Scrubbung From Slime In High Places

firedoglake: 02/26/2006 - 03/04/2006: "We've seen quite a few instances of it recently and it usually has to do with explosive comments that are unfavorable to the narrative being disseminated by the administration (and quite often the Vice President):"

Scrubbing

Back in the days when newspapers and magazines were printed on paper once something was committed to ink that was pretty much it, you had to live with it. And while I do look quite fetching in my tin foil hat I generally like to save it for special occasions, but there's something unexplained and a little disturbing going on with internet news scrubbing.

We've seen quite a few instances of it recently and it usually has to do with explosive comments that are unfavorable to the narrative being disseminated by the administration (and quite often the Vice President):

. Josh Marshall noticed that it happened in a Washington Post article referring to a conversation on Air Force II:

On July 12, the day Cheney and Libby flew together from Norfolk, the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson's credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source. (WaPo, October 30 2005)

. The comments about Sherrifs being turned away from the Armstrong ranch were removed from the CBS online site:

CBS News White House correspondent Peter Maer reports Texas authorities are complaining that the Secret Service barred them from speaking to Cheney after the incident. (CBSnews.com, February 13, 2006)

. Katharine Armstrong's references to alcohol being served on the day Cheney shot the old man in the face were scrubbed from the MSNBC site:

"There may be a beer or two in there," she said, "but remember not everyone in the party was shooting." (MSNBC, February 15, 2006)

. Now a comment Swopa made note of in a WaPo article about the bombing of the Golden Mosque has been deleted:

In Samarra, witnesses said that Interior Ministry commandos and Iraqi police were cordoning the shrine before the explosions took place. (WaPo, February 23, 2006)

CBS PublicEye actually did address what happened to their Cheney article and on its own would seem like a plausible explanation, but these are just a few examples of what appears to be a consistent motif in the mainstream online press. Not to go all 1984, but who is it that's sitting around reading all this stuff, suddenly deciding that these phrases are not okay, then calling up and twisting arms 'til they're taken down?

Bloggers change stuff in their posts all the time, usually as a result of people showing up and pointing out errors. But the presumption is that by the time a story goes up on the washingtonpost.com it's already been approved by the editors and it's not like they're seeing it for the first time online. It's also customary to make a correction note when a major change is made as the CBS Public Eye article noted. That's not happening.

I'm sure there's a partial explanation in the fact that now that things can be changed there is going to be pressure exerted on reporters to do so. But how are we to know that these comments are erroneous and not merely unflattering and/or inconvenient if nobody takes pains to explain that?

I don't know how or why this is happening but it seems to be occurring with some frequency. It would be nice to hear an explanation.

(thanks to reader David F.) posted by Jane Hamsher @ 5:48 PM
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And From the Department of Lunacy...

Talk about taking those lemons and trying your damndest to make some lemonade, eh? The above screen grab is from Fox News on Friday. I found it at Opinio Juris, and had to share it with everyone here. Lunacy, indeed.
Crooks and Liars has some video of Bill Kristol on today's Fox News Sunday, wherein he says, flat out, that the United States has not made a serious effort in Iraq for the last 3 years. Well, isn't that nice to know? ThinkProgress has the transcript. Just a warning -- it's infuriating.

Oh, and according to Kristol, this is all Rummy's fault. Is that a bus I hear rumbling along in the distance?

ThinkProgress also has an excerpt from This Week, wherein George Will flat out says that Iraq is already in civil war.

ZAKARIA: It was a very bad week for iraq. The fundamental problem here remains the original one, which is when people don’t have a sense of security because there were not enough American troops, they will revert to their script, their tribal loyalty, the Sunni and Shiite. This happens in every society. That is what is happening, a pervasive sense of insecurity has made them search for security in the things they can find, which is their sectarian identities. But the fact that a few hundred people died — and it is a terrible tragedy — it does not necessarily mean we’re on the brink of civil war. India goes through sectarian violence from time to time. Nigeria does —

STEPHANOPOULOS: What does civil war look like?

WILL: This. This is a civil war.
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Or maybe, just maybe, has reality begun to intrude on the neocon fantasy island -- to the point that those on the kool-aid fringes are no longer willing to partake? No freaking clue. Would that reality had intruded well before we made the mess in the first place...but it is far too late to be thinking along those lines, isn't it?

