances" argues Steve Solomon, head of the US delegation.

Sigh.

Posted by Alan at 19:43 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 5 May 2004 10:19 PDT home

Monday, 3 May 2004

Topic: Bush

Leadership: The CEO President (folks are getting nervous)

Last week in the magazine - Volume 2, Number 16 of Sunday, April 25, 2004 - Joseph, our American friend in France, commented -

By the way, now that this thing has turned into the fiasco that most of us said it would, I wonder what your "unnamed friend" is saying these days... Hey, the mistake is understandable. We're a nation that admires CEOs, we wanted a CEO president. Now that the nation and the armed services are being run efficiently, like a proper corporation (just forget how far we're in the red) I hope that we're all happy with the result.

And I commented that Bush said he'd run the country as a CEO would, and Bush does have an MBA of course - but every company he was involved with went under. There are CEO's - then there are CEO's.

Robert Kagan, the neoconservative academic and Bush supporter is also thinking on this.

See 'Lowering Our Sights'
Robert Kagan, The Washington Post, Sunday, May 2, 2004; Page B07

Here's Kagan's take on such leadership.

Bush himself is the great mystery in this mounting debacle. His commitment to stay the course in Iraq seems utterly genuine. Yet he continues to tolerate policymakers, military advisers and a dysfunctional policymaking apparatus that are making the achievement of his goals less and less likely. He does not seem to demand better answers, or any answers, from those who serve him. It's not even clear that he understands how bad the situation in Iraq is or how close he is to losing public support for the war, a support that once lost may be impossible to regain.

Does that sound like a CEO to you?

Kevin Drum, over at the Washington Monthly says it sure does. Kevin must have worked for some pretty bad CEO type folks to say this:

Bush styles himself a "CEO president," but the world is full to bursting with CEOs who have goals they would dearly love to attain but who lack either the skill or the fortitude to make them happen. They assign tasks to subordinates without making sure the subordinates are capable of doing them -- but then consider the job done anyway because they've "delegated" it. They insist they want a realistic plan, but they're unwilling to do the hard work of creating one -- all those market research reports are just a bunch of ivory tower nonsense anyway. They work hard -- but only on subjects in their comfort zone. If they like dealing with people they can't bring themselves to read all those tedious analyst's reports, and if they like numbers they can't bring themselves to spend time chattering with distributors about their latest prospect.

And most important of all, weak CEOs are unwilling to recognize bad news and perform unpleasant tasks to fix it -- tasks like confronting poorly performing subordinates or firing people. Good CEOs suck in their guts and do it anyway.

George Bush is, fundamentally, a mediocre CEO, the kind of insulated leader who's convinced that his instincts are all he needs. Unfortunately, like many failed CEOs before him, he's about to learn that being sure you're right isn't the same thing as actually being right.

So sure: George Bush is genuinely committed to winning in Iraq. He just doesn't know how to do it and doesn't have the skills, experience, or personality to look beyond his own instincts in order to figure it out. America is about to pay a heavy price for that.

So, you don't have the skills, experience, or personality to look beyond your own instincts and you're in a leadership position? What do you do? Delegate... and hope.

Kevin Drum seems to have worked in the same sorts of organizations in which I've worked.

Back in the eighties I worked for a dynamic woman at Hughes Aircraft - the company that later turned into Hughes Electronics, then became part of General Motors, then morphed into DirecTV and last year got sold to Rupert Murdoch. Back then I worked for the Hughes Space and Communications Group, and we had two-thirds of the satellites and satellite payloads in orbit for two decades. This was a class act. The place was indeed full of rocket scientists. Aircraft? No, the Hughes Aircraft name had more to do with history. Heck, the last airplane Hughes made had been nailed together in the mid-forties, the famous Spruce Goose - and it had flown once in 1948 down in Long Beach for all of a half-mile.

Anyway, the reign of my dynamic boss, her time in power, ended badly - and I think it had something to do with her "George Bush" style of managing. She would propose all sorts of grand ideas, and ask how we could implement these ideas. So we'd have long staff meetings over many afternoons trying to figure out how to "make it so" - as the commander of the Starship Enterprise says to his crew.

