June 2005 Archives

Remember Bill 'Em: Dead or Alive? Well, this woman called 911 from the drive-up window of a Burger King because she couldn't get a cheeseburger ... Listen to the call or read the transcript, and die laughing. Fabled police reporter Edna Buchanan would have loved it. It's a reminder of her Chicken McNugget classic, which began: "Gary Robinson died hungry."

My staff of thousands just couldn't keep its pilfering hands off this. Matt Haber posted it last week at Low Culture:

"Okay, Now I'm Definitely Against Cloning."

The photo comes via Yahoo/AFP. Haber also provides a related reference clever beyond words.

Our versifier laureate penned "effuse words" about Straight Up's new design:

Three cheers!!! hurrahs!!! huzzahs!!!
I gladly take up
For your scintillating, eye-pleasing
Improved make-up.

As well as your jabbing comments,
It gets the mind jogging
And provides a clean, well-lighted
Design for blogging.

-- Leon Freilich

But don't take him for a pushover. In re: "N.Y. Times Must Look Beyond Its Urban, Liberal Base", he sent this, too.

A NOD TO THE RIGHT

Time to reach out, declares Bill Keller,
Time for the lion to lie down with the lamb.
And lo! A week of Times front pages
Is duly devoted to Billy Graham.

The demonization of Bill Moyers is not limited to conservative venues. It also finds a warm, comfy outlet on supposedly liberal PBS. George Neumayr, executive editor of the hardline right-wing American Spectator Magazine, was given ample time last night to spew his venom on PBS's NewsHour in a softball interview with Jeffrey Brown. But that's the least of it.

Kenneth Tomlinson, head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is on a mission to destroy PBS by targeting Moyers and "Now," his former program, with outright lies. "Evidence [has] surfaced" indicating he dissembled at best when he claimed that former CPB President Kathleen Cox "approved and signed" a contract to hire someone "to monitor the political leanings" of the the guests who appeared on "Now." This morning's New York Times reports that "a copy of the contract ... shows that Mr. Tomlinson signed it on Feb. 3, 2004, five months before Ms. Cox became president."

Confronted with "the apparent discrepancy" between the contract and what he claimed in a letter to Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Tomlinson had no comment. "If he signed the contract, he was not telling the truth, which would be very troubling," Dorgan told the Times. "He's trying to pawn some responsibility for this on others, which is very troubling. This guy has some real credibility problems." Lies are the default setting for the Bush White House and its minions. (It's not Moyers being demonized in the campaign against him and PBS, Neumayr told Brown on the NewsHour, it's Tomlinson who is the target of "a ridiculous smear ... for simply doing his job.")

I've written before about Moyers, more than half a dozen times. A year ago, I said his speech on truth and journalism at the first National Conference on Media Reform in May 2004 is "what gets me up in the morning." He said then that "our democracy is in danger of being paralyzed." His speech to the second conference last month was another eye-opener. Since then the danger has increased. You can see why on this morning's Democracy Now! "I don't want to make any easy comparisons, but I do sense that there is a desire to silence any dissent in this country by the administration," Moyers said.

They practice extraordinary media manipulation. They're the most secretive administration in my 70 years. And this whole attack on me is indicative of how when anyone rises up to speak an alternative truth, an alternative vision of reality, they try to discredit them. ... I'm targeted because my reporting on "Now" was telling the stories that they didn't want told about secrecy in government, about Cheney's energy task forces, about a cover up at the Department of Interior, about the relationship between business, corporations, and the administration. We were reporting what good muckraking journalism always reports, and they don't like that. So that's why they've singled me out.

Public broadcasting has "to get back to the revolutionary spirit of dissent and courage" that inspired it "in the first place," Moyer noted, "and this country does, too." So inform yourself and do something. In a mammoth essay published Monday in The Washington Post, a version of which is online here, Moyers also laid out the assumptions on which PBS was founded. Read them. And if you're at all interested in previous Straight Up posts about "Exhibit A" of PBS's so-called liberal agenda (Neumayr's term for him), here are some of them: Moyers Moves On, Hanging in With George, Fine Tuning and Departing Words.

Prompted by Time magazine's Inside the Wire at Gitmo, about an interrogation at Guantanamo's Camp X Ray in which a sleep-deprived prisoner is kept awake "by dripping water on his head or playing Christina Aguilera music," the legal eagle at Underneath Their Robes has filed a confidential opinion that asks, Is Christina Aguilera's Music "Torture"?

This memorandum necessarily focuses on specific musical compositions by Aguilera and whether playing each individual song to an unwilling detainee might rise to the level of torture.

