Right Wing Nut House

They haven’t seen it, but they know they won’t like it.

The netnuts are going net nutty over the ABC mini-series Path to 9/11 because, as far as I can tell:

1. The screenwriter is some kind of conservative.

2. It assigns blame for 9/11 to Bill Clinton (how much depends on how loony the lefty is)

3. No one will return Jennifer Nix’s calls.

4. Rush Limbaugh likes it.

5. Did I mention that the screenwriter may be a conservative?

And for these deep and noble reasons, the left is climbing the walls with angst ridden soliloquies railing against the unfairness of it all. They have tried so hard to reinvent the Clinton years as some kind of golden age of anti-terrorism nirvana and that everything fell all to hell in the 8 months that George Bush bungled his way to 9/11 that anything which challenges that fantasy simply must be attacked and destroyed.

It is, as I’ve said before, a large part of The Narrative which the left uses to tell bedtime stories about the Bush Administration. Challenging The Narrative is challenging the carefully constructed fantasy/history created by liberals to undermine everything this President has done to try and protect the United States in a time of war. The Narrative has become so all-pervasive that even when it starts to fall apart as it has with the Armitage revelations in Plamegate, the resistance in abandoning any of it is as fierce as a mother bear protecting its cub.

Witness the absolute need to discredit how the President led this country in the days and weeks following 9/11. The left doesn’t want anyone to remember how the country rallied to the President immediately following the fall of the towers but rather that he was reading a silly children’s book as the attacks were underway.They don’t wish people to recall what was almost universally vouchsafed by observers as his strong leadership in the aftermath of the attack but rather the failures of his Administration leading up to them.

What is beginning to terrify the left about this 5 year anniversary of 9/11 is that all those old feelings will resurface among the American people and their dreams of taking over the House and Senate in November may be in danger. On that score, they have less to fear than they realize but perhaps their being out of power so long has dulled their political sensibility while heightening their paranoia.

On that score, Think Progress contributes the unbalanced attack of the day on Path to 9/11 despite not seeing the show and relying on a “review” by Salon’s Heather Havrilesky (actually a three paragraph summary) that sums up the “deceptively biased” project as “painting the president (Clinton) as a buffoon more interested in blow jobs than terrorists.” If this were true, I would join my brothers and sisters on the left in condemning the mini series in no uncertain terms.

Unfortunately for Think Progress, we have someone who has actually seen the film; Justin Levin writing at Patterico’s:

The ironic part is, the critics of this movie who haven’t seen it yet are going to have egg on their face. This film in no way “blames the entire event on Clinton” as some falsely claim. “The Path to 9/11″ absolutely slams Bush in a number of ways:

1. It depicts Condi Rice ignoring Richard Clarke’s advice about Al-Queda and undercutting his authority within the White House.

2. It depicts the August 6th “Presidential Daily Briefing” wherein Rice is explicitly warned before 9/11 that Bin Laden intends to hijack American airplanes.

3. It makes Richard Clarke look like a tragic hero (even though everyone knows that he later went on to become one of Bush’s biggest critics).

4. It contains an epilogue that cites 9/11 Commission members giving the current government a failing grade in implementing their recommendations.

Few people have seen the whole film. Even the select group in Washington only got to see the first half of the film (which obviously doesn’t deal with the Bush administration, based on how the timeline worked). As a result, there is a lot of misinformation going on about what “The Path To 9/11″ is really about.

Think Progress is used to having egg on its face as they were one of the leading lefty blogs who jumped on the Jason Leopold “Rove will be indicted” bandwagon. No matter. For them and other lefties, it isn’t so much that Clinton is going to be portrayed as a President that helped America sleepwalk through the decade with regards to the terrorist threat it’s that George Bush won’t be blamed enough for the events of 9/11.

The effort to whitewash Clinton’s failures during the 9/11 Commission’s public hearings had conservatives up in arms and for good reason; what we now know about that period in history makes it the height of hypocrisy to try and absolve Clinton of his curious lack of will in going after Bin Laden even after the first WTC bombing and the Africa embassy bombings. It had nothing to do with Monica, of course and any docu-drama that tries to bring that issue up except as a way to show how Clinton may have been distracted by the attacks by Republicans will lose any credibility among serious conservatives. But to not show how close we were to actually killing Osama during that time would do a disservice to history.

It would also be a travesty to leave out the story of FBI Director Louis Freeh and the Bureau’s number one counterterrorism agent John O’Neill whose exasperating turf battles with Freeh (the FBI Chief disliked O’Neill intensely) put numerous roadblock’s in the agent’s way in his hunt to unravel the plot he knew was taking shape. This was a battle that spanned both the Clinton and Bush presidencies and revealed Freeh to be a mountebank of tragic proportions.

And like the other movie that liberals loved to hate United 93, I assume we’ll get plenty of searing scenes of our government - the FAA, the military, and the executive branch - reaching out in first confusion, then frustration, and then finally in a befuddled paralysis as the planes hit their targets one after another.

Blaming Clinton for 9/11? In what universe? What the left objects to is that their favorite punching bag of a President is not coming in for all the blame, a laughable historical construct that only an idiotic liberal could fantasize about.

I would suggest that we all sit back and watch the mini-series and judge for ourselves. An objective observer may just find much to praise in a film that finally gives the lie to The Narrative in which 9/11 was purely the result of Bush incompetence (or for the more unbalanced, Bush perfidy) rather than the fault of America itself and our historical myopia regarding overseas threats.

In the end, how much does it matter in a real sense what portion of blame should be ladled out to each President? Three thousand Americans are dead and the people who did it as well as their numerous off shoots and subsidiaries, are still out there waiting to strike again.

Best that the left concentrate more on figuring out whether to engage the enemy in the War on Terror rather than some silly TV show that might tarnish their carefully constructed Narrative about Bush.

What are your main sources for news and information?

I can tell you now that you and I are not typical in our preferences. The fact that you are reading this means you are one of about 13 million Americans who read blogs. And I’ll wager that you also get a lot of your straight news from sources on the internet as well.

But what of the rest of America? The most recent Pew survey finds that fully one third of us get most of our news online. This is actually a decline from their last survey done in 2004. The rest of America gets some of their news online but still rely on newspapers (40%) and broadcast TV to become informed with the old “Big Three” nets of ABC, CBS, and NBC still able to gather 28% of us in front of the tube on any given night.

