Published on Sunday, August 22, 2004 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Bush Weds Religion, Politics to Form World View

by David Domke

American presidents beginning with George Washington have included religious language in their public addresses. Claims of the United States as a divinely chosen nation and requests for God to bless U.S. decisions and actions have been commonplace. Scholars have labeled such discourse "civil religion," in which political leaders emphasize religious symbols and transcendent principles to engender a sense of unity and shared national identity. George W. Bush is doing something altogether different. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, the president and his administration have converged a religious fundamentalist worldview with a political agenda -- a distinctly partisan one, wrapped in the mantle of national interest but crafted by and for only those who share their outlook. It is a modern form of political fundamentalism -- that is, the adaptation of a self-proclaimed conservative Christian rectitude, by way of strategic language choices and communication approaches designed for a mass-media culture, into political policy. Motivated by this ideology, the Bush administration has sought to control public discourse and to engender a climate of nationalism in which the public views presidential support as a patriotic duty and Congress (and the United Nations) is compelled to rubber-stamp administration policies. The goal is a national mood of spiritual superiority under the guise of a just sovereignty. The ultimate irony is that in combating the Islamic extremists responsible for Sept. 11, the administration has crafted, pursued and engendered its own brand of political fundamentalism -- one that, while clearly tailored to a modern democracy, nonetheless functions ideologically in a manner similar to the version offered by the terrorists. All of this has a facade of merely politics as usual. It is not. Unfortunately, as too often occurs with matters of religion, the mainstream news media have missed the story almost entirely, and thus so has much of the U.S. public. Bush is the most publicly religious president since at least Woodrow Wilson. Ronald Reagan had great appeal to religious conservatives, but he was far less outspoken about religion -- a point noted in a June eulogy of the late president by Ron Reagan, who said his father did not "(wear) his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage," a comment many interpreted as a critique of the current president. Indeed, Bush speaks often about his "born-again" faith and regularly references a divine power in public statements, a practice that religion scholar Martin E. Marty has termed "God talk." That the president -- any president -- is a person of religious faith is generally viewed by the U.S. public in favorable terms, the better to be grounded when facing momentous decisions. I share this view because I know how central the Christian faith is to my life and to many others I know and respect. Invocations of a higher power, when emphasizing inclusive and transcendent principles, seem to me to be legitimate and adroit rhetoric for a leader of 290 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom believe in God in some form. What is deeply troubling about Bush's religiosity, however, is that he consistently evinces a certainty that he knows God's will -- and he then acts upon this certainty in ways that affect billions of humans. For example, in his address before Congress and a national television audience nine days after the terrorist attacks, Bush declared: "The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." Similarly, in the 2003 State of the Union address, with the conflict in Iraq imminent, he declared: "Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." These are not requests for divine favor; they are declarations of divine wishes. From this position, only short theological and rhetorical steps are required to justify U.S. actions. For instance, at a December 2003 news conference, Bush said: "I believe, firmly believe -- and you've heard me say this a lot, and I say it a lot because I truly believe it -- that freedom is the Almighty God's gift to every person, every man and woman who lives in this world. That's what I believe. And the arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in Iraq. Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq." Further, this view of divinely ordained policy infuses the public discourse of several administration leaders, irrespective of their particular religious outlook. I systematically examined hundreds of administration public communications -- by the president, John Ashcroft, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld -- about the "war on terrorism" in the 20 months between Sept. 11, 2001, and the end of "major combat" in Iraq in spring 2003. This research showed that the administration's public communications contained four characteristics simultaneously rooted in religious fundamentalism while offering political capital: Simplistic, black-and-white conceptions of the political landscape, most notably good vs. evil and security vs. peril. Calls for immediate action on administration policies as a necessary part of the nation's "calling" and "mission" against terrorism. Declarations about the will of God for America and for the spread of U.S. conceptions of freedom and liberty. Claims that dissent from the administration is unpatriotic and a threat to the nation and globe. In combination, these characteristics have transformed Bush's "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" policy to "Either you are with us, or you are against God." To the great misfortune of American democracy and the global public, such a view looks, sounds and feels remarkably similar to that of the terrorists it is fighting. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to see how the perspective of Osama bin Laden, that he and his followers are delivering God's wishes for the United States (and others who share Western customs and policies), is much different from the perspective of George W. Bush, that the United States is delivering God's wishes to the Taliban or Iraq. Clearly, flying airplanes into buildings in order to kill innocent people is an indefensible, immoral activity. So, too, some traditional allies told the Bush administration, is an unprovoked pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation. In both instances, the aggression manifested in a form that was available to the leaders. Fundamentalism in the White House is a difference in degree, not kind, from fundamentalism exercised in dark, damp caves. Democracy is always the loser. The ascendancy of the administration's political fundamentalism after Sept. 11 was facilitated by mainstream U.S. news coverage, which substantially echoed the administration's views. That became apparent when I analyzed how 20 leading and geographically diverse newspapers and the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC covered each of Bush's national addresses (15 in 20 months, a remarkable pace) and the administration's push for key "war on terrorism" policies and goals in 2001 and 2002, including passage of the USA Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and congressional and U.N. resolutions regarding Iraq. This analysis revealed that news media consistently amplified the words and ideas of the president and other administration leaders. They did that by echoing throughout their coverage similar claims made by multiple administration members, thereby having the administration's perspectives establish the terms of public discourse. For example, only two of more than 300 editorials that I analyzed in response to the president's national addresses criticized the administration's description of the campaign against terrorism as an epic struggle of good vs. evil. None questioned his explicit declarations of God's will. With so many around the globe expressing a different view during these 20 months, by echoing these fundamentalist messages within these editorials, the press failed its readers. To be clear, the U.S. news media did not emphasize the administration's messages to the same extent as the White House did during this time. Such an equation would imply that the commercial, independent news media merely served as mouthpieces, and that is not the case. Disagreement with the administration sometimes appeared in news stories--either as a presentation of different factual information or of divergent observations by other sources -- and in newspaper editorials. Coverage also included occasional strong criticisms of government policy, in particular in regard to the administration's diplomatic difficulties in early 2003. The chief failure of members of the mainstream media, though, is that they did not adequately cover the deeply religious motivations to the administration's actions and, as a result, too rarely questioned the administration's religious-cum-political discourses. Once these fundamentalist discourses became consistently amplified -- but not analyzed -- in leading media outlets, the administration gained the rhetorical high ground, and that went far in determining policy decisions. While Christian conservatives and hard-line neo-conservatives may see the developments after Sept. 11 in a positive light (after all, one might say that God and the United States have been given a larger piece of the planet with which to work), all Americans should be leery of any government that merges religiosity into political ends. Noble ideals such as freedom and liberty are clearly worth pursuing, but the administration promoted those concepts with its left hand while using its right hand to treat others -- including many U.S. citizens -- in an authoritarian, dismissive manner. Unfortunately, the Bush administration appears to be the latest entry in a historical record that shows that beliefs and claims about divine leading are no guarantee that one will exercise power in a consistently liberating, egalitarian manner. David Domke, a former journalist, is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the relationships among political leaders, news coverage and public opinion in the United States. He is the author of "God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the 'War on Terror,' and the Echoing Press" (Pluto Press, 2004). The book is available in the United States through the University of Michigan Press.

