When terrorists aren’t Jihadists: The Media Reaction

From Atlantic

Yesterday’s first reports on the massacre in Norway suggested that there was a link between the horrific attacks, which left 92 dead at latest reports, and Muslim extremists. Only later was the news released that the suspect taken by police, Anders Behring Breivik, was apparently a conservative, right-wing Christian with strong anti-Muslim and anti-immigration beliefs. Many in the media were left reeling over the fact that others were so quick to report and comment that Muslims were involved, before there was clear evidence. Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun had as a headline on the front page, “Al Qaeda Massacre: Norway’s 9/11.” The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial on the bombings that begins with references to Islam. It starts:

When cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad appeared in a Danish newspaper in the fall of 2005 and sparked a full-blown jihadist campaign against Denmark, then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen responded with a telling remark. “We Danes feel like we have been placed in a scene in the wrong movie,” he told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel.”

Joe Weisenthal, deputy editor of Business Insider, tweeted: “It is pretty bewildering that the first 3 paragraphs of this WSJ editorial on Norway are about Al-Qaeda/Islam.”

The most controversial piece, however, seems to be an editorial at The Washington Post by “Right Turn” columnist Jennifer Rubin, who quoted the Weekly Standard that:

We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra. Prominent jihadists have already claimed online that the attack is payback for Norway’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

The editorial remains up on the Post, “sixteen hours after its claims were shown to be false and hysterical, it’s still there, with no correction or apology,” according to James Fallows at The Atlantic. Fallows responded to Rubin’s piece, in a blog post titled, “The Washington Post Owes the World an Apology for this Item,” writing that:

No, this is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too tedious to reserve judgment about horrifying events rather than instantly turning them into talking points for pre-conceived views. On a per capita basis, Norway lost twice as many people today as the U.S. did on 9/11.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn’t, even when it’s allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist… we’ve seen repeatedly: that Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target. Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn’t Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn’t).

Ibrahim Hewitt writes an editoral at Al-Jazeera, where he observes that once media outlets noted that the suspect was not Muslim, they disassociated connections between the suspect’s beliefs and his alleged violent actions.

…the perpetrator was a “blond, blue-eyed Norwegian” with “political traits towards the right, and anti-Muslim views.” Not surprisingly, the man’s intentions were neither linked to these “traits,” nor to his postings on “websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies.” Any influence “remains to be seen”; echoes of Oklahoma 1995. Interestingly, this criminal is described by one unnamed Norwegian official as a “madman.”

…Anyone who claims therefore, that the perpetrator’s “right-wing traits” and “anti-Muslim views,” or even links with “Christian fundamentalist” websites are irrelevant is trying to draw a veil over the unacceptable truths of such “traits” and expecting us to believe that right-wing ideology is incapable of prompting someone towards such criminality.

The right-wing, anti-government mindset attributed to the Norwegian rampage suspect has observers recalling US extremist Timothy McVeigh – behind the devastating Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured more than 800.

McVeigh, then just 26, blew up a van he had packed with explosives and parked outside a large federal building in the Oklahoman state capital, on April 19, 1995.

The blast was the deadliest ever domestic attack in US history, and brought into sharp focus the threat of homegrown terrorism.

Arrested shortly afterwards, McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, was found to have been a figure in neo-Nazi groups and even claimed to have acted for the “common good” of Americans, as he railed against what he thought was the dictatorship of the federal government. (sound like tea party rhetoric?)

Pseudomenos [Greek: liar].

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” — George Orwell

The magnetic power which ideologies exert over human beings, while they have become entirely threadbare, is to be explained beyond psychology, in the objectively determined decay of logical evidence as such. It has come to the point that lies sound like truth, and truth like lies. Every statement, every news report, every thought is preformed by the centers of the culture-industry. What does not bear the trusted mark of such preformation lacks credibility in advance, all the more so that the institutions of public opinion garnish what they send out with a thousand factual proofs and all the power of conviction which the total [corporate] apparatus can bring to bear. The truth which would like to do something against this, bears not merely the character of something improbable, but is moreover too poor to break through in direct competition with the highly concentrated apparatus of dissemination. The German extreme sheds light on the entire mechanism. When the Nazis began to torture, they did not merely terrorize people both inside and outside the country, but were at the same time the more secure against exposure, the more savage the atrocities became. Its sheer unbelievability made it easy to disbelieve what, for the sake of peace, no-one wanted to believe, while simultaneously capitulating before it. Those who trembled in fear told themselves that things were much exaggerated: well into the war, the details of the concentration camps were unwelcome in the English press. Every horror in the enlightened world turns necessarily into a horror story [Greuelmärchen]. For the untruth of the truth has a kernel, to which the unconscious eagerly [begierig anspricht] turns. It does not only wish for horror. Rather Fascism is in fact less “ideological”, to the extent it immediately proclaimed the principle of domination, which was elsewhere hidden.

