(Courtesy of Thoughts on the Eve of the Apocalypse)
U.S. Public Diplomacy: A Tale of Two Who Jumped the Ship at State
By Nancy Snow
Foreign Policy in Focus
Dr. Nancy Snow is an assistant professor of communications at California State University, Fullerton and a senior fellow at the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Information War (Seven Stories Press) and a regular contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org).
In politics, the name of the game is often zero sum. At times one country may have a positive advantage in reputation and influence while others like North Korea, China and Cuba may be on the negative side. At the end of World War II, no country could compete with the victorious United States in ascendancy. Through its competitive economic and ideological advantage, the United States was able to rebuild war-torn Japan and Germany through the Marshall Plan and to create a marketplace for goods and ideas that overshadowed its formidable but lesser competitor, the Soviet Union.
In zero-sum games, one side cannot gain reputation without the other side losing. Following the trajectory of two careers in public diplomacy since Sept. 11, 2001, it seems that Washington’s reputation is fixed at zero in terms of credibility and political leadership. Margaret Tutwiler, who announced her resignation from the U.S. State Department in April 2004 at the end of the bloodiest month in Iraq, was well-regarded in her five-month stretch as the high-profile replacement for Charlotte Beers, a former ad executive who left Washington in March 2003, just days before the outbreak of war with Iraq. Unlike Beers, Tutwiler had an inside-the-beltway career working for four Republican administrations as a State Department spokesman and then as an ambassador to Morocco. Tutwiler was expected to outmaneuver Beers in sheer political experience alone, and hopes were high that she would announce some major initiatives, despite 2004 being a presidential election year. At the time of Tutwiler’s confirmation hearings, it seemed that her Washington political experience would serve her well in helping to tackle the downward slide of America’s reputation in the world. But she deflected such insider experience when she told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee overseeing her confirmation that when it comes to the complex reality of winning hearts and minds: “There is not one magic bullet, magic program or magic solution. As much as we would like to think Washington knows best, we have to be honest and admit we do not necessarily always have all the answers.”1
In her short tenure, Tutwiler emphasized more active listening on the part of the U.S. government—including listening to its diplomats serving on the frontlines—and expanding the discussion of American values and policies to public venues outside of traditional elites in diplomacy and government. “We only have to look at the activities of U.S. corporations overseas to see the value of being present and engaged in neighborhoods that we in government have for too long neglected.”2 She also announced a slight increase in educational exchanges, particularly youth exchanges, focused primarily on the Middle East. When Tutwiler suddenly announced her switch from government public relations to the New York Stock Exchange executive suites, one could not help but notice that the move occurred during the week that the first brutal images of abused Iraqi prisoners were released worldwide, rendering her youth exchange program from the Middle East—Partnerships for Learning, with its less than 200 participants—a drop of hope in an ocean of anger and resentment.
Steel Magnolia of Advertising
Charlotte Beers had been sworn into office as Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs a mere three weeks after the terrorist attacks on the United States. Although lacking experience in politics or public diplomacy, Beers came from the highest pedigree in advertising—the only executive to serve as chairman and CEO of J. Walter Thompson Worldwide and Ogilvy & Mather, two of the top 10 global advertising agencies. Known as the “Steel Magnolia of Advertising” for her ability to combine a feminine Texas charm with the forthright determination to break the glass ceiling all the way to the top, Beers was immediately thrust into the media spotlight as head of the administration’s new mind war on terrorism.
It was clear that the spotlight shift from behind-the-scenes product guru to front-and-center government propaganda CEO was more than Beers might have bargained for with the appointment, despite Colin Powell’s defense of her before members of Congress: “Guess what? She got me to buy Uncle Ben’s rice. So there is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something.” Media wags had a field day with the obvious avuncular comparisons. Some reporters ruminated on just how the first female product manager for Uncle Ben’s rice could manage the mother of all marketing campaigns—promoting Uncle Sam. The Washington Post reported, “She’s been pilloried by pundits on at least two continents, who’ve mocked the whole idea of advertising America.”3 Andrew Alexander of the London Daily Mail wrote, “One shouldn’t laugh, really, but I must confess to a short guffaw on reading that Washington’s new war propaganda chief is a woman head of an advertising agency whose personal triumphs included Uncle Ben’s rice and Head & Shoulders shampoo.” Columnist Frank Rich of the New York Times cracked: “The Bush appointee in charge of the propaganda effort is a C.E.O. (from Madison Avenue) chosen not for her expertise in policy or politics but for her salesmanship on behalf of domestic products like Head & Shoulders shampoo. If we can’t effectively fight anthrax, I guess it’s reassuring to know we can always win the war on dandruff.” Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times joked that the White House decision to choose Beers as chief propaganda queen led to his “second out-of-body experience” since the onset of the war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. (His first out-of-body experience was the White House decision to choose the project title Operation Infinite Justice, which was quickly dumped for the more modest Operation Enduring Freedom.) At first befuddled that the White House would put an ad executive in charge of America’s image war, Lopez sarcastically snipped: “Who knows? Maybe they’re onto something. Just the other day I took a sip of Coke and began singing, ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.’ How could anyone hate a nation of peace-loving simpletons for whom the best part of waking up is Folger’s in your cup?”4
The key question, sarcastic or not, that Lopez and other reporters raised repeatedly in fall 2001 was this: Is it possible to sell Uncle Sam the way you sell Uncle Ben? Can a battle plan for an image war be based solely on a background in product development? Can a national rebranding strategy be seen in marketing terms alone?
Branding America
The United States is, at its heart, more an ideal than a product for sale, but putting Beers in charge—a person with no experience in international politics—seemed to ensure that the branding America campaign wouldn’t even begin to address the fundamental image problem of the United States. That image problem stems in part from the perception that U.S. foreign policy is a form of propaganda constructed by and for American corporations; that the McWorld thus constructed benefits wealthy Westerners at the expense of the world’s poor. The American propaganda machine doesn’t represent Americans individually. It depicts the most heterogeneous country in the world as a single-minded monolith, and it hasn’t begun to tell the story of who and what Americans are.
If the U.S. administration is not willing to revamp its foreign policy, from which many image problems originate, it could at least take its public relations campaign to the streets and neighborhoods of America—rather than the corporate corridors of Madison Avenue—and Washington could explore ways to partner with new or existing nongovernmental organizations. For example, a citizen diplomacy corps of teachers, students and cultural mediators could compile anecdotes revealing America’s strengths in principles and ideals, could admit to past government policy mistakes, and could seek to broaden everyone’s understanding of other histories and cultures. Such an effort would evoke the sentiment expressed by Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1946, establishing the largest post-World War II government-sponsored educational exchange program: “My question is whether America can close the gap between her capacity and her performance. My hope and my belief are that she can, that she has the human resources to conduct her affairs with a maturity which few if any great nations have ever achieved: to be confident but also tolerant, to be rich but also generous, to be willing to teach but also to learn, to be powerful but also wise.”5
However, Fulbright’s educational and statesmanlike vision for America stands in marked contrast to the glitzy branding America campaign that was spearheaded by “the most powerful woman in the ad business.”6 Like it or not, an ad woman was in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, and she was going to work with what she knew best. In an exclusive interview with Good Morning America (with which she had previously collaborated), Beers was introduced by anchorwoman Diane Sawyer as “the woman whose job it is to tell the world who America is and make the Muslim world understand. Talk about a daunting assignment.”7
Beers acknowledged that reaching young Arab men taking to the streets to denounce the United States was a challenge. In her words, they were the “one target market that is the most entrenched. And when we do consumer research, which we finally started doing in a modern marketing way, we learned that they need to believe that bin Laden is a holy man…Some of the people will not join us at all, but there are many more people in the whole Muslim world who are very vulnerable to this kind of information.”
Taking her cue from the cacophony of voices incensed that a Madison Avenue ad maven was put in charge of cultural diplomacy, Sawyer asked Beers to comment about her detractors: “As you know, some of the Washington establishment sniffed mightily when you arrived, saying several things. First of all, an ad executive coming to do diplomacy. Second of all, saying you cannot sell America like Coca-Cola…Do you want to answer them who say we can’t sell it (America) the way we sell from Madison Avenue?” Beers replied: “What we are doing is using modern marketing techniques, and we already have one of the world’s most sophisticated Web sites and computer facilities in the State Department. When we talk to embassies and markets around the world, we desperately need to do a better job of getting communication beyond the elites and the government figures into the mass markets. It’s also crucial that we learn how to use emotion in our communication. Al Jazeera lives on emotion and drama, and we’re content to let everything happen in a logical fashion. This is not a reasonable dialogue we’re engaged in; it includes some emotion.”
Beers’ reference was to the bureaucratic tendency in the U.S. Information Agency and State Department to “let the facts speak for themselves” and to downplay the important emotional and very human connection necessary for influencing public audiences overseas. However, her statement also implied a cultural stereotype that Arab and Muslim “target markets” are more emotional by nature and that Washington must utilize the vernacular nuances that reach people, if it wants to gain more influence. She could have stressed mutual dialogue, both emotional (heart) and rational (head), emphasizing the need for nations to come together in a shared way to eradicate the misunderstandings and misperceptions that incite terrorism and war. Her statement was more homeland-oriented and downplayed a global common ground.
Rewards for Justice
During the interview with Diane Sawyer, Beers introduced a radio advertisement associated with the State Department Rewards for Justice program, which was designed to get Americans to spot terrorists in their midst: “Do you know a terrorist? Not long ago, this would have seemed like a ridiculous question. But not anymore. The United States government is offering rewards up to $25 million for information that prevents an international terrorist act against U.S. persons or property or brings to justice persons who have committed one.”8 The Rewards for Justice print ad showed a picture of September 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta along with the text: “He was spotted in Hamburg, Prague, Florida, Maine. And if someone had called us, his picture wouldn’t be spotted in this ad, it would have been prevented.” The Rewards for Justice web site included ads targeted specifically at American women: “You, as a woman and perhaps a mother, may be in a unique position to act against international terrorism,” declared the print ad headlined, “Can a Woman Stop Terrorism?” Beers explained to Sawyer, “I really believe that women do understand and see more in many ways,” not mentioning that women purchase 80% of all consumer goods and thus are the primary audience of advertisers.
The Rewards for Justice campaign was the most ambitious undertaking in Charlotte Beers’ tenure. It was not a Beers brainchild but rather the expansion of an existing program that began under President Reagan in 1984 and had already paid out more than $7 million to 22 informants in the United States and abroad before Sept. 11, 2001. Beers was helped in her crusade by Scott Case, a co-founder of Priceline.com, who used his marketing and Internet prowess to set up a private fund for the Rewards for Justice campaign, including “United We Stand” license plates in Florida and other states to subsidize the State Department’s reward funds. “This is fighting terrorism with capitalism,” Case beamed. “We expect a tsunami of people coming forward with information,” he predicted, as if anticipating a greater turnout of terrorist spotters during a recession.
At a news conference for the foreign press in November 2001, Beers unveiled her new campaign. “First we will have print and radio. We are going to follow very soon with banner ads that tap into adjacent web sites. We will have movie theater clips and maybe even matchbook covers.” One reporter asked, “How confident are you that your new campaign is not going to end up like, you know, New Coke or the Edsel?” Against a backdrop of a few cynical reporter chuckles, he added, “Is there a poster child—a poster man or woman—that you envision to be set up to, you know, represent a symbol of America abroad?” To the first skeptical question, she responded, “I did a Harvard case study on what happened to New Coke, and if you’ll pull it up and read it, you’ll get your answer to that.” To the second quip, she said, “Well, you know, in a way, our poster people are President Bush and Secretary Powell, who I think are pretty inspiring symbols of the brand ‘The United States.’” That answer prompted Washington Post reporter Peter Carlson to chortle: “Brilliant! Asked to suggest a symbol of America, she immediately named her boss and her boss’s boss. It was a rare demonstration of the kind of talent that can take a person to the very heights of the advertising business—or the federal government.”
Beers believed that the essential elements of marketing the United States brand name were not unlike the ones she used so skillfully throughout her Madison Avenue career. In an interview with Business Week, she insisted that, despite a hostile target market: “We are going to have to deliver the intangible assets of the United States, things like our belief system and values. This calls up a different set of skills…much closer to the kind of disciplines we always had to have in advertising.”9 And, she added, with the U.S.A. brand, as with any great brand, “the leverageable asset is the emotional underpinning of the brand—or what people believe, what they think, how they feel when they use it. I am much more comfortable with that dimension of the assignment, because I’ve dealt with it before.”
Marketing America
So what’s different about marketing a country? Dialogue. Insightfully, Beers admitted, “Countries like the United States, which are big and powerful, will always translate into arrogance if there is no dialogue.”10
In marketing the U.S.A. brand name, Beers and her staff consulted with a list of at least 400 American Muslims, fielded traditional consumer research in Jordan, Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries, and called upon a kitchen cabinet of corporate marketing whizzes ranging from the Nonprofit Advertising Council to private research and marketing firms. Their global marketing research was nonpolicy wonkish by design. In Beers’ outlook: “The government is well poised to give you research in terms of major policy issues, but they’re not going to tell you much about what will help you talk to a 14-year-old boy who has been inculcated for years with a really different vantage point.” To start with, her premise was different than just explaining foreign policy positions as wonks are trained to do. As Allen Rosenshine, chairman of BBDO Worldwide, said of the U.S.A. rebranding campaign: “We have to start from the basis of ‘OK, people hate us.’ If all we do is go out and tell them America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, we’re damn fools.”11
One problem with the Rewards for Justice program was that it tapped into a post-Sept. 11 American consciousness that a terrorist was hiding behind every tree. It harkened back to the Advertising Council’s “Loose Lips Sink Ships” crusade of the 1940s, warning Americans not to spill secrets to the enemy living among us. As Beers told reporters at the marketing rollout for her campaign: “This might have been unthinkable before September 11th, but this is the first time we realized that we must ask every citizen in the United States to think about information they might have, because for the first time we know clearly terrorists are here. They have been here among us, and they are here.”12
A basic program emphasizing mental alertness about suspicious behavior was one thing, but what kind of information might it invite? Would a Middle Eastern-looking man or someone who just looks Arab lead to a tip to the Rewards for Justice hotline? The program ran the risk of becoming, inadvertently or not, a collection center for data about people who were guilty of being associated through religion or ethnicity with the September 11 attackers. As Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute in Washington, D.C., warned, the State Department ad campaign might turn into a citizen watch program gone awry. Washington would do better beefing up intelligence work than encouraging citizens to turn in their neighbors.
The Rewards for Justice campaign corresponded to a general rise in advertising as propaganda following September 11, 2001. After a brief advertising respite in deference to the American psyche in the first few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Big Three automakers in Detroit were compelling Americans to do their patriotic duty and get back on the road with big American SUVs and trucks. The rush to glorify the pleasures of capitalist materialism in the face of fear and uncertainty helped to soothe the collective American psyche, troubled that perhaps not all was well on Main Street, U.S.A., and to remind the individual consumer that the socioeconomic system was still working just fine. As if to further reinforce in surround-sound fashion what the market system was really all about, the Advertising Council initiated its own Campaign for Freedom to remind Americans just how good we have it—pass it on. Presented as an unprecedented volunteer effort from the advertising industry to assist Americans during the war on terrorism (as if someone had asked for “Ad” Nauseam), the Campaign for Freedom’s public service announcements celebrated American freedom in the face of terror. Television and print ads appeared with the tag line, “Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it.” The campaign was inspired by President Bush’s declaration on September 11 that American freedom itself was attacked, and so Americans must vigilantly defend freedom (likely through military force) wherever and whenever it comes under future threat or attack.
Advertising Versus Public Diplomacy
In his book, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion, Michael Schudson states that advertising in a capitalist system like the United States serves basically the same function as the state-sanctioned socialist realist art of the Soviet Union. “American advertising, like socialist realist art, simplifies and typifies. It does not claim to picture reality as it should be,” asserts Schudson.13 One Campaign for Freedom ad included the following text depicting its own version of reality: “Because while rights like freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the press get all the attention in the Constitution, the smaller liberties you can enjoy everyday in America are no less important or worthy of celebration. Your right to backyard barbeques, sleeping in on Sunday and listening to any darned music you please can be just as fulfilling as your right to vote for the president. Maybe even more so because you can enjoy these freedoms personally and often.”14 Such ad copy simplifies and typifies the level of intellectual rigor that arose from the ashes of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The question remains, is it necessary to rebrand the United States? To many throughout the world, America is already a brand, a multitrillion-dollar brand of mass consumerism, bolstered by cultural and military dominance and championed by worldwide symbols like Marlboro, McDonalds, Boeing, Coca-Cola and General Electric. Any further selling of America, even in a new format or packaging, may simply add to the global perception problem that continues to plague the United States. America Inc. is presented in glittering generalities of freedom and democracy fighting evil and tyranny the world over, but our global audience knows that the reality of America is quite different from the rhetoric. The United States remains the world’s leader in arms trafficking, and as long as our international assistance favors arms transfers over humanitarian assistance, developing countries will remain vulnerable to military forces and nonstate actors—like the Taliban and al-Qaida—that systematically violate human rights and exploit people’s deepest fears. Rebranding America is one strategy to improve the U.S. image, but it may not be the best strategy. As a superpower, the United States is very used to doing the talking and marketing of its position on the global stage. It may be time to listen more to the legitimate grievances that even U.S. allies have with the unilateral position that Washington takes in so many geopolitical arenas. Likewise, regarding culture and communication, the U.S. supports the free exchange of information in theory but not in practice, preferring to let the market, and not governments, regulate that flow.
A New Way Forward?
The United States might want to take a step back from its obvious advantage in marketing and advertising and think about how to build bridges of mutual understanding between Americans and people of other countries. Washington’s ability to huckster an image overseas is what fuels misperceptions and feeds stereotypes that Americans care most about market share and least about sharing. The world continues to view the United States predominantly as a product, not as a country of diverse peoples with dissenting positions. Recounting America’s story by depicting the concepts of freedom, civil liberties, justice and pluralism is a necessary book chapter but not the entire book. Madison Avenue, Hollywood and the White House must do their triad campaign, but their storytelling will always be viewed somewhat cynically as a manufactured spin that tilts in favor of a particular U.S. policy or product tie-in.
Telling America's Story
What is needed is a public, grassroots campaign to tell America’s story to the world—a recasting of Rewards for Justice to Rewards for Dialogue, directed by the American people and their neighbors overseas. This project should be as authentic as possible, not driven by merchandising, branding or buying. Its tag line could be, “Let’s listen and learn for our own sake.” Globally oriented newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor and the International Herald Tribune could devote a weekly section to this global dialogue project, inviting citizens around the world to tell the stories of their lives—how they live, what they desire for their children, what they wish to know about how people live in other countries. It’s a small leap from the self-help advice of Dear Abby to the universal knowledge database of Dear Global Citizen. An influx of a few million dollars could sponsor more questionnaires along the lines of the Pew Center’s Global Attitudes Survey designed to poll citizens both at home and abroad about their impressions of each other and the nations in which they live.
The events of Sept. 11, 2001, have forced American citizens to look within themselves as a global people. Winning a worldwide war on terrorism is much more about overcoming cultural mindsets that set people apart from each other out of fear and ignorance than about celebrating the freedom of the American barbecue. In the post-September 11 era, no country is isolated from the realities of any other. In a split second, in the most horrific way, the planet became Marshall McLuhan’s global village. Now is the greatest opportunity for global citizens to come together, not through the legacy of Margaret Tutwiler’s frustrating spell or Charlotte Beer’s bottom-line approach, but through open hearts and learning minds.
Endnotes:
1) Margaret Tutwiler, Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, D.C., October 29, 2003.
2) Margaret Tutwiler, Testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, February 10, 2004.
3) Peter Carlson, “The U.S.A. Account; Ad Woman Charlotte Beers’s New Campaign: Getting the World to Buy America, Washington Post, Style, December 31, 2001, p. C1.
4) Steve Lopez, “We Need People, Not Propaganda, to Sell America to the World,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2001, p. B1.
5) Senator J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 27.
6) “Charlotte Beers; How World’s Top Woman Ad Executive Hit the Heights,” Los Angeles Times, AP Wire, May 4, 1992, p. D6.
7) Interview transcript, Good Morning America, Burrelle’s Information Services, ABC News, December 14, 2001.
8) Rewards for Justice
9) Alexandra Starr, “Building Brand America,” Business Week, December 10, 2001.
10) Starr, "Building Brand America."
11) Marci MacDonald, “Branding America,” U.S. News & World Report, November 26, 2001, p. 46.
12) Michele Kelemen, “All Things Considered,” National Public Radio, Weekend Edition, December 15, 2001.
13) Michael Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 215.
14) Ad Council Campaign for Freedom
For more analysis from Foreign Policy in Focus on public diplomacy see:
The Really Scary Movie
By Nancy Snow (May 27, 2004)
Winning Round Two of American Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds
By R.S. Zaharna (June 13, 2003)
The Unintended Consequences of Crisis Public Diplomacy: American Public Diplomacy in the Arab World
By R.S. Zaharna (June 2003)
United States Information Agency
By Nancy Snow (August 1997)
Monday, June 07, 2004
Frozen Frame Film Series (Lexington)
Frozen Frame Film Series @ The ICEHOUSE
This summer marks the beginning of a new film series in Lexington. The Frozen Frame Film Series strives to bring a wide variety of interesting, controversial, esoteric, and groundbreaking films, shorts and documentaries that may not be readily available at your nearest video store or theater. The showings are free to the public, but donations of $3 will be accepted to help fund future events and showings at The ICEHOUSE. As Ross has mentioned before, the ICEHOUSE is a warehouse art-space that serves as a residence-workshop-studio for a few local artists. Very cool space (no pun intended). Keep in mind, those of you who may not have visited the Icehouse before, it is a very open, studio-like environment with actual provided seating at a minimum... those who attend the showings are encouraged to bring a pillow, blanket, or something to get comfortable with as we all gather 'round on the floor to watch the films (no chairs, please).
To get there, get on HIGH ST. head past RUPP ARENA. A few blocks past Rupp you'll come around a corner and have the option of either flowing onto VERSAILLES ROAD or wrapping back in the opposite direction on MAXWELL. Turn left to head back on MAXWELL and then take an IMMEDIATE RIGHT onto CROSS ST. The ICEHOUSE will be just down the block on your left. you'll see a few steps leading up to a green door. That's the entrance.
Showings will be held every other Sunday throughout the Summer, with showtimes starting at 9:00pm. The schedule of showings so far is as follows (more showings to be announced soon):
Sunday, May 30th - "Style Wars"
Sunday, June 13th - "A Zed & Two Noughts"
Sunday, June 27th - "Tin Drum"
Sunday, July 11th - "Rabbit Proof Fence"
Style Wars (1983) - When director Tony Silver and co-producer Henry Chalfant delivered the broadcast version of their prize-winning film to PBS in 1983, the world received its first full immersion in a... phenomenon that had taken over New York City. The urban landscape was physically transformed by graffiti artists who invented a new visual language to express both their individuality, and the voice of their community. This film is regarded by many as the definitive document of the emerging hip hop culture, and the continuing struggle to keep its authentic spirit alive.
A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) - Peter Greenway's precursor to his controversial "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", tells the darkly comic story of twin zoologists who become obsessed with death, decay, and the search for life's meaning. Powerful, evocative, and rich in visuals.
For more information, contact: FrozenFrameFilmSeries@hotmail.com
This summer marks the beginning of a new film series in Lexington. The Frozen Frame Film Series strives to bring a wide variety of interesting, controversial, esoteric, and groundbreaking films, shorts and documentaries that may not be readily available at your nearest video store or theater. The showings are free to the public, but donations of $3 will be accepted to help fund future events and showings at The ICEHOUSE. As Ross has mentioned before, the ICEHOUSE is a warehouse art-space that serves as a residence-workshop-studio for a few local artists. Very cool space (no pun intended). Keep in mind, those of you who may not have visited the Icehouse before, it is a very open, studio-like environment with actual provided seating at a minimum... those who attend the showings are encouraged to bring a pillow, blanket, or something to get comfortable with as we all gather 'round on the floor to watch the films (no chairs, please).
To get there, get on HIGH ST. head past RUPP ARENA. A few blocks past Rupp you'll come around a corner and have the option of either flowing onto VERSAILLES ROAD or wrapping back in the opposite direction on MAXWELL. Turn left to head back on MAXWELL and then take an IMMEDIATE RIGHT onto CROSS ST. The ICEHOUSE will be just down the block on your left. you'll see a few steps leading up to a green door. That's the entrance.
Showings will be held every other Sunday throughout the Summer, with showtimes starting at 9:00pm. The schedule of showings so far is as follows (more showings to be announced soon):
Sunday, May 30th - "Style Wars"
Sunday, June 13th - "A Zed & Two Noughts"
Sunday, June 27th - "Tin Drum"
Sunday, July 11th - "Rabbit Proof Fence"
Style Wars (1983) - When director Tony Silver and co-producer Henry Chalfant delivered the broadcast version of their prize-winning film to PBS in 1983, the world received its first full immersion in a... phenomenon that had taken over New York City. The urban landscape was physically transformed by graffiti artists who invented a new visual language to express both their individuality, and the voice of their community. This film is regarded by many as the definitive document of the emerging hip hop culture, and the continuing struggle to keep its authentic spirit alive.
A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) - Peter Greenway's precursor to his controversial "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", tells the darkly comic story of twin zoologists who become obsessed with death, decay, and the search for life's meaning. Powerful, evocative, and rich in visuals.
For more information, contact: FrozenFrameFilmSeries@hotmail.com
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Seven Stories Press: Free E-Books
Response to 9/11
The War Prayer by Samuel Clemens
Civil Disobedience
Seven Stories Press is one of my favorite small presses. There is the important and affordable Open Media Series and spanish language Siete Cuentos Editorial sereis. I'm teaching Dale Muharidge's Homeland this summer/fall semesters and they just picked up one of my favorite fiction authors, Octavia Butler-- Bloodchild and Parable of the Talents (read Parable of the Sower first)
The War Prayer by Samuel Clemens
Civil Disobedience
Seven Stories Press is one of my favorite small presses. There is the important and affordable Open Media Series and spanish language Siete Cuentos Editorial sereis. I'm teaching Dale Muharidge's Homeland this summer/fall semesters and they just picked up one of my favorite fiction authors, Octavia Butler-- Bloodchild and Parable of the Talents (read Parable of the Sower first)
Greg Palast on Ronald Reagan's Dark Legacy
Just an alternative voice as the media prepare to canonize Ronald Reagan... its strange to hear him being lauded as a peacemaker?
Thivai
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KILLER, COWARD, CONMAN -
GOOD RIDDANCE, RONNIE REAGAN
MORE PROOF ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG
by Greg Palast
You're not going to like this. You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But
in this case, someone's got to.
Ronald Reagan was a conman. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer.
In 1987, I found myself stuck in a crappy little town in Nicaragua
named Chaguitillo. The people were kind enough, though hungry, except for
one surly young man. His wife had just died of tuberculosis.
People don't die of TB if they get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan,
big hearted guy that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to
Nicaragua because he didn't like the government that the people there
had elected.
Ronnie grinned and cracked jokes while the young woman's lungs filled
up and she stopped breathing. Reagan flashed that B-movie grin while
they buried the mother of three.
And when Hezbollah terrorists struck and murdered hundreds of American
marines in their sleep in Lebanon, the TV warrior ran away like a
whipped dog ... then turned around and invaded Grenada. That little Club Med
war was a murderous PR stunt so Ronnie could hold parades for gunning
down Cubans building an airport.
I remember Nancy, a skull and crossbones prancing around in designer
dresses, some of the "gifts" that flowed to the Reagans -- from hats to
million-dollar homes -- from cronies well compensated with government
loot. It used to be called bribery.
And all the while, Grandpa grinned, the grandfather who bleated on
about "family values" but didn't bother to see his own grandchildren.
The New York Times today, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan
projected, "faith in small town America" and "old-time values." "Values" my
ass. It was union busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone
who couldn't buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing
starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another
million.
"Small town" values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the
Malibu mogul? I want to throw up.
And all the while, in the White House basement, as his brain boiled
away, his last conscious act was to condone a coup d'etat against our
elected Congress. Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper the Ghost Weinberger
with the crazed Colonel, Ollie North, plotted to give guns to the Monster
of the Mideast, Ayatolla Khomeini.
Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter
wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatolla. Reagan, with that film-fantasy
tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach
to Khomeini pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages.
Ollie North flew into Iran with a birthday cake for the maniac mullah
-- no kidding --in the shape of a key. The key to Ronnie's heart.
Then the Reagan roaches mixed their cowardice with crime: taking cash
from the hostage-takers to buy guns for the "contras" - the drug-runners
of Nicaragua posing as freedom fighters.
I remember as a student in Berkeley the words screeching out of the
bullhorn, "The Governor of the State of California, Ronald Reagan, hereby
orders this demonstration to disburse" ... and then came the teargas
and the truncheons. And all the while, that fang-hiding grin from the
Gipper.
In Chaguitillo, all night long, the farmers stayed awake to guard their
kids from attack from Reagan's Contra terrorists. The farmers weren't
even Sandinistas, those 'Commies' that our cracked-brained President
told us were 'only a 48-hour drive from Texas.' What the hell would they
want with Texas, anyway?
Nevertheless, the farmers, and their families, were Ronnie's targets.
In the deserted darkness of Chaguitillo, a TV blared. Weirdly, it was
that third-rate gangster movie, "Brother Rat." Starring Ronald Reagan.
Well, my friends, you can rest easier tonight: the Rat is dead.
Killer, coward, conman. Ronald Reagan, good-bye and good riddance.
Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best
Democracy Money Can Buy. Greg Palast's website
Thivai
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
KILLER, COWARD, CONMAN -
GOOD RIDDANCE, RONNIE REAGAN
MORE PROOF ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG
by Greg Palast
You're not going to like this. You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But
in this case, someone's got to.
Ronald Reagan was a conman. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer.
In 1987, I found myself stuck in a crappy little town in Nicaragua
named Chaguitillo. The people were kind enough, though hungry, except for
one surly young man. His wife had just died of tuberculosis.
People don't die of TB if they get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan,
big hearted guy that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to
Nicaragua because he didn't like the government that the people there
had elected.
Ronnie grinned and cracked jokes while the young woman's lungs filled
up and she stopped breathing. Reagan flashed that B-movie grin while
they buried the mother of three.
And when Hezbollah terrorists struck and murdered hundreds of American
marines in their sleep in Lebanon, the TV warrior ran away like a
whipped dog ... then turned around and invaded Grenada. That little Club Med
war was a murderous PR stunt so Ronnie could hold parades for gunning
down Cubans building an airport.
I remember Nancy, a skull and crossbones prancing around in designer
dresses, some of the "gifts" that flowed to the Reagans -- from hats to
million-dollar homes -- from cronies well compensated with government
loot. It used to be called bribery.
And all the while, Grandpa grinned, the grandfather who bleated on
about "family values" but didn't bother to see his own grandchildren.
The New York Times today, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan
projected, "faith in small town America" and "old-time values." "Values" my
ass. It was union busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone
who couldn't buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing
starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another
million.
"Small town" values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the
Malibu mogul? I want to throw up.
And all the while, in the White House basement, as his brain boiled
away, his last conscious act was to condone a coup d'etat against our
elected Congress. Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper the Ghost Weinberger
with the crazed Colonel, Ollie North, plotted to give guns to the Monster
of the Mideast, Ayatolla Khomeini.
Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter
wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatolla. Reagan, with that film-fantasy
tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach
to Khomeini pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages.
Ollie North flew into Iran with a birthday cake for the maniac mullah
-- no kidding --in the shape of a key. The key to Ronnie's heart.
Then the Reagan roaches mixed their cowardice with crime: taking cash
from the hostage-takers to buy guns for the "contras" - the drug-runners
of Nicaragua posing as freedom fighters.
I remember as a student in Berkeley the words screeching out of the
bullhorn, "The Governor of the State of California, Ronald Reagan, hereby
orders this demonstration to disburse" ... and then came the teargas
and the truncheons. And all the while, that fang-hiding grin from the
Gipper.
In Chaguitillo, all night long, the farmers stayed awake to guard their
kids from attack from Reagan's Contra terrorists. The farmers weren't
even Sandinistas, those 'Commies' that our cracked-brained President
told us were 'only a 48-hour drive from Texas.' What the hell would they
want with Texas, anyway?
Nevertheless, the farmers, and their families, were Ronnie's targets.
In the deserted darkness of Chaguitillo, a TV blared. Weirdly, it was
that third-rate gangster movie, "Brother Rat." Starring Ronald Reagan.
Well, my friends, you can rest easier tonight: the Rat is dead.
Killer, coward, conman. Ronald Reagan, good-bye and good riddance.
Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best
Democracy Money Can Buy. Greg Palast's website
Australian Prime Minister shares a farcical White House media conference with Bush
Australian PM shares a farcical White House media conference with Bush
By Mike Head
WSWS
(excerpt)
In a telling sign of how seriously the catastrophe in occupied Iraq has damaged their governments, US President George W. Bush on Thursday lavished praise on visiting Australian Prime Minister John Howard and launched an extraordinary intervention into the campaign for this year’s scheduled Australian elections.
Their brief media conference on the White House steps was truly surreal. It brought together two blood-soaked political criminals, clinging to each other for electoral survival. One measure of the depth of Bush’s predicament is that he sought to inflate the importance of a man as politically and historically insignificant as the current Australian leader. He hailed Howard—a political flunkey whose government has slavishly followed the US administration—as a “close friend” whose “advice” and “clear vision” were highly appreciated.
A near-fiasco in the final moments of the press conference made clear the purpose of the stage-managed performance. It concerned the final question, which was put to Bush by Steve Lewis from the Australian, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian flagship. Lewis asked Bush to comment on the pledge made by opposition Labor Party leader Mark Latham to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq by Christmas.
Lewis apparently missed his cue to present his question, producing the following exchange:
President Bush: No other questions? This is unbelievable. You better hurry ...
Prime Minister Howard: Mr. Lewis, Steve Lewis, the Australian.
Steve Lewis: President Bush, I’d like to ask you a question ...
President Bush: Where are you? There you are.
Steve Lewis: Just here.
President Bush: Thank you.
Answering Lewis’ question, Bush made the most strident attack by an American president on an Australian political leader in living memory, describing Latham’s policy as “disastrous” and implicitly accusing the Labor leader of siding with “enemy” terrorists.
“It would dispirit those who love freedom in Iraq,” Bush declared. “It would say that the Australian government doesn’t see the hope of a free, democratic society leading to a peaceful world. It would embolden the enemy to believe that they could shake our will. See, they want to kill innocent life because they think that the Western world and the free world is weak.”
From any objective standpoint, Bush’s diatribe was absurd. In the first place, the Howard government’s troop deployment in Iraq is militarily insignificant. Of more than 130,000 foreign troops, including some 120,000 from the US, Australia has just 280 actually on the ground in Iraq, none of whom are directly involved in the major military operations against the growing insurgency.
Secondly, Labor has no fundamental differences with Howard. Rather, it regards the Iraq war as undermining the “war on terror,” as well as Australia’s national security. Latham’s call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq is based on the tactical calculation that Australian military forces are needed for operations closer to home.
As for the equation of the US-led occupation with freedom and democracy, that claim lies in tatters after more than a year of mass killings and brutal repression against the Iraqi population, the exposure of systematic torture and abuse of prisoners in US jails, and the installation of a widely despised puppet government in order to secure US hegemony over Iraq’s oil wealth.
Precisely because of this debacle, Bush felt the need to bolster Howard’s political credentials. No one, not even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has been a more enthusiastic or unconditional backer of the Bush administration and the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, with the withdrawal of Spanish troops, followed by other members of the threadbare “coalition of the willing,” Bush cannot afford to see Howard defeated.
Read Entire Article
By Mike Head
WSWS
(excerpt)
In a telling sign of how seriously the catastrophe in occupied Iraq has damaged their governments, US President George W. Bush on Thursday lavished praise on visiting Australian Prime Minister John Howard and launched an extraordinary intervention into the campaign for this year’s scheduled Australian elections.
Their brief media conference on the White House steps was truly surreal. It brought together two blood-soaked political criminals, clinging to each other for electoral survival. One measure of the depth of Bush’s predicament is that he sought to inflate the importance of a man as politically and historically insignificant as the current Australian leader. He hailed Howard—a political flunkey whose government has slavishly followed the US administration—as a “close friend” whose “advice” and “clear vision” were highly appreciated.
A near-fiasco in the final moments of the press conference made clear the purpose of the stage-managed performance. It concerned the final question, which was put to Bush by Steve Lewis from the Australian, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian flagship. Lewis asked Bush to comment on the pledge made by opposition Labor Party leader Mark Latham to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq by Christmas.
Lewis apparently missed his cue to present his question, producing the following exchange:
President Bush: No other questions? This is unbelievable. You better hurry ...
Prime Minister Howard: Mr. Lewis, Steve Lewis, the Australian.
Steve Lewis: President Bush, I’d like to ask you a question ...
President Bush: Where are you? There you are.
Steve Lewis: Just here.
President Bush: Thank you.
Answering Lewis’ question, Bush made the most strident attack by an American president on an Australian political leader in living memory, describing Latham’s policy as “disastrous” and implicitly accusing the Labor leader of siding with “enemy” terrorists.
“It would dispirit those who love freedom in Iraq,” Bush declared. “It would say that the Australian government doesn’t see the hope of a free, democratic society leading to a peaceful world. It would embolden the enemy to believe that they could shake our will. See, they want to kill innocent life because they think that the Western world and the free world is weak.”
From any objective standpoint, Bush’s diatribe was absurd. In the first place, the Howard government’s troop deployment in Iraq is militarily insignificant. Of more than 130,000 foreign troops, including some 120,000 from the US, Australia has just 280 actually on the ground in Iraq, none of whom are directly involved in the major military operations against the growing insurgency.
