or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
•
"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
January 20, 2009
Free John Barry's Brain!
Via Glenn Greenwald, here's Newsweek's John Barry, explaining why any attempt to hold the Bush administration accountable for its numerous crimes would constitute "vengeance, pure and simple":
[T]urn to Congress—and the core charge that the administration "misled" the legislature and the American public by faking evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Really? There is ample evidence that Saddam was genuinely believed to have an arsenal by those with access to the intelligence. Why? Because Saddam's closest associates and his army commanders believed it; and told the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6, when, by ingenious and genuinely heroic efforts, those intelligence agencies made contact with them. All this is a matter of public record.
It would be incredible for any reporter to write this. The US was told by the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service Tahir Jalil Habbush, Iraq's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, and dozens of relatives of Iraqi WMD scientists that the administration's claims were completely wrong.
But it's truly mind-boggling to hear it from John Barry. It's not just that Barry is one of the better corporate reporters on foreign policy. No, it's much worse: Barry personally broke a giant story immediately before the invasion of Iraq about the U.S. government faking WMD evidence.
In the March 3, 2003 issue of Newsweek, Barry revealed that Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, after defecting to Jordan in 1995, told the US and UN that Iraq had no remaining WMD. This was the opposite of what Bush, Cheney, Blair and Powell were claiming Kamel had said. According to Barry, Kamel's statements had been "hushed up." (Barry says this was done by the UN, but it clearly happened with the connivance of the US.)
But there's more. After Barry's story came out, Reuters asked Bill Harlow, the CIA spokesman and one of George Tenet's closest aides, to comment. Harlow vociferously attacked Barry, calling his article "incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue."
Of course, Barry's story was completely accurate. And it was about something the CIA in 2003 knew with 100% certainty—ie, what Hussein Kamel had said in 1995. (This is opposed to, say, whether what Kamel had said was true. It was later learned he'd been completely honest.)
So to sum up: even after having the CIA blatantly lie about his own work, John Barry will angrily defend the government's veracity.
It's genuinely frightening to see what people have to do to keep their jobs at places like Newsweek. Hopefully Barack Obama is about to create some glasnost within the US government, but even if he does, America's news outlets will retain an alarmingly Soviet tinge.
—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at January 20, 2009 09:10 AMTrue that. And not just a tinge, very similar to the Brezhnev's period model: "mistakes were made, lessons learned, a glorious future ahead - full-speed."
Posted by: abb1 at January 20, 2009 09:56 AMInteresting that the word "torture" never appears in Barry's apologia. That's because the legal case for prosecuting Bush for approving torture is stronger (and therefore harder to dismiss) than the case for prosecuting Bush on the basis that Bush lied about Iraq having WMD's.
He also writes:
The productive exercise at this juncture is to figure out how to prevent, as best we can, the grislier parts of this debacle from happening again.
And then says not a word about the media's role in "this debacle."
But thank God for the internet. There was a time when people like Barry could spew this nonsense and our only recourse was to write a peevish letter to the magazine that employs them, which wouldn't be printed.
Posted by: SteveB at January 20, 2009 10:45 AMIt's genuinely frightening to see what people have to do to keep their jobs
Yes, frightening, but almost entirely pervasive. The deviants don't survive. Just ask Phil Donahue (journalism) and Cynthia McKinney (politics).
One definitive work on government-controlled media in the US is "War Made Easy -- How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death" by Norman Solomon. He reveals a multitude of cases similar to John Barry's where truth is the first casualty of war and speech against government war policy is generally not allowed.
The most grievous event in this general area was of course the suicide of Gary Webb after he was ostracized by the San Jose Mercury News for his reporting of CIA drug involvement.
I imagine that Barry's first Newsweek story was not well received by management and that he then "saw the light" after having been reminded about Webb.
Posted by: Don Bacon at January 20, 2009 11:45 AMThe more players or commentators have uttered, or swooned at the utterance of, "you do the crime, you do the time", the more they now sound like Mary Sunshine.
This swing between extremes is particularly odd coming from self-proclaimed centrists. Surely the middle course is not to pre-judge the results of legally-mandated inquiry whether the kind of crimes in question have actually been committed.
Posted by: AlanDownunder at January 23, 2009 06:23 PMInteresting that the word "torture" never appears in Barry's apologia. That's because the legal case for prosecuting Bush for approving torture is stronger (and therefore harder to dismiss) than the case for prosecuting Bush on the basis that Bush lied about Iraq having WMD's.
For that matter, there's the openly illegal spying they've been doing for the entire length of the Bush administration which all of Washington works really hard at pretending didn't happen / isn't happening.
Posted by: dan at January 24, 2009 02:06 AMYeah, the story was told a lot different in The Way of the World.
Posted by: MouseOfSuburbia at January 26, 2009 01:51 AM
