Archive Listing
March 20, 2005 - March 13, 2005

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

West Virginia Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, questioning Taguba, said the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison was not just about guards and interrogators lacking in personal values, but "about policies and planning" from a higher level.

-- Muslim American Society News

Senator Byrd displays chagrin at the mistreatment of his Arab brethren

THE SON OF DAVE. It's not hard to see why he'd be so upset.

Monday, May 10, 2004

Some of the poor poor prisoners in the halcyon days when they were free

CONTRADICTIONS. It does seem that the media strategy for covering the prisoner abuse story is to devote so much air time and column space to it that the context in which it might be understood disappears. We are being cajoled into viewing these events in isolation, as if there were no war, as if America has no enemies, and as if American troops are not being shot at and blown up by armed killers. That's why it's appropriate to shop around for some different perspectives.

In a recent Washingtom Times column, Bill Gerst offers a reminder of who it is we are fighting in Iraq, and hence who many of the prisoners are to whom we are devoting our heartfelt sympathy.

Nearly all 8,080 prisoners being held by U.S. authorities in Iraq are considered security threats: insurgents linked to attacks on coalition forces, and terrorists and former officials of Saddam Hussein's regime suspected of having useful intelligence, military officials say..

The approximately 7,800 security detainees make up about 95 percent of the prison population, and are the category of prisoners photographed nude and being abused at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, where about 4,000 prisoners are being held, U.S. officials said.

"These are people who have been captured as a consequence of anticoalition or anti-Iraqi activity," the coalition spokesman said.

Writing from Iraq, Rich Galen wants us to know that there is a war going on in Iraq. Remember that? If you're having trouble remembering or haven't heard much about it from your media sources of late, you might find some of his points interesting:

The Roar du Jour from those who want to get into this story by beating their chests over how terrible it all is, keep telling us that this has damaged American credibility in the Middle East.

Let’s look at that.

First, lots of Arabs don’t like us in the first place. Those Arabs will not like us any less for this incident.

That dislike has nothing to do with our cultural insensitivities. It has to do with America’s refusal to allow those same Arabs, many of whom have been bankrolling the Palestinian terrorists for decades, to wipe the State of Israel off the face of the Earth they way they have wiped it off the face of their maps.

Second, those who claim that the Abu Ghraib situation will poison the well of American goodwill for decades, are really the ones who are under rating Arabs. They have to believe that all Arabs will assign the actions of perhaps a couple of dozen soldiers to the 280 million Americans who have pledged to help the Iraqis attain security, independence, and prosperity.

He has much more to say, and he seems irate. It could be that he's irate because he's there, and he knows that there really are insurgents who would like to kill him... and us.

In case any of us have forgotten who the professional troops are whose reputation is being tarred by the broad brush of the mainstream media, Blackfive has found an account of a marine action in Iraq during the initial invasion:

It was fish in a barrel and the Marines were the fish.

And [platoon leader] Brian Chontosh gave the order to attack. He told his driver to floor the humvee directly at the machine gun emplacement that was firing at them. And he had the guy on top with the .50 cal unload on them.

Within moments there were Iraqis slumped across the machine gun and Chontosh was still advancing, ordering his driver now to take the humvee directly into the Iraqi trench that was attacking his Marines. Over into the battlement the humvee went and out the door Brian Chontosh bailed, carrying an M16 and a Beretta and 228 years of Marine Corps pride...

He fought with the M16 until he was out of ammo. Then he fought with the Beretta until it was out of ammo. Then he picked up a dead man's AK47 and fought with that until it was out of ammo. Then he picked up another dead man's AK47 and fought with that until it was out of ammo...

When he was done Brian Chontosh had cleared 200 yards of entrenched Iraqis from his platoon's flank. He had killed more than 20 and wounded at least as many more.

But that's probably not how he would tell it.

There's much more to the story, but maybe nobody's in the mood to be reminded that our troops have been, and still are, performing valiantly in a situation of great peril. You decide.

