bookofdays

notes from their front line

I know I said I’d blog from California, but the trip proved unexpectedly tiring: physical challenges to  my vertigo presented by hills and wobbly public transit, the usual business-trip logistics, and intermittent Internet access in the various homestays. But most of all, my brain was full to bursting with stories -- from experts like Judy Ehrlich (link to TGW) and the directors of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers’  Guild, but more important, from veterans of America’s three most recent wars.

I talked to Vietnam veterans like Paul Cox, who “turned off the war,” he says, when his unit slaughtered mamas and babies in their huts; Mike Wong, who left after advanced training rather than go to Vietnam;  and Steve Morse, a born Quaker who went back in after  his court martial for insubordination, and followed the invasion of Cambodia. I talked to Gulf War veteran Daniel Fahey, who went on to become a leading voice for those exposed to depleted uranium. I talked to Stephen Funk, the first public conscientious objector of the Iraq war, whose unusual and lefty background and sweet, fey presence make him an unusual military voice – but who still says “it’s easier to talk to people who’ve been through the training.”

And to two funding members of Iraq Veterans Against the War – one of whom’s still in the National Guard, and another who was a member of the First Marine Expeditionary Force – yes, that one.

Or maybe we should all hang ourselves.

Just an update on the Graham Amendment, that assault on our constitution that I posted about some time ago. Hilary and Katherine, the two heroines of Obsidian Wings, have stayed on the job, while the rest of us wrung our hands and chirped "Call your Senators."

Specifically, they're going after Senator Graham's completely bizarre statement that "Two medical malpractice claims have come out of this…. Never in the history of the rule of law of armed conflict has an enemy combatant, POW, person who is trying to kill U.S. troops, been given the right to sue those same troops for their medical care." 

First of all, you can just hear the balls rattling off old Mr. Graham's brain: he sees fake whiplash neck braces, people holding their heads, and a darn good talking point. I can't think he really means this:

"[redacted] is from Yemen. He had an injury to his shin and the US amputated more than necessary. However, because he has refused to cooperate with his interrogators, the US military refused for two years to give him a prosthetic limb. The clinic showed him such a prosthetic several times and said that he could only have it if he talked to his interrogators.

Other prisoners who have been denied prosthetic devices unless they cooperate with the interrogators include (...) [redacted] from Saudi Arabia who was denied a prosthetic limb for more than eight months, [redacted] from Yemen who was denied a prosthetic limb for more than two and a half years, and [redacted] from Tukistan (sic) who is without a prosthetic foot to this date, after three years."

* p. 16: One detainee reports the following:

"One mental health professional actually described to Mr. Begg how he could hang himself. She said that he could take his underwear, thread a blanket or trousers through this, and use it to hang himself. Mr. Begg has since been unable to get this image out of his mind, and it haunts him constantly. For a mental health professional to say this to a patient is the height of stupidity, irresponsibility, or sadism."

Moazzam Begg is also among one of the leading plaintiffs in Rasul v. Rumsfeld ( the suit that prompted Graham's legislation.),  and had his story dramatized in last year's Broadway play, Guantanamo. What he carries inside him I cant't imagine.

I just chose a piece of this section, from an extremely complex and important series of posts. PLEASE go  check out the whole series. Please go read.  Be aware. Write and talk about this whenever you can. (And for lobbying marching orders, check here.)

I'll  be back, to talk a bit about my newest pair of projects - my little contribution to the story of the things they carry.

2000

Uh-huh.

As we observe that number, remember also the tenfold more dead civilians.