Swopa and Juan Cole have a lot more on where things are and are likely to go in Iraq, including Juan's report that Sistani is now forming a militia.

As if that isn't depressing enough, our prison at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan is apparently a Gitmo II. Great work, Gen. Miller, great work. Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq -- it's truly the torture tri-fecta for that guy, isn't it?

Lovely that Miller's still got a job at the Pentagon, and still gets to polish all those stars on his collar. Especially since it's only been lower level folks that have had to take responsibility for any of the actions unbecoming our military personnel -- heaven forbid the man giving all those nasty orders be held accountable or anything.
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Today, the NYTimes has an exceptionally written piece about a former Taliban spokesperson who is now attending classes at Yale. It is more of a human interest story than any sort of solution-oriented political and social commentary, but it is a good read nonetheless, and although long, I recommend it with a fresh pot of coffee if you have the time this morning.In 1989, the Soviets withdrew in defeat from Afghanistan. Mohammad Fazal Hashemi, weary of holy-warrior politics and hypocrisy, opened a shoe shop on the outskirts of Quetta. Shortly before the end of the school year, he told his 10-year-old son that his school days were over — he needed Rahmatullah to mind the store while he worshipped at the mosque.

"Why didn't your older brothers help out?" I asked.

"That's a good question," Rahmatullah said. He was silent for a while, as if 16 years later the blow were still fresh. "Those were the best years of my life," he said at last. "When I dropped out that day, I was crying all the time. I thought I would never see school again. We were in a constant economic crisis, moving from one house to another."
At the shop he cleaned windows, brushed the shoes and battled the dust. To guard the stock against thieves during the night, his younger brother, Asadullah, would lock Rahmatullah inside behind a steel shutter. There was no electricity. He read the Persian poets Sa'di Shirazi and Rumi by candlelight, and the Pashtun Shakespeare, Rahman Baba: "An ignorant man is like a corpse."To understand what this one man had in his own heart as a child, and still has with everything he has seen and done, is such a gift. This is an article worth the read, for all its contradictions and questions.

The news is often filled with images and articles and snippets from "Afghanistan" or "Iraq" as if they are nations filled with single-minded people who fit some sort of caricature of what we think they ought to be. But we forget, at our peril, that these are nations filled with individual human beings -- who live, eat, work, play and dream, just as we do. And whose culture and intellectual underpinnings run deeply through all of Western civilization.

In our hubris, we too often forget. And this omission and this failure to broaden our understanding, to learn the lessons that were hard earned in history, this is what has brought us to this point today. And why we are all fearful of the headlines to come over the next few weeks.

But we must continue to work on our understanding. To value individual lights, to help them move toward their dreams -- for it has been that lack which has led far too many toward the darkness, toward violence and hatred and death.

Right after 9/11, I searched for some understanding -- I had the education in terms of the geopolitical concerns and the economic pressures and the ideological fight, but I had little to no real understanding of Afghanistan. I picked up a travel book, "An Unexpected Light" by a fellow named Jason Elliot, which I highly recommend as a good read and a peek into Afghan culture.

One of my fears in all of this is that the constant concern for the violence and safety considerations would cause us to lose sight of individual issues. One of those which has always been important to me is that of women's rights. Afghan women in particular have had to endure so much, and there is still such a long way to go.

Amnesty International issued a report last May which details some of the issues involved for women in the region. With Osama Bin Laden and his Taliban pals still running around the Afghan/Pakistani mountain region, there isn't a whole lot of security or stability to point toward there being a better environment for women there any time soon.

Isobel Coleman (in Foreign Affairs) presents some of the questions (and perhaps some ideas for answers) on how we move the women's rights issue forward in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in other nations in the region where women need our support. She talks about the issue in terms of the new environment in Iraq -- but I think some of her thoughts might translate to Afghanistan as well.

I keep thinking back to Colin Powell's "we break it, we own it" warning before we went into Iraq. With so many things going wrong, so many broken pieces, what I'd like to think is that there is some measure of discussion on solutions. While the headlines keep getting more and more bleak, there has to be some hope. Somewhere.

Because the children who live in Afghanistan and Iraq and everywhere else in the world where strife is a daily form of existence go to bed just like my little girl...and dream their dreams.

And I cannot bear to live in a world where we do not consider all those children's dreams to be important. Every single one of them. posted by ReddHedd @ 8:43 AM