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Networks continue to ignore NY Times' military analyst story, but all find time for Hannah MontanaAs Media Matters noted, the three networks also reportedly declined to participate in a segment on the April 24 edition of PBS' NewsHour regarding the Times story; Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC also refused to appear in the PBS segment.
By contrast, during their April 28 evening newscasts, all three broadcast networks reported on the Vanity Fair photo of Miley Cyrus, star of Disney Channel's Hannah Montana: ABC devoted about two and a half minutes to that story, while CBS and NBC each devoted about two minutes to it.
The Neoconning of a NationU.S. intelligence released a dramatic video last Thursday, supposedly taken by an Israeli spy, that purportedly showed North Korean technicians helping build a nuclear reactor in Syria.
The reactor was destroyed seven months ago by Israeli warplanes.
Until now Israel and the U.S. have remained silent about the attack. Syria claimed a warehouse was hit, but curiously said nothing more about what was an act of war. Washington offered no proof the reactor, if it was one, would have produced weapons rather than electric power. U.S. and Israeli intelligence have long stated Syria had no nuclear weapons capabilities.
Vice-President Dick Cheney and fellow neocons forced the CIA to release the James Bondish video in an effort to sabotage an impending six-nation agreement to end North Korea’s nuclear program. They bitterly oppose the deal for being too soft on Pyongyang. Neocons long have worried the possibility of North Korea selling nuclear technology to Arab states posed a potential threat to Israel.
This mysterious imbroglio also is being used by Israel’s rightwing Likud Party, a close ally of U.S. neocons, to attack political rival Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Kadima Party.
BACK-CHANNEL TALKS
Olmert has been involved in Turkish-brokered, back-channel peace talks with Syria for years. Likud and its U.S. allies are determined to sabotage any deal with Damascus that would return the Golan Heights, which Israel conquered in the 1967 war, to Syria. The Likudniks also sought to derail efforts by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter to encourage the Israeli-Syrian talks, and get Israel and the militant Palestinian movement, Hamas, to talk.
Under the purported deal, Israel would return the Golan Heights in exchange for Damascus’ agreement to sever its close links with Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Hamas. Syria also would grant Israel important water rights. The fate of up to 250,000 Syrian inhabitants driven from Golan remains uncertain.
Israel, backed by the Bush administration, certainly has been using the carrot of a return of Golan to entice Syria away from Iran. But there is also a big stick: Ever-stronger threats of a U.S.-Israeli attack on Syria. Israel’s September attack on Syria was a clear warning.
Cheney and fellow militarists are pushing hard for attacks on Syria, Lebanon and Iran before President George W. Bush leaves office. Neocons have flocked to Sen. John McCain’s banner — in spite of Hillary Clinton’s vow to “obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. They believe U.S. attacks on Arab states and/or Iran would prove decisive in winning the presidency for McCain this November. A U.S. attack on Syria could well be the first step of a broader air war against Lebanon and Iran.
Interrogating Abu Ghraib
Tony Diaz, a former military-police sergeant who served at Abu Ghraib, stares into Errol Morris' camera and speaks in baffled tones about being called into a shower room at that notorious Baghdad prison where CIA interrogators were beating an Iraqi detainee to death. Diaz says he did not participate in the man's interrogation and did not beat him; he was ordered to hold the man up and help secure his arms, and he followed those orders. While he was doing that, drops of blood fell from the detainee's battered face onto Diaz's uniform, and that troubled him. He hadn't done anything wrong, he told Morris, yet the blood made him feel responsible.
I don't mean to demonize Tony Diaz. Virtually alone among the interviewees in Morris' new film "Standard Operating Procedure," an artful, meditative investigation of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs and the circumstances that produced them, Diaz seems to be wrestling with his conscience, after his own bewildered and evasive fashion. (Morris has also co-authored a book of the same title with New Yorker staff writer and Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch, to be published next month.)
Everybody else who was there, from former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the M.P.'s at Abu Ghraib, down to the specialists and privates who took the fall for the abuses committed there -- including Megan Ambuhl, Sabrina Harman and Abu Ghraib poster-child Lynndie England -- enthusiastically points fingers and passes the buck: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did it; I fell in love with the wrong guy; there were black-hat government agents I couldn't control; I was just following orders.
As Morris said to me in our recent interview, welcome to the human species. But at the risk of sounding like a terrorist-coddling America-hater, the human species in our country, circa 2008, has some issues with moral clarity. If I believed that there was any public appetite for a movie like "Standard Operating Procedure," I might also believe that it would spark a public conversation about responsibility for the crimes and abuses committed in our name -- some we know about and a great many more, one suspects, that we don't. If we're honest with ourselves, which is a pretty tall order, we might find ourselves in Tony Diaz's position: We didn't do anything wrong, so how did that blood get on our clothes?
But it's evident, as Morris has observed elsewhere, that the American people don't care about torture. We don't mind it, in fact, as long as we don't have to see it or think about it. If it's called something else, like "harsh treatment" or "stress positions" or "special tactics," so much the better, although I doubt the euphemisms are fooling anybody. Morris' mission in "Standard Operating Procedure," in part, is to restore human dimensions to people like Ambuhl and England and Harman who have arguably committed evil and contemptible acts. Some critics have suggested that Morris is justifying their conduct by placing it in the broader context of the paranoia, conformity and oppression that afflicted the military campaign in Iraq and Abu Ghraib in particular.