That such analysis must proceed on an individualized, song-by-song basis does not restrict applicability of the principles set forth in this memorandum to the enumerated songs. Rather, the approach applied herein to specific songs from Aguilera's latest album is broadly applicable to the entirety of her artistic output, including her embarrassment of a Christmas album, My Kind of Christmas (RCA Oct. 2000), and her unfortunate Spanish-language album, Mi Reflejo (RCA Sept. 2000), [above], featuring "Genio Atrapado," the Spanish version of her hit single "Genie In a Bottle."

Aguilera's taunting lyrics have a certain je ne sais quoi when applied to Gitmo prisoners under interrogation, though it's not clear whether the songs were translated for them. Part of "Genie In a Bottle" goes like this:

Oh . . .
I feel like I've been locked up tight
For a century of lonely nights
Waiting for someone
To release me

You're licking your lips and blowing kisses my way
But that dont mean I'm gonna give it away
Baby, baby, baby
(baby, baby, baby)

The relationship between music and war goes back a long way. Music has been used to stir both patriotism and protest. It's been used both to raise troop morale and demoralize or frighten enemy forces. Music during the Vietnam war was expecially notable. More recently, the U.S. military used '60s and '70s hard rock as a weapon to challenge insurgents in Fallujah. I haven't seen any legal opinions, real ones or parodies, on the use of pop culture in a military assault. Any takers?

Need some entertainment on a Monday morning? How about ABC chief White House correspondent Terry ("Bulldog") Moran, right, questioning White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan the other day? I don't know which to admire more, Moran's tenacity or his sense of humor. As reported by Editor & Publisher, here's how that went:

MORAN: Scott, is the insurgency in Iraq in its "last throes"?
McCLELLAN: Terry, you have a desperate group of terrorists in Iraq that are doing everything they can to try to derail the transition to democracy. The Iraqi people have made it clear that they want a free and democratic and peaceful future. And that's why we're doing everything we can, along with other countries, to support the Iraqi people as they move forward ...
MORAN: But the insurgency is in its last throes?
McCLELLAN: The Vice President talked about that the other day -- you have a desperate group of terrorists who recognize how high the stakes are in Iraq. A free Iraq will be a significant blow to their ambitions.
MORAN: But they're killing more Americans, they're killing more Iraqis. That's the last throes?
McCLELLAN: Innocent -- I say innocent civilians. And it doesn't take a lot of people to cause mass damage when you're willing to strap a bomb onto yourself, get in a car and go and attack innocent civilians. That's the kind of people that we're dealing with. That's what I say when we're talking about a determined enemy.
MORAN: Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes?
McCLELLAN: I think I just explained to you the desperation of terrorists and their tactics.
MORAN: What's the evidence on the ground that it's being extinguished?
McCLELLAN: Terry, we're making great progress to defeat the terrorist and regime elements. You're seeing Iraqis now playing more of a role in addressing the security threats that they face. They're working side by side with our coalition forces. They're working on their own. There are a lot of special forces in Iraq that are taking the battle to the enemy in Iraq. And so this is a period when they are in a desperate mode.
MORAN: Well, I'm just wondering what the metric is for measuring the defeat of the insurgency.
McCLELLAN: Well, you can go back and look at the Vice President's remarks. I think he talked about it.
MORAN: Yes. Is there any idea how long a "last throe" lasts for?

Uh, next question.

"Watching the Sunday morning's talk shows provided possible answers to some political riddles," regular correspondent Alan Edelson writes. He continues:

There was John McCain on Meet the Press, talking on and on about how proud he had felt supporting George W. Bush in 2004, when we knew how much he detested Bush for the slimy way he defeated McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000. It seemed obvious that some sort of inducement had been offered the proud senator from Arizona, but what exactly was it and why was it offered?

McCain admitted that he had his eye on the 2008 presidential race, even though he would then be 72 and the oldest man ever to be elected to the presidency. But there is the unfortunate melanoma that recurred on his face a while ago, requiring more surgery. He pronounced himself completely cured, even though a recurrence of melanoma usually has a poor prognosis. So said an oncologist I know.

On another of the programs someone mentioned a rumor that the Republican leadership wanted to run McCain in 2008. And here's the killer: They plan to put Jeb Bush in second place on the ticket. (Poor Jeb can't succeed himself as governor of Florida when his current term expires.) If McCain manages to complete one term, it's unlikely he'd run for a second at age 76, putting Jeb on track to run himself in 2012. And if McCain should die in office ... well, the Bush tears will just flow and flow and flow. Either way, the Bush dynasty would carry on.

On the Democratic side, Senator Joe Biden shyly admitted that he was beginning to explore making another run for his party's nomination in 2008. I'd vote for him over Hillary any day. He has the experience and the smarts to be a fine president. And he doesn't carry the Clinton baggage that would likely make Hillary easy to defeat.

