Mark Follman is a senior editor at Mother Jones. He is a former editor of Salon, and a cofounder of MediaBugs. His reporting and commentary have also appeared in Salon, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Arrive, and PBS.org.
Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) and President Obama shared a hug as he entered the chamber of the House of Representatives to deliver the State of the Union address.Pete Marovich/Zuma
There was overwhelming bipartisan agreement on Tuesday night that Gabrielle Giffords' arrival for President Obama's State of the Union address was the most compelling moment of the evening. Watch the footage and there's simply no arguing with that—the Arizona congresswoman looked terrific. Her incredible comeback from a near-fatal shooting one year ago seems all the more remarkable each time she appears in public. (Not that she doesn't face challenges ahead; a video she released over the weekend, in which she announced that she's stepping down from her congressional seat to focus on her further recovery, is equally moving.) Her story is as potent a mix of painful and inspirational as there is, and you'd hope that it could stand as something of an antidote to the poisonous politics of the era.
Which is why some news out of Missouri on Tuesday was particularly stomach-churning: Just hours before Giffords made her way into the nation's Capitol, an unknown provocateur was stalking the halls of the Missouri Capitol, tagging the doors of lawmakers—most of them Democratic women—with images of rifle crosshairs. From the Columbia Daily Tribune:
Orange stickers with an image of rifle crosshairs were found Tuesday on the office doors of several Democratic state senators, prompting an investigation by Missouri Capitol Police, Senate Administrator Jim Howerton said. The stickers were on the doors of all four Democratic women in the Senate—Jolie Justus and Kiki Curls, both of Kansas City, and Maria Chapelle-Nadal and Robin Wright-Jones, both of St. Louis, Justus said. One similar sticker was found on the nameplate outside the door of state Rep. Scott Dieckhaus, R-Washington.
"If anyone thinks this was a prank, it is not a prank," Justus said after discussing the discovery of the stickers on the Senate floor. "You don't joke about someone's personal safety." A sticker also was found on the door of Sen. Victor Callahan, D-Kansas City and the Democrats' floor leader.
Sen. Chapelle-Nadal herself weighed in on Twitter and didn't mince words, emphasizing her disapproval with "#DisgracefulCowards." (Her tweets are "protected" but one was posted by St. Louis Activist Hub.)
It's an apt moment to recall that Giffords once criticized Sarah Palin for using a map that literally put political enemies in the crosshairs. "We need to realize that the rhetoric…for example, we're on Sarah Palin's 'targeted' list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we're in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC in spring 2010. "When people do that, they've gotta realize that there are consequences to that action."
We all know what followed.
Palin and other conservatives strongly rejected the notion that their imagery and rhetoric had anything to do with the bloodbath in Arizona a year ago. And no one can know what was truly in the deranged mind of Jared Loughner. But common sense says that when enough targeted political vitriol mixes with enough guns, bad things will eventually happen.
[NOTE: This post is being regularly updated with new developments, including reactions from US authorities, the Taliban, and the media. Scroll to the bottom for the latest.]
The Marine Corps is investigating a YouTube video posted early Wednesday that appears to show four Marines urinating on the heads of Afghans they'd just killed in a firefight. "Have a great day, buddy," one of the Marines can be heard saying on the footage.
The video was posted to YouTube by a user calling himself "semperfilonevoice," a play on the Corps' "Semper Fidelis" motto that suggests the poster might be a Marine with regrets about the warfighters' conduct. (The video, posted by London's Daily Telegraph and TMZ earlier today, is also reposted below. Warning: It contains graphic content.)
The poster of the video alleges that the urinators are members of Scout Sniper Team 4, an elite advance combat unit within the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based Third Battalion, Second Marines. Their identities remain unknown at this point, but the video does contain at least one clue suggesting that's plausible. One service member in the video can be seen holding an M40 rifle, which is typically issued to sniper teams, but not to regular line units. Elements of the 3/2 Marines have seen some fierce fighting in Afghanistan, including a deployment last year to the province of Now Zad—called "Apocalypse Now Zad" by some—in which seven American fighters lost their lives.
