Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky both have excellent analyses of the Brisbane controversy — which, as they point out, sparked such intense reaction because it captured and inflamed long-standing anger toward media outlets for mindlessly amplifying statements without examining whether they’re true. As Stephen Colbert put it in his still-extraordinary 2006 speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home.” While reporters typically react with fury over the suggestion that they are stenographers, Brisbane was essentially posting that this is all they are, and then earnestly wondering aloud whether they should be anything more than that, as though it was some sort of exotic or edgy suggestion.

That most reporters faithfully follow the stenographer model — uncritically writing down what people say and then leaving it at that — is so obvious that it’s hardly worth the effort to demonstrate it. There are important exceptions to this practice even at the most establishment media outlets, where diligent and intrepid investigative journalism exposes the secret corruption of the most powerful. But by and large, most establishment news coverage consists of announcing that someone or other has made some claim, then (at most) adding that someone else has made a conflicting claim, and then walking away. This isn’t merely the practice of journalists; rather, as Rosen points out, it’s virtually their religion. They simply do not believe that reporting facts is what they should be doing. Recall David Gregory’s impassioned defense of the media’s behavior in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when he rejected complaints that journalists failed to document falsehoods from Bush officials because “it’s not our role“ and then sneered that only an ideologue would want them to do so (shortly thereafter, NBC named Gregory the new host of Meet the Press).

Literally every day, one finds major news stories that consist of little more than the uncritical conveying of official claims, often protected by journalists not only from critical scrutiny but — thanks to the shield of anonymity they subserviently extend — from all forms of accountability. Just to take one highly illustrative example from last week, the NYT published an article by Eric Schmitt based almost entirely on the assertions of anonymous officials, announcing that “a nearly two-month lull in American drone strikes in Pakistan has helped embolden Al Qaeda and several Pakistani militant factions to regroup, increase attacks against Pakistani security forces and threaten intensified strikes against allied forces in Afghanistan.” No criticisms of drone attacks were included. Three days later, the U.S. resumed drone attacks, after which the same Eric Schmitt immediately ran to inform us, citing Reuters, that the drone strike killed “at least three militants” (as always, “militant” in American media discourse means: any person who dies when an American missile shot from a drone detonates).

Obviously, U.S. officials knew that drones were about to resume and fed Schmitt a Press Release in advance to justify it — the lack of drone attacks is helping Al Qaeda and the Taliban regroup!!! – and he then printed it uncritically (complete with the Press Release headline they wanted: Lull in U.S. Drone Strikes Aids Pakistan Militants); he then shielded his Press-Release-disseminating friends with anonymity. That is stenography “journalism” in its purest and most degraded form, and it shapes countless news stories of great significance (subservient, anonymity-granting, uncritical stenography is also found with increasing frequency in self-proclaimed MSM-busting New Media).

Every day one can find prominent news articles that are shaped entirely by the following template: A, B and C are true, say anonymous American officials; government claims drive the entire article and shape its narrative, with “officials say” tacked on as an afterthought, an unnoticed formality. In the realm of reporting on the government, this practice encourages and enables government lies; in the realm of political reporting, as Greg Sargent’s examples show, it incentivizes candidates to lie freely.

But there is one important caveat that needs to be added here. This stenographic treatment by journalists — of simply amplifying what someone claims without any skepticism or examination — is not available to everyone. Only those who wield power within America’s political and financial systems are entitled to receive this treatment. For everyone else — those who are viewed as ordinary, marginalized, or scorned by America’s political establishment — the exact opposite rules apply: their statements are subjected to extreme levels of skepticism in those rare instances when they’re heard at all.

Look at one illustrative example from yesterday. An AP photo accompanied the column I wrote yesterday on the murder of yet another Iranian scientist. The photograph showed the scientist, who was 32 years old at the time he died, posing with his young son. I had seen this photograph elsewhere and, knowing that Salon can use AP’s photos, requested that Salon editors use it as the art for my story. But look at the caption that AP wrote to accompany the photograph:

Extreme skepticism oozes from every pore of that photo caption. AP refuses to accept that this scientist was killed; they even refuse to accept that this is an actual photograph of the scientist in question and that the photograph shows him with his son. Instead, AP wants you to know that even these pedestrian assertions are nothing more than unverified “claims” from Iran’s state-controlled media and thus cannot and must not be assumed to be true.

I have no problem with that type of skepticism. To the contrary, it’s warranted; as I.F. Stone famously taught, the only thing journalism students need to know is that “all governments lie.” But the point is that one would never, ever see this level of overt skepticism from AP or any other establishment media outlet when it comes to claims from the U.S. Government. Instead, those claims are treated as presumptively true; in fact, they’re so trustworthy that entire news stories can be written that do little more than adopt those government claims as the dominant narrative (“The drones would be cleared to fire on a senior militant leader if there was credible intelligence and minimal risk to civilians, American officials said“).

Stenographic treatment is a license extended only the most powerful. As Atrios put it yesterday: “It isn’t as if random crazy people on the street are granted ‘they said it so that’s good enough to print’ privileges by our elite newspapers. Powerful connected people are.” The most damaging sin of this stenographic model isn’t laziness — the failure to subject false statements to critical, investigative scrutiny — although that is part of it. The most damaging sin is that it’s propagandistic: it converts official assertions and claims from the most powerful into Truth, even when those assertions and claims are baseless or false. This stenographic model is the primary means by which media outlets turn themselves into eager spokespeople and servants for the most powerful factions: the very opposite of the function they claim, with increasing absurdity, to perform.

