Neo interviews Steve Beren

Neo recently interviewed the "changer extraordinaire" and "expert on the Left" Steve Beren. (Who? He's running for a House seat in the majority-democrat Seattle area against incumbent Jim McDermott.)

The interview contains the following exchange:

[Neo]: So you were a historian of antiwar movements--

[Beren]: And antiwar strategy and tactics. ...

In the beginning of the Afghanistan war, there were rumblings in the media: there were rocky mountains, the British had failed there, the weather would be bad, this could be trouble. And back when John Kennedy had sent troops at the beginning of Vietnam the antiwar movement did it this way (in Vietnam, the Socialists supported the Communist takeover—but you don’t put that on a flyer, do you?) During the Cuban missile crisis what you’d say is that Kennedy is all concerned about Cuba, but he’s ignoring what’s happening in Vietnam. Or in Berlin. Then when he’s in Vietnam, you talk about how he’s ignoring Cuba. Ted Kennedy now talks about North Korea.

[N]: So these are strategies for all situations.

[B]: Yes, it's a rhetorical device. You go from one thing to another, to add negativity to the media and the academic world. Regular people don’t like war—who does?--we all hope a rumor of war is not true. And if we start hearing things to discourage us it feeds on that: “we can’t win anyway, and we should be doing something else that’s more important.”

[Unknown Blogger now follows up where Neo didn't:]

I beg your pardon, Mr. Beren.

First of all, all those things you said that the press wrote about Afghanistan all happen to be true. Do you have some problem with that? Isn't one of the reasons we have a free press is so we can have a fully-informned electorate? How do you see the role of the press when the President or members of Congress start discussing war plans?

Next, we all know it is a crazy mixed-up world out there, with places like Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, and North Korea popping up all the time. We elect Presidents who we expect will select cabinet members and advisers to help him determine an effective foreign policy towards all these places. No President, Republican or Democrat, ever gets to just pick the one he wants to focus on, while everyone else in the country just shuts up.

That's just the way our government works. Do you have some sort of problem with that?

Also, I wonder which remarks by Ted Kennedy on North Korea you are referring to?

Maybe these:

As the Administration emphasizes the threat from Iraq, it gives
less attention to other countries that pose an even more immediate
threat to our security.

The greatest proliferation threat comes not from Iraq, but North
Korea. North Korea is much more likely and capable to develop, use and
sell these weapons. But unlike Iraq, North Korea probably already has
nuclear weapons. Unlike Iraq, North Korea has no nuclear inspectors on
the ground to verify disarmament.

North Korea has a long and well-documented history of selling
its military technology, especially ballistic missiles, to whoever will
pay the highest price. Desperate and strapped for cash, it is the
country most likely to sell or transfer weapons of mass destruction to
terrorists or nations that support terrorism.

In its single-minded focus on Iraq, Administration officials at
first refused to acknowledge that a nuclear crisis even existed. Only
very recently has the Administration begun to devote the attention this
crisis deserves.

Those words are from a speech on the Senate floor on January 29, 2003.

So here we are now, 3 years and $300,000,000,000.00 later, our armed forces stretched to the limit, having removed exactly "zero" nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons from Iraq, nor any significant means of manufacturing them, and North Korea is announcing an imminent test of a nuclear weapon.

Mr. Beren, are you now claiming Ted Kennedy's concern about North Korea in 2003 was not legitimate?

Are you claiming it was improper for the American people to hear those words because the President had decided he wanted to invade Iraq, and such words might "discourage" support for his plans?

* * *

Neo concludes the interview by breathlessly claiming, "We can safely say that Steve Beren is a man with both heart and brain."

*Sigh* Isn't he just dreeeeamy?

Please, send your contribution immediately to re-elect Jim McDermott.

Hala Jaber: Exactly what part of her died when she saw that video?

The "(Not) Atwar Bahjat video" incident was touched off Sunday by Hala Jaber's moving and heartfelt article, "Part of me died when I watched this cruel killing."

My question is: Exactly what part of her died? From what I've read, I'm thinking it was her brain.

Here is how she describes seeing what she thought was her friend Atwar's death in the video:

"First she was stripped to the waist, a humiliation for any woman..." then goes on to describe the sickening beheading.

Yet back in late February, soon after Atwar's murder, Hala published quite a different account in the same paper:

On Thursday morning when I logged on to the news from Iraq, Atwar’s face was staring out of the screen with details of her murder.

For the next hour I read every item I could find about her death, searching in vain for any clue that might explain it. I needed to make sense of it, yet all I could think was that I had declined her invitations to lunch.

...Atwar’s body and those of her cameraman and sound man were found next to their van. The green coat was ripped by two bullets in the back. She also took two to the head."

The green coat. "Two (bullets) to the head." And she must have seen the photograph of Atwar's body.

Did she think that after stripping her to the waist and cutting off her head the killers put her coat back on?

How could this highly-regarded and award-winning journalist get this obvious story so incredibly wrong? She has won Best Foreign Correspondet for 2005 and 2006. Judges praised her for her “fantastic eye for news”.

I haven't seen any explanation or clarification from the Sunday Times. (If anyone has, pleasae let me know.)

It just doesn't make any sense to me that she could have been duped so easily. I'm curious to see where this goes, if it goes anywhere at all.

The Press: Can't live with it, can't live without it.

Neo complained the other day that the press isn't covering a recently-released video showing the vicious beheading of a captive, purported to be Iraqi journalist Atwar Bahjat.

