Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Recently Glenn Greenwald pointed to a post by “OldPunk” at an Instapundit-approved blog. Here’s some of what the post said about Obama’s speech last week about race. The “you” to which OldPunk is addressing himself is black Americans generally:

You see, you’ve just given life to the suspicion that black people in America are, and have long been, a fifth column — unanimously hating the very country that has afforded the highest standard of living ever achieved by black people in human history. We’re teetering at the edge of believing that you’re a secret society, a massive collection of sleeper cells just waiting for your chance to do serious harm to the rest of us. You’ve made it possible for us to believe that.

I’d bet a lot of money that “OldPunk” was outraged in 2003 by Saddam’s massacres of Iraqi Kurds (though not when they were actually happening during the eighties, when he almost certainly didn’t know about them).

The funny part is, some Iraqi Kurds were more than just under “suspicion” of being “a fifth column” during that time. They were actually accepting arms and training from a country with which Iraq was at war, and which in fact had its armies on Iraqi soil.

So if this is “OldPunk”‘s view of black Americans now, I wonder how he’d respond if there were substantial African American militias in U.S. cities who’d been armed and trained by Saddam Hussein and/or Osama bin Laden, at the same time there were Arab troops in Seattle and Boston? My guess is he’d be saying “break out the nerve gas.”

The correlation here is probably almost exact. Just about every single person who wanted war because Saddam “gassed his own people” is someone who’d want a white American president to gas other Americans.

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Iraq Winter Soldier Hearings Show Weakness of Independent Media

Jeff Cohen — full disclosure: he used to be my boss and is a friend — makes some very valid and important points in ““Iraq Winter Soldier Hearings: Victory for Independent Media.”

But there is another way of looking at this.

The fact that the mainstream paid so little attention to Winter Soldier — as well countless other worthy stories — is itself a failure of independent media to propel those stories into the mainstream…

The great success of Fox News Channel is not that it has done what it has done, but that it has influenced the “mainstream” as it has.

And in that sense, independent media has totally failed.

To take the example at hand, what we did not see in the last several weeks was independent media asking questions about Winter Soldier at the White House press conferences, or at the Pentagon or State Department. Had they done so, the administration spokesperson’s words would likely have led to more attention to Winter Soldier than all the work of all the people who labored on it for months…

But no one asked at the news conferences, so none of that happened.

The rest.

Spencer Ackerman has written an excellent look back for the Washington Independent at the role of Jeffrey Goldberg and Stephen Hayes in taking the U.S. to war, and their unrepentant behavior since. Criticizing fellow journalists and journalistic institutions is rarely a good career move, and Ackerman deserves credit for doing it.

BUT THERE’S ONE GLARING FLAW: The article fails to mention this.

There’s been conflict between Congress and the Bush administration in the past several months over the Declaration of Principles Bush and Maliki signed last November. The Declaration of Principles appears to commit the U.S. to defending Iraq from both internal and external threats. Such commitments have previously only been made by treaties, which require Senate approval.

Last Thursday the Politico reported that a “senior administration official” claimed this was all a misunderstanding stemming from an Arabic-to-English translation of the Declaration of Principles. I’ve written a new piece for Democrats.com examining whether there’s any evidence for this. The answer appears to be no.

Bob Fertik has the details of this explosive and appalling story.