Serious about terror

Gee, now here's a surprise:

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

You know, I'm not someone who likes to say "I told you so," but goddammit, I did. Repeatedly. And I was hardly alone. The same was being said at the highest levels of the "war on terror": Richard Clarke, after all, was warning the administration of this outcome before the invasion, and he was ignored. Like the rest of us.

As I noted later:

It is not only Richard Clarke, of course, who believes the nation has gotten seriously off track in the war on terrorism thanks to the Iraq Misadventure. That view, in fact, is held by nearly every serious authority on combating terrorism. Because they know what terrorism is really about.

But somehow, today, even among the so-called "liberal hawks" who are now blaming their misjudgment on the Bush administration's incompetence and their failure to foresee that. And certainly, Bush misfeasance is no small factor here.

But the fact remains that this outcome was not only foreseeable but explicitly foreseen, and those of us who were making this argument were dismissed before the war, and continue to be dismissed, as insufficiently "serious" about dealing with terrorism. That characterization has been part of a steady drumbeat painting liberals as "soft" on the issue, and we're still hearing it to this day.

Well, as I said at the time:

Just in case the prowar right wasn't paying attention the first time around, let's reiterate: The mass of opposition to the war had nothing to do with whether we would win. Opposition was always about what kind of nation we are -- and what we will become -- as we combat terrorism.

... The real danger the Bush Doctrine represents -- of inspiring a fresh round, perhaps even generations, of even more lethal terrorism -- has hardly subsided with the fall of Baghdad.

The gloating of the jingoes may drown out those fears for a day or two. But they will return.

Indeed they have.

Now who, exactly, is "serious" about terrorism, and has been all along?

And when, exactly, will these great Beltway minds actually listen to what we have to say?

Digby and Glenn Greenwald have more.

Handmaidens to torture

Much is being said about Democrats' abysmal failure in stopping the White House's plans to proceed with torturing people suspected of being terrorists, and for good reason. As Digby (in a typically definitive take) points out, the supposed forces of liberalism have simply been rolled by the machinations of the Bush administration.

But equally abysmal has been the performance of the press in making clear to the American public just what is going on here -- from the get-go. Indeed, for the most part, the press has looked the other way, burying stories that should have been atop their front pages, and treating what should have been monstrous scandals as simply politics-as-usual.

It began, in reality, back in 2002, with the abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan. Eric Umansky in Columbia Journalism Review has an in-depth look at how the story was handled by the press, particularly the New York Times, which broke the story -- and then buried it:

Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run," says Gall. "If it's an investigation, occasionally as long as a week."

Gall's story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was "the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can't get much clearer than that," remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times's foreign editor. "I pitched it, I don't know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don't fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one."

Doug Frantz, then the Times's investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times's top editor, and his underlings "insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It's very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed." (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.)

"Compare Judy Miller's WMD stories to Carlotta's story," says Frantz. "On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta's story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations."

Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline "U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody." (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall's digging.)

I raised the issue back in March of 2003 when the buried Times report first was published. I quoted University of Washington law professor Joan Fitzpatrick (who, tragically, died in an apparent suicide two months later), a widely respected expert in international humanitarian law.

Fitzpatrick, in fact, sent a letter to the Times:

The "interrogation" techniques described in "U.S. Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody" (March 4, 2003, A14) violate basic norms of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions require humane treatment of all prisoners, whether POWs or "unlawful combatants," and regardless of the nature of the conflict. All acts of violence or intimidation, outrages upon personal dignity, and humiliating and degrading treatment are strictly forbidden. Does the Department of Defense argue that chaining naked prisoners to the ceiling, in freezing weather, and kicking them to keep them awake for days on end, are practices consistent with the Geneva Conventions? Is the DOD prepared to tolerate this treatment of American POWs in the Iraq war?

These practices also violate human rights treaties to which the United States is a party, specifically the prohibitions on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The United States may not transfer Al Qaeda suspects to other states to facilitate their torture; that too is a violation. Moreover, there is no state on earth "that does not have legal restrictions against torture" ("Questioning of Accused Expected to Be Human, Legal and Aggressive", March 4, 2003, A13). The prohibition on torture is a peremptory norm of customary international law binding on all nations. The torturer is the enemy of all mankind.

If President Bush has commanded these practices, he has committed serious international crimes and crimes against the laws of the United States that are impeachable offenses. Congress must investigate immediately.

Secretary Rumsfeld last Friday again revealed his complete ignorance of the laws of war by suggesting that Iraqi POWs could be tried before military commissions. They may be tried only by court martial, under rules identical to those applicable to U.S. forces. As Bush and Rumsfeld are poised to launch a major war in Iraq, the world stands appalled by their utter disregard for the most fundamental norms of humanity in wartime. Heaven help our "enemies" and our own soldiers.

The Times, of course, never ran her letter.

And when the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed, the press utterly failed to examine just how far up the chain of command these abuses originated -- even though there was a trail of evidence leading right up to the top. Certainly there are indications that not just Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but also former Solicitor General Ted Olson, the White House's legal advocate, were directly involved.

What happened instead was that the press, as a general rule, looked the other way and swallowed whole the administration spin that the problem was consigned to a "few bad apples. As Umansky goes on to explain:

But just as sweeping attacks against "the media" are too reductive, so too are plaudits. And when the record on torture coverage is examined in detail, an ambiguous picture emerges: in the post-9/11 days, some reporters offered detailed accusations and reports of abuse and torture, only to be met with skepticism by their own editors. Stories were buried, played down, or ignored -- a reluctance that is much diminished but still bubbles up with regard to the culpability of policymakers.

So now we are faced, as Marty Lederman has detailed at Balkinization, with the prospect of becoming the first nation to allow violations of the Geneva Conventions:

It only takes 30 seconds or so to see that the Senators have capitulated entirely, that the U.S. will hereafter violate the Geneva Conventions by engaging in Cold Cell, Long Time Standing, etc., and that there will be very little pretense about it. In addition to the elimination of habeas rights in section 6, the bill would delegate to the President the authority to interpret "the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions" "for the United States," except that the bill itself would define certain "grave breaches" of Common Article 3 to be war crimes.

... And then, for good measure -- and this is perhaps the worst part of the bill, for purposes going far beyond the questions of torture and interrogation -- section 7 would preclude courts altogether from ever interpreting the Geneva Conventions -- any part of them -- by providing that "no person may invoke the Geneva Conventions or any protocols thereto in any habeas or civil action or proceeding to which the United States, or a current or former officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent of the United States, is a party as a source of rights, in any court of the United States or its States or territories."

Now, too late, the press is starting to recognize the moral abyss into which the Bush administration is leading the nation. The Washington Post editorial today says:

Mr. Bush wanted Congress to formally approve these practices and to declare them consistent with the Geneva Conventions. It will not. But it will not stop him either, if the legislation is passed in the form agreed on yesterday. Mr. Bush will go down in history for his embrace of torture and bear responsibility for the enormous damage that has caused.

And then there was the New York Times editorial today:

The deal does next to nothing to stop the president from reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. While the White House agreed to a list of "grave breaches" of the conventions that could be prosecuted as war crimes, it stipulated that the president could decide on his own what actions might be a lesser breach of the Geneva Conventions and what interrogation techniques he considered permissible. It's not clear how much the public will ultimately learn about those decisions.

Why not? Well, for answers, we can look to the "nation's paper of record" and its fellow lapdogs in the nation's press.

Freaking out at the Moonie Times

[George W. Bush greets staff and management from the Washington Times at the White House in January 2005. Francis Coombs is at his immediate left.]

Max Blumenthal has been producing a nonstop series of must-read reports in the past year, mostly for The Nation, including his recent expose of the Path to 9/11 miscreants.

Now he's topped it with a stunning inside account of the bigots and fools who run the Washington Times, including the welcome news that their bumbling ways have brought the paper's management to the brink of termination:

A nasty succession battle is now heating up at the paper, punctuated by allegations of racism, sexism and unprofessional conduct, that has implications far beyond its fractious newsroom. According to several reliable inside sources, Preston Moon, the youngest son of Korean Unification Church leader and Times financier Sun Myung Moon, has initiated a search committee to find a replacement for editor in chief Wesley Pruden--a replacement who is not Pruden's handpicked successor, managing editor Francis Coombs.