Attempts by Mother Jones to contact the poster of the video were unsuccessful; calls to the 2nd Marine Division—the 3/2's parent unit—and to the Pentagon seeking further information about the video were not immediately returned. But a Marine spokesperson told TMZ that the video would be "fully investigated." "While we have not yet verified the origin or authenticity of this video, the actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps," she said. It's also important to note that it remains unclear as to where and when the video footage was taken.
According to the Geneva Conventions, which the US military observes, combatants must "at all times, and particularly after an engagement...search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled." They are also required to "ensure that the dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged, that their graves are respected, grouped if possible according to the nationality of the deceased, properly maintained and marked so that they may always be found." (The UK's rules for its military members are even more explicit, threatening court-martial for any soldier for "maltreatment" of a dead enemy.)
Sentiments were divided among some YouTube commenters regarding the video. "You must be living under a rock, have you EVER seen the videos of the Taliban with dead body pieces," one defender of the alleged Marines wrote. "This video is nothing, ABSOLUTELY nothing compared to what they did to us Americans."
But one commenter, who identified himself as a veteran, was less willing to dismiss the behavior in the video: "Thanks fellas, you just pissed away everything me and my boys fought for."
UPDATE 1, Thursday, Jan. 12, 7:00 a.m. EST: The original video has been removed from YouTube by the user; thanks to MoJo reader Craig Boehman for providing the copy below.
UPDATE 2, Thursday, 10:00 a.m. EST: In a statement to the BBC, Pentagon spokesman and Navy Capt. John Kirby said: "We are deeply troubled by the video. Whoever it is, and whatever the circumstances—which we know is under investigation—it is egregious behaviour and unacceptable for a member of the military." The Marine Corps headquarters gave a similar message: "The actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps. This matter will be fully investigated.''
UPDATE 3, Thursday, 1:30 p.m. EST: A Taliban spokesman tells the Christian Science Monitor that the video makes no difference in the group's ongoing peace talks with the Western powers. "It's not a new thing that has happened. It's normal with the American forces and their allies. The foreign forces have always discriminated and abused human rights in Afghanistan," Qari Yousef Ahmadi told the news site. He added, however, "It's an act that makes a person feel ashamed to watch it or talk about it."
As media reactions to the video go, few so far are as powerful as this one from Hamilton Nolan of Gawker, titled "Piss on War: Death, Desecration, and Afghanistan." It must be read in its entirety, but here's a graphic excerpt:
Excerpt from "Piss on War": Courtesy Gawker
UPDATE 4, Thursday, 1:40 p.m. EST: A Marine Corps source speaking anonymously tells Reuters that the service has confirmed the video is authentic, and it's identified the unit shown in the tape. It's believed to be a contingent of the 3/2 Marines, which is consistent with the statements of the anonymous user who originally published the video to YouTube.
At a press conference, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed what she called the "deplorable behavior" in the video, adding that "the United States remains strongly committed to helping build a secure, peaceful, prosperous, democratic future for the people of Afghanistan":
UPDATE 5: Thursday, 4:00 p.m. EST: My colleague Adam Serwer flags a blog post from Islamophobe extraordinaire Pam Geller extolling the video. She writes: "I love these Marines. Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial." Surprisingly, there's more fascinating backstory here, and Adam's got it.
UPDATE 6: Thursday, 6:45 p.m. EST: Reuters reports that two of the four Marines seen in a video have been identified. Apparently the footage could be from last year: According to an unnamed Marine Corps official, the two men identified are still part of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, based out of Camp Lejeune, and their unit served in Afghanistan's Helmand province from March until September of 2011.
UPDATE 7: Thursday, 8:30 p.m. EST: Geller isn't the only right-winger to offer a repugnant response to the video. Radio host Dana Loesch—who is also employed by CNN, where she appears regularly as a political commentator—cheered the Marines' behavior and said, "I'd drop trou and do it too."
