DEBATING IRAQ (AGAIN)

“VIETNAM TEMPLATING”

PENTAGON REFUSES TO PROBE MEDIA KILLINGS

The Iraq War is far from over. It is just in a different stage. It could be just beginning. The Administration understands that it cannot win, cannot put this debacle behind it, and cannot snatch another victory out of the ashes of political defeat unless it can turn the lights on in more ways than one. Already it is taking hits in a media war that until now it has handled so brilliantly, wowing the public and winning over the compliant press. Look at the cover of TIME: “Mission Unsuccessful.” Even the mainstream is defecting. No wonder Former Pentagon Media chief Victoria Clarke who just joined CNN says its time to send the embeds back in.

If you watched Condoleezza Rice squirm on Tim Russerts’ Meet the Press yesterday, you know what I mean. Once again, for the umpteenth week, the Sunday TV talk shows became a platform for the Administration in the way that Iraqi TV was invariably a platform for Saddam and Co. ABC should just hire Colin Powell — he’s there so much. And there he was again, soft-soaping the Bush Administration line. Had he handled PR for Enron, they would still be on top. He didn’t bat an eye when the many errors of his Feb 5 UN presentation were pointed out. He just danced around the critical questions without missing a beat.

NBC was more aggressive than ABC. Russert confronted Condi with her many deceptive evasions but she is well schooled in the art of just repeating stock phrases over and over. She made one admission, e.g.,, that a mistake was made in having the President talk about Uranium being sent to Iraq from Niger. She also revealed the reason: they “forgot” that they had been warned the information was bogus.

HOW UNCERTAINTY BECOMES CERTAINTY

She just kept rattling away with how Iraq had been deceptive and then make a major leap by concluding that studies which showed weapons not accounted for meant they were there and ready for use. Uncertainty becomes certainty because we say so. Period. It was one of those one plus one equals five performances we have become so used to. This morning, the New York Times is out with a report that the House Intelligence Committee which appears to awakened from its slumber is posing questions:

“The debate over the rationale for the war was reopened by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who have delivered a critical interim assessment of how intelligence agencies concluded that Iraq had forbidden weapons and ties to Al Qaeda.

“There were “too many uncertainties” in the outdated and inadequate information underlying a National Intelligence Estimate that the administration used to justify the war, the senior Republican and the senior Democrat on the panel said in a newly disclosed letter to George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence.” On another front, more certainty has crumbled. The Times’ Douglas Jehl reports: “A Pentagon review has concluded that debriefings provided by defectors made available by an Iraqi exile group were of little value.”

WILL WAVERING

Even Russert couldn’t demolish all the doubletalk, stock phrases, selective history, mistaken references, slogans, polemic and clich鳮 Rice had been on Fox earlier in the morning speaking more to an Amen chorus. Yesterday she looked more robotic than ever. After she spoke Fox, caught up with Powell in the street outside ABC so they could have the same “get.” Over on ABC the only surprise was that none other than George Will who had called for the abolition of the UN during the war debates then is now expressing skepticism with all the Administration wriggling about weapons of Mass Destruction. If Will slithers off the reservation, you will see even more fragmenting on the right. He was peeved because the administration seems to be saying that what it said then no longer matters because Iraq has been “liberated.”

Even when they appear to be critical, these Sunday shows stick with the Washington consensus. All the hosts seem to only draw on the Washington Post (and their own archival clips) for research. When the media is judged for its failures, they deserve to be in the dock. And George Stephanopoulos is the worst, pretending at independence, even liberalism, yet never challenging the most grotesques Administration rationales and offering few follow up questions, Eleanor Clift on John McLaughlin’s shout show at least tries to offer a perspective but is always drowned out by the bullies on the right. She predicted that the Congress is in the bag with Bush, will vote the $87 Billion and is equally culpable in his failed polices.

“VIETNAM TEMPLATING” KILLING OUR TROOPS?

There has been some new media bashing by conservatives unhappy with critical coverage of the US practices in Iraq. They say the coverage may be “killing” our troops. Writing in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, a Democratic Congressman, Jim Marshall, writes: “It’s not the reporting of criticisms or bad things that’s the issue… It’s the lazy Vietnam-templating, the ‘of course America must be losing’ spin, the implicit and sometimes explicit sneer, and the relentless bringing to the fore of every convenient negative fact while suppressing the positive ones that’s the issue. It’s what the terrorists are counting on, and it’s what too many in the media are happy to deliver, because they think it’ll hurt Bush.” Please note the term ” lazy Vietnam Templating.” It will be back.