But Pruden and Coombs, evidently, don't intend to go down quietly:

Pruden and Coombs have stonewalled Preston Moon's investigation and threatened to hold a public news conference, during which they would denounce "the crazy Moonies" and claim that Preston Moon and his father are pressuring them to inject pro-Unification Church propaganda into the paper's coverage, according to a senior newsroom staffer. Times president Douglas D.M. Joo is backing Coombs and Pruden to the bitter end. Joo is a business rival of Preston Moon who, the senior staffer says, would be stripped of his post at the Times and redeployed to Korea if Pruden and Coombs go down. "This is a cancer that goes all the way to the top," the senior staffer said of the paper's tolerance of bigotry. "And if you don't root out the cancer, it will kill you. If this ever got out to the mainstream press, we would be finished as a paper."

Particularly damning is Blumenthal's portrait of Coombs, who has been the paper's driving force in ginning up the debate over immigration and promoting (indeed, practically creating) the Minutemen. Coombs' racial animus is portrayed in stark detail, including this little anecdote:

Countering the "feel-good perspective" on race appears to be Coombs's passion. George Archibald told me that when he showed Coombs a photo of his nephew's African-American girlfriend, Coombs "went off like a rocket about interracial marriage and how terrible it was. He actually used the phrase 'the niggerfication of America.' He said, 'Not in my lifetime. If my daughter went out with a black, I would cut her throat.'"

Then there's Coombs' protege, the execrable Robert Stacy McCain (purportedly a social acquaintance of former National Socialist Movement leader Bill White). Another revealing detail:

But McCain's views on race are well-known among his colleagues. In August 2002, according to Archibald, during a discussion in the newsroom about civil rights, McCain defended slavery as "good for the blacks and good for property owners." "We were just appalled," Archibald said. "He is just a complete animalistic racist."

Oh, and then there's the rampant sexism and misogyny. But that's part of the usual right-wing package, isn't it?

Anyway, go read it all.

Webs of Evil, Webs of Light

by Sara Robinson
Onnesha Roychoudhuri's remarkable Tracking The Torture Taxi at Truthdig is the kind of reporting that, in better years, used to appear on the front pages of the country's best newsmagazines. The story is an interview with Trevor Paglen, an expert in secret military bases, and A.C. Thompson of the S.F. Weekly, whose recent book, "Tracking the Torture Taxi," follows their two-year quest to confirm the details of the American gulag built by the CIA and its contractors throughout the world.

The article alone is a hell of a read (which means that I'm going to have to go get the damn book now, and find time to read it). The most striking thing about this story -- apart from the way it blows the lid off America's secret prison network -- is the vast open-source network that Paglen and Thompson assembled in order to bring this most secret of operations into the light. It's a pure act of 21st-century participatory journalism. Here's Roychoudhuri's description:

When U.S. civilian airplanes were spotted in late 2002 taking trips to and from Andrews Air Force Base, and making stops in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, journalists and plane-spotters wondered what was going on. It soon became clear that these planes were part of the largest covert operation since the Cold War era.

Called extraordinary rendition, the practice involves CIA officials or contractors kidnapping people and sending them to secret prisons around the world where they are held and often tortured, either at the hands of the host-country's government or by CIA personnel themselves.

On Sept. 6, after a long period of official no-comments, President Bush acknowledged the program's existence. But the extent of its operations has yet to be publicly disclosed.

How extensive is it? Trevor Paglen, an expert in clandestine military installations, and A.C. Thompson, an award-winning journalist for S.F. Weekly, spent months tracking the CIA flights and the businesses behind them. What they found was a startlingly broad network of planes (including the Gulfstream jet belonging to Boston Red Sox co-owner Phillip Morse), shell companies, and secret prisons around the world. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation of their new book "Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights" is the collusion of everyday Americans in this massive CIA program. From family lawyers who bolster the shell companies, to an entire town in Smithfield, N.C., that hosts CIA planes and pilots, "Torture Taxi" is the story of the broad reach of extraordinary rendition, and, as Hannah Arendt coined the phrase, the banality of evil.

The story that unfolds from there is a case study in the enormous power of shared information networks. Paglen, who is part of a group at Berkeley researching military programs, hooked up with the community of planespotting hobbyists around the world. "At some point," Paglen tells Roychoudhuri, "this hobbyist community became aware that there were these civilian planes flying around, acting as if they were working in military black programs. These people started tracking the planes and repeatedly seeing them in places like Libya and Guantanamo Bay. It became pretty clear that this was a CIA thing and that these were planes that were involved in the extraordinary rendition program." When Dana Priest's coverage of America's secret prison network broke late last year, it provided the larger context in which Paglen's questions began to make sense.

Joining forces with Thompson, who supplied expertise in corporate research, the two were able to not only re-create the vast network of "torture taxis" operated by the CIA; they also discovered the various corporate shells and phony companies (some of them formed by entirely fictitious people) that gave this virtual airline its official cover, and protected it from oversight. Technology plays a huge role in this story, too: at one point, they located the infamous Salt Pit torture facility in Kabul using Google Earth and a rough description of the base's layout from someone who'd been confined there.

This isn't just an astonishing story, as shattering in its way as the stories that led to Frank Church's congressional investigation of the CIA in the mid-70s (which, in turn, gave us FISA and the rest of it). It's also a harbinger of what journalism might look like in the future -- trained researchers working in tandem with vast networks of amateurs, gathering information on a global scale and working together to discern meaningful patterns that tell the story.

But there's a ghastly flipside to this as well. As Roychoudhuri observes, "Torture Taxi" is also a tale of how these same networks can also conspire to increase the banality quotient of the evils committed.

As Thompson started pursuing the dummy corporations that were giving cover to these operations, one of the striking things he found was that the lawyers involved weren't the usual suspects. Rather than firms with known CIA or DC connections, they were usually small law offices run in rural towns by one or two lawyers:

The kind of people we're talking about are Dean Plakias in Dedham, Mass., outside of Boston. He is not a high-profile guy. He's a family lawyer with a small practice and how he ended up in this world is still a mystery. This is an American story, a neighborhood story. When we started looking at all the front companies the CIA had erected, we realized our neighbors were helping the CIA set up these structures. These are family lawyers in suburban Massachusetts and Reno, Nevada. People in our communities are doing dirty work for the CIA. This is not just people being snatched up from one faraway country and taken to a country that's even farther away.?

And, he goes on to say, these folks usually have the tacit support of their communities.

We went to Nevada, Massachusetts and New York to track down the front companies. We went to Beale Air force base in Northern California to track U2 spy planes. We went to Smithfield, N.C, which is home to the airfields that many of these airplanes fly out of. Then we went to Kabul and Gardez, Afghanistan.

But the two most interesting places were the rural town of Smithfield and Kinston down the road, where there's another airstrip that a company called Aero Contractors uses. Aero is the company that flies many of these missions for the CIA. We went there and talked to a pilot who had worked for Aero about exactly what they did and how the program worked. There's nothing random about the CIA using this rural area in North Carolina. If you wanted to shut up a secret operation, this is where you would do it. It's a god, guns, and guts area.

What you start to figure out by spending time in Smithfield is that a lot of people know about the company and have at least an inkling of what goes on at the airport. Most don't want to talk about it and don't take a critical view of it. Folks we met there framed the debate within this religious discourse. The activists that we talked to were god-fearing devout Christians who felt like this was not what they signed up for as religious people, that it violates the religious tenets they adhere to. Interestingly, folks on the other side of the debate seem to be coming from a similar place, but just coming to a different conclusion. The subject of whether or not torture was permitted by the Bible was discussed in church there - and many congregants believed it was.

Thompson's partner, Paglen, puts the acquiescence into a larger context. "It's this small town with this open secret that nobody wants to talk about. It shows what's going on culturally. When a country starts doing things like torturing and disappearing people, it's not just a policy question, it's also a cultural question."

When we kick around visions of what a coming fascist America might look like, we sometimes imagine brownshirt anti-immigration thuggery, domestic terrorism committed by anti-choice zealots, and book-burning barbecues hosted by raging fundamentalists. But Thompson and Paglen's research seems to document the fact that we already have more than the required number of Good Germans - the staid rural burghers who quietly acknowledge the torture flights taking off from their local airports with the same combination of benign righteousness and willful denial that allowed the citizens of small towns in eastern Germany and Poland to wipe the dust of the crematoriums off their windowsills and go on about their everyday lives.

