What Happens When Leaders Cut Brush Instead of Leading

For a variety of reasons, some known knowns, many more either known unknowns or unknown knowns, I am not keeping up with my reading this year, based on both current goals and comparison with last year's program. It's certainly not for want of inspiration. I had Glenn Greenwald's "Great American Hypocrites" pre-ordered and received it a couple weeks ago, but it has alas languished amidst the splendor of other materials (many with a compelling library due date!). However, it is clearly must reading, and will wrestle its' way to the top of the heap soon, I'm sure.

Philip Shenon's "The Commission," the "Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation," despite being quite gripping, did consume more days than I expected. One of the major side-plots featured there that came across as new to me was the attempt by AG Ashcroft and a supporting cast of the usual right-wing swine to scapegoat Commissioner Jamie Gorelick for the failures of the intelligence community and the bush administration in particular to pay attention to repeating warnings of imminent terrorist attacks on US soil prior to September 2001. This ruse involved a memo signed by Gorelick in her role as deputy AG in 1995. This memo basically recounted the long-standing DoJ policy on handling of terrorism cases, including restrictions on unfettered sharing of information between intelligence agents and criminal investigators. Based on multiple court orders, this policy was aimed at preserving civil liberties and reducing the risk that the comparatively low standards required for counterterrorism agents to obtain warrants for eavesdropping would not poison criminal prosecutions by introducing inadmissible evidence. It is a mark of the level of desperation felt by the bush administration that they attempted to gang-tackle Gorelick and make the absolutely ridiculous claim that this memo so hobbled the intelligence agencies that they just couldn't figure out how to do their jobs. Frankly, a little more brush left un-cut down there on that ranch, a lot less strutting around and cartoon role-playing, any midnight oil at all by the president (ever!), and anything resembling actual courageous leadership from george, dick, condie, donald, and george et al could have made a hell of a difference. They know it and even Shenon's pulled punches make it clear how desperately afraid they were of having the truth come out.

Interestingly, pretty much the entire 9/11 Commission apparently rallied strongly behind Gorelick, in particular Republican Slade Gorton:

But as he listened to the attorney general's testimony and the attack on Gorelick, Gorton realized how wrong he had been about Ashcroft. "I was shocked," he recalled. "This attack was unprincipled. I was just infuriated."

I highly recommend The Commission. Important reading for anyone trying to understand the back-stage machinations of that strange incestuous community back in DC. I admit I was hoping for a harder-hitting condemnation of the Commission for the compromises involved in their publications. Likewise, while Philip Zelikow certainly comes off as seriously tainted (and ever so appropriately) in his fully-conflicted and compromised role as the executive director, in my opinion he got off way too easy here.

I have also found myself in the grip of some great historical espionage novels from the pen of Alan Furst. I'm currently in the end-stages of "Night Soldiers," having previously greatly enjoyed "Foreign Correspondent." These are wonderfully gritty tales of very credible characters fully embedded in the intricacies of world events; both of these books are set in the 1930's and '40's in Europe.

But my backlog just within easy reach of the keyboard here (besides Greenwald) includes "Death of a Hawker," an intriguing mystery set in Amsterdam and recommended by neighbor Steve (hi!), "Three Cups of Tea," offered up by Mom but also recommended previously by a co-worker, "How Proust Can Change Your Life," "Walden Pond - a History," and Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" as well as "Truth and Consequences." Relentless.

And then today I was reminded that Arianna Huffington has a highly-touted new book out also, namely "Right is Wrong." I believe the following post is the result of Greenwald acting as host for a book soiree at the Firedoglake site earlier today. I relished the primary post but imagine there is a lot more good nutrition to be found in the extended comment section. This is familiar turf, very complementary to Greenwald's Hypocrites and his yeomanly blogging at Salon on the topic of television and print media having absolutely fallen from grace, drunk the kool-aid, and sold out, as well as the democratic party leadership having bred with jellyfish and lost any ability to actually resemble a party in opposition to the rape of democracy that has been going on in this country for a good long time now.

I believe you will benefit from a full reading of the post and comments. A taste:

Arianna Huffington's latest book -- Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe -- thoroughly documents the most influential fact in our political life: namely, that the right-wing faction which has taken over the Republican Party is radical, deeply hostile to America's core political traditions and values, and incomparably destructive. As she puts it: "they don't believe in evolution but believe in torture."

