On the resignation of Gen Petraeus.
It's a mess and a rabbit hole, that goes very, very deep. I find it strange that folks can go around killing innocents, drone striking, torturing, destroying infrastructures on other people's land, dropping depleted uranium on towns and villages, messing up the water and electric infrastructure, cause all manner of birth defects, cover up rape and abuse towards military women, deal very poorly with the veterans upon their return, declassifying PSTD to other than a medical issue, have these veterans homeless and suicidal, fund and support terrorists militias, cover up and enhance the opium production, drop bombs on people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, arm the insurgents in Syria, yet, when they pull their little dingy out and flash it around, inserting it here and there, NOW THEY MUST RETIRE?????
Something is seriously and morally wrong with American ethics. Dude done did something else other than fool around with a drama queen, and that's for sure!!! NB
Petraeus
scandal is reported with compelled veneration of all things military | Glenn
Greenwald
2011: Holly Petraeus
(left) holding a bible as David Petraeus is sworn in as CIA director by Vice
President Joe Biden. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
Saturday 10 November
2012
The
reverence for the former CIA Director is part of a wider religious-like worship
of the national security state.
(updated
below [Sun.])
A prime rule of US
political culture is that nothing rivets, animates or delights the political
media like a sex scandal. From Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, and Eliot Spitzer to
John Edwards, Larry Craig and David Vitter, their titillation and joy is
palpable as they revel in every last arousing detail. This giddy package is
delivered draped in a sanctimonious wrapping: their excitement at reporting on
these scandals is matched only by their self-righteous condemnations of the
moral failings of the responsible person.
All of these
behaviors have long been constant, inevitable features of every political sex
scandal - until yesterday. Now, none of these sentiments is permitted because
the newest salacious scandal features at its center Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned
yesterday as CIA Director, citing an extramarital affair.
It has now been widely
reported that the affair was with Paula Broadwell, the author of a truly
fawning hagiography of Petraeus entitled "All In", and someone
whom Petraeus, in her own words, "mentored" when he sat on her
dissertation committee. The FBI discovered the affair when it investigated
whether she had attempted to gain access to his emails and other classified
information. In an interview
about Broadwell's book that she gave to the Daily Show back in January, one
that is incredibly fascinating and revealing to watch in retrospect, Jon
Stewart identified this as the primary question raised by her biography of
Petraeus: "is he awesome, or super-awesome?"
Gen. Petraeus is the
single most revered man in the most venerated American institution: the
National Security State and, specifically, its military. As a result, all the
rules are different. Speaking ill of David Petraeus - or the military or CIA as
an institution - is strictly prohibited within our adversarial watchdog press
corps. Thus, even as he resigns in disgrace, leading media figures are
alternatively mournful and worshipful as they discuss it.
On MSNBC, Andrea
Mitchell appeared genuinely grief-stricken when she first
reported Petraeus' resignation letter. "This is very painful",
she began by announcing, as she wore a profoundly sad face. Her voice quivered
with a mix of awe and distress as she read his resignation letter, savoring
every word as though she were reciting from the Dead Sea Scrolls. On the Rachel
Maddow Show later that night, Mitchell began her appearance by
decreeing that "this is a personal tragedy" and said she was
particularly sorrowful for "the men and women of the CIA, an agency that
has many things to be proud about: many
things to be proud about" [emphasis in original].
Christiane Amanpour
of CNN and ABC made Mitchell look constrained by comparison as she belted out this
paean on Twitter:
For good measure,
she then
added:
What does all that
even mean? From which glorious "battlefield" is the CIA Director now
absent, and how and why are we "at a time when we need them most"?
But Amanpour is reciting something akin to a prayer here, and it's thus insusceptible
to rational inquiry of that sort.
Meanwhile, Michael
Hastings - whose Rolling Stone cover story ended Gen. McChrystal's career by
including numerous intemperate quotes and, in doing so, revealingly prompted widespread
animosity among his
media colleagues for the crime of Making a General
Look Bad - was on MSNBC
yesterday with Martin Bashir. Hastings explained how the media has been
devoted to Petraeus' glorification and thus ignored all the substantive reasons
why Petraeus should have received far more media scrutiny and criticism in the
past. In response, Bashir - who has previously demonstrated his contempt
for anyone who speaks ill of a US General - expressed his anger at Hastings
("That's a fairly harsh assessment of a man who is regarded by many in the
military as an outstanding four-star general") and then quickly cut him
off just over two minutes into the segment.
Then there's the
Foreign Policy Community, for which David Petraeus has long been regarded with
deity status. Foreign Policy Magazine Managing Editor Blake Hounshell, under
the headline "The Tragedy of David Petraeus", gushed
that "Petraeus's downfall is a huge loss for the United States," as
"not only was he one of the country's top strategic thinkers, he was also
one of the few public figures revered by all sides of the political spectrum
for his dedication and good judgment." He added: "He salvaged two
disastrous wars, for two very different presidents."
Also at Foreign
Policy, Thomas Ricks, formerly of the Washington Post, argued
that Obama should not have accepted his resignation: "So the surprise to
me is that Obama let him go. But the administration's loss may be Princeton's
gain." Like most people in the media, Ricks has long been an ardent
admirer of Petraeus, even turning
his platform over to Paula Broadwell in the past for her to spread
her hagiography far and wide.
There are several
revealing lessons about this media swooning for Petraeus even as he exits from
a scandal that would normally send them into tittering delight. First, military worship is the central religion
of America's political and media culture. The military is by far the most
respected and beloved institution among the US population - a dangerous
fact in any democracy - and, even assuming they wanted to (which they don't),
our brave denizens of establishment journalism are petrified of running afoul
of that kind of popular sentiment.