The worldwide web gives people like Thompson and Paglen access to the vast network of facts required to unravel the story of the gulag. That same web also connects people and churches in the most rural parts of America into vast consensus networks that enable them to justify their quiet, active support of that gulag, and perpetuate the treasonous evil it represents. As Paglen says: how we use this power is a cultural question that goes to the heart of who we are. It's a question that also offers us a glimpse into the best and the worst of what America's next world order might be.

Definitely not a journalist

I've had occasion a couple of times previously to call into question Michelle Malkin's self-description as a "professional journalist."

Now, I think, she has permanently laid any such questions to rest -- especially among the ranks of actual, working journalists who understand what the work entails.

As Will Bunch at Attytood limns in sharp detail today, Malkin's recent post on the continued detention of Iraqi photojournalist Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press stringer, is nothing short of a right-wing anti-journalistic diatribe:

Powerline, Michelle Malkin and the others like them have no respect for the American principle of a free and unfettered press, no understanding of what a photojournalist does or the importance that uncensored photos can play in the political debate half a world away. The bottom line is they'd like to destroy any photographic evidence of how badly their president's lie-laden misadventure has gone in Iraq.

Malkin has been making accusations against these AP photojournalists for some time now, and they have in fact tended to indicate her utter ignorance of what it is that journalists do -- not to mention her eagerness to accuse the people who supposedly are her colleagues of colluding with the enemy. Some colleague.

By Malkin's standards, journalists like myself and Bill Morlin of the Spokane Spokesman Review must be militia members or neo-Nazi white supremacists, since we both have been known to spend inordinate amounts of time with them. Certainly, we've both been accused of serving their agenda because of our close reportage on them. Fortunately, we never were among them when federal authorities arrested any of them; otherwise, no doubt, Malkin would be demanding we go to the klink as well.

It's entirely possible, of course, that Hussein is in fact an Al Qaeda sympathizer. But his ability to get close to them and record their activities is not, and never has been, de facto evidence of that. All that means for certain is that he's very good at his job, which is to photograph the activities of Iraqi insurgents.

In fact, Malkin's assumption of Hussein's guilt -- that is, of his complicity in the insurgents' activities -- is terribly self-revealing regarding her evident conception of how journalists operate. It's clear that Malkin believes journalists primarily gather information by involving themselves wholly in their subjects, consciously taking their side, thereby becoming essentially propaganda organs for them. Considering the ridiculously biased nature of the entire body of her work, though, that this is her approach is fairly self-evident.

But there are larger principles at stake here than mere journalistic ones. Greg Sargent points out that Hussein is being held without being charged; the Associated Press isn't so much simply demanding that he be released, but that he either be charged with something or be released -- that is, that he needs to be accorded the basic principles of due process.

Just in case anyone needs it spelled out, Glenn Greenwald does the honors:

This principle is just axiomatic -- the fact that someone is accused by the Bush administration of being a terrorist or suspected by the administration of working with terrorists does not, in fact, mean that they are a "terrorist." There is a distinction between (a) being accused or suspected by the Bush administration of working with Al Qaeda and (b) actually being in cahoots with Al Qaeda and being a "terrorist."

In recent weeks, we've read instances of innocent Canadians being captured by Americans and turned over to Syria for torture; of some 14,000 people being held in a network of secret prisons under similar circumstances, the only known evidence of their guilt being authorities' say-so.

It's revealing enough that people like Malkin have no respect for the workings of a free press, for basic journalistic principles and the everyday work of reporters and photographers in the field.

But it is far, far more revealing that these self-anointed defenders of "freedom" (ostensibly threatened by the Islamofascists) are so eager to stand by and applaud as the Bush administration bulldozes such time-honored foundations of freedom as due process and fair play.

Without Conscience indeed

My review of John Dean's remarkable book, Conservatives Without Conscience, is now up at Media Transparency. A brief sample:

The title of John Dean's exegesis on the conservative movement in America is obviously meant to ring a few bells of recognition, being as it is an obvious play on Barry Goldwater's touchstone book, The Conscience of a Conservative. It's clear that Dean hopes to reclaim the good name of conservatism, and in exploring as he does the stark contrasts between modern movement conservatives and the ideals of movement founders like Goldwater, he does so admirably.

But the title rings another bell -- unintentionally, to be sure, but tellingly: it first brought to my mind Robert D. Hare's now-standard text on psychopaths, Without Conscience, which was first published in 1993 but remains in print. Dean's book, as it happens, makes no reference to Hare's work, but it does explore similar territory in examining the psychology not just of the movement's fear-driven followers -- people whose needs drive them to seek out authoritarian leaders -- but the conscienceless manipulators who are all too happy to lead them.

Of course, I would be remiss in failing to point out that my partner in crime, Sara Robinson, has also discussed Conservatives Without Conscience and its ramifications in some detail in her series Cracks in the Wall here, here and here. Also, be sure to check out the excellent discussions of the book at Firedoglake's weekly book salon here and here; Dean himself made an extensive appearance in Week 2.

The other terror anniversary

One week ago, on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the nation was treated to a veritable orgy of remembrance in the national media: the networks, cable, and the press all were busy regaling us with reminders of the Islamist radicals who attacked us that day. Politicians rather predictably joined in, most notably George W. Bush, who used what should have been a solemn occasion to bash Democrats and promote his own agenda.

In rather stark contrast, today also marks the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that followed -- the anthrax letters mailed to a variety of media figures and liberal senators, killing five people and convulsing the nation with fear of similar attacks elsewhere for several weeks afterward.

But there are no network specials planned. No wreath-laying by the president. No ABC docudramas blaming the Clinton administration with made-up sequences. No discussion of the implications of these attacks in the "war on terror."

The last of these, really, is quite telling -- because the implications are profound. And until we confront them, our "war on terror" will remain little more than the political marketing campaign that it has been ever since 9/11.

The scarcity of media coverage of the anniversary is noteworthy. So far, I've been able to uncover only an an MSNBC piece by one of the victims -- a remarkable and read-worthy piece, incidentally, mostly because it gives us a haunting portrait of the kind of devastation the attack wrought on those victims -- and a somewhat sketchy remembrance from the Houston Chronicle.

The initial uproar, you'll recall, occurred not only because it came so close on the heels of the 9/11 attacks, but also because the killer used cover letters clearly intended to cast suspicion on Islamist radicals; however, this was done so clumsily that only the most gullible among us (more on that later) would fall for it. And, as with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, most of the initial suspicion fell on the Arab world, and Iraq in particular.

Problem is, just as in Oklahoma, it soon became apparent that this was an act of domestic terrorism. Interest in the case waned, particularly from an administration intent on waving Islamist radicals in our faces as the most grave threat to confront the nation since Hitler.

Because it was clearly an attack by domestic terrorists -- and most likely, in fact, someone with right-wing sensibilities -- I continued to post on the case, including here, here, here, and here. And though the reportage has continued to taper off to virtual nothingness, I've continued to track the matter in the intervening years. I've also written about the case in the context of the administration's handling of domestic-terrorism issues, particularly in my discussions of terrorism as an asymmetrical threat, as well as similar cases of Bush administration bungling and the right's predilection for casting terrorism as a phenomenon related mostly to brown-skinned foreigners.

Only two newspapers provided dedicated coverage to following up the matter and trying to get to the bottom of the case: the Baltimore Sun, whose reporter, Scott Shane, remains among the most credible in dealing with the case; and the Hartford Courant, whose reportage produced some of the most interesting possibilities regarding likely suspects. Salon subsequently picked up on these reports and ran a good rundown of the results -- though it has done little with it subsequently.

Probably the most complete compilation of information on the anthrax case was provided by an amateur named Ed Lake, whose Web site dedicated to the anthrax case is noteworthy for not only being comprehensive, but even-handed and thoroughly reasoned. As with many of us who have examined the evidence, Lake finds the claims that cast suspicion on scientist Stephen Hatfill -- whose lawsuit against his accusers is now before the courts -- poorly grounded and agenda-driven.

