Weapons, journalistic priorities both missing

Here's a link to a disturbing little story:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/08/06/iraq.weapons.reut/index.html

This story is about how we have lost 190,000 weapons in Iraq, including 110,000 AK-47 Assault Rifles, and how many of those weapons are now being used to fight against American Troops. Awesome. Hope that gets in the progress report we get in September, somehow I would be willing to bet it slips through the cracks.

My question is, why isn't this a bigger story? cnn.com leads with a story of 6 miners getting trapped in a mineshaft. Tragic, but almost a quarter million deadly weapons getting lost in the most dangerous place on earth is a bigger story than 6 miners getting killed, or 60 miners getting killed. How many people will get killed with those weapons?

HuffPost leads with Rudy Giuliani's daughter's facebook page. Seriously. She joined the "1 Million Strong for Barack" facebook group, and now that's a national news story bigger than taxpayer dollars being used to arm out enemies.

Foxnews leads with the coal miners, followed by the facebook page and a twelve-year old "Messiah" getting arrested in France. Ummm...okay. What the hell is wrong with the media in this country?

The press has failed us...

I saw Bush today say that "The same people bombing innocent people in Iraq are the ones who attacked us on 9/11". Now, that is bullshit, not to put too fine a point on it. Two weeks ago, Bush admitted that Al Qaeda accounts for less than a quarter of the violence and fighters in Iraq. And even those fighters don't work for Osama bin Laden, they are Al Qaeda in name only. But here's the thing -- Nobody pointed that out to Bush. The reporters present at the time just sat there and nodded like idiots. Nobody said anything. If nobody is going to say anything, OF COURSE he's just going to keep spouting that unadulterated bullshit. It is totally absurd. Fuck the press, fuck the government, they are in this together as far as I am concerned. What happened to the muckraking, take no shit, call everyone's bullshit of journalists past. Ed Murrow, we hardly knew ye...

So many scandals its actually muddying the water

The Bush administration may have come up with a new tactic: Create so many scandals at once that none of them gets extreme coverage, and then claim that none of them are such a big deal, and wait for them to start dropping off the national radar. There's so many freaking scandals now that every time there's a new development in one of them, I kind of have to jog my memory of exactly what it was all about. It's really incredible how this guy can still be in office. I don't think he's gone more than a few weeks without a major scandal in months.

What the hell does "Mixed Bag" even mean?

It never ceases to amaze me how Bush will take language that seems meant to describe a round of golf and apply it to the war in Iraq. Today he issued a progress report on Iraq that said the government there had made satisfactory progress on about half their benchmarks, and called the results there a "mixed bag". You know, a mixed bag, like "I hit a few birdies, a few too many bogies, I was in the rough a lot off the tee, but I putted pretty well." That's a mixed bag. "We quelled the resistance in Al-Anbar at the cost of hundreds of dead Americans and thousands of dead Iraqis, but Baghdad is still hostile despite the mass death there." That's not a mixed bag. That's an unmitigated disaster.

This administration's willingness to use rhetoric, and this President's ability to use his supposedly "simple" grasp of language to minimize problems is truly incredible. But what is really shocking is the way the mainstream press just reports this bullshit. Every single paper who reported this White House update as if it were factual in any way should be ashamed. In fact, the administration should not be allowed to report on the state of the war at all. It's like a parent telling a five year old to clean her room, and then taking her word that it's done instead of opening up the door and looking for themselves. Gee, I wonder if she's going to say she's made more progress than she really has.

What it is really like, though, is the Enron case. It's like during the trial, Enron issued an internal report saying that there was reasonable doubt about the defendant's guilt. And then, in the middle of the trial, Enron's defense lawyers pulled out the report and said, "See, this report says there's doubt, so they can't be guilty." And then the jurors (played here by the media) said "Well, they must be right, look, it's right there in that report." People are such GD idiots.

