Blog P.I. » 9/11 Attacks

Links, Context and Little Green Footballs

William Beutler — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:24:00 +0000

The New York Times Sunday Magazine this weekend features a long article about the fallout between Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs fame and the rest of the anti-jihadist rightosphere. If nothing else it provides a solid overview for anyone who has noticed LGF’s change in focus over the past year, or read his November post “Why I Parted Ways With the Right” but didn’t remember too much about the controversy surrounding the presence of a representative from fringe Finnish political party Vlaams Belang at a 2007 Brussels conference that presaged it. You can get a good sense of the dispute by reading posts by Johnson and his enemies at Memeorandum; for context, I especially recommend Patterico and R.S. McCain.

But what interests me even more is the intellectual framework writer Jonathan Dee imposes on the proceedings. While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination. It’s impossible for me to say whether this is true in Johnson’s case, but Dee at least presents a persuasive case.

Key excerpts:

Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine. …

Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997.

Fans of Don DeLillo may recall the final pages of his 1997 novel “Underworld” (no relation to the graphic novels, film series nor English techno artists) where the characters Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover are joined for eternity in cyberspace, “a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information. Everything is connected in the end.” Well, I did, anyway.

Meanwhile, Dee makes a secondary point that this blurring of context may contribute to a conflation of conflicting perceptions which one may find too often in online discourse:

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind. …

The soundest conclusion seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.

I cannot say that is what is happening here — I’m certainly not about to be pulled into a discussion of Vlaams Belang. And while misreadings of intentions are not new to online discourse, I think there is a “flattening effect” or, to borrow a metaphor from television, “time-shifting” of opinion which can sometimes confuse more than enlighten. Such confusion may be innocent, but it is also open to exploitation. With no information online separated by more than a few clicks, anyone can choose their own context. And in the blogosphere, some choose contexts incompatible with others’ — even if only for the sake of argument.

The Earliest Known Fisking?

William Beutler — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:19:09 +0000

The word “fisking” — originating in the blogosphere ca. 2001 — has fallen somewhat into disuse in recent years, especially as the ’sphere has expanded to include many who weren’t around back in its earliest days.

For the uninitiated, it refers to a point-by-point refutation of an odious written work, often with an acidic or sardonic tone. The referent is one Robert Fisk, a British columnist whose absurdly self-abegnating columns from Afghanistan made him a pariah, at least until he was forgotten. Forceful responses from bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan gave rise to the term itself.

But this eponym is worth keeping around, and it’s up to armchair cultural anthropologists like yours truly to point out earlier examples of the form where they find them.

Which brings us to the once-popular and still-familiar 1936 book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. I picked up a copy from Amazon recently, and have been reading it on the Metro to work. In one early chapter, Carnegie explains how persuasion is best accomplished by appealing to your persuadee’s self-interest, and as a counter-example reprints a letter from an officious adman and intersperses it with his own commentary. Carnegie introduces the section thus:

This letter was sent to the managers of local radio stations throughout the country. (I have set down, in brackets, my reactions to each paragraph.)

And here, for your reading interest, is a partial reproduction:

Mr. John Blank,
Blankville,
Indiana
Dear Mr. Blank:

   The —— company desires to retain its position in advertising agency leadership in the radio field.

[Who cares what your company desires? I am worried about my own problems. The bank is foreclosing on my house, the bugs are destroying the hollyhocks, the stuck market tumbled yesterday. I missed the eight-fifteen this morning, I wasn't invited to the Jones's dance last night, the doctor tells me I have high blood pressure and neuritis and dandruff. And then what happens? I come down to the office this morning worried, open my mail and here is some little whippersnapper off in New York yapping about what his company wants. Bah! If he only realized what sort of impression his letter makes, he would get out of the advertising business and start manufacturing sheep dip.]

   This agency’s national advertising accounts were the bulwark of the network. Our subsequent clearances of station time have kept us at the top of agencies year after year.

