ben loyal

CBS Silences General Dissent

Listening to retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, you sense his intense loyalty to the military. He commanded the Army's 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, capping a 31-year Army career. So why did CBS News fire him as a paid news consultant? A straight answer from CBS seems as elusive as those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The short answer: Batiste appeared in a television advertisement sponsored by VoteVets.org, a nonpartisan group that advocates for veterans. In the 30-second spot, he said, in part: "Mr. President, you did not listen. You continue to pursue a failed strategy that is breaking our great Army and Marine Corps. I left the Army in protest in order to speak out. Mr. President, you have placed our nation in peril."

Batiste is one of the six retired generals who called for the resignation of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the spring of 2006. Of those generals, he alone both served at a high level in the Pentagon and commanded 22,000 troops in Iraq. Despite a promised promotion to three-star general, which would have made him the second-highest-ranking officer in Iraq, Batiste made the difficult decision to retire and speak out.

In his book and documentary "War Made Easy," media critic Norman Solomon explains the impact these retired TV generals have on the national debate:

"In the run-up to the war in Iraq, the failure of mainstream news organizations to raise legitimate questions about the government's rush to war was compounded by the networks' deliberate decision to stress military perspectives before any fighting had even begun. CNN's use of retired generals as supposedly independent experts reinforced the decidedly military mind-set even as serious questions remained about the wisdom and necessity about going to war."

In 1999, when the U.S. was bombing Yugoslavia, I asked Frank Sesno, vice president of CNN: "Why pay these generals? And have you ever considered putting peace activists on the payroll? Or inviting them into the studio to respond to the drumbeat for war?" He replied: "We've talked about this. But no, we wouldn't do that. Because generals are analysts, and peace activists are advocates."

That's not far from the reason CBS gave for firing Batiste. According to a cbsnews.com blog, CBS News Vice President Linda Mason explained, "We ask that people not be involved in advocacy." Generals, it seems, are analysts when they agree with the war plan, and advocates when they oppose it. Political blog the Horse's Mouth reported that CBS News consultant Michael O'Hanlon clearly advocated for President Bush's troop surge but didn't get tossed. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, told the Horse's Mouth he "would be personally gratified to see Batiste back on CBS."

devil's elbow

The middle of nowhere

The third and greatest error repeated by middle east experts of all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, by Turcologists and by Iranists, is also the simplest to define. It is the very odd belief that these ancient nations are highly malleable. Hardliners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-aimed violence ("the Arabs only understand force") compliance will be obtained. But what happens every time is an increase in hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration, but by sullen non-cooperation and active resistance too. It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in behaviour.

Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.

screen cap postcards sold in Micronesia during the German Colonial Period

Step-by-step plan for withdrawing from Iraq.

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Prewar U.S. intelligence warned of Iraq war effects

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Ex-CIA chief: rendition flights put allies in difficult position

The former head of CIA covert operations in Europe admitted last night that "extraordinary rendition" - the practice of transferring detainees to camps, including Guantánamo Bay, where they risked being tortured - had caused serious problems for America's allies.

Tyler Drumheller, who was in charge of the CIA's clandestine activities in Europe until 2005, said: "We have put our allies in a very difficult position."

He said the way the issue of rendition flights was handled was one of the reasons he resigned. He told BBC2's Mystery Flights programme last night that it affected "the willingness of other countries to work with us - the intelligence services and police forces of other countries we go to".

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He said: "It makes it difficult even if those countries do want to help us ... because there's all this bad publicity and they're at risk of violating their own laws and that sort of thing."

Asked where the buck stopped, Mr Drumheller replied: "The president's the president ... I blame the administration for creating an atmosphere of ... rage and vengeance."

He continued: "The people up the line need to have responsibility for what happened ... They wanted to draw a line so that there was no direct line from what happened to their authority and that's not right." Asked if he was referring to "deniability", he replied: "Deniability, to put it in plain English, yeah."

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, said in little-noted remarks at a conference in Aspen, Colorado, last year, that CIA rendition flights "would have been illegal under British common law".

The British government has admitted that aircraft suspected of being used for "extraordinary rendition" have passed through British airports on 73 occasions since 2001.

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The story that should bring down the republican party

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Manufacturing Indifference: Searching for a New 'Propaganda Model'

There are two other aspects to this that needs to be examined including top-down coercion as when politically motivated moguls like Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi or Conrad Black buy a media outlet and discharge journalists with whom they disagree.

There has just been a worrisome recent development at the one media outlet in the world known for its independence, AlJazeera where a new board has been named with a gutsy independent journalist replaced as managing director by a former Ambassador to Washington. You just know what that will result in-Foxeera, was the formulation coined by one reader.