“A NEW BOMBSHELL”

One of the issues deftly evaded by Powell and Rice is the CIA concerns about the outing of a CIA agent at the instigation of the White House. This gruesome twosome had no comment because the Justice Department is investigating. Can’t interfere with that. Jackie Newberry passes along some comments from blogger Josh Marshall who writes Talking Points. He highlights this other related scandal. “The Post got one “senior administration official” to concede that “two top White House officials” disclosed (CIA Agent and the Wife of Ambassador Joe Wilson) Plame’s identity to at least six journalists. (In its totality, the piece gives me a pretty good hunch who the ’senior administration official’ is.) Here are the five bombshell grafs in their entirety”

“A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson’s account eventually touched off a controversy over Bush’s use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

REVENGE

“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak’

“In any case, this is truly a bombshell and for the first time I suspect someone may actually lose their job over this — though loyalty being what it is to the prez I still have my doubts. Here’s what this means, as nearly as I can see it. Clearly, the White House knows who those two people are. They also know that the wrongdoing did in fact occur. Perhaps most important, the public now knows that they know. Given all that, I don’t see how — in a climate of media feeding frenzy — it will be possible to keep their identities a secret for long. And once their identities are known.”

AL-CHALABI AL-WATCH

And in Iraq, the land of progress, we have the first suggestion that I have read that Mr. Chalabi, the man who the CIA put in power after a PR firm called the Rendon Group named his Iraqi National Congress may have been behind the killing of Aqila Al-Hashimi the Iraqi woman leader who was buried today after being shot down by persons unknown last week. A fabulous Iraqi blogger named “RIVER” offers this morsel in her latest must read column. “There are still no leads to her attackers’ identities? somehow people seem to think that Al-Chalabi and gang are behind this attack just like they suspect he might have been behind the Jordanian Embassy attack. Al-Chalabi claims it’s Saddam, which is the easy thing to do- pretend that the only figures vying for power are the Governing Council, currently headed by Al-Chalabi, and Saddam and ignore the fundamentalists and any inter-Council hostilities, rivalries and bitterness between members. ..

She wrote earlier on Al-Chalabi and the press: “Apparently our leader of the moment, Al-Chalabi, isn’t pleased with the two leading news networks in the region. I can’t really blame him? he has had some of his worst interviews on Al-Arabia and Al-Jazeera. He always ends up looking smug like he’s just done something evil, or conniving like he’s planning something evil. When is he going to learn that there is no network in this wide world that has the technology or capacity to make him look good?”

I have it on good authority that the mysterious author of this amazing resource called Baghdad Burning is a Mediachannel reader.

REMEMBER THE PALESTINE HOTEL?

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has issued a statement saying that it too is “dismayed” at the results of the U.S. military’s investigation into the August 17 killing of Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana, which concluded that U.S. soldiers acted within the rules of engagement when they shot Dana.

“The U.S. military is acting as judge and jury in this case,” said CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper. “The military has concluded that the soldier who shot Dana acted within the rules of engagement, yet they won’t discuss what those rules are.”

The results of the investigation have not been made public but were reported by The Associated Press (AP). The AP story quoted military spokesman Lt. Col. George Kivo as saying that while Dana’s killing was “regrettable,” the soldiers “acted within the rules of engagement.” (More about this story)

News World reports: “Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, described the verdict as “scandalous”, while Reports Without Borders also expressed dismay at the verdict. Meanwhile, Reuters condemned the US authorities for making the result of the investigation into Dana’s death public without informing his family first. In a letter to US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer expressed his “deep dismay” that the news agency and Dana’s family were not properly”

REMEMBERING EDWARD SAID

As a frequent critic of ABC’s This Week, I was impressed that they included Said in a package honoring prominent people who died this past week. It is usually just entertainers who get this treatment. But ABC included writer George Plimpton, who I once met and my partner Rory knew well, and Edward Said, the Palestinian born writer and cultural critics. I was pleased to hear from Hillel Schenker, an editor of the Palestine-Israel journal who shared some of his thoughts, writing from Israel:

After seeing your comments about Edward Said in your column, Ithought you’d be interested in seeing these comments I wrote in an e-networkexchange. “Just a few comments on Edward Said. Of course he was an anti-Zionist. Idon’t know any Palestinian who is a Zionist (i.e., accepts the legitimacyof the Zionist narrative). However, like the majority of the mainstream PLOpeople, he did accept the two state solution as the realistic means forachieving his people’s right to sovereign, national self-determination.Said even went a step further, insisting that it was absolutely essentialthat the Palestinians and the Arabs in general have respect for thesuffering and uniqueness of the Holocaust in Jewish and human history, andrejected any comparison between the Palestinian suffering and theHolocaust?. Yes, he was critical of the Oslo Accords, claiming that they were asell-out. Some said this was sour grapes, because he was shunted asideafter expecting a more central role. Others find a lot of justificationin his critique. But he never (to my knowledge) abandoned his support for atwo-state solution.”

Hillel also included a statement by the people behind the Electronic Intifada website who wrote in part: “Said was for years often the sole andmost effective advocate for this cause in the UnitedStates. Despite relentless and vicious personal attacks,Said never abandoned a vision of peace between Israelisand Palestinians based on deep mutual recognition of theother’s histories and narratives, and reconciliationleading to complete equality. He taught and inspired a newgeneration of activists to speak with clarity and alwayssearch for truth no matter who it offends.

