Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 139             Today’s News and Views         Tuesday, May 16, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2446

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 295

Figures provided by the Iraq Coalition Causality website

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Today's News and Views

May 15, 2006

Pro-Internet Democracy Blogs Run Ads for Corporate Takeover of Net: Another Example of Why BuzzFlash Won't Accept Advertising

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

Right now there is a fierce Capitol Hill war being waged over whether the Internet will continue to belong to the citizens of America or will start to move down the path that cable television went: only the big players will survive as fully accessible content providers, as the Telecom broadband providers start to set up toll gates on the Net.

To make this account simple: advocates of democracy on the Internet with virtually no barriers for content entry are known as proponents of "net neutrality." The Telecom companies who want to start charging tolls for content, among other nefarious plans, are the bad guys.

Right now, many of the leading progressive blogs on the net are running ads by the bad guys. Not only are these ads promoting the corporate takeover of Internet content, they are totally misleading, along the lines of the nuke industry running ads on "How Nuclear Leaks Make Your Community Healthier."

The ad in question leads to an Orwellian flash that tries to convince the viewers that the government is trying to "interfere" with the Internet and that this will destroy it, which is exactly what the people behind the ads are trying to do.

Here's what the ad says, before you click through to the flash: "Don't Regulate The Internet! See The Truth About Net Neutrality. Don't let the Government Regulate the Internet. Make up your own mind. It's about the future of the Internet!" (See http://www.dontregulate.org/) 

If you watch the ad, you find it is sponsored by a coalition misleadingly called "Hands Off the Internet".If you look at the members of "Hands Off the Internet," they are the very Telecom companies who have given large donations to members of Congress to pass legislation -- now having cleared a House Committee -- to allow them to squeeze democracy out of the Internet in order to increase their profits. Members of the cynically named "Hands Off the Internet" coalition include AT&T, BellSouth and Cingular, along with some "front" organizations that again employ the Bush tactic of sounding like they are on your side when they are trying to get away with grand larceny. As many on the Net have noted with contempt, the group is masterminded by former Clinton Press Secretary Mike McCurry.

Okay, so where do these misleading ads show up in droves? Why, on progressive Internet blogs, that's where: blogs who are exhorting their readers to oppose the bill being sponsored by the Telecoms to assert private ownership over a public common carrier. (The FCC last year opened the way for this pernicious legislation by ruling that the Internet was not a common carrier, even though telephones are.)

A BuzzFlash reader pointed out this entire scam to us and how he had tried to get the progressive sites to have the ad removed on their sites, but to no avail. The ad is part of a package offered by a company known as BlogAds. (Click here if you want to know which liberal blog sites financially benefit from BlogAds.)

We don't know if all the sites listed on BlogAds are running the ad for a corporate coalition that wants to turn the Internet into another profit center of branded pablum and propaganda. But we checked three on Sunday night, May 14th, and they all were: Talking Points Memo, Raw Story and MyDD.

BuzzFlash has nothing but respect for the blogs listed on the liberal BlogAds network. We can safely assume they all support "net neutrality" and a pro-democracy Internet. Frankly, otherwise they would be committing suicide. So, it's not like they are seeking these "kill the open net" ads out. But they are trapped in an advertising contract, it appears.

We don't know their agreement with BlogAds, if it allows them to pull misleading and politically sabotaging ads from their sights, but the deceptive ads were still up on the three sites we looked at on the weekend of May 13-14 -- and, we can assume, on many of the participating BlogAds sites.

This is the deal with the devil you make when you start to depend on advertising. You end up in bed with the very people who would like nothing better than to see you shut down in the end. They are paying you in the short term, in order to pass legislation that will knock you off the Internet in the long-term.

If anyone ever asks again, why BuzzFlash doesn't accept advertising, let this example be your answer.

Building progressive values on the Internet and restoring democracy to the people of America requires rejecting the alluring dollars of corporate America, because they are running the nation now, not us.

And if they take away "net neutrality," the Orwellian propaganda of the Republicans and corporate America will have no counterbalance.

The prominent blogs who work with BlogAds are good people with good content and excellent commentary. We read them and post them. They are hard working heroes.

But BuzzFlash takes no advertising. And, this predicament for the BlogAd blogs shows you why.

Any banner ad you see on BuzzFlash is for a premium that we chose because of its quality. We have never accepted a fee for choosing a premium and we don't accept any sort of advertising dollars.

The lamentable news account of the ads for the Telecom front group is the best illustration we can find of why.

We are completely reader-supported and only accountable to you. We will not allow a slick Bush-like thoroughly misleading PR stunt to run on BuzzFlash. And what's worse, it's an ad that holds a gun to the head -- through the Telecom legislation it supports -- of every website on the Internet.

Advertising on BuzzFlash.com? Now, you know why we "just say no."

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

For information on how you can play a role in keeping the Internet the last bastion of news and commentary not controlled by the pro-Republican corporate media, go to http://www.freepress.net.

