Rantingprofs

Hey, What's a Little Evidence Between Friends?

Our old friend Patterico lands a big one -- the LA Times reprints a Reuters article on the continuing dispute between the Italian and American governments over what exactly happened to cause the checkpoint shooting that killed the Italian secret service agent.

Small problem: the Reuters article in question includes definitive evidence that the Americans had cause to shoot. Which the LA Times proceeds to edit out.

Amazing.

How Do We Guard Against Corruption?

Here's a story that should enrage us all.

Nine of the 9/11 hijackers had Florida driver's licenses and others had Florida state id.

Driver's licenses are even more important, of course, since 9/11 than before, but they're critical pieces of documentation, "breeder id," since once you have one you can build an entire identity -- bank accounts, for example -- and of course, once you have one you can travel freely across the country.

The 9/11 Commission (among others) have suggested a national standard for driver's licenses (and been ignored).

But imagine if, rather than trying to forge one, you could just buy an honest to God legitimate driver's license. How cool would that be.

So how angry should we be at government employees -- in Florida no less -- who were selling authentic driver's licenses to anyone with the cash, including illegal immigrants, including licenses to drive trucks, including licenses to drive hazardous materials.

I'd say pretty damn mad.

Let's us remember these names, shall we? And let's hope they all go away for a long, long time, greedy bastards:

The three examiners facing charges in a federal criminal complaint were identified as Derene Frasier, Tracie Dunlap and Yvette Jackson. Maj. David Brierton of the Florida Highway Patrol said the three were in the process of being fired.

USA Today's article starts with a frame that puts the entire situation in perspective:

Corrupt employees in the Florida motor vehicles department illegally sold driver's licenses to more than 2,000 people, some of whom used the credentials to drive 18-wheelers and haul hazardous materials, federal authorities charged Thursday.

Federal agents were scrambling to track down people who bought the licenses and can now use them to board airplanes, cross U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada and drive potentially lethal cargo around the country.

Yeah. Kind of says it all.

Here are the numbers:

Of the more than 2,000 licenses issued, 36 were for commercial drivers to operate trucks, and six to transport hazardous materials, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesman Dean Boyd.

And here's the argument about the importance of this particular form of id:

"These cases are important because a driver's license is a bad guy's ticket in," Miami U.S. Attorney Marcos Jimenez said at a news conference. "It allows someone to operate heavy equipment, which can do a lot of damage," he said.

In the instance, the problems turned out to be fairly benign, but this case proves the potential for bigger trouble:

In the recent case, the falsely obtained commercial driver's licenses allowed several illegal aliens to claim they held U.S. citizenship, said Jesus Torres, the top ICE agent in Miami.

Once you can claim US citizenship, it's off to the races for a terrorist seeking to worm his way into American society and hide. There's your sleeper cell in the making, right there. That's almost scarier than the fact that the hazardous materials licenses were also for sale.

Because, after all:

Someone who gets a driver's license and leaves the United States wouldn't need to apply for a visa to get back in, because he or she could simply fly to Mexico or Canada and use the license to drive across the border, Garcia said.

These are authentic, real licenses, even though the holders shouldn't have them, which means that because

the licenses themselves are real. That makes it impossible for border agents or police to recognize that there's a problem.

The people who were selling the licenses were getting a few grand a pop. But the state employees who were selling them to those brokers were getting at most two hundred dollars a piece.

National security aside, there's a frantic search on because there may be people out on the highways hauling hazardous materials who don't even know how to drive trucks.

How low do you have to be to risk this nation's security, and your fellow citizens saftey, for a few bucks?

Let these bastards rot in jail for the rest of their lives.

The Times Covers the Wave of Bombings

The wave of bombings in Iraq yesterday is the lead article in the Times today.

(Interesting side note: while this is the lead article in the print edition, which seems to make sense given the other choices, it's way downplayed on the web site, as of a bit before 10am, making the home page, but only as a headline under "International." The web page often emphasizes things differently than the print edition, but an emphasis this different generally is because it's later in the day and subsequent events have bumped the story down the list, not because the web page editors simply believe a story to be that much less important than the print edition editors.)

