One thing that’s been true since I’ve been paying attention is that everything The Left does is wrong. By The Left I mean everyone to the left of the basic governing power. Third Parties are bad, sitting out elections are bad, putting pressure on elected reps is bad, protesting is bad, primary campaigns are bad, media criticism might hurt their feefees and is bad, saying mean things about Rush Limbaugh is bad, actually discussing your views honestly is bad, etc. Obviously the failure of The Left to take control and run the country does suggest that it is doing something wrong, but no one ever really offers much constructive advice other than…please STFU.

I just signed this petition to help push Congress to carry out its 2006 mandate to end the occupation in Iraq. It’s clear that our leaders, journalists, and so-called experts in DC aren’t going to do anything about this war unless they hear massive public outrage.

It’s our duty as citizens to express our anger at their open flouting of our will. Please join me by signing this petition:

http://action.openleft.com/page/petition/dc/pqk

At first the evidence was scattered and anecdotal. But now it’s pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration’s takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access to report the story.

First, there were the FEMA orders barring members of the press from photographing anything to do with the recovery of the bodies of the dead.

Perhaps there could be guidelines about photographs which in any way clearly identified the deceased. No one wants to get first confirmation of the death of a loved one by seeing their body on the nightly news. But a blanket ban serves only to prevent the public from knowing what really happened last week. And the right of FEMA or any branch of the federal government for that matter to issue such a ban on American soil seems highly dubious to me. It’s one thing with military casualties: the military operates under its own legal code and not under normal civilian rules. But this is happening on American soil. This isn’t a war zone. Nor is it any longer a situation where police or National Guard troops are in the midst of retaking control from mobs or looters. This is a recovery from a natural disaster.

Now comes this post from Brian Williams, which suggests a general effort to bar reporters from access to many of the key points in the city.

Take a moment to note what’s happening here: these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn’t get key aid on the scene in time last week is coming in in force now. And one of the key missions appears to be cutting off public information about what’s happening in the city.

This is a domestic, natural disaster. Absent specific cases where members of the press would interfere or get in the way of some particular clean up operation, or perhaps demolition work, there is simply no reason why credentialed members of the press should not be able to cover everything that is happening in that city.

Think about it.

First, here’s a great piece of writing from Cherie Priest called Disjointed thoughts on the socio-economics of disaster:

Look at the reporters who are “incensed” by the rampant looting. Look at the smugness from those distant from the situation who chastise the dumb southerners for not evacuating when they had the chance. It blows their minds how many idiots stayed to wait it out. It makes them shake their heads and make “tsk-tsk” noises into their shiny microphones.

Well, fuck the lot of them.

New Orleans and Biloxi are not rich cities. They are poor southern cities disproportionately filled with poor southern people — people who may not have reliable transportation, people who live hand-to-mouth, people who have no where else to go, even if they had the means to get there.

And the evacuation was little more than a vague order to get the hell out — under your own power and at your own expense. If you have, at your immediate disposal, reliable transportation, money for gas, and either distant family OR money for shelter, then this isn’t a big deal. Of course you leave. You pack up everything you can and you head for higher ground. But it is somewhat less easy to do if you are lacking any one of these things, AND you have been informed that what little earthly lot you may claim is about to be destroyed. Do you hang on and try to save what you can? Do you let it go and return to less than nothing?

What the hell do you do?

Ned Sublette comments:

The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number — 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn’t leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in new orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn’t be able to get out. The resources — meaning, the political will — weren’t there to get them out.

Amanda at Pandagon looks at the media’s motives:

I have an eerie feeling that the media is already spinning the horrific loss of life to Katrina into a story that is focused primarily on victim-blaming in order to distract from the massive failure to evacuate the city properly that is caused directly by inhumane BushCo policies.

….

One way or another, the discussion is going to come around to whether or not the absence of the National Guard in Louisiana and just general unwillingness to provide for what should seem inevitable–that New Orleans is in a prime position to get destroyed by a hurricane. And that’s not really a path the media wants to go down, as it’s all wonky and not kiss-assy enough for the modern major media.

So how to distract? Blame the victims.

Steve Gilliard, who’s got a hella ear for racist dog whistles, lays it on the line–racist coverage like this is laying the groundwork for excusing away the fact that the dead are almost surely going to be disproportionately black because the poor are disproportionately black and because the poor are going to be the people who couldn’t escape the city as easily. Atrios posted on the two nearly identical pictures of people taking things they need from flooded stores where the white people were described as “finding” and the black man as “looting”. Directly before that, he rightly complained about the media whining about looters.

Taken altogether, this is what I fear will happen: The victims of the flood will be portrayed via racist stereotypes as criminals and idiots. This will predispose the audience to disliking them. Then, after everything settles down, a few right wingers will start implying that the dead brought their own fate on themselves by being too stupid and/or criminal to evacuate. This focus will distract the pundits from discussing the real issue at hand, which is why the fuck we didn’t have the resources on hand to evacuate a city that has Hurricane Target written all over it. Before you know it, it’ll be a wingnut bonaza of people both gleefully indulging in the most racist tendencies while simultaneously claiming that the only reason one might end up dead in a hurricane is because one doesn’t have “personal responsibility”. But my guess is that the people who are dead mostly didn’t have transportation out of the city. Watch the media bury the truth of what happened so fast it’ll make your head spin.

[via Sarah and Atrios, respectively]

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades.

The full story of this atomic cover-up is told fully for the first time this week at E&P Online, as the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings approaches on Saturday. Some of the long-suppressed footage will be aired on cable television Saturday night.