* * * * *

Speaking of stenographic journalism, consider this amazing fact. After the NYT published its infamous Editor’s Note in 2004 apologizing for (some of) its stenographic coverage of pre-Iraq-war claims (information from anonymous sources “was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged,” the paper confessed), its top editors repeatedly vowed greater levels of skepticism in the future, especially when it came to government claims about America’s enemies. Said Bill Keller in 2007: “We don’t have to tell the reporters to be as skeptical as possible. W.M.D. restored a level of skepticism.”

But look at what has happened with the paper’s subsequent coverage of Iraq and Iran. Amazingly, three consecutive Public Editors have each separately condemned the newspaper for baseless reporting that either relied blindly on government claims or over-stated external threats. In February, 2007, Byron Calame gently though clearly criticized an article by Michael Gordon about Iranian actions in Iraq that relied too much on government claims without qualification. Thereafter, Clark Hoyt slammed the paper for mindlessly adopting Bush claims about Al Qaeda in Iraq. And earlier this week, Brisbane admonished the paper for over-stating the IAEA’s assessment of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Notice that each of these episodes entail the NYT‘s hyping government claims and exaggerating the threats which the U.S. government is attempting to highlight. At least to my knowledge, none of the paper’s Public Editors has ever criticized the NYT for excessive skepticism of government claims or under-stating such threats. And that’s the point: it isn’t merely that all of this is just bad or sloppy journalistic behavior. It’s more directed, more purposeful than that: it all goes in one direction (bolstering official claims), all benefits one faction (those who wield power), and all has one outcome (amplifying elite assertions while shielding them from criticial scrutiny).

The prime argument against calling these scientists killings “Terrorism” is that targeted killings — as opposed to indiscriminate ones — cannot qualify. After Andrew Sullivan wrote a post entitled “The Terrorism We Support” and rhetorically asked: “is not the group or nation responsible for the murder of civilians in another country terrorists?”, and then separately criticized the NYT for failing to describe these killings as Terrorism, numerous readers objected to the use of this term on the ground that a targeted killing cannot  be Terrorism. Similarly, after I noted yesterday that Kevin Drum had denounced as “Terrorism” a right-wing blogger’s 2007 suggestion that Iran’s scientists be murdered and asked if he still applies that term to whoever is actually doing it now, he wrote a post (either coincidentally on his own or in response) strongly implying that this is Terrorism; thereafter, commenter after commenter at Mother Jones vehemently disagreed, on the same ground, with Drum’s suggestion that this is Terrorism (many agreed the term did apply). Meanwhile, Jason Pontin, the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, actually claimed that my use of the term Terrorism to describe these scientist killings is “what turns sober, hardnosed people from the Left” (he’s apparently been elected the spokesman for “sober hardnosed people” turning away from the Left), and then proceeded to insist over and over that these are merely targeted killings, not Terrorism.

Part of the problem here is the pretense that Terrorism has some sort of fixed, definitive meaning. It does not. As Professor Remi Brulin has so exhaustively documented, the meaning of the term has constantly morphed depending upon the momentary interests of those nations (usually the U.S. and Israel) most aggressively wielding it. It’s a term of political propaganda, impoverished of any objective meaning, and thus susceptible to limitless manipulation. Even the formal definition incorporated into U.S. law is incredibly vague; one could debate forever without resolution whether targeted killings of scientists fall within its scope, and that’s by design. The less fixed the term is, the more flexibility there is in deciding what acts of violence are and are not included in its scope.

But to really see what’s going on here, let’s look at how a very recent, very similar assassination plot was discussed. That occurred in October when the U.S. accused Iran’s Quds Forces of recruiting a failed used car salesman in Texas to hire Mexican drug cartels to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Let’s put to side the intrinsic ridiculousness of the accusation and assume it to be true. That plot did not involve anything remotely approaching indiscriminate killing; it was very specifically targeted at one person: the Saudi Ambassador, a government official of a country which has extreme tensions with Iran. Indeed, the targeted Ambassador is an official in a government that has engaged in all sorts of acts of war and is even linked to an actual Terrorist plot: the 9/11 attacks. As Jonathan Schwarz put it at the time: “The funny thing is, I’d bet the Saudi ambassador to the US has closer ‘ties’ to Al Qaeda than 90% of the people we’ve killed with drones.”

Nonetheless, when that plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador was “revealed,” virtually every last media outlet — and government official — branded it “Terrorism.” It was just reflexively described that way. And I never heard anyone — anywhere — object to the use of that term on the ground that targeted assassinations aren’t Terrorism, or on any other ground. One of the nation’s alleged leading Iran experts, Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institution, immediately announced that the plot, if proven, “would represent a major escalation of Iranian terrorist operations against the United States.” And that claim was repeated in almost every major media outlet:

ABC News:

CNN:

The Washington Post:

USA Today:

Council on Foreign Relations:

NPR:

DOJ Press Release:

I could literally spend the rest of the day posting identical examples. That the targeted assassination plot aimed exclusively at the Saudi Ambassador was “Terrorism” was the automatic, unexamined, consensus claim from major media outlets, foreign policy experts, and the U.S. Government. Indeed, the accused defendants were formally charged with “international acts of terrorism” notwithstanding that it was to be a targeted assassination of a Saudi official. If anyone disputed this characterization, it escaped my notice, and I pay close attention to debates over the Terrorism label. Very few people, if anyone, objected at all when this allegedly Iranian plot was repeatedly denounced as Terrorism.

