We Got One!

I had expected more tin foil hat comments on the “Muddying Questions, Squandering Answers” post on the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. I got a few, which I deleted as they weren’t terribly interesting. But today one Chris Michie has posted a lengthy comment on my “intemperate and unfocused rant,” challenging me to defend what I wrote. Which I won’t; it’s all in the post or the documents I linked to in the post, as far as I’m concerned. (The Mahablog Motto: I ain’t your monkey.) But Mr. Michie’s comment is a classic, an articulate and robust demonstration of junk science combined with a near-total failure of critical thought. So I’m calling your attention to it for your reading enjoyment. You can argue with him if you like; I haven’t twit-filtered him. Yet.

Fun With Linear Time!

Let’s study this sequence of events.

November 20, 2005 — U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, report that on Nov. 19, fifteen civilians and one Marine were killed by a roadside explosion and eight insurgents were killed in subsequent combat. According to Time magazine (Tim McGirk, “One Morning in Haditha,” March 27 issue),

A day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with TIME. …

… Soon after the killings, the mayor of Haditha, Emad Jawad Hamza, led an angry delegation of elders up to the Marine camp beside a dam on the Euphrates River. Hamza says, “The captain admitted that his men had made a mistake. He said that his men thought there were terrorists near the houses, and he didn’t give any other reason.”

But the military stood by its initial contention —that the Iraqis had been killed by an insurgent bomb— until January when TIME gave a copy of the video and witnesses’ testimony to Colonel Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.

January 2006Time magazine told military officials in Baghdad — that Iraqis said the fifteen civilians were not killed by a bomb but were deliberately killed by Marines. According to Time, military officials began to investigate what happened in Haditha in January.

According to Reuters, in January 2006 —

Journalism student Taher Thabet, via an Iraqi human rights group, passes video of bodies and homes where they died to Time magazine. Time says [Captain Jeffrey] Pool dismisses it as al-Qaeda propaganda. But Baghdad military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson recommends investigation into possible foul play.

February 10, 2006 — According to the Associated Press, on this date a Time magazine reporter alerted military coalition authorities that the November 19 incident may have involved Marines deliberately killing civilians. The Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) began an investigation.

February 14, 2006: The New York Times reports that “the first official investigation” of the Haditha killings began on this date. The investigation, Col. Gregory Watt, would be concluded three weeks later (see more below).

February 15, 2006: According to Reuters, “Lieutenant-General Peter Chiarelli, the No. 2 US commander in Iraq, initiates a preliminary investigation” on this date.

March 9, 2006 — Colonel Watt described the findings of his investigation to Lt. Gen. Chiarelli. Chiarelli directs the (NCIS) to investigate further, according to Reuters.

March 19, 2006Matthew Schofield of Knight Ridder reported that “Navy investigators announced last week that they were looking into whether Marines intentionally killed 15 Iraqi civilians – four of them women and five of them children – during fighting last November.” Time magazine posts a web exclusive by Tim McGirk:

In January, after Time presented military officials in Baghdad with the Iraqis’ accounts of the Marines’ actions, the U.S. opened its own investigation, interviewing 28 people, including the Marines, the families of the victims and local doctors. According to military officials, the inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military’s initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last week that the matter has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (ncis), which will conduct a criminal investigation to determine whether the troops broke the laws of war by deliberately targeting civilians. Lieut. Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Time the involvement of the ncis does not mean that a crime occurred. And she says the fault for the civilian deaths lies squarely with the insurgents, who “placed noncombatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves.”

April 8, 2006: Nancy A. Youssef of Knight Ridder reported that “the Marines relieved of duty three leaders of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, which had responsibility for Haditha when the shooting occurred.”

May 17, 2006: Rep. John Murtha appears on MSNBC’s Hardball. Murtha said stress on our troops and failure by the Bush Administration to meet the needs of troops were the root causes of the atrocity.

May 18, 2006: Right blogosphere goes ballistic on Murtha, calling him “dishonorable,” a “traitor,” and advocating he be censured.

May 27, 2006: Pentagon announces Marines could face murder charges.

May 30, 2006:
Iraqi Ambassador to the U.S., Samir Sumaidaie, tells CNN that he heard about the killings at Haditha …

… very soon after the event in November from some relatives. And as it happened, my own security detail [man] comes from that neighborhood. And his home is hardly a hundred yards from the home which was hit.

And he was in touch through the Internet with his folks and neighbors. And the situation which he reported to me was that it was a cold-blooded killing. …

… I was at the United Nations, and I found it unbelievable that the Marines would go in and kill members of a family who had nothing to do with combat. But I was under pressure by my friends and relatives to raise this issue.

Without any evidence in my hand, I didn’t really want to make any claims that I could not substantiate. That was, remember, before any video came out. It was just word of mouth, people telling me what happened.

And I know the power of the rumor and the power of allegations without foundation. But in this case, it was more than that.

The Ambassador also said one of his cousins had been shot by Marines in a separate incident.

I’ve already commented on the Haditha killings here and here. Now I’m just looking at how the story emerged and how the U.S. military responded. As you can see from what I pieced together from news stories, it isn’t clear exactly when U.S. military officials in Iraq became aware of the allegations. Maybe it was January, maybe February, but maybe earlier. Nor is it clear when the military began to investigate the allegations; maybe it was two months after the incident, maybe three. The NCIS may have become involved in February, or maybe March.

Even if the top brass in Iraq were unaware of what might have happened, it sounds like the allegations were well known to the Iraqis of Haditha, and their friends and relatives. So the suggestion by some righties that talking about Haditha undermines the war effort doesn’t make much sense.

Today Eric Schmitt and David Cloud report for the New York Times,

A military investigator uncovered evidence in February and March that contradicted repeated claims by marines that Iraqi civilians killed in Haditha last November were victims of a roadside bomb, according to a senior military official in Iraq.

