Published on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Remembering Guatemala, 1954: It’s the Impunity, Stupid
by Rosa Maria Pegueros
The photographs of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib will haunt our political
landscape for a long time but the one that will not leave me is that of the
elated 300 prisoners, innocent of any crime or terrorist act, who were the
first to be released. It has awakened a frightful memory of the time when I
first learned about political violence.
In 1955, I was living in my native city of San Francisco, California. My
mother, a Salvadoran immigrant, had left behind several younger brothers
then living in Guatemala. One evening, the phone rang with terrifying news:
My beloved Tio, uncle, César Homero Mendez, had been abducted on the stairs
of the University of San Carlos of Guatemala, where he was studying law. No
one knew why my uncle, a gentle, scholarly man who had never been involved
in politics or activism of any sort would be kidnapped, although it seems
that everyone knew that it was more than a common crime.
During those terrible days, my mother and her sisters who lived nearby,
waited with rising dread for the phone to ring again. Their anxiety was
heightened by the difficulty of telephone communication with Guatemala. No
one in the Guatemalan branch of the family had a telephone at home, so we
could do nothing but wait for them to call us. Even at the age of four I
understood that something awful was taking place.
He was gone for three days; it seemed endless at the time. By the time the
call came, we had resigned ourselves to the inevitable. The news was good
and bad; Tio Homero was alive, but barely.
The torture he had suffered left him frail and broken. During his
detention, they had held his head under water until he had fainted; they
had beaten him. They had used electrodes to shock him. There were other
punishments that I overheard in whispered conversations but did not fully
understand the nature of until I was much older. Heaven knows what else
they did to him. It would take years for him to recuperate. He never
recovered completely.
My poor uncle was a victim of mistaken identity. The democratically-elected
leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, had been overthrown by a
CIA-sponsored coup in 1954. Following Arbenz’s ouster and exile to Mexico,
Guatemala fell into the clutches of a string of dictators before it
dissolved into its long civil war.
The men who kidnapped Tio Homero thought that he was a leftist guerrilla
named Cesar Romero Mendez who was thought to be connected to Arbenz.
“Mendez” is as common a surname in Latin America as “Smith” is here. They
realized that they had the wrong man only when a judicial official visiting
the jail recognized him as the college professor and vouched for his
innocence. Naked, half dead, he was put into a taxi and sent home.
My uncle eventually became a family law judge in Guatemala. My aunt says
that the terrible physical injuries he suffered were dwarfed by the
spiritual and mental damage that the experience left behind.
In the sad history of Guatemala, my uncle’s story has a fairly happy
ending. After all, he had a relatively long life in a country torn apart by
a CIA-sponsored coup and a 36 year-long civil war underwritten by the
United States. He paid a terrible price but he was lucky; many others did
not escape with their lives.
Many Latin Americans, Guatemalans, Chileans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, to
name a few, harbor a deep and abiding hatred of the United States because
of our interventions in their internal affairs, our sponsorship of their
dictators, and our unblinking disregard for the “collateral damage” we
leave in our wake. Some, like my uncle, had the education to recognize our
shameful role in their sorrowful history.
Although we present ourselves as fighters for freedom and justice, our
actions in Guatemala and many other Latin American countries do not bear
out these boasts. As forensic anthropologists exhume the bodies of the dead
from the mass graves in which they've lain for a third of a century, the
evidence of our misdeeds is there in the bones, most of which contain
American bullets. Amnesty International, Americas Watch, and even the
American Associate for the Advancement of Science have compiled a sickening
record of our part in these abuses.
Guatemalans, citizens of a poor and powerless country, cannot raise a hand
against America: we should be grateful for that. Their guerrillas never had
the money to organize a 9-11-style attack on the United States but the
bitterness is there. The families of the dead will remember who killed
their countrymen and women; who was ultimately responsible for the
disappearances, torture, and killings.
Iraqis, too, will long remember the murderers of their innocents. Yes,
Saddam Hussein gassed and murdered his own citizens, but we dropped bombs
on innocent civilians, destroyed the infrastructure of their cities, and
now want to take credit for bringing them freedom and peace. It’s like the
guy who rapes your sister and impregnates her then wants credit for having
married her.
America must face the fallout of Bush’s misadventure in Iraq with humility;
with the honesty to acknowledge what really happened; and with the resolute
will to punish those who are responsible for the deaths of more than 846
dead American troops in Iraq (combat and combat-related accidents)
http://icasualties.org/oif/, and an estimated 8000 Iraqi civilian dead
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft,
Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and all of their henchman
should be impeached but any move in that direction would be squandered
energy since it would be summarily squelched so long as both houses of
Congress are controlled by Republicans.
We, the people, can throw the bums out of the White House and out of
Congress. We can rebuild our tattered relationships with our allies, and we
can offer more than hypocritical rhetoric about honor, freedom and justice
by changing our foreign policy and our comportment in the world
accordingly. The Middle East, long a tinderbox, has exploded; the fire is
fed by our government’s treachery and misuse of the noble military men and
women who serve our country honorably. If we truly believe that we are a
good people, then we must ferret out the corruption that is poisoning us
and our place in the world.
In memory of Cesar Homero Mendez, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and the victims of
the CIA coup in Guatemala, June 27, 1954, on its fiftieth anniversary.
------------------------------
Dr. Rosa Maria Pegueros is an associate professor of Latin American History
and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She may be reached
at Pegueros@uri.edu
My musings on and criticisms of American culture, media and politics.
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Make Radio More Local Again – Support Low-Power FM
By Steve Macek and Karen Young.
As educators who teach college students about media, we hear a lot of complaints about the sorry state of commercial radio.
When our students are assigned to listen to the radio and report what they hear, horror stories abound. Earlier this year, one student reported that his station, Chicago rock outlet WZZN The Zone, had played approximately 13 minutes of commercials, one song, and then another 12 or so minutes of commercials. Many complain about how the best new rock bands are missing and about the violent and misogynist content of the hip-hop selected for airplay. Even those who hope to land a job in the industry can’t muster much enthusiasm about what they hear.
Why is radio today so terrible, and what can be done to make it better?
Ownership changes have a lot to do with the problems. Companies used to be limited to owning one AM and one FM station in each market, and seven stations nationwide. In those days, there were many local owners deeply tied to their communities, and dozens of radio companies around the country. Through the 1980’s and 90’s, regulations were relaxed, until they were all but abolished through the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Since 1996, ownership of many of the nation’s 10,000 radio stations was rapidly consolidated in the hands of a few companies, some of them the same companies who dominate all media. In the major cities, where most of the population lives, most of the viable stations are now owned by Viacom, Disney, and the largest radio owner, a company called Clear Channel.
Clear Channel owns more than 1,200 stations and takes in at least 20% of all radio revenues. In Chicago, it owns six stations, including all the leading stations targeting African Americans (WGCI-AM and FM, WVAZ, and WNUA). In Rockford, Cumulus – the company best known for banning the Dixie Chicks after one of their members made anti-Bush comments – owns four leading stations. More than half the population tunes to at least one of their stations.
Clear Channel and conglomerates like it have improved their profits by slashing local jobs, replacing unique local elements with standardized programming created at regional and national headquarters, and sharply increasing the number of commercials. There’s just not enough diverse voices or local content in commercial radio anymore. That’s bad for our culture, and bad for our democracy.
Fortunately, our students aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed how bad radio has become.
Since 1996, community voices agitating for more alternatives to commercial radio have become louder and louder. In 2000, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided to allow hundreds of new low-power FM (LPFM) radio stations to go on the air. With a broadcast radius of up to 10 miles, these non-commercial stations could serve their neighborhoods with local public affairs and news programming and a wider array of music. The plan seemed like an ideal way to offset some of the losses caused by media ownership consolidation.
But the big corporate broadcasters lobbied against LPFM, claiming that low-power transmitters would interfere with their signals and had to be sharply limited. Under pressure from the National Association of Broadcasters, Congress blocked the FCC from giving licenses to many stations. In several areas, especially large cities, there were no channels left after the Congressional action.
Now the time has come to revisit LPFM. A recent FCC-commissioned study found that in fact, LPFM stations don’t interfere with high-powered signals. Senator John McCain has introduced legislation in Congress that could bring LPFM back. According to Hannah Sassaman of the Prometheus Radio Project, a low-power advocacy group, if the bill passes Illinois would be likely to gain dozens, if not hundreds, of new low-power stations.
Low-power radio helps restore diversity and localism to the airwaves. For example, WRYR is an LPFM station owned by South Arundel Citizens for Responsible Development (SACReD). With their station, SACReD can publicize their efforts to control sprawling development in the Chesapeake Bay area in Maryland.
In Chicago, the Southwest Youth Collaborative—a group that works with youth from some of the city’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods—had hoped to start an LPFM station. But because of the limits on LPFM imposed by Congress, the group was unable to secure a license.
Congress should act to give groups like the Southwest Youth Collaborative a voice by passing the McCain bill. Low power radio may not solve all the problems with radio, but it would be a huge step in the right direction.
AUTHORS BIOs:
Steve Macek is an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at North Central College in Naperville, IL.
Karen Young is an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago, IL, and a founder of local media activist group Active Voice.
By Steve Macek and Karen Young.
As educators who teach college students about media, we hear a lot of complaints about the sorry state of commercial radio.
When our students are assigned to listen to the radio and report what they hear, horror stories abound. Earlier this year, one student reported that his station, Chicago rock outlet WZZN The Zone, had played approximately 13 minutes of commercials, one song, and then another 12 or so minutes of commercials. Many complain about how the best new rock bands are missing and about the violent and misogynist content of the hip-hop selected for airplay. Even those who hope to land a job in the industry can’t muster much enthusiasm about what they hear.
Why is radio today so terrible, and what can be done to make it better?
Ownership changes have a lot to do with the problems. Companies used to be limited to owning one AM and one FM station in each market, and seven stations nationwide. In those days, there were many local owners deeply tied to their communities, and dozens of radio companies around the country. Through the 1980’s and 90’s, regulations were relaxed, until they were all but abolished through the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Since 1996, ownership of many of the nation’s 10,000 radio stations was rapidly consolidated in the hands of a few companies, some of them the same companies who dominate all media. In the major cities, where most of the population lives, most of the viable stations are now owned by Viacom, Disney, and the largest radio owner, a company called Clear Channel.
Clear Channel owns more than 1,200 stations and takes in at least 20% of all radio revenues. In Chicago, it owns six stations, including all the leading stations targeting African Americans (WGCI-AM and FM, WVAZ, and WNUA). In Rockford, Cumulus – the company best known for banning the Dixie Chicks after one of their members made anti-Bush comments – owns four leading stations. More than half the population tunes to at least one of their stations.
Clear Channel and conglomerates like it have improved their profits by slashing local jobs, replacing unique local elements with standardized programming created at regional and national headquarters, and sharply increasing the number of commercials. There’s just not enough diverse voices or local content in commercial radio anymore. That’s bad for our culture, and bad for our democracy.
Fortunately, our students aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed how bad radio has become.
Since 1996, community voices agitating for more alternatives to commercial radio have become louder and louder. In 2000, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided to allow hundreds of new low-power FM (LPFM) radio stations to go on the air. With a broadcast radius of up to 10 miles, these non-commercial stations could serve their neighborhoods with local public affairs and news programming and a wider array of music. The plan seemed like an ideal way to offset some of the losses caused by media ownership consolidation.
But the big corporate broadcasters lobbied against LPFM, claiming that low-power transmitters would interfere with their signals and had to be sharply limited. Under pressure from the National Association of Broadcasters, Congress blocked the FCC from giving licenses to many stations. In several areas, especially large cities, there were no channels left after the Congressional action.
Now the time has come to revisit LPFM. A recent FCC-commissioned study found that in fact, LPFM stations don’t interfere with high-powered signals. Senator John McCain has introduced legislation in Congress that could bring LPFM back. According to Hannah Sassaman of the Prometheus Radio Project, a low-power advocacy group, if the bill passes Illinois would be likely to gain dozens, if not hundreds, of new low-power stations.
Low-power radio helps restore diversity and localism to the airwaves. For example, WRYR is an LPFM station owned by South Arundel Citizens for Responsible Development (SACReD). With their station, SACReD can publicize their efforts to control sprawling development in the Chesapeake Bay area in Maryland.
In Chicago, the Southwest Youth Collaborative—a group that works with youth from some of the city’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods—had hoped to start an LPFM station. But because of the limits on LPFM imposed by Congress, the group was unable to secure a license.
Congress should act to give groups like the Southwest Youth Collaborative a voice by passing the McCain bill. Low power radio may not solve all the problems with radio, but it would be a huge step in the right direction.
AUTHORS BIOs:
Steve Macek is an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at North Central College in Naperville, IL.
Karen Young is an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago, IL, and a founder of local media activist group Active Voice.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Author: U.S. faces a reality check over oil
By Steve Raabe
Denver Post Staff Writer
Gasoline at $2 a gallon may be just a pleasant memory in a few years as energy prices continue to surge, warns author Paul Roberts.
"There's still plenty of oil, but it's getting harder to find and it's not going to be the cheap oil we're accustomed to," said Roberts, author of "The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World," which hit bookstores last month.
Roberts, along with other analysts and energy producers, will address supply, demand and pricing issues during events in Colorado this month.
U.S. crude oil consumption is currently 20 million barrels a day, which is roughly one-quarter of the world's daily production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The U.S. imports slightly more than half its oil, with Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Canada, Venezuela and Nigeria the top five suppliers.
Domestic U.S. oil production peaked in the early 1970s and has fallen eight of the past 10 years, according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) in Washington, D.C.
At an IPAA conference this week in Colorado Springs, one conference session is titled, "Is the U.S. Running Out of Oil?"
The answer is "yes," said Roberts, who is based in Leavenworth, Wash. "Oil depletion is arguably the most serious crisis ever to face industrial society."
Roberts estimated that global oil production will peak within 30 years and then decline. Roberts said non-OPEC production - preferred by the U.S. because it is more politically secure - could peak by 2015. Meanwhile, the booming economies of China and India - and other industrialized countries - are competing with U.S. demand.
North America has large reserves of oil sands and oil shale, which are sources of petroleum that require special technologies for recovery. Suncor, a Canadian oil company that owns a refinery in Commerce City, claims that by 2010 it will produce 500,000 barrels a day from oil sands. That would be equal to about one-third of the average daily imports from Saudi Arabia.
Conventional oil fields in the U.S., however, are becoming harder to exploit.
Drilling for natural gas is at a three-year high nationally, but U.S. production has been flat over the past several years.
"We are working harder and harder just to keep production levels constant," said Joseph Blount, chairman of the Washington-based Natural Gas Supply Association. "There is little short-term relief ahead for customers."
Not all traditional oil reserves face the same rates of decline. Non-OPEC oil, chiefly from the U.S., North Sea, Russia and Mexico, may tap out sooner than OPEC sources because the non-OPEC fields generally are smaller and have been exploited for longer periods, according to Roberts.
Roberts is an advocate of quicker development of alternatives to oil and natural gas, including hydrogen, wind and solar, coal gasification, and possibly more nuclear power.
Conventional energy producers say alternative and renewable energy sources are costly and less reliable than fossil fuels.