Will two hearings -- one official, the other not -- be seen by historians as a turning point in ending the Bush regime's misrule and bringing its ring leaders to justice? It would be nice to think so. And maybe they will be, judging from "Who We Are," the lead editorial in this morning's New York Times about the Senate Judiciary Committee's official hearing on the prison camp at Guantanamo.

The Times has absorbed torrents of criticism, largely justified, for not taking on the regime in the rush to war and not exposing the justification for invading Iraq, namely the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's WMD, as the Big Lie it was. But some of its editorials have been the strongest voices of opposition to the regime, and this morning's is one.

Demanding (not for the first time) that the Guantánamo Detention Center be closed, it began by praising Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, who heads the committee, for declaring "it was time for Congress to do its job and bring the American chain of prison camps under the law."

The editorial continued:

While the hearing was too long in coming, its timing was useful -- one day after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who should have been fired for bungling the Iraq war and for the prison abuse scandal, offered the bizarre declaration that "no detention facility in the history of warfare has been more transparent" than Guantánamo.

It sliced and diced William Barr, who was attorney general for President George H. W. Bush, for "arrogantly dismiss[ing] the entire debate [over the legality of the camps] as a waste of time. ("Rarely have I seen a controversy that has less substance behind it," said Mr. Barr, who was sent by the administration to dilute a panel of critics of the prison policy.) And it pointed out that

... the hearing only confirmed the urgency of subjecting the post-9/11 detention system to the rule of law -- starting with the president's legally dubious invention of "unlawful enemy combatant." J. Michael Wiggins, a deputy associate attorney general, said the administration believed it could hold anyone given that label "in perpetuity" without even filing charges. Excuse us, Mr. Barr, but that sounds like something of great substance, especially given how bad the administration is at telling actual villains from taxi drivers who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Similarly, perhaps it's possible that historians will see a turning point in the statement by Democratic Rep. John Conyers Jr., right, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who headed the unofficial hearing on the Downing Street Memo:

If these [memo] disclosures are true -- and so far no one from the Bush Administration has bothered to respond to our letters -- they establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses. This means that more than 1,600 brave Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis would have lost their lives for a lie.

That is why we are here today. That is why 122 Members of Congress --which as of today includes the Minority Leader -- have asked the president to explain his actions. That is why more than 550,000 Americans are joining with us in [a petition] demanding answers from the Administration.

The Conyers hearing offered some of the most visceral criticism of the regime from elected representatives of the people in a public forum that I've witnessed. The fact that the hearing had to be held in a basement room of the Capitol under cramped conditions seemed to me to amplify its power by emphasizing the grassroots nature of the exercise, while the regime's tactic of mocking the memo and dismissing the hearing evoked the condescension of benighted royalty.

Mitchelle Stephenson, of Edgewater, Md., caught the moment beautifully this morning in a letter to the editor of the Times:

According to Scott McClellan, the president's chief spokesman, the concerns of the antiwar panel convened in the Capitol's basement ... should be discounted because Mr. Conyers, an elected officer of the legislative branch, "voted against the war in the first place."

So in order for the administration to acknowledge dissent, the dissenters had to have agreed with the administration in the first place? We have certainly arrived at a strange place in American history.

And Richard Pfaehler, of Elverson, Pa., shows that a grassroots exercise can be a potent weapon when it has the force of righteous morality, rather than McClellan's self-righteous indignation, behind it:

Mine is one of the 560,000 signatures on the petition that Representative John Conyers Jr. presented to the White House on Thursday, seeking answers to questions about the president's decision to invade Iraq. ...

The conflict we now find our nation mired in was, and continues to be, based on lies. These lies have created many one-parent families. These lies have disgraced a nation. What is more disgraceful than to make untrue statements with the intent to deceive, and thereby cause the death of even a single individual.

A reader writes, in re: Myth vs. Fact: Is Africa the Lost Continent? "What about all the aid that gets appropriated by corrupt governments in Africa instead of used for its original intent?"

Boy, I'm so glad you asked. One of the points Jeffrey Sachs made, which I did not recount, is that the mismanagement of funds through corruption and poor governance is N0T TRUE -- repeat NOT TRUE -- for many of Africa's poorest nations. It's a convenient myth for those who'd rather not invest in African development, he says.

Sach doesn't deny that countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo are horrors of corruption. But those places are not candidates for development aid. A prerequisite for investment is the guarantee that results are measurable in a monitored program that can be independently audited. The U.S. government gives considerable emergency aid to countries in Africa, but very little to development aid. And most people confuse the two. They're different issues.

