Hmmmmmm

I don't know about you, but the symbology of the Bush White House marketing official presidential hand cleaner strikes me as a flagrant bit of unintentional self-revelation.

It's for getting out those nasty bloodstains, no doubt.

Welcome Home, for real (and, we hope, for good)

-- Sara

My youngest cousin dropped us all an e-mail this morning. Her husband is safely home from 13 months in Iraq -- just in time for Christmas.

This was his second tour; he was deployed to Afghanistan for nine months in 2003.

Welcome home, Cliff. May this be the first of 150,000 homecomings in the year to come.

The "centrist" fallacy

Atrios had a great post today (well worth reading on its own) that springboarded from this interview of ex-Washington Post political editor John Harris by journalist Jay Rosen. It included this snippet from Harris:

I am happy to report that we have some common ground. The "instinct for rationalist, difference-splitting politics" can indeed be a form of bias. A "fixed idea" as Joan Didion says. Extreme centrism (as I would call it) is about hogging rationality to itself. (See Atrios on it.) This is the default form politics takes in the way the mainstream press conducts its reporting and explains the world to us. It's software the system runs on. Maybe you plan to un-install it, or put it out of commission. That would be a development I would watch with great interest.

Atrios is right to observe that this is a more insightful glimmer than we might expect from Harris, given the shape of the Post's coverage during his tenure. It's the kind of insight into Beltway-style Conventional Wisdom that more members of the press need to possess.

But it needs to be pointed out that this kind of approach to journalism is not merely about "hogging rationality to itself." It is, at its core, bad logic and thus nearly certain to lead to misjudgments, miscalculations, and misconceptions.

This kind of thinking is predicated on the fallacy of the middle ground, as I've explained previously:

For the bulk of my journalistic career, I probably saw the world in terms similar to [Cathy] Young's: the left and right, both for their virtues and their flaws, tended to balance each other out. For every bit of ugliness on the right, you could often find a counterpart on the left. This leaves those of us in the middle to balance things out. I think this view dominated in most of the newsrooms where I worked as well.

But I also studied logic and ethics back in the day (philosophy was a second major) and after awhile came to see that what many of us were doing in "balancing" our stories was in fact the antithesis of seeking out the truth, which is what journalism is supposed to be about. Specifically, many of us -- not just journalists -- were indulging in a classic logical fallacy, namely, the "false middle," or the argumentum ad temperantiam: "If two groups are locked in argument, one maintaining that 2+2=4, and the other claiming that 2+2=6, sure enough, an Englishman will walk in and settle on 2+2=5, denouncing both groups as extremists."

I don't know if the balance that I used to see ever existed. But in the 1990s, when it became clear that a lot of people on the right were declaring that 2+2=6, and a lot of people in the media were reporting their claims without batting an eye, any balance I had seen before began to vanish -- and it has not returned.

As the Iraq war devolves into the mess that many of us predicted when it began, you'll continue to hear a lot of people insisting that this kind of "centrism" is the only viable course out of the mess. Rest assured, instead, that it will be a certain prescription for even further disaster.

It can't help itself; it's in its deeply illogical, shallow nature.

UPDATE: Jay Rosen writes in to note that this observation came from him, not from Harris. My many apologies for misreading the outtake. And kudos to Rosen for the keen insight -- though we've known that about him for some time anyway.

Arrrgh. Edited for earlier fuckup. Can you tell I had two teeth extracted and am on painkillers today? Sorry, Jay.

Welcome Home

--Sara

Well, we chose the wrong car to get behind at the border checkpoint, as usual.

The U.S. Immigration officer is taking his time with this one. He's stepped out of the box with a heaving swagger, his barrel chest huge and heavy under his body armor and dark navy cop's shirt. Slowly, he walks around, shading his face with his hands as he peers in the back windows, then wandering to the back of the car to pop open the trunk for a leisurely poke through its contents. He opens a zippered suitcase and gropes around the sides. On the passenger side, a younger officer stands by with a beagle in a bright green jacket, who is sniffing at the wheel wells for drugs.

Finally, after a long Q-and-A with the driver and a long second look at the passports and his computer screen, he waves them on reluctantly -- as though he's sure there's something going on there, but he can't quite make a case that would stick. As the car disappears around the corner, he waves us forward. My husband gooses our ancient SUV through the yellow barriers. A flash goes off as the camera takes a picture of our license plate, and now it’s our turn.

We know the drill so well now that we can almost do it in our sleep. (Though sleeping in front of a CIS officer is a no-no: it's best to wake napping passengers up when you get near the front of the line. Other big no-nos are reading, eating, talking to other people in the car, listening to an iPod, or -- don’t even think about this -- having the radio on.) Over the last three years, we reckon we've passed through this checkpoint well over 100 times, usually on day runs down to Bellingham to pick up mail and do our US banking.

"Where do you live?" It's almost always the first question, and his eyes stay on our faces while his hands effortlessly skim the edges of our passports through an automatic scanner.

"North Vancouver." It's just like talking to any cop: you don't offer any information you're not asked for.

He scans the screen for a moment. It's full of information, evidently accessed via that photo of our license plate and the numbers in the passports. Within a second or two, it's already told him how to handle us. There are only a couple questions after that.

"What brings you to the US this morning?"

"We're just down for the day to get our mail."

"Are you bringing anything down with you -- meat, eggs, plants, gifts, anything like that?"

We know the right answer to this one, and give it without a moment's thought. "No. No food on board. And we're not bringing anything else that's going to stay in the country." Sometimes, we'll make a joke about it: "Only this box of Timbits (Timbits are an iconic Canadian snack -- assorted donut holes, bought by the box at Tim Horton's donut shops, of which there is one right before the border) -- which we guarantee you will be eaten before we leave the US." If the officer is in a smiling mood, this always gets a grin.

"OK, then," the agent says, glancing at the cars down the line as he folds up our passports and hands them back to us. "Have a nice stay." (Once in a while, one will say, "Welcome home.")

You go through this wait and this interview a hundred or so times, watching the ebb and flow of officer interest in people as the lines move around you, and you can't help but wonder. Why did they wave that huge RV through in under 30 seconds -- but pull over that pickup truck for a thorough tossing? Why does my husband attract no attention at all when he's with me -- looking like the male half of a nice middle-aged suburban white couple in family car -- and considerably more when he's by himself in his own car, a vaguely Semitic single man traveling alone in a BMW convertible that's seen better days? What information are they gleaning from questions like, "Why did you move to Canada?" (And, no, we didn't say: Dude, look in the mirror.) And, most curious of all: What on earth is on that screen that pops up when the officer runs our passports?

Well, we know the answer to that now, don't we? Michael J. Sniffen of the AP explains it all to us:

The Associated Press reported Thursday that Americans and foreigners crossing U.S. borders since 2002 have been assessed by the Homeland Security Department's computerized Automated Targeting System, or ATS.

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years. Some or all data in the system can be shared with state, local and foreign governments for use in hiring, contracting and licensing decisions. Courts and even some private contractors can obtain some of the data under certain circumstances.

Almost every person entering and leaving the United States by air, sea or land is assessed based on ATS' analysis of their travel records and other data, including items such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

Acting Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Paul Rosenzweig told reporters Friday they could call it scoring. "It can be reduced to a number," he said, but he clearly preferred the longer description about how the rules are used.

