Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Poor show | Sep 14, 2006 10:55

Well, that got the pledge card out of the headlines for a day. But for all the mighty fulminating about Labour dirty tricks, the fact is that Don Brash was done in by one or more of his own colleagues. Who leaked Tuesday's caucus proceedings to the press, and why did they do it?

I've known that Brash was having an affair with Diane Foreman, vice-chair of the Business Roundtable, for about a year, although I had no recent knowledge of the state of that affair and didn't really want to know. I wasn't the only one, and, indeed, at the time a couple of readers urged me to publish that information.

I didn't, of course, but it didn't make me think well of Brash, especially when he or his colleagues thumped their tubs on the sanctity of marriage, family values or personal integrity. I'm relaxed about most things that consenting adults do, but I value commitment in relationships very highly.

But I think the political dimension of this relationship speaks of shocking judgement on Brash's part. The Business Roundtable is a key supporter and stakeholder for the National Party, and we know that Foreman (through her role in the "no Brash, no cash" edict that helped Brash take the leadership) is a key liaison with the business community. If it emerged that Helen Clark had been secretly porking, say, Ross Wilson, or a major Labour donor, that would be a poor show too.

There's also a lesson here about keeping your personal messy business away from the work email. The implication of recent reports is that Winston Peters' Brash email trove - leaked, stolen, whatever - contains "personal" communications related to the affair. If this is true, it's not only silly to use a taxpayer-funded email system for your clandestine personal affairs, it's very unprofessional.

Perhaps it's time now for both sides to pull back. Both Trevor Mallard and David Benson Pope have slyly baited Brash in Parliament about this in the past couple of weeks - although they could hardly have anticipated the way it would blow up in his own caucus. Helen Clark may or may not have been sincere when she subsequently expressed the Mallardian wish for a taser to keep her minister in line.

But I wasn't terribly impressed with National's Judith Collins tearfully accusing Mallard and Benson Pope of dragging Parliament into the gutter on Morning Report today. It was Collins, you may recall, who smirkingly implied that Benson Pope was a "pervert" in the House, probably beginning the current descent.

Where I do agree with Collins is that I feel very sorry for Brash's wife and other innocent bystanders. But a lot less so for Brash himself. Or Foreman, who, in her Roundtable role, lectured the rest of us on traditional family values. Although she wouldn't be the first from the business community to say one thing to the masses and do another. There may well be grubby little stories about other members of Parliament - the scent of power and separation from home can contrive to make people do the wrong thing - but I don't particularly want to hear about it.

Still, there's a bright side. Matthew Hooton's hilariously wrong again.

Speaking of the pledge card and spending issues, No Right Turn has hosted some useful discussion on the issue, including on an analogy for Labour's defence; a nakedly campaigning National Party brochure paid for from the same fund as the pledge card; and Peter Dunne's insistence that his party - in the auditor- general's sights along with Labour - acted in good faith and had all its expenditure approved by Parliamentary Services. A couple of conversations I've had have given me the strong impression that the Labour leadership fervently believes its case: indeed, why else take such a politically unpopular stance? The trouble is that it's like arguing with the referee. It never really works out.

To clear the decks for frivolity tomorrow - rock 'n' roll and the Chumby, I reckon - some reader feedback …

Warwick Eade has an interesting theory:

This US administration has made terror an institution in our society and in this has given rise to a whole new group around that institution - the terror fantasists.

The British bombers of 7/7 read more like obsessive fanatics rather than career terrorists. They look much closer to Columbine than Bader-Meinhof as do the "cells" discovered in the US.

Before this hugely misguided and compromised response to 9/11 they would have been regarded as disaffected or just plain nutters. But these days any frustrated/disaffected westerner has a good chance of officially becoming part of part of the huge secret international terror network by simply writing a journal about being part of the huge secret internal terror network.

Several readers took issue with the term "Islamic fascists", generally citing more technical definitions of the term "fascist". But one of the definitions in the Concise Oxford is: "system of extreme right-wing or authoritarian views," which is close enough to me. Another reader emailed to shout a bunch of tired clichés: "Islamic is a death cult," and "If we're not careful it will be coming for us too. Then there'll be 3 choices - convert, die or pay tax to our muslim masters."