Indeed, agendas have been in play throughout much of the subsequent discussion of the anthrax case. The white-supremacist National Vanguard, for instance, trotted out a theory (loosely -- very, very loosely -- based on the Courant investigation) that the attack was actually the work of Israeli intelligence agencies.

And then there are folks like Michelle Malkin and Laurie Mylroie, the wingnut whose cockamamie conspiracy theories -- later completely disproven -- helped fuel the invasion of Iraq. Determined from the start to link Iraq to the anthrax, they still haven't given up.

Today, Malkin posted one of the blogosphere's only remembrances of the anthrax attacks, and used it to push this line of theorization. She cites a Joseph Farah piece in the far-right WorldNetDaily, which regurgitates the claim that bentonite was found in the anthrax samples, thereby definitively linking it to Saddam Hussein's operations.

Problem is, the bentonite theory was completely discredited in relatively short order by the scientists examining the anthrax. As Lake says:

Someone who believed or wanted people to believe there was bentonite in the Daschle anthrax forgot the primary rule for getting people to believe a theory: Don't create a theory which can be scientifically disproven.

It's not surprising, I suppose, that we should find Malkin once again promoting phony, discredited information from extremist sources. After all, it's something she specializes in.

Other agendas, unfortunately, have also played a significant role in our failure to track down and identify the killer. Foremost among these have been the Bush administration's agenda, whose failures in the case are probably not something it wants to remind the public about, especially since its incompetence has become an increasing subject of discussion in recent years.

More to the point, Bush's dedication to using the "war on terror" as justification for promoting nearly every component of its political agenda has led it to promulgate the notion that terrorism is primarily a product of turban-clad foreigners.

After all, it probably doesn't help build a case for invading Iraq and then maintaining a permanant force there when the reality that we have our own pack of eager and willing white terrorists is placed before the public, does it? Nor, for that matter, does it help make the case that "Islamofascism" is our most dire enemy, when in fact the terrorists most likely to aid these radical fundamentalists are our own radical fundamentalists.

More precisely, these are the terrorists most likely, like the anthrax killer, to pggibyback off of large-scale terror attacks like 9/11, creating an "echo" effect that heightens and deepens the nation's sense of fearfulness.

That's how terrorism is supposed to work: It's not the actual damage it inflicts -- say, the 3,000 deaths on 9/11 -- but our reaction to them that is most significant. If we react fearfully, panicked into invading other nations and taking out our anger on the perceived perpetrators with acts of even greater and more resonant violence, then the terrorists' objectives are being met. So far, we're doing a great job all around of playing into their hands.

It's not, as I've said before, that domestic terrorism should be the focus of our anti-terrorist program. Rather, the failure to focus on it at all, to give it any kind of serious role in the "war on terror," leaves us vulnerable in a way that also reveals the incoherence of our antiterrorism policy.

After all, the killer who had the entire nation on edge in the wake of 9/11, like Osama bin Laden himself, is still at large. And it is equally telling that no one in the Bush administration seems to consider finding either of them a significant priority.

UPDATE: Tara Smith at Aetiology has a rundown on just how poorly the administration has responded to the need to prepare a biological stockpile for responding in the event of another attack.

Real feminists

I normally don't devote much blogging time to intramural blogospheric fights, since my blogging time is so limited anyway. And on the surface, at least, the brouhaha over Jessica's boobs is just a petty bit of self-revelation from the right-wing blogosphere. Certainly, Ann Althouse displays far more about her own character -- or utter lack thereof -- than whatever wares Jessica shows us.

But there is more at stake than meets the eye, because what Althouse is up to, along with her cohorts on the pseudo-libertarian right, is actually attacking and undermining feminism and whatever gains it may have made over the years. Check out, for instance, the reaction from the Instawanker, in whose stable Althouse firmly resides:

One might almost think that feminism has become nothing more than a subset of the Democratic Party's activist base. Actually, that has become so obvious that even Maureen Dowd managed to figure it out when she famously commented: "Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones."

Phonies like Reynolds and Althouse are fond of claiming that they, and not people who actually take feminist issues seriously, are the true bearers of the feminist torch. It's Newspeak in action: Claim that "real" feminism is something approximating its opposite, and in the process the meaning of the word becomes confused and lost. What, exactly, is a "feminist" when people like this claim to be one?

Recall, if you will (thanks to Scott Lemieux), that last year Althouse took Atrios to task as insufficiently "feminist" by failing to delete sexist remarks from his comment threads.

Now fast forward to Althouse's original post on l'affaire Booboisie. Here's a sampling of the comments from Althouse's regulars:

Goesh said...
Who is the Intern directly in front of him with the black hair?

Meade said...
Dunno, but by her expression, it looks as though she may be getting "a small glimpse at greatness."

bill said...
Since we don't know who she is, this is quite the cheap shot: Who is the Intern directly in front of him with the black hair?

As such, it would be beneath me to respond, I don't know, but she can deliver my pizza any day.

tcd said...
"He's got beautiful blue eyes."
I didn't realize that liberal men also wet their panties at the sight of Bill like their female counterparts.

SippicanCottage said...
The girl in the center is a hot babe, huh?

This is why plain girls go to trekkie conventions. In here, I'm Miss America.

Of course, those comments remain on the site, as well as similar comments on Althouse's subsequent posts. Althouse is clearly incapable of living up to the standards of feminism she demands of others. (Amanda at Pandagon and Lindsay Beyerstein have an even more complete selection. And, as Jessica notes, Althouse herself indulges in comments that don't exactly bespeak someone serious about feminism.

Then, of course, there are the troglodytes on the right blogosphere (like this pathetic example of masculinity) who chimed in thus:

That's right, I said "hussy." Wearin' lipstick. Smiling.

Like a whore.

The right -- including its apologists like Althouse, the claims to feminism and knee-jerk "concern trolling" belied by their actions -- is in fact constitutionally opposed to feminism and everything it stands for. Always has been, always will be.

She's also, obviously, a fairly crude attention-monger, glad to post crap like this because it brings her traffic. And she's already had more than her share from this.

So rather than spend another iota of energy on this affair, I'm going to do something I should have done long ago: Add Feministing to my blogroll (I'm actually kinda embarrassed they're not there already, but I think everyone knows I'm pretty lousy about those housekeeping chores), and do my level best to send her more traffic more regularly. And I'd urge everyone else in the left blogosphere to do the same.

They want attention? OK -- we'll give it to the people they are trying to humiliate. When they try to win by degrading and humiliating people, it's important to make our stand with them.

Because, despite the proliferation of this kind of Newspeak, we all can see fairly clearly who the real feminists are.

The useful enemy

It's becoming increasingly clear, I think, why Osama bin Laden is still at large: Because George W. Bush needs him to be.

It's not a pretty thought. But it's the only one that makes sense.

Atrios yesterday pointed out the strange contrast between Bush's incessant waving of the Bloody Bin Laden Shirt as the epitome of the Islamofascist Threat and his alternately peculiar disinterest in hunting him down:

Bin Laden is Hitler:

He said the world had ignored the writings of Lenin and Hitler "and paid a terrible price" -- adding the world must not to do the same with al-Qaeda.

Mr Bush has been defending his security strategy as mid-term elections loom.

His speech on Tuesday - the day following the US Labor Day holiday - coincided with the country's traditional start date for election campaigning.

"Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them," he said.

Bin Laden is not a top priority:

Barnes said that Bush told him capturing bin Laden is "not a top priority use of American resources." Watch it.

On the surface, this back-and-forth has always been somewhat baffling. As Faiz at Think Progress noted the other day:

Bush's priorities have always been skewed. Just months after declaring he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive," Bush said, "I truly am not that concerned about him." Turning his attention away from bin Laden, Bush trained his focus on Iraq -- a country he now admits had "nothing" to do with 9/11.

The bafflement doesn't end there. There is long string of puzzling behavior on the part of the Bush administration in this matter:

Why did Bush do nothing but clear brush after the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S."?

Why did Bush let Bin Laden escape at Tora Bora?

Why did Bush divert the prosecution of the "war on terror" -- which should have focused on the pursuit of Al Qaeda and Bin Laden in particular -- into a war with Iraq?

Why did Pakistan's truce with the Taliban -- which, according to initial reports (later denied unconvincingly) allows Bin Laden to remain within its borders largely unmolested -- raise nary a protest from the White House?