The Pew Survey linked above gives a graphic and shocking picture of the changing information gathering habits of Americans over the last decade and a half. Perhaps most troubling is that nearly 20% of us apparently don’t bother to inform ourselves at all. Broken down by age group, it boggles the mind to think that 27% of 18-29 year olds don’t find it important enough - despite the dizzying number of news sources available - to watch or read hardly any news at all.

Should we worry about this? Every generation I’m aware of has looked at the generation coming behind it and wailed about how the republic will go to hell and a handbasket when the goofballs are old enough to run things. In the end, the goofballs grow up and things continue as they always have - somewhere between crisis and disaster. The world ain’t peaches and cream now and to posit the notion that it will get much better or much worse based on what somebody is like in their late teens or early 20’s usually comes a cropper of reality. The kids fall in love, marry, have kids of their own, and by sheer force of necessity, become responsible (or nearly so) citizens of the American republic. Some of them even remain liberal Democrats and the country survives although most become rabid Republicans after receiving their first paycheck and seeing how much the government takes out in taxes.

So the lack of interest by the current generation in the world around them should not be taken to heart. Times change, no more so than for the media business. After 50 years of concentration, a gigantic revolution is underway that presages a period where massive changes in not only the way we get our news but in the kinds of companies that deliver the news product will alter lifetsyles as well as our lives.

It is newspapers that are suffering the most in this revolutionary period. And, as this piece in the New York Times about the demise of news giant Knight Ridder makes clear, the reason is the same thing that killed the dinosaurs; utter and complete befuddlement as to what is killing them:

Today, many people in the newspaper industry are still scratching their heads over how and why a company with relatively high profit margins and a trophy case of 85 Pulitzer Prizes allowed itself to be wiped off the media landscape.

“Could anyone imagine 10 years ago saying that in 10 years, Knight Ridder would not exist?” asked Jay T. Harris, a former publisher for Knight Ridder at The San Jose Mercury News who quit in 2001 rather than make cuts that the company sought. “It was one of the strongest newspaper companies in America. How could you have a hand like that and play it in such a way that you would end up losing everything?”

The dismantling of Knight Ridder is a study of the hurdles facing publicly traded newspaper companies in a time of seismic change in the industry. The migration of readers and advertisers to the Internet, as well as rising costs and falling revenue, are threatening the financial well-being — even the very existence — of some of the industry’s most storied brand names.

Jeff Jarvis has been singing this song longer than almost anyone. His analysis - so simple yet so devastating - makes one wonder if there is any hope at all for “dead tree” publications who continue to lumber toward their own apocalypse:

1. Value: You have to provide value or, obviously, you’re worthless. And today in news and media, value is redefined. Value no longer includes delivering the commodity news everyone already told me. But value does now include listening to me and helping me create media alongside you. And value always equates to credibility.

3. Efficiency: There is no rule of journalism that says newsrooms and newspapers should operate as they always have. As I’ve said often, they must shed inefficiencies and resources put to commodities and ego and must find their true value. Return to No. 1.

It’s all about eyeballs. Wherever enough of them gather, the hucksters aren’t far behind. But as Jarvis points out, the eyeballs are not only getting harder to count, they’re also becoming rather demanding and selective in where they wander to. They want more than “news everyone already told me.” The value of the news is now shared between the actual information imparted and the way in which it is delivered. Is it easy to access? Do I have to wait 15 minutes until the network news sees fit to tell me about the Jon Benet story? Or can I just search and click to satisfy my aching eyeballs?

And what of a medium where customers are as important as advertisers? Who woulda thunk it? And just because you have the latest gew gaws and gizmos in the newsroom, does that mean that you’ve “modernized” and made “efficiencies?”

Knight Ridder just didn’t get it. In fact, the very process of their destruction reveals that not only didn’t they get it, it was depressing them that they didn’t even know what questions to ask:

When the sale was announced in March, Mr. Ridder said that Mr. Sherman had backed him into a corner. He said he was “upset” and “depressed,” and when the sale became final in June, he pronounced the day a sad one.

Nearly three dozen potential buyers were contacted when Knight Ridder went on the block, and 21 responded. All but two took a pass. (In addition to McClatchy, a consortium of private-equity firms stepped forward but never made a final offer.)

Analysts concluded that the paucity of bidders suggested there was no longer a market for big newspaper groups as a whole. But McClatchy’s ability to sell a dozen of the Knight Ridder papers after the sale indicated that individual newspapers had value. “No one would have anticipated that a year ago,” said Lauren Rich Fine, an analyst at Merrill Lynch. “A year ago there was a presumption that Gannett and Tribune were still buyers of groups of newspapers and that private equity would be very interested, too.”

I personally haven’t read a Chicago Tribune or Sun Times since last October when I bought a copy of both papers the day after the Sox won the World Series. I didn’t buy them to read but to save as historical curiosities. I had long since gotten most of the information on the game that I wanted to from on line sources. I had long since digested the replays over and over again on Sportscenter. I had already read the celebratory columns appearing in the newspapers in their on line editions.

Is this the future of newspapers? I certainly hope not. I know I am missing a lot by not buying the dead tree editions of both of those estimable news sources. And I hope that after this current shakedown in the business is done, what emerges will be a more consumer oriented, reliable, and yes less biased source for information.

The nation needs newspapers - in whatever form they take. Let’s hope that we can save something of this tradition so that the kind of in-depth look at issues and people we have come to expect on a daily basis from journalists will have an outlet that is as widely available as it is today.

The important thing, obviously, is that Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig have been freed from their captivity. And in an interesting twist that makes one think that their kidnappers knew all too well what Fox News is and what the attitude of the rest of the world media is toward them, they forced the two journalists to “convert” to Islam.

AND JUST LIKE JILL CARROLL, THEY WERE FORCED TO MAKE A PROPAGANDA TAPE CONDEMNING AMERICA:

Fox Television journalists held for 13 days in the Gaza Strip were released Sunday after they were shown on a videotape saying they converted to Islam.

The two journalists, American Steve Centanni, 60, and New Zealand cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, “have liberated themselves” by converting to Islam, according to the statement accompanying a videotape from a group calling itself the Holy Jihad Brigades.