Whatever. A recent Pew Global Attitudes Report makes good homework reading here: among other things, it finds that British Muslims fret about the rise of Islamic extremism in roughly the same proportion (ie: about three quarters) as the overall British population.

Muslims in European countries who perceived a struggled between moderate and fundamentalist overwhelmingly side with moderates. They generally identify with faith before nationality, which, as another Pew survey shows, makes them a bit like Christians in America. This doesn't surprise me: if you do actually believe, then you're believing in something that by definition trumps the mere business of nations.

And, finally, on the issue of 9/11 conspiracies. One reader pointed out - correctly, I think - that the Bush administration's unprecedented fetish for secrecy has helped foster the theorising ("Five years after 11 September 2001, journalists still cannot get the flight manifests of the doomed flights."). The short-selling of American airline stocks in the days before the attacks is a matter of record and may well have been the consequence of a terror tip somewhere in the global financial system.

But the most popular conspiracy theories - Bomber has helpfully listed 101 Questions about 9/11 - are much clunkier than that. Popular Mechanics addressed a lot of it with 9/11: Debunking The Myths and noted more recently that the conspiracies keep coming. The blog Screw Loose Change is also worth reading.

I guess the least implausible theory - one that doesn't require secret missiles and covert explosives - is that someone in the US security apparatus knew the attack was coming, saw it as a fulcrum for the Iraq project, and thus did not prevent it.

But that still requires a watertight degree of secrecy that has not been demonstrated in the Bush administration's subsequent adventures. I prefer to believe in something that the administration has amply demonstrated in recent years: its utter fecklessness.

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Big Norm | Sep 13, 2006 11:35

No time for a substantial post today - and I fear I fell prey to the dreaded 9/11 commentator's ramble yesterday anyway - but here are a couple of things you might like to see.

Norm at OneGoodMove his been on a roll this week. He has a clip of Jon Stewart's opening monologue from the first Daily Show after the 2001 terrorist attacks. It's an extraordinary piece of television which threatens more than once to go off the rails - you wonder if he knows where he's going with it - but winds up as a moving avowal of the best American values.

The Daily Show was airing on the fifth anniversary, and Stewart's opening, in a rather different tone, is there too.

Norm also has Keith Olbermann's furious special comment from Ground Zero.

And Crooks and Liars has Stephen Colbert on The Path to 9/11: "Just because something is utterly invented doesn't mean it's not true!" Very funny.

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The Unreality Engine | Sep 12, 2006 12:13

So if polls find that more than a third of Americans believe the 9/11 attacks to have been an inside job by their own government, and around half still believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with it, does that mean only about 15% have any idea at all?

The fact that the straightforward, evidence-based truth about the terrorist attacks fares so poorly in the American public consciousness says something about the path away from 9/11 - I'm just not sure what that something is.

Certainly, the leadership isn't setting a good example. Only days after yet another official report - this one from a US Senate Intelligence Committee - concluded the obvious: that Saddam Hussein had no relationship with al-Qaeda, and in fact saw it as a threat, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was gamely insisting the exact opposite.

The old axiom about truth being the first casualty of war seems barely adequate to cover the rise and rise of unreality in the past five years. The conflict which has dominated the last three of those years, in Iraq, has been a veritable engine of unreality. The case for it was cherry-picked and fabricated; its key actors never what they seemed; the weekly news always to be taken with a grain of salt.

It's not just America, of course: millions in the Islamic world adhere to desperate conspiracy theories about the same horrible events. In this case, the Zionists did it. Then there are those - in their world and ours - who persist in believing al Qaeda to be fighting for some freedom or other. It's not. I was surprised when Bush's characterisation of terrorists as "Islamic fascists" was deemed controversial: that's exactly what they are.

In some respects, you can understand the theorising. The Nation, in a recent story on the Valerie Plame affair, provided further information on exactly who and what Plame was before she was dealt to by the White House: the operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a group tasked with gathering WMD intelligence to make a case for war on Iraq, which was sharply ramped up months before the 9/11 attacks. This leads many people to suppose - vaulting a logical chasm as they do so - that the people driving such a policy either aided or allowed the attacks. The more mundane truth is that they seized on the need to respond to the attacks to carry their policy forward.