UPDATE 8: Friday, Jan. 13, 1 p.m. EST: Where do the GOP presidential hopefuls stand on the Marine video? There's no way of knowing, because not one has released a statement on it, and no reporter has yet pressed them for an opinion. Even though 2008 presidential nominee John McCain said the video "does great damage" and makes him "sad," and the commandant of the Marine Corps condemned it, and a Medal of Honor recipient said there was no excuse for it, and a bevy of Marines and other combat veterans past and present have said they're "universally disgusted by it and ashamed," there's been nary a word of condemnation—or even acknowledgement—from the GOP 2012 field. The candidates have long attacked President Obama's anti-terrorism and war strategies and made the case that they can keep America safer, but on this issue they're curiously silent. There are three more Republican debates between now and Tuesday, when voters in South Carolina select their preferred candidate; it remains to be seen whether the aspiring commanders-in-chief will address the Marines' behavior, and its implications for US foreign policy and a culture of respect, dignity, and the rule of law.
UPDATE 9: Friday, 2:10 p.m. EST: CNN pundit Dana Loesch has doubled down on her comments from yesterday. "I was using absurdity to highlight absurdity," she says, claiming that progressives have distorted her message and are attacking her unfairly. Decide for yourself what she meant—here's a more complete transcript of what she said on her radio show on Thursday:
Now we have a bunch of progressives that are talking smack about our military because there were marines caught urinating on corpses, Taliban corpses....Can someone explain to me if there's supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I'd drop trou and do it too. That's me though. I want a million cool points for these guys. Is that harsh to say? Come on people, this is a war. What do you think this is?
Loesch also said this morning that the "Left is attacking me so they can avoid calling this Obama's Abu Ghraib. It can't be Obama's fault like it was Bush's." It's long been known that the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were the result of policy designed and directed from inside the Bush White House. On what basis does Loesch equate the behavior of these four Marines? That's a question she's not answering.
Meanwhile, CNN—which has paid Loesch since last February to be part of the "Best Political Team on Television"—is distancing itself from the situation. Spokesperson Edie Emery said in a statement to Politico, "CNN contributors are commentators who express a wide range of viewpoints—on and off of CNN—that often provoke strong agreement or disagreement. Their viewpoints are their own."
UPDATE 10: Friday, 3:15 p.m. EST: The Marines have appointed a general to handle the investigation into the urination video and decide what disciplinary action should be taken against the service members who appeared in or distributed the video, Stars and Stripes reports. Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser's investigation will be in addition to a criminal probe already set up by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Additionally, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan announced the military will run mandatory training for all troops on how to handle casualties. "I require all [NATO] personnel to treat all coalition, Afghan National Security Forces, civilians and insurgent dead with the appropriate dignity and respect," the commander, Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, said Friday.
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) wrote an email, published by the Weekly Standard, castigating critics of the Marines shown in the video. "All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?" He conceded that the Marines should be punished administratively, the lowest level of discipline permitted under military law, and added, "As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell." West, an Iraq vet who resigned from the Army after "menacing" and allegedly "mock executing" an Iraq police officer during an interrogation, is a tea party GOP freshman who's gained notoriety for uncivil and Islamphobic statements in the past.
By contrast, TIME magazine's Nate Rawlings, who also served two tours in Iraq as an Army combat officer, writes that while killing is a part of the job, it is "not a sport or a game." "You can't teach someone how to be human," he writes, but "you can lead and inspire and teach and cajole and most importantly supervise young troops. That’s the way to prevent these things from happening again."
UPDATE 11: Sunday, 1:30 p.m. EST: A Republican presidential candidate has finally weighed in on the video controversy—expressing outrage at an alleged anti-military bias in the US government, rather than at the Marine "kids" shown urinating on corpses in the video. "These kids made a mistake, there's no doubt about it," Rick Perry told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday morning (video below). "But to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top." Perry also suggested that Patton and Churchill had engaged in similar behavior in their times. "Obviously, 18, 19-year-olds make stupid mistakes all too often," Perry said. "What's really disturbing to me is just, kind of, the over-the-top-rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military." As previous updates show, the Marines, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the three-star Army general in charge of Western forces in Afghanistan all took clear stances against the video and initiated the criminal investigations. It's unclear whether Perry meant to argue that these military institutions, too, were showing "disdain for the military."