But Roberts said the fossil-fuel industry is not taking into account the eventual economic costs of carbon emissions and global warming from burning oil, gas and coal.
By Steve Raabe
Denver Post Staff Writer
Gasoline at $2 a gallon may be just a pleasant memory in a few years as energy prices continue to surge, warns author Paul Roberts.
"There's still plenty of oil, but it's getting harder to find and it's not going to be the cheap oil we're accustomed to," said Roberts, author of "The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World," which hit bookstores last month.
Roberts, along with other analysts and energy producers, will address supply, demand and pricing issues during events in Colorado this month.
U.S. crude oil consumption is currently 20 million barrels a day, which is roughly one-quarter of the world's daily production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The U.S. imports slightly more than half its oil, with Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Canada, Venezuela and Nigeria the top five suppliers.
Domestic U.S. oil production peaked in the early 1970s and has fallen eight of the past 10 years, according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) in Washington, D.C.
At an IPAA conference this week in Colorado Springs, one conference session is titled, "Is the U.S. Running Out of Oil?"
The answer is "yes," said Roberts, who is based in Leavenworth, Wash. "Oil depletion is arguably the most serious crisis ever to face industrial society."
Roberts estimated that global oil production will peak within 30 years and then decline. Roberts said non-OPEC production - preferred by the U.S. because it is more politically secure - could peak by 2015. Meanwhile, the booming economies of China and India - and other industrialized countries - are competing with U.S. demand.
North America has large reserves of oil sands and oil shale, which are sources of petroleum that require special technologies for recovery. Suncor, a Canadian oil company that owns a refinery in Commerce City, claims that by 2010 it will produce 500,000 barrels a day from oil sands. That would be equal to about one-third of the average daily imports from Saudi Arabia.
Conventional oil fields in the U.S., however, are becoming harder to exploit.
Drilling for natural gas is at a three-year high nationally, but U.S. production has been flat over the past several years.
"We are working harder and harder just to keep production levels constant," said Joseph Blount, chairman of the Washington-based Natural Gas Supply Association. "There is little short-term relief ahead for customers."
Not all traditional oil reserves face the same rates of decline. Non-OPEC oil, chiefly from the U.S., North Sea, Russia and Mexico, may tap out sooner than OPEC sources because the non-OPEC fields generally are smaller and have been exploited for longer periods, according to Roberts.
Roberts is an advocate of quicker development of alternatives to oil and natural gas, including hydrogen, wind and solar, coal gasification, and possibly more nuclear power.
Conventional energy producers say alternative and renewable energy sources are costly and less reliable than fossil fuels.
But Roberts said the fossil-fuel industry is not taking into account the eventual economic costs of carbon emissions and global warming from burning oil, gas and coal.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
Pending Draft Legislation Targeted for Spring 2005
There is pending legislation in the House and Senate
(twin bills: S 89 and HR 163) which will time the program's initiation
so the draft can begin at early as Spring 2005 -- just after the 2004
presidential election. The administration is quietly trying to get
these bills passed now,while the public's attention is on the elections, so
our action on this is needed immediately.
$28 million has been added to the 2004 Selective
Service System (SSS)budget to prepare for a military draft that could
start as early as June 15, 2005. Selective Service must report to Bush on
March 31, 2005 that the system, which has lain dormant for decades, is
ready for activation. Please see website:
www.sss.gov/perfplan_fy2004.html
; to view the sss annual
performance plan - fiscal year 2004.
The Pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to
fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots
nationwide. Though this is an unpopular election year topic, military
experts and influential members of congress are suggesting that if
Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan [and a
permanent state of war on "terrorism"] proves accurate, the U.S. may have no
choice but to draft.
Congress brought twin bills, S. 89 and HR 163 forward
this year, http://www.hslda.org/legislation/na...s89/default.asp
entitled the Universal National Service Act of 2003, "to provide
for the common defense by requiring that all young persons [age 18--26] in
the United States, including women, perform a period of military service
or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national
defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." These active bills
currently sit in the committee on armed services.
Dodging the draft will be more difficult than those from the Vietnam
era.
College and Canada will not be options. In December
2001, Canada and the U.S. signed a "smart border declaration," which
could be used to keep would-be draft dodgers in. Signed by Canada's minister
of foreign affairs, John Manley, and U.S. Homeland Security
director, Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30-point plan which implements,
among other things, a "pre-clearance agreement" of people entering
and departing each country. Reforms aimed at making the draft more
equitable along gender and class lines also eliminates higher education as a
shelter. Underclassmen would only be able to postpone service
until the end of their current semester. Seniors would have until the end of the
academic year.
Even those voters who currently support US actions
abroad may still object to this move, knowing their own children or
grandchildren will not have a say about whether to fight. Not that it should
make a difference, but this plan, among other things,
eliminates higher education as a shelter and includes women in the draft.
The public has a right to air their opinions about such an important
decision.
Please send this on to all the friends, parents, aunts
and uncles, grandparents, and cousins that you know. Let your
children know too -- it's their future, and they can be a powerful voice for
change!
Please also contact your representatives to ask them
why they aren't telling their constituents about these bills -- and
contact newspapers and other media outlets to ask them why they're not
covering this important story.
There is pending legislation in the House and Senate
(twin bills: S 89 and HR 163) which will time the program's initiation
so the draft can begin at early as Spring 2005 -- just after the 2004
presidential election. The administration is quietly trying to get
these bills passed now,while the public's attention is on the elections, so
our action on this is needed immediately.
$28 million has been added to the 2004 Selective
Service System (SSS)budget to prepare for a military draft that could
start as early as June 15, 2005. Selective Service must report to Bush on
March 31, 2005 that the system, which has lain dormant for decades, is
ready for activation. Please see website:
www.sss.gov/perfplan_fy2004.html
performance plan - fiscal year 2004.
The Pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to
fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots
nationwide. Though this is an unpopular election year topic, military
experts and influential members of congress are suggesting that if
Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan [and a
permanent state of war on "terrorism"] proves accurate, the U.S. may have no
choice but to draft.
Congress brought twin bills, S. 89 and HR 163 forward
this year, http://www.hslda.org/legislation/na...s89/default.asp
entitled the Universal National Service Act of 2003, "to provide
for the common defense by requiring that all young persons [age 18--26] in
the United States, including women, perform a period of military service
or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national
defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." These active bills
currently sit in the committee on armed services.
Dodging the draft will be more difficult than those from the Vietnam
era.
College and Canada will not be options. In December
2001, Canada and the U.S. signed a "smart border declaration," which
could be used to keep would-be draft dodgers in. Signed by Canada's minister
of foreign affairs, John Manley, and U.S. Homeland Security
director, Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30-point plan which implements,
among other things, a "pre-clearance agreement" of people entering
and departing each country. Reforms aimed at making the draft more
equitable along gender and class lines also eliminates higher education as a
shelter. Underclassmen would only be able to postpone service
until the end of their current semester. Seniors would have until the end of the
academic year.
Even those voters who currently support US actions
abroad may still object to this move, knowing their own children or
grandchildren will not have a say about whether to fight. Not that it should
make a difference, but this plan, among other things,
eliminates higher education as a shelter and includes women in the draft.
The public has a right to air their opinions about such an important
decision.
Please send this on to all the friends, parents, aunts
and uncles, grandparents, and cousins that you know. Let your
children know too -- it's their future, and they can be a powerful voice for
change!
Please also contact your representatives to ask them
why they aren't telling their constituents about these bills -- and
contact newspapers and other media outlets to ask them why they're not
covering this important story.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Jensen here appropriately turns House minority leader Pelosi's critique of Bush and the U.S. invasion of Iraq against both the Democrats and the Republicans. It is time we started calling the "War on Terrorism" what it really is: the latest installment in an imperialist project that began with the birth of the nation.
It's Not Just the Emperor Who is Naked, But the Whole Empire
by Robert Jensen
Republican politicians took potshots at House Democratic leader Nancy
Pelosi last week after she called President Bush "incompetent" and
criticized his judgment and leadership. Her conclusion -- "the
emperor has no clothes" -- understandably made Republicans angry,
because it is so obviously accurate.
Pelosi's remarks deserve scrutiny, but not because she was too harsh
on the president. The lies and distortions that Bush and his top
officials used to promote the U.S. invasion of Iraq were exposed long
ago, and day-by-day the disastrous consequences of the occupation are
obvious to all but the most fanatical of the Leader's faithful.
But the problem is not just that the EMPEROR is bare, but that the
U.S. EMPIRE has no clothes, and in that respect mainstream Democrats
stand before the world as naked as the most reactionary Republicans.
It is understandable that many think of Bush administration policies
as a radical departure from past U.S. foreign policy, and certainly
the doctrine of preemption (which is so far untested, because Iraq
posed no threat to the United States; the U.S. invasion, therefore,
didn't preempt anything but was instead a simple crime against peace)
and the open call for world domination have taken the country -- and
the world -- down a particularly dangerous path. But Bush is hardly
the first president to engage in empire building.
A few years ago, anyone who described the United States as an empire
was branded part of the loony left. But since 9/11, even conservative
pundits talk of empire, albeit in perversely positive terms,
exhorting U.S. leaders to seize the opportunity to remake the world.
But that project didn't begin with 9/11. Whatever point in U.S.
history one claims as the beginning of the imperial project (the
genocide of indigenous people in North America? the Monroe Doctrine?
the conquest of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War?),
there is no doubt that U.S. empire building went into high gear after
World War II. The fact that the United States doesn't acquire
colonies in the same fashion as past empires, preferring instead to
install compliant governments that will do its bidding, doesn't make
us less an empire. The modalities of control change, but the game
remains the same; set the terms for the world economy and derail the
possibility of independent development by any means necessary, with a
gargantuan military on call when violence is required.
Nor do the differences in style and tactics make Democratic
administrations any less imperial than Republicans. The Cold-War
liberals of the Democratic Party had no greater qualms than
Republicans about using the military to extend U.S. power in the
Third World. The blood of millions of dead Vietnamese is on the hands
of liberal darling John F. Kennedy and conservative curmudgeon
Richard Nixon alike. Whatever the differences in domestic policy in
the postwar period between Republicans and Democrats, in
international relations the consensus on each side of the aisle was
firmly in favor of militarism to project U.S. power around the world.
The only admirable people in either party were the few dissidents
(such as Democrats Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, the only two
senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that justified
expansion of the Vietnam War, or Republican Rep. Pete McCloskey, who
challenged Nixon).
That pattern continues up to this day. We should not forget that for
all the talk of Bill Clinton's "multilateralism," he launched an
illegal attack on Iraq in 1998 and insisted on maintaining the
harshest economic embargo in modern history on that country for eight
years, which killed as many as 1 million Iraqis -- policies that had
virtually no support in the world. In short, Clinton killed more
Iraqis than Bush as he ignored international law and world opinion. I
doubt the fact that Clinton is smarter and more rhetorically gifted
than Bush makes much difference to the dead in Iraq.
And while Bush bears primary responsibility for the Iraq War, he
couldn't have done it without the help of some Democrats (such as
John Kerry, who voted for it) and the inaction of others (such as
Pelosi, who voted against the war but expended no political capital
to mount a serious campaign to stop it and added to the case for war
with false statements such as "Saddam Hussein certainly has chemical
and biological weapons" as late as November 2002).
There's no indication that any of the current strategists in the
Democratic Party have learned anything from all this. Kerry is not
calling for an end to the illegal and immoral occupation but instead
advocates a continued U.S. presence with an international fig leaf.
Neither Republicans nor mainstream Democrats seem capable of
admitting that the invasion of Iraq was never about weapons of mass
destruction, terrorist ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, or creating
democracy; it was simply an intensification of the longstanding U.S.
project of controlling the strategically crucial energy resources of
the Middle East. That project has gone on under Democratic and
Republican presidents alike, taking different forms but always with
that same goal of expanding U.S. power.
It's not just the Iraq War that is immoral. The whole rotten project
of empire building is immoral -- and every bit as much a Democratic
as a Republican project. When politicians from both parties offer
platitudes about America's benevolent intentions as they argue about
the most appropriate strategies for running the world, we should
remember this trenchant comment after World War I from W.E.B. DuBois:
"It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself,
first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist
in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role."
This analysis doesn't mean voters can't judge one particular
empire-building politician more dangerous than another. It doesn't
mean we shouldn't sometimes make strategic choices to vote for one
over the other. It simply means we should make such choices with eyes
open and no illusions.
Here, I borrow phrases from Pelosi's condemnation of Bush: "When are
people going to face reality? Pull the curtain back."
Indeed, Rep. Pelosi, pull the curtain back. You will see naked
emperors, Republican and Democratic. You will see the cowardly
legislators who chose to step aside before the war, when spirited
opposition in Congress might have helped derail the disaster that is
playing out in Iraq.
Pull the curtain back, and step in front of the mirror.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at
Austin and the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to
Claim Our Humanity." He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
It's Not Just the Emperor Who is Naked, But the Whole Empire
by Robert Jensen
Republican politicians took potshots at House Democratic leader Nancy
Pelosi last week after she called President Bush "incompetent" and
criticized his judgment and leadership. Her conclusion -- "the
emperor has no clothes" -- understandably made Republicans angry,
because it is so obviously accurate.
Pelosi's remarks deserve scrutiny, but not because she was too harsh
on the president. The lies and distortions that Bush and his top
officials used to promote the U.S. invasion of Iraq were exposed long
ago, and day-by-day the disastrous consequences of the occupation are
obvious to all but the most fanatical of the Leader's faithful.
But the problem is not just that the EMPEROR is bare, but that the
U.S. EMPIRE has no clothes, and in that respect mainstream Democrats
stand before the world as naked as the most reactionary Republicans.
It is understandable that many think of Bush administration policies
as a radical departure from past U.S. foreign policy, and certainly
the doctrine of preemption (which is so far untested, because Iraq
posed no threat to the United States; the U.S. invasion, therefore,
didn't preempt anything but was instead a simple crime against peace)
and the open call for world domination have taken the country -- and
the world -- down a particularly dangerous path. But Bush is hardly
the first president to engage in empire building.
A few years ago, anyone who described the United States as an empire
was branded part of the loony left. But since 9/11, even conservative
pundits talk of empire, albeit in perversely positive terms,
exhorting U.S. leaders to seize the opportunity to remake the world.
But that project didn't begin with 9/11. Whatever point in U.S.
history one claims as the beginning of the imperial project (the
genocide of indigenous people in North America? the Monroe Doctrine?
the conquest of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War?),
there is no doubt that U.S. empire building went into high gear after
World War II. The fact that the United States doesn't acquire
colonies in the same fashion as past empires, preferring instead to
install compliant governments that will do its bidding, doesn't make
us less an empire. The modalities of control change, but the game
remains the same; set the terms for the world economy and derail the
possibility of independent development by any means necessary, with a
gargantuan military on call when violence is required.
Nor do the differences in style and tactics make Democratic
administrations any less imperial than Republicans. The Cold-War
liberals of the Democratic Party had no greater qualms than
Republicans about using the military to extend U.S. power in the
Third World. The blood of millions of dead Vietnamese is on the hands
of liberal darling John F. Kennedy and conservative curmudgeon
Richard Nixon alike. Whatever the differences in domestic policy in
the postwar period between Republicans and Democrats, in
international relations the consensus on each side of the aisle was
firmly in favor of militarism to project U.S. power around the world.
