connecting*the*dots

(shot by Lisa Scheer)

What a naive lot those New Yorkers are…

I highly doubt Ron Paul or Chuck Hagel will make it through the Republican primaries, but if one of them were to represent the GOP, I’d have a bunch to think about.

And Dave is right; what’s with the protective, uber-patriotic attitude projected by Wolf Blitzer? Who is he pandering to? Are there really Americans out there that still think that US foreign policy over the past 50 years — particularly policy regarding the Middle East — didn’t in the very least contribute to a perfect storm of blowback on 9/11?

It must be a comfy place to own a world view where the US government operates around the world (and at home) with pure, egalitarian intent.

UPDATE: Ron Paul was asking great questions regarding Iraq prior to Shock and Awe. (h/t to Doc Searls)

I’ve found Hitchens to be a smug, smarmy, pseudo-intellectual asshole over the years, but I couldn’t agree with him more about Falwell.

UPDATE: Pre-whackjob Dennis Miller on Jerry Falwell:

(originally uploaded by JaciVico)

Harlem, New York

(originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes)

Question: Who’s the man in the above picture?

I admit the visual reference might not be enough for anyone that isn’t a Hip hop head, so I’ll give you even more of a hint:

Sorry for the set-up; I wouldn’t expect many people to know that he’s Boots Riley from The Coup.

I also wouldn’t expect many people to know the depth of the man and his music.

Or even that Boots blogs.

I’m using Boots as just one example of someone who represents one particular slice of a culture, Hip hop, that most people don’t know anything about — no matter what they think.

More on Boots and his colleagues in a bit.

What You Hear Is Not A Test

Today, Ed Cone ventured into a pretty lightweight deconstruction of “rap” lyrics, and only after numerous people and media outlets — local and from afar — made a stink about Don Imus catching flak for his pointed remarks a few weeks back, arguing that African-Americans and/or “rappers” actually drive the use of this harmful language.

Ed’s introduction to his column:

[…] “For my newspaper column, I listened to the lyrics of Billboard’s top ten rap tracks and tried to contextualize the Imus affair.” […]

I can’t remember the last time someone in Hip hop, out-of-the-blue, verbally assaulted a specific group of innocent people like the Rutger’s Women’s Basketball team. Admittedly, I’m not twisting the context of the offense to the use of a particular word or phrase and instead, keeping it focused on the nature of the attack from a broadcaster.

Along those lines, IMO, it would be more productive to review the context of Imus’ bile by looking at the rest of the shock-jock industry, like this gem from Neil Bortz:

Boortz: For instance, or for goodness sakes, jump in and I’m gonna say — I’m gonna start out with something controversial. I saw Cynthia McKinney’s new hair-do. Have you seen it, Belinda?

Skelton: No.

Boortz: She looks like a ghetto slut.

Skelton: Well, how is it?

Boortz: It’s just — it’s hideous.

Skelton: Is it braided? Or –

Boortz: No, it’s not braided. It just flies away from her head in every conceivable direction. It looks like an explosion in a Brillo pad factory. It’s just hideous. To me, that hairstyle just shows contempt for — no, it’s not an Afro. I mean, no, it just shows contempt for the position that she holds and the body that she serves in. And, I’m sorry, there’s just no other way to — it’s just a hideous and horrible looking –

Marshall: It looks better than the braids she was wearing.

Boortz: No, the braids had some dignity. They had some class.

Marshall: The braids had dignity?

Boortz: They had more class than this thing.

Marshall: This says, you know, kinda 2000s, you know, stepping up to the plate. Contemporary look, you know?

Boortz: She looks like Tina Turner peeing on an electric fence.

Pam has great context for those of you who might think of these comments as harmless.

But the point of this post isn’t about Don Imus, nor is it about those people out there that are obfuscating the context of his comment. There’s a whole other angle of misinformation in Ed’s post, based more in ignorance than intent, that I wish to dissect.

I’m One Of A Kind And I’ll Shock Your Mind

Whether he knows it or not, Ed made a bunch of generalizations in his column. This particular paragraph stood out the most to me:

[…] “I’m bothered not just by what rappers say but why they say it. The lyrics and the popularity of the genre aren’t happening in a vacuum; they reflect something about the realities of a larger culture that is coarse, consumerist and often violent. Public Enemy’s Chuck D famously said that rap is like “CNN for black people.” Maybe part of the problem is that these days, the best-known member of the socially conscious Public Enemy is Flava Flav, who once rapped about the harsh reality of life in poor neighborhoods but now does clownish “reality” shows on corporate television.” […]

People like to talk about Hip hop as if they know everything about anything, so I’m not surprised by Ed’s perspective — even with him being alive during The Sugarhill Gang’s debut.

How Ed jumps from “a larger culture that is coarse, consumerist and often violent” to Public Enemy — without pause for at least a paragraph on the current administration of the Executive Branch — is beyond me.

You know, it wasn’t Flavor Flav that told America to go out and buy shit just a few days after the towers went down on 9/11.

I’ll play along for shits and giggles, though.

