I doubt few "mainstream" journalists are prepared to consider — much less cope with — the possibility that the U.S. government is waging information warfare against them (and, by extension, against the American people), even though Rummy and company long ago all but declared their intention of doing just that.
Back to Main
June 4, 2005
The Friday Flush
Comments
For the love of Pete, WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE READ THE MARCH REPORT IN HARPER’S!
Or any of the earlier corroborating reports of Koran desecration in the press all around the world?
Damn, how many times people?
How many times?
Posted by: ststrat | Jun 4 2005 7:49 utc | 1
I’d venture to say that many “mainstream” journalists are actually part of the information warfare being waged.
Posted by: steve expat | Jun 4 2005 9:25 utc | 2
Can’t we get it straight, folks? Almost all of us, reporters and otherwise, been programmed for sixty years to regard Islam with total contempt. It’s as if a vast pool of anti-Semitism were transformed into a vast pool of….anti-Semitism–hardly a new thing in America, since anti-Native-American rhetoric in this country was, for a good three centuries, little more than a slightly displaced anti-Semitism (the lost tribes of Israel, all that sort of thing). So too, I rather suspect, the racist rhetoric of all subsequent wars. Because Christians, fundamentally speaking, know just one enemy, and when they’ve found their “Christ killers” du jour , then certain “Christian values” are instantly done for (if you have any doubts about this, just consult with Generals Miller and Boykin, among others). My only hope is that the “insurgents” in Iraq and Afghanistan will beat us up so badly that, to borrow Lincoln’s words about Grant, we’ll end up trying to find out what “whiskey they’re drinking” so that we can give it to some of our own people. I look forward to the day when the Koran is studied in Arabic, and with care, in American High Schools.
Posted by: alabama | Jun 4 2005 13:27 utc | 3
The effect on the home front, on the other hand, was everything the Bushies could have hoped for. Newsweek was cowed, the right-wing noise machine was given a bunch of shiny new pots to bang on and the nasty details of America’s dirty war were shoved even deeper into the shadows, where clever, career-minded journalists know better than to go poking around. Which may have been the real point of the exercise all along.
Isn’t that the only thing they care about? The domestic audience?
so this is yet another success for them, if true.
Posted by: Jérôme | Jun 4 2005 20:32 utc | 5
Release an overblown story, with “corroboration by silence”, wait til story hits, attack ferociously, make example of reporters daring to report negative stories. Then when real report comes out, all the outrage is gone…
Posted by: doug r | Jun 4 2005 21:59 utc | 6
To butcher HST (I think):
‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’
So, what if Isikoff didn’t blow the story?
At least not in an operational sense?
Regardless, as an added incentive for information domination/innoculation…..don’t forget Rummy, the Rovians and Mr. Coleman also had a Scottish Madman with hate in his heart and truth on his side looming just over the horizon at the time.
lol…..we know the neo-crooks are friday dumping because we are too busy with the friday cat-blogging…..correct, ross.;-)
Posted by: lenin’s ghost | Jun 5 2005 7:06 utc | 8
Nice piece. Yes, the so-called credentialed journalists are indeed asleep at the wheel, and I’m still waiting for the rest of the hearings on abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
Seymour Hersh teased us all before the election by referring to ‘rape rooms’ and other sordid goings-on that would blow the lid off the military fairy tales, but so far, nobody has said or done anything now that this Newsweek story has occupied their tiny little minds.
I read (before Christmas, so the numbers may have gone up) that over 2 dozen ‘detainees’ at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and other locales have DIED while in the custody of the US military.
I know the Pentagon likes to defend its handling of prisoners by referring to the vast quantity of individuals who don’t get killed while in custody, but the American penal system probably doesn’t have such a bad record and it currently holds over 1 million, maybe 2 million young men and women in dozens of facilities.
What I’m suggesting is that if 2 dozen inmates died of causes other than old age or AIDS and inmate-on-inmate violence, the federal prison system would be examined like a crooked bank teller.
So why isn’t anybody asking more questions about Iraqis who get arrested and then beaten to death by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib?
And why are we so bizarrely, stupidly pre-occupied with this stuff about ‘Koran abuse’?
Posted by: Jon Koppenhoefer | Jun 5 2005 7:16 utc | 9
The Koran stands in for Muslims themselves. It is Muslims who are urinated on, ripped and shredded, etc.
