SmithAntics

...our occupation leaders stood idle and permitted the looting and vandalism of the wonderful Baghdad Museum, but, hey, we'll have a great state-of-the-art prison to be proud of.

Gordon Riess
Beverly Hills

“In the current White House, attendance at daily Christian Evangelical prayer meetings is mandatory."

"Vice President Cheney is the de facto President of the United States. When he arrives at the White House for one of his "briefings" of the President, all employees are cleared from the West Wing and especially from the Presidential office suites. Cheney arrives in an escorted armored limousine surrounded by his own personal, heavily armed bodyguard and is always shown directly into the President's office. It is reliably reported by [redacted] that Bush has a thick pad of lined, yellow note paper on his desk, placed there by [redacted] just before the Vice President arrives."

"White House staff members report that they rarely see the President during work hours and that when they do, he is generally accompanied by Mr. Rove and almost never either looks at or speaks to members of the staff. He does not appear to recognize many of the staff members and almost all contact with these individuals are carried out by his close aides, especially by Mr. Rove."

"Most of the staff are young, dedicated, almost fanatical, and very, very Christian. The Ten Commandments are in each and every office with nice pictures of Jesus accompanying them. I have chatted up a few of these bright-faced kids and find out that they Love Jesus, Hate Gays, Abortionists, Moslems, Blacks, Catholics, some Jews, all Democrats, Liberals, Hindus, Chinese, Frenchmen, Germans, and now, Spaniards."

Fox has all but monopolized the top positions for news shows in the ratings race. With 2.2 million viewers, "The O'Reilly Factor" is top of the heap, followed by "Hannity & Colmes" with 1.5 million viewers and the "Fox Report with Shepard Smith" with 1.4 million. CNN's "Larry King Live" was in fourth place with 1.3 million viewers. The next eight spots are occupied by Fox News shows, including "Special Report with Brit Hume," "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" and "Fox and Friends."

I got an advance copy of this book, having been an observer of Mr Brock's trajectory over the years. He has done an amazing service in this orderly, calm and utterly devastating history of the rise of the radical right's propaganda machine and its subversion of our nation's media. Brock begins at the beginning, with a treatise by a woman named Efron arguing that the GOP and business interests need their own distinct media. Efron gets Nixon's attention, Nixon tries to put Efron's plan into action, Nixon runs into the Watergate buzzsaw. But the seed is planted, back in the 1970's, and then cultivated by GOP activists like William Simon, financed heavily by Richard Mellon Scaife, Olin, Coors dynasties etc. (who Brock calls the four sisters). Until the whole thing flowers: all of a sudden a huge battery of propaganda houses like Heritage and American Enterprise, funded by oil companies and GOP financiers, are churning out a counter history of the American experience. Anything counter to GOP orthodoxy is branded 'liberal'; Murdoch and Sun Myung Moon's media empires swiftly join the cause, whose committed purpose is to subdue America's independent media and convert it into service of corporate interests generally and GOP political figures specifically.

Throughout this book, which will be the standard text in colleges and for historians, Brock's tone is calm and steady and he lets the facts speak for themselves (very unlike his earlier books, which are overly polemical -- duh). The research here is encyclopedic. (In a book about media, virtually every quote is on the record).

It is amazing to this reviewer how our media could have been so thoroughly corrupted. How our politicians could have so haplessly junked the Fairness Doctrine which would have smothered the entire Fox News Propaganda Machine in its cradle. It is amazing to me that a small and toxic band of right wing ideologues, (nevertheless armed with billions of dollars of their patrons' money) could so effectively intimidate and cow the so-called guardians of our democracy. Is the triumph of the radical right wing the fault of the Neo-cons, or is it our fault, for our complacency and our timidity?

Sully— responding to the burning and hanging of American contractors from a bridge in Falluja:

“All the more reason to maintain the deadline for the transition to self-rule, and to keep a close military and police alliance with the incoming government. I'm still an optimist - in the medium term. But the next two or three years could be brutal. We just got a taste of how brutal they could be.”

TBOGG:

“First of all, Andrew, you didn't get a taste of anything except a vanilla latte with a bit too much foam on top. Watching the news doesn't make you a part of what happened in Falluja, just like watching baseball on TV doesn't mean you have to start thinking about warming your arm up. Sitting safely at home and thinking "How very sad" isn't participating. Check your clothes and see if any of them have a hint of Eau de Burned Flesh.”

"I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," he said. "It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually."

—Tucker Carlson of CNN’s Crossfire on the Iraq war

For all I that I occasionally make fun of Friedman for his yo-yo mood swings and bizarre metaphor-challenged prose, I have to say that I sympathize with him here. As much as I've always despised Bush for his party-über-alles approach to the presidency, I too spent most of 2002 figuring that even he would put politics on hold and put the country first when it came to war.

But he didn't. It was basically just an election gimmick to him, a club to whack Democrats with, and it's so hard to conceive of an American president treating a war this cynically that I can understand why Friedman took so long to admit it to himself. Hell, even I still have moments where I just shake my head and think that I must be wrong. No one could be that callow, that vindictive, that shortsighted.

But George Bush is. After 9/11 he had a chance to make the war on terror into a bipartisan cause but he didn't take it. What's worse, it's not that he tried and did a bad job of it, but that he deliberately decided to make terrorism as divisive an wedge issue as he possibly could. By doing that he has set the anti-terrorist cause back by years.

He truly is a disgrace to the Republican party.

But here you have Jim Inhofe lumbering out of his cave and on to the stage, arguing that we can do whatever we want because we're America. Inhofe's America is one that is glutted on pretension, cut free from all its moral ballast, and hungry to sit atop a world run only by violence. Lady Liberty gets left with fifty bucks, a sneer, a black eye, and the room to herself for the couple hours left before check out.

