Category: Politics

An Assyrian Christian writes “I was wrong” to protest the war in Iraq. When he visited Iraq prior to the war, he was surprised to learn that many Iraqis welcomed war and were angry at his peace protests:

Without exception when allowed to speak freely the message was the same — “Please bring on the war. We are ready. We have suffered long enough. We may lose our lives but some of us will survive and for our children’s sake please, please end our misery.”

“We are not afraid of the American bombing. They will bomb carefully and not purposely target the people. What we are afraid of is Saddam Hussein and what he and the Baath Party will do when the war begins. But even then we want the war. It is the only way to escape our hell. Please tell them to hurry. We have been through war so many times, but this time it will give us hope.”

The Assyrian Christians website from which this article was taken provides an interesting perspective on the war and the Christian persecution in Iraq. Particularly troubling is a July 5, 2004 article about the destruction of Christian villages in Iraq.

A story in today’s (London) Sunday Times points to how bloggers are exposing factual errors, out of context quotes, and generally poor journalism. The author, Sarah Baxter writes If it makes America look bad it must be true, mustn’t it? Some left-leaning media will rush to publish anything, right or wrong, if it meets their anti-war agenda. The story is about an article published June 4 by the Guardian online, headlined “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil.”. It stated that US deputy defense secretary Wolfowitz had claimed the real motive for the war was that Iraq is ‘swimming’ in oil.

The Wolfowitz story was too good to be true and too good to check. A freelance at The Guardian was so delighted with it that he went to the trouble of translating Wolfowitz from German into English, when he had spoken in English in the first place. And the German story was wrong anyway. No matter: another journalist turned it into the splash.

The story was eventually retracted, but only after having spread elsewhere. It was reported in Russia by Pravda, in Dar al hayat, the Beirut newspaper, on Radio Shi’i and by other Arab media.

Emily Bell, managing editor of Guardian Online, said the mistake had nothing to do with the anti- war stance of the paper or many of its staff: “I don’t know what the politics of my writers or editors are.” But it is hard to resist the conclusion that the fallacy crept in because it fitted a pre-existing mindset about the war.

Gregory Djerejian, 30, is an American blogger (web logger) in London who runs a site called Belgravia Dispatch. A current affairs junkie, he took only minutes to do The Guardian’s job for it. “When I saw the headline, my first reaction was Paul Wolfowitz is too smart to say anything like that, so I did a quick Google search.”

Wolfowitz had in fact drawn a comparison between North Korea, teetering on the edge of economic collapse — which he described as “a major point of leverage” over its weapons programme — and Iraq. “The primary difference … is that we had virtually no economic options in Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil.” At no point did he state or imply that the war was a grab for oil.

A correction was up and running on Belgravia Dispatch hours before The Guardian got around to its own. “I don’t have a political agenda,” said Djerejian, “but I get a little offended by the constant conspiratorial agenda about the Americans.”

My feelings entirely. The National Museum of Baghdad is to reopen this week with almost all of its treasures intact. Yet western academics and commentators rushed to blame the Americans for the worst vandalism since the invasion of the Mongols.

Who knows whether weapons of mass destruction will turn up like the 5,000-year-old Vase of Warka, which was returned by three Iraqis in the back of a car last week? Whether they will or not, it is at least clear to me that Wolfowitz never described such weapons as a “bureaucratic excuse for war”.

Read the Belgravia Dispatch for its assessment of the Guardian article, commentary on the story carried in Pravda, as well as most fascinating of all, the commentary about the Times article and the role meta-bloggers are playing in fact-checking the press.

If it makes America look bad it must be true, mustn’t it?
Some left-leaning media will rush to publish anything, right or wrong, if it meets their anti-war agenda, writes Sarah Baxter

June 15, 2003

The e-mail was from a friend I hadn’t heard from since the start of the war with Iraq. “Recalling our earlier conversations … ” it began. We’d had quite a few talks in the past about the merits of taking on Saddam: I was for, he was against. Like most anti-war protesters, he was convinced it was a war for oil. I thought it was for other reasons, which would have as a happy consequence the overthrow of a tyrant.

So there was a whiff of triumph in his latest correspondence, relaying the headline from The Guardian’s online edition of June 4. “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil.” Aha! See what a sap I had been? The article went on: “The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz — who has already undermined Tony Blair’s position over weapons of mass destruction by describing them as a ‘bureaucratic’ excuse for war — has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is ‘swimming’ in oil.”

My bullshit detector went off immediately. Why on earth would Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s ideologue, make such a crude admission? What’s more, The Guardian claimed he had made this “frank assessment” at an Asian security summit in Singapore, which was reported in two German newspapers. Hmm. Let’s hear it in plain English.

I should have replied: “Pah! I don’t believe it.” But, in case I was wrong, I e-mailed back frostily: “I’m surprised Wolfowitz has said this and I’d like to see his remarks in context . . .”

I did not have to wait long. The next morning The Guardian deleted the article and confessed he had said nothing of the kind, but the lie had already spread. In Russia, Pravda picked up the story; more damagingly in the Middle East it has been reported in Dar al hayat, the Beirut newspaper, on Radio Shi’i and other Arab media, where it has become the gospel about American motives.