Among the pieces of evidence that conflicted with the marines’ story were death certificates that showed all the Iraqi victims had gunshot wounds, mostly to the head and chest, the official said. …

… The three-week inquiry was the first official investigation into an episode that was first uncovered by Time magazine in January and that American military officials now say appears to have been an unprovoked attack by the marines that killed 24 Iraqi civilians. The results of Colonel Watt’s investigation, which began on Feb. 14, have not previously been disclosed.

It is now more than six months since whatever it was that happened, happened, which is six months for word-of-mouth about what happened to spread through Iraq. I am skeptical that the investigation into what happened needed to take that long. Even if the preliminary investigation by Col. Watt concluded on March 9, that’s more than three months ago. Now we’re getting leaks from senior military officials. The charges are serious, but the facts of the case don’t seem so complex that it would take this long to either obtain indictments or put forth evidence that the allegations are false.

Schmitt and Cloud continue,

Colonel Watt also reviewed payments totaling $38,000 in cash made within weeks of the shootings to families of victims.

What does “within weeks” mean? January? February?

In an interview Tuesday, Maj. Dana Hyatt, the officer who made the payments, said he was told by superiors to compensate the relatives of 15 victims, but was told that rest of those killed had been deemed to have committed hostile acts, leaving their families ineligible for compensation.

After the initial payments were made, however, those families demanded similar payments, insisting their relatives had not attacked the marines, Major Hyatt said.

Major Hyatt said he was authorized by Colonel Chessani and more senior officers at the marines’ regimental headquarters to make the payments to relatives of 15 victims.

Colonel Chessani “was part of the chain of command that gives the approval,” Major Hyatt said.

Over on the Right, Captain Ed links to the Schmitt and Cloud New York Times story and says,

From this description, rather than the impression of official denial and cover-up, the Marine Corps took decisive action early to ensure that evidence could be retained and that investigators started working on unraveling the deaths in Haditha. By the time that Time reported this incident publicly in the March 27th issue, the US military had already determined that war crimes had potentially been committed at Haditha. Time Magazine reported as much in its story, noting that it presented the military with the information that started the investigation.

If the US military had already determined that war crimes had potentially been committed by March 27, IMO they should have been a hell of a lot more pro-active about making information public and obtaining indictments asap. Seems to me that time is of the essence. The longer the military remains silent, the worse the rumors and the suspicions become.

And, frankly, if Rep. Murtha hadn’t started talking about Haditha a couple of weeks ago, we in the U.S. probably would know even less about what happened than we’ve learned so far.

See also: “A reporter’s shock at the Haditha allegations” by Arwa Damon, CNN.

Cross posted to The American Street.

A Tale of Two Democrats

Oliver Burkeman and Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian report that Al Gore called the Bush Administration a “renegade band of rightwing extremists.”

Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency, describing the current US administration as “a renegade band of rightwing extremists”.

In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a “recovering politician”, but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming.

Denying that his politics have shifted to the left since he lost the court battle for the 2000 election, Mr Gore says: “If you have a renegade band of rightwing extremists who get hold of power, the whole thing goes to the right.”

Righties are outraged, because Gore made these remarks in Britain. To a rightie, criticizing Dear Leader on foreign soil is the worst kind of lèse-majesté. Of course, they’d be just as outraged if he’d said the same thing in the U.S. There’s no pleasing some people.

Burkeman and Freedland continue,

The new levels of attention he is receiving have led some Democrats to call on him to run again for president, while others have responded with anger that Mr Gore did not show the same level of passion in the 2000 campaign.

He has since acknowledged that he followed too closely the advice of his consultants during that campaign, and – before he started to scoff at the idea of running again – swore that if he ever did so, he would speak his mind.

It says something about the state of politics in the U.S. when politicians in office are afraid to speak their minds. (Such as …)

According to Steve Thomma of Knight Ridder, some Dem Party insiders are starting to criticize Hillary Clinton for being a wuss. Finally.

As she kicks off her campaign Wednesday for a second term, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York carries the image of a leader of her party and the expectation she’ll be the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Yet many Democrats and analysts think she’s failed to lead at a pivotal time for her party and the nation, complaining that she’s been overly cautious and timid in her first term. They contend that she’s remained a backbencher on major issues such as the Iraq war and immigration. And they say she’s squandered the unique platform her celebrity gives her to put other issues in play, such as expanding health care.

The approach may help or hurt her political career. But it’s angered or frustrated some Democrats who want more from her, and has contributed to the buzz within the party for former Vice President Al Gore as a more forceful champion heading into the 2008 campaign.

“As we tackle the great issues and debates, I don’t know that she has defined them for us,” said Joe Turnham, the state Democratic chairman in Alabama.

At a recent gathering of state and national Democratic leaders in New Orleans, Turnham said, “I sensed . . . a great yearning for someone to step up to the plate and speak the truth with almost a disregard to their own political posturing . . . even the Clinton admirers admit she’s not ready to go there yet.”

Is it too much to ask that our leaders be, well, leaders?

“Members of Congress scratch and claw to get one line of a news story. Hillary Clinton can wake up and decide to put health care on every front page in the country. But she hasn’t,” complained David Sirota, a liberal activist and former Democratic congressional aide.

“If you ask, `What does Hillary Clinton really represent?’ It would be hard to tell.”

“On the big issues, she hasn’t been there,” agreed Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

He said she’d worked to build a record of collaborating with Republicans on small, noncontroversial issues, much as her husband built up his political capital with proposals such as requiring school uniforms or installing V-chips in televisions to control children’s exposure to violence.

“She’s very cleverly co-sponsored a lot of minor legislation with conservative republicans like Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., so people can say she’s not divisive. It’s not on anything of great importance,” Baker said.

Speaking of David Sirota, this post suggests he probably approved of what Gore said about the rightwing renegades.