But now that it’s widely believed that some combination of Israel and the U.S. are behind the ongoing plot to serially extinguish Iranian scientists — see here, here and here for just some of the evidence suggesting that — it’s suddenly improper, even outrageous, to suggest that this is Terrorism. That’s because the U.S. and Israel are incapable of committing Terrorism, by definition. Terrorism is only something done to those countries and by Muslims, not the other way around (the list of examples proving this to be true is extensive indeed).

Does anyone have any doubt whatsoever that if Iran were sending hit squads to kill Israeli scientists in Tel Aviv, or was murdering a series of American scientists at Los Alamos (while wounding several of their wives, including, in one instance, shooting them in front of their child’s kindergarten), that those acts would be universally denounced as Terrorism, and the only debate would be whether the retaliation should be nuclear, carpet-bombing, or invasion? As always, Terrorism is the most meaningless — and thus most manipulated — term of propaganda; it’s always what They do and never what We do.

* * * * *

Regarding the question of who is responsible for the spate of scientist murders and explosions in Iran, it is true that there is no dispositive evidence on that question; that’s one of the benefits of conducting most consequential governmental action behind a wall of secrecy: no public accountability. But as the links above demonstrate, there is strong circumstantial and even direct evidence that (a) Israel is involved and (b) the U.S. has engaged in substantial covert acts of war aimed not only at the Iranian nuclear program generally but at Iran’s nuclear scientists specifically.

That all of this is done with total secrecy and no oversight by design enables deniability, if one is eager to embrace that. Newsweek‘s neocon national security reporter, Eli Lake, even went so far yesterday as to suggest the “possibility” that Iran is behind these acts of violence: because, as is well known, countries love to murder their own nuclear scientists and blow up their own nuclear facilities (Lake, of course, is right that it’s a “possibility” that Iran is behind this; as I replied: “Another possibility: maybe Senegal, or Singapore, is killing Iran’s scientists – or maybe Martians don’t like their nuclear program”). But by far the most likely explanation is that Israel is responsible, and one would have to be deliberately gullible — to the point of extreme self-delusion — to believe that the U.S. not only has no knowledge of or complicity in a spate of assassinations by its closest client state in a nation in which it has exhibited an intense interest, but also has no ability to stop it if it chose to (at the very least, the U.S. frequently sanctions state sponsors of Terrorism; if it objected to Israel’s acts, wouldn’t it do that here?).

Whatever else might be true, Israel and the U.S. are certainly the leading suspects behind these killings. And that is what explains the vehement resistance against calling this Terrorism.

UPDATE: There’s one point that should be added about why this matters so much: the fact that Terrorism has no fixed meaning does not mean it is inconsequential. The opposite is true. Terrorism is one of the most consequential words in our political lexicon. The term designates Supreme, Unmitigated Evil. Once someone is successfully branded a Terrorist, it means that anything and everything can and should be done to them without constraints (e.g., sure, I don’t love the idea that the President —  in secret and with no due process – can target my fellow citizens for assassination, but I support its being done to Anwar Awlaki because he’s a Terrorist; I don’t like detention without trial but I can live with it as it’s being used to imprison Terrorists; it’s terrible when we slaughter children with drones but it has to be done to get the Terrorists,  etc. etc.).

As I’ve said before, Terrorism is simultaneously the term that means nothing and justifies everything. That’s why such strong emotions are evoked when it is used in a way that deviates from mandated orthodoxies. It’s a meaningless term, but incredibly (perhaps incomparably) significant in governing how power and violence can be wielded and against whom.

Back then, I wrote about Reynolds’ suggestion several times, but I was far from alone. Law Professor Paul Campos wrote a column in the Rocky Mountain News denouncing Reynolds for publicly advocating “murder,” which, he pointed out, is exactly what this would be given that the U.S. is not at war with Iran (he went on to suggest that targeting civilian religious leaders and scientists would still be murder even if the U.S. were at war with Iran); Campos added: “government-sponsored assassinations of the sort Reynolds is advocating are expressly and unambiguously prohibited by the laws of the United States.” Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller documented with absolute clarity that such assassinations would be illegal in the absence of a formal war.

But the angriest reactions came from progressive bloggers, who widely denounced Reynolds as “contemptible” for suggesting this; one progressive writer, Lindsay Beyerstein, was horrified that one could even suggest such a thing, explaining that she ”despair[s] for our society when it’s necessary to supply a rigorous analytical exposition of why our government shouldn’t have scientists and religious leaders whacked.” Scott Lemieux railed against what he called Reynolds’ “kooky scheme for illegal death squads” as “crackpot,” “dumb” and “nuttier than a Planters factory.” And Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, went the furthest of all — in a post he entitled “Terrorism” — branding the killing of Iran’s scientists as “Terrorism”:

I imagine a lot of people agree with [Reynolds], but his recommendation really demonstrates the moral knot caused by George Bush’s insistence that we’re fighting a “war on terror.” After all, killing civilian scientists and civilian leaders, even if you do it quietly, is unquestionably terrorism. That’s certainly what we’d consider it if Hezbollah fighters tried to kill cabinet undersecretaries and planted bombs at the homes of Los Alamos engineers.

If you think Iran is a mortal enemy that needs to be dealt with via military force, you can certainly make that case. But if you’re going to claim that terrorism is a barbaric tactic that has to be stamped out, you can hardly endorse its use by the United States just because it’s convenient in this particular case.

What is most amazing about all this is that, a mere three years later, some combination of Israel and the U.S. are doing exactly that which Reynolds recommended. Numerous Iranian nuclear scientists are indeed being murdered.