Gaza journalists confirmed that Centanni and Wiig arrived at a hotel in Gaza shortly after noon local time.

[snip]

Parts of the latest six-minute tape, aired on al-Jazeera television, showed Centanni and Wiig seated cross-legged. Both read from written statements condemning the American policy in the Middle East. In one scene, both men were shown eating.

“It is Apache helicopters firing Hellfire missiles made in America that kill the residents in Gaza,” Wiig said on the tape.

Their statements were punctuated on the tape with screens of written verse from the Koran, and scenes from Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq that was the site of abuse of Muslim prisoners by American soldiers.

This “conversion” wrinkle is certainly personally humiliating for the two reporters. I say this not disparaging Islam but rather pointing out the obvious; conversion at the point of a gun points up the total control the kidnappers had over the lives of their captives. That is the message the kidnappers were sending. And it appears to me that the kidnappers may also be very aware of the fact that Fox News is seen by most of the western press as a “conservative” news outlet. Since it is no secret where the most vigorous opposition to the agenda of radical Islam comes from, one wonders if these particular jihadists were trying to send a message to conservatives; resistance is futile.

Are they that sophisticated? Think Reuters and then tell me they are not. Radical Islamism is the most media savvy enemy America has ever faced. For whatever reason, the old Soviet Union was clumsy and at times, laughably off target in their attempted media manipulations.

But these guys have studied the western mind, studied western politics, and most importantly, studied the process of how the modern collection and dissemination of news is done. They are aware of news cycles and feeding frenzies. We already knew they were very good at creating irresistible images for the wire services and other independent news sources whose reporting the major nets depend on during a war. What their manipulation of images of these particular hostages may mean is that they are aware of the politics of media coverage as well.

It almost appears as if the kidnappers had been reading the blogs over the last week. If there was one way to embarrass their tormentors in the right wing blogosphere, it would be to show that no one can resist the power of their religion. Whether they realize what the reaction by lefty blogs will be - gratitude for their release followed by a lecture on tolerance and some pointed remarks equating this hostage release with the way righty blogs handled the Jill Carroll imbroglio - is impossible to say but given the sophistication of their media relations as well as how internet savvy their cells have proved to be, I wouldn’t put it past them.

And even if the kidnappers don’t know what blogs are, the lefty blogs would have a point regarding Jill Carroll. If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you read her gripping story that will be out in book form soon, excerpts of which have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor. (HT: Bill Roggio). Carroll’s ordeal should remind all of us that no matter what one’s politics, all Americans are held hostage when one of us falls into the hands of these thugs.

Carroll was targeted for kidnapping for the exact same reason the Fox News reporters were taken; to influence and terrorize the American public. This is also the reason both were required to make a tape spewing anti-American propaganda. The thugs are not concerned with our petty political squabbles except as a way to divide us. They didn’t “like” Jill Carroll any more than they were fond of Steve Centanni. Carroll’s alleged sympathy for Islam didn’t do her any more or less good than Centanni’s connection to Fox News denoting hostility to radical jihadism. It just didn’t matter.

Maybe the good that comes out of this incident is that conservatives will realize that it doesn’t matter to our enemies whether reporters write sympathetic pieces about them or whether they do highly critical new stories on their movement. What matters is that they are American. That’s all that matters. The rest is so much chaff.

UPDATE

Michelle has links to all the video as well as her transcription of this from Centanni:

I just hope this never scares a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover this story because the Palestinian people are very beautiful, kind-hearted, loving people who the world need to know more about and so do not be discouraged. Come and tell the story. It’s a wonderful story. I’m just happy to be here. Thanks for all your support.

Ed Morrissey thinks the conversion ploy shows that the jihadists are amateurs:

The Holy Jihad Brigade apparently wants to include themselves among the Big Three of Palestinian terrorism. They have a strange way of applying. Besides forcing the conversion of the two to Islam, they made them play dress-up and recorded a degrading video of the pair denouncing the West in Arabic robes. I’m not sure who they thought such a display would convince, but Centanni and Wiig wisely played along with the demands, and now this laughable statement gives evidence of the childish and intellectually stunted nature of Palestinian terrorism. Even Haniyeh will be embarrassed by that show.

This could be. “Holy Jihad Brigade” could be a bunch of guys who hang out together after Friday prayers and who decided to get a little attention by kidnapping some westerners. It’s possible they didn’t know the significance of the Fox News connection nor that their motives in releasing the videos were anything more than, as Ed says, a “childish and laughable” exercise in propaganda.

If so, they sure got lucky picking a journalist with ties to a news organization that is closely identified with an ideology that has given the Islamists the most sustained and unrelenting opposition in the west.

Also, be sure to check out the videos at Ms. Underestimated.

I have nothing but the greatest respect for journalists as well as a deep appreciation for the almost impossible job they have when trying to cover a war. The danger, the confusion, the rush to fill air time and to make deadlines - all this is a contributing factor to the difficulty in placing yourself in the midst of warring parties and report what is going on.

I also am trying to appreciate how hard it is to separate fact from propaganda and try your best not to be manipulated by either side into skewing your story. I got an earful the last time I visited this issue from a genuine photojournalist who has covered numerous conflicts around the globe. He told me in a series of fascinating emails that it is at times unavoidable to pass along propaganda from one side or another. I accept this is a price of being in a war zone. But then there are things that should not be accepted by my friend the photo journalist or anyone concerned with the credibility of the media.

As I predicted in this post the debunking of war reporting by the MSM that started with the exposure of Reuters as a shill for Hizbullah has not gone away and indeed, has gotten more intense.

The microscopic scrutiny being applied by the conservative blogosphere to how the MSM screwed the pooch in their coverage of the war (lefty blogs have dismissed the issue as “one picture” that was only “slightly altered”) has continued despite the media moving on to more important matters - like the fake confession in a 10 year old murder case by a disturbed pedophile. After all, why deal with the media’s assistance to a terrorist group in getting their propaganda out when you can garner ratings and viewers by devoting absurd amounts of time and effort to titillating your audience with pictures of an unfortunate little girl dressed up to look like an adult?

