I’ve had a number of interesting responses from readers to matters I’ve written about recently. I thought I might share a few of them with you.
1.) The Jessica Lynch story redux: For instance, on a subject I’ve been banging at, the Washington Post, deserving more than an aiding and abetting charge in the creation of the Jessica Lynch mythology, finally went back to the well to review their own work. Now you have to note that the BBC, not to speak of the Associated Press and other papers had done this weeks ago, and had more or less dismantled the initial tale. No other work, however, was mentioned or acknowledged in the lengthy, distinctly mild Post piece. The Post wrote in part:
“Lynch’s story is far more complex and different than those initial reports [in the Post]. Much of the story remains shrouded in mystery, in large part because of official Army secrecy, concerns for Lynch’s privacy and her limited memory.
“The Post’s initial coverage attracted widespread criticism because many of the sources were unnamed and because the accounts were soon contradicted by other military officials. In an effort to document more fully what had actually happened to Lynch, The Post interviewed dozens of people, including associates of Lynch’s family in West Virginia; Iraqi doctors, nurses and civilian witnesses in Nasiriyah; and U.S. intelligence and military officials in Washington, three of whom have knowledge of a weeks-long Army investigation into the matter.
“The result is a second, more thorough but inconclusive cut at history. While much more is revealed about her ordeal, most U.S. officials still insisted that their names be withheld from this account.”
Todd Gitlin, author of Media Unlimited, sent me the following comments on all this:
“On June 17, Eric Umansky, who writes Slate’s ‘Today’s Papers,’ feature,
rightly called attention to the Washington Post’s page 1 rethink of the
Jessica Lynch story, written by Dana Priest, William Booth, and Susan
Schmidt (A Broken Body, a Broken Story, Pieced Together). Umansky added:
“The Post’s initial coverage attracted widespread criticism because many of the sources were unnamed and because the accounts were soon contradicted by other military officials. In an effort to document more fully what had actually happened to Lynch, The Post interviewed dozens of people, including associates of Lynch’s family in West Virginia; Iraqi doctors, nurses and civilian witnesses in Nasiriyah; and U.S. intelligence and military officials in Washington, three of whom have knowledge of a weeks-long Army investigation into the matter.
“The result is a second, more thorough but inconclusive cut at history. While much more is revealed about her ordeal, most U.S. officials still insisted that their names be withheld from this account.”
Todd Gitlin, author of Media Unlimited, sent me the following comments on all this:
“On June 17, Eric Umansky, who writes Slate’s ‘Today’s Papers,’ feature,
rightly called attention to the Washington Post’s page 1 rethink of the
Jessica Lynch story, written by Dana Priest, William Booth, and Susan
Schmidt (A Broken Body, a Broken Story, Pieced Together). Umansky added:“‘Today’s WP piece downplays the Post’s own role in creating the Lynch
Media Myth. The WP says “initial news reports, including those in The
Washington Post” were misleading. The reality is that the WP was the
prime mover of much of that bogus info. Consider the WP’s “scoop” that
landed on Page One two days after Lynch’s rescue, ‘”SHE WAS FIGHTING TO
THE DEATH’; Details Emerging of W. Va. Soldier’s Capture and Rescue”‘ Most other media outlets just riffed off that report.'”[Gitlin himself continues:]”If you click to the original April 3 piece, you see that its authors
were Susan Schmidt and Vernon Loeb. Its prime sources were unnamed ‘U. S. officials.’“It’s good that Schmidt is reconsidering her own journalism. Why stop
now? Not so long ago, with grave consequence, the selfsame Schmidt was
the Post’s prime operative on the Whitewater and Starr investigation
beats. There and then too, she was favored by official leakers. Much
of her bloodhound work in behalf of Republican hatchet-artists looking
to get the goods–some goods, any goods–on Bill and Hillary Clinton
was convincingly taken down by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons in their
book, The Hunting of the President. But on the subject of the nonstory
that paralyzed the Clinton White House, she and her paper still stand
by their acres of misleading column-inches. Ombudsmen of the future,
if there are any, please take note.”
On the inside pages of the New York Times today, David Kilpatrick has a little news story about the Post piece that’s really a review of sorts, and significantly harsher than the Post itself, but it too manages not to mention the work of the BBC (Reports on Soldier’s Capture Are Partly Discounted by Paper). He ends with a nice paragraph that goes: “Yesterday, Mark Danner, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism, said the revisions to Private Lynch’s story matched the debate about Iraq’s missing banned weapons. ‘Her story was symbolic of support for the war as it was being fought, and now it is symbolic of our second thoughts about the war,’ Professor Danner said.'”
