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Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/05/18/025621.php Weldon BergerAs temperatures rise regarding the Newsweek story in which the magazine quoted an anonymous source describing the desecration of a copy of the Koran, the Bush administration appear divided over both the impact that the brief item had on riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan and on the US image in the Muslim world, and on whether the allegation has, as the White House says, been discredited.It's not unusual for officials of an administration to be at odds with one another over particular policies or events, although the current Bush administration maintain better message discipline than most.In this instance, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita and White House press secretary Scott McClellan are contradicting the US commander in Afghanistan, a spokesman for the Army's Southern Command, and each other.In a May 12 Department of Defense briefing, several days after rioting had broken out in Afghanistan and spread to Pakistan, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Richard Meyers said that General Karl Eikenberry believed the rioting was unrelated to the Newsweek article."It's the -- it's the judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eikenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran -- and I'll get to that in just a minute -- but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his Cabinet is conducting in Afghanistan. So that's -- that was his judgment today in an after- action of that violence. He didn't -- he thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.Eikenberry's judgement has since been discarded as both the Pentagon and the White House explicitly blame the rioting on the Newsweek item. DiRita is quoted by Newsweek as saying, when the magazine informed him that their source still stood behind his allegation but was no longer certain where he had seen it, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?"Two days prior to the Meyers briefing, on May 10, DiRita responded to a question about the Newsweek item by saying that an investigation into the allegations was underway and would probably be completed in several weeks. But six days later, press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters that he knew of no incidents where US personnel put Korans in toilets, and that "the Department of Defense said last week that they could find no credible evidence of it either. They have looked into it."The implication in McClellan's statement is that sometime between May 10, when DiRita said that because of the number of agencies involved in investigating allegations of abuse at Guantanamo, "I think we're probably several weeks away from being able to say that the commander has made his final assessments there," and May 16, when McClellan made his remark, the Pentagon and Justice Department had concluded and reviewed their several investigations and were certain that the allegations were false. But yet another spokesman, US Southern Command's Lt. Col. Jim Marshall, told USA Today on May 16, the same day McClellan made his categorical statement, that "the military did not start looking at allegations of Koran desecration until last week after the Newsweek article was published" and he didn't know how long the investigation would take.Taken in sum, the various government and military statements offer wildly contradictory images of what the government and military know, or think they know, about the accuracy of the Newsweek allegation. One thing upon which everyone now seems agreed, including Newsweek but with the possible exception of General Eikenberry (who hasn't been heard from in some time), is that the allegation helped trigger the rioting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.Regardless the provenance of the Newsweek item, it's certain that reports of interrogators abusing copies of the Koran have been circulating for more than two years, including, most recently, a New York Times story about Newsweek's retraction of its item that includes an on the record interview with a former translator at Guantanamo."Last month, a former American interrogator confirmed to The New York Times an account given in an interview by a former Kuwaiti detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said that mishandling of the Koran once led to a major hunger strike. The strike ended only after a senior officer expressed regret over the camp's loudspeaker system, which was simultaneously translated by linguists at the end of each cell block, the former interrogator said.In that case, the accusations were of copies of the Koran being tossed on the floor in a pile and treated roughly, but there was no assertion that any had been put in the toilet.Erik Saar, a co-author of the book "Inside the Wire" and an Arabic language translator at Guantánamo from January to June 2003, said in an interview Monday that while he "never saw anything along the lines of a Koran being flushed down a toilet," the issue of how guards and interrogators handled the book was a chronic problem."In November of 2004, New Press published "Guantánamo: The War on Human Rights," by David Rose. Rose describes statements made by five British men who were released from Guantanamo in March of 2004, in which they claimed to have been punched, slapped, denied sleep, sexually humiliated, hooded and forced to watch copies of the Koran being flushed down toilets.The Guardian newspaper in England, for which Rose writes, maintains a large archive of Guantanamo-related stories, many of which include allegations of torture and other crimes committed by US personnel there. In June of 