UPDATE 12: Sunday, 3:30 p.m. EST: Animal activists are using the Marine video furor to draw attention to another video, uploaded anonymously to the internet last November, that appears to show US Army soldiers beating a sheep to unconsciousness (and possibly death) by repeated blows to the head with an aluminum baseball bat. (Warning: The video is graphic and disturbing.) Several of the soldiers can be heard laughing as the sheep attempts to stand up and is hit, again and again.
PETA President Ingrid Newkirk discussed the video on Huffington Post Friday. "PETA did what it always does when someone blows the whistle on these incidents of gratuitous cruelty: We wrote to Secretary of the Army John McHugh [PDF] and then, when no answer was forthcoming, to other high-ranking officers," she wrote. "No one—not PETA and not the thousands of people who have seen this video and are rightly disturbed by it—has received any acknowledgment, not even a single comforting word, that an investigation has been started."
By now you've heard about politicians denouncing the anti-Wall Street uprising, from Eric "Beware the mob" Cantor to Herman "Get a job!" Cain. The hostility from the political right is hardly a surprise. But in recent days things have taken a curious turn among the right-wing commentariat, with a fixation on feces, urine, drugs, and sex. For these folks Occupy Wall Street isn't so much about an economic crisis or even class warfare—it's crass warfare, with "Revenge of the Dirty Hippies" invading a city near you!
Read on for the best of the worst, gathered up using Storify.
Earlier this week I wrote about a piece published on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com that relies so heavily on flawed assertions about a new global-warming study that it's ripe for a retraction. Not only did the piece wrongly attribute an author to the new study, published in Nature in late August, but it also recycled an old quote from that person to promote its claim that the study definitively refuted human-caused climate change. (The study, as I explained in detail, did nothing of the sort.)
Multiple attempts the prior week to reach Breitbart and the writer of the piece, Chriss W. Street, about the erroneous contents had failed to get their attention. But apparently my story (and subsequent posts in The New York Times, Salon and Media Matters) did: An editor's note appeared on the Big Government piece later the same day. Unfortunately, it's more of a wreck than it is rectifying. Breitbart.com's "in-house counsel" Joel Pollak says in the note:
Earlier today, Mother Jones...accused Andrew Breitbart of a "global warming blunder" because the piece below cited Jykri Kauppinen as an author of a Nature study on cosmic rays. The author of the piece, Chriss W. Street, has indicated that Kauppinen is the author of a separate submission to Nature in 2010 that also contests the UN Climate Panel's "consensus" view on the degree to which human activity contributes to global climate change. Street stands by his argument, regardless of the minor citation error that Breitbart's habitual critics on the left have attempted to magnify.
Why Street failed to "indicate" in his piece the true orgin of Kauppinen's comments, and why he passed them off as a conclusion of the study just published in Nature, Pollak doesn't say. Nor does Pollak explain why the piece continues to state, erroneously, that Kauppinen is one of the new study's authors. (Chalk it up, perhaps, to the stuff of "minor citation.") As for Big Government's blatantly wrong claim that the new studydebunks overwhelming scientific consensus on humanity's role in climate change, it seems that one was, well, simply too hot for them to touch.
On September 6, an article on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site announced that the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change had been debunked once and for all. Nature, "the world's most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth's atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man," the article said. "One of the report's authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: 'I think it is such a blatant falsification.'"
The article, written by "nationally recognized financial writer" Chriss W. Street, then revisited the smear campaign known as "Climategate" (which had implicated Nature) and asserted that the study was "a tectonic rejection by academia" of international efforts to combat climate change.
