Current Invective

The state of Minnesota will put up $38 million to divide among 158 victims as compensation for losses sustained in last year’s collapse of a bridge under Interstate 35 in Minneapolis. Thirteen were killed in the accident, which was the result of structural defects.

To claim part of the award, approved by both houses of the Minnesota state assembly, the victims, many of them now pursuing civil lawsuits for negligence, will have to release the state from legal liability. The total comes out to about a quarter-million dollars per person, but a third of the money will be used to sustain victims with severe permanent injuries. Victims of the 9/11 attacks made a somewhat more lucrative settlement of potential claims against the federal government and the airlines.

Law buffs might reasonably wonder why victims of the levee collapse in New Orleans aren’t entitled to similar relief. They have received nothing except modest emergency assistance. The explanation might be that this is a much more populous class of plaintiffs. The amounts awarded to victims of lesser catastrophes, like 911, would pale by comparison, given the scale of the damage to New Orleans and its residents. The losses could run to astronomical amounts, equal to several weeks of war costs.

The flood victims’ claims are no less meritorious than those of the other plaintiffs. The negligence–if it was negligence and not deliberate malfeasance–is patent, at least as egregious as the misconduct of those who let the planes crash into the buildings and those who let the bridge shudder till it gave way. Most responsible authorities had long known that the levees couldn’t survive a severe hurricane, but nothing was done to prepare for that inevitable event. Worse, among the officials who neglected the levees were people who celebrated the displacement of New Orleans’ African-American underclass, leading many of us to believe that the flood was the result of purposeful neglect by racists.

In addition to the uncounted dead and missing (try to find reliable numbers on the flood’s toll in and around New Orleans), hundreds of thousands remain displaced in the diaspora. They had so little before the flood that the rest of us are encouraged to assess their losses as trivial. They have nothing now, and nobody is proposing that they be recompensed like the victims in New York, Washington and Minneapolis. Americans should be asking why.

The gang rape committed by the embedded mass media on Jeremiah Wright will never be acknowledged, but history will record it as a sample of 21st Century racism. Wright is the hapless victim of neobigots, paid promoters of a popular racism that proceeds not from the presumed superiority of the white race but from its presumed inferiority. Blacks hate whites, according to contemporary theory, and this puts whites, who are disadvantaged by unfair laws and inherent good nature, in mortal danger.

The modern racist believes that black hatred is expressed in talk about slavery and discrimination and disproportionate rates of poverty, incarceration, illiteracy, and unemployment. African-Americans who are preoccupied with conditions that reflect poorly on our country shouldn’t be surprised when the white folk question their patriotism. Wright has delivered some sermons on these topics over the years, and the neoracist minority, in the person of the commercial media, rose up indignant, as if a single word Wright uttered were anything but true.

The public repudiation of Jeremiah Wright was altogether a fabrication of the media. Although the Clintons introduced Wright’s politics as “an issue” (because he was her opponent’s pastor), guilt by association is never a legitimate issue, and the reporters knew that. But Wright was outspoken, and he’s very similar in skin color to Barack Obama, and innocent whites could get hurt, so the networks and newspapers made a special exception and made Obama’s association with an immoderate orator a political issue.

Enter the redeemer of journalism, Bill Moyers, with an interview that exposes Wright as a keen analyst and an altogether guileless and charitable human being. This gifted leader inspired a discouraged community to rediscover dignity and hope and he’s a credit to the Obamas and their fellow congregants. He deserves a nod of approval from all of us. Instead, the keenest of analysts in the commercial media put a stick in his eye.

I don’t know if Moyers hopes to rehabilitate his profession with this interview, but it’s pretty clear that the reporters in the quarter-million-a-year bracket are beyond redemption. The best paid people in the news industry are gossip-mongers, and they willingly cash out credibility for fame and fortune. The Moyers interview won’t go down in history as amends, but it does set the record straight.

I wait and wait for Obama to confront the toads who follow him around, but he seems to be afraid of them. I keep expecting this outburst: “That’s the stupidest question I ever heard Charlie. All this mess, and you’re asking about that?” If Obama ever stood up to these babbling idiots, I’d consider voting for him. He could start by excluding from his entourage each and every news organization that attacked Jeremiah Wright. Clinton should make the same rule for the reporters that feed at her buffet.

The document affectionately known as the “torture memorandum” is the work of one John Yoo, Law Professor, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. This 2003 tome, which Yoo presumes to refer to as a memorandum of law, is the most egregious case of legal bootstrapping since Nixon claimed: “When the President does it . . . it is not illegal. ”

The most sweeping pronouncements–for example, that Constitutional due process of law does not apply to people held captive by the military–are supported by no authority whatsoever, and a substantial proportion of the citations in the 80 pages of text are to opinions from Yoo’s own Office of Legal Counsel and not to cases that ever came before the courts.