No Guardian readers in Britain will have seen the story unless they logged onto the net. But the online edition receives an astounding 10m hits a month and, for international readers, there is no distinction between the fish and chip paper and the .co.uk one. As this paper’s New York correspondent, the internet edition is all I have to go on.

A powerful editor of The New York Times just lost his job over the fabrications of Jayson Blair, a young newsroom protégé. Admittedly Blair lied deliberately, pretending to be all over America when he was actually at home in Brooklyn, but his little flights of fancy look trivial next to the casual anti-American distortions of so many newspapers.

The Wolfowitz story was too good to be true and too good to check. A freelance at The Guardian was so delighted with it that he went to the trouble of translating Wolfowitz from German into English, when he had spoken in English in the first place. And the German story was wrong anyway. No matter: another journalist turned it into the splash.

I’m told senior editors at The Guardian were too busy with exciting news about Tony Blair’s leadership pact with Gordon Brown at the Granita restaurant in Islington nine years ago to notice there had been a “massive cock-up”.

Emily Bell, managing editor of Guardian Online, said the mistake had nothing to do with the anti- war stance of the paper or many of its staff: “I don’t know what the politics of my writers or editors are.” But it is hard to resist the conclusion that the fallacy crept in because it fitted a pre-existing mindset about the war.

Gregory Djerejian, 30, is an American blogger (web logger) in London who runs a site called Belgravia Dispatch. A current affairs junkie, he took only minutes to do The Guardian’s job for it. “When I saw the headline, my first reaction was Paul Wolfowitz is too smart to say anything like that, so I did a quick Google search.”

Wolfowitz had in fact drawn a comparison between North Korea, teetering on the edge of economic collapse — which he described as “a major point of leverage” over its weapons programme — and Iraq. “The primary difference … is that we had virtually no economic options in Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil.” At no point did he state or imply that the war was a grab for oil.

A correction was up and running on Belgravia Dispatch hours before The Guardian got around to its own. “I don’t have a political agenda,” said Djerejian, “but I get a little offended by the constant conspiratorial agenda about the Americans.”

My feelings entirely. The National Museum of Baghdad is to reopen this week with almost all of its treasures intact. Yet western academics and commentators rushed to blame the Americans for the worst vandalism since the invasion of the Mongols.

Who knows whether weapons of mass destruction will turn up like the 5,000-year-old Vase of Warka, which was returned by three Iraqis in the back of a car last week? Whether they will or not, it is at least clear to me that Wolfowitz never described such weapons as a “bureaucratic excuse for war”.

This phrase not only popped up in the same Guardian Online piece, but also in other quality newspapers such as the French Le Monde, which claimed the presence of weapons of mass destruction “was merely a pretext” for war. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung concluded: “The charge of deception is inescapable.”

How so? My reading of Wolfowitz’s comments, from this month’s Vanity Fair, is that he and his colleagues were convinced that Saddam’s weapons posed a major threat. There were plenty of justifications for the war, he explained, but “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason”.

Trying to counter these myths as they spread around the world is a boggling task. Thinking the worst about the Americans has become ingrained. Bell feels The Guardian has done all it can. “We made a mistake and we apologised for it and if people choose to ignore our correction I can’t take responsibility for them.”

Ian Mayes, the readers’ editor of The Guardian, noted in his column that it had not been the “best of weeks” for his paper, especially as The Guardian had just apologised to Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, for “locating him at a meeting which he did not attend”.

This was an alleged meeting at the Waldorf hotel in New York between Straw and Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, where they were said to have discussed the poor intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Except Straw wasn’t there.

As I passed my newsagents’ a few days ago, the weekly international edition of The Guardian was still displaying the “scoop” of the “Waldorf transcripts” on the front page. Never mind. Guardian insiders tell me they got the location wrong, but not really the gist of the conversation between the two foreign secretaries. But if the meeting never took place how do they know that? It’s rather like my friend, to whom I smugly e-mailed The Guardian’s mea culpa with the words: “This should settle matters.”

Far from it. He pinged back: “I think it only proves that The Guardian made a mistake and that Wolfie wasn’t so dumb as to have admitted that in public … It is common sense that oil was one of the reasons for the war.”

This time I did reply: “Pah!”

Interesting… Has the current war spurred some nations of the Middle East to start thinking about democracy?

Why are France, Germany, and Russia opposed to war with Iraq? Follow the Money.

As Basil noted, this site has been figuratively flying the black flag since the Eldred v. Ashcroft supreme court ruling. It seems time to get back to normal, or at least as normal as can be expected these days.

I’m still saddened by how much was lost, but the Creative Commons provides hope for the future. The conversation and debate are improving. More people are aware of copyright issues and the public domain. Some are writing fascinating articles that challenge our views and look for the good of the people.

Aaron Swartz’s article “Why ‘Intellectual Property’ is not Property” points out that government should protect our rights against actions that endanger them, but copyright prevents a right that we’d otherwise have. His terminology guide is fun.

