TWO FROM J. ORLIN GRABBE
Kickass Journalists Edition

From CounterPunch, an essay by longime Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk of the London Independent:

Why Have We Suddenly Forgotten Abu Ghraib?

And that, I fear, is the least of the suffering that has gone on at Abu Ghraib. For what happened to all those videos which members of Congress were allowed to watch in secret and which we--the public--were not permitted to see? Why have we suddenly forgotten about Abu Ghraib? Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib story--and one of the only journalists in America who is doing his job--has spoken publicly about what else happened in that terrible jail.

I'm indebted to a reader for the following extract from a recent Hersh lecture: "Some of the worst things that happened that you don't know about. OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib... The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what's happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomised, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking..."

Already, however, we have forgotten this. Just as we must no longer talk about weapons of mass destruction. For as the details slowly emerge of the desperate efforts of Bush and Blair to find these non-existent nasties, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Click here for the rest.

And from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the New York Times' Princeton economist-in-residence, Paul Krugman:

Media need to fact-check the debate

Interviews with focus groups after the first 2000 debate gave Al Gore a slight edge. Post-debate analysis should have widened that edge. After all, during the debate, Bush told one whopper after another -- about his budget plans, about his prescription drug proposal and more. Fact-checking in the next day's papers should have been devastating.

But as Adam Clymer pointed out Monday on the Op-Ed page of The Times, front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized not what the candidates said but their "body language." After the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Gore's sighs but nothing about Bush's lies. And even the fact-checking pieces "buried inside the newspaper" were, as Clymer delicately puts it, "constrained by an effort to balance one candidate's big mistakes" -- that is, Bush's lies -- "against the other's minor errors."

The result of this emphasis on the candidates' acting skills rather than their substance was that after a few days, Bush's defeat in the debate had been spun into a victory.

And

Nonetheless, tomorrow there will be a temptation to revert to drama criticism -- to emphasize how the candidates looked and acted, and push analysis of what they said, and whether it was true, to the inside pages. With so much at stake, the public deserves better.

Click here for the rest.

As for myself, I don't think I'm going to even watch a few minutes of tomorrow's "debate." They've become an even bigger joke/photo-op than party conventions. I've got better things to do.

Of course, with my luck, Kerry'll finally show some spine, and I will have missed it. Such is life. Whatever will be will be. And all those other latin-based phrases that became pop songs.

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