There was one little problem with the Big Government piece, though. Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, supplier of the "blatant falsification" comment, was not one of the study's 63 authors. And it turns out that the article's breathless summary of what the study shows is (shockingly!) flat-out wrong.Doh! Al Gore's crowning achievement zapped by cosmic rays. Screen shot: BigGovernment.com
The quote from the non-author caught the attention of New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin, who submitted an error report about it at MediaBugs, a nonpartisan site that helps get errors in the news media corrected. (Disclosure: I'm one of the site's creators.) MediaBugs then alerted Breitbart to the mistake using Big Government's online feedback form, and also sought a response from him multipletimeson Twitter. Breitbart has not responded and has ignored the mistake. (I also emailed Street for a response, to no avail.)
Breitbart's silence may seem unsurprising. Then again, accurate reporting is something that the right-wing media gadlfy has claimed to care a lot about lately. When the Huffington Postwrongly accused Breitbart of doctoring a video related to the debt-ceiling battle in August, he threatened war via Twitter, and then celebrated when HuffPo issued a retraction and apology. After publishing lewd photos that brought down Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) back in June, Breitbart elbowed his way to the front of a major press conference seeking vindication for his work. He boasted to the New York Times that political conservatives bring him scoops to publish because "They know I'm willing to march through the fire with them."
But apparently he's not really sweating his site's global warming blunder. The dramatic opening of the Big Government piece simply plopped in a quote from Kauppinen—one that appears to have come from a Finnish newspaper article from more than a year earlier. Trumpeting the quote as a conclusion of the study helped inject the fundamentally flawed piece into the digital media stream.
The study in Nature actually shows no conclusive link between cosmic rays and climate change. As RealClimate's Gavin Schmidt noted in late August when the paper came out, "It is eminently predictable that the published results will be wildly misconstrued by the contrarian blogosphere as actually proving this link. However, that would be quite wrong." Schmidt, a climate modeller at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, then explained in detail why anyone arguing that the study definitively satisfied the criteria necessary to prove that link "will be going way out on a limb."
According to Revkin, the Big Government piece is a classic example of what could be called "single-study syndrome," which tends to turn up whenever a political agenda is threatened or supported by a specific line of scientific inquiry. "Some new finding, however tentative, gets highlighted while the broader suite of research on a tough subject is downplayed or ignored," Revkin told me in an email. "And few questions are tougher than clarifying the role of clouds in climate change." The appetite for headline-grabbing conclusions, he said, gives rise to fast-and-loose science coverage that torques public discourse until it's mainly hyperbole.
But Breitbart seems to have been yearning for credibility lately. A friendly profile of him in the New York Times suggested that he stands out among conservative media personalities because of his accessibility. "He gives out his cellphone number in speeches and passes along his personal e-mail address to almost anyone who asks," the Times piece gushed. "If you write him, chances are you will hear back."
A US Army soldier and his dog jump off a helicopter ramp during water training in March 2011.
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be still scratching your head about the end of Osama bin Laden. Between the Obama administration and major media reports, there have been multiple divergent accounts of the Navy SEALs' mission in Abbottabad, Pakistan, with the story seeming to be colored by politics, sensationalism, and outright fantasy. In some respects that's unsurprising for one of the most important and highly classified military missions in modern memory‚ the outcome of which, many would argue, is all that really matters. But precisely because of its importance, it is worth considering how the tales have been told, and where history begins to bleed into mythology.
Lots of praiseflowed in early August for Nicholas Schmidle's riveting story in TheNew Yorker of the SEALs' raid on bin Laden's compound. It added many vivid details to what was publicly known about the death of America's arch-nemesis in early May. But Schmidle's exquisitely crafted reconstruction also contradicted previous reporting elsewhere and sparked some intriguing questions of its own.
It underscored what we still don't really know about the operation. Schmidle's depiction of the tense scene in the White House situation room, as President Obama and his top advisers monitored the action with the help of a military drone, included a notable refutation. The SEALs converged at the ground floor of bin Laden's house and began to enter, Schmidle reported, but:
What happened next is not precisely clear. "I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on," [CIA chief Leon] Panetta said later, on PBS NewsHour. Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone's video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS.
