Friday, August 17th, 2007
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A quarter-century of levelheaded talk ;
Unpaid yet undaunted, radio host Ian Masters amps up the debate by vetting issues from multiple points of view.
by Sean Mitchell, Special to The Times
On a Sunday morning like any other, when so many Southern Californians are sleeping in or heading to the beach, Ian Masters, Australian expatriate, former BBC journalist, Hollywood dropout and indefatigable student of American foreign policy, has arrived at his post behind a live microphone in the political free-fire zone of KPFK-FM (90.7) on Cahuenga Boulevard.
Looking a bit bleary-eyed, Masters nevertheless has an air of authority about him. Dressed in a smart sports coat and pressed jeans, with a healthy shag of white hair and overseas accent, he reminds you of a former road manager for the Rolling Stones. "I didn't get much sleep last night, my girlfriend was up sick," he tells me moments before the clock in the studio reads 11 a.m. straight up, and he bends into the microphone to introduce today's edition of "Background Briefing," his brainy show about current events and geopolitics that he has been doing for 26 years.
Like many programmers in public radio, Masters gets no money -- zero -- for all the hours that go into producing a program that is considerably more ambitious and frequently more illuminating than such Sunday morning television fare as NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos."
Though he doesn't earn a salary for "Background Briefing" and "Live From the Left Coast," the name given to a second hour he got as a consolation prize in 2002 for surviving one of the purges that occasionally sweep through left-leaning Pacifica affiliate KPFK, the two shows earn a good amount of money for the station in donations. "In the last pledge drive, Ian raised $10,600 an hour," says KPFK senior producer Alan Minsky, "which was substantially higher than any other show -- and he's not in a prime radio slot."
On this day, Masters will interview ex-CIA officer Graeme Fuller to talk about the possibility of a U.S. military strike against Iran; he will talk to constitutional law professor Dawn Johnsen of Indiana University about the U.S. attorney firings and then to Rocky Anderson, the mayor of Salt Lake City, who has called for the impeachment of President Bush. In the second hour he will phone "old friend" Gloria Steinem to talk about the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama rivalry and then interview Jeremy Scahill, the author of "Blackwater," about the 100,000 American private contractors operating in Iraq.
He will cross this expanse of intellectual and political terrain armed with smart questions drawn from a store of knowledge and reasoned opinion that he does not hesitate to share. His interviews tend to be more conversational and more probing than most -- a rare mix that eschews the kind of formal objectivity familiar to American broadcast journalism without lapsing into pure advocacy or rant. With his clear, understated voice set at an unwavering pitch, Masters seems to be pushing ever onward toward the heart of the matter.
"You try not to bring baggage to the story," he says. "You try to be an advocate for the truth, not an ideology. Ideology has been the death of the American right and self-righteousness the death of the left." It's not just his accent that reveals that Masters grew up in a very different political culture. "Politics is more of a contact sport in Australia and England," he notes.
"He has the ability to ask questions and provide a point of view that inspires people to go deeper into subjects," says Andrew Davis, the Hollywood director of "The Fugitive" and "Collateral Damage" and a longtime friend who has used Masters as a consultant. "He sees linkages that other people don't see."
Often out in front of the herd, Masters was among the first to interview former diplomat and WMD-debunking emissary Joseph C. Wilson IV about the problematic case made by the administration to go to war. Well before Scooter Libby went on trial for perjury in the outing of Wilson's CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame, Masters interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, who told him he believed the forged letters implicating the African nation Niger in uranium sales to Iraq (and mysteriously acquired by an Italian intelligence agency) originated not in Niger or Italy but in the U.S.
Sometimes the program contains so much bracing information from political insiders, scholars and authors about the deceits and policy failures of government leaders, it is hard to listen and not despair.
"It is a dilemma," Masters says, "but you can't be Pollyanna. I think people fighting the good fight are inspiring. At the end of the day, it's all about trying to empower citizenship. I've spent some time in Washington, and I'll tell you there isn't much to expect from the people on the Hill. The lobbyists are in control. Until the people get back into it, nothing is going to change."
Documentary as springboard
THE seeds of the program were sown in 1978, when Masters, then a film editor, was enlisted by cinematographer Haskell Wexler to help make the anti-nukes documentary "War Without Winners," produced by a group of retired generals and admirals. The TV documentary was a response to "The Price of Peace and Freedom," a 30-minute Pentagon-friendly film made by the hawkish Committee on the Present Danger, a group that included Paul Wolfowitz and George H.W. Bush.
To gather material, Masters went on an extensive fact-finding tour of Washington, D.C., and the Pentagon to find a justification for the U.S. to amass more nuclear weapons. If he was going to make an advocacy film, he wanted to know the arguments on the other side.
The experience left him with "all this knowledge and nowhere to go," he says, until he got a call from someone at KPFK with the offer of a Sunday morning show. "Reagan was coming on," Masters remembers. "And there was a genuine concern that we were moving toward Armageddon."
The contacts he had made in government, the military and the intelligence agencies were the start of his compiling what he calls a great Rolodex, but those same official sources have made him an object of suspicion among some KPFK supporters who have accused him of being a government apologist and CIA stooge.
The fact that he is a white male, says one station insider, does not help Masters win support internally at multicultural KPFK -- or at the Pacifica network, which does not distribute the program to the other four Pacifica stations.
Masters -- who is 63, has been married twice, to an English and an American actress, and has a 22-year-old daughter -- recently graduated from UCLA. While he has missed out on getting rich like many of his peers, he has kept interesting company along the way, sharing flats in London with Monty Python's Eric Idle and Australian director Bruce Beresford, and working alongside Jonathan Miller and Lindsay Anderson at the BBC. He got to know Mick Jagger while working as an editor for Tony Richardson on the 1970 movie "Ned Kelly."
He grew up in Byron Bay, a small town on the eastern coast of Australia. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother the respected novelist Olga Masters. He has five siblings, all of whom ended up in some form of professional media. Two sisters and a brother work in Australian television, one brother is a sportswriter in Australia and another is a film director in England.
After attending the University of Sydney, he won a scholarship to film school in Paris during the New Wave but didn't stay long. "It was a waste of time, very academic." He quit and started shooting film for news agencies, including the BBC, where he became an editor.
He moved to Los Angeles in the early '70s, met Wexler and got work editing documentaries, including "The Secret Life of Plants." He tried his hand at screenwriting and wrote one feature for 20th Century Fox, an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum espionage thriller "The Osterman Weekend" (1983), the last film directed by Sam Peckinpah. "That was a very unpleasant experience," he says.
Masters muses that he could have been a contender as a screenwriter, earning the financial security that has eluded him. "If I had stayed with the [expletive] system, but I wasn't A-list."
He says he does not regret not having multiple homes and multiple Mercedes common to many of the people in the business who are his friends. "What I'd like to do is get paid for what I do," he says.
"We all know he's always in money trouble," says Wexler. "He lives very frugally." When he is not preparing for the program, Masters gives lectures, moderates panels and develops movie projects. He also wants to become an American citizen after more than three decades living as a legal resident alien. "I want to vote," he says.
By the time Rocky Anderson is on the line and on the air, Masters' producer, Louis Vandenberg, is sweating bullets -- or at least sweating. The thermostat in the studio is not working, and it is unseasonably warm inside KPFK. "This is the support we get for being the fund drive leader," Vandenberg says with a bite. The producer, who works during the week as an administrator at UC Riverside, sits in front of a computer screen flashing images of news Web pages he is monitoring while trying to get a good phone line for Steinem.