Let me leave today’s final word on the subject to Sam Smith of Progressive Review, quoted in Danny Schecter’s daily weblog:
“Long after the mythical official story of Private Lynch had been challenged by media such as the BBC, the Washington Post has come up with a revised version that, in a backhanded fashion, admits that what it and other major American media reported was wrong. The admission is buried in a 6,000 word account that amounts to death by detail, sure to turn off many readers. In the end, the facts of the Lynch case aren’t really that interesting anyway, especially in contrast with the Bush regime’s mythical version. What would be more interesting is finding out who lied to the Post and other media, and how they got away with it so easily.”
2) Who’s responsible for names like Operation Desert Scorpion?
I asked this question in a certain wonderment several days back and Matt Bivens, who does a fine Nation weblog, The Daily Outrage, wrote me to say that indeed something was known about the geniuses who create these campaign names. He referred me to a brief article he wrote back in 2001 on this very subject for the Moscow Times, which I reproduce here:
Pentagon PR in Search of the Perfect Name
By Matt Bivens
The Moscow Times
Sept. 24, 2001Operation Infinite Justice? That’s the code name the
Pentagon has given its coming war against terrorism.
As in: Justice that only God himself can mete out.Or Allah. The name has alarmed Moslem scholars, to
whom it sounds like the declaration of a Holy War —
and who are still reeling from President George Bush’s
description of Infinite Justice as a “crusade.”The Pentagon, to give it credit, has now announced it
will choose a new name. Which raises the question: How
does the Pentagon come up with these names anyway?The fascinating answer is laid out in a six-year-old
article by Gregory Sieminski, a U.S. military
intelligence officer. (It’s at
carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1995/sieminsk.htm).It seems the Germans were the first to make broad use
of code names, during World War I. They chose names
“not only memorable but also inspiring,” Siemenski
writes, “borrow[ing] from religious, medieval, and
mythological sources: Archangel, St. Michael, St.
George, Roland, Mars, Achilles, Castor, Pollux, and
Valkyrie.”World War II saw the Americans color-coding their
operations: Indigo, Gray, Black. When they ran out of
colors, they began to generate random words — but
fearing confusion if two Allied operations ended up
with the same name, they began to consult with the
British.Enter Winston Churchill, who had strong opinions on
the matter.“The world is wide, and intelligent thought will
readily supply an unlimited number of well-sounding
names which do not suggest the character of the
operation or disparage it in any way,” Churchill
wrote, “and do not enable some widow or mother to say
that her son was killed in an operation called
‘Bunnyhug’ or ‘Ballyhoo.'”He added, “Operations in which large numbers of men
may lose their lives ought not to be described by code
words which imply a boastful or overconfident
sentiment.”As to a proper humility, Churchill did not always
follow his own advice — think of Operation Overlord.
But Allied code names were at least in code. It took
Hitler to start using names that revealed an
operation’s secret nature. The 1941 invasion of the
Soviet Union was originally Operation Fritz. Hitler
renamed it Barbarossa — the folk name of Frederick I,
who had in the 12th century lorded it over the Slavs.But if some names aimed to inspire the troops, they
never targeted the broader public — because code
names were classified, and only revealed after a war’s
end. These days, code names are publicly declared (so
they are technically considered nicknames, not codes),
and are designed to achieve specific and subtle public
relations goals.Sieminski sees some of this in America’s Vietnam and
Korean wars, and some in Urgent Fury, the over-the-top
nickname for Ronald Reagan’s 1983 invasion of tiny
Grenada. But as a calculated PR policy, he traces it
to the first Bush presidency — when, on the eve of
the 1989 invasion of Panama, two top U.S. military
commanders objected to the idea of their grandchildren
hearing they ran Operation Blue Spoon, and renamed the
operation the more grandiose Just Cause.Since then we’ve had Provide Comfort (helping Kurdish
refugees in Turkey), Uphold Democracy (Haiti), and
Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Throughout, we’ve also
had a public sour on the practice — from the New York
Times dismissal of Just Cause as “Operation High
Hokum” to the wariness of a Pentagon bent on Infinite
Justice.
3.) Lies of the prewar era:
In response to my “contest” for the first head to fall, a reader suggests: “[Douglas] Feith’s head will be the first to roll, no doubt about it. It was his little shop of “intelligence analysts” [at the Pentagon] that ginned up the WMD “evidence” so often quoted in the walk-up to the invasion and now so often repudiated and derided.”
He then added: “One administration lie no one seems to be addressing is the Big Lie right up to a few days before the invasion that “the President still hasn’t yet made up his mind whether to go to war.” Yeah, right. Admissions and conclusions after the fact more or less prove all that talk about presidential indecision was lip service at best.”