The problem was those of us on the staff who liked to suggest there were some problems we'd have to solve, that we should have contingency back-out plans and slack in the project schedules for unexpected events, even things as minor as illness keeping key players home for a day or two, or the real possibility a vendor might be late a day or two with something critical we really needed. But we were the problem. She didn't want to hear the negative. She didn't like people who didn't have a positive attitude. She made us remove the slack from the project schedules - and we were told to not tell her, ever, of factors that might slow us down or stop us in any way. She didn't want to hear it. She called this positive leadership - you had to believe anything could be done and not consider any obstacles. The word was we can to this, not we can do this if....

Most everything we did, of course, didn't quite work as planned, or just didn't work at all. Then she'd have a meeting and berate us all for not being sufficiently positive. Our negative attitude had doomed us all. Why couldn't we be more like her? You get the idea.

How did that all end? Oddly enough she was fired for theft of company property, a computer hard drive that she wanted for her Macintosh at home.

When I see how Bush manages our country, I think of her.

___

By the way, Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo read the Kevin Drum item above and adds this:

One of the things I've found difficult about writing about Iraq in recent days is imputing some level of seriousness to the arguments of the president and his retainers who continue to press an optimistic view of what's happening in Iraq. From them, on any given day, you can still hear the argument that, notwithstanding some tough days, things are still getting better in Iraq and the key to success is sticking with it.

At the same time, I talk to, or have conversations related to me with, various foreign policy, intelligence and military experts, all of whom --- across the political spectrum --- seem to believe that things are about as bleak as they can be. On top of this, they seem uniform in the belief -- sometimes based on inference, other times based on direct knowledge -- that the White House is fresh out of ideas about what to do, and basically hasn't any idea how to proceed.

Either the president knows the situation is that bad or he (and perhaps his advisors too) is just too out of touch to have any idea what's happening. Increasingly, I think that the president is just too small-minded and vainglorious a man to come to grips with the situation.

A strong president, a good president, would put his country before his pride and throw himself into saving the situation even if it meant admitting previous mistakes and ditching past policies and advisors. But I don't think this president has the character to do that.

Making a clean sweep, firing some of his most compromised advisors, admitting some past mistakes -- not for effect, but so that those mistakes could be more thoroughly and rapidly overcome -- might well doom the president politically. But I doubt there's any question they'd be in the best interests of the country.

This president seems either disinclined to or unable to do more than preside over a drift into disaster while putting on a game face.

Yeah, well, don't hold your breath, Josh.

Marshall concludes with this:

There's all this talk about what might be the best critique of the president's policies (politically and substantively), what the best alternative policies might be, and so forth. But all of that, I think, misses the point. This president is too compromised by his deceptions, his past lack of accountability and his acquiescence in failed policies, ever to correct the situation. Like C.S. Lewis's metaphor about the road to hell being easy to walk down, but the further walked, harder and harder to turn back upon, this president is just too far gone with misleading the public, covering up and indulging incompetence, and embracing venality ever to make a clean break and start retrieving the situation.

Oh, THAT'S real cheery.

___

Of course, in my local newspaper you get this - a summary of what all these recent books about George Bush show about how he works -

See Books Depict Bush as Instinct-Driven Leader
Political experts say recent works by White House insiders reveal an absence of analysis in the president's decision-making style
Maura Reynolds, Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2004

Key items? Well, there is the CEO business

President Bush styles himself as the first CEO president, applying the rigor and authority of his MBA education to the job of chief executive of the nation.

But that's not the picture that emerges from three recent insider accounts of the workings of the Bush administration, experts in decision-making and presidential management say. On the contrary, they say, the president appears to have a highly personal working style, with little emphasis on systematic analysis of major decisions.

"There seems to be almost an absence of any analytical or deliberative process for mapping the problem or exploring alternatives or estimating consequences," said Graham Allison, a professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

And Bush appears to give greater weight to his own instincts than to experts or other sources of advice and information. The president has a "bias for action," said Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. "I've been struck by [how] Bush's sense of personal identity as a leader shapes his decisions," he said.

Well, many argue a bias for action is a good thing. Remember the words of Marge Simpson - "We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it." The man has no French in him.

Some paragraphs above I mentioned long meetings. Bush doesn't do those - or memos or any of that sissy stuff. Fred Greenstein, a presidential historian at Princeton University is a bit amazed.

Greenstein said that one striking thing about all three books was what they don't show. There are few examples, for instance, of Bush presiding over meetings in which subordinates presented problems, weighed evidence and aired differing views.

"I think a lot of policy is made on the fly," he said. "It isn't a process in which people assemble and go back and forth in a rigorous way."