Recall the intense
controversy that erupted last Memorial Day when MSNBC's Chris Hayes gently
pondered whether all soldiers should be considered "heroes". His
own network, NBC, quickly assembled a panel on the Today Show to
unanimously denounce him in the harshest and most personal terms ("I
hope that he doesn't get more viewers as a result of this...this guy is like a
– if you've seen him...he looks like a weenie" - "Could you be more
inappropriate on Memorial Day?"), and Hayes then subjected himself to the predictable
ritual of public apology (though he notably did not retract the substance
of his remarks).
Hayes was forced
(either overtly or by the rising pressure) to apologize because his comments
were blasphemous: of America's true religion. At virtually every major sporting
event, some uber-patriotic display of military might is featured as the crowd chants
and swoons. It's perfectly reasonable not to hold members of the military
responsible for the acts of aggression ordered by US politicians, but that
hardly means that the other extreme - compelled reverence - is justifiable
either.
Yet US journalists -
whose ostensible role is to be adversarial to powerful and secretive political
institutions (which includes, first and foremost, the National Security State)
- are the most pious high priests of this national religion. John Parker, former
military reporter and fellow of the University of Maryland Knight Center for
Specialized Journalism-Military Reporting, wrote an extraordinarily
good letter back in 2010 regarding why leading Pentagon reporters were so
angry at WikiLeaks for revealing government secrets: because they identify with
the military to the point of uncritical adoration:
"The
career trend of too many Pentagon journalists typically arrives at the same
vanishing point: Over time they are co-opted by a combination of awe -
interacting so closely with the most powerfully romanticized force of violence
in the history of humanity - and the admirable and seductive allure of the
sharp, amazingly focused demeanor of highly trained military minds. Top
military officers have their s*** together and it's personally humbling for
reporters who've never served to witness that kind of impeccable competence.
These unspoken factors, not to mention the inner pull of reporters' innate
patriotism, have lured otherwise smart journalists to abandon – justifiably in
their minds – their professional obligation to treat all sources equally and
skeptically. . . .
"Pentagon
journalists and informed members of the public would benefit from watching 'The
Selling of the Pentagon', a 1971 documentary. It details how, in the height of
the Vietnam War, the Pentagon sophisticatedly used taxpayer money against
taxpayers in an effort to sway their opinions toward the Pentagon's desires for
unlimited war. Forty years later, the techniques of shaping public opinion via
media has evolved exponentially. It has reached the point where flipping major
journalists is a matter of painting in their personal numbers."
That is what makes
this media worship of All Things Military not only creepy to behold, but
downright dangerous.
Second, it is truly remarkable what ends
people's careers in Washington - and what does not end them. As Hastings
detailed in that interview, Petraeus has left a string of failures and even
scandals behind him: a disastrous Iraqi training program, a worsening of the
war in Afghanistan since he ran it, the attempt to convert
the CIA into principally a para-military force, the series of misleading
statements about the Benghazi attack and the revealed large CIA presence in
Libya. To that one could add the constant killing of innocent people in the
Muslim world without a whiff of due process, transparency or oversight.
Yet none of those
issues provokes the slightest concern from our intrepid press corps. His career
and reputation could never be damaged, let alone ended, by any of that.
Instead, it takes a sex scandal - a revelation that he had carried on a
perfectly legal extramarital affair - to force him from power. That is the
warped world of Washington. Of all the heinous things the CIA does, the only
one that seems to attract the notice or concern of our media is a banal sex
scandal. Listening to media coverage, one would think an extramarital affair is
the worst thing the CIA ever did, maybe even the only bad thing it ever did
(Andrea Mitchell: "an agency that has many things to be proud about: many things to be proud about").
Third, there is something deeply symbolic and
revealing about this whole episode. Broadwell ended up spending substantial
time with Petraeus when she, in essence, embedded with him and followed him
around Afghanistan in order to write her biography. What ended up being
produced was not only the type of propagandistic hagiography such
arrangements typically produce, but also deeply personal affection as well.
This is access
journalism and the embedding dynamic in its classic form, just a bit more
vividly expressed. The very close and inter-dependent relationship between
media figures and the political and military officials they cover often
produces exactly these same sentiments even if they do not find the full-scale
expression as they did in this case. In that regard, the relationship between
the now-former CIA Director and his fawning hagiographer should be studied in
journalism schools to see the results reliably produced by access journalism
and the embedding process. Whatever Broadwell did for Petraeus is what US media
figures are routinely doing for political and especially military officials
with their "journalism".
Other
matters
Harvard Law
Professor Jack Goldsmith, formerly with the Bush justice department, has an
excellent analysis explaining why "one important consequence of
President Obama's re-election will be the further entrenchment, and
legitimation, of the basic counterterrorism policies that Obama continued, with
tweaks, from the late Bush administration." He explains why an Obama
presidency will strengthen these policies far more than a Romney presidency
could have (as a former Bush official, Goldsmith is understandably delighted by
this fact).
In Seattle tonight,
I'm delivering the keynote speech to the annual Bill of Rights dinner for the
ACLU in Washington; there are still a few tickets left for the event, which
begins at 7:00 pm, and they can be obtained here.
Finally, I
participated, along with ABC's Jake Tapper and Lisa Rosenberg, in a report by
NPR's "On the Media' on Obama's first term record on transparency. My
participation is in the first four minutes or so and can be
heard here. I was also interviewed yesterday by NPR's local Seattle
affiliate for about 30 minutes on Obama's foreign policy and civil liberties
record, and that segment, which was quite good as it included several
adversarial calls from listeners, can be heard
here.
UPDATE
[Sun.]: CORRECTION
I wrote above that
Petraeus "sat on [Broadwell's] dissertation committee". This is
inaccurate. Petraeus was one
of Broadwell's "dissertation advisers".
