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Posts Tagged ‘New York Times’

Daily Mail Fail; Bin Laden Burial News A Bunch of Crap

Posted in News, Politics, tagged , , , , , on March 7, 2012| 1 Comment »

You expect amazing stupidity from conspiracy theorists, who use bullying tactics to get you to believe that they are smarter than you and tell you that you’re programmed if you don’t let them program you. But rarely do they push news organizations into such amazing blunders.

At least a couple of different online news sites, the Mirror and the Daily Mail Online, are reporting today that Osama Bin Laden was not, after all, dumped in the Indian Ocean after his ignominious end at the hands of Navy SEALs last May. Instead, according to internal e-mails stolen from Austin, Texas security firm Stratfor by hackers, bin Laden’s body was taken to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda, Maryland for examination and cremation. Stratfor, which does security work for the United States government, is called by detractors the shadow CIA. The firm supposedly has extensive knowledge about U.S. internal security and handles accounts for some of the largest U.S. corporations doing business overseas and thus stands at the nexus of commerce and power, say its foes.

According to the e-mails, which appeared on Wikileaks.org, a Stratfor executive named Fred Burton posted in an e-mail subject line, “Body bound for Dover, DE on CIA Plane” when referring to bin Laden’s corpse, which would then be sent onward to Bethesda. That e-mail came at 5:51:12 on May 5, 2011. This elicits the response from George Friedman, the company’s president, that the sea burial was an unlikely account. It sounded to him like the disposition of Adolf Eichmann’s body:

“Eichmann was seen alive for many months on trial before being sentenced to death and executed. No one wanted a monument to him so they cremated him. But i dont know anyone who claimed he wasnt eicjhman [sic]. No comparison with suddenly burying him at sea without any chance to view him, which i doubt happened.” The FBI wouldn’t let that happen, he opines.

The Mail goes on to show pictures of the supposed aircraft carrier next to the supposed pathology institute, and top if off with a nice post-prandial sorbet: a sidebar explaining who Adolf Eichmann was.

Problem is, a later Stratfor cable the news organizations didn’t bother to read says, “Never mind.”

I first read this story after seeing a thread on The New York Times Web site about a bunch of hackers being arrested who were vaguely linked to the same large Anonymous movement that has targeted firms like Stratfor. One commenter said that the Bin Laden cremation story had appeared all around the world “except in America, due to the heavily censored government/corporate media.” There’s no telling why the Times would gain from burying this story, since the paper has regularly published Wikileaks material. Supposedly the Times, Dow Chemical, Stratfor and Barack Obama are now all in cahoots.

Smart readers probably already knew the story was a hoax when they read Friedman only “doubted” that the bin Laden burial at sea was true. That means the alternative Bethesda cremation story was simply conjecture by the Stratfor guys, a bunch of armchair analysts obviously outside the loop or still gathering information. But if that wasn’t enough to convince conspiracy theorists or gullible newspaper reporters hot for copy, then certainly this memo should have been:

“Down & dirty done, He already sleeps with the fish….” ** Fred’s Note: Although I don’t really give a rats ass, it seems to me
that by dropping the corpse in the ocean, the body will come back to haunt us….gotta be violating some sort of obscure heathen religious rule that will inflame islam? I was sleeping thru that class at Langley.”

The time code on this: 15:11:03, May 5, 2011. Well after the first two e-mails.

So, Stratfor concedes in the later memo, Osama bin Laden, was indeed thrown into the sea. How did they know? They probably heard it on the god damn news.

You can debate all day whether it was important for hackers to target Stratfor, which seems to have as many conspiracy theories about Julian Assange as he does about them. Reading the links is sometimes less like reading John Le Carre and more like listening to “Dueling Banjos.” When you read through Stratfor e-mails, you hear a mix of braggadocio and paranoia that is likely the proper cocktail of people who work in the spook business, but what you don’t hear are the voices of powerful people who control our daily lives. Sometimes they seem just as out of the loop as anybody (“Look here! Everything we need to know about our hacker enemies I found in this issue of Wired!”) The hackers who broke into the company regard it schizophrenically as an evil perpetrator of black ops standing at the nexus of power but then disdainfully as a company too drag ass to even protect its own computers from attack.

I wrote extensively about Assange last year, noting that even though information is always a good thing, his motivations are nutty. Of course, why should I care about that if the leaks are substantial? Well, in this case, much of the information was stolen by people who also stole credit card information from companies, assuming all companies are part of the complex. It so happens I write about finance, and perhaps part of my paycheck comes from advertising money doled out by a hated industry. Does that make me part of the complex? Does that make my credit card worth stealing?

