Does pork really go over that well in Afghanistan?

More on Afghan elections. This will come as a shocker: Karzai’s opponents accuse the US ambassador of acting as his campaign manager. The Times (reprinted here): “In the past week, the US Ambassador has appeared three times at Mr Karzai’s side at the opening of US-funded reconstruction projects, some of which have not even been completed. ...After two years of doling out meagre reconstruction funds, the Bush Administration has pumped in an extra $ 1.76 billion this election year.” The irony is that Karzai was already a favorite, but the landslide Saturday is going to wind up making him look less legitimate because it will be seen as resulting from American meddling.

Under Bush’s faith-based marriage promotion program, the gov is hiring Moonies and funding Moonie programs. Moonie marriages, of course, are mass marriages between strangers, but those unions produce children free of the taint of original sin, so, uh, good deal.

Afghan elections just as silly as ours: let freedom reign

The Sunday Times notes: “Karzai cancelled his last election broadcast because of security concerns although Kabul Radio City, where it was due to be recorded, is less than a mile from the palace and across the road from the headquarters of the Nato led peacekeeping force.” “[T]he 18 candidates include a vodka swilling warlord who likes to crush his enemies with tanks but is running on a human rights platform; a poet returning from exile in Paris; a woman paediatrician and one man who submitted an old black-and-white passport photograph remarkably similar to the only known image of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.” And it’s still a better choice than Bush v. Kerry.

Something called International Foundation for Election Systems is passing out picture-only election literature described thus by the Sunday Times: “a series of pictures begins with a map of Afghanistan with a Kalashnikov at its centre and scenes of devastation. Then pictures of people voting are followed by images of Afghanistan with a sun in the centre radiating out to roads, hospitals, schools and wheat fields.” Yes, by all means encourage magical thinking about the electoral process. And, um, wheat? (If anyone comes across this, or indeed any Afghan election lit., please email me.)

It notes the problems in preventing voter fraud by putting indelible ink on people’s fingers when so many are amputees because of landmines.

All the bad guys all gone now

The level of lying is increasing. The US is claiming that in Samarra, 125 rebels were killed and no civilians. None. Zero. They’re not even bothering to come up with half-plausible lies anymore. Area hospitals of course tell a different story. The Iraqi interior minister also tells a story, a children’s story to judge by the vocabulary: “We cleaned up the city from all the bad guys and terrorists.”

David Avery, running the Afghan presidential elections for the UN, says that there will be many irregularities, but not enough to undercut their legitimacy or affect the outcome. Of course the elections and the irregularities haven’t happened yet, so Avery is obviously prepared to overlook any amount of violence or chicanery.

Yes, I used the word chicanery. Everybody should use the word chicanery once in their lifetime.

When the Germans occupied France, they set up an internment camp. It was kept going secretly until 1949, evidently mostly housing foreigners it would have been embarrassing to release because to do so would be to admit that French guards had collaborated with the Germans. So the French government effectively kept collaborating with Nazis who were no longer there because they had been defeated 4 years before. Shows real dedication to the fine art of collaboration.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza (the 5,934th invasion, I believe) is being called Operation Days of Penitence, which just seems obnoxious to me.

Tim Dunlop is right: the voices that wouldn’t let Bush finish were not in an earpiece, they were the voices in his chimp-like head.

Pictures of cemeteries are not representative of the new Afghanistan

The UN is funding PR advisers to teach the candidates in the Afghan presidential elections the finer points of spin-doctoring.

Gen. Dostum, a whisky-drinking mujahideen leader whose Northern Alliance forces helped defeat the Taliban, had to be dissuaded from posing for a campaign poster among the graves of "martyrs" who died fighting the Taliban.

Tactfully, they pointed out that he might look for a more positive image. “Pictures of cemeteries are not representative of the new Afghanistan,” Mr Marie said. The general eventually agreed to pose at a building site instead.

The UN, according to the Observer, has 115,000 election officials in Afghanistan, with 5,000 satellite phones, 1,150 jeeps and 4 helicopters. Also donkeys: some of the ballot boxes will be sent by donkey. Meanwhile, in Iraq, they have 8 people working on the elections. Not that the 115,000 officials etc aren’t working in the service of a farce, of course. It would help keep everyone’s understanding of this focused if the media used language more carefully. For example, The Observer says that “More than 10 million voters have registered,” but since there are fewer than 10 million eligible voters in the whole country, so that statement is false, disregarding the large and unknown level of fraud.