The Times reporters, unlike the Post's, do see these attacks as linked to specific events, answering them, rather than being isolated in time and space and planned randomly.

Insurgents determined to destabilize Iraq's new government executed a devastating series of coordinated attacks on Iraqi forces on Friday, detonating 12 car bombs across greater Baghdad and striking military targets throughout Iraq. At least 40 people were killed and more than 100 others wounded.

The attacks, a direct challenge to the new Shiite-dominated government that was formed Thursday, were aimed at Iraqi police officers and national guardsmen at their bases and traveling in convoys in northern and southern Baghdad and in Madaen, 15 miles southeast of the capital. At least 23 Iraqi policemen and troops were killed. Some reports put the total death toll at as many as 50 people. (My emph.)

That's a start, but while this places the attacks in a frame that sees them as strategic and coherent (thought through in response to the actions of an enemy) it doesn't go far enough. The actions that prompted these attacks were not military but political, after all. What's missing is any serious thinking about what terrorists hope to accomplish through their attacks, and "destabilization" radically oversimplifies that.

Terrorism (and, in this case, since much of the violence was aimed at legitimate military targets, the use of terroristic tactics) is violence that is above all communicative. In this case it is communicating a range of messages: we will not accept this government, and, above all, this government cannot stop us. If you've been thinking that the recent violence has only been because the new government was not yet formed, forget it.

But then the reporters give the terrorists far too much credit. Look at these paragraphs:

The strikes Friday morning came after a momentous and tumultuous day for the new government. After three months of delays that American officials said gave new strength to the insurgency, the dominant Shiite alliance won approval for a new cabinet - but not before angering Sunni political leaders who said they had been shortchanged.

The Shiites also pledged a housecleaning of former Baathists from the government, a move sure to drive a deeper wedge between Shiites and Sunnis, who conduct most insurgent activity. Sunni Arabs, who dominated Iraq's Baathist government under Saddam Hussein, largely boycotted elections in January. (My emph.)

That's a suggestion that there's a concern for the nuances of political activity, an attention to possible slights to the Sunni political groups.

But in point of fact, Zarqawi and his thugs don't care about the ups and downs of those Sunnis looking to participate. As far as they're concerned any Sunnis looking to participate have made themselves targets.

With Friday's attacks, at least 480 Iraqi policemen and troops have been killed by insurgents in the last two months, according to tallies by Western security contractors, Iraqi officials and local news accounts.

I'm glad that's in there. Large numbers of Iraqis have put their lives on the line for the new Iraq, and too little attention has been paid to them in the American press, so little that the question sometimes comes up why Americans should fight and die for Iraq when the Iraqis aren't willing to do so. We hear of Iraqi casualties in ones and twos, and it doesn't sink in how many casualties they're really taking.

In the streets, the insurgents once again turned to an increasingly common tactic: multiple bombings intended to kill not only the victims of the initial blast but also security forces and bystanders who rush to the aid of the wounded.

I just find that interesting. In what had to be desperation they turned to what amounted to a version of conventional military tactics, an approach that was doomed to failure, and that in fact failed spectacularly. Yet they got big press for the fact that they had a "new" tactic. Now that they've (no surprise) abandoned that approach and gone back to traditional terrorism, so much harder to defend against, the press is silent on the fact that their "new" tactic has been abandoned.

They had to have reached for something new because what they were doing wasn't working. They had to have abandoned their new approach because it wasn't working. Yet all we get in the press is a mention that they're returning to the old tactic.

And one more thing: if the first bomb is aimed at police, security services, and the American military, that's terrorist tactics, but not terrorism. But the second bomb being intentionally timed for emergency services (translation: ambulances, aid workers, EMTs) and the inevitable crowds that gather, hey, that's terrorism. My thinking is that if you engage in terrorism at all, then even when you are using terrorist tactics but aiming at legitimate targets, then you're a terrorist who's currently going after legitimate targets, but you're still a terrorist.