I only worry about that because conspiracy theorists lump everybody into plots, damning innocent and guilty alike, and what’s more, especially in this case, THEY DON’T KNOW HOW TO READ OR TELL TIME. And yet their conviction is such that they will not be moved, they bully dumb reporters into stories like these, and finally, their extremism promotes criminality. If what they find in their hacking promotes the greater good, like the Pentagon Papers, I’m ready to defend them. And Stratfor seems to be full of nutty right wing conspiracy theorists itself. But there’s the rub. Conspiracy theorists are usually notable only by their infantile feelings of helplessness and their need to be in the know. And often, on both sides of the debate, they can impress us only in being smug, self-satisfied and wrong. In this case, the firm’s detractors seem as unlikable as the firm they invaded.

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Ross Douthat Damns Hitchens With Grace

Posted in Books & Literature, Essay, tagged , , , , , , on January 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I was going to let Christopher Hitchens rest (lest he is in heaven chafing at the sound of me typing) but then got a nose-full of this warm, cuddly obit, for him by The New York Times‘ boy conservative Ross Douthat.  I’ve written here before that Douthat as a thinker gets everything backward, not looking at the world with true inquisitiveness so much as constantly articulating an a priori conservative identity for himself that the world and facts conform to later. (We start with a love of Ronald Reagan and then try to figure things out from there.) Now he fondly teases another dead man. He cites Hitchens’ bluster about godlessness and says it tacitly reveals what must have been some sort of basic belief in a deity–that Hitchens was constantly saying “no” to a non-entity and was thus not atheist but rebel (Like Job!) So, really, could his anti-theist polemic have happened in a vacuum? Wasn’t there some entity there to argue with? Or, as Descartes argued, isn’t the ability to grasp a perfect being proof that that being is real?

Actually, Hitchens spent a great deal of time trying to find an antidote for this age-old fallacy, one that in one form or another has befallen many Christian intellectuals, that the very concept of a God (or the fight against the concept) is proof he exists. This 1,000-year-old plus ontological hard sell, pushed by Descartes most famously, has been flushed down the toilet often, by Kant most memorably, who said that this reasoning boils down to a maddening tautology, “We know God is because God is.” Hitchens himself took to task the similar logic of C.S. Lewis: Anybody who came up with the idea of a God would have to be mad … so the fact that somebody came up with it despite it all that means God’s existence must be true!

It would have been a really funny, ironic article if Douthat had merely said Christians loved Hitchens because he was a really smart and charming atheist and just too damn irresistible to hate and because love is (or ought to be) the Christian tool with the most reach. It’s another thing to try to indoctrinate a dead man after the fact into a silly cosmology, try to make a net wide enough for Hitchens’ clear-eyed rationalism to be somehow folded into Douthat’s fairy tale and made whole with it. If I were Hitchens, I’d prefer it if somebody told me I was going to rot in hell while fox hounds snacked on my intestines.

The end of the article is simply an insult to everybody who thinks: “Rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor,” says Douthat. OK. If I am not allowed to call Douthat stupid (after all, he went to better colleges than I did), then I can at least call this sentence infuriatingly patronizing. If you see off to the right of my page here, there are some 34 pieces of music. I want to testify that every one of them was made while I was drunk on the pernicious wine of rigorous atheism–the knowledge that there is no God (and perhaps even no listeners). I’ll be harsher. I’ve lost relatives, some of them as close to me as my heart, that I have no hope of being reunited with ever. That sad fact is made warm by the knowledge that loving them was a process, that I loved them first with the selfish love of an infant, then that of an adult with some understanding. That love was born, grew, matured. And all processes come to an end, something children come to understand, at least seemingly until they turn into adults. I don’t need a “God” to make those relationships meaningful or the false idea of perpetual life to give them a perspective they don’t require or deserve.

Douthat, who has in the past arrogantly imposed rigidity in the thinking about international affairs (in Libya, for instance) as a cold slap at inchoate humanitarian aims, suddenly falls short in sangfroid when it comes time to attack the most horrible idea: hope is no excuse for illusion.

Perhaps we should turn to Spinoza, who did talk a lot about God, but tended to see “him” as process, as nature in motion, unfolding in mind, which was inseparable from the imperfections of the wasting body, and not as a white bearded celestial mountain man watching over us. All humans are blessed with intuition, and feeling the presence of a greater power is part of that particular spiritual talent. I guess you could make the sensual argument: just because we perceive the color red on a tomato doesn’t mean the color red doesn’t exist, and thus if we feel a God there must be something to that. But intuition might also lead you to a plethora of Gods, goddesses, voodoo rituals, wiccan love spells, space aliens and other ideas your intellect cannot be accountable for and reason won’t accommodate. It leads you to abdicate your responsibility to your here and now.

