Late Sunday, NY Times reporter James Risen (who has in the past done some commendable work, such as breaking the Bush wiretapping story), let loose a with a flashing, five siren headline about the recent “discovery” of Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth, supposedly valued in the neighborhood of $1 trillion. Startling revelation. Earth-shattering expose. Game-changing development. How could the US leave now, what with all that ore in need of liberation from the cruel grip of third world mountaintops, and won’t someone think about the Afghan people?
Except, not really.
Turns out, Afghanistan’s mineral wealth had been well documented for years, dating back to when the Soviets were taking their turn pissing away vast amounts of wealth pushing Sisyphus’ boulder up and down the Khyber Pass for no good reason other than that to stop would embolden the Afghans to claim victory.
In fact, details of Risen’s “breaking news” had been reported repeatedly over the past half decade, as documented by several astute bloggers, as well as a few hybrid types like Josh Marshall, Blake Hounshell and Marc Ambinder. Not only that, but the value of the minerals is exaggerated, and the logistical hardships in extracting them considerable, and thus there’s not really much of a story, or incentive to stay and keep up the fight.
These journalists/bloggers went on to note that, given the stale nature of the facts in the piece, and the rather loud headline and lede, the story looked like part of the Pentagon’s efforts to buttress sagging support for a pointless war that even an easily distracted, and reflexively jingoistic, American public is finally souring on. You can only kill so many brown people for so long before the thrill leaves your leg and you begin to yearn for new and bigger things to blow up.
Looks like Risen got played by the old pros in the Pentagon, which is no great sin. Happens to the best of them, and Risen, as I mentioned, is certainly better than average. Prudence would counsel that Risen should either walk back the story, dig deeper into the motives of those that fed it to him, or just kind of pretend the whole thing didn’t happen.
But when you’re a very serious journalist working at the New York Times, prudence can suck on this:
New York Times reporter James Risen is fighting back against critics who have cast a skeptical eye on his Page One story yesterday about Afghanistan’s mineral deposits. In an interview with Yahoo! News, Risen dismissed suspicions that the story was part of an orchestrated campaign to rescue the troubled American effort there and derided critical bloggers as pajama-clad layabouts with no reporting chops. [...]
Risen’s piece quickly drew fire from online reporters and writers (including this one), who pointed out that many of the story’s purported revelations about Afghanistan’s mineral reserves had been previously reported. They also questioned the timing of the story, coming as it did on the heels of a series of troubling reports about the stability of the Karzai government and one day before Gen. David Petraeus was scheduled to testify before Congress about the war. [...]
Risen didn’t take kindly to the blogospheric criticism. “Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas,” Risen said.**
“The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people’s stories,” Risen told Yahoo! News during an increasingly hostile interview, which he called back to apologize for almost immediately after it ended. “Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don’t know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think.” (Risen and fellow Times reporter Eric Lichtblau shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program; this reporter was 33 years old at the time.)
Risen defended the article against claims that Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was largely a matter of public knowledge prior to his story. “If it wasn’t news, then why didn’t anybody write about it?” he asked.
In fact, McClatchy Newspapers reported last year that “the region is thought to hold some of the world’s last major untapped deposits of iron, copper, gold, uranium, precious gems and other raw materials.” In February, Agence France Presse quoted Afghan president Hamid Karzai, citing a U.S. Geological Survey study, claiming that his country had $1 trillion in mineral assets. Just last month, Karzai repeated the claim at a U.S. Institute of Peace event, saying the value was between $1 trillion and $3 trillion.
“But no one picked up on it,” Risen said. He explained that he based his report on the work of a Pentagon team led by Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense charged with rebuilding the Afghan economy…
So was the story a Pentagon plant, designed to show the American public a shiny metallic light at the end of the long tunnel that is the Afghan war, as skeptics allege? Risen said he heard about the Pentagon’s efforts from Milt Bearden, a retired CIA officer who was active in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The men co-authored a book, “The Main Enemy,” in 2003, and Bearden is now a consultant working with Brinkley’s survey team.
