connecting*the*dots

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

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(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 — and not just to a sovereign position or a bottom line — marks the potential for transforming the media into the greatest, political equalizer on the face of the earth.

In 1970, the attack on the “liberal” media — outlets that didn’t explicitly recognize corporate interests over human interests at every turn — was eerily similar to the conservative banter of today. From Into The Dark: The My Lai Massacre:

[…]

On April 1, 1971, just two days after the verdict, Nixon ordered Calley to be placed under house arrest while his appeal worked its way through the courts. “The whole tragic episode was used by the media and the antiwar forces to chip away at our efforts to build public support for our Vietnam objectives,� he wrote.

Across the nation, there were many demonstrations of support for Lt. Calley. The American Legion announced plans that it would try to raise $100,000 for his appeal. Draft board personnel in several cities resigned in groups. Several politicians spoke out in public criticizing the government’s prosecution of the soldiers at My Lai. “I’ve had veterans tell me that if they were in Vietnam now, they would lay down their arms and come home,� Congressman John Rarick told the New York Times.

But prosecutor Aubrey Daniel also did not remain silent. He wrote a highly publicized letter to President Nixon criticizing him for releasing Calley to house arrest: “How shocking it is if so many people across this nation have failed to see the moral issue… that it is unlawful for an American soldier to summarily execute unarmed and unresisting men, women and babies.�

[…]

In the end, we have to recognize that an atrocity such as Haditha is a symptom of the behavioral patterns of all warfare.

To brush it aside as a random act of violence would be to remove the complicit nature of war planners from the equation and lay it squarely on the shoulder of the brave souls that serve our country, no matter the call to duty.

Chickenhawk bitch

Peter Beinart
‘NY Times’ Sunday Preview:
Democrats Need a Shot of ‘Cold War Liberalism’

NEW YORK Democrats may feel they are riding high, heading into the midterm elections with President Bush’s approval rating at an all-time low, but Peter Beinart offers a warning, and a new direction, for the party in a feature piece upcoming this Sunday in The New York Times Magazine. It’s titled provocatively, “The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal.�

The article is adapted from his forthcoming book, “The Good Fight.� Beinart is currently editor-at-large for The New Republic.

Beinart warns that it is not enough for the Democrats to simply run on “competence� this year, rather than telling Americans “what their vision is.� For better or worse, the Republicans have such a vision, which voters understand: “America represents good in an epic struggle against evil.�

Democrats have some good foreign-policy minds and even some worthy foreign-policy proposals but no “coherent story about the post-9/11 world….Before Democrats can conquer their ideological weakness, they must first conquer their ideological amnesia,â€? he declares.

The problem is, “Liberals don’t have a script because they don’t have a Reagan.� Their most recent presidents: Jimmy Çarter, considered a “failure� in the international field, and Bill Clinton, who allegedly didn’t have to do much because foreign policy was “peripheral� when he was in charge. (Beinart does not mention that Clinton at least ignored pleas to invade and occupy Iraq.)

While conservatives have “at least told a coherent political story, with deep historical roots, about what keeps America safe and what makes it great,” liberals “have offered adjectives drawn from focus groups and policy proposals linked by no larger theme.”

So what are the Dems to do? According to Beinart, they should look back to the late 1940s and 1950s and embrace the cold war liberalism of the time, best represented by Reinhold Niebuhr and George F. Kennan.

Besides being tough and anti-isolationist, this is defined by “a struggle not merely for democracy but for economic opportunity as well, in the belief that the former required the latter to survived.â€? It also requires admitting that even in fighting evil America must admit that we are not “inherently good.” He also calls for “generosity at homeâ€? as well as “generosity abroad.â€?

But how all this differs from current Democratic philosophy is hard to discern.

Themes? Stories? Vision?

I’m sorry, but I don’t want any of that politics-as-usual crap from the Democratic Party. I want agile leadership, stocked with backbone and the ability to shift on the fly.

And for this guy to wax poetic about the Republicans owning the concept, “America represents good in an epic struggle against evilâ€? shows how out of touch he is with the American voters, because ever since the Bush administration took office, even Republicans have been questioning this… narrative.

Keep on telling stories, bitches.

In the meantime, I’ll take a leader who listens to his/her constituency, will pull out a mirror and ask the tough questions of us as a republic and is willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of our already impoverished unborn grandchildren any day of the week.

You think?

Joby Warrick, The Washington Post
Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts — scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons — who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.

None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, “Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers,” remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.

“There was no connection to anything biological,” said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: “the biggest sand toilets in the world.”

[…]

Here’s the thing: we all know Bush lied. We all know that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush drooled over the prospect of invading Iraq from the moment the first plane hit the WTC. Unfortunately, we also know that we have to continue this charade of shock in order to pressure Congress to do their jobs and impeach this bastard.

It’s amazing to me how this man is able to consistently spin out of any degree of accountability. And while his legacy is already sealed as the most incompetent president of all-time, I often wonder how history will treat us — the men and women that allowed him to run rampant.

These two guys hate each other, right? Then why is it that everyone else is doing all the dying?