Something I keep wondering about -- The Iraqis are being bombarded every day with incendiary anti-American rhetoric from Al-Jazeera. Either they swallow all of it, in which case they probably already believe far worse fiction about U.S. troops than the comparatively tepid reality that's coming out now. Or they have learned to discount a great deal of what the worldwide anti-war media says, in which case maybe they are actually forming their own, more measured opinions. Roger L. Simon has a long excerpt from an Iraqi blog that suggests the latter. The Iraqi, it turns out, is a doctor and has a colleague who had actually performed medical services at the infamous Abu Graib facility. The blog excerpt recounts a conversation between the two:

Yesterday a friend of mine, who’s also a doctor, visited us. After chatting about old memories, I asked him about his opinions on the current situations in Iraq. I’ve always known this friend to be apathetic when it comes to politics, even if it means what’s happening in Iraq. It was obvious that he hadn’t change and didn’t show any interest in going deep into this conversation. However when I asked him about his opinion on GWB response to the prisoners’ abuse issue, I was surprised to see him show anger and disgust as he said:

"This whole thing makes me sick."

"Why is that?!" I asked.

"These thugs are treated much better than what they really deserve!"

"What are you saying!? You can’t possibly think that this didn’t happen! And they’re still human beings, and there could be some innocents among them."

"Of course it happened, and I’m not talking about all the prisoners nor do I support these actions, and there could be some innocents among them, but I doubt it."

"Then why do you say such a thing?"

"Because these events have taken more attention than they should."

The doctor who had seen the facility in question goes on to explain how well the prisoners he observed were treated by their American captors, including food, hygiene, clothing, and, yes, civility. The whole conversation is educational.

Of course, a lot of us are worried about what the rest of the world thinks, particularly our allies and the estimable adversaries who don't need any more reasons to hate us. Here's a good entry at Snopes.com which documents just how much support the United States gets at the U.N. on matters that don't have to do with Iraq. You probably haven't ever seen any real figures about how the voting goes at the U.N. Well, here you go.

Finally, a huge unspoken question has been nagging at me for days now. Just who are these young prison guard-reservists who thought it was fun -- or at least not career threatening -- to ship photos of themselves mocking Iraqi prisoners to their friends and families across the world? Or, if they didn't ship them, to pose for them? No one has more respect than I do for the professional military that has wrought all the major accomplishments in Iraq. But isn't it possible that some small percentage of ancillary personnel are, in fact, something like the self-absorbed and media-besotted high school youngsters who are IMing each other every hour to discuss who's doing who and emailing cellphone photos of the outfits they'll be wearing tomorrow? Do you know any of these young Einsteins? If you don't, think about the poseurs in Iraq while you read this, and this, and this. The question is not just what language they are speaking, but whether it's a language that CAN possess any component of morals or values. I leave it up to you.

That's all for now.

Sunday, May 09, 2004

THE LEGACY OF NED. Since it's Mothers Day, we offer an update on Bernadine Dohrn (see the Instapunk entry ECHOES OF WILLIE on April 28), that great mom who finally quit being a serial bomber so that she could make enough money to raise her kids. The Weather Underground documentary was vague, as we mentioned, about the scope of her current activities, although it seemed clear she was not as conscience-stricken as her fellow ringleader Mark Rudd. Now it turns out that she's giving speeches on college campuses again, most recently at Northern Illinois University. The campus newspaper, ironically named The Northern Star (does anyone else remember the wartime Hollywood movie North Star, which glamorized Stalin's Russia?), ran a cordial feature story about her visit that said, in part:

The main topic of discussion centered around Dohrn’s part in the radical “Weather Underground” group during the ’60s. The Weather Underground and its members took part in doing all they could to change the course of the Vietnam War by educating people on the need for reform. “We organized both against war and racism,” Dohrn said. “We also taught that all human life is equally valid, not just the body count of the United States.”