I'M DONE WITH PARIS HILTON

Paris Hilton got out of jail last night. She says she has changed. Either that is true or it isn't. If it is true, there's no more story. If it isn't true, I'm not giving that attention whore any more reinforcement. I refuse to be a party to her co-dependency with the tabloids a moment longer. If she comes on TV, I'm changing the channel.

Pay attention to Rhetorical shifts or you'll be in a diferent conversation without knowing it

I just found an EXCELLENT, GREAT, SUPERLATIVE article on Salon.com that I wanted to share:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/23/al_qaeda/index.html

This article describes the rhetorical shift among the bush administration and the military leaders from calling the people we are fighting "insurgents" or "Sunni/Shia fighters" to calling them "Al Qaeda". This is the kind of thing that changes conversations, and the fact is that (as the article states) the Bush administration only a few years ago freely admitted that only the smallest portion of the enemy was actually Al Qaeda affiliated.

This is the kind of reporting that is truly important, and keeps people honest, particularly if others take notice and start to call officials on it directly.

At least as important, the author points out that the NY Times has picked up the administration rhetoric and put it in dozens of stories. Papers that are infamously liberal (at least according to those on the right) like the NYT should not blindly accept terminology changes like this, especially ones that are obviously bullshit. That's how conversations get changed, and rhetorical battles get won.

I've just written a letter to both the times and salon.com, chiding the one and congratulating the other. I suggest you all do likewise. This is an absolutely CRITICAL issue.

The Medium is the Massage (That's a joke, not a typo)

Check out this article:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB219/index.htm

on George Washington University's excellent National Security Web Site. The article discusses the manipulation of media in Post-Saddam Iraq, and the transition from state-controlled media to an "Iraqi Free Media", whose message would, ironically, be controlled exclusively by the US, hence the white paper describing the apparatus and appropriate message to push.

The point here is not to notice that we wanted to manipulate the media in Iraq. I didn't need a Freedom of Information Act request to tell me that the USG wants to control the message in a time of war. They learned their lesson from Vietnam on that one.

The point IS that they did such a poor job of envisioning and planning how that might have been done. There is no mention in this document of any kind of alternative news sources, including low-budget, pirate TV news, nor does it give any thought to the internet (along the lines of Al Jazeera). This failure of imagination is staggering.

So even if we had won the military conflict, conducted a successful counter-insurgency operation, and executed our media-control strategy (we did none of these, except maybe the first), we would have been in the shit. If you can get a message out there, you can start a revolution.

That's what is so ironic about this whole document. Trying to find a way to truly control the message in this day and age is like writing a paper about how to square a circle. It's impossible by definition.

People have said, "The medium is the message". I don't know if that's true, but I think we can say that some time in the last quarter century, the medium became more important than the message. We live in an age of such volume of message that any particular thing is lost in the shuffle (a trend of which this blog is a symptom). Trying to control a message in that morass of soapboxes is, as I just said, impossible.

This fundamental misunderstanding of the situation with regard to message is a microcosm of this entire war. We have a politics and an attention span in this country with no appreciation for subtlety or nuance, and a situation in Iraq that is nothing but nuance. Trying to sum it up in a white paper, to say nothing of a political speech or, god forbid, a sound byte, is not an option. These matters take years of experience and honed instinct, something which few of our current leaders possess. They are really good at getting elected, laughably bad at understanding or governing. At least, it would be laughable if not for the death screams of all those people.

Talking Heads and The War

I'm watching Hardball with Chris Matthews (MSNBC) right now. It's my favorite of the bullshit talking head shows, a category into which I don't put excellent shows like Charlie Rose, et al. Anyways, Matthews does a nice job, but he is so limited by the format of his show that I can barely stand to watch it at times.

Today he had Bob Shrum on, a pundit who I actually like, and they spent 20 minutes talking about Krum's book, and Matthews was grilling him on comments he had made about the Presidential candidates. Things like Edwards saying gays made him uncomfortable at times, and a bunch of other meaningless crap. And I suddenly thought "Hey, did the Iraq war end during the last commercial break? Or is Chris Matthews just helping Shrum pimp his book at the expense of genuine content?"