Whatever humane principles the democracies marshaled to oppose it, were effortlessly rebutted by pointing out that these do not concern all of humanity, but merely its false image, which Fascism is man enough to divest itself of. So desperate however have human beings become in their culture, that they are ready to cast off the frail signs of a better state of affairs, if only the world does their worse side the favor of confessing how evil it is. The political forces of opposition however are compelled to make use of the lie, if they do not wish to be completely extinguished as completely destructive. The deeper their difference from the existent, which nevertheless grants them shelter from a still worse future, the easier it is for the Fascists to nail them down as untruths. Only the absolute lie still has the freedom to say anything of the truth. The confusion of truth with lies, which makes it nearly impossible to maintain the difference between the two, and which makes holding on to the simplest cognition a labor of Sisyphus, announces the victory of the principle in logical organization, even though its military basis has been crushed. Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The reconfiguration of all
questions of truth into those of power, which truth itself cannot evade, if it does not wish to be annihilated by power, does not merely suppress the truth, as in earlier despotisms, but has reached into the innermost core of the disjunction of true and false, whose abolition the hired mercenaries of logic are anyway feverishly working towards. Thus Hitler, who no-one can say if he died or escaped, lives on.

—Minima Moralia, Theodore Adorno

Click to enlarge:

Obama: George Bush Jr. in Blackface?

Obama DoJ Asserts “State Secrets;” ACLU Blasts Obama

Jeppesen DataPlan, an entity known to anyone familiar with aviation, helped the U.S. government plan flights and logistics for its extraordinary rendition program in the earlier part of this decade. A lawsuit brough by five men who say they were unlawfully rendered to torturing countries was dismissed by a judge who agreed with the Bush Administration’s claim of a state secrets privilege. Civil rights activists had hoped that the Obama Administration would somehow change its mind at appeal, and argue the case on its merits in open court. That’s not going to happen. Today, the Justice Department — the Eric Holder / Obama Justice Department — re-asserted the state secrets privilege in Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen. This may be disappointing to civil libertarians, but it shouldn’t be surprising.

The case is fairly straightforward, and some of the classified details, like what Jeppesen did for the government, are known, having been disclosed by Jane Mayer and others. The CIA used Jeppesen’s unit to coordinate the complex travel arrangements that extraordinary rendition implies; which airports would be available when; how to schedule pilots; fuel requirements, etc. Jeppesen would therefore have access to a lot of data that’s not in the public domain, including how many renditions there were, which countries were used as transit points — CIA Black Sites — and which countries were rendition partners, whether they tortured or not. Jeppesen ostensibly has a lot of information about countries to whom the U.S. legally renders suspects. We know a lot about this stuff, but we don’t know everything.

It wouldn’t be wise for a new administration to come in, take over a case from a prosecutor, and completely change a legal strategy in mid-course without a more thorough review of the national security implications. And, of course, the invocation itself isn’t necessarily an issue; civil libertarians and others who voted for Obama did so with the belief that his judgment and his attorney general would be better stewards of that privilege than President Bush and his attorney generals (and vice president.)

More at Atlantic Monthly

The ACLU says the Obama administration reneged on civil liberties, offers “more of the same.”

Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU said of the decision: “Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.”

Rights Are Curtailed for Terror Suspects

By EVAN PEREZ – MARCH 24, 2011

The Obama administration took further chunks out of the Miranda recently when it passed new rules allowing investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning. According to the WSJ’s Evan Perez, the rules “significantly expand[] exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.”

And…

New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.

• A Process for Questioning Detainees

  From Miranda v. Arizona ruling: “Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed. The defendant may waive effectuation of these rights, provided the waiver is made voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently.”

  —Chief Justice Earl Warren, 1966

• Miranda v. Arizona (1966)

  Landmark ruling, citing the Fifth Amendment, says suspects must be reminded of their right to avoid self incrimination.

• Berghuis v. Thompkins (2010)

  Suspects don’t have to explicitly waive their Miranda rights for a confession to be admissible.

The move is one of the Obama administration’s most significant revisions to rules governing the investigation of terror suspects in the U.S. And it potentially opens a new political tussle over national security policy, as the administration marks another step back from pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods.

More from the Wall Street Journal

Top Bush-era GITMO and Abu Ghraib psychologist is WH’s newest appointment

One of the most intense scandals the field of psychology has faced over the last decade is the involvement of several of its members in enabling Bush’s worldwide torture regime.