The article didn't contain a single reference to the Weatherman bombings. Note Dohrn's use of the words "educating" and "taught," as if she and her brethren spent the 70s holding wine and cheese seminars about the verities of life. Students at Northern Illinois could no doubt come away from the whole proceeding and its coverage believing that Ms. Dohrn is a mild-mannered heroine of the antiwar movement who is now contributing her time-honored wisdom to the current situation in Iraq. They could believe that if they never stumbled by accident on David Horowitz's account of her present-day affiliations and activities. He writes:

Bernardine Dohrn is one of America's most notorious homegrown terrorists. She was the head of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. She and her cohorts declared "war" on "AVmerika" and blew up many sites, including a bathroom in the Capitol in an effort to incite others to take up arms against this country. Today she is anti-American activist, in full support of global radicals dedicated to overthrowing this democratic government and to aiding and abetting America's enemies. She is also the scheduled commencement speaker at Pitzer College, one of the nation's premier liberal arts schools. All across this country, liberal administrators and radical professors are providing support for terrorist ideas and movements. Indicted terrorists Lynne Stewart (a colleague and comrade of Dohrn's) and Sami al-Arian (head of Palestine Islamic Jihad and a leading "civil libertarian" against the Patriot Act) have been honored speakers at law schools and universities all over America. They are supported by the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU (Dohrn is on the ACLU advisory board for example) and other liberal organizations. I guarantee you that conservatives who are in the forefront of the battle of ideas defending this country -- Victor Davis Hanson, David Frum, Robert Kagan to name three -- have never been commencement speakers, officially sponsored keynoters and honored guests of any liberal university. This tells you more than you probably care to know about the commitments of our university officials and the state of their campuses.

Horowitz, of course, has good reason to keep an eye on Dohrn. He was a leftist radical himself in the 60s and 70s, extensively involved with the Black Panther organization which was so lightly treated by the Weather Underground documentary. His defection from the left was driven in large part by his guilt for having supported Panthers whom he knew to be murderers and thugs. The book Radical Son is Horowitz's autobiography and mea culpa, and it is necessary reading for those who wish to understand how the extreme left operated in the Vietnam era AND how the extreme left is operating today.

One of the key revelations in Radical Son is Horowtiz's explication of the relationship between the American Communist Party (CPUSA) of the 1950s and the New Left of the Vietnam period. Shows like Weather Underground tend to present SDS and other radical groups as a follow-on to the civil rights movement, applying its tactics to new causes, including pacifism, feminism, and environmentalism. Horowitz argues that this is essentially an illusion, that the New Left actually learned its tactics from the organization which spawned Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. In fact, many of the prominent New Left activists were, like Horowitz himself, the offspring of lifelong CPUSA members. This is the source of the New Left's skill at employing the smear, the oft-repeated lie, and the frankly treasonous uses of illegally obtained national security information. It was also the source of the Weather Underground's ability to organize itself in cells and live undercover without detection for a decade. (They sure didn't learn it from Martin Luther King.)

All this may be interesting, you say, but what does it have to do with the contemporary political scene, and why is there anything ominous about an appearance by Bernadine Dohrn at a midwestern university? Here is the opening part of the Northern Star piece:

A decade of disaster was revisited Thursday night as the infamous anti-war activist Bernardine Dohrn spoke on behalf of the atrocities that she witnessed during the Vietnam War. Dohrn served as an active participant in the radical anti-Vietnam War movement throughout the ’60s.

Although Dohrn holds a plethora of positions to her name, including multiple degrees from the University of Chicago, she is most notable for her work as a radical anti-war activist.

“She is best known for what she did in the 1960s and ’70s,” associate English professor Larry Johannessen said.

This is the problem. One of the greatest skills of the Old Left was its ability to rewrite history (any history) in terms favorable to its agenda of the moment. Now we are being asked to listen to Dohrn for her knowledge of the atrocities of the Vietnam War. How could she have witnessed any atrocities? She was never in the military, never in Vietnam. The only atrocities she witnessed were her own. But Associate Professor of English Larry Johannessen doesn't see fit to clarify the facts for the college students in attendance. The renascent New Left described by Horowitz above resides in the colleges and universities of the United States, which were the preferred sanctuary of radical activists after the war ended. Actually, "resides in" is too bland a term. It would be more accurate to say "occupies." And we have every right to ask what kind of generation Bernadine Dohrn and her academic sponsors and apologists are intending to give birth to.

