Brooks’ columns invariably remind me of Roy Edroso’s recurrent line about Jonah Goldberg, which I am paraphrasing from memory and probably mangling: this is the stupidest thing he has ever written, until the next thing he writes. Still, this morning’s was a real contender.
The most idiotic campaign punditry in recent days has been the assertion that the Iraq war as an issue is so over. Like, so last summer. It reached a climax today, Tuesday, with David Brooks’ column in The New York Times declaring that we are now in the “postwar” period. Brooks calls this suddenly “a postwar election.” The public, he suggests, is changing from “a war mentality to a peace mentality,” exhausted by “the war over the war.”
Postwar? Peace? Try telling that to the soldiers in Iraq, and the families whose kids are still coming home minus a limb or part of their brain. Last I checked we were still spending billions of dollars a month Over There and I haven’t heard about any bases, or the grand embassy, being dismantled.
I’ve become a huge fan of the show Journeyman, about a San Francisco journalist–slash–inadvertent time traveller who intervenes in peoples’ pasts, basically a cross between The Time Traveler’s Wife and Quantum Leap. I wasn’t entirely swept away at first, as some of the relationships between the characters seemed a little too contrived and soap opera-ish for my tastes. But a show about a time traveller set in San Francisco pretty much has me at “hello,” and now, at close to the end of the season, I’m totally sold on it. The writing is solid, the lead actor is compelling, and so far the show manages a delicate balancing act between two concurrent plots in each episode and an overall story arc that actually unfolds in a fairly satisfying manner, all while dancing around the basic mystery of what’s happening to the central character and why.
But here’s the thing: if you came to this show late in the season, and were intrigued, you’d probably want to catch up on it from the start. If this show had been on a year ago, iPod users, at least, could have gone to iTunes and downloaded the first couple episodes at the extremely well-considered price point of $1.99 per. Unfortunately, NBC and Apple are having a little pissing match, and that’s not an option this year. You can go to the NBC site for a free download — but they’ve only got five episodes up, so starting from the beginning is not an option, at least not until the show is cancelled and comes out on DVD next year, which seems to be the network model these days, at least for every show I find halfway interesting.
(Update: a reader emails to note that full episodes of Journeyman are in fact available for download, on Amazon, rather than iTunes, which almost turns this post into an Emily Litella moment — except that this is not something that NBC seems to publicize, and the system and equipment requirements still look to make this an annoying workaround, rather than an easy way to watch a show in which you might be casually interested. So some tattered remnant of the basic point stands.)
Anyway: add to this the fact that the option NBC does push, the streaming interface on their website, is also clunky and annoying, and you really have to wonder if these people are deliberately trying not to cultivate new viewers. I honestly don’t understand the point of creating these complex, interesting shows which require a commitment of time on the part of the viewer, and then making it difficult, rather than easier, for people to catch up. NBC has a couple of other shows this season that look intriguing — Life, in particular, looks quirky and interesting — but given how little time I have to watch purely escapist entertainment, and the obstacles NBC has placed in my path, I’m probably not going to bother.
None of this is of earth-shattering importance, of course, but it is a puzzling way to do business.
Of course, while we’re on the topic of puzzling network behavior — why not just give the writers a fair cut of future online revenue and settle the damn strike, rather than shut down an entire season’s worth of shows across the board (and potentially alter audience habits permanently)? But we know the answer to that one. They’re terrified of the internet — all the old economic models of content distribution are melting into air and they just don’t know how to react. It’s the same way in my own field — nobody really knows what the newspaper industry is going to look like five years from now, and personally, let’s just say I’m happy that my wife is gainfully employed. (The uncertain future of print journalism is an ongoing subplot in Journeyman, further endearing the show to me.) And I do understand how easy it is to toss out glib advice on topics about which you know nothing — I myself am ever so grateful whenever someone suggests that my own future economic model should involve giving my work to publications for free and making a living off the ancillary merchandising, which currently brings in literally tens of dollars each week. Nonetheless — while acknowledging that I am not the first person ever to take note of the fundamental irrationality of the television industry — it really does not seem like the networks are making the best possible decisions as they try to grapple with these changing realities.
…while I’m on the subject of tv shows: Mad Men was absolutely the most compelling thing I’ve seen on television in ages, with brilliant writing and sublime acting. Highly recommended, and available for easy download on iTunes…
The Unholy Trinity Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture — from Latin America to Iraq By Greg Grandin
The world is made up, as Captain Segura in Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable and the untorturable. “There are people,” Segura explained, “who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea.”
