parody Posts

It seems that every day brings new revelations from mainstream media about governmental spying on Americans.

MS-NBC started the ball rolling on the 14th when they informed us that the Pentagon had a database of protesters including the Raging Grannies and a dozen or so Quakers in Florida. This must have prompted the New York Times to publish a story they had been sitting on for a year: the scoop that Bush had ordered the super-secret National Security Agency to start evesdropping on Americans following the 9/11 terror attacks. It's revelation was an FBI agent's email complaining about radical militant librarians [who] kick us around. Two days later we received the almost-humorous news that the Department of Homeland Security was hard at work monitoring the Massachusett's inter-library loan system [UPDATE: this has been revealed to be a hoax by the student]. Trying to outdo the DHS in ridiculous, we learned on the 20th that the FBI has been infiltrating vegan potlucks. Today it turns out the New York City Police Department has been doing its own extensive investigations into protesters. They even apparently staged mock arrests in an attempt to incite violence (their contribution to the self-parody has been to send officers undercover on bicycle protests).

Are we surprised by all this? Well, not really. The fears unleashed after 9/11 ignited a firestorm of paranoia in the ranks of spydom. Nonviolence.org got a call from the U.S. Secret Service when Osama bin Laden posted to the board that he wanted to kill President Bush (well, actually we're pretty certain it was a acne-faced fourteen year old procrastinating on his geometry homework). When I shot shot photos of a scuffle at a Biodemocracy protest a few months ago a Philadelphia police detective was in my office an hour later wanting to see it (the "melee" was harmless except for a policeman with heart conditions who took that moment to have a heart attack).

While some monitoring and prudence is indeed necessary, what ties together the string of stories this week is the randomness of the targets. It's as if the agencies had lost all sense of judgement. Anyone critical of the war (or even mainstream culture: witness the vegans) was considered a threat. All leads were investigated, no matter how silly.

While invading American's privacy is upsetting and unwarranted, the greatest danger is the sheer mass of irrelevant information that's been collected. What's an agency to do with reams of data on bicycle riders and Quakers? Who's watching the flight schools and fertilizer depots while Agent Nincompoop is trading hummus recipes with the cute vegan with the nosering?

Judith Miller in cursor.org parody photo referring to her tendency to print dubious WMD intelligence from Ahmed Chalabi, Bush's favorite iraqi exile before the war and allegation he now spys for Iran.

Yesterday the Supreme Court refused to hear appeals about the most important Freedom of the Press case in recent memory. It appears very likely that two reporters, the New York Times' Judith Miller and Time's Matt Cooper, are heading to jail for refusing to tell a federal prosecutor who told them that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. The informant was almost certainly a Bush Administration hack trying to smear Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who had recently gone public with doubts about iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The cases are ironic to the point of parody. Judith Miller never even wrote an article. Matt Cooper's article in Time criticized the Bush Administration for engineering the leak. These were the responsible journalists and they're the ones going to jail? Robert Novak, the journalist who actually did out Plame's CIA employment, is not under investigation or under threat of jail. Observers think that the federal prosecutor actually knows the identity of the informant but as of this date, this person hasn't been charged.

It's not an easy case. I frequently questioned Judith Miller's shoddy reporting during this time. She relied on shady off-the-record public officials way too much. She never heard a weapons of mass destruction story she didn't believe. She was guilable and time has proven she was wrong. Good reporting consists of more than sitting around a White House water cooler and printing the spin from the bottom-feeding political hacks trying to get a story in the Times. But she is a reporter for a major paper. She's done a lot of good work. She shouldn't go to jail simply for talking to someone. Sometimes those shady conversations in White House basements do lead to important journalism and we need to protect that.

And in all the court manoeuvrings we're forgetting that someone exposed a CIA agent, her undercover assignments and her network of on-the-ground informers, all to play politics in Washington. Someone very near the White House committed treason. Shouldn't that be the big story?

Update:

Apparently Matt Cooper's notes indicate that Presidential right-hand man Karl Rove is one of the sources behind the leak.

One has to applaud the sheer honesty of the group of leading Quakers who have recently proposed turning the grounds of Philadelphia's historic Arch Street Meetinghouse into a retirement home. It makes perfect sense. Arch Street is the host for our annual sessions, where the average age is surely over 70. Why not institutionalize the yearly meeting reality?

Quakers Uniting in Publications, better known as "QUIP", is a collection of 50 Quaker publishers, booksellers and authors committed to the "ministry of the written word." I often think of QUIP as a support group of sorts for those of us who really believe that publishing can make a difference. It's also one of those places where different branches of Friends come together to work and tell stories. QUIP sessions strike a nice balance between work and unstructured time, it's has its own nice culture of friendliness and cooperation that are the real reason many of us go every year.

Recruiting Satire. I've always found U.S. Army recruiting advertising fascinating. It's not just that the ads are well-produced. They catch onto basic human yearnings in a way that's the teen equivalent of self-help books. "Be all that you can be" is wonderful--who wouldn't want that. And the current ads making the Army look like a extreme sport also hits the nexus of cool and inspiring. The current US Army slogan is "An Army of One," which might almost make potential recruits forget that a basic cornerstone of military training is wiping away individuality to mold recruits into interchangable units. The link above is to "Army of None," a smart parody of the official recruiting site.