Denial like a river

We've been hearing for over a decade from conservatives that liberalism is the source of everything wrong with America. Indeed, attacking liberals as "evil" (see, e.g., the title of Sean Hannity's current screed) seems at times to be the entire raison d'etre of the conservative movement, at least insofar as it promotes its own ideology.

The corollary to this, of course, is that conservatism, by contrast, is the source of all that is good and right and pure about America. Most conservatives prefer the former tactic -- it's always easier, not to mention more emotionally satisfying for the conservative mindset, to tear your enemies down -- but of course, the Whatta Rush Limbaughs of the world are never shy about a little vacuous self-plumping.

That's why they really hate it when anyone brings up the little problem of racism.

Nearly everyone recognizes, of course, that racism is in fact one of the real things that is foul and wrong about America. And while the Democratic Party was for years the primary home of white supremacists, most people -- especially minorities -- are well aware that this all changed in the 1960s and '70s, thanks to the so-called "Southern Strategy."

That, of course, was Richard Nixon's tactic of drawing in white nationalists in the South to the Republican Party by making not-too-subtle appeals to their innate racism. It transformed the GOP from the party of Lincoln to the party of neo-Confederates it is today.

And most of us are similarly aware that the Southern Strategy remains alive and well in today's GOP.

One of the ways today's Republicans deal with this conundrum is not to try to actually confront these elements and eradicate the racist impulse from its ranks. Its preferred course is to play a PR game touting a phony "compassionate conservatism" by posing party leaders with as many minorities as they can find, even while it continues promulgating policies, such as attacking affirmative action, that clearly are counter to the interests of those same minorities. When someone like Trent Lott is caught revealing Southern Republicans' oft-camouflaged inner thoughts about segregation and civil rights, their initial impulse is to deny, obfuscate and counterattack, until the building PR nightmare finally forces them to slap his wrists.

Recently, we've seen a new tactic emerge, consonant with the movement's increasing dependence on Newspeak: Deploy up-is-down arguments that the Southern Strategy really doesn't have racism at its core, pretending that white supremacism is actually vanishing from the South.

Roger Ailes recently pointed us to a Jonah Goldberg entry at National Review's The Corner that made this argument by proxy, likewise directing us to an article by Gerard Alexander in the pseudo-academic conservative propaganda journal of the Claremont Institute:

The Myth of the Racist Republicans

Alexander examines four serious texts dealing with the Southern Strategy, and denounces them all as fundamentally deluded because, it seems, racism isn't really present as a significant political impulse in the South any longer.

Alexander introduces this thesis with a peculiar formulation of the argument against the GOP:

A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism and has spread to the 2004 presidential campaign. It goes something like this: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist. Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists. Either way, today's Republican Party -- and by extension the conservative movement at its heart -- supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself.

There may be some critics of the GOP who use the first argument, but not many, at least not those who are serious about the matter. But there are many who clearly adopt the latter, including many former Republicans who abandoned the party precisely because of this strategy and the way it transformed the party.

I happen to be one of the latter. And my view -- like those of many others -- is actually somewhat more nuanced. What is clear to us is that the GOP, and the conservative movement generally, has been overtaken by people whose chief concerns have little to do with true conservatism and more with the Machivellian acquisition of power by any means. This is not mere opportunism, but a malignant metastasis that not only finds white supremacism an acceptable impulse but one fully consonant with its drive to power.

Alexander, however, denies this is the case. The old racism of the South, he argues, has been displaced by standard middle-class concerns about policy that are innocent of racism and are instead based on middle-of-the-road policy concerns:

The fact that these (and many other) books suggest otherwise shows that the myth is ultimately based on a demonization not of the GOP but of Southerners, who are indeed assumed to have Confederate flags in their hearts if not on their pickups. This view lends The Rise of Southern Republicans a schizophrenic nature: it charts numerous changes in the South, but its organizing categories are predicated on the unsustainable assumption that racial views remain intact.

The basic dishonesty of Alexander's argument is revealed in the fact that one of the books that he criticizes -- Joseph Aistrup's The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South -- is not particularly critical of the GOP. Indeed, it is in fact largely a strategic manual for Republicans, arguing that the top-down strategy (which is to say, an orientation toward top national offices as a way of leading a national Republican charge at state and local levels) inherent in the Southern Strategy should remain intact while shedding the old racism that was at its core.

However, Aistrup is both blunt and accurate in assessing the Southern Strategy's foundations and its continuing polity. I excerpted relevant parts of the text some time back:

The Southern Strategy was developed to take advantage of the upheavals of the southern structure (Bass and De Vries, 1976, 22-33). The major goal of the Southern Strategy was to transform the Republicans' reputation as the party of Lincoln, Yankees, and carpetbaggers into the party that protects white interests (Klinkner 1992; Bass and DeVries 1976; 22-23). Thus, subtle segregationist threads are sewn in to the tapestry of the Southern Strategy. As a response in part to the GOP's new image and the liberalizing changes in the national Democrats' party positions, the Southern Democrats evolved from a party that depended on race-baiting, white supremacists to a party that needs and depends on black support to win elections (Lamis 1988).

Significantly, the GOP began a conscious effort to recast their Southern image after Nixon's loss in 1960. Under the influence of Goldwater and his allies, the Republican National Committee's program "Operation Dixie" (Klinkner 1992) changed to openly promote a more conservative states' rights and segregationist policies and to recruit candidates of this ilk. Republican segregationist candidates made respectable showings in the 1962 South Carolina U.S. Senate elections, where William Workman received 43 percent of the vote, and in the 1962 Alabama U.S. Senate election, where James Martin was seven thousand votes shy of unseating Democratic Sen. Lister Hill.

Even with the subtle change toward accepting candidates who were more in tune with the predominant white Southern party at that time, it was not until the 1964 presidential campaign that the Republicans' new image became solidified. The key event that highlighted the Republicans' new strategy and led to the Democrats shedding their old segregationist image was the national Democrats' support of civil rights and Goldwater's and the Republican party's support of states' rights (Bass and De Vries 1976, 29). This election, more than any other (Carmines and Stinson 1989), drew clear lines of division and provided a glimpse of the future of party politics in the South and the rest of the nation. The battle was defined in the South as segregation versus desegregation. However, it was the Republicans, not the Democrats, who promoted segregational politics.

As Aistrup observes, these appeals were not as overt as the white supremacy of the old Dixiecrats like Theodore Bilbo, John Rankin and Strom Thurmond:

... In tandem with the Southern Strategy issue orientation, a number of Republicans attempted to use subtle segregationist suggestions to win elections. Southern Republicans developed a set of policy positions that reinforced their racially conservative policy orientations. Republicans opposed forced busing, employment quotas, affirmative action and welfare programs; at the same time, they favored local control and tax exemptions for segregated private schools (Lamis 1988, 24). Segregationist policies became more abstract, a Reagan official explained: "You're getting abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes ... [these policies] are totally economic things and a by-product of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it" (Lamis 1988, 26).

...Undaunted by Wallace's potential usurpation of the states' rights mantle, Nixon cut a deal with Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond (S.C.) to continue promoting policies consistent with a states' rights orientation. Murphy and Gulliver describe the meeting: "Richard Milhous Nixon ... sat in a motel room in Atlanta in the early spring of 1968 and made his political deal. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was there. There were others. The essential Nixon bargain was this: If I'm president of the United States, I'll find a way to ease up on the federal pressures forcing school desegregation or any other kind of desegregation. Whatever the exact words or phrasing, this was how the Nixon commitment was understood by Thurmond and other southern GOP strategists."

Since this time, the racially conservative issue appeal of the southern Strategy has evolved from advocating states' rights and opposing busing in the 1960s and 1970s to opposing large segments of the civil rights policy agenda, including affirmative action and quotas in the 1980s... The key to deciphering the Southern Strategy and understanding its evolution is found by revealing how its policy rhetoric appeals to its target audience, Southern whites. Many of the public words and deeds of the Southern Strategy have hidden meanings to adherents. Seemingly ambiguous political language has important, specific connotations for various groups in society.

And as Aistrup observes, the Southern Strategy has broader ramifications for voters well outside the South as well:

When a GOP presidential candidate's campaign strategy emphasizes racially conservative appeals, he identifies not only himself but his party as the one that protects white interests. The identification of the GOP, instead of the Southern Democrats, as the protector of white interests, combined with the large infusion of blacks into the Southern Democratic parties, opens the door for Southern whites to abandon their historic ties to the Democrats.

Indeed, it seems fairly clear that the GOP has largely followed the core ideas of Aistrup's thesis since the book was published in the mid-1990s -- with varying degrees of success. "Compassionate conservatism" represents a cosmetic attempt to appear to shed the old racism, even though the reality is that, in both the South and elsewhere, those old impulses are not so easily shed.

This is especially the case when it comes to the continuing, and sometimes overwhelming, presence of the far-right neo-Confederate movement within the ranks of the GOP. This movement, as I've discussed at length previously, is not merely arch-conservative but positively radical; it not only defends the Confederacy and slavery and denounces Lincoln, but it argues for outright secession.