Great. I'm from San Francisco, which has got to mean my score is probably in the tank from the get-go. If they've got my air travel records, they can see I've done the occasional one-way trip (usually some sort of drive/fly vacation involving our RV) -- oops, points off for that, too. Being a lover of window seats probably calms their minds -- you can't make sudden moves when you're wedged in behind two other passengers -- but Mr. R is an aisle seat kinda guy, and a long-time martial artist to boot. He could do some damage in a hurry if he had a mind to. Big guy, big points off there.

And what about those meals? I usually order vegetarian or kosher meals on flights originating in the Midwest, where airline catering often doesn't have quite the flair one finds at coastal airports. It's one way to increase the odds of getting a decent meal. It's probably a good thing it's never occurred to me to order halal. But millions of other have made this choice, unaware that they were implicating themselves as potential terrorists.

The basic paranoia that prevails at US border crossings, both air and land, has already muted my behavior in many small ways that rub at my American sense of justice like gravel in sweaty shoes. The way I tuck away my reading material before approaching the checkpoint, for fear that seeing The Nation or Mother Jones in my lap will arouse unnecessary suspicions. The way I just never get around to putting those great bumper stickers on my car, for the same reason. Being liberal in America these days means that you're only safe as long as you don't try to wear it (literally) on your sleeve or anywhere else. Being a liberal who regularly crosses borders may be unsurprising as a metaphor; but as a literal act, it's best approached with caution, in full awareness that you are putting yourself in the direct path of all kinds of official mischief.

And now it turns out that, for the past four years, all this information, some factual, some inferred, has been compiled into a superfile that -- unlike my driving record, my medical file, or my credit rating -- is completely out of my ability to view, correct, or control. Every time I cross that border or get on an airplane, I'm adding another data point to its detailed and growing portrait of my life. If the border guard is feeling cranky, he can take the time to read the screen in greater detail, and harass me about the things he finds "of interest." And it does happen: the "Why did you move to Canada?" guy went on to ask a lot of other questions about our political beliefs, more than hinting that he found the idea of Americans choosing to live elsewhere deeply offensive and suspicious. He did not approve of our choice; and he was determined to make us answer to him for it. For about five seconds, we considered discussing his attitude with his supervisor -- and then realized that even that very reasonable step would likely get us written up in a file somewhere (and now we know exactly where) as activist malcontents, and subjected to much worse harassment in the future. But keeping silent is always a mistake, too: because we didn't do that, he's probably out there on the job today, adding who knows what to the files of those unlucky enough to end up at his booth.

The thought that would-be stormtroopers like this one, based on secret information and a whim, could detain me, restrict my access to the country of my birth, put my US assets and mail beyond reach, charge me in secret, and deport me for extrajudicial "treatment" is terrifying. And all this inferential "data" is, day by day, making its way into other databases, where it will be seen (according to the AP) by employers, lower-level governments, contracting agencies, and people who issue licenses. Lies and whispers, hints and allegations -- yet they may someday, without our even being aware of it, determine which of us gets a job, a loan, a university acceptance, a government contract, a business license.

Is it worth exposing myself to all this just to go get my damned mail? It's a question I've started asking myself every time I pull into the southbound customs line to wait for my welcome home.

Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont has promised to institute oversight on the ATS program in the new year.

Eliminationism in America: I

[Introducing a ten-part series]

Part I: The Lurker Below





Last week Jerry Klein, a D.C. area radio talk-show host, decided to scrape below the surface of the right-wing brouhaha over the so-called "flying Imams" -- six Muslim clerics asked to deplane from a U.S. Airways flight, a case touted by everyone from David Frum to Michelle Malkin to Powerline to Pajamas Media.

Klein took this kind of talk the next logical step -- that is, by calling on his radio show for requiring all Muslims wear crescent-moon armbands, or perhaps even tatooing or branding them. The response was disturbing, to say the least:

The first caller to the station in Washington said that Klein must be "off his rocker." The second congratulated him and added: "Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country ... they are here to kill us."

Another said that tattoos, armbands and other identifying markers such as crescent marks on driver's licenses, passports and birth certificates did not go far enough. "What good is identifying them?" he asked. "You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans."

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

"I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland

"For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting.

"Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous."

(Crooks and Liars has the video. at DKos has more.)

Satire done well has that ability to slice open and expose the darker aspects of our collective psyches. The film Borat is all about using similar tactics -- pretending to be a bigot as a way of getting certain segments of the American populace to drop their defenses and show their honest bigotry:

In one scene, Borat sings a song that was commonly called Throw the Jew Down the Well, which incited hatred to Jews as the cause of all of Kazakhstan's problems. The song was wildly supported and cheered when it is played in a bar. Another Borat scene involves his visiting the Serengeti Range ranch in Texas, where the owner of the ranch reveals himself to be so anti-Semitic as to believe that Hitler's 'Final Solution' was a necessity for Germany. He further implies (with the egging on of Borat) that he would have no problem running a ranch where people can hunt, in Borat's words, "deer... then Jew."

Some of the noteworthy characters to appear in the film were Justin Seay and his frat brothers, whose bigotry spewed all over the carpet:

In the movie Seay and his Chi Psi colleagues encounter Borat in the southwestern United States, where they pick up a "hitchhiking" Borat and proceed to consume what appears to be large amounts of alcohol with Borat. Borat encourages the group to discuss slavery and their desire for slavery to return to the U.S. During this discussion, Seay is quoted as saying, "In our country, the minorities actually have more power."

Well, as Logan Pearsall Smith put it: "How it infuriates a bigot when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions." Seay and his brothers have sued the makers of Borat. One of Borat's victims, James Broadwater -- a onetime Republican candidate for Congress who opined that Jews were going to hell -- responded angrily by saying his supposed victimization by the stunt "is just one more reason why I believe that the liberal, anti-God media needs to be brought under the strict control of the FCC, and that as soon as possible."

Borat also inspired a wave of less-than-persuasive defensiveness from the likes of Charles Krauthammer, whose airbrushed version of history seems to hold that Jews' relationships with America is definable solely in terms of U.S. support for Israel. This sole fact evidently obliterates a history of latent and sometimes express anti-Semitism in America, as well as the continuing existence of a substantial chunk of the populace that is either anti-Semitic or believes anti-Semitic nonsense.

This is the naked bigotry revealed by both Klein's and Borat's stunts, and it has a particular quality to it -- a theme running through it, as it were: eliminationism.

White frat boys who long to enslave blacks, Texas ranchers who think hunting and shooting a Jew sounds like fun, and radio audiences who want to tattoo Muslims and lock them up in concentration camps -- they all reflect the strands of the hard-wired right-wing desire to eliminate, by violent means if necessary, anyone deemed the Other, or the Enemy.

Certainly Muslims and Jews are among the leading targets of this kind of talk. Jews -- despite Krauthammer's historically soft-focused version of things -- were national scapegoats for many years (the grim tale of Leo Frank being the most vivid reminder) and a cause celebre for leading American figures, including Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and Charles Coughlin. They remain a grim focus of the radical right's hatred even today; the world's leading exponent of anti-Semitism, David Duke, has recently made headlines by making speaking appearances in Kyiv and in Urkaine. Meanwhile, as Bernd Debusmann report for Reuters went on to explore, there is also a now thoroughly concocted fear of Muslims abroad in the American public:

Those in agreement are not a fringe minority: A Gallup poll this summer of more than 1,000 Americans showed that 39 percent were in favor of requiring Muslims in the United States, including American citizens, to carry special identification.