Wal-Mart Tries to Shine Its Image by Supporting Public Broadcasting
August 16, 2004
By CONSTANCE L. HAYS , New York Times

Wal-Mart, stung by criticism of its labor practices,
expansion plans and other business tactics, is turning to
public radio, public television and even journalists in
training to try to improve its image.

So far this year, the company has become a sponsor on
National Public Radio, where recorded messages promote its
stores. It has underwritten a popular talk show, "Tavis
Smiley," accompanied by similar promotional messages, on a
public television station in California.

And earlier this month, Wal-Mart announced plans to award
$500,000 in scholarships to minority students at journalism
programs around the country, including Howard University,
University of Southern California and Columbia University.

Wal-Mart has not supported any of those organizations in
the past. But as the company outgrows its rural roots and
moves into suburbs and cities, it is encountering more
resistance from people whose traditions and values may be
different from those of Wal-Mart's historic customers.

The company has been faulted for its selective approach
toward the publications that it sells, which has included
banning three men's magazines and ordering plastic covers
to conceal what it considered "uncomfortable" headlines on
several women's titles, including Glamour and Redbook. It
has refused to sell music albums with what it deems
offensive lyrics, and manufacturers acknowledge producing
sanitized versions of popular CD's in order to maintain a
presence in the giant retailer's stores.

Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said the
journalism scholarships were "a first of their kind" for
the retailer, and came about because of the recent
publicity around its business practices.

"We've really been in the spotlight and I think that's made
us especially sensitive to the need for balanced coverage,"
Ms. Williams said. "It doesn't matter if the subject is
Wal-Mart or something else. You just aren't going to have
that unless different perspectives are represented."
Without diversity, she added, "the result can be narrower
thinking as news events are presented to the public."