For a hint of what this might be like, the current issue of Reason Online provides some disturbing insights. In an article titled Fools for Communism, Glenn Garvin reviews and analyzes the academic response to In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. His essay spells out in painstaking detail the ongoing effort within the American university system to rewrite the entire history of the Cold War in terms favorable to Stalin and derogatory to the United States. Many of his anecdotes would be funny if they weren't so ominous. For example:

A constant stream of articles in academic journals and lefty magazines -- even an entire conference sponsored by New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies -- has pilloried them [historians accurately recording the facts uncovered since the fall of the Soviet Union] for everything from "triumphalism" (that is, they’re glad Stalin didn’t win the Cold War; can you imagine a historian of World War II being drummed out of the profession for expressing gratitude that Hitler didn’t win?) to accepting funding from conservative foundations (which, unlike the tens of millions of dollars the CPUSA took from the Kremlin, might come with secret strings attached) to starting the Vietnam War, destroying affirmative action, and dismantling the welfare state.

That bit about Vietnam came from a piece co-authored by Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University, who in a movement rich with unintentional self-parody nonetheless towers above the rest. We might even call her the Lucille Ball of anti-anti-communism, though, to be sure, she would never be so gauche as to associate with a pre-revolutionary Cuban like Ricky Ricardo. A prodigious apologist, Schrecker in one article conceded that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg delivered atomic secrets to the Soviets, then plaintively demanded: "Were these activities so awful?" She also coined the immortal phrase "non-traditional patriots" for the Rosenbergs, a felicitous way of saying that they lived in the United States but were loyal unto death to the Soviet Union.

Garvin's essay is lengthy, but it's as entertaining as it is thorough. He documents how pervasive the new orthodoxy of the new New Left is and illustrates what a stranglehold this bizarre fictionalization of our own history has on the academic establishment. Our most powerful academics and scholars seem intent on transmuting violent felons into luminaries, murderous tyrants into misunderstood idealists, patriots into fascists, U.S. history into a criminal indictment, and, perhaps, Islamist barbarians into the nemesis of American democracy. If you want to understand what lies behind the softer, gentler new face of Bernadine Dohrn, read every word of it

Saturday, May 08, 2004

Our presidential candidates demonstrating their fitness to serve.

MEDIA MAMAS. This is just too good. We have it on excellent authority that Margaret Carlson appeared on MSNBC last night, commenting on the performance of Donald Rumsfeld during his congressional testimony. What did Margaret have to say? "He thinks he's a combination of John Wayne and Hugh Grant," she opined. Huh? This made us remember our entry for Margaret back in the year 2000 for our feature called Who's Who in Shuteye Nation (names changed to protect the guilty). It wasn't very respectful. Now that we've experienced her latest wisdom, we feel, well, not very respectful.

Margaret Curlson. Political columnist for Newsprint magazine and regularly scheduled pundit on CTN's Capital Geeks. She's the one who did all her homework in ninth grade even the day after the tornado flattened the school. But then nobody invited her to the prom, and she's been mad ever since. She's also figured out that it's all the fault of the Republians. Well, that's progress. Now, if she could only nerve herself up to get one of those miraculous TV talk show makeovers—lose the glasses, get her hair washed, try some makeup—who knows what wonderful things might happen?

And as long as we're being less than respectful, we thought maybe we'd throw in our Who's Who entry for Eleanor Clift. She probably sounded off about about Rumsfeld last night too, or at least she'll be doing so very soon. Too bad for her.

Eleanor Cleft. Political columnist for Newsprint magazine and frequent guest pundit on TV shows about politics. She's even more insane than Mary Magdalen, which is saying something. When she's on TV, you can actually feel her throbbing and pulsing her way to a full-blown psychotic episode. Hate is just too mild a word for the way she feels about Republians, and the betting line in Lost Vegas is that she'll be the first TV journalist to come to work one day with a semi-automatic rifle and waste a few of her right-leaning pundit colleagues. It's hard to say where all this animus comes from. On the face of it, she's had a pretty fortunate career for a woman of extremely modest intelligence and charm. It's hard to imagine anyone inviting her to participate in any event, professional or social. Maybe she just showed up one day, and nobody's ever wanted to run the risk of telling her she's not wanted. On the other hand, maybe it's a diversity issue. There can't be too many other pundits who take the position that abortions should be not just legal, but mandatory. This may sound a little chauvinistic, but we're only trying to help—has she, we wonder, ever tried sex? It's been known to calm people down. Some people. Somewhat. Forget it. Sorry we asked.