The reader also asks:

If you want to discuss humanitarian aid vs. defense spending, how much do those enlightened leaders of Europe, who spend far less on defense, give to Africa? I am talking about the same Euro-leaders who really want to help out in Africa and elsewhere, but haven't bought enough air- or sealift to get to Africa.

Boy, I'm glad he asked that question, too. The Europeans have agreed to give a miniscule percentage of their Gross National Products recommended by the U.N. Millenium Project, and so has the United States.

The project recommends that "high-income countries should increase official development assistance from 0.25 percent of donor GNP in 2003 to around 0.44 percent in 2006 and 0.54 percent in 2015" to support the Millennium Development Goals, particularly for qualified low-income countries, and that "each donor should reach 0.7 percent no later than 2015" when other "development assistance priorities" are included.

Because each of the European GDPs are so much smaller than that of the U.S., their contributions naturally will be smaller. Meantime, the Europeans have been meeting their obligations, Sachs says, and so far the U.S. has not.

Further, their interest payments per capita on the forgiven African debt will be much greater than those of the U.S. Over the next decade, the interest will cost the U.S. $120 million a year, Britain $75 million, Germany, France, Japan and Italy roughly $75 million each, and Canada $45 million. That means Britain, France and Italy (with populations of 51 million, 60 million and 58 million, respectively) will be paying more than $1 per capita, as will Canada (pop. 33 million). Germany (pop. 82 million) will be paying slightly less than $1 per head, and Japan (pop. 127 million) more than 50 cents. The U.S. (pop. 296 million) will be paying less than 50 cents, as I wrote too generously. It actually comes to about 36 cents per capita.

This same reader complains:

You are so biased in your writing, why not make a name for yourself by breaking away from most of the pack of opinion writers and actually compile some facts from both sides of the argument and possibly educate and inform the few of us who might bother clicking on your articles [rather] than offering up the same old half-baked nonsense?

What can I say except ... how about reading the U.N. Millenium Declaration and finding out exactly what the current U.S. regime is so reluctant to support, after which your apology will be accepted.

Congressman John Conyers Jr., far left (courtesy of the daily Kos -- have a look at this), was barred from delivering a petition to Georgie Boy that demanded an explanation of the Downing Street Memo. The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Conyers yesterday convened a meeting of House Democrats about the memo and the Iraq war. The session, held in the basement of the Capitol, is to be rebroadcast tonight on television at 8 p.m. ET by C-SPAN2. A video of the entire session is currently available for viewing on the Web at C-SPAN.org under "recent programs."

Economist Jeffrey Sachs was his usual stellar self earlier this week at the Council on Foreign Relations -- calm, cogent, full of facts (all of them broken down into relevant categories), persuasive, angered by the Bush regime -- contemptuous of it I'd say, but he managed to keep his contempt in check no doubt for diplomatic reasons -- unhappy with the American public in general, and ultimately not very optimistic about Africa's chances of succeeding in feeding itself or eliminating diseases like malaria unless the United States ponies up its fair share of development aid.

The best thing about listening to Sachs, left, who more often gives the impression of tempered optimism, is that the ideas he advocates are simple. His proposals are practical. They are integrated. Each one affects or leads to another. They make sense. Sachs has a reputation among his detractors and even among some admirers of being on an ego trip, a man who wants to save the world and believes he can if only others would agree with him and put his ideas into practice. Well, he didn't come off that way on Tuesday. At least not to this listener. He seemed a wholly reasonable man with an entirely reasonable mission, although the title of his talk -- "Can We End Global Poverty?" -- might make you wonder.

Remember the recent headlines about the world's wealthiest nations forgiving $40 billion owed to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank by the world's 18 poorest nations (14 of them in Africa, four in Latin America)? Well, that's all they are -- headlines. The reality contradicts them, said Sachs, who travels to Africa once a month as Special Advisor on development to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan and as Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

In actual fact, Sachs told the council, all that's going to happen is that the interest on the debt -- $1.5 billion a year -- won't have to be paid back by the poorest nations. The interest will be paid by wealthy industrialized nations who make up the Group of Eight, or G8. The net result for some of the poorest African nations now receiving relatively tiny amounts of development aid from the U.S., for instance, is that they will receive less money than they otherwise might because the Bush regime intends to compensate for the interest payments it makes by deducting the amounts from current U.S. aid programs, Sachs said.

(Others have also made the point that the debt forgiveness is virtually an "empty gesture" in relation to the billions needed to help the poorest nations climb out of poverty. The interest payments over the next decade will cost the U.S. $120 million a year [less than 50 cents per capita], Britain $75 million, Germany, France, Japan and Italy roughly $75 million each, and Canada $45 million.)