So, Flav has become the king of reality tv, but as the de facto hype man in the carefully orchestrated membership of Public Enemy — something that would take another post entirely to detail — that shouldn’t shock anyone.

Flav was never the point man of PE, the guy “rapping about the harsh reality of life in poor neighborhoods.” For every 911’s A Joke, there are a hundred songs with Flav explicitly playin’ his role in the group as comic relief while shadowing Chuck.

So how does that play out 20 years beyond the zenith of Public Enemy’s career?

While Flav does his reality tv and flashes his grill, Chuck D does his speaking gigs and radio shows covering everything from anti-DRM to politics. The whole of Public Enemy prospers from their individual focuses — which draw in new audiences from distinct demographics — far more than simply being a sum of its parts.

But if you’ve seen any of the Flavor of Love shows, you know that he doesn’t represent himself as a foul-mouthed “rapper.” I honestly don’t see how Flav acting like Flav with a viking cap and oversized clock necklace and sunglasses has anything to do with the topic at hand — except for serving as a convenient segue from the bridge of the CNN line.

All that said, Ed is pretty much on point when he ruminates over “rap” lyrics and the ills of a larger culture.

The point begging to be made about this particular element — the crux of his column — is that he doesn’t realize to what degree and how narrow of a focus that truly is within the culture of Hip hop.

What we need is the Teacher to break this down to a digestible format:

More KRS-One:

(by thecnote)

[…] “ ‘Hip hop has nothing to do with rap. Rap is an element. There is a consciousness that makes you rap, graffiti or break, for example.’

KRS-One talked a great deal about the importance of being one’s own self, the most essential part of Hip hop culture. ‘Hip hop begins with the courage to be yourself. Being you has consequences,’ KRS-One said.

Want to find out if you’re Hip hop? You know you are if ‘you gravitate toward it. You see graffiti art and you try to make out the words, you see breaking and you say, ‘Man, I could do that,’ KRS-One said.

And, of course, one should know the proper way to actually identify the culture. Hip hop is a culture; therefore, it should function as a proper noun. Hip hop is the music, and referring to the culture in the hyphenated form, KRS-One claimed, is degrading. The rapper’s explanations of the technicalities of the Hip hop world could have left audience member confused; if Hip hop is not the music, what is?

Listeners were enlightened about the differences between Hip hop and rap. ‘Hip hop is not rap music,’ KRS-One said. ‘Rap is controlled by corporations. A rapper rhymes for corporations, and an emcee rhymes for culture. A rapper talks about himself, what he has. An emcee talks about what’s already on your mind. An emcee raps about what you need, not about fantasy.‘ Ultimately, a point stressed heavily throughout the night, Hip hop is something that is lived, a consciousness of the world around us.” […]

That’s a much more expansive description of Hip hop than “rappers” being misogynistic and foul-mouthed, but culture can’t be locked down to one set of definitions either — passing the mic back to Boots Riley, from a long, lost interview at Davey D’s spot:

(by bagelradio)

[…] “When the first Sugarhill Gang record came out and it was on the radio I was already living in Oakland then but there were people who had recently moved out here from the mid west and the south and I remember us saying they had a hambone record out on the radio. My whole thing with that is there’s a lot of elements of hip hop… like the four elements of hip hop is really just a commercialization and a way to commodify things because you have to put things into easy categories in order to sell it. It’s a lot easier to sell as an invention that kind of slipped and fell together by a series of events that happened in one place than it is to tell it as a history of a people. So that’s something that I feel is left out of hip hop. That was my first connection to rapping [hamboning]. Another more obvious one is beatboxing. That was something that was very much a part of hip hop. I first started hearing the four elements maybe from the early 90s. I don’t know who started that but it’s full of shit to me.” […]

Contradicting, yet accentuating points of view within a culture — a hell of a lot deeper than “bitch” and “ho” framed within the bullshit corporate constructs of a genre.

The CNN For ALL People Who Care To Tune-In

If all this isn’t new to you, glad to have you in my digs. To those of you who are learning something new, you might just dig checking out a few CTD alumni.

One bit of advice: focus on the message, the intent and the wordplay — leave the curse count for Tipper Gore.

• De La Soul
• Immortal Technique
• The Roots
• Public Enemy / Paris
• The Coup
• Brand Nubian / Common
• Rage Against The Machine
• KRS-One
• Talib Kweli
• DJ Danger Mouse
• Chuck D
• Mos Def

Thank God their standards for speaking truth to power and shedding light are higher than CNN.