I don’t think Ross Douthat is dumb; I just find him, for lack of a better word, incomplete. But we’re all a lot more incomplete without people like Hitchens. So maybe I’m not so much angry at the article as sad, because now Hitch is gone and all of us incomplete people are running around free of his delimiting logic to continue chattering our incomplete ideas thinking we’ve been made, by some abstract god, whole.

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Liberal Wars

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on March 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

As we watch the crisis unfold in Libya, here’s a reminder to you liberals about what happens in liberal wars. Because liberals spend so much time building consensus, they never clearly define objectives the way a strongman would. Inadvertently, they cause more bloodshed. By contrast, more successful wars (by conservatives, we assume) tend to limit violence by creating strict guidelines, rules of engagement and precise military goals.

So what Ross Douthat is saying, I guess, is that conservative wars like those waged in Iraq go off without a hitch. Meanwhile, the U.S. intervention by liberals in places like Yugoslavia are nightmares. After all, the Yugoslavian War continues to drag on to this day while Iraq finished nicely. Rwanda is another good example. Thanks to our restraint there, Rwanda took care of itself. Just as certainly as Libya will.

I often read Douthat’s column only because it’s a fascinating character study of Ross Douthat himself. The guy is often reasonable, but he suffers from a personality crisis. People ought to define themselves politically by dealing with facts on their face. When they start to interpret, that’s when they figure out whether they are on the liberal or conservative side, generally. But Douthat is one of those sad creatures who does it backwards–like too many conservatives I know. Their identity as conservatives becomes more important to them over time than any particular beliefs. They seem to value mostly their membership in a team. If they are reasonable and consider their philosophies against the realities of the world (and that’s a big if), then like Douthat they must constantly draw and redraw the stencil lines of their political identity and then see  how the world fits into it.

Doesn’t work, kid.

Should I go the ultimate course, help Ross out and remind him what the “liberal” and “conservative” labels are–meaningless fictions? Changing styles that ought not to be defined so much as alluded to in generalities, as green phosphenes that disappear on the back of your eyes? Is being liberal or conservative really going to help you put the Libyan upheaval into a perspective? No. I think Ross would be a better writer if he realized this. Yes, I know, his being a young, idealistic conservative is the only thing that got him his job at the New York Times. But there are hordes of better (more experienced?) conservative columnists around. And his presence there sometimes seems to serve the same purpose that Alan Colmes’ did on Fox News–to look weak-chinned and not-so-bright next to the real stars.  Is it because he’s dumb or a bad writer? No. But he is a chalk artist of sorts–a man trying to constantly clarify for us skeptics what conservatism is in a changing world and who ends up trying to draw a figure in a rain storm. Yes, we know you all think Ronald Reagan saved the world. Doesn’t help us or you at this point.

At best, Douthat ends up looking like the kid in the choir trying to show how well he reads the book of hymns to the faithful. At worst, he ends up writing nonsensical articles like this one that needlessly insult the foreign policy victories of the Clinton era and especially insult those who took on wars for humanitarian issues alone, as if without a revenge factor, a war is a waste of time. Insulting humanitarian issues for one war (like Kosovo or Libya) and then hiding behind them for a war of aggression (like the one in Iraq) makes you simply an asshole.

The fact is, no war is good, even those that are sadly necessary. All of them begin to end political chaos and yet all of them ironically increase political complexity once they are started (even morally defensible ones like World War II). You often get to a point you never intended to be, and end up fighting for things you never started fighting for. You can’t control a war’s outcome, not if you’re a high-minded humanitarian trying to stop a massacre or if you’re a bullying empire trying to get more land. All you can do is try to control the variables. A good political leader might have tried, for example, to control American revenge lust in 2003 rather than exploiting it.

So there’s no need to pollute our arguments with ridiculous paradigms like conservative and liberal. When I explain to a person that the estate tax repeal was an abomination that was engineered by a few and served even fewer, I should not have to deal with the counterpoint, “You’re a liberal.” Ross Douthat is not as dumb as that, and yet he and the dummy who says it are thinkers of the same kidney. If you had just stuck with the facts, kid, “Maybe only a ground war could take Qaddafi out,” then I would have taken your article seriously and said you had a point. Instead, you want to make every article about Ronald Reagan and hometown values and a lot of other insipid garbage. It gets obnoxious and irritating to watch you grow up in public.