Masters, on the other side of the glass, finishes up with Anderson, who has explained the history of impeachment in Britain and how the concept of "high crimes," meaning "political crimes," found its way across the ocean. It was intended, the mayor says, as a remedy for precisely the kind of behavior exhibited by President Bush in starting an illegal war of aggression, but such an abuse of power has been permitted by a "cowardly" Congress.
"They have enabled this president through their cowardice, I agree with you entirely," Masters says, in one of those moments that makes it clear this is not "Washington Week in Review." When the phone line is patched, Masters asks Steinem if she is aware that Hillary Clinton asked Al Gore, yet a potential presidential candidate, if he was in favor of a carbon tax?
Steinem says she was not aware of this and then says, "Ian, you always notice things and bring them to our attention."
"Gore said, 'Yes,' " Masters says, without skipping a beat. "I wonder if Hillary might be more afraid of Gore than Obama?"
It was something to think about, as usual.
Click for:
Why the Children in Iraq Make No Sound When They Fall
By Bernard Chazelle
Tuesday February 24th ,
2004
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Bush's Desolate
Imperium
By Bernard Chazelle
Ah, the ease with which George W. Bush attracts superlatives! Helen
Thomas calls him "the worst president ever." A kinder, gentler
Jonathan Chait ranks him "among the worst presidents in US
history." No such restraint from Paul Berman, who brands him "the
worst president the US has ever had." Nobel Laureate George Akerlof
rates his government as the "worst ever." Even Bushie du jour,
Christopher Hitchens, calls the man "unusually incurious,
abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically
uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud
of all these things." Only Fidel Castro, it would appear, has had
kind words for our 43rd President. "Hopefully, he is not as stupid
as he seems, nor as Mafia-like as his predecessors were."...
To read the rest
of the article, click here
Friday, September 12,
2003
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Michael Moore to Wesley Clark:
Run!
A Citizen’s Appeal to a General in a Time of War (at
Home)
Dear General Wesley Clark,
I've been meaning to write to you for some time. Two days after the
Oscars, when I felt very alone and somewhat frightened by the level
of hatred toward me for daring to suggest that we were being led
into war for "fictitious reasons," one person stuck his neck out
and came to my defense on national television.
And that person was you.
Aaron Brown had just finished interviewing me by satellite on CNN,
and I had made a crack about me being "the only non-general allowed
on CNN all week." He ended the interview and then turned to you, as
you were sitting at the desk with him. He asked you what you
thought of this crazy guy, Michael Moore. And, although we were
still in Week One of the war, you boldly said that my dissent was
necessary and welcome, and you pointed out that I was against Bush
and his "policies," not the kids in the service. I sat in Flint
with the earpiece still in my ear and I was floored -- a GENERAL
standing up for me and, in effect, for all the millions who were
opposed to the war but had been bullied into silence.
Since that night, I have spent a lot of time checking you out. And
what I've learned about you corresponds to my experience with you
back in March. You seem to be a man of integrity. You seem not
afraid to speak the truth. I liked your answer when you were asked
your position on gun control: “If you are the type of person
who likes assault weapons, there is a place for you -- the United
States Army. We have them.”
In addition to being first in your class at West Point, a four star
general from Arkansas, and the former Supreme Commander of NATO --
enough right there that should give pause to any peace-loving
person -- I have discovered that...
1. You oppose the Patriot Act and would fight the expansion of its
powers.
2. You are firmly pro-choice.
3. You filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of
the University of Michigan's affirmative action case.
4. You would get rid of the Bush tax "cut" and make the rich pay
their fair share.
5. You respect the views of our allies and want to work with them
and with the rest of the international community.
6. And you oppose war. You have said that war should always be the
"last resort" and that it is military men such as yourself who are
the most for peace because it is YOU and your soldiers who have to
do the dying. You find something unsettling about a
commander-in-chief who dons a flight suit and pretends to be Top
Gun, a stunt that dishonored those who have died in that flight
suit in the service of their country.
General Clark, last night I finally got to meet you in person. I
would like to share with others what I said to you privately: You
may be the person who can defeat George W. Bush in next year's
election.
This is not an endorsement. For me, it's too early for that. I have
liked Howard Dean (in spite of his flawed positions in support of
some capital punishment, his grade "A" rating from the NRA, and his
opposition to cutting the Pentagon budget). And Dennis Kucinich is
so committed to all the right stuff. We need candidates in this
race who will say the things that need to be said, to push the
pathetically lame Democratic Party into having a backbone -- or get
out of the way and let us have a REAL second party on the
ballot.
But right now, for the sake and survival of our very country, we
need someone who is going to get The Job done, period. And that
job, no matter whom I speak to across America -- be they leftie
Green or conservative Democrat, and even many disgusted Republicans
-- EVERYONE is of one mind as to what that job is:
Bush Must Go.
This is war, General, and it's Bush & Co.'s war on us. It's
their war on the middle class, the poor, the environment, their war
on women and their war against anyone around the world who doesn't
accept total American domination. Yes, it's a war -- and we, the
people, need a general to beat back those who have abused our
Constitution and our basic sense of decency.
The General vs. the Texas Air National Guard deserter! I want to
see that debate, and I know who the winner is going to be.
The other night, when you were on Bill Maher's show, he began by
reading to you a quote from Howard Dean where he (Dean) tried to
run away from the word "liberal." Maher said to you, so, General,
do you want to run away from that word? Without missing a beat, you
said "No!" and you reminded everyone that America was founded as a
"liberal democracy." The audience went wild with applause.
That is what we have needed for a long time on our side -- guts. I
am sure there are things you and I don't see eye to eye on, but now
is the time for all good people from the far left to the middle of
the road to bury the damn hatchet and get together behind someone
who is not only good on the issues but can beat George W. Bush. And
where I come from in the Midwest, General, I know you are the kind
of candidate that the average American will vote for.
Michael Moore likes a general? I never thought I'd write these
words. But desperate times call for desperate measures. I want to
know more about you. I want your voice heard. I would like to see
you in these debates. Then let the chips fall where they may -- and
we'll all have a better idea of what to do. If you sit it out, then
I think we all know what we are left with.
I am asking everyone I know to send an email to you now to
encourage you to run, even if they aren't sure they would vote for
you. (Wesley Clark's email address is:
info@leadershipforamerica.org ). None of us truly know how we will
vote five months from now or a year from now. But we do know that
this race needs a jolt -- and Bush needs to know that there is one
person he won't be able to Dukakisize.
Take the plunge, General Clark. At the very least, the nation needs
to hear what you know about what was really behind this invasion of
Iraq and your fresh ideas of how we can live in a more peaceful
world. Yes, your country needs you to perform one more act of brave
service -- to help defeat an enemy from within, at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue, an address that used to belong to "we, the
people."
Yours,
Michael Moore
Lottery # 275, U.S. military draft, 1972
Conscientious Objector applicant
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com
'Reclaiming the Media'
June 17, 2003
By Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, Common Dreams
It should come as no surprise that the decision of the Federal
Communications Commission to rewrite media ownership rules has
stirred a firecry in Congress. Unlike the members of the FCC,
members of the House and Senate must face the voters at election
time. And, while Americans may disagree about many issues, they are
united on one point: Communications conglomerates should not be
allowed to extend their already excessive control of the public
discourse at the local or national level.