And, once again, every article on yesterday's events needs to mention the fact that these people are so degenerate that they think it a legitimate idea to pack an ambulance full of explosives and use it as a bomb.

How do you write up yesterday's events and not think that the American people have a compelling need to know that?

30 Years After the Fall of Saigon

Well, on the one hand, look who sponsored floats in the parade:

Down the grand boulevard where Communist tanks once rolled in, capitalism has taken solid root. Many of the parade floats were sponsored by American companies including VISA and American Express. One float featured women pushing shopping carts loaded with supermarket goods.

These days, Le Duan Street is home to Diamond Plaza, a glittering, upscale department store where French perfumes and Italian shoes are sold to an emerging urban, middle class. Along the same strip, a French-owned five-star hotel sits across the street from the U.S. consulate, rebuilt after the former U.S. Embassy was razed in the late 1990s.

That's a little, uh, spooky.

On the other hand, color me shocked that every ordinary worker the Post interviewed looked forward to a better future.

When ordinary people living in unfree states give positive quotes about their way of life to Western reporters, shouldn't it be beholden upon those reporters to at least mention that sometimes there might be negative consequences for ordinary workers who speak freely to Western reporters, meaning that such quotes might best be taken with a grain of salt? Yet because Vietnam has embraced capitalism nothing is said in this article about the state of political rights whatsoever.

Case Closed

Do we need more proof that the media goes off the deep end at the drop of a hat?

A Georgia woman had been missing not quite a day when the media decided to make her the latest missing woman of the week. (How they pick these cases is beyond me, and how they all decide to agree on the same case out of all the missing persons and missing childrens cases also remains a mystery. There must a newsletter.)

Why wasn't this a local story? Let me refer you once again to this wonderful piece written for the Salt Lake paper during the height of the tragic story of Lori Hacking. I hope you read the whole thing, but if you want a cheat sheet, here's what I had to say about it when it was first printed.

Now, after devoting an enormous amount of time to the story of the woman in Georgia, including many interviews with friends and family all insisting that this had to be an abduction because it couldn't possibly be a case of a bride with cold feet -- it turns out to be a case of a bride with cold feet. (Which frankly was obvious as soon as her story came out. I was abducted, driven to New Mexico and let go? Please.)

So now they're painted into the corner of reporting on the story of a bride who just wanted out, which is a sad family story, but the furthest possible thing from national news. At best, this is small town gossip.

And that's what happens when the national media decide to make a cause celebre out of what is fairly obviously a local story.

Case closed.

By the way, I realize that you could argue that the difference is that Lori Hacking was already known dead when that piece was written, so there was some possible benefit to getting the Georgia woman's face out across the nation.

But that benefit didn't require nearly as much coverage as the story received.

And if the point is to get a face out, what about all the other faces of all the other women and children who are missing on any given day? That just isn't what the media is for, with the possible exception of Amber Alerts on the local media.

Update: You would think, if only out of embarrassment, the cable nets would get out from under this as fast as possible, but they're wallowing. Fox is trying to figure out if somebody can be charged with something. MS is evaluating the psychology of her inner-runner. CNN is babbling about something or other; I've lost the heart to pay attention, but this has now gone on for two hours and I have yet to see any other news.

For this there is no excuse.

On the other hand, it's not like there's a war on or anything.

Oh. Right.

Update: Ah-ha! The story had already started when I surfed over, but at 9:39 Fox was talking North Korean nucs.

And at 9:42 they announce that when they come back from commercial they'll be analyzing (again) what the fiance had to say when HE HEARD THE RUNAWAY BRIDE WAS JUST A RUNAWAY BRIDE, OH GOD I CAN'T TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS.

Okay, I'm alright now. Just lost it for a second there at that brief suggestion that real news was in the offing.