Recruit 5 people to sign up for BuzzFlash alerts and help spread the truth: http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/subscribe.php

© BuzzFlash.

GWB : The Right Man to lead the CIA... (Video)

Angus Reid Global Scan : Polls & Research

Americans Criticize Guantanamo Situation

May 14, 2006

(Angus Reid Global Scan) – Many adults in the United States disagree with the current circumstances at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, according to a poll by Knowledge Networks for the Program on International Policy Attitudes. 63 per cent of respondents think the U.S. should not hold certain individuals for interrogation for several years without charging them with a crime.

In May 2005, a 308-page report by Amnesty International criticized the U.S. government for its handling of prisoners in several detention centres, including one at Guantanamo Bay where more than 500 "enemy combatants"—most of them from Afghanistan—are being held. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have urged the federal administration to close the prison.

U.S. president George W. Bush called the Amnesty International document "absurd," adding, "The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world. When there’s accusations made about certain actions by our people, they’re fully investigated in a transparent way."

The survey also showed support for the International Criminal Court (ICC). 66 per cent of respondents believe the U.S. should back this permanent tribunal.

The ICC was established by the Rome Statute, which delineates the tribunal’s functions, structure and jurisdiction. To date, 100 countries have ratified the document, thereby granting authority to the ICC to try their citizens for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed after Jul. 1, 2002.

In October 2004, Bush dismissed the rationale for the ICC, saying, "This is a court based in The Hague, where our troops, or diplomats, could be brought before a foreign judge, an unaccountable foreign judge, because of decisions made by our country. (...) I think it would be bad for our troops to (face) an unaccountable prosecutor in a foreign land."

Polling Data

As you may know, the U.S. participates in the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights, which reviews human rights standards in various countries including the U.S. Recently, the Commission evaluated how the U.S. treats detainees at Guantanamo Bay and determined that the U.S. has held certain individuals for interrogation for several years without charging them with a crime, contrary to international conventions. Do you think that the U.S. should or should not change this practice according to the prescriptions of the UN Commission on Human Rights?

A permanent International Criminal Court has been established by the UN to try individuals suspected of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Some say the U.S. should not support the Court because trumped-up charges may be brought against Americans, for example, U.S. soldiers who use force in the course of a peacekeeping operation. Others say that the U.S. should support the court because the world needs a better way to prosecute war criminals, many of whom go unpunished today. Do you think the U.S. should or should not support the permanent International Criminal Court?

Source: Knowledge Networks / Program on International Policy Attitudes
Methodology: Online interviews with 1,023 American adults, conducted from Apr. 8 to Apr. 23, 2006. Margin of error is 3 per cent.

Complete Poll (PDF)

All Content ©2003 - 2006. Angus Reid Consultants.

Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling

May 15, 2006 10:33 AM

Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. The CIA asked for an FBI investigation of leaks of classified information following those reports.

People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.

The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.

A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.

May 15, 2006

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

“While ability to meet the current demands associated with OIF (Operational Iraqi Freedom) and OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan) is of great importance, the Army Reserve is additionally in grave danger of being unable to meet other operational requirements including those in named OPLANS (operational plans) and CONUS (continental United States) emergencies, and is rapidly degenerating into a 'broken’ force,” Helmly wrote.

Helmly said military leaders had rebuffed his proposals for change. The memo’s purpose was to inform Schoomaker of the Army Reserve’s “inability — under current policies, procedures and practices governing mobilization, training and reserve component manpower management — to meet mission requirements” for the two wars, Helmly wrote.

'Dysfunctional practices’
In his eight-page memo, first disclosed by the Baltimore Sun, Helmly titled one section “US Army Reserve Readiness Discussion, Past Dysfunctional Practices/Policies.”

The Pentagon, maintaining higher-than-expected troop levels after failing to anticipate that a bloody guerrilla war would follow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s ouster in 2003, has relied heavily on Army Reserve and Army National Guard soldiers. These part-time troops comprise about 40 percent of the U.S. force in Iraq.

Some reservists and families have complained about frequent and lengthy tours in war zones, inferior equipment and scant notice before being pressed into service.

Helmly’s remarks gave fuel to critics of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who argue that his policies and his resistance to a large increase in the active-duty Army are harming the all-volunteer military.

Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island called the memo ”deeply disturbing,” adding: “By consistently underestimating the number of troops necessary for the successful occupation of Iraq, the administration has placed a tremendous burden on the Army Reserve and created this crisis.”

Volunteer versus mercenary
Helmly referred to “potential ‘sociological’ damage” to the all-volunteer military by paying inducements of $1,000 extra per month to reservists who volunteer to remobilize.

“We must consider the point at which we confuse ’volunteer to become an American Soldier’ with ' mercenary,”’ Helmly said.

Helmly said Pentagon reluctance to issue orders calling reservists to active duty “in a timely manner” resulted in more than 10,000 reserve soldiers getting as little as three to five days notice before being compelled back into uniform.