The FCC knew this because more than 750,000 Americans told them so.
According to dissident Commissioner Michael Copps, who opposed
rewriting the rules to favor the interests of big media
corporations, citizen input to the FCC ran 99.9 percent against the
proposed rule changes. And this was after FCC Chairman Michael
Powell explicitly asked Americans to email and write the FCC to
tell him what they thought about relaxing the media ownership
rules. Yet, FCC Powell and his two Republican allies went ahead and
did the bidding of the media giants -- after accepting dozens of
junkets paid for by the key players in industries they are supposed
to regulate.
Now, members of Congress are working on a number of fronts to
reverse the damage done June 2 when the FCC voted to allow a single
company to buy up television stations that reach up to 45 percent
of American viewers, to own two (or, in some cases, even three)
television stations in the same town, and to own both newspapers,
radio and television stations in the same community.
Senators who opposed the ownership rule changes -- ranging from
progressives like Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold to moderates
like Wisconsin Democrat Herb Kohl and Maine Republican Olympia
Snowe and conservatives like Mississippi Republican Trent Lott --
are talking about forcing a vote to overturn the new rules,
restricting appropriations that the FCC needs to implement the
rules or simply writing laws that would supercede the rules. And
they are winning new allies daily. Even Arizona Republican John
McCain, who is usually a champion of loosening restrictions on
media ownership, says, "I have gone from (being) a deregulator to
someone who is very concerned about the level of media
concentration."
The next big day in the fight for media reform will be June 19,
when the McCain-chaired Senate Commerce Committee will decide
whether to support a motion to rescind the FCC rule changes.
The Congressional interest -- and potential intervention -- is
great news. But Americans should not be lulled into complacency by
a sense that Congress will simply do the right thing when it comes
to defending competition, diversity and local control of media.
Only by keeping up the pressure on Congress will citizens force
their representatives to block these rule changes and to begin the
process of restoring the public-interest rules and regulations that
will protect the public interest that the FCC chose to ignore.
To learn all about the fight to rescind the rule changes, and to
get a comprehensive overview of the burgeoning media reform
movement, go to http://www.mediareform.net
You will also learn about the National Conference on Media Reform
in Madison in from November 7-9.
But don't stop there. Take two minutes to make the difference
between victory and defeat.
Go to the online petition http://www.mediareform.net/stopthefcc and
tell your friends to do the same. Read on for more details.
This "viral" petition campaign will create a massive wave of
petitions to Commerce committee members in both chambers.
The legislation (S.1046) would roll back the broadcast ownership
cap limit, and a crucial amendment is planned that would reverse
the rule allowing cross-ownership of newspapers and TV
stations.
Here's what to do:
1) Go to the petition campaign http://www.mediareform.net/stopthefcc
2) Personalize the message to your Congressional delegation
3) Enter email addresses of friends and colleagues in your
state;
4) Send your message. It will be printed out and walked to your
members of
Congress, and this message will be forwarded to your contacts. Your
friends will not receive spam as a result of this petition.
It's that simple.
For more information on the FCC battle, media reform and how to get
involved, go to http://www.mediareform.net
You should also go to the Common Cause website, Common Cause has
been a champion in this struggle.
Don't have world wide web access? Forward this email to your
friends and colleagues in your state.
June 19 is just the first step in this next part of the fight to
take the power back from big media.
© Copyrighted 1997-2003 www.commondreams.org
Reprinted from Common Dreams:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0616-02.htm
In Ian's conversation with Roger Morris (Background
Briefing, May 25, 2003), he made reference to a Commencement
Address by New York Times reporter, Christopher Hedges, who wrote
the book, "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning." The book is
a thoughtful reflection on his experiences as a war correspondent,
what war really is ("industrialized killing") and why it has an
on-going appeal to patriotism, romanticism and adventure,
experienced by the combatant as a "heady intoxication," and
providing a sense of purpose and "meaning." In
reality, as Hedges insights reveal, it is a poison which is as
toxic to us as it is intended to be to our enemy. Here is the text
of Mr. Hedges remarkable address, with descriptions of the audience
reaction. It is this reaction, along with the general tenor
of the times in the United States today, that prompted the
discusssion.--Louis Vandenberg
Text of the Rockford College graduation speech by Chris
Hedges
May 17, 2003
I want to speak to you today about war and empire.
Killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq.
Although blood will continue to spill -- theirs and ours -- be
prepared for this. For we are embarking on an occupation that, if
history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will
be to our prestige, power, and security. But this will come later
as our empire expands and in all this we become pariahs, tyrants to
others weaker than ourselves. Isolation always impairs judgment and
we are very isolated now.
We have forfeited the good will, the empathy the world
felt for us after 9-11. We have folded in on ourselves, we have
severely weakened the delicate international coalitions and
alliances that are vital in maintaining and promoting peace and we
are part now of a dubious troika in the war against terror with
Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink in
Palestine or Chechnya from carrying out acts of gratuitous and
senseless acts of violence. We have become the company we keep.
The censure and perhaps the rage of much of the world,
certainly one-fifth of the world's population which is Muslim, most
of whom I'll remind you are not Arab, is upon us. Look today at the
14 people killed last night in several explosions in Casablanca.
And this rage in a world where almost 50 percent of the planet
struggles on less than two dollars a day will see us targeted.
Terrorism will become a way of life, and when we are attacked we
will, like our allies Putin and Sharon, lash out with greater fury.
The circle of violence is a death spiral; no one escapes. We are
spinning at a speed that we may not be able to hold. As we revel in
our military prowess -- the sophistication of our military hardware
and technology, for this is what most of the press coverage
consisted of in Iraq -- we lose sight of the fact that just because
we have the capacity to wage war it does not give us the right to
wage war. This capacity has doomed empires in the past.
"Modern western civilization may perish," the
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr warned, "because it falsely worshiped
technology as a final good."
The real injustices, the Israeli occupation of
Palestinian land, the brutal and corrupt dictatorships we fund in
the Middle East, will mean that we will not rid the extremists who
hate us with bombs. Indeed we will swell their ranks. Once you
master people by force you depend on force for control. In your
isolation you begin to make mistakes.
Fear engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity, and
then paralysis. In the center of Dante's circle the damned remained
motionless. We have blundered into a nation we know little about
and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups
and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a
modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among
other things, by the division of earth into independent secular
states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in
a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool
for the British when they occupied it in 1917; it will be a
cesspool for us as well. The curfews, the armed clashes with angry
crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the military governor, the
Christian Evangelical groups who are being allowed to follow on the
heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about
Jesus.
Hedges stops speaking because of a disturbance in the
audience. Rockford College President Paul Pribbenow takes the
microphone.
"My friends, one of the wonders of a liberal arts
college is its ability and its deeply held commitment to academic
freedom and the decision to listen to each other's opinions. (Crowd
Cheers) If you wish to protest the speaker's remarks, I ask that
you do it in silence, as some of you are doing in the back. That is
perfectly appropriate but he has the right to offer his opinion
here and we would like him to continue his remarks. (Fog Horn
Blows, some cheer).
The occupation of the oil fields, the notion of the
Kurds and the Shiites will listen to the demands of a centralized
government in Baghdad, the same Kurds and Shiites who died by the
tens of thousands in defiance of Sadaam Hussein, a man who happily
butchered all of those who challenged him, and this ethnic rivalry
has not gone away. The looting of Baghdad, or let me say the
looting of Baghdad with the exception of the oil ministry and the
interior ministry -- the only two ministries we bothered protecting
-- is self immolation.