Artists: Mos Def - Immortal Technique - Eminem

=============

[Mos Def - talking]
Man, you hear this bullshit they be talkin’
Every day, man
It’s like these motherfuckers is just like professional liars
YouknowwhatI’msayin? It’s wild
Listen

[Hook - Mos Def]
Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]

[Verse 1 - Immortal Technique]
I pledge no allegiance, nigga fuck the president’s speeches
I’m baptized by America and covered in leeches
The dirty water that bleaches your soul and your facial features
Drownin’ you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers
And if you speak about the evil that the government does
The Patriot Act’ll track you to the type of your blood
They try to frame you, and say you was tryna sell drugs
And throw a federal indictment on niggaz to show you love
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in
All they talk about is terrorism on television
They tell you to listen, but they don’t really tell you they mission
They funded Al-Qaeda, and now they blame the Muslim religion
Even though Bin Laden, was a CIA tactician
They gave him billions of dollars, and they funded his purpose
Fahrenheit 9/11, that’s just scratchin’ the surface

[Hook - Mos Def]
Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]

[Verse 2 - Immortal Technique]
They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that’s bullshit, I’ll show you why it’s totally wrong
Cuz if another country invaded the hood tonight
It’d be warfare through Harlem, and Washington Heights
I wouldn’t be fightin’ for Bush or White America’s dream
I’d be fightin’ for my people’s survival and self-esteem
I wouldn’t fight for racist churches from the south, my nigga
I’d be fightin’ to keep the occupation out, my nigga
You ever clock someone who talk shit, or look at you wrong?
Imagine if they shot at you, and was rapin’ your moms
And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons
We sold him that shit, after Ronald Reagan’s election
Mercenary contractors fightin’ a new era
Corporate military bankin’ off the war on terror
They controllin’ the ghetto, with the failed attack
Tryna distract the fact that they engineerin’ the crack
So I’m strapped like Lee Malvo holdin’ a sniper rifle
These bullets’ll touch your kids, and I don’t mean like Michael
Your body be sent to the morgue, stripped down and recycled
I fire on house niggaz that support you and like you
Cuz innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily
This ain’t no alien conspiracy theory, this shit is real
Written on the dollar underneath the Masonic seal

(I don’t rap for dead presidents
I’d rather see the president dead
It’s never been said but I set precedents)–[Eminem]

[Hook - Mos Def]
Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]

(Shady Records was 80 seconds away from the towers
Some cowards fucked with the wrong building, they meant to hit ours)– [Eminem]

(originally uploaded by Akcelik)

sponsored by…

(originally uploaded by ConjugalVisitor)

McClatchy Washington Bureau
Rumsfeld, Ashcroft received warning of al Qaida attack before 9/11
By Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The State Department’s disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don’t remember the warning.

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10″ that “connected the dots” in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

Former CIA Director George Tenet gave the independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission the same briefing on Jan. 28, 2004, but the commission made no mention of the warning in its 428-page final report. According to three former senior intelligence officials, Tenet testified to commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste and to Philip Zelikow, the panel’s executive director and the principal author of its report, who’s now Rice’s top adviser.

[…]

And people called Clinton’s interview with Chris Wallace “crazed?” Sounds much more like it was a factual explosion.

(originally uploaded by Scoobymoo)

Steve | 09.29.06 - 11:52 am

I’d have to say, I once thought terrorists were just religious nuts trying to get their 40 virgins. I thought 9/11 was a cowardly, yet simplistic attack.

Today, I realize how sophisticated crashing unarmed civilian airplanes into buildings really was. That single move has our country perilously close to destruction. Why hasn’t Al Queda attacked again? Because they don’t need to. We’ll do far more damage to ourselves than some cult of nuts with AK47s ever will.

We have played right into their hands. Knowing how badly we needed to go into Iraq, and being able to foresee (unlike us) the costly aftermath, they were able to bank on us depleting our treasury. Of course, this means more cuts to social programs and schools, ensuring we will be weak in the future. Then we really go the extra mile to appease them and take away our own rights to show them just how tough we are.

We now have secret prisons and full government control of our personal lives with no court oversight. The mere mention of terrorism and you can disappear forever with no trial. Hell, who needs evidence when you have torture. With torture, it’s only a matter of time before you get whatever confession you like.

Welcome to Cold War USSR. Goverment control, fear, economy being drained to support the military, secret prisons, the works. Being the ones to set the demise of the Soviet Union in motion, you’d think we’d see this coming. I guess not. I am now convinced Al Queda did.

The top scientific minds and universities in the world are here in the US. The most advanced country in the world being beaten down by a bunch of pink unicorn zealots. How embarrassing. They aimed to make us destroy our own country out of fear. They have been more effective than I had ever imagined.

The only element of Steve’s comment that I don’t particularily agree with is his position on social programs and schools. If it wasn’t Iraq, we would’ve figured out another way to send the majority of our taxes into the military industrial complex. You know, gotta keep making the widgets.

Well, maybe not quite at this clip.

But that’s where we stand, all because 19 men — neither boogymen nor fascists, but men — armed with box cutters, simply outfoxed our minimum wage airport security defenses 5 years ago and murdered 3,000 people in the most spectacular fashion possible.

We respond not by going after the chief conspirator of the mass homicide, instead we initiate “Shock and Awe” in a pre-planned pissing contest, create a killing field in Iraq and alter the most important elements of our DNA as Americans in the guise to protect us from people who would destroy all that we stand for as Americans.

The irony sickens me.