Some links that fit these reflections:

• I'm late on this, but Maureen Dowd rules in her Miller piece.  Anyone who starts referencing Thackeray, on her  way to slicing Judith Miller to ribbons, demonstrates true class. Read it via Steve Gilliard, if only for the photo.
• It's not enough that they're stressed and getting shot at: now they get to lose it all at the table.
• Eric Schmitt gives the most concise expression to what we're all thinking when Bush/Rice start talking new war: With who?
• Via the Rage Diaries: Data bad! Data confuse government!
• Debra Dickerson's review in Salon of Kayla Williams' book contains this concise, extraordinary passage:

The military is full of diamond-in-the-rough kids like her who might have made a few mistakes but still know that there are uncharted worlds inside them. They know they were destined for a polyester uniform; making a break for the GI's outfit, rather than the burger flipper's -- or, God forbid, the inmate's -- is a daring demand to be taken seriously, to be invested in, to be challenged. To be seen. For poor or lost kids, joining up is an escape attempt, a prison break. Our all-volunteer military remains tenable only because these strivers somehow know that hot marches in the sun and nights spent sleeping in a foxhole will open the door to whatever's buried inside their dreams.

Now that it's Tuesday, I'll wrap up with what's frosted me since Friday  morning -- when I saw George Freeman, a lawyer for the New York Times, on Friday, try  to make Judith Miller's case an integral part of  a lecture on the legal concept of reporter's privilege.the pixie dust Freeman tried to toss in our eyes.

He allowed that Miller's work did not present the best argument for a shield law. "Would I have wanted a different set of facts in this case?" he said, spreading his arms wide. " Of course."

As part of the wider discussion, about how the concept of reporter's privilege involved, we of course discussed the issue of the inclusion of bloggers; having just written the post that appears below, I quoted it to him and suggested blogs were also a "weapon in the defense of liberty." He responded like  lawyer/politician: you'd never get the Senate to support that, he said.

Then Freeman proceeded to give a perfect, party-line defense of Miller. He said that Lewis Libby's original waiver, whose signing was mandatory as a condition of the White House, couldn't  be believed as sincere until the two of them talked -- and that recent events, including the negotiations that led to her release. were a sign that Fitzgerald was becoming "pretty desperate."

He stuck by Miller's story that she had "discovered" her June 2003 notebook just recently; a friend said later that she'd not been able to ask him about reports (by Murray Waas,  and now others) others that Miller only admitted that meeting existed after seeing Secret Service logs that proved she was there.

His politics came clear, and predictable enough, from his opinion of the leak case itself, which mimicked Richard Cohen's = not much of a crime, so he's going to create a conspiracy about a non-crime.  I so wanted to ask him about the Daily News' confirmation of Miller's  "charter membership" in the White House Iraq Group, but I'd used up my question time talking about free speech for blogs.

Now I join the rest of you in waiting to hear how many of the  powerful men, the suns to which Miller's flower turned, are placed under indictment - or whether the administration will decide to raise the flag of secrecy over the whole thing.

and they see only their own shadows

The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our own history abundantly attest. The press in its connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.
        -- Justice Charles Evans Hayes, Lovell v. Griffin, 1934

In the height of the Great Depression, someone had an idea about whether  bloggers should be considered journalists. Not that Justice Hayes, born in 1882, would ever have conceived of the Web, let alone a Web log, as he considered whether the First Amendment applied to broadsheets put out in the city of Lovell, California.

I've been watching elite journalists muse soulfully on the question, "Are bloggers journalists?" for what feels like a sickeningly long time, but is probably only since this past February, when the National Press Club convened its first panel on the question in the aftermath of the Jeff Gannon scandal.

John Aravosis, had investigated a fellow named James Guckert, who had been allowed into the White House press corps under the name Jeff Gannon. Aravosis found out, among other things, that Gannon had advertised his services as a male prostitute online and that his news service, Talon News, was funded directly by the Republican Party (rather like those 18th-century news broadsheets Andie Tucher spoke of in that August lecture).

So with worried faces, a panel that included Gannon,  Congress Daily's John Stanton, former Philadelphia Inquirer staffer Ana-Marie Cox, now running an online column, mused soulfully on whether people like Gannon, or even like Cox, should be taken seriously, or seriously marginalized. (Aravosis, whose work exposing Gannon was the kind of digging Sree likes to talk about, wasn't invited onto the panel, though he spoke from the audience.)

The well-paid journalists in the room were worried, perhaps justly, about this blending of fact and opinion, which depending on who you read (just as with print magazines) can be crude or well crafted, thoughtful or not, original or lazy. These conversations seemed, at that point, kind of theoretical.