As someone who knows Iraq, speaks Arabic, and spent
seven years in the Middle East, if the Iraqis believe rightly or
wrongly that we come only for oil and occupation, that will begin a
long bloody war of attrition; it is how they drove the British out
and remember that, when the Israelis invaded southern Lebanon in
1982, they were greeted by the dispossessed Shiites as liberators.
But within a few months, when the Shiites saw that the Israelis had
come not as liberators but occupiers, they began to kill them. It
was Israel who created Hezbollah and was Hezbollah that pushed
Israel out of Southern Lebanon.
As William Butler Yeats wrote in "Meditations in Times
Of Civil War," "We had fed the heart on fantasies / the hearts
grown brutal from the fair."
This is a war of liberation in Iraq, but it is a war
now of liberation by Iraqis from American occupation. And if you
watch closely what is happening in Iraq, if you can see it through
the abysmal coverage, you can see it in the lashing out of the
terrorist death squads, the murder of Shiite leaders in mosques,
and the assassination of our young soldiers in the streets. It is
one that will soon be joined by Islamic radicals and we are far
less secure today than we were before we bumbled into Iraq.
We will pay for this, but what saddens me most is that
those who will by and large pay the highest price are poor kids
from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job
or health insurance and joined the army because it was all we
offered them. For war in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal
of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of
idealists by cynics. Read Antigone, when the king imposes his will
without listening to those he rules or Thucydides' history. Read
how Athens' expanding empire saw it become a tyrant abroad and then
a tyrant at home. How the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed
on others it finally imposed on itself.
This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian
democracy; Athens destroyed itself. For the instrument of empire is
war and war is a poison, a poison which at times we must ingest
just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we
do not understand the poison of war -- if we do not understand how
deadly that poison is -- it can kill us just as surely as the
disease.
We have lost touch with the essence of war. Following
our defeat in Vietnam we became a better nation. We were humbled,
even humiliated. We asked questions about ourselves we had not
asked before.
We were forced to see ourselves as others saw us and
the sight was not always a pretty one. We were forced to confront
our own capacity for a atrocity -- for evil -- and in this we
understood not only war but more about ourselves. But that humility
is gone.
War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport.
The military and the press -- remember in wartime the press is
always part of the problem -- have turned war into a vast video
arcade came. Its very essence -- death -- is hidden from public
view.
There was no more candor in the Persian Gulf War or
the War in Afghanistan or the War in Iraq than there was in
Vietnam. But in the age of live feeds and satellite television, the
state and the military have perfected the appearance of candor.
Because we no longer understand war, we no longer
understand that it can all go horribly wrong. We no longer
understand that war begins by calling for the annihilation of
others but ends if we do not know when to make or maintain peace
with self-annihilation. We flirt, given the potency of modern
weapons, with our own destruction.
The seduction of war is insidious because so much of
what we are told about it is true -- it does create a feeling of
comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for
perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong.
War allows us to rise above our small stations in
life; we find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and
even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial
scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is
a fine diversion. War for those who enter into combat has a dark
beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible
calls it the lust of the eye and warns believers against it. War
gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning.
(A man in the audience says: "Can I say a few words
here?" Hedges: Yeah, when I finish.)
Once in war, the conflict obliterates the past and the
future all is one heady intoxicating present. You feel every
heartbeat in war, colors are brighter, your mind races ahead of
itself. (Confusion, microphone problems, etc.) We feel in wartime
comradeship. (Boos) We confuse this with friendship, with love.
There are those who will insist that the comradeship of war is love
-- the exotic glow that makes us in war feel as one people, one
entity, is real, but this is part of war's intoxication.
Think back on the days after the attacks on 9-11.
Suddenly we no longer felt alone; we connected with strangers, even
with people we did not like. We felt we belonged, that we were
somehow wrapped in the embrace of the nation, the community; in
short, we no longer felt alienated.
As this feeling dissipated in the weeks after the
attack, there was a kind of nostalgia for its warm glow and wartime
always brings with it this comradeship, which is the opposite of
friendship. Friends are predetermined; friendship takes place
between men and women who possess an intellectual and emotional
affinity for each other. But comradeship -- that ecstatic bliss
that comes with belonging to the crowd in wartime -- is within our
reach. We can all have comrades.
The danger of the external threat that comes when we
have an enemy does not create friendship; it creates comradeship.
And those in wartime are deceived about what they are undergoing.
And this is why once the threat is over, once war ends, comrades
again become strangers to us. This is why after war we fall into
despair.
In friendship there is a deepening of our sense of
self. We become, through the friend, more aware of who we are and
what we are about; we find ourselves in the eyes of the friend.
Friends probe and question and challenge each other to make each of
us more complete; with comradeship, the kind that comes to us in
patriotic fervor, there is a suppression of self-awareness,
self-knowledge, and self-possession. Comrades lose their identities
in wartime for the collective rush of a common cause -- a common
purpose. In comradeship there are no demands on the self. This is
part of its appeal and one of the reasons we miss it and seek to
recreate it. Comradeship allows us to escape the demands on the
self that is part of friendship.
In wartime when we feel threatened, we no longer face
death alone but as a group, and this makes death easier to bear. We
ennoble self-sacrifice for the other, for the comrade; in short we
begin to worship death. And this is what the god of war demands of
us.
Think finally of what it means to die for a friend. It
is deliberate and painful; there is no ecstasy. For friends, dying
is hard and bitter. The dialogue they have and cherish will perhaps
never be recreated. Friends do not, the way comrades do, love death
and sacrifice. To friends, the prospect of death is frightening.
And this is why friendship or, let me say love, is the most potent
enemy of war. Thank you.
(Boos cheers, shouts, fog horns and the like)
Robert Byrd of West Virginia is the Senate's
longest serving member and has become that body's
conscience. His words suggest the authentic voice of
democracy itself, speaking over the millenia, carrying a warning
for these times and resonant with truth. This wisdom has not
come without time, error, triumph and defeat for the Senator.
He is 84 years old, once briefly was a member of the KKK and has
seen most of what can be seen as an American politician. It
is clear that Senator Byrd's warnings now, delivered as they are
with almost Shakespearian portent, stand as the most significant of
his long career. Why does our nation not seem to listen?
--LV
'The truth will emerge'
By US Senator Robert Byrd
Senate Floor Remarks - May 21, 2003
"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again, --
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshippers."
Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all
attempts to obscure it. Distortion only serves to derail it
for a time. No matter to what lengths we humans may go to
obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of squeezing
out through the cracks, eventually.
But the danger is that at some point it
may no longer matter. The danger is that damage is done
before the truth is widely realized. The reality is that,
sometimes, it is easier to ignore uncomfortable facts and go along
with whatever distortion is currently in vogue. We see a lot
of this today in politics. I see a lot of it -- more than I
would ever have believed -- right on this Senate Floor.
Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this
Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting
the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of
long-standing International law, under false premises. There
is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have
been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin
Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to
Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of
Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet invoking
every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds,
to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ
laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy
dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein's direct threat to
our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure
reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post
traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of
911. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo
for the anger.
