Rolling back with Rosen and Bay

The New Neo Posted on by

[Note: I’ve posted an update to this article here.]

Jay Rosen and Austin Bay have recently posted an interesting exchange of ideas about Bush and the press. You can find it here on Rosen’s blog, and here on Austin Bay’s blog.

It began with a question Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU and a press critic and reviewer, posed to Bay: whether the Bush administration is essentially stonewalling the press (Rosen calls the process “rollback”) by giving it as little information and cooperation as possible; and furthermore, if so, whether this policy is wise or necessary.

Austin Bay answers in his usual insightful, straightforward, and thorough manner, and then Rosen responds to Bay.

I’m not going to enter into a discussion of the issues myself, since they’ve been well-aired by both Bay and Rosen, and in the voluminous comments on both blogs. Instead, I want to discuss Rosen’s reaction to the discussion that ensued in the comments section of his own blog.

Many of the commenters there were about as fed up with the MSM as any you’ll find anywhere, the consensus being that whatever “rollback” has occurred on Bush’s part was a justifiable reaction to press bias and distortion. Here is Rosen’s response:

This is depressing. Austin and I had hoped that perhaps we’d move the dialogue a tiny bit with this.

I’ll let it go for a day or so, and see if anything changes. If not, PressThink will go on full vacation mode, and comments will shut down. Cheers, everyone.

Understand that the comments section on the thread had not degenerated into the sort of overwhelmingly vicious nastiness that sometimes occurs on so many blogs. Nor was it filled with bad language or racial insults or spambots any of the usual reasons bloggers might have for deleting comments; not at all. In fact, in general, the tone was unusually refined–at least, as blog comments sections go–rather than lowdown and dirty. Yes, some of the comments may have overstated the case (on either side), and the comments were certainly polarized. But that’s hardly remarkable in a comments section; in fact, it is to be expected. On the other hand, many of the commenters made some excellent points. And yes, many accused the press of bias, but this would hardly seem to be off-topic in the discussion at hand, whether or not Rosen disagrees with the accusation.

I’m not exactly inexperienced in this arena; after all, I moderate a comments section myself that features a certain amount of lively argument, and plenty of commenters with whom I disagree. Rosen’s response on his blog made me wonder what might move me to close down comments on a thread. Suffice to say it would have to be something a great deal worse than what Jay was experiencing (and please, commenters, don’t take that as a challenge!).

It’s Rosen’s blog, so he of course is allowed to do whatever he wants with his comments section, including closing it down, either in a single thread or completely (so far, by the way, he has allowed the comments to remain open).

From later remarks Rosen made on the same thread, it appears that he is upset with the comments to the post in question because he thinks the claims and accusations of press bias are too extreme. But even if that were true, would the proper remedy be to shut comments off? Wouldn’t it be to refute them himself–or to let other commenters refute them–with facts, argument, and logic?

I found Rosen’s threat to close down comments disturbing, especially in someone who is dedicated–as I believe he would say he is–to the free and open exchange of ideas. I’ve read Rosen with interest every now and then, and I must say I’ve never seen this particular side of him before. He’s always seemed relatively evenhanded to me–although he is upfront about his own liberal orientation–and he is certainly not above criticizing the press himself (remember, his bio bills him as a “press critic”). So something about this thread seems to have pressed his buttons–“big time,” as Dick Cheney would say.

I hope I’m not being too harsh in stating that Rosen’s reaction reminded me of some of my grade school teachers who would open a topic up for discussion and then, if the responses weren’t to their liking for whatever reason, would purse their lips and tap their feet in exasperation, waiting for the right answer–the one that agreed with their own point of view.

What is most strange about this reaction of Rosen’s is that his post contains a critique of the Bush administration for supposedly shutting off the flow of information to the press in retaliation for what it perceives as press bias against it. But in the very same thread Rosen threatens to close his own comments section for engaging in free speech that doesn’t quite suit him, apparently because it doesn’t go in the direction in which he wants it to go. There’s a certain fearful symmetry there.

I didn’t know Mick was a fan of mine

The New Neo Posted on by

The nearly geriatric Rolling Stones have a new song out called “Sweet Neo Con.”

“It is not really aimed at anyone,” Jagger said on the entertainment-news show’s Wednesday edition. “It’s not aimed, personally aimed, at President Bush. It wouldn’t be called ’Sweet Neo Con’ if it was.”

Not aimed at anyone? Right, Mick; I’ll never tell.

For tomorrow morning

The New Neo Posted on by

I took the day off from heavy posting, and expect to return tomorrow.

But I thought I’d offer the following passage from one of my favorite authors, something to think about for tomorrow morning. For those of you who love snooze alarms and Milan Kundera as much as I do, here’s an excerpt from his book Immortality (Chapter 2):

I’m in bed, happily dozing. With the first stirrings of wakefulness, around six in the morning, I reach for the small transistor radio next to my pillow and press the button. An early-morning news program comes on, but I am hardly able to make out the individual words, and once again I fall asleep, so that the announcer’s sentences merge into my dreams. It is the most beautiful part of sleep, the most delightful moment of the day: thanks to the radio I can savor drowsing and waking, that marvelous swinging between wakefulness and sleep which in itself is enough to keep us from regretting our birth.

And here, from my archives, is the way to rescue yourself if you find that you are overindulging in the blissful pleasure of the snooze alarm.