Sean Wilentz discussed the neo-Confederate presence in the modern GOP a couple of years ago in detail at The American Prospect:

Neo-Confederate influence in the Bush White House is not, meanwhile, confined to Hines. Bush's first act as president was to nominate Ashcroft as attorney general. Ashcroft had just lost a Senate race in Missouri after deciding not to run against Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has observed, Ashcroft -- as attorney general, governor of Missouri and a U.S. Senator -- "built a career out of opposing school desegregation in St. Louis and opposing African-Americans for public office." During the St. Louis integration crisis and after, Ashcroft maintained intimate links to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the successor organization to the segregationist White Citizens Councils, which has its headquarters in St. Louis. Ashcroft even intervened at the behest of CCC leader Gordon Baum in a strange case involving a prominent CCC member accused of plotting the murder of an FBI agent. In his Southern Partisan interview, arranged by Hines, Ashcroft commended the magazine for helping to "set the record straight" and for "defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Thomas "Stonewall"] Jackson, and [Jefferson] Davis." As George W. Bush's attorney general, Ashcroft has used the Department of Justice to support Republican efforts at voter suppression, many of them aimed at black voters.

There are other ways that white supremacism has adopted new guises as well, and these likewise have become inextricably interwoven with the conservative movement. One of the most significant of these is through so-called "academic racist" organizations such as American Renaissance, which promotes the old supremacy by couching it in seemingly respectable language, even as a closer examination reveals not only specious logic but a foundation of truly vile racism. Yet mainstream conservatives treat AR and its leader, Jared Taylor, as a respected authority; Joe Scarborough's MSNBC talk show, for instance, has hosted Taylor on two occasions without even explaining to its audience that AR is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

AR also provides an important way of networking with other white supremacists, and helps to likewise plug them into mainstream conservatism, as this report points out:

In 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve resurrected scientific racism. Now it was no longer culture and behaviour which caused unemployment and crime, but genes and biology. That year in Atlanta American Renaissance held its first conference. The mainstream conservative cloak came off revealing a different movement. Sam Dickson, John Tyndall's favourite Atlanta attorney, for example, was a featured speaker. Sam Francis gave an unvarnished appeal to resurrect white supremacy. In attendance was a gaggle from the Council of Conservative Citizens along with Ed Fields, the Truth At Last publisher who alternates between Klan and neo-nazi affiliations.

The above-mentioned Council of Conservative Citizens likewise has something of a notorious role in connecting mainstream conservatism with the racist far right. Trent Lott, before his meltdown of last year, had previously raised eyebrows by maintaining substantive connections to the group, and only half-heartedly distancing himself from the group when its core agenda was revealed.

But that was not the end of the CofCC's role in the Republican Party. It reappeared again last year during Haley Barbour's successful bid for the Mississippi governorship, which also featured overt appeals based on the Confederate flag debate (a significant code issue for Southern racists). Barbour, in keeping with the standard GOP approach to such issues, tried shrugging off his grip-and-grin appearance with the group's offiicals by suggesting that the CofCC was a constituency just like any other.

Indeed, the CofCC regularly insists that it is not a racist organization, even though the evidence is substantial that it is indeed. Perhaps the most stark case of this came when Earl Holt, one of the CofCC's founders, based in St. Louis, decided to respond to criticism from ArchPundit:

Being the shallow, nigger-loving dilettante that you are, you probably DO consider niggers to be your equal (who am I to question this?): Yet, unlike you and your allies, I have an I.Q. in excess of 130, which grants me the ability to objectively evaluate the Great American Nigro (Africanus Criminalis.)

The nigro is 11.5 % of the U.S. population, yet he commits in excess of 55% of all felonies (although felonies are UNDER-represented in the nigro community, where observing the law is considered "acting White!") Moreover, he (or should I say she?)accounts for 48% of all ADC recipients in the U.S. We have spent over $7 TRILLION on "Urban Welfare Spending" since the mid-1960s, (black economists Thomas Sowell & Walter Williams) and the nigro is still as criminal, surly, lazy , violent and stupid as he/she ever was, while his illegitimacy rate is 80% nationwide, and over 90% in the "large urban areas."

... Some day, You sanctimonious nigger-lovers will either have to live amongst them ("nothing cures an enthusiasm for integration like a good dose of niggers") or else defend yourselves against them. My guess is that you are such a cowardly and pusillanimous lot of girly-boys, they will kill fuck, kill and eat you just as they do young White males in every prison system in the U.S. That's right: When defending this savage and brutish lot, you must also consider their natural ( or should I say UN-natural) enthusiasm for buggery!

I honestly pray to God that some nigger fucks, kills and eats you and everyone you claim to love!

Holt, who hosts a St. Louis radio talk show touting conservative issues, is still a key figure in Republican politics in St. Louis, as this report explains.

Similar comments cropped up recently during the debate over erecting a statue of Lincoln in Virginia, as Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest recently observed. The petition complained that placing the statue in Richmond -- the capital of the Confederacy -- would be like "one glorifying the evil Third Reich to Hitler in Tel Aviv." Comments against the plan ran like this:

"Absolutely Not ! I'll accept a statue of Ape Lingum in Richmond when Karl Marx and Vlad Lenin are placed in Washington, D.C. along with a statue of Bin Laden in New York City.....

Why not put up a statue of Osama bin Laden at Ground Zero?....

The only way that I would support a statue of Lincoln in Richmond would be to have him depicted in CHAINS in a kneeling position!....

Based on years of monitoring the growing interconnection between the racist right and mainstream conservatism, Mark Potok of the SPLC offered the following assessment:

In fact, the ideas of the radical right are thriving in a number of venues. On hugely popular talk shows like "The O'Reilly Factor," conspiracy theories about non-white immigration that originated on the extreme right are now bandied about as fact. A number of major foundations are pushing the notion that a tiny group of German Jews are behind the destruction of "American culture." In much of the South, the idea of Abraham Lincoln as a racial emancipator is under attack by right-wing academics. Extremists have seized control of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a purportedly mainstream Southern heritage group with 32,000 members, a $5 million bank account, and an increasingly far-right political agenda.

... Sam Francis, perhaps the leading intellectual of the radical right, recently wrote that the future of the movement lies with the softer-line hate groups like American Renaissance, a journal and allied foundation focusing on the "science" of race, and the Council of Conservative Citizens, which sees non-white immigration as a threat to the nation.

"Both have succeeded in learning how to discuss ... the scientific, social, and political realities of race without reliance on the old rhetoric of what was called 'white supremacy' and 'hate,'" Francis wrote.

The sad reality is that Francis is mostly right. Trent Lott is no longer Senate majority leader and white supremacist groups across the board have taken a serious body blow. But the ideas they represent are alive and doing surprisingly well.

Make no mistake: There are thousands if not millions of conservative Republicans who are free of racist taint. These tend to be genuine conservatives of principle who, as Alexander suggests, base their beliefs on serious policy concerns that have nothing to do with racism or white supremacism.

But pretending that the racist element has little influence -- or, even more absurdly, that it doesn't exist -- does not raise any hope that conservatives will be serious about eradicating its presence in their ranks anytime soon.

Which is all the more the tragedy. The sooner that racism is deprived of any political power in America, the sooner it will be eradicated. Conservatives like Alexander only give it the kind of cover it needs to keep eating away at the nation's soul.

Waco in Iraq

My friend Jean Rosenfeld, whose work I've mentioned previously, is a religious-studies researcher at UCLA who specializes in analyzing extremist religious movements and the way religion can inspire violence. She was among the scholars consulted by the FBI during the Freemen standoff in Montana, and counts among her colleagues the scholars consulted by the FBI at Waco (whose recommendations were made to the negotiating team, whose work in turn was ignored by the tactical units that were in charge of the scene there). I also consulted with Jean while I was covering the Freemen standoff in Montana -- which, because the negotiating team was placed in charge, had a dramatically different outcome than that in Waco. (For details, see In God's Country.)

She sees an important parallel in what is now happening in Iraq regarding the Sadrists, and is hoping that the government does not make the same mistakes there that they made at Waco. She recently penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that appears to have been ignored by that paper's editors. So I'm going to publish it in full here.

One of the most difficult problems before and during a critical incident is one of access. The media understands this problem, but perhaps does not know that it is a major problem for people with expertise outside the agencies tasked to handle the incident.

There were experts outside the cordon at Waco who were effectively negotiating David Koresh out of Waco. This is now well documented. One of these experts was very effective during the Freemen crisis when he was brought on site by the FBI.

I have studied both critical incidents and written about them. I was involved in data gathering and sending memos during the Freemen critical incident.

Watch what is happening with al-Sadr in an-Najaf. This is a critical incident writ large of the type my colleagues and I have advised about, studied, and written about over a period of eight years. I am hypothesizing that we risk making the same mistake at an-Najaf with al-Sadr that we made at Waco, unless the knowledge gained from three critical incidents in the U.S. -- the CSA (The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord), Branch Davidian, and Jordan, Montana -- has been transmitted to the U.S. military and CPA and has been incorporated into their strategies and tactics. I seriously doubt that this is the case.