Secondly, Labor has no fundamental differences with Howard. Rather, it regards the Iraq war as undermining the “war on terror,” as well as Australia’s national security. Latham’s call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq is based on the tactical calculation that Australian military forces are needed for operations closer to home.
As for the equation of the US-led occupation with freedom and democracy, that claim lies in tatters after more than a year of mass killings and brutal repression against the Iraqi population, the exposure of systematic torture and abuse of prisoners in US jails, and the installation of a widely despised puppet government in order to secure US hegemony over Iraq’s oil wealth.
Precisely because of this debacle, Bush felt the need to bolster Howard’s political credentials. No one, not even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has been a more enthusiastic or unconditional backer of the Bush administration and the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, with the withdrawal of Spanish troops, followed by other members of the threadbare “coalition of the willing,” Bush cannot afford to see Howard defeated.
Read Entire Article
Satya Magazine: 10 Year Anniversary
Satya Magazine is a monthly publication focusing on vegetarianism, environmentalism, animal advocacy, and social justice. In Sanskrit, "satya" means "truth," and formed the basis of Mohandas Gandhi’s Satyagraha or "truth action" movement for Indian self-sufficiency. Satya Magazine is committed to continuing Gandhi’s legacy by increasing dialogue among activists from diverse backgrounds and engaging readers in ways to integrate compassion into their daily lives.
Satya
Satya
Saturday, June 05, 2004
Learning About Globalization
I would start with John Benyon and David Dunkerley, edited Globalization: The Reader (Routledge, 2000) to get a feel for the competing views... perhaps with a quick visit to a source like The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2001) for a view on why globalization is not a new subject.
There are a lot of good online sources:
Globalization: A Primer
Globalization: Key Concepts
Landscapes of Global Capital
Rise of Global Anticapitalism Movements
There are a lot of good online sources:
Globalization: A Primer
Globalization: Key Concepts
Landscapes of Global Capital
Rise of Global Anticapitalism Movements
So You Want to Learn About Marxist Cultural Theory?
This is Illinois State University English Professor Ron Strickland's excellent online Marxist Cultural Theory course. If you get the chance, take the course (contact him and tell him you are interested!). You can work out credit through your home university. It is a great opportunity as Ron usually gets leading critics (that you are reading) to engage in a dialoge with students. Also the class is usually composed of students from across the nation and sometimes from other countries. Here are some of the highlights of the past two courses:
Course Syllabus
Course Readings
Ron Strickland's Homepage
Marxist Internet Archive
Course Syllabus
Course Readings
Ron Strickland's Homepage
Marxist Internet Archive
Friday, June 04, 2004
Remembering Gloria Anzaldua
I've read both "Borderlands/La Frontera" and the collection "This Bridge Called my Back"... I also had the pleasure of seeing Anzaldua speak at the University of Illinois--Champaign. Her work/books were very influential in my development--she caused me to reflect on the mixed cultural conditions of the americas and how we need to rethink our cultural conditioning... she will be missed.
Posted at Small Press Distribution
Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004)
Internationally recognized cultural theorist and creative writer, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, passed away on May 15 from diabetes-related complications. She was 61 years old. A versatile author, Anzaldúa published poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, children's books, and multigenre anthologies.
As one of the first openly lesbian Chicana authors, Anzaldúa played a major role in redefining contemporary Chicano/a and lesbian/queer identities. And as editor or co-editor of three multicultural anthologies, Anzaldúa has also played a vital role in developing an inclusionary feminist movement. Anzaldúa is best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a hybrid collection of poetry and prose which was named one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by both Hungry Mind Review and Utne Reader. Anzaldúa's published works also include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), a ground-breaking collection of essays and poems widely recognized by scholars as the premiere multicultural feminist text; Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists-of-Color (1990), a multigenre collection used in many university classrooms; two bilingual children's books--Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro lado (1993) and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/ Prietita y la Llorona (1995); Interviews/Entrevistas (2000), a memoir-like collection of interviews; and this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation (2002), a co-edited collection of essays, poetry, and artwork that examines the current status of feminist/womanist theorizing.
Anzaldúa was born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas in 1942, the eldest child of Urbano and Amalia Anzaldúa. She received her B.A. from Pan American University, her M.A. from University of Texas, Austin, and was completing her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A public memorial will be planned at a later date.
Posted at Small Press Distribution
Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004)
Internationally recognized cultural theorist and creative writer, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, passed away on May 15 from diabetes-related complications. She was 61 years old. A versatile author, Anzaldúa published poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, children's books, and multigenre anthologies.
As one of the first openly lesbian Chicana authors, Anzaldúa played a major role in redefining contemporary Chicano/a and lesbian/queer identities. And as editor or co-editor of three multicultural anthologies, Anzaldúa has also played a vital role in developing an inclusionary feminist movement. Anzaldúa is best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a hybrid collection of poetry and prose which was named one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by both Hungry Mind Review and Utne Reader. Anzaldúa's published works also include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), a ground-breaking collection of essays and poems widely recognized by scholars as the premiere multicultural feminist text; Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists-of-Color (1990), a multigenre collection used in many university classrooms; two bilingual children's books--Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro lado (1993) and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/ Prietita y la Llorona (1995); Interviews/Entrevistas (2000), a memoir-like collection of interviews; and this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation (2002), a co-edited collection of essays, poetry, and artwork that examines the current status of feminist/womanist theorizing.
Anzaldúa was born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas in 1942, the eldest child of Urbano and Amalia Anzaldúa. She received her B.A. from Pan American University, her M.A. from University of Texas, Austin, and was completing her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A public memorial will be planned at a later date.
Newseum's Strategies for Relegitimizing Journalism in the Information Age
"From Heroic Objectivity to the News Stream: The Newseum's Strategies for Relegitimizing Journalism in the Information Age"
Ted Friedman
Originally published in Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15:3 (September, 1998)
Introduction
The Newseum, "the world's only interactive museum of news," opened its doors in Arlington, Virginia in April of 1997. Combining historical exhibits, high-tech spectacle, and the manic ambiance of a busy shopping mall, the Newseum is state-of-the-art "edutainment." Built at a cost of $50 million (Freedom Forum, 1998b), the Newseum is free to the public. It's the project of the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation with close ties to the Gannett Company, one of America's largest media corporations.
In an era when, according to one survey, "two out of three members of the public [have] nothing or nothing good to say about the media" (Times Mirror Center for People and the Press, 1995)(1), the Newseum aims to spruce up the image of journalism. As founder Al Neuharth puts it, "By taking visitors behind the scenes, we hope to forge a deeper understanding of the role of news and a free press in our lives" (Freedom Forum Online, 1998). What exactly that role is supposed to be, however, is a tricky question to answer, and the frenzy with which the Newseum assaults the visitor attests to the ongoing legitimation crisis in American journalism.
The professional status and public authority of contemporary American journalism is grounded in the doctrine of "objectivity." Objectivity insists that facts can be separated from values, and that the proper role of the media is to sort, verify, and deliver those "unbiased" facts to readers. A critical function of the ideology of objectivity is to render invisible the press's power to shape and reinforce public opinion and cultural standards. Objectivity asks us to think of the media not as an independent influence on American life, but only the transparent transmitter of already-existing information. As with baseball umpires, you shouldn't notice reporters as long as they're doing their jobs right. As Michael Schudson (1995) has pointed out, this accounts for the invisibility of journalism in conventional American historiography.(2) Most narratives of American history assume the role of the news is simply to transmit information; the real historical actors are supposed to be the subjects about whom reporters write.
This helps explain why the United States has never has a major press museum before the opening of the Newseum. It'd be like an umpires' museum - what would you show besides the mistakes? But it's not hard to see why the Freedom Forum concluded a press museum is now needed to bolster journalism's sagging cultural capital. At this point in our information-saturated age, ignoring the media is like ignoring the elephant in your living room. The very success which has made the media so ubiquitous - and financially lucrative - has eroded its claims to professional authority. It's no longer credible to treat the press as simply an invisible messenger. Postmodern culture trains viewers to notice the medium as well as the message. Take, for example, the celebritization of network news. The high profile of superstar newscasters like Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer has made them more marketable, but at the same time less credible as "objective" reporters who can be relied upon to subordinate their individual opinions to a depersonalizing professional method. It's no wonder, then, that the fantasy of objectivity is under siege from all sides, as the press is regularly accused of "bias" from both the left and the right. The legitimizing narrative of journalism is breaking down. Viewers may still watch, read, and listen to the news, but they respect it less (McAneny & Saad, 1997; Fallows, 1996).
In the face of this predicament, any relegitimation project has two options: to refurbish objectivity so that it can stand the scrutiny of a media-savvy public, or to move beyond objectivity altogether. The Newseum attempts both strategies.
The Newseum's version of objectivity gives up on the ideal of invisibility, acknowledging that the press is a large, influential institution in American life. Rather than mystifying the press by hiding its work, it mythologizes the press by turning reporters into heroic freedom fighters (Reese, 1997). That's still kosher under the values of objectivity, because the process of transmission remains transparent and "value-free." What's heroic is the act of transmission itself. There's a contradiction to this fantasy of heroic objectivity, though. Systems of objectivity are designed to subordinate individual autonomy to depersonalizing professional technique, in order to guarantee standardized, reproducible results. The Newseum attempts to gloss over this problem by highlighting the achievements of exceptional figures such as Woodward and Bernstein. But, as we shall see, when the Newseum's focus shifts from mythic history to the ordinary experiences of everyday reporters, the contradictions in the heroic model of objectivity begin to seep through.
In the age of satellites and the Internet, of course, the mechanics of transmission are changing rapidly. The proliferation of instant, globally accessible news sources, in fact, offers the utopian promise of a way out of the compromises of objectivity. As the cramped column space of the newspaper is replaced by the unlimited bandwidth of the World Wide Web, perhaps univocal objectivity can give way to a polyphonous public sphere. Rather than journalists sorting through information to cull kernels of fact, viewers and readers could become empowered to more directly engage and assess information. As the Newseum struggles to transcend the constraints of objectivity, it offers occasional glimpses of this vision of a free, unmediated flow of information, what it calls "the news stream." But, we will discover, this utopian vision runs into its own problems.
The Newseum is a dazzling, disorienting, and self-contradicting institution. What lends this confusion a modicum of coherence is the narrative imposed by the building's design. Visitors can't simply wander from room to room, as in a traditional museum. Instead, new arrivals are quickly deposited on the top floor of the museum, and must follow a single path weaving through each exhibit in order to get back to the entrance. The path is roughly chronological: after an introductory video, the tour begins with the News History Gallery, representing journalism's past. From there, it's on to the Video News Wall, which captures the immediate present with live feeds from an array of all-news channels. Finally, you end up in the futuristic Interactive Newsroom, a riot of multimedia computers and participatory activities. The chronological development of the Newseum roughly coincides with its ideological development, as well: while the early sections lay out the model of heroic objectivity, the high-tech exhibits move on to the utopian vision of the news stream. To capture the experience of stumbling through the Newseum, this essay will follow the building's structure, walking through each exhibit in order. The Newseum is jam-packed with information, so this analysis will be far from complete. But I'll try to hit all the highlights.
Read the Rest of the Essay
Visit Newseum Website
Ted Friedman
Originally published in Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15:3 (September, 1998)
Introduction
The Newseum, "the world's only interactive museum of news," opened its doors in Arlington, Virginia in April of 1997. Combining historical exhibits, high-tech spectacle, and the manic ambiance of a busy shopping mall, the Newseum is state-of-the-art "edutainment." Built at a cost of $50 million (Freedom Forum, 1998b), the Newseum is free to the public. It's the project of the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation with close ties to the Gannett Company, one of America's largest media corporations.
In an era when, according to one survey, "two out of three members of the public [have] nothing or nothing good to say about the media" (Times Mirror Center for People and the Press, 1995)(1), the Newseum aims to spruce up the image of journalism. As founder Al Neuharth puts it, "By taking visitors behind the scenes, we hope to forge a deeper understanding of the role of news and a free press in our lives" (Freedom Forum Online, 1998). What exactly that role is supposed to be, however, is a tricky question to answer, and the frenzy with which the Newseum assaults the visitor attests to the ongoing legitimation crisis in American journalism.
The professional status and public authority of contemporary American journalism is grounded in the doctrine of "objectivity." Objectivity insists that facts can be separated from values, and that the proper role of the media is to sort, verify, and deliver those "unbiased" facts to readers. A critical function of the ideology of objectivity is to render invisible the press's power to shape and reinforce public opinion and cultural standards. Objectivity asks us to think of the media not as an independent influence on American life, but only the transparent transmitter of already-existing information. As with baseball umpires, you shouldn't notice reporters as long as they're doing their jobs right. As Michael Schudson (1995) has pointed out, this accounts for the invisibility of journalism in conventional American historiography.(2) Most narratives of American history assume the role of the news is simply to transmit information; the real historical actors are supposed to be the subjects about whom reporters write.
This helps explain why the United States has never has a major press museum before the opening of the Newseum. It'd be like an umpires' museum - what would you show besides the mistakes? But it's not hard to see why the Freedom Forum concluded a press museum is now needed to bolster journalism's sagging cultural capital. At this point in our information-saturated age, ignoring the media is like ignoring the elephant in your living room. The very success which has made the media so ubiquitous - and financially lucrative - has eroded its claims to professional authority. It's no longer credible to treat the press as simply an invisible messenger. Postmodern culture trains viewers to notice the medium as well as the message. Take, for example, the celebritization of network news. The high profile of superstar newscasters like Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer has made them more marketable, but at the same time less credible as "objective" reporters who can be relied upon to subordinate their individual opinions to a depersonalizing professional method. It's no wonder, then, that the fantasy of objectivity is under siege from all sides, as the press is regularly accused of "bias" from both the left and the right. The legitimizing narrative of journalism is breaking down. Viewers may still watch, read, and listen to the news, but they respect it less (McAneny & Saad, 1997; Fallows, 1996).
In the face of this predicament, any relegitimation project has two options: to refurbish objectivity so that it can stand the scrutiny of a media-savvy public, or to move beyond objectivity altogether. The Newseum attempts both strategies.
The Newseum's version of objectivity gives up on the ideal of invisibility, acknowledging that the press is a large, influential institution in American life. Rather than mystifying the press by hiding its work, it mythologizes the press by turning reporters into heroic freedom fighters (Reese, 1997). That's still kosher under the values of objectivity, because the process of transmission remains transparent and "value-free." What's heroic is the act of transmission itself. There's a contradiction to this fantasy of heroic objectivity, though. Systems of objectivity are designed to subordinate individual autonomy to depersonalizing professional technique, in order to guarantee standardized, reproducible results. The Newseum attempts to gloss over this problem by highlighting the achievements of exceptional figures such as Woodward and Bernstein. But, as we shall see, when the Newseum's focus shifts from mythic history to the ordinary experiences of everyday reporters, the contradictions in the heroic model of objectivity begin to seep through.
In the age of satellites and the Internet, of course, the mechanics of transmission are changing rapidly. The proliferation of instant, globally accessible news sources, in fact, offers the utopian promise of a way out of the compromises of objectivity. As the cramped column space of the newspaper is replaced by the unlimited bandwidth of the World Wide Web, perhaps univocal objectivity can give way to a polyphonous public sphere. Rather than journalists sorting through information to cull kernels of fact, viewers and readers could become empowered to more directly engage and assess information. As the Newseum struggles to transcend the constraints of objectivity, it offers occasional glimpses of this vision of a free, unmediated flow of information, what it calls "the news stream." But, we will discover, this utopian vision runs into its own problems.
The Newseum is a dazzling, disorienting, and self-contradicting institution. What lends this confusion a modicum of coherence is the narrative imposed by the building's design. Visitors can't simply wander from room to room, as in a traditional museum. Instead, new arrivals are quickly deposited on the top floor of the museum, and must follow a single path weaving through each exhibit in order to get back to the entrance. The path is roughly chronological: after an introductory video, the tour begins with the News History Gallery, representing journalism's past. From there, it's on to the Video News Wall, which captures the immediate present with live feeds from an array of all-news channels. Finally, you end up in the futuristic Interactive Newsroom, a riot of multimedia computers and participatory activities. The chronological development of the Newseum roughly coincides with its ideological development, as well: while the early sections lay out the model of heroic objectivity, the high-tech exhibits move on to the utopian vision of the news stream. To capture the experience of stumbling through the Newseum, this essay will follow the building's structure, walking through each exhibit in order. The Newseum is jam-packed with information, so this analysis will be far from complete. But I'll try to hit all the highlights.
Read the Rest of the Essay
Visit Newseum Website
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Diebold Variations
The River points out these great parody posters of Diebold (the company in charge of the electronic voting booth technology) created by slouching toward urschleim:
Diebold Variations
Diebold Variations
Wisdom from Fup the Cat
Powell's Books (Portland Oregon) has a store cat who has just realized that its sheltered, insular life is robbing it of its edge. How many of us can say the same?
Fup the Cat
Fup the Cat
Waking Up the Young and Apathetic
Generation Debt - The New Economics of Being Young
by Anya Kamenetz
Village Voice
A Sleeping Class
Young Americans fight for every cause but their own. Wake up, already.
Read Entire Essay
by Anya Kamenetz
Village Voice
A Sleeping Class
Young Americans fight for every cause but their own. Wake up, already.
Read Entire Essay
The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney
This is a year old, but it is even more important today.
Thivai
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney
Greg Palast,
AlterNet
Have you heard about Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Congresswoman?
According to those quoted on National Public Radio, McKinney’s “a loose cannon” (media expert) who “the people of Atlanta are embarrassed and disgusted” (politician) by, and she is also “loony” and “dangerous” (senator from her own party).
Yow! And why is McKinney dangerous/loony/disgusting? According to NPR, “McKinney implied that the [Bush] Administration knew in advance about September 11 and deliberately held back the information.”
The New York Times’ Lynette Clemetson revealed her comments went even further over the edge: “Ms. McKinney suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.”
That’s loony, all right. As an editor of the highly respected Atlanta Journal Constitution told NPR, McKinney’s “practically accused the President of murder!”
Problem is, McKinney never said it.
That’s right. The “quote” from McKinney is a complete fabrication. A whopper, a fabulous fib, a fake, a flim-flam. Just freakin’ made up.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi, Lynette. My name is Greg Palast, and I wanted to follow up on a story of yours. It says, let’s see, after the opening -- it’s about Cynthia McKinney -- it’s dated Washington byline August 21. “McKinney’s [opponent] capitalized on the furor caused by Miss McKinney’s suggestion this year that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.” Now, I have been trying my darndest to find this phrase . . . I can’t. . .
Lynette Clemetson, New York Times: Did you search the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
Yes, but I haven’t been able to find that statement.
I’ve heard that statement--it was all over the place.
I know it was all over the place, except no one can find it and that’s why I’m concerned. Now did you see the statement in the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
Yeah....
[Note: No such direct quote from McKinney can be found in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.]
And did you confirm this with McKinney?