Egyptian psychiatrist: on suicide bombers

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr Sanity calls attention to a program that aired in July of 2005 on Al-Arabiya TV, featuring the wife and young children of a Palestinian suicide bomber named Salah Ghandour. The following text is taken from the MEMRI translation of the interview. Here is an excerpt:

Reporter: “Hizbullah filmed Salah’s operation and final message, and the entire program was aired on Al-Manar TV, which belongs to Hizbullah.”

Salah Ghandour’s son: “This is the operation that daddy carried out. This is the convoy that came from here, from Palestine. This is his operation…”

Salah Ghandour’s daughter: “This is the place of the operation in which he was gone.”

Salah Ghandour’s son: “This is the car daddy blew up.”

Maha Ghandour: “Of course I miss him and remember his words. Sometimes it saddens me, but I love to watch him.”

When the widow says, “I love to watch him,” she is apparently referring to the film of his matyrdom “operation,” which the children seem to have watched, as well.

As Dr Sanity writes, “Do you imagine that these children will grow up to be psychologically healthy and productive individuals in the new Palestinian state?” And a commenter on the thread asks Dr. Sanity, “As a mental health professional, what do you make of this woman’s attitude?” Dr. Sanity’s answer can be found here.

Unfortunately, such attitudes as those expressed by Salah Ghandour’s family seem far from unusual among people in that part of the world; the fact that Palestinian culture seems to revel in and glorify death to an unusual extent has been remarked upon many times. Although it doesn’t cut much ice with the PC “it’s racist to judge any culture, with the exceptions of the US and Israel” crowd, the best evidence is that Palestinian society has some markedly unhealthy traits in the psychological sense–and, in addition, any already-existent emotional problems of Palestinians are eagerly exploited by those whose business it is to enlist new bodies for suicide matyrdom. One thing feeds into the other, and vice-versa.

One especially shocking aspect of this “cycle of violence” (and this time it really is a cycle of violence) is the cooperation of some Arab mental health professionals themselves in promoting the near-worship of suicide bombers by the society as a whole. MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, does an invaluable service by offering translations of Arabic texts of newspaper articles and television programs, giving us a window on a dark and inverted world, one in which famous psychiatrists act as shills for those who choose to blow themselves apart in the act of doing the same to innocent women and children.

Many of you are no doubt familiar with this MEMRI article, which received quite a bit of blogosphere publicity when it first came out. But, in light of Dr. Sanity’s post, I thought I’d point it out again.

Here is what passes for psychological health, according to Dr. ‘Adel Sadeq, whose credentials as a psychiatrist are impeccable–he is chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association and head of the Department of Psychiatry at ‘Ein Shams University in Cairo, and a recipient of the 1990 Egyptian State Prize. During an April 2002 interview on Iqraa, a Saudi-Egyptian satellite television channel, Dr. Sadeq said the following:

When the [suicide bomber] dies a martyr’s death, he attains the height of bliss. As a professional psychiatrist, I say that the height of bliss comes with the end of the countdown: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. And then, you press the button to blow yourself up. When the martyr reaches ‘one,’ and then ‘boom,’ he explodes, and senses himself flying, because he knows for certain that he is not dead. It is a transition to another, more beautiful world, because he knows very well that within seconds he will see the light of the Creator…

This war will not end, and anyone who deludes himself that there will be peace must understand that Israel did not come to this region to love the Arabs or to normalize relations with them. Anyone who thinks that peace will come, either now or in the future, has limited historical vision. Either we will exist or we will not exist. Either the Israelis or the Palestinians – there is no third option…

There are no Israeli civilians. They are all plunderers. History teaches this. Remove the Apache [helicopter] from the equation, leave them one-on-one with the Palestinian people with the only weapon [for both sides] being dynamite. Then you will see all the Israelis leave, because among them there is not even one man willing to don a belt of dynamite…

The goal of all of us is to liberate Palestine from the Israeli aggressors. To use words that some people no longer like to use today: “We will throw Israel into the sea.” This phrase, by the way, is the truth. Either they will throw us into the sea, or we will throw them into the sea. There is no middle ground. Coexistence is total nonsense…

The real means of dealing with Israel directly is those who blow themselves up. According to what I see in the battle arena, there is no [other means] except for the pure, noble Palestinian bodies. This is the only Arab weapon there is, and anyone who says otherwise is a conspirator…

Remember, this man is chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association and head of the Department of Psychiatry at a major Cairo university. He is not on the fringes of Egyptian society nor of his profession; he is at the center of it.

Now, is it any wonder that Salah Ghandour’s wife loves to watch films of her husband’s suicide “operation?”

Light, heavy; heavy, light

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote two other posts today that are of what you might call the “light” variety–not about anything deeply emotional, or about politics or any earthshattering world events. Until yesterday I’d been doing “heavy” post after heavy post, and I realized I need to vary things a bit, both for my sake and perhaps for yours.

For those of you who prefer heavy, though, don’t worry–more will be coming, soon.

And remember a while back I said I was working on the next post in the “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series? Well, I lied. No, actually, I didn’t lie–I fully meant to work on it, and in fact I have been working on it somewhat– in my head. But it’s going to be delayed a bit more.

Part of the reason is that I’m still very heavily involved in dealing with my mother’s illness. For those of you who are following that event, she is doing considerably better: her hand is about 85% back to normal, in my estimation, which is wonderful. Her leg has a great deal further to go, but she can move it quite a bit now, and the physical therapists are hopeful that some day she will walk with a walker or even perhaps just a cane. She finds that very hard to believe. But her spirits are better, and at times she even seems like her old self.