(originally uploaded by anotherview)

Times Herald-Record
We came, we saw, we made enemies
By Nicole Belle

[…]

Short version: Iraq wasn’t a terrorist threat when we attacked it; it is now because we did attack and botched the job so badly that terrorists are dying to go there and learn how to kill Americans anywhere. So the world is safe from Saddam (who was never a threat) but more vulnerable to terrorism, which (back to the beginning) was on the ropes in the early days in Afghanistan.

* * *

This NIC report, revealed this week in stories in The New York Times and Washington Post, is devastating to the Bush administration argument for continuing the fight in Iraq. John Negroponte, Bush’s national intelligence director and the boss of all 16 intelligence agencies, cautions not to form conclusions based solely on these news reports. There’s more to the assessment, he says, and many more judgments than the one linking the war to more terrorism. He says to do that would be a distortion.

Fine. Then release the 30-page National Intelligence Estimate for all Americans to read. Have congressional committees black out the really classified data, if necessary. But let us know what our intelligence agencies say firsthand, not what Bush decides to tell us they said. We’ve been here before, and there are now 2,600-plus reasons to doubt what the president says.

[…]

Someone, anyone, come up with a scenario for me where invading Iraq wouldn’t have created a similar state of affairs.

Take your time…

Now, it probably would’ve helped if we had taken this operation seriously and created a reconstruction plan before trucking into Iraq, but as Donald Rumsfeld so eloquently stated in the pre-war planning stages, “the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war.”

The result of such rhetoric, you ask?

Rumsfeld intimidated his planners out of creating any plans for reconstruction following the capture of Saddam — you know, these last 3 years come December.

Now we have jihadists and near enemy soldiers training and killing in the sandbox of our creation, using Iraqi citizens as pawns, targets and propaganda to rile up even more anti-American fury across the middle-east and the world.

But I digress…

Here are my three top reasons for why Iraq has become a hotbed of terrorist activity:

1. The Project For The New American Century
   If PNAC is the neoconservative playbook, this administration is an all-pro team for its execution. If I stumbled across this direct and coded language for the invasion of Iraq (and anywhere else for that matter) just ten days into the Iraq invasion, I’m betting that this document has been used by a few terrorists to up their enrollment prior to 9/11. And as soon as the invasion of Iraq was a sure bet, I’m guessing it became a major recruitment tool. The only reason I can come up with as to why (potential) leaders of this nation would publicize a document such as PNAC, is that they wanted the reality we now find ourselves knee-deep within and they needed their own recruitment stake-in-the-ground.
2. Poverty, Chaos And Fear: A Perfect Storm For Revenge
   If a child is killed in Iraq nowadays, we’re ultimately held responsible by his/her family. If a child’s father is killed, that child will most likely grow up with a propensity towards revenge. If a child’s uncle’s wedding is wiped out with a car bomb… well, you get the picture.
3. Let’s Talk About Sects, Baby
   Compare how much you know about, say, the Shia/Sunni relationship today with what you knew in 2003. You probably didn’t even know the names of any Islamic sects back then, right? And now I hope you realize that there is more internal conflict within Islam itself than with the West in general. Now realize that our government absolutely understood the issues between these sects — from their religous differences to their standing within the entire middle-east region to how they would respond to the overthrow of Saddam. I’m not cynical; if you believe we went in there without a clue, you’re only kidding yourself.

What are yours?

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and — as I discovered from those “missing posters” seared still into my soul — two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are “soft,”or have “forgotten” the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast — of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds — none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country’s wound is still open.

Five years later this country’s mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial — barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field — Mr. Lincoln said, “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. “We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground.” So we won’t.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they’re doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party — tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election — ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications — forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President — and those around him — did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, “bi-partisanship” meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, “validate the strategy of the terrorists.”

They promised protection, and then showed that to them “protection” meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ’something to do’ with 9/11 is “lying by implication.”

The impolite phrase is “impeachable offense.”

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced — possibly financed by — the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you — or those around you — ever “spin” 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney’s continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called “The Twilight Zone” broadcast a riveting episode entitled “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.”

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An “alien” is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, “they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.”

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

“For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn.”

When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have “forgotten the lessons of 9/11″… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Keep bringing the truth Keith, hard and fast — no matter what you’re called.

While you’re finding enunciating your voice, do know that you’re speaking for many of us in the process; people that don’t believe that a hundred thousand dead Iraqi’s will ever bring back our dead and our shallow innocence lost of five-years past and will only give birth to the repeat cycle of violence.

You’re speaking for a people who want justice, first and foremost, with bin Laden put away in a cell or a pine box, his choice.

Most importantly, the people you speak for don’t buy into the much marketed fear of the future, because we refuse to climb aboard a self-fulfilling prophesy to live in such a state.

The people you speak for are Americans, and we are not afraid.

Get us to 2008, Keith. We’ll take care of the rest.

the show with zefrank

photo by inklake

Reflections on loss, this 11th day of September
By David Allen

[…]

There are two lessons which can be drawn from loss: One is that life is ultimately futile. All that we love will die and we cannot prevent this. We can let each death harden us, make us cavalier in our pronouncements and opinions about other people’s lives. We can become dead while we yet breathe.