I don't see it that way. Intentionally or not, Morris' interviews with these confused, vacuous and morally rudderless people felt to me like a sweeping indictment of those of us who are their fellow citizens and who share the culture that produced them. Lynndie England, in particular, is pretty hard to take. Out on parole after three years in prison, she looks battered and puffy, closer to 40 than 25, and remains completely without insight into how her affair with former Cpl. Charles Graner (the alleged mastermind of many of the abusive acts shown in the photos) led her to collaborate in the sexual humiliation and ritual degradation of Iraqi detainees.
The GOP on the verge of implodingThe political career of George H.W. Bush illustrated the contradictions of Republicanism and the growing radicalism of the party that his son would later push to an extreme. His difficulties reflect the radicalization of the party going back to 1964 and his circuitous route in navigating its currents. As much as he was overwhelmed by events, the elder Bush was also undermined by his inability to sustain a viable Republican center post-Reagan. For every gesture he made toward fiscal prudence, a traditional Republican virtue, his party punished him. In 1992, former Nixon speechwriter and conservative firebrand Patrick Buchanan challenged Bush for the Republican nomination, capturing 38 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, a humiliation for the incumbent president. Buchanan's insurgency and the right's obstreperousness made it necessary for Bush to lend them the stage of the Republican National Convention in Houston, a disaster for him contributing to his loss in the general election.
The principal lesson the son absorbed from his father's political failure was to avoid having enemies on the right. George W. Bush became what his father never could, a radical conservative, transcending the problems that had plagued the father throughout his career. The son systematically abandoned the father's respect for fiscal responsibility, individual rights, the separation of church and state, the Congress, constitutional checks and balances, and a realistic and bipartisan foreign policy. George W. Bush saw Reagan more than his father as his model, but he was as little like Reagan as he was like his father. Bush's radicalism has provided a vantage point for historical revisionism, causing his Republican predecessors, judged to be avatars of conservatism in their day, as more moderate in perspective. Reagan's pragmatic willingness to negotiate with congressional Democrats on such matters as Social Security, for example, takes on another aspect. But the inexorable movement to the right is inarguable as a historical pattern.
Every time the conservative Republican period seemed to be exhausted it gained new impetus through openings created by Democratic fractiousness and incompetence in politics and governing. With each cycle conservatism reemerged more radicalized -- a steady march further to the right. After Nixon's disgrace in Watergate came Reagan; after the conservative crackup that engulfed George H.W. Bush came the radical Congress elected in 1994, led by Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay; and then came George W. Bush. Bill Clinton's presidency served as an interregnum that might have broken the Republican era for good had his vice president Al Gore been permitted to assume the office he won by a popular majority. But the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court ultimately thwarted him. When the court in Bush v. Gore handed the presidency to Bush it gave him an extraordinary and unnatural chance to extend Republican power.
Only through the will to power in the Florida contest, the deus ex machina of the Supreme Court, and the tragedy of September 11, was Bush able to gain and hold the presidency. But he and the Republicans have been living on borrowed if not stolen time.
Karl Rove believed he could engineer a political realignment by recreating his work in Texas where he marshaled money and focused campaign technology in order to destroy the Democrats. But the analogy of the nation as Texas writ large was faulty from the start. In Texas he had the wind at his back, regardless of how elaborate and clever his machinations. The transformation of Texas in the 1980s and 1990s into a Republican state was a delayed version of Southern realignment. Yet Rove came to Washington believing that the example of Texas could be transferred to the national level. With the attacks of September 11, this seasoned architect of realignment believed he possessed the impetus to enact his theory. It apparently never occurred to Rove or Bush that using Iraq to lock in the political impact of September 11 would ever backfire. In his First Inaugural, Bush spoke of an "angel in the whirlwind," but the whirlwind was of his own making. For all intents and purposes Rove could not have done more damage to the Republican Party than if he had been the control agent for the Manchurian Candidate.
The cataclysm has consumed Rove's theory, his president, his party, and prospects for a Republican majority. The Republicans may take years if not decades to recreate their party, but that project would have to be on a wholly different basis.
The radicalization of the Republican Party is not at an end, but may only be entering a new phase. Loss of the Congress in 2006 is not accepted as reproach. Quite the opposite, it is understood by the Republican right as the result of lack of will and nerve, failure of ideological purity, errant immorality by members of Congress, betrayal by the media, and by moderates within their own party. They may never recover from the election of 2004, when they believed their agenda received majority support and they ecstatically thought they were the "Right Nation."
Herbert Hoover did not transform his party but became its avatar through failure. By contrast, Bush has remade the Republican Party, turning it into a minority party as a consequence of his radicalism. Bush's discredited Republicanism has further provoked the radicalization of its base where religious right and nativist elements are increasingly dominant. The party is in the grip of an intolerant identity politics -- white male semi-rural fundamentalist Protestant -- that seems only to alienate women, suburbanites, Hispanics, and young people. By the end of his presidency, Bush had achieved the long conservative ambition of remaking the Republican Party without an Eastern moderate wing. Once a national coalition, embracing New York and California, Alabama and Illinois, the Republican Party has retreated into the Deep South and Rocky Mountains.
The war in Iraq has become “a major debacle” and the outcome “is in doubt” The war in Iraq has become “a major debacle” and the outcome “is in doubt” despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon’s premier military educational institute.
[ ]…At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion.
“No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans’ benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel,” wrote Collins, who was involved in planning post-invasion humanitarian operations.