Sachs has been the strongest, most voluble proponent of development aid for the third world, especially in Africa. (See his new book "The End of Poverty.") He's been saying all along that $25 billion is the necessary investment to enable the poorest nations to grow more food, eliminate widespread diseases such as malaria (which could be done merely by distributing mosquito netting and antibiotics), provide safe drinking water, build roads, install a telecommunications system and offer basic education.

Although he called the debt forgiveness "a small step in the right direction," in an interview on PBS earlier this week, he was less willing to sugarcoat it at the council, where he made the case that it was a piddling step, possibly in a backward direction. And he reminded the council, as he has been reminding anyone who will listen, that when Tony Blair recently asked America to join in giving the $25 billion, the answer from America's Dear Leader, as we all know, was "no."

If the U.S. would contribute its fair share, Sachs asserted, Africa could see a green revolution modeled on Asia's green revolution of the '60s. It was that revolution that started India and China, the most prominent examples, down the road to industrialized development.

Merely distributing improved seed and fertilizer to African farmers would make an enormous difference, Sachs said. In a model project he's been working on, a village in Kenya, right, which received seed and fertilizer just four to five months ago, is now harvesting 400% more food than it ever grew before, he said. The village will not only be able to feed itself and provide better nutrition, which will result in better all-around health, there will possibly be a surplus of food to give to schools and to sell or trade for other goods.

When someone asked about human rights and women's rights, and why he did not pay more attention to those issues, Sachs pointed out that the most significant way to help women in Africa's poorest nations is to relieve them of being beasts of burden. Women do all the water-carrying, most of the farming, all the care-giving for the ill and for the children, he said. Growing more food, eliminating malaria, providing clean water and the rest, are, in effect, both human rights and women's rights projects.

Frankly, this is an inadequate summary of his talk. When the council puts up the transcript on its web site, I'll post a link.

Postscript: In the absence of a transcript, here are some relevant excerpts from an op-ed piece Sachs wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "Africa's Suffering Is Bush's Shame." It appeared last Sunday and began:

President Bush last week brazenly brushed aside British Prime Minister Tony Blair's call for a doubling of aid to Africa. Blair and other European leaders have taken on the task of fighting extreme poverty -- and Bush watches from the sidelines. To justify its dereliction, the Bush administration perpetuates a mythology that contributes to the premature deaths of millions of people each year.

The mythology says:

The U.S. is a generous provider of aid to Africa ... but Africa is corrupt and mismanaged and thus cannot absorb more aid. In addition, there is no room in the [U.S.] budget to do any more than what we are currently doing. This multipart fantasy is widely shared in the U.S. and recalls Napoleon's dictum that "history is a fable often told."

"The facts are otherwise," Sachs writes.

Total annual U.S. aid for all of Africa is about $3 billion, equivalent to about two days of Pentagon spending. About $1 billion pays for emergency food aid, of which half is for transport. About $1.5 billion is for "technical cooperation," essentially salaries of U.S. consultants. Only about $500 million a year -— less than $1 per African -- finances clinics, schools, food production, roads, power, Internet connectivity, safe drinking water, sanitation, family planning and lifesaving health interventions to fight malaria, AIDS and other diseases. [Boldface added.]

Sachs also points out:

Malaria will kill up to 3 million children this year, overwhelming Africa's meager hospitals. Yet five measures could end this: long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets (cost: $7 per net); effective medications freely available to the poor; community health workers trained in malaria control; medical diagnostic capacity at the local level; and indoor insecticide spraying where appropriate. The cost: $3 billion a year for the industrialized countries, $1 billion for the U.S. -- about 10 times what's currently spent on malaria control.

The administration's claim that budget restraints prevent more spending on Africa is the most cynical of its contentions. The president has cut taxes by more than $200 billion a year, with the wealthiest Americans the chief beneficiaries, and has raised military spending by $200 billion a year. But when $20 billion is needed to keep the poorest of the poor in Africa alive and put the continent's economies on a path toward long-term growth, there's no money available.

The piece ends on what seems to me its only false note: "Americans want to do better." I doubt that Sachs truly believes they do, not because he's a cynic -- he works too hard for that -- but because at bottom I think he's a realist.

Any fan of Paul Desmond, let alone his biographer, rates a big welcome in my book. Doug Ramsey joins the ArtsJournal blogging crew today with the launch of Rifftides. He says his blog, though largely about jazz, will be "dedicated to taking music seriously," but "with only enough seriousness to maintain reasonable dignity." He's already taken on Ben Ratliff of The New York Times in Crystal Ball Criticism for "the amazing critical leap of predicting that a musical event will be uneventful" before it begins. The event, at the JVC Jazz Festival-New York, is tonight's "Piano Masters Salute Piano Legends" concert.