Or we can understand that each life is irreplaceable, and should be cherished, nurtured and loved. Those of us who have lost should remember the pain we share with others and try to guide the recently wounded back to the light. Those who have never experienced such a loss should close their eyes and try to imagine it, try to prepare for the day it comes to them. Try to understand the unfathomable. And while none of us can stop the random, senseless deaths, we should do all in our power to stop the vindictive, spiteful deaths. We should remember that the pain is no less acute because it happens to people we hate.

We all wake up at night in terror. We all hope to find what we have lost just behind the next door.

(via Lex)

photo by LarimdaME

(photo by Jesus’ General)

Reuters
ABC Scrambling to Change 9/11 Drama

[…]

Officials at the Walt Disney Co.-owned network said they were still tinkering with the five-hour production, titled “The Path to 9/11,” which is scheduled to air without commercial interruption in two parts on Sunday and Monday.

But ABC declined to say how the movie was being reshaped or whether any changes would address specific complaints lodged by Clinton, his former aides and congressional Democrats that the film contained numerous inaccuracies and distortions.

The Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety, citing sources close to the project, reported the network was considering canceling the miniseries altogether.

The docu-drama, which ABC says is based largely on the official 9/11 Commission Report, opens with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and traces subsequent events leading up to the coordinated suicide hijackings five years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Much of the controversy focuses on a scene depicting CIA agents and Afghan fighters coming close to capturing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, only to have then-White House national security adviser Samuel Berger refuse to authorize completion of their mission.

An unfinished version of the film circulated by ABC to TV critics for review portrays Berger as abruptly hanging up the phone while the CIA is pressing him to approve the raid.

In letters of protest to Disney President Robert Iger, Berger and former White House aide Bruce Lindsey said no such episode ever occurred.

The executive producer of the film, Marc Platt, acknowledged to Reuters on Thursday the Berger scene was a “conflation of events.”

The film also drew denunciations from Clinton supporters for strongly suggesting his administration was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to deal effectively with the gathering threat of Islamic militancy. Lindsey said the 9/11 Commission Report disputed that notion.

[…]

This is what you get when you try to cash in too early on a national tragedy.

Remember the films JFK and Pearl Harbor? Both films took tremendous license in their portrayals of actual events, but the difference is that they did so 28 and 60 years after the fact, respectively. And while each took accuracy jabs from critics, neither had to deal with this degree of criticism because the emotional scars of the American public had already healed and the people who were on watch during these tragedies were either retired or dead.

With the airing of The Path to 9/11 on the eve of the five year anniversary of the events of that day, we also happen to be stuck, knee-deep, in a war that has been proven to have no relationship to the events of that day. No matter what inaccuracies are found — from either side of the aisle — this production was bound to catch major flack for trying to feed a narrative to a still healing nation, ever so hungry for the truth, not some docu-drama version of the events leading to 9/11.

Who Made The Call To Produce This Film?

In my estimation, there are only two possible reasons why Disney/ABC would give the green light on this production at this time:

1. Karl Rove instructed his minions to write the narrative and convince Disney/ABC to produce the film
2. Disney/ABC is simply gambling on the old adage, “There is no such thing as bad PR”

As a firm believer in the power that human greed wields in shaping our world over back door conspiracies, I’m sitting pretty squarely in the second camp (though I couldn’t help using the above image of Mickey Rove; Gen. JC Christian, Patriot is a genius).

I’m betting that Disney/ABC figured that this would be business as usual, though blown up a bit due to the subject matter; you know the formula — create a controversy, sell the advertising, line the pockets and move on unscathed within a few weeks.

What they didn’t take into consideration is the age that we live in now — where blog reach is both gaining traction in the very same homes that their sugar-coated narrative is being presented, as well as influencing the presentation of popular shows on TV (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to name a few).

When a passive audience starts to become more active in their digestion of information, these old axioms of capitalism begin to start biting mainstream marketing strategies in the ass.

To make my point, let me perform a few minutes worth of Google research… Okay, I’m back (and my own thesis has shifted somewhat after only 20 minutes). Take this bit of information from HuffPost as an example of how nutritional facts for digesting reality can change a perspective in a matter of minutes:

[…]

In fact, “The Path to 9/11″ is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film’s director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father’s group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry.” As part of TFI’s long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission’s in film industry jobs “so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out,” according to a YWAM report.

Last June, Cunningham’s TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled “Untitled History Project.” “TFI’s first project is a doozy,” a newsletter to YWAM members read. “Simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!” (A web edition of the newsletter was mysteriously deleted yesterday but has been cached on Google at the link above).

The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series “under a shroud of secrecy” about the 9/11 attacks. “At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries ‘Untitled Commission Report’ and producers refer to it as the ‘Untitled History Project,’” the Post noted.

[…]

Hm… Maybe I was too quick to espouse my faith in greed over conspiracies? I highly doubt I’ll be going to Disneyland again. In any event, the chances of Disney/ABC walking away clean from this beaut of a mis-timed and shady production is slim to none.