Another thing largely missing from the books was any indication that documents or memos weighing policy alternatives are circulated and discussed. Harvard's Allison said one of the few documents the administration did prepare in advance of the Iraq war -- the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq probably had weapons of mass destruction -- was quickly compiled and not very well done.

"The more it's examined, it seems quite sloppy," he said. "At this point, if there had been some good analysis of the issues on paper, we would have seen some evidence of it.

"The contrast with the textbook conception of informed decision making is distressing," he said.

Distressing? Perhaps. But "informed decision making" is probably overvalued. That concept is not as important as resolve and determination. The guy from Stanford's Graduate School of Business explains - Bush is not following what everyone teaches these days in business school, but rather is being what people EXPECT a CEO to be - without the messy details.

Stanford's Kramer said though Bush showed little interest in the kind of number-crunching analysis taught in business school, his style of management does conform to the popular image of chief executives as forceful and "decisive." "There seems to be a lot of value attached to showing resolve and demonstrating resolve," he said.

But Jay Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of "Decision Making at the Top," said the decision-making techniques taught at that school -- from which Bush received an MBA -- focus on understanding the nature of decisions, not simplifying them.

"What we teach around here is that you've got to understand the complexity of the territory you're trying to affect," he said. "You don't make a decision until you've surveyed all the possible ramifications. The binary idea that you're either right or wrong is just foolishness."

Foolishness? Bush is not following the Havard Business school methods, or the methods most every CEO actually uses?

Well, let's put it this way: Bush is not really a CEO. He just plays one on TV.

How so? He's got the moves down - Gordon Gecko, the Welch guy who used to run GE, the legendary Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap famous for dismantling Sunbeam and all sorts of other companies - like Donald Trump on his reality show "The Apprentice" - Bush cuts to the chase. He plays the part of the decisive executive, as he understands it.

In the Times a smattering of other business folks weigh in on Bush.

"He doesn't like long meetings. He likes truncated meetings. That means you're not going to have the kinds of sessions ... that are going to bring in lots of different kinds of information."

So? Who needs it?

"The decisiveness part is certainly there. The imperviousness to facts and analysis is also there. So what we have is someone who is going on raw instinct."

So? Facts bog you down.

"Bush appears to rest his confidence in a few people whose judgment corresponds to his gut instincts. He seems to be obsessive about being decisive, but willing to make hard and fast decisions on the basis of ideology more than evidence."

So? He believes in what he is doing. Folks like that about him.

All these people from the top business schools seem to think the president would flunk out of their programs because although he plays at being a fine CEO, he doesn't really get the quite basic concepts of what a CEO actually does.

But he's president, and they are not, and never will be. They can chat with this Times reporter all they want, and complain Bush is giving every CEO in America a bad name. It doesn't matter.

The bottom line - something you think a CEO refers to all the time as he leans across the conference table, sweeps all the paper aside, all the analyses and project plans and contingency documents and all that stuff, scowls at his quivering subordinates and growls, slowly and menacingly, "So, what's the bottom line?" Great drama!

The bottom line here is that the nation prefers the "popular concept" of the decisive leader to the real thing. Image trumps substance every time.

Most folks would vote for Donald Trump for president if he ran for the office. And Trump has considered it. But Trump, to his credit, figured out that although he knows lots about real estate and finance and such things, and knows a lot about fading European models, as he tends to marry those when he can, he doesn't know jack about running the most powerful nation in the world, about international relations and geopolitics, about the history and needs of our allied nations and those who give us trouble, about the ways congress passes laws or doesn't, about the role of the courts and the constitutional questions that keep coming up - all that stuff.

George Bush never did figure out he didn't know much of that stuff, and he doesn't seem to want to learn it now. One would assume he thought that with his father's old friends and advisors as his subordinates all around him that all of those pesky details really didn't matter.

Some of us think they do matter, but like the business school professors, we aren't the president and never will be. Heck, who would want the job?

Posted by Alan at 15:00 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Monday, 3 May 2004 22:33 PDT home

Sunday, 2 May 2004

New issue of JUST ABOVE SUNSET MAGAZINE now online!

No blogging today. Anyway, it was too hot to review events in this sorry world - another day of over a hundred in the shade. A day to hide....

And Sunday is the day I do final assembly and post the week's new issue of this: Just Above Sunset Magazine.