Not any more, in the wake of a journalism scandal far more explosive than Jeff Gannon and the resulting talk of a federal shield law, including testimony before Congress on the part of the very journalist who's at the center of the scandal. And the Press Club was at it again, on the same day as some of its  members were asking: do bloggers deserve this shield?  And the panel, this time including  Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics at the University of Minnesota, and two TV journalists, agreed "probably not." All of it part of "National Free Speech Week, which may define irony, as noted by Roxanne .

Suddenly we're wondering what sort of writer gets First Amendment protection, and of what kind. And that brings me - briefly, I promise - back to the Supreme Court.

burning down the House

Q. Do you have any recollection about anything that he said?
A. Oh, yeah, he said they had been into an argument and he slapped her and she fell and hit her
head and it killed her and he didn’t mean for it to happen.
Q. Was he intoxicated?
A. He was drinking real heavily, yeah.
Q. Was he emotional?
A. Very.
Q. All right. How very is very?
A. Well, he was crying and just all to pieces.
Q. All right. How long had he been there before he told you about this incident?
A. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes, not real long.
Q. Did he say what they were arguing about?
A. He had wanted to go to a dance or something or another and was wanting to go somewhere
else. That is what they got into an argument over.
Q. What did you do when you heard Little Hube say he hit his wife and she died?
A. I freaked out and run him off.
Q. You freaked out?
A. I freaked out and ran him off.
Q. Okay. After the party did you tell anybody about this?
A. Not that night. The next day I went to Union County and tried to talk to some law people
and —
Q. Would they listen to you?
A. Went to Union County to the Sheriff’s Department. I tried to speak to the Sheriff but he was
real busy. He sent me to a deputy. The deputy told me to go upstairs to the courtroom and
talk to this guy. I can’t remember his name. I never did really get to talk to anybody.
Q. Tried to tell them?
A. Yeah.
Q. Did you talk to your mother about it?
A. A little later on there wasn’t a whole lot said about it, but she was the one that took me to the courthouse.
Q. Your mother went with you to the courthouse that day?
A. She drove me. I didn’t have a vehicle.
Q. Did you know Carolyn Muncey?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Are you aware of whether or not Little Hube had ever abused her or beat on her?
A. She was constantly with black eyes and busted mouth.

Testimony of Kathy Parker, Nashville resident, testifying to a federal district court in Tennessed on behalf of Paul House, who is on death row for Carolyn Muncey's murder.

Is  this a Supreme Court preview, or an episode of CSI?

Well, it's House v. Bell, which turns out to be both.

Not that I've ever seen that show, actually, but I thought I'd be wrestling more with precedents than with blood spatters, missing or planted evidence, semen-stained jeans, or a theory that an entire rape-murder can be committed, in a rural area without a car, inside of 50 minutes. I didn't know that Paul Gregory House, who has been on death row since 1986, has multiple sclerosis -  of the most advanced kind, which may kill him before anyone tries to strap him down for the lethal injection or gas chamber.

It's all about the DNA, of course.
It's all about the revolution in our thinking about the death penalty thanks to the careful work of attorneys, all around the country, who have re-opened investigations that were done sloppily, or ineffectively presented, the first time.

And it's all about politics. Paul Gregory House was 2/3 of the way to exoneration when 8 of 15 appeals court judges declared he was probably innocent and he deserved a new trial. But a year later, when they could have made it official, four of those 8 judges, appointed by Democrats, had been replaced  by George Bush. Their replacements said no, he still hadn't established reasonable doubt - despite DNA evidence, despite eyewitnesses, despite affidavits that shot down, or at least seriously questioned, the forensic evidence offered by the prosecution.

And it's all about the word "no."