The Future Of Market Accountability

As the ecosystem for delivering entertaining, informative and personalized information gains a new foothold of innovation each and every year, we’re becoming deeper and deeper immersed within the information age.

The people formally known as the audience are becoming more politically aware through osmosis these days. And the harder the mainstream, one-way channels are leveraged to message us with constructed narratives, the easier it becomes for us to unbundle the programming and filter fact from fiction — no matter our brand of politics.

An analogy: The addition of nutritional labels to food products years ago didn’t end up preventing obesity, but the presentation of nutritional meta-data sure as hell increased the potential for new forms of viable economic levers within the food industry.

As high-fat foods in the mid-nineties and high-carb foods over the past few years have taken a hit due to greater consumer awareness, low-fat and low-carb products have gained a place in the market at a higher selling point due to simple demand.

My point?

While a conglomerate like Disney/ABC can get away with producing a film with this level of empty calories here and there, as we move deeper into the online revolution, such blatant disregard for nutritious content could easily lead to the collapse of advertising arteries via brand corrosion, as an informed public is now armed with digital printing presses.

And man, is the web chock full of beating hearts willing to pump out blood or what?

(originally uploaded by Comandante Agi)

Duluth News Tribune
Army general says Rumsfeld refused to plan for post-war Iraq
By Stephanie Heinatz

[…]

In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.

On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.

On Sept. 11, he said, “life just went to hell.”

That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to “get ready to go to war.”

A day or two later, Rumsfeld was “telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.

“Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq.”

Scheid said he remembers everyone thinking, “My gosh, we’re in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It’s just going to be too much.”

Planning was kept very hush-hush in those early days.

“There was only a handful of people, maybe five or six, that were involved with that plan because it had to be kept very, very quiet.”

There was already an offensive plan in place for Iraq, Scheid said. And in the beginning, the planners were just expanding on it.

“Whether we were going to execute it, we had no idea,” Scheid said.

Eventually other military agencies like the transportation and Army material commands had to get involved.

They couldn’t just “keep planning this in the dark,” Scheid said.

Planning continued to be a challenge.

“The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”

Scheid said the planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4,” or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like security, stability and reconstruction.

Even if the troops didn’t stay, “at least we have to plan for it,” Scheid said.

“I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

“He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war.”

[…]

Anyone who cared more about finding Osama bin Laden than wasting lives and money on trying to reshape the face of the middle east via a neo-con wet dream, immediately saw where our “war on terror” went wrong. No sooner did we commit to hunting down the mass murderer responsible for 9/11, the administration shifted focus and began to implement war planning in Iraq.

That’s like beginning the manhunt for the Son of Sam and then a month into it, sending the entire NYPD after the mob because, well shit, they’re both bad for the city.

But the temerity of Donald Rumsfeld to forgo the advice of his war planners — even threatening to fire them if they continued to present their opinion on post-regime change rebuilding — well, it speaks volumes to how this administration rolls.

Rumsfeld tells his staff that the American public wouldn’t back a long war. Fast forward three years into this debacle and the administration decides to present the terminology of The Long War to the American public in a “suck it up and deal with it” kind of way.

If that doesn’t make you pause for a moment and think about how planned chaos can occur, I don’t know what will. A military industrial complex doesn’t thrive in times of peace, you know.

Not properly planning for the war in Iraq was beyond foolish — it was inhumane — but that’s practically a moot point, because we never should have been there in the first place.

Here’s my deal: I’m tired of my government using 9/11 as their business card; their credentials for running amok in the middle east. It’s not what I wanted as I watched F-16’s buzz over my old pad in Brooklyn for a week in the fall of 2001. My former neighbors are tired of this administration hijacking our personal memory of that day as well.

Anyone with a conscience is tired of it.

Salon
What They Went Through
by Garrison Keillor

It was painful to hear the woman in anguish on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center, crying, “I’m going to die, aren’t I? I’m going to die.” Melissa Doi was 32, beautiful, with laughing eyes and black hair. She was lying on the floor of her office at IQ Financial, overwhelmed by smoke and heat, calling for help. And then there was Kevin Cosgrove on the 105th floor, moments before it collapsed, gasping for breath, saying, “We’re young men, we’re not ready to die.” And then he screamed, “Oh my God” as the building started to collapse. It’s in their voices, what they went through.

[…]

This is an amazing column by Keillor and something that I personally needed to read (thank you, David).

For hours upon hours after the towers went down, I watched my neighbors leaping to their death on TV and on that day, I couldn’t, I wouldn’t turn away. I studied every moment. I did so because I inherently recognized that for every detail I could make out of their silhouetted images dropping through space and time towards their moment of blackness, I felt as if I was with them… and they weren’t alone.

In those fleeting seconds, their humanity was my humanity and mine — as much as I could will — was hopefully theirs.

As the moments and hours turned into days, which quickly turned into weeks and months, and life resumed to some form of normality in NYC, I began to lose such perspective.