The point of the substitution is that the public , the pundits, the journos can gleefully discuss these acts in mock horror. Openly – after all, it is only a book.
Posted by: Noisette | Jun 5 2005 10:22 utc | 10
..the American penal system probably doesn’t have such a bad record..
From Amnesty International on the US:
“In recent years, U.S. prison inmates have been beaten with fists and batons, stomped on, kicked, shot, stunned with electronic devices, doused with chemical sprays, choked, and slammed face first onto concrete floors by the officers whose job it is to guard them. Inmates have ended up with broken jaws, smashed ribs, perforated eardrums, missing teeth, burn scars—not to mention psychological scars and emotional pain. Some have died.
Both men and women prisoners—but especially women—face staff rape and sexual abuse. Correctional officers will bribe, coerce, or violently force inmates into granting sexual favors, including oral sex or intercourse. Prison staff have laughed at and ignored the pleas of male prisoners seeking protection from rape by other inmates.”
Link
Indeed, some invesitagtions are carried out. The one quoted below is interesting.
Excerpt: from the Office of the Inspector General, April 2005:
“The OIG has investigated hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse of inmates by BOP* staff. Cases involving staff sexual abuse of BOP inmates annually comprise approximately 12 percent of the OIG’s total number of investigations. From fiscal years (FY) 2000 to 2004, the OIG opened sexual abuse investigations of 351 subjects who allegedly sexually abused inmates. In the same time period, approximately 185 OIG investigations of staff sexual abuse had criminal or administrative outcomes.
The BOP also has recognized that staff sexual abuse is a significant problem within its institutions. For example, Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the former Director of the BOP, stated that even though she believed a very small percentage of BOP staff members committed sexual abuse, sexual abuse of inmates was the biggest problem she faced as Director. She also stated that she believed sexual abuse of inmates was one of the most serious forms of misconduct by staff in the BOP.”
Link
* Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Posted by: Noisette | Jun 5 2005 10:53 utc | 11
Yep Noisette I’d be suprised if the numbers of deaths in mainstream jails weren’t at least as bad as Gitmo in fact I seem to remember some official at some time pointing out that the deaths per 100 inmates at Gitmo were lower than in the criminal penal system. And didn’t the worst abusers at Abu Ghraib work as jailers in civilian life?
In a way this red herring sums up the problem with any revelations about this horrible conflict. There seems to be a groundswell of feeling in middle america that it is possible to have a war of occupation and pillage that isn’t brutal, murderous and ultimately dehumanizing.
It seems to be that while it probably isn’t possible to either change the neo-cons from their course or even publically humiliate them, it is possible to help people see that war is by definition not the sort of endeavour practised by a civilised people.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 5 2005 11:23 utc | 12
A fact-laden, AI report that is critical of domestic prison abuse?
Why that’s absurd.
Not wrong, inaccurate or dis(ass)embling – just absurd.
And of course, to paraphrase Felix Unger…..We all know what happens when you Ass-U-Me absurdity.
The Newsweek Koran-defiling retraction, the Dan Rather Bush-Awol retraction, and the British-Iraq-torture-photos retraction would seem to indicate a new phase in spookish Total Information Management. In addition to the traditional melodies played on the mighty Wurlitzer (planted stories and “first order” disinformation, the discrediting and
re-dimensioning of inconvenient revelations, and gatekeeping to enable cover-ups) we are now witnessing “second order” news management: planting “essentially true” accounts with minor but “verifiable” embedded errors for use in high-profile media vehicles, only to unmask the errors and thereby discredit the dangerous truth. Clearly both witting and unwitting media pawns may be maneuvered in this game, which is the transposition to the mediatic realm of those preventive
strikes so dear to the strategic thinkers of the Pentagon. Very probably the refined mediatic version of this tactic will prove more effective than its rude military prototypes, since its intended victims
are already fogbound in a diffuse mist of patriotic
bombast and resolute denial.
It is, however, ironic that the moral absolutists who lead the “right nation” should be constrained to employ
means that reek of relativism: there is no truth, but only infinitely malleable points of view sanctioned by
decrees from the “guardians” and the consent of the uninformed “cave-dwellers”.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Jun 6 2005 7:52 utc | 14
we are now witnessing “second order” news management: planting “essentially true” accounts with minor but “verifiable” embedded errors for use in high-profile media vehicles, only to unmask the errors and thereby discredit the dangerous truth.