Specifically the "no" in the following paragraph from Sandra Day O'Connor:

a petitioner must show that, in light of the new evidence, it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The focus on actual innocence means that a district court is not bound by the admissibility rules that would govern at trial, but may consider the probative force of relevant evidence that was either wrongly excluded or unavailable at trial. The district court must make a probabilistic determination about what reasonable, properly instructed jurors would do, and it is presumed that a reasonable juror would consider fairly all of the evidence presented and would conscientiously obey the trial court's instructions requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Schlup v. Delo, the 1995 Supreme Court opinion quoted above, offered both hope and frustration to defendants with newly discovered evidence, as it instructs judges to imagine themselves that Platonic "reasonable, properly instructed juror."  In its poetry, it's  also proved a Rorschach blot, taken up by  both sides. And to Judge Dan Boggs, a grizzled veteran of the Sixth Circuit, "no reasonable juror" means exactly that: not a single juror. Basically, the Sixth Circuit panel demanded that every single piece of evidence put out by the prosecution be directly refuted  before it could order a new trial.

Is this all too arcane? Should I get back to the blood?

the cup of despair goes on the shelf

What  is Needed After Food

And so beautiful it cracks the bones, especially Jerusalem
With the lustre of her stones, the hurt in her eyes
And our dreams for her children:  a triangle

Beauty, despair, hope...the whole mispocah
Pulling three ways at the same time
Like the people in so many families,

Fighting but joined at the hip, or call it a sandwich,
Despair the filling embraced by the bread of beauty and hope,
Like manna we at every day, sent from above,

While on earth in Jerusalem my friend's husband and son
Relax  from a sabbath meal, like well-fed beasts,
Happily slumped watching the aftermath

Of a game where the Nazareth team has just won
And vaulted from the bottom of their  league
To the top, the players have stripped off their shirts,

Hugging and dancing, circle dancing, belly dancing,
Waving at crowds in the stands to  make them cheer louder,
The coach strips his shirt from his hairy barrel chest,

Climbs a wire fence, wobbles and waves his hips.
When someone asks how he feels about his team
(A mix of Jews, Moslems, and one Nigerian,

He himself is Druze), he punches  the air
And roars, I beat them all! I beat Arafat! And Sharon!
I show them we love each other! We watch a while,

The celebration is still going on when we quit
To go back to the kitchen, where loaves of beauty and hope
Stand on the counter and the cup of despair goes on the shelf,

My friend and I, we don't ask for much, we read Amichai,
We're not messianic, we don't expect utopia, which is anyway
Another name for a smiling prison,

But love is a good idea, why on earth not,
Simple women that we are, simple mothers cleaning up
The kitchen to make one meal ready for the next.

                    -- Alicia Suskin Ostriker

When I started this blog, I said I'd post a poem on any day I couldn't write. I'd fallen away from it, which I now think is an error.   Alicia Suskin Ostriker's name may be familiar to you for her activism on peace and justice issues, but I've admired and taught her poetry for years now, and  was delighted to be able to review her new book for Pleiades. I'll post my thoughts, as I draft the review, in a bit - but for now, let this one be my offering to the morning, amid all our strife and horror.

 

the mother of all impossible deadlines

Last night, I met my summer creative writing students -- a grand group, many of whom are taking the class to get the elusive "urban studies" credit (how do you make a creative writing class worth the time of a community college student? By making it one of the ways s/he can engage more deeply with his/her city). There are 22 of them, and it's going to be a dance helping each discover her own voice.

And next week, I'm back where I was when  began this blog: teachind Voltaire's  Candide, and rest of that impossible World Humanities class -- this time compressed into four weeks.

Not the best time to decide to finish revising a novel of about 600 pages. (The Suicide Project, of course. What else?)

But with the J-School bootcamp sniping at my heels (classes begin August 8, or approximately 72 hours after I teach my last class),, I'm loath to let this novel, which I had made my agent put aside "while I fix it," remain on the shelf for another year. So far I've only got 125 pages revised, but that was when it was a side project for which I had set no deadlines, subject to the more hysterical pressures of both teaching and journalism.

So here I am, back at this impossible book -- and trying to get most of the 400+ pages left revised in six weeks. It's still that point of view experiment -- but given that this is a text that merges fiction and nonfiction (I was under the influence of Milan Kundera when I conceived of it), it also makes me fact-check myself all over again. And to see what I can cut, what's not essential or even additive, what facts are turned prosey and dead.

