Cheney: Vader unmasked

Bit by prevaricated bit, reporters for McClatchy, Columbia Journalism Review and Slate pick apart former Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech before the American Enterprise Institute:

First up, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel’s piece for McClatchy, in which they remove the shaky supports from Cheney’s defense of U.S. interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists:

[Cheney] quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country.”

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.” …

Cheney said that President Barack Obama’s decision to release the four top-secret Bush administration memos on the interrogation techniques was “flatly contrary” to U.S. national security, and would help al Qaida train terrorists in how to resist U.S. interrogations.

However, Blair, who oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, said in his statement that he recommended the release of the memos, “strongly supported” Obama’s decision to prohibit using the controversial methods and that “we do not need these techniques to keep America safe.

Writing for Columbia Journalism Review, Charles Kaiser aims squarely at the contradictions between Cheney’s professed beliefs and his actions:

Geriatric Barbie

Slate’s Laura Shapiro employs some journalistic rope-a-dope and provides the first great “wait for it … wait for it” line of my day:

[Helen Gurley] Brown is 87 now but looks ageless. Or, rather, she looks determined to look ageless. Or, rather—oh, never mind, the truth is she looks like Geriatric Barbie, and somebody should have told her so.

Wolverine is a pop culture Marvel

Tomorrow, Hugh Jackman returns for a fourth go-round as the metal-clawed Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  In a very entertaining essay, Grady Hendrix explains how a mutant antihero from Canada has become a pop culture touchstone.

Righting bad journalism’s wrongs

Just a couple of the lessons to be learned from the two stories cited below: the loss of institutional credibility when journalists unquestioningly accept government statements as truth, and the speed with which half-truths, obfuscations and outright lies can spread throughout the mainstream media to become established “fact.”

First up, Timothy Noah reveals the logical fallacy of believing that the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed helped U.S. intelligence foil a plot to crash a plane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles:

The CIA and Thiessen had argued that torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, allowed the U.S. government to thwart the Library Tower attack, wherein al-Qaida planned to hijack a jetliner and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles (formally known these days as the U.S. Bank Tower). The trouble with this argument was that the chronology didn’t work. Sheikh Mohammed was captured in March 2003, and on more than one occasion (for instance, here, here, and here), the Bush administration stated that the Library Tower plot was broken up in 2002. How could torturing Sheikh Mohammed in 2003 have prevented an attack that had already been foiled a year earlier?

After my column appeared, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America noted (here, here, and here) that the following people continued to repeat the Library Tower canard without acknowledging its logical inconsistency: Karl Rove, Dana Rohrabacher, Clifford May, and Fox News’ Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto, Steve Doocy, Catherine Herridge, and Brian Kilmeade.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald provides a similarly withering criticism of the establishment media’s handling of the benefits of U.S.-sponsored torture. He takes ABC News‘  Brian Ross to task for reporting in 2007 that the waterboard torture of Abu Zubaydah lasted about “30 to 35 seconds” before he spilled his guts to the CIA about numerous terrorist plots:

Layoffs played for laughs and pathos

Slate has a cute compilation of movie scenes of people being laid off (or fired or let go or canned; choose your euphemism). Depending on your current job status (or capacity for empathy) you may find this depressing, amusing or possibly cathartic. I enjoyed touches of all three!

Great review of Bob Dylan’s Together Through Life

John Dickerson offers a perceptive, very well-written review of Bob Dylan’s latest album, Together Through Life. A couple of nuggets from this must-read:

This is a tough, battered love—lost, out of reach, painful. Yet the voices in these songs are clutching at it. “Life Is Hard” is a crooning parlor ballad of a chilly and barren world of lost love. “Forgetful Heart” starts with a little banjo plucking, which suggests a lightness (Steve Martin said no song sounded sad when played on the banjo), but soon a dark minor blues guitar riff enters and everything gets bleak. The singer’s heart is like a battered valise he carries even though it barely works any more. After trying to kick up pleasant memories of old devotions, he gives up and wonders if love was always just an illusion. “The door has closed forevermore/If indeed there ever was a door.”…

… The only song Dylan wrote himself is “This Dream of You.” It’s another deeply atmospheric song with the drifty feel of “Romance in Durango” or “Mozambique.” Dylan sits in a world of shadows, in “curtain gloom,” clinging to the dream of a lost love in a fleeting world where everything he touches or looks at disappears. The dream sustains him, but if it came true, you get the sense it would disappear as he touched it.

All swine, all the time

Slate really brings home the bacon today with its wall-to-wall swine flu coverage:

Mexico’s president uses swine flu to consolidate power

What you need to know about the swine flu

How does a pandemic ever end?

Swine flu and the Mexico mystery

Do surgical masks stop swine flu?

The effect of swine flu on stocks

When can the government quarantine its citizens?

A full Slate of stories about U.S.-Mexico relations

In advance of President Obama’s visit to Mexico, Slate.com has published a series on U.S. relations with its neighbor to the south. What makes this series so compelling is that each article was reported by experts on Mexico and international relations:

“Our Model Neighbor: Ignore the bad press; Mexico has undergone an economic and political transformation over the last decade,” by Barbara Kotschwar.

Since the early 1990s, Mexico has cut its external debt by more than half, has lowered inflation from triple to double to single digits, has adopted a flexible exchange rate that helps maintain price stability, and has nearly doubled its openness to trade. Mexico has accumulated sufficient foreign reserves and has kept the government fiscal position healthy enough to be able to provide a buffer during bad economic times and to stimulate its economy in the current downturn—at least for a time.

“Calderón’s War of Choice: How Mexico’s war on drug cartels is like the war in Iraq,” by Jorge Castañeda. Posted April 14, 2009.

Snipers, angles and Somali pirates

Brian Palmer explains the factors that Navy SEALs snipers had to account for before killing three Somali pirates:

If the pirates’ heads were fully exposed, it would have been an easy shot. A sniper rifle is accurate to within a “minute of angle,” provided the shooter can keep his or her target in the crosshairs. That means that a good marksman can reliably hit a 1-inch target at 300 feet and reliably kill someone at 3,000 feet. The bobbing of the lifeboat would have been a factor, but snipers regularly shoot at moving targets from moving vehicles. (Advanced Navy SEAL training includes target practice from helicopters.)

Missing from Palmer’s account are visual illustrations to help readers “see” the concepts he is explaining, particularly for the adjustments the snipers had to make because of the relatively short distance between them and their human targets.

6 Hour Power ad is sex in a bottle

Over at Slate, Seth Stevenson wonders if 6 Hour Power is running the most sexually explicit ad ever:

In my view, the ad very clearly implies (right up until the reveal of its final shots) that the secretary is back there, hidden from view, fellating her boss to orgasm.

Indeed it does. The question is whether the rest of the commercial uses that implication to its advantage.

Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper says that, despite Stevenson’s assertion to the contrary, the ad isn’t successful: