Repeat After Me: War On “Violent Extremists”
July 28th, 2005 - by: danny
NOTE TO READERS: I will be in Europe through August 8. My blogging may be sporadic. See below.
NY TIMES QUOTE OF THE DAY:
From NASA after last night’s announcement that the space shuttle would be grounded:
“We decided it was safe to fly as is. Obviously, we were wrong.” Recall the email to this blog by Dale Howard from Tulsa on the morning of the launch. It was at the time, a lonely dissent, not a story that most of the media picked up on in the celebratory “we are back in space” coverage.
“This morning’s decision to launch has been heavily criticized. For example, Joseph Gutheinz, retired agent in NASA’s inspector general office, is quoted as saying “It is clear to me that NASA continues to put mission over safety” (Tulsa World, 7/26/03).
“We shall see the results of NASA’s decision in a short while. Stay tuned.”
FORGET THE TERROR WAR
SHUTTLE GROUNDED
PEARL SUSPECT SNATCHED
Say goodbye to the GWOT–the Global War on Terror. It is apparently over because the idea is not playing well in the polls. That war’s mission has now been revised with a new enemy that its likely to prove more popular better in the media. (and in the mind of Thomas Friedman.) Call it “violent extremism” a concept that is at once vaguer and more pervasive and something that violent extremists on all sides can understand..Bush Aide Karen Hughes now has to sell the new war and help us forget the old. Down with VE’s –repeat after me.
Get Them Violent Extremists. Its probably easier. And who are they? Fox’s Bill O’Reilly named some in a recent outburst of bloated Bill-sized baloney as passed on by FAIR:
“You must know the difference between dissent from the Iraq War and the war on terror and undermining it. And any American that undermines that war, with our soldiers in the field, or undermines the war on terror, with 3,000 dead on 9/11, is a traitor. Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they’re undermining everything and they don’t care, couldn’t care less.”
CAFTA WINS IN HOUSE
Note the margin in the Central America not so Free Trade Agreement vote. The Washington Post calls it an “eke.”
“GOP Struggles to Eke Out 217-215 Victory on CAFTA ”
SPEAKING OF MS. HUGHES
RawStory reports:
Senior Bush adviser Karen Hughes, headed to confirmation in the full Senate for the State Department’s top public relations post, provided a terse two sentence answer to questions submitted by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) about her role and knowledge about the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, RAW STORY has learned.
Kerry’s line of questioning focused on whether Hughes knew Wilson was a covert operative, and whether she had ever spoken with Bush adviser Karl Rove about the agent.
“Hughes response was curt: “Because of my ongoing contact with the White House, I was interviewed as part of that investigation and was happy to cooperate, as I noted in my Senate Foreign Relations Committee questionnaire. As you know, these questions relate to an ongoing criminal investigation. I believe that I should honor the prosecutor’s request not to discuss this matter until he has completed his investigation.”
The Chronology
Steve Souza of fakemedia.us passes this item along:
“Concerning the Rove leak, and Gonzales, no one seemed to pick up on the story that their was probably more than 12 hours for the Bush cronies. Maybe up to 4 days!
“Here is the transcript of MSNBC countdown with OLBERMANN on Monday July 25th.
OLBERMANN: Boom, indeed. And there is another potentially explosive question to ponder tonight. What if that gap between when the counsel’s office first knew that the investigation was at least imminent and when White House staff members were told not to destroy any documents was more than just 12 hours?
“The timeline we have now: Monday evening, September 29, 2003, about 8:00 o’clock, Mr. Gonzales gets the official word from Justice. Literally minutes later, say, 8:05, he told Mr. Card. Tuesday morning, September 30, 2003, about 8:00 AM, he told everybody else.
“But September 29 was probably not the first time he’d heard about the investigation, the story first reported on Friday night, September 26, by Alex Johnson and Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.com, nearly 72 hours earlier, making the gap until staffers were told 84 hours. Alex and Andrea wrote at that time the CIA had asked the Justice Department to „investigate allegations that the White House broke federal laws by revealing the identity of one of its undercover employees in retaliation against the woman’s husband, a former ambassador who publicly criticized President Bush’s since-discredited claim that Iraq had sought weapons-grade uranium from Africa, NBC News has learned.”
ROBERTS WATCH:
Sorry I missed this earlier. Check out Howard Kurtz’s piece in the Washington Post on just how devious, slick and right wing Justice Roberts is. As he notes, this perspective is not being communicated on TV.