Roughly a quarter of those polled said they would not want to live next door to a Muslim and a third thought that Muslims in the United States sympathized with al Qaeda, the extremist group behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

It isn't only Muslims and Jews who are being included in this kind of talk. Probably the leading targets of hateful rhetoric in the past year have been illegal immigrants. But the range of targets is fairly broad, and now includes gays and lesbians; environmentalists; civil-rights advocates; journalists; and the most common target of the past decade, liberals generally.

The first real uptick in this rhetoric was associated with the initial liberal resistance to the invasion of Iraq, which produced a real flood of elimination talk from the rabid American right, including such leading pundits as Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Today, the right's rose-petaled enterprise has turned to shit, just as the "treasonous" bastards warned them it would -- so of course, those same bastards are now to blame. This is the way it always works for the right, the people of the party of responsibility, who seem unable to accept any responsibility whatsoever for the disasters created at their own express behest, and instead blame those with the foresight to warn against them beforehand.

Confronted with their own moral vacuity, the more rabid elements are nothing short of furious in their frantic scramble to obfuscate reality. Chief among their targets as the Iraq fiasco has crumbled has been the media for its reporting on the unfolding disaster. The result has been hate talk aimed at war critics and journalists, such as this:

So, in the school of what's good for the goose is good for the gander, we are providing this link so YOU may help the blogosphere in locating the homes (perhaps with photos?) of the editors and reporters of the New York Times.

Let's start with the following New York Times reporters and editors: Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. , Bill Keller, Eric Lichtblau, and James Risen. Do you have an idea where they live?

Go hunt them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous -- grab for the golden ring.

While it may seem as though this rising drumbeat of eliminationism proceeding from the American right is something new and uniquely dangerous, a look at our history actually reveals that it is something buried deep in our national psyche. It lies dormant in our soil and comes bursting forth when bidden.

What distinguishes eliminationism -- and particularly the rhetoric that precedes it and fuels it -- is that it represents a kind of self-hatred, especially in an American culture which advertises itself as predicated on inclusiveness, egalitarianism, and equal opportunity, since it runs precisely counter to those ideals. Eliminationists, at heart, really hate the very idea of America.

It has its origins, like slavery and war, in some of man's most ancient and most savage impulses: the desire to dominate others, through violence if necessary. However, in contrast, it goes largely unnoticed and largely unexamined, perhaps because it is a side of human nature so ugly we prefer not even to recognize its existence. So much so that only recently have we even had a term like "eliminationism" with which to frame it.

As I've explained, the term's first significant use came from historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his controversial text, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Goldhagen never provides a concise definition of the word, but rather constructs a massively detailed description of the eliminationist mindset.

Goldhagen's focus, however, is almost solely the Holocaust and the virulently antisemitic form that took root in Europe prior to the Second World War. But as a principle, we can see eliminationism playing a role in human history through the ages -- including its special role in American history and the shaping of American culture, right up to the present day.

I've tried to give a more concise definition previously:

What, really, is eliminationism?

It's a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.

... Rhetorically, it takes on some distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself -- unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated "enemy" as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and loves to incessantly suggest that its targets are themselves disease carriers. A close corollary -- but not as nakedly eliminationist -- are claims that the opponents are traitors or criminals, or gross liabilities for our national security, and thus inherently fit for elimination or at least incarceration.

And yes, it's often voiced as crude "jokes", the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.

But what we also know about this rhetoric is that, as surely as night follows day, this kind of talk eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

What distinguishes eliminationist rhetoric from other political hyperbole, in the end, are two key factors:

-- It is focused on an enemy within, people who constitute entire blocs of the citizen populace, and

--It advocates the excision and extermination, by violent means or civil, of those entire blocs.

As Jerry Klein found, those impulses lie not very far beneath the skin of American civil society. In fact, as we will explore here, they are deeply woven into our very makeup, and can be found as deep strands running and twining through our history: the genocide against the Indians, the "lynching era" and the Ku Klux Klan, the internment of Japanese Americans, the continuing shameful legacy of hate crimes in modern America.

Eliminationism all began, of course, long before there was even an America. But the roots of America's history are bathed in the blood of an eliminationist impulse imported from Europe -- and we have never quite outgrown that legacy.

Next: The Urge to Eliminate

The other kind of terror

Lambert at Corrente points out that the L.A. Times buried its story on Chad Castagana's indictment for sending anthrax hoax letters. Still, the report has plenty of noteworthy details:

A federal grand jury indicted a Woodland Hills man Friday on charges of sending threatening letters with white powder to half a dozen politicians and celebrities, including incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and television personalities Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann.

The 14-count indictment accuses Chad Conrad Castagana, 39, of sending the letters from Sept. 7 through Nov. 9 to those three as well as Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, comedian and late-night talk show host David Letterman and Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone. The powder turned out to be harmless.

Especially noteworthy was the motive:

... "It appears the individuals were targeted based on what he described as their liberal politics," Assistant U.S. Atty. Donald Gaffney said Friday after the indictment was returned.

"He described himself as a compulsive voter who voted conservatively or Republican and he did not like the politics of these individuals."

The powder in the envelopes, Gaffney said, turned out to be laundry detergent, household cleansers or other products commonly found in the home.

"We have had a number of cases where we have had these hoaxes, whether it was sending fake anthrax in the mail or making a fake bomb threat to a plane," Gaffney said. "These hoaxes consume an enormous amount of investigative time and energy so we take them very seriously, especially when you are talking about a [threatened] chemical or a biological weapon."

Perhaps the inclination to ignore this case, and many others like it involving non-Muslim terrorists, in the media is a product of the kind of pathetic quality of the actual threat. In this case, Castagana sent laundry detergent. Maybe they just see this as a "prank" on steroids or something.

Maybe the editors of the L.A. Times and the producers at various broadcast networks who have so far dismissed this story and relegated it to their black news holes missed the part about the extraordinary amount of law-enforcement manpower these kinds of "pranks" entail.

Maybe they missed the fact that these kinds of incidents are in fact a serious kind of domestic terrorism.

Maybe understanding that this kind of domestic terrorism is part of a piggybacked chain going back directly to Sept. 11 -- maybe that just went over their heads. We'll be generous for now.

What obviously hasn't occurred to the leaders of our national discourse ensconced in prominent newsrooms is the possibility that a half-baked understanding of terrorism in fact leaves us more vulnerable to it. That their perpetuation of the public's ignorance about the broad-ranging, asymmetrical nature of terrorism -- embodied in the blinkered coverage of terrorism that elevates Muslim clerics' removal from an airliner to headline status, while relegating an actual plot to blow up Congress to the nether world of the non-story -- creates a blind spot we cannot afford.

From what we've gathered in the news reports regarding Castagana, he is only the tip of the right-wing iceberg when it comes to these anthrax-hoax letters. As I noted previously, similar hoaxes have been sent to Air America and Bill Clinton -- the latter being especially a matter of concern, since he is a former president.

Yet neither of them has yet been linked to Castagana. Either he was a phenomenally busy terrorist, or there are more people just like him out there, mailing threats to the same new set of victims.

If so, there will be more of these cases. Perhaps then the media will start taking out those blind spots. But I'm not holding my breath.

A letter to the L.A. Times

Just sent the following letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times:

To the editors:

Michael McGough's op-ed on hate crimes ("There's little to like about hate-crimes laws," Dec. 3) is so laden with misconceptions and distortions that it really begs a response.