James Westhead - BBC
Planning the US ‘Long War’ on terror

It sounds eerily like the Cold War - and that is no mistake.

The “Long War” is the name Washington is using to rebrand the new world conflict, this time against terrorism.

Now the US military is revealing details of how it is planning to fight this very different type of war.

It is also preparing the public for a global conflict which it believes will dominate the next 20 years.

The nerve centre of this war against terror is the huge MacDill airbase in Tampa, Florida.

Surrounded by white sand beaches, palm trees and two golf courses it looks more like a holiday camp than a military camp.

But inside US Central Command (Centcom) generals are planning what they call “fourth-generational warfare”.

Centcom is already responsible for operations in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa - as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and now it is planning a campaign that will eventually span the globe.

Aiming at al-Qaeda

The man behind what the US military calls its “principles of the Long War” is Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt.

Gen Kimmitt, Centcom’s deputy director of plans and strategy, told BBC News: “Even if Iraq stabilised tomorrow the Long War would continue.”

So as Centcom tries to control events in Iraq, he is also planning a strategy for “nothing less than the defeat of al-Qaeda across the world and its associated movements strung together by extremist ideology”.

To achieve victory the US military will have to change dramatically, he says.

Like the terrorists it will have to build international networks, Gen Kimmitt says, making better use of “soft power” - diplomacy, finance, trade and technology.

“I’m an artillery officer, and I can’t fire cannons at the internet,” he says, referring to what he sees as one of the key weapons of the modern age.

Instead, he argues that the US military must try to break down “old mind-sets and bureaucracies” and build new relationships with other agencies - like the FBI, the police and the state department - through what in military jargon are called “joint inter-agency task forces”.

Improved posture

The theory is that the military cannot fight alone against such a nimble and deadly foe as al-Qaeda, and must build a new kind of worldwide network as flexible and smart as its enemy.

As a result Gen Kimmitt predicts a much lower profile for traditional US forces.

He believes that will help win hearts and minds, by ending the impression that the US is occupying the Middle East.

“Our future posture is still being worked out,” he says.

“But I would like to see to the number of troops in the Middle East cut to a fraction of the current 300,000, by at least a half.”

The US military is planning a big increase in the role of special forces, the smaller, specially-trained teams able to speak local languages - including Arabic - deploy rapidly and work with the armies of other nations.

Trailer park diplomacy

Outside Centcom sits a symbol of the new approach and its complexity - a large trailer park with fluttering flags atop each trailer representing each of the 63 nations represented at Centcom, from Denmark to El Salvador.

Inside each trailer, a small team of military liaison officers shares information with their American colleagues and co-ordinates action in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the region.

According to an American general working with the coalition, the aim is to maintain this loose-knit arrangement to fight the global war on terror.

“We want to make it a lasting organisation,” he said.

“We don’t want it to dissolve like it did after Desert Shield and Desert Storm.”

However, America’s difficult relationship with some allies after 11 September 2001 suggests that this will be a challenge.

France and Germany, for example, opposed the war in Iraq. Rear Adm Jacques Mazars, the French representative at Centcom, says French and American forces co-operate more successfully on the ground than their politicians.

But, he said, running a coalition for a sustained period would be hard.

“On the conceptual level we can agree,” he said. “There will be a long war to be won. But on the practical level it will be harder.”

One regular cause of tension among the allies is the sharing of sensitive intelligence.

“There are some things you wouldn’t share with a neighbour and even an ally,” one senior US officer said.

There are signs that despite the difficulties, the new coalition against terror is here to stay.

The Pentagon admits its vision is not yet fully realised, but it has already started work on a new building in the MacDill complex, providing a bricks-and-mortar home for the international occupants of the trailer park.

“I can’t see there ever being a completely homogenous coalition dealing with worldwide terror,” said Col Mark Bibbey, the chief of staff of the British mission at Centcom. “The 63 nations are not signed up to the same view on everything.”

But he added: “You’ve got to start somewhere. You have to plan ahead. You have to be driving in a particular direction. If we don’t start driving now or soon, we’ll be behind the curve.”

Don’t believe this shit for a minute. We’ve been consistently at war ever since WWII. All this formal labeling does is give our administration a streamlined name for hanging their illegal wiretaps, warrentless searches and covert operations, while providing the media, publishing and entertainment industries a new topical issue to craft a narrative around.

Are the US Armed Forces currently optimized to combat a Cold War enemy? Sure. But the decentralized, agile, inconspicuous warfare that our current foes engage in has been around forever and we’ve been playing that game as well over the years. The only reason we don’t hang our hat on covert operations and the funding of rebellions that support our interests in other countries, is because that type of involvement isn’t viewed as honorable in the eyes of the civilized world.

State-sponsored or individually driven, terrorism is terrorism.

So we’re now formalizing on a name, while removing the “civil” formalities of warfare. We’ll continue to position our red coats around the world in formal lines of advancement, while sneaking in for the kill with our scrappy blue coats when the sun goes down and the townsfolk are asleep. Nothing has changed.

Photo by Emily Geoff

Associated Press (Newsvine)
Papers: Cheney Aide Says Bush OK’d Leak

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide told prosecutors President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case.