I’ve graduated to not visiting her every single day, although I still do go most days. She will probably be in the rehab facility for at least a month more. At some point I plan to write about that experience, too, which will be partly heavy and partly light.

Even if the shoe fits, I don’t think I’ll wear it

The New Neo Posted on by

On beautiful days–and we’ve had an awful lot of them lately–I exercise by doing some fast walking at a local park that features a lighthouse, cliffs, and spectacular ocean views. All around me I can see people relaxing and having fun, or at least trying to–playing frisbee, pushing their kids on swings, flying kites, walking dogs (or being walked by their dogs).

Sometimes I take my radio headset, but sometimes I go without and watch the scenery and the people. If I get there around dinnertime, which I often do, there are invariably some picnickers who are using the grills near the wooden tables and benches, and the aromas of barbecuing meat reach out to tantalize me as I walk by.

Yesterday I was passing one of the playing fields and noticed a young Asian couple throwing a frisbee and speaking to each other in a language I couldn’t place. The woman was the one who caught my eye first because she was nearest to me and, as I passed, she flipped the frisbee towards the man with an unusually smooth and practiced motion that it made it seem as though she’d been doing this virtually all her life. And perhaps she had.

He was a good frisbee player, but she was better. Very very petite, and dressed in denim shorts and a tank top. I watched for a moment as I drew near, thinking well, she can throw awfully well, but how’s her catching? and the answer came right away: excellent. Very deft indeed. And that’s when I noticed what she had on her feet.

What did she have on her feet? Something that looked pretty much like this (and thanks, Blogger, for making photos so much easier to insert now):

I could barely believe my eyes. She was running in them. She looked swift and agile. I don’t think I saw her leap, but she didn’t need to; she anticipated exactly where that frisbee was going and was there to meet it.

I don’t think I could have walked in those shoes for more than a few minutes, even at her age. How did she keep them on her feet, how did she keep from tripping and breaking her ankle? And, more importantly and mysteriously, why hadn’t she taken them off to play frisbee??

Astounding. It reminded me of that old saying about Ginger Rogers, that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only she did it backwards and in high heels. But I can understand why Rogers had to wear high heels to dance in stupendously glamorous evening gowns. And at least her high heels had backs.

Spambots: the invasion of the comment snatchers

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then there’s a certain kind of message that’s left on my telephone answering machine. I bet you get them, too: those cozy chatty little communications that try to get you to believe the person leaving it is someone you know, someone you’ve had dealings with before–perhaps at a bank, a credit card company, or maybe selling insurance. The Voice seems to be implying that he (and it’s always a he) has promised to call you back, at your request, and well–here he is. Or perhaps it was you who had promised to get back to him. But no matter. All you have to do now is to call him back, and all will be well. And you’ll get a great deal, too, on something-or-other.

There’s a certain quality about the Voice that both riles me and amuses me at the same time. It seems to have mastered a tone of studiedly casual friendliness–not too eager, not too formal, just right–but is nevertheless totally and instantly recognizable as utterly phony (Holden Caulfield would be onto him in a second).

The Voice accomplishes this effect though a series of hesitations, trying to sound as though he’s not reading from a script. Right. There’s a liberal (pardon the word) use of “ummmm”s, many moments in which the speaker seems to hesitate and search his brain for just the right phrase. But the timing is always ever-so-slightly wrong–the hesitation is too long, or too short, or too choppy.

Spambots are the internet equivalent of the Voice, on a computer screen rather than a telephone answering machine. For those of you who don’t know what spambots are–as I didn’t know, myself, until quite recently, when they began infesting this blog like ugly little weeds in a garden–a spambot comment (or, to be technical, a UBS–an unsolicited bulk comment) is an automatically-generated message sent out to many blogs at a time and deposited, like little turdlike droppings (mixed metaphor, I know, having already called them weeds), in the comments sections of blogs. Spambots masquerade as real people making real comments, although they are no better at this task than the Voice is at seeming to be a person with whom you’ve already had dealings.

What is their purpose? Same as the Voice’s–to make money for somebody, in this case by persuading you to click on a link and thereby inflate the hit counter of a commercial blog, or a blog front (if I’m explaining this poorly or incorrectly, forgive me and correct me–I’m new at this game myself.)

Do spambots work? Hard to believe that anyone falls for them, but apparently they do. And so the answer must be “yes,” just as I would imagine the Voice must draw in enough people to justify its continuing existence.

The spambots–like the Voice–are very friendly. But they use a technique that I’ve never heard the Voice use, and that is flattery. Whoever designs the spambot program knows that we humans are suckers for praise. So the spambots give out a sentence or two that sounds enthusiastic and is apparently music to the ears of many a lonely blogger who’s been waiting in vain to receive a comment or two: “You’ve got a great blog here! I’ve bookmarked it. Hope you visit mine, http://lawnmowers.blogspot.com. It’s all about lawnmowers and other cool stuff like that.”

The spambots don’t always use the same exact phrases of praise in each post. They are far more clever than that; they vary them. But spambots do very much like the word “stuff,” which appears in a great many of their comments. “Stuff” apparently has just the right air of casual inexactness to set the desired tone of seeming sincerity.