Still depicting helmet cameras worn by the SEALS from CBS News' digital reconstruction of the raid. Screenshot: CBS NewsThe contradiction has big implications. Martin's own story was in part a response to the famously mutating account from the Obama White House in the days following the mission. The administration had attributed its multiple revisions to "the fog of war" after backtracking from claims that bin Laden had engaged the SEALs in a firefight and used his wife as a human shield. Martin's piece stated he was putting forth "a new picture of what really happened" in Abbottabad; he reported that "the 40 minutes it took to kill bin Laden and scoop his archives into garbage bags were all recorded by tiny helmet cameras worn by each of the 25 SEALs. Officials reviewing those videos are still reconstructing a more accurate version of what happened."
Such footage obviously could go a long way toward a precise account. According to Schmidle's New Yorker piece, though, it doesn't exist.
There are other glaring discrepancies between The New Yorker and CBS reports concerning the climax of the raid. In Schmidle's version, the encounter involved two of bin Laden's wives, and one SEAL firing the kill shots:
The Americans hurried toward the bedroom door. The first SEAL pushed it open. Two of bin Laden's wives had placed themselves in front of him. Amal al-Fatah, bin Laden's fifth wife, was screaming in Arabic. She motioned as if she were going to charge; the SEAL lowered his sights and shot her once, in the calf. Fearing that one or both women were wearing suicide jackets, he stepped forward, wrapped them in a bear hug, and drove them aside…
A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden's chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed.…Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden's life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye.
But in Martin's version, the encounter involved bin Laden's "daughters" as well as one of his wives—and not one, but two SEALs firing the kill shots:
The SEALs first saw bin Laden when he came out on the third floor landing. They fired, but missed. He retreated to his bedroom, and the first SEAL through the door grabbed bin Laden's daughters and pulled them aside.
When the second SEAL entered, bin Laden's wife rushed forward at him—or perhaps was pushed by bin Laden. The SEAL shoved her aside and shot bin Laden in the chest. A third seal shot him in the head.
Then there is the question of how many SEALs were in on the raid: Martin reported that 25 of them stormed the compound. Schmidle reported that 23 did (along with a Pakistani American translator and a now legendary Belgian Malinois.)
What's going on here? Martin's piece was broadcast nearly two weeks after the raid; presumably the US government had its story straight by then. (The Guardian's roundup of White House revisions linked above was published on May 4.) Martin provided scant information in the piece about his sourcing. If it has turned out to contain inaccuracies, to date CBS News has given no indication.
It is also possible that Schmidle's piece contains inaccuracies, though it is more deeply reported and goes further in describing its sources. They include Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, and perhaps most significantly, "a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid."
Still, Schmidle wasn't able to interview any of the Navy SEALs directly involved in the mission, although his piece gave the impression he had. Instead, Schmidle told the Washington Post's Paul Farhi, he relied on the accounts of others who had debriefed the men. "None of them had any previous knowledge of the house's floor plan," Schmidle wrote conspicuously in his New Yorker piece, "and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections—on which this account is based—may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute."
Other reports deepen the confusion. The consensus became that bin Laden was unarmed when the SEALs shot him, but who else was in the room? An early May broadcast from NBC News matches neither CBS nor The New Yorker on that count. "As the SEALs stormed up the stairs two young girls ran from the room," NBC reported. "One SEAL scooped up the girls and carried them out of harm's way. The two other SEALs rushed the bedroom door." In this version only one of bin Laden's wives was in the third-floor room where he was killed. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported the prior day that one of bin Laden's sons was also there: "The son was shot dead in that room, too." (NBC and others reported the son was killed on the second floor.) According to the AP report, bin Laden acted aggressively when confronted: He had "appeared to be lunging for a weapon." According to a Fox News report, bin Laden had acted "scared" and "completely confused" and in a "cowardly manner."