Richard Koman’s article Eldred Opinion Met with Anger, Determination written for the O’Reilly Network expresses the general feeling and reactions in the technical community to the copyright case:

The hackers and activists who make up the Electronic Frontier Foundation are seething, said EFF spokesman Cory Doctorow. “There’s widespread anger and even rage that this decision came down the way it did, and there’s a renewed sense that something must be done as soon as possible to counteract the harmful effects of bad laws like the Sonny Bono act. … We are now at a point where the issue of copyright reform and the public domain, which two years ago was so obscure as to be invisible—even among very technical people—is now a mainstream issue, at least within the technology world. We can hope now that this [decision] will vault this issue into the nontechnical world, but certainly a generation of technical people have been changed forever by the preparation for and the outcome of this case.”

…

Eric Eldred, the Internet publisher who was the lead plaintiff in the case, … believes in the virtue of putting as much as possible on the Net. The court “seemed to accept the argument that the copyright law gives financial incentive to copyright owners to make things available, and extending the term only increases the chance of availability,” Eldred said in a telephone interview, “which seems to me just wrong, actually.”

Eldred thinks the burden is now on the publishers to make works available online. “If the court says this law is the best way to do it, then fine, let’s do it—put up or shut up.” If this doesn’t happen, he warns, Internet users will start taking the law into their own hands. “I think people will just kind of disregard the copyright law and make things available if they want to, and if there are suits about it, then maybe this decision will be some sort of defense.” He noted that there’s a section of the 1998 law that allows libraries and archives to publish works in the last 20 years of their copyright term. “As far as I know nobody’s taking advantage of that, but both the government and the court have pointed to that as some sort of escape passage, and I’d like to see people just go ahead and make the works available on the Internet, and we’ll see if there are any lawsuits that come out of that.”

…

There’s a general consensus among copyright reformers that the decision could be a rallying cry to energize a growing movement of hackers, consumers, and academics.

“I hope this case becomes a rallying point for people who care about the public domain, and this issue, which has been so obscure and hard to understand for most people, creates a more mainstream dialogue in which creators and audiences come to realize how important the public domain is,” said EFF’s Doctorow.

We’ve already seen the breakdown of respect for copyright in online music sharing and, I believe, in some ways in all online publishing. It seems an obvious reaction to the excesses of copyright protection; it no longer serves the good of the people. My own reaction is to look into ways to open my own works. The Founder’s Copyright looks promising. I’ve asked the Creative Commons for more details. I am also seeking to educate my friends and family about what was lost in this case.

The Supreme Court rules that Congress can steal from the public. I shouldn’t be surprised.

This decision in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case extremely saddens me, particularly since it will severely impact internet archives for the next 15 or so years, and also because a fundamental constitutional principle has been overlooked. Larry Lessig has more commentary and the opinions.

On election day, I heard a talk radio host saying that he did not want higher turn out at the polls. He said that if people hadn’t been paying attention to the political scene and were debating whether they should go or just felt they should go because of some “duty” to vote, he didn’t want them there. “Stay home, put your feet up,” he encouraged. He has a good point. When I voted, several of the people there demonstrated an extreme lack of knowledge about what was on the ballot. They read the two Kentucky constitutional amendments for the first time at the polling place and said they didn’t know anything about them. (Aside: it’s not like Kentucky makes this information easily available. Since they have to publish the absentee ballots in advance, you’d think they could stick a copy of the ballots for each county on a website somewhere.)

I was talking to someone at work about this. We’d had an interesting debate about the merits of the amendments the day before and suffered similar experiences with uninformed voters. Our conversation turned to how much easier it is to be informed now than it was even 5 years ago. You can read a massive number of newspapers from around the state, nation, and the world as easily as clicking a link. Pre-web this would have required either large amounts of money or a trip to the library daily. Even then, many libraries would get only a few of the newspapers, and most likely few of the international papers. Now we can be overwhelmed by the wealth of information or we can just hit Google News for the daily snapshot. Wow.

Former President Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming only the third U.S. President (after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) to have the honor. Did President Jimmy Carter, who shook my hand and patted my sister on the head when we saw him at the airport as kids, gain this recognition because he brought peace? Many will point to the Camp David peace accords he helped facilitate, his work with Habitat for Humanity, or his work in overseeing elections as his work for peace. Some point to his more recent activies and assess him as “a better ex-president than president.” Yet has this gained any real peace in the world? It feels like he got this more for good intentions than actual results.

Perhaps this wasn’t about President Carter at all. “It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken,” said Gunnar Berge, the chairman of the Nobel committee. “It’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.”

In his recent column, A Nobel Idea of Peace, Michael Kelly suggests that a strong case can be made for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to President George H. W. Bush or his son, our current President. Kelly writes:

There are many thoughts that are unthinkable to the ideologically bankrupt establishment-left that the Nobellians exemplify. Paramount among these is that war — or, to be precise, war or the threat of war sponsored by the United States — has been the modern world’s great deliverer of peace. But there the truth sits.

US News says “Keep an eye on bloggers. The main arena for media criticism is not going to be books, columns, or panel discussions, and it certainly won’t be journalism schools. It will be the Internet.”