Commentary here will resume tomorrow.

Check it out the new issue of the virtual magazine, the parent publication of the weblog.

This is the "May Day" issue - Volume 2, Number 17

Current Events

War Notes: : How things are going depends on how you look at things, as it is all a matter of having the right attitude...
This is expanded from the "Tinkerbell" items over the last several days here, with commentary from Phillip Raines in Georgia and information on the Hersch revelations that were just published in The New Yorker regarding the Baghdad prison business.

The Dead: A turning point this week? A long road to the final paragraphs that suggest just that...
This is on the ABC "Nightline" broadcast of the roll call of the dead American soldiers in Iraq Friday night - who said what and odd details, and what this all might mean....
This is a new article.

The Zeitgeist: Nathaniel West, cellos and mountain lions... Strange Times as seen from Los Angeles
A tighter version of what originally appeared here....

History Lessons: A minor history lesson from an unlikely source ... Clemenceau jokes around with Woodrow Wilson? Something in praise of Warren G. Harding?
A tighter version of what originally appeared here....

Press Notes: Fox News, Fair and Balanced - Just Not Very Canadian
A Canadian columnist takes on Bill O'Reilly and lives to tell about.
Bill O'Reilly claims France is in ruins, and he helped in this just punishment.
And the other Carlin fellow - Bush want to replace our retiring National Archivist with someone who doesn't like people looking at facts at all.
This is a new article.

Sidebar: Selling ersatz personal responsibility to the masses...
A tighter version of what originally appeared here....

Pythons: The Monty Python survivors (Eric Idle and Terry Jones) speak out ...
Putting the two items Pythons who wrote this week both in one place... in perspective.

Features

Photography: May Day - From our correspondents in Paris and Chicago...
Ric Erickson sends exclusive photos of the May Day parades in Paris, and, for the day, Muguets - that's Lily of the Valley. A tradition. And there's a photo of a deranged cat from Chicago - some odd Paris stuff, and a tree peony shot that's awesome.
This is all new.

Minor Ironies: The Revenge of the French Against America
A tighter version of what originally appeared here with one new detail - that's a 1967 Citro?n, of all things.

Quotes: Two more odd ones... New.

Posted by Alan at 21:37 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Sunday, 2 May 2004 21:44 PDT home

Saturday, 1 May 2004

Topic: The Media

Another Python Speaks

Back on November 9th of last year I reported that according to a story in Reuters - actually reported in a lot of places - my local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, had ordered its reporters to stop describing anti-American forces in Iraq as "resistance fighters," saying the term romanticizes them and evokes World War II-era heroism.

The ban was issued by Melissa McCoy, a Times assistant managing editor, who told the staff in an e-mail circulated the Monday before that the phrase conveyed unintended meaning - and asked them to instead use the terms "insurgents" or "guerrillas." Apparently the editors got queasy: "[Times Managing Editor] Dean Baquet and I both individually had the same reaction when we saw the term used in the newspaper," McCoy said. "Both of us felt the phrase evoked a certain feeling, that there was a certain romanticism or heroism to the resistance."

But, of course, McCoy said she considered "resistance fighters" an accurate description of Iraqis battling American troops, but it also evoked World War II - specifically the French Resistance or Jews who fought against Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. "Really, it was something that just stopped us when we saw it, and it was really about the way most Americans have come to view the words."

So the term is quite accurate but - "We are loath to proscribe the use of just about any word, but sometimes certain combinations of words send an unintended signal. You combine these two seemingly innocuous words and suddenly they have this unintended meaning."

The New York Times was following. Allan Siegal, assistant managing editor: "We don't have a policy but when you mentioned the phrase it sounded like romanticizing to me. I don't think it's the kind of cool, neutral language we like to see."

The Washington Post did not follow. David Hoffman, the foreign editor of said his paper had used the phrase "resistance fighters" to describe Iraqi forces and had no objection to the term. "They are resisting an American occupation so it's not inaccurate."

Well times have changed - and one of the old Monty Python troop speaks on this.

See The war of the words
Terry Jones, The Guardian (UK), Friday April 30, 2004

Jones sees the problem as even bigger -

One of the chief problems with the current exciting adventure in Iraq is that no one can agree on what to call anyone else.

In the Second World War we were fighting the Germans, and the Germans were fighting us. Everyone agreed who was fighting who. That's what a proper war is like.