Influencing that presentation may be at the heart of the
effort, although Ms. Williams said there was "no hidden
agenda here" and added that it probably would have been
done even if Wal-Mart had not come under scrutiny.

John Siegenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center at
Vanderbilt University, said, "Wal-Mart is doing what most
corporations do: when they feel pain, they try to salve the
wound." He predicted that "they may get less out of it than
they expect to," but he added that "if it helps minority
journalism, I hope they salve it with more than half a
million dollars."

As for public radio, Ms. Williams said the company sought
the demographic that National Public Radio listeners
represent. The goal is to "reach community leaders and help
them understand the value that we bring to their areas."

"We want those folks to know that having a Wal-Mart in
their town is a good thing," she said.

A spokeswoman for NPR, Jenny Lawhorn, said its audience
consisted of "intelligent and well-educated people" who
"tend to be business leaders and tend to be engaged in the
civic process." According to a recent survey, about 56
percent of them are Wal-Mart shoppers, she said, compared
with 66 percent of the general population.

Wooing community leaders fits well into Wal-Mart's plans.
The company has stumbled in recent months against
opposition to its stores. In April, its effort to win voter
support for a store in the Inglewood, Calif., suburb of Los
Angeles was defeated after the company took the unusual
step of putting the issue on the ballot. An attempt to
build a store in Chicago was rejected, although a second
store was approved, while plans to open a store in downtown
New Orleans have been slowed by opposition as well.

The company has also been criticized by labor unions, which
say Wal-Mart fights their organizing efforts. In
California, unionized supermarket workers staged a lengthy
strike earlier this year seeking benefits that stores said
they could not afford because they needed to compete with
Wal-Mart.

Neither Wal-Mart nor NPR would reveal what it pays as an
NPR sponsor. The contract began Feb. 16 and extends until
January. Total corporate financing is expected to reach $30
million this year, Ms. Lawhorn said. As part of its NPR
arrangement, Wal-Mart is described several ways when it is
mentioned as an underwriter on the air. The descriptions
include the following: "Wal-Mart. Providing jobs and
opportunities for millions of Americans of all ages and all
walks of life." Another says the company is "bringing
communities job opportunities, goods and services and
support for neighborhood programs."

NPR has received letters and e-mail messages from listeners
since the Wal-Mart underwriting information began to be
broadcast. One listener wrote: "What a disappointment!
Maybe next it will be Halliburton." The role of Wal-Mart
was taken up by NPR's ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, who wrote
in his NPR.org online column, "Wal-Mart symbolizes values
that some listeners believe to be antithetical to the
values of public radio" and suggested that "one way that
NPR could prove that underwriting has no effect on its
integrity is for NPR to produce more hard-hitting
interviews, more investigative reporting and yes, even more
scandalizing satires."

The company also underwrites "Tavis Smiley," a talk show on
KCET, the public television station in Los Angeles. The
program began in January and Wal-Mart was on board
immediately, a spokesman for the show, Joel Brokaw, said.
In late March, Mr. Smiley interviewed Wal-Mart's chief
executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., who is seldom made available
to reporters. After disclosing twice that Wal-Mart
sponsored the show, Mr. Smiley went on to ask his guest
about Wal-Mart's image problems. Mr. Brokaw said he did not
know how much Wal-Mart paid to be a sponsor.

The journalism plan evolved separately, Ms. Williams said.
Ten journalism schools will receive $50,000 each, which
will be distributed as $2,500 scholarships to four students
at each school. The scholarships will be awarded in each
student's junior year and can be renewed for the senior
year as well.

The recipients chosen include Arizona State University and
Syracuse University. Administrators at the universities
said the selections came as a complete surprise. In most
cases, corporate donations for scholarships are unheard of,
the administrators said, unless the corporation is involved
in the news business or another communications medium like
advertising.

"It's kind of a reach to expect companies that don't see
themselves as part of the media world to support journalism
education," said Steve Doig, the interim director of the
Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at
Arizona State, where some scholarships have been provided
by newspaper companies like Gannett.

Mr. Doig, a former reporter for the Miami Herald, said that
he was aware of Wal-Mart's practices with magazines but
that did not prevent him from accepting the scholarship
money.

"It's not the American Nazi Party," he said. "I don't see
Wal-Mart as problematic enough to miss the opportunity they
are offering to several of our students."

He added: "Both the banning of certain magazines and the
decision to give money to journalism schools are calculated
behaviors and not necessarily contrary. I don't support
banning newspapers or any particular publication, but a
company has the right to decide what it wants to sell."