Several months ago, Milt started telling me about what they were finding,” Risen said. “At the beginning of the year, I said I wanted to do a story on it.” At first both Bearden and [Paul Brinkley, the guy at DOD tasked with rebuilding the Afghan economy] resisted, Risen said, but he eventually wore them down. “Milt convinced Brinkley to talk to me,” he said, “and Brinkley convinced other Pentagon officials to go on the record. I think Milt realized that things were going so badly in Afghanistan that people would be willing to talk about this.” In other words, according to Risen, he wasn’t handed the story in a calculated leak. Calls and e-mails to Brinkley and to Eric Clark, a Pentagon public relations contractor who works with him, were not immediately returned.[emphasis: mine. childish defensive name calling: Risen's]
What kind of defense is that anyway? He claims the story wasn’t fed to him by the Pentagon, he just based it on a Pentagon report fed to him by Milt Bearden who, as Steve Hynd documents in his pajamas, is up to his eyeballs in spookery and various strands of international rat-fuckeration. Risen dismisses the argument that the story was timed to address waning public support, but then cites that very fact as a reason the story was put together and pushed.
And then he blames bloggers for having the temerity to even make an attempt at deconstructing a story written by Him (actually resorting to the “do you know who I am” argument), even though the story was so flimsy that it didn’t need deconstruction as much as a gentle nudge before it came tumbling down.
**Bonus Foul Mouthed Blogger Fun Fact: John Cook, the guy who interviewed Risen for the above excerpted story, posted the following on Twitter:
NYT’s Jim Risen just told me bloggers criticizing his Afghan minerals story are “jerking off in their pajamas.” Yahoo worried abt language.
Yeah, well, sometimes we have to pleasure ourselves Jim because, unlike your exalted self, we don’t have access to the Pentagon reach-around.
Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly. Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students to be changed to Caucasian skin. [...]
The children depicted on the mural, as we mentioned before but feel compelled to repeat, are little kids who go to the school — “a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project.”
And these children, for the past several months as this happy mural encouraging “green transportation” was being painted by local artists, have been treated to the city of Prescott’s finest citizens driving by and yelling “Nigger” and “Spic” at this school wall painted with pictures of the children who attend the school. And this has been encouraged by a city councilman, Steve Blair, who uses his local radio talk show to rile up these people and demand the mural be destroyed.
And now the faces are being painted white, “because of the controversy.”
With a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his face outside a Columbia bar, Republican S.C. Sen. Jake Knotts called Lexington Rep. Nikki Haley, an Indian-American Republican woman running for governor, a “raghead” several times while explaining how he believed she was hiding her true religion from voters.“She’s a f#!king raghead,” Knotts said.
He later clarified his statement. He did not mean to use the F-word.
Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries. He claims she is hiding her religion and he wants the voters to know about it.
“We got a raghead in Washington; we don’t need one in South Carolina,” Knotts said more than once. “She’s a raghead that’s ashamed of her religion trying to hide it behind being Methodist for political reasons.”
President Obama’s father is from Africa. His mother is a white woman from Kansas.
The rock band Rush has sent Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul a distant early warning: stop using our music.
Paul, who has quickly stepped into the limelight, used the Rush song “Tom Sawyer” in a Web video, and his campaign has also played “The Spirit of Radio” at a rally. In a far cry from the conservative Paul’s discussion of protecting private property rights, his campaign actually used the libertarian-minded band’s intellectual property without permission, attracting a letter from the band’s lawyer for his attempt to get something for nothing.
The Web video using “Tom Sawyer” has already had its audio track disabled, after a complaint by Rush’s attorney Robert Farmer. “This is not a political issue — this is a copyright issue,” Farmer told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “We would do this no matter who it is.” Farmer also pointed out that Rush are not Americans — they are Canadians, so the squabbles of American politics are not particularly closer to the heart for them.
I have nothing to add, except to note that, even under these nearly-ideal circumstances, it is impossible to make non-contrived amusing references to ”By-Tor and the Snow Dog”. Believe me, I just spent the last 8 hours trying.
I see a broad range* of applicability for Stephen Walt’s list of 21 Steps to Defend the Indefensible – a spin manual for governments that get caught behaving badly:
Here are my 21 handy talking-points when you need to apply the white-wash:
1. We didn’t do it! (Denials usually don’t work, but it’s worth a try).
2. We know you think we did it but we aren’t admitting anything.
3. Actually, maybe we did do something but not what we are accused of doing.
4. Ok, we did it but it wasn’t that bad (“waterboarding isn’t really torture, you know”).
5. Well, maybe it was pretty bad but it was justified or necessary. (We only torture terrorists, or suspected terrorists, or people who might know a terrorist…”)
6. What we did was really quite restrained, when you consider how powerful we really are. I mean, we could have done something even worse.
