Monthly Archives: July 2009

The Final Passing of American Journalism

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“And that’s the way it is …”

Walter Cronkite

It feels as if the last bit of actual journalism in America is now dead.

In «What We Lose With Cronkite’s Death», Bruce Maiman sums it up pretty well:

“… it’s a reminder, too, that the broadcasting style and journalistic credibility that Cronkite represents also seems to be fading into history. Cronkite’s death was inevitable rather than sad, but what is sad is that no one has picked up his mantle to deliver the news in a fashion that doesn’t glorify something or someone, or trash something or someone. Cronkite set a standard for conveying the news that was at once warm, measured, dignified, good humored and uncompromising.”

He also notes one of my favorite stories about Cronkite:

&#8220In her autobiography, «A Desperate Passion», physician and Nuclear Freeze activist Helen Caldicott tells the story of when she met Cronkite and his wife Betsy at a dinner one night: “Walter amazed me by saying that if he had his way, he would remove all U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe. “What would the Russians do then, roll over people with their tanks?” he asked. I said: “The American people love you, Walter. Why don’t you tell them that?” He laughed and replied, “I’m only loved because they don’t know what I think.””

The ever-excellent Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, touches on all of this in «Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did»:

“Tellingly, his most celebrated and significant moment — Greg Mitchell says “this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million” — was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn’t trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false. In other words, Cronkite’s best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do — directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won’t even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.”

Cronkite, and the pathetic remains of American journalism, will be laid to rest on Thursday.

And THAT, my friends, is the way it is, on this Sunday, 20-Jul-09, the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

Add One More to the Pile

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This evening’s mail brought, finally, an official copy of our California marriage certificate, which is one of only 18,000 gender-neutral, Constitutionally equally protected, legally recognized marriages. (The copy pictured here has some personal details blanked out, such as birth dates, addresses, witnesses, and parents.) I post it here as a big ol’ kiss off to Prop H8 and its supporters and sympathizers.

We’re happy and proud of this (it represents a significant victory in an ongoing struggle to educate our countrymen and realize the promise of Constitutional equal protection) … and also sorrowful for other California and American couples like us who can’t get this piece of paper … and the thousands of civil rights that go along with it.

So it’s a bittersweet moment.

Now we go buy another frame and make space on the wall. Because of the religious intolerance, ignorance, homophobia, and stupidity currently prevalent in this country at the moment, in order to have some semblance of civil rights as a couple, we have necessary certificates on our wall from the City and Country of San Francisco (two of those); the city of Ann Arbor, MI; the state of California (one domestic partnership cert and one marriage cert); and one marriage certificate from our wonderful neighbors to the north in Canada (one side in English and one in French).

Of Interest: 12-Jul-09

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• In Minneapolis, the New York Times turns up «a fascinating, heartbreaking, and ultimately, important story» of povery, terrorism, Somalia, teenagers, Facebook, and oddly enough, the building used to depict Mary Richard’s later apartment on the Mary Tyler Moore Show back in the 1970s, all of which may add up to the “most significant domestic terrorism investigation since Sept. 11,” 2001.

• On PBS, «Bill Moyers has a bull session with the former corporate communications director of Cigna Health Care, Wendell Potter», who describes his come-to-Jesus moment in Wise County, Virginia, where he was faced with the truth about his industry and what it has to American health care. A full video of the session, plus word-for-word transcript, is available and should be watched by every American, especially Barack Obama.

i• In Washington state, «brother and sister recant» 20-year-old claims of sexual abuse that sent their father to prison; brother tells judge “he made the allegation after months of insistent questioning by now-retired Clark County sheriff’s detective Sharon Krause just so she would leave him alone.” Krause allegedly gave the sister ice cream; that cone put daddy in prison for 20 years and slapped a sex offender label on him that is proving hard to scrape off.

• In Anchorage, the Crazy Train continues puffing up the tracks as soon-to-be-former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin «announces she will campaign for anyone who will have her» (including conservative Democrats) and that even her own son is not a Republican (he’s “unaffiliated” like his daddy, meaning, one assumes, a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which, among other things, “advocates an in-state referendum which includes the option of Alaska becoming an independent nation,” according to its website).

• In Washington, D.C., it was revealed that «Dick Cheney ordered the concealment from Congress of a CIA counterterrorism program» and that Attorney General Eric Holder is contemplating opening a criminal probe of possible CIA torture. President Obama is sticking to his “let’s move forward stance” and appears worried that healthcare reform will be “derailed by partisan bickering over torture.”

• In Los Angeles, «LaToya Jackson believes she knows» who the real killers are.

• Yale University Press produces a book called Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, which reveals that «Ernest Hemingway was “for a while on the KGB’s list of its agents in America”». The book is co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, and is “based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 90s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.” The book apparently has no definitive answer to the main question posed in the article: “Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?”

Another fabulous summer week in America!

The Right Way

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“The whole world is watching what we do here. We’re going to win or lose this war depending on how we do this.”

Ali Soufan

The story of the United States of America joining the long and black list of nations who abuse and torture prisoners and then invent all sorts of justifications for it is dribbling out slowly. «A new article in Newsweek» is one of the best I’ve seen so far at laying out both the nitty-gritty and some of the bigger cultural issues at play.