Every day for the next 18 months, I commuted directly past the remains of the WTC on foot. I watched street vendors sell Ground Zero t-shirts and hats to tourists, while photographers — amateur and professional alike — lined up to document their moment in the aftermath of tragedy. Over time, as I walked past the classic NYC particle board, blue construction walls that lined my path to Jersey City on the south side of the mass graveyard, I watched them gather with graffiti expressing the raw emotions of New Yorkers concerning 9/11, the victims and the impending wars. Ten months in, they were all painted over by the city, just to be thought “vandalized” once again.

Somewhere within that surreal period of time, I stopped looking at images of that day and lost track as to why that person leaping from the tower meant so much to me, and much more importantly, why my attention hopefully meant something to him or her in those fleeting moments heading towards eternity.

I needed to say that out loud.

Another milestone in Iraq has come and gone. As of yesterday, America’s occupation in Iraq has officially eclipsed the length of time America spent in World War II.

No matter your personal view on the potential of terrorist tactics, we’re not at war to stop an advancing fascist or an existing genocide dead in its tracks (such as modern-day fascist Kim Jong-il of North Korea or the current genocide in Darfur).

There’s only one similarity between WWII and the occupation of Iraq; in both cases, it took an attack on US soil to rally and motivate the American public to back entering an armed conflict. Of course, the attack on Pearl Harbor directly emanated from the ongoing conflict of WWII, whereas the emotional ties between the events of 9/11 and the perception of Iraqi leadership remain simply that — emotional.

Iraq has never been an immediate threat to our nation; no weapons of mass destruction ever threatened our safety from afar. Could that situation have changed for the worse over time? Sure, but so could any number of scenarios in the world, which is exactly why the tactic of preventive war is considered state-sponsored terrorism in many people’s eyes.

Fact: The combined death toll from all major, classically defined terrorist activities over the past twenty years pales in comparison to the loss of life at the hands of the Nazi fascist state.

This administration twisted false stories of Iraq hunting for yellow cake in Niger into a narrative that fit our administration’s desire to go to war in Iraq and delivered this false case to Congress to justify an invasion.

In a post-9/11 America still freshly licking its wounds, we all should have known what would happen within our political arena:

Who Lied To Whom?: …”Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.”…

When that cover was blown by, well, reality, our government simply began to whisper false ties to 9/11 to go after a client-state that refused to play nice anymore, all beginning with its 1991 invasion of Kuwait.

What we have “accomplished” in Iraq since the occupation began in 2003 is quite amazing, actually. A Shi’ite majority has now been voted into power — something that no US planner would have hoped for, but constitutes a perfect example of what democracy at the end of the barrel of a M-16 will get you.

Essentially, we’ve backed the formation of a government and a constitution that leans in the opposite direction from modernity and strengthened the potential for a collaborative, radical mid-east region, at the cost of more than 2 billion dollars per week, while losing close to 3,000 US patriots and killing at least 50,000 Iraqi civilians.

One can only imagine how that loss of life is going to be avenged.

Remember that slippery slope?…

(originally uploaded by cjsylvor)

(originally uploaded by Von Hutchins)

“Terrorists can be defeated simply by not becoming terrified — that is, anything that enhances fear effectively gives in to them.”
- John Mueller, Ohio State University

(originally uploaded by celebdu)

(originally uploaded by jamarju)

“I am worried that I have a finger-pointing President who quite possibly does more damage to more people every day than any traditional terrorist could do in a lifetime and most likely won’t be happy until he completely isolates America from the rest of the world, throwing all of us into a third World War.”
- Alex Sandell, Terrorists in Business Suits 2: The Second Coming

With the massacre of Haditha already drawing comparisons to the My Lai massacre — where up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children were killed in cold blood by American forces — proponents of this war are holding fast against this incident becoming the tipping point of complete anti-war sentiment.

Local blogger, Joe Guarino:

[…] We cannot take these unfortunate events, and then somehow generalize and amplify the Big Message they convey to suggest that the overall war effort is unworthy. We cannot make general assessments of the war in Iraq (or in Vietnam, for that matter) on the basis of tragic events that do not reflect the overall pattern.

The media would be wrong to muster a drumbeat on these stories, but if they do in stereotypical fashion, the public should ignore it.

Unfortunately for Joe and his agenda, the American public will discuss the role this atrocity plays in the overall war effort.

Whether Haditha represents an accurate assessment of the US military’s tactical MO or not, it has marked a clear shift in our collective perception of modern warfare. No longer do we live in a fantasy world of surgically precise operations; we’ve all awoken to the reality that combat-stressed groups of men and women in a war zone are capable of murdering civilians on their own accord.

That 21st century, smart-bomb warfare meme is kaput; we’re now all aware that the US is knee-deep in a grudge match.

But in the end, it truly doesn’t matter if this one incident is indicative of the pattern to the entire war effort or not, because to the Iraqi people — the people on the other end of the gun barrel in any circumstance — it signifies a terrifying escalation of chaos, murder and occupation that cannot be erased with clarifying words.

Not that our words would do any good anyways.