But the real value of this book is its examination of the two key culprits in the ascension of this right-wing fringe: the establishment media and the Beltway leaders of the Democratic Party. Huffington's insights are most piercing and innovative when her targets are the bloated, empty-headed media stars who have done more than anyone else to allow this fringe group to masquerade as part of the mainstream. And she pinpoints the dual afflictions which have rendered the media totally supine, when they aren't actively complicit, in the face of this falsehood-spewing, extremist movement -- the twisted notion of journalistic "balance" which means that they present every claim no matter how objectively false, along with the "self-hating" mentality of "liberal" journalists who have internalized right-wing smears and thus repeat them and seek to accommodate them:

A key to understanding the fanatical Right’s takeover of the Republican Party and how these ideas spread to the rest of the country is looking at the role of the media—not the Fox News pseudo-newsmen or the talk radio blowhards—but the respectable, supposedly liberal media. Without the enabling of the traditional media—with their obsession with “balance” and their pathological devotion to the idea that truth is always found in the middle—the radical Right would never have been able to have its ideas taken seriously. . . . By reporting everything through this prism the media missed the big story: the hijacking of America by the lunatic Right.

Perhaps the most compelling proof of how potent is Huffington's critique of the media's malfeasance is that one of her prime and most-deserving targets, pseudo-tough-guy Tim Russert, banned Huffington from appearing on NBC and MSNBC shows to discuss her book, because of his hurt feelings over the criticism she voices. As demonstrated by the recent network news blackout of the NYT's "military analyst" expose -- a blackout which Huffington recently described as "among the most shameful in the history of American journalism" -- our media stars will simply suppress, conceal from their audience, any content which reveals their fundamental corruption. Hence, Russert uses his position at NBC to ensure that NBC viewers are blocked from hearing Huffington's revealing critique of his "journalism."

Huffington is equally unsparing -- and equally on-point -- when it comes to the fear-driven, weakness-embodying Democratic Party establishment, which has been as unwilling as the establishment press to take on the fringe Right:

The other not-so-innocent bystanders to the Right’s takeover are the Democrats who have continued to tread far too lightly when it comes to holding the GOP’s fanatical core accountable. Time and time again, the Democratic leadership has allowed itself to get played, run over, or distracted.

In sum, we are a nation that has been taken over by a political movement that holds fringe views largely because the two institutions which had the responsibility to expose the truth of what they are -- the media and the "opposition party" -- miserably failed to fulfill those functions. Huffington's book is a merciless though extremely well-document indictment of those failed institutions, and highlights the havoc these failures have wreaked on our country and political culture.

As depressing as all of that may sound, the book itself is characterized by the vibrant and entertaining yet always hard-hitting tone which characterizes everything Arianna does. And underlying its assessment of our deep-seated political woes is a bulging optimism that the Right can be easily crushed -- the same optimistic premise which drove her to create and build with shocking speed The Huffington Post, one of the few real counter-weights to the toxic right-wing noise machine.

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Damming the News

The "mainstream" media are taking a lot of heat these days on the Internet, and rightly so. Yes, this is the same old supposed "liberal media." The one Rush Limbaugh, Coulter, et al, all apparently gifted with no actual ability other than hate-mongering, have made a career out of bashing. This despite plentiful evidence that on the rare occasion when MSM even try to dabble in journalism as it used to be known, there is an increasingly strong bias in what's left of the print and televised media for rightist, conservative, pro-corporation, and hence elitist ideology.

Their reader/viewer numbers are in the dumpster and continuing to decline. Do you suppose any of that could be a result of actual citizen news-searchers who are learning more and more about how little value there is in the "news" promulgated by the few remaining monopolistic news-screening or -damming operations? The Times had a great expose a week ago on a long-standing White House/Pentagon propaganda operation directed at the American people. This involved retired generals, admirals, and other pooh-bahs of seemingly every stripe and color rehearsing their talking points with those in that five-sided building and then being allowed to feed it to the eager, uncritical (maybe declining is a good thing!) masses by way of most if not all of the major broadcasters with little if any of the cross-checking or corroboration that would seem to be the minimum effort required if one is to call something "news" when there is no actual "source." And of course this propaganda has virtually never been presented in a venue that involved contrary opinions.

Mr. Orwell, how be you?

Anyone who relies solely on television or print media would have little knowledge of this issue, never mind the additional venality it seems to pile on to a recent saga of despicability that is third only to the republican party in general and the current administration in particular. The "mainstream" media have pretty much censored the entire topic, presumably as it reflects so badly on their performance.

Greenwald was properly on top of the NYT article right out of the gate:

This morning's "blockbuster" New York Times article by David Barstow, documenting the Pentagon and U.S. media's joint use of pre-programmed "military analysts" who posed as objective experts while touting the Government line and having extensive business interests in promoting those views, is very well-documented and well-reported. And credit to the NYT for having sued to compel disclosure of the documents on which the article is based. There are significant elements of the story that exemplify excellent investigative journalism.

At the same time, though, in light of questions on this very topic raised even by the NYT back in 2003, it is difficult to take the article's underlying points seriously as though they are some kind of new revelation. And ultimately, to the extent there are new revelations here, they are a far greater indictment of our leading news organizations than the government officials on whom it focuses.