However, in Iraq, there isn't even any agreement on what to call the Americans. The Iraqis insist on calling them "Americans", which seems, on the face of it, reasonable.

The Americans, however, insist on referring to themselves as "coalition forces". This is probably the first time in history that the United States has tried to share its military glory with someone else.

Well, we do not want to seem like we're doing this all alone - because even if the Spanish and a few others have bailed out, the Brits are still with us, not to mention the folks from Fiji and Tonga. It's not just us.

But Jones too sees a problem with what we call the Iraqis, besides calling them the Iraqis.

Then there's the problem of what the Americans are going to call the Iraqis - especially the ones that they kill. You can call people who are defending their own homes from rockets and missiles launched from helicopters and tanks "fanatics and terrorists" only for so long. Eventually even newspaper readers will smell a rat.

Similarly it's fiendishly difficult to get people to accept the label "rebels" for those Iraqis killed by American snipers when - as in Falluja - they turn out to be pregnant women, 13-year-old boys and old men standing by their front gates.

It also sounds a bit lame to call ambulance drivers "fighters" - when they've been shot through the windscreen in the act of driving the wounded to hospital - and yet what other word can you use without making them sound like illegitimate targets?

Ah yes, well, these things happen, and have to be... packaged? Yes, carefully.

And Jones points out that one of the other key things here is to try to call US mercenaries "civilians" or "civilian contractors", while calling Iraqi civilians "fighters" or "insurgents".

Yep, that works. We do that.

And we try out new terms all the time.

Describing the recent attack on Najaf, the New York Times happily hit upon the word "militiamen". This has the advantage of being a bit vague (nobody really knows what a "militiaman" looks like or does), while at the same time sounding like the sort of foreigners any responsible government ought to kill on sight.

No. It's just vague. But whatever, Jones points to even thornier semantic problems in the last few days, and coming up soon in June.

For example, there's the "handover of power" that's due to take place on June 30. Since no actual "power" is going to be handed over, the coalition chaps have had to find a less conclusive phrase. They now talk about the handover of "sovereignty", which is a suitably elastic notion. And besides, handing over a "notion" is a damn sight easier than handing over anything concrete.

Then again, the US insists that it has been carrying out "negotiations" with the mojahedin in Falluja. These "negotiations" consist of the US military demanding that the mojahedin hand over all their rocket-propelled grenade launchers, in return for which the US military will not blast the city to kingdom come. Now there's a danger that this all sounds like one side "threatening" the other, rather than "negotiations" - which, after all, usually implies some give and take on both sides.

As for the word "ceasefire", it's difficult to know what this signifies anymore. According to reliable witness reports from Falluja, the new American usage makes generous allowance for dropping cluster bombs and flares, and deploying artillery and snipers.

Well, call it "forceful negotiation." And you might click on the link to see what Jones has to say about the words used by the folks in the Oval Office.

Posted by Alan at 15:55 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Friday, 30 April 2004

Topic: The Media

A turning point this week? A long road to a final paragraph that suggests just that...

Since it is the press controversy of the week regarding the war, it seems best to review the business with the Sinclair Broadcast Group and ABC News, a division of the Disney Corporation.

Friday, March 30, on his show ABC show "Nightline" - broadcast after the late local news around 11:30 in most markets - the host and producer Ted Koppel read the names of all the soldiers killed to date in Iraq. Sinclair Broadcast Group decided not to air the show on their stations. Sinclair General Counsel Barry Faber said this: "We find it to be contrary to the public interest."

The boycott affects eight ABC-affiliated Sinclair stations.

To be official about this, here are the positions:

STATEMENT OF THE SINCLAIR BROADCAST GROUP

The ABC Television network announced on Tuesday that the Friday, April 30th edition of "Nightline" will consist entirely of Ted Koppel reading aloud the names of U.S. servicemen and women killed in action in Iraq. Despite the denials by a spokeswoman for the show the action appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq.

While the Sinclair Broadcast Group honors the memory of the brave members of the military who have sacrificed their lives in the service of our country, we do not believe such political statements should be disguised as news content. As a result, we have decided to preempt the broadcast of "Nightline" this Friday on each of our stations which air ABC programming.

We understand that our decision in this matter may be questioned by some. Before you judge our decision, however, we would ask that you first question Mr. Koppel as to why he chose to read the names of the 523 troops killed in combat in Iraq, rather than the names of the thousands of private citizens killed in terrorists attacks since and including the events of September 11, 2001. In his answer, you will find the real motivation behind his action scheduled for this Friday.