In January, 2010, a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle killed Masoud Ali Mohammadi, 50, who “taught neutron physics at Tehran University.” In November, 2010, two separate car bombs exploded within minutes of each other on the same day, one that killed nuclear scientist Majid Shahriar and wounded his wife, and the other which wounded another nuclear scientist, Fereidoun Abbasi, along with his wife. Then, in July of last year, Darioush Rezaei, 35, was shot dead and his wife was wounded by two gunmen firing from motorcycles outside of their daughter’s kindergarten; Rezaei “did his doctorate in neutron transport – which lies at the heart of nuclear chain reactions in reactors and bombs” and “was a member of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the country’s official atomic energy commission.”

And now, yet another Iranian scientist has been killed. According to Iranian media, a 32-year-old university professor, Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, died when an assailant riding on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to his car, which then detonated and killed him. According to The Washington Post‘s Thomas Erdbrink, a conservative news outlet in Iran reported that the young scientist “was believed to be involved in procuring materials for Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz.”

What’s most remarkable here is to compare the boisterous, furious denunciations of the mere suggestion by a blogger on the Internet that Iranian scientists be killed, versus the relative silence in the face of its actually being done in real life, now that the corpses of murdered Iranian scientists are beginning to pile up. Does anyone doubt that some combination of the two nations completely obsessed with Iran’s nuclear program — Israel and the U.S. — are responsible? (U.S. officials deny involvement while pointing the finger at Israel, whose officials will not comment but “smile” when asked; the CIA has “targeted” Iran’s scientists in the past, several of whom have disappeared only to end up in U.S. custody, including one who “resurfaced in the United States after defecting to the CIA in return for a large sum of money”). At the very least, there has been no denunciation from any Obama officials of whoever it might be carrying out such acts.

I have no doubt that Professors Campos and Heller would apply the same legal rationale now that it’s actually being done, but what about the progressives who so stridently denounced Reynolds? Does Lemieux still believe that whoever is responsible — Israel, the U.S., or some combination — is guilty of dispatching “illegal death squads”? Does Beyerstein still “despair for our society” that such acts could even be contemplated? Does Drum still believe that whichever political leaders are responsible for these killings are Terrorists; specifically: if, as is widely assumed, the Israelis are responsible, does that mean that Israel is a Terrorist state, and if U.S. agencies are complicit in some way, does that mean President Obama is a Terrorist, a state sponsor of Terrorism or, at the very least, a supporter of Terrorism?

In general, the American covert war against Iran is extraordinarily dangerous and probably illegal (it’s certainly unauthorized), but in particular, the assassination of Iran’s scientists is just reprehensible. Now that it’s actually happening, one wishes the reaction to it were even partially as aggressive as it was when a right-wing blogger suggested it.

* * * * *

Three other brief noteworthy items: (1) yet again, the New York Times’ Public Editor admonishes that newspaper for baseless reporting about Iran that overstates the threat it poses (specifically for overstating the IAEA’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear program); FAIR first raised objections to the offending article last week; (2) here is a telling scene from Tom Friedman’s current field trip to Cairo; and (3) a sixth-grader named Wolf writes a nice little school report for his civics class on the presidential race.

UPDATE: This morning, Haaretz has a timeline of what it calls “Mysterious deaths and blasts linked to Iran’s nuclear program” — and by “linked to,” they mean: “aimed at” (h/t James Carter). It includes the murder of these scientists as well as various explosions killing many people. If you removed the proper nouns from this timeline (Iran, Ahmadinejad, Natanz), very few people would have any doubt that this is Terrorism.

UPDATE II: The right-wing religious extremist Rick Santorum said previously: ”On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly”; he added: “I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe.” This is how he justified all that:

If people say, “well, you can’t go out and assassinate people” — well, tell that to Awlaki. OK, we’ve done it. We’ve done it to an American citizen, so we can certainly do it to someone who’s producing a nuclear bomb that can be dropped on the state of Israel . . . .

We better hope and pray Rick Santorum never becomes President or else the legal prohibitions against assassinations will simply be ignored and that will become standard American policy — oh, wait. Meanwhile, long-time commenter DCLaw1 poses this question:

Even for people who don’t believe the US has anything to do with the assassination of Iranian scientists, just flip the scenario: how would they react to news that Israeli scientists were being systematically murdered, and Iranian officials just smiled and acted coy when asked about it? What would they say about that, and what would they say the US and Israel would be justified to do in response?

To answer that, just consider the consensus outrage that spewed forth when it was claimed (ridiculously) that Iran was sponsoring a Terror plot on U.S. soil to have a failed Texan used car salesman hire Mexican drug cartels to kill the Saudi ambassador: Terrorism!

UPDATE III: Lemieux responds by saying: “If the United States was involved in the killings — and we should stress the ‘if’ here — the Obama administration’s actions were both illegal and immoral, for the same reasons stated in my earlier posts.” Similarly, Drum strongly implies that he believes the assassinations are Terrorism. Meanwhile, Professor Campos, writing on the blog where Lemieux writes, tries to explain to Lemieux’s angry commenters what the point is of asking these questions and what the benefit is of hearing denunciations not only when a right-wing blogger proposes it, but also when it’s done in reality (in comments, David Mizner attempted the same).

For its part, the U.S. denied involvement in today’s murder and said they “strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like what is being reported today,” while ”in Israel . . . the denial was much more vague. Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, the Israeli military spokesman, wrote on his Facebook page that ‘I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear,’ Agence France-Presse reported.” Nonetheless, “Theodore Karasik, a security expert at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai, said the assassination fit a pattern over the past two years of covert operations by the West and its allies to ‘degrade and delay’ Iran’s nuclear program.”

UPDATE IV: Beyond what’s discussed here, John Glaser looks at the publicly available evidence, including what has been reported in The Guardian and Der Spiegel, regarding who is likely behind this spate of killings of Iranian scientists.