Since the war's end, every subsequent revelation which
has seemed to refute the previous dire claims of the Bush
Administration has been brushed aside. Instead of addressing
the contradictory evidence, the White House deftly changes the
subject. No weapons of mass destruction have yet turned up,
but we are told that they will in time. Perhaps they yet
will. But, our costly and destructive bunker busting attack
on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite
of what we were told was the urgent reason to go in. It seems
also to have, for the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix
and the inspection team he led, which President Bush and company so
derided. As Blix always said, a lot of time will be needed to
find such weapons, if they do, indeed, exist. Meanwhile Bin
Laden is still on the loose and Saddam Hussein has come up
missing.
The Administration assured the U.S. public and the
world, over and over again, that an attack was necessary to protect
our people and the world from terrorism. It assiduously
worked to alarm the public and blur the faces of Saddam Hussein and
Osama Bin Laden until they virtually became one.
What has become painfully clear in the aftermath of
war is that Iraq was no immediate threat to the U.S. Ravaged
by years of sanctions, Iraq did not even lift an airplane against
us. Iraq's threatening death-dealing fleet of unmanned drones
about which we heard so much morphed into one prototype made of
plywood and string. Their missiles proved to be outdated and
of limited range. Their army was quickly overwhelmed by our
technology and our well trained troops.
Presently our loyal military personnel continue their
mission of diligently searching for WMD. They have so far turned up
only fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the
occasional buried swimming pool. They are misused on such a
mission and they continue to be at grave risk. But, the Bush
team's extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for a
preemptive invasion has become more than embarrassing.
It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the
reckless use of power. Were our troops needlessly put at
risk? Were countless Iraqi civilians killed and maimed when
war was not really necessary? Was the American public
deliberately misled? Was the world?
What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim
that we are "liberators." The facts don't seem to support the label
we have so euphemistically attached to ourselves. True, we
have unseated a brutal, despicable despot, but "liberation" implies
the follow up of freedom, self-determination and a better life for
the common people. In fact, if the situation in Iraq is the
result of "liberation," we may have set the cause of freedom back
200 years.
Despite our high-blown claims of a better life for the
Iraqi people, water is scarce, and often foul, electricity is a
sometime thing, food is in short supply, hospitals are stacked with
the wounded and maimed, historic treasures of the region and of the
Iraqi people have been looted, and nuclear material may have been
disseminated to heaven knows where, while U.S. troops, on orders,
looked on and guarded the oil supply.
Meanwhile, lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq's
infrastructure and refurbish its oil industry are awarded to
Administration cronies, without benefit of competitive bidding, and
the U.S. steadfastly resists offers of U.N. assistance to
participate. Is there any wonder that the real motives of the
U.S. government are the subject of worldwide speculation and
mistrust?
And in what may be the most damaging development, the
U.S. appears to be pushing off Iraq's clamor for
self-government. Jay Garner has been summarily replaced, and
it is becoming all too clear that the smiling face of the U.S. as
liberator is quickly assuming the scowl of an occupier. The
image of the boot on the throat has replaced the beckoning hand of
freedom. Chaos and rioting only exacerbate that image, as
U.S. soldiers try to sustain order in a land ravaged by poverty and
disease. "Regime change" in Iraq has so far meant anarchy,
curbed only by an occupying military force and a U.S.
administrative presence that is evasive about if and when it
intends to depart.
Democracy and Freedom cannot be force fed at the point
of an occupier's gun. To think otherwise is folly. One
has to stop and ponder. How could we have been so impossibly
naive? How could we expect to easily plant a clone of U.S.
culture, values, and government in a country so riven with
religious, territorial, and tribal rivalries, so suspicious of U.S.
motives, and so at odds with the galloping materialism which drives
the western-style economies?
As so many warned this Administration before it
launched its misguided war on Iraq, there is evidence that our
crack down in Iraq is likely to convince 1,000 new Bin Ladens to
plan other horrors of the type we have seen in the past several
days. Instead of damaging the terrorists, we have given them
new fuel for their fury. We did not complete our mission in
Afghanistan because we were so eager to attack Iraq. Now it
appears that Al Queda is back with a vengeance. We have returned to
orange alert in the U.S., and we may well have destabilized the
Mideast region, a region we have never fully understood. We
have alienated friends around the globe with our dissembling and
our haughty insistence on punishing former friends who may not see
things quite our way.
The path of diplomacy and reason have gone out the
window to be replaced by force, unilateralism, and punishment for
transgressions. I read most recently with amazement our harsh
castigation of Turkey, our longtime friend and strategic
ally. It is astonishing that our government is berating the
new Turkish government for conducting its affairs in accordance
with its own Constitution and its democratic institutions.
Indeed, we may have sparked a new international arms
race as countries move ahead to develop WMD as a last ditch attempt
to ward off a possible preemptive strike from a newly belligerent
U.S. which claims the right to hit where it wants. In fact,
there is little to constrain this President. Congress, in
what will go down in history as its most unfortunate act, handed
away its power to declare war for the foreseeable future and
empowered this President to wage war at will.
As if that were not bad enough, members of Congress
are reluctant to ask questions which are begging to be asked.
How long will we occupy Iraq? We have already heard disputes
on the numbers of troops which will be needed to retain
order. What is the truth? How costly will the
occupation and rebuilding be? No one has given a straight
answer. How will we afford this long-term massive commitment,
fight terrorism at home, address a serious crisis in domestic
healthcare, afford behemoth military spending and give away
billions in tax cuts amidst a deficit which has climbed to over
$340 billion for this year alone? If the President's tax cut
passes it will be $400 billion. We cower in the shadows while
false statements proliferate. We accept soft answers and
shaky explanations because to demand the truth is hard, or
unpopular, or may be politically costly.
But, I contend that, through it all, the people
know. The American people unfortunately are used to political
shading, spin, and the usual chicanery they hear from public
officials. They patiently tolerate it up to a point.
But there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in invisible ink
for a time, but eventually it will appear in dark colors, tinged
with anger. When it comes to shedding American blood -- when
it comes to wreaking havoc on civilians, on innocent men, women,
and children, callous dissembling is not acceptable. Nothing
is worth that kind of lie -- not oil, not revenge, not reelection,
not somebody's grand pipedream of a democratic domino theory.
And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which
we see so often of late by the "powers that be" will only keep the
loyal opposition quiet for just so long. Because eventually,
like it always does, the truth will emerge. And when it does,
this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall.
Here's an Op-Ed, appearing in the May 1, 2003 Los Angeles Times, by
a writer whose name may be familiar to visitors to this
website.
COMMENTARY
Media Monopolies Have Muzzled Dissent
By Ian Masters
Ian Masters is the host of "Background Briefing" on KPFK-FM (90.7)
in Los Angeles.
May 1, 2003
If information is the oxygen of democracy, the United
States has just been gassed, not by weapons of mass destruction but
by a weapon of mass distraction.
With George W. Bush basking in glorious ratings and Fox News
climbing in the ratings, we may be moving toward a coronation
instead of a reelection in 2004. It was, after all, Rupert
Murdoch's unilateral anointment of Bush as the winner in the early
hours of the morning after the undecided 2000 election that led Al
Gore to foolishly concede, because he and the other networks
believed what they saw on Fox Television.
Now the marriage between a government and its volunteer
information ministry has been consecrated by the blessed victory of
"Operation Iraqi Freedom," the geopolitical equivalent of an O.J.
meets "Joe Millionaire" wrapped in the flag.
Totalitarian regimes don't tolerate any distinction between
journalism and propaganda, but in most democracies it is
unprecedented for the free press to abandon Joseph Pulitzer for the
methods of Joseph Goebbels.
