I’m putting together a similar foreign-policy discussion blog with a few of my friends. I’ll have to cross link to yours or something once it gets going…

At least on this blog, which is the first I heard of the Newsweek incident, the debate we are having is over at which point does the communication of an anonymous tip become a socially irresponsible act worthy of sanction. That is a different debate than the egregiousness of Guantanamo versus other acts of political violence, because it specifically concerns the way we allow ourselves to communicate, or in a larger way- what kind of civilization we want to live in.

On some level, I might agree that smearing a Muslim with menstrual blood is not as bad as a journalist being beheaded, or thousands being killed in Darfur. That would indeed be a very interesting moral debate to which there are no easy answers. Frankly, I don’t have one and if I did you shouldn’t necessarily trust it. What the media allows, so long as it is not mandatorily rammed down people’s throats as state propaganda, is enough information for people to be able to reach a concensus among themselves. But Alex is making this particular point from the position that this information should never have been made available in the first place because some people died, which leads to the logic of saying that chinese poets should be jailed because they fill people’s heads with funny ideas.

I actually don’t think Alex really believes that, I think he’s angry at the media and initially believed that this incident would be a clear rebuke to people who attack Bush for having based the Iraq war on misinformation. Now because it seems that abuses did occur, we’re discussing *how bad were those abuses compared to all the other evil in this*, whereas what I’m still interested in is exactly what objective standards is Alex upholding by continuing to call for Newsweek’s head, and is he willing to allow this standard in a context where his political sympathies lay elsewhere.

-morgan

Rather than ban Newsweek, I believe people have the right to subscribe to whatever news source they want to- be it Newsweek, the ISO Daily, the John Birch Society newsletter or whatever. I don’t subscribe to Newsweek because I don’t like retro-seventies canary yellow headlines asking “Is the DaVinci Code TRUE?”, but I don’t compare it to Tokyo Rose and try to criminalize it.

Anyway, advocate the creation of a constitutionally mandatory “How-Much-Will-It-Offend-Central-Asia-Ometer” and we can discuss whether or not Newsweek is guilty of anything. As for your libel case though, if you were as concerned for civil liberties as you say you are you would realize that the Newsweek article didn’t name a private citizen, didn’t even name a *public official*- you’re just saying that the government doesn’t like it so the mean liberals should go to jail. Good luck getting that argument to stick in any marginally democratic system. That’s what I’m standing up for.

But what Manhattan does have doing for it is that it’s very dense. There is a LOT of stuff within walking distance of any subway stop. And most of the office buildings are clustered in Midtown and Downtown within walking distance from either the east side or west side lines.

Unlike the dumb “Metro” stations in Virginia that are in the middle of nowhere.

For example, look at Japan, which is a “linear” country with very high density cities. They have a fantastic high-speed rail system that was very easy to deploy because they can run a single line and hit the vast majority of the long-distance travel in the country. Similarly, the have a great internet backbone, because they can run a single fibre line and cover every major city. Compared to Japan, in the US the cost deploying transportation and telecommunications infrastructures is very high, with the end result that the US has slower and more expensive broadband service, and terrible train service. Of course, in Japan they fund basic services much better than we do in the US, which is probably a factor as well…

It’s interesting, Josh, that you’re in South Africa during this. I hope you’re well down there. Much of this debate reminds me of Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, and in particular his narrators observation during the interrogation of an insurgent that brutalization is inherent to imperial administration, but that once you identify your civilizing force as imperial, you are already consigning it to eventual collapse.

The casual psychological degradation- the menstrual blood smearing, the koran abuse, the prisoners wrapped in Israeli flags- may not yet be of the level of, say- the way Germans and Russians treated each other during WWII, but it is dehumanization to be sure- and it should be reported.

Regardless of the specifics of the pentagon inquiry- whether the Koran was flushed or kicked or whatever- Alex likened the Newsweek report, which, by any standard I can think of was entirely justified, to Lord Haw Haw and other traitors. In fact, what Alex actually said was that whether or not Newsweek should be held culpable was not dependent on the veracity of that claim in particular, it was dependent on whether *the supposed ideological tone of their news reporting in general* passed political muster. In an earlier post on the Rwandan genocide, Alex, you dismissed a character’s suggestion that the Rwandan radio stations be shut down as indicative of ‘regulatory liberal thinking’ and offered instead that a competing message of ‘peace and hope’ should have been beamed in during these weeks of horror in the spirit of competition. Aside from the impossibility of such a solution in those circumstances, how can you be advocating Newsweek be held responsible for 15 deaths in reporting a claim in the Periscope section corroborated at least by the FBI, but in circumstances in which 800,000 died as a result of all-pervading hate radio explicitly exhorting people to commit genocide find any punitive countermeasure to be too regulatory?

In the case of Newsweek and the reasonably accurate Koran report, why not just suggest the same thing- that al-Hurrah (or, heck, even some actual *private* news outlet) offer a competing meme that takes issue with Newsweeks reportage?

Doing some homework, I found this:
“”"
”
The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Quran and was later fired for “a pattern of unacceptable behavior.”

In other confirmed incidents, a guard’s urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran.
”

Five incidents – is that a pattern of abuse? Is that indicative of a policy? Of course not. More shuckens. Newsweek ran the “Koran flushing” story to embarrass the White House and Pentagon and suggest a “cover up” of abuse. Well, the cover is off. Here’s the big revelation: the report finds 15 incidents where prisoners “mishandled” their own Korans.
”
Hood also said his investigation found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Qurans. “These included using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on the Quran,” Hood’s report said. It offered no possible explanation for those alleged abuses.

In the most recent of those 15 cases, a detainee on Feb. 18, 2005, allegedly ripped up his Quran and handed it to a guard, stating that he had given up on being a Muslim. Several of the guards witnessed this, Hood reported.
”
“”
http://austinbay.net/blog/index.php?p=380

Do you really think this stuff justified people thinking of us as monstrous given the actual monstronsity in the world?

and is arlen spector a traitor in your eyes?

alex, you have absolutely no idea how america and bush are viewed in the rest of the world. we are monsters, monsters. here in the most urbanized, modern part of africa, it is taken as a given that our country has totally and completely lost its mind.

you’re so stubborn that i cannot imagine you ever saying openly ‘whoops, i was wrong’. but i know that all of this just makes you sick inside.

“It is not the anti-American sentiment, it is a protest over news of the desecration of the holy Koran,” Karzai told reporters in Brussels. He said Afghanistan was now a democracy in which demonstrations were allowed, but that security forces were not yet prepared to handle them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/11/AR2005051101874.html

For full discussion of who is at fault, see
http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2005/05/did_newsweek_ca.html

As for standard journalistic standards, Newsweek engaged in libel, not journalism.

Whether they should also be liable for the riots is an open question, but lefties keep wanting us to ask ourselves “Why do they hate us?” Their point being that the actions of terrrorists are justified by some bad behavior of ours.

But with Newsweek they are suddenly singing a different tune. Now they HATE us because they’ve been told to hate us by people relying on lies like those propagated by Newsweek. They’ve engaged in violence because they’ve been incited by these lies.

I’ll hold newsweek and its defenders innocent when they hold the US and its defenders innocent.