I have written and spoken many times about how a religiously motivated critical incident, or standoff, differs qualitatively and markedly from a criminally-motivated hostage standoff. The latter is the model for defusing critical incidents among law enforcement and CT specialists. They remain uninformed and skeptical about these important differences to this day. The Freemen crisis actually began to unravel after scholars advised the FBI to "get a letter from God" to Gloria Ward that allowed her and her two children to leave the Clark ranch. They did so and she left. I have published an article about the Freemen crisis in a peer-reviewed journal and it was reprinted in the book, Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence, ed. by Catherine Wessinger.

[Coalition spokesman] Dan Senor is reported in the Times [last week] as saying, "The way we look at it is, there is no alternative to getting it (capturing or killing al-Sadr and eradicating the Sadr brigades) done ... If we allow the violence to cause setbacks to the political process, the terrorists and the extremists will have scored an enormous victory."

Aside from Senor's mistakenly mixing the Sadrist crisis up with the al-Zarqawi letter that advocated sparking a Sunni/Shiite civil war -- an agenda peculiar only to al-Zarqawi's foreign jihadists in Iraq and not to any other faction even a faction within al-Qaida that we know of, Senor is taking the very same approach that the Waco tactical commanders took to the Branch Davidians. Negotiators at Waco dissented with the tactical team, but were overruled.

What is not known about Waco is that the final assault plan was amended on the ground by the tactical field commanders on the very day of the assault. That alteration had been discussed and rejected by the FBI brass over several weeks. Nonetheless, the FBI HRT commander, Richard Rogers implemented the rejected plan via a loophole signed by Janet Reno the morning of the final assault on April 19. That alteration was identical to the gassing and demolition plan that two Delta Force advisors seconded to the Justice Dept. in a principals meeting of April 14. Those two advisors supported the rejected plan that was later implemented "hypothetically" in order to conform to the letter of Posse Comitatus law. I also have published a peer-reviewed article with this finding. It is based on government documents--all open source. The rejected plan supported by Jeff Jamar, Richard Rogers, and the two Delta Force officers resulted in a disaster that did not have to happen. It was an ill-advised tactical approach to a religious community that feared that Satan was attacking them.

Those two Delta Force officers were Peter J. Schoomaker and "Jerry" Boykin, now both top officials in the US Army in charge of military planning for the war on terrorism.

So, watch an-Najaf. The religiously-motivated standoff may end with a whimper. Or it may end with a bang. It need not end violently or set off more violence against the US. If al-Sadr is killed, he will become a martyr to Shiites outside of Iraq. We have already seen demonstrations in support of al-Sadr elsewhere in Iraq among Sunnis and elsewhere in the Arab world. Al-Sadr is creating solidarity between Sunni and Shiite activist and militant groups. This is not in the longterm US interest.

I believe that the hard tactical approach being contemplated in an-Najaf, if negotiations now under way do not result in al-Sadr's surrender -- is the same approach contemplated and executed at Waco. Capturing or killing al-Sadr will not neutralize what he is regarded as symbolizing to Shiites angry at "occupiers" in Iraq or in Israel. It will only amplify it. There are better ways to defuse the problem of al-Sadr. We should not take a tactical approach because it suits the politics or flawed strategy of the current administration. We may have to change our strategy in Iraq to accommodate new realities instead. This may be tough political medicine, but it will save us from terrible consequences down the road.

I believe Senor's approach is similar to the tactical one taken at Waco against another "messiah." It resulted in many deaths and a legacy that led us to the "commemoration" atrocity in Oklahoma City. As one of many scholars who study these cases of religion and violence and who have not seen our findings incorporated into law enforcement (we did have some input into the FBI's millennium approach) or the military, I am very concerned that the standoff in an-Najaf has the potential to become "another Waco."

The wild card at an-Najaf is religion -- a factor very few experts in fields other than ours fully understand and weigh in their calculations and strategies in these alarming and perplexing incidents.

So, please watch an-Najaf. Consult with knowledgeable experts outside the military cordon there, people who know what al-Sadr represents. He is not in league with Iran. SCIRI is closer to Iran. He is an Iraqi nationalist. He is a puritanical, orthodox Shiite. He does want political representation. We have mistakenly isolated him and his oppressed, impoverished, young supporters. That was dumb, but we should not now be dumber by making him a martyr in the Shiite fundamentalist pantheon.

It is worth observing, of course, that (as Atrios notes) the coalition appears determined to make this mistake, since its official stance is that "The mission of U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr."

The incompetence coverup

The astonishing mendacity of the Bush administration regarding the ample warnings of impending terrorist attacks in the summer of 2001 -- and its subsequent failures to act in any substantive way on those warnings -- is perhaps understandable. After all, the situation reveals, as noted previously, the Bush team's grotesque incompetence.

Numerous bloggers have already weighed in on the blatant lying engaged in not merely by Condoleezza Rice, but George Bush himself, over the weekend. Daily Kos has a handy summary, including a link to David Sirota's excellent takedown.

Another problem with Rice's testimony popped up recently in this Newsday report, which found that other of Rice's claims before the 9/11 commission were on shaky ground, factually speaking:

Rice, testifying before the Sept. 11 commission Thursday, said that those 70 investigations were mentioned in a CIA briefing to the president and satisfied the White House that the FBI was doing its job in response to dire warnings that attacks were imminent and that the administration felt it had no need to act further.

But the FBI Friday said that those investigations were not limited to al-Qaida and did not focus on al-Qaida cells. FBI spokesman Ed Coggswell said the bureau was trying to determine how the number 70 got into the report.

... [Rice] said the briefing memo disclosed that the FBI had 70 "full-field investigations under way of cells" in the United States. And that, Rice said, explained why "there was no recommendation [coming from the White House] that we do something about" the flurry of threat warnings in the months preceding the attacks.

But Coggswell Friday said that those 70 investigations involved a number of international terrorist organizations, not just al-Qaida. He said that many were criminal investigations, which terrorism experts say are not likely to focus on preventing terrorist acts. And he said he would "not characterize" the targets of the investigations as cells, or groups acting in concert, as was the case with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In addition to these investigations, Rice told the panel that FBI headquarters, reacting to alarming but vague intelligence in the spring and summer of 2001 that attacks were imminent, "tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known suspected terrorists" and to contact informants who might provide leads.

That, too, is news to the field offices. Commissioner Timothy J. Roemer told Rice that the commission had "to date ... found nobody, nobody at the FBI, who knows anything about a tasking of field offices." Even Thomas Pickard, at the time acting FBI director, told the panel that he "did not tell the field offices to do this," Roemer said.

But that's not all. It seems the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing that has become the focus of the current controversy was not the only significant warning the administration received.

A year-old Newsweek "Web exclusive" by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball contained the following nugget, conveniently buried near the end:

Some sources who have read the still-secret congressional report say some sections would not play quite so neatly into White House plans. One portion deals extensively with the stream of U.S. intelligence-agency reports in the summer of 2001 suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning an upcoming attack against the United States -- and implicitly raises questions about how Bush and his top aides responded. One such CIA briefing, in July 2001, was particularly chilling and prophetic. It predicted that Osama bin Laden was about to launch a terrorist strike "in the coming weeks," the congressional investigators found. The intelligence briefing went on to say: "The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

What's particularly noteworthy about this is the way the document was classified:

The substance of that intelligence report was first disclosed at a public hearing last September by staff director Hill. But at the last minute, Hill was blocked from saying precisely who within the Bush White House got the briefing when CIA director Tenet classified the names of the recipients. (One source says the recipients of the briefing included Bush himself.) As a result, Hill was only able to say the briefing was given to "senior government officials."

This reeks of cover-up. The common reason for classifying a document, or portions thereof, is to protect the identity of sources of intelligence information, not the recipients.

As Mark Crispin Miller (who sent this item along) points out:

Some recipients of the briefing could have been low-visibility CIA people, and it would be appropriate to shield them. However, with regard to the White House, the identity and government role of all recipients would be well-known. Therefore, Tenet's classification of all the names of recipients would be a clear case of politicizing the classification process, if White House personnel or Bush were recipients of the briefing, as they should have been.

At this point, only the willfully self-blinded or the spectacularly dumb should unable to see what's going on here. Unfortunately, that seems to include nearly every self-described conservative.

Smear artists

The depths to which the Moonie-owned Washington Times will reach to attack non-conservatives is no longer a surprise, of course. After all, this is a newspaper that sabotaged America's best chance to take out Osama bin Laden before 9/11 just so it could spite Bill Clinton.

Now it is descending to scummy Little Green Footballs-like depths in attempting to attack John Kerry -- trading in outright falsehoods while playing on xenophobic stereotypes about Muslims.

In a recent editorial titled "Inept or Ignorant?", the paper described Kerry as "a man who either doesn't understand the struggle against radical Islam or blindly went trolling for votes from a radical Islamic organization."

In December, when John Kerry was badly trailing Howard Dean, the Massachusetts senator spoke at the annual convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), an anti-Semitic organization that has defended infamous terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. Addressing the Long Beach, Calif., audience by phone, Mr. Kerry told the crowd that he "really want to earn support of Muslim leaders across the United States." Mr. Kerry appealed to the crowd by strongly implying that the Bush administration is not protecting the First Amendment rights of Muslims. "I believe this administration is moving our country in a radically wrong direction and is cynically exploiting people in the country and has forgotten some of the heart of the Constitution of the United States of America," he said during his speech.