The only admirable people in either party were the few dissidents
(such as Democrats Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, the only two
senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that justified
expansion of the Vietnam War, or Republican Rep. Pete McCloskey, who
challenged Nixon).
That pattern continues up to this day. We should not forget that for
all the talk of Bill Clinton's "multilateralism," he launched an
illegal attack on Iraq in 1998 and insisted on maintaining the
harshest economic embargo in modern history on that country for eight
years, which killed as many as 1 million Iraqis -- policies that had
virtually no support in the world. In short, Clinton killed more
Iraqis than Bush as he ignored international law and world opinion. I
doubt the fact that Clinton is smarter and more rhetorically gifted
than Bush makes much difference to the dead in Iraq.
And while Bush bears primary responsibility for the Iraq War, he
couldn't have done it without the help of some Democrats (such as
John Kerry, who voted for it) and the inaction of others (such as
Pelosi, who voted against the war but expended no political capital
to mount a serious campaign to stop it and added to the case for war
with false statements such as "Saddam Hussein certainly has chemical
and biological weapons" as late as November 2002).
There's no indication that any of the current strategists in the
Democratic Party have learned anything from all this. Kerry is not
calling for an end to the illegal and immoral occupation but instead
advocates a continued U.S. presence with an international fig leaf.
Neither Republicans nor mainstream Democrats seem capable of
admitting that the invasion of Iraq was never about weapons of mass
destruction, terrorist ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, or creating
democracy; it was simply an intensification of the longstanding U.S.
project of controlling the strategically crucial energy resources of
the Middle East. That project has gone on under Democratic and
Republican presidents alike, taking different forms but always with
that same goal of expanding U.S. power.
It's not just the Iraq War that is immoral. The whole rotten project
of empire building is immoral -- and every bit as much a Democratic
as a Republican project. When politicians from both parties offer
platitudes about America's benevolent intentions as they argue about
the most appropriate strategies for running the world, we should
remember this trenchant comment after World War I from W.E.B. DuBois:
"It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself,
first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist
in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role."
This analysis doesn't mean voters can't judge one particular
empire-building politician more dangerous than another. It doesn't
mean we shouldn't sometimes make strategic choices to vote for one
over the other. It simply means we should make such choices with eyes
open and no illusions.
Here, I borrow phrases from Pelosi's condemnation of Bush: "When are
people going to face reality? Pull the curtain back."
Indeed, Rep. Pelosi, pull the curtain back. You will see naked
emperors, Republican and Democratic. You will see the cowardly
legislators who chose to step aside before the war, when spirited
opposition in Congress might have helped derail the disaster that is
playing out in Iraq.
Pull the curtain back, and step in front of the mirror.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at
Austin and the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to
Claim Our Humanity." He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
Monday, May 24, 2004
A powerful New York Times Magazine piece by Susan Sontag, who demonstrates here once again that she's still one of America's sharpest, most incisive cultural critics. Contra G. W. Bush, she argues that the photos of American atrocities at Abu Ghraib are in fact representative of the "true nature" of America, or at least of the "true nature" of the American occupation of Iraq. I couldn't agree more. The history of imperialism-- from ancient Athens and Rome to 20th Century British and French colonialism-- shows that occupations lead inevitably to the sort of brutality on display in the Abu Ghraib pictures.
Regarding the Torture of Others
May 23, 2004
By SUSAN SONTAG
I.
For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have
laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged
and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a
visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to
determine what we recall of events, and it now seems
probable that the defining association of people everywhere
with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively
in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of
Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam
Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib.
The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly
sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the
dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with
the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by
the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of
the reality onto the photographs themselves. The
administration's initial response was to say that the
president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs --
as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what
they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word
''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of
''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the
most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been
charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is
different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm
not going to address the 'torture' word.''
Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the
strenuous avoidance of the word ''genocide'' while some
800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few
weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that
indicated the American government had no intention of doing
anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib
-- and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in
Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay -- by its true name,
torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the
Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions
of torture contained in a convention to which the United
States is a signatory: ''any act by which severe pain or
suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally
inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from
him or a third person information or a confession.'' (The
definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture
and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time
in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3
-- common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 -- and
many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention
declares, ''No exceptional circumstances whatsoever,
whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal
political instability or any other public emergency, may be
invoked as a justification of torture.'' And all covenants
on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to
humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells
and corridors.
Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit
the damage of the widening revelations of the torture of
prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere -- trials,
courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of
senior military figures and responsible administration
officials and substantial compensation to the victims -- it
is probable that the ''torture'' word will continue to be
banned. To acknowledge that Americans torture their
prisoners would contradict everything this administration
has invited the public to believe about the virtue of
American intentions and America's right, flowing from that
virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage.
Even when the president was finally compelled, as the
damage to America's reputation everywhere in the world
widened and deepened, to use the ''sorry'' word, the focus
of regret still seemed the damage to America's claim to
moral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington
on May 6, standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan, he
was ''sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi
prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.''
But, he went on, he was ''equally sorry that people seeing
these pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart
of America.''
To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these
images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a
war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern
times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a
huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions
representative and others not? The issue is not whether the
torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by
everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized.
Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is
not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs
such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted
by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to
carry them out makes such acts likely.
II.
Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is,
they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of
any foreign occupation together with the Bush
adminstration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the
Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual
humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this
generic corruption the mystifying, near-total
unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with
the complex realities of the country after its
''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching,
distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely
that the United States has embarked on an endless war and
that those detained in this war are, if the president so
decides, ''unlawful combatants'' -- a policy enunciated by
Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as
January 2002 -- and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ''technically''
they ''do not have any rights under the Geneva
Convention,'' and you have a perfect recipe for the
cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands
incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in
American-run prisons that have been set up since the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves
but what the photographs reveal to have happened to
''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is
shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the
horror that the photographs were taken -- with the
perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless
captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took
photographs of the atrocities they were committing in
Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners
placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare,
as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing
the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something
comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of
the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between
the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning
beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman
hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs
were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants
felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the
pictures from Abu Ghraib.
The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as
trophies -- taken by a photographer in order to be
collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken
by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a
shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to be
saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A
digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where
once photographing war was the province of
photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all
photographers -- recording their war, their fun, their
observations of what they find picturesque, their
atrocities -- and swapping images among themselves and
e-mailing them around the globe.
There is more and more recording of what people do, by
themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy
Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life
isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has
become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people
record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here
I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my
teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school.
People record all aspects of their lives, store them in
computer files and send the files around. Family life goes
with the recording of family life -- even when, or
especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and
disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of
one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years
was the most astonishing material in ''Capturing the
Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about
a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges.
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that whither
can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And
perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to
record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely
revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public
view, that torture photographs are interleaved with
pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with
one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have
a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of
prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among
themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the
photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and
sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted
if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful
positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are
infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted.
You have only to look at the terror on the victim's face,
although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits
of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a
larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman
leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix
imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures
inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the
vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the
Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out
Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.
III.
To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's
life, and therefore to go on with one's life oblivious, or
claiming to be oblivious, to the camera's nonstop
attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share
in the community of actions recorded as images. The
expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being
inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part
of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being
photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond
not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with
glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed.
The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something
missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take
a picture of them.
Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can
someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another
human being? Set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of
cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hooded prisoners
to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And
you feel naive for asking, since the answer is,
self-evidently, People do these things to other people.
Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most
common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration
camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein.
Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told,
or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute
power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them
when they are led to believe that the people they are
torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the
meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were
performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no
sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures
show.
Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be
circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And
this idea of fun is, alas, more and more -- contrary to
what President Bush is telling the world -- part of ''the
true nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure
the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life,
but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video
games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys
-- can the video game ''Interrogating the Terrorists''
really be far behind? -- and on to the violence that has
become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant
kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in
violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments
inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban
high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's 1993 film,
''Dazed and Confused'' -- to the hazing rituals of physical
brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities
and on sports teams, America has become a country in which
the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good
entertainment, fun.
What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the
exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings -- as in Pier
Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, ''Salo''
(1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt
in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era -- is now
being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or
venting. To ''stack naked men'' is like a college
fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the
many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show.
Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No
matter. The observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on
the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some
Americans was Limbaugh's response: ''Exactly!'' he
exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different than
what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're
going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to
hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really
hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are
the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on:
''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm
talking about people having a good time, these people. You
ever heard of emotional release?''
Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis.
And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce
to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern
of criminal behavior in open contempt of international
humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up,
before the atrocities they commit, and send off the
pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that,
formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal,
you now clamor to be invited on a television show to
reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much
the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for
unapologetic brutality.
IV.
The notion that apologies or professions of ''disgust'' by
the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient
response is an insult to one's historical and moral sense.
The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a
direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines
of world struggle with which the Bush administration has
sought to change, change radically, the international
stance of the United States and to recast many domestic
institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has
committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of
war, endless war -- for ''the war on terror'' is nothing
less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless
incarcerations. Those held in the extralegal American penal
empire are ''detainees''; ''prisoners,'' a newly obsolete
word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by
international law and the laws of all civilized countries.
This endless ''global war on terrorism'' -- into which both
the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the
unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by Pentagon
decree -- inevitably leads to the demonizing and
dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration
to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for
debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.
The charges against most of the people detained in the
prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent -- the
Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held
seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in
the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep
of ''suspects'' -- the principal justification for holding
them is ''interrogation.'' Interrogation about what? About
anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If
interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners
indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and
torture become inevitable.
Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases,
the ''ticking time bomb'' situation, which is sometimes
used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners
who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general
or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by
American military and civilian administrators to learn more
of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know
virtually nothing, in countries about which they are
singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all
might be useful. An interrogation that produced no
information (whatever information might consist of) would
count as a failure. All the more justification for
preparing prisoners to talk. Softening them up, stressing
them out -- these are the euphemisms for the bestial
practices in American prisons where suspected terrorists
are being held. Unfortunately, as Staff Sgt. Ivan (Chip)
Frederick noted in his diary, a prisoner can get too
stressed out and die. The picture of a man in a body bag
with ice on his chest may well be of the man Frederick was
describing.
The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the
digital world in which we live. Indeed, it seems they were
necessary to get our leaders to acknowledge that they had a
problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions of
reports compiled by the International Committee of the Red
Cross, and other reports by journalists and protests by
humanitarian organizations about the atrocious punishments
inflicted on ''detainees'' and ''suspected terrorists'' in
prisons run by the American military, first in Afghanistan
and later in Iraq, have been circulating for more than a
year. It seems doubtful that such reports were read by
President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza
Rice or Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get
their attention, when it became clear they could not be
suppressed; it was the photographs that made all this
''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had
been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of
infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination,
and so much easier to forget.
So now the pictures will continue to ''assault'' us -- as
many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to
them? Some Americans are already saying they have seen
enough. Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war:
endless stream of photographs. Will editors now debate
whether showing more of them, or showing them uncropped
(which, with some of the best-known images, like that of a
hooded man on a box, gives a different and in some
instances more appalling view), would be in ''bad taste''
or too implicitly political? By ''political,'' read:
critical of the Bush administration's imperial project. For
there can be no doubt that the photographs damage, as
Rumsfeld testified, ''the reputation of the honorable men
and women of the armed forces who are courageously and
responsibly and professionally defending our freedom across
the globe.'' This damage -- to our reputation, our image,
our success as the lone superpower -- is what the Bush
administration principally deplores. How the protection of
''our freedom'' -- the freedom of 5 percent of humanity --
came to require having American soldiers ''across the
globe'' is hardly debated by our elected officials.
Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned
against indulging in an orgy of self-condemnation. The
continuing publication of the pictures is being taken by
many Americans as suggesting that we do not have the right
to defend ourselves: after all, they (the terrorists)
started it. They -- Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's
the difference? -- attacked us first. Senator James Inhofe
of Oklahoma, a Republican member of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, before which Secretary Rumsfeld
testified, avowed that he was sure he was not the only
member of the committee ''more outraged by the outrage''
over the photographs than by what the photographs show.
''These prisoners,'' Senator Inhofe explained, ''you know
they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in
Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers,
they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them
probably have American blood on their hands, and here we're
so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.''
It's the fault of ''the media'' which are provoking, and
will continue to provoke, further violence against
Americans around the world. More Americans will die.
Because of these photos.
There is an answer to this charge, of course. Americans are
dying not because of the photographs but because of what
the photographs reveal to be happening, happening with the
complicity of a chain of command -- so Maj. Gen. Antonio
Taguba implied, and Pfc. Lynndie England said, and (among
others) Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a
Republican, suggested, after he saw the Pentagon's full
range of images on May 12. ''Some of it has an elaborate
nature to it that makes me very suspicious of whether or
not others were directing or encouraging,'' Senator Graham
said. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said that
viewing an uncropped version of one photo showing a stack
of naked men in a hallway -- a version that revealed how
many other soldiers were at the scene, some not even paying
attention -- contradicted the Pentagon's assertion that
only rogue soldiers were involved. ''Somewhere along the
line,'' Senator Nelson said of the torturers, ''they were
either told or winked at.'' An attorney for Specialist
Charles Graner Jr., who is in the picture, has had his
client identify the men in the uncropped version; according
to The Wall Street Journal, Graner said that four of the
men were military intelligence and one a civilian
contractor working with military intelligence.
V.
But the distinction between photograph and reality -- as
between spin and policy -- can easily evaporate. And that
is what the administration wishes to happen. ''There are a
lot more photographs and videos that exist,'' Rumsfeld
acknowledged in his testimony. ''If these are released to
the public, obviously, it's going to make matters worse.''
Worse for the administration and its programs, presumably,
not for those who are the actual -- and potential? --
victims of torture.
The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged,
it's hard to censor soldiers overseas, who don't write
letters home, as in the old days, that can be opened by
military censors who ink out unacceptable lines. Today's
soldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put
it, ''running around with digital cameras and taking these
unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against
the law, to the media, to our surprise.'' The
administration's effort to withhold pictures is proceeding
along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking a
legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as
evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be
prejudiced if they are made public. The Republican chairman
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of
Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image
of sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqi prisoners,
said he felt ''very strongly'' that the newer photos
''should not be made public. I feel that it could possibly
endanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are
serving and at great risk.''
But the real push to limit the accessibility of the
photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect
the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq -- to
identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a campaign
to undermine American military might and the purposes it
currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an
implicit criticism of the war to show on television
photographs of American soldiers who have been killed in
the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will
increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new
photographs and further tarnish the image of America.
After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more
so than any of the people who got us into this rotten war
seem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the
pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one
picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders
choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more
snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.
Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''Regarding
the Pain of Others.''
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Regarding the Torture of Others
May 23, 2004
By SUSAN SONTAG
I.
For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have
laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged
and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a
visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to
determine what we recall of events, and it now seems
probable that the defining association of people everywhere
with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively
in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of
Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam
Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib.