When there are citations to actual cases, these are steeped in deception, with only a pretense of responsible legal reasoning. The overall presentation seems intended to obfuscate rather than illuminate. Yoo relies principally on a 1942 case that was unprecedented at the time (wartime, officially, pursuant to a congressional declaration) and that hasn’t ever been followed by the Supreme Court. He cites a work from 1612 for the proposition that people who don’t obey laws aren’t entitled to their protection, and he cites opinions from the Israeli Supreme Court laying out what is and isn’t cruel and unusual punishment.

Among the most outrageous legal claims made by Yoo:

• The Justice Department has no authority to prosecute crimes committed in the course of military activities (citing Justice Department opinions)
• Congress has no authority to regulate the military, and criminal laws that explicitly cover government employees are to be interpreted to exclude the president and his military subordinates
• Torture during the interrogation of military “detainees” is exempt from criminal laws
• the President can suspend or terminate any treaty or provision of a treaty

Yoo employs the word “detain” (detention is temporary, by definition) when he means “imprison,” and this exemplifies his dishonest use of language throughout. Phrases without legal meaning, such as “unlawful combatant” and “Commander-in-chief power,” are used to justify vast areas of unlawful conduct. Coinages and neologisms have no place in legal writing, but they are a staple of this author.

Taken in sum, Yoo’s arguments, which are without legal merit, amount to a prescription for tyranny. Although the memo has since been “withdrawn,” it served as legal justification for uncounted acts of torture and kidnapping, atrocities for which Yoo is personally responsible.

Yoo includes a ten-page discourse on the definition of assault, concluding that torture in the course of interrogation doesn’t qualify. A third of the opinion is devoted to the Convention against Torture, which the US ratified and which Yoo sifts for loopholes. It turns out this treaty is all but unenforceable against the U. S. president. There’s no legal scholarship behind Yoo’s finding on these points, just a lot of miscellaneous musings, almost as if the opinion were bulked up to compensate for the weakness of its logic.

Yoo must have been very confident that this memo would remain forever secret, because the arguments expose the author as an anti-lawyer and an enemy of the rule of law. Or maybe he’s just confident of his own immunity to accountability. He can be fairly certain that there will be no searching legal analysis of his arguments by any major news-monger. This memo has already been critiqued and tossed aside by the people who tell us what to believe, as if the document itself were something less than a crime against humanity and an assault on the Constitution.

The House Judiciary Committee has invited Yoo to testify about the memo. Committee staffers are presumably taking the memo apart now piece-by-piece, and we can only hope that they take the miscreant to task for his grievous breach of professional responsibility. Yoo ought to be disbarred for this.

A fact is a piece of language, a statement about reality. It’s a very particular kind of statement. “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” isn’t a fact, and neither is “I want you to do me a favor.” Although there’s nothing tangible about a fact, it often refers to something tangible.

Roses are red. Is that a fact? Depends on how we interpret the language. It’s a fact that some roses are red, but it’s also a fact that some roses aren’t red. We’ll go along with a child who tells us that roses are red, and maybe let the child know that roses come in other colors, too, but we woudn’t take the statement as fact from a grown-up.

We make judgments when people tell us things that aren’t facts. If we know that the statement is untrue, we might deduce that the teller doesn’t know what he’s talking about or has constructed her own personal reality, or we might notice that it’s April 1. If we don’t know whether the statement is a fact or not, our judgment of the person might lead us to believe what we’re told, or to disbelieve it.

News is factual. By definition, if it’s not factual, it’s not news. When we hear a report from someone we recognize as a reporter of news, we take it for fact. But is it a fact that news is factual? Let’s test a typical news report for truth or falsity. This is from the CBS News website today:

“A U.S. helicopter fired a Hellfire missile at gunmen attacking ground forces early Tuesday, killing six militants in Baghdad’s Shiite stronghold of Sadr City. However, Iraqi police said three unarmed men were killed and six people wounded, including two children.”

Notice that the first statement, about the firing of the missile on “gunmen,” killing “militants,” is said with no attribution, but the second statement, that unarmed men were killed and children were wounded, is attibuted to Iraqi police. What sort of editorial decisions could have produced such a sentence? Did the reporter actually see the attack, but only hear about the casualties? That’s the implication, unlikely as it is, and the construction of the sentence seems to accord the first statement greater credibility than the second one. Is it really more factual?

The reporter doesn’t tell us the source of the first statement, and so we have no way of assessing it for truth or falsity. If the information came from whoever ordered the helicopter to fire, it is self-serving, and the lack of attribution makes the statement incomplete and not factual. And yet we are meant to believe it. We are meant to believe that the targets were “gunmen” and the victims were “militants”–epithets with no precise meaning–and we are meant to be skeptical of the report that children were wounded and unarmed men were killed.