"Exhibit A" of a "domesticated" press. That's what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this morning's Washington Post editorial, which describes the main revelation of the Downing Street memo as "vague but intriguing." In other words, it doesn't believe that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" to invade Iraq. McGovern, who ripped into the press for knuckling under to the Bush regime, says there's "nothing vague" about the memo and, far from intriguing, "it's depressing."

McGovern points out further that 1) the head of Iraq's WMD programs -- Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who defected from Iraq, then returned and was executed -- told the U.S. regime that the WMD had been destroyed in 1991 and that 2) Cheney Boy himself claimed he was a fully reliable source of information who proved that Iraq had WMD. But 3) somehow Cheney Boy et al chose not to believe this reliable source's info that the WMD had been destroyed, which, as we all know, has been proven correct. Ain't that cherry pickin' peculiar.

Also, did I speak too soon yesterday when I said I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an investigation of the Bush regime's headlong invasion of Iraq? The short answer: Yes.

John Conyers Jr., left, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, will hold a hearing Thusday in the Capitol on the Downing Street memo and the regime's "effort to cook the books on pre-war intelligence." The bigger question is whether Georgie Boy violated the constitution in his rush to war.

The long answer: It's not an official committee hearing, because the Republican majority would not allow it. Conyers, who also accuses the U.S. press of a deafening silence, was going to hold the hearing at the Democratic National Committee. But he told Democracy Now! this morning that he finally wangled a room in the Capitol.

Amy Goodman interviewed both Conyers and McGovern on Democracy Now! It's very strong stuff. As soon as DN puts up the video and/or a transcript of the interview, we'll post the link. In the meantime, read McGovern on the SECRET UK EYES ONLY briefing document that preceded the Downing Street memo and on the "proof" (his term) that Georgie Boy "fixed the facts."

The video is now up with a partial transcript. Click: It's very strong stuff.

I never thought I'd be glad to hear from a Goldwater Republican, much less agree with him. But Straight Up reader M. Paulding has changed my mind. He writes in response to Battle of the Prewar Memos:

The second DSM [Downing Street Memo] is more damning than the first, despite Sanger's observation. I'm a conservative, not a neoconservative. There is a BIG difference. And as a Goldwater Republican, I DEMAND an investigation of HOW and WHY the idiots in the White House decided it was necessary to SQUANDER $208 billion of our money and the finest army on earth.

Take my word for it, there are MORE DSMs coming, and what they [will] reveal is a bunch of political whores on both sides of the Atlantic. They "packaged" this war and sold it to a trusting American public like a box of soap. Even Congressman "Freedom Fries" Jones has now got the message. Remember him? He was pissed off because the French wouldn't jump aboard Bush's juggernaut three years ago. Now, he wants a timetable to get out of Iraq.

Paulding also writes in reference to Frank, Rich, and Dandy, He Keeps on Truckin':

Matt Lauer, et al, are poodles. They engage in fluff journalism and don't even count. Frankly, I'd be surprised to learn that Matt Lauer even knows what Watergate was all about. I'm not a so-called lefty, but a conservative, and NOT a neoconservative. Colson, Liddy, that whole god-damned crowd tried to subvert the United States Constitution. They disgust me. The neoconservatives, who are really Straussians, are now attempting to do the same damned thing. There must be an investigation to get to the bottom of this, and it must be done as soon as practicable.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for either investigation (and I presume neither would Paulding). But it's grand to hear that righties are fed up, too. Some of them at least.

More Camp X Ray frolics: An 18-year-old Saudi camper of Chadian descent who was just shy of his 15th birthday when he was seized in Pakistan by local authorities has told his lawyer "he was beaten regularly in his early days at Guantánamo, hanged by his wrists for hours at a time and that an interrogator pressed a burning cigarette into his arm." No word, though, on whether he likes the "culturally appropriate" food he's served three times a day.

Another prewar memo, written July 21, 2002, two days before the famous Downing Street memo, has come to light. Here it is, as posted by The Sunday Times of London. Now compare Walter Pincus's report on it in Sunday's Washington Post with David Sanger's in this morning's New York Times. The difference is night vs. day.

Pincus begins by saying the memo concluded that "the US military was not preparing adequately for what the memo predicted would be a 'protracted and costly' postwar occupation" and follows up by saying that it "provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable and realized more clearly than their US counterparts the potential for the postinvasion instability that continues to plague Iraq." He adds further that the introduction to the 8-page memo says U.S. "military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace" and emphasizes that "little thought" has been given to "the aftermath and how to shape it."