ABC NEWS STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO SINCLAIR

We respectfully disagree with Sinclair's decision to pre-empt "Nightline's" tribute to America's fallen soldiers which will air this Friday, April 30. The Nightline broadcast is an expression of respect which simply seeks to honor those who have laid down their lives for this country. ABC News is dedicated to thoughtful and balanced coverage and reports on the events shaping our world with neither fear nor favor -- as our audience expects, deserves, and rightly demands. Contrary to the statement issued by Sinclair, which takes issue with our level of coverage of the effects of terrorism on our citizens, ABC News and all of our broadcasts, including "Nightline," have reported hundreds of stories on 9-11. Indeed, on the first anniversary of 9-11, ABC News broadcast the names of the victims of that horrific attack.

In sum, we are particularly proud of the journalism and award winning coverage ABC News has produced since September 11, 2001. ABC News will continue to report on all facets of the war in Iraq and the War on Terrorism in a manner consistent with the standards which ABC News has set for decades.

Here are the stations -

WXLV, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point NC
WEAR, Pensacola
KDNL, St. Louis
WSYX, Columbus OH
WLOS, Asheville NC
WCHS, Charleston, Huntington W VA
WGGB, Springfield MA

Is honoring "our war dead" in this way is a political statement aimed at undermining support for the war? Or is Sinclair defending Bush. The Sinclair Group is pretty loyal to the administration, as you can see from their political contributions.

Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly reports this:

Washington Monthly editor Ben Wallace-Wells emails to say he discussed Nightline on a radio show in a deeply Republican area of North Carolina recently and got a different reaction:

The host and his sidekick (whose brother was KIA in Vietnam) opposed Koppel on the established conservative line: it's politically opportunistic, it's a cynical ratings-grab, it's unpatriotic to drum up opposition to a war president. But we heard from 6 or 7 callers, all but one conservative (and even the Democrat was a military wife), and to a person they disagreed with the hosts, thought the reading was noble and honorable, a proper way to honor our dead. Some still agreed that the timing was opportunistic, politically motivated, but nevertheless they said they supported the name-reading.

So which is it - a left-wing political stunt to embarrass the president, or a gesture of respect to honor these people?

Drum's conclusion?

... war supporters need to get a grip. In a popular war, battlefield losses serve to redouble public commitment to the fight, and honoring the dead is viewed as a solemn and patriotic gesture. It's only in unpopular wars that combat deaths cause public support to decline.

Present day conservatives seem to unthinkingly assume that any public acknowledgement of Iraqi war deaths is obviously just an underhanded political gesture designed to weaken support for the war. This is partly a result of their paranoid conviction that the sole purpose of the media is to undermine conservative causes, but it's also a tacit admission that this is, fundamentally, a war with very shallow support indeed. If they really believed in the war and in the administration's handling of it, they'd show some backbone and welcome Ted Koppel's gesture of respect tonight. Instead they're acting as if they're ashamed we're over there.

Yeah, well, that's one way of seeing it.

Want to hear from a Republican, conservative war hero? Here's John McCain's letter to Sinclair:

Fri Apr 30 2004 11:29:49 ET

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) issued the following letter today to Mr. David Smith, President and CEO of Sinclair Broadcast Group, in response to the preemption of this evening's Nightline program:

I write to strongly protest your decision to instruct Sinclair's ABC affiliates to preempt this evening's Nightline program. I find deeply offensive Sinclair's objection to Nightline's intention to broadcast the names and photographs of Americans who gave their lives in service to our country in Iraq.

I supported the President's decision to go to war in Iraq, and remain a strong supporter of that decision. But every American has a responsibility to understand fully the terrible costs of war and the extraordinary sacrifices it requires of those brave men and women who volunteer to defend the rest of us; lest we ever forget or grow insensitive to how grave a decision it is for our government to order Americans into combat. It is a solemn responsibility of elected officials to accept responsibility for our decision and its consequences, and, with those who disseminate the news, to ensure that Americans are fully informed of those consequences.