A senior Army official said Schoomaker and Army Secretary Francis Harvey were reviewing the memo. “Changes are expected over time, and the Army is already working these issues. The memo just brings it to the forefront,” the official said.

Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

© 2006 MSNBC.com

Rove vs. Reality

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006; A17

It was in the middle of a question-and-answer session yesterday after a speech defending President Bush's economic record that Karl Rove let drop a phrase that told us everything.

Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, Rove started talking about "game changers," a nice, wonky term to throw around at a leading conservative think tank. The idea is that certain changes in policy can push the political debate in new and -- from the point of view of the game changer -- more congenial directions. The phrase told us everything about what Bush's No. 1 guy had once hoped to accomplish -- and everything about the fix he and the president are now in.

Rove's hope was that at the end of the Bush presidency, he and his boss would have so changed the rules of the policy and political game that all the pressures would be for lower taxes, less domestic spending, more market-friendly approaches to health care, and private accounts within Social Security.

There has indeed been a lot of game-changing going on, but Rove's remarks served to underscore that the game has, from his point of view, been changing in exactly the wrong way. At certain moments, he almost admitted as much.

Contrast Rove on offense in January before the Republican National Committee with yesterday's more defensive Rove. In January Rove spoke of the battle against terrorism and said this fall's election would turn on the contrast between "two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security."

In his speech yesterday, Rove shelved the world-historical perspective in favor of the staple issue of midterm politics, pleading with his audience to think kindly of the Bush economic record. He spoke at length about the mess the economy was in toward the end of Bill Clinton's term (though he did not mention Clinton's name), and how our economic problems were deepened by the consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush's economic policies, particularly his tax cuts, helped cure what ailed us, Rove said bravely. They "have strengthened the economy, increased productivity and created new jobs."

That Rove needed to make this case in the first place tells you the trouble the administration faces. All the polls, which Rove played down but acknowledged reading avidly ("I love all these polls," he said before dismissing the idea of poll-driven policies), show large majorities disapproving of Bush's handling of the economy.

There is also a rather widespread sense that the economy did very well under Clinton -- better than under Bush -- and it's doubtful that getting voters to think about the Clinton days will do Republicans much good in November 2006.

Most astonishingly, Rove tried to make the case that Bush's tax cuts actually left the rich paying more. Everyone knows the Bush cuts in levies on dividends, capital gains and inheritances overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. But here was Rove playing class politics by arguing that the wealthy now pay a larger share of total income taxes than they did before Bush.

This is statistical flimflam, of course. It leaves out payroll taxes, which hit most Americans the hardest. And the wealthy are paying more of the total share of income taxes, even though their rates are much lower, because their share of national income has gone up. Rove's numbers actually prove the rich are getting richer. But the fact that Rove tried to sound like William Jennings Bryan is the surest indicator that the administration is worried about its image as protector of the privileged.

The real game changer is the very question of national security that Rove has used over and over as the killer issue against Democrats. In explaining Bush's poor standing, Rove kept going back to the war in Iraq. "They're just sour right now on the war. And that's the way it's going to be," Rove said of the voters. At another point, he acknowledged that the war had created discontent in the land. "I think the war looms over everything," he said. Indeed.

Rove joked about being way "off message" in talking about the economy just hours before his president was to address the nation on immigration.

Rove needn't worry. The problem is not that Rove was off message but that the country has gone off Bush's message, and shows no sign of coming back. Everything Rove said yesterday shows that the smartest man at Bush's side knows it.

postchat@aol.com

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Ohio losing faith with President

By Justin Webb
BBC News, Washington

President George W Bush's reshuffling of his White House team is part of an attempt to salvage a reputation which seems to be sinking fast. But Justin Webb in Washington says it is too late to be tinkering with the staff: most Americans have already consigned President Bush to history.

I am here to report two conversations with two very different Americans on the subject of President Bush.

The first was with a woman who described herself to me as one of the biggest fundraisers for the president in the entire state of Ohio.

The second was with an illegal immigrant from Venezuela.

Guess who thought that Mr Bush could bounce back from his present difficulties? That's right, the illegal immigrant.

Is this in any sense good news for the president or his beleaguered party? Well, it might be but I will come to that in a bit.

First to Ohio, though. To Cleveland: an ordinary looking place, grey and depressed in late spring rain, rescued by the view from the centre of town. You look across the main square and suddenly everything changes - there's water as far as the eye can see - the glassy expanse of Lake Erie.

I am staying out of town, though, in the suburbs where - as in every American city - the rich congregate.

I am here to meet a group of ladies who lunch - serious people of considerable consequence in these parts; owners of newspapers and coal mines; lawyers or the wives of lawyers of national repute.

Champions, all of them, in the white Anglo-Saxon tradition who smell of soap and money.

On that subject, one told me of her financial difficulties. She was having trouble giving it away.

"I just shell it out but the investments make even more," she said wistfully.