Mr. Kerry's words, though not justified by facts or any reasonable interpretation of reality, are not the primary problem. His willingness to address the group in the first place is. No presidential candidate should lend legitimacy to a group with MPAC's track record.

Well, what is MPAC's real track record? Here is its own reply to the smear job:

The Washington Times ... editorial falsely charges MPAC with being both anti-Semitic and a supporter of, or at best apologist for, terrorism. Both of these charges are baseless, and we categorically reject them as instruments of political exploitation. In fact, an honest and responsible analysis of our record demonstrates the opposite about our organization.

The irony is that in the organized American Muslim community, MPAC is perhaps the most vocal critic of terrorism, Wahhabism, and extremism. We have been at times criticized in our own community for being "divisive" when we have stood up for our principles. We produced a Counterterrorism paper last year numbering over 100 pages that gave detailed policy suggestions on how the United States can better fight and win the War on Terrorism. That paper was favorably reviewed by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Former Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA Graham Fuller, among others.

When it was politically incorrect in our own community to do so, MPAC condemned the Taliban for its treatment of women and its destruction of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. MPAC took a firm stance against the Taliban even when the U.S. business establishment had ties to them. Our organization never hesitates to stand up for the rights of minorities in the Muslim world, dedicating an entire panel of our recent convention to the subject. When Salman Rushdie was given a death sentence, MPAC defended his right to free speech and condemned the sentence. The list of such principled positions goes on and on.

Our sense of principle also applies to the terrible violence in the Middle East. If the Washington Times had called MPAC or so much as visited our website, it would have found the above paper and our policy brief on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in which we clearly call for a two-state solution and condemn terrorism against Israelis and Palestinians. You would have noticed that we endorsed Oslo, the Road Map, the Geneva Accords, and we in fact favor any reasonable and viable peace deal as being not just in Muslim interest, but in America's interest. The Times should have cited our extensive work with Jewish organizations over 16 years and our on-going Muslim-Jewish dialogue, the longest in the country. You would have seen from our track record (a bibliography of our statements spanning over 60 pages that is easily available by a simple request), that we have condemned terrorism conducted by Hamas and Hizbullah by name, not once, but several times, including on national television.

What is truly bizarre about this type of pseudo-journalism is the unyielding and irrational determination to contort MPAC into an extremist group, even when such a hatchet job requires completely misrepresenting the facts. To take just one of several examples of this unethical behavior, the Times alleged that Salam Al-Marayati downplayed Hamas’ "quote unquote military operations". In reality, Al-Marayati said "quote unquote" because he does not believe that operations carried out by Hamas that kill civilians are "military operations": he believes they are terrorism.

On the day of the September 11th attacks, in response to a caller that placed Islam on the suspect list, Salam Al-Marayati responded that Israel should be put on the list of suspects for the bombing. At that early stage of the tragedy, when no culprits were identified, Al-Marayati made that comment as a rhetorical rejoinder: if we are to blame the tragedy on a religion, what is to stop others from wildly pointing fingers in other directions? Furthermore, Al-Marayati published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times clarifying his position and regretting any misunderstanding. He made personal phone calls to Jewish leaders and attended several meetings. These exchanges are also a matter of public record the Times chose to ignore. To paint MPAC as an "anti-Semitic group" because of this exchange is nonsense and an entirely inappropriate and irresponsible use of the serious charge of anti-Semitism.

As for John Kerry, not only did he speak at MPAC's convention, but so did Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Senator Tom Harkin, and representatives from the Bush Administration itself. In fact, the MPAC leadership has met with all levels of this administration several times, including the President himself. Our helpfulness on counterterrorism issues has been lauded by FBI Director Robert Mueller, leaders at the Office of Homeland Security, and countless local law-enforcement officials, with whom we have held numerous meetings and brainstorming sessions to help America remain safe. Perhaps your next editorial can clarify whether you consider the White House "Inept or Ignorant".

In the end, we continue to shake our heads and wonder why a paper like the Washington Times wants to waste its time attacking Muslims who are moderate, responsible, anti-terrorist and who want to help America in an informed and in-depth manner. We think your actions are un-American and a gross breach of journalistic ethics, which would at least have demanded that you speak to us directly before smearing us.

The Washington Times might be both inept and ignorant, but in this case, it's being neither. It's simply lying -- at the expense of responsible Muslims -- in a crude attempt to harm John Kerry.

All apologies

I've been wrapped up in proofing the galleys for Death on the Fourth of July. I'll be back in the saddle again later today.

Condi, Clarke and the Millennium Plot

Something Condoleezza Rice mentioned in her appearance this morning before the 9/11 commission caught my attention:

It's also the case that I think if you actually look back at the millennium period, it's questionable to me whether the argument that has been made that somehow shaking the trees is what broke up the millennium period is actually accurate -- and I was not there, clearly.

But I will tell you this. I will say this. That the millennium, of course, was a period of high threat by its very nature. We all knew that the millennium was a period of high threat.

And after September 11th, Dick Clarke sent us the after-action report that had been done after the millennium plot and their assessment was that Ressam had been caught by chance -- Ressam being the person who was entering the United States over the Canadian border with bomb-making materials in store.

I think it actually wasn't by chance, which was Washington's view of it. It was because a very alert customs agent named Diana Dean and her colleagues sniffed something about Ressam. They saw that something was wrong. They tried to apprehend him. He tried to run. They then apprehended him, found that there was bomb-making material and a map of Los Angeles.

Now, at that point, you have pretty clear indication that you've got a problem inside the United States.

I don't think it was shaking the trees that produced the breakthrough in the millennium plot. It was that you got a -- Dick Clarke would say a lucky break -- I would say you got an alert customs agent who got it right.

And the interesting thing is that I've checked with Customs and according to their records, they weren't actually on alert at that point.

So I just don't buy the argument that we weren't shaking the trees enough and that something was going to fall out that gave us somehow that little piece of information that would have led to connecting all of those dots.

Juan Cole has already discussed in depth how "the Millennium plot" arrests tended to undermine the Bush administration's pooh-poohing of Richard Clarke's damning critique of Bush's "war on terror":

What Clarke's book reveals is that the way Ressam was shaken out at Port Angeles by customs agent Diana Dean was not an accident. Rather, Clinton had made Clarke a cabinet member. He was given the authority to call other key cabinet members and security officials to "battle stations," involving heightened alerts in their bureaucracies and daily meetings. Clarke did this with Clinton's approval in December of 1999 because of increased chatter and because the Jordanians caught a break when they cracked Raed al-Hijazi's cell in Amman.

I haven't seen the passages in Clarke's book yet detailing this matter, but Cole leaves the impression that Ressam was caught because Clarke put border officials on high alert -- though this was not in fact the case. In fact, just as Rice asserted today, Ressam was captured primarily through the work of a Customs agent who was simply doing her job as she might normally. (The Seattle Times had a riveting account of the arrest as part of its excellent series on the Ressam case.)

However, that's not the entire story, either.

I checked with Mike Milne, the PIO for Customs in Seattle -- which oversees the Port Angeles bureau where Ressam was caught -- and he confirmed that there was no "high alert" for his agents in December 1999.

"There wasn't such a thing back in those days as elevated alert levels or terrorist-watch kinds of issues within U.S. Customs at that time," Milne said. "What this was was a case of inspectors just doing their jobs as they normally would.

"I've sat through with Diana Dean on a number of occasions when she has done interviews with national, international and local media, and she would just tell you that she was doing her regular line of questioning, trying to determine if this person was somebody that could just be released, whether they required an additional secondary examination. In this case, what piqued her interest was the circuitous routing -- you know, he was going to Seattle via Victoria and Port Angeles. You know -- you can just drive down I-5 if you want to drive from Vancouver to Seattle."

After the Ressam capture, however, Milne said, "We in Customs Service went into an immediate change of how we did operations along the U.S.-Canada border."

So Rice is technically correct. But her "context" for the case omits the bigger picture -- which tends, in fact, to corroborate Clarke's version, and moreover paints Rice and her Team Bush cohorts in a decidedly incompetent light.

The bigger picture includes what happened next: Namely, FBI agents and the Clinton counterterror team, headed by Clarke -- realizing the enormity of what Ressam represented -- sprung quickly into action and soon uncovered most of the rest of his co-conspirators. Ressam, it must be remembered, was scheduled to bomb L.A. International Airport. However, there were at least three other millennium plots, all outside the U.S. but against mostly American targets. (As far as I know, the speculation that the Space Needle was targeted has been mostly discredited.) More to the point, investigators began uncovering a much broader assortment of Al Qaeda terrorist cells operating within the U.S.

This happened largely because of Clarke's "battle station" status for officials in Washington. The Seattle FBI agent investigating the case, Fred Humphries, was quickly brought under the wing of John O'Neill, Clarke's counterterrorism chief (and himself a victim of 9/11, having been forced out by the Bush administration). And O'Neill, as Clarke explained in a PBS interview last year, used Ressam to springboard into a broad swath of terrorist cells -- and because of that, the other components of the Millennium Plot were stymied:

What happened in the millennium plot was that we found someone who had lived in Boston who was the leader of the planned attack at the millennium in Jordan. We found someone who lived in Canada who was planning a simultaneous attack in Los Angeles. When we started pulling on the strings, what we found was there were connections to people in Seattle, Boston, Brooklyn, Manhattan and other cities throughout the United States.