Six weeks ago, E&P broke the story that articles written by famed Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki were finally published, in Japan, almost six decades after they had been spiked by U.S. officials. This drew national attention, but suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world.

There’s also an excellent piece on TPMCafe that takes to task the idea that Valerie Plame was somehow not really a covert CIA operative.

With Senate debate on two of President Bush’s most controversial judicial nominees beginning May 18, the heated rhetoric over the so-called “nuclear option” to ban Senate filibusters on judicial nominations has reached its boiling point. The rules of the Senate thus far remain intact, but filibuster opponents have pulled all rhetorical stops, advancing numerous falsehoods and distortions, and, as Media Matters for America documents below, the media have too often perpetuated that misinformation by unskeptically, and sometimes even deliberately, repeating it.

Once again the Republicans have chosen to use half-truths and outright lies, because, as has been the case with so much of their agenda over recent years, if they tell the public the truth they’ll get nowhere. Why does the mainstream media keep letting them get away with it?

The report in Newsweek that the US military desecrated the Koran as part of an attempt to break the Muslim prisoners there with humiliation techniques has provoked demonstrations, angry sermons, riots, and over a dozen deaths in Afghanistan, with demonstrations also in Gaza, Pakistan, Indonesia, and now Yemen. Both the chief Sunni Muslim cleric in Lebanon and its Shiite Grand Ayatollah, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah have now condemned it. The former threatened jihad or holy war. The latter said, “The desecration of the holy Koran in the terrifying Guantanamo detention center that America created under the title of fighting terrorism against the Muslims who have been arbitrarily rounded up there, is one of the American methods of torture . . . This is not an isolated act carried out by an American soldier but is part of an American program…of contempt for Islam, to disfigure its image in the minds of American.” Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, the rector of al-Azhar seminary and the chief Sunni authority in Egypt, called the desecration of the Koran “a great crime.” But he dismissed it as the work of “a bunch of kids, criminals . . .”

Then the anonymous source for that part of the story had a change of heart. The Bush administration was quick to demand a retraction of the story, and to blame Newsweek for both the deaths that occurred in the rioting and besmirching the United States’ image abroad.

What’s going on here?

But if stuff like the Newsweek version of a now two-year old tale about toilets and Qu�rans is enough to set off rioting in the streets of countries whose nationals were not even the supposed recipients of the �abuse�, then weren�t those members of the military or the government with whom Newsweek vetted the plausibility of its item, honor-bound to say �you can�t print this�?

Or would somebody rather play politics with this? The way Craig Crawford reconstructed it, this one went similarly to the way the Killian Memos story evolved at the White House. The news organization turns to the administration for a denial. The administration says nothing. The news organization runs the story. The administration jumps on the necks of the news organization with both feet – or has its proxies do it for them.

Newsweek has since retracted the story entirely, but this was hardly the first time that stories about the Koran being used as part of the U.S. interrogation tactics had appeared in the press. Why was the White House acting like this particular article was actually the reason for the riots, when there were plenty of other reasons [Salon day pass required]?

While the Newsweek error provided another flash point, it’s absurd to insinuate that anti-American violence from Kabul to Baghdad isn’t about a much larger fallout from U.S. war policies over the last three-plus years. Which is why it’s so appalling to watch the White House get up on its soap box as a matter of political convenience now

The real motive behind the White House’s actions is that they saw an opportunity to once again blame the media for their problems. I’ll let the ever-eloquent Arthur Silber explain the dangers of that.

The speed and the depth of Newsweek�s climbdown on this story is deeply disheartening. And it shows that there is a danger that is perhaps even greater than the profound danger that outright censorship represents: self-censorship by the media, on every story of importance and across the board. In fact, it is this kind of self-censorship that we have been seeing during most of the Bush administration�s time in office: a reluctance to question authority too much, and beyond a certain point. Outright censorship is a clearer danger: in such circumstances, everyone knows that �news� is officially dictated, and they realize they need to find the truth via other outlets. But self-censorship allows people to believe that they are getting the full story: after all, no one is making the media report these stories, so they must be true, right? But of course, that isn�t right�but the illusion is a deeply damaging one. If people think they�re getting the truth from major news outlets, they have no incentive to look elsewhere�and the full truth will forever escape them. In that sense, a self-emasculated press is more insidious a danger than a press in chains which everyone can see.

What is most striking to me about the Newsweek controversy, and what I find inexpressibly depressing, is the overpowering air of unreality about it. Another part of the subtext to the orchestrated Newsweek outrage is the notion that it is inconceivable that America could ever do anything that is less than admirable, that we are always on the side of good, and that our motives are always noble and heroic. Such fables might be comforting to children (although children are often the first to see through this kind of subterfuge), but they are singularly inadvisable for adults living in this world. Many Americans, and almost all the warhawks, seem to find it impossible to believe that any American might be guilty of racial prejudice, or that racial and/or religious animus might play any role in the behavior of our troops. Yet one need only consult an article like Bob Herbert�s about Aidan Delgado to see how far from the truth such a belief is. And there are and have been many similar stories. I am certainly not saying that the kinds of ignorant and hateful attitudes that Delgado describes are true of most, or even many, of our troops. But I also do not think those kinds of attitudes are that unusual, as Delgado makes clear.

While Newsweek may have made an error in judgement in their reporting of the original story, they made a much bigger mistake when they gave into pressure and retracted the story entirely. The job of the so-called fourth estate is to hold the high and mighty accountable for their actions, not to bow and scrape every time they make those in power uncomfortable. I highly recommend taking the time to read the articles from which I’ve quoted, so you can get a better idea of what’s really going with this whole Newsweek debacle, and of how the Bushites have once again managed to avoid taking responsibility for their actions by blaming the messenger.