First, McGough seems to believe that prosecutorial misconduct is the fault of the laws that are abused. After all, it is possible to find all kinds of cases involving the kind of selective prosecution that he insists occur with hate-crimes laws (McGough notably fails to provide any statistical support for this claim). These involve all kinds of criminal laws, ranging from murder and assault to simple theft; surely McGough is not suggesting that we revoke those laws as well, simply because prosecutors abuse them? The problem he's decrying here is a systemic one, and not the product of the laws themselves -- except to the extent that people in law enforcement misunderstand them.

It seems evident that McGough misunderstands them as well; the only muddling between "bad acts and bad thoughts" that occurs in the case of bias-crime laws is that indulged by McGough. The reality is that the perpetrator's mental state -- known in the law as mens rea -- has always been a consideration of criminal law. It is the difference, for instance, between first-degree murder and manslaughter. Both intent and motive are, and always have been, considerations of the law, particularly when it comes to sentencing. And that's what bias-crime laws are: sentence-enhancement laws. They do not create new crimes; rather, they stiffen the terms for acts that are already crimes, committed in this case with a bias motive.

McGough concludes: "If their overarching purpose is to affirm the equality of all people, then the law should punish all assaults the same, regardless of the race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or veteran status of the victim. The 'protected class' should be human beings." Well, as it happens, this latter is precisely how the laws work: they are intended to protect everyone equally from these kinds of crimes. Everyone, after all, has religious beliefs of one kind or another; we all have a race, a gender, an ethnicity, a sexual orientation. A quick look at the FBI's annual bias-crime statistics bears this out; anti-white bias crimes are the second-largest category of racial crimes, and anti-Christian crimes constitute the second-largest in the religion category. If the laws were written as McGough suggests, they couldn't possibly pass the Constitution's equal-protection muster; yet these laws have.

Bias-crime laws intend to protect us all from being subjected to criminal acts simply because of who we are as human beings, and they intend to protect our communities from threats and intimidation of the kind these crimes are about. Treating a gay-bashing as just another assault, or a swastika on a synagogue as just a vandalism, obscures this larger reality about hate crimes: they are "message" crimes, intended to threaten and intimidate whole blocs of the community, whose harm extends well beyond just the immediate victims and includes the larger community within which they occur. They are, after all, profoundly anti-democratic, their purpose being to exclude and oppress.

Mushy-headed libertarians and liberals (not to mention conservatives) who see bias-crime laws as creating "thought crimes" -- a concern for which, in over two decades of having these laws on the books, there is scant evidence -- seem to be wringing their hands over a rather abstract notion of freedom, while losing sight of the hard reality that bias-crime laws are about protecting the freedoms of millions of Americans. Maybe that's because these critics see the only threat to our freedoms as emanating from government. But over the history of our country, there have been notable examples in which people's freedoms were taken away by the acts of their fellow citizens -- the "lynching era" of 1880-1930 being the most prominent. Today's bias-crime laws are the direct descendants of the anti-lynching laws that were never passed at the height of this era, based largely on arguments similar to McGough's -- a failure for which the Senate recently apologized.

The legacy of lynching remains with us today in the form of hate crimes -- whose purpose, once again, is to oppress and eliminate targeted minorities. Hate crimes have the fully intended effect of driving away and deterring the presence of any kind of hated minority -- racial, religious, or sexual. They are essentially acts of terrorism directed at entire communities of people, and they are message crimes: "Keep out." And they damage both the fabric of our communities and the democratic underpinnings of a free society. Most of all, they create what Yale's Donald Green calls "a massive dead-weight loss of freedom" for all Americans, particularly minorities.

Bias-crime laws aren't merely about "affirming the equality of all people": they're about preserving very real, basic freedoms -- freedom of association, freedom of travel, the freedom to live where we choose, and most of all the freedom from fear -- for every American. The only "freedom" upon which they impinge is that of violent yahoos to threaten and intimidate and take away the freedom of others. Is that the kind of freedom Michael McGough wishes to protect?

David Neiwert
Seattle

Falling down on hate crimes

When the FBI released its hate-crime statistics for 2005 earlier this year, many of us who track hate crimes were a little surprised at the results: the total number of hate crimes reported to the FBI had decreased for the first time in several years.

That was anomalous with what many of us saw at least anecdotally, with an increased number of bias-motivated crimes cropping up in a number of quarters. The most notable change was the increasing violence targeting Latinos amid an acrimonious and racially charged immigration debate.

This doesn't necessarily mean the total numbers of hate crimes will be increasing; oftentimes, the people capable of committing such crimes simply shift their targets, depending largely on demographic shifts and the xenophobia du jour. In fact, as I noted earlier, we saw exactly that phenomenon in California, where the total number of hate crimes declined 4.5 percent last year but hate crimes against Hispanics increased 6.5 percent.

Yet in this year's FBI report, anti-Hispanic bias crimes were reported as having actually declined in pure numbers, and held steady as a percentage of all hate crimes.

Well, it turns out that the 2005 statistics showed a decrease in hate crimes for a much simpler reason: Fewer law enforcement officials were even bothering to report them.

CivilRights.org had the details a couple of weeks ago:

FBI Hate Crime Statistics for 2005 Called Incomplete

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) recently released "Hate Crime Statistics, 2005" shows a decrease in the total number of hate crimes in the United States.

However, those same statistics also reveal that some of the largest cities in America failed to report their hate crimes, prompting many civil rights groups to call the statistics "incomplete."

A hate crime is defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as acts of violence motivated by race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin. According to the FBI report, 7,163 incidents of hate crimes were reported in 2005, down from 7,649 in 2004.

However, with no data on hate crimes from New York City and Phoenix -- two of the Top 10 largest cities in the U.S. -- civil rights groups have said the data is incomplete. "The fact that New York City and Phoenix did not report hate crime data to the FBI ... marks a setback to the progress the Bureau has made in the program," said Deborah M. Lauter, director of civil rights at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Louisville, the 26th largest city in the United States, also failed to report any hate crimes.

There is also concern that there were no reports of hate crime in two states and fewer than 10 hate crimes reported in four others, perhaps by virtue of the voluntary nature of the reporting. Neither Mississippi or Alabama reported any hate crimes for 2005, Hawaii did not participate at all, Wyoming reported 3, Alaska reported 4, and South Dakota reported 9.

In 2004, New York City reported 97 hate crimes; Phoenix reported 100. If either city had real numbers of hate crimes similar to those in 2005, then that's nearly 200 unreported hate crimes from those two cities alone.

These problems underscore a larger and persistent problem with the FBI's hate-crime reportage system: it simply is not working well, largely because of the failure of many law-enforcement officials to participate, compounded by a disinclination to either investigate or prosecute many clear-cut hate crimes. What's particularly likely to happen is for hate crimes against Latino immigrants to go completely unreported even to police in the first place.

The cumulative effect is that the FBI's numbers probably reflect only about one-fifth of all the nation's hate crimes. And when major cities fall out of the reportage, those numbers decline even farther.

I explored this in some detail a while back, citing from my book Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America:

Initiated in 1990 with the passage of the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the project [for collecting hate-crime statistics] under the care of the FBI was largely understood in its early years to be nascent and problematic at the outset, for a variety of reasons: many law-enforcement agencies were slow to participate; the initial numbers of hate crimes were likely to be skewed by the sharp increase certain to result from increased awareness of the crimes; and uncertainty and confusion reigned regarding the need to report and how to do it. It was hoped that, given enough time, the reporting system's flaws would self-correct and begin providing a clearer picture of the phenomenon. That was largely what happened. As already noted, by 1996 the wild fluctuations in numbers that occurred early on had largely disappeared, and the statistics began indicating a fairly stable phenomenon indicating about 8,000 bias crimes reported annually, and largely stable percentages of the kinds of the different kinds of hate crimes.