Whether any footage of the raid would ever see the light of day is one matter. (There are obvious reasons why it would be kept secret.) But whether it exists at all is significant.
In a recent email exchange regarding the helmet-cam issue, Schmidle would only reply off the record to my questions about his certitude and sourcing. Last week I reached an executive at CBS News by phone; the executive was dismissive and would only speak off the record, even then providing no useful information and refusing to put me in touch with Martin or his producers.
From fraught US-Pakistan relations to conspiracy theories to partisan politics, it's an understatement to say that there is keen interest in knowing exactly how the killing of bin Laden went down. Faulty reporting may be to blame for standing in the way. Alternatively, the mind doesn't require much bending to imagine why military, CIA, or White House officials might have been happy at various turns to help muddle the story. A certain degree of imprecision or misdirection can serve the side of secrecy. Perhaps at a time when the White House declined, amid much clamor, to release photos of bin Laden's corpse, it was useful to let the world know that it also had video footage of the whole operation. Perhaps at a later point it was useful to quash the idea that the US government had raw footage with which it might address questions about the circumstances and legality of bin Laden's killing.
Whatever the case, one of two stories from major American media sources is flat-out wrong on a significant piece of information about the raid, and there is much conflicting information about other details as well. It may be that a precise account of the historic mission will elude us for a long time, just as its target so famously did.
Guest blogger Mark Follman writes frequently about current affairs and culture at markfollman.com.
For many years Vancouver has had a serious heroin addiction. So it's heartening to see that one of the city's boldest strategies for confronting the problem, launched eight years ago, is continuing to meet with serious success: Vancouver's government-backed "supervised injection site"—the first of its kind in North America—has helped reduce the number of fatal drug overdoses in the city by 35 percent, according to a new scientific report detailed in the Vancouver Sun.
The news is gratifying for me personally, having invested deeply in the issue with a reporting project I did for Salon beginning in 2003. (My initial story from Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside—a neighborhood much changed these days, particularly since the 2010 Winter Games—is linked above.) Reporting another piece in 2006, one of the most striking things I found was that early results from Insite, as it's called, had already converted some hardcore conservatives. Then city councilor George Chow—who had campaigned vigorously against the injection site when running for office—told me in fall 2006 that conservatives' ideological fears had been misguided. They had declared that a government-sponsored facility for helping drug users shoot up would only breed more chaos.
Guest blogger Mark Follman writes frequently about current affairs and culture at markfollman.com.
A report from the Washington Post on Wednesday describes an effort by the CIA to assess the impact of WikiLeaks on US national security. The effort is known as the WikiLeaks Task Force. Apparently it's also commonly referred to as 'WTF' around the halls in Langley. While that acronym may be cracking some sardonic grins, the Post story also reveals a CIA perspective that is no laughing matter.
To some agency veterans, WikiLeaks has vindicated the CIA's long-standing aversion to sharing secrets with other government agencies, a posture that came under sharp criticism after it was identified as a factor that contributed to the nation's failure to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Even while moving to share more information over the past decade, the agency 'has not capitulated to this business of making everything available to outsiders,' said a former high-ranking CIA official who recently retired. 'They don't even make everything available to insiders. And by and large the system has worked.'
Without a doubt the sharing of sensitive information among US agencies remains a complex and unwieldy issue—perhaps as complex and unwieldy as the US national security apparatus itself since it ballooned under George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. But while a strong majority of Americans believe that WikiLeaks has harmed the national interest, it could be dangerously foolish to buy into a resurgent lockdown mentality.
In his indispensable 2006 book 'The Looming Tower,' journalist Lawrence Wright investigated the devastating effect of turf battles among the CIA, FBI and NSA prior to the 9/11 attacks. Wright's book, as I detailed in an essay for Salon, made a persuasive case that the 9/11 plot may well have been foiled if not for fatal duplicity on the part of the CIA, which jealously guarded its intelligence gathering from the criminal-investigation focused FBI. A crucial opportunity apparently came and went in late 2000:
In Yemen, [FBI agent] Soufan was on the trail of an al-Qaida figure closely connected with Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khaled al-Mihdhar, two Saudi-born al-Qaida operatives who would later help seize planes on 9/11. The CIA had surveillance photos of all three men together from an al-Qaida summit in Malaysia the previous January, but when Soufan came knocking for information, the CIA slammed the door shut. It was part of what Wright calls 'a bizarre trend in the US government to hide information from the people who most needed it.'