Yesterday, the White House announced Daley’s departure — he will now co-chair Obama’s re-election campaign, which basically means raising huge amounts of money from his Wall Street friends — and unveiled his replacement as Chief of Staff: Jacob Lew. In 2010, Lew became head of the Office of Management and Budget when Peter Orszag left and then, a couple months later, accepted a multi-million dollar position as a high-level Citigroup official. Lew has spent many years in various government positions, but he has his own substantial ties to Citigroup. Here is what Lew was doing in 2008 at the time the financial crisis exploded, as detailed by an excellent Huffington Post report from last year:

[Lew] oversaw a Citigroup unit that profited off the housing collapse and financial crisis by investing in a hedge fund king who correctly predicted the eventual subprime meltdown and now finds himself involved in the center of the U.S. government’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs. . . .

[I]t is his few years at Citi — in particular the one year he spent at its then-$54 billion proprietary trading, hedge fund and private equity unit — that’s likely to raise the most eyebrows in the coming weeks as Lew faces a Senate confirmation hearing.

Especially his unit’s investments in a hedge fund that bet on the housing market to collapse — a reality suffered by millions of American homeowners.

In particular, the Citigroup fund run by Lew, Citi’s Alternative Investments, invested heavily in the hedge fund of John Paulson, “who made billions off the deterioration of the housing industry by making bearish bets on securities tied to home mortgages — particularly subprime home mortgages.” One of Paulson’s largest bets at the time involved Goldman Sachs, which the SEC has now charged with “defrauding investors by creating and selling exotic securities tied to subprime home mortgages in 2007 without disclosing that they were handpicked by a hedge fund [Paulson] that was betting on them to fail.”

Although these bets turned a profit for Citigroup as the housing market collapsed — a collapse that led to the foreclosures of millions of Americans’ homes — Lew’s unit “lost as much as billions of dollars in 2008 as its bets turned sour. In the first quarter of 2008 alone the unit lost $509 million; the company stopped publicly disclosing the unit’s individual numbers soon thereafter, but the part of the company that absorbed Alternative Investments lost $20.1 billion in 2008, according to the bank’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.” As a result of that and other losses, Citigroup received $45 billion as part of the Wall Street bailout, and also used a crisis-created FDIC program to issue another $64.6 billion in taxpayer-backed debt. All of that led to these comments when Lew was chosen last year to replace Orszag as OMB Director:

Lew’s role at the fund is raising some eyebrows among good government groups.

“That sounds pretty nasty, doesn’t it?” said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a group that monitors the budget office. “Any activity and any player that contributed to the economic calamity needs to be looked at.

“We already got enough players in this administration that certainly were key players in the economic malaise that we currently have,” Bass continued. “Why shouldn’t we have another one?” he said with a slight chuckle.

For his work at Citigroup, work that included betting on the housing collapse, Lew received a salary of $1.1 million. After Citigroup received its $45 billion taxpayer bailout, Lew — two weeks before joining the Obama administration — received another $900,000 from Citigroup as a bonus. This was revealed only in 2010; in 2009, when Lew first joined the administration as a State Department official, both he and the administration refused to say if he had received a post-bailout bonus from Citigroup (at the time, there was a huge political scandal over Wall Street executives receiving large bonuses despite needing taxpayer bailouts). There’s certainly nothing illegal about betting on a housing market collapse, but it’s quite symbolic that those who made millions of dollars from the crisis are now running government policy.

Lew (like so many key Obama officials) also participated in the orgy of Wall Street de-regulation that took place in the 1990s when he served as Clinton’s OMB head; after leaving Citigroup to join the Obama administration, he unsurprisingly said in response to questioning from Sen. Bernie Sanders that he does not believe deregulation contributed to the financial crisis.  The New York Times today says that Lew “has built a reputation as a pragmatic liberal who believes Democrats must compromise with Republicans on long-term deficits in order to forestall draconian cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.” The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein was a bit more blunt: Lew “has emerged as one of the members of the Obama administration Republicans prefer working with.” Whatever else one might want to say, Lew, a fairly standard-issue Democrat with less of a “centrist” reputation than Daley, is a perfect fit for this administration.

So the first White House Chief of Staff, Emanuel, not only built a Democratic majority in the House by supporting corporatist Blue Dogs over progressive challengers, but himself got rich when he left the Clinton White House to join a Chicago investment bank and made “more than $18 million in just two-and-a-half years, turning many of his contacts in his substantial political Rolodex into paying clients”; thereafter, Emanuel worked hard in the House on behalf of the hedge fund industry and — unsurprisingly — “was the top recipient in the House of Representatives of campaign contributions from hedge funds, private equity firms and the wider securities and investment industry during the 2008 election cycle.” The second Chief of Staff was JP Morgan’s Daley. And now the third is Lew.

All of this reflects what Matt Taibbi meant when he wrote last week that “once the primaries are finished, we’re going to be left with one 1%-approved stooge taking on another” and that the election will present “a choice between two different versions of the status quo.” Moreover, the 2008 financial crisis is the new Iraq War: it does not matter how prominent a role someone played in enabling it, or how much they profited from it, or how centrally they were part of the corrupted machinery that brought it about. If they have the right ideology and good standing in Washington circles, all is forgiven and they do not suffer any consequences at all, even reputationally. Indeed, not only is it no impediment to their advancement, but it’s actually an asset.