Badly chosen BBC headline: “Nigeria Spearheads Polio Campaign.” Glad to find that it didn’t involve actual spears. Given the obscurantism in some of the Muslim states, this would not be out of the question. This time President Obasanjo himself personally administered the vaccine to the daughter of the governor of Kano, one of the states that had previously banned the vaccine.

Porter Goss has picked as executive director of the CIA a guy, Michael Kostiw, who was an oil company lobbyist--natch--after he was forced out of the CIA in 1981 for shoplifting. Well, for getting caught shoplifting, anyway. Hopefully the Post won’t stop investigating until it can tell us exactly what he shoplifted, but somehow I think we all know it was women’s underwear.
(Update: pink women’s underwear, no doubt in my mind)

Bush and Kerry agreed that nuclear proliferation was an important issue. In fact, Bush said US spending had gone up by I think he said 30%. Turns out, that includes the cost of getting rid of the US’s own unwanted nuclear materials. This means he came prepared with a fake number, on an issue he claimed to consider really important.

The Spanish government is moving forward with plans to allow gay marriage and gay adoption. The Vatican calls this a “sad step.” Yes, and we should listen because the Catholic Church’s record of social policy in Spain is so good:

Never seen a meeting that would depose a tyrant

A 1977 patent for the comb-over (don’t miss the drawings), via the 2004 IgNobel prizes.

Contrariwise, a French Muslim schoolgirl shaved her head to protest the headscarf ban, just as I suggested.

Bush keeps making fun of Kerry’s plan to call a summit on Iraq: “I’ve never seen a meeting that would depose a tyrant, or bring a terrorist to justice.” Then open a history book, you ignoramus:

We'll be bombing ya tamarrah, Samarrah

Bill Maher says the FCC is upset about the televising of the debates, because they showed the emperor without clothes.

DO AS WE SAY... : Two BBC website stories: 1) “US pushes to take Iraq rebel town: More than 100 people die as US and Iraqi forces launch a major attack to regain control of the town of Samarra.” 2) “US urges Israel to show restraint: Washington calls on Israel to limit its offensive in the Gaza Strip, as tanks move deep into militant strongholds.”

The Samarra operation’s raison d’être is to allow it to participate in the demonstration elections (a phrase coined by leftists in the 1980s for the hilariously fake elections Reagan ordered be held in El Salvador and Honduras, which I’m happy to see coming back into widespread use) in January. In the debates, Shrub castigated Kerry for allegedly setting a deadline for leaving Iraq, but his Iraq policy is being distorted to pull off a meaningless “election.” The descriptions of the Samarra campaign by American military types suggests not just a counter-insurgency, but a coup: the WaPo quotes an Army spokesmodel: “We recognized some time ago the police chief, the city council and the mayor were ineffective.” By ineffective, he means not enforcing American diktats.

September the 11th been very, very good to me

The debate has brought out the urge of many people to illustrate it or write parodies.

Augusto Pinochet may finally be taken down, not for disappearing hundreds or thousands of members of the opposition, but for not paying his taxes. Well, if it’s good enough for Al Capone...

Putin now also plans to take control of the body that appoints, disciplines and removes judges.

The House Ethics Committee admonished (from the Latin word admonere, meaning to moderately chide someone with no sense of shame) Tom DeLay for having tried to bribe (I’m using the term in its legal sense) Rep. Nick Smith, offering to support his son’s run for Congress if he voted for the Medicare drug bill. DeLay issued a statement noting that the committee hadn’t previously addressed such conduct, so how could he possibly have known that bribery was unethical?

DeLay is also proud of the House vote to overturn the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, because it’s more important for DC residents to have a gun than a vote.

Impertinent

The Official God FAQ.

Responding to the new video of hostage Ken Bigley, Comical Allawi called the kidnapping “impertinent.” That’ll put ‘em in their place. But what he really dislikes is the fact that the Western media air the videos.

Bush: “The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice.” Actually, Khan was pardoned after making a confession that he did it all, without anyone in the government knowing anything about it and...and here’s the part everyone always leaves out...he was allowed to keep all the money he made!