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How Come Bigots Are Always So Sexy?

Posted in Global Affairs, tagged , , on October 10, 2010| Leave a Comment »

A lot of people, journalist Ron Rosenbaum probably the most prominent, have questioned how someone like Adolf Hitler could rise to power in a country as culturally sophisticated and technologically advanced as Germany was in the 1930s–a country where there was almost no illiteracy. A country where there was political plurality and a free press. A country that, we should all remember, voted Hitler into power in a fair, democratic process.

I submit to you that maybe it was Hitler’s private collection of himself in beefcake poses.

Fast forward to the United States in 2010 and I give you Pamela Geller, a woman who has risen to fame almost entirely for hateful diatribes toward Muslims and her bikini photos. No matter how long you write, no matter how long you study, no matter how much thought you put into a subject, no matter how many credentials you collect or peer reviews you receive, it still seems as if the best way for you to get attention and to snag a bit of celebrity for yourself, even in a “good” society like America, is to do it just as you did in high school: find the person who is not like anybody else and then go to town on him. In high school, you gave wedgies or beat somebody up in the locker room. Today you get on a Web site and bash foreigners.

Geller even calls herself a bigot racist as a joke. It just makes her that much cuter, and we’re supposed to laugh her off. I suggest we create a new line of racist Barbie or Bratz dolls–“Give Us A Squeeze,” says the box.

Ann Coulter led the way when she learned that the more provocative you are, the more beloved you are by people with no self-esteem and no imagination. It’s led us directly to Geller, a person who might even chagrin Coulter (who has recently tried to rehabilitate herself a bit by cuddling up to gays).  It’s always been pretty easy to call Coulter an attention whore. For Geller, it seems too nice a phrase.

Of course, the U.S. is not Nazi Germany, and I don’t mean to suggest that it is. I make the comparison to show how bigotry, which we were all taught to watch out for in school, is even today an aphrodisiac with a sexy hint of taboo.  This woman uses a lot of meretricious rhetoric appealing to those with wounded pride. It could be she appeals to people who are too nationalistic. Those who are out of work and need someone to blame. Or more likely it’s those whose lack of intellectual confidence turns them into “joiners.” It sounds insipid to say out loud–that there’s a group of Americans who’d be swayed by a pastiche that is so transparent–and yet this woman mobilized thousands (millions?) against Park 51, an Islamic center in downtown Manhattan whose symbolism makes it somehow unacceptable, even in an area that already has mosques in it.

Geller called the center a “victory lap” for America’s enemies. You can’t argue with buzzwords like that. They’re so small, you can’t get an editorial in edgewise.

As a proud atheist, I dislike all religions, and would definitely challenge some of the points of Islam–the treatment of women in some corners (though not all) and the iconoclasm of certain sects that denies the bigger imperative of free speech (something I’m a bit of an absolutist about). I’m as angry as anybody that an American cartoonist, Molly Norris, was forced to go into hiding for her satiric idea that we should have an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” (an idea that wasn’t even serious, but that grabbed the attention of extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and got the poor woman put on a hit list). If we can’t get past the ephemeral (and totally inconsistent) picture-drawing ban by Muslims, then how might we ever drill down into their even more troublesome ideas?

But criticizing Islam in its cultural confrontation with the West is a far cry from dehumanizing all Muslims. I interviewed several Muslims myself for a book a few years back, and what I discovered is that there are plenty of competing philosophies and reflections and ways of reconciling the sacred and profane within Islam as there are anywhere else. I was most impressed by a Sufi adherent who said that the religion he knew didn’t believe in mullahs or burkas but was only obsessed with the spirit and what nourishes it. He didn’t see Islamic teaching as incompatible with a Western upbringing. You might say he’s not representative, but then you might ask who is a representative Christian. A Crusader? Torquemada? Jerry Fallwell? Larry Flynt in his born again period? An atheist who just thinks it’s right to turn the other cheek? We say that we hate Muslim strictures on female clothing, but what about the rules of certain Christian faiths that girls must wear skirts and nobody can dance? This is usually where arch-conservatives write in that Christians don’t blow up buildings. I feel unable to defend myself against a person who can’t count the billion or so non-building-destroying Muslims out there. It’s like arguing with a pelican.

I’m a bit depressed that The New York Times had to give this lunatic coverage, even under the pretext of responsibly keeping tabs on her. I just hope it doesn’t give her some kind of legitimacy.

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