I haven’t seen enough examples yet to make even a circumstantial case that this is by design, but in terms of what I SUSPECT is happening, that’s it in a nutshell.
Posted by: Billmon | Jun 6 2005 14:22 utc | 16
Given that this “true but wrong” strategy of media manipulation is now as much a fact of modern life as nuclear explosions – Buddha nature accepts this (what Shakespeare called his demon accepts this) and learns how to act effectively in this latest brave new world.
I suspect we can use corporate media the way Mike Royko used politicians own words, as evidence that proves what their real goals are. They, in this case, includes a lot of arms manufacturers who, for some reason, own the major media companies. But unlike Mike, we can’t rely on major corporate media to signpost our case.
On the bright side, though, bars and samizdats haven’t done so badly in the past as places for sharing gritty ugly truths.
Posted by: citizen | Jun 6 2005 16:03 utc | 17
Billmon, I’m pretty much persuaded that the 90% true lie is a standard technique. The Burkett Texas Air National Guard documents struck me as a possible setup as soon as they were broadcast. The early reaction from Republicans to Martinez’s Schiavo talking points — assuming that the Democrats had fallen for a forgery — is interesting in terms of showing their expectations and mindset.
But this is a risky game if the tracks aren’t covered. Hopefully someone will have the presence of mind to trace some of these things back to the source. Although I wonder what impact it would make even if Rove was caught redhanded.
Posted by: alvin | Jun 6 2005 17:59 utc | 18
One often has the feeling that part of the US public thinks and acts as if they were living in a Hollywood movie. The images, words, sound-bites, create a fictional world in which they are happy to play a part -be on stage, put forward their personality- as bit players in a minor role, appearing now and then to support someone, join the gang, cheer or bring em on, or, conversely, emit some dissident opinion, in a pompous or shrill manner, suitably exagerated for the circumstances.
They stay rigidly within the script and wouldn’t dream of taking on a more important role.
That is what MSM (or whatever we are supposed to call it now) does. It creates that world. And I am sure those actions seems quite natural to most of the actors in that milieu. It is not so much that they are paid to do it, and would loose income and status if they stopped – simply, no-one likes to see themselves as a paid flunkey, scribbling down what they are told (basically that is all they do, though I suspect some of the big TV chains are actually engaged in conscious and planned lies; you can see it on their faces and in their non verbal behavior…) The facts and opinions presented becomes THE reality, and why exactly that is so is not thought about.
To me this attitude is peculiarly American. There a quality of play acting, one upmanship, glamor and glory in it all -familiar to us EUs in American cultural products, films, books, etc. – but also very evident in daily life.
The Brits love lies, scandal, gossip and exageration. But that is a different thing .. a discourse that is understood by all parties as being ‘over the top’…and moreover, all about people. The French (though they have changed in the past 10 years) were always given to theory and obfuscation, an often accusatory attitude. Both very different…
The problem is that today the US is play acting on the world stage and holding guns to the heads of the audience. It drives Arabs, the Chinese and some EUs totally spare. If Bill Clinton (and I am no fan) had some merit it is that he managed this aspect well – he kept pretense in check while telling whoppers. He took the task on himself, as we say here .. BushCo are incapable. (From this problem others grow but that is enough for now.)
However, the recent hesitations about the script – snarls and retractions, as well as odd revelations, I’m thinking about Felt here – indicate serious slippage or lack of control.
Posted by: Noisette | Jun 6 2005 18:39 utc | 19
I do want to add that the play acting and pretense have invaded many Gvmt. agencies and have even lead to the creation of new, useless, empty ones.
Facts are fizzling and popping, leaving the stage with little bangs as I write.
A case of cultural hubris gone mad.
Journalists are powerless.
Posted by: Noisette | Jun 6 2005 18:51 utc | 20
But still, even though failure in the ongoing coverup may be at hand (not so sure on that one), the money is all piled up at the top, so when the crash finally happens the perps can walk away with cash in hand and blame somebody else.
Just a thought. It has been said before.
Posted by: rapt | Jun 6 2005 21:33 utc | 21