[You are big and rich and right at the top, are you? So what? I don't give two whoops in Hades if you are as big as General Motors and General Electric and the General Staff of the U.S. Army all combined. If you had as much sense as a half-witted hummingbird, you would realize that I am interested in how big I am--not how big you are. All this talk about your enormous success makes me feel small and unimportant.]

   We desire to service our accounts with the last word on radio station information.

[You desire! You desire. You unmitigated ass. I'm not interested in what you desire or what the President of the United States desires. Let me tell you once and for all that I am interested in what I desire--and you haven't said a word about that yet in this absurd letter of yours.]

Zing! Dale Carnegie wasn’t warblogger, but he certainly could have fit in with those whippersnappers.

Bloggingheads.tv: The Modern AIG

William Beutler — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:50:43 +0000

Well, I didn’t plan to disappear from blogging for a week, but sometimes that happens. Not that I was entirely absent from the blogosphere last week: among other activities related to blogging, I recorded my latest segment for Bloggingheads, this time not with Bill Scher but with Sara Robinson of Orcinus. Watch the whole thing here:

I’ll admit, I think this was my weakest appearance. Our discussion leaned heavily toward economic systems and policy, which admittedly has not been a focus of my reading ever since, well, about the time I moved to the District. Funny, that. However, the Bheads forum regulars yet again seem not to hate me and even sort of have my back, for which I am grateful.

An Op-Ed We Just Might Blog

William Beutler — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:37:52 +0000

Memeorandum is not my homepage, although it might as well be — if you want to know what’s going on in the political blogosphere right now, it beats the pants off Technorati or Google’s BlogSearch. Normally here I’d say something about its impressive signal-to-noise ratio, but the fact is, there’s no noise. (On sister site Techmeme once, I saw a weeks-old story linked once. Once.)

It’s good enough that I tend to think that just by eyeballing it you can tell how big a particular story is. If that’s the case, then the Michael O’Hanlon/Kenneth Pollack op-ed in today’s New York Times may be the most talked-about newspaper article this year, at least:

Unlike many, perhaps most, stories listed by Memeorandum this one attracted attention from both the pro-war/conservative/righty bloggers as well as the anti-war/progressive/lefty bloggers. If you’ve read the op-ed, it’s not hard to see why. O’Hanlon and Pollack both supported the Iraq war at the outset — the latter expressly advocating it in an influential book — but changed their minds as the war continued and the rebuilding project went awry. Nowadays the right is grateful for any sign that the war might be winnable, especially if it comes from Democratic-aligned intellectuals, especially if it runs on the New York Times’ left-leaning op-ed page. Meanwhile, the left has at least as much invested in ending the very same war that the right wishes to continue, in discrediting Pollack and O’Hanlon’s work, by pointing out inconsistencies and oversights, not to mention disputing their anti-war credentials.

It is not, however, an even split.

So who wins this battle of wills? Well, if you trust Memeorandum creator Gabe Rivera’s secret sauce, and you trust my count (I’ve included the complete breakdown after the jump, if you’re feeling argumentative), and we focus on this iteration of the page (there were others), several more large blogs of the right hopped on this story than blogs of the left tried to burst it like a bubble: 37 to 18, with 10 online newspaper items and non-aligned bloggers making up the oft-overlooked third leg of the blogospheric debate. Still, take this with a grain of salt — The Huffington Post has more traffic than many of these blogs put together, while righty traffic leader Instapundit linked it approvingly, but as usual offered too little commentary to make the cut. And in the course of writing this, I have seen more than a few perfectly major blogs not linked here — but I still think it’s a pretty good representation.

If there’s nothing else to be said here, it’s a fitting story to capture (political) blogosphere-wide attention — the rightosphere came to be after 9/11 and to support war on terrorism, of which Iraq is consdidered a piece, while the leftosphere was built around opposition to the invasion, and frustration with moderate liberals who supported it — like, say, Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon.

