Ohiocore

Why would the FBI be the one alleging the military tortured prisoners in Guantanamo? Well, they're playing an old military game: cover your ass. It turns out that military interrogators regularly impersonated FBI agents during interrogation, thereby insulating themselves from later blame, but also with the effect of making the detainee utterly unprosecutable in an US court. Maybe that is part of the reason they still hold hundreds of men without charges or outside contact. But the FBI memos turning up now (thanks to an ACLU lawsuit) are bound to solidify the long known complaints of torture and mismanagement, including:

• Dogs used for intimidation and torture, as in Abu Ghraib, despite the repeated military statements that nothing of the kind of occured.
• FBI (and other agency) impersonation, widespread loss of prosecution chances due to illegal questioning.
• Shackling, exposure, forced nudity, sexual imposition, squalor and living-in-shit.
• And, for good measure, apparently we like to wrap prisoners in an Israeli flag and blast them with extremely loud rap music. Does this even sound like an interrogation with any chance of success? Wrapping them in an Israeli flag? What genius conjured that up? Let's hope it was somebody austere and credible like Paul "Arab men are suspceptible to sexual intimidation" Wolfowitz.
• Restults? Quoting an FBI agent email of Dec. 5, 2003: "These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and . . . have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee."

source: Washington Post

This past week the headlines in the news fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Each news story added another dimension to the emerging picture of war policy that is increasingly costly and incompetent.... there was the story of the six Ohio reservists who were court marshaled for cannibalizing abandoned Army vehicles in Kuwait. When a convoy is moving, the policy is to abandon any vehicle that would take more than 30 minutes to fix. These soldiers took parts from two abandoned tractor-trailers to fix their own vehicles so they could carry out their mission in Iraq. You might think they would get a commendation for ingenuity. No, they were convicted of theft and destruction of Army property. They got jail for six months. That takes us to those who did get commendations this week. President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the central architects of the Iraq war.

Those three recipients are, of course:

One went to retired CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who tried but failed to produce intelligence proving that Saddam had WMD, and produced very little about al-Qaida before 9/11.

Another went to Gen. Tommy Franks, who planned for the invasion but failed to plan at all for any insurgency. Then Franks took early retirement while his war was still going on. What general does that?

The final medal was awarded to L. Paul Bremer, who helped feed the insurgency by disbanding the entire Iraqi army, thereby creating hundreds of thousands of armed, unemployed troops who hated the U.S. Well done!

• Senator John McCain (AZ-R): "no confiedence" in Rumsfeld;
• Senator Chuck Hagel (NE-R): "That soldier, and those men and women there, deserved a far better answer from their secretary of defence than a flippant comment. That might work in a newsroom where you can be cute with the television audience, but not when you're putting these men and women in harm's way, who will be wounded - some, some will be killed."in the Sydney Morning Herald;
• Senator Norm Coleman (MN-R): "serious misgivings" (see the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune);
• William Kristol (former GOP White House aide, Weekly Standard editor, Chairman for the Project for the New American Century): as published in the Washington Post, "surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term."
• Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf (senior commander during Persian Gulf War) issued a "harsh indictment" during an MSNBC Hardball interview:
  

  And I was very, very disappointed—let me put it stronger, I was angry about the words of the secretary of defense when he laid it all on the Army. I mean, as if he as the secretary of defense didn‘t have anything to do with the Army, if the Army was over there doing it themselves screwing up.

• Thomas Donnelly: As if Bill Kristol wasn't enough, you also have this fellow fellow, as it were, of the American Enterprise Institute (resident fellow) and PNAC (senior fellow) . In a piece for another Rupert Murdoch backed venture, the Daily Standard, he writes "Even longtime supporters and transformation advocates have begun to recognize that Rumsfeld is now a large part of the problem."
• Former Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott (MI-R) in the Post:
  Wednesday in Mississippi, Lott said: "I am not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld. I don't think he listens to his uniformed officers." Lott said Rumsfeld should not be forced to resign immediately, but "I would like to see a change in that slot in the next year or so."

"It's a question of will and priorities. It's hard to escape the conclusion that this is the Army they want -- one whose front-line personnel are forced to wait in line for lifesaving safety equipment (in some cases paying for it out of their own pockets) because a missile defense shield and no-bid Halliburton contracts had to come first...