Evidently, watching the debate on PBS as I did was the equivalent of listening to the Kennedy-Nixon debate on radio. Where my weak impression (which is why I didn’t declare a winner in the last post) was that Kerry had probably lost the debate, everyone else whose opinion I’ve since read online watched it on C-SPAN, which evidently often ran a split-screen, and they thought Bush looked irritated, the down-market version of Gore’s 2000 debate performance (like Gore, he seems to feel his opponent is beneath him or that he is above having to debate when he is self-evidently superior). The problem is, most of America didn’t watch it on C-SPAN. The other question is how many of the oh-so-important undecided voters watched the whole debate. As I said, Bush came with only 30 minutes of material, and so looked less and less competent as the debate went on.
(Update: Actually, this lovely two-minute clip of Bush squirming and rolling his eyes while Kerry was speaking comes from ABC.)

Bush-Kerry debate blogging: it’s hard work, but I’ll try not to send mexed missages

Kerry: “I’ve never wilted in my life.” I think I’ll leave the response to that line to Wonkette.

Kerry says the biggest danger in the world is nuclear proliferation, and although he makes a good case for it and I don’t disagree, we all know he just wanted to force Bush to try to pronounce the phrase. We know his problems with nukyular, and proliferation is at least two syllables beyond Shrub’s comfort zone (he did try “vociferously” at one point, but he didn’t use it correctly)(to be fair, Kerry early on warned about “radical Islamic Muslims”).

Notably, Bush tried to reshape that issue, as if nuclear proliferation only mattered in terms of terrorists getting their hands on nukes.

The guys controlling the cameras (Fox, actually) did occasionally show reaction shots in violation of the agreement between the campaigns. But not enough. Kerry started one response, “the president just said something extraordinarily revealing.” I’d have loved to see the look on GeeDubya’s face, since saying something revealing was the last thing he wanted to do. The revealing thing was “the enemy attacked us” as an excuse for invading Iraq; Kerry was going after Bush for conflating Al Qaida and Iraq, or, as Kerry phrased it, copying Bush’s annoying tendency to personalize foreign policy, Osama and Saddam. Bush’s response: “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us.” Well, I’m reassured.

Bush came to the 90-minute debate with enough prepared material for 30 minutes. He wasn’t just on message, he was on repeat. No doubt someone is doing a word count, but he kept saying “it’s hard work” about various things [Update: 11 times], presumably to indicate that he doesn’t spend all his time clearing brush in Crawford and leaving the work to other people. It just occurred to me that other people were barely mentioned. Powell was, but shouldn’t Kerry have been pounding on Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc?

Another phrase Bush used over and over and over was “mixed messages” (or mexed missages, in one case). Evidently you can’t lead if you give mixed messages. For someone who speaks as if he has no first language, he places a great deal of faith in the power of words. The suggestion seems to be that other countries, and American troops, are so unsophisticated that any deviation from the script will demoralize. “Not in front of the children” is the message.

Joe Lockhart is spinning that Shrub had an “annoyed smirk,” whatever that might be.

Rich cultural heritages

It was only a matter of time: www.kerryhatersforkerry.com

The trial on sex charges of the majority of adult males on Pitcairn Island, a place so far from anything that no plane can reach it, has begun, and I’m disappointed. I’d always heard that the descendants of the Bounty mutineers spoke with 18th-century accents, but hadn’t heard any actually speak until the BBC news yesterday. The women interviewed had only a mild accent, vaguely Australiany, not at all how I imagined Pitt the Younger and Daniel Defoe speaking. Pitcairn, which already has too few people to be really viable as an economy (or, indeed, a gene-pool, if you catch my drift), will become a ghost island if the men are convicted. They insist that having sex with 11-year old girls is part of their rich cultural heritage.

While the Italian government has been issuing non-denials about paying ransom for 2 women hostages in Iraq. The ransom was reputed to be one million American dollars, so the US has had some cultural influence on Iraq after all. Italian politicians, newspapers and polls have all said, So what? You’d think a country with a rich cultural heritage of kidnappings would know so what.

Uplifting accounts with good news messages

There are times when I despair of this country. The R’s try to sneak a provision into the omnibus intelligence restructuring bill to allow any non-citizen, without trial or hearing, to be turned over to countries that are likely to (or asked to) torture them. And in the House Judiciary Committee, the vote was along party lines. A vote in favor of torture, in favor of violating international laws and American due process, and the vote is determined by no higher principle than partisan freaking politics. And in the new favorite tactic of the right, American courts would be deprived of the ability to overturn the rules governing “rendition.” And just to ensure there isn’t a constitutional protection unviolated, it will apply retroactively. And people could be sent to any country we feel like sending them to, whether they were born there or had ever set foot there in their lives.