Personal fortunes

Incidentally the amount of money amassed by individuals in every medium-sized city of this nation is one of the things that marks America out as a special and different place - partly the result of generous tax regimes for the rich and partly the hugeness of the American market.

If you make it here the rewards are as big as the nation itself.

Rewards which accrue to people like Frances, who picks me up from the hotel in a car plainly built for invading Iraq yet quaintly painted white in case, by some chance, you didn't see it.

There is even a white towel on the floor of the passenger's side. Apparently Frances's friends all have gleaming soles.

My point is that these folk are the cream of Middle American society, opinion formers, achievers and respecters of achievers.

They were not by any means all of them Bush backers in the past but, if the president was a force in the land, these folk would sniff it, notice it, respect it.

Looking beyond Bush

But they were almost unanimously - Republicans and Democrats alike - openly contemptuous of the commander-in-chief.

"Not the sharpest knife in the drawer," the big-time fundraiser sniffed sadly, as if writing off for tax purposes an investment which she now knew was simply never going to pay.

The rescuing of the president is, for these people, no longer a topic worthy of conversation.

They are looking ahead to a future where wars are not messed up, where reckless expenditure is reined in, where "White House competence" is not an oxymoron.

They were unanimously appalled for instance by a harebrained plan - now dropped - to give every American $100 to help them pay the high cost of petrol.

This money would have been added to the national debt: to fiscally conservative Republicans (and that should mean all Republicans) the craziest and most irresponsible use of government money.

If the president's party has descended to those depths, they argue, no amount of fiddling with senior White House appointments can really do the job.

I left Cleveland surer than ever that the Bush era has ended.

The big money players - in the widest sense of that term - no longer take him seriously.

But what of the future?

A different view

A visit to North Carolina this week brought me face to face with a humorous and thoughtful illegal immigrant, Carlos from Venezuela.

I was chatting to Carlos about the president and John Kerry, the Democratic contender he beat in 2004.

Carlos agreed that Bush had his troubles. "But," he said, "he's better than Kerry.

Why? John Kerry supports abortion rights.

From the bottom of the pile in American society - from a man who is not yet even a proper citizen here but whose children will be - comes a message that hostility to abortion and to homosexuality - a belief in other words in Bush values - is going to be the wave of the future.

In a few decades, more than a quarter of the people of this nation will be Hispanic immigrants and the great majority of them - like Carlos - will be socially conservative.

Too late of course to save this president, though not too late to re-write history in his favour.

The headlines scream "Bush finished" and in the short term the headlines are right.

But America is full of surprises.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 13 May, 2006 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

Published: 2006/05/13 11:24:59 GMT

© BBC MMVI

p m carpenter's commentary

May 14, 2006

Another week, another prodigious scandal followed by another muted chorus of short-lived outrage, and finally, another notch in the belt of Constitution killers.

The latest predictable outrage (please nudge me should I doze off while scribbling this) was the revelation that on top of violating eavesdropping laws the administration has, in further violation of the law, been trolling for a record of every domestic phone call. It is, of course, all quite illegal -- "If they don't get a court order, it's a crime," bluntly said the director of the Center for National Security Studies -- and would have guaranteed impeachment proceedings against any sexually promiscuous president without other sin.

A president sitting on a mountain of past high crimes and misdemeanors gets a constitutional pass, however, because -- or so it is argued -- tolerating criminality really does get easier when that criminality is framed in just the right circumstantial question.

The public nods approvingly when asked if it supports the government taking every possible precaution against another terrorist attack. Who wouldn’t? On the other hand, who would if the question included: “outside of constitutional boundaries and in direct violation of statutory law”?

The former is what was asked in the context of the latest criminal outrage, and not surprisingly, 63 percent responded, “You bet.”

Given that level of public imprimatur, the government can then defend the indefensible without even worrying about how silly the defense sounds. Consider this:

One senior government official, who was granted anonymity to speak publicly about the classified program, confirmed that the N.S.A. had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States. But the official said the call records were used for the limited purpose of tracing regular contacts of "known bad guys."

Here’s a presumably deduction-minded superspook saying that the NSA indeed knows who the bad guys are, and it’s well aware of the bad guys’ “regular contacts,” yet these two factors fail to stamp the data collection of your calls to Aunt Molly as anything but untouchable.

That defense wouldn’t pass the laugh test at a junior-high debate meet, yet there it is, the government’s laughable but seemingly acceptable story in the absence of widespread outrage demanding accountability.

But maybe outraged commentators are wrong in speculating that public outrage is understated largely, or only, because of faulty polling. Maybe outrage is missing mostly because the public doesn’t really care. Maybe the improper construction of polling questions is as irrelevant to the problem as the NSA’s illegal tactics are to tracking terrorists.

Civil liberties never have polled well and, when asked, most Americans don’t know the Bill of Rights from a bill of fare. Maybe for all their proud talk and forgotten civics lessons Americans simply don’t value liberty that much and will willingly trade freedom for police-state security on even the flimsiest of rationales.