Why did Bush and Co. allow the trail to Bin Laden to grow "stone cold" since 9/11?

Now, consider briefly what would have happened to Bush's "war on terror" if, say, Bin Laden had been captured or killed at Tora Bora. Al Qaeda and the terrorist threat, no doubt, would have continued to exist, but it would have been akin to a hydra with its strategic head chopped off -- dangerous, but far less so, and decidedly on the run. There would have been no identifiable but elusive boogie-man to scare the public with. Instead of being able to hype the nation into an attack on Iraq under false pretenses, Bush would have had to deal with terrorism as the asymmetrical threat that it actually is.

I have no idea whether, in fact, letting Bin Laden remain at large is a conscious strategy on the part of Team Bush or not -- although, given the utterly Machiavellian way the administration has leveraged the "war on terror" into every conceivable corner of its agenda, from the outrageous expansion of executive powers and concomitant lawbreaking in its wiretapping and torture programs to the smearing of all his opponents as "Islamofascist" apologists (and all points in between, including environmental policy like the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge drilling plan), it certainly is not inconceivable. Nor, for that matter, is it beyond the realm of possibility that it's just another aspect of his grotesque incompetence.

More likely, it's identical to the same Bush traits that wrought the Katrina debacle:

[T]here is a reason that, after being properely warned, Bush stayed on vacation and, essentially, sat on his hands, both before 9/11 and Katrina: It was in his best interests to do so.

The mistakes that were made in the runup to both events were in fact a direct outgrowth of policies that benefited Bush's cronies and his political allies. Counterterrorism -- derided in the early Bush administration as a "Clinton thing" -- was deemphasized in favor of the greatest defense-spending black hole ever devised, "missile defense." Preparing for a federal emergency in the event of a real disaster -- whether a terrorist attack or a hurricane in New Orleans -- was forsaken on behalf of pursuing a needless war in Iraq. The outcomes of both have been nothing but a huge bonanza for Bush's cronies.

Those policies were a product of this administration's priorities, which in the end are always about promoting the well-being of the moneyed class at the expense of the middle classes and poor, while effectively driving a wedge within those classes. That's no conspiracy; it's just the way the world works, especially with men like Bush in charge.

Osama bin Laden has been a very, very useful enemy for George W. Bush. So it should not surprise us that he remains in our faces -- and probably will as long as Bush is president.

My Life as A Futurist

by Sara Robinson

You will not offend me if you give me That Look when I tell you what business I'm in.

After all, my own mother still gives it to me. "Tell me again....just what is it that you...do?" she queries me now and again, her voice a nuanced blend of confusion, incredulity, and a sincere desire not to hurt my feelings. At least she doesn't smirk or giggle out loud (which has been known to happen with less gentle acquaintances). Not that I would blame her if she did. I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to get That Look every time I introduce myself, probably for the rest of my days. It's an occupational burden I'm learning to bear.

Everybody knows this. Futurists are crazy old men with wild white hair and bow ties and pockets full of cool micro-gizmos who go around talking about flying cars. (In fact, the very phrase "flying cars" is a standing joke in the professional futurist trade, the signifier for all the usual and stereotypical things the media wants to talk to us about, even when we're desperate to talk about something far more important or interesting.) Bucky Fuller was a futurist. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist. Here in Vancouver, we have Dr. Tomorrow, a colorful character who's been the town's iconic (and iconoclastic) "futurist" for about 30 years.

But that middle-aged mom over there with the dimples and the tumbled thatch of auburn hair? No. She is not what comes to mind when you think of a futurist. At all. Which is why I get That Look.

The picture only gets fuzzier when you understand that there are futurists and futurists -- and sometimes even they themselves aren't quite sure where the line between them falls. On one hand, anybody can hang out their shingle and call themselves a futurist. There are urban futurists and media futurists and space futurists and fashion futurists: a motley crew of people who are united by their optimism about the future, and their eagerness to share (or sell) their visions of how it might take shape. Imaginative and intelligent, these people are full of creative ideas about how things will become. They also tend to make more earthbound types a bit...uncomfortable. "Flaky" is a word that's sometimes used. "Wild-eyed" is another. "Professional"...not so much.

Which rather annoys those on the other hand, who are indeed real-life professional futurists. Most of these are serious people who spent years in graduate school and professional practice mastering a large body of foresight methods that have emerged over the past century, and which were refined into usefulness at places like the Department of Defense, RAND, and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. While no less imaginative -- and often at least as idealistic -- these highly educated guessers are focused on scanning the horizon and tracking actual signs of change, separating the truly plausible from the not very likely, and helping their clients systematically prepare for a wide variety of possible futures. The biggest of big thinkers, they operate in a weird overlapping space that's part sociology, part technology, part policy analysis, part economics, part environmentalism, part research, part instinct, and part voodoo.

I'm the second kind of futurist. Or, more precisely: I'm a professional futurist-in-training, hard at work on a masters of science in Futures Studies at the University of Houston.

Professional futurists do a vast range of things, most of them fascinating. Some of my colleagues and mentors work in-house for large corporations like Kimberly-Clark, IBM, Dow, and Pitney Bowes. (The future of postage? Yes. And it's actually pretty intriguing.) Others work for foresight firms that advise US agencies or foreign governments. A handful teach futures studies courses, which are increasingly being offered in graduate business, urban planning, and public policy schools. Quite a few are happily swimming in think tanks; and others are independent researchers, writers, and consultants.

Surprisingly, while we're all at least somewhat engaged with technology, not all futurists are technologists (or even technophiles). There are energy futurists, transportation futurists, food and agriculture futurists, urban futurists, medical futurists, retail futurists -- you name it, and there's a futurist somewhere keeping a weather eye on developments in the field. While we all pay close attention to technology shifts because they're typically a leading change driver, we're also watching how the effects ripple out to create change in other areas that most people wouldn't have imagined might be affected.

Me? I'm a social futurist. My area of interest is authoritarian movements -- fundamentalisms initially, but the field is broadening in time. That's what brought me to Dave's blog in the first place. It's also why I stuck around and became part of the ongoing dialogue. And, since Dave has given me my own key to his whaling shack, it's something you're going to hear me hold forth on now and again. That's why I'm taking this opportunity to explain, in a little depth, what I do and where I'm coming from.

It's a settled fact among most futurists that we are in an era of unprecedented technological change. My friend John Smart at the Accleration Studies Foundation says that on just about any front you can name, our ability to process matter, energy, space, time, and information is expanding at an exponential rate. We will create more change in this decade alone than humanity saw in the entire first 1500 years AD. There's lively argument about whether that rate of acceleration is sustainable, and for how long. But most futurists agree that the pace of change is many orders of magnitude faster now than it's ever been in history -- and will likely continue to pick up speed at least through the rest of our lifetimes.

Smart also set down several "laws of technology," one of which is that all new technology is inherently destructive and dehumanizing in its first generation. There are always problems we could never have anticipated, economic upheavals as old technologies are supplanted, badly-planned responses simply because nobody's ever done this before, and cultural convulsions as the new invention demands people to form new social rituals and customs around it. For a while, things get strained while we figure out what this new thing is, what it does, how it harms, how it helps, what its limits are, and how we might optimize it to maximize the good features and minimize the bad.

By and by, with all this new information in hand, we go back to the drawing board and create a second-generation version, which typically resolves about 75% of the problems in the first generation, greatly mitigates most of the rest...and usually creates one or two fresh concerns of its own (nothing being perfect). Second-generation technology tends to be much more human-centered, is often far more economically and ecologically sustainable, and usually doesn't create the vast economic upset the first generation did. At that point, we finally refine it into something that genuinely adds positive value to our existence. That, says Smart, is how progress happens.

All this is rattling around the back of my mind when I look at the tech futurists' acceleration J-curves. I don't just see a dizzying launch into a future that's getting harder and harder to predict. I also see vast new waves of first-generation technologies, each one requiring us to go through its dehumanizing early phases (though the good news is that we'll also advance to the second generation much faster than we used to). I also see the growing numbers of people who stand to be left behind by those ever-increasing changes -- people who are comfortable and content now, but are vulnerable to losing it all when some random new development comes out of left field and knocks them out of the economic or social game. It's going to happen more and more often -- perhaps several times a lifetime. Most of us aren't emotionally or financially equipped to handle this, which suggests that the number of seriously dislocated people could become profound -- at least for the couple of generations it will take for society to absorb the pace of change, and start equipping its children with better tools to cope.