There is no valid reason for Sinclair to shirk its responsibility in what I assume is a very misguided attempt to prevent your viewers from completely appreciating the extraordinary sacrifices made on their behalf by Americans serving in Iraq. War is an awful, but sometimes necessary business. Your decision to deny your viewers an opportunity to be reminded of war's terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail, is a gross disservice to the public, and to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. It is, in short, sir, unpatriotic. I hope it meets with the public opprobrium it most certainly deserves.

Okay, now it come down to name-calling. The Sinclair Broadcasting Group says Ted Koppel and the ABC Disney folks are unpatriotic. McCain, war-hero, former prisoner-of-war in Vietnam, and one of the two senators from Arizona, says the Sinclair Broadcasting Group is unpatriotic.

Here's General JC Christian over at Patriot Boy writing to the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, and this is satire of course. -

Dear Mr. Smith,

I'm sure the traitors among us will disagree with Sinclair Broadcasting's decision to spare our nation the trauma of putting names and faces to the young men and women who lost their lives in Iraq. It is better that we hide our dead away and never speak of them. Remembering the fallen only risks shaming Our Leader at a time when he's working very hard to bring us four more years of his wise leadership.

I hope that you'll consider helping another great leader as well. For many years, the names of the dead found on the 1969-1973 sections of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall have served as silent criticism of Richard Milhous Nixon's war policies. Isn't it time they were removed and replaced by scenes depicting the President's greatest moments--events like the secret invasion of Cambodia and Kissinger's announcement of a secret plan to end the war after the '72 election?

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, Patriot

Yeah well, the week ended with everyone weighing in on this.

Here you'll find background on this Sinclair organization. Some nuggets -

Like many a media empire, Sinclair grew through a combination of acquisitions, clever manipulations of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules, and considerable lobbying campaigns. Starting out as a single UHF station in Baltimore in 1971, the company started its frenzied expansion in 1991 when it began using "local marketing agreements" as a way to circumvent FCC rules that bar a company from controlling two stations in a single market.

These "LMAs" allow Sinclair to buy one station outright and control another by acquiring not its license but its assets. Today, Sinclair touts itself as "the nation's largest commercial television broadcasting company not owned by a network." You've probably never heard of them because the 62 stations they run - garnering 24 percent of the national TV audience - fly the flags of the networks they broadcast: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and the WB.

TV Barn's Mark Jeffries calls Sinclair the "Clear Channel of local news," a reference to the San Antonio, Texas, media giant that has grown from 40 to more than 1,200 stations today thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which relaxed radio ownership rules. But the parallels extend beyond their growth strategies. Jeffries describes Sinclair as having a "fiercely right-wing approach that makes Fox News Channel look like a model of objectivity," while Clear Channel is best known for sponsoring pro-war "Rallies for America" during the Iraq conflict. And like Clear Channel's CEO L. Lowry Mays - a major Republican donor and onetime business associate of George W. Bush - the Sinclair family, board, and executives ply the GOP with big money. Since 1997, they have donated well over $200,000 to Republican candidates.

The rest of the item goes on to discuss how Sinclair programs news on these sixty-two stations - basically a feed from Baltimore of all items not strictly local that only seems to come from the local station - all carefully managed. To maintain the appearance of local news, the Baltimore on-air staff is coached on correct local pronunciations. Or the weatherman, safely removed from the thunderstorms in, say, Minneapolis, will often engage in scripted banter with the local anchor to maintain the pretense: "Should I bring an umbrella tomorrow, Don?" "You bet, Hal, it looks pretty ugly out there..."

You get the idea.

Over at the conservative site NewsMax you get a more positive view of Sinclair.

Sinclair, The Next Fox, 'Fair and Balanced'
Wes Vernon, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2004

WASHINGTON -- One of the nation's newest and fastest-growing TV news networks says it's tired of left-leaning news reporting and wants to offer Americans a fair and balanced perspective, just as Fox News Channel does.

Fox News eschewed politically correct news to become the dominant force on cable news. And now the Sinclair Broadcast Group has been following in Fox's footsteps to do the same for broadcast news in news markets across the nation.

The Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) is the eighth-largest network of television stations, based on revenues, and the nation's largest independent group owner of stations, according to Broadcasting & Cable.

... The broadcast operation reaches nearly 5 million viewers each night, an audience that surpasses even Fox and CNN.

And just like Fox News, Sinclair's News Central is getting some heat from some establishment media outlets for offering a more balanced and less liberal-leaning news report.

Sinclair relishes the criticism.