Maybe this lambs-to-the-slaughter mentality of submission is just an atavistic, desperate Hobbesian reflex impossible to suppress in our short and brutish existences.

Try polling that.

02:08 PM

There's a number that people needing help with Part D can call. But when the program first went into effect, there were only 300 customer service representatives standing by. (Remember, there are 43 million Medicare recipients.)

There are now 7,500 representatives, making it easier to reach someone. But should you believe what you're told? Maybe not. A survey by the Government Accountability Office found that when Medicare recipients asked for help in determining which plan would cover their medications at the lowest cost, they were given the right answer only 41 percent of the time.

Clearly, nobody in the Bush administration took responsibility for making Part D's start-up work. But then you can say the same thing about the whole program.

After all, prescription drug coverage didn't have to be bafflingly complex. Drug coverage could simply have been added to traditional Medicare. If the government had done that, everyone currently covered by Medicare would automatically have been enrolled in the drug benefit.

Adding drug coverage as part of ordinary Medicare would also have saved a lot of money, both by eliminating the cost of employing private insurance companies as middlemen and by allowing the government to negotiate lower drug prices. This would have made it possible to offer a better benefit at much less cost to taxpayers.

But while a straightforward addition of drug coverage to Medicare would have been good policy, it would have been bad politics from the point of view of conservatives, who want to privatize traditional social insurance programs, not make them better.

Moreover, administration officials and their allies in Congress had both political and personal incentives not to do anything that might reduce the profits of insurance and drug companies. Both the insurance industry and, especially, the pharmaceutical industry are major campaign contributors. And soon after the drug bill was passed, the congressman and the administration official most responsible for drafting the legislation both left public service to become lobbyists.

So what we got was a drug program set up to serve the administration's friends and its political agenda, not the alleged beneficiaries. Instead of providing drug coverage directly, Part D is a complex system of subsidies to private insurance companies. The administration's insistence on running the program through these companies, which provide little if any additional value beyond what Medicare could easily have provided directly, is what makes the whole thing so complicated. And that complication, combined with an obvious lack of interest in making the system work, is what led to the disastrous start-up.

All of this is, alas, terribly familiar. As John DiIulio, the former head of Mr. Bush's faith-based initiative, told Esquire, "What you've got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm." Ideology and cronyism take complete precedence over the business of governing.

And that's why when it comes to actual policy as opposed to politics, the Bush administration has turned out to have the reverse Midas touch. Everything it gets its hands on, from the reconstruction of Iraq to the rescue of New Orleans, from the drug benefit to the reform of the C.I.A., turns to crud.

posted by Roziu

One sympathizes with grieving survivors, of course, and can fully understand the need for comforting ritual at such times. But as a journalist, narrative stories based on such rally-round-the-campfire platitudes offend me. Not only because they a) follow a cookie-cutter narrative model of "suffering and redemption," and b) decline to engage the relevant critique of our government's rhetorical justifications for war. But also because c) they fail to illuminate the individual reality of grieving mothers, fathers, wives, children. "He was proud to serve his country" is stiff-upper-lip and formal -- a ritualized observance more than a human feeling expressed.

Who believes that, in her most private moments, a widow or mother of a fallen soldier finds true solace in such remarks?

The promise of narrative journalism is precisely to penetrate beyond formal speech and the rituals of social life, in order to reveal the usually hidden, unidealized "felt life" of individual people. It is completely understandable that under the pressures of daily journalism, or any kind of journalism covering war, reporters using narrative forms will not always reach the full potential of the genre. Partial kudos for partial attainment is, in this sense, justified. Yet when the narrative form is routinely abused, a degradation of this useful genre tears away at reader trust. It is part of journalism's larger -- and today very considerable -- credibility crisis with citizens.

Fake Newsmen

Among journalistic story forms, narrative journalism offers a perspective that is uniquely humane and, more to the point, in great need when so many global social structures -- of commerce, finance, politics, industry, bureaucracy and war -- efface the dignity of individual human life. Within the journalism profession, narrative storytelling is a way to ensure that the individual, humble, urgent human voice is honored and maintained in society. To routinely publish "narrative" pieces that merely recycle society's phrase book bromides thus degrades the potency of the narrative genre. It seems little different from late night infomercials where fake newsmen sit behind a TV anchor's desk to announce "breakthroughs" in erectile dysfunction drugs and skin-smoothing creams.

Yet if the potential of the narrative genre is unique, its erosion in the contemporary newsroom is not. News organizations have a large selection of story forms at their disposal. All are being degraded today because of mainstream journalism's overall decline. So the crisis of narrative journalistic storytelling, as seen in cliched "he loved the army" stories, is similar to crises in other newsroom genres.

Myriad Threats

Investigative journalism failed to reveal the truth about the absence of WMDs in Iraq. Daily news reports routinely fail to check the veracity of claims made by politicians speaking in their campaigning and legislative roles. Both straight news stories and analytical articles are widely mistrusted by readers for supposed, and at times real, distortion due to ideological and other biases.