* * * * *

The General Accounting Government Accountability Office this week issued a report criticizing the Treasury Department for incomplete and misleading press releases designed to make the results of the TARP program look better than reality warrants. In particular, “GAO’s analysis of Treasury press releases about specific programs indicate that information about estimated lifetime costs and income are included only when programs are expected to result in lifetime income”; “however, press releases for investments in AIG, a program that is anticipated to result in a lifetime cost to Treasury, did not include program-specific cost information.” In other words, Treasury loudly touts in its Press Releases when it makes money from TARP, but excludes the losses. For more on the now-ossified claim that TARP was a profit-generating success, see the always indispensable Dean Baker.

* * * * *

On a different note: Falguni Sheth is a Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Hampshire College. She has written a comprehensive response to Katha Pollitt’s Nation piece on progressives and Ron Paul that, among many things, wildly distorted what I wrote. But addressing Pollitt’s distortion is the least important and interesting point in Professor Sheth’s essay, which I really encourage everyone to read.

UPDATE: The History Professor and cartoonist James MacLeod summarizes this development this way:

In September, 2006, the U.S. Congress passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA) which, among other things, not only authorized the detention of accused Terrorist suspects without a trial, but even explicitly denied all Guantanamo detainees the right of habeas corpus: the Constitutionally mandated procedure to allow prisoners at least one opportunity to convince a court that they are being wrongfully held. Habeas hearings are a much lower form of protection than a full trial: the government need not convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is guilty, but rather merely present some credible evidence to justify the imprisonment. But the MCA denied even habeas rights to detainees.

Only once the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 2008 decision bearing Boumediene’s name, ruled that this habeas-denying provision of the MCA was unconstitutional, and that Guantanamo detainees were entitled to habeas corpus review, was the U.S. government finally required to show its evidence against Boumediene in an actual court. A Bush-43 appointed federal judge then ruled that there was no credible evidence to support the accusations against him, and he was finally released in May, 2009. Please first go read Boumediene’s short though gripping account of what this indefinite detention did to his life, and then consider the following points:

(1) Since the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision, dozens of Guantanamo detainees like Boumediene were finally able to have a federal court review whether there was any credible evidence against them, and the vast majority have won their cases on the ground that there was no such evidence (at one point, 75% of Guantanamo detainees prevailed, though the percentage is now somewhat lower). Had the Military Commissions Act been upheld as constitutional, Boumediene — and dozens of other innocent, now-released Guantanamo detainees — would undoubtedly still be indefinitely imprisoned.

Put another way, if those who voted for the MCA had their way — and that includes all GOP Senators except Lincoln Chafee along with 12 Democrats, including Jay Rockefeller, Debbie Stabenow, Robert Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, and current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar — then Boumediene and dozens of other innocent detainees would still be wrongly imprisoned. Moreover, the Democrats had 46 Senators at the time and could have filibustered but did not; indeed, even many Democrats who voted against the bill anointed John McCain as their negotiator and were prepared to vote for the MCA until the very last weekend when some unrelated changes were made without their input and they were offended on that procedural ground. As Boumediene’s Op-Ed reflects, acting to empower the President to imprison people indefinitely with no charges is one of the most pernicious and dangerous steps a government can take, and yet the U.S. Congress in 2006 did exactly that.

(2) The Boumediene Supreme Court decision was a 5-4 vote; thus, four Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court voted to uphold the constitutionality of imprisoning human beings indefinitely, possibly for life, without even the minimal protections of a habeas hearing. Had Anthony Kennedy voted with his conservative colleagues, not only would Boumediene and dozens of others still be wrongly imprisoned, but the power which the U.S. has long taught its citizens is the defining hallmark of tyranny — the power to imprison without due process — would have been fully enshrined under American law.

(3) Post-Boumediene, indefinite detention remains a staple of Obama policy. The Obama DOJ has repeatedly argued that the Boumediene ruling should not apply to Bagram, where — the Obama administration insists — it has the power to imprison people with no due process, not even a habeas hearing; the Obama DOJ has succeeded in having that power enshrined. Obama has proposed a law to vest him with powers of “prolonged detention” to allow Terrorist suspects to be imprisoned with no trials. His plan for closing Guantanamo entailed the mere re-location of its indefinite detention system to U.S. soil, where dozens of detainees, at least, would continue to be imprisoned with no trial. And, of course, the President just signed into law the NDAA which contains — as the ACLU put it — “a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision,” meaning — as Human Rights Watch put it — that “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.” Those held at Guantanamo will continue to receive at least a habeas hearing, but those held in other American War on Terror prisons will not. Read Boumediene’s Op-Ed to see why this is so odious.

(4) As we head into Election Year, there is an increasingly common, bizarre and self-evidently repellent tactic being employed by some Democratic partisans against those of us who insist that issues like indefinite detention (along with ongoing killing of civilians in the Muslim world) merit high priority. The argument is that to place emphasis on such issues is to harm President Obama (because he’s responsible for indefinite detention, substantial civilian deaths, and war-risking aggression) while helping competing candidates (such as Gary Johnson or Ron Paul) who vehemently oppose such policies. Thus, so goes this reasoning, to demand that issues like indefinite detention and civilian deaths be prioritized in assessing the presidential race is to subordinate the importance of other issues such as abortion, gay equality, and domestic civil rights enforcement on which Obama and the Democrats are better. Many of these commentators strongly imply, or now even outright state, that only white males are willing to argue for such a prioritization scheme because the de-prioritized issues do not affect them. See here (Megan Carpentier), here (Katha Pollitt) and here (Dylan Matthews) as three of many examples of this grotesque accusatory innuendo.