"Basically, [we're] in the red states," says Sinclair's Vice President for Corporate Affairs Mark Hyman in a NewsMax interview, referring to the markets SBG serves -- mostly in "red" states George Bush won in the 2000 election.

... Hyman says with some glee that Sinclair stations are "not in the Hamptons, not in the regions of the cultural elite who look down on the 'little people.' " Thus, he suggests, Sinclair is fulfilling a demand in flyover country for a fresh perspective on the news.

"I think that is good for us because the folks who live in the red sections of the country are the ones most starved for a balanced newscast," he adds.

... As Hyman puts it [referring to critics], "The left's real beef is who controls the microphone. We're not liberal. We're not providing a slanted view. And that's what really angers them."

Sinclair CEO David Smith echoed that sentiment, telling the Washington Post that his aim is to offer a "fair and balanced" news program, something missing on the major network news programs.

"Our objective is to tell the story in the most truthful and honest way possible," he said, adding, "There will be no spin."

Of course not.

Still, this sort of thing from the city where I grew up is a bit distressing.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)

August 17, 1996, Saturday, SOONER EDITION

David D. Smith, president and chief executive officer of Sinclair Broadcast Group, was arrested this week in his hometown of Baltimore and charged with a misdemeanor sex offense. Sinclair owns WPGH, the Fox affiliate in Pittsburgh, and programs most of WPTT.

The Baltimore Sun reported that Smith, 45, was arrested Tuesday night in an undercover sting at a downtown corner frequented by prostitutes.

On Thursday night, Sinclair issued a statement that Smith's arrest was unrelated to company business and ''The company will continue to operate under the direction of its current management.''

Ah, not important.

But you might like juicy detail.

Broadcasting official charged in sex stakeout
Sinclair president, woman arrested in company car

Published on: August 15, 1996
Edition: FINAL
Section: NEWS
Page: 2B
Byline: SUN STAFF Peter Hermann

The president of Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., which owns the local Fox television affiliate, was arrested Tuesday night and charged with committing a perverted sex act in a company-owned Mercedes, city police said.

David Deniston Smith, 45, of the 800 block of Hillstead Drive in Timonium, who also is Sinclair's chief executive, was arrested in an undercover sting at Read and St. Paul streets, a downtown corner frequented by prostitutes, Baltimore police said yesterday.

Smith and Mary DiPaulo, 31, were charged with committing unnatural and perverted sex act. Smith was held overnight at the Central Booking and Intake Center and released on personal recognizance at 2 p.m. yesterday. DiPaulo's bail status was not available.

Officials at WBFF-TV (Fox 45) and Sinclair, one of the fastest-growing broadcasting companies in the nation with 28 television and 34 radio stations, would not comment yesterday. The company had $126 million in sales in the first half of this year.

Police said undercover Officer Gary Bowman, on a prostitution detail, was talking to DiPaulo about 9: 15 p.m. in a car at St. Paul and Read streets. She left the undercover car after telling Bowman that ``she had just seen her regular date driving in the area,'' according to court documents.

Police said DiPaulo ran across the street to a 1992 Mercedes, registered to Sinclair, and got in on the passenger side. Police followed the car onto the Jones Falls Expressway, where they said they witnessed the two engage in oral sex while Smith drove north.

Police said they followed the car back to Read and St. Paul streets, where they arrested Smith and DiPaulo, who lives in the 700 block of Washington Blvd.

My, my...

But none of that has much to do with the "Nightline" show and the roll call of the dead.

April 30 may come to be a turning point kind of day. The business of our soldiers, either the real ones or the subcontractors we use, humiliating, mocking and even torturing prisoners we hold near Baghdad exploded in the Arab press today - with all the pictures. ABC does this "litany of the dead" reading. The Mirror in the UK publishes photos of British soldiers treating an Iraqi civilian prisoner rather badly - photos of the guys urinating on him. And they later knocked out all his teeth, broke his jaw, then drove him off in the night and dumped him from the back of a truck - and thus lost track of him. They have no idea if he survived. Those pictures will hit the Arab press tomorrow. And our Marines have decided not to mess with Fallujah - and one of Saddam's generals has been brought out of retirement, rounded up more than a thousand former Iraqi soldiers, and will take care of things for us there. That doesn't look good to the locals - Saddmam's guys with guns are back. And we set it up.

Things are, indeed, going a bit sour as this week ends.

Posted by Alan at 20:33 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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