The latest episode in this slow motion car wreck for the media comes to us via Michelle Malkin. The story of those evil Joooooos targeting ambulances with missile strikes that was reported by many so-called reputable news agencies has been debunked by a woman who calls herself “Zombie.” Read both Michelle’s post and Zombie’s analysis to get the complete picture of what we’ve only guessed at prior to this; that the media was, if not a willing partner, a gaggle of “useful idiots” for Hizbullah during the coverage of the war.

We know of Zombie from her frontline photo reports of various protests by radical leftists over the past few years. In this instance, Zombie used her analytical skills and knowledge of photography to offer up a definitive and devastating account of how Hizbullah fed the media’s preconceived notions about Israel and banked on the laziness of editors in order to perpetrate a fraud upon the world.

The ease with which they accomplished this is breathtaking in its implications. What Zombie’s work shows is that the media was not concerned with reporting the “truth” or even the “facts” but rather with telling “the story.” In the recently concluded Israeli-Islamist war, the “story” was Israel heartlessly bombing civilians which in turn gave substance and urgency to the UN’s efforts to stop the war short of Israel achieving its military objectives.

There is little doubt that the IDF was pounding the hell out of Hizbullah, especially the last 72 hours before the cease fire. While it is doubtful that the outcome of the “war of perceptions” would have been different (Hizbullah was not going to be “destroyed” hence they would be declared the winner by the world press regardless of how much damage they sustained), the shattering conclusion to be reached by examining Zombie’s analysis, as well as the analysis of several bloggers who have debunked other photos and stories, is that Hizbullah military assets and fighters were saved thanks to their expert propaganda campaign. They successfully manipulated the press through heartbreaking visuals and carefully choreographed stories into reporting the war in such a way as to place political pressure on the United States to force the issue of a cease fire at the UN.

Were there civilians killed in Lebanon? There is no doubt of this. How many? The Lebanese government says over 1000 were killed but there is absolutely no independent verification of that number nor is there any reason to believe that all of those deaths were indeed “civilian” in nature. The work of Zombie and others places the burden of proof now on the Lebanese government and the news media to give an accurate accounting of civilian deaths in Lebanon during the war. Numbers from any other source - including the UN - can now legitimately be questioned and indeed, can rightly be called exaggerations since it is clear that so much of what we heard and saw from Lebanon was a lie.

It cannot be stated forcefully enough that the media absolutely must undertake a massive re-examination of their coverage of this war, ideally using independent investigators, in order to find out how so much of their coverage was so easily co-opted by Hizbullah propagandists. Was it simple laziness? Was it competitive pressures? Was it gullibility? Any way you look at it, the entire media comes out looking like dupes. And their already damaged credibility has suffered another blow that means from here on out, bloggers are going to take nothing from them for granted. If they thought they were being fact checked prior to these incidents, they haven’t experienced anything yet.

Will they reform? I believe that we have not seen the last of these revelatory investigations about MSM coverage during the war. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop on this story - that “stringers” used by many in the print media to help in compiling stories on the war were also either Hizbullah operatives or sympathizers. I feel confident that someone with the resources and the time will be able to ferret that story out of the shadows eventually also. But even if that aspect never materializes, the mainstream press is going to have to come to grips with the fact that the way they gather news and report it must change or whatever credibility they have left will be lost.

UPDATE

In a related story, Allah has the jaw dropping response of Editor and Publisher to all the charges of fakery, flummoxing, and stagecraft by the media during the war.

I don’t know quite what to say. But Allah does:

I don’t know what to say, except that if these guys see no higher ethical obligation in war photography than press-conference photography; if they have no moral objection to enabling the exploitation of children’s corpses for propaganda purposes; if they detect no corruption in their presence at the scene of a newsworthy event shaping the participants’ actions during the event; then David Perlmutter’s got a bigger job ahead of him than he realizes.

Perlmutter is the journalism professor whose article in last week’s E & P set off Greg Mitchell and was the reason for this two part screed on how bloggers suck and it’s okay to print propaganda pictures.

That’s an oversimplification but after reading Mitchell’s piece and the comments of several war photogs, one can hardly come away thinking anything else.

Michelle Malkin has the right idea regarding the missing Fox news journalists; create a buzz in the blogosphere to keep their plight front and center.

Fox and other news outlets are downplaying the kidnapping, hoping not to exacerbate the situation by giving massive amounts of publicity to the kidnappers which would probably encourage them to hold on to the Yank and the Kiwi in order to milk the notoriety of their crime.

That said, we can certainly do our best to remember them and let their families know that we haven’t forgotten about them.

Michelle reports that Fox management, the journalist’s families, and surprisingly, Palestinian journalists are all working hard for their release. One would hope that our State Department would also be working for a quick resolution as well. (Note: State would have to be working through third parties since we’re not talking to Hamas although I would hope that our government has contact with the PA on some level.)

Michelle questions why the dearth of news on the kidnapped journalists. One would think if an American reporter working for a big time daily or one of the other major nets were kidnapped, there at least would be some updates, some acknowledgement of the situation.

Judging by what this fellow has to say, maybe it’s a good thing that no one is opening their mouths:

Fox has deliberately set itself apart from other news media. Starting at the top with Roger Ailes, the Fox sales pitch has been to deride other media, to declare itself the one source of the real truth, the sole source of ‘fair and accurate’ news reporting. As a result, there’s not a reservoir of kinship or good will with Fox on the part of the rest of the news media. You can’t keep insulting people and then expect friendship when you need it.

They’ve made it a policy to keep a distance between themselves and the rest of the media, far beyond the usual competitive spirit, so that’s where they are: at a distance.

This from media critic Bob Laurence of the San Diego Union-Trib. He must also be the President of the local Union of Louts, Lickspittles, and Losers. It pains me to find out from Mr. Laurence that there is no “reservoir of kinship or good will” for human beings who are in mortal danger of their lives from a bunch of cutthroats. The fact that one of the victims of this unconscionable crime is an American also apparently doesn’t rate any feelings of kinship or good will from that great humanitarian and philistine Mr. Laurence.

And to pretend that the news business is not hyper competitive with the nets savaging each other regularly in order to acquire any edge they can (so much for “kinship”) is to either demonstrate a naivete that calls into question Mr. Laurence’s credentials as an adult or a delusional personality more suited for weaving baskets in a mental ward.