I once clicked on one of these spambot sites out of curiosity, despite knowing that the comment was spam and would probably lead me to a dummy site and make money for the spambot designers (my lips are sealed as to the URL of the site, but let’s just say the blog had something to do with recipes for a certain dessert). It consisted of two posts–that was the whole blog–each with a short list of recipes.

But that blog had a very active comments section. There were over fifty on one of the posts, as I recall. So it was clear that the spambot had achieved its aim of getting a fair number of people to the site (note how I’m anthropomorphizing the spambot; it’s hard not to do so, they seem so pesky and duplicitous). Quite a few of the commenters on the spam blog, however, were not pleased; they posted little messages on the order of “You effing a-hole spambot, get off my blog and never come back”

But a large number of the commenters seemed touchingly grateful. They said things like, “So glad you liked my blog! Come back soon. Thanks for the recipes.”

At first I thought these might be second-generation counter-spambots, like in some sci-fi movie, evolving to make war on the original spambots and kill them with kindness. But no, they seemed to be real people with real blogs, seduced by flattery into thinking that finally, finally, they’d found a grateful and appreciative reader in the spambot, which of course they took to be a real person.

I’m not meaning to mock these people. I well remember the times when I was getting a grand total of five readers a day on this blog–and three of them were me, because I didn’t know how to block my own IP address; and the other two had reached here in error. So I know what it’s like to plod away in isolation and hope to be discovered. But I like to think that even in those days a spambot wouldn’t have fooled me.

Now I have the near-daily task–not too onerous as of yet–of plucking the things from my blog. I like to weed the garden–that is, I don’t really like it, but it’s satisfying, and it feels (and looks) so good when it’s over.

[ADDENDUM: As several helpful commenters have pointed out, spambots can be successful whether you click on their links or not. The link itself boosts the site’s ranking in Google and other search engines. Ah, the ingenuity of humankind!

By the way, I’ve already deleted three spam comments on this thread. I let one remain in honor of the post’s subject matter–couldn’t resist having at least one good example of the genre right here.]

Able Danger and the firewall: getting some perspective

The New Neo Posted on by

The Able Danger controversy has been brewing for some time now, with swirling speculation about Jamie Gorelick, the 9/11 Commission, and the role of Sandy Berger in a possible coverup. Then it kind of simmered down. Right now it’s in a holding pattern while we await either further revelations of wrongdoing, or a debunking of the whole brouhaha.

Austin Bay, for example, has this recent post on the current ambiguous state of affairs, and asks President Bush to make a statement and perhaps call for an investigation. Dr. Sanity, who has been hot on the case from the beginning, has an excellent roundup of recent posts around the blogosphere on the topic.

But whatever did or did not happen with the 9/11 Commission and Able Danger, there are some basic issues underlying it that I think have been insufficiently aired. These issues have to do with the origins and rationale for the firewall between the CIA and the FBI that was alleged to have blocked effective action on the intelligence received about Atta.

The way some write about it, it seems almost as though the firewall in question was just something Gorelick got into her pretty little head one bright morning and decided to implement, apropos of nothing. But in fact that firewall was only the culmination of a long and winding road towards the blocking and limiting of intelligence gathering–a path that, retraced, leads us straight back to those familiar and formative watershed events: the Vietnam War and Watergate.

Clinton and Gorelick were neither the originators nor even the main players in setting up the impediments that may have led to the ignoring of the Atta data. They were merely the latest actors in a long line of intelligence-weakening efforts that go back about forty years. But before the Democrats in the crowd get too happy about that statement, let me just say that this doesn’t mean the Democrats are exonerated. On the contrary; Democrats were major players all along in the campaign to set up roadblocks and obstacles, as well as ultimately firewalls, to the gathering and sharing of intelligence by the US government–although their goal was not so much the blocking of intelligence as the curbing of what they feared were overreaches by the government and possible intrusions into civil liberties.

In April of 2004, an amazingly instructive article on this subject appeared in Commentary, an exploration of how this turn of events came to be, and why. It is entitled “The intelligence mess: how it happened, what to do about it,” and was written by Andrew C. McCarthy, the lawyer who prosecuted Sheik Rahman in the 1995 trial connected with the first World Trade Center bombing. Fortunately, I’ve been able to locate a full text of the article online, here. I can’t recommend strongly enough that you read the whole thing.

It’s hard to summarize, because it is so comprehensive and so dense with information; every word feels important. But here is my effort at a quick presentation of the most relevant points:

The antiwar movement that rose as a result of the Vietnam War had a distrust of American power and intelligence gathering and of agencies such as the CIA. The events of Watergate only “deepened the aversion,” since the burglars included former intelligence officers, and Nixon also used the CIA to obstruct the work of the FBI in trying to investigate the break-in. Furthermore, the CIA was engaged in some domestic spying scandals and other acts considered excesses, such as attempts to assassinate foreign leaders (investigated by the Congressional Church Commission of the mid-70s). The upshot of all this was, among other things, a desire to limit the power of the executive branch of government and of intelligence-gathering, because the fear was that these entities, unchecked, could (and would) combine in corrupt ways to undermine our liberties.

What were the mechanisms by which these limits were applied? Congressional oversight, and rulings by federal courts. Previously, the executive branch had been trusted in manners of national security without much input from these branches; after Vietnam and Watergate, no more–Congress and the courts sought to keep the executive branch and the intelligence bureaus on a tight leash.

