When Dirt Is Dug Up, Muddy the Waters

Julian Assange is what he is because the American media are not what they should be.

Rather than cleaning up their own act, however, American journalists have become willing accomplices in the establishment's predictable response to Assange's WikiLeaks revelations.  They are attacking his character.

CNN arranged an interview with Assange ostensibly to talk about the content of the thousands of secret documents WikiLeaks acquired and made public about the Iraq war. But the questioning prompted Assange to ask, "Do you want to talk about deaths of 104,000 people or my personal life?"  When the personal questions persisted, he walked out of the interview.  This act, declared Howard Kurtz, the media's foremost apologist from his pulpits at the Washington Post and CNN, proved that Assange is "delusional."

Indeed, "delusional" seems to be the adjective of choice in the orchestrated attacks on Assange.  John Burns, a darling of the Pentagon, gave it a workout in his hatchet job on Assange that the New York Times felt compelled to give equal prominence with its report on the actual content of the leaked documents.  This is what the media today call "balance."

I worked with the Times's late Tad Szulc  when he obtained a series of secret documents revealing illegal arms shipments by the U.S. government to countries to which such shipments were banned by law.  The newspaper did not feel compelled at that time to publish side-by-side with Tad's disclosures an innuendo-packed account of his sex life or his racetrack associates.

Gene Roberts, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, hailed his multiple Pulitzer Prize winning reporters, Don Barlett and Jim Steele, as "document reporters."  Their work was never accompanied, with equal prominence, by sidebars quoting unnamed sources about shady allegations of Barlett's personal life in Akron or Steele's college romances.

I don't know if Assange was set up by his enemies for the rape allegations against him that are still under investigation in Sweden, but I do know that such tactics are almost as old as the sex act itself. More than half a century ago an upstart coach in another state snatched three prized football recruits from Ohio, where the imperious Woodrow Wilson Hayes was the supreme dictator of the Ohio State University football program.  Not only that, but the upstart coach, with all three of his Ohio recruits playing prime roles, upset a heavily favored Ohio State team.  The very next year, three of the upstart's best players were suspended on charges of rape and sexual assault brought by two young women.  Only later was it revealed -- by a "document reporter" -- that the women who filed the charges had themselves been accused of prostitution in, of all places, Columbus, OH, home of the Buckeyes.

The last really big release of war documents the government didn't want  us to see was the Pentagon Papers, given to my friend and colleague Neil Sheehan by the whistle-blower, Dan Ellsberg.  Neil made the Nixon enemies list; Nixon sent the plumbers after Ellsberg, raiding his psychiatrists' office to dig up dirt.  Ellsberg offered the documents to Sheehan not because of Neil's exemplary personal life, but because he had demonstrated the highest integrity in his reporting from Vietnam. Would that, say, Burns had demonstrated such independence from the generals' handouts in his reporting on Iraq.

I know of no law that requires a digger after important  documents to be a candidate for canonization.  In fact, one of the first, best "document reporters" I ever worked with would have had great difficulty trying to defend his personal life in light of the conventional mores of those times.  But his documents were real and their disclosure put some criminals in jail.

The important side issue about Julian Assange isn't who went to bed with him, under what circumstances, or whether he's a pleasant  fellow to work with.  The main issue is the content of the documents he makes public; the important side issue is why in the hell the media aren't digging them up themselves.

These things are documents, not delusions.

Walking Slowly Among All the False Gods

IN A CANYON IN SOUTHERN UTAH -- A massive storm system that washed out unpaved roads extends our camping vacation here longer than we intended. But satellites fly even above these desolate and ruggedly beautiful places, so that our electronic umbilical to the real world remains intact.
We who spent our working lifetimes collecting and purveying news tend to develop an addiction to it. Our new age enablers, the cybergods, sate our ravenous needs. Little has changed Out There. The fragile vestiges of the Great American Experiment continue to unravel. Can a democratic republic formed of the people, by the people and for the people actually work, can it endure, can it thrive? Two hundred thirty-four years after the experiment began, the answer is becoming clear: Nope.
Round up the usual suspects: greed, corruption, ignorance,  hubris . . . the entire dark side of human nature. Round and round we go, down and down we go. But then, what else is madness but to repeat the same actions over and over and expect different results?
Many of us -- yet far too few to sustain a semblance of democracy -- will go to the polls in about three weeks to perform our duty as citizens, to vote. We repeat this process of electing leaders periodically, irrationally thinking that this time we will actually put someone into office somewhere who will effectively serve the needs of The People.
The corporate overlords, the war makers and the oligarchs of Wall Street have already decided the election -- $14 million here, $10 million there, small fortunes from foreign billionaires with a financial stake in our lives through the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The candidates they have purchased and will put into office know what they are expected to do -- speed up the erasure of the last vestiges of democracy -- and they will do so even as they prattle tribute to the great American "values."
In most of the election contests for which we will cast our meaningless votes, we have but two choices: a corporate-owned Democrat or a corporate-owned Republican. The candidates with the most lavish corporate financial support will almost invariably win. The  propagandists of the corporate media tell us that the pollsters expect a net gain of up to 50 seats in the House of representatives for the Republicans.
Not much has changed since we camped out here in the semi-wilderness. We are nested on a hillock from which we can gaze miles in any direction without seeing a fellow human. Our nest is in one of the diminishing number of places in this country that are not "owned" by anyone, because they are owned by everyone. Public land. Protected by the government on behalf of all the people because of its esthetic, cultural or historical significance.
We come to such places as often as we can because we know they will not always be here. Corporations covet the riches to be made by destroying them to extract their minerals, or trees, or what lies beneath their surface, or on it. Whatever can serve their gods of greed.
Gods are everywhere around us: the cybergods who bring us the news we crave even if it's bad, the gods of greed who covet whatever wealth this land promises, the gods of power derived from wealth who are our real government. So too are the gods of the ancient ones who once occupied this land. Images of their gods can still be found carved on cliff faces and rock outcroppings a short walk from our campsite. Their gods were powerless against famine, drought and the guns of the pale invaders who drove them out -- to extract wealth from their homeland.
Nothing changes.
There is a dark side to human nature. There always will be.
It is almost time to go back and live with it again.