The editorial decisions that produced this non-factual sentence were corrupt and intended to deceive rather than to inform. And yet it comes to us as news and we take it as news, except for one thing: we don’t believe it. In a poll released a couple of months ago by Sacred Heart University (and reported almost nowhere), only one in five Americans believe all or most of what’s reported in the news, and almost one in four believe little or none of it.

So it’s news, but we we’re not sure it’s fact. Since news is, by definition, fact, we seem to be left with this: consumers of news no longer believe in facts or even in truth or falsity. We’re content with self-serving statements–at least CBS News thinks we are–without regard to truth. We would like to believe that our soldiers fired at militants, thinks the CBS editor, so he allows us to, but we don’t want to believe that our soldiers are killing children, so the editor raises doubt, even when there is none. And that’s supposed to make us happier and, really, better off.

The day may come when we’ll need a fact or two. Unfortunately, because of the destruction of facts by our embedded mass media, we won’t know facts when we see them. We’ll be slogging through disinformation like the innocuous-looking CBS report, trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, while our republic collapses around us.

There are two kinds of censorship. There’s black-out censorship, of the sort you see in redacted documents, with words and sentences blacked out so you can’t read them. You might come across this form of censorship in government documents that make reference to secret information and also in letters from prison inmates. And then there’s blackout censorship, in which you’re kept in the dark without explanation.

Take the current news coverage of Iraq. There isn’t any. Last we heard two days ago a couple of people in the so-called Green Zone got killed, but they didn’t have names, and they still don’t.  (That report has since been revised without explanation to ”at least two,”  as of 4/1).  We saw smoke rising from the U.S. compound, but no reporter told us what was burning or even why they weren’t telling us what was burning. We know that there was an announcement to embassy personnel to stay under cover, but that was days ago.

There were some bombing raids in the south, we learned, and there’s about five minutes of film from Basra, which all the news media seem to be sharing. The websites for CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN combined have less than a half-hour of video from Iraq, much of it two and three days old. You can’t tell how old a piece of film is, because the networks don’t date their video dispatches, allowing them to show clips over and over, as if they were news. The CNN site has something called “Hot Topics.” Iraq isn’t one of them. None of the networks is treating the renewed conflict as a top story, even though hundreds of people have been killed and the American compound has been under attack.

The Sunday interview shows had next to nothing on Iraq. Tim Russert asked the Director of Central Intelligence whether he knew in advance that the Iraq government was about to launch an offensive, but he didn’t insist on an answer and he didn’t get one. The main topic of conversation everywhere in today’s news was who’s ahead between Obama and Clinton.

All signs point to a total news blackout from Iraq, and it’s the most pernicious form of censorship. Not only are we not permitted to know what the reporters in Iraq are seeing, we’re also not allowed to hear why they’re not talking. I’m sure the silent journalists could recite a list of “security” reasons for their reticence, but they know what they’ve become–whores for a corrupt military regime–and they’re not expressing any reservations about that.

I wonder if al Sadr watches American TV. If so, he must be frustrated at the news coverage. He’d probably like to know how many people have to die to get the attention of the American media. He’s not alone there.

Soldiers and former soldiers watch TV and read newspapers. Put yourself in the place of a 24-year-old vet whose unit is still deployed. He’d like to know what’s happening to his friends, and he may be in touch by email with some of them, but there’s no big picture for him, no substantive reporting, and this has to be frustrating. I got my discharge almost 40 years ago, and I’m worried for my young comrades.

You hear less talk these days among journalists about freedom of the press and its role in maintaining the republic, and no wonder. Unable to report what they see, they must be experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance. Hope they gag on it.

“Bush’s War,” which aired on “Frontline” this week, was positively Shakespearean in its portrayal of the internecine struggles that gave rise to the nation’s current military adventures.

For the esteemed newsmen of the embedded mass media of the USA to lecture the Chinese on human rights, they must turn their collective back on conditions in Iraq.

I’m trying to decide whether I’m in favor of putting up billions in public assets to rescue insolvent investment bankers. Not that I have a say. The Federal Reserve, a private bank, can, for all practical purposes, print dollars in any amount and give them to any banker on the orders of one man.

When the Fed prints money and hands it out, it lowers the value of my dollars. It’s like a tax on everything I own.  The people the Fed is rescuing are the owners and depositors of the bank, who, as you might expect, tend to be folks that have lots of money to put in banks. They loaned a lot of it out to people who can’t pay, and, without the newly printed dollars that degrade my meager purchasing power, they might lose a portion of their abundant supply of dollars.

I know I should be grateful for this opportunity to put my capital to work for the greater good, but, damn, I don’t want to do it. My feeling about bankers is that they’re not cutting us any slack, and so why should we give them any special breaks? As for people with lots of money, I’m feeling really cranky about them. They seem to be in charge of just about everything, and everything’s really messed up. We should trust these folks with more?