Sanger begins by saying the memo "explicity states the Bush administration had made 'no political decisions' to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced." He adds further that the memo also said "American planning in, the eyes of [British Prime Minister] Blair's aides, was 'virtually silent' on problems of a postwar occupation."

Apart from the general tenor of Sanger's article, the prominence he gives to the statement that "no political decisions" were taken creates an odd disconnect. If there were no "political" decisions by then, how come military decisions had already been made for the invasion? Does anyone really believe advanced military planning for action is not a euphemism for military decisions taken on the basis of the administration's orders, which were inherently political in this case?

The latest Frank Rich column is a dandy recap of what's been happening in The Land of Oz. "The attacks [on the press] continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated," he wrote Sunday, citing the July 23, 2002, "Downing Street memo" as an example.

Well, Frank, you can't say Greg Palast didn't tell us -- see The Gun That Smokes, of May 5, 2005. In re: "the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished," which you single out for a parallel to the contemporary version, see GAO Finding: Gannon Did Not Break Law, of June 10. In re: Charles W. Colson, who you rightly point out "embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories" and so on, see I Find It Strange (as did many others), of June 1.

You certainly summarized, as well as anybody has, the peculiarity of Colson's moral complaint about Mark Felt (a k a Deep Throat):

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt -- and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't mention any of this -- or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson -- and he was ubiquitous -- ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."

I especially love what you concluded from that:

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president's men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.

In re:

Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report on Vanity Fair's scoop, interrupted President Bush's post-Memorial Day Rose Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the current president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned Nixon walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that would carry him into exile.

See The Free Press in Full Squeak, of May 29; Imperial Mourning, of Memorial Day, May 30; and What Is Really Happening in Iraq?, of May 31.

And bless you, Frank, for this:

The journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to connect those dots on the news media's center stage of television. You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much "gotcha" journalism. That's a rather absurd premise given that no "gotcha" journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.

Frank, you have to start watching Democracy Now! We all do. It's not the only TV news show that connects the dots, but it does a damned serious job of it, and it's out there five days a week on more than 330 TV and radio stations, as well as the Web. Put it on your to-do list, if you haven't already. Today's broadcast has an interview with former FBI agent Mike German, a whistleblower who quit to protest the FBI's lousy management of its counter-terrorism program. German talks about the threat of terrorism, not necessarily from foreign terrorists, but from domestic "lone wolves" spawned by white supremacist groups.

By the way, Frank, my staff of thousands envies your full-time research assistant and your Lexis-Nexis subscription. So do I, not to mention the nifty writing.

It took James Woolcott to lead me to a wrenching, eloquent piece on the realities and myths of war by Chris Hedges, who begins this way and never lets up:

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with words of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war.

Stop what you are doing. Click this link and read what Hedges has written. Then take a deep breath and, if you must, go back to work. On your way home, though, you'll have plenty to think about, namely our deformed American ideals and how appalling this nation has become under Georgie Boy's deluded leadership. And maybe -- sad to say, a very big maybe -- you'll do something about it.

Summer is soon upon us, and it won't be long before it's off to overnight camp for many lucky youngsters. They'll be writing home, of course. Low Culture recently posted a letter from a camper who got a jump on the season's frolics. Here's an excerpt:

Dear Mom and Dad,

Greetings from Camp X Ray ... I am having a lot of fun here and am meeting a lot of really, really nice people from all over the world. We do sports for one hour every day and we get to sing along to all kinds of music. Our counselors are really crazy!... (Once a counselor accidentally splashed pee-pee on my bunkmate's Holy Koran and we had an ice cream party.) Next week we're going to a petting zoo with real live animals! It's gonna be great! We might also go swimming, but I am afraid I might drown. Ha ha ha.

Love, Your Son

I keep touting (read: lifting) Matt Haber's posts at Low Culture because, well, they're good enough to steal. He is someone who takes blogging seriously. To see how seriously, go here.

A reader took notice of my recommendation the other day. (OK, if you must know, it was one of my staff of thousands who took notice.) He writes:

Jan, we bought the Watson book "Ideas." It is good, but not as good as I had hoped. Too breezy. I like a tighter line. He spends a lot of time on religion. Not my idea of important ideas. Those are such subjective beliefs, why even argue about them. Same goes for whether there is some mysterious inner being. Who gives a damn. The business about emptiness is a couple of pages at the very end. He mentions Gray in the discussion, which is perhaps why Gray gave so much weight to that tiny part of the book. It's like reviewing a Mercedes and devoting half the article to the hood ornament.

It's one thing to diss the review, another to diss the book under review. To do both -- a double diss -- rates a 3.6 degree of difficulty. That last sentence puts him in the water without a splash.