2004, The San Francisco Chronicle published an overview of allegations and investigations."Prisoners have been forced to strip naked -- nudity is a violation of Muslim principles; forced to commit actual or simulated sex acts; prevented from sleeping; threatened with dogs; hooded; given electric shocks; beaten with fists, chains, boots and other objects; forced to maintain painful positions for hours; kept in frigid isolation rooms; subjected to loud music, strobe lights and diets of bread and water; urinated on and prevented from praying or reading the Koran....Based on official data available, there are 107 separate military inquiries, involving at least 111 Iraqis and Afghans. Eighty-five investigations are being conducted by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division into detainee deaths and alleged assaults and thefts by U.S. soldiers since the beginning of 2003.And in March of 2003, The Washington Post's Mark Kaufman interviewed a group of Afghan men recently released from Guantanamo, some of whom complained that US soldiers in Afghanistan had abused the Koran."Some of the men released today were close-shaven, but most kept their beards. The men who wore their beards in the long fashion of the Taliban complained most about poor treatment at the hands of Americans and insults against Islam.Ehsannullah, 29, said American soldiers who initially questioned him in Kandahar before shipping him to Guantanamo hit him and taunted him by dumping the Koran in a toilet."It was a very bad situation for us," said Ehsannullah, who comes from the home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. "We cried so much and shouted, 'Please do not do that to the Holy Koran.'"Merza Khan, who had been captured in northern Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban, said Americans in Kandahar tied him up and alternately forced him to lie face down on the ground, then squat with his hands on his head for hours. He also said he saw American soldiers throw the Koran on the ground and sit on it while in Kandahar."Obviously, reports of US soldiers and other personnel treating the Koran with a lack of respect — not to mention the people to whom the copies belonged — have been circulating throughout the Muslim world and the western one for several years, a fact that makes questionable the contention that Newsweek has damaged our country's image among Muslims. As a number of polls have shown, our image is already very close to being as damaged as it can possibly get.What does seem to have happened is that various actors in Afghanistan and Pakistan seized upon the Newsweek item to further inflame existing unrest in the two countries, and that the Newsweek reporters were ill served by their source, by the Pentagon official who reviewed the item before it was published and by their own reliance on their previous relationship with their source. And at the end of it all, we're still left with questions about what investigations have been completed and reviewed by whom, and whether or not the allegations made by numerous Guantanamo detainees and a US government official, are true. Somewhere, behind the smoke and the heat, lie the answers.===========Weldon Berger is a writer in Hawaii and runs BTC News, the only blog with a White House correspondent. Politics29671@blogcritics.org Wed, 18 May 2005 02:56:21 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/04/09/174822.php Weldon BergerDan Froomkin has a story on BTC News and our White House writer, Eric Brewer, in his April 5 "White House Briefing" column in The Washington Post. Aside from providing some very positive coverage of Eric's White House work—and that's what it is—Froomkin took Scott McClellan's response to Eric's question and Googled the various phrases and sentences to see how many times McClellan had used the same words and phrases prior to Friday. We were so taken with our own image that we didn't really pay attention to that masterwork until Shawn at The Liquid List noted it.Say what you will about McClellan (and of course we won't lest we lose the opportunity to not get more questions answered), he's consistent.What Eric asked was whether the Robb-Silberman report on the generally pathetic state of US intelligence on Iraq before the invasion (and Iran and North Korea now) had had any effect on the doctrine of preventive war. McClellan replied by invoking 9/11 and the earth-moving the Administration would have done had they known it was coming (which was pretty much irrelevant to the question), and added that the costs of doing nothing were just to high to contemplate. Eric followed up by asking about the costs of doing something based on bad intelligence, which McClellan rightly understood to be about Iraq, and which he answered in such a fashion as to indicate that massive intelligence failures leading to unnecessary preventive wars and the concomitant loss of lives and dollars and credibility was better than not doing anything so long as you could point to something positive (Saddam Hussein is no longer in power) about the exercise. In other words: "No. Why should it?" Which makes sense, in a way, because the purpose of preventive war is to preclude the possibility of something bad happening—never mind that in this instance the invasion wouldn't have prevented anything anyway, given our inability to secure the places the banned weapons weren't—so it doesn't actually matter if the possibility is real. Either way, in theory, you've prevented it. If it wasn't real, blowing it up will keep it that way. So there's not much reason to change the policy even if, as Don Rumsfeld might say, there are things you know you don't know and one of them is whether you really know that the things you do know are