In my new book Hostile Takeover, I spend a good deal of time showing how ultra-conservative right-wingers have hijacked the terms “centrist” and “mainstream” and disconnected them from what’s actually “centrist” and “mainstream” among the public. This is no small matter (and a topic I have focused on before) – it is a hugely important and powerful linguistic weapon deviously employed by the most destructive forces. That’s right – today in Washington, positions that are way to the right of where the American public stands are regularly called “centrist” or “mainstream.” That’s no accident – it is a deliberate strategy employed by Big Money interests that run the Establishment to effectively marginalize the vast majority of the population from its own political debate and political system. It is, in short, a hostile takeover not just of our government, but of political discourse itself.

Like I said — In the past several years the media has made right-wing extremism seem “centrist” while progressivism, which has a long and respectable history in mainstream American politics, has been marginalized as something alien and weird and loony. Media enabled the Republicans to become the dominant party in national politics even though the Dems are more representative of American public opinion on issue after issue. It’s more accurate to say that a large right-wing extremist faction has been able to co-opt and coerce a large part of American mass media into reflecting its point of view. What Gore said is, of course, the plain truth, except that the extremists that control our government are not limited to the Bush Administration.

David goes on to talk about a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. I think that, these days, Al Gore is the soul of the Democratic Party, and the question is whether those who control the party will allow the soul to inhabit the body or drive it away. A Dem Party led by Clintonites and the DLC seems a cold, lifeless, soulless thing to me.

Old-Time Religions

If you have access to Salon, I recommend the interview of Karen Armstrong by Steve Paulson. In particular I recommend the interview to those of you who hate religion, although I believe you’d enjoy it if you don’t hate religion.

Armstrong is a former nun-turned-agnostic and religious historian who has written some excellent books, including A History of God, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, and a lovely biography of the Buddha.

In this interview Armstrong makes several points near and dear to me. One point is that religion isn’t primarily about belief in some Big Daddy God. Nor is it about miracles or belief in an afterlife or in supernatural beings, like angels. The problem is that westerners, and no doubt Americans in particular, cling to a very narrow and mostly infantile definition of religion that focuses on belief in a Big Daddy God, heaven, miracles, etc. So most of us in the West think that’s what religion is. That, and the fact that the world seems infested with warring religious whackjobs, makes religion easy to hate. I understand that.

But the problem isn’t with religion. The problem is that, somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped, resulting in stupid and warped religion at war with all things rational and humane.

At the same time, Armstrong argues, hatred of religion is a pathology. She says that some people who hate religion are “secular fundamentalists. They have as bigoted a view of religion as some religious fundamentalists have of secularism.” I can relate to that, but I think many people in western culture have been exposed only to the most ignorant, dogmatic, low-level kinds of religion, and have no clue religion can be any other way. Some commenters to Mahablog will write that all religion is superstition or even mental illness, which saddens me.

How do good religions go bad? Armstrong’s newest book, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, looks at the Axial Age, 900 to 200 BCE, during which the world’s great religious traditions developed, independently of each other, in four regions of the world — Confucianism and Taoism in China; Hinduism (I would have narrowed that to Vedanta), Buddhism, Jainism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.

Armstrong says,

Without any collusion, they all came up with a remarkably similar solution to the spiritual ills of humanity. Before the Axial Age, religions had been very different. They had been based largely on external rituals which gave people intimations of greatness. But there was no disciplined introspection before the Axial Age. The Axial sages discovered the inner world. And religions became much more spiritualized because humanity had taken a leap forward. People were creating much larger empires and kingdoms than ever before. A market economy was in its very early stages. That meant the old, rather parochial visions were no longer adequate. And these regions were torn apart by an unprecedented crescendo of violence. In every single case, the catalyst for religious change had been a revulsion against violence.

First of all, they all insisted that you must give up and abandon your ego. The sages said the root cause of suffering lay in our desperate concern with self, which often needs to destroy others in order to preserve itself. And so they insisted that if we stepped outside the ego, then we would encounter what we call brahman or God, Nirvana or the Dao.

But by “god” the sages didn’t necessarily mean a big daddy in the sky:

In my book “A History of God,” I pointed out that the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn’t think about God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to apply to God.

“God” in this sense is not a person or spirit. “God” might represent the ground of being, for example. But if religion isn’t about worshipping gods, what is it? Armstrong says,

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn’t necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words.

The mystical traditions of most religions are about disciplining oneself to transcend “I” and directly experience beingness outside of space and time. Some neurobiologists suggest that some of the older meditation practices — which are nothing like “transcendental meditation” or the relaxation techniques that pass for meditation these days — cause some parts of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain to shut down so that the seeker experiences being without the boundaries of “I” and the passage of linear time. However it happens, through this experience the mystic’s perception of self and other, life and death, time and space, etc., changes. With the guidance of a skilled teacher or guru, the mystic becomes more at peace with himself, and he develops more selfless compassion for others.

The problem with mysticism is that it’s a ton of work. So over the years religions developed myths and rituals as learning aids. The myths may have begun as guides to the ineffable, not meant to be taken literally. But over time myths become beliefs and harden into dogma, and the ineffable ground of being is given a personality and parameters, and it becomes Big Daddy God.

IMO religion that defines itself by doctrine and ritual is not religion at all, but a cheap substitute thereof.

A theme that runs through several of Armstrong’s books is that, before the modern era, people didn’t take scripture literally. Even though fundamentalists think “old-time religion” means taking every word of the Bible literally, in fact this rigid literalism is a newfangled thing that arose in the past couple of centuries or so.