The Overall Pattern In Iraq

From pg. 39 of the September 2004 Strategic Communication report, by the Defense Science Board — a federal advisory committee established to provide independent advice to the secretary of defense:

2.3 What is the Problem? Who Are We Dealing With?

The information campaign — or as some still would have it, “the war of ideas,� or the struggle for “hearts and minds� — is important to every war effort. In this war it is an essential objective, because the larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.

American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.

• Muslims do not “hate our freedom,â€? but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
• Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that “freedom is the future of the Middle Eastâ€? is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World — but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.
• Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination.
• Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack — to broad public support.
• What was a marginal network is now an Ummah-wide movement of fighting groups. Not only has there been a proliferation of “terroristâ€? groups: the unifying context of a shared cause creates a sense of affiliation across the many cultural and sectarian boundaries that divide Islam.
• Finally, Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic — namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is — for Americans — really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is of course necessarily heightened by election-year atmospherics, but nonetheless sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims they are really just talking to themselves.

Thus the critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim World is not one of “dissemination of information,� or even one of crafting and delivering the “right� message. Rather, it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none — the United States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and of Islam. Inevitably therefore, whatever Americans do and say only serves the party that has both the message and the “loud and clear� channel: the enemy.

That last sentence (with my emphasis) represents the overall pattern that I see in the Iraq war.

We’re a 100,000 strong force of monolinguistic, armed men and women on a foreign soil.

Our soldiers have little to no training in the local customs of the Iraqi people, and practically no one can verbally communicate with either civilians or the enemy.

Essential building blocks of communication with Iraqi’s — humane, personal connections via idle chat during a convoy exercise, supportive conversation in local establishments, calming direction provided during a house raid — all become lost opportunities to gain a semblance of trust or credibility.

This simple inability to communicate waters the fields of insurgent seeds.

So when an atrocity such as Haditha occurs, the Iraqi people’s understanding of the act can’t be contextualized or messaged into obscurity by our military.

Worse even, the sheer brutality of such an incident doesn’t need to be framed or spun by operatives of al Qaeda or the leaders of local insurgents to build a greater resistance to American forces.

The atrocity speaks for itself, with a clarity of message delivered via a deafening tone of dead relatives, neighbors and friends, all never to be seen again.

Iraqi citizens have lived with the fear of a potential Haditha massacre for years now. Their daily lives are filled with various degrees of similar experiences with American forces as we consistently sweep through house after house in the middle of the night, searching for insurgents. A Haditha massacre does only one thing: it confirms their worst fears, leading to more fear and more aggression towards our troops.

No matter what we want to tell ourselves, perception is reality.

The DoD knows we’ll never be able to control the perception of Iraqi’s, so this cry of the right to look at the big picture of the war is a nothing more than panicked attempt to control the perception and reactions of Americans that might question this war effort.

To suggest that the American public should “ignore” the “media mustering a drumbeat on these stories” — these atrocities — in order to protect the overall pattern of the war in Iraq is a failed intellectual position. This incident might only be one data point in the overall pattern of war, but it’s a glaring one — one that exposes more elements going wrong over there than going right.

The Role Of The Media

Iraqi war planners aren’t overly concerned with critical journalism, such as the March 2006 Time magazine exclusive on Haditha, affecting the average American’s take on the state of the war.

Sure, it’s a concern, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

If not managed, the mainstream media can become a major threat to war efforts because it is exists via the same capitalistic infrastructure as the government it supposes to watchdog.

In other words, when media institutions begin climbing onto editorial limbs, foregoing their inherent responsibility to the interests of corporate advertising, it clearly signals a shift in times to American corporations who become placed in a position to make certain decisions they’d rather not have to make:

• They can remove themselves from media buys that are beginning to serve the reflected will of the consumer (poor PR) or
• They can keep their advertising in place as a public relations strategy, while implicitly distancing themselves from our government’s effort to wage war

See, the real concern isn’t with the common people in as much as it is with the flow of money, for once the majority of corporations are off the bandwagon of a war effort, its future becomes rather short-lived.

An Example Of The Power Of Media

Lieutenant William Calley — the American officer in charge at the My Lai massacre — faced the scrutiny of the much more centralized, mainstream media of 1970. Advertising legend George Lois provides context to the media exposure of the atrocity at the time by describing the decision and experience of placing Calley on the November, 1970 cover of Esquire magazine :

“Lieutenant, this picture will show that you’re not afraid as far as your guilt is concerned. The picture will say: ‘Here I am with these kids you’re accusing me of killing. Whether you believe I’m guilty or innocent, at least read about my background and motivations.’” Calley grinned on cue, and we completed the session.

When I sent the finished cover to (Esquire editor, Harold) Hayes he called to let me know that his office staff and Esquire’s masthead bureaucrats were plenty shook up.

“Some detest it and some love it,” he said. “You going to chicken out?” I asked. “Nope,” he said. “We’ll lose advertisers and we’ll lose subscribers. But I have no choice. I’ll never sleep again if I don’t muster the courage to run it.”

The notion that some editors might feel a sense of duty to a global community