In addition, national security issues and intelligence-gathering began to be regarded as a form of law enforcement, especially when the activities took place domestically. It’s well worth quoting from McCarthy’s article on the difference between law enforcement and national security; his writing is incredibly lucid on these matters (and, coincidentally, Belmont Club touches on some of these issues in today’s post, entitled “Law vs. War):

In the constitutional license given to executive action, a gaping chasm exists between the realms of law enforcement and national security. In law enforcement, as former U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr explained in congressional testimony last October, government seeks to discipline an errant member of the body politic who has allegedly violated its rules. That member, who may be a citizen, an immigrant with lawful status, or even, in certain situations, an illegal alien, is vested with rights and protections under the U.S. Constitution. Courts are imposed as a bulwark against suspect executive action; presumptions exist in favor of privacy and innocence; and defendants and other subjects of investigation enjoy the assistance of counsel, whose basic job is to thwart government efforts to obtain information. The line drawn here is that it is preferable for the government to fail than for an innocent person to be wrongly convicted or otherwise deprived of his rights.

Not so the realm of national security, where government confronts a host of sovereign states and sub-national entities (particularly terrorist organizations) claiming the right to use force. Here the executive is not enforcing American law against a suspected criminal but exercising national-defense powers to protect against external threats. Foreign hostile operatives acting from without and within are not vested with rights under the American Constitution. The galvanizing national concern in this realm is to defeat the enemy, and as Barr puts it, “preserve the very foundation of all our civil liberties.” The line drawn here is that government cannot be permitted to fail.

But for quite a while the growing feeling was that the threat to liberties from overreaching by agencies such as the CIA and FBI as well as the power of the executive branch were more dangerous and more pressing than the national security issues involved. Simply put, these agencies were no longer trusted, and this loss of innocence on the part of the public, Congress, and the courts led to a series of curbs.

FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed in 1978, was the mechanism by which these brakes were applied. Over the years, mainly through the mechanism of a federal FISA court whose main purpose was to oversee intelligence-gathering, the screws were tightened on these agencies by the mechanism of applying to national security issues many legal safeguards originally developed for dealing with law enforcement issues. To take just one example, the agency asking for a wiretap for national security reasons would now have to establish probable cause that the target was acutally the agent of a foreign power. From the article:

Previously, it would have been laughable to suggest that foreign enemy operatives had a right to conduct their perfidies in privacy””the Fourth Amendment prohibits only “unreasonable” searches, and there is nothing unreasonable about searching or recording people who threaten national security. (The federal courts have often recognized that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.) Now, such operatives became the beneficiaries of precisely such protection. Placing so severe a roadblock in the way of a crucial investigative technique necessarily meant both that the technique would be used less frequently (thereby reducing the quantity and quality of valuable intelligence) and that investigative resources would have to be diverted from intelligence-collection to the rigors of compliance with judicial procedures (which are cumbersome).

The restriction of powers then expanded over time, as the fear grew that intelligence agents might use FISA “as a pretext to investigate crimes for which they themselves lacked probable cause to secure a regular criminal wiretap.” That fear governed many of the further restrictions that later came to be applied, and created among prosecutors:

a grave apprehension about “the appearance of impropriety”–a hidebound concept governing lawyer ethics that is perfectly nonsensical in the life-and-death-context of national security…Often, the result was weeks or more of delay, during which identified terrorists who happened also to be committing quotidian crimes went unmonitored while the government dithered over whether to employ FISA or the criminal wiretap law. The insanity reached its apex in 1995 with the “primary purpose” guidelines drafted by the Clinton administration: henceforth, a firewall would be placed between criminal and national-security agents, generally barring them even from communicating with one another.

So there you have it–the history of the Clinton/Gorelick firewall. It was simply an extreme extension of a trend that had been going on for decades, albeit an exceedlingly costly one. At the ourset, though, it probably seemed quite rational to those implementing it, especially since terrorism was being uniformly treated (by both parties, I might add) as primarily a law enforcement rather than a national security issue.

The article goes on to describe a host of other important developments–once again, I strongly urge you to read every single word. McCarthy describes, among other fascinating and illuminating topics, the myriad negative effects the firewall had on the fight against terrorists and terrorism, the origins of the separation of turf between the FBI and the CIA, the counterproductive and pernicious effects that trials of terrorists had on national security because of legal discovery rules, the decline of intelligence services themselves prior to 9/11, and suggestions for the future.

I cannot overestimate the way in which this article gave clarity to events and trends that had heretofore seemed very murky to me. So much so that when I learned that Gorelick, the so-called “architect” of the firewall, was on the 9/11 Commission, it was quite clear to me that she needed to recuse herself, and why. But it was also quite clear that Gorelick’s firewall itself had only ensured that a long trend in US policy had finally reached its ultimate and shocking conclusion.

With the hindsight provided by the McCarthy article, the absurdity of events such as the following, described in this article in National Review, have an understandable historical context:

Able Danger analysts recommended the information [about Atta and associates] be passed on to the FBI so that the cell could be rounded up. Accounts in Government Security News, the New York Times, and the Associated Press indicate that Pentagon lawyers decided that anyone holding a green card (as it was believed the cell members did) had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had gathered could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded. This is in keeping with “the wall” philosophy and policy established in 1995 by Assistant Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, in which intelligence and law enforcement were directed to go beyond what the law requires to keep intelligence-gathering and criminal law enforcement separated.