Every time we looked at one of these individuals who looked like an Al Qaeda person, they lead us to someone else who was an Al Qaeda person -- probably, somewhere else in the United States.

So I think a lot of the FBI leadership, for the first time, realized that O'Neill was right -- that there probably were Al Qaeda people in the United States. They realized that only after they looked at the results of the investigation of the millennium bombing plot. So by February 2000, I think senior people in the FBI were saying there probably is a network here in the United States, and we have to change the way the FBI goes about finding that network.

The work needed to make that change, as Clarke has made clear in his testimony, is a significant part of what he tried to bring to the attention of Bush administration officials shortly after being sworn into office in January 2001. It was the chief reason he asked for a Principals meeting then -- though Rice and the Bush team now contend he was supposedly focused solely on dealing with Al Qaeda abroad. As we all now know, that Principals meeting did not occur until Sept. 4.

Even more significant is the fact that -- just as the Aug. 6 Presidential Daily Briefing that is now the focus of the post-testimony controversy apparently suggests, according to 9/11 commissioners Bob Kerrey and Tim Roemer -- the same warning signs that had alerted officials to the Millennium Plot -- were replicating themselves.

As the Center for American Progress details in its rebuttal to Rice's testimony:

Page 204 of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 noted that "In May 2001, the intelligence community obtained a report that Bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States" to "carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives." The report "was included in an intelligence report for senior government officials in August [2001]." In the same month, the Pentagon "acquired and shared with other elements of the Intelligence Community information suggesting that seven persons associated with Bin Laden had departed various locations for Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States." [Sources: Joint Congressional Report, 12/02]

That wasn't all. Just as one of the key conspirators -- namely, Ahmed Ressam -- had been caught in 1999, leading Clarke, O'Neill and the counterterrorism team to break up the rest of the Millennium plot, so had one of the 9/11 conspirators evidently already been captured on Aug. 15: Zacarias Moussaoui.

Did Bush's counterterrorism team spring into action and catch the rest of his co-conspirators? Well, no. But then, we all knew the answer to that.

As the conclusion of the Seattle Times series details:

This case involved a suspect in custody in Minnesota: Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent. Moussaoui was a student pilot who had frightened flight-school trainers in Minneapolis by insisting on learning to steer a jumbo jet while showing no interest in learning to take off or land.

FBI agents in Minneapolis had questioned Moussaoui on Aug. 15 and asked to read files on his laptop computer. He refused to let them.

The agents needed probable cause to persuade a judge to issue a search warrant to seize the laptop. They contacted Ghimenti in Paris, asking him to find out what the French intelligence service might have on Moussaoui.

From the French, Ghimenti obtained a substantial dossier: The French had been tracking Moussaoui since 1995. He had links to al-Qaida. He had journeyed to Afghanistan several times and had trained at a terrorism camp.

Ghimenti passed the information along to Coleen Rowley, chief division counsel in the Minneapolis FBI office, and it went to the counterterrorism section at headquarters.

Rowley and other Minneapolis agents were convinced Moussaoui was a terrorist threat. So was the veteran Ghimenti. But for reasons still unclear, the counterterrorism section in Washington would not seek the warrant.

As Joe Conason put it in today's Salon:

The public testimony of Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 commission had a strategy and a structure, to use terms that she favors. The obvious strategy was to swathe every answer to a challenging question from the commissioners in "context" that did more to obfuscate than clarify.

They keep saying, you know, that Sept. 11 was "the day that changed everything." I'm not so sure about that.

But there is one thing I know changed that day: The Bush administration's grotesque incompetence, and its devastating consequences, were laid bare for all the world to see. It's just taken this long for the smoke to clear -- and not even Condi Rice's fresh layer of fog can hide it any longer.

Disturbing the peace

Sidney Blumenthal has an excellent piece up at Salon about how Condoleezza Rice not only botched the war on terrorism, she also managed to sabotage negotiations for peace in the Middle East: [registration req'd]

In January 2002, Rice launched a serious effort to restart the Middle East peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. She hired Flynt Leverett, who was a professional foreign service officer on the policy planning staff of the State Department, as director of the initiative on the National Security Council. Rice told him and those assigned to work with him that she understood that the absence of peace process was hurting the war on terrorism and that Leverett should propose any and all measures he thought necessary, regardless of potential political controversy. "She told us we should go for the long bomb, using a football metaphor," Leverett recalled to me.

Leverett then developed a plan on final status dealing with security, Palestinian political reform and Jerusalem; the core of the plan was essentially the same as President Clinton's ultimate proposal. Rice rejected it; her own mandated team had come up with something she judged as "unworkable" and politically untenable for Bush, who would have been forced to confront Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to enact it.

On April 4, Bush delivered a speech calling for a "two state" solution, but without any details, and sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region. Leverett traveled with him. Powell gained agreement for the basic outline of the original plan, but just as he was to announce his breakthrough in a press conference Rice intervened, instructing him not to discuss any political process and that the whole burden of accountability must be put on the Palestinians and none on the Israelis. In private, Powell seethed but did not fight Rice.

Rice had crumbled in the face of internal political opposition from the neoconservative armada. "In the end, the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, plus Karl Rove's political shop, prevailed," Leverett told me.

As longtime readers may recall from this post, this is not the first time that Republican neoconservatives have wrecked the hopes for a negotiated peace in the Middle East. They interfered with Bill Clinton's efforts as well:

Richard Perle sabotages peace talks

Richard Perle, a veteran cold war warrior and former assistant secretary of state, urged the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, not to agree to any settlement which left the future status of Jerusalem unresolved, according to the New York Post website.

The website quoted a message received by Mr Barak yesterday from two of his emissaries, Yoram Ben-Ze'ev and Yossi Alpher. The two men said Mr Perle "asked us to send a clear message" to Mr Barak that it would be a "catastrophe" if the Jerusalem question was not dealt with, and urged him "to walk away" from the Camp David negotiations if faced with that outcome.

Elliott Abrams, who seems to be the chief culprit in the Rice matter, is of course a Perle protege.

Restoring honor and dignity

White House spokesman Scott McClellan has been caught once again pretending that up is down (while of course admonishing reporters to do likewise), in this report from USA Today's Mimi Hall:

Dealing with criticism that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wouldn't testify in public before the 10-member commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, White House spokesman Scott McClellan complained last month that when she testified in private, "only five members showed up" to hear what she had to say.

What McClellan didn't tell reporters was that on Nov. 21 -- long before Rice met with the five commissioners in February -- the White House counsel's office had sent the commission a letter saying no more than three commissioners could attend meetings with White House aides of Rice's rank.

Given that demand, "we are a little surprised that the White House has repeatedly implied to the public that commissioners were uninterested in attending these meetings," commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said Tuesday.

Susan Strahan at CJR Campaign Desk has more, pointing out that it took Hall -- who at least had the gumption to check out a basic fact -- a whole month to do so:

Unlike McClellan, Felzenberg didn't do his own lecturing to the media about "context." Or even about that little trick they teach you in Journalism 101 -- get both sides of the story. As in: Pick up a phone.

By now, the picture should be clear to everyone in the press room: This White House will lie without compunction. Everything it says needs double-checking. It's a simple matter of integrity.

Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler has been documenting for years now just how abysmal the Washington press corps has become. This is yet another crystalline example of just how lazy and propaganda-prone the journalism coming out of D.C. is these days.

Ralph and the right

Ralph Nader's campaign -- which just took a shot to the groin from Oregon voters, who declined to put show up in sufficient numbers at a Nader rally to get him on the ballot -- keeps getting stranger and stranger. From the Hartford Courant (registration required):

Nader Seeks Strange Bedfellows

WASHINGTON -- Ralph Nader, while vowing his presidential run is as an independent, is embarking on a new strategy that, come Election Day, may find him running as an independent, a Green, a Populist and a Reform Party candidate all at once.

In recent days, he has met and exchanged letters with third-party officials to negotiate what he says is a pragmatic strategy that would help him gain access to all 50 ballots.

"I would still be an independent candidate, I would just appear on their ballot lines," Nader said this week.

But such a hodgepodge of party affiliations threatens to muddle his message of pure independence, not to mention giving critics more reasons to attack his politics. Already, it is creating controversy within third parties. And it has some fans wondering whether this pragmatic approach is at odds with the central idealism of his candidacy.

"It's weird," said John B. Anderson, the 1980 independent presidential candidate. "That, to me, would shred the credibility of his effort."

We've already noted Nader's transparent willingness to form alliances with right-wing extremists in the pursuit of the presidency. That propensity, however, may create some problems down the road:

If Nader's strategy works as well as La Follette's, he may face a prospect of flatly contradicting one of the parties he represents.

On immigration, for instance, the Greens' current platform says: "We must accept the contributions and rights of our immigrants." The Reform Party national chairman, in an interview this week, described a different stance: . "We are sick and tired of this country being flooded by immigrants," he said.

For now, Nader said, he agreed with most points on both platforms.