We're tired of media mamas.

Friday, May 07, 2004

MUSLIM SENSIBILITIES. In a column at Townhall.com, Jonah Goldberg makes the case for why CBS should not have aired the prisoner abuse photos that sparked the latest firestorm of controversy. He begins with this preamble:

Because it is required to repeat the obvious as if it were catechism during feeding-frenzy moments like this, let me say again: The abuse of Iraqi prisoners depicted in those now world-famous photos is an outrageous scandal and the perpetrators must be punished.

I'm not going to do that. If this means I should be considered a suspect in the conspiracy to commit the worst war crimes since the last time an American soldier insulted some foreigner, so be it. I'm feeling less apologetic all the time. What's bothering me is hinted at in a sentence much later in Goldberg's column:

But these pictures are so inflammatory, so offensive to Muslim and American sensibilities, whatever news value they have is far, far outweighed by the damage they are doing. "Context" - the supposed holy grail of responsible journalism - is lost in the hysteria and political grandstanding.

I know what he''s trying to say. I know he's trying to do the civilized thing and assume the best about all the good people of the world. It's just that I can't quite get past the phrase "Muslim and American sensibilities" without slamming on the brakes. This wording makes it seem very much as if we're being asked to regard these as the same sensibilities. I'm not buying that. If he had written "Muslim sensitivities and American sensibilities," I might have let it go. But he didn't. And now I'm moved to sound off about Muslim sensibilities as I perceive them.

Never mind that the Saddam regime practiced torture on a scale more massive than anything seen since the tyranny of Stalin while the good Muslims of the middle east resisted the idea that he should be removed from power. Chalk that up to politics. Never mind that American prisoners of Muslim combatants have been routinely beaten and, worse, killed, mutilated, displayed, and cheered in their desecration. Chalk that up to extremism. Never mind that the worldwide scourge of terrorism is of exclusively Muslim origin and is without precedent in its deliberate targeting of the most helpless among us. Chalk it up to fundamentalism, even though some of us will be inclined to mutter under our breath that Christian fundamentalists have yet to hijack an airliner full of civilians and crash it into a convention hall loaded with abortionists. Never mind that despite the media's universal acceptance of so-called moderate Muslim outrage about 9/11 and subsequent acts of Islamofascist terror, I personally have yet to see any kind of Muslim advocate evince regret about these attacks without rushing into a "but" clause focused on excoriating the west for its treatment of Muslims. Chalk that up to failed communications.

What I do mind is having my sensibilities compared to those of a religion which currently practices what are called honor killings. These can't be blamed on politics or governments or miscommunications. They are not isolated incidents. A search for the term will turn up more than 90,000 entries in Google. These horrors are committed by men of Muslim "sensibility" against their own sisters and daughters, their wives, and the mothers of their children. All too often they are not prosecuted. No arrests are made. They are accepted as part of Islamic culture.

Why am I expected to care about the sensibilities of such people? I don't give a fig about what they regard as "humiliation" and "abuse." My American sensibility is that it's inexcusable for Americans to do what was done to Iraqi prisoners. I'm very much afraid that the media orgy these acts have inspired will lead directly to the deaths of good Americans in Iraq. But I'm not losing any sleep over how much it may have offended the feelings of Muslims.

Now I guess I belong to the growing fraternity of Americans who owe the rest of the world an apology. Okay. I apologize for the fact that I'm not going to apologize. So there.

Thursday, May 06, 2004

ITEM. Contrast these stories about President Bush and Senator Kerry.