Wouldn’t common decency demand a little “good will” toward a fellow journalist in distress? How about simple human kindness? One would hope that our “reservoir” for such feelings wouldn’t depend on being filled by who we work for or what our politics are.

But for bitter, envious, loutish people like Bob Laurence, the well is dry of human decency.

This is a HUGE SURPRISE! The already shaky underpinnings of the Bush dictatorship received a crippling blow that may help collapse the entire, rotten edifice:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government’s warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency’s program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

“Plaintiffs have prevailed, and the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution,” Taylor wrote in her 43-page opinion.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of journalists, scholars and lawyers who say the program has made it difficult for them to do their jobs. They believe many of their overseas contacts are likely targets of the program, which involves secretly listening to conversations between people in the U.S. and people in other countries.

(Bias? What media Bias? “…[S]ecretly listening to conversations between people in the U.S. and people in other countries” conjures up the men in the black van hunched over their magic decoder machine listening in while Auntie Midge talks to her sister in Budapest. If the judge based her decision on what was known about the program, this description of it is so far off from the truth of the matter as to not even be in the same galaxy.)

I can barely type this through my tears of joy. Lambchop and all the civil libertarian absolutists who have battled to save the soul of America lo these many years by trying to make the world safe for journalists, academics, lawyers, and their terrorist contacts overseas are to receive all the plaudits of a grateful nation.

Do you think a parade for these heroes is enough? Perhaps a laurel wreath of triumph and gratitude to be placed upon their fetid brow? How about (eliminationist rhetoric warning) a rope around their necks?

After all, what do you think the penalty was during World War II if a journalist, or scholar, or lawyer was found to be in contact with a member of the Nazi party in Germany? I can guarantee that the FBI took a very dim view of such contacts. I guess they figured if you couldn’t do your job unless you were talking to the enemy, that kinda made you, ya know, like, the enemy too.

But then, World War II was a real war, not this trumped up, ginned up political sideshow hatched by Evil Karl and Shrub in order to make their buddies in the military industrial complex rich and instill terror in the hearts of Americans so that they would vote for Republicans rather than Democrats in elections. This, after all, is no fair at all. Since Democrats could give a sh*t about national security, elections should avoid this issue at all costs. Better to have elections hinge on Democratic issues of taxing the rich (anyone who makes over $25,000 a year), enslaving the poor, handcuffing businesses, and playing pattycakes with the thugs in Hamas, Hizbullah, and any other dirty necked galoot (especially that radioactive elf in Tehran) who can prove that Shrub is at fault for all the troubles in the world.

There was one bright spot in the judge’s ruling. That other top secret program that liberals say was an impeachable offense and was proof of the President’s march to dictatorship that uses data mining techniques to develop information on terrorist networks was declared “constitutional” after all.

Maybe we could get that gizmo they used in Men in Black and flash the entire world, replacing the memory of people having information on that program with a recipe for my Aunt Donna’s corned beef and cabbage.

Oh, that’s right. No such gizmo exists. I guess we’ll just have to ask for an apology from the press and a great big “never mind” for revealing it in the first place. I await the day that happens with as much anticipation as I await the day that Ned Lamont takes his rightful seat on one of the most influential bodies in the world - the Connecticut Port-o-Potty Authority.

And no, we’re not going to ask liberals to apologize. After all, they were looking out for all of our interests. Even the interests of the terrorists who, after all, are almost human too. Better that 100,000 Americans die than one terrorist suspect in this country have a conversation monitored with his Aunt Beddie Boo in Damascus. (I sympathize. I had an Aunt Beddie Boo in Damascus m’self once).

Leave it to Goldstein to crystallize thinking and reveal the truth of the matter:

Even still, it’s amazing that we’ve reached the nuance point where only by revealing secrets can we show the the secrets in question should not be revealed, lest they damage programs meant to protect us from attacks, which only work while details of how they work remain secret.

But it’s the thought that counts.

And what I’m thinking at this moment (Warning: more eliminationist rhetoric) about the civil liberties absolutists who revealed both these programs would get me 20 years to life in the real world.

The ancients firmly believed in destiny, that fates ruled the affairs of men. These fates, or Moirai, were the daughters of the Goddess of Necessity Themis and spun the thread of an individuals life so that events played themselves out along a predestined string. This placed the hapless mortal in the position of being pulled this way and that by the Gods with no chance of doing anything to affect what happened to him.

In this framework, all the large events of history were explained by a kind of predetermination, unmovable historical forces where man was the captive of events, riding the waves of time unable to change direction while taking part in the drama of history for the amusement of the Gods.

We know better today, of course. Or at least we should. Instead, it appears that the Moirai are alive and well and comfortably ensconced in the editorial offices of the New York Magazine, playing havoc with rational thought and being joined in their revelry by the more modern gods of revisionism and political partisanship.

What makes my critique of their series of “essays” about a world where 9/11 never happened so spiteful is first and foremost the utter waste of a brilliant idea. It is a travesty that such an exciting concept was treated by the participants with a kind of bored cynicism more appropriate to a review of the newest Manhattan Bistro rather than a serious attempt to add anything of value to our cultural understanding of 9/11. In fact, whether by design or not, the only participant in the project who spent more than 5 minutes thinking about the premise was Andrew Sullivan.

Mr. Sullivan should be commended for his effort but skewered for his laughably shallow extrapolation of what a 9/11-less Bush presidency would have been. Indeed, this intellectual conceit appears to have taken on the morphology of a vicious, extraordinarily voracious bug in that it seems to have bitten almost every essayist involved in the project. The exception being author Tom Wolfe who either didn’t understand the directions given to him by the editors or simply gave up on the project and wrote whatever meandering thoughts on our post-9/11 culture that happened to be ready for transfer from mind to pen to paper.

In truth, it is shocking to read some of the reveries by people who are generally considered to be our cultural elites. Perhaps the format - a short essay (and I mean in some cases short!) encompassing thoughts on the subject from the perspective of their interest or expertise - did not lend itself to the kind of serious effort that would have illuminated some larger truths about where we are as a people 5 years after 9/11.

The question I would have then is why bother? Even the historians Doris Kearns-Goodwin and Douglas Brinkley gave responses so banal that they may have been rejected by a high school newspaper. Al Sharpeton’s contribution is incoherent. Frank Rich, who actually made a slight effort to address the question, came up with some pretty off the wall scenarios either trying to be amusing or proving that he’s simply daft.