`Support the troops,' coming from Rumsfeld and company, appears to be nothing more than demagoguery. "

Tune in next time for the stirring conclusion, when we predictably and mind-numbingly discover YET ANOTHER SECRET MILITARY FACILITY FOR TORTURE...

Nearly all indecency complaints in 2003 -- 99.8 percent -- were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group. This year, the trend has continued, and perhaps intensified.

Through early October, 99.9 percent of indecency complaints, aside from those concerning the Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast on CBS were brought by the PTC, according to the FCC analysis dated Oct. 1.

• 2000: under 350;
• 2001: under 350;
• 2002: __140,000;
• 2003: __240,000;
• 2004: 1,068,767+.

But why does the number of complaints matter at all? Because complaints initiate investigations, and justify punishments, typically fines, but with the possibility of ultimately losing broadcast license(s). Interestingly enough, MediaWeek cites a specific case where the number of complaints was disputed legally:

The agency on Oct. 12, in proposing fines of nearly $1.2 million against Fox Broadcasting and its affiliates, said it received 159 complaints against Married by America, which featured strippers partly obscured by pixilation. But when asked, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said it could find only 90 complaints from 23 individuals...

And Fox, in a filing last Friday, told the FCC that it should rescind the proposed fines, in part because the low number of complaints fell far short of indicating that community standards had been violated. “All but four of the complaints were identical… and only one complainant professed even to have watched the program,” Fox said. It said the network and its stations had received 34 comments, “a miniscule total for a show that had a national audience of 5.1 million households.”

Somebody please figure out what part of this last citation is the sickest:

• the Man's Math -- that 23 individuals were represented by the government as 159 complaints;
• the Show itself -- "reality" TV where contestants marry the mate chosen by the viewing audience;
• that 5.1 million households watched it;
• that I feel compelled to side with Fox's legal position, just after having blogged their nasty ClearChannel partnership;
• or that it puts me on the side of a clearly and characteristically craptastic program, despite likely sharing the same objections as its detractors.

Well, ego and grudges, bedamned, it not acceptable for any branch of government to cite a number of public missives in policy or punitive formulation, and then not be able to produce them. That just don't jive.

PTC is an interesting case. On many points, including opposition to corporate broadcast consolidation, and believing that FCC regulations should have teeth, I agree with them. However, their site is immediately mockable. Case in point, the "PTC store," with material organizationally approved for your family's viewing. Apparently the same oligarchic corporations they complain churn out objectionable crap by virtue of their unassailable chokehold on American media, also turn out their favorite productions (Warner Bros., Buena Vista, Universal, etc.). And oh what a bounty they are. We're talking:

• Steve Allen's 75th Bday Celebration Live;
• The Carol Burnett Show on DVD;
• Jazz Lesson w/ Steve Allen;
• Billy Ray Cyrus in the television show Doc;
• Steve Allen's Private Joke File;
• The Judds' Greatest Hits;
• Vulgarians at the Gate by Steve Allen;
• Girly girl matieral like Princess Diaries (I & II), A Cinderella Story and the extensive American Girl doll series of promotional entertainment; and
• 3 separate VHS titles by DORF.

No really, I think they need more Steve Allen. I like that Braveheart and Gladiator are both included as "clean films", complete with little halo logo. I wonder at that. These movies involves intimate battlefield violence, executions and disfigurement at length. For example, when arrow shafts rain down on aged and purile soldiers, piercing the arse of one who had been mooning the archers.... Or in at least one massive scene, when blood actually strikes the camera lens. Execution combat w/ Tigers as public spectacle... Apparently, that's clean. But Janet Jackson's boob, OMG WTF!

Ah well, what do you expect from people who put this on their t-shirt.

Fox currently provides one-minute newscasts to 275 stations. Starting next year, it will provide more than 100 Clear Channel stations with a 5-minute newscast at the top of each hour, a nightly news broadcast and serve as San Antonio-based Clear Channel's primary source on breaking national news.

If all options in the agreement are exercised, its radio service could have more than 500 affiliates by the middle of next year... many of Clear Channel's most prominent news and talk stations, including those in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta and San Diego.