There are numerous glaring flaws with this divisive tactic. For one, it relies on a full-scale, deliberate distortion of the argument being made; demanding that issues like indefinite detention, civilian deaths and aggressive war be given high priority in the presidential race does not remotely advocate the de-prioritization of any other issues. For another, many women and ethnic and racial minorities – as well as gay Americans — are making similar arguments about the need for these issues to receive substantial attention in the election.

More important, it’s irrational in the extreme to argue that self-interest or “privilege” would cause someone to want to prioritize issues like indefinite detention and civilian causalities given that the civil liberties and anti-war advocates being so accused are extremely unlikely themselves to be affected by the abuses they protest. For the most part, it isn’t white males being indefinitely detained, rendered, and having their houses and cars exploded with drones — the victims of those policies are people like Boumediene, or Gulet Mohamed, or Jose Padilla, or Awal Gul, or Sami al-Haj, or Binyam Mohamed, or Afghan villagers, or Pakistani families, or Yemeni teenagers.

Put another way, when you spend the vast bulk of your time working against the injustices imposed almost exclusively on minorities and the marginalized — as anyone who works on these war and civil liberties issues by definition does — it’s reprehensible for someone to deploy these sorts of accusatory tactics, all in service of the shallow goal of partisan loyalty enforcement. Those who were actually driven primarily by privileged self-interest would want to de-prioritize these issues in a presidential campaign, not insist on their vital importance.

And that is this real point here: what’s so warped about those who employ this tactic for partisan ends is how easily it could be used against them, rather than by them. All of the authors of the three accusatory examples linked above (Carpentier, Pollitt, and Matthews) — as well as most of those Democrats who have now sunk to explicitly arguing that such matters are unimportant — are white and non-Muslim. To apply their degraded rhetoric to them, one could easily say:

Of course they don’t consider indefinite detention, invasions and occupations, and civilian slaughter to be disqualifying in a President or even meriting substantial attention in the presidential election — of course they will demand that everyone faithfully support a President who continues to do these things aggressively — because, as non-Muslims, they’re not the ones who will be imprisoned for years with no trial or have their children blown to bits by a U.S. drone or air strike, so what do they care?

I don’t employ or endorse that wretched reasoning, but those who do — such as the authors of the above-linked accusations — should have it applied to them and their own political priorities; they deserve to reap what they are sowing.

Indeed, The Washington Post today has an excellent article on the millions of civilian deaths which the U.S. has caused over the last several decades and how steadfastly those civilian deaths are ignored in U.S. political and media discourse. The article is by John Tirman, the executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies who just released a book on that topic. One primary reason that these deaths receive such low priority is because Americans are unaffected by these casaulties and can thus easily de-prioritize them as aberrational:

This explains much of our response to the violence in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the wars went badly and violence escalated, Americans tended to ignore or even blame the victims. The public dismissed the civilians because their high mortality rates, displacement and demolished cities were discordant with our understandings of the missions and the U.S. role in the world.

These attitudes have consequences. Perhaps the most important one — apart from the tensions created with the host governments, which have been quite vocal in protesting civilian casualties — is that indifference provides permission to our military and political leaders to pursue more interventions.

To invoke the exploitative, accusatory tactics of Megan Carpentier, Katha Pollitt, Dylan Matthews and the other accusers linked above: it’s much easier to view these policies as non-disqualifying and to insist on their de-prioritization in favor of other policies because their white, non-Muslim privilege means that they aren’t the ones who are going to be indefinitely detained, assassinated without due process, or have their homes and children targeted with drones and cluster bombs. Muslims have a much harder time so blithely acquiescing to such abuses — as do non-Muslims who are capable of protesting grave injustices even when they’re not directly affected by them. Again, that is not a form of reasoning I accept or use — there may be all sorts of reasons why one would want these policies to be de-prioritized or at least not be seen as disqualifying beyond selfish, privilege-based indifference — but those who spew those kinds of smears should understand how easy it is to subject them to those accusations.

Ultimately, it really isn’t that complicated to understand why many people consider these issues to be so imperative. Those struggling to understand it should go read Lakhdar Boumediene’s Op-Ed. Or this story and this Op-Ed about a 16-year-old boy and his 12-year-old cousin whose lives were ended when the 16-year-old was targeted (in secret and with no checks) with a drone strike in Pakistan. Or these newly documented findings of ongoing abuse of detainees at Bagram. Or the dozens of Yemeni women and children killed by a U.S. cluster bomb. Or the secretive process by which the current President has seized the unilateral power to target even U.S. citizens for assassination.

There are many reasons why one might insist on attention being paid to these issues, even in an Election Year. As I explained in my response to Carpentier’s lowly Guardian attack, self-interest and “privilege” are not among them. If anything, those traits are likely to produce exactly the opposite reaction, i.e., that these issues not be prioritized because empowering one’s own political party and caring about issues that personally harm oneself is the overriding goal.

UPDATE: The NYT has published an Op-Ed from another released, innocent Guatanamo detainee, Murat Kurnaz, that is just as harrowing and moving. It isn’t the people who are demanding these injustices receive high priority who have to answer charges of race-and-privilege-based self-interest and indifference; if anyone should answer those scurrilous charges, it’s those insisting that these abuses are not disqualifying and can and should be de-prioritized in the 2012 election.