OK, so here’s the complete list. Feel free to tell me where I’m wrong:

Anti-war/Progressive/Lefty

News item/Moderate/Non-aligned

Pop quiz — can you guess who switched sides? If you give up, the answer is here.

Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood II: CFRed and the Globalist Conspiracy

William Beutler — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:51:31 +0000

Earlier this month, Blog P.I. tracked a multi-monikered Internet troll whose sole enjoyment in life appears to derive from supplying blog comment sections with underwhelming arguments against Fred Thompson (disclosure).

I promised then to look a little closer at the identity of this dedicated anti-Fredhead, and while I later thought I had thought the better of it, Christopher Caldwell’s piece in the most recent New York Times Magazine afforded me the opportunity to re-rethink that decision.

And so this post exists… in three interminable parts. I don’t often use the below-the-fold feature on WordPress, but this post won’t appeal to everyone, and I don’t want it to get in everyone’s way. But if you’re game, then follow me…

I. Lucky Jim

Let’s start at the beginning. The post mentioned above dared The Artist Sometimes Known as Jim Robinson to post on this site, and to his credit (I suppose) he did:

Jim Robinson
Jul 11th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

Y’all (thats “you all” dumbed down for FRaudheads) flatter me. I guess if Fred actually had credentials you wouldnt be sitting here worrying about what Im posting on blogs.

DOH!
Posted Jul 11, 2:14 PM

I went on vacation a few days later, and apparently “Jim” missed the flattery enough to come back and beg for some more:

RepublicanWomenAgainstFredThompson
Jul 20th, 2007 at 3:55 pm

I thought y’all were gonna do something about me???? What happened? ROFLAMO! losers.

Taunted into submission, eventually I decided to go ahead and see where his IP address was located:

The IP address traces to Bell, California, a nothing city located in Los Angeles County. According to Wikipedia, its most famous native is bandleader Stan Kenton, and was last heard from in 2000, when USPS misplaced some Oscar statuettes and this was inaccurately reported as a stolen shipment. For what it’s worth, this IP address is the same one supplied to me by another blogger hit with similar absurdities from our friend “Jim.”

Next I tried contacting the person at the Yahoo address listed for multiple handles, s1nderella@yahoo.com. I was even going to offer an e-mail interview, if he or she was so willing. Alas, it bounced back immediately.

So I Googled s1nderella, which seems to be a named used by a handful of young female social networkers. I suppose this could lend credence to the idea our “Jim Robinson” is actually a woman in drag. Or maybe not. Perhaps our political prankster is just a little more planned-ahead than usual, and is reasonably sure the IP address will not connect him to his or her job, nor any candidate.

And that’s just as well. It’s not as if these attacks are having any impact besides annoying the Fredheads (I’m sure some will read the very existence of this post as evidence that Fred supporters are “afraid” of such attacks, but I’ll just point again to the title and mission statement of this blog). Meanwhile, “Jim” had struck again (and probably again and again), even getting called out at Sean Hackbarth’s site, where a contributor linked back to my original post.

II. Basil the Great

So “Jim Robinson” continues to hide in plain sight. But what is his agenda, if he has one beyond making a scene? Let’s now look at his actual words. Here’s one of the more peculiar (not to mention widely-distributed) phrases from his oeurve:

One right-wing critic in a widely circulated internet column called Thompson a “neocon globalist” for his immigration, free trade, and foreign policy positions.

I joked at the time that the source must have been left unidentified because he was so obscure as to induce, at best, confusion. Seems I was more right than I knew. The “right-wing critic” appears to be someone named Basil Harrington, who sometimes describes himself as “a retired businessman, poet, and resident of Chapel Hill, North Carolina” and sometimes merely as “a scholar, writer and gentleman.”