The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly
sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the
dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with
the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by
the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of
the reality onto the photographs themselves. The
administration's initial response was to say that the
president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs --
as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what
they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word
''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of
''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the
most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been
charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is
different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm
not going to address the 'torture' word.''
Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the
strenuous avoidance of the word ''genocide'' while some
800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few
weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that
indicated the American government had no intention of doing
anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib
-- and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in
Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay -- by its true name,
torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the
Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions
of torture contained in a convention to which the United
States is a signatory: ''any act by which severe pain or
suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally
inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from
him or a third person information or a confession.'' (The
definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture
and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time
in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3
-- common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 -- and
many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention
declares, ''No exceptional circumstances whatsoever,
whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal
political instability or any other public emergency, may be
invoked as a justification of torture.'' And all covenants
on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to
humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells
and corridors.
Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit
the damage of the widening revelations of the torture of
prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere -- trials,
courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of
senior military figures and responsible administration
officials and substantial compensation to the victims -- it
is probable that the ''torture'' word will continue to be
banned. To acknowledge that Americans torture their
prisoners would contradict everything this administration
has invited the public to believe about the virtue of
American intentions and America's right, flowing from that
virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage.
Even when the president was finally compelled, as the
damage to America's reputation everywhere in the world
widened and deepened, to use the ''sorry'' word, the focus
of regret still seemed the damage to America's claim to
moral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington
on May 6, standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan, he
was ''sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi
prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.''
But, he went on, he was ''equally sorry that people seeing
these pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart
of America.''
To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these
images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a
war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern
times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a
huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions
representative and others not? The issue is not whether the
torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by
everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized.
Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is
not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs
such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted
by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to
carry them out makes such acts likely.
II.
Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is,
they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of
any foreign occupation together with the Bush
adminstration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the
Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual
humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this
generic corruption the mystifying, near-total
unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with
the complex realities of the country after its
''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching,
distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely
that the United States has embarked on an endless war and
that those detained in this war are, if the president so
decides, ''unlawful combatants'' -- a policy enunciated by
Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as
January 2002 -- and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ''technically''
they ''do not have any rights under the Geneva
Convention,'' and you have a perfect recipe for the
cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands
incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in
American-run prisons that have been set up since the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves
but what the photographs reveal to have happened to
''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is
shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the
horror that the photographs were taken -- with the
perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless
captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took
photographs of the atrocities they were committing in
Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners
placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare,
as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing
the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something
comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of
the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between
the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning
beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman
hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs
were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants
felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the
pictures from Abu Ghraib.
The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as
trophies -- taken by a photographer in order to be
collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken
by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a
shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to be
saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A
digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where
once photographing war was the province of
photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all
photographers -- recording their war, their fun, their
observations of what they find picturesque, their
atrocities -- and swapping images among themselves and
e-mailing them around the globe.
There is more and more recording of what people do, by
themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy
Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life
isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has
become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people
record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here
I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my
teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school.
People record all aspects of their lives, store them in
computer files and send the files around. Family life goes
with the recording of family life -- even when, or
especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and
disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of
one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years
was the most astonishing material in ''Capturing the
Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about
a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges.
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that whither
can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And
perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to
record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely
revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public
view, that torture photographs are interleaved with
pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with
one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have
a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of
prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among
themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the
photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and
sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted
if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful
positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are
infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted.
You have only to look at the terror on the victim's face,
although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits
of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a
larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman
leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix
imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures
inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the
vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the
Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out
Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.
III.
To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's
life, and therefore to go on with one's life oblivious, or
claiming to be oblivious, to the camera's nonstop
attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share
in the community of actions recorded as images. The
expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being
inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part
of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being
photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond
not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with
glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed.
The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something
missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take
a picture of them.
Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can
someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another
human being? Set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of
cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hooded prisoners
to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And
you feel naive for asking, since the answer is,
self-evidently, People do these things to other people.
Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most
common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration
camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein.
Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told,
or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute
power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them
when they are led to believe that the people they are
torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the
meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were
performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no
sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures
show.
Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be
circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And
this idea of fun is, alas, more and more -- contrary to
what President Bush is telling the world -- part of ''the
true nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure
the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life,
but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video
games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys
-- can the video game ''Interrogating the Terrorists''
really be far behind? -- and on to the violence that has
become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant
kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in
violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments
inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban
high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's 1993 film,
''Dazed and Confused'' -- to the hazing rituals of physical
brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities
and on sports teams, America has become a country in which
the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good
entertainment, fun.
What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the
exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings -- as in Pier
Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, ''Salo''
(1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt
in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era -- is now
being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or
venting. To ''stack naked men'' is like a college
fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the
many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show.
Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No
matter. The observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on
the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some
Americans was Limbaugh's response: ''Exactly!'' he
exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different than
what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're
going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to
hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really
hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are
the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on:
''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm
talking about people having a good time, these people. You
ever heard of emotional release?''
Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis.
And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce
to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern
of criminal behavior in open contempt of international
humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up,
before the atrocities they commit, and send off the
pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that,
formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal,
you now clamor to be invited on a television show to
reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much
the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for
unapologetic brutality.
IV.
The notion that apologies or professions of ''disgust'' by
the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient
response is an insult to one's historical and moral sense.
The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a
direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines
of world struggle with which the Bush administration has
sought to change, change radically, the international
stance of the United States and to recast many domestic
institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has
committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of
war, endless war -- for ''the war on terror'' is nothing
less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless
incarcerations. Those held in the extralegal American penal
empire are ''detainees''; ''prisoners,'' a newly obsolete
word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by
international law and the laws of all civilized countries.
This endless ''global war on terrorism'' -- into which both
the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the
unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by Pentagon
decree -- inevitably leads to the demonizing and
dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration
to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for
debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.
The charges against most of the people detained in the
prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent -- the
Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held
seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in
the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep
of ''suspects'' -- the principal justification for holding
them is ''interrogation.'' Interrogation about what? About
anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If
interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners
indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and
torture become inevitable.
Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases,
the ''ticking time bomb'' situation, which is sometimes
used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners
who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general
or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by
American military and civilian administrators to learn more
of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know
virtually nothing, in countries about which they are
singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all
might be useful. An interrogation that produced no
information (whatever information might consist of) would
count as a failure. All the more justification for
preparing prisoners to talk. Softening them up, stressing
them out -- these are the euphemisms for the bestial
practices in American prisons where suspected terrorists
are being held. Unfortunately, as Staff Sgt. Ivan (Chip)
Frederick noted in his diary, a prisoner can get too
stressed out and die. The picture of a man in a body bag
with ice on his chest may well be of the man Frederick was
describing.
The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the
digital world in which we live. Indeed, it seems they were
necessary to get our leaders to acknowledge that they had a
problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions of
reports compiled by the International Committee of the Red
Cross, and other reports by journalists and protests by
humanitarian organizations about the atrocious punishments
inflicted on ''detainees'' and ''suspected terrorists'' in
prisons run by the American military, first in Afghanistan
and later in Iraq, have been circulating for more than a
year. It seems doubtful that such reports were read by
President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza
Rice or Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get
their attention, when it became clear they could not be
suppressed; it was the photographs that made all this
''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had
been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of
infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination,
and so much easier to forget.
So now the pictures will continue to ''assault'' us -- as
many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to
them? Some Americans are already saying they have seen
enough. Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war:
endless stream of photographs. Will editors now debate
whether showing more of them, or showing them uncropped
(which, with some of the best-known images, like that of a
hooded man on a box, gives a different and in some
instances more appalling view), would be in ''bad taste''
or too implicitly political? By ''political,'' read:
critical of the Bush administration's imperial project. For
there can be no doubt that the photographs damage, as
Rumsfeld testified, ''the reputation of the honorable men
and women of the armed forces who are courageously and
responsibly and professionally defending our freedom across
the globe.'' This damage -- to our reputation, our image,
our success as the lone superpower -- is what the Bush
administration principally deplores. How the protection of
''our freedom'' -- the freedom of 5 percent of humanity --
came to require having American soldiers ''across the
globe'' is hardly debated by our elected officials.
Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned
against indulging in an orgy of self-condemnation. The
continuing publication of the pictures is being taken by
many Americans as suggesting that we do not have the right
to defend ourselves: after all, they (the terrorists)
started it. They -- Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's
the difference? -- attacked us first. Senator James Inhofe
of Oklahoma, a Republican member of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, before which Secretary Rumsfeld
testified, avowed that he was sure he was not the only
member of the committee ''more outraged by the outrage''
over the photographs than by what the photographs show.
''These prisoners,'' Senator Inhofe explained, ''you know
they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in
Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers,
they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them
probably have American blood on their hands, and here we're
so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.''
It's the fault of ''the media'' which are provoking, and
will continue to provoke, further violence against
Americans around the world. More Americans will die.
Because of these photos.
There is an answer to this charge, of course. Americans are
dying not because of the photographs but because of what
the photographs reveal to be happening, happening with the
complicity of a chain of command -- so Maj. Gen. Antonio
Taguba implied, and Pfc. Lynndie England said, and (among
others) Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a
Republican, suggested, after he saw the Pentagon's full
range of images on May 12. ''Some of it has an elaborate
nature to it that makes me very suspicious of whether or
not others were directing or encouraging,'' Senator Graham
said. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said that
viewing an uncropped version of one photo showing a stack
of naked men in a hallway -- a version that revealed how
many other soldiers were at the scene, some not even paying
attention -- contradicted the Pentagon's assertion that
only rogue soldiers were involved. ''Somewhere along the
line,'' Senator Nelson said of the torturers, ''they were
either told or winked at.'' An attorney for Specialist
Charles Graner Jr., who is in the picture, has had his
client identify the men in the uncropped version; according
to The Wall Street Journal, Graner said that four of the
men were military intelligence and one a civilian
contractor working with military intelligence.
V.
But the distinction between photograph and reality -- as
between spin and policy -- can easily evaporate. And that
is what the administration wishes to happen. ''There are a
lot more photographs and videos that exist,'' Rumsfeld
acknowledged in his testimony. ''If these are released to
the public, obviously, it's going to make matters worse.''
Worse for the administration and its programs, presumably,
not for those who are the actual -- and potential? --
victims of torture.
The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged,
it's hard to censor soldiers overseas, who don't write
letters home, as in the old days, that can be opened by
military censors who ink out unacceptable lines. Today's
soldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put
it, ''running around with digital cameras and taking these
unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against
the law, to the media, to our surprise.'' The
administration's effort to withhold pictures is proceeding
along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking a
legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as
evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be
prejudiced if they are made public. The Republican chairman
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of
Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image
of sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqi prisoners,
said he felt ''very strongly'' that the newer photos
''should not be made public. I feel that it could possibly
endanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are
serving and at great risk.''
But the real push to limit the accessibility of the
photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect
the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq -- to
identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a campaign
to undermine American military might and the purposes it
currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an
implicit criticism of the war to show on television
photographs of American soldiers who have been killed in
the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will
increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new
photographs and further tarnish the image of America.
After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more
so than any of the people who got us into this rotten war
seem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the
pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one
picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders
choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more
snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.
Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''Regarding
the Pain of Others.''
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Monday, May 17, 2004
The G-Rated War
The media have covered up the casualties - and we've got the data to
prove it.
by Sean Aday, Senior Editor
4.29.04
Many have already lambasted the Bush Administration for trying to censor
images of coffins carrying U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, and
rightly so. It's hard to imagine a greater insult to these dead young
men and women than to willfully ignore them because their sacrifice
might be a political liability.
But it's important we remember that the administration has an accomplice
in this kind of censorship: the press.
And I'm not just talking about the photos from Dover, although it's
interesting that the successful FOIA case did not come from any
mainstream media organization but rather an intrepid website,
www.thememoryhole.org. Even more important is the self-censorship
practiced by the broadcast networks in their coverage of the Iraq war a
year ago.
Put simply, the war fought on television was devoid of blood,
particularly that spilled by U.S. soldiers.
A team of researchers at George Washington University's School of Media
and Public Affairs led by myself and my colleague Steven Livingston
recently analyzed 600 hours of coverage on CNN, Fox News Channel, and
ABC from the start of the war on March 20 to the fall of Baghdad on
April 9 to see how "real" the war looked on TV. We included the highly
watched morning shows from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., and afternoon and early
evening coverage from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m.
We even made it easy for the networks. Instead of including every story
they ran during that time (which would make percentages of casualty
stories look artificially low because many stories weren't about
fighting) we only examined stories that included images of battles
(including artillery firing and bombs falling on Baghdad), casualties of
any sort, or both.
What did we find? Let's put it this way: We have a newfound sympathy for
the Bush administration's hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
Of 1710 stories we analyzed, only 13.5 percent included any shots of
dead or wounded coalition soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, or civilians.
Similarly, of the 5087 individual shots of either battles or casualties
in those stories, only about 15 percent showed the latter.
Even rarer were pictures of the ultimate cost of war: Fewer than 4
percent of the shots we analyzed showed dead soldiers or civilians. And
even when the dead were shown, they were more likely to be hidden inside
a coffin, under a sheet, or represented by some surrogate image such as
a shoe.
These data become all the more noteworthy in contrast to the lofty
rhetoric offered by journalists who ran those gory pictures of charred
and mutilated contract workers hanging from a bridge in Fallujah a few
weeks ago. Those who used the images argued that it's the media's
responsibility to show audiences the grim realities of war. As Nightline
producer Leroy Sleavers put it:
"War is a horrible thing. It is about killing. If we try to avoid
showing pictures of bodies, if we make it too clean, then maybe we make
it too easy to go to war again. After all, these men and women are over
there in our names, whether you agree with the war or not. Shouldn't we
know what price we are asking them to pay?"
Of course, those particular images were not of soldiers, as Sleavers
seems to be suggesting, but he's right that the press shouldn't shy away
from telling the full story about a war. Yet virtually no one in the
press (with the notable exception of Nightline anchor Ted Koppel) made
this argument during the actual Iraq war a year ago. Back then the
networks willfully shied away from showing audiences the true cost of
war, opting instead for a sanitized, bloodless version less graphic than
a typical Los Angeles newscast.
In truth, rather than showing viewers "the price" of the Iraq war,
television instead transformed a war with hundreds of coalition and tens
of thousands of Iraqi casualties into something closer to a defense
contractor's training video: a lot of action, but no consequences, as if
shells simply disappeared into the air and an invisible enemy magically
ceased to exist.
That those shells ended up tearing people apart was clear to anyone who
gave it some thought, and certainly to the soldiers and civilians
embroiled in the fighting. But more to the point, it was obvious to the
reporters covering the war, many of whom were embedded with front-line
units and who saw this gruesome reality right in front of them. As CBS'
John Roberts said in Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson's oral history
"Embedded":
"It was pretty horrible to see all those guys lying around. There was
this one guy whose feet were facing me; he's lying out of the back, his
feet were facing me, he was sort of spread-eagled on the ground. As I
walked up, his body was in perfect shape, but when I got right up on top
of him, his head was missing, like it had been removed. Then there was
another guy whose head was blown into three pieces and part of his body
had been ripped off by a shell."