Well, faith is not a matter of believing things. That’s again a modern Western notion. It’s only been current since the 18th century. Believing things is neither here nor there, despite what some religious people say and what some secularists say. That is a very eccentric religious position, current really only in the Western Christian world. You don’t have it much in Judaism, for example. …

… I think we’ve become rather stupid in our scientific age about religion. If you’d presented some of these literalistic readings of the Bible to people in the pre-modern age, they would have found it rather obtuse. They’d have found it incomprehensible that people really believe the first chapter of Genesis is an account of the origins of life.

A mystic might say that Genesis is a parable about the development of human consciousness, for example. Adam and Eve become self-aware, and after that come shame, greed, and other unpleasant things they weren’t aware of before. The original moral might have been that the cure for shame, greed, etc. is to transcend ego.

Armstrong says that scripture should be read like poetry. “It’s an attempt to express the inexpressible.” She also makes the interesting point that science sometimes uses mythological language — e.g., “Big Bang,” “black hole” — for realities that dangle just outside the scope of most human cognition. “I think some scientists are writing a new kind of religious discourse, teaching us to pit ourselves against the dark world of uncreated reality and pushing us back to the mysterious.”

Armstrong goes on to call belief in an afterlife a “red herring” (the Buddha said pretty much the same thing in one of the early sutras). Also,

Sometimes, I think the way monotheists talk about God is unreligious. … people very often talk about him as a kind of acquaintance, whom they can second-guess. People will say God loves that, God wills that, and God despises the other. And very often, the opinions of the deity are made to coincide exactly with those of the speaker. … God transcends personality as God transcends every other human characteristic, such as gender. If we get stuck there, this is very immature. Very often people hear about God at about the same time as they’re learning about Santa Claus. And their ideas about Santa Claus mature and change in time, but their idea of God remains infantile.

One of the things I came to appreciate about Buddhism is the attitude that all teaching is provisional. The student may be taught myths or doctrines or initiated into some esoteric practice, but always it is understood that the lessons are like rungs in a ladder; to get to the next rung you have to leave the old one. In some religions belief in a god or gods is such a provisional step. But monotheists too often get stuck at Santa Claus God level, and even the churches have forgotten what comes after believing in Santa Claus God. And limited, fearful people who feel threatened by the modern world have twisted religious beliefs into something hard and ugly. Instead of practicing religion as a guide to transcendence, they’ve reverted to primitive, tribal forms of religion to protect themselves from whatever it is they are afraid of.

In the 1930s, Albert Einstein wrote that religions seem to have three levels. Level one is religion practiced to assuage fear; believers perform rituals and pray to imaginary gods to protect them. At level two, people form a social or moral concept of God. “This is the God of Providence,” Einstein wrote, “who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer’s outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead.”

But there is a third stage, with “no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.” Einstein called it a “religious feeling” — I think he might have bumped into the limits of language, as that sounds pretty lame — but he continues,

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

Einstein goes on to argue that those who have dedicated their lives to scientific inquiry are “the only profoundly religious people” in this materialistic age. And, truly, there is no reason for science and religion to be at odds with each other. It’s not religion, but the fear, ignorance, and superstition that passes for religion, that’s the problem.

New Media, New Politics

Jonathan Alter gets it

Bob Schieffer of CBS News made a good point on “The Charlie Rose Show” last week. He said that successful presidents have all skillfully exploited the dominant medium of their times. The Founders were eloquent writers in the age of pamphleteering. Franklin D. Roosevelt restored hope in 1933 by mastering radio. And John F. Kennedy was the first president elected because of his understanding of television.

Will 2008 bring the first Internet president? Last time, Howard Dean and later John Kerry showed that the whole idea of “early money” is now obsolete in presidential politics. The Internet lets candidates who catch fire raise millions in small donations practically overnight. That’s why all the talk of Hillary Clinton’s “war chest” making her the front runner for 2008 is the most hackneyed punditry around. Money from wealthy donors remains the essential ingredient in most state and local campaigns, but “free media” shapes the outcome of presidential races, and the Internet is the freest media of all.

No one knows exactly where technology is taking politics, but we’re beginning to see some clues. For starters, the longtime stranglehold of media consultants may be over. … just as Linux lets tech-savvy users avoid Microsoft and design their own operating systems, so “netroots” political organizers may succeed in redesigning our current nominating system. But there probably won’t be much that’s organized about it. By definition, the Internet strips big shots of their control of the process, which is a good thing. Politics is at its most invigorating when it’s cacophonous and chaotic.

I’m not sure about Alter’s example, Unity08, which is an organization dedicated to elected a “unity” ticket of one Dem and one Republican in the 2008 presidential elections. The “crashing the gate” netroots initiative to reform an established party — the Dems — seems more practical. We’ll see how that goes.

Last week Jamison Foser called media “the dominant political force of our time.” Foser and Eric Boehlert, in his new book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (which I’m currently reading) make essentially the same point: In the past several years the media has made right-wing extremism seem “centrist” while progressivism, which has a long and respectable history in mainstream American politics, has been marginalized as something alien and weird and looney. Media enabled the Republicans to become the dominant party in national politics even though the Dems are more representative of American public opinion on issue after issue.

Certainly much of media does little more than act as a conduit for right-wing propaganda. The reasons for this are complex. Many media personalities (passing as journalists) are ideologues pushing their dogma with an evangelical zeal. But others of them are, I suspect, unconscious of the role they play in the noise machine. Matt Bai comes to mind. He seems sincerely oblivious to the power of mass media politics even though he is immersed in mass media politics. (Which may be the problem; does a fish perceive water?)

We can’t reform American politics without either reforming media or breaking its stranglehold on the political process. Using the Internet to strip big shots of their control of the process seems the way to go.

Battlefield of Dreams

This is rude

… all the good and loyal writers over the borderline in Right Blogsylvania hate the troops of the United States. It is the only logical conclusion, if you believe that the war is a mistake of such gigantic proportion that one day underground monuments will be built as a way of burying the disgrace brought on this nation by those who planned and encouraged this debacle. Yeah, it’ll be like an iceberg, with just the top of it visible aboveground where the individual dead soldiers can be listed, but below will be the largest part, to represent the magnitude of the treachery done to America by its “leaders.” When do we reach the tipping point where support of the Iraq War simply means you wish death upon more and more American soldiers? Or are we there already there?