There are some themes that seem to run through the majority of pieces. George Bush would have been a one term President. We would have continued to sleepwalk through history awaiting a hammer blow by Osama. Saddam would still be in a cage and presumably, children would still be flying kites in his paradise prison camp. Liberals are good, Conservatives are bad.

Am I missing anything? Oh yes, New York is a great town with great people. And, in the strangest of all the essays, the Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and Rebuilding Dan Doctoroff sees 9/11 if not as a godsend then as a fortunate happenstance of history in that all of his pet redevelopment projects for Lower Manhattan that had been languishing in bureaucratic limbo all these years got a serious boost when the yokels in Washington opened the money spigot and billions of dollars began to make their way into the bowels of his bureaucracy.

Always nice when someone can see the silver lining in just about anything.

By far the most egregious sin committed by all the essayists (with a couple of exceptions) was this almost surreal failure to grasp the larger forces of history at work between 2001-2006 of which 9/11 was a symptom and of which George Bush was positioned to manage better than any alternative personality on the political scene. While most of the essayists posited that Bush would have stuck with a domestic agenda and given the issue of terrorism short shrift, it seems obvious that he would not have been vouchsafed the choice.

If, as seems likely, Osama Bin Laden would have attacked us somewhere in the world if 9/11 had failed, the idea that Bush would have continued to ignore terrorism as a threat is belied by the testimony of Condi Rice before the 9/11 Commission. Rice related how Bush was sick of the United States “swatting flies” when it came to striking back at terrorism. An attack on Americans overseas would have initiated a confrontation with Bin Laden in Afghanistan that almost certainly would have involved regime change. In this alternate scenario, Bush emerges as a wartime leader and the 2004 election goes ahead as a battle between Bush and the man the Democrats nominate to counter Bush’s national security credentials; none other than John Kerry.

The point is that you can muck around with history all you want, play virtual history games to your hearts content, but there are larger trends at work that defy any change of direction as the result of one event. In this respect, even a cataclysm like 9/11 only ripples the pond a bit. I believe that going after Osama and Saddam were historical necessities that 9/11 made even more logical. Regardless of how both those military adventures turn out, they were the right choices at the time.

It is tempting to believe that the world would be a much quieter place without George Bush and 9/11. But it seems clear - and is even admitted by some of the essayists - that the forces of Islamic radicalism were not going to leave us alone regardless of who was in the White House or what party controlled Congress. The same Hizbullah that attacked Israel didn’t need George Bush to build up its strength over the years and lie in wait for the right opportunity to strike. The victory at the polls by Hamas was not the result of anything that the United States could have done differently. And the mullahs in Iran, hell bent on getting their hands on nuclear weapons, paid more attention to A.Q. Khan and his black market nuclear bazaar than to anything happening in the United States.

This strange obeisance to the fates when liberals talk and write about George Bush is one of the strangest outgrowths of Bush Derangement Syndrome. As if the thread of the Bush presidency could have been glimpsed 6 years ago and that everything that has happened since - including 9/11 - was predictable. Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.com uses this theme to show how evil George would have pushed through draconian law and order measures regardless of whether or not 9/11 happened. Tom Friedman writes if not Osama, it would have been China as Bush’s “obsession.”

I suppose this attitude is inevitable given the dangerous and frightening times we live in. But to have so much of it appear in one place and defined by so many people who should know better makes it all the more mystifying.

ATTENTION LIZARDOIDS! TUNE IN TO THE RICK MORAN SHOW THIS MORNING BETWEEN 7:00 AM AND 9:00 AM CENTRAL TIME FOR AN EXAMINATION OF THE ISSUES SURROUNDING FAKED AND STAGED PHOTOS BY THE WIRE SERVICES. CLICK ON THE “LISTEN LIVE” BUTTON IN THE LEFT SIDEBAR TO HEAR THE BROADCAST.

Well, it took a while but I made it through the top 30 or so lefty blogs looking for reactions to the Reuters scam.

After disinfecting the keyboard, I got to work. It appears that out of the top lefty blogs, only 4 had anything to say about the Reuters story. And then there’s Billmon. Our friend didn’t write about the Reuters story. But he did use a photo of a woman that DFR at Drinking from Home has proven to be part of staged propaganda.

TBogg, in his usual incoherent and childish manner (is there a more immature intellect on the web?) essentially points out that yes, it’s bad that Reuters did this but RETHUGLICANS DO IT TOO…NYEAH, NYEAH, NYEAH. (One can almost see TBoy sticking his tongue out in a most defiant manner).

How very grown up of you. Maybe next year, your mama will let you go to the playground all by yourself as long as you look both ways before crossing the street…

Ahab blogging at Roger Ailes site also takes the juvenile road by using the Reuters scam to savage Powerline for not posting a complete answer by Rep. John Dingell to the question of whether or not he was “against Hizbullah.” Dingell answered “no” and then tried to prove he was neutral (meaning of course, he was not against Hizbullah) but which the lefty blogs erupted because the guys didn’t include Dingell’s long winded explanation regarding his agnosticism about a terrorist group.

I know, I know…But you have to think like a liberal to understand the “nuance” involved.

At any rate, Ahab only mentions the Reuters story in passing - as if we get this kind of thing all the time so what’s the big deal? I guess I’m just not sophisticated enough to be blase about a wire service with thousands of clients printing fake pictures in order to advance the public relations cause of a terrorist group.

Brad at Sadly, No! takes exactly the right attitude - for a Hizbullah toady. He condemns the offending photo as “unethical” and then adds the Hiz Spin:

Now, while I think it’s unethical for Reuters to photoshop any picture it runs, I have to ask… is there really that much of a difference between the two that justifies the wingnutosphere’s scream fest? I mean, to me it looks like the photographer mostly darkened the smoke in the picture so it’d look better in black-and-white. I can’t believe this is the best the wingnutosphere can come up with nowadays.

Moral blindness personified. It isn’t a question about whether there is little difference between the two pictures, the fact is that the doctored photo was done to elicit a greater emotional response from the reader. This is the essence of propaganda which makes ‘ole Brad a truly useful idiot of Hizbullah. Even when presented with incontrovertible evidence he’s being taken for a fool, he goes right on acting and thinking foolishly.