The real danger that keeps me up at night is this: If we allow the numbers of the lost and sidelined to grow, that necessary process of cultural adaptation may get derailed. Overall attitudes towards change and progress can sour and harden into anger, bitterness, and resentment of progress. It's not hard to imagine a mass backlash that violently rejects modernism, and creates large cultural movements that operate out of a deep fear of change. Unfortunately, these are also the two most essential characteristics that authoritarian religious and political leaders feed on -- which means it's not an overstatement to say that our capacity to assure that there even will be a future could be overwhelmed by the demands of vast fundamentalist and totalitarian movements unless we get very smart, very quickly, about keeping large masses of people out of those belief systems.

This is, as we say in the futures biz, not my preferred future.

Especially when you consider what we've got coming up on our plate this century. Beyond accelerating technology and all its outfalls, we've got seismic geopolitical shifts, global warming, increasing resource scarcity (water is the big one nobody's talking about), and the necessary transition from hydrocarbons to other fuels. We've got a massive amount of work to do just to keep this blue ball alive and spinning; and the clock is ticking.

Unfortunately -- as we have so painfully learned from the way America's authoritarian leadership botched Iraq -- the inflexibility, irrationality, defensiveness, either/or dogmatism, and epic capacity for denial inherent in authoritarian systems often preclude them from even recognizing actual threats, let alone moving ahead to create clear and effective plans to deal with them. Any system that allows a few amoral opportunists do most of the thinking for the entire group is not only inherently brittle and unstable; it's also profoundly ill-equipped to respond effectively to the kinds of challenges we are going to be facing in the century ahead.

It's obvious that authoritarian leaders and followers, reflexively acting out of their fear of change, will not be the ones to solve our huge and looming problems. Even worse: they've already put us on notice that they're going to do whatever it takes to keep us from even acknowledging those problems, and doggedly work to obstruct our best efforts to do anything about them. There is too much at stake here to waste time on these people. We no longer have the time or the bandwidth to deal with their nonsense.

Ten thousand years of human history, 220 years of modern democracy, and the more recent discoveries of chaos theory have convinced most of the world-- pretty much beyond argument -- that groups and individuals operating within free, open societies are more innovative, prosperous, and creative. They are also more likely to seek and preserve peace, and immeasurably more flexible and adaptive in the face of serious political, economic, environmental, or other threats. Looking ahead, it's clear that if we are going to solve our looming global issues, promoting and preserving democratic societies is the critical precondition for success.

At the same time, we are coming to understand that these open social orders and democratic societies are also complex organic systems that take many generations to come into being, but can be very easily and thoughtlessly destroyed in the space of a few years. These fragile ecologies are global assets need to be protected for the sake of the future of the planet, no less than the rainforests and oceans.

Yet, when it comes to building the kind of open, democratic societies that are our best hope for a prosperous and peaceful future, the world's authoritarians can only manage reactions that range from vague suspicion to outright hostility. It's probably not an overstatement to say that the fate of the planet may well depend on our ability to reliably, intelligently, effectively identify and deal with these enemies of the future wherever they crop up -- and figure out how to create the conditions that will prevent them from arising in the first place.

My wandering explorations of these issues will likely become a dominant theme in the things I write here at Orcinus.. I hope they'll be an interesting counterpoint and complement to Dave's pieces. He understands, more keenly and intimately than most, the past and present of the far-right authoritarians in our American midst. I'm looking ahead to the future -- both the short-term specifics of how we can curb the authoritarian impulse within people and cultures, and the longer-term generalities of why this is important for our collective survival.

As the Democrats rise from the dead, and as more Americans awaken to the true costs of our recent experiments with authoritarianism, I think it's a conversation that will take some interesting turns. Thanks to Dave for giving me a place on his porch to get that discussion started -- and to the rest of you for not giving me That Look.

The Republican tradition

Today's Dave Horsey cartoon in the Seattle P-I seems to be inspired by TRex's observations at FDL:



Of course it immediately brought to my mind a rather similar image, this time for real:



This was a billboard in Pittsburgh, Pa., back in 1949. (Charles "Teenie" Harris was the photographer.)

Ah, there's nothing like sticking with the tried and true, is there?

Playing the Rove card

If you're looking for a clear sign that Republicans are growing desperate about their chances for hanging onto control of the House, look no further than Washington's 8th District, where Democrat Darcy Burner has been turning up the heat, forging a three-point lead over Republican incumbent Dave Reichert in the latest polls.

So how does the GOP respond? Why, they send in the master of the dirty-trick campaign, Karl Rove.

Lynn Allen at Evergreen Politics has the details regarding Rove's career, just in time for for his visit here.

How soon after his visit here, you think, will we start seeing the nasty attack ads on Burner?

The countdown won't be weeks or even days. More like nanoseconds.

Tunnels and Bridges, Part IV: Landing Zones

by Sara Robinson

Inspiring people to take a look over the wall, then climb it, then brave the crossing is only the first half of the process. The second half is welcoming them and helping them find their feet here in the reality-based world.

Recent polls show that the rising chorus of strong progressive voices has already begun to intrigue disillusioned soon-to-be-former RWAs. When these people seek us out, and finally admit: "Yeah. I was sold a bill of goods. Now, tell me something I can believe," we should be ready to deliver the goods they need to integrate themselves into the reality-based world. This post offers some thoughts about what they're most likely to need, and how we can create landing zones that meet those needs effectively.

Culture Shock
For a while, they're going to be wobbly. In Cracks In The Wall II and III, we saw that people tend to join authoritarian groups to as a refuge from a world they find unmanageable on ther own; and they consider leaving when they start to acquire skills and discover unrealized inner strengths that restore confidence in their ability to manage. But these skills don't emerge overnight. We'll do best if we recognize and respect that the first year or two is a learning period, and deal with them gently while they're sorting out their new worldview.

Here are some of the issues we can expect to see among the newly-landed:

Information Hunger -- For many new arrivals, fresh information is the main antidote to the enforced ignorance of their old life. As they move away from an emotion-based worldview and toward a more evidence-based one, they may spend hours a day on the Web, change their TV habits from O'Reilly to Olbermann, and devour books that fill in knowledge gaps that are almost painful for them to acknowledge.

But raw data only goes so far. They also need to connect with live people who help them integrate this new information, show them the lay of the land, work through the implications of it, and make their new world friendly. The most urgent desire of my former fundie friends is simply having somebody understanding and non-judgmental to talk to while they process this avalanche of new data.

One of these friends, Karen, offers a caution: "Don't tell them it'll be easy or encourage them to chuck their past beliefs quickly. They're so used to being led, preached at, and dictated to, that reasoning and freethinking is all new - and liberating. They need to exercise that freedom little by little. (Some do plunge in all at once and come to their own conclusions quickly. But I think that's the exception, rather than the norm.)"

What our newest arrivals may need most is role models of how free-thinkers think -- how to approach the world in a way that is non-judgmental, how to put all this new information into a rational perspective, and relax and wrap the odd parts in humor rather than fretting about them. It's a skill that takes some learning -- but if they've come this far, they're already bent on mastering it.

A Craving for Community -- Careful readers of Muder will recall that new arrivals may bring with them very different expectations of family and community, which will also be under adjustment for a while. Former fundamentalists often mourn the hothouse intensity of their family and church ties -- even when they're simultaneously grateful not to be under the constant watchful eyes of all those intrusively "caring" people, and free of the manipulations used to keep them in line. On our side of the wall, that level of intimacy is harder to come by. What feels like an appropriate respect for other people's boundaries to us may feel fairly cold and uncaring to them, and it may take a while before they become accustomed to the more temperate social climate that prevails on our side of the wall.

Says my wise friend Karen, a lifelong fundamentalist who made the leap in her late 30s, "Make yourself available when they need to vent, cry, question, cower in fear and spew in anger. It's an extremely emotional process and one that is SO isolating. The person's traditional support group is no longer available for them and this may be the first time in their lives they are thinking for
themselves, so they need reinforcement."