How did a born-again, family-values administration get
in bed with a purveyor of misogyny and mayhem, trash and
titillation? The common thread, for all the public piety, has to be
the late Lee Atwater, who was friend, mentor and role model to
George W., Karl Rove and Roger Ailes, the head hound in the Fox
pound of junkyard attack-dog journalism.
This undemocratic confluence of politics and propaganda
has long been in the making as corporate media have been
incrementally empowered while public influence, input and
"interest" have been eliminated.
The transformation of active citizens into passive
consumers was enabled by the Federal Communications Commission
under Ronald Reagan's Mark Fowler, who declared "the perception of
broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of
broadcasters as marketplace participants."
Welcome to America, Mr. Murdoch: You can buy the airwaves and, who
knows, some day the presidency.
TV's Fox could not get away with its shameless shilling
for the White House if the Fairness Doctrine were still in place,
and radio's Clear Channel monopoly would not be able to impose
wall-to-wall Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage, etc., on the public if
broadcasters were accountable to public opinion rather than the
dictates of plutocrats.
How could it be that in the land of the free and the
home of the brave Americans are afraid of opinions? Where are the
Tom Paines, the Mark Twains, the Menckens, the Ida Tarbells?
Dissent has not gone away; it has just been
marginalized by monopolies and relegated to the interstices of the
Internet.
But the hammer is about to drop on the Internet too.
The head of the FCC, Michael Powell, wants to give away what's left
of the store to the broadband cable and satellite providers and
make them gatekeepers or tollbooths on the information highway.
It used to be that the Internet was accessed via a
common carrier, the phone company, but as technology has moved
forward, these new unregulated media monopolies have increasing
control over the information pipeline. Without regulation, they
have the ability to choose what content they provide.
Two FCC commissioners want to delay this hand-over and
encourage public debate, but the public is largely unaware of what
is at stake.
Obviously you can't expect the Limbaughs, O'Reillys and their
bosses or their president in the White House to give them talking
points on preserving diversity of opinion while there is a tax cut
to sell.
So speak up, America: It's your country, they're your
airwaves. Maybe you can pursue the American dream while you are
asleep, but it will be too late to reclaim your country's freedom
when you wake up.
This op-ed by Roger Morris, a repeated
guest on Background Briefing, is exceptionally insightful and
recommended.
Published on Monday, April 14, 2003 by the Globe &
Mail/Canada
From Republic to Empire
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were labeled 'imperial
presidents,' recalls former White House adviser Roger Morris. But
neither could hold a candle to today's George Bush. Whatever his
triumph in Iraq, George W. Bush already enjoyed a victory of
historic proportions in the United States. By unique dominance of
Congress and the rest of government, and to the approval of the
American media and an impressive majority in the polls, Mr. Bush
had acquired power beyond the grasp of any predecessor. Before U.S.
forces ever roared through Baghdad, their Commander-in-Chief was
America's most imperial president.
The specter of an emperor in the White House is
familiar to an American system that lurches between the wider
powers of the modern president and the long-sacred constitutional
restraints placed on executive supremacy. In his noted 1973 book,
The Imperial Presidency, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned of
"presidential power so spacious and peremptory as to imply a
radical transformation of the traditional polity." Cases in point
were Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, whose conduct from the
Vietnam War to the Watergate scandal seemed to many to be a
dangerous culmination of might and pretension assembled in the Oval
Office.
By the mid 1970s, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Nixon had left
Washington in disrepute. Congress reasserted itself in the War
Powers Act, which limited the unilateral power of the president to
go to war, and take certain other steps. Presidential authority
shrank under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
As Capitol Hill and the White House divided between Republicans and
Democrats, the traditional shifting balance between legislative and
executive branches continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s under
the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill
Clinton. An imperial presidency seemed the relic of a bygone
era.
Now George W. Bush has sharply reversed that history.
His empire began with the surrender of Congress, a collapse almost
as sweeping as the fall of the Baghdad regime.
In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson had his Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, the 1964 act that endorsed U.S. entry into the Vietnam
War. President Johnson liked to refer to it as "grandma's
nightshirt" because the legislation covered everything. To strike
Iraq, Mr. Bush demanded and got from legislators an even broader
cloak for invasion, occupation, and further military action in the
Middle East and elsewhere.
Like the Tonkin measure, hastily voted amid what proved to be false
reports of a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. vessels, this
Congress's Iraqi resolution passed with scant debate and a
brandishing of bogus intelligence, such as the forgery of Iraqi
nuclear procurement from Niger. In a stroke, the blank check for
Mr. Bush swept away the legal requirement of a congressional
declaration of war or even compliance with the 1973 War Powers
Act.
As a result, the White House was ceded sovereign
authority to justify and launch full-scale hostilities -- a right
vested by the Constitution in the Congress precisely to prevent
such fateful power falling to any one president and handful of
advisers.
The groundwork for this usurpation was laid last September with the
National Security Strategy Mr. Bush sent to Congress. In this
document, the President claimed the right -- indeed, responsibility
-- to take pre-emptive action against perceived future threats to
the security of the United States. From this, it was but a short
jump to his Iraqi venture. Claiming a prerogative to invade Iraq as
a "clear and present danger" to peace -- it was by no means "clear"
to much of the world or even Iraq's closest neighbors, and it was
by no means "present" even in his prediction of a threat "in one
year or five years" -- Mr. Bush erased long-recognized limits on
the right of any nation to attack another.
If the unilateral abrogation alarmed allies, friends
and the United Nations, however, it went unchallenged on Capitol
Hill, another sign that any internal democratic restraint on the
President's war-making was a dead letter.
Added to all this was an equally historic concentration
of power in domestic affairs. By the Patriot Act and other enabling
laws in the pervasive new realm of "Homeland Security," Mr. Bush
has brought an imperial presidency home to a depth and breadth that
Lyndon Johnson, with his furtive FBI spying on antiwar groups, or
even Richard Nixon, with his Watergate "plumbers" and other
extraconstitutional means, never contemplated. Under
Attorney-General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department now has the
kind of licence to conduct the political surveillance without
probable cause or court sanction that many of the Nixon men went to
prison for. As no other federal government before it, the Bush
administration wields the authority to arrest and hold suspects
without charge, detain prisoners indefinitely, and deny access to
legal counsel, all with unparalleled secrecy.
It would be easy to attribute this singular massing of
power to predictable chauvinist politics in America's reaction to
the shock of Sept. 11. There is comfort in thinking of Mr. Bush as
one more president riding the crest of a breaking wave -- and that
the tide will turn back, as always, to constitutional balance. Yet,
even apart from the uncertain course of the "war on terrorism," or
Washington's open-ended evocation of it, that optimistic view
ignores decisive new realities in U.S. politics -- and the emerging
reality of George W. Bush himself.
Today's imperial presidency looms over political
parties and a Congress very different from those of the recent
past. President Johnson faced formidable critics from his own
party, such as senators William Fulbright, Robert Kennedy and
Eugene McCarthy. Mr. Nixon fought to the end a Democratic-ruled
Senate and House, and the resistance of many influential Republican
moderates. President Bush, on the other hand, will deliver his
Iraqi war victory speech to houses of Congress dominated by
conservative Republicans, with GOP moderates a rarity and rebels
extinct. Their religious fundamentalist leaders, as well as the
rank and file, not only back the President's new reach with
domestic repression and foreign retribution, but also share the
larger geo-strategic urge to American hegemony behind the war on
Iraq.
