Weisberg, Goldenberg on the Bush Team’s Media Judo
Here are a couple of interesting followup items on that story about Newsweek having to retract their Koran-flushing-guards-at-Guantanamo news item. First, from Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, a really nice analysis of the degree of hypocrisy required for the Bush people to get feisty with Newsweek for harming our reputation in the Muslim world: Abuse Week – Behind Bush’s latest assault on the press.
And from David Goldenberg, whose Golden Palace monkey piece I just linked to, and who made me feel special by singling out lies.com for a personal submission of same, here’s an aspect of the Bush team’s asymmetrical media warfare that I should have noticed myself: How the Man is helped by today’s Deep Throats.
Government officials had the opportunity to respond to the Koran in-the-toilet story before it aired, and were evasive or declined to comment. Therein lies the biggest lesson about how this information made it to print. The Bush team seems to have figured out that it is better to force media organizations to scramble around in damage-control mode after printing overreaching stories than to correct them beforehand.
I remember how that was very much a part of the Dan Rather Memogate scandal, but I hadn’t realized it was part of this Newsweek incident as well. (Goldenberg also references a third example of the same practice.)
Sneaky, sneaky politicos! Wicked! Tricksy! False!
May 25th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
The Weisberg article is no doubt of interest, as he is the most consistently anti-Bush author on Slate.
First of all, I’m not going to try to defend everything that this, or any other, Administration has ever done as being free of hypocrisy. That would be an utter failure. But this article begins its hypocrisy proof by equating the acceptance of a shaky single anonymous source that backfired ( used by Newsweek), with the acceptance of a professional, detailed assessment of Iraq’s pre-war capabilities, made by what was suppose to be the gold-standard agency for intelligence gathering and analysis, yet got it wrong (used by Bush).
The prisoner tortures and deaths and their damage to Muslim relations are an obvious black eye for the US, whether you believe that a collection of low-ranking sadists, Intelligence spooks, and mid-level officers took advantage of circumstances, or that a higher-level conspiracy was afoot. Weisberg however, takes the one issue and tries to make three seperate points of proof out of it, to beef up his thin list of exhibits.
But worse than any of that is the outrageous statement that he makes regarding US military making Abu Ghraib “even more notorious under our management than it was under Saddam Hussein’s”. Frankly, anyone who really believes that idea needs an intelligence check to go along with a reality check.
Perhaps a few excepts from the clip of film recovered in Iraq (and shown by the Congress to little, if any, attention) can help here:
“The clip jumps to footage of scrub-clad “surgeons” with rubber surgical gloves severing the man’s hand at the wrist. First the skin is peeled away with surgical knives and tweezers; ligaments, tendons, muscle, and bone underneath are exposed. Then the gloved hands wielding the knives begin to slice, shredding through the sinews, slashing muscle, breaking bone, until the hand is ultimately detached and plopped onto a green cloth, as yellow, pulpy tissue spills forth.”
“The swordsman-torturer, not sufficiently satisfied with his first effort, raises the sword again and drives down once more on the man’s immobile hand. This time he severs the fingers closer to the knuckles as blood spurts cartoonishly from his hand spilling over and down the concrete slab. The victim emits a wail I have never heard — could never imagine hearing — from a grown man, this time louder, harder than the first.”
“The camera jumps to al-Arousi sitting with one arm tied behind him as his right arm is extended out to his side. His right elbow rests on a cinderblock and his right fist is supported by another cinderblock. Nothing supports his forearm in between. While a Fedayeen holds the prisoner’s elbow in place, Tarik Juman crashes a three-inch-thick pipe down on his old compatriot’s forearm, bending the forearm in a ‘V’ shape and shattering the bones within. This procedure is repeated for his left arm as well.”
“In another clip a hooded and blindfolded prisoner is led to a room where he is forced to kneel, hands tied behind his back. Another man sits before the prisoner with thick metal tweezers and a scalpel. With his left hand he grabs the tip of the prisoner’s tongue with the tweezers and pulls it forward from his head. With the scalpel in his other hand he slices through the prisoner’s tongue, cutting it out of his mouth and then dropping it on the floor.”
There’s much, much more….
This doesn’t excuse those responsible for participating in more recent actions. But it does in my mind, automatically completely discredit any person who would make such a breathtakingly asinine and irresponsible comment.