The only lefty who seems to get it a little bit is Taylor Marsh who, not surprisingly, is more centrist than leftist on some issues. Ms. Marsh makes a valid point about why this kind of thing happens in the first place:

As if we needed more corporate media disrespect, we’ve now got Reuters’ propaganda. They’ve now admitted to actually doctoring a picture to show more smoke and disaster in Lebanon than was happening in a certain snapshot. It’s bad enough in Beirut, so we surely don’t need to push this envelope, not to mention heighten mistrust of the media. There are not that many corporate outlets willing to risk their people in war zones as it is.

Indeed, the reason Hizbullah is able to get away with this kind of crap is because the mainstream press, for a variety of reasons - some good, some bad - are not covering this war with their own people. The extensive use of stringers has been forced on media outlets due to the danger, the lack of personnel, and the limitations imposed by the warring parties. We see the same thing in Iraq, only magnified considerably because the danger is so much greater thanks to the lawlessness in Baghdad as well as hatred of westerners in general.

This brings us to Billmon of Whiskey Bar and his use of the old woman photo who seems to turn up whenever Reuters needs a “grieving old woman standing in front of her ruined house” picture.

She appears to be the same woman seen in two different pictures, mourning the loss of two different homes, on two different dates.

It is very hard to say for sure, but it appears to me that the picture in Billmon’s post is of an entirely different neighborhood as well. At the very least, this woman has been moved around in order to get great background shots of the devastation. We know this because when Hizbullah takes the press out for a Devastation Photo Op, they rope them off and only show them images that the terrorists want presented to the world.

WORLD PRESS PENNED UP BY HIZBULLAH AT QANA

But Billmon should not be criticized too harshly. After all, he was unaware of the Hizbullah propaganda shenanigans and only used the photo to elicit a gut wrenching, emotional response from the reader. In other words, even if the photo wasn’t staged, he was doing Hizbullah’s work for them.

He also has a picture of Mr. “Green Helmet” whose traveling mortician show magically moves from Lebanese town to Lebanese town. “Green Helmet” was in both Qana and Tyre and just coincidentally happened to bring out dead children in both cities, parading them shamelessly before the penned up reporters down what the EU Referendum blog calls “Stretcher Alley.” Read the jaw dropping piece by EU Ref accompanied by photo evidence that at the very least raises enormously troubling questions about the way that wire services are getting their photos and writing their stories.

And for my lefty friends out there, let me make it absolutely clear that by examining the aftermath of what happened at Qana and Tyre in no way diminishes the fact that civilians lost their lives as a result of a bomb dropped by the IAF. That fact is not in dispute here. I think it a baldfaced lie to say that Israel deliberately targets civilians but I am not arguing that the IAF’s actions leave them blameless. They have freely admitted to making a mistake in Qana, apologized for it, and even changed their targeting regime to help prevent it ever happening again.

What does concern me is that you have become the unwitting propaganda pawns of Hizbullah when you ignore what Reuters has admitted doing; they have pulled every single one of Mr. Hajj’s photos from their archives because he has apparently been doctoring photos for weeks. The implications are staggering. It is now impossible to trust any “news” coming from Reuters. Anyone who does is a fool. And my gut feeling is that these revelations will not be confined to Reuters. It would not surprise me in the slightest if in the coming days we see similar stories about photos from AP, UPI, AFP and other wire service outfits.

And what about stringers being used by the big newspapers like the New York Times and WaPo? Can we really trust these outlets to vet their stringers and make sure that they are as unbiased as possible in this conflict? Can we be assured that the stringer’s BS detector is good enough to tell the difference between propaganda and news?

This story is a foreshock. The earthquake that may follow could rock the media establishment like no other event in our lifetimes. Am I exaggerating? I wonder what they’re talking about at AP today? Do you think they’re nervous over at UPI? Has someone been tasked at AFP with looking at old photos with a more critical eye?

These and other mainstream outlets live or die by selling the appearance of unbiased truth. By exposing Reuters as a propaganda arm of Hizbullah, the blogs have shown that the media emperors have little clothing left covering their behinds. And that’s the kind of perception that directly affects the bottom line.

UPDATE

Jeff Jarvis gets it. In spades:

It seems more likely an act of agenda that fits into the current argument about proportionalism in the Hizbullah-Israel war. One side of the argument is, of course, that Israel’s security was violated by Hizbullah, and it has a right to defend itself and to assure that these attacks will stop by disarming or disabling Hizbullah. The other side of the argument we hear now is that Israel’s response is disproportionate, an argument I find puzzling in war, where the disproportion is in winning or losing (I have blogged on this here and here and here). If the effort is not to make war look worse but to make one side in it look disproporationate, then I suppose it makes sense to make the smoke bigger and blacker. It makes sense if that is your agenda.

It doesn’t make sense if what you’re trying to do is report the news.

And in addition to the usual jaw dropping variety of links in her round-up, Malkin adds this:

If Reuters had half a brain, it would post all of Hajj’s photos on a separate site and welcome continued blogger analysis that uncovered this debacle in the first place. Withdrawing the photos to cover their tracks is a dumb idea.

If they are interested in the truth, they will harness the power of the Internet’s distributed intelligence network–not cut it off.

Thee’s never a half a brain around when you need one…

UPDATE II 8/8

I got a very interesting email from a professional photo-journalist who disabused me of some notions about working in a war zone:

Actually, if you were a journalist with experience in a war zone, or a disaster
site, you’d understand that this is common enough practice. They cordon off a
“secured” area to keep the group safe for their tour. Once the tour is over,
you can go where you want. This is done everywhere, not only by Hezbollah. For
example, on disaster sites, down in NOLA, and at Ground Zero. It’s a common
practice to keep reporters and photogs from stepping into a hole or worse,
during the tour.

Point taken. However, I doubt if you were at NoLA or Ground Zero, they would threaten your life if you aimed your camera at the wrong target.

This is also an excellent point:

Also, you and others keep harping on pictures that seem out of place by date.
The old woman for example. It is not uncommon for a number of things to happen.
First, the photog takes a series of pictures of an event. The one of the woman
could average up to 100. (Fast exposure, multi-series with a digital camera
etc) Easy. And, they could very well show many different backgrounds. I’ve
taken pictures like this many times.