TORTURE IS NOT US
FAS reports:
“Some of the bluntest criticism of Bush Administration policy on military interrogation of detainees comes from within the military itself.
“In a debate on the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) introduced several “recently declassified” internal memoranda from various Navy Judge Advocate General personnel.
“Basically these memos are telling us that the proposed interrogation techniques dealing with the war on terror, suggested by the Department of Justice, sent over to Department of Defense, were such a deviation from the normal way of doing business that it would get our own people in trouble,” Sen. Graham said.
“It was such a deviation from the normal way of doing business that we would lose the moral high ground in fighting the war on terror,” he said.
“Senator Graham spoke in favor of an amendment (no. 1557) to the Defense Authorization Act that he co-sponsored with Senator McCain and others to establish uniform standards for the interrogation of detainees held by the U.S. military.”
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2005_cr/s072505.html
WAR POWERS: DECIDING TO USE FORCE ABROAD
The process of authorizing the decision to go to war is reexamined in a new report by a bipartisan commission which generally concludes that Congress must be more assertive in exercising its constitutionally mandated role.
“Congress must perform its constitutional duty to reach a deliberate and transparent collective judgment about initiating the use of force abroad except when force is used for a limited range of defensive purposes.”
See “Deciding to Use Force Abroad: War Powers in a System of Checks and Balances,” The Constitution Project, June 29, 2005:
http://www.constitutionproject.org/wp/WarPowers_final.pdf
PROVOS TO CHANGE POLICY
Irish Republican News reports: “Preparations are underway for a landmark statement by the Provisional IRA, announcing an end its armed struggle for a united Ireland and agreeing to turn to political methods.
“New-York businessman Niall O’Dowd, who said he had been briefed on the contents of the statement, described it as “a truly historic moment in Irish history”.
“The statement is a response to an appeal to the IRA by Sinn Fein
President Gerry Adams, who called for the IRA to move into a new mode so that the struggle could be “taken forward by other means”.“Mr Adams asked the IRA: “Can you take courageous initiatives which will achieve your aims by purely political and democratic activity?”
See the whole Post / →
Media in the News and The News of Media
July 28th, 2005 - by: danny
CNN: New arrest in Pearl case
From Pakistan comes word of a new arrest in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl. A man named Hashim Qadeer, was arrested Wednesday…..
FINDING THE KILLER
Greg Mitchell has another big story in Editor and Publisher cited on the European Journalism Center:
“One of the most remarkable stories of the Iraq war appeared on 27 July at the online magazine Salon, written by its longtime foreign correspondent Phillip Robertson. Amazingly, he managed this month to track down the American sniper who apparently shot and killed Knight Ridder correspondent Yasser Salihee, 33,
on 24 June. The article, “The Victim and the Killer,” chronicles this search, and lengthy exchanges between Robertson and the sniper, described only as
“Joe.” Salihee, a physician who had worked for KR for more than a year, was accidentally shot, on his day off, while driving his car in what seemed like a
haphazard manner, wrongly suspected by American soldiers of being a suicide bomber.”
Source: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000998748
UK SCOOP BY US BROADCASTER
The BBC was reporting last night that it had been outscooped in the terror probe by ABC:
“US broadcaster ABC News has shown exclusive photographs related to the London bombings of 7 July. This X-ray picture shows a bomb packed with nails found near Luton railway station.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4722775.stm
:
New Legislation Could Cost Consumers, Warns CU
(Washington, DC) — Consumers Union cautioned that legislation introduced today by Senator John Ensign (R-NV) could end up costing consumers more for phone, cable and Internet services.
“Consumers better hold on to their wallets if this bill becomes law,” said Jeannine Kenney, senior policy analyst at Consumers Union. “They can look forward to soaring cable and phone bills and even fewer choices for broadband as dominant cable and phone companies tighten their stranglehold on the limited competition in these markets. Despite platitudes toward consumer choice and protection, this bill does the exact opposite.”
More information about cable and phone issues can be found at HearUsNow.org.
PRESS COVERAGE OF THE ROBERTS NOMINATION”FAWNING”
Eric Boehlert writes;
” John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court certainly qualified as Big News at both Time and Newsweek, which delivered all-hands-on-deck profiles for this week’s issue. (In all, 20 Newsweek and Time reporters contributed to the articles.)