It was always going to end in tears. The sources with whom the JTFI was presented were the epitome of unreality. And thus, of course, their claims were reported as news, and the war went ahead. It could even be said that the war in Iraq went ahead at the expense of the War on terror. Check this from the Washington Post last week:

On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2002.

It still seems hard to believe that such a significant and costly action as that war could have been taken at the urgings of men like Richard Perle, a crook and war profiteer of some decades' standing. During the Reagan administration Perle took money from an Israeli armaments company then used his influence to channel contracts to the company. In 2003, he quietly resigned from his presidentially-ordained position as chair of the Defense Policy Advisory Board under suspicion of doing exactly the same thing, again. More recently, the Securities Exchange Commission singled him out for special mention as part of the "kleptocracy" that corruptly mishandled funds at Conrad Black's Hollinger International. And yet, there he was last weekend, wading in in support of Tony Blair in The Guardian. With friends like Perle, who needs enemies?

Like Perle, Donald Rumsfeld believed that Iraq would be a pushover. He slapped down advisors who fretted about having too few troops for the job and, remarkably, refused to even discuss what might happen next:

Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.

The horrible descent into death (1500 in Baghdad alone last month) and debacle that followed has prompted quite a lot of ex post facto rationalisation. We're fighting the terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here. We gave the Iraqis the chance for democracy and they "chose" sectarian bloodshed. It would have happened anyway. And best of all, the Iraqis are ungrateful. This isn't reasoning, it's shrugging and walking away, and it's offensive.

There's plenty more unreality where that came from though. Adam Bogacki drew my attention to this astonishing essay from the Armed Forces Journal:

Maj. Peters, formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence where he was responsible for future warfare, candidly outlines how the map of the Middle East should be fundamentally re-drawn, in a new imperial endeavour designed to correct past errors. "Without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East," he observes, but then adds wryly: "Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works."

Thus, acknowledging that the sweeping reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve massive ethnic cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a genocidal scale, he insists that unless it is implemented, "we may take it as an article of faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our own."

Yes, you read it right. It's a prosaic proposal for genocide. All, of course, for the right reasons. It rather relieves the Islamofascists of having to make stuff up, doesn't it?

Travelling in the US, as I did recently, it's hard not to feel sometimes that the terrorists did win. Yes, there's still argument and insight and brilliance in a grand tradition. America is stil fabulous and vibrant.

But as we surrendered our toothpaste and shampoo and disposable lighters in the name of technically far-fetched terror plots, while PA system announcements and photocopied notices reiterated the message about the "threat level" having risen to orange, we were all spooked. And in some ways, people wanted to be spooked, as if being spooked made them safe. They wanted to be secure.

The most unhealthy element of the new psychology is the rise of the undifferentiated enemy: of them. This unreal foe is many enemies at once, none of them to be defeated any time soon, and he can be conjured to justify almost anything; any transgression of old norms and hard-won rights and freedoms, or even the most patent public manipulation.

You don't have to venture far in the mediasphere to find some clown recommending mass-murder as a prescription for freedom. People say things that would have been utterly extraordinary five years ago. They pronounce on the clash-of-civilisations and declare a war that, we are told, will last generations. They cheerfully conflate Muslims and jihadists the way the jihadists conflate all of us in the West. They warn of Europe being overrun by Islam while the jihadists feel a fear amonmgst Muslims that Islam itself is under threat. It is meant as wisdom, but it is empty. We live in an uncomfortable age.

So much so that it's tempting to take comfort in imagining an alternative: if the US had committed properly to Afghanistan, hadn't taken away resources for the Iraq folly, had actually caught the bad guy, had kept its moral authority. Would there still have been terrorism? Yes, like always. But consider this: the total financial cost of the Iraq war - taking into account the cost of servicing the debt that funded it - has been repeatedly estimated in excess of a trillion dollars.

Try and imagine the impact on hearts and minds of a trillion dollars worth of benign investment in the Middle East and the wider Islamic world: in business development, health care, education, NGOs, printing books. Might things have worked out better? It's unreal, of course. But it's hard not to think about.

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The Strange Path | Sep 11, 2006 09:01

At least two local bloggers have earned their fame by reporting on the first part of the weirdly fictionalised "docudrama" The Path to 9/11, which screened here on TV One last night - before it aired on the ABC network in the US.