In some countries, media dissenters are jailed or even killed. That's why it was suggested at the conference that the title Manufacturing Consent today should be modified for "Manufacturing Compliance." Increasingly governments don't care what people think at all– or if they consent-just that they go along with the program by hook, crook or club. Most prefer that we don't vote at all. That's why elections are treated as sports events. The non-voters increasingly outnumber whose who cast ballots.

Even more distressing is the tend towards the depoliticalization of politics through the merger of showbiz and newsbiz to assure that much of the media agenda is noisy and negative, stripped of all meaning: superficial, often celebrity-dominated with little in-depth explanatory or investigative journalism. They would rather market American Idol as the American Ideology. To them, the only "hegemony" in Canada is its beer and hockey.

The people who run our media are, after all, in the end, promoting a culture of consumption, not of engaged citizenship. They want eyeballs for advertisers, not activists to promote change. The sound-bytes presented as substance are there for entertainment, not illumination. It's heat, not light, all the way

lord of the road

Small Magazines, Big Ideas

The Internet may be the way of the future, but for today much of what you read on the Web is generated by newspapers and small magazines. They may be devoted to a cause, a party, a worldview, an issue, an idea, or to one eccentric person's vision of what could be, but they nourish the public debate. America wouldn't be the same without them.

Our founding fathers knew this; knew that a low-cost postal incentive was crucial to giving voice to ideas from outside the main tent. So they made sure such publications would get a break in the cost of reaching their readers. That's now in jeopardy.

An impending rate hike, worked out by postal regulators, with almost no public input but plenty of corporate lobbying, would reward big publishers like Time Warner, while forcing these smaller periodicals into higher subscription fees, big cutbacks and even bankruptcy.

It's not too late. The Postal Service is a monopoly, but if its governors, and especially members of Congress, hear from enough citizens, they could have a change of heart. So, liberal or conservative, left or right, libertarian, vegetarian, communitarian or Unitarian, or simply good Samaritan, let's make ourselves heard.

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Gonzales' yearlong effort to block Comey's testimony

In addition to blocking Comey and Ashcroft's testimony about these matters throughout all of last year, the Bush administration -- led by Bush himself -- single-handedly blocked an investigation into the role played by DOJ lawyers in authorizing the NSA program by extraordinarily refusing to grant security clearances to DOJ investigators in the Office of Professional Responsibility. That investigation -- had it proceeded -- would have encompassed an examination of whether DOJ lawyers acted unethically in authorizing the program.

As always, the contempt which the Bush administration has for the rule of law is illustrated not only by their serial and conscious lawbreaking, but also by their extreme efforts to conceal those actions and shield them from any scrutiny or oversight of any kind. Knowing about these events in Aschcroft's hospital room (because he was a key participant in them), Gonzales, with a straight face, insisted in February, 2006 that he would not allow Ashcroft or Comey to testify because "you have to wonder what could Messrs. Comey and Ashcroft add to the discussion." It is impossible to express how free they are of even the most minimal constraints to tell the truth.

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quantitative experience

Barbara Bush, on Good Morning America in March 2003:

Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

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Burns' Documentary Perpetuates the 'Invisible Minority'

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A Global Democratic Movement Is About to Pop

A President Gone AWOL

A President Gone AWOL

George Bush, the most ideologically-driven and politically calculating president in American history, wants Americans to believe that he has suddenly discovered a moral high ground from which to make grand declarations about why he must maintain the occupation of Iraq.

After vetoing legislation Tuesday that gave him the money to continue his war but required that he accept loose limits of its ultimate duration, the president told the nation, "I recognize that many Democrats saw this bill as an opportunity to make a political statement about their opposition to the war. They sent their message, and now it is time to put politics behind us and support our troops with the funds they need."

Bush has made his position clear: Democrats, many of whom rightly argued four years ago that going to war in Iraq would be the huge mistake it has turned out to be, and who have since been far ahead of the White House in identifying the nature of the crisis that has since developed, are now to be dismissed as the players of political games when they advocate for a strategy that would begin bringing US troops home from the conflict on a schedule beginning October 1.

That's a remarkable line of analysis from a president whose inability to recognize the flaws in his own neo-conservative vision has rendered his wrong at every turn, and whose determination to play politics with life-and-death decisions has defined not just his approach to the Iraq war but his tenure as president.

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Content analysis of O'Reilly's rhetoric finds spin to be a 'factor'

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A Governor Truly Tightens His Belt

SALEM, Ore., April 27 — He swore off beer, had to put the pricey organic bananas back on the supermarket shelf and squeezed four meals out of a single chicken, all in the name of reducing hunger. And this is not even an election year.

Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski's decision to live on $3 a day in grocery money for a week, as he had been urged to do in an Oregon "food stamp challenge," could confound the surest cynic. At 66, he was just elected to his second term, with a budget surplus surpassing $1 billion and a legislature controlled by his fellow Democrats. So just what was there to gain politically?