I think it's similarly safe to agree that Nader is rapidly representing everything he's supposed to stand against.

Willie Horton, Texas style

The ghost of the "Willie Horton" campaign of 1988 is hovering over the congressional race in Texas between Democrat Martin Frost and Republican Pete Sessions.

An outside group unaffiliated with the Sessions campaign -- specifically, the anti-immigrant Coalition for Future American Workers, one of John Tanton's front groups -- has begun running smear ads that present false "facts" about Frost' record, and do so with a not-so-subtle appeal to racist sentiments:

The ads, purchased on four Dallas television stations, are full of details about Frost's positions on upcoming legislation. However, Frost claims the ads' claims are flat-out wrong.

"His bill will import 250,000 more workers to take jobs and drive down wages," the ad intones.

"They just want to make a statement that I support 250,000 more foreign workers annually, when that is President Bush's position, not mine," Frost said.

Plus, the ads feature many pictures of dark-skinned immigrants. Frost calls them racially divisive, and claims the coalition behind them gets money that is tainted.

"They got $1.4 million from the Pioneer Fund, which is a white supremacist group -- clearly documented," Frost said.

As the Dallas Morning News story [registration req'd] on the matter makes clear, Sessions' campaign is claiming no association with the ads:

Sessions campaign manager Chris Homan said Mr. Sessions has no knowledge of the organization sponsoring the advertisements, the Coalition for the Future American Worker, and no involvement with them.

"We're not going to engage groups like this in any capacity," Mr. Homan said.

The CFAW continues to claim that it's attacking Frost for his record, but their claims have no relation to reality:

Mr. Frost said that no bill he is sponsoring or co-sponsoring will ever give amnesty in Texas to hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers.

"I have no idea what they're talking about, quite frankly," Mr. Frost said. "I'm for the freedom of the press. I'm for the First Amendment. But I'm not for people to lie with impunity."

As many of you may recall, the Horton ads (which played a big role in sinking Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential candidacy) were ostensibly the creation of an "independent" group called Americans For Bush -- though, as Joe Conason later reported, the ad's real creators were GOP operatives Floyd Brown and Craig Shirley.

The Texas ads, likewise, have the smell of Tom DeLay all over them. Just like his fingerprints are all over the use of Treasury Department employees to analyze John Kerry's tax proposal.

Terror and the war in Iraq

Jessica Stern, whose previous work I recently cited, weighs in at Salon with an important analysis of the Bush administration's "war on terror":

How the war in Iraq has damaged the war on terrorism

The false idea that the United States is engaged in a crusade against the Islamic world is a critical component of the Islamist nihilists' worldview, and spreading this idea is critical to their success. The unprovoked attack on Iraq, followed by an occupation that is widely perceived as inept and arbitrary, even by our British ally, has confirmed this view among potential sympathizers. Every time American troops shoot into a crowd, even in self-defense, the image of America as a reckless, ruthless oppressor is highlighted. Televised pictures of American soldiers and their tanks in Iraq are a "deeply humiliating scene to Muslims," explained Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, who calls the war in Iraq a "gift" to Osama bin Laden. Unsurprisingly, terrorist recruiters are using the war and the continuing occupation to mobilize recruits -- not only inside Iraq but outside as well. Intelligence officials in the United States, Europe and Africa have reported that the new recruits they are seeing since the war became imminent are younger, with a more menacing attitude.

... The war in Iraq has split the allies, not the terrorists. It has turned Iraq into a Mecca for international terrorists, and mobilized local Shiite and Salafi jihadist groups that had previously posed a minimal threat. It has facilitated connections between terrorists and those with formal military experience in Saddam's army, the lethal nightmare that the invasion was supposed to have thwarted. Antipathy toward the United States, not only in Iraq and throughout the entire Islamic world, but in Europe as well, has become a dangerous trend exploited by terrorists. Even as we tout our successes in rounding up al-Qaida terrorists, the broader movement inspired by bin Laden and ignited by the invasion of Iraq is recruiting new nihilist minions throughout the world. The war in Iraq has not only been a distraction from the war on terrorism; it has strengthened our enemies in ways that continue to surprise and horrify us. Where will we be surprised next?

If Stern is right, Ramadi is just the first of those surprises.

A Denial

[Graffiti at an abandoned business in West Seattle, April 1994]

Come dowsed in mud, soaked in bleach
As I want you to be
As a trend, as a friend, as an old memoria

Ten years ago today I was riding my bike to work -- it was a little after 11, I think -- when I rode past Kurt Cobain's home, which was along my daily route. And I knew something was up.

The house was one of the many mansions situated along Lake Washington Boulevard. The estate sits in a little depression of sorts, right next to a tiny green place called Viretta Park, which has mostly a lot of steeply sloped lawn, a couple of trees and a bench.

The gated entrance to the estate, though, was crawling with police. Inside the gate I could see an ambulance, and outside were several cruisers. I kept riding, since I was still nearly an hour away from work.

At the time I was still the news editor of the Journal American, the Bellevue-based newspaper that has since transmogrified into the suburban King County Journal (I stepped down from the job shortly thereafter). When I pulled up to the newsroom a little after noon, I notified our police reporter and entertainment editor of what I had seen. Just about then, video began arriving over the local news stations from the scene. We sent our reporters out to chase the story, and they shortly confirmed the initial reports: Kurt Cobain had been found dead inside, the victim of an apparent suicide by gunshot.

In the ensuing days we partook, almost by necessity, of the media circus surrounding his death. There were the necessary profiles and biographies, the photos from the scene and from his career; the columns and letters tut-tutting the latest rock n'roll suicide.

I kept riding my bike that week past the place, and for the first few days it was a circus there, too -- TV trucks and teenagers and gawkers. My return ride took me past the place late at night, and for several days there were steady candlelight vigils.

Viretta Park, which is not much more than an acre in actual size (part of the park is a wooded slope), became the center of the Cobain mourners. Even after the circus settled down, the park attracted a steady trickle of daytime visitors. The center of it all was the solitary bench, which not only collected a wealth of graffiti, but also became a message center for parents trying to reach their runaway teens. Here is a shot of the bench about a month later.



I went to the memorial service at Seattle Center and watched the young people climbing on the fountain, and listened to Courtney Love's strangely self-serving eulogy. I watched the TV specials, listened to the Nirvana sets on the radio, even listened to Rush Limbaugh's revealingly inhuman rant against Cobain on his radio show (""Kurt Cobain was, ladies and gentleman, I just -- he was a worthless shred of human debris...").

I was oddly disconnected from it all, partly because I hadn't ever had a chance to see Nirvana live or meet Cobain. I wanted to feel something, but all I had was regret. I'd had a chance to see Cobain just a few months before -- at the MTV taping at Pier 48, and had missed it, thinking, well, they'll be around a few years. I can see them sometime. When I go to my grave, it will be one of my real regrets.

I was 20 and living in Idaho in 1977, the year punk broke. Though at the time I was a devotee of more mainstream fare -- the usual, you know: Led Zeppelin, Yes, Genesis, The Who -- I had developed a taste for more obscure fare as well, from Bruce Springsteen (before he hit it big; I hated Born to Run as a sellout, and to this day think that The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle is his best work) to Roxy Music.

The first punk album I ever heard was the first Ramones album, which threw me for a complete musical loop and hooked me all at once. Within a few months, I was gathering up all the Sex Pistols and Damned and X-Ray Spex and Buzzcocks and Clash albums I could find. In Idaho, as you can imagine, this was a feat.

Good punk only lasted a couple of years. It split off into hardcore -- some of which I liked, some not -- and New Wave (likewise) and who knows what else. But it never really made it big, except among people who had the ears to hear. We were like a secret club. Me especially -- I was working straight jobs and looked straight, and it threw people off when I played punk for them. I always gravitated to other people who liked punk.

One of these was my friend Tim, who ran the record shop in Missoula where I would scout out albums to review for the local paper. Tim always had great taste, and had forgotten more about music than most people know, and he loved punk. We used to both talk about how we liked to put on "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" first thing in the morning.

Another kid who liked to hang out in Tim's record shop was this basketball player from Big Sandy who played bass in local bands and eventually moved to Seattle to make it big. His name was Jeff Ament.

I followed out to Seattle a couple of years later (in 1989), and when I began checking out the music scene, was pleased to see Jeff doing well. He played in one of the city's seminal punk bands, Green River, and then making waves with a much more straight-up rock band called Mother Love Bone. But MLB's lead singer, Andrew Wood, died of a heroin overdose, a tragedy that made big headlines locally. It was a precursor of the doom that seemed to hang over the Seattle scene.

It was in this time frame that the movement everyone called "grunge" seemed to come together, and better rock journalists than I (notably Charles Cross) have admirably charted its course. It seemed to have three or four real internal factions, bringing together under one "sound" bands that in fact inhabited very different universes: Soundgarden, which was more in the mold of a straight-up heavy metal band; Pearl Jam -- to which Tim's friend Jeff Ament gravitated -- who played mainstream guitar rock; and angry punks, like Mudhoney and Screaming Trees.

But the best of the punks, without question, was Nirvana.