Well, I worked with her office. The statement is from the floor of the House [of Representatives].... Right?
So did you check the statement from the Floor of the House?
I mean I wouldn’t have done the story. . . . Have you looked at House transcripts?
Yes. Did you check that?
Of course.
You did check it?
[Note: No such McKinney statement can be found in the transcripts or other records of the House of Representatives.]
I think you have to go back to the House transcripts.... I mean it was all over the place at the time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, this is one fact the Times reporter didn’t fake: The McKinney “quote” was, indeed, all over the place: in the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and needless to say, all the other metropolitan dailies--everywhere but in Congresswoman McKinney’s mouth.
Nor was it in the Congressional Record, nor in any recorded talk, nor on her Website, nor in any of her radio talks. Here’s the Congresswoman’s statement from the record:
“George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11.”
Oh.
And I should say former Congresswoman McKinney.
She was beaten in the August 2002 Democratic primary. More precisely, she was beaten to death, politically, by the fabricated quote.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Months before the 2000 presidential elections, the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 90,000 citizens from the voter rolls because they were convicted felons . . . and felons can’t vote in Florida. There was one problem: 97 percent of those on the list were, in fact, innocent.
They weren’t felons, but they were guilty . . . of not being white. Over half the list contained names of non-whites. I’m not guessing: I have the list from out of the computers of Katherine Harris’ office -- and the “scrubbed” voter’s race is listed with each name.
And that’s how our President was elected: by illegally removing tens of thousands of legal African American voters before the race.
But you knew that . . . at least you did if you read the British papers -- I reported this discovery for the Guardian of London. And I reported again on the nightly news. You saw that . . . if you live in Europe or Canada or South America.
In the USA, the story ran on page zero. Well, let me correct that a bit. The Washington Post did run the story on the fake felon list that selected our President -- even with a comment under my byline. I wrote the story within weeks of the election, while Al Gore was still in the race. The Post courageously ran it . . . seven months after the election.
The New York Times ran it . . . well, never, even after Katherine Harris confessed the scam to a Florida court after she and the state were successfully sued by the NAACP.
So, I can’t say the New York Times always makes up the news. Sometimes the news just doesn’t make it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At BBC Television, we had Florida’s computer files and documents, marked “confidential” -- stone-cold evidence showing how the vote fix was deliberately crafted by Republican officials. Not a single major U.S. paper asked for the documents – not from the state of Florida nor from the BBC. Only one U.S. Congressperson asked for the evidence and made it public: Cynthia McKinney of Atlanta.
That was her mistake.
The company that came up with the faux felon list that determined the presidency: a Republican-tied database company named “ChoicePoint,” one of the richest, most powerful companies in Atlanta.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before I started with the BBC in London, I took a one-day television training course with the Washington correspondent for Fox News.
We filmed Al Gore. Specifically, we filmed the eleven seconds of Gore’s impromptu remarks . . . which we’d been given two hours earlier by his advance ladies. They wore blue suits.
The man for the Associated Press wrote a lead paragraph of Gore’s impromptu remarks one hour before Al walked in and said them. The network reporter copied down the AP lead line. I copied down the AP lead line.
After we got Al Gore’s eleven seconds and footage of someone in the crowd saying, “Wow, Al Gore really talked different from the way Al Gore usually talks,” we set up in front of the hotel where Al Gore talked. The important network reporter looked sternly into the camera and spoke in a very important voice. I squinted into the camera and spoke in a very important voice.
I can’t remember what I said.
He can’t remember what he said.
No one can remember what we said.
No one should.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Did I mention to you that (ex-)Congresswoman McKinney is black? And not just any kind of black. She’s the uppity kind of black.
What I mean by uppity is this:
After George Bush Senior left the White House, he became an advisor and lobbyist for a Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. Hey, a guy’s got to work. But there were a couple of questions about Barrick, to say the least. For example, was Barrick’s Congo gold mine funding both sides of a civil war and perpetuating that bloody conflict? Only one Congressperson demanded hearings on the matter.
You’ve guessed: Cynthia McKinney.
That was covered in the . . . well, it wasn’t covered at all in the U.S. press.
McKinney contacted me at the BBC. She asked if I’d heard of Barrick. Indeed, I had. Top human rights investigators had evidence that a mine that Barrick bought in 1999 had, in clearing their Tanzanian properties three years earlier, bulldozed mine shafts . . . burying about 50 miners alive.
I certainly knew Barrick: They’d sued the Guardian for daring to run a story I’d written about the allegations of the killings. Barrick never sued an American paper for daring to run the story, because no American paper dared.
The primary source for my story, an internationally famous lawyer named Tundu Lissu, was charged by the Tanzanian police with sedition, and arrested, for calling for an investigation. McKinney has been trying to save his life with an international campaign aimed at Barrick.
That was another of her mistakes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The New York Times wrote about McKinney that Atlanta’s “prominent Black leaders -- including Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP and former Mayor Maynard Jackson -- who had supported Ms. McKinney in the past -- distanced themselves from her this time.”
Really? Atlanta has four internationally recognized black leaders. Martin Luther King III did not abandon McKinney. I checked with him. Nor did Julian Bond (the Times ran a rare retraction on their website at Bond’s request). But that left Atlanta’s two other notables: Vernon Jordan and Andrew Young. Here, the Times had it right; no question that these two black faces of the Atlanta Establishment let McKinney twist slowly in the wind -- because, the Times implied, of her alleged looniness.
But maybe there was another reason Young and Jordan let McKinney swing. Remember Barrick? George Bush’s former gold-mining company, the target of McKinney’s investigations? Did I mention to you that Andy Young and Vernon Jordan are both on Barrick’s payroll? Well, I just did.
Did the Times mention it? I guess that wasn’t fit to print.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I suppose it’s my fault, McKinney’s electronic lynching. Unlike other politicians, McKinney, who’s earning her doctorate at Princeton School of Diplomacy, enjoys doing her own research, not relying on staff memos. She’s long been a reader of my reports from Britain, including transcripts of BBC Television investigations. On November 6, 2001, BBC Newsnight ran this report with a follow-up story in the Guardian the next day:
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
Probes Before 11 September
Officials Told to 'Back Off' on Saudis Before September 11.
FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11. US intelligence agencies have come under criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are complaining that their hands were tied.
FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, with which they were linked.
And so on. There was not one word in there that Bush knew about the September 11 attacks in advance. It was about a horrific intelligence failure. This was the result, FBI and CIA/DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) insiders told us at BBC, of a block placed on investigations of Saudi Arabian financing of terror. We even showed on-screen a copy of a top-secret document passed to us by disgruntled FBI agents, directing that the agency would not investigate a “suspected terrorist organization” headed in the US by a member of the bin Laden family. The FBI knew about these guys before September 11 (with their office down the street from the hijackers’ address).
The CIA also knew about a meeting in Paris, prior to September 11, involving a Saudi prince, arms dealers, and al Qaeda. Although the information was in hand, the investigation was stymied by Bush’s intelligence chiefs. This is what McKinney wanted investigated.
Why were the Saudis, the bin Ladens (except Osama), and this organization (the World Assembly of Muslim Youth) off the investigation list prior to September 11, despite evidence that they were reasonable targets for inquiry? The BBC thought it worth asking; the Guardian thought it worth asking -- and so did Congresswoman McKinney. Why no pre-September 11 investigations of these characters?
And what was the reason for the block? According to the experts we broadcast on British television, it was the Bush Administration’s fanatic desire to protect their relations with Saudi Arabia -- a deadly policy prejudice which, according to the respected Center for Public Integrity of Washington, DC, seems influenced by the Bush family ties, and Republican donors’ ties, to Saudi royalty. McKinney, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, thought the BBC/Guardian/Observer investigation worth a follow-up Congressional review.
According to NPR, her “loony” statement was made on the radio news show Counterspin. (Not incidentally, Counterspin is produced by an NPR competitor, the nonprofit Pacifica Radio Network.) I have the transcript; it’s on the web. Her charge that Bush knew about the September 11 attacks in advance and deliberately covered it up can’t be found.
What can be read is her call for a follow-up on the revelations from the BBC and USA Today on the information about a growing terror threat ignored by Bush . . . and whether the policy response -- war, war, war -- was protecting America or simply enriching Bush’s big arms industry donors and business partners. Fair questions. But asking them is dangerous . . . to one’s political career.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The BBC report which got McKinney in hot water mentioned the Bush Administration’s reluctance to investigate associates of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which the FBI secret document termed “a suspected terrorist organization.” They may be. They may not be. McKinney’s question was only, Why no investigation?
Just after McKinney’s defeat, the courier of Osama bin Laden's latest alleged taped threat against the United States was busted in Africa: He was on the staff of WAMY. Shortly thereafter, Prince Abdullah, the Saudi dictator, invited WAMY leaders to his palace and told them, “There is no extremism in the defending of the faith.”
So if you listen to U.S. radio and read U.S. papers, you are told this: Abdullah’s protector and godfather, George W. Bush, is sane and patriotic, and McKinney, who wants to investigate these guys, is a loony and a traitor. Got it?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ted Koppel’s Nightline did a kind of follow-up to the BBC elections story. Our BBC team discovered that of the 180,000 votes never counted in the Florida 2000 presidential race, a sickeningly disproportionate number came from black counties. In Gadsden County, where more than half the population is black, one in eight ballots was marked "spoiled" and, thus, never counted.
Koppel’s team got on the case, flying down to Florida to find out why thousands of black votes were never counted. They talked to experts, they talked to important white people, and Koppel reported this: Many blacks are new to voting and, with limited education, have a difficult time with marking the sophisticated ballots. In other words, ABC concluded, African Americans are too fucking dumb to figure out how to vote.
Hey, if true, then you have to report it. But it wasn’t. It was a fib, a tall tale, made-for-TV mendacity, polite liberal electronic cross-burning intellectual eugenics.
Here’s the real scoop: All races of voters make errors on paper ballots. But in white counties like Leon (Tallahassee), if you make a stray mark or other error, the vote machine rejects your ballot, and you get another ballot to vote again. But in black counties like Gadsden, you make a mistake and the machine quietly accepts and voids your ballot.
In other words, it wasn’t that African Americans are too dumb to vote but that European American reporters are too dumb to ask, too lazy to bother, too gutless to tell officialdom to stop lying into the cameras.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in the edit room with Mr. Washington Network TV Reporter, we were ready to bake the cake, the Gore story. We had all the ingredients.
“Take out your watch,” said the Fox man.
“You get 90 seconds,” he said. “That’s what you get. You got an intro, 40 seconds of narration, two sound bites, and end with a stand-up to camera.”
I repeated, “Forty seconds narrate, two sound bites, stand-up.”
He said, “Two sound bites and a stand-up. Every story. Every time.”
He said, “What do you think?”
I said, “I think I’m leaving the country.”
Greg Palast is an investigative reporter for BBC television and author of the New York Times bestseller, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” (Penguin/Plume 2003). This article is based on his contribution to the compendium, "Abuse Your Illusions," released this month by Disinformation Press. Oliver Shykles, Fredda Weinberg, Ina Howard, and Phil Tanfield contributed research for this report.
Thivai
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney
Greg Palast,
AlterNet
Have you heard about Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Congresswoman?
According to those quoted on National Public Radio, McKinney’s “a loose cannon” (media expert) who “the people of Atlanta are embarrassed and disgusted” (politician) by, and she is also “loony” and “dangerous” (senator from her own party).
Yow! And why is McKinney dangerous/loony/disgusting? According to NPR, “McKinney implied that the [Bush] Administration knew in advance about September 11 and deliberately held back the information.”
The New York Times’ Lynette Clemetson revealed her comments went even further over the edge: “Ms. McKinney suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.”
That’s loony, all right. As an editor of the highly respected Atlanta Journal Constitution told NPR, McKinney’s “practically accused the President of murder!”
Problem is, McKinney never said it.
That’s right. The “quote” from McKinney is a complete fabrication. A whopper, a fabulous fib, a fake, a flim-flam. Just freakin’ made up.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi, Lynette. My name is Greg Palast, and I wanted to follow up on a story of yours. It says, let’s see, after the opening -- it’s about Cynthia McKinney -- it’s dated Washington byline August 21. “McKinney’s [opponent] capitalized on the furor caused by Miss McKinney’s suggestion this year that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.” Now, I have been trying my darndest to find this phrase . . . I can’t. . .
Lynette Clemetson, New York Times: Did you search the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
Yes, but I haven’t been able to find that statement.
I’ve heard that statement--it was all over the place.
I know it was all over the place, except no one can find it and that’s why I’m concerned. Now did you see the statement in the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
Yeah....
[Note: No such direct quote from McKinney can be found in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.]
And did you confirm this with McKinney?
Well, I worked with her office. The statement is from the floor of the House [of Representatives].... Right?
So did you check the statement from the Floor of the House?
I mean I wouldn’t have done the story. . . . Have you looked at House transcripts?
Yes. Did you check that?
Of course.
You did check it?
[Note: No such McKinney statement can be found in the transcripts or other records of the House of Representatives.]
I think you have to go back to the House transcripts.... I mean it was all over the place at the time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, this is one fact the Times reporter didn’t fake: The McKinney “quote” was, indeed, all over the place: in the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and needless to say, all the other metropolitan dailies--everywhere but in Congresswoman McKinney’s mouth.
Nor was it in the Congressional Record, nor in any recorded talk, nor on her Website, nor in any of her radio talks. Here’s the Congresswoman’s statement from the record:
“George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11.”
Oh.
And I should say former Congresswoman McKinney.
She was beaten in the August 2002 Democratic primary. More precisely, she was beaten to death, politically, by the fabricated quote.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Months before the 2000 presidential elections, the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 90,000 citizens from the voter rolls because they were convicted felons . . . and felons can’t vote in Florida. There was one problem: 97 percent of those on the list were, in fact, innocent.
They weren’t felons, but they were guilty . . . of not being white. Over half the list contained names of non-whites. I’m not guessing: I have the list from out of the computers of Katherine Harris’ office -- and the “scrubbed” voter’s race is listed with each name.
And that’s how our President was elected: by illegally removing tens of thousands of legal African American voters before the race.
But you knew that . . . at least you did if you read the British papers -- I reported this discovery for the Guardian of London. And I reported again on the nightly news. You saw that . . . if you live in Europe or Canada or South America.
In the USA, the story ran on page zero. Well, let me correct that a bit. The Washington Post did run the story on the fake felon list that selected our President -- even with a comment under my byline. I wrote the story within weeks of the election, while Al Gore was still in the race. The Post courageously ran it . . . seven months after the election.
The New York Times ran it . . . well, never, even after Katherine Harris confessed the scam to a Florida court after she and the state were successfully sued by the NAACP.
So, I can’t say the New York Times always makes up the news. Sometimes the news just doesn’t make it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At BBC Television, we had Florida’s computer files and documents, marked “confidential” -- stone-cold evidence showing how the vote fix was deliberately crafted by Republican officials. Not a single major U.S. paper asked for the documents – not from the state of Florida nor from the BBC. Only one U.S. Congressperson asked for the evidence and made it public: Cynthia McKinney of Atlanta.
That was her mistake.
The company that came up with the faux felon list that determined the presidency: a Republican-tied database company named “ChoicePoint,” one of the richest, most powerful companies in Atlanta.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before I started with the BBC in London, I took a one-day television training course with the Washington correspondent for Fox News.
We filmed Al Gore. Specifically, we filmed the eleven seconds of Gore’s impromptu remarks . . . which we’d been given two hours earlier by his advance ladies. They wore blue suits.
The man for the Associated Press wrote a lead paragraph of Gore’s impromptu remarks one hour before Al walked in and said them. The network reporter copied down the AP lead line. I copied down the AP lead line.
After we got Al Gore’s eleven seconds and footage of someone in the crowd saying, “Wow, Al Gore really talked different from the way Al Gore usually talks,” we set up in front of the hotel where Al Gore talked. The important network reporter looked sternly into the camera and spoke in a very important voice. I squinted into the camera and spoke in a very important voice.
I can’t remember what I said.
He can’t remember what he said.
No one can remember what we said.
No one should.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Did I mention to you that (ex-)Congresswoman McKinney is black? And not just any kind of black. She’s the uppity kind of black.
What I mean by uppity is this:
After George Bush Senior left the White House, he became an advisor and lobbyist for a Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. Hey, a guy’s got to work. But there were a couple of questions about Barrick, to say the least. For example, was Barrick’s Congo gold mine funding both sides of a civil war and perpetuating that bloody conflict? Only one Congressperson demanded hearings on the matter.
You’ve guessed: Cynthia McKinney.
That was covered in the . . . well, it wasn’t covered at all in the U.S. press.
McKinney contacted me at the BBC. She asked if I’d heard of Barrick. Indeed, I had. Top human rights investigators had evidence that a mine that Barrick bought in 1999 had, in clearing their Tanzanian properties three years earlier, bulldozed mine shafts . . . burying about 50 miners alive.
I certainly knew Barrick: They’d sued the Guardian for daring to run a story I’d written about the allegations of the killings. Barrick never sued an American paper for daring to run the story, because no American paper dared.
The primary source for my story, an internationally famous lawyer named Tundu Lissu, was charged by the Tanzanian police with sedition, and arrested, for calling for an investigation. McKinney has been trying to save his life with an international campaign aimed at Barrick.
That was another of her mistakes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The New York Times wrote about McKinney that Atlanta’s “prominent Black leaders -- including Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP and former Mayor Maynard Jackson -- who had supported Ms. McKinney in the past -- distanced themselves from her this time.”
Really? Atlanta has four internationally recognized black leaders. Martin Luther King III did not abandon McKinney. I checked with him. Nor did Julian Bond (the Times ran a rare retraction on their website at Bond’s request). But that left Atlanta’s two other notables: Vernon Jordan and Andrew Young. Here, the Times had it right; no question that these two black faces of the Atlanta Establishment let McKinney twist slowly in the wind -- because, the Times implied, of her alleged looniness.
But maybe there was another reason Young and Jordan let McKinney swing. Remember Barrick? George Bush’s former gold-mining company, the target of McKinney’s investigations? Did I mention to you that Andy Young and Vernon Jordan are both on Barrick’s payroll? Well, I just did.
Did the Times mention it? I guess that wasn’t fit to print.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I suppose it’s my fault, McKinney’s electronic lynching. Unlike other politicians, McKinney, who’s earning her doctorate at Princeton School of Diplomacy, enjoys doing her own research, not relying on staff memos. She’s long been a reader of my reports from Britain, including transcripts of BBC Television investigations. On November 6, 2001, BBC Newsnight ran this report with a follow-up story in the Guardian the next day:
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
Probes Before 11 September
Officials Told to 'Back Off' on Saudis Before September 11.
FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11. US intelligence agencies have come under criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are complaining that their hands were tied.
FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, with which they were linked.