I’ve looked at the pictures you site, and it is just not possible to tell if it
is the same background or not. Not enough info to make that judgement. A point
you struggle with as well. With no real definitive answer.

Agreed. My primary beef with the old woman is that the captions cited by DFH are on two different dates. Perhaps the second one was a result of your editor needing something dramatic. Fine. But the caption from the later date makes it seem as if the Israelis had just destroyed her home the previous night.

Not exactly honest journalism, in my opinion.

Thanks to “Camera A” for the fascinating background info.

The IDF may be winning the battle in southern Lebanon to carve out a buffer zone that will eventually keep Hizbullah terrorists from attacking Israeli cities and towns, but they are badly losing the atrocity war.

This “atrocity gap” gets larger daily and threatens the mainstream media’s one sided coverage of the conflict. In fact, some analysts say that it is probable that the lopsided advantage that Hizbullah is showing in the atrocity area could lead to a disastrous state of affairs for the mainstream media. They would be forced to report something like the truth; that Hizbullah revels in targeting and killing innocent civilians while Israel doesn’t. These analysts point to the fact that it is getting harder and harder for the MSM to be sanguine and “neutral” in the face of Hizbullah’s ever growing number of rockets launched aimed at killing civilians while still ginning up enough outrage at the accidental killing of civilians by the IDF.

The Israeli problem is obvious. By nature of the fact that the Israeli atrocities happen by accident, unlike Hizbullah there is no overall plan for the IDF to kill civilians. Many analysts scoff at the excuse that the Israeli Air Force, if they put their mind to it, could really go to town and kill tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians given the superiority of their weaponry and enormous destructive power of their bombs. Lack of atrocity planning by the Israelis is no excuse they say.

The terrorists made a huge stride forward in their atrocity scorecard today:

A woman and two men were killed and at least 189 people were wounded on Sunday evening when a massive barrage of rockets struck at least six sites in a crowded residential area of Haifa.

Two people who were critically wounded died of their wounds shortly after. Several others were listed in serious condition. All of the wounded were evacuated to local hospitals within some 30 minutes.

One building sustained a direct hit and collapsed, trapping dozens of people inside. Emergency workers labored to extract the victims.

The incident was defined a high-casualty event. This was the first time such a definition was applied to an attack on Israel since rockets started landing in Israel almost four weeks ago.

One Hizbullah terrorist speaking on condition of anonymity complained that Hizbullah may be winning the atrocity war as far as “murderous intent” and “cold blooded heartlessness” but that the terrorists were actually losing the all-important “atrocity perceptions” battle.

“What’s the use of deliberately slaughtering innocent Israelis if you infidels in the media don’t give us proper credit for our barbarity?” the terrorist said. “Israel accidentally kills some civilians and the media calls it a ‘war crime. You want war crimes? Nobody can do war crimes like the Party of God,” he said.

Analysts are undecided whether it is more important that Israeli accidental atrocities are perceived as much worse than Hizbullah’s deliberate murder of the innocent or whether the sheer number of Hizbullah atrocities will eventually wear down the MSM and win the day for the terrorists.

These analysts say the outcome of the atrocity war will be one of the more interesting sidelights to the Israeli-Islamist conflict.

UPDATE

Luck of the Hiz:

A massive rocket barrage was fired Sunday afternoon at Kibbutz Kfar Giladi in the Kiryat Shmona area. Ten Israelis were killed in the attack and another two people died of their wounds at the Ziv Medical Center in Safed and the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, to where they were evacuated in critical condition.

Fifteen people are still hospitalized at the Safed and Haifa hospitals, two of them in serious condition, three in moderate condition and six in light condition.

[snip]

Celebratory processions were held in Nablus following the lethal attack. Cars with photographs of Hassan Nasrallah drove past with Hizbullah flags.

The dead were all Israeli reservists evidently gathering in a parking lot waiting to be deployed.

The tragedy brings to mind the unlucky hit by a Scud missile on the American barracks at al-Khobar during the Gulf War. Twenty-eight Americans died and 93 were wounded when the one in a million hit by the crudely aimed Scud caused most of the casualties during that conflict.

To say that these men were a legitimate target would be correct. But they were not the target. Hizbullah could not possibly have had any inkling that the reservists were gathering in that parking lot nor did they themselves know where their missile would end up. Their target was Israeli civilians. The fact that it hit soldiers doesn’t negate the intent of the atrocity.

This is unbelievable.

A Reuters photograph of smoke rising from buildings in Beirut has been withdrawn after coming under attack by American web logs. The blogs accused Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage.

The photograph showed two very heavy plumes of black smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut after an Air Force attack on the Lebanese capital. Reuters has since withdrawn the photograph from its website, along a message admitting that the image was distorted, and an apology to editors.

DISTORTED! HOW ABOUT “FAKED?” HOW ABOUT “MANIPULATED?” HOW ABOUT “PROPAGANDIZED?”

It appears that someone emailed Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs with some compelling evidence that a Reuters photograph showing smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut was heavily altered. After Charles posted the original story, the blogosphere went to work with a vengeance.

Several bloggers weighed in with their own evidence, including a photographer’s blog who determined that the photo indeed had been altered. From there, the blog frenzy continued with one blogger finding a probable match for the photo that was undoctored. Others weighed in that the photo really was an awful photoshop image, an obvious fake.

The rest is familiar. As more and more evidence piled up, it became obvious that Reuters had screwed the pooch. And the final bit of evidence that sealed the fate of this photo was the photographer in question, one Adnan Hajj, who just happened by Qana at the moment the “rescue worker” in the green helmet was holding aloft a dead child.

Coincidence or collusion between the photographer and Hizbullah?

It certainly raises some interesting questions about how the Qana story has been reported. First the drastically lower casualty figure of 28 instead of 56 and now we have Mr. Hajj and his travelling propaganda show revealed as a liar and perhaps even an agent of Hizbullah.

Read the entire story at LGF and see the genesis of a Blog Strike. It should probably go without saying that the lefty blogs sat this one out, never dreaming that the international media could be playing them for fools. And it should be interesting to see what they’ll be saying about this as the day wears on. Perhaps I’ll post reaction - if there is any.

Kudos to LGF, Charles, and all the bloggers who participated in this exercise in people power at its best.