A Response to the New Government

The day after the Iraqi government breaks the stalemate and announces (most of) the new cabinet there's a massive wave of bombings, particularly in Baghdad.

Is that any surprise?

The media is still not thinking of the violence as anything other than violence, disruptive, meant to be destabilizing. They sometimes write lines like, "the insurgents sent a message today," but that's just cliche for them, they aren't really thinking through the implication of what that means.

If you think about terrorism as a strategy, is it at all surprising that the day after a new cabinet -- the first freely elected government in decades -- is announced that there would be a massive wave of violence?

Yet it's reported as if it's little more than coincidence, the timing being pretty much irrelevant.

It's also clear that a favorite tactic of Palestinian suicide bombers has now been adopted: set off a bomb, and leave a remote controlled bomb or bomb on a timer nearby, set to go off roughly twenty minutes later, timed to get the first responders in the area.

After four waves of bombs, suicide attacks and mortars detonated Friday in the Adhamiyah neighborhood in the capital, a woman trapped in a charred, overturned van and cradling an infant in her arms screamed for help. But help was slow in coming. Security forces in some areas held back ambulances for more than an hour, fearful of more explosions aimed at rescuers.

The grim scene highlighted a deadly, developing tactic of Iraq's insurgency -- setting off bombs in waves, killing not only people near the first blast but also those who come to try to save them and the wounded in second and third rounds of attacks.

Okay, now can we call them terrorists?

Across the country Friday, insurgents unleashed at least 13 mortar, bomb and suicide car bomb attacks against Iraq's national forces and their U.S. allies, killing at least 50 people, including three American soldiers.

Oh, guess not, at least not in the Washington Post.

As in this article I've seen this tactic described in several outlets as "increasingly sophisticated."

Is this what counts as "increasingly sophisticated?" It means planting a second bomb (or bomber) in tandem with the first bomb, timed twenty minutes after the first. It certainly counts as "increasingly brutal," but how much more sophisticated is it, really, as these things go? Particularly if the second bomb is attached to a second suicide bomber?

It is clear that responding to these bombings requires increasingly sophisticated police and emergency work, and that the Iraqis aren't there yet, merely holding back those who responded to the first bombing in a number of instances, which is no solution at all. It leaves the wounded uncared for, and if the second bomb is remote controlled or attached to a suicide bomber that bomb won't go off while they're waiting. I'm sure this isn't an answer the Iraqis will be happy with, but they need training assistance from the Israelis, even if that happens in secret.

By the way, no story should have left out this detail:

A suicide attacker blew up an ambulance packed with explosives near a police special-forces patrol, killing four Iraqis, including two policemen.

If a story is going to leave the impression that there was nationwide violence, chaos, so on and so forth, fair enough, but then that story should also describe the real nature of the enemy we face.

And You Wonder Why Network News is Dying?

It isn't quite so hard to imagine when you take a look at the decision-making process regarding whether or not to carry the President's press conference from the industry's point of view.

On Tuesday, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found President Bush's approval rating is at an all-time low of 47 percent, owing no doubt to some combination of a) still no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, b) 60-day tour pitching Social Security "privatization" a bust, c) attempt to use Terri Schiavo for political gain backfired, d) nomination of John "Yosemite Sam" Bolton for U.N. ambassador turning into long nightmare, e) key House ally under attack for alleged ethical improprieties.

What's a president to do?

Hey, here's a great idea! Call a "news" conference for the first night of the May sweeps. That way, tens of millions of hardworking people who had been looking forward to putting up their feet and watching an original episode of their favorite show will instead see the president with his concerned face on, talking about how much he cares about soaring gas prices even if there is very little he can do about it immediately.

And schedule the news conference for 8:30 p.m. so that it doesn't just preempt CBS's "Survivor" but CBS's "C.S.I." as well. And not just NBC's "Will & Grace" and "Joey" (guest-starring Carmen Electra!) but "The Apprentice." Not to mention Fox's "The O.C."