Then — so Greene thought — Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site detention centers. The CIA’s deployment of Orwellian “Special Removal Units” to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere and the whisking of these “ghost prisoners” off to Third World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term “extraordinary rendition,” a hauntingly apt phrase. “To render” means not just to hand over, but to extract the essence of a thing, as well as to hand out a verdict and “give in return or retribution” — good descriptions of what happens during torture sessions.
Please note that Ken Silverstein has retracted the most important part of the post several days ago about Silvestre Reyes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. (I mentioned this below.) Silverstein now says Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA executive catching blame for the destruction of the Al Qaeda interrogation tapes, is NOT in business with a brother of Reyes.
Family of those in Iraq more opposed to war than anyone
According to a new LA Times poll, 69% of family members of soldiers in Iraq, and Iraq veterans themselves, want U.S. troops brought home within the next year. This compares to 64% of Americans overall. Details here.
What is Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA Deputy Director of Operations who ordered the destruction of the interrogation tapes of two al Qaeda members, doing now? According to Ken Silverstein at Harper’s, he’s in business with one of the brothers of Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Moreover, says Silverstein, Rodriguez is very close friends with Reyes, who praised him at his retirement by saying Rodriguez was “was really the genesis” of 24.
A Reyes staffer has told me that the story “is absolute fiction” and that Rodriguez has never had any discussions about doing business with any member of Reyes’s family. “There’s absolutely no truth to” the story, the staffer said. He said Reyes’s planned a “rigorous inquiry” into the destruction of the videotapes and that, “We are going to follow the facts wherever they may lead.”
I have retraced my steps in reporting the story and it’s clear that what I wrote was wrong…I regret the error and apologize for it.
For what it’s worth, the part about Reyes comparing Rodriguez to Jack Bauer is right.
Robert Parry’s Consortium News is starting a $50,000 fundraiser. Parry is one of the greatest investigative journalists in the United States, and I encourage you to check them out and consider donating.
Parry explains the need for the fundraiser and Consortium News generally here. There are so many possibilities now to fund and create better media ourselves that it’s a self-indulgent waste of time to complain about the corporate media. (Certainly few people are more guilty of this than me. Indeed, if complaining about the corporate media is a crime, then I’m getting the death penalty. But as of today, I resolve to do better.)
The Zero-Sum Fiasco Bush in a Humiliating Zero-Sum Iranian Game of His Own Making By Dilip Hiro
Bush’s woefully misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, carried out under false pretences, has not only drained the United States treasury, but reduced Washington’s standing in the Middle East in a way not yet fully grasped by most commentators. Whereas Washington once played off Tehran against Baghdad, while involved in a superpower zero-sum game with the Soviet Union, the Bush administration is now engaged in a zero-sum game, as a virtual equal, with Iran. That is, America’s loss has become Iran’s automatic gain, and vice-versa.
To grasp the steepness of Washington’s recent fall, recall that until Saddam Hussein’s disastrous invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the zero-sum doctrine in the region applied only to Iraq and Iran, two minor powers on the world stage.
Tomdispatch: So, take us on a little tour of our world in terms of nuclear weapons.
Jonathan Schell: The way I think of it, in the Cold War, the nuclear age was in a sort of adolescence. Just a two-power or, at most, a five- or six-sided affair. Now, it’s in its prime. We already have nine nuclear powers, with lots of aspirers to the club waiting in the wings. The nuclear weapon is fulfilling its destiny, which was known from the very beginning of the nuclear age: to be available to all who wanted it, whether or not they choose to actually build the thing.
In a certain sense, we’re just beginning to face the nuclear danger in its inescapable, quintessential form. At key moments in the nuclear age, the public has suddenly gotten very worked up about its peril. Now, if I am not mistaken, could be another such moment. Everybody who has ever marched or spoken up against nuclear weapons should dust off their hiking boots and get back in the fray.
Let us start with the most crucial point. The reaction from all quarters to the NIE relies on several interrelated central assumptions, ones that are regarded as so unquestionably true that no one thinks they need to be stated: that major policy decisions, including decisions of war and peace, are based on intelligence in the first place; that a decision to go to war is one made only after cool and careful rational deliberation; and that nations go to war for the reasons they announce to the world.
I agree mostly, but not completely, with Arthur’s take. Certainly the new NIE changes nothing about the bipartisan policy that we must run the middle east, which in turns means we must crush Iran. However, it may change the cost/benefit ratio perceived by our sane evil leaders about how we go about the crushing. It also strengthens the hand of our sane evil leaders vis a vis their insane evil rivals. Strangling and subversion may become more likely and direct military assault less so.