They played punk the way it is supposed to be played: Loud, fast, pissed-off. And on top of that, they wrote great fucking songs. (It's difficult enough to produce a single album on which all the cuts, if not great, are really good; and Nirvana made three of them.) And because they were punk, I loved them. The other bands were good, they were interesting; but you only had to listen to Nirvana once to know they were great.

However, because I wasn't writing about music much my first few years in Seattle, I was lackadaisical about seeing them. I hung out at local music bars on the nights I could get away -- I was doing evening shifts at the JA -- but it wasn't often enough. I caught Mudhoney and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, the Posies and Screaming Trees, but somehow never was in the right place at the right time to see Nirvana.

I had that one last chance, in December 1993, to see them, when I was offered a press pass to go the Pier 48 performance. But I had some duty or other pressing upon me and gave it to another reporter instead, a middle-aged fellow who surprised me by coming back and raving about what a great show it had been. I was jealous.

The truth was, though, that the rot was already setting in around the grunge scene then. It had become a cliché of the local comedy show that record executives were descending on the city and trying to scout out and sign anyone who could pass themselves off as a Seattle band. And many of them were crap, but knew how to play off the grunge image. Sad, but all too true.

Cobain's death was the stake that plunged right through the heart of an already dying moment in music. It marked the end of "grunge" -- and just as well. Many of the big-name acts just crumbled; others, like Alice in Chains, succumbed eventually to the same doom. The surviving bands -- notably Pearl Jam -- still are capable of turning out music with integrity, but it isn't vital anymore, not the way it once was. Or maybe that was an illusion.

I've read Cobain's diaries and tried to understand what it was that tormented him so. I wonder if it wasn't quite literally fame that killed him. Cobain seems to have been acutely aware that the music business is built on hype, so even a real artist can never know if what he's doing really matters.

The massive popularity that hit Nirvana seems to have undermined the very integrity of his own sense of who he was. The cognitive dissonance of feeling like the same loser he had been for all those years, while being assaulted by the fake adulation that comes with a No. 1 album, seems to have driven him to want to destroy it all. Most suicides kill themselves not because they feel sorry for themselves or are simply depressed, but because they are in unending psychic pain, and after awhile, suicide seems like the best way to relieve it. Cobain, in the end, seems to fit this mold.

Cobain's suicide also underscored the rampant phoniness in the grunge scene. For a music whose image is all about artistic integrity, the flow of money proved to be poison for the community well. Egos were inflated and then burst. Once-good bands began miring down in mediocrity. And drugs, particularly heroin, were just killing both the artists and the artistry.

By 1996 or so, it was clear grunge was gone for good. Seattle moved on. Its music scene has become healthier in recent years -- more diverse, but not cohesive either -- and culturally, everyone seems to have forgotten Nirvana and what they once meant.

Except for the young kids. I still see a lot of Cobain T-shirts. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, Viretta Park hosts a gathering of them to listen and remember. This year, the 10th anniversary, was no different.

What was a little different -- besides the larger crowds at Viretta -- was that this year the media remembered. On previous anniversaries, little has been said or observed; but this being the 10th, they checked in with the dutiful memorials. Both the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer carried remembrances this weekend. But it all has a hollow ring to it.

The reality is that Seattle has had a great deal of difficulty dealing with its fallen stars over the years, regardless of how significant their contributions. Perhaps it is, as Cobain seems to have suspected, the curse of Frances Farmer.

Certainly, Jimi Hendrix -- who met a similarly troubled death -- inhabited the same sort of limbo for years as far as the city was concerned. Sure, he may have been the greatest rock guitarist of all time, but the civic and business leaders recoiled at the very idea of honoring someone who had died because of a "drug overdose" (or so went the myth; Hendrix actually died of asphyxiation, not an OD).

For years, the only Hendrix memorial to be found anywhere in Seattle was a brass plaque imbedded in a rock at the Woodland Park Zoo, donated by a local radio station. You could always drive down to Renton and visit his grave (completely nondescript, except for the Stratocaster engraved in the granite). Nowadays, of course, we have the Experience Music Project, the ugly-but-cool rock museum built around a great Hendrix collection; but it took Paul Allen's clear philanthropy (the thing loses money like a sieve) to get it built, which in itself raises all the usual conflicts about corporate money's role in rock. Ah well.

Likewise, there has not, to my knowledge, been any serious discussion of a Cobain memorial. Seattle has moved on, and no one seems to want to remember.

The little A-frame house where Cobain killed himself is gone now. It was a guest house on the estate, and in fact was quite visible from the park, including the upper room where the suicide occurred:



Courtney Love had it torn down before she sold the place and moved off to Malibu (where her sellout career has recently been reaching new heights). After she moved away, the main mansion itself was torn down and completely replaced as well.

The only really fitting memorial to Cobain is in his hometown, Aberdeen, a depressed logging center near the Washington Coast. If you go just outside the city limits, there is a bridge over the Wishkah River that is a place Cobain used to inhabit when he was a homeless teenager. Underneath it is a marvelous collection of graffiti, most of it in Cobain's honor.

But Cobain -- who actually only lived here for a year and a half -- deserves better from Seattle. The circumstances of his death can't obscure the fact that he was one of those momentous figures in music history, just as Hendrix was. As Vernon Reid observed in the recent Rolling Stone that placed Cobain among rock's 50 greatest icons (he'd probably be in a Top 10, for that matter), "Cobain changed the course of where the music went."

Then again, one can just imagine Cobain cringing at the very idea of a memorial. It's hard to imagine what shape a fitting tribute could possibly even take. Maybe the whole concept of memorializing someone is anathema to what Nirvana was about.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

Oblique threats

Stinging Nettle is reporting that anti-abortion activists are driving around Raleigh, N.C., today in large trucks adorned with photos of aborted fetuses and the word "Choice" in block letters across them:

If these guys were dark-skinned and bearded, they'd have been pulled out of their trucks on suspicion of terrorism.

But they are not. When they kill doctors, it's not terrorism, in fact it's actually debated whether or not they were committing justifiable homicide. When they blow up buildings, it's not terrorism - no, they retreat to the mountains and become folk heroes.

Now, these guys are implicitly threatening the population of downtown Raleigh, and no one pays any attention. Really, what other message is conveyed by repeatedly stopping a large moving van right next to the auxiliary Federal Building/U.S. Courthouse? Oklahoma City is the implicit threat. Do you doubt what would happen if the trucks had ten foot high letters saying "Allah'u Akbar!"?

I'm sure Glenn Reynolds would be all over it, in that case.

Bringing It On

[From Without Sanctuary]

It is no great surprise that the photos from Fallujah last week of the burned corpses of American "contractors" being strung up from a bridge while their murderers celebrated evoked all kinds of strong feelings, across a pretty broad range. Some of these -- notably Daily Kos' -- have in turn evoked extremely powerful counter-responses, and further counters to these.

Images like these always evoke real horror -- especially, for Americans, if the corpses belong to their countrymen. When that happens, the lust for revenge comes rushing alongside.

I was struck, however, by how similar these images were to those from the lynching era, when black men were routinely killed by mass mobs in the most horrifying ways imaginable -- including torturing them by flaying and dismembering them while still alive, setting them aflame, and then finally raising them aloft, often with a chain. The image above of the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in particular was reminiscent -- not merely for the horror of the corpse itself, but the horror of the smug satisfaction on the faces of his lynchers. This was the same horror, I think, most people felt watching those children celebrate by mutilating American corpses.

Of course, Billmon, in a marvelously insightful post, has already remarked on much the same, observing:

I'll leave it to others to decide whether the Iraqis who celebrated the deaths of their enemies today by decorating a local bridge with their remains are worse, better or equal to the lynchers of early 20th century America, who decorated trees and streetlamps with the victims of a segregationist reign of terror. At a minimum, though, history suggests the connection between "terrorism, culture and barbaric scenes" isn't quite as tight as some of our cuture war idealogues seem to think.

Predictably, this view has been attacked as a "blame America first" mentality, which is the smear du jour for any attempt to take a thoughtful approach to what occurred in Fallujah. This is not terribly surprising, because Billmon was making a subtle point about the nature of violence that cuts deeply against the grain of jingoist reactionarism.

Perhaps the reason the pictures from Fallujah are so disturbing is that, as Billmon suggests, they hold up a mirror to us. The violence we visit readily on others is waiting to be visited on us in return; the continuously self-begetting nature of violence just spirals onward and upward.

"Bring it on," we say. The mob in Fallujah does so -- knowing full well that retribution awaits, and shouts by the horror of its act its own defiance: "Bring it on."

America the Bringer of Death is well known to Iraqis. They first encountered it in the 1991 Gulf War. They came to be on intimate terms with it during the invasions, especially the bombings. But they are not alone.

The Native Americans who populated the land first knew it well. It is hard to say where the cycle of violence began first, but by the time its spiral had completed for them, the American government had mercilessly rubbed them out.

The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki know it well too. As did, of course, black Americans in the South.

I have discussed previously the nature of the systematic lynching of thousands of black people in America between the years 1880 and 1930.