WaPo headline: “U.S. Effort Aims to Improve Opinions About Iraq Conflict.” By, among other things, censoring reports about the increasing violence. Congress won’t even get them anymore. I assume the headline is sarcastic, or something. The Pentagon will also pay for Iraqi-Americans and the CPA officials who did such a wonderful job getting Iraq back on its feet, to deliver “uplifting accounts with good news messages” at military bases--here in the US, not in Iraq, they’re not complete idiots--where soldiers will be encouraged to attend “voluntarily” and to refrain from asking, “So if Iraq is so great now, when are you moving back?”

Chain of Command

One of the rules in the 32 pages of rules for tomorrow’s debate is that when one candidate is speaking, the camera will not show the other candidate--looking at his watch like Bush the Elder, sighing like Al Gore, sweating like Nixon. Of course there is no reason for the networks to abide by this agreement between the two candidates.

Seymour Hersh will be on the Daily Show tonight. I finished his book Chain of Command a couple of days ago, but have held off writing about it, because while it is a pretty good if uneven book, it didn’t add that much to what I already knew. Of course I’m a blogger and by definition know everything, and had already read the New Yorker articles that form the basis of much of the book, and that might be the same for many of my readers as well. I also wasn’t thrilled with all the good quotes being anonymous.

Hersh doesn’t go into much detail about the actual torture of prisoners. In fact, given the importance of the pictures in giving this story the traction it has had, it’s interesting that the book has no pictures. Hersh’s main purpose is to demonstrate the culpability of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc in the torture of prisoners from Guantanamo through Abu Ghraib. If you’re not convinced, definitely read the book. He also throws in material, some of it a little cursory, on many of the failures of intelligence and wrong-headed foreign policy of the Bush admin, adding up to a thesis that they tend to see what they want to see. In his last sentences, Hersh wonders whether Bush is actually a big ol’ liar:

“But lying would indicate an understanding of what is desired, what is possible, and how best to get there. A more plausible explanation is that words have no meaning for this President beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real. It is a terrifying possibility.”

It was funny to read that, since I’ve been speculating recently myself (in the lead paragraphs of this and this post)
about Bush’s relationship to the words he uses, if any.

Bush’s relationship to logic and evidence is another matter. During the 2000 campaign, those of us who had contempt for the man’s intellectual capacities assumed that he understood how ignorant and incompetent he was. It was really the only reassuring assumption to make, since it meant he would leave the decisions to smarter people. As Colin Powell has found out, this has not been the case, because Bush--this is what we failed to understand--thinks of himself as wise. Facts are secondary to him.

I didn’t really understand this until early in 2002. A month or so after the State of the Union address in which he referred to the “axis of evil,” he was in South Korea. I saw him on television talking about something he’d just heard, which was that in North Korea there was a peace museum in which was displayed an ax with which a NK soldier had killed two American soldiers. In a peace museum, was Bush’s point. “No wonder I think they’re evil,” he said. That sentence involved a reversal of deductive reasoning: he was pleased to be able to show evidence in support of what he already believed. In normal logic, the evidence comes first. But for Bush, facts are, as Ronald Reagan once said, stupid things. A real man derives his understanding of people and events from his “character” rather than his intellect. Bush can, he believes, look into Putin’s eyes and understand his soul.

If you wanted perfection

Missed one: kerrywrongforevangelicals.com. Identical to wrong for Catholics, which is identical to wrong for Mormons.

See if this sounds familiar: Secretary of War Donald “What, me worry?” Rumsfeldis quoted in a WaPo article on Star Wars, explaining why the US will deploy a system that won’t work: “Did we have perfection with our first airplane, our first rifle, our first ship? I mean, they’d still be testing at Kitty Hawk, for God’s sake, if you wanted perfection.’” Yes, that’s just what he said about Iraqi elections. The article mentions that he used to be a pharmaceuticals exec: be afraid.

Followup on handshakes: the Guardian, in an article on the subject, says that Prince Charles refused to shake Idi Amin’s hand in 1978, that Helmut Kohl refused to shake PW Botha’s in 1984, and Fidel Castro believed that the CIA intended to poison him through a handshake, which isn’t sillier than anything else they tried, and so kept a cigar in his hand as an excuse.

Bumper sticker: Osama still has his job. Do you still have yours?

Russia is dealing with the danger of Beslan-type incidents in schools: all schoolchildren will now wear dog tags, “designed to withstand a fire or bomb blast.” I suppose it’s still better than “duck and cover.”