And now, after warming up with Book I (San Francisco) and Book II (Rome), I'm today looking at Book III (Jerusalem). You can only imagine what a text that has so much to do with suicide, and a suicidal character that is sent on a business trip to Jerusalem, could include: and how the 5 years since I last worked on it have brought forth even more grist for that mill. But my job isn't to add more, not without taking away. And I need to not get sucked into the vortex of current Middle East politics, as much as my theme of collective suicide feels shouted from its depths.

I need to stay with Judith -- or rather, just behind her and to the side, as I work to open the narrative beyond her self-obsessed, hyperactive brain. I need to notice what she doesn't, and notice when the accretion of detail obscure the arcs of her discoveries. And I need to think about, but not say out loud, what it means now for a book whose frame narrative takes place in Vietnam (Judith's father is a vet) to embrace a sub-narrative,  that brings her down the Via Dolorosa, past the Dome of the Rock,  Al-Aqsa and  Masada.

Can I do this with approx 15 weekday hours and 12 weekend hours available each week?  Even with all the grading involved with 22 classroom hours a week? When I write all that down, it sounds patently absurd.

But I bet I can get much of the grunt work done on it -- get close enough that it'll be ready for careful feedback from my friends (and my agent) as I cast off for this entirely new adventure.

Will it cut into blogging? Likely, though I'm not likely to give up my chance to keep up the commentary entirely. 

Besides, I'm counting on you to spot  me.

I may post bits of the new TSP  on another blog: let  me know if you'd like to see. (I'm also going to start a journalism-school blog when the time comes: the title I'm thinking of is "Crayons to Chaos," if that's not just too Eminem.)

interrogation unresolved

Like many people,  I was a little startled to see a hood on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. I was immediztely cynical, after post-election cover stories that left the administration line unchallenged -- let alone that love letter to Rick Santorum. I flinched: "What are they going to do now?"  I calmed when I saw they'd brought in Joseph Lelyveld, a giant who's been doing masterful work since around the time I was born. I wish I felt it  had the power of its parts.

Lelyveld has produced an interesting, oddly subdued meditation on torture. "Interrogating Ourselves"  asks a complex, if rather sexy, question:   what is and is not kosher in interrogation of suspects who've been identified as terrorists?  After a brilliant opening that combines a short history of the legal and political contexts (for the latter, see Katherine's explication in her comments from Body and Soul), and lays out  many of the questions whizzing around his topic, Lelyveld works like a jeweler urging all the facets of a diamond into view. Except that he does it by shattering the diamond, and holding up each shard for us to see.

Many of the fragments thus created are true jewels. Lelyveld exhibits a high level of trust in the reader by leaving each aside as he goes on to the next: it's our job to decide what we think of it all. But I kept hoping that he would bring them more closely together, and not leave behind the factual circumstances that spur his explorations, as he sits down with lawyers, interrogators, military officials, and even human rights activists.

For example,  he acknowledges that

it's striking how often the hard men who make the hard decisions to fight it out in the shadows snatch the wrong people, then fail to follow through. Only after a new commanding officer had arrived and official inquiries had issued their reports did we learn that 40 percent of those penned up at Guantanamo never belonged there in the first place. At Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the record was even worse: two-thirds of the detainees were eventually said to have been innocent of terrorist links. At least when they were picked up. Who knows what leanings they developed or links they forged during and after their interrogations?

fascist picture story time

Speaking of what the press isn't covering....a  quick meander from Kos led me here. Many thanks to the Lebanese/Iraqi Christian blogger liminal catharsis;  this is a psycho mix of the medieval Passion Play, the Army Adventure Van, and  all this talk of "patriot pastors" and other bashes at the fragile church-state wall. Pseudo-Christian politics, with a militaristic cast that looks like "Team America" on some very bad mescaline. I'm importing the whole post, which liminal put up in February, and will comment very briefly after.

              

Holy S**t! It's fascist picture story time!! 

