Mark Danner on American politics today

Journalist Mark Danner, on current events. A few excerpts you should read.

“That leads me to a conclusion I came to then: that in many stories it's not the information, it's the politics. It's not that we were lacking information. It's that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary. When I look at our time I see that phenomenon writ large. It's gone way beyond a massacre in a relatively obscure Central American country. It's gone to policies and statements that led the United States to invade a country that had not attacked us, to torture prisoners and deny we're doing it even when clear evidence says that we are, to domestic spying in which the government is clearly breaking the law and the president declares that he will continue to do so. In all these cases, it's not the information, it's the politics. This is a hard thing for journalists to admit because the model of journalistic behavior in our era is Watergate. It's very hard for journalists to come to grips with the reality that wrongdoing can indeed be exposed, and continue to be exposed again and again with no result, in a kind of tortuous eternal return.”

“There's been an interesting ambivalence in the administration when it comes to all these actions they've taken in the name of national security -- between the impulse to deny and stonewall and the impulse to come forward and very boldly assert that they took such actions in the name of national security. You see it in eavesdropping, where Karl Rove has clearly indicated a preference for declaring, in a very clever response to the NSA revelation, "If al-Qaida is talking to someone in the United States we want to know about it. Apparently some Democrats don't." Which is basically to say: If you're concerned about this, you're weakening the United States. All this human rights, Fourth Amendment stuff is so much hooey.”
“In essence, this is an assault on the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is in the Constitution because the framers understood that a lot of these rights, especially when under pressure in wartime, are not particularly popular. So they were put in permanently, so as not to be subject to majority control or majority abnegation. It's politics of the most savagely bare-knuckle and dangerous kind when you use that gap between the country's precepts as embodied in the Constitution and the fact that many of these become unpopular in time of war to destroy your political opponents, which is what this administration does.”
“Today in the New York Times, there was a striking report about the steady upsurge in the number of attacks since the beginning of the insurgency. This has been inexorable, which shows that the insurgency is growing more formidable, despite all these reports about American and Iraqi successes in the war. That story appeared on Page A12 of the New York Times. It wasn't even news. Accompanying it was a piece about the failure of infrastructure in Iraq. Though the United States has put roughly $16 billion of American money into the Iraqi infrastructure, the number of hours of average electricity available to an inhabitant of Baghdad has gone from 24 hours to 4. All the figures on infrastructure point downward, so that if you're an Iraqi, you have seen your standard of living steadily decline under the Americans even as you now have a much greater chance of being kidnapped or killed or blown up in an explosion or having your children kidnapped. Very little of this gets through to Americans.”

“I think it's widely known at the top of the administration that Iraq is a failure. It's also been recognized by many that, in strategic terms, the Iraq war could turn out to be a catastrophe because it's essentially created a Shia Islamist government sympathetic to Iran and, among other things, made it impossible for the U.S. to adequately pressure Iran on the nuclear issue. The result of this occupation is going to be a reversal of 50 years of American policy in the Gulf, which has been a reliance on the Sunni autocracies in the area. That policy had an awful lot wrong with it; its support of those autocracies over many decades certainly helped lead to al-Qaida and its epigones. The fact is, though, that the Bush administration has essentially overthrown that policy with nothing to put in its place.”

You can read the whole thing in Salon.com or TomDispatch.com.