“Fawning, glowing, congratulatory, adulatory, Sycophantic. Take your pick, the stories are so over the top they have to be read to be believed, with the only real question being should Fred Thompson – Roberts’ WH-appointed handler–have received ghostwriting credit? I mean, how could Thompson possibly top Newsweek’s almost comical portrait of Roberts as a too-good-to-be-true “centrist” who’s “enormously self-confident” but “not arrogant or showy.” An “unpretentious” “regular guy” with a “wicket wit” who “mows his own lawn.” (Newsweek conveniently omits the name of the high school John “Regular Guy” Roberts attended; La Lumiere.) According to the weekly he’s loyal to church, family, school and “most importantly” (wait for it…) “to the law.”
“The Time piece isn’t quite so embarrassing, although editors there think nuggets that Roberts is ambidextrous on the racquet ball court and plays Candyland with his kids qualify as insight. The piece ends with the completely baseless speculation that liberals might come to love Roberts as a Supreme Court justice.
“There’s nothing wrong with the press toasting a man’s life accomplishments, and certainly Roberts has had many. But aren’t Time and Newsweek supposed to be news magazine, helping to put events in context? Their Roberts profiles lacked any.
“For instance, combined, the two features run 6,390 words, with over two dozen people quoted. Here’s how many quotes there are from people even politely questioning the Roberts nomination: 0.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/eric-boehlert/newsweek-time-heart-john_4708.html
WAR IS FUN
Sheldon Rampton of PR Watch reports:
“Years of writing about public relations and propaganda has probably made me a bit jaded, but I was amazed nevertheless when I visited America’s Army, an online video game website sponsored by the U.S Department of Defense. In its quest to find recruits, the military has literally turned war into entertainment.
“America’s Army” offers a range of games that kids can download or play online. Although the games are violent, with plenty of opportunities to shoot and blow things up, they avoid graphic images of death or other ugliness of war, offering instead a sanitized, Tom Clancy version of fantasy combat. One game, Overmatch, promises “a contest in which one opponent is distinctly superior … with specialized skills and superior technology … OVERMATCH: few soldiers, certain victory” (more or less the same overconfident message that helped lead us into Iraq).”
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3865
GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS
Some news from the Islamic group CAIR says, “According to a survey which was conducted between the day of the first terrorist attacks in London and July 17, a majority of Americans (55 percent) say they have a favorable opinion of American Muslims. That figure is significantly higher than the 45 percent holding favorable views in March 2001, prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”
Contrast this with Vikram Dodd’s report in the Guardian
” Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have thought about leaving Britain after the London bombings, according to a new Guardian/ICM poll. . . The poll also shows that tens of thousands of Muslims have suffered from increased Islamophobia, with one in five saying they or a family member have faced abuse or hostility since the attacks. . . Nearly two-thirds of Muslims told pollsters that they had thought about their future in Britain after the attacks, with 63% saying they had considered whether they wanted to remain in the UK. . .
CABLE MERGER MANIA
“Comcast and Time Warner are trying to further consolidate their regional monopolies. If this deal goes through, Big Cable Company #1 (Comcast) and Big Cable Company #2 (Time-Warner) will gobble up Big Cable Company #3 (Adelphia), and the two remaining cable giants will control over 50% of US cable subscribers. At the same time, the FCC is considering rules that could potentially allow just 3 cable companies to control over 90% of broadband and cable access across the United States.”
RATINGS
Daniel Delson writes on one side of a media issue in Congress:
As a consultant to Nielsen Media Research, I thought the following information would be of interest to you:
“As the media landscape shifts, television ratings have become a target for broadcasters looking to defend their turf. Several station owners, including News Corp., are currently seeking government oversight of advanced ratings technology that is tracking the decline of broadcast audiences.
“Tomorrow, July 27, Susan D. Whiting, President and CEO of Nielsen Media Research will testify before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to oppose legislation to regulate TV ratings. Other critics of the bill, which was introduced by Senator Conrad Burns (R, MT) and drafted in cooperation with News Corp., include many cable companies, advertising agencies, minority groups and media writers.
“Cable operators argue that broadcasters are trying to hold back technological progress because it threatens their bottom line. Ad agencies worry that regulation would stifle efforts to measure new systems like Video on Demand and Digital Video Recorders. Minority leaders warn that the bill would roll back much of the progess that has been achieved in measuring audiences of color. And, as the article below illustrates, media analysts wonder why is Senator Burns is focused on regulating television ratings at a time when there are more critical issues before the Commerce Committee, such as the digital television transition, communications mergers, and issues related to video news releases.