I guess you can see where I’m going with this. I’m inclined to let the bank go down and see what happens. In fact, I’m dangerously close to advocating the erection of a gallows for bankers and other billionaires. This goes a bit beyond mere taxation, but it’s just the sort of public policy we’ll all be talking about if the Fed keeps to its current course. 

I heard Andrew Kohut, who claims to be an assessor of public opinion, tell an NPR audience today that the trend is in favor of support for the occupation (which he calls “war”) both here and in Iraq. “The Surge,” as Kohut refers to the extension of soldiers’ deployments, seems to be working, at least in terms of public relations.

Kohut wasn’t asked what procedures are in place for polling people in Iraq, where Kohut claims there is widespread support for the occupation. It seems as if we should be suspicious of any survey findings from Iraq, where it’s too dangerous for door-to-door polling, and a fourth of the population has been displaced by violence. This report didn’t even raise the issue of reliability but took Kohut’s assertions as if they were objective facts. Kohut did acknowledge that most of the polling data were coming from Baghdad, but he didn’t suggest that this should in any way undermine confidence in the data, which he was using to justify the military occupation.

Kohut wasn’t asked about the importance of media censorship on domestic opinion. For example, he could have been asked whether the refusal of any major news organization to cover the Winter Soldier conference of this past weekend might have an effect on polling. He could have been asked how much Americans actually know about what’s happening Iraq, but he wasn’t.  He probably wouldn’t have given a coherent answer, because pollsters don’t sample people’s knowledge, only their opinions. To the pollster, uninformed opinion is no different from informed opinion.

Kohut’s agenda is to sell survey data, not to measure public opinion, and a responsible journalist would remind listeners of that every so often, but there are no responsible journalists in the public radio family. There are only famous voices, and they don’t dispense facts.

Rules of engagement–ROE for short–don’t involve prenuptial etiquette but the use of deadly force against human beings. I watched a couple of dozen young Americans testify to their personal experiences with rules of engagement, and their testimony was compelling. These kids were given the power of life and death over defenseless people in places far, far from home, and it hurt them grievously.

These were veterans of the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. One after another, they recounted killings of unarmed people and acts of random violence against homes, places of worship, animals, children, and sometimes entire villages. They described brutal, occasionally lethal interrogations, and fruitless predawn searches of private homes, with families held at gunpoint by soldiers in full battle array. These were kids who joined the military to do something decent and honorable and who found themselves violating their own moral code. One posed for pictures with dead bodies. One tortured a prisoner. One shot a woman carrying a bag of groceries. Most stood silent while others did worse things.

The confessional for these outstanding young people is Winter Soldier, a four-day conference that ends tomorrow and features the personal testimony of survivors of America’s current armed conflicts. Organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, Winter Soldier takes its name from a similar conference conducted in 1971 by Vietnam veterans to testify to crimes committed there. This conference, like the 1971 meeting, is meant to establish once and for all that the atrocities committed by American soldiers are not the acts of “a few bad apples” but have their origins in the rules of engagement established by the people at the top. In Iraq and Afghanistan, these rules change so often and so capriciously that they can’t honestly be referred to as rules at all. What these kids were part of, some until only a few short months ago, was a movement of heavily armed and exhaustively indoctrinated boys ranging about a hostile foreign land without rules. The result was mayhem, and the victims who survived will never be the same.

Some of the accounts came across as cool and surgical, others as moving and impassioned, and all were credible, many documented with slides and video. The crimes are too many and too varied to catalog here in a summary of so many hours of testimony. Marines seemed to predominate among the soldiers I saw, and it was wrenching to see these kids, hardened and trained to a keen edge, reduced to abject contrition by the moral issues that challenged them in the field and afterwards. These are exemplary young people who have committed frightening offenses on our orders and are suffering for it.

I didn’t see an officer, and I didn’t see a career NCO among those testifying. The soldiers in attendance were lower-ranking “grunts” mostly, the riflemen and drivers and forward observers who function as seasoned professionals before age 20. The people who gave the orders were conspicuous by their absence.

Also absent were the embedded mass media, who bear so much responsibility for the injury done to these brave kids. You can search the CNN site and the NPR site and the Boston Globe and you’ll find no mention of this historic conference. Although Iraq Veterans Against the War live-streamed the whole conference to an audience including active-duty military personnel around the world, the mass media declined to cover it. Even though the stories were heart-rending, related by soldiers who evoked strong parental feelings in me and tearful responses in the audience, the embedded mass media turned away. These were the most courageous of soldiers telling their stories, and they were spurned by journalists. It’s censorship of the most despicable kind and can only further compromise whatever last shreds of credibility the so-called free press can still muster.