Yet surely the argument that the press has a responsibility to show the
true cost of war is at least as relevant – and probably more so – during
wartime as it is now. After all, the scene Roberts describes isn't any
more unsettling than the charred and mutilated remains hanging from the
bridge in Fallujah. So what changed that led networks to embrace their
journalistic "responsibility" and air those images?
One likely explanation is that while the press tends to rally around the
flag and produce uncritical coverage early in a war, if the conflict
drags on in bloody and ambiguous fashion media coverage can get more
skeptical and realistic.
In Vietnam, for example, the change in media coverage occurred following
the Tet Offensive, which called into question administration claims that
America was winning the war and peace was at hand. Whether Fallujah will
become such a symbolic turning point in this conflict will depend, as it
always does, on the White House's ability to convince the American
people that the costs paid by U.S. soldiers (and now civilians) are
worth it.
But recognize the paramount journalistic failure inherent in this trend:
Only after a war goes to hell will the media tell you the truth. Before
that, reporters and, especially, producers are too cowed by the White
House, perceived audience pressure, and these days the Patriotism Police
in the right wing media to dare risk offense by simply doing their jobs
and reporting the whole story about a war.
Walt Whitman said of the horribly bloody Civil War "the real war will
never get in the books." Sadly, Americans saw more of the grim reality
of that war – the first American conflict in which photographs of dead
soldiers were available to the public – than they do on television today.
© 2004 New Progressive Institute Inc. All rights reserved.
The media have covered up the casualties - and we've got the data to
prove it.
by Sean Aday, Senior Editor
4.29.04
Many have already lambasted the Bush Administration for trying to censor
images of coffins carrying U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, and
rightly so. It's hard to imagine a greater insult to these dead young
men and women than to willfully ignore them because their sacrifice
might be a political liability.
But it's important we remember that the administration has an accomplice
in this kind of censorship: the press.
And I'm not just talking about the photos from Dover, although it's
interesting that the successful FOIA case did not come from any
mainstream media organization but rather an intrepid website,
www.thememoryhole.org. Even more important is the self-censorship
practiced by the broadcast networks in their coverage of the Iraq war a
year ago.
Put simply, the war fought on television was devoid of blood,
particularly that spilled by U.S. soldiers.
A team of researchers at George Washington University's School of Media
and Public Affairs led by myself and my colleague Steven Livingston
recently analyzed 600 hours of coverage on CNN, Fox News Channel, and
ABC from the start of the war on March 20 to the fall of Baghdad on
April 9 to see how "real" the war looked on TV. We included the highly
watched morning shows from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., and afternoon and early
evening coverage from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m.
We even made it easy for the networks. Instead of including every story
they ran during that time (which would make percentages of casualty
stories look artificially low because many stories weren't about
fighting) we only examined stories that included images of battles
(including artillery firing and bombs falling on Baghdad), casualties of
any sort, or both.
What did we find? Let's put it this way: We have a newfound sympathy for
the Bush administration's hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
Of 1710 stories we analyzed, only 13.5 percent included any shots of
dead or wounded coalition soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, or civilians.
Similarly, of the 5087 individual shots of either battles or casualties
in those stories, only about 15 percent showed the latter.
Even rarer were pictures of the ultimate cost of war: Fewer than 4
percent of the shots we analyzed showed dead soldiers or civilians. And
even when the dead were shown, they were more likely to be hidden inside
a coffin, under a sheet, or represented by some surrogate image such as
a shoe.
These data become all the more noteworthy in contrast to the lofty
rhetoric offered by journalists who ran those gory pictures of charred
and mutilated contract workers hanging from a bridge in Fallujah a few
weeks ago. Those who used the images argued that it's the media's
responsibility to show audiences the grim realities of war. As Nightline
producer Leroy Sleavers put it:
"War is a horrible thing. It is about killing. If we try to avoid
showing pictures of bodies, if we make it too clean, then maybe we make
it too easy to go to war again. After all, these men and women are over
there in our names, whether you agree with the war or not. Shouldn't we
know what price we are asking them to pay?"
Of course, those particular images were not of soldiers, as Sleavers
seems to be suggesting, but he's right that the press shouldn't shy away
from telling the full story about a war. Yet virtually no one in the
press (with the notable exception of Nightline anchor Ted Koppel) made
this argument during the actual Iraq war a year ago. Back then the
networks willfully shied away from showing audiences the true cost of
war, opting instead for a sanitized, bloodless version less graphic than
a typical Los Angeles newscast.
In truth, rather than showing viewers "the price" of the Iraq war,
television instead transformed a war with hundreds of coalition and tens
of thousands of Iraqi casualties into something closer to a defense
contractor's training video: a lot of action, but no consequences, as if
shells simply disappeared into the air and an invisible enemy magically
ceased to exist.
That those shells ended up tearing people apart was clear to anyone who
gave it some thought, and certainly to the soldiers and civilians
embroiled in the fighting. But more to the point, it was obvious to the
reporters covering the war, many of whom were embedded with front-line
units and who saw this gruesome reality right in front of them. As CBS'
John Roberts said in Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson's oral history
"Embedded":
"It was pretty horrible to see all those guys lying around. There was
this one guy whose feet were facing me; he's lying out of the back, his
feet were facing me, he was sort of spread-eagled on the ground. As I
walked up, his body was in perfect shape, but when I got right up on top
of him, his head was missing, like it had been removed. Then there was
another guy whose head was blown into three pieces and part of his body
had been ripped off by a shell."
Yet surely the argument that the press has a responsibility to show the
true cost of war is at least as relevant – and probably more so – during
wartime as it is now. After all, the scene Roberts describes isn't any
more unsettling than the charred and mutilated remains hanging from the
bridge in Fallujah. So what changed that led networks to embrace their
journalistic "responsibility" and air those images?
One likely explanation is that while the press tends to rally around the
flag and produce uncritical coverage early in a war, if the conflict
drags on in bloody and ambiguous fashion media coverage can get more
skeptical and realistic.
In Vietnam, for example, the change in media coverage occurred following
the Tet Offensive, which called into question administration claims that
America was winning the war and peace was at hand. Whether Fallujah will
become such a symbolic turning point in this conflict will depend, as it
always does, on the White House's ability to convince the American
people that the costs paid by U.S. soldiers (and now civilians) are
worth it.
But recognize the paramount journalistic failure inherent in this trend:
Only after a war goes to hell will the media tell you the truth. Before
that, reporters and, especially, producers are too cowed by the White
House, perceived audience pressure, and these days the Patriotism Police
in the right wing media to dare risk offense by simply doing their jobs
and reporting the whole story about a war.
Walt Whitman said of the horribly bloody Civil War "the real war will
never get in the books." Sadly, Americans saw more of the grim reality
of that war – the first American conflict in which photographs of dead
soldiers were available to the public – than they do on television today.
© 2004 New Progressive Institute Inc. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Findings from a new national poll show support for impeachment, growing opposition to war on terrorism.
Reporting from an ongoing survey of public knowledge and opinion, Berkeley based NGO Retro Poll released startling results suggesting that 39% of Americans favor impeachment of President Bush. The poll, taken between April 19 and May 5 asked whether people believe that misleading Congress and the Public on weapons of mass destruction to take the country to war is grounds to impeach the President (39% said yes, 40% said no). On whether the U.S. should have invaded Iraq the poll results are consistent with findings of Gallup and other major polls (48% said yes).
Other surprising findings were that almost half of respondents (46%) favor an independent investigation of the U.S. role in the overthrow of Haiti’s democratically elected president, Juan Bertrand Aristide, and 57% favor a national moratorium on the death penalty because of the procedural problems that have put many innocent people on death row (112 released so far). Four out of five Americans also repudiate the use of torture.
As in earlier Retro Polls most support for the war in Iraq and the War on Terrorism was found among people who still think that Saddam Hussein worked with Al Qaeda (though no evidence has been published) and among the 32% of people who believe the War on Terrorism is preventing terrorism. However, 24% of Americans believe that the War on Terrorism is actually creating terrorists. In addition, 56 % of people who gave an opinion say the War on Terrorism is removing important democratic rights in the US and large percentages (50-80%) oppose various intrusive provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.
The poll reached 513 random Americans and has a “margin of error” of +/- 3.5% Full results are available at www.retropoll.org.
Marc Sapir MD, MPH
Executive Director
Retro Poll
www.retropoll.org
Reporting from an ongoing survey of public knowledge and opinion, Berkeley based NGO Retro Poll released startling results suggesting that 39% of Americans favor impeachment of President Bush. The poll, taken between April 19 and May 5 asked whether people believe that misleading Congress and the Public on weapons of mass destruction to take the country to war is grounds to impeach the President (39% said yes, 40% said no). On whether the U.S. should have invaded Iraq the poll results are consistent with findings of Gallup and other major polls (48% said yes).
Other surprising findings were that almost half of respondents (46%) favor an independent investigation of the U.S. role in the overthrow of Haiti’s democratically elected president, Juan Bertrand Aristide, and 57% favor a national moratorium on the death penalty because of the procedural problems that have put many innocent people on death row (112 released so far). Four out of five Americans also repudiate the use of torture.
As in earlier Retro Polls most support for the war in Iraq and the War on Terrorism was found among people who still think that Saddam Hussein worked with Al Qaeda (though no evidence has been published) and among the 32% of people who believe the War on Terrorism is preventing terrorism. However, 24% of Americans believe that the War on Terrorism is actually creating terrorists. In addition, 56 % of people who gave an opinion say the War on Terrorism is removing important democratic rights in the US and large percentages (50-80%) oppose various intrusive provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.
The poll reached 513 random Americans and has a “margin of error” of +/- 3.5% Full results are available at www.retropoll.org.
Marc Sapir MD, MPH
Executive Director
Retro Poll
www.retropoll.org
Thursday, May 06, 2004
Yet another example of commercial censorship compliments of Disney Co. Have no doubts that Moore will ultimately find a distributor and that, thanks to all the publicity surrounding Disney's efforts to spike the film, Fahrenheit 911 will make money hand over fist.
http://www.fair.org/activism/disney-moore.html
ACTION ALERT:
Michael Moore Film Faces Disney Censorship
May 5, 2004
The Disney corporation is forbidding its subsidiary, Miramax Films, to
distribute Michael Moore's new documentary, the New York Times reported
today.
The film, Fahrenheit 911, explores the Bush family's close personal and
financial ties to the Saudi royal family, and describes how the current
Bush administration helped evacuate relatives of Osama bin Laden from the
United States after the September 11 attacks in 2001. A Disney executive
told the New York Times that it was blocking the distribution of the film
in the United States and Canada because, in the paper's words, "Disney
caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore's
film...could alienate many."
The executive is quoted: "It's not in the interest of any major
corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political
battle."
Given that corporations like Disney control much of the public discussion
in the U.S., this avowed unwillingness to air controversial viewpoints
that might challenge the views of some customers is chilling enough. But
Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, charges that Disney has an even more
disturbing reason for blocking the film. According to Emanuel, he had a
conversation last spring with Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, who
asked him to cancel his deal with Miramax and "expressed particular
concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme
park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb,
is governor."
Disney may have another reason, not mentioned by the Times, to reject a
film that might offend the Saudi royal family: A powerful member of the
family, Al-Walid bin Talal, owns a major stake in Eurodisney and has been
instrumental in the past in bailing out the financially troubled amusement
park (AFP, 6/1/94). The project is facing a new cash crunch, and Al-Walid
has been mentioned as a potential rescuer again (L.A. Times, 1/26/04).
Whatever Disney's motivations for not wanting to release the film, it's
not because there is no audience waiting to see it. Moore's last film,
Bowling for Columbine, grossed $58 million worldwide. Unfortunately, when
giant corporations are making the decisions, the fact that millions of
people might want to see a film doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be
able to-- if that film might conflict with the corporation's other
interests.
ACTION: Please contact Disney and urge the company to allow Miramax to
distribute Fahrenheit 911.
CONTACT:
George Mitchell
Chairman
The Walt Disney Company
mailto:george.mitchell@piperrudnick.com
Phone: 818-560-1000
For another action on this subject, see Act for Change:
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=16898
http://www.fair.org/activism/disney-moore.html
ACTION ALERT:
Michael Moore Film Faces Disney Censorship
May 5, 2004
The Disney corporation is forbidding its subsidiary, Miramax Films, to
distribute Michael Moore's new documentary, the New York Times reported
today.
The film, Fahrenheit 911, explores the Bush family's close personal and
financial ties to the Saudi royal family, and describes how the current
Bush administration helped evacuate relatives of Osama bin Laden from the
United States after the September 11 attacks in 2001. A Disney executive
told the New York Times that it was blocking the distribution of the film
in the United States and Canada because, in the paper's words, "Disney
caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore's
film...could alienate many."
The executive is quoted: "It's not in the interest of any major
corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political
battle."
Given that corporations like Disney control much of the public discussion
in the U.S., this avowed unwillingness to air controversial viewpoints
that might challenge the views of some customers is chilling enough. But
Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, charges that Disney has an even more
disturbing reason for blocking the film. According to Emanuel, he had a
conversation last spring with Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, who
asked him to cancel his deal with Miramax and "expressed particular
concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme
park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb,
is governor."
Disney may have another reason, not mentioned by the Times, to reject a
film that might offend the Saudi royal family: A powerful member of the
family, Al-Walid bin Talal, owns a major stake in Eurodisney and has been
instrumental in the past in bailing out the financially troubled amusement
park (AFP, 6/1/94). The project is facing a new cash crunch, and Al-Walid
has been mentioned as a potential rescuer again (L.A. Times, 1/26/04).
Whatever Disney's motivations for not wanting to release the film, it's
not because there is no audience waiting to see it. Moore's last film,
Bowling for Columbine, grossed $58 million worldwide. Unfortunately, when
giant corporations are making the decisions, the fact that millions of
people might want to see a film doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be
able to-- if that film might conflict with the corporation's other
interests.
ACTION: Please contact Disney and urge the company to allow Miramax to
distribute Fahrenheit 911.
CONTACT:
George Mitchell
Chairman
The Walt Disney Company
mailto:george.mitchell@piperrudnick.com
Phone: 818-560-1000
For another action on this subject, see Act for Change:
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=16898
Friday, April 30, 2004
Stations to Boycott 'Nightline's' List of the Fallen
By Lisa de Moraes
Friday, April 30, 2004; Page C07
The country's largest owner of television stations announced yesterday that it has ordered its eight ABC affiliates not to carry tonight's "Nightline" broadcast, in which the names of hundreds of U.S. servicemen and women killed in Iraq will be read as their photographs appear on-screen.
"The action appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq," the Baltimore County-based Sinclair Broadcast Group said in a statement announcing that it would yank the show.
"We believe ['Nightline' anchor Ted Koppel's] motivation is to focus attention solely on people who have died in the war in order to push public opinion toward the United States getting out of Iraq," Barry Faber, Sinclair vice president and general counsel, told The TV Column.