Wal-Mart also plans to include the scholarship students at
next year's annual shareholder meeting, Ms. Williams said.

"They will be guests in the audience, and we think that
would be a great educational experience for them," she
said. They may also have tours of the company's offices in
Bentonville, Ark., as well as a warehouse nearby.

Tom Bowers, dean of the School of Journalism and Mass
Communication at the University of North Carolina in Chapel
Hill, said the move was "saying to the public, look at the
good thing we're doing." North Carolina was not one of the
journalism schools designated by Wal-Mart for scholarships,
but the university awards about $100,000, some from media
companies, to students every year, Mr. Bowers said.

"The people who win our scholarships typically don't go to
any national meetings and aren't put on display by these
corporate donors," he said. "We certainly make sure there
is no quid pro quo on these. The only obligation is to
write them a letter and thank them for the scholarship. The
student isn't expected to do anything for the company."

Of the programs chosen, only the University of Southern
California's Annenberg School has received corporate
funding from nonmedia companies in the past. A spokesman,
Geoffrey Baum, said the school had gotten money from Nissan
and General Motors, as well as from Raytheon and Home Depot
for public-relations programs. Some journalism programs are
in states where Wal-Mart has opened a large number of
stores. The University of Florida and the University of
Texas made the list; those states have nearly 600 of
Wal-Mart's 3,596 stores, according to Wal-Mart.

Jannette L. Dates, dean of Howard University's John H.
Johnson School of Communications, hopes that Wal-Mart's
scholarship will encourage other nonmedia companies to
contribute.

"I'm going to go after some of those others and say 'See,
Wal-Mart did this, why don't you?' " she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/business/16walmart.html?ex=1093708926&ei=1&en=9ac89bda624039b5

Chicago Media Action Study Finds WTTW's "Chicago Tonight" Favors Affluent Whites, Ignores People of Color and Workers

According to a study released today by media watchdog Chicago Media Action, the topics, sources and views aired on Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW's flagship public affairs program, Chicago Tonight, consistently cater to the interests of advertisers and white affluent Chicagoans while ignoring news and perspectives of interest to other constituencies. The study, "Chicago Tonight: Elites, Affluence and Advertising", covers thirty episodes of Chicago Tonight, twenty of which aired in September 2003, and ten episodes that aired in January and February 2004.

"Public television is supposed to provide us with an alternative to commercial broadcasting. Yet CMA's study demonstrates that WTTW's signature news and public affairs program showcases the same white, male, professional voices that already dominate commercial TV news," explained Stephen Macek, Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at North Central College in Naperville and a collaborator on the study.

James Owens, principal author of Chicago Media Action's research effort, said "Over 40% of the Chicago area is made up of people of color - 58% in the City - but 79% of the guests on Chicago Tonight are white. During our study, Chicago Tonight presented only white guests in stories on business and economy. In addition, on stories of business and economy during our study, corporate representatives made up over 47% of the guests, while labor representatives made up less than 5% of the guests and no public interest representatives appeared."

Citizen activists, public interest representatives and labor representatives accounted for only 3.1% of the guests on Chicago Tonight in our study. Average citizens, with extremely rare exception, were permitted to give their opinions only in entertainment segments on Chicago Tonight. Owens further explained, "We live in a time of unprecedented public anger over the media's shortcomings in the performance of its democratic function, with no less than the New York Times apologizing for huge journalistic errors regarding Iraq. It is essential that we take this opportunity to look closely at public broadcasting too. And fix it."

Chicago Media Action co-organizer and study contributor Scott Sanders stated: "We call for the creation of a carefully selected local commission to investigate all the changes necessary to ensure that underrepresented communities are given direct, hands-on control of programming on WTTW that best meets their needs. And we call for the creation by WTTW of programming that provides for the discussion of issues of special interest to African Americans, hosted by African Americans, and programming that provides a live monthly forum for the public to discuss issues of debate and controversy, including discussion of independent documentaries. Lastly, we call for an independent audit of the station's finances due to the theft and gross negligence cited elsewhere."

Sanders continued: "The working people, communities of color and other diverse constituencies in Chicago are getting shut out by the elite class and the commercial interests which set the agenda for Chicago Tonight. Thirty-nine out of WTTW's board of sixty self-elected trustees run or control a corporation. Twenty-six trustees run or control a financial firm. Our study proves in many ways what we have all sensed for some time - that the station's call letters really do stand for 'Winnetka Talks To Wilmette'. We're going to have to fully discuss and rethink the way our public media is managed, funded and structured."

ABOUT CHICAGO MEDIA ACTION
Founded in 2002, Chicago Media Action (CMA) is a membership-run organization that monitors and analyzes media in the Chicago area in order to expose the economic and political interests that control them. We seek to democratically empower and organize the working-class to challenge corporate control of major media, and to create their own media.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CMA VISIT OUR WEBSITE WWW.CHICAGOMEDIAACTION.ORG TO OBTAIN A COPY OF "Chicago Tonight: Elites, Affluence and Advertisers", PLEASE VISIT:

The Executive Summary
http://www.chicagomediaaction.org/pdffiles/CMA_WTTW_ExecSummary.pdf

The Full Study (including the Executive Summary)
http://www.chicagomediaaction.org/pdffiles/CMA_WTTW.pdf

The Appendix
http://www.chicagomediaaction.org/pdffiles/CMA_Appendix.pdf

OR E-MAIL US AT cma@chicagomediaaction.org, 773-753-0818

<<<30>>>

Why the Press Failed
By Orville Schell

When, on May 26, 2004, the editors of the New York Times published a mea
culpa for the paper's one-sided reporting on weapons of mass destruction and
the Iraq war, they admitted to "a number of instances of coverage that was
not as rigorous as it should have been." They also commented that they had
since come to "wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining claims" made
by the Bush Administration. But we are still left to wonder why the Times,
like many other major media outlets in this country, was so lacking in
skepticism toward administration rationales for war? How could such a poorly
thought through policy, based on spurious exile intelligence sources, have
been so blithely accepted, even embraced, by so many members of the media?
In short, what happened to the press's vaunted role, so carefully spelled
out by the Founding Fathers, as a skeptical "watchdog" over government?

There's nothing like seeing a well-oiled machine clank to a halt to help you
spot problems. Now that the Bush administration is in full defensive mode
and angry leakers in the Pentagon, the CIA, and elsewhere in the Washington
bureaucracy are slipping documents, secrets, and charges to reporters, our
press looks more recognizably journalistic. But that shouldn't stop us from
asking how an "independent" press in a "free" country could have been so
paralyzed for so long. It not only failed to seriously investigate
administration rationales for war, but little took into account the myriad
voices in the on-line, alternative, and world press that sought to do so. It
was certainly no secret that a number of our Western allies (and other
countries), administrators of various NGOs, and figures like Mohamed
ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Hans Blix,
head of the UN's Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission, had
quite different pre-war views of the "Iraqi threat."

Few in our media, it seemed, remembered I. F. Stone's hortatory admonition,
"If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words:
Governments lie." Dissenting voices in the mainstream were largely buried on
back pages, ignored on op-ed pages, or confined to the margins of the media,
and so denied the kinds of "respectability" that a major media outlet can
confer.

As reporting on the lead-up to war, the war itself, and its aftermath
vividly demonstrated, our country is now divided into a two-tiered media
structure. The lower-tier -- niche publications, alternative media outlets,
and Internet sites -- hosts the broadest spectrum of viewpoints. Until the
war effort began to unravel in spring 2004, the upper-tier -- a relatively
small number of major broadcast outlets, newspapers, and magazines -- had a
far more limited bandwidth of critical views, regularly deferring to the
Bush Administration's vision of the world. Contrarian views below rarely
bled upwards.

As Michael Massing pointed out recently in the New York Review of Books,
Bush administration insinuations that critics were unpatriotic -- White
House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer infamously warned reporters as war
approached, "People had better watch what they say" -- had an undeniably
chilling effect on the media. But other forms of pressure also effectively
inhibited the press. The President held few press conferences and rarely
submitted to truly open exchanges. Secretive and disciplined to begin with,
the administration adeptly used the threat of denied access as a way to
intimidate reporters who showed evidence of independence. For reporters,
this meant no one-on-one interviews, special tips, or leaks, being passed
over in press conference question-and-answer periods, and exclusion from
select events as well as important trips.

After the war began, for instance, Jim Wilkinson, a 32 year-old Texan who
ran Centcom's Coalition Media Center in Qatar, was, according to Massing,
known to rebuke reporters whose copy was deemed insufficiently "supportive
of the war," and "darkly warned one correspondent that he was on a 'list'
along with two other reporters at his paper." In the play-along world of the
Bush Administration, critical reporting was a quick ticket to exile.

A media world of faith-based truth

The impulse to control the press hardly originated with George W. Bush, but
his administration has been less inclined than any in memory to echo Thomas
Jefferson's famous declaration that, "The basis of our government being the
opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right;
and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without
newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment
to prefer the latter."

The Bush Administration had little esteem for the watchdog role of the
press, in part because its own quest for "truth" has been based on something
other than empiricism. In fact, it enthroned a new criterion for veracity,
"faith-based" truth, sometimes corroborated by "faith -based" intelligence.
For officials of this administration (and not just the religious ones
either), truth seemed to descend from on high, a kind of divine revelation
begging no further earthly scrutiny. For our President this was evidently
literally the case. The Israeli paper Ha'aretz reported him saying to
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister of the moment, "God told me to
strike Al Qaeda and I struck, and then he instructed me to strike Saddam,
which I did."

It is hardly surprising, then, that such a President would eschew newspapers
in favor of reports from other more "objective sources," namely, his staff.
He has spoken often of trusting "visceral reactions" and acting on "gut
feelings." For him as for much of the rest of his administration,
decision-making has tended to proceed not from evidence to conclusion, but
from conclusion to evidence. Reading, facts, history, logic and the complex
interaction between the electorate, the media, and the government have all
been relegated to subsidiary roles in what might be called "fundamentalist"
policy formation.

Just as the free exchange of information plays little role in the
relationship between a fundamentalist believer and his or her God, so it has
played a distinctly diminished role in our recent parallel world of divine
political revelation. After all, if you already know the answer to a
question, of what use is the media, except to broadcast that answer? The
task at hand, then, is never to listen but to proselytize the political
gospel among non-believers, thereby transforming a once interactive process
between citizen and leader into evangelism.

Although in the Bush political universe, "freedom has been endlessly
extolled in principle, it has had little utility in practice. What possible
role could a free press play when revelation trumps fact and conclusions are
preordained? A probing press is logically viewed as a spoiler under such
conditions, stepping between the administration and those whose only true
salvation lies in becoming part of a nation of true believers. Since there
was little need, and less respect, for an opposition (loyal or otherwise),
the information feedback loops in which the press should have played a
crucial role in any functioning democracy, ceased operating. The media
synapses which normally transmit warnings from citizen to government froze
shut.

Television networks continued to broadcast and papers continued to publish,
but, dismissed and ignored, they became irrelevant, except possibly for
their entertainment value. As the press has withered, the government,
already existing in a self-referential and self-deceptive universe, was
deprived of the ability to learn of danger from its own policies and thus
make course corrections.

A Universe in Which News Won't Matter

Karl Rove, the president's chief political advisor, bluntly declared to New
Yorker writer Ken Auletta that members of the press "don't represent the
public any more than other people do. I don't believe you have a
check-and-balance function." Auletta concluded that, in the eyes of the Bush
Administration, the press corps had become little more than another
special-interest lobbying group. Indeed, the territory the traditional media
once occupied has increasingly been deluged by administration lobbying,
publicity, and advertising -- cleverly staged "photo ops," carefully
produced propaganda rallies, preplanned "events," tidal waves of campaign
ads, and the like. Afraid of losing further "influence," access, and the
lucrative ad revenues that come from such political image-making, major
media outlets have found it in their financial interest to quietly yield.

What does this downgrading of the media's role say about how our government
views its citizens, the putative sovereigns of our country? It suggests that
"we the people" are seen not as political constituencies conferring
legitimacy on our rulers, but as consumers to be sold policy the way
advertisers sell product. In the storm of selling, spin, bullying, and
"discipline" that has been the Bush signature for years, traditional news
outlets found themselves increasingly drowned out, ghettoized, and cowed.
Attacked as "liberal" and "elitist," disesteemed as "trouble makers" and
"bashers" (even when making all too little trouble), they were relegated to
the sidelines, increasingly uncertain and timid about their shrinking place
in the political process.

Add in a further dynamic (which intellectuals from Marxist-Leninist
societies would instantly recognize): Groups denied legitimacy and disdained
by the state tend to internalize their exclusion as a form of culpability,
and often feel an abject, autonomic urge to seek reinstatement at almost any
price. Little wonder, then, that "the traditional press" has had a difficult
time mustering anything like a convincing counter-narrative as the
administration herded a terrified and all-too-trusting nation to war.

Not only did a mutant form of skepticism-free news succeed -- at least for a
time -- in leaving large segments of the populace uninformed, but it
corrupted the ability of high officials to function. All too often they
simply found themselves looking into a fun-house mirror of their own making
and imagined that they were viewing reality. As even the conservative
National Review noted, the Bush administration has "a dismaying capacity to
believe its own public relations."

In this world of mutant "news," information loops have become one-way
highways; and a national security advisor, cabinet secretary, or attorney
general, a well-managed and programmed polemicist charged to "stay on
message," the better to justify whatever the government has already done, or
is about to do. Because these latter-day campaigns to "dominate the media
environment," as the Pentagon likes to say, employ all the sophistication
and technology developed by communications experts since Edward Bernays,
nephew of Sigmund Freud, first wed an understanding of psychology to the
marketing of merchandise, they are far more seductive than older-style news.
Indeed, on Fox News, we can see the ultimate marriage of news and PR in a
fountainhead of artful propaganda so well-packaged that most people can't
tell it from the real thing.

For three-plus years we have been governed by people who don't view news, in
the traditional sense, as playing any constructive role in our system of
governance. At the moment, they are momentarily in retreat, driven back from
the front lines of faith-based truth by their own faith-based blunders. But
make no mistake, their frightening experiment will continue if Americans
allow it. Complete success would mean not just that the press had
surrendered its essential watchdog role, but -- a far darker thought --
that, even were it to refuse to do so, it might be shunted off to a place
where it would not matter.

As the war in Iraq descended into a desert quagmire, the press belatedly
appeared to awaken and adopt a more skeptical stance toward an already
crumbling set of Bush administration policies. But if a bloody, expensive,
catastrophic episode like the war in Iraq is necessary to remind us of the
important role that the press plays in our democracy, something is gravely
amiss in the way our political system has come to function.

Orville Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley. This piece is adapted from the preface
to a collection of New York Review of Books articles on the media's coverage
of the war in Iraq by Michael Massing. It will be published soon as a short
book, Now They Tell Us (The New York Review of Books, 2004).

Copyright C2004 Orville Schell

Antiwar group says its ad is rejected
From New York Times, July 12, 2004
By Raymond Hernandez and Andrea Elliott

A group of antiwar advocates is accusing Clear Channel Communications, one of the nation's largest media companies, with close ties to national Republicans, of preventing the group from displaying a Times Square billboard critical of the war in Iraq.

The billboard - an image of a red, white and blue bomb with the words "Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War" - was supposed to go up next month, the antiwar group said, and it was to be in place when Republicans from across the country gathered in New York City to nominate President Bush for a second term.

But members of the group, Project Billboard, contend that Clear Channel backed out of a leasing agreement last month that the two had reached in December for the billboard site, on the Marriott Marquis Hotel at Broadway and 45th Street.

A Project Billboard spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said the group planned to file a lawsuit today in federal court in Manhattan charging Clear Channel with breach of contract and asking it to live up to what the group said were the terms of the deal.

Last night, the president and chief executive of Clear Channel, Paul Meyer, said the company had objected to the group's use of "the bomb imagery" in the proposed billboard. Mr. Meyer said Clear Channel had accepted a billboard that would replace the bomb with a dove. However, he said, any billboard at the site required the approval of the Marriott Marquis management, which he said also objected to the bomb.

"We have no political agenda," Mr. Meyer said. "It's the bomb imagery we objected to."

A spokeswoman for the hotel, Kathleen Duffy, said that the management considered the ad with the bomb "inappropriate," but that it had not seen the version with the dove.

Told of Mr. Meyer's comments, Mr. Wolfson said that earlier, Clear Channel had rejected the ad with the dove as well as the one with the bomb, demanding that the words be changed, too. "It's news to us, and not reflected in any prior communications between Clear Channel and Project Billboard," Mr. Wolfson said last night. "This contradicts Clear Channel's demand that the copy be changed."

The dispute had led members of the antiwar group to accuse Clear Channel of censorship.

"I think the idea that political advertising is banned from some part of New York City would be repellent to New Yorkers," Mr. Wolfson said. "I guess we can have a war, but we can't talk about it."

This is not the first time that Clear Channel, one of the nation's largest owners of radio stations, has found itself in the middle of a debate over free speech and censorship.

The company has been accused of using its radio stations to rally support for the war in Iraq, while trying to silence musicians who oppose it.

The company's critics point out, for instance, that some Clear Channel country music stations stopped playing the songs of the Dixie Chicks last year after the group's lead singer, Natalie Maines, told fans during a London concert, "We're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

The company's critics also point out that the Federal Communications Commission is considering regulations that would make it easier for companies like Clear Channel to own more television and radio stations.

But even some of its fiercest critics agree that some claims against Clear Channel are overstated. As it turns out, for example, its stations were only sporadically involved in a boycott against the Dixie Chicks.