Yes, presidential press conferences are vegetables, not ice cream. That doesn't change the networks' obligation to carry them. In fact, that's why it's an obligation, not something they can make money off of and are therefore eager to do. They make money every other night -- and, once again, let's remember they're making that money off the public's airwaves.

Did the White House have their own agenda in scheduling when they did? Gee, what a shock. But the networks don't get to judge those when they schedule the press conference. And, guess what, the press themselves don't particularly care, as evidenced by their constant carping about not getting enough cracks at the president -- once he steps out into the room he can't control what questions he gets asked.

Broadcast networks got word on Wednesday around 7 p.m. that the White House planned to throw a news conference last night.

Fortunately, though Bush runs the country, wiser men run the broadcast networks  men who know what it means to preempt "Survivor," "C.S.I." and "The O.C."

So early yesterday, ABC was the only broadcast network that planned to carry the president's show. Viewers could, of course, also catch Bush on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN Headline News and PBS.

Oh, yes, "wiser men." Because it's more important that we get another chance and another night of watching our favorite shows than of watching a presidential press conference?

The argument that the news networks would carry it is, of course, no argument at all. Because few people would turn away from ice cream for vegetables: that's the point. And, of course, that is no answer to the fact that it is the broadcast networks who have the obligation to carry this kind of event, not the cable networks.

But six networks just weren't enough for the president's program. So the White House started in with the "Sopranos" stuff, as that network suit described it.

And, again, "six networks" aren't enough because unless the three traditional broadcast networks preempted their big sweeps night no one would turn away -- isn't that the whole reason everyone was upset those shows were preempted to begin with?

"We have caved," one network suit reported sorrowfully late yesterday, referring to the broadcasters collectively.

In other words, they had to be forced, because left to their own devices, there's no way they'd what it was they were supposed to do.

And you wonder why the news divisions are in trouble, answering to these people?

There was a time when if a White House asked for time, it was given, without their reason for asking being second guessed. (Well, I'm sure it was second guessed, but the networks did the right thing anyway.) Of course, that was back when the networks were basically splitting the audience three ways, so the battle for ratings wasn't quite so bitter. But that was also back when presidents called far more prime time press conferences.

So, not only have we moved to a time when the networks are ceding political coverage to the cable news networks (the conventions, for example) we may soon reach the point where what was once considered a national news event (presidential press conferences) are given up as well, despite the fact that those were once considered public service, public events programming.

Why should any president give prime time press conferences under those conditions? If they aren't programmed in such a way that most Americans will see them, what difference is there between prime time and day time press conferences?

And how much longer will it be before the networks reject presidential addresses to the nation?

What, exactly, do they think counts as covering their public service obligation? Particularly now that the traditional nightly news format is under re-examination? Surely it isn't those loathsome "news magazine" shows?

Credit Where It's Due, Please

Another one left over from Monday. I heard this in the airport, and was just amazed, although at this point nothing Jane Arraf says should amaze me. Here's the key statement from her report on Wolf Blitzer's show on Monday on the Marsh Arabs.

ARRAF: Since the regime fell, Abadi and tens of thousands of other Iraqis have returned from exile in Iran. Part of the marshland has returned, as well.

(on camera) These marshes are where recorded civilization began. Just a few years ago some of this was salty wasteland, but now, in parts of the area, the water is coming back.

(voice-over) It's coming back here, because marsh Arabs took matters into their own hands. In other parts of this region, the size of the Florida Everglades, aid organizations are doing detailed studies on how best to reflood the marshes. The solution here was more immediate.

Well, everyone feels for these people, whose way of life was intentionally destroyed after thousands of years, but to say that this way of life is coming back simply because they "took matters into their own hands" is disingenuous at best.

They've had charitable, scientific and material help from all over the world, from the US State Department and UN, the US Army Corps of Engineers, with more to come.

None of this is to take anything away from the Marsh Arabs themselves, but to suggest instead that things were so far gone because of Saddam's intensity of brutality that there's no way they could have restored their way of life on their own.