However, what closer examination -- particularly the Department of Justice study [titled "Improving the Quality and Accuracy of Hate Crime Reporting, conducted by the Justice Research and Statistics Association released and coauthored by Northeastern University's Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research] -- revealed was a reporting system that was deeply flawed, with statistics distorted by widespread failures to report the crimes and moreover, confusion about the differences between the absence of a report and the active reporting of zero hate crimes. The DOJ study, which surveyed 2,657 law-enforcement agencies, reported a "major information gap" in the data: It estimated that some 37 percent of the agencies that did not submit reports nevertheless had at least one hate crime. Worse yet, roughly 31 percent of the agencies that reported zero hate crimes did, in fact, have at least one; about 6,000 law-enforcement agencies (or one-third of the total of participants) likely dealt with at least one unreported bias crime. All told, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the total number of hate crimes committed annually in America is closer to 50,000 than the 8,000 found in statistics.

"The overall numbers are worthless," says hate-crime expert Donald P. Green, a Yale University professor whose work includes debunking the notion that tough economic times increase the likelihood of hate crimes. Green says that bias crimes are especially likely to arise when minorities, for a variety of economic reasons, begin moving into communities that were previously homogeneous (that is, for the most part, predominantly white, such as the Midwestern communities that are currently experiencing a large influx of Hispanics); or when previously oppressed minorities, such as homosexuals, begin asserting themselves in public fashion.

And as I described later in the book, the underreportage problem becomes acute with people who have reasons not to go to police, including gay men. This occurs on a massive scale in Latino and other immigrant communities, where even legal immigrants are reluctant to contact police out of fear of being deported:

Of all the factors that cause law-enforcement officers to fail to identify and investigate bias crimes, the most significant, the DOJ study's authors found, was the gap between the victims and the police. The less trust that exists between minorities and their local law enforcement, the greater the likelihood that hate crimes will go unresolved.

The Filipino family that encountered Chris Kinison and his friends in Ocean Shores was a textbook example of how hate crimes can go unresolved this way. Many of the victims spoke poor English and had difficulty communicating with the police officers who came to their rescue; even though some of them later reported that they had wanted to pursue harassment charges against the men, the officers either failed or refused to register this. And the officers, little trained in dealing with hate crimes, clearly did not recognize that they had come upon the scene of a felony, which in most other such cases would require a careful and serious investigation and specialized handling of the victims.

By seeming eager to simply break up the potential violence and send everyone on their respective ways -- and particularly by escorting the family to the town's borders -- the officers communicated to the victims the message that the harassment they had endured was insignificant. This in turn feeds the distrust that any outsider (particularly a minority) in a strange town is likely to feel.

Moreover, the incident vividly illustrates that the problem of letting hate crimes go unresolved extends well beyond the mere statistical issues, and that the stakes can be very high indeed, especially for small towns. The result, as it was in Ocean Shores, was that these crimes can escalate from simple harassment to outright violence. Perpetrators, as some studies have observed, see their escape from the arm of the law almost as an invitation to step things up.

Other studies have likewise observed that the most common cause of this cascade of crime is the failure of police to proactively bridge the gap between themselves and the victims. The JRSA's Joan Weiss, in earlier research, found that the reluctance of victims to report crimes was significantly higher for hate crimes than for other crimes. The DOJ study reiterates this point: "For a multitude of reasons, hate crime victims are a population that is leery of reporting crimes -- bias or otherwise -- to law enforcement agencies."

Most hate-crime victims are minorities in the communities where the crimes occur. In many cases, they have poor English skills and have difficulty asking for assistance; in others, they may simply be unaware that what has happened to them is a serious crime. This is particularly true for immigrants, who may be reluctant to even contact police because of their experience with law enforcement in their homelands, where corruption and indifference to such crimes are not uncommon. Likewise, hate-crime victims may be confused about or unaware of the bias motivation involved, interpreting a threat or assault as a random act when other evidence suggests it was not. At other times, they may be reluctant to tell police about the bias aspects of the acts against them, fearing the police won't believe them or that they simply won't do anything about it anyway. And in the case of gays and lesbians, many are reluctant to report the crimes out of fear they will be forced to reveal their own identities as homosexuals; many more fear (sometimes with good reason) that they will wind up being humiliated and victimized further by police.

Likewise, many minorities in certain communities -- blacks in the South or Hispanics in the Southwest, for example -- have long histories of built-up distrust of law enforcement in their communities, and may simply refuse to participate in an investigation without proactive efforts on the part of police to bridge that gap. Indeed, this level of involvement was almost unanimously the chief factor reported by advocacy groups when queried by the authors of the DOJ study about what most affected hate-crime victims' decision to call or cooperate with police.

The causes of the increasing failure of the FBI to obtain the necessary data, as was clearly the case this year, lie both with the FBI -- which has not prioritized improving its hate-crime reportage -- and with local law enforcement, who increasingly are either resistant to participating in the program or have become so lax about it that they don't bother.

This laxity is reflective of a larger softening of public attitudes about hate crimes, particularly among libertarians and some liberals, including on the political front. There seems to be little appreciation for the reality that hate-crimes laws are about protecting people's freedoms, not taking them away -- unless you consider depriving other people of their freedoms a form of protectable freedom itself.

This shift in attitudes is reflected at all levels of the law-enforcement system, from police investigators who dismiss them as "political correctness," to prosecutors who choose not to bring hate-crimes charges in fairly clear-cut cases for extraordinarily weak reasons, to judges who dismiss charges against perpetrators by declaring that "boys will be boys".

Bias crimes have managed to slip off the national radar. Too bad it probably will take some horrifically gruesome murder to bring them back.

Killer whales indeed

I have at least a little sympathy for the main argument offered by the marine-park industry in favor of keeping wild killer whales captive: that they provide whole generations of children, and the public in general, with an up-close, concrete appreciation for these animals.

After all, I can date my own daughter's love of all things orca back to a visit to SeaWorld in San Diego we made back in the spring of 2003. At all of 20 months old then, she wanted mostly to spend the day at the big glass windows to the orca tanks, and of course I had to buy the stuffed orca doll. Even today her toy and book collections are riddled with killer whales.

And give the seaquariums credit: it was their exposure of orcas to the public through such venues that transformed the public perception of them from that of dangerous killers to cuddly sea mammals.

We were reminded this week, however, that the friendlier stereotype can be nearly as destructive, and that you cuddle them at your mortal peril: like Peter Pan's mermaids, "They'll sweetly drown you if you get too close." A SeaWorld orca named Kasatka injured her trainer with an unexpected display of threatening behavior:

Park trainers were examining the whale, a female orca named Kasatka, and trying to determine what made her grab her trainer, Ken Peters, Koontz said.

... Peters, 39, remained hospitalized with a broken foot after the whale grabbed him and twice held him underwater during a show. He had a fractured metatarsal in his left foot but was in good spirits, Koontz said.

Peters was hurt around 5 p.m. Wednesday during the final show of the day at Shamu Stadium, a 36-foot-deep tank.

The show's finale called for Kasatka to shoot out of the water so Peters could dive off her nose. The whale is about 17 feet long and weighs well over 5,000 pounds.

As several hundred spectators watched, the whale and trainer plunged underwater, where Kasatka grabbed Peters by the foot and held him for less than a minute before surfacing, Koontz said.

"The trainer was being pinned by the whale at the bottom of the pool," Karen Ingrande told KGTV-TV.