As I noted in my piece about WikiLeaks and cyber warfare earlier this month, some US officials have been warning anew about the dangers of inter-agency turf battles. Former national intelligence director Dennis C. Blair recently told Congress, 'This infuriating business about who's in charge and who gets to call the shots is just making us muscle-bound.'
What happens when the next 9/11 is in the works? The real imperative, it seems, is for the US government to better protect any necessary secrets (the definition of which is another key subject—see Thomas Blanton on 'the massive overclassification' of US national security information) while improving upon the sharing of vital information among agencies. If it fails in that mission, the fallout could ultimately be far greater than anything perpetrated by the likes of Julian Assange and company.
Guest blogger Mark Follman writes frequently about current affairs and culture at markfollman.com.
When the "Afghan war logs" became public earlier this year, I focused on WikiLeaks from the standpoint of its huge impact on the media. The ongoing release of a quarter million State Department cables has since unleashed a torrent of hot debate about government secrecy and whether Julian Assange's organization is a force for good or evil.
Like many others, I've marinated myself in related articles and commentary over the last week but remain ambivalent about some of the complex moral issues involved. I've also been pondering a question that seems noticeably absent from the discussion: Could it be that WikiLeaks is actually the best thing in a long time to afflict US national security?
The cacophonous phenomenon on the world's front pages has been a grand wake-up call—the rise of cyberwar is no longer a matter of theory. It's here whether you believe Assange is an enemy or a hero. If it proves true that a low-level Army analyst was able to get his hands on such a colossal amount of sensitive documents, what does that say about Pentagon preparedness for the security challenges of the proliferating information age?
"My parents, with admirable foresight, had their first child while they were on fellowships in the United States. My mother was in public health, and my father in a library-science program. Having an American baby was, my mother once said, like putting money in the bank."
So begins Daniel Alarcón's recent New Yorker story "Second Lives," whose narrator is a Latin American man with a potent longing for a First World life. His dream has eluded him; he realizes he is doomed to a "terminal condition" of Third World citizenship, despite that his older brother—the one lucky to be born on US soil—had seized the opportunity to emigrate many years prior.
Alarcón is a writer I've long admired, in part for how he weaves complex cultural politics into quietly powerful narratives. (His luminous story collection War by Candlelight is a must-read.) "Second Lives" arrived with uncanny timing in this politically boiling August. At face value, its opening easily could be another rallying cry for the political far right, members of which have been stirring up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hysteria from California to Texas to lower Manhattan.
Even by today's standard of partisan politics, the hot wave of demagoguery hitting the country feels off the charts. Take the fear mongering of Louie Gohmert, the Texas congressman pushing the "terror babies" conspiracy on national television: Shadowy foreigners are plotting to give birth in the US, only to take their tots overseas, train them as terrorists and send them back decades later, courtesy of the 14th Amendment, to wreak havoc inside the country.
That this theory is plainly ridiculous, and has been debunked by FBI and US Customs officials, is beside the point. As Ruben Navarrette Jr. wrote from Phoenix, this is political opportunism of a very scary kind.
You might say that Gohmert is just small potatoes. But what about more influential Republicans eager this election season to foment an anti-Islam crusade? The tactics aimed at the so-called "Ground Zero mosque"—which in name is pure invention—are no less craven. Newt Gingrich put a Hitlerian stamp on the proposed Muslim center: "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington," he said by way of egregious comparison on Fox News. No doubt Gingrich is pleased to be in lockstep with the cowardly Anti-Defamation League; he could scarcely do more to exploit fearful support from Jews than to evoke the Holocaust.
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