No American pressure behind the handshake

I have a theory. Colin Powell said Sunday about the Iraqi insurgency: “Yes, it’s getting worse, and the reason it’s getting worse is that they’re determined to disrupt the election.” My theory: what if the reason the Bushies are insisting on a totally unrealistic deadline for sham elections is to provide just this excuse for their failure to get the insurgency under control?

Allawi is now under pressure to apologize for shaking the Israeli foreign minister’s hand. “Allawi said there was no American pressure behind the handshake.” Sounds like my mother reminding me to write thank-you notes. Yesterday I commented about political handshakes. I think that in the secret religion shared by all politicians, a handshake can steal your soul, like cameras for some Native American tribes.

Google has set up a news.google in Chinese, but searches won’t display the sites the Chinese government doesn’t like. Google says it’s just efficient not to show a lot of links that will just be blocked to Chinese internet users anyway.

No concern for the Iraqi people

The Department of Homeland Security is buying a town, Playas, New Mexico, a former mining town with only 50 residents remaining, from its owner, Phelps Dodge, to use for practicing responses to suicide bombings, anthrax attacks, poisonings of water supplies, etc. Try not to think of this as a metaphor.

Life should be interesting for the 50 residents.

When the US government, after first trying to pretend that Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam was some sort of terrorist-symp, changed excuses to claim that the problem was a misspelling, I was going to make a joke about the government not being able to handle C-A-T, but decided it was too obvious. But there’s a real issue here.

It was the Yusuf bit they had problems with, of course. Three years after 9/11, when several men who weren’t supposed to have been allowed into the country got onto planes they also shouldn’t have been allowed on because the gov didn’t have a standard for transliterating from Arabic, they still haven’t fixed the problem. Now we hear that there’s a huge and growing backlog of tapes not being translated from what the NYT calls “languages commonly associated with terrorism” by the FBI (motto: Terrorist Not Spoken Here). The reason they don’t learn from their hideous mistakes is that there are no consequences for their major intelligence failures (other than 2,900 dead on 9/11/01, I mean). Also: stop recording every conversation spoken in Arabic anywhere in the world. They’re not all terrorists. Really.

Colin Powell says the “major thrust” of US military efforts in Iraq in the near future (i.e., after the US election) will be to go into “no go” areas. You know who might have an opinion on this? A guy whose entire mission in another war was to take a boat up a river for no other reason than to show that there were no areas the US military couldn’t go?

Uh, Kerry. We were all clear on that, right?

The LA Times article that provided the Powell quote contains several instances of US military assholery related to aerial bombardment of Sadr City. The US talks about a “precision strike”...that lasted for hours. Army spokesmodel Lt. Col. Jim Hutton blamed casualties on insurgent mortars, saying “The enemy shows no concern for the Iraqi people.” Did I mention we just bombed a crowded suburb of Baghdad for several hours? Another spokesmodel called reports of civilians killed by bombing in Fallujah “propaganda,” and “suggested that local hospitals had been infiltrated by insurgent forces.” Please, just fucking spare me.

But is he good for the Zoroastrians?

The Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi, which is a serious center of learning in economics & stats, really, suspended classes because students were complaining about a ghost.

Yesterday I posted a link to www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com. Guess what I found today: www.kerrywrongformormons.com. They’re word-for-word identical because, Mormons, Catholics, pretty much the same thing, right? Those are evidently the only religions Kerry’s bad for, because there’s no kerrywrongformuslims.com, or kerrywrongforjews.com, or kerrywrongforsatanworshippers.com. Yet. Consider that a hint to anyone with the inclination to write a parody.

From the Daily Telegraph: “Poland’s state railway is claiming £320 compensation from a man who delayed services by being run over by a train. But the company said yesterday it may relent after learning that his house had burned down. ‘We are acting in accordance with article 415,’ said a spokesman. Pawel Banaszek, 19, who was paralysed in the incident, said he was beaten by a gang and left on the track. He would pay the compensation from disability allowance.”

The British foreign minister accidentally shook the hand of Zimbabwean dictator at a reception in NY last week, to his embarrassment (there’s a long description in Clinton’s memoirs of the lengths he went to to avoid being filmed shaking Arafat’s hand)(and the rules for the Bush-Kerry debates make a handshake mandatory). Still, let’s not bring race into it (Indy headline: “Straw Shook Mugabe’s Hand ‘Because It Was Dark’”). Oh, wait, they meant the room was dark.