See the whole Post / →
Your Letters and Comments
July 28th, 2005 - by: danny
YOUR LETTERS
Jack Shultz writes from Canada:
“There has always been, for me, a very bad smell about 9/11. I don’t know if its the PNAC declaration that it will take a “Pearl Harbour like incident to mobilize the American public for war in Iraq” back in 1998, or the testimony of former FBI agents such as Sybil Edmonds and Kathleen Crowley, who testified before the 9/11 commission. It seemed that the outlines of the 9/11 plot were discovered by 4/11. However , after 9/11, those within the FBI who actively tried to prevent it were either demoted or fired, while those who actively or passively prevented the FBI from acting on the information, were promoted.
“I have always believed that decisions of promotion and demotion are closely linked to the goals of the organization. What exactly were the the goals of the FBI before and after 9/11?
Something is not kosher, and everybody knows it.
KEEP ON STIRRING
Blackbird Crow Raven writes from Wisconsin:
‘
“I heard you on WPR this morning. You did well–you came across as more balanced, less
strident than, for instance, Michael Moore. My perception is that you have more in common
with Chomsky than Moore. Actually, I like them both–or all of three of you, I should say.“I just ordered “WMD” from netflix. The last time I looked for it there it was not yetavailable, but this morning’s show prompted me to look again. I’m looking forward to watching it. Keep on Stirrin’!
EASY TO ORDER: www.wmdthefilm.com
Paul Kane writes:
“I much appreciated Danny Schechter’s article on 911 conspiracy theories. I particularly appreciated his comments about stridency on the left wing and about how that can make issues that MSM already tend to shrink from even more unpalatable.
“However, as a fairly strident left winger myself, who recently had to leave a politically oriented message board due to conflicts that could no longer be handled in a civil way, I think there is a signifigant counterpoint to be made.
“It is at times almost impossible not to become strident in the face of constant avoidance that at times seems to be most assiduously practised by moderate lefties. Yes, that’s right. I think that left wingers feel more ignored by moderates in their own wing than by moderates or extremists on the other side…
“So, much as I appreciate your remarks, Danny, I have to ask whether you are putting the shoe on the wrong foot to some extent. Maybe there is a meeting point where Leftie moderates and Leftie radicals can come together without either side having to compromise too much. Part of the road towards that might be less stridency on the part of radicals, but the road might also involve fewer cold shoulders towards the left wing and less concern with appeasement towards the right wing on the part of the moderates.
Marye writes from Naples Fla:
” Thanks for your good work in these oh-so-awful-times.
“Only wanted you to know that some of the hearing (but their total program) was on the I.N.N. Network news Friday night, and suspect more tonight…they also had decent interviews the 2 preceding evenings with David Ray Griffin. It is still on their website.
“Dish Network is new to me, but I (Boy,oh -BOY! do I ever) recommend it to everyone. My main/initial reason for switching was to quit giving political contributions to GwB/GOP et al. via Comcast “Rangers”…but the quality of the shows and programming are just so much better/relevant, I am so pleased.
“In particular love the (snarky) INN team. Imagine getting a “Billionaires for Bush” skit once a week. IF you see fit to put a link to their website could you maybe add a line in your news letter in e: where they are from? Their website is under construction and I could not find a “who we are” link to click.
TV NOTICE
The Documentary “BUSH’S BRAIN” Airs ON SUNDANCE CHANNEL ON SATURDAY MORNING
Saturday 07.30.05, 11:30 AM (Eastern)
Its all about Karl Rove. . “Darkly comical, seriously scary” — Variety.
http://www.sundancechannel.com/schedule/?schedDate=07/30/2005+06:00:00>BUSH’SBRAIN
SAVE THIS PICTURE
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2005/07/we-support-out-troops.html
OFF AGAIN
Your News dissector is off for a week to Frankfurt Germany to work on a documentary about the great Wikipedia, the brilliant on-line participatory encyclopedia.
I hope the heat there is not as oppressive as it has been here in New York. Sweat. Sweat.
Back August 8.
Keep your letters coming. We are posting some Mediachannel opportunities as we seek to strengthen our team with commited people who can afford to work with us. If you fit the bill, let us know.
Write: dissector@mediachannel.org
See the whole Post / →
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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