So, when Michelle Malkin makes her solemn tribute to war dead, saying “Freedom is not free,” she could just as well say, “I don’t care who dies so my verson of imposed ‘liberty’ can be shoved into any place I decide needs it.”

Didja ever notice that people who keep reminding us that “freedom isn’t free” are the same ones who don’t lift a finger themselves to either defend it or take care of it?

Or, as Dr. Atrios put it yesterday, “The willingness to send others off to die for a misguided war because you wet your pants after 9/11 is called ‘cowardice’ not courage.”

Righties just hate it when somebody badmouths the Iraq War. I think this is because they hate interruptions in their fantasy life. For example, Victor Davis Hanson writes about Iraq as if he’s expecting the victory parade any minute now.

…what did 2,400 brave and now deceased Americans really sacrifice for in Iraq, along with thousands more who were wounded? And what were billions in treasure spent on? And what about the hundreds of collective years of service offered by our soldiers? What exactly did intrepid officers in the news like a Gen. Petreus, or Col. McMaster, or Lt. Col Kurilla fight for? …

… The Kurds would remain in perpetual danger. The Shiites would simply be harvested yearly, in quiet, by Saddam’s police state. The Marsh Arabs would by now have been forgotten in their toxic dust-blown desert. …

Yes, Iraqis are so much better off now. Nir Rosen wrote in yesterday’s WaPo

Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq “the republic of fear” and hoped it would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

Oh, wait … Um, Victor Davis Hanson continues,

… We should remember the achievement this Memorial Day of those in the field who alone crushed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, stayed on to offer a new alternative other than autocracy and theocracy, and kept a targeted United States safe from attack for over four years.

The reality is that the “crushed” Taliban is making a comeback. Today, thousands of grateful Afghanis rioted in Kabul after an American military truck crashed into a dozen cars on the north side of town, killing and wounding several people. Iraq is being taken over by our buddies in Iran and is well on the way toward becoming an Islamic theocracy. And whether the effort in Iraq did a dadblamed thing to make us safer is purely a matter of faith.

But Hanson’s got his lawn chair parked by the curb, and he’s got his balloons and flags and he knows that victory parade is just around the corner. I’m sure he finds us naysayers tiresome. We’re spoiling the parade.

Today a number of rightie bloggers express concern that Rep. John Murtha’s blabbing about the alleged massacre of civilians by U.S. troops at Haditha will hurt the war effort. IMO this exemplifies the classic colonialist attitude toward the simple swarthy natives, who won’t notice they’re oppressed if we don’t tell them. But the Gulf Times of Qatar says that Iraqis don’t consider a civilian massacre by U.S. troops to be news.

Word that US Marines may have killed two dozen Iraqi civilians in “cold-blooded” revenge after an insurgent attack has shocked Americans but many Iraqis shrug it off as an every day fact of life under occupation.

Despite US military denials, many Iraqis believe killing of men, women and children at the hands of careless or angry American soldiers is common. No reliable statistics are available

I very much hope this is not true, but if a large portion of the Iraqi population believes it is true, then a “rush to judgment” on Rep. Murtha’s part is the least of our problems in Iraq. If we are serious about getting some kind of good outcome in Iraq, such allegations need to be investigated promptly and vigorously, and the U.S. military in Iraq must demonstrate in no uncertain terms that abuse of innocent civilians will not be tolerated. And when allegations are unfounded, then the facts must be made clear and public asap. But pretending everything is just hunky-dory when it’s not is counter-productive to the war effort.

Unless, of course, the “war effort” you are rooting for is a fantasy that lives only in your own head, in which case unpleasant news will get in the way of your glorious imagination.

And then there’s the Dreamweaver in Chief, who enjoys rotating fantasies of being either Ronald Reagan or Harry Truman fighting either the Cold War or World War II. Next he may assume the identity of Frederick the Great in the Seven Years’ War.

The collective fantasies of the Right wouldn’t be such a problem except that they use real soldiers and real wars in their play-acting. Maybe we could get them interested in paintball or Final Conquest. They could enjoy their fantasies and we could get the real soldiers back.

Memorial Day

You probably know that Memorial Day began after the Civil War, evolving from local “decoration day” observances. After World War I it expanded to a day of remembrance for soldiers in all American wars.

War has been part of our national experience from the birth of the nation. Some of these wars were necessary; some of them weren’t. Some of our wars are glorified in countless books and movies (e.g., World War II), but there are other wars we try hard to forget (e.g., Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam). Wars both justified and unjustified shaped history and steered national politics. They also affected ordinary citizens, personally and intimately. The soldiers, their families, their communities, went through gut-wrenching change, often terrible and tragic, but sometimes joyous. It’s important, I think, to remember these individuals and these experiences. It’s part of who we are.

