Rich on the Bush Administration on Newsweek
Here’s an excellent op-ed piece from the New York Times by Frank Rich: It’s all Newsweek’s fault.
“Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care,” said the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, as he eagerly made the magazine the scapegoat for lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. McClellan was so fixated on destroying Newsweek – and on mouthing his own phony P.C. pieties about the Koran – that by omission he whitewashed the rioters themselves, Islamic extremists who routinely misuse that holy book as a pretext for murder.
That’s how absurdly over-the-top the assault on Newsweek has been. The administration has been so successful at bullying the news media in order to cover up its own fictions and failings in Iraq that it now believes it can get away with pinning some 17 deaths on an errant single sentence in a 10-sentence Periscope item that few noticed until days after its publication. Coming just as the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll finds that only 41 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq is “worth fighting” and only 42 percent think it’s going well, this smells like desperation. In its war on the press, this hubristic administration may finally have crossed a bridge too far.
Let’s stipulate flatly that Newsweek made a serious error. For the sake of argument, let’s even posit that the many other similar accounts of Koran desecration (with and without toilets) by American interrogators over the past two years are fantasy – even though they’ve been given credence by the International Committee of the Red Cross and have turned up repeatedly in legal depositions by torture victims and in newspapers as various as The Denver Post and The Financial Times. Let’s also ignore the May 1 New York Times report that a former American interrogator at Guantánamo has corroborated a detainee’s account of guards tossing Korans into a pile and stepping on them, thereby prompting a hunger strike. Why don’t we just go all the way and erase those photographs of female guards sexually humiliating Muslims (among other heinous crimes) at Abu Ghraib?
Even with all that evidence off the table, there is still an overwhelming record, much of it in government documents, that American interrogators have abused Muslim detainees with methods specifically chosen to hit their religious hot buttons. A Defense Department memo of October 2002 (published in full in Mark Danner’s book “Torture and Truth”) authorized such Muslim-baiting practices as depriving prisoners of “published religious items or materials” and forcing the removal of beards and clothing. A cable signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez called for interrogators to “exploit Arab fear of dogs.” (Muslims view them as unclean.) Even a weak-kneed government investigation of prison abuses (and deaths) in Iraq and Afghanistan issued in March by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III of the Navy authenticated two cases in which female interrogators “touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner in order to incur stress based on the detainees’ religious beliefs.”
To my mind, the reaction by the Bush people (and by the right-wing echo chamber) to the Newsweek story is very reminiscent of the reaction to “Rathergate,” in which Dan Rather was excoriated for running a story about Bush’s spotty National Guard record based on a memo that turned out to be a forgery.
In each case, we have a media outlet that has run a story damaging to the Administration, where the specific evidence used turns out to be bogus (or, in this latest case, at least potentially bogus). But in each case, there also is substantial other evidence that makes the story seem plausible, if not proven. By attacking the specific piece of bogus evidence, while leaving the large body of corroborating evidence unmentioned, the Bush people are able to fight the public relations battle on ground of their own choosing. Suddenly the story isn’t about the underlying scandal (Bush’s spotty National Guard record, or the ill-treatment of muslim prisoners), but is instead about the lax reporting standards and irrational anti-Bush animus of the media.
Since the media outlet in each case actually does operate within an ethical framework that compels it to acknowledge error, the engagement plays out favorably for the Bush people. They make lots of hay over the specific media screw-up, leaving the larger body of evidence unacknowledged and uncontested. Then, having undercut their opponent’s credibility, they simply move on to whatever the next battle is that they’ve defined as offering the best chance of playing out in their favor.
Operating largely free of the media’s self-imposed requirements of fairness and accountability, the Bush administration and its supporters are in effect fighting a “guerilla war” of information. It’s an unconventional, asymmetrical conflict, using the strength of the opponent against him, sniping from behind trees and hedgerows at the enemy’s massed troops, leaving improvised roadside bombs to blow up in the enemy’s face, then melting away to fight another day rather than facing the enemy’s counterattack.
Pretty slick.