And so on. There was not one word in there that Bush knew about the September 11 attacks in advance. It was about a horrific intelligence failure. This was the result, FBI and CIA/DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) insiders told us at BBC, of a block placed on investigations of Saudi Arabian financing of terror. We even showed on-screen a copy of a top-secret document passed to us by disgruntled FBI agents, directing that the agency would not investigate a “suspected terrorist organization” headed in the US by a member of the bin Laden family. The FBI knew about these guys before September 11 (with their office down the street from the hijackers’ address).
The CIA also knew about a meeting in Paris, prior to September 11, involving a Saudi prince, arms dealers, and al Qaeda. Although the information was in hand, the investigation was stymied by Bush’s intelligence chiefs. This is what McKinney wanted investigated.
Why were the Saudis, the bin Ladens (except Osama), and this organization (the World Assembly of Muslim Youth) off the investigation list prior to September 11, despite evidence that they were reasonable targets for inquiry? The BBC thought it worth asking; the Guardian thought it worth asking -- and so did Congresswoman McKinney. Why no pre-September 11 investigations of these characters?
And what was the reason for the block? According to the experts we broadcast on British television, it was the Bush Administration’s fanatic desire to protect their relations with Saudi Arabia -- a deadly policy prejudice which, according to the respected Center for Public Integrity of Washington, DC, seems influenced by the Bush family ties, and Republican donors’ ties, to Saudi royalty. McKinney, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, thought the BBC/Guardian/Observer investigation worth a follow-up Congressional review.
According to NPR, her “loony” statement was made on the radio news show Counterspin. (Not incidentally, Counterspin is produced by an NPR competitor, the nonprofit Pacifica Radio Network.) I have the transcript; it’s on the web. Her charge that Bush knew about the September 11 attacks in advance and deliberately covered it up can’t be found.
What can be read is her call for a follow-up on the revelations from the BBC and USA Today on the information about a growing terror threat ignored by Bush . . . and whether the policy response -- war, war, war -- was protecting America or simply enriching Bush’s big arms industry donors and business partners. Fair questions. But asking them is dangerous . . . to one’s political career.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The BBC report which got McKinney in hot water mentioned the Bush Administration’s reluctance to investigate associates of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which the FBI secret document termed “a suspected terrorist organization.” They may be. They may not be. McKinney’s question was only, Why no investigation?
Just after McKinney’s defeat, the courier of Osama bin Laden's latest alleged taped threat against the United States was busted in Africa: He was on the staff of WAMY. Shortly thereafter, Prince Abdullah, the Saudi dictator, invited WAMY leaders to his palace and told them, “There is no extremism in the defending of the faith.”
So if you listen to U.S. radio and read U.S. papers, you are told this: Abdullah’s protector and godfather, George W. Bush, is sane and patriotic, and McKinney, who wants to investigate these guys, is a loony and a traitor. Got it?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ted Koppel’s Nightline did a kind of follow-up to the BBC elections story. Our BBC team discovered that of the 180,000 votes never counted in the Florida 2000 presidential race, a sickeningly disproportionate number came from black counties. In Gadsden County, where more than half the population is black, one in eight ballots was marked "spoiled" and, thus, never counted.
Koppel’s team got on the case, flying down to Florida to find out why thousands of black votes were never counted. They talked to experts, they talked to important white people, and Koppel reported this: Many blacks are new to voting and, with limited education, have a difficult time with marking the sophisticated ballots. In other words, ABC concluded, African Americans are too fucking dumb to figure out how to vote.
Hey, if true, then you have to report it. But it wasn’t. It was a fib, a tall tale, made-for-TV mendacity, polite liberal electronic cross-burning intellectual eugenics.
Here’s the real scoop: All races of voters make errors on paper ballots. But in white counties like Leon (Tallahassee), if you make a stray mark or other error, the vote machine rejects your ballot, and you get another ballot to vote again. But in black counties like Gadsden, you make a mistake and the machine quietly accepts and voids your ballot.
In other words, it wasn’t that African Americans are too dumb to vote but that European American reporters are too dumb to ask, too lazy to bother, too gutless to tell officialdom to stop lying into the cameras.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in the edit room with Mr. Washington Network TV Reporter, we were ready to bake the cake, the Gore story. We had all the ingredients.
“Take out your watch,” said the Fox man.
“You get 90 seconds,” he said. “That’s what you get. You got an intro, 40 seconds of narration, two sound bites, and end with a stand-up to camera.”
I repeated, “Forty seconds narrate, two sound bites, stand-up.”
He said, “Two sound bites and a stand-up. Every story. Every time.”
He said, “What do you think?”
I said, “I think I’m leaving the country.”
Greg Palast is an investigative reporter for BBC television and author of the New York Times bestseller, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” (Penguin/Plume 2003). This article is based on his contribution to the compendium, "Abuse Your Illusions," released this month by Disinformation Press. Oliver Shykles, Fredda Weinberg, Ina Howard, and Phil Tanfield contributed research for this report.
Bush Administration Freed Terror Suspect
Administration Freed Terror Suspect
By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer
Yahoo
Nabil al-Marabh was No. 27 on the FBI's list of terror suspects after Sept. 11. He trained in Afghanistan's militant camps, sent money to a roommate convicted in a foiled plot to bomb a hotel and boasted to an informant about plans to blow up a fuel truck inside a New York tunnel, FBI documents allege. The Bush administration set him free — to Syria — even though prosecutors had sought to bring criminal cases against him and judges openly expressed concerns about possible terrorist ties.
Al-Marabh served an eight-month jail sentence and was sent in January to his native Syria, which is regarded by the United States as a sponsor of terrorism. The quiet disposition of his case stands in stark contrast to the language FBI agents used to describe the man.
Al-Marabh "intended to martyr himself in an attack against the United States," an FBI agent wrote in a December 2002 report obtained by The Associated Press. A footnote in al-Marabh's deportation ruling last year added, "The FBI has been unable to rule out the possibility that al-Marabh has engaged in terrorist activity or will do so if he is not removed from the United States."
One FBI report summarized a high-level debriefing of a Jordanian informant named Ahmed Y. Ashwas that was personally conducted by the U.S. attorney in Chicago, signifying its importance. The informant alleged al-Marabh told him of specific terrorist plans during their time in prison.
Even the judge who accepted al-Marabh's plea agreement on minor immigration charges in 2002 balked. "Something about this case just makes me feel uncomfortable," Judge Richard Arcara said in court. The Justice Department assured the judge that al-Marabh did not have terrorist ties.
A second judge who ultimately ordered al-Marabh's deportation sided with FBI agents, federal prosecutors and Customs agents in the field who believed al-Marabh was tied to terrorism.
"The court finds applicant does present a danger to national security," U.S. Immigration Judge Robert D. Newberry ruled, concluding al-Marabh was "credibly linked to elements of terrorism" and had a "propensity to lie."
Neither the courts nor al-Marabh's lawyers were given access to the most striking allegations provided by the Jordanian informant.
Asked to explain the decision to free al-Marabh, Justice spokesman Bryan Sierra said the government has concerns about many people with suspected terror ties but cannot effectively try them in court without giving away intelligence sources and methods.
"If the government cannot prosecute terrorism charges, another option is to remove the individual from the United States via deportation. After careful review, this was determined to be the best option available under the law to protect our national security," he said.
But a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee scoffed at the explanation. "It's hard to believe that the best way to deal with the FBI's 27th most wanted terrorist is to send him back to a terrorist-sponsoring country," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. He said the Justice Department could have used a military tribunal or a classified criminal. "This action certainly raises a lot of questions and demands a lot of answers," Schumer said.
Internal FBI and Justice Department documents reviewed by AP show prosecutors and FBI agents in several cities gathered evidence that linked al-Marabh to:
--Raed Hijazi, the Boston cab driver convicted in Jordan for plotting to blow up an American-frequented hotel in Amman during the millennium celebrations of 1999. Al-Marabh and Hijazi were roommates at the Afghan training camps and later in the United States, and al-Marabh sent money to Hijazi.
--The Detroit apartment where four men were arrested in what became the administration's first major terror prosecution after Sept. 11. Al-Marabh's name was still on the rental unit when agents raided it. The men were found with false IDs and documents describing alleged terror plots.
--Several large deposits, withdrawals and overseas wire transfers in 1998 and 2000 that were flagged as suspicious by a Boston bank. The Customs Service first identified al-Marabh in 2001 for possible terrorist ties to Hijazi.
FBI documents said Al-Marabh denied being affiliated with al-Qaida. But he acknowledged receiving "security" training in rifles and rocket-propelled grenades in Afghan mujahedeen camps, sending money to his friend Hijazi, using a fake address to get a truck driving license and buying a phony passport for $4,000 in Canada to sneak into the United States shortly before Sept. 11.
Al-Marabh's attorney, Mark Kriger, said Wednesday he had never seen the Jordanian informant report and still doesn't believe his client had anything to do with terrorism. He said his client broke ties with Hijazi years ago after a falling out.
Kriger said he found it unbelievable "that the government, if it believed Ashwas, would have deported Mr. al-Marabh rather than indict him."
The Justice Department's criminal division chief, Chris Wray, expressed concern to Congress last month that some suspects were being deported to freedom. "It may be more difficult than people would expect" to make a case against a suspect, even when he or she trained at terror camps, he said.
"We may be able to deport the person under the immigration laws," Wray added. "And while that should give us some comfort, the fact is, if we go that route, the person is removed to another country and turned loose there, and we have no ability to make sure that they're not engaged in further terrorist activity."
At one point in late 2002, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago drafted an indictment against al-Marabh on multiple counts of making false statements in his interviews with FBI agents. Justice headquarters declined prosecution. Fitzgerald declined through a spokesman to discuss the reasons.
Fitzgerald then tracked down Ashwas, the Jordanian who because of minor immigration problems had spent time with al-Marabh in a federal detention cell in 2002. Fitzgerald had the man flown to Chicago and oversaw his debriefing along with FBI agents from Chicago and Detroit, documents show.
Ashwas alleged that during one of his encounters he helped persuade the prison psychiatrist to prescribe al-Marabh an anti-anxiety drug called Claripan and that al-Marabh began talking more freely, the FBI reported.
The FBI summarized Ashwas' allegations:
_Al-Marabh said he aided Hijazi's flight from authorities and sent him money, plotted a martyrdom attack in the United States and took instructions from a mystery figure in Chicago known only as "al Mosul," which means "boss" in Arabic.
_Al Mosul asked al-Marabh to attend a driving school in Detroit with Arabic instructors so he could get a commercial truck driver's license, and arranged for al-Marabh to live in the Detroit apartment later raided by the FBI as a terror cell.
_Al-Marabh said he and Hijazi planned to steal a fuel truck from a rest stop in New York and New Jersey and detonate it in the heavily traveled Lincoln or Holland tunnels, but the plan was foiled when Hijazi was arrested.
_Al-Marabh acknowledged he had distributed money — as much as $200,000 a month — to the various training camps in Afghanistan in the early 1990s.
The FBI and prosecutors confirmed some aspects of Ashwas' account, including that al-Marabh had been at the Detroit apartment, had trained at at least one Afghan camp and had gotten the truck driver's license.
Fitzgerald wasn't alone in his efforts to try to bring a case against al-Marabh
Prosecutors and FBI agents in other states sought to get enough evidence to prosecute him.
In Detroit, prosecutors developed evidence but weren't allowed to bring a case connecting al-Marabh to the terror cell there.
One of those prosecutors, longtime career Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino, recently sued Ashcroft, alleging the Justice Department improperly interfered with prosecuting terrorists. Justice says Convertino is under investigation for possibly withholding a piece of evidence from defense lawyers in the Detroit terror case.
When al-Marabh's name surfaced in the Detroit trial in March 2003, an FBI agent said al-Marabh remained under investigation for terrorism but hadn't been charged.
"Mr. Al-Marabh was listed No. 27 on the FBI Watch List," agent Michael Thomas testified. "He was a known associate, a former roommate of Mr. Raed Hijazi."
Less than 10 months after Thomas' testimony, al-Marabh was freed from custody and put on a plane to Syria.
Article Link
By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer
Yahoo
Nabil al-Marabh was No. 27 on the FBI's list of terror suspects after Sept. 11. He trained in Afghanistan's militant camps, sent money to a roommate convicted in a foiled plot to bomb a hotel and boasted to an informant about plans to blow up a fuel truck inside a New York tunnel, FBI documents allege. The Bush administration set him free — to Syria — even though prosecutors had sought to bring criminal cases against him and judges openly expressed concerns about possible terrorist ties.
Al-Marabh served an eight-month jail sentence and was sent in January to his native Syria, which is regarded by the United States as a sponsor of terrorism. The quiet disposition of his case stands in stark contrast to the language FBI agents used to describe the man.
Al-Marabh "intended to martyr himself in an attack against the United States," an FBI agent wrote in a December 2002 report obtained by The Associated Press. A footnote in al-Marabh's deportation ruling last year added, "The FBI has been unable to rule out the possibility that al-Marabh has engaged in terrorist activity or will do so if he is not removed from the United States."
One FBI report summarized a high-level debriefing of a Jordanian informant named Ahmed Y. Ashwas that was personally conducted by the U.S. attorney in Chicago, signifying its importance. The informant alleged al-Marabh told him of specific terrorist plans during their time in prison.
Even the judge who accepted al-Marabh's plea agreement on minor immigration charges in 2002 balked. "Something about this case just makes me feel uncomfortable," Judge Richard Arcara said in court. The Justice Department assured the judge that al-Marabh did not have terrorist ties.
A second judge who ultimately ordered al-Marabh's deportation sided with FBI agents, federal prosecutors and Customs agents in the field who believed al-Marabh was tied to terrorism.
"The court finds applicant does present a danger to national security," U.S. Immigration Judge Robert D. Newberry ruled, concluding al-Marabh was "credibly linked to elements of terrorism" and had a "propensity to lie."
Neither the courts nor al-Marabh's lawyers were given access to the most striking allegations provided by the Jordanian informant.
Asked to explain the decision to free al-Marabh, Justice spokesman Bryan Sierra said the government has concerns about many people with suspected terror ties but cannot effectively try them in court without giving away intelligence sources and methods.
"If the government cannot prosecute terrorism charges, another option is to remove the individual from the United States via deportation. After careful review, this was determined to be the best option available under the law to protect our national security," he said.
But a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee scoffed at the explanation. "It's hard to believe that the best way to deal with the FBI's 27th most wanted terrorist is to send him back to a terrorist-sponsoring country," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. He said the Justice Department could have used a military tribunal or a classified criminal. "This action certainly raises a lot of questions and demands a lot of answers," Schumer said.
Internal FBI and Justice Department documents reviewed by AP show prosecutors and FBI agents in several cities gathered evidence that linked al-Marabh to:
--Raed Hijazi, the Boston cab driver convicted in Jordan for plotting to blow up an American-frequented hotel in Amman during the millennium celebrations of 1999. Al-Marabh and Hijazi were roommates at the Afghan training camps and later in the United States, and al-Marabh sent money to Hijazi.
--The Detroit apartment where four men were arrested in what became the administration's first major terror prosecution after Sept. 11. Al-Marabh's name was still on the rental unit when agents raided it. The men were found with false IDs and documents describing alleged terror plots.
--Several large deposits, withdrawals and overseas wire transfers in 1998 and 2000 that were flagged as suspicious by a Boston bank. The Customs Service first identified al-Marabh in 2001 for possible terrorist ties to Hijazi.
FBI documents said Al-Marabh denied being affiliated with al-Qaida. But he acknowledged receiving "security" training in rifles and rocket-propelled grenades in Afghan mujahedeen camps, sending money to his friend Hijazi, using a fake address to get a truck driving license and buying a phony passport for $4,000 in Canada to sneak into the United States shortly before Sept. 11.
Al-Marabh's attorney, Mark Kriger, said Wednesday he had never seen the Jordanian informant report and still doesn't believe his client had anything to do with terrorism. He said his client broke ties with Hijazi years ago after a falling out.
Kriger said he found it unbelievable "that the government, if it believed Ashwas, would have deported Mr. al-Marabh rather than indict him."
The Justice Department's criminal division chief, Chris Wray, expressed concern to Congress last month that some suspects were being deported to freedom. "It may be more difficult than people would expect" to make a case against a suspect, even when he or she trained at terror camps, he said.
"We may be able to deport the person under the immigration laws," Wray added. "And while that should give us some comfort, the fact is, if we go that route, the person is removed to another country and turned loose there, and we have no ability to make sure that they're not engaged in further terrorist activity."
At one point in late 2002, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago drafted an indictment against al-Marabh on multiple counts of making false statements in his interviews with FBI agents. Justice headquarters declined prosecution. Fitzgerald declined through a spokesman to discuss the reasons.
Fitzgerald then tracked down Ashwas, the Jordanian who because of minor immigration problems had spent time with al-Marabh in a federal detention cell in 2002. Fitzgerald had the man flown to Chicago and oversaw his debriefing along with FBI agents from Chicago and Detroit, documents show.
Ashwas alleged that during one of his encounters he helped persuade the prison psychiatrist to prescribe al-Marabh an anti-anxiety drug called Claripan and that al-Marabh began talking more freely, the FBI reported.
The FBI summarized Ashwas' allegations:
_Al-Marabh said he aided Hijazi's flight from authorities and sent him money, plotted a martyrdom attack in the United States and took instructions from a mystery figure in Chicago known only as "al Mosul," which means "boss" in Arabic.
_Al Mosul asked al-Marabh to attend a driving school in Detroit with Arabic instructors so he could get a commercial truck driver's license, and arranged for al-Marabh to live in the Detroit apartment later raided by the FBI as a terror cell.
_Al-Marabh said he and Hijazi planned to steal a fuel truck from a rest stop in New York and New Jersey and detonate it in the heavily traveled Lincoln or Holland tunnels, but the plan was foiled when Hijazi was arrested.
_Al-Marabh acknowledged he had distributed money — as much as $200,000 a month — to the various training camps in Afghanistan in the early 1990s.
The FBI and prosecutors confirmed some aspects of Ashwas' account, including that al-Marabh had been at the Detroit apartment, had trained at at least one Afghan camp and had gotten the truck driver's license.
Fitzgerald wasn't alone in his efforts to try to bring a case against al-Marabh
Prosecutors and FBI agents in other states sought to get enough evidence to prosecute him.
In Detroit, prosecutors developed evidence but weren't allowed to bring a case connecting al-Marabh to the terror cell there.
One of those prosecutors, longtime career Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino, recently sued Ashcroft, alleging the Justice Department improperly interfered with prosecuting terrorists. Justice says Convertino is under investigation for possibly withholding a piece of evidence from defense lawyers in the Detroit terror case.
When al-Marabh's name surfaced in the Detroit trial in March 2003, an FBI agent said al-Marabh remained under investigation for terrorism but hadn't been charged.
"Mr. Al-Marabh was listed No. 27 on the FBI Watch List," agent Michael Thomas testified. "He was a known associate, a former roommate of Mr. Raed Hijazi."
Less than 10 months after Thomas' testimony, al-Marabh was freed from custody and put on a plane to Syria.
Article Link
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
What Is It About the O.C.