Only a few years ago, journalism gave the American public its essential mental picture of the world. Today, it's lost that role to a handful of entertainment conglomerates. Network TV news departments are now buried inside these giants, while newspapers battle myriad threats ranging from the Internet cannibalizing classified ads, to shareholders demanding higher profit margins, to vastly declining numbers of young readers.

The essential crisis in journalism is thus a conflict between front-office commercial demands on the one hand, and the profession's revered code of "objectivity" on the other. The latter is clearly losing. Network TV news has gone the infotainment route, while newspapers downsize and slash newsgathering and investigative budgets to meet profit goals.

The Balance Trap

The inevitable result is continued loss of public trust. The percentage of people who said they can believe most of what they read in their daily newspaper dropped to 54% in 2004 from 84% in 1985, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.

"Balance and objectivity, without a strong commitment to the truth, can turn journalism into farce," wrote the distinguished war reporter Chris Hedges. He was summarizing his experience covering more than a dozen wars, such as the one in Kosovo, where he and other journalists filed eyewitness reports of massacres of men and women by Bosnian Serbs, only to be hounded by editors back home to balance these accounts with Serbian denials.

And without those "balancing" quotes, the stories sometimes didn't run. Who might those editors have been fearful of upsetting, had they published the story of a massacre without a denial by the perpetrators?

This question applies not only to coverage of wars abroad, but also to coverage of the domestic effect of war waged overseas, such as the impacts of the war in Iraq on American families, communities and society.

Tragic Miscalculation

Who are editors and reporters at mainstream newspapers and TV stations fearful of upsetting should they report -- in full and gritty detail -- not just "he was proud to serve and die for his country" but also details of familial suffering, doubts about the war's legitimacy and a family's experience of the war as also a cultural war inside America, one that touches them directly? This cultural war is splitting families, communities, economies and our whole society. Do journalists who are embedded in our communities throughout the country, where the dead soldiers lived, typically tell this story?

Editors and reporters may suppose that uplifting stories of sacrifice on the battlefield "balance" the depressing and horrible facts of the war, or that their communities need tales of valor and happy endings as a counterweight to the endlessly lengthening roll calls of the dead and wounded. That's a tragic editorial miscalculation. The first thing J-school tells students, and it's true, is that a journalist's loyalty is not to sources, power, city, state or nation. It's to the facts. Truth.

What the government does has long been a definition of news. But in recent years that notion, like a commitment to "balance" that's blind to the truth, has been stretched to the point of farce.

Unofficial = Unpublishable

For example, leading television networks and newspapers today put a correspondent in the White House, another one in Congress, and feel their job covering the U.S. government is done. One person is all a news organization needs, the thinking goes, to attend press conferences, pick up press releases and buttonhole aides for "background" stories. No doubt, one person following the president and one following Congress fulfills a news organization's front-office needs for low-cost, high-impact coverage. But does this formula serve the information needs of a democracy?

An insidious corollary to "what the government does is news," taken to extremes, is that any news, event or person is not actual until they have been so announced by a certified public body. This applies equally to foreign as to domestic news. If a massacre or genocide abroad doesn't incur formal acknowledgement by the very officials who committed the crimes, newspaper editors may treat the story as "unverified" and often, therefore, as unpublishable. Readers miss much of what happens "unofficially" although such events are real and often devastating and revealing.

A case in point: I returned to Minnesota from an African reporting trip in April 2004. I'd interviewed several dozen members of the Anuak tribe of western Ethiopia. They gave virtually identical eyewitness accounts of a slaughter of some 425 Anuak men and boys by the Ethiopian army, in the town of Gambella in western Ethiopia on December 13, 2003. Yet even after I gave three versions of painstakingly reported and sourced articles on this crime to my editors at the states largest newspaper, they asked me, "If this is true, how come the United Nations has not reported it? How come Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International has not reported it?" One kept asking, "How come this hasn't been reported in the Ethiopian press?"

Comic Oracle

That last absurd question aside, I explained to these editors that the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are all huge bureaucracies that often take years to respond to crises. That didn't change their notion that a massacre not "officially" announced hasn't happened. The paper killed the story; I published the news on my blog, where it was confirmed a month later by two small nongovernment organizations that sent teams to Ethiopia, and 15 months later by Human Rights Watch.

Yet if the press is increasingly wary of moving decisively, such as announcing major news without authorization from a government body, it is not outright government manipulation of the press that usually is to blame. Rather, a new kind of self-censorship involving a complicit duet of press and power -- each ritually griping about the relationship but working hand-in-glove -- is at work today. There is very little mystery to the process any more.

Here's how Stephen Colbert, the ironic comic oracle of "The Colbert Report," explained the game in his keynote speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 29th (with President Bush and his wife sitting nearby):

"But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction!"

The disease has been diagnosed and treatment prescribed, but the patient is still dying -- journalists rarely speak out against their profession's failings.