In 2002 and 2003, when Americans were relentlessly subjected to their commentary, news organizations were hardly unaware that these retired generals were mindlessly reciting the administration line on the war and related matters. To the contrary, that's precisely why our news organizations -- which themselves were devoted to selling the war both before and after the invasion by relentlessly featuring pro-war sources and all but excluding anti-war ones -- turned to them in the first place. To its credit, the article acknowledges that "at least nine" of the Pentagon's trained military analysts wrote Op-Eds for the NYT itself, but many of those same sources were also repeatedly quoted -- and still are routinely quoted -- in all sorts of NYT news articles on Iraq and other "War on Terrorism" issues, something the article fails to note.

What the article also does not disclose, but should have, is that the NYT itself already published, back on March 25, 2003, right after the invasion of Iraq, an article by John Cushman raising the thorny questions posed by the media's extensive reliance on retired generals as "military analysts":

Old soldiers, it turns out, don't just fade away not when a war is being carried live on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and the broadcast networks. Instead, a whole constellation of retired one-, two-, three- and four-star generals -- including many who led the recent wars in Afghanistan, Kosovo and the Persian Gulf -- can be seen night and day across the television firmament, navigation aids for viewers lost in a narrative that can be foggier than war itself. . . .

But the generals' performances raise some questions, including how much they really know and whether they are disclosing more than they should. Some receive occasional briefings from the Pentagon, but like most reporters, they stay current by checking with their friends in the military and studying all the public information they can gather.

On the other hand, their evident sympathies with the current commanders, not to mention their respect for the military and immersion in its doctrines,sometimes seem to immunize them to the self-imposed skepticism of the news organizations that now
employ them.

Rarely, unless pressed, do the generals bluntly criticize the conduct of the war, a detailed review of their recent remarks discloses. Instead, they tend gravely to point out the timeless risks of combat.

That 2003 article, at the very beginning, highlighted the obvious conflicts raised by this morning's article, as it quoted Gen. Greg Newbold on ABC News as praising the invasion as follows: "If things haven't gone exactly according to script, they've gone according to plan," even though Newbold himself "until late last year [] was helping to draw up those plans as the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

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I was fully of a mind to post on that NYT article last week, but other events intervened. I encourage you to read both the Times article and the Greenwald post. Highly instructive.

So, here we are a week later and older. Glenn has uncovered at least one unusual co-complainant:

Few journalists are the target of as much (justifiable) criticism, here and elsewhere, as CNN's and The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz is. But one must give some credit where it's due. He's one of the very few establishment media figures to cover in any meaningful way what ought to be the "military analyst" scandal, first revealed by the New York Times' David Barstow. Kurtz has written a Post column on it, discussed it on his CNN show last week, and then again this week devoted a segment to the story that included a relatively decent, adversarial interview of former Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita.

There are all sorts of valid criticisms one can make about how Kurtz has covered the story. But compared to the rest of the establishment press, which -- despite their being at the center of the scandal -- have clammed up in Kremlin-like fashion and ignored the story almost completely, Kurtz's attempt to cover the story and address its central points is commendable. Today, in his Washington Post chat, he opined as to why the media has largely refused to address the allegations against them:

I don't agree that the MSM cover war and economics poorly but I do think their coverage of this important issue has been pathetic. I covered the controversy stemming from the NYT story on "Reliable Sources" the last two weeks; yesterday I had Don Rumsfeld's former Pentagon spokesman and a retired colonel who was a military analyst for NBC. If there has been any coverage of this on CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC or Fox, I've missed it. The story makes the networks look bad, and their response, by and large, has been to ignore it.

Kurtz's specific criticism of the media's behavior regarding this story highlights a broader and even more important point. In general, the establishment media almost completely excludes critiques of their own behavior, and discussions of the role the media plays in bolstering deceitful narratives is missing almost entirely from media-controlled discourse.

One of the most significant political stories of this decade, if not this generation -- the media's full-scale complicity with the Government in the run-up to the Iraq war -- has never been meaningfully discussed or examined on any establishment television network, including cable shows. While piecemeal quibbles of media coverage can be heard (of the type Kurtz typically spouts, or the Limbaugh-driven complaint about the "liberal media"), no fundamental critique of the role the media plays, the influence of its corporate ownership, its incestuous relationship with and dependence on government power -- among the most influential factors driving our political life -- are ever heard. That is the case for exactly the reason Kurtz today pointed to in explaining the blackout of the military analyst story ("The story makes the networks look bad, and their response, by and large, has been to ignore it").

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Kurtz is indeed deserving of major kudos for his promotion of this issue. Out of character from what I can tell, but it's a character he's overdue to get out of. If only a few more of his peers would dig deep enough to find a bit of conscience.