My grandfather, who was born and raised on the East Coast and later moved to the West Coast (like the rest of my family), told me when I was a kid that the reason there are so many crazy people in California is because the nation tilts toward the left and all the nuts roll that way eventually to be stopped by the Pacific Ocean (the world's largest prophylatic?)...
Thivai
What Is It About the O.C.?
American terrorists, California boys, and how the press thinks about treason.
By Julia Rabig
The Revealer
California Boys: Gadahn and Lindh
In the wake of the FBI’s public appeal earlier this week for help locating seven alleged terrorists, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and MSNBC -- not to mention the Orange County Register -- responded with profiles of Adam Yahiye Gadahn, the only American citizen among the suspects. Although none of them explicitly links Gadahn to John Walker Lindh (the "American Taliban"), most of these stories try to fit him into the taxonomy of the impassioned California seeker gone awry, an archetype of American journalism.
Read Entire Essay
Thivai
What Is It About the O.C.?
American terrorists, California boys, and how the press thinks about treason.
By Julia Rabig
The Revealer
California Boys: Gadahn and Lindh
In the wake of the FBI’s public appeal earlier this week for help locating seven alleged terrorists, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and MSNBC -- not to mention the Orange County Register -- responded with profiles of Adam Yahiye Gadahn, the only American citizen among the suspects. Although none of them explicitly links Gadahn to John Walker Lindh (the "American Taliban"), most of these stories try to fit him into the taxonomy of the impassioned California seeker gone awry, an archetype of American journalism.
Read Entire Essay
On the Ground Reality TV
On-the-ground Reality TV
Jason Vest, Boston Phoenix
Alternet
Reposted at Free Press
On November 22, 2003, the 16th paragraph of an Associated Press story filed from Baghdad reported that troops from the U.S. Army's Fourth Infantry Division had arrested former Iraqi lieutenant general "Taha Hassan" "for alleged involvement in mortar attacks on police stations" in his hometown of Baquoba. One day later, Agence France-Presse noted the arrest of "Taha Hassan Abbas," as he was correctly identified, in a report that included additional dramatic details. A Fourth Infantry Division spokesman quoted by AFP provided the official account of the arrest: Abbas had "resisted when an assault force approached his house," and "engaged [in] fire," which was returned by U.S. troops who "captured" Abbas and two others.
Far more important than the AP's errant reporting -- itself a reflection of the story's low priority -- is that these two dispatches moved over the wires but went unpublished by any newspaper. Instead, in what has become par for the course, readers were treated to brief depictions of beleaguered U.S. troops engaging in the challenge of bringing law and order to a country beset by Ba'athist insurrectionists. But as disturbing details and images continue to flow from investigations into the horror show that was Abu Ghraib, an increasingly outraged American public is trying to fathom why U.S. forces seem so obviously out of control in their sweeping arrests and torturous interrogations of Iraqis. Just as important, they're also wondering whether the American media have failed -- by design or default -- to convey the ground-level truth of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, minimizing the causes of Iraqi alienation and resentment.
In a soon-to-be-released documentary, a top international investigative reporter offers a tentative explanation for both forms of derailment. On March 14 -- almost six weeks before 60 Minutes II aired its Abu Ghraib story -- the Australian NineNetwork's Sunday newsmagazine program aired a scaled-down version of Iraq -- On the Brink," reported by Ross Coulthart, a journalist whose award-winning investigations have spanned rough-and-tumble assignments in East Timor and Afghanistan to seminal intelligence and public-corruption investigations in the U.S. and Australia. Indirectly, Coulthart raises serious questions about American media self-censorship -- something journalists have been wrestling with since the first Gulf War. The film also raises the possibility that, then as now, such self-censorship may have helped the military cover up Iraqi wartime deaths. (A 15-minute trailer for "Iraq -- On the Brink" can be seen at the Journeyman Pictures website Latest RealPlayer required. American audiences may get to see snippets of the documentary in Michael Moore's award-winning Fahrenheit 9/11, depending on how it's released.)
Indeed, what began at Abu Ghraib as a probe into torture has now forced the Army to reveal that at least 32 Iraqi deaths may qualify as homicides. Whether Taha Hassan Abbas was one of the victims is difficult to say; extensive official and unofficial inquiries by the Phoenix into the former general's status yielded no answers. Yet as film footage shot by the NineNet crew shows, the Fourth Infantry Division's official account of Abbas's arrest was disingenuous at best.
Beyond the sometimes-shocking documentary content of "Iraq -- On the Brink," the film bears witness to the yawning gap between what on-the-scene journalists see and what the rest of the world sees. The Hassan-arrest footage was not recorded or guarded or classified by the U.S. Army. It was shot and marketed by a major news organization, the Associated Press Television News (APTN). So why doesn't footage like this make it into U.S. news coverage? TV news services send out teasers for potential stories, and clients buy footage based on what they see in the teasers. The trouble is, either teasers don't include the most damning material or, even if such material is included, news producers, for whatever reasons, decide not to buy the whole piece. However, it happened, the footage that made it into Coulthart's documentary, as well as that which was left out, was as available to American TV networks as, say, footage of George W. Bush carrying a turkey platter to troops on Thanksgiving Day. Yet no one chose to run it.
Coulthart goes out of his way to present a nuanced view of the occupation. He notes that under the command of Colonel David Teeples, soldiers of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was charged with enforcing a 9:00 p.m. curfew in the Iraqi-Syrian border town of Qusabah, were exceptionally careful. Coulthart's camera crew captured images of Teeples's resolute but respectful soldiers questioning Iraqis through translators, and in one case, quickly entering and exiting a house in pursuit of a suspected curfew violator. In other encounters, U.S. troops make a point of explaining why they're doing what they're doing, and ask for the Iraqis' help in the future. Heavy weaponry aside, the footage plays like a domestic-dispute encounter from Fox TV's Cops.
These scenes stand in stark contrast to what comes next. "The Americans need to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis," Coulthart says in his voiceover. "But that's not helped by aggressive raids like this one carried out by troops not under the command of Colonel Teeples." Though the troops are not identified, patches on their uniforms peg them as soldiers from the 588th Engineering Battalion of the Fourth Infantry Division. "It's the dead of night outside the house of a senior former Iraqi officer," Coulthart continues, referring to Taha Hassan Abbas, "who's suspected of helping the insurgents."
The soldiers don't exactly approach with stealth. They kick open a gate to the house's yard. What happens next, as Coulthart explained in an interview with the Phoenix, illustrates a perilous gap in American and Iraqi cultural understanding. "First, you have to understand that guns are ubiquitous in Iraq -- most people have them, and it's very common for them to shoot them in the air all the time for any number of reasons -- from celebrations to anger to whatever," he says. "Burglary has become very common in the past year, and oftentimes, if people hear something outside their homes at night, they'll fire a shot or two into the air to scare burglars away. Now, you could just go up to a house, like other soldiers do, and just knock on the door. But some treat these missions like full-fledged combat operations and start kicking things in with guns drawn, and then you get what happens next."
Coulthart's voiceover continues: "The officer's son -- thinking the soldiers are thieves -- goes to the roof of the house and fires into the air to scare them away." The response from U.S. soldiers: "We've got a shooter on the roof!" followed by a hail of bullets loosed at the house.
The next shot -- of film, that is -- shows Abbas, a clearly unarmed, middle-aged, balding man in pajamas, hands above his head, trembling as he stands across from at least a half-dozen U.S. soldiers whose M-16s are trained on him. "Inside the house, the officer surrenders, but he doesn't understand what the Americans are saying -- and they don't have a translator," Coulthart explains. Abbas repeats the only English he appears to know -- "Welcome! Welcome!" -- over and over again, keeping his hands far above his head as the Fourth Infantry Division soldiers handle the situation in a way almost exactly the opposite of how the Third Cav troops acted in similar circumstances. The Fourth Infantry soldiers' manner foreshadows the images at Abu Ghraib that the world would see months later.
"Want me to shoot him in the leg?" one soldier yells. "I might shoot you!" another growls at Abbas. As Abbas stands motionless in the doorway between his kitchen and the next room, one soldier shouts, "He's trying to draw us in there!" Another solider half mutters, half yells, "I don't give a shit, I'm gonna shoot, I'm gonna shoot, I'm gonna shoot!" while another hollers, "I can shoot him in the leg!"
"Get the fuck over here, get the fuck over here," shouts another, while the previous soldier repeats his desire to shoot Abbas in the leg, adding that someone should also "shoot him in the foot."
Abbas steps away from the doorway and moves his back to the wall. "The Iraqi officer, thinking he's about to die," Coulthart's voiceover resumes, "can now be heard praying." The American response is far from ecumenical, with one soldier yelling, "Who the fuck are you talking to? Who the fuck are you talking to? Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!" The soldier then grabs the man's pajama top and hurls him across the room into the hands of another soldier, who in turn hurls him into a chair that goes flying as the Iraqi sprawls onto the floor. One soldier begins to kick Abbas, who, though on his back, has his hands in the air again, repeating, "Welcome! Welcome!" Three soldiers put their gun barrels in his face, with one solider yelling repeatedly, "Shoot him!" Another asks, "Who's shooting?" when he hears gunfire from the roof, and then yells, "Bullshit" at the prone Abbas, who continues to repeat, "Welcome!"
The next sequence shows the capture of Abbas's adult son, who had shot the gun off on the roof; as he's being restrained, a soldier's voice barks menacingly, "Take the camera off him." The film then resumes with a shot of two women -- apparently Abbas's wife and daughter -- kneeling on the ground at gunpoint, their hands on their heads, their faces pictures of anger and humiliation.
The final shot shows the former general. Though fleeting, it is, perhaps, the most disturbing sequence of the film, given that in his previous appearance Abbas was terrified but physically unharmed. Now, his arms are restrained behind his back. His face is battered and bruised. His left eye is beginning to swell shut. The front of his shirt is stained with blood, and a stream of snot and blood dangles from his left nostril.
"No one here was killed," Coulthart's voice resumes. "But it's raids like this that can only fuel the resentment against Coalition forces."
Speaking from Australia, Coulthart doesn't entirely fault the soldiers for their initial reaction to gunfire from the roof: "One could reasonably, though incorrectly, conclude that one was being fired on, and it makes perfect sense to fire back if that's what you think." But, he says, it again raises the question of who gave the order for the squad to apprehend the general in the way it did -- especially without a translator -- given the obvious potential for creating an unnecessarily inflammatory situation. "People don't seem to realize the incalculable damage something like this causes," he says. "You can see on the face of the young woman that her heart and mind are gone forever to the Americans. When we first saw this footage, the first reaction of our Iraqi fixers was absolute anger -- I can only begin to guess what the reaction is to the scenes from Abu Ghraib."
Coulthart says he's not sure what's more troubling: that the arrest of a former Iraqi lieutenant general apparently merited no coverage; that footage showing an arrest almost completely at odds with the official account was not distributed in its entirety by Associated Press Television News; or that what was distributed wasn't of interest to any APTN clients.
"We had a hunch that there was probably some very disturbing footage cameramen had shot that American network producers had consciously chosen not to air, or that broadcast-news-service editors had edited teasers in a way that didn't prominently feature footage like this," he says. "I think the problem is more with the clients for TV news services than the services themselves. In this case, the edited version sent out was just a shortened version that didn't show the drama that we realized when we viewed the entire sequence. When we saw it, we couldn't believe no one had used it. Because the clients should have realized first off that the version was an indication of something more sinister worth investigation."
At the same time, he says, it may be asking too much of news organizations to air such footage. "This is part of the irony of how modern news systems actually work to keep stuff like this off the air. Places like APTN and Reuters TV generate so much, squirting out images 24 hours a day on permanent satellite-feed channels, that there just isn't time to monitor it and watch it all. Which is too bad, because it's the wire services like APTN and Reuters that are doing most of the really ballsy shooting."
Coulthart is similarly vexed by the lack of attention U.S. media paid to the American use of cluster bombs last year -- and how the damage they've done has engendered extreme ill will towards the American occupiers, particularly in the Doura section of Baghdad. Condemned by most international humanitarian organizations, cluster bombs explode and then spray smaller explosive bomblets over a vast area; all too often some of the bomblets don't immediately explode, causing civilian casualties later on. Featured prominently in "Iraq -- On the Brink" is Aida al-Ansari, an English-speaking Doura resident whose son and 25 others were killed when a U.S. warplane cluster-bombed her neighborhood as American forces were fighting their way into Baghdad last spring. While a handful of stories mentioned the Doura bombing last year, there's been no follow-up since -- another missed opportunity, as the Sunday crew discovered, to understand the roots of growing Iraqi anger at the occupation.
When Coulthart visited the Doura neighborhood this year, he discovered al-Ansari, who still has the shrapnel-torn, bloodstained jeans her 16-year-old son, Fahad, was wearing when he died on the operating table at a local hospital, bereft of any anesthetic to ease the pain. Almost a year later, Coulthart reports, "grief among Fahad's family and friends has now hardened to anger" directed at the U.S. government. "They hate them," al-Ansari tells him of the Americans, explaining that "they don't hate the people, but they hate Bush and the Army."
"Did they hate the United States before this war?" Coulthart asks.
"No," she responds. "They were -- everybody used to dream to go to United States to work or to do something."
"Has anyone from the Coalition ever come to you or to this community and apologized for what happened?" he asks.
"No. No one."
The documentary also includes another type of footage rarely seen on American television. Though ABC originally aired it briefly (and though a handful of Web sites have shown it at various lengths), "Iraq -- On the Brink" includes the full night-vision footage taken from the gun cameras of a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter that shows the killing of three men, one of whom appeared to be hiding a rocket-propelled grenade. Though it's impossible to verify just what the man has, the crew is nonetheless instructed by radio to "Smoke 'em," and then coolly fires through the dark at each suspected insurgent in turn. In this sort of video-game-style footage, we're used to seeing the destruction of bunkers and buildings, not human figures.
However shocking it is to watch, the action is actually permissible under the U.S. Army's rules of engagement; indeed, it was likely that reliable intelligence led the helicopter to stake out the scene in the first place, and as helicopters are notoriously vulnerable to rocket-propelled-grenade and other shoulder-fired-missile attacks, it's not entirely surprising that the Apache fired away. Rather, says Coulthart, the importance of the footage is that it reflects what many non-American Coalition military units said to his crew: that they've grown increasingly concerned about the political ramifications of the Americans' take no-prisoners/show-no-mercy approach. "When it came up in conversation with one Coalition officer," says Coulthart, "he shook his head and said, 'The Americans have gone feral and no good will come of it.'"
"Iraq -- On the Brink" also captures the brusque aloofness of CPA administrator J. Paul Bremer, the shiftiness of Ahmad Chalabi, the still-being-uncovered hidden horrors of Saddam's regime, and the bravery of the Baghdad Police Department's bomb squad in defusing scores of bombs each day. (The Americans use remote-controlled robots to neutralized explosives threatening U.S. troops; the Iraqis display what Coulthart calls a "splendid madness in heroism" as they are left to defuse bombs by hand, with no protective gear.)
While Coulthart thinks the documentary makes for an accurate and timely snapshot of post-Saddam Iraq, he exhales a rueful sigh at the mention of Abu Ghraib -- a sigh that reflects a sense of both self-recrimination and angst born of the economics of foreign correspondence. When his crew was en route to meet Teeples and his Third Armored Cavalry soldiers in Iraq's western desert, their route took them past Abu Ghraib. As Coulthart recalls, no discussion was required to stop the van; the scene they beheld "was like something out of Dante's Inferno." "We all knew what it was and what it stood for, this thing with mythological status in Iraq where all this death and misery took place," he says. "Part of what was striking was that, frankly, it wasn't looking much different now -- barbed wire, troops with menacing gun emplacements, lines of people trying to get in to see relatives.
"While we're filming overlays, up walks this mother, who tells us this horror story about her sons essentially being abducted from their home in Um Qasr by the Americans in the middle of the night. I did the interview, of course, but didn't run it in our story because it seemed a little off our focus. You're so focused on the story you tell yourself is the story -- in part because the cost is so high and the budget is so tight. It cost us $1500 a week to be there, and unless we deliver results, it's harder in the future to get the support this kind of work requires."
Indeed, Coulthart says, those sorts of cost considerations actually kept the cluster-bomb segment from appearing on Sunday for a year. "Most of that we shot last year, but we had to focus on the story we were supposed to be telling, which was mostly about Chalabi," he says. Determined to advance the dormant story on his latest visit to Baghdad, days of street reporting led the crew to al-Ansari, whose experiences ultimately made for a much more informative and affecting piece of journalism.
Yet the fact remains that a disturbing reality went unreported for a year, essentially due to constraints on time and money. "And with Abu Ghraib, it was the same situation again," Coulthart sighs. "Though we had the luxury of more time and more flexibility than anyone who covers Iraq day in and day out, we felt like we couldn't shift our focus. And the irony was, here was this story of a lifetime right under our noses. There were people standing in queues trying to see their sons, waiting eight hours a day and often being told to come back the next day, and then the next and the next. Looking back on it, I'm not only kicking myself now, but am kind of ashamed. I'm sure that if we had scratched the surface and had taken the time to systematically interview people coming out to Abu Ghraib trying to figure out what had happened to their loved ones, we could have dug something up then."
Coulthart's sentiment is not uncommon among seasoned, independent-minded reporters cognizant of the complexities of most foreign stories. But in some respects, the dice have been loaded against journalists covering Iraq since the beginning of the war. While a handful of journalists has provided a steady stream of exemplary reporting, there are some who feel that whatever good reporting has been done since the end of "major combat operations" has involved an even greater uphill battle for attention than usual. Why? Because the Bush administration's practice of embedding journalists with the troops set the tenor of Iraq-war reporting.
As the Washington Post's Richard Leiby wrote last year, embedding was nothing short of a "propaganda coup" for the Defense Department. By embedding scores of reporters (many with little or no combat or foreign experience) in rapidly advancing frontline units, argued Leiby, the Pentagon ensured that virtually no one who was "cover[ing] the instability and power vacuum left in the invasion's wake" got nearly the play their "embedded" colleagues did -- thus minimizing the disturbing realities of poor post-war planning and lulling Americans into a sense of complacency, not about what was to come, but about what was already happening.
Speaking at an extraordinary-but-unnoticed symposium at the University of Texas last year, award-winning combat photographer Peter Turnley was unsparing in his criticism of the increasingly institutionalized self-censorship he believes began in the first Gulf War, and has only become more insidious since. In Gulf War I, Turnley -- then a top Newsweek photographer -- was so uncomfortable with the Pentagon's control of journalists through its "pool" system that he actually left Saudi Arabia before the war and snuck across the Kuwaiti border by dressing as an Army colonel. While many of his colleagues were being shepherded through the theater of operations by U.S. military minders, Turnley at one point found himself surveying a horrific scene that the Army thought it had successfully quarantined from journalists.