In their all but silent minority, today's congressional
Democrats are similarly to the political right of their
predecessors, and bow no less to enlarged presidential power at
home and abroad -- if not to Mr. Bush benefiting from it. The
"bipartisan" approach by this Congress that goes beyond terrorism
and Iraq is an abdication of legislative responsibility. Congress
has ceded the White House exceptional authority over trade
agreements, allowed it to rewrite the usually sacrosanct farm bill,
capitulated on the $400-billion military budget. The sort of party
revolt that forced Mr. Johnson to retire, or the bipartisan ballast
to Mr. Nixon's command, are nowhere in the offing for Mr. Bush.
Not least in a new calculus of an imperial presidency
is the man in the Oval Office. George W. Bush, of course, was an
unlikely emperor -- America's least informed modern president in
world affairs. For the first nine months of his term -- it now
seems hard to remember -- he was a lackluster, evidently
purposeless and unprepossessing politician of ridiculed syntax and
shrouded electoral legitimacy. Questions about his suspect business
dealings, or the sway over his administration of corporate
interests, even more egregious than Washington's accepted captivity
to moneyed power, began to swirl about the White House. Then, in
perhaps the most dramatic effect of its kind in American history,
Sept. 11 transformed the man as well as the political setting.
"Every president reconstructs the presidency," Mr.
Schlesinger wrote of the imperial impulse, "to meet his own
psychological needs." Elevated by terrorist attacks from a butt of
satire to a commanding leader disposing an awesome, vengeful power,
Mr. Bush took on his own reconstruction with earnest determination,
even gusto, finding his yet undefined political destiny in an
expansively defined war on terrorism.
As the first inside testimony of his presidency tells,
he remains much the man he was before his new power and purpose,
still lacking knowledge and experience, while still caustic about
opponents, still convinced of his own sound judgment and moral
rectitude. By all accounts, he has adopted naturally the concept of
a "spacious" and "peremptory" authority that Mr. Schlesinger saw in
the elected emperor. In contrast to Lyndon Johnson's
Washington-backroom politicking or Richard Nixon's aloof cynicism,
it is Mr. Bush's mixture of his old defiant self-assurance and his
new sense of mission that makes his exercise of the imperial
presidency all the more formidable.
That grip only tightens with the President's domination
of the government beneath him, as well as the acquiescence, if not
outright support, he enjoys from the American media, and the
personal popularity he wins. The role of a small clique of
officials in the decision to invade Iraq -- Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon consultant
Richard Perle and others who have long advocated an attack -- is
well known from coverage of the war. Less noted, however, is how
much their bureaucratic dominance of the military, State Department
and intelligence agencies in the process added to the power of a
president who embraced their strategy so completely. Mr. Bush and
his hawkish advisers face another battle altogether in their
ambitious vision of Iraqi democracy and its inspiration for freer
regimes across the Middle East. But their swift military victory
disarmed, along with Saddam Hussein, any U.S. bureaucratic
opposition to the President's writ, fixing a White House mastery
over foreign affairs not seen in Washington since the policy
autocracy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
So, too, Mr. Bush stands likely to have a prolonged
honeymoon with the American media. It is not only that television
coverage in particular -- epitomized by the ironically named
"embedded reporters" -- has cheerled the advance into Baghdad.
Crippled by self-censorship, often by its lack of knowledge or
sensibility, and without a vocal opposition in Congress to report
by default, American journalism will give the new imperial
president publicity his forerunners could only envy.
Finally, there is Mr. Bush's paradoxical popularity.
If 70 per cent to 75 per cent of Americans approve of his war and
performance, the same number question a sagging economy and other
issues that are his least-imperial domains. Yet the White House has
a manifest capacity to keep the terrorist threat a political
preoccupation. Its public shows an equally clear acceptance of a
strong leader to deal with the post-Sept. 11 world. The combination
will certainly rescue Mr. Bush from the return to domestic concerns
and resulting fall in popularity that his father suffered after the
first war in the Persian Gulf -- yet another reason why this
imperial presidency will not soon wane.
All this makes for a certain irony when Mr. Bush comes
before the Congress to announce the triumph in Iraq, basking in his
new power won at the constitutional expense of the very chambers
that will hail him.
Not that this should surprise us. Shortly before he
died in 1989, the eminent American writer Robert Penn Warren,
author of All The King's Men, a novel about a democratic demagogue
and dictator, was asked if he foresaw another president with too
much power.
"Well, it'll probably be someone you least expect
under circumstances nobody foresaw," he said. "And, of course,
it'll come with a standing ovation from Congress."
Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council under
presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, is the author of
Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician and
Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America.
(above) Wide angle long-shot of
central-Baghdad square when Saddam's statue was pulled down.
This incident was depicted hundreds of times in the US media with
tight shots on the crowd, shots which disinformed the public
to believe that there that been a spontaneous uprising in the
city during which the crowd took down the statue. In
reality, the square had been sealed by the US military and a US
tank pulled the cable that toppled the statue. The "crowd" of
less than one-hundred were reported to be Iraqi exiles who had been
brought into the square to stage this event. Why did US media
go along with this? Where was context and objectivity?
Empire vs. Republic
By Robert Parry
April 21, 2003George W. Bushís doctrine of
preemptive wars is creating a new deep divide in U.S. politics. On
one side, Bush and his backers see the Iraq War as the start of an
American global empire built around unparalleled military power. On
the other, a scattered grouping of skeptics dig in for what they
see as a fight for the soul of the American republic.
Without doubt, the Bush side now owns the strategic
high ground, asserting vindication in the U.S. ouster of
Iraqís dictator Saddam Hussein. Bush also can claim near
total mastery of a U.S. news media that shed any pretense of
ìobjectivityî as it flooded the nation with heroic
images of American soldiers and heart-warming scenes of grateful
Iraqis, while downplaying civilian dead and growing signs that many
Iraqis resent the U.S. occupation.
The anti-empire side finds itself pinned down, too, by
accusations that its opposition to the three-week war was
naïve and even disloyal. Plus, it's a disorganized mix of
political interests, ranging from old-time conservatives to
traditional liberals, from the likes of Pat Buchanan to Howard
Dean. Yet as imbalanced as this struggle now appears, both sides
agree that it holds in its outcome the future of the American
democratic experiment.
The pro-empire side argues that only a militarily
assertive United States can address what Bush calls
ìgathering dangersî facing the nation ñ even if
that means tighter constraints on liberty at home and freer use of
U.S. troops abroad. The pro-republic forces say Bushís
imperial strategy is a sham ñ false security that cedes
life-and-death national decisions to the dictates of one man.
Shallow Media
To the pro-republic side, part of the price for empire
is the increasingly shallow U.S. news media that largely sanitized
the war. Rather than troubling Americans with gruesome images of
mangled and dismembered Iraqi bodies, including many children, the
cable networks, in particular, edited the war in ways that helped
avoid negativity and gave advertisers the feel-good content that
plays best around their products.
Fox News may have pioneered this concept of casting the
war in the gauzy light of heroic imagery, where Iraqi soldiers were
ìgoonsî and interviews with Americans at war were
packaged with the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the
soundtrack.
But the supposedly less ideological MSNBC may have carried the idea
to even greater lengths with Madison-Avenue-style montages of the
Iraq war. One showed U.S. troops in heroic postures moving through
Iraq. The segment ended with an American boy surrounded by yellow
ribbons for his father at war, and the concluding slogan,
ìHome of the Brave.î
Another MSNBC montage showed happy Iraqis welcoming
U.S. troops as liberators and rejoicing at the toppling of Hussein.