May 25th, 2005 at 6:35 pm
That line (about us making Abu Ghraib more notorious than Saddam) jumped out at me, too, for the same reason. But please note that Weisberg isn’t saying that under Bush, human rights violations at Abu Ghraib have been worse than they were under Saddam. He’s saying that the place has become “more notorious” under our management than it was under Saddam’s. And I think it’s basically true that Abu Ghraib _is_ more notoriously a symbol of abuse now, as a result of US actions, than it was in the days when Saddam was running it.
Now, one could certainly argue that the degree of notoriety attaching to our actions is unfair, given the much more horrific abuses carried out there by Saddam. But that would be a different argument, one that doesn’t really have much to do with Weisberg’s larger point about it being hypocritical for the Bush team to scold Newsweek for damaging the US reputation in the Muslim world.
I don’t doubt that Weisberg is a member of the Vast Bush-Hating Conspiracy, and yeah, his statements need to be interpreted with that in mind. But at least in terms of this specific example, I don’t think you’ve made the case for his statements being “breathtakingly asinine and irresponsible.”
May 25th, 2005 at 8:56 pm
In my mind, the statement is every bit as bad as I described it, regardless of whatever slack you want to give him.
If Weisberg wanted to be clear on his point he would have said that, due to the widely distributed pictures and investigations of the actions of US military personnel, that Abu Ghraib became a tipping point for many Muslims with suspicions about US intent (that would at least fall in line with the theme of his story). The full quote makes it clear that Weisberg wants to assert that the actions themselves supercede those that occurred under Saddam. (American military personnel tortured, sexually humiliated, and apparently caused the death by torture of at least one inmate at Abu Ghraib, managing to make the Iraqi prison even more notorious under our management than it was under Saddam Hussein’s.)
The guy is a professional writer. He knows full well when he is making an inflammatory comment to add a certain weight or shock value to his column. Regardless of the level of intellectual dishonesty used.
May 25th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
I’m very much interested in not granting him slack. Yes, I happen to agree with his essay’s overall theme, and that’s probably going to bias my interpretation of it even as I try to resist that bias. But as someone who disagrees with his point, you’re subject to the same sort of bias in the opposite direction, and I think that might be involved in our disagreement on this narrow point.
Per dictionary.com: notorious (adj): Known widely and usually unfavorably; infamous: a notorious gangster; a district notorious for vice.
Notoriety specifically deals with the extent of something’s bad reputation, in the sense of the number and distribution of people holding a negative view of it. Weisberg’s full quote, as given by you here, doesn’t say what you say it does. You write, “The full quote makes it clear that Weisberg wants to assert that the actions themselves supercede those that occurred under Saddam.” Then you give the quote, as follows: “American military personnel tortured, sexually humiliated, and apparently caused the death by torture of at least one inmate at Abu Ghraib, managing to make the Iraqi prison even more notorious under our management than it was under Saddam Hussein’s.”
The first part of the sentence, which lists some of the known acts by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib, is, as far as I can confirm, scrupulously factual, so Weisberg loses no points there. His use of the word “managing,” to my mind, actually implies the very point you accuse him of getting wrong, that Saddam’s behavior at Abu Ghraib was objectively worse than ours. That is, by using the word “managing,” Weisberg is implying that it is something of a noteworthy accomplishment (in a negative sense) that US forces managed to beat Saddam in the contest for Abu Ghraib notoriety, given how awful Saddam’s own behavior was.
May 26th, 2005 at 6:49 am
I would argue that it wasn’t just the actions of the US soldiers themselves that made Abu Ghraib more notorious in the strict sense of the word. It was the flooding across the world of pictures of the actions, and the subsequent hearings, trials, and investigations. That is the difference between an open society (yes, it still is) and the closed, repressive society of Saddam’s. I believe that words can be powerful, especially when used by people in assumed positions of knowledge and trust. I also believe that the comparative assessment used by Weisberg begins to erode the true horror and evil of Saddam and his minions in order to play up a political point. I frankly don’t care if I’m alone on this argument. It’s simply the way it strikes me.
If I can assume what Weisberg’s cultural heritage likely is, I would think he would be much more sensitive about saying anything that may soften the actions of a dictator with a history of genocide.
May 26th, 2005 at 7:08 am
Yeah, see, I think we’ve mostly been talking past each other. I basically agree with the whole first paragraph in your latest comment, while simultaneously believing that it doesn’t really undercut the point of Wiesberg’s essay, as to the Bush team’s hypocrisy in ragging on Newsweak for having damaged the US reputation in the Muslim world.