Ha’aretz offers some penetrating words from Israeli journalist Noga Tarnopolsky on the difficulties of living in fear in Jerusalem and writing about it; “I am a journalist in perhaps the most overexposed place on Earth, and the discharge of my profession often feels superfluous. Sometimes, it feels obscene, as it did early one morning last year when I walked over to see what was left of a coffee shop that was blown up near my apartment and I ended up writing about a man perched like a bird on the top rungs of a construction ladder, using tweezers to pick pieces of human flesh from the trees.

“Words fill me with despair. I scan reports of yet another attack, another initiative, another discussion between Bush and Sharon, another Arafat announcement, another tragedy at another checkpoint, another calamity that is too small to merit a full article and, to be frank, too vast for words to do it justice, and I see so many empty glyphs, so much faded laundry whipped about by a futile wind.

“This city has been bleached by the unremitting glare of the media, which emit thousands and thousands of words a day. Yet the words just float by, and in the past few days, as birds on their annual autumn pilgrimages from Europe to Africa have flown overhead — 10,000 eagles last week — I have sometimes looked gloomily skyward and seen in the black flapping of their wings random letters floating high and unattached above me.

“It is not just that the articles have all already been written and rewritten so many times; it is that the events themselves recur so often they lose their sting….”

LETTERS: KUCINICH MANAGER PRAISES MEDIACHANNEL

David Swanson, Campaign Press Secretary of Dennis Kucinich for President writes to compliment us for my piece on election coverage : (See Home Page) “Very well said. Much of the media, including NPR, completely left Rep. Kucinich out of debate coverage. Chris Matthews went on the Today Show and said that only Dean had opposed the war from the beginning.

“Joe Klein went on CNN and asked Kucinich, Sharpton, and Braun to leave the race; Klein is on record opposing Kucinich’s positions and expressing fear that he will deprive Dean of voters and/or push Dean toward supporting bringing the troops home. This one gets it basically right.

“And this tells a major neglected story.”

Richard L. Dechert writes belatedly about the pro-Bush docudrama DC 911 that I wrote about extensively: “Brian Lambert’s … evaluation of that “9/11″ fantasy is only slightly higher than yours. I don’t know if you’re familiar with hiswork, but as the long-time media columnist for the generallyconservative “Pioneer Press,” he provides its readers with a lot ofcritical integrity that’s also reflected in his most recent FCCcritique. I’ll send him your “9/11″.

Media scholar Geert Lovink is out with a provocative new book on Internet culture called “My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition.” According to a release: “The study maps the transition of critical Internet culture from the mid to late 1990s Internetcraze to the dotcom crash, the subsequent meltdown of global financialmarkets and 9/11. In his discussion of the dotcom boom-and-bust cycle, GeertLovink lays out the challenges faced by critical Internet culture today. Ina series of case studies, Lovink meticulously describes the ambivalentattitude that artists and activists take as they veer back and forth betweeneuphoria and skepticism. As a part of this process, Lovink examines theinternal dynamics of virtual communities through an analysis of the use ofmoderation and “collaborative filtering” on mailing lists and weblogs. Healso confronts the practical and theoretical problems that appear as artistsjoin the growing number of new-media education programs. Delving into theunexplored gold mines of list archives and weblogs, Lovink reveals a worldthat is largely unknown to both the general public and the Internetvisionaries.”

HMMM?.

One late breaking conspiracy theory to speculate on this week from a perceptive friend in “Old Europe.” Whatcha think? Pia Raug writes: “I am not much for conspiracy theories - BUT - isn’t it peculiar, that within a month - starting out in the States - 3 of Bush’s most outspoken supporters (and supporters of the Iraq war) are leaders of governments in the 3 countries one by one experiencing huge black-outs?” She refers to us, the UK and Italy. “Peculiar that when the black-outs were reported, in all 4 cases media all over focused on the impact on life in the Capitals (New York being an economic capital). CAPITALS! “Das Capital”!

?. By the by, I now have not so conspiratorial theory about the origins of the phrase “Old Europe.” When I was in Washington last week, we passed a restaurant by that very name. Could that be where Rummy got the phrase? I wouldn’t be surprised Anti-fans of the Secretary of Defense will love Maureen Dowd’s column in the NY Times yesterday skewering the ex-wrestler she brands a “stud muffin.”

Finally, I was sent this rarely sung verse of the song America The Beautiful. It is beautiful:
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.”

VOLUNTEER EDITOR SOUGHT

I am looking for a caring, quick and experienced volunteer editor who can work with me in getting this column proofread, and distributed earlier each day. If you can afford an hour or two weekdat mornings receiving the column via email by 9 AM, please let me know. Write: dissector@mediachannel.org. Other letters welcome too.