Good Reputation Sleeping

Saturday Car Wash

A little bit of "normal" life courtesy my Sanyo videophone. (QuickTime 6.5 required)

The War on Terror is Forever.

Chatter is starting about efforts to get mandatory military service going for all Americans age 18 to 26 just in time to miss the 2004 presidential election (spring 2005). Here are the bills everyone will be talking about...

H.R.163 Title: To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes. Sponsor: Rep Rangel, Charles B. [NY-15] (introduced 1/7/2003) Cosponsors (14) Related Bills: S.89 Latest Major Action: 2/3/2003 House committee/subcommittee actions. Status: Executive Comment Requested from DOD.

S.89
Title: A bill to provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.
Sponsor: Sen Hollings, Ernest F. [SC] (introduced 1/7/2003) Cosponsors (None)
Related Bills: H.R.163
Latest Major Action: 1/7/2003 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Armed Services.

Disruptive Technology - Part Three

Yahoo! News - Rumsfeld bans camera phones in Iraq: report

LONDON (AFP) - Cellphones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a business newspaper reported.

Quoting a Pentagon source, The Business newspaper said the US Defense Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.

The Visual Record of Our Times

Regarding the Torture of Others, The New York Times Magazine

"For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib." ~ Susan Sontag

Free Trade Zone

The Twilight of the Information Middlemen

"Information is both invaluable and impossible to value. Historically, the main way around this problem has been to pack the results of intellectual or creative effort into something tangible that can be priced and sold: a book, a seat in a theater, an hour of an expert's time. Technology causes economic chaos when it disrupts this packaging plan, as is now happening in the music industry. Ten years ago, if you wanted to play a song, you had to buy a CD or a tape. Now, thanks to downloaded MP3 files, you don't - and the chaos is all the worse because the same young audience that would otherwise be buying the most CD's is the quickest to adopt MP3's. Publishers must shudder as they contemplate the distant but inevitable day when "electronic paper" does the same to them, making downloaded files as convenient to read as ordinary books, magazines and newspapers are today." ~ James Fallows

nice thought piece from yesterday's Sunday New York Times that I almost missed! Find more on this here. (thanks Rebecca)

Copper Green

THE GRAY ZONE by Seymour M. Hersh

More bombshells from The New Yorker, which is quickly becoming a web must-read. Details, according to Sy Hersh, of the 'government approved' program of torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. (link-Joi Ito)

"According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A."

and on the photos...

"The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said."

see also The Washington Post, The New York Times, National Public Radio (NPR).

Guilty Pleasures in a World Gone Mad

Looking for a break from the madness? I am looking forward to this coming week's Alanis Morissette album. Get a sneak peek here.

U.K. tabloid admits Iraq abuse photos fake

CBC News:U.K. tabloid admits Iraq abuse photos fake

"The Daily Mirror published in good faith photographs which it absolutely believed were genuine images of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi prisoner," the newspaper said. "There is now sufficient evidence to suggest that these pictures are fakes and that the Daily Mirror has been the subject of a calculated and malicious hoax." Editor Piers Morgan resigned, effective immediately, the newspaper said in a statement, noting that it would be "inappropriate" for him to continue in the job.

More Technology, More Disruption.

'The Video'

Ok, I have seen the video...it took about 10 minutes to find and download; it is easily going to get around.

On a daily basis now, we are getting horrifically blasted by images from our 'connected' society. The flow of data is becoming almost completely unfiltered - people to people - putting government and the press into the role of explaining and justifying, rather then editing and presenting.

Blaming the Messenger

News Media Quandary Over Showing Graphic Images of Abuse

"The news media are wrestling with how many and how much of the graphic photographs they should show, and their decisions are drawing controversy of their own. Some critics have accused news organizations of serving an antiwar agenda and endangering troops and Americans overseas by showing such shocking images." ~ David Carr, The New York Times.

An interesting moment in time now as the debate is shifting from the horror of the acts to a questioning of the existance of the photographs. As if by removing the photographs from public view will make the issue of abusive treatment go away. If we can control or limit the public's ability to view them, after the barn door has been opened and the horse has escaped, this will all go away?

Another question that should be asked; does it matter, in the free-flow-of-digital-information-age, what newspapers or TV stations do with these images? Are they not already out there in the ether of the net, where the interested public has ready and un-ending access to them? Isn't under estimating the power of the digital info gathering capabilities of the general population what got this started anyway?