Free at last, free at last, to practice naked yoga in public

San Francisco prosecutors have dropped public nuisance charges against “Naked Yoga Guy,” having decided that naked yoga is not illegal in the city. Plan your vacations accordingly.

Time magazine claims that the Bushies dropped a plan for the CIA to “aid candidates favored by Washington” in the Iraqi elections, after getting negative reactions from several congresscritters (the article condescendingly refers to Nancy Pelosi, who come to think of it is Naked Yoga Guy’s representative, as coming “unglued” over it). I know I’m reassured.

I’m also reassured by the US ambassador to Afghanistan’s denial that he pressured rival candidates to Karzai to quit the race.

In the Iraq story, Time says the Bushies considered that intervention in the elections was justified as a counter-balance to Iranian resources. Because an election that was unfair when one foreign nation is trying to influence it becomes completely fair when two foreign nations are doing so. And by the way, the reason I put “aid candidates favored by Washington” in quotes is that Iraqis will be voting for parties, not for candidates. The Time piece shows a total ignorance of the electoral system the US foisted on Iraq.
(Update: Juan Cole has made all those points about the Time story at greater length and with greater expertise, although a day later.)

Everybody reports on Turkey’s revision of its criminal justice code, which were largely in a liberal direction in the hopes of getting EU membership. Since that isn’t gonna happen, I worry about what will happen when the day finally comes that Turkey realizes it isn’t gonna happen. Will they re-criminalize adultery? Reinstitute lesser penalties for rape if the man marries his victim and greater ones for rape of a virgin? Probably not, but it would have better had they come to this on their own. Only the Daily Telegraph, that I can find, mentions, in rather vague terms, something about restricting discussion of issues such as the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Mickey Mouse President

Wrong for Catholics

Take a quick look at this website:
www.kerrywrongforcatholics.com
Did you notice who paid for it? It’s at the very bottom of the page.

I am nothing to you

In Britain, much of whatever support remaining for the Iraq war dissipated this week because of the videotape from hostage Ken Bigley (pictured), a civil engineer, pleading with Tony Blair for his life. Bigley is the man threatened with execution (the two Americans captured with him have been killed) unless the two women prisoners are released.

I am Ken Bigley from Liverpool in the Walton district. I am here in Iraq and I think this is possibly my last chance to speak to someone who will listen from Europe. ... Mr Blair, I am nothing to you, it’s just one person in the whole of the United Kingdom that’s all. With a family like you’ve got a family, with children, like your children, your boys, your wife. Please you can help, I know you can. These people are not asking for the world, they’re asking for their wives and the mothers of their children.

Full transcript.
He also has an 86-year old mother who collapsed a few days ago.





Blair finally responded publicly, with his own plea to the British public (he evidently had nothing to say to the kidnappers), against compassion (Bigley’s family must have known they were fucked when Blair praised their stoicism): “What these terrorists understand is that they can use and manipulate the modern media to gain enormous publicity for themselves and put democratic politics and politicians in a very difficult position.” Poor baby. Really, modern media and technology have made it so difficult to ignore suffering. So unfair.

Except that the mirror image (if I may mention older representational technology) of that is that, as Mary Riddell writes in the Observer, “When history is a string of macabre Kodak moments, those slaughtered off-camera evaporate as if they had never lived. ... On the day Ken Bigley’s video played in millions of British living rooms, 22 people were murdered in Baghdad.”

Similarly, on the day in April when those 4 mercenaries were killed in Fallujah, and their bodies burned and hung from a bridge, with pictures, several US soldiers were also killed, with little fuss. But the crispy critters pictures caused the US to mount another invasion attempt, evidently against the advice of the Marine general in charge of the area. And Rumsfeld ignored the torture at Abu Ghraib, explaining that he didn’t consider it important enough to inform Bush because “The problem at that point was one-dimensional. It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t photographs and video.” The “problem,” of course, was very much three-dimensional to the people involved.

Back in May I wrote about the Bushite obsession with images, “like the flight deck landing, the statue toppling and all the other carefully stage-managed moments, as if they’re constantly auditioning for a postage stamp. ... Bush, who is less fixated on words, for obvious reasons, thinks that once he has the right visual, he’s fixed in place the meaning of an event. Ironically, it was the two words Mission Accomplished that really turned Flight Suit Boy’s million-dollar photo op into a sick joke, and it was the photos of the prisoners that made torture into a live issue.”