-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 9, 2007 7:21:27 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Six Degrees of Osama bin Laden
What’s in a Name? (al-Qaeda edition)
http://theglitteringeye.com/?p=3000
“The real question is, is it part of a plan that is being directed
by someone?”’ said David Bentley, an analyst in terrorism law at
London-based policy research group Chatham House. “London today,
Glasgow tomorrow, then maybe Birmingham or Manchester?’”
That question, from Bloomberg’s update on the story of abortive
terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow certainly is a question but
I don’t think it’s the only question.
The number of arrests in connection with the incidents has now
risen to seven (six men and a woman) in England and Scotland.
They’re being variously described as “al-Qaeda”, “al-Qaeda
affiliated”, “al-Qaeda linked”, “sympathetic to al-Qaeda” and other
similarly unhelpful descriptions. Frankly, I doubt that these
particular would-be mass murderers received their directions from
Osama bin Laden or that their plan was approved or contributed to
by Osama bin Laden or his close associates.
I find the term “al-Qaeda linked” troubling since we’re all linked
to al-Qaeda in an Erdös number sort of way. [The game Six Degrees
of Kevin Bacon is an application of the same idea to the movie
industry, connecting actors that appeared in a film together to the
actor Kevin Bacon.] Does it mean “linked to al-Qaeda, with an Erdös
number of 1”? 2? 10? <George Bush himself, by the way, is closely
"linked to Al Qaeda," with a HIGH Erdos number, via onetime
business partner James Bath.> With a LOW Erdös number --“six
degrees of separation” and all-- the entire Muslim world is linked
to al-Qaeda. It’s meaningless.
But I think that the need to link terrorists to al-Qaeda does
reflect a faultline between those who actually believe that we
should respond in any way to radical Islamist terrorism. That’s
what the “Afghanistan where the real war on terror is” notion is
based on. If you believe that we are engaged in a war against al-
Qaeda and that al-Qaeda is a relatively small number of people
mostly holed up in the wilds of tribal Pakistan, that’s exactly
what you do believe and you must be pretty darned frustrated at
what’s been going on for the last six years. If, on the other hand,
you think (as I do) that our problem is violent radical Islamist
terrorists and you don’t much care whether they’re al-Qaeda,
affiliated, linked to, or even heard of. Dead is dead whether
murdered by doctors with exploding cars in Glasgow or terrorists
flying planes into buildings.
The view of the War on Terror as broader has its own mistaken and,
IMO, counterproductive subview: that Islam itself is the enemy a
view I categorically reject since I don’t think it’s inevitable
that Muslims become violent terrorists any more than I think it’s
inevitable that Christians be Albigensians.
But I can see how people would be eager to discover ways of linking
disaffected Muslims in Britain or Iraq with the al-Qaeda hiding in
caves whereever they are if only in an attempt to convince those
who think the real war is in Afghanistan otherwise. It’s not
working. They’re complaining that everybody is being called al-
Qaeda these days.
I think that only real use of the term al-Qaeda these days is for
propaganda (maybe it’s always been the only real use). We can use
it that way, too. In that sense we should flog the incompetence,
impotence, and fecklessness of al-Qaeda for all we’re worth. Repute
is what the terrorists mostly have to go on.
-----------
Is The New Mantra
“Al Qaeda Is Around Every Corner?”
By Joe Gandelman
http://themoderatevoice.com/politics/military/13938/is-the-new-
mantra-al-qaeda-is-around-every-corner/
The New York Times has a new Public Editor — and he wasted no time
zeroing in on a flaw he sees in his new organization: it has begun
blindly accepting what some pointed to in recent weeks as a notable
shift in the White House and military descriptions of Iraq where
insurgent attacks are increasingly being attributed to Al Qaeda.
The Public Editor is Clark Hoyt, who had an extensive and a highly
distinguished editing and reporting career with the great, late
Knight-Ridder Newspaper chain which was swallowed up by McClatchy
Newspapers. Among other things, Hoyt ran KRN’s journalistically
solid Washington bureau which directed the chain’s highly praised
and enterprising Iraq war coverage. He has also given a lot of
thought about to where the news biz is going. (DISCLAIMER: I worked
for Hoyt briefly before I left KRN’s Wichita Eagle-Beacon to accept
a job as a reporter on the San Diego Union. He had become the EB’s
Managing Editor.)
His piece is remarkable because it minces no words about the need
for newspapers to always remain skeptical, strive to be accurate
and to not fall into being sucked into official spin, which often
can come in the form of changing the language (much as “pre-owned
cars” replaced “used cars”).
Here is the link to his piece, titled “See Al Qaeda Around Every
Corner.” But for our purposes here, we’re going to look at parts of
it out of order.