A Case Study

Let's consider a hypothetical I described recently to my students at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. (A majority know someone fighting in Iraq.) In it a reporter assigned to write a deadline narrative must weigh the chance to land a scoop against the chance (less likely but possible) to report a longer narrative that would be richer in truth:

You are assigned to interview the family of a young man killed in Iraq.

When you get to the house you are greeted by the soldier's father. The soldier had been a fireman in civilian life, as is the father, a broad-shouldered man who comes across as open, sincere and intelligent. In the living room, during the interview, he brings out photographs of his son -- playing Little League, fishing, on high school graduation day, on his first day at boot camp. Recent shots show him in Baghdad horsing around with fellow soldiers.

It is 3 p.m. You have the story exclusively for now, and if you get it into the next day's paper you score a scoop. After that, the Army will release a statement and every other newspaper will share the story. To make tomorrow's paper, you need to file by 6 p.m. -- not a second later.

"Dad, I Want to Go"

You calculate that you need to finish the interview by 4 p.m. to get back to the office, write the story, fact-check it and file it. If you leave even a minute later than 4 p.m., you'll probably lose the scoop.

Between 3 and 3:45 p.m., the father gives you a great interview. His descriptions of his son are colorful, specific and heartfelt. His overarching theme is the pride he feels for his son, and his stories express this theme.

In particular the father relates (and here I draw specific details from war-at-home narratives I've read in Minnesota and national newspapers): 1) his son was searching for a purpose in life and found it in the Army; 2) Army service instilled in his son the idea of importance of duty to nation; 3) when his son had enlisted, the father had expressed some doubt but the son had cut him off: "Dad, it's what I want to do;" 4) his son was proud to be helping the Iraqi people establish democracy; 5) only a week ago his son had called him from Baghdad and said he'd been assigned to a new mission to train Iraqi citizens to be soldiers, and he felt motivated by the mission; and 6) he and his son had had a heart-to-heart talk on the telephone and the son assured him "he had no regrets" about signing up for Army service.

The Mother's Story

At 3:45 p.m., you are thinking to yourself: "Wow, I've got a great story here. Great color. Great quotes. A solid through-line. It's time to wrap up and get back to write it."

However, at that moment, the son's mother first walks into the living room. She looks terrible, as though she hasn't slept for weeks. Her face is tear-stained; she's nervous and distracted. For the last few minutes of the interview, she keeps her eyes fixed on the floor as her husband answers questions, but you notice she grimaces and shakes her head slightly when he speaks.

I asked the students: "As a reporter, what do you do at this point?"

They understood the dilemma, but I summarized it: "You see there is another side of the story, but if you try to get it, interviewing the mother will take at least another hour and you won't get into the paper the next day. You will probably lose your exclusive, and the entire story may be killed if your editors knows that the competition across town may publish a similar interview with the soldier's father the next day."

A Few Minutes

The students had some great suggestions:

Tell the soldier's mother you need to get back to the office because you're on deadline to tell the story as the father has told it, but you'd like to come back the next day to write a second story based on her thoughts and reactions to her son's death;

Tell the mother you are on deadline, but you have ten minutes remaining and want to give her the opportunity to use that time to say whatever she would like about her son's life and death;

Realize that every story is limited in some way and that this time around, you only had time to interview the father and tell his story. If you engage the mother with only a few minutes to talk, you will inevitably get a limited view from her that will misrepresent her in print, so it's best not to even get started on that path;

Decide it's important to get the full story even at risk of losing a scoop, so you open a full conversation with the soldier's mother. If you're lucky and the competition is slow, your story will be twice as good. And the story would represent more fully (and therefore more accurately) the impact of the son's death on his family.

Worthy Sacrifice

Which option would you as a journalist choose?

This hypothetical gave students a sample of the day-to-day ethical decisions journalists make, and led us to consider a few basic questions in class discussion:

Of every, say, 100 stories the news media run these days built from interviews with family members of soldiers killed in Iraq, what percentage tell the redemptive story the father offered in his interview -- i.e., a story that honors the fallen soldier and stresses choice and worthiness of his sacrifice?

My class thought that virtually all stories take this tack; they had not seen any interview with a surviving family member who echoed the mother's doubt, grief and anger. And no one could remember reading in local or state newspapers, or seeing on television, any grieving parent (except Cindy Sheehan), widow or surviving child rail at the President and his advisors for deceptively getting us into the war.

Did the students think it was important for citizens to hear the mother's story? Why? What is society losing if they do not hear the mother's story as well as the father's?

America's Story

What is it, structurally, about the news media that most often prevents it from telling the mother's story?

How could the media change so that it gets the mother's narrative more often and thus, by the assessment of all in the class, presents a fuller and more realistic picture of the impact the Iraq war is having at home?

Would anything change if this hypothetical, especially the last four questions, were discussed in every newsroom in America? That sincere gesture, I propose, is the least we owe to the mother's story, which is America's story as well.

Copyright @ 2006 The McGill Report
Permanent Link http://www.mcgillreport.org/warathome.htm

"They call themselves Demo-crats now," she said.