"If they wanted to do a program on, is the cost of this war in human life worth it, and discuss that issue and explain the benefit of what [the U.S.] is doing and what the cost has been and allow people to comment on it, that public debate we would welcome.
"But without any context and any discussion of why we're there and why these lives are being sacrificed, it will unduly influence people," Faber said.
Which is ironic because just Wednesday, ABC approved expanding tonight's "Nightline" to 40 minutes to add the photos and names of the more than 200 U.S. troops killed in non-combat situations in Iraq after relatives of some of those dead complained about the omission, executive producer Leroy Sievers said.
(The show originally announced earlier this week that, because of time constraints, the telecast would include only the 500 troops actually killed in action.)
"I received a phone call from the father of a soldier who was decorated for bravery but was killed in a truck accident on his way back from the front," Sievers wrote in yesterday's "Nightline" Daily E-mail.
"His father asked how could we possibly not include his son and the others? The answer is that we couldn't."
ABC said in a statement yesterday that the "Nightline" broadcast is intended as "an expression of respect which simply seeks to honor those who have laid down their lives for this country.
"ABC News is dedicated to thoughtful and balanced coverage and reports on the events shaping our world with neither fear nor favor -- as our audience expects, deserves, and rightly demands," the news division said.
Faber estimated that the affected markets -- in Columbus, Ohio; St. Louis; Charleston, W.Va.; Pensacola, Fla.; Springfield, Mass.; Asheville, N.C.; Tallahassee; and Winston-Salem, N.C. -- represent less than 5 percent of the country's TV audience.
By way of supporting its contention that the "Nightline" broadcast is an antiwar statement, Sinclair noted that Koppel will not be reading the names of "the thousands of private citizens killed in terrorists attacks since and including the events of September 11, 2001."
"We do not oppose an honest and sincere effort to honor those who lost their lives in Iraq, but it's important at the same time to inform people about why we're there, leading to the loss of life," Faber told The TV Column.
But ABC News noted that all of its programs, including "Nightline," have reported "hundreds" of stories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and that on the first anniversary of 9/11, ABC News broadcast the names of the victims.
"The average viewer who watches the show [tonight] is not going to remember that," Faber shot back.
Sinclair has been doing its own reporting on Iraq for its 62 stations. In February, when the company sent Washington bureau chief Jon Leiberman and its "editorialist" Mark Hyman to Iraq, the Baltimore Sun reported that the men described their job as to cover "the positive 'untold stories' that the 'liberal media' don't recount during constant coverage of the attacks against U.S.-led forces and simmering political unease during the occupation of Iraq."
Faber told The TV Column yesterday that "our view was that the mainstream media focuses such a large percentage of their coverage of the U.S. efforts in Iraq on two things: one, the deaths of U.S. military members, and two, on Iraqis who are opposed to our presence in Iraq. We don't believe they're telling the whole story," he said, "so we sent people over there. We found, according to our reports, that the overwhelming majority are thrilled the U.S. is there after suffering years of oppression, and they are worried about what some radicals would do if we left."
In an interesting standoff, Sinclair yesterday tried to get an interview with Koppel for a program it has produced about its decision to pull "Nightline." It plans to air the show on its ABC stations tonight in the "Nightline" slot. Sinclair was turned down because, ABC News told The TV Column, Koppel would be airing against Koppel.
Meanwhile, ABC News's "Good Morning America" tried to book Sinclair's Hyman to discuss the controversy for this morning's telecast. Faber said Sinclair agreed, but only if the interview was live. "GMA" wanted to tape it, which, Faber noted, would give it the opportunity to edit the interview, so Sinclair turned ABC News down.
In an interview this week with the Associated Press, Koppel said he was concerned that tonight's "Nightline" broadcast not be seen as a political gesture.
"We had to be careful that it could not be seen as political on our part," he said. "I think it can be seen just as powerfully by people who are totally supportive of the war as those who aren't."
Yesterday, Sievers told the AP of tonight's telecast, "I'm somewhat surprised that anybody would object."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
By Lisa de Moraes
Friday, April 30, 2004; Page C07
The country's largest owner of television stations announced yesterday that it has ordered its eight ABC affiliates not to carry tonight's "Nightline" broadcast, in which the names of hundreds of U.S. servicemen and women killed in Iraq will be read as their photographs appear on-screen.
"The action appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq," the Baltimore County-based Sinclair Broadcast Group said in a statement announcing that it would yank the show.
"We believe ['Nightline' anchor Ted Koppel's] motivation is to focus attention solely on people who have died in the war in order to push public opinion toward the United States getting out of Iraq," Barry Faber, Sinclair vice president and general counsel, told The TV Column.
"If they wanted to do a program on, is the cost of this war in human life worth it, and discuss that issue and explain the benefit of what [the U.S.] is doing and what the cost has been and allow people to comment on it, that public debate we would welcome.
"But without any context and any discussion of why we're there and why these lives are being sacrificed, it will unduly influence people," Faber said.
Which is ironic because just Wednesday, ABC approved expanding tonight's "Nightline" to 40 minutes to add the photos and names of the more than 200 U.S. troops killed in non-combat situations in Iraq after relatives of some of those dead complained about the omission, executive producer Leroy Sievers said.
(The show originally announced earlier this week that, because of time constraints, the telecast would include only the 500 troops actually killed in action.)
"I received a phone call from the father of a soldier who was decorated for bravery but was killed in a truck accident on his way back from the front," Sievers wrote in yesterday's "Nightline" Daily E-mail.
"His father asked how could we possibly not include his son and the others? The answer is that we couldn't."
ABC said in a statement yesterday that the "Nightline" broadcast is intended as "an expression of respect which simply seeks to honor those who have laid down their lives for this country.
"ABC News is dedicated to thoughtful and balanced coverage and reports on the events shaping our world with neither fear nor favor -- as our audience expects, deserves, and rightly demands," the news division said.
Faber estimated that the affected markets -- in Columbus, Ohio; St. Louis; Charleston, W.Va.; Pensacola, Fla.; Springfield, Mass.; Asheville, N.C.; Tallahassee; and Winston-Salem, N.C. -- represent less than 5 percent of the country's TV audience.
By way of supporting its contention that the "Nightline" broadcast is an antiwar statement, Sinclair noted that Koppel will not be reading the names of "the thousands of private citizens killed in terrorists attacks since and including the events of September 11, 2001."
"We do not oppose an honest and sincere effort to honor those who lost their lives in Iraq, but it's important at the same time to inform people about why we're there, leading to the loss of life," Faber told The TV Column.
But ABC News noted that all of its programs, including "Nightline," have reported "hundreds" of stories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and that on the first anniversary of 9/11, ABC News broadcast the names of the victims.
"The average viewer who watches the show [tonight] is not going to remember that," Faber shot back.
Sinclair has been doing its own reporting on Iraq for its 62 stations. In February, when the company sent Washington bureau chief Jon Leiberman and its "editorialist" Mark Hyman to Iraq, the Baltimore Sun reported that the men described their job as to cover "the positive 'untold stories' that the 'liberal media' don't recount during constant coverage of the attacks against U.S.-led forces and simmering political unease during the occupation of Iraq."
Faber told The TV Column yesterday that "our view was that the mainstream media focuses such a large percentage of their coverage of the U.S. efforts in Iraq on two things: one, the deaths of U.S. military members, and two, on Iraqis who are opposed to our presence in Iraq. We don't believe they're telling the whole story," he said, "so we sent people over there. We found, according to our reports, that the overwhelming majority are thrilled the U.S. is there after suffering years of oppression, and they are worried about what some radicals would do if we left."
In an interesting standoff, Sinclair yesterday tried to get an interview with Koppel for a program it has produced about its decision to pull "Nightline." It plans to air the show on its ABC stations tonight in the "Nightline" slot. Sinclair was turned down because, ABC News told The TV Column, Koppel would be airing against Koppel.
Meanwhile, ABC News's "Good Morning America" tried to book Sinclair's Hyman to discuss the controversy for this morning's telecast. Faber said Sinclair agreed, but only if the interview was live. "GMA" wanted to tape it, which, Faber noted, would give it the opportunity to edit the interview, so Sinclair turned ABC News down.
In an interview this week with the Associated Press, Koppel said he was concerned that tonight's "Nightline" broadcast not be seen as a political gesture.
"We had to be careful that it could not be seen as political on our part," he said. "I think it can be seen just as powerfully by people who are totally supportive of the war as those who aren't."
Yesterday, Sievers told the AP of tonight's telecast, "I'm somewhat surprised that anybody would object."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Friday, April 09, 2004
No passion for Easter Bunny at church show
Children in audience watch as actor in rabbit costume whipped
The Associated Press
Updated: 9:37 a.m. ET April 08, 2004
GLASSPORT, Pa. - First, the Passion of the Christ. Now, the torment of the Easter Bunny?
advertisement
It may not have been as gruesome as Mel Gibson’s movie, but many parents and children got upset when a church trying to teach about Jesus’ crucifixion performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs.
People who attended Saturday’s show at Glassport’s memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, “There is no Easter bunny,” and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.
Melissa Salzmann, who brought her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. “He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped,” Salzmann said.
Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God, said the performance wasn’t meant to be offensive. Bickerton portrayed the Easter rabbit and said she tried to act with a tone of irreverence.
“The program was for all ages, not just the kids. We wanted to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter bunny, it is about Jesus Christ,” Bickerton said.
Performers broke eggs meant for an Easter egg hunt and also portrayed a drunken man and a self-mutilating woman, said Jennifer Norelli-Burke, another parent who saw the show in Glassport, a community about 10 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
“It was very disturbing,” Norelli-Burke said. “I could not believe what I saw. It wasn’t anything I was expecting.”
© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Children in audience watch as actor in rabbit costume whipped
The Associated Press
Updated: 9:37 a.m. ET April 08, 2004
GLASSPORT, Pa. - First, the Passion of the Christ. Now, the torment of the Easter Bunny?
advertisement
It may not have been as gruesome as Mel Gibson’s movie, but many parents and children got upset when a church trying to teach about Jesus’ crucifixion performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs.
People who attended Saturday’s show at Glassport’s memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, “There is no Easter bunny,” and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.
Melissa Salzmann, who brought her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. “He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped,” Salzmann said.
Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God, said the performance wasn’t meant to be offensive. Bickerton portrayed the Easter rabbit and said she tried to act with a tone of irreverence.
“The program was for all ages, not just the kids. We wanted to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter bunny, it is about Jesus Christ,” Bickerton said.
Performers broke eggs meant for an Easter egg hunt and also portrayed a drunken man and a self-mutilating woman, said Jennifer Norelli-Burke, another parent who saw the show in Glassport, a community about 10 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
“It was very disturbing,” Norelli-Burke said. “I could not believe what I saw. It wasn’t anything I was expecting.”
© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Corporate control of U.S. media subject of
McChesney talk April 13 at North Central College
NAPERVILLE, Ill. - Can citizens be sure they’re getting fair, balanced, unbiased news when just one company owns all the news outlets for a given market? Award-winning author and media expert Robert McChesney, speaking at North Central College on Tuesday, April 13, thinks not.
McChesney will speak at 7:30 in the Harold and Eva White Activities Center, 325 E. Benton Ave., on “The Emerging Struggle for Control of the Media in the United States” and how ordinary citizens can get involved. The event, originally scheduled for January but cancelled due to bad weather, is free and open to the public.
McChesney’s most recent book, The Problem of the Media, has just been published to glowing reviews. Said one reviewer, “If you are sick of the dumbed-down, hyper-commercialized media and want to know how to change it, this is must reading. An essential call to arms.”
Author or editor of eight additional books on the role of media in democratic and capitalist societies, McChesney says that a wave of mergers in recent years has led to a concentration of media ownership that is unhealthy for the future of American democracy. He argues that the media have become an anti-democratic force in the United States and, to varying degrees, around the world; that increased “choice” (including the Internet) does not necessarily translate into more objective information; and that wealthy investors, advertisers and a handful of huge media, computer and telecommunications conglomerates are the principal beneficiaries of the Information Age.
McChesney is a leader in the burgeoning media reform movement that in the past year generated over a million phone calls and pieces of mail to Congress and the White House protesting the Federal Commerce Commission's June 2nd decision to further deregulate media ownership.
Since 1998, McChesney has been at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. From 1988-1998, he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was an award-winning classroom teacher. His Ph.D. is from the University of Washington. His most recent books include The Problem of Media (2004), Our Media, Not Theirs (with John Nichols, 2002) and Rich Media, Poor Democracy (2000).
White Activities Center is handicap-accessible.
-30 -
McChesney talk April 13 at North Central College
NAPERVILLE, Ill. - Can citizens be sure they’re getting fair, balanced, unbiased news when just one company owns all the news outlets for a given market? Award-winning author and media expert Robert McChesney, speaking at North Central College on Tuesday, April 13, thinks not.
McChesney will speak at 7:30 in the Harold and Eva White Activities Center, 325 E. Benton Ave., on “The Emerging Struggle for Control of the Media in the United States” and how ordinary citizens can get involved. The event, originally scheduled for January but cancelled due to bad weather, is free and open to the public.
McChesney’s most recent book, The Problem of the Media, has just been published to glowing reviews. Said one reviewer, “If you are sick of the dumbed-down, hyper-commercialized media and want to know how to change it, this is must reading. An essential call to arms.”
Author or editor of eight additional books on the role of media in democratic and capitalist societies, McChesney says that a wave of mergers in recent years has led to a concentration of media ownership that is unhealthy for the future of American democracy. He argues that the media have become an anti-democratic force in the United States and, to varying degrees, around the world; that increased “choice” (including the Internet) does not necessarily translate into more objective information; and that wealthy investors, advertisers and a handful of huge media, computer and telecommunications conglomerates are the principal beneficiaries of the Information Age.
McChesney is a leader in the burgeoning media reform movement that in the past year generated over a million phone calls and pieces of mail to Congress and the White House protesting the Federal Commerce Commission's June 2nd decision to further deregulate media ownership.
Since 1998, McChesney has been at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. From 1988-1998, he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was an award-winning classroom teacher. His Ph.D. is from the University of Washington. His most recent books include The Problem of Media (2004), Our Media, Not Theirs (with John Nichols, 2002) and Rich Media, Poor Democracy (2000).
White Activities Center is handicap-accessible.
-30 -
Monday, March 22, 2004
A timely article about one of the leaders of the Levellers, the radically democratic religious heretics who fomented "a revolution within the revolution" during the English civil war (see Chrisopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down for the full story). As St. Clair points out, the lessons of Lilburne's life and of his unswerving dedication to the right of dissent speak to our own situation as citizens of Bush and Ashcroft's Neo-Puritan, Neo-Imperialist America. What's not to love about a relgious movement that wanted to abolish social class and declared proudly that "the ale house is the house of God"?
From Counter Punch 3/20/04
What Would Lilburne Do?
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
In Love's free state all powers so levelled be
That them affection governs more than awe.
William Davenant
In 1638, John Lilburne was put on secret trial by the Star Chamber of Charles I. His crime? The writing and distribution of seditious pamphlets that skewered the legitimacy of the monarchy and challenged the primacy of the high prelates of the Church of England. He was promptly convicted of publishing writing of "dangerous consequence and evil effect."