7. Besides, what we did was technically legal under some interpretations of international law (or at least as our lawyers interpret the law as it applies to us.)
8. Don’t forget: the other side is much worse. In fact, they’re evil. Really.
9. Plus, they started it.
10. And remember: We are the good guys. We are not morally equivalent to the bad guys no matter what we did. Only morally obtuse, misguided critics could fail to see this fundamental distinction between Them and Us.
11. The results may have been imperfect, but our intentions were noble. (Invading Iraq may have resulted in tens of thousands of dead and wounded and millions of refugees, but we meant well.)
12. We have to do things like this to maintain our credibility. You don’t want to encourage those bad guys, do you?
13. Especially because the only language the other side understands is force.
14. In fact, it was imperative to teach them a lesson. For the Nth time.
15. If we hadn’t done this to them they would undoubtedly have done something even worse to us. Well, maybe not. But who could take that chance?
16. In fact, no responsible government could have acted otherwise in the face of such provocation.
17. Plus, we had no choice. What we did may have been awful, but all other policy options had failed and/or nothing else would have worked.
18. It’s a tough world out there and Serious People understand that sometimes you have to do these things. Only ignorant idealists, terrorist sympathizers, craven appeasers and/or treasonous liberals would question our actions.
19. In fact, whatever we did will be worth it eventually, and someday the rest of the world will thank us.
20. We are the victims of a double-standard. Other states do the same things (or worse) and nobody complains about them. What we did was therefore permissible.
21. And if you keep criticizing us, we’ll get really upset and then we might do something really crazy. You don’t want that, do you?
I’d say Israel is doing laps at this point.
*This stuff could save marriages.**
**void for marriages destroyed by recognition of same-sex marriage.
Israel has suffered yet another unprovoked, brutal attack by fervent extremists. A large group of highly trained, highly armed Israeli commandos were just minding their business, innocently rapelling* on to a ship carrying humanitarian aid in international waters in the middle of the night with arms at the ready and smoke grenades popping (such stagecraft!), when they were brutally attacked by the ship’s inahbitants, who were laying in wait to ambush the heavily armed soldiers wielding fearsome hands, meancing clubs and pointy knives (which I believe are now considered WMD) for no reason at all. I mean wtf?
In light of the inevitable anti-semitic wailing about how Israeli commandos began firing indiscriminately, killing a dozen or so humanitarian protestors and how this (and the raid itself) is somehow evidence of heavy-handedness and disproportionate use of force in defense of a grossly unjust and inhumane blockade, I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone of my treatise self defense. Which the Medium Lobster stole, unattributed:
Ah, Israel, the holy land, light unto the nations! Barely a month after valiantly killing 1300 Gazans, maiming and wounding thousands more, and leaving the rest for dead in an open-air prison, Israel has stood up for its right to stand up to other people’s rights by forming its most hawkish possible government. A lesser nation might have wavered in the face of a merciless Palestinian onslaught of pleading and stump-waving, but Israel realizes this is a war between good and evil, right and wrong, civilization and those too poor to afford civilization. True, it’s far from a fair fight – Israel has a mere three hundred nuclear warheads while the Palestinians have countless rocks to throw – but somehow the pluck and determination of this scrappy regional superpower has prevailed over the deadly horde of orphans, beggars and amputees who threaten to live next to it.
Israel’s critics will forever bicker over the spilled milk of Israeli policy – a few thousand homes demolished here, a few thousand corpses over there – but we must allow that Israel has a right to defend itself, and we must also allow that defending itself necessarily entails the indiscriminate bombing of thousands of screaming refugees…And when you went to bomb those terrorists and their families, wouldn’t you also bomb everyone and everything around them, reasoning that only a terrorist would live near, go to school with, or be hospitalized in the same vicinity as a terrorist?…And before planning that massive bombing campaign, wouldn’t you be sure to cut the entire population off from terrorist food, militant medicine, and jihadist electricity for months in advance?…
Yes, we may be tempted to mourn the civilian dead, but in killing those civilians, isn’t Israel merely protecting itself against future terrorists who would otherwise go on to retaliate against Israel for the deaths of their children? And yes, we may be tempted to mourn the deaths of the children, but in killing those children, isn’t Israel simply preemptively taking out future militants who would otherwise grow up to avenge the deaths of their parents?…
Message to those seeking to get food and medicinal weapons into Gaza: this aggression will not stand and Israel, badly outnumbered and demonstrably out knived, will find a way to persevere.