We do not know as yet whether or not the firewall prevented news of Atta from reaching those who could have prevented 9/11, and whether that fact was indeed received and covered up by the 9/11 Commission. If either or both of these events turn out to be the case, it would be a vile and terrible thing–but not, in the final analysis, a totally surprising one. In fact, it would seem almost inevitable, given the long history of ever-increasing curbs on US intelligence-gathering power–and the tendency of human beings to cover up, ignore, or excuse their own failures.

Grieving parents in war–Part II: protesting parents, why now?

The New Neo Posted on by

[For Part I, go here.]

It doesn’t take a therapist to note that many people, when struck by the tragic loss of a loved one, are angry as well as sad. That anger can be unleashed in a variety of directions–including towards the dead person him/herself, although that route can lead to almost unbearable feelings of guilt in the survivor. It tends to feel better to have someone or something else to blame.

Sometimes people who’ve been bereaved–especially if the bereavement is of the type that is widely judged to be the most intensely painful of all, the loss of a child–find it helps to channel that rage and energy into a crusade against whatever may have caused the death of that child: drunk drivers or fraternity hazing, for example.

So it’s neither unique nor surprising that Cindy Sheehan is energized by her hatred of President Bush, and that she blames him for her son’s death. Although her son is the one who joined up, and she may indeed have some anger at him for doing so, it’s much easier to believe he was recruited under false pretences and lied to than that he freely entered into a war she feels was unnecessary and which caused his death. If she doesn’t even have the consolation of feeling he died a hero in a worthy endeavor, all the more reason to strike out at the person she feels to be the real culprit.

Once again, I see somewhat of an analogy to the position of certain abused children who blame the parent who fails to protect rather than the actual perpetrator of the abuse. This reaction is not uncommon, and it often entails the abuse victim being far more angry at the former than the latter. It is often safer to blame the more accessible parent and to imagine that, had they only wanted to, that parent could have prevented this horror from happening. Bush–and all Presidents–is unavoidably something of a parental figure, and as such is sometimes subject to this sort of dynamic, also, which can exacerbate the rage felt against him.

Blogger Varifrank has a written a post that eloquently describes the intense search for order in the world of chaos that grieving parents feel when they lose a child: the need to assign blame of some sort, if only to themselves. The death of a child is an upending of what is considered the rightful order of the world:

I watched my parents in anguish over the loss of their daughter, who at age 17, took the family car to work one day and never came home. My parents were nearly comatose with guilt. My father wandered for years in a cloud of “if onlys”; “if only he had changed the tires, the car might not have flipped…” and so on. My mother felt that she shouldn’t have let my sister get the job that she was driving to, a drive that one day lead to her death. The list goes on and on of “what might have been” in the minds of a parent who has lost a child.

Cindy Sheehan’s “what might have been” is quite clear: her son would be alive if not for President Bush. And if she had been voicing this idea only to friends and family, in relative privacy, it would be unremarkable, and we wouldn’t be talking about her on the news or writing about her in blogs. A respectful curtain would be drawn over her grief and her rage.

But Cindy Sheehan has decided to go very publicly political, and that’s what makes her a proper topic of discussion. There have been angry bereaved parents in earlier wars (commenter David quoted some letters from parents in WWII with similar sentiments, for example). But at no time during WWII or the Vietnam era would such widespread coverage as has been given to Sheehan have been likely, because it requires, among other things, the cooperation of the intensely competitive 24-hour news cycle.

Sheehan and the media have a symbiotic relationship. Each needs the other right now: the media needs Sheehan for the sensationalism and the anti-Bush rhetoric she offers, and Sheehan needs the media for publicity for the cause that is driving her so strongly. So while there is exploitation, it goes in both directions, as each uses the other for their own purposes. We can say that Sheehan’s grief is being exploited far more than she is exploiting the media, and I think we would be correct in saying that. But I am even more certain that Cindy Sheehan herself would disagree with the assessment that she is being exploited, since she is doing exactly what she thinks is best. Nor does she think she is exploiting her son’s memory, although many think so. She thinks she is honoring it.

The Sheehan campaign would not have gotten much publicity but for the 24-hour news cycle. But also necessary is the rabid anti-Bush atmosphere of the last couple of years, and the left’s perception of members of the military as victimized and manipulated dupes of the government.

Another important part of the current mix is the internet, which affords the opportunity for parents such as Sheehan to communicate easily and to network with activist leftist organizations, and to form their own groups and websites composed of other grieving parents of like mind. And then, of course, there’s the opportunity for people such as myself and other bloggers to comment online, causing an amplification of the publicity.

So, although Sheehan may be the most famous of the activist grieving parents so far, she is far from alone, as this Guardian article, sympathetic to the parents’ cause, makes clear. Lila Lipscomb, another grieving and angry mother whose son met his death in Iraq, was featured in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The father of Nicholas Berg was a vocal presence for quite some time on the leftist circuit, blaming Bush for his son’s horrific beheading by terrorists.

An important, although not immediately obvious, key to this phenomenon is a historical and generational one. It goes as follows: many of the parents involved are of the generation that was shaped by the Vietnam era and its antiwar sentiments, whereas their children, in the time-honored way of many generations before, have been shaped by very different historical forces.