Subject: James D. Guckert -- Reprinting Government Press Releases as His Own Work

You remember when Guckert (a k a Jeff Gannon) published White House press releases, verbatim, as his own reporting? Well, he did not break the law prohibiting the "use of appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda," the Government Accounting Office ruled Thursday.

Even if Guckert-Gannon, right, "repeatedly incorporated substantial excerpts ... into articles he published on the internet without disclosing that this material was produced and distributed by the government," the GAO ruled, he's allowed to because he's a private citizen.

Congressional reps Louise Slaughter and John Conyers Jr. had asked the GAO to investigate. The GAO General Counsel responded:

In your letter, you liken this activity to activities found in earlier GAO cases regarding agencies authoring newspaper articles and op-ed pieces. However, the fact situations giving rise to the earlier opinions differ significantly from the issue of Mr. Guckert reprinting press releases. There the agencies did not issue press releases, but instead used appropriated funds to write the editorials and news stories as the ostensible work or opinion of someone not connected with the government.

Here's the complete GAO response, with explanation and footnotes. Here it is as a pdf file.

The government has a point. If it puts out press releases and other people claim authorship, is the government at fault? You'd have to find evidence that the government sought to have Guckert-Gannon pass off its announcements as his own independent writing. Sad to say, he's not the only "journalist" who simply repackaged press releases as news articles.

Still, it's pretty neat. White House-credentialed fake reporter with fake name from fake news agency promotes government policy by spreading White House propaganda without attribution. Government is home free. Fake reporter is home free. Public is home fucked.

I recommend this book review by my favorite aphorist, the British philosopher John Gray, although he is not aphorizing, as he does in his own books (such as "Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals" or Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern."

Gray points to a key question of Peter Watson's new book "Ideas: From Fire to Freud," which he calls "an astonishing overview of human intellectual development," covering "everything from the emergence of language to the discovery of the unconscious, including the idea of the factory and the invention of America, the eclipse of the idea of the soul in 19th-century materialism and the continuing elusiveness of the self."

The key question it asks, Gray says, is "whether the very idea of an 'inner self' may not be misconceived," and answers:

Looking "in", we have found nothing -- nothing stable anyway, nothing enduring, nothing we can all agree upon, nothing conclusive -- because there is nothing to find.

I couldn't agree more. To shift context, Dear Leader of these United States -- he of the inflated emptiness -- is the most obvious example, a perfect illustration of "nothing enduring," the nothing inside.

Obi Wan Canoli says, "The true ways of the farm are almost forgotten." Click the link, watch and listen. You'll laugh, you'll cry. You'll wonder why George Lucas hasn't sued.

A reader writes: "This is so priceless, and so easy to see happening, customer service being what it is today. Be sure to cancel your credit cards before you die -- just in case."

A lady died this past January, and Citibank billed her for February and March for their annual service charges on her credit card, and then added late fees and interest on the monthly charge. The balance had been $0.00, and now is somewhere around $60.00. A family member placed a call to Citibank:

Family Member: "I am calling to tell you that she died in January."
Citibank: "The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply."
Family Member: "Maybe you should turn it over to collections."
Citibank: "Since it is two months past due, it already has been." Family Family Member: "So, what will they do when they find out she is dead?"
Citibank: "Either report her account to the frauds division or report her to the credit bureau, maybe both!"
Family Member: "Do you think God will be mad at her?"
Citibank: "Excuse me?"
Family Member: "Did you just get what I was telling you . . the part about her being dead?"
Citibank: "Sir, you'll have to speak to my supervisor."

Supervisor gets on the phone.

Family Member: "I'm calling to tell you, she died in January."
Citibank: "The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply."
Family Member: "You mean you want to collect from her estate?"
Citibank: (stammering) "Are you her lawyer?"
Family Member: "No, I'm her great nephew." (Lawyer info given)
Citibank: "Could you fax us a certificate of death?"
Family Member: "Sure." (Fax number given)

After the fax was received:

Citibank: "Our system just isn't set up for death. I don't know what more I can do to help."
Family Member: "Well, if you figure it out, great! If not, you could just keep billing her. I don't think she will care."
Citibank: "Well, the late fees and charges do still apply."
Family Member: "Would you like her new billing address?"
Citibank: "That might help."
Family Member: "Odessa Memorial Cemetery, Highway 129, Plot Number 69."
Citibank: "Sir, that's a cemetery!"
Family Member: "What do you do with dead people on your planet?"

Some urban myths are too good to believe but deserve to be spread.

The original "correction" about David D'Arcy's MoMAGATE story that NPR ran on its corrections page reads:

Jan. 27,