Category: Current Affairs

A double bankshot from the world of Journalism Navel Gazing: An Online Journalism Review brief on an item on the Poynter Institute site:

“A new Intelliseek service could be a godsend for Web-savvy editors, Poynter Online reports. The ‘automated trend discovery system’ Blogpulse.com compiles the most popular names, phrases and links in more than 1 million blogs to find out what issues and personalities might be tomorrow’s front-page news. Steve Outing, a senior editor at Poynter, was surprised to see that the top news stories — prisoner abuse and beheadings in Iraq — did not top Blogpulse’s “key phrase” list. Rather, according to Blogpulse, many Weblogs are more concerned with the Mexican air force’s UFO sighting, Ralph Nader’s Reform Party endorsement and Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader who allegedly beheaded American Nicholas Berg.”

Wow. Torturegate didn’t make the list. And parenthetically, but without the parens, I absolutely love the use of “allegedly” in that description of the Berg murder. Yes, journalists must pantomime their belief in the presumption of innocence and objective distance in criminal matters (even though they generally report the cops’ or government’s word as gospel). But this is where that exercise turns fatuous. Someone proclaiming himself to be Zarqawi is carrying out the murder on camera; further the reported evidence points to Zarqawi’s personal role; and finally, there’s no legal allegation at issue — there’s a video, a claim, and a bounty on a wanted man’s head. So if you want to be careful, you could say “the al-Qaeda leader suspected of beheading Nick Berg” or, “Zarqawi, the apparent self-proclaimed killer of Nick Berg” or something like that. But please, don’t use “allegedly.”

One of the really disheartening things about Bush’s Baghdad Blunder is the fact we’ll be stuck with the consequences for decades beyond the point where Laura Bush holds a press conference at the spread in Crawford to announce W doesn’t remember who he is anymore, much less why he wanted Iraq so bad. The challenge for the Bush opposition now is to offer some constructive ideas for how to do what the reigning boneheads seem incapable of — actually improving the situation in Iraq, if only as a prelude to our saying, “It’s been nice, but now we have to go home and have a nice cold one.” An example of this sort of constructive approach comes from the liberal Center for American Progress, which just put out a list of suggestions for what the U.S. authorities ought to do to deal with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

From Justice Louis Brandeis’s dissent in Olmstead vs. United States:

“… Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. …”

Good New York Times story on some of the military officers defending terror-war detainees in upcoming military tribunals. It takes a lot of courage, and belief in what are often termed basic American values, to fight the system:

"Last month, an audience at Oxford University in England was stunned, witnesses said, when two of the lawyers, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift ofthe Navy and Maj. Mark Bridges of the Army, said the tribunals were not capable of producing a fair and just result.

"The several hundred people who had gathered for a talk about the Guantánamo detention facility did not expect to hear the American officers’ objections.

"Murray Wesson, a Rhodes Scholar from South Africa who attended, wrote on his Web log: ‘What I was unprepared for, given that these were, after all, military lawyers, was how critical of the process they were. Indeed, they went so far as to describe the tribunals as`fundamentally flawed’ and insinuated that they would not amount to fair trials.’ "

Sources for following the casualty count in Iraq.
There are a couple very good sources on U.S. and allied casualties.
Sources on Iraqi casualties are speculative and unclear by comparison.
That’s because the United States got out of what’s been termed "the
body-count business" (an allusion to the weekly totals provided during
most of
the Vietnam War) during the Gulf War. I guess that’s because it was
politically tricky to report the magnitude of the casualties we were
inflicting. But enough of memory lane, and on to the casualty
counts:

Iraq
Coalition Casualties:
A very reliable and up-to-date summary
of U.S. and allied casualties, backed up by press and military reports
of killed and wounded. Includes a list of every U.S./allied soldier
killed in action since the war started.

GlobalSecurity.org
gives a slightly different count.
Its totals vary slightly from those on the previous site. Maybe the
best feature of the list is the longish explanatory
essay, with some historical perspective, on the numbers and
how they’re derived.

Iraq Body Count:
An explicitly antiwar site that attempts to do what the governments
involved will not do and what the media cannot do (or haven’t gotten
around to doing): tally civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning of
the war (the current estimated range is 9,018 to 10,873).