And so you have deeply antiwar parents, children of the Vietnam era, frustrated and puzzled by their children’s desire to join the military (I myself have a friend in exactly that position). Even for the ones whose children return unharmed, you can almost hear them asking themselves, “Where have I gone wrong?” These parents, in turn, had rebelled against the previous generation, their parents, whose formative war experience was World War II and who had a very different take on military service. This accounted for a large amount of intergenerational conflict during the Vietnam era, with protesting children causing parents to ask themselves, in turn, where they (or their children) may have gone wrong.

It’s not an unusual phenomenon, this alternating of generations in which grandparents and grandchildren are aligned, with parents the odd men (and women) out, in the middle. This extremely interesting article explains how it goes:

It is a complicated paradox – one that history cannot help [this father] navigate. During Vietnam, college-age sons and daughters bucked their World War II-era parents to lead protests against the war. But the Iraq war has turned that around, exposing a divide between activist parents, some of whom were shaped by Vietnam, and their more conservative children, who were shaken by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001…

However subtle the role reversal is, hundreds of families scattered across the country are living it.

In Waterbury, Ray Odiorne, 56, an ordained minister who works as a psychotherapist, reflects on the days he used to take his two young daughters to peace vigils around New England. He told them stories of how he had marched against the Vietnam War while attending seminary school in Massachusetts, how once he had run all the way from Harvard Square to downtown Boston after a face-off with police firing tear gas.

Few people know it, but he is a military dad. His youngest daughter, Kathryn, 23, enlisted in the Army last year. When she broke the news to him in October, he felt punched in the gut.

“I was stunned. It was so out of the blue. I mean, good grief, she went to Wellesley,” a liberal arts college, he said. “I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a way to get back at dear old dad.”

Although almost a comical caricature in his response “Good grief, she went to Wellesley!”, and despite the narcissism inherent his explanation–as though his daughter’s enlistment were all about him–Odiorne does express a certain intergenerational truth. Children often decide to do things that run counter to their parents’ beliefs and wishes, although there’s ordinarily a great deal more to a decision to enlist than that. The gulf often yawns between parent and child, exacerbated by the intensity of parental feeling caused by worrying about a child who has enlisted (or, during the Vietnam War, had been drafted).

I wonder what transpired between Cindy Sheehan and her son Casey when he signed up. She is widely reported to have opposed the Iraq War even before her son enlisted, so my guess is that she went through something very much like what those parents in the article experienced: an initial shock and even perhaps anger, and then an effort to support that child despite anger at that child’s choice, and a fervent hope that the child will be okay.

And then, when parents such as Sheehan endure the horror of their worst nightmares coming true and their child dies in that war, their anger can be released, to leap out at the nearest and largest target: the President.

And the press stands by and fans the flames.

[Trackback to open post at Mudville Gazette.]

Pushing for the draft

The New Neo Posted on by

The Kathe Kollwitz thread seems to have engendered a heated discussion, sparked by another “anonymous,” once again (or perhaps the same “anonymous” once again), who said that those who are for the Iraq war and consider it so “noble” would feel quite differently if a draft were instituted, and their own children or relatives were forced to serve.

I’ve stayed out of the discussion so far because so many commenters have been so eloquent and logical in their arguments that there really seemed no need for me to jump in.

But I do have an observation or two (just can’t shut up, I guess). The first is that it’s interesting that “anonymous” somehow found it necessary to post this challenge (or, rather, “simple question” /sarcasm off) on a post that was devoted to honoring the grief of parents who lose children in war. My post contained no discussion of the “nobility” of this, or any other war. It was really an exploration of what war poet Wilfred Owen called, “the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” My take on the Cindy Sheehan aspect of it was going to be saved for Part II.

So one thing the ensuing commentary illustrates is the deep and pressing need for the “anonymii” of the world to make such statements of challenge whenever possible, whether relevant to the discussion or not, and no matter how many times such questions have been asked and answered before. It is a repetitive exercise on their part, and lets me know they must think this particular argument is a ripping good one. The answers given–which were many, varied, and excellent–don’t really seem to matter to “anonymous.” It’s the question that counts. I don’t know the political slant of this particular “anonymous,” but most of those mounting such arguments tend to be on the liberal/left side of things.

I have noticed for quite some time now how intent many on the left/liberal seem to be on instituting a draft (or at least on pretending to, for argument’s sake). Such a draft, if instituted, appears to be a “backdoor” way of getting what they want, which is to amplify antiwar sentiment to a fever pitch and have us pull out of Iraq–in other words, to recreate Vietnam and the scene of the left’s greatest triumph, the fall of Saigon and the Communist takeover of South Vietnam (I have explored the origins of such sentiments at great length, and why the left clings to them so tenaciously, in this post in my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series).

There is no doubt whatsoever that part of the impetus for the antiwar protests during Vietnam was the existence of the draft. In fact, when the draft was ended, the protests virtually ended, and yet the war dragged on. So, “anonymous” is referring, I think, to a historical truth, at least as far as Vietnam goes: the draft and antiwar sentiment were linked.

I believe that fact is a major motivation underlying the left’s insistence on ending the volunteer military and reinstituting the draft. As long as the military is volunteer, it’s much harder to mobilize the type of demonstrations of their old glory days of the 60s.

We can debate (and have, on many of the Vietnam-related threads here) how necessary the Vietnam War was, both morally, and strategically in terms of the Cold War. We can debate the same for the Iraq War; I happen to think that it was morally justified and that strategically it was the best choice at the time among crazinesses (see this post for what I mean by “choice among crazinesses.”) How it will turn out is still unknown, but if the left has its way and we pull out, I have little doubt that the consequences will be far worse than the already very sad consequences of the fall of South Vietnam.