UPDATE II: NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen wrote this on Twitter earlier this afternoon regarding Carpentier’s falsehood-based attack piece in The Guardian:

Carpentier’s purported summary of what I wrote is so blatantly false — indeed, is the exact opposite of what I argued — that I had strongly considered demanding a retraction from The Guardian, only to decide that that level of drama wasn’t worth the time and energy required, and instead asked only that an Editor’s Note be added to her Op-Ed linking to my response (which they then added). As I said the very first time I wrote about these arguments, I was doing so “even knowing in advance how wildly they will be distorted”; I also knew who would do the distorting and why. I nonetheless proceeded to make the arguments because I believed they were sufficiently important and “it’s always inadvisable to refrain from expressing ideas in deference to the confusion and deceit of the lowest elements.” In particular, I knew that in an Election Year, any attempt to locate important advocacy outside of The Party would prompt all sorts of dishonest and slimy smears — and they have — but I genuinely believe these issues are too important to permit those sorts of tactics to deter constructive efforts to do something about them. The two Op-Eds from the former Guantanamo detainees underscore why I believe that.

UPDATE III [Mon.]: Here are three worthwhile posts relating to all of this: (1) from David Mizner on the sudden effort by some progressives to insist on the relative unimportance of war and certain civil liberties issues — and the irrational claim that they can and should be separated from domestic policy matters — given how bad their party and their candidate is on those issues; (2) from Bob Somerby on the potent role which tribalism plays in driving this debate; and (3) from Jayel Aheram on specifically what causes the types of obvious distortions seen from Carpentier.

Even worse, The Washington Post, ABC News and others irresponsibly published totally anonymous military sources claiming with no basis that Hastings violated ground-rule agreements for the interviews. In the face of that media-military onslaught, it would have been easy for this young reporter to protect his careerist ambitions and back down. Instead, he doubled down, accusing military officials of “lying” and then unapologetically explaining to these lions of American journalism that the role of a journalist is to scrutinize and expose — not protect and glorify– the nation’s most powerful political and military leaders:

Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn’t be mistaken for hostile – I’m just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on fucking K Street. That’s what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.

That mindset shapes Hastings’ superb new book on the Afghanistan War: The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan. The bulk of the book is devoted to his experiences in Afghanistan and his examination of how the war has been managed and the propaganda that has been disseminated to sustain it. Because Hastings writes as someone who expressly believes that U.S. should not be in Afghanistan, and (even more rarely) as someone who has no concern whatsoever for whom he offends by reporting the truth, the book provides vital insights about the war and how it has been run that are not available anywhere else.

Hastings’ exposé on the war is what has received the bulk of the attention in book reviews — both positive and negative (The Wall Street Journal amusingly compared him — as though it were a grave insult — to Vietnam War reporters David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan for the crime of reporting the negative aspects of a war and the government deceit behind it). But his discussions of national security journalists and how the Pentagon uses them are at least equally valuable. First, consider how Gen. McChrystal viewed the role the American media played in helping to sell the Iraq War:

When even George Bush’s own Press Secretary and his Pentagon spokesman mock the American media for its mindless subservience to government war propaganda — and when even the war General who is a the subject of a glowing Atlantic profile derides the writer as “totally co-opted by the military” – perhaps that’s a sign that the profession (also known as: The Liberal Media) should take account of the actual function it serves. The other lesson from this passage is, as Hastings put it to me by email: ”Though these big time journalists like to view themselves as ‘peers’ of McChrystal and the generals, the generals often view the big time journalists with a healthy dose of contempt.” People who are easily and eagerly used are often appreciated for the value they provide, but are rarely viewed with respect.

Then there’s the reaction of many establishment journalists to Hastings’ Rolling Stone article on McChrystal — a reaction that did as much to expose their mindset and the role they play as any other single incident:

One sees this over and over; there is a perverse, inverse relationship between the amount of power someone wields in Washington and the willingness of most establishment journalists to engage in reporting that exposes or embarrasses them. These journalists love to swarm with contempt on the marginalized and powerless in their world (people and groups like Julian Assange, Occupy Wall Street, Christine O’Donnell, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, etc.), but when it comes to those who exercise real power and are members in good standing of the Washington establishment — war Generals, senior White House officials, corporate officials and lobbyists — they tread with extreme caution when they do anything other than obediently convey messages. That dynamic is supposed to be precisely the reverse for a real journalist, which is why Hastings was genuinely confused and confounded at first by the angry reaction to his article from his (ostensible) peers.

But Hastings ultimately realized that these were not his peers at all, because they were engaged in completely different functions. Whereas Hastings viewed himself as an “outsider” reporting on those in power, these journalists very much viewed themselves as insiders, with a function not to report on those in power but to serve them. Hastings entitled Chapter 43 of this book the “Media-Military-Industrial-Complex” to make this point clear:

This is exactly why these journalists were so offended by Hastings’ career-ending reporting on McChrystal: because they so identify with the powerful officials whom they “cover” that any harm to those officials is viewed as harm to these journalists themselves — much the way that aides to a Senator get angry when a newspaper article reflects poorly on their boss. That same dynamic was quite visible when it was media figures who tellingly led the chorus of anger and scorn against WikiLeaks for doing what should have been those journalists’ job: namely, exposing the secret corruption and illegality of the world’s most powerful political and corporate factions. But because those journalists see themselves as integrated members of those factions, they reacted with as much anger to that exposure as government officials themselves. That’s because there is no real division between these media figures and the political officials whom they cover. That is exactly what explains the anger toward Hastings from his fellow national security journalists for the crime of reporting in a way that reflected negatively on the Honorable Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Ordinarily, I would urge as many people as possible to buy the book of someone like Michael Hastings solely in order to support the kind of journalism he does: the more successful his book is, the more it bolsters this journalistic approach and the more of a repudiation it is to the power-serving reporters who attacked him. But this book is very worthwhile in its own right. The Afghanistan War is now more than ten years old with no end in sight, and this is one of the most eye-opening accounts provided yet about why it has dragged on, from one of the bravest and most intrepid journalists who has covered it.