For reasons made clear below, there has been a furious debate about this film in the US in the past week. In response to complaints based on preview DVDs, ABC declared on Friday that critics had not seen a finished version, and that it would be re-editing some of the more controversial scenes. So there has been considerable interest in seeing exactly what went to air on TVNZ.

AmericaBlog links to this report from WebWeaver, in which she has live-blogged the show and revealed that the wholly invented scene in which Clinton security advisor Sandy Berger hangs up on field agents who have Osama Bin Laden surrounded and want permission to go in and take him out has been slightly edited - Berger now does not hang up on his plucky agents, he stares into space, end of scene. No part of this ever happened: there was no such phone call and CIA operatives never had Bin Laden cornered.

I was impressed with WebWeaver's work, but someone called xynz has gone above and beyond, with a comprehensive post to Kos which links to an array of annotated YouTube clips of the programme's more risible moments - most notably, the key events that are simply invented. Bravo.

I watched some of the programme last night. It had the trappings of edginess - Traffic-style jump-cuts and wobbly cameras - but the thing that struck me was the questionable taste of dressing real events in the usual thriller clichés; creating a Harvey Keitel character (brave, serious agent battles the establishment to get his man) for Harvey Keitel to play (although the person on whom the character John O'Neill, is based did actually exist, and his sense of purpose has been the subject of tribute by Richard Clarke) and generally giving it the flavour of an episode of 24. This really happened. It's still happening. And one would think it's compelling enough not to need fictionalising.

The second thing is, yup, there's a remarkably strong political agenda underlying the whole thing. There are repeated implications that 9/11 happened because people paid too much attention to girly-man stuff stuff like due process and human rights.

Who would make such a thing? Turns out it's actually the sharp end of a semi-secret evangelical Christian putsch on Hollywood, with links to the mad McCarthyist David Horowitz. More here.

ABC has been making this thing for over a year, even using secret code-names for the production. Two former FBI agents hired as consultants quit after only weeks on the job last year:

One of the agents, Thomas E. Nicoletti, was hired by the producers of the mini-series in July 2005 to oversee its technical accuracy, but left after less than a month because of scenes he believed were misleading or just false.

"There were some of the scenes that were total fiction," said Mr. Nicoletti, who served as a supervisory special agent and a member of the joint terrorism task force before retiring in 2003. "I told them unless they were changing this, I could not have my name associated with it."

Chief among Mr. Nicoletti's concerns were scenes that placed people at places they had not been present at and scenes that depicted events that were out of chronological order.

"There were so many inaccuracies," he said.

Mr. Nicoletti said he asked the producers to make changes, but was rebuffed. "I'm well aware of what's dramatic license and what's historical inaccuracy," Mr. Nicoletti said. "And this had a lot of historical inaccuracy."

For ABC to then go forth and declare it to be "The Official True Story" in a trailer cut from the most egregiously invented scene in the whole production is pretty cynical.

It seems that ABC had some idea of what it was handling. The production was carried out under code names. Previews were screened for right-wing commentators and activists, but no one else - even the people involved - was allowed to see it.

Apart from the big stuff, the film seems littered with minor untruths and inaccuracies. The airport where Mohammed Atta boarded a plane and the airline that let him on are real, just not the ones where the real events took place, and the circumstances are misrepresented. It even spells Madeleine Albright's name wrong.

Scholastic, which had agreed to distribute education material alongside the film, dumped the lot once it realised what it would be distributing:

Scholastic caved quickly, yanking educational materials tied to the movie that critics said linked Iraq to 9/11 and glossed over the grim situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues," Scholastic Chairman Dick Robinson said.

While an alarming number of right-wing opinion-leaders seem to think it's just fine, even some Fox News commentators think that just making stuff up in a show like this is "slanderous" and "defamatory"

I don't particularly blame TVNZ for screening The Path to 9/11. When you're offered a $40 million network production on the claim that it's based on the official report into 9/11, you're going to take it, and you're not going to pull it because a couple of local law lecturers cry foul the day before it screens. The formal complaint isn't too much of a bother either. Of course, if one of those maligned in the film chose to take action under New Zealand's friendly libel laws, that might be very nasty, but I suspect that won't happen.

I'll leave you with the semi-literate billing for the programme that appeared in the MySky EPG:

"A dramatisation of the events published in the US bestseller 'The 9/11 Commission Report'."

Eh?

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