Numerous health professionals worked for the U.S. government to help understand how best to mentally degrade and break down detainees. At the center of that controversy was — and is — Dr. Larry James. James, a retired Army colonel, was the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo in 2003, at the height of the abuses at that camp, and then served in the same position at Abu Ghraib during 2004.

Today, Dr. James circulated an excited email announcing, “with great pride,” that he has now been selected to serve on the “White House Task Force entitled Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family.” In his new position, he will be meeting at the White House with Michelle Obama and other White House officials on Tuesday.

For his work at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Dr. James was the subject of two formal ethics complaints in the two states where he is licensed to practice: Louisiana and Ohio. Those complaints — 50 pages long and full of detailed and well-documented allegations — were filed by the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, on behalf of veterans, mental health professionals and others. The complaints detailed how James “was the senior psychologist of the Guantánamo BSCT, a small but influential group of mental health professionals whose job it was to advise on and participate in the interrogations, and to help create an environment designed to break down prisoners.” Specifically:

During his tenure at the prison, boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted. The evidence indicates that abuse of this kind was systemic, that BSCT health professionals played an integral role in its planning and practice. . . .

More grisly details from Salon Magazine

Poll: Growing number of Americans succumb to Right-Wing Propaganda about Obama’s Religion

Poll: Growing number incorrectly call Obama Muslim

By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Americans increasingly are convinced — incorrectly — that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, and a growing number are thoroughly confused about his religion.

Nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009, according to a poll released Thursday. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is down to just 34 percent.

The largest share of people, 43 percent, said they don’t know his religion, an increase from the 34 percent who said that in early 2009.

The survey, conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and its affiliated Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is based on interviews conducted before the controversy over whether Muslims should be permitted to construct a mosque near the World Trade Center site. Obama has said he believes Muslims have the right to build an Islamic center there, though he’s also said he won’t take a position on whether they should actually build it.

In a separate poll by Time magazine/ABT SRBI conducted Monday and Tuesday — after Obama’s comments about the mosque — 24 percent said they think he is Muslim, 47 percent said they think he is Christian and 24 percent didn’t know or didn’t respond.

In addition, 61 percent opposed building the Muslim center near the Trade Center site and 26 percent said they favor it.

MORE on The Story from Yahoo

Kosovo, Ukraine, and US / Russia relations

from

Bush recognizes Kosovo, says will bring peace

By Deborah Charles
Reuters
Tuesday, February 19, 2008; 1:07 AM

DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) – President George W. Bush on Tuesday recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia and said it would bring peace to the Balkans.

He told reporters in Tanzania: “History will prove this will be a correct move to bring peace to the Balkans. The United States supports this move because we believe it will bring peace.”

from

Kosovo Gains Recognition By U.S., Some in Europe

By Peter Finn and Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 19, 2008

President Bush, traveling in Africa, hailed the new state’s “special friendship” with the United States, promising to set up a U.S. embassy there and inviting Kosovo to establish a diplomatic mission in Washington. Asked Tuesday about Russia’s opposition, Bush told reporters, “There’s a disagreement, but we believe as do many other nations that history will prove this to be the correct move.”

In a letter Monday to President Fatmir Sejdiu, Bush said, “On behalf of the American people, I hereby recognize Kosovo as an independent and sovereign state.”

So, what’s the problem?

Russia warns US over Kosovo move

BBC News

Russia has warned the US that Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia endangers international stability.

“We confirmed our principled position on the unacceptability of unilateral actions by Pristina declaring its independence,” the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement, following talks between Mr Lavrov and Ms Rice.

“We underlined the dangerous consequences of such a step, which threatens the destruction of world order and international stability which have developed over decades,” the statement said.

But what does Russia have to be afraid of?

Putin Threatens Ukraine On NATO

Russian Raises Issue Of U.S. Missile Shield

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 13, 2008

MOSCOW, Feb. 12 — President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia could aim nuclear missiles at Ukraine if its neighbor and former fraternal republic in the Soviet Union joins the NATO alliance and hosts elements of a missile defense system proposed by the Bush administration.

“It is horrible to say and even horrible to think that, in response to the deployment of such facilities in Ukrainian territory, which cannot theoretically be ruled out, Russia could target its missile systems at Ukraine,” Putin said at a joint news conference with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who was visiting the Kremlin. “Imagine this just for a second.”

Who else but Russia has the missile capability to necessitate a missile shield. In light of this, to try to pass it off as defense against “rogue nations” and/or terrorists is disingenuous. And no wonder Russia is worried about the US forming a “special friendship” with yet another former Eastern Bloc nation.