She naturally concludes this lack of media coverage is part of an intentional effort by the terrorist-friendly media to "deny the nature of the enemy we face."

She quotes a fellow blogger who writes that "presuming to protect us from the nature of our enemy...is irresponsible—and either presumptuously paternalistic, or cynically calculating."

So, surprise, surprise. There goes our awful press again, colluding with terrorists by hiding their wicked deeds from us, softening us up for the kill.

She concludes:

But to fight [The War on Terror] effectively we need to take our hands away from our eyes and take a good look at the enemy we face.

Fair enough.

But it seems that when it comes to the press, Neo's mind is a "not-so-difficult-thing to change."

Back in July, Neo argued (in a post called "Publicists for Terrorists") that the press "...has become the unwitting mouthpiece of the terrorists... Every attack is trumpeted to the skies because it's big news, but this means that the press is now in the business of publishing what amounts to terrorist press releases."

"Previous generations" in earlier (pre-Vietnam) conflicts seem to have had "more grit," she continues, "but in this they were helped by journalists who considered it their duty to shape news in order to encourage morale on the home front, not discourage it."

She concludes by asking:

"How to end this "media magnification?...All we can try to do is to be watchdogs of the press. That's part of where blogs come in--to point out the effects of publicizing terror, and to try to counter the fear, negativity, and weariness that ensues."

Now this was back when coalition forces had just suffered through a year of unprecedented levels of insurgent attacks (see chart on p. 15, "Rebuilding Iraq"), so one can't blame her for feeling a bit tired of reading the newspaper.

But it seems Neo wants a press that just prints only the news she sees fit to print, a press that is not so much focused on accurately reporting actual events but rather "shapes news to encourage morale."

Could it be that in Neo's ideal world, the press that is now reporting on *confirmed* attacks against our troops and Iraqi civilians would just ignore those and instead be busily exploiting a dubious snuff video for propaganda purposes? Car bombings, suicide bombings, IEDs, these are not enough to show us the enemy we face?

The authenticity of the video which inspired this umpteenth "liberal media" whining session has been disputed since news of it appeared in an Op-ed piece in the Sunday Times, indeed, practically as soon as Neo finished typing.

In fact, at the time of Atwar's *actual* murder back in February, AFP photos released to wire services a photograph of her clothed, un-beheaded body, a fact which I'm sure many other editors were no doubt well aware of when the "beheading" story broke, thus causing some skepticism among them.

But for the editor-free blogger "watchdogs", it was off to the races. This was just a little op-ed in the Sunday Times. Why the need to pounce on these things so quickly? Can't anyone take a minute to do a Google search or even look up her wikipedia entry?

I find the many exculpatory updates over at the Jawa Report embarrassing. Let's just admit, "I sometimes write about stuff I really know nothing about." They even discovered (too late) that they had reported on her "bullet riddled body" back in February. But I will give them all due credit for correcting the record. I'm not sure how many others will do the same.

Correct the record? Why bother? It was never really "about" Atwar Bahjat at all was it? This was just another pretext to:

1. Remind us all (in case we've forgotten - anybody out there forget?) that beheadings are nasty and the people who perform them are barbaric (are you listening, King Abdullah?),

and

2. Slam the press as terrorist sympathizers.


As for #1, do I sense just a *tinge* of dissappointment among some of these bloggers as they realize that the video wasn't what they thought it was? As The Jawa Report notes in it's latest version of the story, the video they were all watching was actually a re-run from summer 2004.

As you may have noticed, reports of beheadings have kind of dropped off lately, but that's not because of any reticence on the press to publicize them. Rather, this heinous practice is (thankfully) declining as a tactic of choice among the insurgents. Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Zarqawi was explicitly told to stop beheading captives in an Oct 2005 letter from bin Laden's second in command. (You'll have to scroll down, The Weekly Standard buried that bit in the next-to-last paragraph.) It seems the beheadings were "alienating the public and potential allies." (Yes, beheadings even repulse *muslims*! Who would have believed it? I thought their religion was suppposed to mandate those?) And there are recent unconfirmed reports that Zarqawi may have even been demoted due to such extreme tactics.

Make no mistake - I do believe these terrorists *are* barbarous killers, criminals, and fiends. But while we are "taking our hands away from our eyes to see the enemy we face" let's not engage in distortions of fact or exaggerations of evidence. Let's really look.

As for #2, slamming the press—what's that you say? Atwar was a journalist? Well, now that you mention it, no, I didn't see very much made of that aspect among all the indignant blogging, even though the Iraq war is the deadliest conflict for journalists in the past 25 years.

O, the irony! The circumstances of a journalist's death were exaggerated (as if it weren't already brutal enough) and exploited to attack the press as afraid to spread the truth about the enemy. Yet for all their sympathetic words about Atwar the terrorist victim, I wonder how many frothy-mouthed bloggers would have been clamoring to see her head on a stake just a year and a half ago when, while working as a reporter for Al-Jazeera, she was arrested by the US military as a spy? But then, how would they have seen that news? No one cares about "Reporters without Borders."

So contrary to the claims of some, this incident is a case not of the terrorist-friendly press burying a story due to bias, but rather a free press exercising a professional skepticism and restraint ( The Sunday Times excepted) in order to verify a story before going public with it.

Skepticism and restraint. Blogger "watchdogs" of the press, take note.

And by the way, for the record: beheadings are barbarous acts committed by fiends.

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