The article centers on the story of Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s top experts on Al Qaeda who also ‘had a reputation as a shrewd interrogator who could work fluently in both English and Arabic.’ It was Soufani who successfully discovered both the Jose Padilla dirty bomb plot and the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (one a preventive and one a prosecutorial piece of detective work) within the rule of law, without using torture:

“Last week Soufan, 37, now a security consultant who spends most of his time in the Middle East, decided to tell the story of his involvement in the Abu Zubaydah interrogations publicly for the first time. In an op-ed in The New York Times and in a series of exclusive interviews with Newsweek, Soufan described how he, together with FBI colleague Steve Gaudin, began the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. They nursed his wounds, gained his confidence and got the terror suspect talking. They extracted crucial intelligence—including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the architect of 9/11 and the dirty-bomb plot of Jose Padilla—before CIA contractors even began their aggressive tactics.’ … “I was in the middle of this, and it’s not true that these [aggressive] techniques were effective,” he says. “We were able to get the information about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a couple of days. We didn’t have to do any of this [torture]. We could have done this the right way. ” [Emphasis added.]

What did ‘the right way’ look like?

“As the sessions continued, Soufan engaged Abu Zubaydah in long discussions about his world view, which included a tinge of socialism. After Abu Zubaydah railed one day about the influence of American imperialist corporations, he asked Soufan to get him a Coca-Cola—a request that prompted the two of them to laugh. Soon enough, Abu Zubaydah offered up more information—about the bizarre plans of a jihadist from Puerto Rico to set off a “dirty bomb” inside the country. This information led to Padilla’s arrest in Chicago by the FBI in early May. ”

But Bush/Cheney and the CIA didn’t want ‘the right way,’ followed (it was too calm and too much namby-pamby ‘police action’ for them) and manufactured, through the compliant devices of the likes of John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the means to ramp up torture. And the only objections that seemed forthcoming appear to have been centered on the potential political blowback, not on the inhumane, immoral, and illegal acts being undertaken:

“Pasquale D’Amuro, then the FBI assistant director for counterterrorism … and other officials were alarmed at what they heard from Soufan. They fretted about the political consequences of abusive interrogations and the Washington blowback they thought was inevitable, say two high-ranking FBI sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. According to a later Justice Department inspector general’s report, D’Amuro warned FBI Director Bob Mueller that such activities would eventually be investigated. “Someday, people are going to be sitting in front of green felt tables having to testify about all of this,” D’Amuro said, according to one of the sources. ”

The issue, as usual, follows America’s cultural fault lines. There are (hopefully a minority) Americans who, in this case, are so steeped in fear and anger that they have no problem using any means necessary, including those of history’s worst human offenders as well as contemporary terrorists, in order to feed that fear and anger. The fault lines not only run through society, but through all government service as well:

“… in early 2002, Soufan flew to Guantánamo to conduct a training course. He gave a powerful talk, preaching the virtues of the FBI’s traditional rapport-building techniques. Not only were such methods the most effective, Soufan explained that day, they were critical to maintaining America’s image in the Middle East. “The whole world is watching what we do here,” Soufan said. “We’re going to win or lose this war depending on how we do this.” As he made these comments, about half the interrogators in the room—those from the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies—were “nodding their heads” in agreement, recalls McFadden. But the other half—CIA and military officers—sat there “with blank stares. It’s like they were thinking, This is bullcrap. Their attitude was, ‘You guys are cops; we don’t have time for this’.” ”

Americans on one side committed to the rule of law and cognizant of the possible price that has to be paid to follow it; on the other side those who would jettison it when the going gets rough and their fear and anger get control of them. The same is true in the general society. There are Americans who are so fearful and anger that they stock the house with guns and loudly tell anyone who will listen that ‘if anyone tries to break in their house, they’ll blow ‘em away!’ and then tries to pass laws that arm teachers (ostensibly to prevent more Columbines) and carry guns into restaurants and so on and so on. There are Americans who accept that life is sometimes dangerous and short and that if something happens the police are there to ‘protect and serve.’ And then get on with their lives.

Meanwhile, the torture story goes on. The documents being examined tell the story about how our nation willfully abrogated the rule of law and committed acts for which we prosecuted and executed or jailed perpetrators in other nations within our living memory. And the perpetrators, like many Germans and Japanese of the 1933-45 period and communists of the Soviet and People’s Republic periods, will probably never be brought to heel for what they’ve done. Especially if they think like Torturer James Mitchell:

“Although Soufan declined to identify the contractor by name, other sources (and media accounts) identify him as James Mitchell, a former Air Force psychologist who had worked on the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training—a program to teach officers how to resist the abusive interrogation methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War. Within days of his arrival, Mitchell—an architect of the CIA interrogation program—took charge of the questioning of Abu Zubaydah. He directed that Abu Zubaydah be ordered to answer questions or face a gradual increase in aggressive techniques. One day Soufan entered Abu Zubadyah’s room and saw that he had been stripped naked; he covered him with a towel. The confrontations began. “I asked [the contractor] if he’d ever interrogated anyone, and he said no,” Soufan says. But that didn’t matter, the contractor shot back: “Science is science. This is a behavioral issue.” The contractor suggested Soufan was the inexperienced one. “He told me he’s a psychologist and he knows how the human mind works.” Mitchell told Newsweek, “I would love to tell my story.” But then he added, “I have signed a nondisclosure agreement that will not even allow me to correct false allegations.” ”

How convenient. And how very … American. And human. And disgusting.