Personal remembrances: Among my ancestors were two great-times-four grandfathers in the Revolution (I know only their names — William Gillihan and “Big John” Fronebarger) and three great great grandfathers who fought for the Union in the Civil War (another William Gillihan, a volunteer from Indiana who died in Arkansas in 1865, probably from disease; Ephraim Senter, volunteer from Missouri who was wounded somewhere in the western theater and who died shortly after the war; and Fielding King, Missouri volunteer and quartermaster who served under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman). My grandfather, Robert John Thomas, was a veteran of the Western Front, World War I. My father, Robert Thomas, was born while Grandpa was in France. (Grandpa didn’t like his middle name, John, and he and Grandma never settled on another middle name, so my dad never got one.) Before World War II my dad was in the horse cavalry at Ft. Riley, Kansas, but when war preparations began the Army realized that the days of mounted saber charges were over, and they sent my Dad to airplane mechanics school. My dad’s younger brother, Harold Thomas, was a U.S. Marine embassy guard in Peking and taken prisoner by the Japanese the day after Pearl Harbor. He and the other North China Marines were POWs through the entire war. (After he was rescued he called home; when Grandma heard his voice, she fainted.) Of my Ma’s three brothers, Marion and Harold Gillihan were WWII vets, I believe, and Donald Gillihan is a veteran of Korea. My bro Robert Wayne Thomas (Grandpa wouldn’t let my folks name my brother “Robert John”) was in Vietnam ca. 1969-1970, as I remember. (Nephew Ian might help me out with that.) And my other nephew, Maj. Robert John Thomas (Grandpa wasn’t around to nix the “John”) is in the Army now, but I’m not sure what he’s doing right this minute. (Ian?)

I’m feeling a bit inarticulate today, so instead of writing something inane about What Memorial Day Means to Me I thought I’d just link to some photos from the Library of Congress and National Archives of veterans and the people who remembered them. Enjoy.

Daisies gathered for Decoration Day, May 30, 1899.

Soldiers observe Decoration Day, Manilla, Philippines, ca. 1900.

President Theodore Roosevelt reviews a Memorial Day parade in Canton, Ohio, 1907.

President Taft at Grand Army of the Republic convention, Rochester NY, 1911.

Confederate and Union veterans at Gettysburg reunion, 1913.

Decoration Day, 1917, location not specified.

Portrait of American soldier of World War I, ca. 1918.

U.S. soldier eating, ca. 1918.

124th Infantry (formerly Second Florida), Col. Walter S. McBroom, commanding, Camp Wheeler, Ga., Jan. 16th, 1918.

Sailors work to salvage the U.S.S. Arizona, 1942.

Salvaging the U.S.S. Oklahoma, 1942.

M-4 Tank crew, Fort Knox KY, 1942.

Memorial Day at Manzanar Relocation Center, California, 1942.

Herbert Kondo, an American of Japanese Ancestry volunteer, is photographed with his parents in Kauai District, Territory of Hawaii, 1943. The elder Mr. Kondo is a veteran of World War I.

Memorial Day service at Arlington National Cemetery, 1943.

Private Margaret Fukuoka, Women’s Army Corps, portrait by Ansel Adams, 1943.

Decorating a grave at Arlington, 1943.

Elizabeth L. Gardner of Rockford, Illinois, WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilot), 1947.

“A fond farewell from his family, sends Capt. Johnnie Gosnell of Borger, Texas, off on another mission over Korea.” 1950.

“Wolfpack pilots of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing sweep Colonel Robin Olds away from his F-4 Phantom II aircraft following his return from his 100th combat mission over North Vietnam.” 1967

Private First Class Russell R. Widdifield in Vietnam, 1969.

Way to Go

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder reports that the Shiite militias have taken control of much of southern Iraq, and that these militias are being trained and armed by Iran.

Southern Iraq, long touted as a peaceful region that’s likely to be among the first areas returned to Iraqi control, is now dominated by Shiite Muslim warlords and militiamen who are laying the groundwork for an Islamic fundamentalist government, say senior British and Iraqi officials in the area.

The militias appear to be supported by Iranian intelligence or military units that are shipping weapons to the militias in Iraq and providing training for them in Iran.

Some British officials believe the Iranians want to hasten the withdrawal of U.S.-backed coalition forces to pave the way for Iran-friendly clerical rule.

Iranian influence is evident throughout the area. In one government office, an aide approached a Knight Ridder reporter and, mistaking him for an Iranian, said, “Don’t be afraid to speak Farsi in Basra. We are a branch of Iran.”

Just think — our military misadventure is helping Iran expand into Iraq. We should send them a bill for services rendered.

Meanwhile, President Bush is promising to “complete the mission.” Which is what, exactly? To establish the United Islamic Republic of Greater Mesopotamia? Maybe we’ll finish the famous $592 million embassy in Baghdad in time to hand the keys over to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Wouldn’t that be a bite just 27 years after the Iran hostage crisis? I’m sure Saint Ronnie of Blessed Memory is pleased.

Update: See also Juan Cole

Iran is perhaps the only unambiguous winner in the new situation in Iraq, and its foreign minister was basking in the glow on Saturday. On Friday, Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari defended Iran’s right to have a civilian nuclear energy program. That can’t be what Washington was going for in backing the new Iraqi government.

Y’know, maybe it was what Washington was going for. Or at least, when Iran takes over Iraq, I’m sure the Bushies will have talking points explaining why that was the plan all along …

Update: Riverbend (thanks, Swami!) wrote,

[After the fall of Baghdad] We immediately began hearing about the Iranian revolutionary guard, and how they had formed a militia of Iraqis who had defected to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. We heard how they were already inside of the country and were helping to loot and burn everything from governmental facilities to museums. The Hakims and Badr made their debut, followed by several other clerics with their personal guard and militias, all seeping in from Iran.

Today they rule the country. Over the duration of three years, and through the use of vicious militias, assassinations and abductions, they’ve managed to install themselves firmly in the Green Zone. We constantly hear our new puppets rant and rave against Syria, against Saudi Arabia, against Turkey, even against the country they have to thank for their rise to power- America… But no one dares to talk about the role Iran is planning in the country.