When they came up, Peters tried to calm the animal by rubbing and stroking its back but it grabbed him and plunged down again for about another minute.

What's noteworthy about this is that Kasatka was exerting a high level of reciprocal control over the situation. A killer whale could snuff out the life of its trainer at almost any given moment: its jaws are capable of crushing large mammals to death instantaneously. Their tails are also capable of delivering crushing blows. If Kasatka had meant to harm Peters, she could have done so easily.

In spite of the incident, Kasatka was back performing today, and whale experts agreed that it was difficult to tell what set her off:

Some experts agree the 30-year-old orca simply may have been having a bad day.

Kasatka may have been put out by a spat with another whale, grumpy because of the weather or even just irritable from a stomachache, they speculated.

"Some mornings they just wake up not as willing to do the show as others," said Ken Balcomb, the director of the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Wash. "If the trainer doesn't recognize it's not a good day, this will happen."

The Humane Society of the United States, which opposes keeping orcas in captivity, issued a statement Thursday suggesting SeaWorld may one day have to kill a whale to save a person's life.

"Simply put, keeping these powerful and intelligent marine mammals in captivity and allowing people to swim with them is utterly inappropriate," said Naomi A. Rose, marine mammal scientist for the society.

Rose has more than a point, because the double-edged sword of public exposure to captive orcas is that we get to see all too clearly that keeping these large wild animals penned up in limited concrete tanks is not good for the animals. And even worse is forcing them to perform stunts for the sake of entertaining crowds of people.

Certainly, that was our experience. Having seen them in the wild, I was disturbed by the limited nature of the captive orcas' existences: circling, circling, circling constantly in a featureless concrete tank whose sides constantly echo. For a creature whose primary mode of perception -- its echolocation -- is predicated on sound, seaquarium life must represent a kind of sterile hell. Particularly for a creature accustomed to roaming open seas at will. As much as I was pleased with her interest, I was disquieted by what we saw the orcas forced to endure.

It's not that I'm opposed to viewing wildlife in captivity -- we are frequent Woodland Park Zoo visitors as well. It's also knowing, from watching the Keiko saga up close, just how exceptional these animals are. Many animals are in zoos because they were injured and rehabilitated; for most of them, return to the wild is out of the question. For killer whales, it's the question.

Keiko -- who was a particularly bad choice for any effort to return to the wild, since he was captured at such a young age he had no hunting skills, and his family group was completely unknown -- overcame tremendous odds in any event and proved himself capable of living in the wild for the better part of a year, until he succumbed to disease. If Keiko could do it without familial support (which is usually critical to orcas' survivability), then there are a number of other candidates whose family groups we have identified -- notably Miami Seaquarium's Lolita and SeaWorld's Corky -- whose chances of success seem vastly better.



The case of Lolita is especially egregious; her decrepit tank in Miami is smaller than the tank in Mexico from which Keiko was so famously rescued. Since she was captured at age 7 and probably still has at least some hunting skills; since she still uses her L pod family calls; since we know almost precisely which family group (the L25 subpod) she belongs to; and since, at age 44, she is still in the middle of life (females in the wild can live to 90 years old) and in fine health; for all these reasons, she is one of the prime candidates for the return of a killer whale to the wild.

Note in the photo of Lolita above how her trainer is riding her; this practice has in subsequent years been stopped. But it was while performing a similar kind of stunt at SeaWorld that Kasatka injured her trainer.

This underscores, as many whale experts already know, that orcas really do not like to be ridden. Yet SeaWorld evidently persists in these kinds of performances. And that raises even more serious questions about making orcas perform for crowds generally. Marine-park owners and trainers insist that the orcas like it; but there are many indications that the rote nature of the performances may just be stifling and aggravating to the orcas, who are intellectually playful by nature. Certainly the sterile, cramped life inside the tanks is stifling for them. And eventually, some of them act out.

Though there has never been a recorded attack by a wild killer whale on a human, that is decidedly not the case in captivity. Erich Hoyt has documented the negative effects of captivity on killer whales and dolphins, and he vividly recalls the one case, here in the Puget Sound, where a captive orca actually killed its trainer, in circumstances horrifyingly similar to this week's incident:

On February 20, 1991, University of Victoria marine biology student and part-time trainer Keltie Byrne, 20, slipped and fell into the orca pool at Sealand of the Pacific. She had just finished a show with the three orcas. Since Sealand trainers stay out of the water, she was not wearing a wetsuit. One whale took her in its mouth and began dragging her around the pool, mostly underwater. A champion swimmer who had competed at the international level, she was no match for three huge orcas determined to keep her in the pool. At one point she reached the side and tried to climb out but, as horrified visitors watched from the sidelines, the whales pulled her screaming back into the pool.

"I just heard her scream my name," said trainer Karen McGee, 25, and then I saw she was in the pool with the whales. "I threw the life-ring out to her. She was trying to grab the ring, but the whale, basically, wouldn't let her. To them it was a play session, and she was in the water." McGee and other Sealand staff tried to distract the whales by throwing them fish, banging on the water with steel buckets and giving them hand and voice commands. Nothing worked. Byrne came up screaming one more time and then, as the whale swam round and round the pool with Byrne in its mouth, she finally drowned. It was several hours before her body could be recovered.

She had ten tooth marks on her body, the largest on her left thigh, but was otherwise untouched. The whales had stripped her clothes off. "It was just a tragic accident," Sealand manager Alejandro Bolz told newspaper reporters. "I just cannot explain it."

There have been dozens of similar incidents, all dismissed as "isolated incidents." One of the earliest was at SeaWorld:

In March 1987, at Sea World in San Diego, Jonathan Smith, 21, was in the water performing with the orcas before several thousand cheering spectators crowded into Shamu Stadium. A six-ton orca suddenly grabbed him in its teeth, dove to the bottom of the tank, then carried him bleeding to the surface and spat him out. Smith gallantly waved to the crowd - which he attributed to his training as a Sea World performer - when a second orca slammed into him. He continued to pretend he was unhurt as the whales repeatedly dragged him 32 feet (9.8 m) to the bottom of the pool, as if trying to drown him. He was cut all around the torso, had a ruptured kidney and a six-inch (15-cm) laceration on his liver, yet he managed to escape and get out of the pool.

... In recent years, with the proliferation of cheap video cameras, a number of incidents have been recorded. They range from bitings and collisions to near drownings when whales have held trainers underwater. Many of these dangerous incidents happened when the trainers were riding whales around the pool. Some former trainers such as Graeme Ellis believe that orcas, in general, do not like to be ridden. "They may tolerate it when they're young or new to captivity," says Ellis, "but later, it can lead to problems." Yet most marine parks still feature trainers riding orcas during the shows.

We made one more visit to SeaWorld in 2004, which included a "dinner with Corky" that was more disturbing for my daughter than fun. After that I was determined to make sure that when my daughter saw orcas in the future, it would be in the wild, where they belonged. And I've followed through on that.

I'm not entirely opposed to limited captivity for killer whales, because I do recognize that they serve a genuinely educational purpose. Certainly, for orcas born in captivity, a return to the wild is not an option. Paul Spong has proposed replacing the current captivity system with an "ambassadors" program under which a limited number of whales are captured annually for a short number of years and then returned to their families; while not ideal, it would be superior to the current system, under which orcas from communities that are not as thoroughly studied as those in the Pacific Northwest -- notably those in Iceland -- are still commonly and wantonly captured for marine parks.