"I witnessed U.S. soldiers forcing Iraqi prisoners at gunpoint to pick up bodies and pile them up and put them in mass graves where bulldozers would come and cover them up," he said. "There were two Iraqi soldiers, they were really very pathetic, in their 40s, didn't have teeth, very tired and fatigued, and at gunpoint being made to pick up dozens of bodies. It seemed rather inhuman to me, how long they were obliged to do this. I remember as they dropped a body next to a stack of bodies, one of the Iraqi soldiers fell to his hands and knees and started sobbing. I got on my knees and started to make a picture -- at that point an American soldier came up and punched me in the chest and said, 'You animal.' And I grabbed him by the shirt and told him I didn't make these guys do this."
Although Turnley took rolls of disturbing and moving images -- some of which he showed to the symposium audience -- almost none saw the light of day, either in Newsweek or through distribution by his photo agency. Yet almost every newspaper reproduced Turnley's photograph of a wounded U.S. soldier in a helicopter, crying as a comrade died in his arms.
During the 2003 Gulf War, Turnley -- this time for the Denver Post -- once again struck out on his own, purposely avoiding U.S. and British soldiers and focusing his attention on the Iraqi people. "For the first three weeks, I would see a convoy, a whole troupe of writers from major media outlets that would come in for a half day's reporting so they could get their dateline and then get out," he recalled. "It took me literally five seconds of entering into Iraq and looking into the eyes of people whose eyes showed mistrust, open hostility at the worst. There were towns that troops had just flown through, not staying to create any law and order. People showed me leaflets the Americans had dropped from the sky saying they should be embraced with joy and welcomed because we were bringing liberation and food and water and power, and they'd scream at me, 'Where's the water? Where are the medical supplies? In the hospital we have nothing.'"
In Turnley's view, the media-government arrangement that effectively produced much of the coverage of Gulf War II and the early occupation conspired to create what he terms a "projected idea of reality" -- which policymakers actually consider tantamount to reality. Yet wrenching situations like the one he witnessed in a Baghdad hospital five days after the city's liberation, he says, are precisely what people need to see to drive home the reality that the invasion was not about American pride, but about America's failure to secure the blessings of liberation for the Iraqi people. "I saw this beautiful little girl on the bed -- yellow socks, white shirt -- and I noticed two doctors were doing cardiac massage on her chest, and that I was watching the life of this little girl evaporating. I thought I saw her chest exhale and I had this leap of joy, I thought she was coming back to life -- and one of the doctors had this look of disgust and put a towel over her face and walked out."
The girl, Turnley found out, had died of pneumonia, for which she could have been treated. But because the Americans had failed to plan for crowds running riot, the girl's father couldn't get her to the hospital before it was too late.
A clip and transcript of "Iraq -- On The Brink" are available on the Journeyman Pictures website. A transcript of the shorter version of the documentary that aired on NineNet's Sunday program is available here; a transcript of Sunday's 2003 piece "The Spoils of War" is available here. You can also read related articles by Ross Coulthart at The Bulletin, an Australian newsweekly.
Jason Vest is a contributing writer for the Boston Phoenix.
Jason Vest, Boston Phoenix
Alternet
Reposted at Free Press
On November 22, 2003, the 16th paragraph of an Associated Press story filed from Baghdad reported that troops from the U.S. Army's Fourth Infantry Division had arrested former Iraqi lieutenant general "Taha Hassan" "for alleged involvement in mortar attacks on police stations" in his hometown of Baquoba. One day later, Agence France-Presse noted the arrest of "Taha Hassan Abbas," as he was correctly identified, in a report that included additional dramatic details. A Fourth Infantry Division spokesman quoted by AFP provided the official account of the arrest: Abbas had "resisted when an assault force approached his house," and "engaged [in] fire," which was returned by U.S. troops who "captured" Abbas and two others.
Far more important than the AP's errant reporting -- itself a reflection of the story's low priority -- is that these two dispatches moved over the wires but went unpublished by any newspaper. Instead, in what has become par for the course, readers were treated to brief depictions of beleaguered U.S. troops engaging in the challenge of bringing law and order to a country beset by Ba'athist insurrectionists. But as disturbing details and images continue to flow from investigations into the horror show that was Abu Ghraib, an increasingly outraged American public is trying to fathom why U.S. forces seem so obviously out of control in their sweeping arrests and torturous interrogations of Iraqis. Just as important, they're also wondering whether the American media have failed -- by design or default -- to convey the ground-level truth of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, minimizing the causes of Iraqi alienation and resentment.
In a soon-to-be-released documentary, a top international investigative reporter offers a tentative explanation for both forms of derailment. On March 14 -- almost six weeks before 60 Minutes II aired its Abu Ghraib story -- the Australian NineNetwork's Sunday newsmagazine program aired a scaled-down version of Iraq -- On the Brink," reported by Ross Coulthart, a journalist whose award-winning investigations have spanned rough-and-tumble assignments in East Timor and Afghanistan to seminal intelligence and public-corruption investigations in the U.S. and Australia. Indirectly, Coulthart raises serious questions about American media self-censorship -- something journalists have been wrestling with since the first Gulf War. The film also raises the possibility that, then as now, such self-censorship may have helped the military cover up Iraqi wartime deaths. (A 15-minute trailer for "Iraq -- On the Brink" can be seen at the Journeyman Pictures website Latest RealPlayer required. American audiences may get to see snippets of the documentary in Michael Moore's award-winning Fahrenheit 9/11, depending on how it's released.)
Indeed, what began at Abu Ghraib as a probe into torture has now forced the Army to reveal that at least 32 Iraqi deaths may qualify as homicides. Whether Taha Hassan Abbas was one of the victims is difficult to say; extensive official and unofficial inquiries by the Phoenix into the former general's status yielded no answers. Yet as film footage shot by the NineNet crew shows, the Fourth Infantry Division's official account of Abbas's arrest was disingenuous at best.
Beyond the sometimes-shocking documentary content of "Iraq -- On the Brink," the film bears witness to the yawning gap between what on-the-scene journalists see and what the rest of the world sees. The Hassan-arrest footage was not recorded or guarded or classified by the U.S. Army. It was shot and marketed by a major news organization, the Associated Press Television News (APTN). So why doesn't footage like this make it into U.S. news coverage? TV news services send out teasers for potential stories, and clients buy footage based on what they see in the teasers. The trouble is, either teasers don't include the most damning material or, even if such material is included, news producers, for whatever reasons, decide not to buy the whole piece. However, it happened, the footage that made it into Coulthart's documentary, as well as that which was left out, was as available to American TV networks as, say, footage of George W. Bush carrying a turkey platter to troops on Thanksgiving Day. Yet no one chose to run it.
Coulthart goes out of his way to present a nuanced view of the occupation. He notes that under the command of Colonel David Teeples, soldiers of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was charged with enforcing a 9:00 p.m. curfew in the Iraqi-Syrian border town of Qusabah, were exceptionally careful. Coulthart's camera crew captured images of Teeples's resolute but respectful soldiers questioning Iraqis through translators, and in one case, quickly entering and exiting a house in pursuit of a suspected curfew violator. In other encounters, U.S. troops make a point of explaining why they're doing what they're doing, and ask for the Iraqis' help in the future. Heavy weaponry aside, the footage plays like a domestic-dispute encounter from Fox TV's Cops.
These scenes stand in stark contrast to what comes next. "The Americans need to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis," Coulthart says in his voiceover. "But that's not helped by aggressive raids like this one carried out by troops not under the command of Colonel Teeples." Though the troops are not identified, patches on their uniforms peg them as soldiers from the 588th Engineering Battalion of the Fourth Infantry Division. "It's the dead of night outside the house of a senior former Iraqi officer," Coulthart continues, referring to Taha Hassan Abbas, "who's suspected of helping the insurgents."
The soldiers don't exactly approach with stealth. They kick open a gate to the house's yard. What happens next, as Coulthart explained in an interview with the Phoenix, illustrates a perilous gap in American and Iraqi cultural understanding. "First, you have to understand that guns are ubiquitous in Iraq -- most people have them, and it's very common for them to shoot them in the air all the time for any number of reasons -- from celebrations to anger to whatever," he says. "Burglary has become very common in the past year, and oftentimes, if people hear something outside their homes at night, they'll fire a shot or two into the air to scare burglars away. Now, you could just go up to a house, like other soldiers do, and just knock on the door. But some treat these missions like full-fledged combat operations and start kicking things in with guns drawn, and then you get what happens next."
Coulthart's voiceover continues: "The officer's son -- thinking the soldiers are thieves -- goes to the roof of the house and fires into the air to scare them away." The response from U.S. soldiers: "We've got a shooter on the roof!" followed by a hail of bullets loosed at the house.
The next shot -- of film, that is -- shows Abbas, a clearly unarmed, middle-aged, balding man in pajamas, hands above his head, trembling as he stands across from at least a half-dozen U.S. soldiers whose M-16s are trained on him. "Inside the house, the officer surrenders, but he doesn't understand what the Americans are saying -- and they don't have a translator," Coulthart explains. Abbas repeats the only English he appears to know -- "Welcome! Welcome!" -- over and over again, keeping his hands far above his head as the Fourth Infantry Division soldiers handle the situation in a way almost exactly the opposite of how the Third Cav troops acted in similar circumstances. The Fourth Infantry soldiers' manner foreshadows the images at Abu Ghraib that the world would see months later.
"Want me to shoot him in the leg?" one soldier yells. "I might shoot you!" another growls at Abbas. As Abbas stands motionless in the doorway between his kitchen and the next room, one soldier shouts, "He's trying to draw us in there!" Another solider half mutters, half yells, "I don't give a shit, I'm gonna shoot, I'm gonna shoot, I'm gonna shoot!" while another hollers, "I can shoot him in the leg!"
"Get the fuck over here, get the fuck over here," shouts another, while the previous soldier repeats his desire to shoot Abbas in the leg, adding that someone should also "shoot him in the foot."
Abbas steps away from the doorway and moves his back to the wall. "The Iraqi officer, thinking he's about to die," Coulthart's voiceover resumes, "can now be heard praying." The American response is far from ecumenical, with one soldier yelling, "Who the fuck are you talking to? Who the fuck are you talking to? Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!" The soldier then grabs the man's pajama top and hurls him across the room into the hands of another soldier, who in turn hurls him into a chair that goes flying as the Iraqi sprawls onto the floor. One soldier begins to kick Abbas, who, though on his back, has his hands in the air again, repeating, "Welcome! Welcome!" Three soldiers put their gun barrels in his face, with one solider yelling repeatedly, "Shoot him!" Another asks, "Who's shooting?" when he hears gunfire from the roof, and then yells, "Bullshit" at the prone Abbas, who continues to repeat, "Welcome!"
The next sequence shows the capture of Abbas's adult son, who had shot the gun off on the roof; as he's being restrained, a soldier's voice barks menacingly, "Take the camera off him." The film then resumes with a shot of two women -- apparently Abbas's wife and daughter -- kneeling on the ground at gunpoint, their hands on their heads, their faces pictures of anger and humiliation.
The final shot shows the former general. Though fleeting, it is, perhaps, the most disturbing sequence of the film, given that in his previous appearance Abbas was terrified but physically unharmed. Now, his arms are restrained behind his back. His face is battered and bruised. His left eye is beginning to swell shut. The front of his shirt is stained with blood, and a stream of snot and blood dangles from his left nostril.
"No one here was killed," Coulthart's voice resumes. "But it's raids like this that can only fuel the resentment against Coalition forces."
Speaking from Australia, Coulthart doesn't entirely fault the soldiers for their initial reaction to gunfire from the roof: "One could reasonably, though incorrectly, conclude that one was being fired on, and it makes perfect sense to fire back if that's what you think." But, he says, it again raises the question of who gave the order for the squad to apprehend the general in the way it did -- especially without a translator -- given the obvious potential for creating an unnecessarily inflammatory situation. "People don't seem to realize the incalculable damage something like this causes," he says. "You can see on the face of the young woman that her heart and mind are gone forever to the Americans. When we first saw this footage, the first reaction of our Iraqi fixers was absolute anger -- I can only begin to guess what the reaction is to the scenes from Abu Ghraib."
Coulthart says he's not sure what's more troubling: that the arrest of a former Iraqi lieutenant general apparently merited no coverage; that footage showing an arrest almost completely at odds with the official account was not distributed in its entirety by Associated Press Television News; or that what was distributed wasn't of interest to any APTN clients.
"We had a hunch that there was probably some very disturbing footage cameramen had shot that American network producers had consciously chosen not to air, or that broadcast-news-service editors had edited teasers in a way that didn't prominently feature footage like this," he says. "I think the problem is more with the clients for TV news services than the services themselves. In this case, the edited version sent out was just a shortened version that didn't show the drama that we realized when we viewed the entire sequence. When we saw it, we couldn't believe no one had used it. Because the clients should have realized first off that the version was an indication of something more sinister worth investigation."
At the same time, he says, it may be asking too much of news organizations to air such footage. "This is part of the irony of how modern news systems actually work to keep stuff like this off the air. Places like APTN and Reuters TV generate so much, squirting out images 24 hours a day on permanent satellite-feed channels, that there just isn't time to monitor it and watch it all. Which is too bad, because it's the wire services like APTN and Reuters that are doing most of the really ballsy shooting."
Coulthart is similarly vexed by the lack of attention U.S. media paid to the American use of cluster bombs last year -- and how the damage they've done has engendered extreme ill will towards the American occupiers, particularly in the Doura section of Baghdad. Condemned by most international humanitarian organizations, cluster bombs explode and then spray smaller explosive bomblets over a vast area; all too often some of the bomblets don't immediately explode, causing civilian casualties later on. Featured prominently in "Iraq -- On the Brink" is Aida al-Ansari, an English-speaking Doura resident whose son and 25 others were killed when a U.S. warplane cluster-bombed her neighborhood as American forces were fighting their way into Baghdad last spring. While a handful of stories mentioned the Doura bombing last year, there's been no follow-up since -- another missed opportunity, as the Sunday crew discovered, to understand the roots of growing Iraqi anger at the occupation.
When Coulthart visited the Doura neighborhood this year, he discovered al-Ansari, who still has the shrapnel-torn, bloodstained jeans her 16-year-old son, Fahad, was wearing when he died on the operating table at a local hospital, bereft of any anesthetic to ease the pain. Almost a year later, Coulthart reports, "grief among Fahad's family and friends has now hardened to anger" directed at the U.S. government. "They hate them," al-Ansari tells him of the Americans, explaining that "they don't hate the people, but they hate Bush and the Army."
"Did they hate the United States before this war?" Coulthart asks.
"No," she responds. "They were -- everybody used to dream to go to United States to work or to do something."
"Has anyone from the Coalition ever come to you or to this community and apologized for what happened?" he asks.
"No. No one."
The documentary also includes another type of footage rarely seen on American television. Though ABC originally aired it briefly (and though a handful of Web sites have shown it at various lengths), "Iraq -- On the Brink" includes the full night-vision footage taken from the gun cameras of a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter that shows the killing of three men, one of whom appeared to be hiding a rocket-propelled grenade. Though it's impossible to verify just what the man has, the crew is nonetheless instructed by radio to "Smoke 'em," and then coolly fires through the dark at each suspected insurgent in turn. In this sort of video-game-style footage, we're used to seeing the destruction of bunkers and buildings, not human figures.
However shocking it is to watch, the action is actually permissible under the U.S. Army's rules of engagement; indeed, it was likely that reliable intelligence led the helicopter to stake out the scene in the first place, and as helicopters are notoriously vulnerable to rocket-propelled-grenade and other shoulder-fired-missile attacks, it's not entirely surprising that the Apache fired away. Rather, says Coulthart, the importance of the footage is that it reflects what many non-American Coalition military units said to his crew: that they've grown increasingly concerned about the political ramifications of the Americans' take no-prisoners/show-no-mercy approach. "When it came up in conversation with one Coalition officer," says Coulthart, "he shook his head and said, 'The Americans have gone feral and no good will come of it.'"
"Iraq -- On the Brink" also captures the brusque aloofness of CPA administrator J. Paul Bremer, the shiftiness of Ahmad Chalabi, the still-being-uncovered hidden horrors of Saddam's regime, and the bravery of the Baghdad Police Department's bomb squad in defusing scores of bombs each day. (The Americans use remote-controlled robots to neutralized explosives threatening U.S. troops; the Iraqis display what Coulthart calls a "splendid madness in heroism" as they are left to defuse bombs by hand, with no protective gear.)
While Coulthart thinks the documentary makes for an accurate and timely snapshot of post-Saddam Iraq, he exhales a rueful sigh at the mention of Abu Ghraib -- a sigh that reflects a sense of both self-recrimination and angst born of the economics of foreign correspondence. When his crew was en route to meet Teeples and his Third Armored Cavalry soldiers in Iraq's western desert, their route took them past Abu Ghraib. As Coulthart recalls, no discussion was required to stop the van; the scene they beheld "was like something out of Dante's Inferno." "We all knew what it was and what it stood for, this thing with mythological status in Iraq where all this death and misery took place," he says. "Part of what was striking was that, frankly, it wasn't looking much different now -- barbed wire, troops with menacing gun emplacements, lines of people trying to get in to see relatives.
"While we're filming overlays, up walks this mother, who tells us this horror story about her sons essentially being abducted from their home in Um Qasr by the Americans in the middle of the night. I did the interview, of course, but didn't run it in our story because it seemed a little off our focus. You're so focused on the story you tell yourself is the story -- in part because the cost is so high and the budget is so tight. It cost us $1500 a week to be there, and unless we deliver results, it's harder in the future to get the support this kind of work requires."
Indeed, Coulthart says, those sorts of cost considerations actually kept the cluster-bomb segment from appearing on Sunday for a year. "Most of that we shot last year, but we had to focus on the story we were supposed to be telling, which was mostly about Chalabi," he says. Determined to advance the dormant story on his latest visit to Baghdad, days of street reporting led the crew to al-Ansari, whose experiences ultimately made for a much more informative and affecting piece of journalism.
Yet the fact remains that a disturbing reality went unreported for a year, essentially due to constraints on time and money. "And with Abu Ghraib, it was the same situation again," Coulthart sighs. "Though we had the luxury of more time and more flexibility than anyone who covers Iraq day in and day out, we felt like we couldn't shift our focus. And the irony was, here was this story of a lifetime right under our noses. There were people standing in queues trying to see their sons, waiting eight hours a day and often being told to come back the next day, and then the next and the next. Looking back on it, I'm not only kicking myself now, but am kind of ashamed. I'm sure that if we had scratched the surface and had taken the time to systematically interview people coming out to Abu Ghraib trying to figure out what had happened to their loved ones, we could have dug something up then."
Coulthart's sentiment is not uncommon among seasoned, independent-minded reporters cognizant of the complexities of most foreign stories. But in some respects, the dice have been loaded against journalists covering Iraq since the beginning of the war. While a handful of journalists has provided a steady stream of exemplary reporting, there are some who feel that whatever good reporting has been done since the end of "major combat operations" has involved an even greater uphill battle for attention than usual. Why? Because the Bush administration's practice of embedding journalists with the troops set the tenor of Iraq-war reporting.