The last few days we’ve been hearing about Iranian attacks on northern Iraq- parts of Kurdistan that are on the Iranian border. Several sites were bombed and various news sources are reporting Iranian troops by the thousand standing ready at the Iraqi border. Prior to this, there has been talk of Iranian revolutionary guard infiltrating areas like Diyala and even parts of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the new puppets (simply a rotation of the same OLD puppets), after taking several months to finally decide who gets to play the role of prime minister, are now wrangling and wrestling over the ‘major’ ministries and which political party should receive what ministry. The reason behind this is that as soon as a minister is named from, say, SCIRI, that minister brings in ‘his people’ to key positions- his relatives, his friends and cronies, and most importantly- his personal militia. As soon as Al-Maliki was made prime minister, he announced that armed militias would be made a part of the Iraqi army (which can only mean the Badrists and Sadr’s goons). …

…So while Iraqis are dying by the hundreds, with corpses turning up everywhere (last week they found a dead man in the open area in front of my cousins daughters school), the Iraqi puppets are taking their time trying to decide who gets to do the most stealing and in which ministry. Embezzlement, after all, is not to be taken lightly- one must give it the proper amount of thought and debate- even if the country is coming unhinged. …

… The big question is- what will the US do about Iran? There are the hints of the possibility of bombings, etc. While I hate the Iranian government, the people don’t deserve the chaos and damage of air strikes and war. I don’t really worry about that though, because if you live in Iraq- you know America’s hands are tied. Just as soon as Washington makes a move against Tehran, American troops inside Iraq will come under attack. It’s that simple- Washington has big guns and planes… But Iran has 150,000 American hostages.

Muddying Questions, Squandering Answers

More than anything else, what triggered the birth of The Mahablog were unanswered questions about September 11. About six months after that day, news stories in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere revealed that the feds had received copious warnings that a terrorist strike on U.S. soil was imminent, yet the Bush Administration took no action to prevent it. In the spring of 2002 I spent considerable time piecing together a September 11 timeline, mostly so I could get straight in my own head what the U.S. government had done to prevent terrorism in both the Clinton and Bush II administrations, and what warnings the Bush White House had received before September 11.

In 2002 Condi Rice protested that no one could have imagined that terrorists would use hijacked airplanes to carry out a strike on American soil. But we learned since that a presidential daily brief of August 6, 2001, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” not only explicitly said that, um, Osama bin Laden was determined to mount a terrorist strike in the U.S., the strike might involve a hijacked airplane and the strike would probably be carried out by bin Laden followers already in the U.S. The briefing even mentioned the World Trade Center and Washington. Yet the Bush Administration was weirdly unconcerned.

We got a reminder of the Bush Administration’s misplaced priorities this week when Robert Parry wrote for Consortium News (emphasis added):

… the documentary evidence is now clear that in summer 2001 – at the same time Bush’s National Security Council was ignoring warnings about an impending al-Qaeda terrorist attack – NSC adviser Condoleezza Rice was personally overseeing a government-wide task force to pressure India to give Enron as much as $2.3 billion.

Then, even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when India’s cooperation in the “war on terror” was crucial, the Bush administration kept up its full-court press to get India to pay Enron for a white-elephant power plant that the company had built in Dabhol, India.

And last week Rory O’Connor and William Scott Malone wrote for AlterNet about “the 9/11 story that got away” — an anonymous White House source leaked top-secret NSA intelligence to reporter Judith Miller about a planned attack by al Qaeda on the United States. The story never got published.

In spite of attempts at investigation, there are vast gaps in our understanding of what happened on 9/11. The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent Commission submitted a long list of questions to the commission, most of which are still not clearly answered, IMO. Along with a full account of why intelligence of an impending attack was, apparently, ignored, there are many unanswered questions about NORAD and exactly what Bush and Cheney were up to — Cheney in particular — on that day.

My 9/11 timeline was obliterated without notification to me by the web host, Tripod, along with the first 13 months or so of Mahablog posts. But I remember a number of other loose threads, such as interference by the White House with the investigation of the U.S.S. Cole bombing. And let us not forget the 28 pages about the Saudis that were redacted from a congressional report on 9/11.

There’s little chance we’re going to get those questions answered as long as the Bushies control the White House and Congress, but I’ve hoped that someday the truth would come out. However, I fear that there are people — well-meaning people for the most part — who are working very hard to destroy any chance of a full accounting in our lifetime.

I’m talking about the “inside job” theorists. I’ve noticed what seems to be increased interest in the notion that the World Trade Center towers collapsed from controlled detonation rather than from being struck by commercial airplanes. And the theorists are getting more aggressive. Last week I deleted several comments linking to implosion theory sites and banned a commenter who would not respect my request to stop posting that junk here. I’ve received snippy emails from people who accused me of being a Bush dupe because I don’t subscribe to the detonation theory. Clearly, large numbers of people are determined to believe that the Bush Administration planned and carried out the September 11 attacks.

There are too many variations of the detonation scenario drizzled around the web to address every point. I could be flip and point out that, given their track record, if the Bushies had been behind 9/11 the WTC towers would still be standing. But to me the clearest sign the detonation theories are wrong is that the scenarios inevitably ignore basic, irrefutable facts about the WTC towers and their collapse. The theorists are frantically passing along misinformation to each other and spinning further and further into the Twilight Zone.

For example, this page — which calls itself “Hard Science and the Collapse of the World Trade Center” — goes on at length about the “mysterious” collapse of Tower 7 without mentioning the fact that the building had not only suffered structural damage when Tower 1 collapsed (among other things, the collapse set off an earthquake in lower Manhattan that registered on seismographs miles away), but also that fires raged unchecked on several floors for seven hours before the building finally crumbled about 5:20 that afternoon. (The FDNY was, you might recall, either dead or busy elsewhere that day.)

A New York Times article of September 12, 2001 (James Glanz, “A DAY OF TERROR: THE BUILDINGS; Towers Believed to Be Safe Proved Vulnerable to an Intense Jet Fuel Fire, Experts Say“) quoted Brian McIntyre, chief operating officer of the structural engineering firm that worked out the original WTC design (Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire), who said that WTC 7 was ”basically designed to resist heat buildup for three hours.” Catastrophic damage after seven hours of uncontrolled fire didn’t seem that mysterious to Mr. McIntyre.