As for “anonymous’s” actual arguments themselves, I think the best answer is that most people are reluctant to have their children put themselves in harm’s way. Any type of harm’s way. It’s just the nature of the parenthood beast.

Parents are usually proud when their children sign up for dangerous service–whether it be military or police or firefighter or rescue squad–and parents usually support the choice. But it’s not necessarily one the parent would choose. At any rate, it is the grown child’s choice, not the parents’, and all the parent actually can do is support or not support, and fervently hope that the child survives intact.

“Anonymous” would seem to want us all to be like those Spartan mothers who required their sons to “come back with your shield or on it” (if you click on the previous link, you’ll find a host of other interesting Spartan tales, such as the following, “Another Spartan woman killed her son, who had deserted his post because he was unworthy of Sparta. She declared: ‘He was not my offspring for I did not bear one unworthy of Sparta.'”) Well, most of us are not Spartan mothers, which is probably a fortunate thing.

But because parents would not necessarily choose that a child be a firefighter or police officer (or join the military) does not preclude them from honoring those who do choose to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of us all, or from wanting the benefit of the protection they offer and supporting the establishment of both a fire and a police department and a military. Nor does it stop them from honoring and supporting a child who does make such choices.

Grieving parents in war–Part I: from Kathe Kollwitz to Cindy Sheehan is a long road

The New Neo Posted on by

Who is this woman?

The serene young artist, glowing with life:

The worn-out older woman, lines of age etched deeper by profound grief:

She’s Kathe Kollwitz, one of the greatest graphic artists of all time, in two of her extraordinary self-portraits. Born in Germany in 1867, she had the sorrowful distinction of living long enough to see her beloved son Peter die at age nineteen in one of the earliest battles of World War I, and her beloved grandson die fighting in WWII. She never got over her grief at either event, but transmuted it–at least partially–into art.

Kollwitz was a socialist and a pacifist. As such, she supported neither war waged by Germany, and so she didn’t even have the solace available to those who did.

I first encountered Kollwitz’s spare and haunting work about three decades ago, at an exhibit devoted to women artists, and was immediately struck by its power and uncompromising sorrow. Here was a woman who had no need to prettify things. Take a look at some of her graphics, which focus mainly on loss and grieving, particularly in war.

There is little prettiness in her art, but there is much beauty. Although Kollwitz herself had strong political viewpoints, they are a very distant subtext to the main themes of her work, which are universal and human. One cannot read about her life or look at her art without a feeling of deep respect, even if one disagrees with pacifism or socialism itself.

Kollwitz worked for many years on one of her major compositions, a large memorial sculpture in honor of her son Peter. She worked through many prototypes, and in the end decided on two simple but monumental figures of grieving parents, the models for which were Kollwitz herself and her husband Karl. The sculptures are installed permanently at the Vladslo cemetery for German soldiers from World War I at her son’s grave, and their restraint and dignity only adds to the intensity of their grief (please click on the link if you’d like to read even more about Kollwitz’s reaction to the wars and her losses):

Among the graves [at Vladso, in Belgium] is that of Peter Kollwitz, a student from Berlin who volunteered as soon as the war broke out. Two months later, in October 1914, he was killed, aged nineteen, in one of the war’s first major campaigns.

Kathe Kollwitz was informed of her son’s death in action on 30 October. ‘Your pretty shawl will no longer be able to warm our boy,’ was the touching way she broke the news to a close friend. To another friend she admitted, ‘There is in our lives a wound which will never heal. Nor should it.’

By December 1914 Kollwitz, one of the foremost artists of her day, had formed the idea of creating a memorial to her son, with his body outstretched, ‘the father at the head, the mother at the feet’, to commemorate ‘the sacrifice of all the young volunteers’. As time went on she attempted various other designs, but was dissatisfied with them all. Kollwitz put the project aside temporarily in 1919, but her commitment to see it through when it was right was unequivocal. ‘I will come back, I shall do this work for you, for you and the others,’ she noted in her diary in June 1919.

Twelve years later, she kept her word: in April 1931 she was at last able to complete the sculpture. ‘In the autumn – Peter, – I shall bring it to you,’ she wrote in her diary. Her work was exhibited in the National Gallery in Berlin and then transported to Belgium, where it was placed, as she had promised, adjacent to her son’s grave. There it rests to this day.

This entire meditation on Kollwitz’s life and work was occasioned by the media circus around Cindy Sheehan, grieving but activist mother of a soldier son killed in Iraq. Whether you think Sheehan is being exploited herself or exploitating others tends to depend on what side of the fence you are on the war, but sympathy for her grief is near-universal.

Grief-striken parents are a tragic given in war. Whether they consider the sacrifice worthwhile or not, the tragedy, as Kollwitz herself said, leaves a wound which will never really heal–nor should it.

But this sort of angry activism on the part of a mourning parent such as Cindy Sheehan seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. What is driving it? Why are we seeing it and hearing about it now, as opposed to previous wars? My attempt to answer these questions will be the subject of Part II. For background reading, though, you would do well to read this excellent post from Varifrank.

(Trackback to Mudville Gazette open post. Also, I’ve started a new post on the topic of the discussion in the comments section of this thread here.)

[Part II here].