Self-Respect and Self-Expression -- Emerging RWAs may have sublimated their own needs and desires to those of their leaders to the point that they may not know how to ask directly for things that they want and need. In fact, they may not even be aware of their own physical, emotional, or practical needs at all. This can make them easily frustrated and angry. Learning to consciously identify their own desires and express them honestly and appropriately may take some time, practice, and solid role models. This is especially true of those who grew up in authoritarian homes.

Boundary-Setting -- Authoritarian systems are, almost by definition, obsessively nosy attitude about their followers' personal lives. There's no detail so small or intimate (right down to your choice of underwear, breakfast, and sexual position) that the leaders won't attempt to make and enforce rules regarding it, and attempt surveillance to ensure the rules are followed. Right-wing authoritarian followers tend to be very submissive to these incursions -- the more intimate, the better, in fact -- and accept them as a sign that their leaders care.

Liberals, being liberals, have a much stronger respect for the place where one's personal life ends and the public sphere begins -- and thank no one to cross that line, or to try to tell them how to run their private business. They can handle that just fine on their own, thanks.

These different understandings may lead to culture clashes in the early phases. A newly-emerged leaver may make inquiries that they regard as simply pleasantly social, but we see as just plain nosy. They may respond to our misfortunes with a generosity that we find a bit unsettling; or, conversely, they may expect us to become involved with theirs to an extent that's frustrating to us and disappointing to them. It's best to remember that what's really happening here is a bit of cross-cultural miscommunication, and deal with it in that same multiculti spirit. It's something we're supposed to be good at.

Negotiation -- Authoritarian leaders do not negotiate with their followers. Leaders give commands; followers follow them. The farther down you fall on the Great Chain of Being, the less power you have to negotiate for your rights; and the harder the retribution will fall on you if you try. Which is why RWA women children, and low-status men may never learn to stand up and argue for their own interests at all.

Given this, it's not surprising that exiting RWAs are often frightened, puzzled, and astonished at the way reality-based folks negotiate with each other for things. The free and easy give-and-take we enjoy with our spouses, bosses, liberal clergy, civil authorities, and so on may be viewed as shockingly transgressive (confirming, perhaps, the belief that we're a bunch of unwashed hippies with no respect for authority or the rules of society). They can't imagine themselves having such egalitarian conversations with the authorities in their lives.

On their side of the wall, authority is to be feared and followed. Confronting it is always dangerous; better to shut up and deal rather than speak up and buy almost certain trouble. Defiance, if you dare, will almost always be covert and passive-aggressive. The kinds of conversations in which adults meet as moral equals to dispassionately consider and resolve a problem may very well be entirely outside of their life experience. It takes kind mentors, and a few positive experiences, to show them how it's done.

Reason Over Emotion -- One of the most important psychological traits that separates our side from theirs is that, while reality-based people tend to prefer arguments based on facts, evidence, and logic, RWA followers assess arguments on the basis of their emotional appeal. Facts just don't carry the same weight as the deeper sense of personal truth that they feel in their gut. (This is the origin of Stephen Colbert's "truthiness," which he defines as "something that isn't factually true, but feels true.") Politicians who give up on facts and speak to their emotional truth always do better with this group. Conversely, if you argue a point with them, you will likely hear an appeal that's long on passion and short on evidence -- because on their side of the wall, passion is what scores points and wins debates.

Here in the reality-based world, though, acquiring the ability to identify the real issue, separate it from the emotional content, line up the evidence, and argue calmly for it is one of the hardest lessons an ex-RWA will have to learn. For many of us, this lesson was learned in a series of examples -- meetings with enlightened authority that went extremely well, conflicts with friends or co-workers who were able to model rational resolution methods, and so on. The light goes on: there are other ways of resolving things besides avoidance, passive aggression, creating a dramatic scene (there's that love of passion again) or storming out in a huff. And the winner is not the one who can bring the most emotional persuasion to bear.

Tools for Troubled Times -- It seems likely that humans have an innate instinct to fall in behind their leaders in times of stress. (I'm expecting history to record this as the "9/11 effect," after the way Americans of all persuasions automatically lined up behind George Bush in the days following the tragedy.) From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. For a new arrival to the reality-based side of the wall, though, it's a habit that particularly hard to shake.

Among former fundies, we see people tend to return to the church in times of great personal or cultural stress. It's natural for any of us to reach into the old toolbox for the familiar coping strategies our families and churches taught us -- especially when you're overwhelmed, tired, lonely, or scared. Almost always, former fundies flirt with this for a few weeks or months before realizing that they really can't go home again. At that point, they get serious about investing in a new toolbox with better real-world coping tools that allow them to address their fears and problems more directly and effectively.

We need to expect that individual leavers will regress in times of stress, and accept this as a natural part of their process. At the same time, we do them a great service when we stick around and show them other ways of dealing with trouble.

Perhaps most important of all: we need to remain keenly aware of the human biological tendency to follow the leader during times of stress. If there should be another 9/11, the fate of the country may depend on how effectively the reality-based world can address people's fear responses, and provide them with strong models of firm, resolute calm.

Whose Job Is This?
A lot of us in the blogosphere are activists. We're eager to take the fight to the RWA leaders and their hard core, to face them down and push them to the fringes where they belong. It's an important and noble piece of the fight, and one that my friend Dave has covered with depth and thoughtfulness here and elsewhere through the years.

But the more subtle task of finding and courting would-be former RWA followers is at least as important in the long run. Without legions of the faithful supplying votes and money, the leaders quickly deflate to nothing. Going into this fall's elections, when vast numbers of Americans are reckoning with the consequences of their support for RWA leaders, we need to get good at talking to these people -- individually, in large groups, and fast.

Local groups play the front-line role here. Mainstream and liberal churches, unions and veterans' groups, parent and school groups, community and service groups, and other places where people share non-political common ground are logical landing zones for the newly-escaped. Local Democratic offices should also play a central role in this. (If you don't know where your nearest one is, find out and give them a call.)

Those of us who are active in these organizations should be keeping our eyes open for new arrivals, and have strategies in place for receiving them. We are performing a huge national service when we become enlightened witnesses to these new arrivals, and offer them safe havens where they can explore and validate their personal desires and needs, learn to draw boundaries and negotiate for them, grow in trust and skill, and learn to operate in the reality-based world.

Strategic efforts to find and engage those interested in change might focus on people in transitions -- young men and women just leaving home, newlyweds, new parents, moms at home, men and women in midlife , the lately divorced, immigrants, those who've lost their jobs, recent arrivals, those who've lost parents or spouses, the recently retired. These people are usually looking for new ways to engage with community. If we don't find a way to put their energies to work, our local fundie churches and right-wing groups very well might.

At the same time, we need to invest in restoring community, family, social, recreational, and personal support networks. It's benefited the authoritarians in our midst tremendously to have these gone. These things are essential social capital: their very existence increases the relative liberality of our culture. It's not going to be easy while we're working 60-hour weeks for falling dollars -- but these networks are valuable resources that make tough times more emotionally and financially survivable, as any oldtimer who remembers the Depression can tell you.

Finally, remember that what we're spreading here is memes -- which are, Dawkins' original formulation, a form of virus that propagates and spreads. My recovered fundie friends report that weeks, months, and years typically elapsed between the casual comment, the sudden observation, or the unignorable fact that sparked the very first doubt; and the moment they finally decided to head over the wall for good. Often, the person responsible was never aware that they'd done or said something that had changed that person's life forever.

You never know what little cognitive seed is going to take root in somebody's head and sprout like a weed long after you've gone. The ideas in this series are just a little pocketful of such germinators, to be sprinkled wherever we see someone starved for a bit of sustenance, and with a growing appetite for change. It will take time, persistence, and practice; but we will change the world only when we find ways to speak to the madness and persuade reason to answer us back.

Say hello to Sara

Many of you are probably wondering what's going on with my vacation fill-in, Sara Robinson, aka Mrs. Robinson, who's been busy much of the past month helping me out while I was off watching whales.

When I got back and had a chance to read through Sara's work -- which is still ongoing, since she's working at wrapping up her series on "Tunnels and Bridges" -- I was so impressed that I asked her if she was interested in making it a permanent arrangement of sorts. She readily agreed. (In the next day or so I'll put up a complete list of links to the series in the sidebar.)

