Gyroscope

A newsletter for those unmoved by spin.
No. 22, December 29, 2003

Subscribe

Change Address

Unsubscribe

Comment

The year in review.

When the year began, Saddam was in power in Iraq, but contained, unable to mount any effective threat to any other country. Weapons inspections were underway, but not finding anything. That absence of results was, all the sophisticated insiders assured us, simply because Saddam was too cunning for the rubes of the UN agencies.

Now, Saddam is gone, the humiliation of his capture causing him to rapidly shrink from fearsome enemy to empty shell. No loss.

But what of the weapons? Not only have they vanished, but so has the story about them. Buried, non issue. History is being effectively rewritten so that it is democracy that we went to war for.

Also vanished is the story about how the White House, or someone close to the White House, outed a CIA spy by leaking her name to a reporter. The reporter thinks he did nothing wrong, the investigation has been dropped from the media. One can only imagine how much attention the media would have given this story if they thought Clinton had risked the life of an agent, but since it was a Republican who did it, they aren't interested.

When the year began the Israelis and the Palestinians were locked in a round of mutual bad decision making and military activities that injured their own causes as much as their opponents. Not much has changed a year later. But one thing that does hold promise for the future is the grassroots peace campaign that is leading to various 'mock-treaties'. How sad that the leaders of the US and Israel reject this citizen demand for peace, even though the agreements are pretty much identical to what the official process is looking to do.

Similarly, on Cyprus, citizen efforts, especially on the Turkish side, also opposed by the government, hold hope for a possible resolution of the 30 year old crisis..

And what about Afghanistan, the one war worth fighting? It is as if the entire nation has vanished from sight. I read of mixed reports from the country, nation building making some progress and having some setbacks, but it is not an item of concern to many. The loya jirga is finally meeting, something that should command attention, but it does not.

The corruption of American journalism continues unabated, but the attention given to books attacking it is a helpful sign.

That corruption is a problem for the year ahead where the media is already busy spinning election coverage to reward Bush and demonize Dean.

Economic corruption was also a big issue this year with more and more evidence that a significant fraction of the late 90's boom was, in fact, a bubble, unrelated to long-term economic progress.

So this newsletter will move into its second year. I've often struggled for time to produce it, but never for material to fill it with. My list of neglected issues and a stack of clippings grows dangerously Look for more on civil liberties in the year ahead, perhaps the most significant issue of the upcoming election.

Thanks to those of you who've written with questions and support. Send email addresses - a subscription makes a good belated Christmas present gift to the independent minded on your gift list.

"Rights groups estimate that more than 1,000 [Palestinian olive] trees have been damaged or destroyed [by Israeli settlers] in recent weeks, some dating back to the Roman era." -- Guardian Weekly, Nov. 20, p. 5

"Manuel Vasquez Portal, a Cuban journalist, was arrested this year and given an 18-year prison sentence. His crime was to have written courageously about his country's political and economic failings under Fidel Castro.

Stephen Glass, a whiz kid worthy of J. D. Salinger's fictional family of the same name, lied an cheated his way through a short career at The New Republic, making up more than two dozen articles in whole or in part.

Here's the question: Which of these two journalists gets star treatment, with a book contract, a movie ... and interviews?" asks Clyde Haberman, New York Times, Nov. 25, p.A23, going on to site other pairs of examples where a journalist crook got rewarded and the courageous one got nothing.

"At a time when Washington spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined, the West as a whole does not suffer from a lack of military capacity." - Ronald Asmus, in Foreign Affairs, Sept 2003, p.27.

"Boeing has taken a $20 million stake in an investment fund run by Richard Perle, a top Pentagon adviser, underlining its close links with the US defense establishment." - Joshua Chaffin, Financial Times, Dec. 4, p. 1.

"Boeing has formed ties with half a dozen members of the Defense Policy Board, an influential civilian group that advises the Pentagon. The relationships range from Boeing hiring board members as paid consultants to pouring tens of millions of dollars into their investment funds." Joshua Chaffin, Financial Times, Dec. 8, p. 1.

"Around five exabytes (5 billion gigabytes of information was crated in 2002, up from around two exabytes in 1999, according to the latest 'How much Information' survey produced by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California in Berkeley. This is equivalent to half a million libraries the size of America's Library of Congress." The Economist, Dec 6, Technology Quarterly, p. 10.

The US misled people about how many cluster bombs were dropped in Iraq and where they were used, reports USA Today, Dec. 11th, p. 1. The paper reports that US soldiers as well as Iraq' civilians have been wounded by ordnance that did not explode when it first was fired.

"Soldiers 'are being used as cannon fodder,' declares Nancy Lessin, the stepmother of a Marine who was deployed to Iraq and the cofounder of a group called Military Families Speak Out.