So people don't think I'm independently inventing anything. I still had the window open when I noticed the whole thread went down. So I took screen shots as proof. Here's where these pictures originate via locomono's post on Fark.com :

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14


I'm just going to post two pictures first and the story. I'll comment more later; one thing though: What is the difference between Muslims trying to defend their homeland by recruiting from mosques and Christians trying to defend their homeland by recruiting from churches? And this is coming from an old school Iraqi Assyrian Orthodox Christian. In plain speak, I think both are wrong any way you cut it. This absolutely blows my mind. This is another one of those whatever happened to the separation of church and state moments.  Onward Christian soldier.


This first picture is the American flag clearly covering up the cross.


This picture apparently shows banners of the various branches of American Armed Forces hanging from the pews.

Now here's the story told by a self-proclaimed Republican, remember...locomono, whom I completely agree with besides the fact he supports the war:

First off, this is absolutely true and only happened about an hour ago. I am a Christian, a republican and support the war in Iraq, but this pisses me off in ways I cannot explain even to myself. This is not a debate thread, after you read this and look at the pictures, if you post anything it will be reactions, advice, or simple opinion. I know there are a lot of military personal in this forum and I would love to here what you have to say about this but if this turns into a flame war I will be extremely upset with whoever's involved. Now on to the story

The other day my dad tells me we're going to a "guy's night out" banquet. Innocent enough sounding, right? Well I haven't done anything that could be considered a favor for him in a long time, and it seems important to him if incredibly boring so, what the hell I'll go. He picks me up at the house around six. I nearly walk out the door about 5 times each time remembering something I've left behind, the last thing I go back for is my camera.
In the car conversation goes as awkwardly as it usually does with my dad,
"What is this thing anyway? Just sitting around card tables talking about good ‘ol days?"
"Probably not they've got one of the guys from the battle in black hawk down to talk about his time there"
Thinking to myself, at least that doesn't sound too bad, "Cool enough. Where is it, are we gonna get there on time?"
"Oh, it's right up the street at porter memorial"
So, that's kinda weird that it's at a church, but whatever. Churches are relatively cheap to rent out during the week.

When we get there traffic is crazy, there must be two thousand people coming to this one church. It's kind of odd that there are three squad cars just to stop traffic and let us all in, but you know what they say, "when enough people gather together in harmony, the fuzz come to break it up"

There's a humvey and black hawk helicopter sitting outside with corresponding units, half the people that are walking in with us are wearing service shirts. Whether air force, army, marines, coastguard, ambulance driver or fireman, all these guys get a check from Uncle Sam. Ok, I don't have any problems with men in uniform, unless I'm drunk outside and they're cops. A door opens and we're headed into the basement for pork barbeque sandwiches, chicken quarters, refried beans and slaw. On the way I glance guardsmen setting things up with that military motion you don't lose in civilian life until about a year out of boot camp. We tell old war stories full of gore and glory and times we almost bought the farm, as we eat. Without any of that kind of story of my own I told him about a PI named John Landrith killing three armed kidnappers with a rusty old meat cleaver to save a seven year old. It's well received in the basement of a church while we eat our Oreo minis. When our meal is done the mass is herded to the sanctuary were we watch the history channel's documentary on the events of black hawk down. When the lights come up my earlier discomfort is redoubled. I realize something is very ********ed up, and start taking pictures. What I see reminds me of footage from the third right the way patriotic imagery is thrown around bugger all. What you’re looking at is government mesh thrown over the steps to the balcony, and a huge flag covering up all but the tip of a huge cross in the first picture, and the huge amount of people sitting below various armed forces banners in the second. There was a nice POW one behind me. I apologize for the poor quality but it’s a new camera, and I’m still learning how to use it, especially in low & mixed light conditions

So, I can't help myself.  I'd like to share locomono's utter disbelief and completely repost the thread in this discussion forum.

They were ready to start the show, so after a raffle for all five branches of the military t-shirts, UK basketball tickets, and Famous Dave’s BBQ coupons(the caterer), we were subjected to a really shitty Rockapella group wearing camo with cackies, and singing mixed Christian rock and patriotic numbers.

joe pulitzer's wonderfully disreputable ghost

The Post follows current American news industry practice of killing any story based on evidence from a confidential source if a government honcho privately denies it. A flat-out "we didn't do it" is enough to kill an investigation in its cradle.