A Small Mistake with Large Consequences

I've been meaning to mention this one since I got back from Canada.

In an article in Monday's National Post (the more right-of-center of the national papers) comes this statement:

The al-Qaeda linked Jemaah Islamiyah used a cellular phone to set off a bomb at the U.S. consulate in Bali in 2002, and cell phones were similarly used in the 2004 bombing of commuter trains in Madrid. Iraqi insurgents and pro-Taliban forces in Afghanistan have made extensive use of such bombs, which "have the benefit to the perpetrator of being initiated from a standoff distance, without needing a physical link to the device, and affording not only blast survival but also increased expectation of escape from capture," the RCMP report says.

Small problem, of course: the Bali bombing was not an attack on the US consulate, but an attack on night clubs known to be frequented by Westerners, particularly Aussies. The bulk of the victims were Australian, which is why the attack was referred to as "Australia's September 11th."

Misremembering that attack as an attack on an American government facility does three things.

First, it downplays the horror of a terrorist attack on what were clearly and undeniably civilian targets -- tourists vacationing, off duty, in nightclubs -- by replacing them with a target that falls into more a grey area (is a consulate a civilian target or not? Not everyone would agree the answer to that question is self-evident.)

Second, it masks the fact that all of us in the Western democracies are in this together, by turning an attack that ended up mostly killing Australians into an attack on, no surprise, Americans, feeding the perception that the war on terror really is, after all, an American war, of only peripheral interest to everyone else.

Finally, it contributes to the forgetting of the victims, not all of whom were Australian and not all of whom died.

Remember This The Next Time a Reporter Snarks That This President Holds Historically Low Levels of Prime Time Press Conferences

The whole point of a president holding press conferences in prime time, historically, has been that unlike a press conference held during the day (in those days before video streaming) Americans who worked during the day could see their president in action if a press conference were held in the evening.

Of course, that was back in the day when, if the White House asked for prime time air time, the networks automatically provided some.

That wasn't so much a courtesy as an extension of their public service responsibility -- something they were believed to owe the American people, since they were after all sending out their signal on the public's air waves.

For free.

Something early on called "a license to print money."

But last night the White House had the nerve, the unmitigated gall to ask for time on the first night of sweeps week.

So the networks negotiated a change in start time during leading to last minute calls for some of them to carry it at all.

For CBS and Fox Broadcasting, the choice, at least initially, was relatively simple. However rare the prime-time appearance may have been, neither thought that it could afford to pre-empt the popular one-hour shows that they broadcast beginning at 8 p.m. For CBS, it was "Survivor." For Fox, it was "The O.C."

Both networks announced early yesterday that they did not intend to broadcast the president's remarks live on their main networks. The calculus was relatively clear-cut for ABC, as well. It decided to pre-empt a movie, "Sweet Home Alabama" with Reese Witherspoon, to show the president, followed by an expanded edition of its newsmagazine "Prime Time Live."

Nowhere was the choice more complicated than at NBC, which is fighting mightily to avoid ending the television season that began last fall ranked fourth, at least in terms of viewers ages 18 to 49.

Had it decided to carry the news conference, NBC would have had to bump, or at least delay, a comedy, "Will and Grace," at 8:30, and delay the start of "The Apprentice," among its most popular shows.

Like a game of dominoes, a delay in starting "The Apprentice" would have delayed the start of "E.R.," also among its most popular shows, and that could have then jeopardized the starts of local newscasts, at least on the East Coast.

In the end, NBC decided that it could afford to pre-empt "Will and Grace," but not "The Apprentice."

At 5 p.m., the White House released this one-sentence statement: "Due to the complications of network programming, the White House is moving the time of tonight's news conference to 8:00 p.m."

Once some of the networks caved the others were shamed into doing the same.

What a disgraceful performance.

White House reporters continue to note the low number of prime time press conferences, but somebody should ask them -- exactly how many of these puppies do they think their bosses would tolerate?