These stirring pictures ended with the slogan, ìLet Freedom
Ring.î
Left out of these ìnewsî montages were any
images of death and destruction. For instance, there was no scene
of a newly orphaned 12-year-old Iraqi boy waving the stump of
whatís left of his arms. No sense either of the unspeakable
pain of a father who was injured in a U.S. bombing and was about to
learn that his three young daughters, who were the center of his
life, were dead.
The happy montages also sanitized out the horror of a mother who
found her 20-year-old daughter in the ruins of a bombed-out
restaurant, first her torso and then her head. The U.S. had bombed
the restaurant in a residential area thinking Hussein was
there.
Cable news also downplayed evidence that many Iraqis,
while glad to see Hussein gone, were angered by the U.S. invasion
and its aftermath, which brought widespread destruction, arson and
looting, including the loss of priceless antiquities of Mesopotamia
dating back more than 5,000 years. The reaction to the U.S.
occupation has included marches by thousands of Iraqis demanding
withdrawal of U.S. troops and calling for an Iran-like Islamic
state.
The Wall Street Journal took note of the dueling
coverage presented by domestic CNN and its CNNI Networks, which
broadcasts to international viewers. While domestic CNN focused on
happy stories, such as the rescue of U.S. prisoner-of-war Jessica
Lynch, CNNI carried more scenes of wounded civilians overflowing
Iraqi hospitals.
During the Gulf War in 1991, [CNN] presented a uniform
global feed that showed the war largely through American
eyes,î the Journal reported. ìSince then, CNN has
developed several overseas networks that increasingly cater their
programming to regional audiences and advertisers.î [WSJ,
April 11, 2003]
Left unsaid by the Journalís formulation of how CNNís
overseas affiliates ìcaterî to foreign audiences was
the flip side of that coin, that domestic CNN is freer to shape a
version of the news that is more satisfying to Americans and to
U.S. advertisers.
more at: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/042103a.html
SUMMARY: two disturbing reports on loose genetically-engineered
bioweapons emerging, some humor, gun companies seek shielding from
lawsuits and the peace movement searches for strategic focus:
Lethal Legacy: Bioweapons for Sale
U.S. Declined South African Scientist's Offer on Man-Made
Pathogens
By Joby Warrick and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 20, 2003; Page A01
First of two articles
PRETORIA, South Africa -- Daan Goosen's calling card to the FBI was
a vial of bacteria he had freeze-dried and hidden inside a
toothpaste tube for secret passage to the United States.
From among hundreds of flasks in his Pretoria lab, the South
African scientist picked a man-made strain that was sure to
impress: a microbial Frankenstein that fused the genes of a common
intestinal bug with DNA from the pathogen that causes the deadly
illness gas gangrene.
"This will show the Americans what we are capable of," Goosen said
at the time.
MORE AT:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58454-2003Apr19.html
Biotoxins Fall Into Private Hands
Global Risk Seen In S. African Poisons
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 21, 2003; Page A01
Second of two articles
PRETORIA, South Africa -- In three days of secret meetings last
July, the man known throughout South Africa as "Doctor Death"
astounded U.S. law enforcement officials with tales of how the
former white-minority government carried out unique experiments
with chemical and biological weapons.
Wouter Basson, the bearded ex-commander of South Africa's notorious
7th Medical Battalion, spoke candidly of global shopping sprees for
pathogens and equipment, of plans for epidemics to be sown in black
communities and of cigarettes and letters that were laced with
anthrax. He revealed the development of a novel anthrax strain
unknown to the U.S. officials, a kind of "stealth" anthrax that
Basson claimed could fool tests used to detect the disease.
But most disturbing was the question Basson could not answer: Who
controls the microbes now?
MORE AT:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64518-2003Apr20.html
*************************************************************
HUMOR
A genuinely funny satire on the Dixie Chicks apology to the
USA in the wake of their criticism of George Bush:
http://www.thespeciousreport.com/2003_dixiechicks.html
**************************************************************
April 21, 2003
Bill to Bar Suits Against Gun Industry Stuns Crime
Victims
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
WASHINGTON, April 17 ó Conrad
Johnson, a bus driver in Montgomery County, Md., was standing on
the top step of his bus last Oct. 22, getting ready for his morning
route, when he was shot once in the back and killed.
For Mr. Johnson's wife, Denise, it was an incomprehensible act. Now
she is confronting another action that she says is nearly as
baffling.
Mrs. Johnson has filed a lawsuit against the gun shop, Bull's Eye
Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Wash., that supplied the gun, a
Bushmaster rifle, to one of two men charged in the sniper attacks
that killed her husband and nine others last fall. She has also
sued the rifle's manufacturer. But last week the House of
Representatives, at the urging of the National Rifle Association,
passed a bill granting the gun industry nationwide immunity from
virtually all lawsuits. The Senate is expected to take up the bill
after the Easter recess.
So Mrs. Johnson is hurriedly trying to turn herself into a
lobbyist, going to news conferences in the Capitol and working
Senate offices to tell her story.
"When I heard that Congress is seriously considering giving gun
dealers special protection from suits like mine, I figured this had
to be some kind of bad dream," Mrs. Johnson said in an interview,
after attending a news conference with Senator Frank R. Lautenberg,
Democrat of New Jersey. "I'm appalled and outraged that Congress
can take away my rights as an American to have my day in
court."
MORE AT: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/21/politics/21GUNS.html
**************************************************************
April 20, 2003
Antiwar Movement Tries to Find a Meaningful Message
By KATE ZERNIKE
on Tuesday, the leaders of the antiwar
coalition Win Without War will gather for a two-day retreat outside
New York City to discuss their group's future now that the war has
ended. One of the items on the agenda: Should it change its name to
Win Without Wars?
The question of whether to go plural reflects how the antiwar
movement is trying to move forward now that the conflict it so
passionately wanted to avert ó and for a time, thought it
might avert ó has ended.
Leaders in the movement do not like to focus on the notion that
they lost. Yes, they failed to stop the war. Yes, the public has
overwhelmingly supported President Bush's actions. With a swift
United States victory over a brutal dictator and fewer casualties
than most experts predicted, it is particularly hard for antiwar
organizers to argue that their dire forecasts were right.
They focus instead on how much strength the movement gained so
quickly ó it was largely invisible just six months ago
ó and on their next moves, even if they are not quite
certain what those might be.
Throughout the war, these organizers worked hard to stay in harmony
ó if not quite in tune ó with the American public,
emphasizing that this peace movement is patriotic and mainstream.
After violent protests at the beginning of the war angered
officials in several cities, they emphasized the civil in civil
disobedience.
Now again, the challenge is to find a message that resonates.
MORE AT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/international/worldspecial/20PROT.html
An interesting take on the World Economic Forum, and Patriot Act
II
1) This is a widely circulated email written by a highly honored,
very credible journalist who attended the World Economic
Forum. Her candid thoughts make for some fascinating
reading. She is reportedly very upset that this email has
gotten out. We are editing references which would identify
her, though her identity is something of an open secret now.
The writer has received a Peabody, a Polk and a Pulitzer. She
has two doctorates and lives in New York.
------------------------ Forwarded Message-------------------
click for
more...
Contact Ian at: ianmasters@mail.com
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