I spent a big chunk of the day in a car with two other people trying to get off Manhattan island. When I got home that afternoon I remember flipping on the television and hearing a news report that WTC 7 was burning and severely damaged, and was expected to collapse soon, which it did. No big surprise.

Yet according to the “hard science” report hailed by several commenters as an amazing breakthrough, WTC 7 just sat safe and happy, nice as you please, all day long, until “WTC7 mysteriously imploded and fell to the ground in an astounding 6.5 seconds.” No mention of the fire.

Now, recall, we’re supposed to believe that each floor of the building “pancaked” on the one below. Each of the 47 floors supposedly pancaked and collapsed, individually. Yet WTC7 reached the ground in 0.5 seconds longer than freefall. Is this really possible?

I don’t know if that’s possible, but Tower 7 didn’t fall that way, according to New York Times news stories. Towers 1 and 2 fell that way (I’ll get to them in a second), but I haven’t seen any accounts of Tower 7’s collapse that claim it fell that way. Nor could I confirm the author’s claim that the collapse took only 6.5 seconds. A couple of news stories estimated the collapse took about 40 seconds, although that wasn’t official. The “hard science” guy doesn’t say where he got his data. I have to assume he hauled it out of his butt.

About the alleged “implosion” of towers 1 and 2 — as regulars know I watched the towers from a high rise office building on West 17th St., from which I had a clear, straight-on view. As I watched it was obvious to me that both towers collapsed when the weight of the floors above the impact sites was no longer supported and crashed down on the floors below, setting off a domino effect that brought both towers to the ground. Later I read a number of engineering reports that confirmed what I saw with my own eyes.

I’m not sure how this makes me a Bush dupe, but I’m told it does. Instead of relying on my own eyes, I’m told I must look at fuzzy and possibly doctored web clips that “prove” the towers “imploded.”

But let’s talk about implosion for a minute. According to this “how stuff works” explanation:

The basic idea of explosive demolition is quite simple: If you remove the support structure of a building at a certain point, the section of the building above that point will fall down on the part of the building below that point. If this upper section is heavy enough, it will collide with the lower part with sufficient force to cause significant damage. The explosives are just the trigger for the demolition. It’s gravity that brings the building down.

That’s pretty much what happened to the towers, except that the trigger was a loss of structural integrity caused by several factors resulting from a commercial airliner loaded with jet fuel plowing into each tower. Read the engineering reports linked above or here for details.

The “How Stuff Works” article continues to explain that controlled demolitions require considerable pre-demolition prepping and rigging. The whole process takes several days. The demolition team has to remove walls and cram explosive material into bore holes at several points in the building.

People, there’s no way a demolition team could have rigged the WTC towers to implode without anyone noticing them. That’s even dumber than thinking you could take the Brooklyn Bridge apart with a blowtorch without getting caught. The WTC towers had heavy security 24/7, and no one could have waltzed into, say, the Cantor Fitzgerald offices and drilled holes in the wall without somebody saying, um, excuse me? And you are here, why? No way.

[Update: From “World Trade Center – Some Engineering Aspects” by Tim Wilkinson at the University of Sydney:

Implosion firstly requires a lot of explosives placed in strategic areas all around the building. When and how was this explosive placed in the building without anyone knowing about it. Second, implosion required more than just explosives. Demolition experts spend weeks inside a derelict building planning an event. Many of the beams are cut through by about 90% so that the explosion only has to break a small bit of steel. In this state the building is highly dangerous, and there is no way such a prepared building could still be running day to day like WTC was.

Details, details … ]

Other arguments — the “inside job” people will tell you there were detonations on the lower floors, and they know this because people have testified they heard explosions. Of course they heard explosions. When big chunks of airplane and building fall nearly a quarter mile and hit pavement, this makes a big BOOM. Duh.

The “inside job” people also like to point to pictures that show billowing “smoke” that looks like smoke from a detonation. What they see is the billowing dust of pulverized building material. (Remember the news clips of people running to escape dust clouds?) The white dust was everywhere in and around the financial district after 9/11. I saw people walking up 8th Avenue covered in white dust that day.

Most of all the various “studies” created by the “inside job” people nearly always fail to consider the unique structure of the WTC towers and instead compare them to collapses of more conventional steel-supported skyscrapers. They’ll say jet fuel wouldn’t have burned that long, forgetting that the towers were full of all kinds of combustible things — furniture, carpeting, lots and lots of paper. Etc. etc. No, they say, the only way those towers could have collapsed was from a controlled demolition. End of argument. (And they say I’m closed minded.)

I’ve been loathe to bring this up, because I know as soon as I post this the tin foil hat crowd will flock here and post insults in the comments as fast as they can keyboard (which I will delete as promptly as possible). Clearly, some people have an irrational but overwhelming psychological need to exonerate the plane hijackers. But I decided to post this just once so I can link to it in the future when the theorists demand why I am so stupid as to believe the “official story” of 9/11, whatever that is.

There’s no question the Bushies benefited from 9/11 and have exploited it shamelessly. And as I said in the early paragraphs, I have big questions about what the feds might have known before the tragedy and why the White House took no action to prevent the tragedy they must have at least suspected was coming. But whatever they knew or didn’t know, it’s plain as day that Bush was unprepared for the Real Thing. If he’d known what was going to happen that day, he would have done a better job pretending to be a hero. But he was stunned. And he spent most of the day flitting about North America before pulling himself together to go back to Washington.

I fear the “inside job” theorists are poisoning the well. By mixing nonsense with legitimate issues they may be making all questions about September 11 seem absurd and further inquiry less likely. And, people, that pisses me off. And that’s why this blog will not be used as a conduit for the “inside job” theories.

Update: See also this British “September 11 Conspiracy Theories” page and this article from Popular Mechanics.