On George Bush's watch, and mine, and yours
posted by CharlesPeirce @ 11:47 AM
3 comments
Pragmaticism
Cut back to Shamrock: "Tito Ortiz is going to find out who Ken Shamrock is, was, and is now." The "is now" in that sentence wasn't really a redundancy. Shamrock was employing a new tense—the ultimate tense—to describe how he was about to be bringing it, how it was about to have been brung.
3 Comments:
This article is ridiculous. Look, I don't disagree that the situation in Sudan is abysmal, and that Bush should be doing something about it and isn't. But to say we're sacrificing humanitarian efforts against the regieme for an alliance is a lofty claim, and the only support they give for it is the term "fruitful relationship", which Condoleeza Rice said America HOPES to form with the Sudan against terrorism in a letter in which she's criticizing the regieme and calling for it to end the genocide!!
I am completely for involving ourselves in some meaningful way to end the slaughter. I'm very upset about what's happening there. But this article makes it sound like Bush is in bed with the Sudan and offers absolutely no meaningful support for that idea, and that's very very bad journalism.
The government of Sudan should be censored, sanctioned and shut off in every way possible until this stops. We should use every diplomatic measure possible to call for the genocide to stop. Engaging our military would be more difficult, since, for better or worse, it's entrenched in Iraq right now.
Critize Bush for invading Iraq intead of Sudan. Criticize him for not doing more diplomatically. Criticize him for talking about freedom and not acting on it. But don't take diplomatic comments about desires for good will and use it to invent the sensationlist claim that Bush has somehow allied our country with the genocidal government of the Sudan - that's absurd, ridiculous, and manifestly not the case.
Also, there's no "equivalent to the CIA" in Sudan. They might have the same function - foreign intelligence - but the statement implies yet another parallel between our countries that simply doesn't exist. The CIA has a million more capabilities and functions than any organization in a third world country with a GNP the size of a walnut could ever boast.
The Village Voice does not do investigative journalism, they are essentially an Op/Ed outlet that draws on other sources. In this article, for instance, they do reference Ken Silverstein’s brilliantly researched article in the L.A. Times (04/29). Here is an excerpt from that article:
Sudan has "given us specific information that is ... important, functional and current," said a senior State Department official who agreed to discuss intelligence matters on condition of anonymity. The official acknowledged that the Mukhabarat could become a "top tier" partner of the CIA. "Their competence level as a service is very high," the official said. "You can't survive in that part of the world without a good intelligence service, and they are in a position to provide significant help." From Khartoum the view is markedly upbeat. "American intelligence considers us to be a friend," said Maj. Gen. Yahia Hussein Babiker, a senior official in Sudan's government. During an interview at the presidential palace, Babiker said Sudan had achieved "a complete normalization of our relations with the CIA." Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, who otherwise declined comment for this article, told The Times: "We have a strong partnership with the CIA. The information we have provided has been very useful to the United States."
So it isn't bad journalism, it isn't journalism; and the journalism on which it relies is top notch.
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