For these intolerable opinions, the royal tribunal sentenced him to be publicly flogged through the streets of London, from Fleet Prison, built on the tidal flats where Fleet Ditch spilled out London's sewage, to the Palace Yard at Westminster, then a kind of public showground for weekly spectacles of humiliation and torture. By one account, Lilburne was whipped by the King's executioner more than 500 hundred times, "causing his shoulders to swell almost as big as a penny loafe with the bruses of the knotted Cords."
The bloodied writer was then shackled to a pillory, where, to the amazement of the crowd of onlookers, he launched into an impassioned oration in defense of his friend Dr. John Bastick, the puritan physician and preacher. Only weeks before, Bastick's ears had been slashed off by the King's men as punishment for publishing an attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury, an essay that Lilburne had happily distributed far and wide. Lilburne gushered forth about this barbaric injustice for a few moments, before his tormentors gagged his mouth with a urine soaked rag. After enduring another two hours of torture, the guards dragged him behind a cart back to the Fleet, where he was confined in irons for the next two-and-a-half years. This was the first of "Free-Born" John Lilburne's many parries with the masters of Empire.
While in his foul cell in Fleet prison, Lilburne was kept in solitary confinement on orders of the Star Council, his lone visitor a maid named Katherine Hadley. Somehow the maid was able to sneak pen, paper and ink past the Fleet's guards to the young radical. According to Lilburne's own description, he was "lying day and night in Fetters of Iron, both hands and legges," when he began to write furiously, penning a gruesome account of his mock trial and torture, The Work of the Beast, and a scabrous assault on the Anglican bishops, Come Out of Her, My People. These pamphlets were smuggled out of Newgate, printed in the LowLands and distributed through covert networks across England to popular acclaim and royal indignation.
Oliver Cromwell, then a Puritan leader in the House of Commons, took up Lilburne's cause, giving a stirring speech in defense of the imprisoned writer. It swayed Parliament, which voted to release Lilburne from jail. Lilburne emerged from the grateful to Cromwell, but not blind to the general's dictatorial ambitions: he would later pen savage attacks on Cromwell and his censorious functionaries.
Soon Lilburne joined the Parliamentary Army, fighting with distinction against the royal forces in numerous clashes, including the battle at the Edgehill, the first major encounter of the English Civil War, before being captured at Brentford on 12th November, 1642. Once again he faced trial, this time at Oxford, for "taking up arms against the King." Lilburne was swiftly convicted and sentenced to death. But his friends in Parliament rose to his defense, threatening similar reprisals against Royalist prisoners. A prisoner exchange was arranged and Lilburne was on the loose again, leading soldiers into battle against the king's troops, eventually rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
But in 1645 Lilburne abandoned the Cromwell's New Model Army, known for singing the Psalms as they clamored into battle, after he was told that he must swear to the Solemn League and Covenant, Cromwell's equivalent of a religious loyalty oath to the Presbyterian church. Lilburne, an Independent, hated oaths and had defied the Star Chamber, in his first prosecution, by refusing to take the oath ex officio, which he argued violated the ancient right of habeas corpus.
But by now, Lilburne was plotting a more profound insurrection aimed at democratizing the army, as well as the rest of the nation. Why, he asked, should soldiers be expected to fight in a war declared by legislators for whom they could not vote? Why, he asked in the halls at Westminster, weren't the soldiers paid more? Why weren't the families of the slain compensated?
"Every free man of England, poor as well as rich, should have a vote in choosing those that are to make the law," Lilburne wrote. "All and every particular and individual man and woman, that ever breathed in the world, are by nature all equal and alike in their power, dignity, authority and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority, dominion or magisterial power one over or above another." Jefferson sounds cautious beside Lilburne's exuberant prose.
These were the opening shots of the Levellers, aimed, in the words of one observer, "to sett all things straight and rayse a parity and community in the kingdom." It would be, in Lilburne's view, a new kingdom, without a king or a House of Lords or even land lords.
The Leveller movement began as a rebellion within a rebellion, spreading from the Army to persecuted religious sects to farmers and working class people. It was a movement energized by writers, headlined by Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn, and the pamphlets flew off the presses, with more than 2,100 different tracts being printed in 1645. This prompted the repressive acts known as the Ordinances, which suppressed public assemblies, outlawed meetings of Antinomians and Anabaptists, prohibited preaching by lay preachers, and imposed strict censorship of the press. Cromwell's notorious Committee of Examinations, essentially Parliament's version of the Star Chamber, was tasked with investigating "scandalous" writing, destroying independent presses and arresting writers, publishers and vendors of documents deemed seditious. These were the oppressive laws, which prompted Milton to write the Areopagitica. Milton's passionate polemic, one the great defenses of a free press, was mild compared to the furious denunciations that poured from Lilburne's pen.
These testy impertinences landed Lilburne in Newgate again, this time on charges of libel. But 2,000 leading Londoners signed a petition on his behalf and public riots in his defense prompted his quick release. The experience only served to sharpen his resistance to Cromwell, who he saw as a dictatorial sell-out to the forces of Empire (not unlike, say, John Kerry), and the leading agent of state oppression. He fired off a threatening public letter to Cromwell, which darkly concluded: "rest assured if ever my hand is upon you, it shall be when you are in your full glory."
Lilburne and his Leveller cohorts started an underground paper called The Moderate. The title was something of a joke. After all the Leveller platform seems downright pinko by our constricted standards: they wanted to outlaw monopolies, eliminate taxes on the poor, impose term limits on members of Parliament, eliminate all restrictions on the press and religious worship, universal suffrage and assure trial by juror for all defendants.
But Lilburne was far from the most radical spirit in those topsy-turvy days. He was outflanked to his left by Gerrard Winstanley's Diggers and by the Seekers, Ranters, Antinomians and militant fen dwellers, the Earth First!ers of their time.
Like Tom Paine, he opposed the death penalty, speaking out against the execution of Charles I. "I refused to be one of his (Charles I) judges," Lilburne wrote. "They were no better than murders in taking away the King's life even though he was guilty of the crimes he was charged with. It is murder because it was done by a hand that had no authority to do it."
Cut to 1649. Lilburne is imprisoned once more in the Tower of London, along with four of his Leveller cohorts, including the brilliant polemicist Richard Overton. This time they'd attacked Cromwell head-on, accusing him of being a reactionary force roaming the land with secret police threatening all dissenters. "If our hearts were not over-charged with the sense of the present miseries and approaching dangers of the Nation, your small regard to our late serious apprehensions, would have kept us silent; but the misery, danger, and bondage threatened is so great, imminent, and apparent that whilst we have breath, and are not violently restrained, we cannot but speak, and even cry aloud, until you hear us, or God be pleased otherwise to relieve us." The charge was treason.
His wife Elizabeth, herself a forceful agitator for peace and the rights of women, wrote an urgent pamphlet in his defense, titled A Petition of Women. The prose still resonates, perhaps more now than it has in 300 years. "Would you have us keep at home in our houses, when men of such faithfulness and integrity as the four prisoners, our friends in the Tower, are fetched out of their beds and forced from their houses by soldiers, to the affrighting and undoing of themselves, their wives, children, and families? Are not our husbands, our selves, our daughters and families, by the same rule as liable to the like unjust cruelties as they?" Elizabeth got 10,000 people to sign a petition on Lilburne's behalf.
He was soon released. But arrested again within the year. This time for denouncing Cromwell's genocidal raids on Ireland. But the jury refused to convict him and Cromwell had him banished from England. Lilburne spent a few months in Holland writing incendiary pamphlets before sneaking back into England. He was soon discovered and arrested on charges of treason once again. Again the jury refused to convict. But Cromwell refused to release him, shuttling Lilburne from the Tower, to the Mount Orgueil, a dank Norman castle in Guernsey, and finally to Dover castle. One of his guards described Lilburne as being tougher to handle than "ten Cavaliers."
While locked in Dover castle, Lilburne fell under the spell of the Quakers, and became a radical pacifist, writing that he had finished with "carnal sword fightings and fleshly bustlings and contests." His pen never stopped, though. The pamphlets continued to flow until his death in 1657.
Lilburne refused to be a martyr. He faced the beast, endured prisons and tortures that would give even an inmate at Guantanamo the chills, and remained defiant and upbeat. He lived the life of an escape artist, who could talk himself into and out of trouble, almost effortlessly. His mind ran in overdrive and so, apparently, did his mouth. His friend Harry Marten, the regicide, quipped: "If the world was emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and John with Lilburne." And so it should be.
I first encountered the writings of John Lilburne in 1981 during a series of lectures on Milton and the radicals of the English revolution delivered by the great British historian Christopher Hill, author of The World Turned Upside Down. Hill was stalking other game in those lectures, but his energetic asides on Lilburne and his band of Levellers pricked my interest. Here were puritans who detested imperial ambitions and believed in unfettered free speech and absolute equality. A far cry from Nathaniel Hawthorne's band of vicious prudes, not to mention the neo-puritans, like Falwell and Robertson, then in the ascendancy.
Lilburne had long fallen out of favor with American historians and his writings were difficult to track down. I ended up devouring them at the stark library of Georgetown University (the meager library at American University, where I went to school, is a international scandal), overlooking the Potomac River and the gloom-stricken Lincoln Memorial. In those days, the chill shadow of Reagan loomed over the Republic and Lilburne's polemics on freedom and repression, gripped me like an urgent voice from the grave.
It's strange, but perhaps instructive of our current historical amnesia, that Lilburne's reputation has fallen into such neglect in the US, for his anarchic style seems more in line with the rambunctious spirit that animated the American revolution than the dour pontifications of John Locke, whose writing gets all the press clips these days.
So why do I reprise the moldering life of John Lilburne now, at this perilous moment in the life of the Republic? Well, for starters, the forces that Lilburne confronted "with violent and bitter expressions" have coalesced once again (not that they ever really dissipated, mind you) and threaten to impose their preemptive will upon the living creatures of the world. What are these forces? Militarism, religious bigotry, official censorship, prosecutorial inquisitions and torture, imperial expansion, monopolists, land grabbers, misogynists and those who buy and sell the earth and humans, too. In short, the whole sick crew.
When you survey the wreckage of the Bush imperium, it's very easy to become overwhelmed by darkness of the times, submerged in the remorseless riptide of blood and official violence. But even facing methods of torture and imprisonment that would unnerve an inmate of Guatanamo, Lilburne never surrendered to defeatism. His writing remains infused with radical purpose, a radiant call from across the centuries for collective resistance.
As you steel yourself to confront the new imperialists, ask yourself: what would Lilburne do?
Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, is just out from Common Courage Press.
From Counter Punch 3/20/04
What Would Lilburne Do?
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
In Love's free state all powers so levelled be
That them affection governs more than awe.
William Davenant
In 1638, John Lilburne was put on secret trial by the Star Chamber of Charles I. His crime? The writing and distribution of seditious pamphlets that skewered the legitimacy of the monarchy and challenged the primacy of the high prelates of the Church of England. He was promptly convicted of publishing writing of "dangerous consequence and evil effect."
For these intolerable opinions, the royal tribunal sentenced him to be publicly flogged through the streets of London, from Fleet Prison, built on the tidal flats where Fleet Ditch spilled out London's sewage, to the Palace Yard at Westminster, then a kind of public showground for weekly spectacles of humiliation and torture. By one account, Lilburne was whipped by the King's executioner more than 500 hundred times, "causing his shoulders to swell almost as big as a penny loafe with the bruses of the knotted Cords."
The bloodied writer was then shackled to a pillory, where, to the amazement of the crowd of onlookers, he launched into an impassioned oration in defense of his friend Dr. John Bastick, the puritan physician and preacher. Only weeks before, Bastick's ears had been slashed off by the King's men as punishment for publishing an attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury, an essay that Lilburne had happily distributed far and wide. Lilburne gushered forth about this barbaric injustice for a few moments, before his tormentors gagged his mouth with a urine soaked rag. After enduring another two hours of torture, the guards dragged him behind a cart back to the Fleet, where he was confined in irons for the next two-and-a-half years. This was the first of "Free-Born" John Lilburne's many parries with the masters of Empire.
While in his foul cell in Fleet prison, Lilburne was kept in solitary confinement on orders of the Star Council, his lone visitor a maid named Katherine Hadley. Somehow the maid was able to sneak pen, paper and ink past the Fleet's guards to the young radical. According to Lilburne's own description, he was "lying day and night in Fetters of Iron, both hands and legges," when he began to write furiously, penning a gruesome account of his mock trial and torture, The Work of the Beast, and a scabrous assault on the Anglican bishops, Come Out of Her, My People. These pamphlets were smuggled out of Newgate, printed in the LowLands and distributed through covert networks across England to popular acclaim and royal indignation.
Oliver Cromwell, then a Puritan leader in the House of Commons, took up Lilburne's cause, giving a stirring speech in defense of the imprisoned writer. It swayed Parliament, which voted to release Lilburne from jail. Lilburne emerged from the grateful to Cromwell, but not blind to the general's dictatorial ambitions: he would later pen savage attacks on Cromwell and his censorious functionaries.
Soon Lilburne joined the Parliamentary Army, fighting with distinction against the royal forces in numerous clashes, including the battle at the Edgehill, the first major encounter of the English Civil War, before being captured at Brentford on 12th November, 1642. Once again he faced trial, this time at Oxford, for "taking up arms against the King." Lilburne was swiftly convicted and sentenced to death. But his friends in Parliament rose to his defense, threatening similar reprisals against Royalist prisoners. A prisoner exchange was arranged and Lilburne was on the loose again, leading soldiers into battle against the king's troops, eventually rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
But in 1645 Lilburne abandoned the Cromwell's New Model Army, known for singing the Psalms as they clamored into battle, after he was told that he must swear to the Solemn League and Covenant, Cromwell's equivalent of a religious loyalty oath to the Presbyterian church. Lilburne, an Independent, hated oaths and had defied the Star Chamber, in his first prosecution, by refusing to take the oath ex officio, which he argued violated the ancient right of habeas corpus.
But by now, Lilburne was plotting a more profound insurrection aimed at democratizing the army, as well as the rest of the nation. Why, he asked, should soldiers be expected to fight in a war declared by legislators for whom they could not vote? Why, he asked in the halls at Westminster, weren't the soldiers paid more? Why weren't the families of the slain compensated?
"Every free man of England, poor as well as rich, should have a vote in choosing those that are to make the law," Lilburne wrote. "All and every particular and individual man and woman, that ever breathed in the world, are by nature all equal and alike in their power, dignity, authority and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority, dominion or magisterial power one over or above another." Jefferson sounds cautious beside Lilburne's exuberant prose.
These were the opening shots of the Levellers, aimed, in the words of one observer, "to sett all things straight and rayse a parity and community in the kingdom." It would be, in Lilburne's view, a new kingdom, without a king or a House of Lords or even land lords.