A very good point — and a lie no one here is making anything of.
In England, where there is actually a debate about what went on, Patrick Wintour of the Guardian reports today that Clare Short, former member of Tony Blair’s cabinet made a startling public charge (Short: I was briefed on Blair’s secret war pact):
“Senior figures in the intelligence community and across Whitehall briefed the former international development secretary Clare Short that Tony Blair had made a secret agreement last summer with George Bush to invade Iraq in February or March, she claimed yesterday.
“In damning evidence to the foreign affairs select committee, Ms Short refused to identify the three figures, but she cited their authority for making her claim that Mr Blair had actively deceived the cabinet and the country in persuading them of the need to go to war.
“She also claimed that the intelligence and diplomatic community had privately opposed the war. This is the first time she has alleged that intelligence figures had serious doubts about the need for early military action.
“Justifying her charge of deception, she said: ‘Three extremely senior people in the Whitehall system said to me very clearly and specifically that the target date was mid-February.’ “
4.) Troop levels and Vietnam analogies:
Although news reports generally suggest 140-150,000 or so U.S. forces are now involved in the occupation of Iraq (and support for it), the Los Angeles Times has recently claimed that those figures are creeping toward 200,000. Now, a reader has directed me to Defense and the National Interest, an all-military (or ex-military) website devoted to debate about the role of the military in post-Cold War national defense, and pointed out the following comments:
“The Army is getting bogged down in a morale-numbing 4th Generation War in Iraq that is now taking on some appearances of the Palestinian Intifada.
“It is likely a large deployment of troops will be required for the indefinite future, notwithstanding the Administration’s promises to the contrary. Rumor has it that the Army’s personnel management czars are about to reinvent the thoroughly discredited individual replacement system to rotate people through the units stationed in Iraq. This rotation system, as many readers know, had disastrous effects on morale and American lives in Vietnam – indeed, the opening scenes of the movie Platoon portray poignantly the debilitating psychology of isolation, mistrust, and vulnerability that are experienced by the individual replacement (Charlie Sheen) as he enters a battle hardened unit.
“What is becoming a semi-permanent mobilization of Reserve and National Guard troops is adding fuel to the fires torching the Army’s personnel system. Some officers have told me privately they believe the Army’s personnel system will melt down in about 9 to 12 months as returning active duty soldiers leave the Army and reservists refuse to renew their contracts.”
Interesting speculation. There have been numerous reports on the falling morale of American soldiers who thought the “job” was done and expected to be home by now. This is, of course, why the neocons in this administration were so adamant before the war about how few troops (less than 100,000) we would need for postwar Iraq. You head for 200,000 and problems ensue.
Finally, let me offer a few beginning paragraphs from Peter Foster of the British Telegraph, which give a sense of how top Brit officials in Baghdad view our occupation so far: (America’s rebuilding of Iraq is in chaos, say British):
“The American-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is ‘in chaos’ and suffering from ‘a complete absence of strategic direction’, a very senior British official in Baghdad has told The Telegraph. The comments paint a grim picture of American incompetence and mismanagement as the Coalition Provisional Authority struggles to run post-Saddam Iraq.
“‘This is the single most chaotic organisation I have ever worked for,’ the official said yesterday. The source revealed that Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, had ‘fewer than 600’ staff under his control to run a country the size of France in which the civil infrastructure was on the point of collapse. ‘The operation is chronically under-resourced and suffers from an almost complete absence of strategic direction,’ he added.
“Similar frustrations have been voiced privately in London, where British ministers are said to be fed up with being ‘taken for granted.'”
And finally, a number of readers have urged on me a recent speech by Bill Moyers given at a “Take Back America” conference. To consider the very idea of taking back America, Moyers first steps back to the Progressive Era to put “the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime” in perspective, to — in his own way — offer genuine hope, and to remind us all that getting rid of ruling oligarchs is, as it was in the 1890s, hard work indeed, but hardly impossible work. The speech appears at the AlterNet website. In this reader’s choice dispatch, let me end with that. Tom
Acceptance of America’s Future
By Bill Moyers
AlterNet
June 10, 2003Thank you for this award and for this occasion. I don’t deserve either, but as George Burns said, I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that, either.
Tomorrow is my 69th birthday and I cannot imagine a better present than this award or a better party than your company.
Fifty three years ago tomorrow, on my l6th birthday, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter – small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I got assigned to cover what came to be known as the Housewives’ Rebellion. Fifteen women in my home town decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that – here’s my favorite part – “requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” They hired themselves a lawyer – none other than Martin Dies, the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s. He was no more effective at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax.