Mark Fiore’s The All-Purpose Excuse Mother Jones [requires flash player; slow to load] and, from your friendly Office of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge’s Operation Mandatory Patriotic Tattoo [like the one yer man in the FmH masthead above has been sporting for years…]
Daily Archives: 2 Dec 01
FBI agents rebel over new powers
The US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was yesterday reported to be ready to relax restrictions on the FBI’s powers to spy on religious and church-based political organisations.
His proposal, leaked to the New York Times, would loosen limits on the FBI’s surveillance powers, imposed in the 1970s after the death of its founder J. Edgar Hoover.
The plan has caused outrage within the FBI itself with agents expected to act upon new surveillance powers describing themselves as ‘very, very angry’. Guardian UK
A vehement New York Times editorial decrying the police state tactics of the administration — Justice Deformed: War and the Constitution:
‘The inconvenient thing about the American system of justice is that we are usually challenged to protect it at the most inopportune moments. Right now the country wants very much to be supportive of the war on terrorism, and is finding it hard to summon up much outrage over military tribunals, secret detentions or the possible mistreatment of immigrants from the Mideast. There is a strong temptation not to notice. That makes it even more important to speak up.
…(I)f the antiterrorism effort is to be a genuine success, Americans must speak up. We do not want history to record this as one of those mixed moments in which the behavior of our government failed to live up to the performance of our troops in the field. We do not want to remember this as a time when the nations of the world united in a campaign against terrorists, and then backed away when America attempted to prosecute foreign nationals in secret trials conducted according to unfair rules.’
Well-reasoned rejoinder to Rush Limbaugh’s defense of military tribunals, from rc3. Here’s an excerpt. Read the whole thing.
Limbaugh: In 1942 the Supreme Court ruled that Roosevelt’s military commissions were constitutional when used to try eight Nazi saboteurs for violating the laws of war, spying and conspiracy. The lawyers who drafted Bush’s order no doubt relied on FDR’s court victory in that case — an irony obviously lost on Bush’s critics.
rc3: I don’t need to tell readers of this site that this decision was widely seen as regrettable, and was reached under different circumstances than Bush’s executive order. As a refresher, the tribunals for the eight Nazi saboteurs were held during a state of declared war, and the order was written specifically for the 8 saboteurs in question, not for any old saboteur we might possibly catch in the future.
Furthermore, the military tribunals ordered by FDR are nothing to look back on with pride. It’s widely understood now that the tribunals were held in order to avoid embarrassment for Hoover’s FBI. The saboteurs were caught because one of the eight turned them in as soon as he arrived in the United States. The embarrassment stemmed from the fact that the first time the saboteur attempted to turn himself (and the others) in, he was dismissed as a crank. Only on his second contact with the FBI did they actually investigate the case and apprehend the saboteurs.
After making specious arguments that the military tribunals do not violate the Bill of Rights, he goes into the problems with trying terrorists in criminal courts, ignoring the fact that we successfully tried the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center the first time, the terrorists who blew up the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the terrorists who blew up US embasses in Africa in 1998 in civil courts without issue.
The Real Story of Flight 93: Newsweek reporters reconstruct the details of the last minutes of the doomed flight from the cockpit voice recorder and interviews with family members who received phone calls from passengers.
This letter to the editor from the Eugene Register-Guard of Nov. 23 [via Adam] bears printing in full:
Patriotism is running strong, so we can expect to see some important changes in the near future. Americans who think nuclear power is a good idea will soon call for an aggressive switch to wind and solar because nuclear plants make excellent terrorist targets, but windmills scattered across the rural areas of our country do not.
Americans who think toxic-right-to-know laws are absurd will change their minds when they discover that the paint factory near their home is a prime terrorist target. Those who think Microsoft software is excellent will reconsider upon realizing that a terrorist hacker can attack 90 percent of the country’s computers with a single virus.
Americans who think factory food tastes good will soon switch to organics because small farms are less likely to have their crops poisoned by terrorists. Those who think their automobiles deserve new freeways paved through wetlands will soon switch to mass transit and bicycles so that America becomes less dependent on foreign oil.
And Americans who think the above statements are correct are dreaming. Most Americans don’t think much at all. Once the flag is in the car window, they’re done. They are now official patriots. Forget clean air, clean water, healthy neighborhoods: “I’ve got a flag and I’m covered. Presidential papers hidden? So what. Government access to e-mail? Sure. Military tribunals? No problem. Limits to media access? But of course. So where is the remote? Did the game start yet?”
Charles Magee
Eugene, Oregon
Meanwhile …: ‘A Pennsylvania legislator has announced she will seek a second term next year even though she claims in a $7.5 million lawsuit that she “needs help with reading and understanding material and carrying on conversations” due to brain and other injuries she suffered in a car wreck.’
But the most significant piece of information, confirming all our suspicions, follows:
‘Rep. Jane Baker, a 56-year-old Republican, says in her lawsuit that the injuries make her “virtually unemployable” outside the Legislature.” ‘ Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial [thanks, Adam]
A Mind So Rare by Merlin Donald, reviewed: “There has been tremendous progress over the past few decades in understanding the nature and functioning of human consciousness. Although this knowledge has not yet settled into an explicit consensus, and details are lacking, nevertheless all the necessary elements are in place. A theory of human consciousness is here or hereabouts.
From the evidence of this book, Donald is one of those who substantially understand consciousness — which is to say that he can give a coherent and broadly valid account of the evolved function of consciousness and its main modes of operation. A Mind So Rare can therefore be added to a list that would include Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), and Antonio R Damasio’s Descartes’ Error (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (1999).” British Medical Journal
Susan Haack: Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism
We are in danger of losing our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, disinterested inquiry. The preposterous environment in which academic work is presently conducted is inhospitable to genuine inquiry, hospitable to the sham and the fake. Encouraging both envy and resentment of the sciences, it has fed an increasingly widespread and articulate irrationalism.
That is preposterous which puts the last first and the first last. . . . Valuing knowledge, we preposterize the idea and say . . . everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion.
— Jacques BarzunSkeptical Inquirer
Is it time to remove the “What’s a Weblog?” paragraph in the sidebar? Do you suppose any new readers come this way these days who don’t already know one when they see one?
“Freedom to vote, smoke, dress down, act up, disagree, organize, bear arms, ride helmetless – America is about nothing if not individual freedoms. But there’s one freedom very few people are fighting for because hardly anyone realizes it’s being denied. This is a new kind of freedom, and it may well be the most important one of them all:
Freedom in the mental realm… ”
Adbusters 38 is a manifesto for the creation of ‘mental environmentalism’. Selected features:
- Birth of a Movement:
The environmental movement gelled in the summer of 1989 as a flurry of shocking news items appeared day after day: seals dying mysteriously in the North Sea; acid rain devastating the mythical Black Forest; hypodermic needles washing up on New York beaches; people suffering from a fatigue syndrome that no doctor was able to diagnose.
Now we have evidence of a mental environment no less in crisis: 20 million North Americans diagnosed with clinical depression; another 20 million suffering anxiety disorders; antidepressants now a $10-billion-a-year business; commercial messages everywhere the eye can rest – from the banana in the supermarket to the booster-rockets of the space shuttle, to product placement in the movie you’re watching to escape it all. The number of megacorporate gatekeepers of most of the world’s information stands at six – and falling.
In 1989, we realized that our natural environment was dying. That was pretty good incentive to march.
Today, we are realizing that our mental environment is dying too and we’re getting ready to march again with a new vision: the vision of a wave of antitrust suits against the media megacorps, a new science of mental ecology, a new way of managing the production of meaning in our society.
Synchronize your watches, folks. And remember this day.
- American Psycho:
After two and a half years, researchers Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson of the University of Iowa had a blockbuster study in hand. It pointed, decisively, to troubling conclusions about a social problem at the core of an ongoing national debate. The findings appeared as the lead article in American Psychologist, the flagship of their field. Colleagues were applauding. And then came the mainstream media reaction.
“A lot of silence,” says Bushman flatly.
Here, in a nutshell, is the story the media missed. Bushman and Anderson carried out an exhaustive review – a “meta-analysis” – of every existing study of the link between media violence and real-life violence. The result: Research has indicated a clear connection since at least the 1970s, and the body of evidence has been growing ever since.
- Has David Byrne sold out to Microsoft? His fans discuss it.
- Listening to Homer: why the Seinfeldesque is turning Kafkaesque.
- Nine Pioneers of Mental Environmentalism:
- Neil Postman:
“The big issue we need to face is information glut. We are in a situation where there is so much information available from so many different sources – not just television – that we have a problem.
Schools are still acting as if they need to provide people with information, which the schools were pretty good at when there was information scarcity. When you have information overload, then the schools have something entirely different to do…”
- Len Masterman: “The author of Teaching The Media says corporations belong in school – on our terms, never theirs.”
Jerry Mander: “Twenty-three years after the publication of his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, [one of the most important, still unsurpassed cultural critiques ever written, IMHO –FmH] Mander still sees TV as the primary threat to a healthy mental environment – though a competitor is fast on its heels.”
Robert McChesney, research professor at UIUC:I’ve always argued that people who want to change the world had better get serious about changing media and communications, and not think it’s a dependent variable that will work itself out once you’ve changed everything else. What we’ve seen is that the rapidly evolving global movement for democracy – and against neoliberalism and hyper-commercialism – is making media reform an integral part, woven right into the heart of the movement. The dominance of the corporate media system has made this almost unavoidable.
The major ideological defence of the corporate media is that the Internet is changing the system, making it much more competitive and responsive, and that therefore previous concerns about corporate control or commercialism are now completely irrelevant. If you don’t like what you’re getting, then go to one of the other 80 billion websites, or start your own. Everyone should just shut up and shop.
It’s a lot easier to start a website than to organize people to get a sufficient force to change the system. The sad and inescapable truth is we have to do both. If we concede that all the laws and regulations and subsidies can go to these corporate giants, but we’re going to have our groovy websites, then barring a phenomenal upsurge in political activity we will guarantee our marginality.
The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable that the Internet is not going to radically change and improve our media system. If you read the business press, like Fortune magazine (owned by AOL Time Warner), they acknowledge that the Internet is basically run by corporations and it’s just tightening up their control of the commercial media…
Cees Hamelink professor of communications at the University of Amsterdam:“The growing importance of media, at least in my analysis, is strongly related to advertising. Some people tend to believe we are moving towards an information society or communications society. I think we are really moving to what I like to call a ‘global billboard society.’ ”
Theodore Roszak, founder of ecopsychology:“How often in history did people wake up in the morning and have someone tell them what they needed in life? All through the day advertising is trying to convince you of what you require in order to manage. Of course that’s been going on since advertising began. But just within my lifetime the technique of getting between people and the ordinary aspects of life – from eating to sleeping to working to sex to diet – has compounded enormously…”
Jay Rosen, author of What Are Journalists For? and a professor of journalism at New York University, discussing journalists’ accountability in media reform.
Sheri Herndon, one of the organizers of the 65 Independent Media Centers.
George Gerbner, founder and president of the Cultural Environment Movement:“Are we too late? I have no definition for what is ‘late’ or ‘too late.’ Nor do I have definite criteria for what is ‘success.’ We must do what we can do. You light a candle under a pot of water. For a seemingly long time ‘nothing happens.’ At one point it begins to boil — a qualitative transformation. (It took only some six degrees rise in the average temperature to melt down the Ice Age.) So, you just keep up the pressure and hope the change occurs in your lifetime. But, if not, no energy ever disappears, no effort is ever wasted.”
- Neil Postman:
- 2-Minute Media Revolution:
“For nine years now, Adbusters has tried to get its famous TV “subvertisements” aired by the NBC, CBS and ABC networks. Every year, they refuse. We need to make a hairline crack in that media monopoly. How long will it take? Let’s start with two minutes.
The “Two-Minute Media Revolution” is a campaign to demand that two minutes out of every broadcast hour be made available for advocacy messages that could come from anyone, on any topic. We’ve launched cyberpetitions to the US Federal Communications Commission and the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.”
Gore Vidal: Times Cries Eke! Buries Al Gore: ‘The late Murray Kempton once noted that although the New York Times likes to pose as being above the battle, this position has never stopped the Times, once the battle’s fought, from sneaking onto the field and shooting the wounded. November 12, krauthammers at the ready, Times persons swept through the electoral swamps of Florida, shooting those survivors who questioned “President” Bush’s alleged plurality.’ The Nation [via Adam]
“It’s past time to focus on the gravest dangers that we face.” A Nuclear Nightmare: It Could Happen Today
Few things concentrate the mind like the prospect of a nuclear mushroom cloud in your own neighborhood. So please concentrate on this: I asked Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., a sober, respected, retired career arms control official who was President Clinton’s special representative for nonproliferation and disarmament from 1994-97, to quantify the risk of nuclear terrorism. Here is what he said, from Moscow, via cell phone:
“Any judgment like this is a guess. But my judgment is that in the next year, there is perhaps a 10 percent risk of a major nuclear event in a large city, and in the next five years, perhaps a 50 percent risk. This risk would include the theft and use of an actual nuclear weapon, the fabrication and detonation of a crude nuclear device from fissile material, as well as a radiological bomb possibly based on fissile material.”
Five years. Fifty percent. Maybe several cities destroyed. Hundreds of thousands or millions dead. The nation in chaos. Worse than our worst nightmares. The Atlantic
Part of my reaction to the scale of the destruction in the World Trade Center attack was its eerie resonance with the recurrent waking nightmares I’ve had for most of my adult life as someone preoccupied with preventing the use of nuclear weapons. Yet I flinch every time I hear the lower Manhattan site referred to, as has come to be general practice, as ‘ground zero’. We can’t afford the degree of denial and minimization in that linguistic artifice, diluting as it does the internal imagery we must have about a veritable ground zero.