Part of what may be fueling speculation about the company's motives is the close relationship that its executives have with the Republican Party and the Bush administration. In the 2000 and 2002 election cycles, for instance, the company and its officials donated slightly more than $300,000 in unregulated money, almost all of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization in Washington that monitors political contributions.

In addition, Tom Hicks, the Texas Rangers' owner who has longtime ties to President Bush, is a top executive at Clear Channel.

Project Billboard's representatives said the contract they signed in December with Spectacolor, a division of Clear Channel, required the antiwar group to pay $368,000 to use the billboard space from Aug. 2 through Nov. 2, Election Day.

But they said Spectacolor began balking after company officials saw the ad that included the image of the bomb. The group then sent a second ad, which replaced the bomb with a red, white and blue dove accompanied by the same words, but Mr. Wolfson said that was also rejected.

A lawyer for Project Billboard, Doug Curtis, said that at one point Clear Channel suggested that the group use a less provocative billboard ad, one with the image of a little girl waving a flag accompanied by the words, "Democracy is best taught by example."

Mr. Curtis said that earlier this month, a vice president for marketing for Spectacolor and Clear Channel, Barry Kula, sent the group an e-mail message that said, in part, "We hope you will appreciate that New York City has endured a horrific attack and businesses in this area that serve a wide array of clientele are extremely sensitive to references to war."

Project Billboard's director, Deborah Rappaport, indicated that the reaction of Clear Channel executives was not a complete surprise given what she described as its poor record on free expression. "This is not the first time," she said. "They try to suppress speech with which they don't agree."

The dispute between Clear Channel and the antiwar group drew a mixed reaction yesterday from visitors in Times Square.

When shown a printed copy of the antiwar ads that Clear Channel is said to have rejected, Nene Ofuatey-Kodjoe, 36, of Stamford, Conn., became visibly upset. "Clear Channel should not have a position one way or another about what they put up there as long as it's not obscene," he said.

He also scoffed at the alternative billboard proposed by Clear Channel, with a little girl waving the flag. "All the fence-sitting is what has gotten us to where we are today," he said. "You have got to take a stand."

Terry and Jim Baugh, two Californians strolling north on Seventh Avenue, said the image of the bomb bordered on treason. "That looks like they're trying to blow up America," said Mrs. Baugh, 59, a retired dental hygienist.

This article is from New York Times. If you found it informative and valuable, we strongly encourage you to visit their website and register an account to view all their articles on the web. Support quality journalism.

Assault on the Labor Movement in Iraq
by Ralph Nader
Published on Monday, June 28, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

What is going on among Iraq's working classes? We do not hear about those workers except for the high number of unemployed.
Thanks to the Labor Party Press we learn that George W. Bush's top representative in Iraq, Paul Bremer, continues to enforce Saddam Hussein's decree banning unions using military force where necessary. Bush's coalition authority also would interpret "illegal" unions, demonstrations and strikes as inciting civil disorder which can result in the workers being arrested and treated as prisoners of war.
Labor Party Press reports that Bremer has lowered Saddam Hussein's minimum wage and has cutoff the dictator's welfare benefits of housing and food. Ironic! All this is depriving and embittering millions of Iraqi families and increasing their sympathy for the insurgency. The Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI) has been working to keep both the occupying soldiers and the insurgents from remaining inside the cities and residential areas.
All kinds of political movements - secular and religious - are churning in Iraq. The secular populist associations - labor, women, self-help, civic - believe the U.S. occupation has attracted fundamentalist mobilizations from outside and inside the country. There is now a Union of the Unemployed (UUI) that in the past year has enrolled 300,000 members. Their desire is to get some of the 300,000 reconstruction jobs under the U.S. occupation. Apparently Labor Party Press reports UUI spokesman describing then meeting with the U.S. Coalition authority as follows:
"We went in with out [membership] records in our hands, and they said 'Who are you? Who do you represent? You are nobody. We are the power here." Well, at least, that is the impression by the UUI of the reception they received. So they demonstrated in front of the Coalition's Palace, followed by a sit-in. Fifty of the demonstrators were arrested.
Daily life is what concerns most Iraqis, not the politics of various religions and ethnic groups. The U.S. occupation still has not meet the people's needs for adequate water, food, cooking, oil and often electricity.
Before Saddam came to power, with U.S. help in 1979, there used to be a strong labor movement. Now two union federations are emerging. American labor journalist David Bacon is reporting on the struggles of Iraqi workers to restore their jobs in the oil industry that U.S. companies like Halliburton were replacing with foreign workers. Teachers and women workers are also engaging in labor activity, he says.
For more information, see www.laboragainstwar.org.

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

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.

help

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.

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.

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.

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