On your second paragraph, you can certainly think that Weisberg’s (presumed) Jewish heritage would make him prone to be disposed against someone like Saddam. But for myself, I can see where a consideration of the Jewish experience in the 20th century would make someone even more sensitive to the precursors of Nazi-style fascism that are betrayed by the attitudes and actions of the Bush administration. (I know that statement is going to tempt you to invoke Godwin’s Law on me, but I figure that for anyone keeping score, you already triggered its application, at least obliquely, with your previous comment.)
Ultimately, of course, what you or I think Weisberg’s cultural heritage would make him sensitive to isn’t terribly relevant, compared to what his demonstrated sensitivities actually are. And I think that gets to the heart of the problem I have with your initial take on his essay: Regardless of how you (or I) feel about his previous body of work and his (presumed) cultural heritage and our disappointment in the missed opportunities reflected in what he didn’t say, we have an obligation, if we’re going to make a response to his essay, to focus that response on what he actually did say.
May 26th, 2005 at 8:06 am
I used the first two paragraphs of my initial post giving my take on the issue that Weisberg was raising in his column. I even acknowledged, in part, one of his points.
However, the Abu Ghraib comment hit me as so jarringly inflammatory and misleading that I had to focus on it.
And yes, you can assume what my response would be to the whole tired Bush-Hitler thing without me elaborating on it.
May 26th, 2005 at 12:29 pm
Well, in turns out that maybe Newsweek’s story wasn’t “factually lacking” afterall, Bush-lovers.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An FBI agent wrote in a 2002 document made public on Wednesday that a detainee held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had accused American jailers there of flushing the Koran down a toilet.
One of favourite lines from the article, because it’s soooo true…
“Unfortunately, one thing we’ve learned over the last couple of years is that detainee statements about their treatment at Guantanamo and other detention centers sometimes have turned out to be more credible than U.S. government statements,” said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer.
You can read the article below, because I doubt that this story will make it to TV.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050525/ts_nm/security_guantanamo_koran_dc
May 26th, 2005 at 2:08 pm
If you read your own posted article, you’ll note several things:
1. This is a narrative report that a detainee made to a FBI Agent. One person telling another a story is not “proof” of anything. Just another allegation.
2. The fact that he is telling the Agent that he hasn’t got anything personal against the US is “laugh-out loud” funny! (Oh no, nothing other than the fact that I’m bring held indefinitely in a foreign prison as a enemy combatant!!!)
3. The US military questioned the detainee recently and he did not reiterate his claim of 2002 (although he didn’t specifically recant it either, to be fair).
4. One interesting comment from these documents is regarding a detainee who said that an uprising that started went a fellow detainee claimed that a guard purposely dropped a Koran onto the ground, was actually false, because the accusing detainee himself dropped the book.
Listen, there is no way anyone is going to say that mistreatment hasn’t happened. Abu Ghraib itself shows that. But let’s try to view these stories objectively, and seperate allegations and accusations from facts before we start jumping up and down and shouting, “Look, look, I see bad Americans!!”
May 26th, 2005 at 7:34 pm
I really mangled point #4 grammatically! I obviously meant that the claim made by a detainee that started an uprising was later said to be false, according to another detainee.
And, by the way Rise Against, let me add that although I don’t know if this story made any TV news programs, but an even lengthier version of the AP account is posted on the FOX News website, no less! (What a shocking betrayal by the Bush propaganda machine! ;>)
May 27th, 2005 at 6:47 am
You CUNTS Still on this Bush thing ?????? You pathetic pieces of Shits!!!!! Why dont you take the plank out of your OWN FUCKING Eyes before picking on the tiny splinter in Bushes.
You Lot are Lower than Sewer Rats!!!! Your probably all Bum jacking each other, you Fucking Poofters!!!!
Just accept life the way it is and Go back to your Gay Clubs!!!!
May 27th, 2005 at 10:14 am
Robert,
How’s the trollin’ going?
JBC,
The first rule of Godwin’s Law is that you do not talk about Godwin’s law. ;)
Oh — and do you want to meet at the Gay Club tonight? I hear that they’re having an anti-bush rally and Bum jacking fest.
-EP
May 27th, 2005 at 12:28 pm
Point(s) taken Craig. But let me point out that the detainee said he didn’t have anything against American people, but obviously he has differrent feelings towards the US government for the reason you noted.
Ethan – I will see you guys there. Don’t forget about the circle jerk being held immediately following the bum jacking fest.
May 28th, 2005 at 8:18 am
Dear Rise and ethan,
I don’t agree with your political views, but gee you guys are funny!!, I feel a bit left out now……..(whistleling)…………………………you got the address of that club?????
hehehe….Cheers….Robert