BEWILDERMENT. Yesterday I couldn't seem to get away from Ted Rall. He's the political cartoonist who savaged Pat Tillman in print on the day the former Cardinal football player was laid to rest. Rall was a guest on the O'Reilly Factor and after a couple minutes I walked out on him and ran an errand in my car. It turned out that he was there too, as a guest on a local talk radio show. So I gave up and listened to him talk. He claimed, just as he had on O'Reilly, that he was a mainstream liberal Democrat. He stood behind his quote about Tillman, repeating his assertion that the Army Ranger was "fighting an evil war on behalf of an evil President." He denied not only the legitimacy of the war in Iraq, but also the legitimacy of the war in Afghanistan. He declared it unproven that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attack. This is a mainstream liberal Democrat? Maybe it's so. If it is, I feel genuine sorrow about what has happened to this country. That such a vituperative and graceless vindictiveness could poison the mainstream of one of the nation's two great political parties is a nauseating possibility. What is it they are for, these people who feel so much hatred about what they're against? I never seem to hear them articulate it in any broad terms. I know they're in favor of government-controlled healthcare. I know they want higher taxes on people they deem well to do. I know they have a faith in the U.N. that is as naive as their anger at Bush is noisome. But all of this does not seem to me to add up to a real philosophy of governance comprehensive enough to account for their fury and hatefulness. And without a great vision to counterbalance them, their dark emotional outbursts seem to arise from no discernible source, which comes very close to looking like an objective definition of evil, a malignancy that exists for its own sake. I hope I am wrong about this. I fear the possibility, however small, that I am not wrong about this.

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

PARTISANSHIP. Okay. So they didn't. But if it was Bush who was being accused, you know this would have been the headline.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

DEJA VU. The mass media of the world are never happier than when skewering the American military. No, American soldiers shouldn't mistreat prisoners. We can all agree on that. And muslim idiots shouldn't fire their damn guns in the air. But why is it we're still waiting to see the first picture of a child with a bullet hole in the top of her head? Nobody can tell me this doesn't happen in the course of all those loony street celebrations they have. Is it that Americans are more likely to be toting cameras with them wherever they go? What would we be saying right now if Saddam's prison guards had had Walmart disposable cameras to record their beatings, rapes, and murders of 300,000 political undesirables? Oh. That's right. We'd be saying, "Look at how barbarian the Americans are..."

A more reasonable view is offered by Victor Davis Hanson. He, too, is offended by the photos of prisoner abuse, but he has the wit to be offended by other things as well.

The Arab world -- where the mass-murdering Osama bin Laden is often canonized -- is shocked by a pyramid of nude bodies and faux-electric prods, but has so far expressed less collective outrage in its media when the charred corpses of four Americans were poked and dismembered by cheering crowds in Fallujah. The taped murder of Daniel Pearl or a video of the hooded Italian who had his brains blown out -- this is the daily fare that emanates now from the television studios of the Middle East.

Indeed, if Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera could display the same umbrage over mass murder that they do over these recent accounts of shame and humiliation of the detained Iraqis, much of the gratuitous violence of the Middle East would surely diminish. The papers that now allege war crimes are the same state-controlled and censored media that print gleeful accounts of death and desecration of Westerners and promulgate an institutionalized anti-Semitism not seen since the Third Reich.

Shame on all -- soldiers and media types alike -- who are serving up such a delightful meal to al Jazeera.

MAINLINERS: Here's a happy news item.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - An investor group headed by former Vice President Al Gore said Tuesday it is launching a cable news network for young adults, buying an existing network with an eye to retooling it with "irreverent and bold" programming.

The group is buying the Newsworld International channel from Vivendi Universal Entertainment for an undisclosed sum. The deal with Gore's company, INdTV Holdings, was announced Tuesday during the National Cable and Television Association convention in New Orleans.

Newsworld International is a 24-hour channel broadcasting international news produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that now has about 14 million North American households, according to the Vivendi Web site.

Gore said the network will be "an independent voice in this industry" with a primary target audience of people between 18 and 34 "who want to learn about the world in a voice they recognize and a view they recognize as their own."

"This is not going to be a liberal network, a Democratic network or a political network," Gore said at a news conference.

The programming will continue to be provided by Canadian Broadcasting Corp., officials said.

So it's just going to be an out-and-out socialist network. Sounds good, Al. We can't wait to enjoy a brand new outlet for 24/7 America bashing.

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