With that succinct statement, Greg Palast has punctured the illusions of many a young journalist.

Like everyone, I've  followed this weekend's revelations about "Deep Throat" with interest; I was too young to understand much of the Watergate hearings over the thundering of my Republican father, but at twelve I was pulled into the cinematic version  (the first time I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, actually -- something I always forget, given my circuitous route since) and intrigued enough by the Holbrook shadow-figure offering clues for the cub reporters to follow. The story of the 91-year old Mark Felt, whose motivations were not the purest on the planet when he formed his  bizarre partnership with Bob Woodward, trying to sell his story to Vanity Fair felt at first mostly significant for its pathos, till the right-wing offensive (thank GOD I don't have cable) reminded us of the true relevance of this story. "Treasonous," they cried, usefully echoing Rumsfeld, Shrub and Myers as they smeared Amnesty International for using the word I've done all along about the torture bases -- "gulag."

Deep Throat came out for money, but his emergence reminds us of what journalists used to do in pursuit of the truth -- and what even mainstream newspapers like the Washington Post were willing to support, in order to comfort the afflicted and afflict the powerful. Naive as I am, I'd assumed that the sloth and timidity of recent years a mix of greed and inertia. I feel like a moron to learn that skepticism of the statements of the powerful is no longer central to the profession -- it's a hazard.

George McGovern, for whom I cast my first happy (if futile) vote in 1984, yearns for a new Deep Throat to save us:

"We need someone like that who is highly placed to tell us what's really going on. We know that we were misled on Iraq," McGovern told Fox News Radio.

McGovern, a former senator, unsuccessfully ran against Richard Nixon for the White House in 1972.

Deep Throat, revealed this week as former

FBI assistant director Mark Felt, acted as a source to The Washington Post newspaper, helping to bring down Nixon's presidency over the Watergate scandal in 1974.

"I wish there were somebody of the Deep Throat time in this administration who are aware of what's going on," McGovern told Fox News Radio.

"This war in Iraq, in my opinion is worse than anything Nixon did. I think Nixon deserved to be expelled from office in view of the cover-up that he carried on and the laws that he violated."

McGovern, apparently, is as unaware as I was of the shift in newsroom policies, from spunk to fear. No wonder the Downing Street Memo has barely made a splash so far; why talk of impeachment has so far raised only by the usual suspects. You can impeach a guy for sex, but not for spilling the blood of hundreds of thoussnds. If the NY Times, which is reported to be working on a story, punts (just like Woodward's new Washington Post did with Palast's evidence about the 2000 elections, we may all as well become Jeff  Gsnnon and find more direct means to fellate the White House.

Why did I name this post after Joe Pulitzer? Because, as I learned nearly 2 months ago from Columbia Journalism Review editor Andie Tucher, it took 10 years before Columbia University would accept his gift of $2 million, offered in 1892, for a journalism school -- on the grounds that such an nasty, disreputable profession would sully an institution of higher learning. I guess it's time, again, to live up to that.

Time for nasty hands, for climbing gutters to beg a source to help us, for not taking a White House denial as anything but a reason to push harder and get the story out. Nowadays, of course, such an approach is downright dangerous, and can land you in prison, broke, dead (cf. Gary Webb) or stuck in tinfoil-hat territory.  But no other way has any honesty. In this case, nasty hands are clean hands.

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I am such a bad member of the Progressive Blogger Union. The hard-working chair sends out a loose topic every week and sometimes I follow it, or manage to connect it to what I was going to write already.  Other times I can't switch my obsessions that fast, as passionate as I may potentially be about global warming or the Minutemen (that I could write about now, of course, after the spotlight has passed). But this week's themes are just up my alley, and so I put forward the first half of my contribution to PBU23 -- with a promise of more to come tomorrow night. Then, I'll make more direct reference to the way newspapers and TV news mis-report the war every day (for now, looksee what Jorgey at MediaInTrouble has called out).