The marine-park industry owes it to the animals themselves to make a good-faith effort to facilitate a return to the wild for those animals that are potential candidates; and they owe it to the species to subsidize the research necessary to assess the impact of their captures on those communities (such as those in Iceland and the Antarctic) where killer whales are still being taken.

Unfortunately, the industry has been steadily opposed to any measures even potentially leading in this direction, which tends to underscore that the high-minded environmentalism they sell alongside their cuddly dolls is really just for show, like the orcas: the bottom line is still the bottom line.

Which is why incidents like this week's will crop up from time to time. These "isolated incidents" will continue until the public takes note of the real problems -- both behavioral and ethical -- posed by forcing killer whales to perform stunts for public entertainment.

Let's face it: killer whales would still enthrall and entice and educate children simply by being themselves in captivity. The performances serve no real purpose except to make money for the marine parks. Cutting them out might dilute the parks' bottom line, but it would make their captivity at least a little less stultifying and difficult.

Marine parks are a fine idea -- if executed with the animals' well-being first in mind. But the public needs to demand they do so.

Immigrants and crime

One of the key components of eliminationist rhetoric is the demonization of the target group by associating it with crime and violence. It was a staple of both Nativist and lynching-era rhetoric against immigrants and blacks. And it continues today in the debate over Latino immigration.

Probably no one this side of Tom Tancredo has been more assiduous in associating illegal immigrants with crime than Rep. Steve King, the far-right Republican from Iowa. The Carpetbagger Report points out that King is now claiming that illegal immigrants kill 12 Americans daily:

Twelve Americans are murdered every day by illegal aliens, according to statistics released by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. If those numbers are correct, it translates to 4,380 Americans murdered annually by illegal aliens. That's 21,900 since Sept. 11, 2001.

This news was heralded by World Net Daily, which ran with this nugget of "data" to further extrapolate the incendiary charge that the government has been releasing "terror threat" immigrants into the general population.

Where did this "data" come from?

Steve King's ass, apparently.

It first appears in one of his patented anti-immigrant screeds at his House Web site:

What would that May 1st look like without illegal immigration? There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines that plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of meth that day by 80%. The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.

Funny thing about this "data": A year ago, King was claiming that the number was twenty-five Americans killed daily by illegal immigrants. And that figure is what a number of King's fellow nativists still like to bandy about.

Statistically speaking, of course, there is a huge difference between 12 and 25 murders daily. So which is it? Well, probably neither.

Colorado Media Matters reports that King cooked up the original "25 per day" figure by misreading government data:

But rather than asserting that the GAO reported this figure, King claimed in May to have "extrapolate[d]" it from a GAO study he requested that, he said, showed that 28 percent of inmates in federal, state, and local prisons and jails are "criminal aliens."

There is no GAO study reporting that 25 Americans per day are killed by illegal immigrants. Moreover, Colorado Media Matters has reviewed GAO reports addressed to King as well as figures released by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and has found no support for his assertion that 28 percent of inmates in all prisons and jails are criminal aliens.

Indeed, the real numbers are under 7 percent:

However, data from the BJS suggest that the percentage of prisoners who are criminal aliens, at least at the federal and state levels, is far lower than King claimed. According to the BJS, 6.4 percent of all state and federal inmates at midyear 2005 were "noncitizens" -- not just illegal immigrants -- down from 6.5 percent in 2004, 6.6 percent in 2003, and 6.9 percent in 2002.

Even Captain Ed was able to sniff out that King's claims are utterly bogus.

But that never stopped a Republican demagogue before.

Government stenographers vs. journalists

The right-wing blogosphere is still whipping up a froth over the the Associated Press' reportage on the immolations of six Sunnis last week in Iraq. What's especially noteworthy about this is their selective credulousness -- especially considering that some of them claim either to be journalists themselves or knowledgeable stewards of journalistic standards.

Military authorities on Thursday went on the offensive, claiming that there is no police captain by the name -- Jamil Hussein -- given by the AP reports. Michelle Malkin typed up the details provided by the military press office:

From CPATT PAO:
BG Abdul-Kareem, the Ministry of Interior Spokesman, went on the record today stating that Capt. Jamil Hussein is not a police officer. He explained the coordinations among MOI, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Defense in attempting to track down these bodies and their joint conclusion was that this was unsubstantiated rumor.

He went on to name several other false sources that have been used recently and appealed to the media to document their news before reporting. He went into some detail about the impact of the press carrying propaganda for the enemies of Iraq and thanked "the friends" who have brought this to their attention.

AP did attend the press conference.

Of course, Malkin considers all this further evidence of "reckless" reporting by the AP, though of course she has never been an on-the-ground reporter -- or editor -- herself. And like all the other would-be media critics in this matter, her eagerness to parrot the government line in this case is noteworthy -- especially since they all are notably skeptical of the government when it suits their own agendas.

But as this case demonstrates, defending an increasingly indefensible war boils down to accusing the press reporting on the disaster of treasonous behavior, including running false reports that amount to "carrying propaganda for the enemies of Iraq." Even if it's the military authorities doing so -- and right-wing bloggers taking their reports at face value -- without a trace of irony.

The basic attitude was voiced by Hindrocket at Powerline:

I have infinitely more faith in the U.S. military than in the Associated Press, but that doesn't mean the military is always right or the AP always wrong. It seems that the AP believes it is in a strong position. I'm tempted to say that one institution or the other must emerge from this affair with its credibility damaged.

In cases like this, the truth always will out, even if it is then often conveniently forgotten by those who are proven wrong. Certainly, it is possible -- as the right-wing commenters at Tom Zeller's NYT blog avidly ascertained -- that Hussein "is in fact a fraud, and never existed," though it is far more unlikely than people working outside of journalism might assume.

On the other hand, consider the AP's own reportage: After questions about Hussein arose, their reporters -- who had dealt with him several times over the years in his official capacity at a local police station -- found three more independent witnesses who confirmed the immolations.

The AP had its own response to the military's claims, as E&P reported:

Today brought the Baghdad press conference and the Iraqi official, Brig. Gen. Abdu-Karim Khalaf, charging that Capt. Hussein was not a Baghdad police officer -- and denounding media reports based on unconfirmed sources and what he said were mere rumors. Carroll then responded with her statement.

After stating that AP was "satisfied" with its reporting, she continued: "AP journalists have repeatedly been to the Hurriyah neighborhood, a small Sunni enclave within a larger Shiia area of Baghdad. Residents there have told us in detail about the attack on the mosque and that six people were burned alive during it. Images taken later that day and again this week show a burned mosque and graffiti that says 'blood wanted,' similar to that found on the homes of Iraqis driven out of neighborhoods where they are a minority. We have also spoken repeatedly to a police captain who is known to AP and has been a reliable source of accurate information in the past and he has confirmed the attack.

"By contrast, the U.S. military and Iraqi government spokesmen attack our reporting because that captain's name is not on their list of authorized spokespeople. Their implication that we may have given money to the captain is false. The AP does not pay for information. Period.

"Further, the Iraqi spokesman said today that reporting on the such atrocities 'shows that the security situation is worse than it really is.' He is speaking from a capital city where dozens of bodies are discovered every day showing signs of terrible torture. Where people are gunned down in their cars, dragged from their homes or blown apart in public places every single day.

"At the end of the day, we have AP journalists with reporting and images from the actual neighborhood versus official spokesmen saying the story cannot be true because it is damaging and because one of the sources is not on a list of people approved to talk to the press. Good reporting relies on more than government-approved sources.

"We stand behind our reporting."

