reflectivepundit

The “Rebels” Surrendered and Still Claim Victory

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The editorial in today’s Washington Post got it right: “The Abuse [of detainees] Can Continue: Senators won’t authorize torture, but they won’t prevent it.” The much hailed rebellion of several Republican Senators against the administration’s push for legislation that would have reinterpreted the Geneva Convention with respect to interrogation methods was whipped in line during a long session in Vice President Cheney’s Capitol Hill office. While the compromise legislation will not rewrite parts of the Geneva Convention, it will not prevent the President from doing so in an executive order. After the so-called compromise was reached, Mr. Bush and his aides made clear that they would indeed go the executive order route. In other words, the President and his legal advisers in the Justice Department, who have approved torturous interrogation methods in the past, will continue to decide how the CIA can press suspected terrorists to reveal information.

Towards a Real Moral Majority?

Bry Brigitte L. Nacos

In today’s Washington Post, David Broder devotes his column “Independence Days” to point to the emergence of a real moral majority in opposition to the policies of President Bush, who, according to Broder, “has proved to be lawless and reckless. He started a war he cannot finish, drove the government into debt and repeatedly defied the Constitution.” For Broder, the refusal of a handful of Republican Senators and former administration officials transcends the immediate issue of torture. In Broder’s words, “Now, however, you can see the independence party forming -- on both sides of the aisle. They are mobilizing to resist not only Bush but also the extremist elements in American society -- the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left and the doctrinaire religious extremists on the right who would convert their faith into a whipping post for their opponents.” Are we really headed for better days—this year’s election throwing lots of the congressional rascals out and the 2008 election bringing a moderate and moral leader into the oval office?

Torture by Mistake and “Aggressive Interrogation”

By Brigitte L. Nacos

If you need an actual case to categorically oppose the torture and the secret detention of what the Bush administration labels broadly as “enemy combatants, the horror story of Maher Arar will do. The Canadian citizen was falsely identified as a suspected terrorist, arrested at Kennedy Airport, and, according to the benign sounding “extraordinary rendition” practices of the CIA, sent to Syria for unspeakable torture treatment that lasted ten months. There is good reason to believe that many of the detainees who are held for years at Guantanamo Bay and other prisons abroad never had any ties to terrorists and have nevertheless suffered the same treatment as Mr. Arar. The Canadian eventually broke down and told his torturers what they wanted to hear--that he had trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan—although he had never been in that country. As today’s Washington Post editorial “Tortured by Mistake” points out, “it is well known that information they [torturous methods] produce is unreliable." Just as important, such methods are gross human rights violations.

 

Mass-Mediated Trouble: The Pope's Treatise and Its Aftermath

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The protests by Muslim leaders and the violent reactions in a number of countries to a recent speech by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Germany underline the problematic side of news reporting and global communication. I have read the text of the long speech in which the Pope cited what he himself characterized a “brusque” remark by a Byzantine emperor that Islam teaches the spreading of faith by violence. Most of the pope’s remarks focused critically on the West’s obsession with reason. In the end, Benedict called for a “genuine dialogue between cultures and religions so urgently needed today.” But what was reported and transmitted to the whole world focused mostly and most prominently on Benedict’s rejection of religious violence according to the Muslim concept jihad.

Highlighting the Terrorist Threat Works Again for President Bush

By Brigitte L. Nacos

After President George W. Bush highlighted the continued terrorist threat in a series of speeches before and on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, his public approval increased in the polls of the major survey organizations to the by far highest level since February. While this approval spike was mostly the result of a jump in presidential support among Republicans, it confirmed research findings that I described in an earlier post (“Mass-Mediated Terror Threats Intimidate the Public”): In the post-9/11 years, such actual terrorist threat assessments or warnings and the media coverage thereof increase the public’s fear of future terrorism on American soil and bolster the President’s approval. Perhaps more important for the upcoming off-year elections: The latest “going public” campaign by President Bush (and perhaps Vice President Cheney’s efforts as well) lifted the public’s confidence in the Republican Party’s handling of terrorism.