true. Politics27953@blogcritics.org Sat, 9 Apr 2005 17:48:22 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/04/01/014507.php Weldon BergerJohn Danforth, who served three terms as the Republican senator from Missouri and until January served as US ambassador to the UN, has joined Republican Congressman Chris Shays and Virginia senator John Warner in bemoaning their party's sharp sectarian turn.Danforth, an Episcopal minister who is regarded as among the senior statesmen of his party, spoke out Wednesday in a New York Times op-ed piece addressing the Terri Schiavo case and other recent religious right muscle flexing, saying that "Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs."I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations."The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement."When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another."It's been overlong in coming, but it appears as though former Reagan and Bush I official Bruce Bartlett may have been right when he told Ron Suskind last October that if Bush won the election, "there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3." Hostilities may have been declared then, but not until now did any shooting break out. (Suskind's NY Times Magazine story, "Without a Doubt," is well worth reading again.)Encouraging though it is to see a few blossoms of sanity blooming in the scorched earth where Republicans now live, one can't help but think, "Where in the hell have you been?" It isn't as though Tom DeLay has made a secret of his belief that his job in Congress is to promote a biblical worldview (while making a mockery of ethical guidelines), or as though Bill Frist and Rick Santorum and other GOP senators have tried to disguise their assaults on secular America, or as though anyone to the left of those people failed to recognize that the party has adopted thuggery and bile, cloaked in Christianity, as its principal tools of persuasion.It's possible these nascent GOP freedom fighters have waited too long to rally the troops; we'll see how many others hie to the flag during the next few weeks. But if Danforth and Shays do turn out to be the leading edge of a fledgling rebellion, it could mean that the Roundhead wing of the party has finally overreached and salvation is at hand. If Democrats can capitalize on a Republican schism to capture one chamber of Congress in 2006, that would be sufficient to begin investigations that could pop the Bush Administration like an infected cyst.Danforth closes his piece thusly: "The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots."I turn to Mark Twain to close mine:Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town? —The King to the Duke, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Politics27581@blogcritics.org Fri, 1 Apr 2005 01:45:07 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/04/01/000744.php Weldon BergerThe National Press Club is the latest organization to feel the heat generated when bloggers and the press collide. Last time, it was the Brookings Insitution's March 22 panel on "The Impact of the New Media," which ran into trouble because the initial lineup of panelists from Blogolia included only gossip blogger Wonkette (presumably representing the liberal end of the spectrum because she talks about sex a lot) and the hermaphroditic (in terms of press and blogging) Andy Sullivan, plus a pair of well-known conservative bloggers commenting on the event from home. After an extensive brouhaha and lots of indignant emails and open letters, Brookings added a few liberals to balance out the essentially meaningless discussion.The Press Club ran into trouble when it snagged the now-infamous Jim Guckert/Jeff Gannon as the headliner for its panel, "Who Is a Journalist?" The initial lineup included the ubiquitous Wonkette, again, presumably, as the trash-talking liberal, and several institutional press types. The panel's question drew an immediate answer from traditional journalists: "Not Jeff Gannon," and bloggers were equally adamant that he's not a blogger either, at least not until a month or so ago. Bloggers — primarily on the left — were annoyed both by Wonkette's seemingly inevitable inclusion and the implication that Gannon is a blogger.The conflict first erupted when press trade magazine Editor & Publisher ran a belligerently skeptical story about Gannon's invitation to the Press Club, and NPC vice president Jonathon Salant responded indignantly in the letters section of the media mosh pit know as Romenesko's Media News. Although Salant defended the decision on the basis of Gannon/Guckert's news value, the original NPC description of the event left the impression that GG was participating because of his expertise on the subject rather than because of his notoriety. It has since been rewritten to emphasize the question of how he got his lifetime day pass into the White House, and Salant emphasized in an email to me that the question of access was to be the panel's primary focus.In addition to rewriting the blurb, the NPC responded by adding two more bloggers to the panel: Media Bistro's Garrett Graff, who edits the Fishbowl DC blog for the company and was the first blogger admitted to the White House press room, and Matt Yglesias, a modestly liberal blogger who won a staff position at The American Prospect magazine on the strength of his writing. At present, with a week to go before the event, those three remain Blogolia's ambassadors to Pressworld.Although Editor & Publisher reacted before anyone else, liberal bloggers (including me) joined in the fun by first deriding the selection of bloggers, which led to the additions noted above, and then by digging up numerous examples of a Gannon/Guckert journalistic hallmark: plagiarism. So we now had — still have — a two-front war, with the ommission of the liberal bloggers whose investigative efforts broke the Gannon story, and with the now well-documented plagiarism problem. Adding insult to already injured sensibilities, the NPC decided to close the proceedings to the general public (read: bloggers) and limit the audience to NPC members and credentialed journalists. Ironically, the new restrictions would prevent three of the panelists, GG, Wonkette and Graff, from attending were they not on the panel. One can't help but think that the Press Club may be regretting their decision to invite GG, or at least to do so in the way that they did. And one can't help but think that with a week to go and pressure building to focus on the questions of GG's White House access and his plagiarism, he may be regretting the invite as well; bookies have the odds on his appearance at 60-40 for and falling. The next week should be interesting.The über-irony is that after all the fuss, the question, "Who is a Journalist," probably isn't even worth discussing. Journalists are people who do the stuff that journalists do, from investigative reporting to commentary. The most common beef the institutional press have with bloggers is our presumed lack of responsibility and accuracy, but as every paper with a press critic and every J-school magazine prove, one needn't be a blogger to get things hideously wrong, or to plagiarise or lie or bow to corruption. It's a subject that fascinates some among the institutional press, mostly those who view journalism more as a besieged priesthood than a trade, but that doesn't hold much interest for most bloggers beyond the question of gaining access to the places we'd like to go to get our stories.But if you want to get in on the controversy — and the field is wide open for conservative bloggers; why should we on the left have all the fun?— you've still got that one-week window to check out the panel and weigh in with your own comments or grievances or both. Blog on, my brothers and sisters .... Culture27576@blogcritics.org Fri, 1 Apr 2005 00:07:44 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/03/22/205215.php Weldon BergerTom Friedman strews flowers at the feet of Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, proposing him for the Nobel Peace Prize and conflating him with Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev in the process. Meanwhile, Don Rumsfeld explains that the insurgency is Turkey's fault, thereby extending his responsibility hitless streak. Rumsfeld also came up with the funniest sick line of the day when he observed that had the US put sufficient troops in the country to secure it and avoid the chaos following the invasion, Iraqis would have viewed the troops as occupiers rather than liberators.It's true that things in Iraq would likely be worse had Sistani not forced the US to permit elections there, thereby sparing the Bush administration the burden of spreading democracy by suppressing elections. But ... but, as Juan Cole and the Babe of Baghdad, Riverbend, both note, Sistani's dominance of the political process almost certainly means that civil law will be the province of religion, and that religion is often unkind to women. Riverbend scoffs at the notion of a Nobel Prize for Sistani, saying that if anyone should get it, it's Ahmed Chalabi because he's the one thing virtually all Iraqis can agree upon.Friedman's comparison of Sistani to Gorbachev and Mandela contains certain flaws, prominent among which are that neither of the latter two gentlemen derived their power from a fortuitous invasion of their country, and neither threatened to replace a zealously secular government with one that incorporates a state religion which would roll back protections for women. Riverbend:"Then there’s Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He got to be puppet president for the month of December and what was the first thing he did? He decided overburdened, indebted Iraq owed Iran 100 billion dollars. What was the second thing he did? He tried to have the “personal status” laws that protect individuals (and especially women) eradicated."They try to give impressive interviews to western press but the situation is wholly different on the inside. Women feel it the most. There’s an almost constant pressure in Baghdad from these parties for women to cover up what little they have showing. There’s a pressure in many colleges for the segregation of males and females. There are the threats, and the printed and verbal warnings, and sometimes we hear of attacks or insults. "You feel it all around you. It begins slowly and almost insidiously. You stop wearing slacks or jeans or skirts that show any leg because you don’t want to be stopped in the street and lectured by someone who doesn’t approve. You stop wearing short sleeves and start preferring wider shirts with a collar that will cover up some of you neck. You stop letting your hair flow because you don’t want to attract attention to it. On the days when you forget to pull it back into a ponytail, you want to kick yourself and you rummage around in your handbag trying to find a hair band… hell, a rubber band to pull back your hair and make sure you attract less attention from *them*.It's particularly ironic that Friedman, who has rightly said on any number of occasions that perhaps the primary impediment to economic development in much of the Middle East is the effective removal of half the population, women, from the potential work force, should be championing Sistani so strongly.On the other hand, there really isn't anyone else to champion. But people shouldn't win a Nobel Peace Prize by default. Politics27127@blogcritics.org Tue, 22 Mar 2005 20:52:15 EST