First, from the end, his conclusion:
I went back and read war coverage for much of the month of June and
found many stories that conveyed the complexity and chaos of
today’s Iraq. Times reporters wrote that Iraq’s political leaders
were failing to meet benchmarks that would show satisfactory
progress to the American government, that a formerly peaceful
Shiite city in southern Iraq was convulsed by violence as rival
groups fought for control, and that Sunnis feared their own
country’s army because it is dominated by Shiites.
But those references to Al Qaeda began creeping in with greater
frequency. Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said she takes “great
pride in the whole of our coverage” but acknowledged that the paper
had used “excessive shorthand” when referring to Al Qaeda in
Mesopotamia. “We’ve been sloppy,” she said. She and other editors
started worrying about it, Chira said, when the American military
began an operation in mid-June against what it said were
strongholds of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
On Thursday, she and her deputy, Ethan Bronner, circulated a memo
with guidelines on how to distinguish Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from
bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.
It’s a good move. I’d have been happier still if The Times had
helped its readers by doing a deeper job of reporting on the
administration’s drive to make Al Qaeda the singular enemy in Iraq.
Military experts will tell you that failing to understand your
enemy is a prescription for broader failure.
Hoyt’s piece raises issues here.
(1) The inclination of officialdom, particularly in the Bush
administration, to use language to foster images and trigger
emotional reactions. Al Gore dealt with this extensively in his
book The Assault On Reason.
(2) The basic dilemma of a newspaper (magnified even more so in
this new medium you’re reading here called weblogs) that big
stories and tons of information are gathered, written, edited and
placed in “news holes” quickly so from the standpoint of time,
certain things may not be totally thought through and other things
may simply fall through the cracks.
(3) The basic job of a newspaper to always be skeptical of everyone
of any party and to question – something that may anger axe-to-
grind partisans but is critical if the news media is to be more
than a public relations stenographic media easily manipulated by
those in power who realize journalists are human and could
unintentionally or otherwise take the easy way out.
He begins his piece by laying out a development others have noted:
AS domestic support for the war in Iraq continues to melt away,
President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are
increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al
Qaeda.
Bush mentioned the terrorist group 27 times in a recent speech on
Iraq at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. In West Virginia on
the Fourth of July, he declared, “We must defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq.”
The Associated Press reported last month that although some 30
groups have claimed credit for attacks on United States and Iraqi
government targets, press releases from the American military focus
overwhelmingly on Al Qaeda.
Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual
exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important
story. So is the question of how well their version of events
squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on
the ground.
And then he zeroes in on the Times:
But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in
recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting
the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role
in Iraq — and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.
And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has
also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group
that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in
Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the
American invasion.
But Hoyt didn’t end it there.
It’s clear he did HIS OWN REPORTING and didn’t just dash off a
piece off the top of his head about what he felt needed improvement
at his new newspaper:
Middle East experts with whom I talked in recent days said that the
heavy focus on Al Qaeda obscures a much more complicated situation
on the ground — and perhaps a much more dangerous one around the
world.
“Nobody knows how many different Islamist extremist groups make up
the insurgency” in Iraq, said Anthony H. Cordesman of the
bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Even
when you talk about Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the idea of somehow it
is the center of the insurgency is almost absurd.”
Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor of Peace and Development
at the University of Maryland, said, “I have been noticing — not
just your paper — all papers have fallen into this reporting.” The
administration, he added, “made a strategic decision” to play up Al
Qaeda’s role in Iraq, “and the press went along with
it.” (Actually, that’s not entirely accurate, but we’ll get to that
in a moment.)
He then cites Times stories that fell into the trap and adds some
more tidbits such as:
Indeed the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq,
representing the intelligence community’s consensus assessment,
summed up the situation this way:
“Iraqi society’s growing polarization, the persistent weakness of
security forces and the state in general, and all sides’ ready
recourse to violence are collectively driving an increase in
communal and insurgent violence and political extremism.” Al Qaeda
and the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia, were mentioned as “very
effective accelerators for what has become a self-sustaining inter-
sectarian struggle between Shia and Sunnis.”
In other words, the story of Iraq isn’t the story of all Al Qaeda
all the time.
Hoyt is a heavy-hitter and anyone who thinks he’s going to be
perfunctory Public Editor better think again. His pieces are likely
to be highly readable, thoughtful and, for the Times, potentially
course-correcting, stand alone columns.
In other words, anyone who thinks Hoyt will be (using the word used
in one of the Times’ less stellar recent journalistic efforts) a
“trophy” Public Editor will be as accurate as those who suggest
that all insurgent attacks stem from Al Qaeda terrorist attacks.
See what's free at AOL.com.
www.ctrl.org
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/
<A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
