War on Terrorism

When’s the next War?

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Excuse me, but aren’t these folk old enough to be off their training wheels? From today’s LA Times:

“They planned on an unrealistic set of assumptions,” he [James Dobbins] said. “Clearly, in retrospect, they should have anticipated that when the old regime collapsed, there would be a period of disorder, a vacuum of power They should have anticipated extremist elements would seek to fill this vacuum of power. All of these in one form or another have been replicated in previous such experiences, and it was reasonable to plan for them.”
Looking back from the third floor of the Pentagon, Feith dismissed such criticism as “simplistic.” Despite initial problems, he said, progress is being made, with order returning to most of the country and a new Iraqi governing council in place.
Still, he and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely � to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.
“We’re going to get better over time,” promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. “We’ve always thought of post-hostilities as a phase” distinct from combat, he said. “The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum
“This is the future for the world we’re in at the moment,” he said. “We’ll get better as we do it more often.”

Is this the future you plan to live in?
Via Tristero via Atrios.

Check it Out

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Tim Porter tells us that the media is under using one of the basic tenets of journalism:

� Check it out. And that seems to be the culprit behind many of today’s journalism scandals – as a well the perception by the public that the press is not paying attention. They’re not checking it out enough. Jayson Blair – check him out. George Bush – check him out. Weapons of mass destruction – check them out.

Tim was reminded of this when reading . . . Bring Back the Skeptical Press by Gilbert Cranberg in yesterday’s Washington Post. Cranberg takes the media to task for not checking the facts:

The Bush administration has been taking heavy flak for its as yet unproved claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. In fixing blame for the way the public appears to have been sold a bill of goods, don’t overlook the part played by the media. Instead of closely questioning the administration’s case, the nation’s newspaper editorialists basically nodded in agreement.

Read the piece for Cranberg’s analysis of editorial response to Colin Powell’s WMD presentation to the Security Council. Sometimes trying to be current and timely can be a disservice to your constituency:

but the downside of instant analysis is the scant time it leaves for careful reporting and reflection. I learned in my many years of editorial writing to follow I.F. Stone’s prudent advice to read texts and not to rush to judgment. None of these publications evidently realized, or noted, how Powell had embellished some facts, although that is readily apparent from a close reading of his text.
If the first casualty of war is truth, the media will need to be a lot more skeptical and alert to minimize the toll on truth.

I’m not a journalist and haven’t absorbed basic tools of the trade like ‘check it out.’ But I’m learning them and this means that my posts are often taking me longer to write then when I started blogging. I’ve learned that anything that has a fact in the text needs to be verified: sometimes the fact is just right, other times my memory served it up wrong and once in a while I fat finger the keyboard.
Via The Rhetorica Network

Terrorism at Home

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The 19th-century novelist Feodor Dostoevski, a political prisoner in Russia for four years, wrote: “The degree to which a society is civilized can be judged by entering its prisons.” No wonder we want to avert our eyes from ours.

This ends an essay on prison rape by Richard Lowry that Ampersand points out.

Lowry appears to tell us that we should take a closer look at this society that so many hold up to be the guiding light to the rest of the world. In the first part of the article he notes that there are 2,000,000 people in US jails. This number is astounding….what society puts this many in jail?

Maybe this is not so bad. Let’s check and see what things are like elsewhere in the world:

In 1995 Russia had 1,017,372 inmates and jailed folks at the rate of 690 per 100,000

The US had 1,585,401 inmates and jailed folks at the rate of 600. This rate is higher then DOJ figures.

Belarus had 52,033 inmates and jailed folks at the rate of 505 per 100,000

The rate drops off dramatically after this. We are in fine company: the two great cold war opponents slugging it out to see whose gulags can be the fullest. Dostoevski would not be thrilled by either.

Yes, the problem of rape in prisons should be dealt with. Perhaps if rape dealt with effectively out here in ‘free’ society there will, then, be some prospect of it being dealt with inside.

But before either will be effectively dealt with the terrorism that places 2,000,000 americans in jail must be eliminated.