Appalling Film: "The Death of a President"

By Brigitte L. Nacos

One would think that nobody in his or her right mind would have the idea to produce a film about the assassination of a sitting president, never mind produce such a movie. Yet, British director
Gabriel Range did. His “Death of a President” is about the assassination of George W. Bush after the President delivers a speech in Chicago on October 19, 2007. One would also think that nobody would want to see such a movie, never mind pay scalpers as it happened according to rumors at the Toronto Film Festival where the film had its world premier on Sunday. And today, the movie is shown on television in the United Kingdom. I read in one of the stories about the film’s debut that the topic raises the question of insensitivity. Just insensitive? I find it utterly despicable to show the murder of a sitting president for what the director calls a “fictionalized retrospective documentary…in which we’re using the lens of the future to look at the present.”

Indeed, What Liberal Media? MSNBC drops Altercation

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Press freedom and the exercise of freedom of expression in today’s mass society are for those who own the means of communication—especially television: A relatively small number of large corporations or, more specifically, their managers and large stockholders. These people are ultimately guided by profit imperatives and the desire for good relations with those in government that protect their private interest—not the public interest. And, of course, they control who has access to today’s most important media and who has not. Eric Alterman wrote in his book What Liberal Media? The Truth About BIAS in the News persuasively about this state of affairs and conservatives’ false claim that the major news media in the United States are slanted in favor of liberals and their left ideological preferences. Now MSNBC fired Alterman by notifying him that MSNBC.com will cease its support for “Altercation,” Alterman’s ten year old blog. It seems that General Electric and NBC are now removing the last remnants of liberal voices along with the appearance of some kind of political balance in their offerings.

Trying to Catch bin Laden Not Just Listen to Him

By Brigitte L. Nacos
"I learned a lot of lessons on 9/11," President Bush said in one of the speeches he delivered this week, "and one of the lessons is this: In order to protect the country, we will keep steady pressure, unrelenting pressure on al Qaeda and its associates. We will deny them safe haven, we will find them, and we will bring them to justice." But the President's assurances of his administration's tough stance and progress in the war on terrorism competed on Thursday with a newly released Al Qaeda video-tape for news coverage and public attention. Both the President's speech and the Al Qaeda tape were massively covered. And since bin Laden, although in hiding, shared the mass media stage with the President of the United States, it was a very good propaganda coup for the Al Qaeda leader For more on terrorism, counterterrorism, media and public opinion listen to my remarks on yesterday's Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.

Mass-Mediated Terror Threats Intimidate the Public

By Brigitte L. Nacos

According to a widely accepted definition, terrorism is political violence that deliberately targets civilians. But because one, perhaps the most important goal of terrorists is the intimidation of  societies they target, terrorism is also understood as the threat of political violence against civilians. While researchers have studied the effects of terrorist incidents on affected populations, they have not dealt with the impact of terrorist threats. The same is true for the news about govermental terror alerts, warnings, and assessments. My colleagues Robert Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon and I closed this gap by examining the post-9/11 television coverage of both threats from Al Qaeda leaders and terror alerts and assessments by the Bush administration. Reporter Matthew Stannard discusses some of our findings in an article in today's San Francisco Chronicle.

Real Terrorist Plotters and Delusional Would-Be Terrorists

By Brigitte L. Nacos
In today's Washington Post, Walter Pincus reports under the headline "FBI Role in Terror Probe Questioned" about the seven Floridians who were arrestred a few months ago for conspiring to aid a terrorist organization (Al Qaeda) and for plotting to bomb a federal building. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales led an army of officials who used press conferences to praise the administration's commitment and success to prevent terrorist attacks. But now Pincus learned  from court records that the "deadly plot" described by Gonzales was "virtually the pipe dream" of a bunch of unsophisticated men who had virtually no ability to achieve their alleged goal of bombing and toppling the Sears Tower in Chicago. Instead, these men may have been sucked deeper into their illusionary plot by questionable FBI informers.