More than half of the nation's voters live in the suburbs. According to one GOP analysis, 138 suburban districts are represented in Congress by Republicans and 86 by Democrats. But a recent poll commissioned by Republicans found a majority of suburban voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. The poll also found that even as suburban voters are concerned about broader issues such as the war in Iraq and national security, they are also worried about kitchen-table issues including gangs, education and sprawl.

"Suburban families feel they are under attack and believe they need a voice in Congress," said Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who leads the suburban caucus.

A Florida-based Democratic pollster, Dave Beattie, coined the phrase "Starbucks Republicans" in 2004, calling them independent-leaning voters in high-growth areas in the South and West who ultimately backed Bush two years ago but are now disappointed in the president and the Republican Congress.

Beattie said that although the group's support for Bush had been waning, Congress' attempt to get involved in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case and the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina were the "tipping points" in the growing skepticism about the political status quo.

But Beattie also had a warning.

"They may be disappointed in Republicans, but they are not convinced yet that Democrats will do better," he said. "They view what is happening in Washington, D.C., as a childish food fight."

© Copyright 2006, The News & Observer Publishing Company

To fight the plague, our government has turned the lemon of the drug war into the lemonade of totalitarian control. With narco-spies on every corner and informants in every cupboard, Linklater’s movie presents a land where paranoia reigns supreme. Unlike Orwell’s Big Brother iron fist, “A Scanner Darkly” gives us governmental oppression that’s two-thirds mind-fuck and one-third surreal tragedy—in other words, something very akin to what we’re seeing from the Bush administration.

Not that this should be too surprising to anyone. But that, at least, may be part of the problem. There is a peculiar and longstanding trend for science fiction to play both a predictive and a prescriptive role in our world. That is, in addition to being a warning call about the police-state possibilities of an ever-escalating drug war, “Scanner” may actually be showing us the way.

Take our conception of robots, for example. When Carnegie Mellon created its Robot Hall of Fame, one of the earliest inductees was Robbie the Robot from the 1956 MGM flick “Forbidden Planet.” While the term “robot” was coined in 1921 by writer Karl Capek in his play “R.U.R” (Rossum’s Universal Robot), a derivation of the Czech word robata, meaning forced labor, it didn’t creep into popular usage until MGM threw $1.9 million behind “Forbidden Planet” (a blockbuster sum in those days), turning Robbie into the iconic face of a then-burgeoning field. But his impact—the suddenly popular notion that robots must take a humanoid form—influenced the field far more than anticipated. As Wired magazine recently pointed out, “for decades the word robot was synonymous with Robbie’s bulbous figure.” For this reason, scientists spent much of the latter half of the 20th century trying to build machines that fit this cinematic projection, before realizing the fundamental flaws in the humanoid approach (it wasn’t until Honda debuted its android ASIMO in 2000 that anyone got close). Fred Barton, who sits on the Robot Hall of Fame inductee board, sums this up nicely when he says, “It’s been 50 years, but Robbie is still the most imitated and sought-after robot of all time, despite the fact that he was originally the product of a movie studio.”

Nor is this phenomenon limited to the cinema. Back in 1982, William Gibson wrote “Burning Chrome,” a short story that ran in the now defunct futurist magazine Omni. In that story he posited the notion of “cyberspace” as a sort of mass “consensual hallucination.” This was a good 15 years before the Worldwide Web went worldwide, but a good number of technophiles have argued that Gibson’s predictive fantasy became the model upon which the Internet was built.

The online treasure trove Wikipedia explains further:

While cyberspace should not be confused with the real Internet, the term is often used simply to refer to objects and identities that exist largely within the computing network itself, so that a web site, for example, might be metaphorically said to “exist in cyberspace.” According to this interpretation, events taking place on the Internet are not therefore happening in the countries where the participants or the servers are physically located, but “in cyberspace”. This becomes a reasonable viewpoint once distributed services (e.g. Freenet or bittorrent) become widespread, and the physical identity and location of the participants become impossible to determine due to anonymous or pseudonymous communication. The laws of any particular nation state would therefore not apply.

And in a peculiar combination of mediums, Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” became a very different story in Ridley Scott’s movie “Blade Runner,” but both predicted a bleak environmental future where animals are so rare that robots have replaced pets and a vast underground black market churns on the sale of exotic species. Well, here we are in 2006, and Sony’s AIBO has become the best-selling robot in history and the current Interpol estimate of the exotic pet trade runs to $10 billion a year—an illegal trade figure surpassed only by that of drug dealing.

Which brings us back to “Scanner.” Dick’s dark prophecy stems not only from his own experiences as an addict but also from his living through the early years of our drug war. In 1972 President Nixon appointed the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse to investigate the country’s burgeoning desire for altered states. The commission suggested that the answer to our woes lay in decriminalization of marijuana and a policy of control based on medical risk. Unfortunately, since Nixon had been elected on a talk-tough, act-rough platform, this was not quite the solution