I should add that the response I received from readers was overwhelmingly positive, in some cases powerfully so. The only really negative note came from an old friend and ally who, strangely, chose to radically misinterpret what she was saying; something, I suspect, that is likely to befall either of us.

I decided to do this, after nearly four years of running Orcinus as a purely solo blog, not so much to ease up my workload but to help fill out a lot of what I do write. Sara's background in technology and futurism complements much of what I do because, while I tend to focus on identifying problems and areas of concern, Sara actually thinks about what we can do about it. It's a good symbiosis, and brings to my mind the superb way that Digby and Tristero work off each other.

Sara has been a regular commenter here for some time and I've found that her insights have been so good that at times I've wanted to just post them. So, rather than do the work myself, I've basically enabled her to do it.

I think you've all seen too that Sara is a superb writer, and it's my expectation that the added practice here will only make her better.

Orcinus will continue to be what it has always been: A place where blog readers can go to get information and analysis, as well as some deeper insights, that you can't find anywhere else. Sara, I think, will just add to that depth.

Max Blumenthal Explains It All For You

by Sara Robinson

The Nation Online has posted Max Blumenthal's roundup of where we currently are with the "Path to 9/11" story. His summary of Our Story So Far makes it very clear that, while the show may have already aired, the fallout will be landing for quite some time to come yet. A few choice snippets:

ABC 9/11 Docudrama's Right-Wing Roots

On Friday, September 8, just forty-eight hours before ABC planned to air its so-called "docudrama," The Path to 9/11, Robert Iger, CEO of ABC's corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, was presented with incontrovertible evidence outlining the involvement of that film's screenwriter and director in a concerted right-wing effort to blame former President Bill Clinton for allowing the 9/11 attacks to take place. Iger told a source close to ABC that he was "deeply troubled" by the information and claimed he had no previous knowledge of the institutional right-wing ties of The Path to 9/11's creators. He reportedly said that he has commenced an internal investigation to verify the role of the film's creators in deliberately advancing disinformation through ABC.

...All week, ABC has withstood withering criticism for The Path to 9/11's imaginative screenwriting that depicts Clinton and members of his administration either ignoring threats from Al Qaeda or botching operations that could have eliminated terror-master Osama bin Laden. Iger conceded in a September 5 press release that key scenes in The Path to 9/11 were indeed fabricated, calling the film "a dramatization, not a documentary." Behind the scenes, Iger reportedly made personal assurances to some of the film's most prominent critics that those scenes would be edited out. But even though some deceptive footage was cut from the original, much of its falsified version of events leading up to 9/11 remains.

Iger now bears ultimate responsibility for authorizing the product of a well-honed propaganda operation--a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far-right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, a secretive evangelical religious right group long associated with Horowitz, founded by The Path to 9/11's director, David Cunningham, that aims to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision, has taken the lead.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC signed David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). According to Sara Diamond's book Spiritual Warfare, during the 1980's YWAM "sought to gain influence within the Republican party" while assisting authoritarian governments in South Africa and Central America. Cunningham, Diamond noted, was a follower of Christian Reconstructionism, an extreme current of evangelical theology that advocates using stealth political methods to put the United States under the control of Biblical law and jettison the Constitution. Cunningham instilled his radical ideology in young missionaries by sending them to "Discipleship Training School." A former student of Cunningham's school claimed "similarities between cult mind controlling techniques and the [Discipleship Training School] program instituted by YWAM."

(It should probably be noted here that YWAM shares its quarters in Garden Valley, TX with Ron Luce's Teen Mania group, which is famous for its hypermilitary "Battle Cry" rallies and "Acquire the Fire" workshops around the country. The Garden Valley ranch serves as a summer training camp for high-school-aged Teen Mania missionaries, who are farmed out around the world on short-term mission assignments. The Acquire The Evidence website has more.)

When the young Cunningham entered his father's ministry, he helped found an auxiliary group called The Film Institute (TFI). According to its mission statement, TFI is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry." Cunningham has placed over a dozen interns from Youth With A Mission's Discipleship Training School in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.

Last June, Cunningham's TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled Untitled History Project. "TFI's first project is a doozy," a newsletter to YWAM members read. "Simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!"

...The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series "under a shroud of secrecy" about the 9/11 attacks. "At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries 'Untitled Commission Report' and producers refer to it as the 'Untitled History Project,'" the Post noted.

Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named Cyrus Nowrasteh to write the script of his secretive Untitled film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious agendas, like Cunningham.

...Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood. His Hollywood nest centers around his Wednesday Morning Club, a weekly meet-and-greet session for Left Coast conservatives that has been graced with speeches by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens. The group's headquarters are at the offices of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a "think tank" bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugar daddies like billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (Scaife financed the Arkansas Project, a $2.3 million dirty tricks operation that included paying sources for negative stories about Bill Clinton that turned out to be false.)

In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, Horowitz led the right's campaign to pin the blame for attacks on Clinton. On February 19, 2002, Horowitz's organization mailed 1,500 lengthy pamphlets to major media outlets which claimed to expose how "the left" in general and Clinton in particular had "undermined America's security," thus causing 9/11. Two years later, Horowitz penned a lengthy manifesto for his FrontPageMag blaming Clinton once again for having "accepted defeat" in the fight against Al Qaeda. Horowitz singled out Clinton's National Security Council Director, Samuel "Sandy" Berger, as especially culpable for allowing the terror threat to fester, casting him as "a veteran of the Sixties 'anti-war' movement" who "abetted the Communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia."

This year, Horowitz's Hollywood hothouse finally spawned his most potent anti-Clinton propaganda device. With the LFF under Horowitz's control, his political machine began drumming up support for Cunningham and Nowrasteh's Untitled project, which finally was revealed last August as The Path to 9/11.

Like Iger, Horowitz has pleaded ignorance about the sectarian agenda of the film's creators. Responding to an article I wrote for the Huffington Post exposing Horowitz's involvement in The Path to 9/11 (on which this article is adapted), he claimed in a blog post, "In fact, I never heard of David Cunningham or his group before reading about them in Max's hilarious column."

However, Horowitz's public relations blitz on behalf of the film began at least a month ago with an August 16 interview with Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine In the interview, Nowrasteh described how The Path to 9/11 was filmed "under the very able direction of David L. Cunningham." (Doesn't Horowitz read his own magazine?)

....Although Iger and ABC trimmed as much as thirty minutes of deceptive footage from Sunday's episode of The Path to 9/11, it appeared nonetheless as a mostly faithful adaptation of Horowitz's anti-Clinton essay. Indeed, The Path to 9/11 still contained its most egregiously false scene, in which Sandy Berger refuses to authorize a CIA officer's request to capture bin Laden, who is completely surrounded by rival Northern Alliance soldiers. After the halted (and totally fictional) operation, "Kirk," the (completely imaginary) CIA op played by Donny Wahlberg of New Kids on the Block fame, stands on a hilltop beside the Northern Alliance's quixotic warlord, Ahmed Shah Massoud.

"Are there any men left in Washington?" the script has a frustrated Massoud asking "Kirk." "Or just cowards?"

"Cowards?" The question is quietly being raised in the corridors of ABC-TV's headquarters in Burbank, California. Besieged in his lush office, Iger privately agonizes that he was complacent about an attack on his network's reputation by a band of political terrorists. But when faced with his own version of the Taliban, he appeased them.

It's a testament to our growing power that Iger is being forced to reckon with his inattention -- and his decision to let Horowitz run a mini-"network within a network" at ABC. That reckoning is far from over. At the very least, I hope Max and the rest of us will keep digging until we get an answer to the $40 million question: Who ponied up the funds for this extravaganza -- and picked up the bill for six hours of prime-time advertising?

We will also need to keep the pressure on ABC until they evict Horowitz and his mouseketeers from the premises. (Iger's story should be a caution to corporate leaders everywhere: Don't ever put right-wing ideologues like Horowitz in charge of so much as the parking lot, unless you can afford the legal, financial, PR, and shareholder catastrophe that will inevitably follow.) Beyond that, we can now assume that YWAM moles are probably scattered in media companies from coast to coast. They may go underground for a while after this fiasco, but we almost certainly haven't heard the last of them.