There are many postcards that recorded these lynchings, because the participants were rather proud of their involvement. This is clear from the postcards themselves, which frequently showed not merely the corpse of the victim but many of the mob members, whose visages ranged from grim to grinning. Sometimes, as in the Lige Daniels case, children were intentionally given front-row views. A lynching postcard from Florida in 1935, of a migrant worker named Rubin Stacy who had allegedly "threatened and frightened a white woman," shows a cluster of young girls gathered round the tree trunk, the oldest of them about 12, with a beatific expression as she gazes on his distorted features and limp body, a few feet away.

Indeed, lynchings seemed to be cause for outright celebration in the community. Residents would dress up to come watch the proceedings, and the crowds of spectators frequently grew into the thousands. Afterwards, memento-seekers would take home parts of the corpse or the rope with which the victim was hung. Sometimes body parts -- knuckles, or genitals, or the like -- would be preserved and put on public display as a warning to would-be black criminals.

That was the purported moral purpose of these demonstrations: Not only to utterly wipe out any black person merely accused of a crimes against whites, but to do it in a fashion intended to warn off future perpetrators. This was reflected in contemporary press accounts, which described the lynchings in almost uniformly laudatory terms, with the victim's guilt unquestioned, and the mob identified only as "determined men." Not surprisingly, local officials (especially local police forces) not only were complicit in many cases, but they acted in concert to keep the mob leaders anonymous; thousands of coroners' reports from lynchings merely described the victims' deaths occurring "at the hands of persons unknown." Lynchings were broadly viewed as simply a crude, but understandable and even necessary, expression of community will. This was particularly true in the South, where blacks were viewed as symbolic of the region's continuing economic and cultural oppression by the North. As an 1899 editorial in the Newnan, Georgia, Herald and Advertiser explained it: "It would be as easy to check the rise and fall of the ocean's tide as to stem the wrath of Southern men when the sacredness of our firesides and the virtue of our women are ruthlessly trodden under foot."

The lynching campaign drew on many of the nation's darker wellsprings -- particularly its taste for violence -- but it served one primary purpose, the subjugation of the black population:

There were, of course, other components of black suppression: segregation in the schools, disenfranchisement of the black vote, and the attendant Jim Crow laws that were common throughout the South. But lynching was the linchpin in the system, because it was in effect state-supported terrorism whose stated intent was to suppress blacks and other minorities, in no small part by eliminating non-whites as competitors for economic gain. These combined to give lynching a symbolic value as a manifestation of white supremacy. The lynch mob was not merely condoned but in fact celebrated as an expression of the white community's will to keep African-Americans in their thrall. As a phrase voiced commonly in the South expressed it, lynching was a highly effective means of "keeping the niggers down."

Of course, the threat of the rape of white women and other pretenses for lynching presented handy pretexts for these horrors. As always, the violence was predicated on a fear of future violence; lynching was excused as a preemptive act.

Yet in reality a black person could be lynched for literally no reason at all -- in some cases, simply for defending himself from physical assault, or for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lynching laughed at the notion of blacks advancing through hard work; moderately prosperous blacks who managed to do so were often the first targets of angry lynch mobs intent on dealing with "uppity" blacks.

And God have mercy on any black communities who tried to stand up to this violence. When this happened, the result was commonly known as a "race riot," but what these typically comprised were wholesale lethal assaults on black communities by whites. They became particularly prevalent during the "Red Summer" of 1919, when the riots broke out in some 26 American cities.

The most notable of these race riots occurred in 1921 in Tulsa, where a prosperous black population was literally bombed out of existence over two days of complete lawlessness. The rioting was set off by a black youth's alleged assault on a local white girl that later turned out to be harmless consensual contact. The youth was promptly arrested without incident, but the local press played it up with garish headlines that ignored the real nature of the incident, and one Tulsa newspaper publicly called for the young man's lynching.

This attempt, however, met with real resistance from the black community. When a group of local blacks attempted to ward off a lynch mob by meeting them at the jailhouse, the fighting broke out. Soon the entire district was swarmed over by gun-wielding whites who began mowing down black residents at random, setting fire to homes and businesses, and looting, raping and maiming. There are reports that an airplane flew over the black community and dropped incendiary bombs. By the time the violence had subsided, as many as three hundred black people were believed killed, many of them buried in a mass grave, and thirty-five city blocks lay charred. The death toll has never been properly calculated, largely because of the ways the bodies were disposed of, but some counts reach as high as 300 or more. And Tulsa's African-American community, at one time known as the "Negro Wall Street" because of its prosperousness, was never the same. Most of the survivors simply left.

We all like to think of America as a peace-loving and "civilized" nation, where freedom and justice reign supreme. But our history tells us otherwise.

And the point, of course, is not to suggest that what happened in Fallujah was some kind of response to the harm inflicted on black Americans a century ago. Rather, what it suggests is that we do not so easily escape our history by such simple distancing mechanisms as saying -- as the right is wont to do -- that hey, that happened a hundred years ago, and I didn't have anything to do with it.

The reality, however, is that there is a dark side to our preferred self-image as a beacon of hope and light to the rest of the world -- that alongside whatever democracy America has created, it has also imposed its will ruthlessly and bloodily, mainly through our seemingly endless capacity for violence. This capacity has never gone away; it has merely changed its face. In 1916, it came with rope and fire and chains. In 2004, it comes with incendiary bombing attacks delivered with the push of a button from high in the air. Either way, we produce hundreds of charred corpses, thousands of personal tragedies, and bottomless wells of hatred for our nation.

This is not to "blame America" -- it is to recognize a reality about how the rest of the world sees us, and more importantly, how the spiral of violence works. To the extent that America conducts its business with the rest of the world without resorting to violence, then we probably are a beacon of hope for democracy; but when we unleash the dogs of war -- especially when, as we have in Iraq, we do so under false pretenses -- then we open up the Pandora's Box of evil that colors both our history and our present in shades of red and black.

It's become much easier, thanks to technology, for us to indulge this violence, almost thoughtlessly. "Bring it on," says the president, with a smirk resembling those on the faces of Jesse Washington's lynchers. And his cheerleaders indulge the same arrogance of will -- vowing, as we always have, the most terrible and unending violence for anyone who dares stand in our way, or most of all, stand up to us, to threaten to visit upon us the same violence we have just visited upon them.

Justifying everything under the banner of the terrorist attacks on America on 9/11 -- attacks which, as we now know, the people of Iraq had nothing to do with -- we sit in our comfy chairs typing away on computers and urge our leaders to "nuke Fallujah," as Kathleen Parker so judiciously suggested the other day. Bill O'Reilly can broadcast to the nation his belief in a "final solution" to how we deal with Fallujah. Little Green Footballs and the Anti-Idiotartian Rottweiler likewise fulminate about leveling the city, and Instapundit nods approvingly. The ghosts of those Tulsa newspaper editors live on.

So there is no small irony in the blustering of these same right-wing bloggers over Daily Kos' remarks, particularly his callous dismissal of the fate of four contractors. If you believe, as I do, that each man's death lessens us, then there can be no condoning such sentiments. But they pale in contrast to the monstrous indifference to death that has been a major component of the "warblogger" contingent since well before the war. And it must be noted that not only is this kind of callousness out of character for Kos, he has apologized for making it -- better than could ever be said of his tormentors.

These are people who, after all, have regularly described Muslims in the most degrading terms available, often depicting them as mere vermin or, metaphorically, as diseases to be exterminated. They even sneer at the deaths of their fellow Americans, such as Rachel Corrie, if they happen to be of the wrong political persuasion. Instapundit is hardly immune from making outrageous and cruelly thoughtless remarks -- including those directed at Hispanic organizations, or soft-pedaling the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II; no one on the right, it must be noted, has ever held Reynolds accountable for this commentary.

The whole Kos dustup, in this context, is just nakedly fraudulent. Their outrage at Kos' callousness is not based on any respect for human life -- it is, as Matt Stoller makes clear, a "gotcha" game whose sole purpose is to score political points and derail the liberal blogosphere's rising influence. Kos was wrong (at least in terms of his sentiments; his factual point about the comparative treatment of American GIs was an important one to make); this does not make them right.

Particularly not when it comes to their proposed "final solution" for Fallujah, a city of 250,000, only a handful of whom participated in the recent atrocities. These acts, it should be understood, were a classic terrorist provocation, taken directly from Mao's tactics in the Chinese civil war. The entire purpose is to get American forces to overreact and take punitive action against the general populace. This turns the populace against the occupiers, making the terrorists' work that much easier, since they are no longer seen as extremists by the public but widely accepted and sympathetic freedom fighters. It also makes for fertile recruiting ground among the victims of the inevitable ensuing tragedies.

This is how the cycle of violence works, and it starts when we visit violence preemptively upon people we believe, often without real reason, threaten us. They fight back, and we visit more violence upon more of them as a way of "sending a message." And at each step, we create more hatred, and more future acts of violence. We can nuke Fallujah, sure; but when we do so, we sow the seeds for a thousand more Fallujahs, and a hundred more 9/11s.

There is another, better way, and that is to respond proportionately -- reserving retribution simply for those who committed the atrocities, and finding ways to mitigate the festering sympathy for terrorism that pervades the Iraqi countryside. We should pray, for the sake of all our souls, that our leaders in Iraq find it.

Because, as the looming civil war makes clear, their time is running very short.

Bring it on, indeed.