I yelled at the TV for a minute, then my roomate told me to shutup and calm down. It's not that there's anything wrong with pimping books, and I understand that it's a hour-a-day show, and they can't have hard-hitting discussion every single second, but it's so damn frustrating to watch them talk about BS for twenty minutes, and then have to cut off discussion of an actual issue because they "ran out of time". Can we have two commercial breaks discussion about the most important issue in the world, and maybe chop 10 minutes out of the Bob Shrum advertisement? Is that too much to ask?

Coercive Interrogation is Bullshit

I just finished reading a fascinating article:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19032165/site/newsweek/page/0/

In which the Steven Kleinman, a veteran interrogator from as far back as WWII, argues that coercive interrigation techniques (read: torture) are indefensible on grounds of effectiveness, rather than any particular moral or legal problem. This is something that has made common sense to me for quite some time, and I was glad to see a mainstream publication giving voice to the position.

Kleinman favors instead the use of empathetic techniques, the defusal of resistance postures through counter-intuitive, overly friendly and helpful stances that create rapport and a desire to please on the part of the subject.

In one of the article's most interesting exchanges, the interviewer suggests that the level of fanaticism found in terrorists today would render non-coercive techniques ineffective. Kleinman pushes against this point by insisting that Nazi fanaticism (during the period he was cutting his teeth with these techniques) was commensurate with terrorists devotion to Osama bin Laden today.

It seems to me that, even if he is wrong, and the terrorists today are greater fanatics than the Nazis, that only makes his case stronger. Fanaticism (defined by me as the willingness to suffer and inflict suffering for a person or cause) is more help in resisting torture than in resisting empathetic techniques.

Kleinman's techniques involve more subterfuge and deception than coercive techniques, and those weapons are more likely to circumvent fanaticism than a head on challenge. In fact, physical suffering plays directly into the fanatics hands by allowing him to "offer up" that suffering to his God or figurehead.

A friend of mine who was an on-the-ground interrogator attached to an infantry unit in Iraq told me that by far the most effective technique he has seen used on the terrorists was a religous reversal. That is, convincing a religous fanatic that Allah had intended for him to survive whatever battle he had been captured during, and that Allah's will now was for him to cooperate with the US. (Otherwise, Allah would have allowed him to die) The point about this technique is that when it works, it works all the way. No disinformation, no withholding, as opposed to coercove techniques which force interrogators to fight tooth and nail for every gain.

Kleinman also made an interesting point with regard to the assumed effectiveness of coercive techniques. He said that shows which depict torture (most notably "24") show it (falsely) to be such an effective method, that even the opponents of torture tend to oppose it on legal or moral grounds rather than pressing on the expected results. This is a huge mistake.

The question is whether the creators of such shows bear any responsibility to the public trust, in terms of spreading this disinformation. I have the same question about shows (I was watching "Mission Impossible III" last night, and they did this.) that depict someone performing CPR, pressing sharply on someone's chest, and restarting a stopped heart. This is medically impossible, that technique is only useful for keeping minimally oxygenated blood flowing through the veins until actual medical help can be obtained. Do people actually try this? And if so, should the creators of such shows be held responsible for creating this dangerously fictional perception?

Finally, I fail to understand why opponents of torture (Notably John McCain. There isn't even really a debate in the Democratic Party.) fail to utilize these arguments in their opposition to torture. During the last debate, McCain said "We could never gain as much from torture as we would lose in international opinion." (That quote is close, it may not be on the money.) Those kinds of arguments are inherently weak, because A) loss of international opinion is a hypothetical future event and B) It should be clear from the 2004 election that 51% of this country doesn't give a shit about international opinion. If McCain (and others) would step up and make the debate much more about the ineffectiveness of torture rather than the abhorrent nature of the means, they wouldn't come off as such wussies. And they would still be right.