The AP is hardly a perfect institution; it makes mistakes like anyone else. It is also famously stodgy and deferential to institutional power, which makes it less likely to commit fraud on the scale that these critics claim. Their track record, especially in recent years, has been solid, particularly on the ground in Iraq.

This is in direct contradistinction from the track record of American military authorities in Iraq.

Remember the toppling of the Saddam statue? You know, the one that was faked for American media consumption?

As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.

After the colonel — who was not named in the report — selected the statue as a "target of opportunity," the psychological team used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqi civilians to assist, according to an account by a unit member.

But Marines had draped an American flag over the statue's face.

"God bless them, but we were thinking … that this was just bad news," the member of the psychological unit said. "We didn't want to look like an occupation force, and some of the Iraqis were saying, 'No, we want an Iraqi flag!' "

Someone produced an Iraqi flag, and a sergeant in the psychological operations unit quickly replaced the American flag.

Or how about Jessica Lynch?

Some time after Lynch's rescue, several sources alleged the story of Lynch's rescue was distorted and exaggerated by the United States government in an effort to undercut public resistance to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iraqi doctors at the hospital in question claimed Lynch was well cared for by hospital personnel and virtually unguarded at the time that she was rescued by American forces; rather, Lynch's "rescue" was a publicity stunt that was staged, and the subsequent news reports were carefully controlled propaganda, drawing on the captivity narrative genre. Though Pentagon statements claimed that Lynch emptied her rifle fighting off her attackers, later reports and Lynch herself indicated that this was not the case; in fact her rifle jammed on the first round and she did not offer any resistance to her capture. The story is now believed to have stemmed from the mistranslation of an intercepted Iraqi message which referred to one of her male fellow soldiers.

Amended reports by The Washington Post, which initially reported dramatic stories of Lynch's ordeal, indicated that U.S. officials made no attempt to downplay exaggerated or incorrect reports in the media. The dramatic rescue, with heavy force ready for an unknown situation, was videotaped at the request of military public affairs, who knew this would be a popular story. Iraqi doctors caring for Lynch told reporters that they gave Lynch the best care possible while she was kept at the hospital, and that they often bought juice that she asked for using their own money. They also said that they were not only frightened by the dramatic way US forces held them at gunpoint during the rescue, but that the forces also slashed the special sand bed that Lynch was given, the only such bed in the hospital (designed to prevent bed sores for patients suffering from serious burns) before sweeping out again. During the "raid", twelve doors were also kicked in and damaged, and a sterilized operating theatre was contaminated. No reports that the Iraqi hospital would be compensated for the damage were ever published. Doctors also claimed that Iraqi soldiers had left the hospital the morning before the rescue.

... She denied the claims that she fought until being wounded, reporting that her weapon jammed immediately, and that she could not have done anything anyway. Interviewed with Diane Sawyer, Lynch stated, concerning the Pentagon: "They used me to symbolize all this stuff. It's wrong. I don't know why they filmed [my rescue] or why they say these things". She also stated "I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember." She reported excellent treatment in Iraq, and that one person in the hospital even sang to her to help her feel at home.

And then there was Fallujah:

What the US said

Napalm/Mark 77s

The Pentagon denied reports it had used napalm, saying it had last used the weapon in 1993 and destroyed its last batch in 2001. "We don't even have that in our arsenal."

Cluster bombs

General Richard Myers, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said coalition forces dropped nearly 1,500 cluster bombs during the war and only 26 fell within 1,500ft of civilian areas.

White Phosphorus

"[WP was used] very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters." US State Department

How the US came clean

Napalm/Mark 77s

It took five months for the US to admit its marines had used Mk 77 firebombs (a close relative of napalm) in the invasion. The Pentagon said their functions were "remarkably similar".

Cluster bombs

General Myers admitted: "In some cases, we hit those targets knowing there would be a chance of collateral damage." It was "unfortunate" that "we had to make these choices".

White Phosphorus

Pentagon spokesman Lt-Col Barry Venable said this week that WP had been used, "to fire at the enemy" in Iraq. "It burns... it's an incendiary weapon. That is what it does."

And let's not forget the case of Pat Tillman:

A report described in the Washington Post on May 4, 2005 (prepared upon the request of Tillman's family) by Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones revealed that in the days immediately following Tillman's death, U.S. Army investigators were aware that Tillman was killed by friendly fire, shot three times to the head. Jones reported that senior Army commanders, including Gen. John Abizaid, knew of this fact within days of the shooting but nevertheless approved the awarding of the Silver Star, Purple Heart, and a posthumous promotion. The citation report accompanying these awards said that Tillman was killed by enemy forces and contained a detailed account of the alleged battle which Army leadership knew had never taken place.

Jones reported that members of Tillman's unit burned his body armor and uniform in an apparent attempt to hide the fact that he was killed by friendly fire. Several soldiers were subsequently punished for their actions by being removed from their Ranger unit. Jones believed that Tillman should retain his medals and promotion, since he intended to engage the enemy and, in Jones's opinion, behaved heroically.

Tillman's family was not informed of the finding that he was killed by friendly fire until weeks after his memorial service, although at least some senior Army officers knew of that fact prior to the service. Tillman's parents have sharply criticized the Army's handling of the incident; they charge that the Army was more concerned about protecting its image and its recruiting efforts than about telling the truth.

His mother Mary Tillman told the Washington Post, "The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting." Tillman's father, Patrick Tillman, Sr., was incensed by the coverup of the cause of his son's death, which he attributed to a conscious decision by the leadership of the U.S. Army to protect the Army's image:

"After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely interfered with the investigation; they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."

He also blamed high-ranking Army officers for presenting "outright lies" to the family and to the public.

And then there were the killings at Haditha:

On November 20, 2005 a Marine press release from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi said the deaths of the civilians was a consequence of a road side bomb and Iraqi insurgents. The initial US military statement read:

A US marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha. Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another.

Soon after the killings, the mayor of Haditha, Emad Jawad Hamza, led an angry delegation of elders up to the Haditha Dam Marine base allegedly complaining to the base captain.

Marines paid a total of $38,000 to families of 15 of the civilians killed. [8]

... On February 14, 2006, a preliminary investigation was ordered by Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, after video evidence was released, which conflicted with the initial US report. On March 9 a criminal investigation was launched, led by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, to determine if the troops deliberately targeted Iraqi civilians.

On March 19, the US military officials confirmed that contrary to the initial report, 15 civilians were accidentally killed due to the US marines and not Iraqi insurgents.

... As of June 2, 2006, news outlets had reported that 24 Iraqis were killed, none as a result of the bomb explosion. The news comes in anticipation of the results of the military's investigation, which is said to find that the 24 unarmed Iraqis—including children as young as two years and women—were killed by 12 members of Kilo Company in the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division.

Of course, Malkin dismissed the original reporting on Haditha as so much "hyperventilation" and attacked "the leakers," and when her story collapsed, she still managed to blame those dirty liberals. Powerline blamed Jack Murtha.

The cold reality, backed up by case after case, is that the information being released by the American military in Iraq for the duration of this misbegotten war has been not merely PR on steroids, but a psy ops operation targeting the Iraqi population only tangentially. Its chief target all along has been the American public.

The first people to come into conflict with such operatations have always been journalists, particularly those trying honestly to do their jobs. This has always been the case, and will always be so.

What's new in the mix is all the Cheetos-stained wretches back home whose "independence" leads them to swallow whole the story offered by government authorities with a proven track record of propagating false information.

And here we thought stenography was a problem with the press corps. It's got nothing on the right-wing blogosphere.