As the Washington Post's Richard Leiby wrote last year, embedding was nothing short of a "propaganda coup" for the Defense Department. By embedding scores of reporters (many with little or no combat or foreign experience) in rapidly advancing frontline units, argued Leiby, the Pentagon ensured that virtually no one who was "cover[ing] the instability and power vacuum left in the invasion's wake" got nearly the play their "embedded" colleagues did -- thus minimizing the disturbing realities of poor post-war planning and lulling Americans into a sense of complacency, not about what was to come, but about what was already happening.
Speaking at an extraordinary-but-unnoticed symposium at the University of Texas last year, award-winning combat photographer Peter Turnley was unsparing in his criticism of the increasingly institutionalized self-censorship he believes began in the first Gulf War, and has only become more insidious since. In Gulf War I, Turnley -- then a top Newsweek photographer -- was so uncomfortable with the Pentagon's control of journalists through its "pool" system that he actually left Saudi Arabia before the war and snuck across the Kuwaiti border by dressing as an Army colonel. While many of his colleagues were being shepherded through the theater of operations by U.S. military minders, Turnley at one point found himself surveying a horrific scene that the Army thought it had successfully quarantined from journalists.
"I witnessed U.S. soldiers forcing Iraqi prisoners at gunpoint to pick up bodies and pile them up and put them in mass graves where bulldozers would come and cover them up," he said. "There were two Iraqi soldiers, they were really very pathetic, in their 40s, didn't have teeth, very tired and fatigued, and at gunpoint being made to pick up dozens of bodies. It seemed rather inhuman to me, how long they were obliged to do this. I remember as they dropped a body next to a stack of bodies, one of the Iraqi soldiers fell to his hands and knees and started sobbing. I got on my knees and started to make a picture -- at that point an American soldier came up and punched me in the chest and said, 'You animal.' And I grabbed him by the shirt and told him I didn't make these guys do this."
Although Turnley took rolls of disturbing and moving images -- some of which he showed to the symposium audience -- almost none saw the light of day, either in Newsweek or through distribution by his photo agency. Yet almost every newspaper reproduced Turnley's photograph of a wounded U.S. soldier in a helicopter, crying as a comrade died in his arms.
During the 2003 Gulf War, Turnley -- this time for the Denver Post -- once again struck out on his own, purposely avoiding U.S. and British soldiers and focusing his attention on the Iraqi people. "For the first three weeks, I would see a convoy, a whole troupe of writers from major media outlets that would come in for a half day's reporting so they could get their dateline and then get out," he recalled. "It took me literally five seconds of entering into Iraq and looking into the eyes of people whose eyes showed mistrust, open hostility at the worst. There were towns that troops had just flown through, not staying to create any law and order. People showed me leaflets the Americans had dropped from the sky saying they should be embraced with joy and welcomed because we were bringing liberation and food and water and power, and they'd scream at me, 'Where's the water? Where are the medical supplies? In the hospital we have nothing.'"
In Turnley's view, the media-government arrangement that effectively produced much of the coverage of Gulf War II and the early occupation conspired to create what he terms a "projected idea of reality" -- which policymakers actually consider tantamount to reality. Yet wrenching situations like the one he witnessed in a Baghdad hospital five days after the city's liberation, he says, are precisely what people need to see to drive home the reality that the invasion was not about American pride, but about America's failure to secure the blessings of liberation for the Iraqi people. "I saw this beautiful little girl on the bed -- yellow socks, white shirt -- and I noticed two doctors were doing cardiac massage on her chest, and that I was watching the life of this little girl evaporating. I thought I saw her chest exhale and I had this leap of joy, I thought she was coming back to life -- and one of the doctors had this look of disgust and put a towel over her face and walked out."
The girl, Turnley found out, had died of pneumonia, for which she could have been treated. But because the Americans had failed to plan for crowds running riot, the girl's father couldn't get her to the hospital before it was too late.
A clip and transcript of "Iraq -- On The Brink" are available on the Journeyman Pictures website. A transcript of the shorter version of the documentary that aired on NineNet's Sunday program is available here; a transcript of Sunday's 2003 piece "The Spoils of War" is available here. You can also read related articles by Ross Coulthart at The Bulletin, an Australian newsweekly.
Jason Vest is a contributing writer for the Boston Phoenix.
Bloggers and Big Media
(courtesy of Andie Miller)
To Their Surprise, Bloggers Are Force for Change in Big Media
Mark Glaser
Online Journalism Review
A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic's query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers' scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism.
Read Entire Article
To Their Surprise, Bloggers Are Force for Change in Big Media
Mark Glaser
Online Journalism Review
A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic's query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers' scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism.
Read Entire Article
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Chuck D and Hank Shocklee on Digital Sampling
How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop
By Kembrew McLeod, Stay Free! Magazine
Alternet
When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in 1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing sounded like it at the time. It Takes a Nation came frontloaded with sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing tracks over which P.E. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music industry, black nationalism, and – in the case of "Caught, Can I Get a Witness?" – digital sampling: "CAUGHT, NOW IN COURT ' CAUSE I STOLE A BEAT / THIS IS A SAMPLING SPORT / MAIL FROM THE COURTS AND JAIL / CLAIMS I STOLE THE BEATS THAT I RAIL ... I FOUND THIS MINERAL THAT I CALL A BEAT / I PAID ZERO."
In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of opportunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot. The following is a combination of two interviews conducted separately with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.
Read the Interview
By Kembrew McLeod, Stay Free! Magazine
Alternet
When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in 1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing sounded like it at the time. It Takes a Nation came frontloaded with sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing tracks over which P.E. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music industry, black nationalism, and – in the case of "Caught, Can I Get a Witness?" – digital sampling: "CAUGHT, NOW IN COURT ' CAUSE I STOLE A BEAT / THIS IS A SAMPLING SPORT / MAIL FROM THE COURTS AND JAIL / CLAIMS I STOLE THE BEATS THAT I RAIL ... I FOUND THIS MINERAL THAT I CALL A BEAT / I PAID ZERO."
In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of opportunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot. The following is a combination of two interviews conducted separately with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.
Read the Interview
US Prison Boom
US prison boom creates an Orwellian world
By Peter Daniels
WSWS
A recent study by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit policy research and education organization, sheds important light on the growth of prisons in the US over the past two decades, and on some little-noticed social and political ramifications of this phenomenon.
The report, issued in late April, is entitled, “The New Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping America’s Prison Expansion.” Its focus is a very narrow one. It does not address any of the reasons for the expansion of prisons or the fact that the US, with more than 2 million people in prisons and jails (2,019,234, according to a Justice Department announcement in April 2003), now occupies first place in the entire world in the percentage of its citizens behind bars—702 per 100,000.
The report deals only with the prison population, leaving out those in local jails awaiting trial or serving brief sentences. Its figure for this prison population in 2000 is 1.3 million, a number that has skyrocketed from 218,000 in 1974. The exact numbers are 315,974 in 1980, 739,980 in 1990, and 1,321,137 in 2000.
More than 40 percent of state prisons in operation today were opened in the last 25 years. The number of such facilities has jumped from 592 in 1974 to 1,023 in 2000. Back in 1923 there was a grand total of 61 prisons in the entire country. The population has tripled since then, but the number of prisons has increased 17-fold.
The report focuses on the 10 states with the largest growth in the number of prisons in the last 20 years. These include most or all of the states with the largest population—California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Michigan and Ohio—along with Georgia, Colorado and Missouri. Sixty-three percent of the additional prisons opened in the past two decades have been in these 10 states. The number of prisons in these states more than tripled between 1979 and 2000, from 195 to 604. Texas is in a class by itself, with 120 new prisons, for a growth of 706 percent over the 21 years. Not surprisingly (although not dealt with in this report), Texas also leads in the number of executions carried out since the legalization of the death penalty in the mid-1970s.
Several aspects of the prison-building boom are highlighted. First is what is called the “pervasiveness of prison growth.” The proportion of counties in the 10 states studied that include at least one prison increased from 13 percent in 1979 to 31 percent in 2000.
The second theme of the study is the impact of prison expansion in rural and “non-metro” counties, defined as those lacking “a large population nucleus, together with adjacent communities, having a high degree of social and economic integration with that core.” The growth of prisons in these more sparsely populated areas has led to a situation in which a growing number of counties have 5, 10 or 20 percent or more of their residents behind bars.
A third aspect studied is the growing disconnect between the largely urban areas most prisoners come from and the counties of imprisonment where they serve their time, often hundreds of miles away from their homes and families.
One of the authors of the study, Jeremy Travis, explained the development of what he called “a prison construction advocacy position.” This phenomenon has been studied elsewhere (Going Up the River, by Joseph Hallinan, Random House, 2001; “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” by Eric Schlosser, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1998). Rural legislators on the national as well as local level have lobbied intensively for locating new prisons in areas which have lost jobs in both industry and agriculture and are plagued by high unemployment. This is advanced as a jobs program, although according to one study cited by the Urban Institute report, there was little difference in economic growth between counties that had prisons compared to those without them.
As a result of the influx of prisoners into sparsely populated areas, 114 counties out of a total of 1,052 in the ten states in the study, or more than one out of ten, have more than 5 percent of their population in prison. Forty-seven counties have 10 percent or more of their population in prison, 13 have 20 percent or more, and two counties, one in Florida and one in Texas, have 30 percent or more. Concho County in Texas, with a population of just under 4,000, had 33 percent in prison. Union County, in Florida, with a population of 13,400, had 30 percent behind bars.
Five states were studied to compare where prisoners are from with where they are imprisoned. In Ohio, for example, it is no surprise that most prisoners (58.7 percent) come from counties in which the major cities are located: Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Franklin (Columbus), Hamilton (Cincinnati), Montgomery (Dayton), Summit (Akron) and Lucas (Toledo). Only 4.6 percent of prisoners were serving their sentences in these counties, however. Most (78 percent of the total) were being held in prisons in smaller counties, far from their homes. This same pattern held, in varying degrees, in the other states in the study.
The report ends by posing the question, “Why are prisons located in counties that are different from prisoners’ home counties?” without providing an answer. It notes that “spatial mismatch between prisoners and their homes not only impacts the communities that host prisons, but it also impacts family members and friends of prisoners,” a complicated way of stating that an enormous hardship is imposed on many thousands of poor and working class families, while adding to the burdens of those in prison in preparing for release by obtaining jobs and making living arrangements.
The prison building program documented in this report reflects the unrelenting right-wing law-and-order frenzy that has been waged by both Democratic and Republican parties and lawmakers on every level of government. The consequences of this decades-long buildup in state repression are not mysterious. The locating of many new prisons in rural areas has several related aims: First, it is designed to provide low-paid jobs and take advantage of a plentiful supply of labor in some of the poorest sections of the country. Second, it serves the purpose of transferring federal funds from cities and urban areas, with larger populations of minority workers, trade unionists and other sections of the working class, to rural areas which are usually under the control of the extreme right. Third, it provides direct political benefit for these areas, since the prisoners, while denied the right to vote, are counted in the population figures which are used not only in the allocation of federal money for Medicaid and a whole variety of social services, but also in determining the allotment of legislative seats on a state and federal level.
The report does not tabulate the number of workers employed in the record-setting prison expansion, nor does it examine the related issues of prison privatization and the use of prison labor by a wide variety of industries. It is not an exaggeration, however, to say that there are numerous counties in the US where the local prison is the biggest “industry,” and the total of those behind bars plus those who are paid to guard (and in some cases brutalize) them adds up to between 20 and 40 percent, or more, of the total population.
As the author of the study explained. “This study shows that the prison network is now deeply intertwined with American life, deeply integrated into the physical and economic infrastructure of a large number of American counties. This network has become a separate reality, apart from the criminal justice system. It provides jobs for construction workers and guards, and because the inmates are counted as residents of the counties where they are incarcerated, it means more federal and state funding and greater political representation for these counties.”
All of these developments merge into a growing nightmare of forced labor, the disenfranchisement of millions of workers, and the use of the instruments of state repression to isolate and atomize large sections of the working class while building up the most reactionary forces to repress the working class. There are substantial areas of the country where the population is increasingly made up of the jailed and their jailers. It is certainly no accident that many of those caught up in the torture scandals against Iraqi prisoners received their training as prison guards in the US. It is in the rapidly growing prison system that they learned the traits of brutality, callousness and indifference to human life that were displayed in the photos sent around the world.
Article Link
By Peter Daniels
WSWS
A recent study by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit policy research and education organization, sheds important light on the growth of prisons in the US over the past two decades, and on some little-noticed social and political ramifications of this phenomenon.
The report, issued in late April, is entitled, “The New Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping America’s Prison Expansion.” Its focus is a very narrow one. It does not address any of the reasons for the expansion of prisons or the fact that the US, with more than 2 million people in prisons and jails (2,019,234, according to a Justice Department announcement in April 2003), now occupies first place in the entire world in the percentage of its citizens behind bars—702 per 100,000.
The report deals only with the prison population, leaving out those in local jails awaiting trial or serving brief sentences. Its figure for this prison population in 2000 is 1.3 million, a number that has skyrocketed from 218,000 in 1974. The exact numbers are 315,974 in 1980, 739,980 in 1990, and 1,321,137 in 2000.
More than 40 percent of state prisons in operation today were opened in the last 25 years. The number of such facilities has jumped from 592 in 1974 to 1,023 in 2000. Back in 1923 there was a grand total of 61 prisons in the entire country. The population has tripled since then, but the number of prisons has increased 17-fold.
The report focuses on the 10 states with the largest growth in the number of prisons in the last 20 years. These include most or all of the states with the largest population—California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Michigan and Ohio—along with Georgia, Colorado and Missouri. Sixty-three percent of the additional prisons opened in the past two decades have been in these 10 states. The number of prisons in these states more than tripled between 1979 and 2000, from 195 to 604. Texas is in a class by itself, with 120 new prisons, for a growth of 706 percent over the 21 years. Not surprisingly (although not dealt with in this report), Texas also leads in the number of executions carried out since the legalization of the death penalty in the mid-1970s.
Several aspects of the prison-building boom are highlighted. First is what is called the “pervasiveness of prison growth.” The proportion of counties in the 10 states studied that include at least one prison increased from 13 percent in 1979 to 31 percent in 2000.
The second theme of the study is the impact of prison expansion in rural and “non-metro” counties, defined as those lacking “a large population nucleus, together with adjacent communities, having a high degree of social and economic integration with that core.” The growth of prisons in these more sparsely populated areas has led to a situation in which a growing number of counties have 5, 10 or 20 percent or more of their residents behind bars.
A third aspect studied is the growing disconnect between the largely urban areas most prisoners come from and the counties of imprisonment where they serve their time, often hundreds of miles away from their homes and families.
One of the authors of the study, Jeremy Travis, explained the development of what he called “a prison construction advocacy position.” This phenomenon has been studied elsewhere (Going Up the River, by Joseph Hallinan, Random House, 2001; “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” by Eric Schlosser, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1998). Rural legislators on the national as well as local level have lobbied intensively for locating new prisons in areas which have lost jobs in both industry and agriculture and are plagued by high unemployment. This is advanced as a jobs program, although according to one study cited by the Urban Institute report, there was little difference in economic growth between counties that had prisons compared to those without them.
As a result of the influx of prisoners into sparsely populated areas, 114 counties out of a total of 1,052 in the ten states in the study, or more than one out of ten, have more than 5 percent of their population in prison. Forty-seven counties have 10 percent or more of their population in prison, 13 have 20 percent or more, and two counties, one in Florida and one in Texas, have 30 percent or more. Concho County in Texas, with a population of just under 4,000, had 33 percent in prison. Union County, in Florida, with a population of 13,400, had 30 percent behind bars.
Five states were studied to compare where prisoners are from with where they are imprisoned. In Ohio, for example, it is no surprise that most prisoners (58.7 percent) come from counties in which the major cities are located: Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Franklin (Columbus), Hamilton (Cincinnati), Montgomery (Dayton), Summit (Akron) and Lucas (Toledo). Only 4.6 percent of prisoners were serving their sentences in these counties, however. Most (78 percent of the total) were being held in prisons in smaller counties, far from their homes. This same pattern held, in varying degrees, in the other states in the study.
The report ends by posing the question, “Why are prisons located in counties that are different from prisoners’ home counties?” without providing an answer. It notes that “spatial mismatch between prisoners and their homes not only impacts the communities that host prisons, but it also impacts family members and friends of prisoners,” a complicated way of stating that an enormous hardship is imposed on many thousands of poor and working class families, while adding to the burdens of those in prison in preparing for release by obtaining jobs and making living arrangements.
The prison building program documented in this report reflects the unrelenting right-wing law-and-order frenzy that has been waged by both Democratic and Republican parties and lawmakers on every level of government. The consequences of this decades-long buildup in state repression are not mysterious. The locating of many new prisons in rural areas has several related aims: First, it is designed to provide low-paid jobs and take advantage of a plentiful supply of labor in some of the poorest sections of the country. Second, it serves the purpose of transferring federal funds from cities and urban areas, with larger populations of minority workers, trade unionists and other sections of the working class, to rural areas which are usually under the control of the extreme right. Third, it provides direct political benefit for these areas, since the prisoners, while denied the right to vote, are counted in the population figures which are used not only in the allocation of federal money for Medicaid and a whole variety of social services, but also in determining the allotment of legislative seats on a state and federal level.
The report does not tabulate the number of workers employed in the record-setting prison expansion, nor does it examine the related issues of prison privatization and the use of prison labor by a wide variety of industries. It is not an exaggeration, however, to say that there are numerous counties in the US where the local prison is the biggest “industry,” and the total of those behind bars plus those who are paid to guard (and in some cases brutalize) them adds up to between 20 and 40 percent, or more, of the total population.
As the author of the study explained. “This study shows that the prison network is now deeply intertwined with American life, deeply integrated into the physical and economic infrastructure of a large number of American counties. This network has become a separate reality, apart from the criminal justice system. It provides jobs for construction workers and guards, and because the inmates are counted as residents of the counties where they are incarcerated, it means more federal and state funding and greater political representation for these counties.”
All of these developments merge into a growing nightmare of forced labor, the disenfranchisement of millions of workers, and the use of the instruments of state repression to isolate and atomize large sections of the working class while building up the most reactionary forces to repress the working class. There are substantial areas of the country where the population is increasingly made up of the jailed and their jailers. It is certainly no accident that many of those caught up in the torture scandals against Iraqi prisoners received their training as prison guards in the US. It is in the rapidly growing prison system that they learned the traits of brutality, callousness and indifference to human life that were displayed in the photos sent around the world.
Article Link
Review of "Girl With a Pearl Earring"
Creating the past in their own self-involved image
Girl with a Pearl Earring
WSWS
Girl With a Pearl Earring
Girl with a Pearl Earring
WSWS
Girl With a Pearl Earring
Review of "House of Sand and Fog" directed by Vadim Perelman
If you hacen't seen this film yet don't read this review as it gives away the ending. This film moved me... something about the struggle and loss over propoerty and the disenfranchisment and alienation and delusions of its characters.
Thivai
House of Sand and Fog, directed by Vadim Perelman
Thivai
House of Sand and Fog, directed by Vadim Perelman
Review of "Spartan" by David Mamet
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