The Leveller movement began as a rebellion within a rebellion, spreading from the Army to persecuted religious sects to farmers and working class people. It was a movement energized by writers, headlined by Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn, and the pamphlets flew off the presses, with more than 2,100 different tracts being printed in 1645. This prompted the repressive acts known as the Ordinances, which suppressed public assemblies, outlawed meetings of Antinomians and Anabaptists, prohibited preaching by lay preachers, and imposed strict censorship of the press. Cromwell's notorious Committee of Examinations, essentially Parliament's version of the Star Chamber, was tasked with investigating "scandalous" writing, destroying independent presses and arresting writers, publishers and vendors of documents deemed seditious. These were the oppressive laws, which prompted Milton to write the Areopagitica. Milton's passionate polemic, one the great defenses of a free press, was mild compared to the furious denunciations that poured from Lilburne's pen.
These testy impertinences landed Lilburne in Newgate again, this time on charges of libel. But 2,000 leading Londoners signed a petition on his behalf and public riots in his defense prompted his quick release. The experience only served to sharpen his resistance to Cromwell, who he saw as a dictatorial sell-out to the forces of Empire (not unlike, say, John Kerry), and the leading agent of state oppression. He fired off a threatening public letter to Cromwell, which darkly concluded: "rest assured if ever my hand is upon you, it shall be when you are in your full glory."
Lilburne and his Leveller cohorts started an underground paper called The Moderate. The title was something of a joke. After all the Leveller platform seems downright pinko by our constricted standards: they wanted to outlaw monopolies, eliminate taxes on the poor, impose term limits on members of Parliament, eliminate all restrictions on the press and religious worship, universal suffrage and assure trial by juror for all defendants.
But Lilburne was far from the most radical spirit in those topsy-turvy days. He was outflanked to his left by Gerrard Winstanley's Diggers and by the Seekers, Ranters, Antinomians and militant fen dwellers, the Earth First!ers of their time.
Like Tom Paine, he opposed the death penalty, speaking out against the execution of Charles I. "I refused to be one of his (Charles I) judges," Lilburne wrote. "They were no better than murders in taking away the King's life even though he was guilty of the crimes he was charged with. It is murder because it was done by a hand that had no authority to do it."
Cut to 1649. Lilburne is imprisoned once more in the Tower of London, along with four of his Leveller cohorts, including the brilliant polemicist Richard Overton. This time they'd attacked Cromwell head-on, accusing him of being a reactionary force roaming the land with secret police threatening all dissenters. "If our hearts were not over-charged with the sense of the present miseries and approaching dangers of the Nation, your small regard to our late serious apprehensions, would have kept us silent; but the misery, danger, and bondage threatened is so great, imminent, and apparent that whilst we have breath, and are not violently restrained, we cannot but speak, and even cry aloud, until you hear us, or God be pleased otherwise to relieve us." The charge was treason.
His wife Elizabeth, herself a forceful agitator for peace and the rights of women, wrote an urgent pamphlet in his defense, titled A Petition of Women. The prose still resonates, perhaps more now than it has in 300 years. "Would you have us keep at home in our houses, when men of such faithfulness and integrity as the four prisoners, our friends in the Tower, are fetched out of their beds and forced from their houses by soldiers, to the affrighting and undoing of themselves, their wives, children, and families? Are not our husbands, our selves, our daughters and families, by the same rule as liable to the like unjust cruelties as they?" Elizabeth got 10,000 people to sign a petition on Lilburne's behalf.
He was soon released. But arrested again within the year. This time for denouncing Cromwell's genocidal raids on Ireland. But the jury refused to convict him and Cromwell had him banished from England. Lilburne spent a few months in Holland writing incendiary pamphlets before sneaking back into England. He was soon discovered and arrested on charges of treason once again. Again the jury refused to convict. But Cromwell refused to release him, shuttling Lilburne from the Tower, to the Mount Orgueil, a dank Norman castle in Guernsey, and finally to Dover castle. One of his guards described Lilburne as being tougher to handle than "ten Cavaliers."
While locked in Dover castle, Lilburne fell under the spell of the Quakers, and became a radical pacifist, writing that he had finished with "carnal sword fightings and fleshly bustlings and contests." His pen never stopped, though. The pamphlets continued to flow until his death in 1657.
Lilburne refused to be a martyr. He faced the beast, endured prisons and tortures that would give even an inmate at Guantanamo the chills, and remained defiant and upbeat. He lived the life of an escape artist, who could talk himself into and out of trouble, almost effortlessly. His mind ran in overdrive and so, apparently, did his mouth. His friend Harry Marten, the regicide, quipped: "If the world was emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and John with Lilburne." And so it should be.
I first encountered the writings of John Lilburne in 1981 during a series of lectures on Milton and the radicals of the English revolution delivered by the great British historian Christopher Hill, author of The World Turned Upside Down. Hill was stalking other game in those lectures, but his energetic asides on Lilburne and his band of Levellers pricked my interest. Here were puritans who detested imperial ambitions and believed in unfettered free speech and absolute equality. A far cry from Nathaniel Hawthorne's band of vicious prudes, not to mention the neo-puritans, like Falwell and Robertson, then in the ascendancy.
Lilburne had long fallen out of favor with American historians and his writings were difficult to track down. I ended up devouring them at the stark library of Georgetown University (the meager library at American University, where I went to school, is a international scandal), overlooking the Potomac River and the gloom-stricken Lincoln Memorial. In those days, the chill shadow of Reagan loomed over the Republic and Lilburne's polemics on freedom and repression, gripped me like an urgent voice from the grave.
It's strange, but perhaps instructive of our current historical amnesia, that Lilburne's reputation has fallen into such neglect in the US, for his anarchic style seems more in line with the rambunctious spirit that animated the American revolution than the dour pontifications of John Locke, whose writing gets all the press clips these days.
So why do I reprise the moldering life of John Lilburne now, at this perilous moment in the life of the Republic? Well, for starters, the forces that Lilburne confronted "with violent and bitter expressions" have coalesced once again (not that they ever really dissipated, mind you) and threaten to impose their preemptive will upon the living creatures of the world. What are these forces? Militarism, religious bigotry, official censorship, prosecutorial inquisitions and torture, imperial expansion, monopolists, land grabbers, misogynists and those who buy and sell the earth and humans, too. In short, the whole sick crew.
When you survey the wreckage of the Bush imperium, it's very easy to become overwhelmed by darkness of the times, submerged in the remorseless riptide of blood and official violence. But even facing methods of torture and imprisonment that would unnerve an inmate of Guatanamo, Lilburne never surrendered to defeatism. His writing remains infused with radical purpose, a radiant call from across the centuries for collective resistance.
As you steel yourself to confront the new imperialists, ask yourself: what would Lilburne do?
Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, is just out from Common Courage Press.
Monday, March 15, 2004
PBS censors clamp down on Emma Goldman's nipple!
If there were any justice in the world, every major paper in the country would pick up the story below and run it under the headline suggested above. Sadly, only the tabloids would have the daring.
Even Buttoned-Down PBS Gets Caught in the Wringer
By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page C07
Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone confided to investors this week that "a
woman's breast is not such a big deal" to him. We wish him a speedy
recovery.
Ironic, isn't it, that thanks to Mr. Redstone's MTV and CBS, which
produced and aired, respectively, the little Super Bowl halftime number
that's come to be known as the Breast Heard Round the World, TV execs
all over the country have been engaged in vigorous debate about that
part of the female anatomy which no longer holds any interest for the
80-year-old Mr. Redstone.
Take PBS station WGBH, for example, where suits went back and forth
about how much cleavage to show in its upcoming "American Experience"
documentary "Emma Goldman."
You cannot expect to make a documentary about a colorful 20th-century
anarchist and advocate of free speech and free love -- a woman J. Edgar
Hoover once called one of the most dangerous people in America --
without including a little anarchy, a little free speech and a little
free love in the piece.
In calmer times, this would not be a problem.
But since Justin Timberlake unleashed Janet Jackson's right breast
during the Super Bowl halftime show and it began its scorched-earth
march through the TV industry, it's a big problem.
So the executive producer of "American Experience" agreed to cut a
couple of seconds of a scene re-creation in the documentary, in which
Goldman's lover is seen unbuttoning the front of her chemise, revealing
about as much cleavage as Susan Sarandon showed off in that black number
she wore to this year's Academy Awards.
According to "American Experience" executive producer Mark Samels,
during the normal finishing process this documentary, like all "American
Experience" documentaries, went to an attorney at WGBH for what's called
"errors and omissions" analysis. While screening the project, Samels
reports, the attorney raised concerns about the love scene.
Here is where Samels's version of what happened differs from that of the
public TV source who was among those who brought this to the attention
of The TV Column.
According to our source, the showing of cleavage was what knotted the
attorney's knickers; he thought it would be objectionable to the Federal
Communications Commission, which has been on a sort of shock-and-awe
campaign against TV smut -- at least the broadcast stuff -- since its
chief wandered in on the halftime show while watching the Super Bowl
with his family.
According to Samels, it wasn't the cleavage that had the attorney
grinding his teeth; it was the question of nipplage.
Mel Buckland, who wrote, produced and directed the documentary, declined
to comment for this article, nervously telling The TV Column that she
had been expressly told by folks at "American Experience" not to discuss
the situation and explaining that she was afraid of the career
consequences if she did talk to the press. (Just to refresh your memory:
This is still about a documentary on the life of a woman who lobbied in
this country, back in the early 1900s, for freedom of -- among other
things -- speech.)
Samels says the "American Experience" team assured the WGBH attorney
that there was no nipplage in the scene.
According to Samels, the attorney passed along the documentary to an
outside attorney who does work for WGBH on communications issues, for a
second opinion.
"That person also agreed that it looked like a full breast was exposed,
which was a pretty common-sense line of decency we haven't crossed,"
Samels explained.
However, a spokeswoman for "American Experience" with whom we spoke
yesterday afternoon said the outside attorney did not screen the
documentary; rather, the in-house attorney had described the scene in
question and the outside attorney advised that "he didn't perceive any
legal issues with it."
Back to Samels, who tells The TV Column that the "American Experience"
people "went back and did a frame-by-frame analysis, because we had only
looked at it 50 times while making it.
"I didn't see a fully exposed breast, and sure enough, there isn't," he
said.
"What there is is a shadow of a blouse which gives the appearance of the
revealing of a nipple, the full breast."
That, he says, is why they agreed to remove what he calls 51 frames and
our source says is about two seconds of the love scene.
Samels insists, however, that even after the nip and tuck, there is
"enough cleavage to drive a truck through in this scene."
We will pause here for a minute while you try to get that image out of
your head.
Our public TV source and Samels do agree that it's pretty ironic that a
documentary about a woman who preached free love and free speech should
be mired in a discussion about whether it's okay to show a breast on TV.
"What I love about it is that it shows the country has never gotten away
from its Puritanical roots," Samels said. "Which once again calls for
exploration of American history. You can only understand who we are by
knowing how we got this way."
That, of course, is a shameless plug for "American Experience," which
bills itself as television's longest-running history series.
Oh well, that's showbiz.
Note: The American Experience documentary on Emma Goldman airs on Mon.,
April 12. Check out the website
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldman/index.html for more information.]
If there were any justice in the world, every major paper in the country would pick up the story below and run it under the headline suggested above. Sadly, only the tabloids would have the daring.
Even Buttoned-Down PBS Gets Caught in the Wringer
By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page C07
Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone confided to investors this week that "a
woman's breast is not such a big deal" to him. We wish him a speedy
recovery.
Ironic, isn't it, that thanks to Mr. Redstone's MTV and CBS, which
produced and aired, respectively, the little Super Bowl halftime number
that's come to be known as the Breast Heard Round the World, TV execs
all over the country have been engaged in vigorous debate about that
part of the female anatomy which no longer holds any interest for the
80-year-old Mr. Redstone.
Take PBS station WGBH, for example, where suits went back and forth
about how much cleavage to show in its upcoming "American Experience"
documentary "Emma Goldman."
You cannot expect to make a documentary about a colorful 20th-century
anarchist and advocate of free speech and free love -- a woman J. Edgar
Hoover once called one of the most dangerous people in America --
without including a little anarchy, a little free speech and a little
free love in the piece.
In calmer times, this would not be a problem.
But since Justin Timberlake unleashed Janet Jackson's right breast
during the Super Bowl halftime show and it began its scorched-earth
march through the TV industry, it's a big problem.
So the executive producer of "American Experience" agreed to cut a
couple of seconds of a scene re-creation in the documentary, in which
Goldman's lover is seen unbuttoning the front of her chemise, revealing
about as much cleavage as Susan Sarandon showed off in that black number
she wore to this year's Academy Awards.
According to "American Experience" executive producer Mark Samels,
during the normal finishing process this documentary, like all "American
Experience" documentaries, went to an attorney at WGBH for what's called
"errors and omissions" analysis. While screening the project, Samels
reports, the attorney raised concerns about the love scene.
Here is where Samels's version of what happened differs from that of the
public TV source who was among those who brought this to the attention
of The TV Column.
According to our source, the showing of cleavage was what knotted the
attorney's knickers; he thought it would be objectionable to the Federal
Communications Commission, which has been on a sort of shock-and-awe
campaign against TV smut -- at least the broadcast stuff -- since its
chief wandered in on the halftime show while watching the Super Bowl
with his family.
According to Samels, it wasn't the cleavage that had the attorney
grinding his teeth; it was the question of nipplage.
Mel Buckland, who wrote, produced and directed the documentary, declined
to comment for this article, nervously telling The TV Column that she
had been expressly told by folks at "American Experience" not to discuss
the situation and explaining that she was afraid of the career
consequences if she did talk to the press. (Just to refresh your memory:
This is still about a documentary on the life of a woman who lobbied in
this country, back in the early 1900s, for freedom of -- among other
things -- speech.)
Samels says the "American Experience" team assured the WGBH attorney
that there was no nipplage in the scene.
According to Samels, the attorney passed along the documentary to an
outside attorney who does work for WGBH on communications issues, for a
second opinion.
"That person also agreed that it looked like a full breast was exposed,
which was a pretty common-sense line of decency we haven't crossed,"
Samels explained.
However, a spokeswoman for "American Experience" with whom we spoke
yesterday afternoon said the outside attorney did not screen the
documentary; rather, the in-house attorney had described the scene in
question and the outside attorney advised that "he didn't perceive any
legal issues with it."
Back to Samels, who tells The TV Column that the "American Experience"
people "went back and did a frame-by-frame analysis, because we had only
looked at it 50 times while making it.
"I didn't see a fully exposed breast, and sure enough, there isn't," he
said.
"What there is is a shadow of a blouse which gives the appearance of the
revealing of a nipple, the full breast."
That, he says, is why they agreed to remove what he calls 51 frames and
our source says is about two seconds of the love scene.
Samels insists, however, that even after the nip and tuck, there is
"enough cleavage to drive a truck through in this scene."
We will pause here for a minute while you try to get that image out of
your head.
Our public TV source and Samels do agree that it's pretty ironic that a
documentary about a woman who preached free love and free speech should
be mired in a discussion about whether it's okay to show a breast on TV.
"What I love about it is that it shows the country has never gotten away
from its Puritanical roots," Samels said. "Which once again calls for
exploration of American history. You can only understand who we are by
knowing how we got this way."
That, of course, is a shameless plug for "American Experience," which
bills itself as television's longest-running history series.
Oh well, that's showbiz.
Note: The American Experience documentary on Emma Goldman airs on Mon.,
April 12. Check out the website
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldman/index.html for more information.]
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