Someone in this administration has to go. While the war between State and the Pentagon probably makes for oh-so-wonderful Beltway cocktail chatter, it also means that we have a completely dysfunctional government at a time when we can ill-afford to have that.

Independent, aggressive and critical media are essential to an informed democracy. But mainstream media are increasingly cozy with the economic and political powers they should be watchdogging. Mergers in the news industry have accelerated, further limiting the spectrum of viewpoints that have access to mass media. With U.S. media outlets overwhelmingly owned by for-profit conglomerates and supported by corporate advertisers, independent journalism is compromised.

Uniquely, FAIR works with both activists and journalists. We maintain a regular dialogue with reporters at news outlets across the country, providing constructive critiques when called for and applauding exceptional, hard-hitting journalism. We also encourage the public to contact media with their concerns, to become media activists rather than passive consumers of news.

”Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.”

Got that?

The administration invented ties between Saddam and Bin Laden to justify its war against an impotent Iraq. Yet it had real, live terrorists in its crosshairs, and refused to pull the trigger. Because it would hurt the case against Bush's War.

And as a result, at least 700 have paid the ultimate price.

Let’s recap shall we? We invaded a country that we now know posed no threat to us and enjoyed no connection whatever to those who did. In order to do so, we pulled manpower and resources away from the job of protecting us and thereby made ourselves more vulnerable to the thousands of new enemies we created with our failed, dishonest invasion. OK, what next?

How about we go through the nation we profess to be liberating, arrest a whole bunch of innocent people and then torture them —raping a few here, killing a few there. What next? Well, what do you say we continue to this for a year after the Red Cross alerts us both to the fact of the torture as well as the innocence of ”70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year?”

I don’t know about you, but I’m having trouble understanding why, at minimum, the term “criminal negligence” is not being used here. If Rumsfeld really is responsible, and he says he is, then he should not merely be fired, but tried. I know it’s more than he’s willing to offer an American citizen like Jose Padilla but I’m in a generous mood. This being the Bush presidency, however, he is instead congratulated. “You are doing a superb job. You are a strong secretary of defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude,” says the man who has just reached the lowest popularity point of his presidency. I fear Mr. Orwell is looking more and more pollyanish every day.

I do wonder what honest supporters of the war are telling themselves now. There was no threat. There was no planning for the occupation. We are hated by the people who we professed to liberate and we have destroyed our reputation in the Arab world we were pretending to teach a lesson about democracy. The Arab-Israeli peace process is in tatters and we are reduced to begging the very same United Nations we treated so contemptuously to bail us out of the mess we’ve created. In the meantime, Americans are in the hundreds are being killed a year after the president proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” and we have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to make neither ourselves nor the rest of the world any safer.

Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.

There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

Just Trust Us

Didn't you know, in your gut, that something like Abu Ghraib would eventually come to light?

When the world first learned about the abuse of prisoners, President Bush said that it "does not reflect the nature of the American people." He's right, of course: a great majority of Americans are decent and good. But so are a great majority of people everywhere. If America's record is better than that of most countries — and it is — it's because of our system: our tradition of openness, and checks and balances.

Yet Mr. Bush, despite all his talk of good and evil, doesn't believe in that system. From the day his administration took office, its slogan has been "just trust us." No administration since Nixon has been so insistent that it has the right to operate without oversight or accountability, and no administration since Nixon has shown itself to be so little deserving of that trust. Out of a misplaced sense of patriotism, Congress has deferred to the administration's demands. Sooner or later, a moral catastrophe was inevitable.

“You expect -- or perhaps better to say, you hope -- soon to see the sober, serious grown-up come along, put his hand on the guy's shoulder and say, "It's over" -- perhaps saying it a few more times, with arresting finality, until he understands.

Perhaps a better metaphor is a user at the ugly outset of his own intervention -- the increasingly desperate lies, the bargaining, the lickety-split oscillations between apologies, self-pity and impulsive anger.”

Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility.

We can contribute a second hand anecdote to newspaper stories on rising concern, last year, from Secretary of State Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage about Administration attitudes and the risks they might entail: according to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration... the highest levels... whenever Powell or Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to endure what our source characterizes as "around the table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners...."

WASHINGTON, May 6 — At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said today.

The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, but it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. quality-assurance manager, who crushed the cassette in his hand, cut the tape into little pieces and dropped them in different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.

The dirty little secret of President Bush's bus tour is that he didn't spend much time on the bus.

An hour or so on Tuesday was all he logged, though that seemed plenty for the startled residents of some small towns in rural parts of Ohio, who had never seen a motorcade quite like this one. After all, it is not every day you see three buses moving along on back roads, preceded and followed by Chevy Suburbans carrying men with large guns, and helicopters overhead. One woman who was mowing her lawn ran indoors, leaving the lawn mower idling in her yard.

Stick a fork in us, we're done. We have officially lost the battle for hearts and minds. We have officially failed as representatives of enlightened democracy.

You know what this says to the Iraqis? Your lives are worthless. Our people can murder you at will, and receive barely a reprimand.

“On Oct. 6, 1965, the Selective Service lifted its ban against drafting married men who had no children. Nine months and two days later, Mr. Cheney's first daughter, Elizabeth, was born.”

“Richard Cheney did everything humanly possible -- short of fleeing to Canada -- to avoid military conscription: He applied for and received 5 student deferments, a number described as "incredible" by professor David Curry of the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Curry has written extensively about the draft, including a 1985 book, "Sunshine Patriots: Punishment and the Vietnam Offender." The Times quotes Mr. Curry as observing: "That's a lot of times for the draft board to say O.K."