Before his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on information and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure, the court papers say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8, 2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

There was no indication in the filing that either Bush or Cheney authorized Libby to disclose Valerie Plame’s CIA identity.

But the disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Bush’s political foes jumped on the revelation about Libby’s testimony.

“The fact that the president was willing to reveal classified information for political gain and put interests of his political party ahead of Americas security shows that he can no longer be trusted to keep America safe,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said.

Libby’s testimony also puts the president and the vice president in the awkward position of authorizing leaks — a practice both men have long said they abhor, so much so that the administration has put in motion criminal investigations to hunt down leakers.

The most recent instance is the administration’s launching of a probe into who disclosed to The New York Times the existence of the warrantless domestic surveillance program authorized by Bush shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The authorization involving intelligence information came as the Bush administration faced mounting criticism about its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason the president and his aides had given for going to war.

If this weren’t such blatent and reckless disregard for our National Security, I’d be fun to watch the right try to spin this bombshell into obscurity.

Bush and Cheney consistently play to the American voter’s fear of a National Security breech, creating a hardline image of them being the “protectors” of leaking classified information to the media.

So when someone else leaks classified information (regarding the NSA warrantless wiretapping program authorized by the President of the United States) they launch a criminal investigation. Fair enough. They wanna play hardball and they have the Justice Department in their pocket to do so.

But I do hope they fully realize that they’ve now set a precedent. If they go after the “leaker” of the NSA program with any degree of vigor, they had better damn well be ready to accept accountability for this authorized leak of classified information.

The difference between the two?

This leak didn’t lead to the uncovering of a questionable government wiretapping program; it directly fed the propaganda machine that greased the skids for launching the war in Iraq.

All I want for Christmas is an article of impeachment.

UPDATE: It looks like the administration is going to argue that when the president tells someone to leak information, the process of declassifying the information is automatic and understood. Or some bullshit like that.

Associated Press
Theater Pulls Trailer for ‘United 93′

NEW YORK - A New York City movie theater has pulled the trailer for “United 93,” which chronicles in real time the hijacked United Airlines flight that crashed into a Western Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11.

The AMC Loews Lincoln Square 12 theater in Manhattan said it made the decision after viewers complained they found it too upsetting.

“I don’t think people are ready for this,” theater manager Kevin Adjodha said.

“One lady was crying,” Adjodha told Newsweek. “She was saying that we shouldn’t have played the trailer. That this was wrong.”

Universal Studios in Los Angeles, meanwhile, said it would go ahead with plans to show the trailer for the thriller, which is scheduled to open in theaters on April 28.

Adam Fogelson, Universal’s president of marketing, said the trailer would be shown only before R-rated movies or “grown-up” PG-13 ones.

“The film is not sanitized or softened, it’s an honest and real look” at the events of Flight 93, Fogelson told The New York Times in Tuesday editions. “If I sanitized the trailer beyond what’s there, am I suggesting that the experience will be less real than what the movie itself is? We as a company feel comfortable that it is a responsible and fair way to show what’s coming.”

“United 93″ is scheduled to make its world premiere on opening night at the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan.

The festival, which was created to help lower Manhattan recover economically from the attacks, begins April 25 and runs through May 7.

The trailer begins with images of passengers boarding the plane on a sunny morning, and builds to a disturbing scene that includes actual news video of a plane about to hit one of the World Trade Center towers. It then returns inside Flight 93 as terrorists begin hijacking it and a passenger calls his family to tell them of the impending disaster.

The Families of Flight 93 have said that Universal Pictures will donate 10 percent of the first three days’ grosses to the memorial.

Where to begin? I guess I could start with my absolute disdain for the philathropic smokescreen Universal is attempting with their pathetic 10% donation of the first three days gross (that makes my last 401k plan of a 25% match up to 6% look charitable), but that’s not my major issue.

What fucking asshole decided to make this film? If you’re someone that considers 9/11 to be historically synonymous to Pearl Harbor, how ready do you think America circa 1946 would’ve been for a similar flick? America had already wrapped up WWII (while bombing Japan to hell in the process) yet I’d bet that the raw nerve of December 7, 1941 would’ve been wide open.

Almost five years beyond 9/11 we still (supposedly) can’t even find bin Laden, yet we’ve succeeded in destablizing an entire region — murdering tens of thousands of innocent people in the process while mobilizing the recruitment efforts of the very fundamentalist fervor we’re attempting to “battle.”

We’ve done everything except make a complex global situation less complex, and now the first 9/11 movie is on the horizon for release. We all know what happened on that horrific day, but know absolutely nothing about the seeds that led up to that day. I guess in this world of reality tv and goverment positioning, that doesn’t mean anything.

Personally speaking, I don’t appreciate the attempt to capitalize on my raw nerves and emotions surrounding the event. Then again, it took me more than a year to simply sit through the news footage of the planes crashing into the WTC due to being forced to walk though the rubble of Ground Zero for over a year on my daily commute from Brooklyn to Jersey City…

I might not have the average American’s perspective on this one.

What do you think?