Mr. Harrington appears to be nobody of any repute, and if he wrote anything prior to March of this year, it’s not easy to find. He is considered a self-promoting crackpot at Free Republic, a website that knows from self-promoting crackpots. In fact, it appears that Mr. Harrington’s limited output as an essayist has been posted to just about any website accepting unpaid conservative commentary: at Liberty Post, Men’s News Daily, Enter Stage Right, ChronWatch, SmallGovTimes (which claims Bill Frist, Dick Morris and others as contributors (i.e. it has copied their words from the Senate floor and The Hill)), and NewsBull to list a few. He is “widely-circulated” all right — apparently all by himself.

NewsBull is (at least one) home to the rant that inspired “Jim Robinson.” It begins:

Fred Thompson: Neocon Globalist

By Basil Harrington

For the past few days movement “conservatives” and GOP cheerleaders have been ecstatic that Fred Thompson, former Senator from Tennessee, may form an exploratory committee to seek the GOP nomination for president. “Now we’ll have a conservative in there,” said one person, who, I assume, has no idea what a real conservative is.

There already are two fine conservative candidates seeking the nomination: Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo. And Fred Thompson does not even come close measuring up to them.

Fred Thompson is a neocon globalist.

It’s also funny, and possibly telling, that in this brief article Harrington uses the same “one person said” trick often employed by “Jim.” More than once, actually:

As one commentator notes: “Overall, Americans for Better Immigration gives [Thompson] a career grade of C…”

As a rhetorical strategy it subtracts the need to name sources, but it also subtracts credibility. I hesitate to suggest that Basil Harrington doesn’t exist — that he could simply be another invention of “Jim Robinson” — but I suppose I just did. They certainly both have a habit of posting their writings to as many websites as possible, and “Robinson” sure does like to quote “Harrington.”

I have sent Mr. Harrington an e-mail, which at least hasn’t bounced back. But even if he does reply, what would that prove? (Although to be fair, I’m not sure what it would disprove, either.)

III. Keeping Up With The Joneses

The epithet “neocon globalist,” as wielded by “Jim Robinson,” is often accompanied by a mention that Fred is a member of that venerable magnet for conspiracy nuts, the Council on Foreign Relations. Sometimes “Jim” (and possibly other anti-Fredheads) shortens this to “CFRed,” which I must concede is at least sort of clever.

But really, who cares about the CFR? Who actually thinks this book club for the political elite is some kind of, ahem, global conspiracy? Well, just plug CFR, neocon and globalist into Google and it doesn’t take long before you’ll find Infowars, the conspiracy site run by fringe online radio host Alex Jones.

It may be worth pointing out — and I swear, I’ve avoided using this name for as long as I could — that Ron Paul is now a repeat guest on Jones’ online radio show. And while the last time on he didn’t actually say that the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks (a favorite theory of Jones’) he certainly did court the support of that theory’s most high-profile proponents. This connection between simultaneous support for Ron Paul, fear of globalism, hatred of neocons, and interest in the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, among other conspiracies (ice hockey and Alanis Morrisette (there’s that Canadian thing again…)) can be found on this YouTube account, and this one and this one. And this one.

So at long last, let’s go back to Caldwell’s fascinating piece for the NYT. Caldwell does not mention Alex Jones and he doesn’t invoke the hoary threat of “neocon globalism,” but he does invoke another name which is better known to conservatives: John Birch.

Paul never deals in disavowals or renunciations or distancings, as other politicians do. In his office one afternoon in June, I asked about his connections to the John Birch Society. “Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society!” he said in mock horror. “Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution. I don’t know how many positions they would have that I don’t agree with. Because they’re real strict constitutionalists, they don’t like the war, they’re hard-money people. . . . ”

Paul’s ideological easygoingness is like a black hole that attracts the whole universe of individuals and groups who don’t recognize themselves in the politics they see on TV. To hang around with his impressively large crowd of supporters before and after the CNN debate in Manchester, N.H., in June, was to be showered with privately printed newsletters full of exclamation points and capital letters, scribbled-down U.R.L.’s for Web sites about the Free State Project, which aims to turn New Hampshire into a libertarian enclave, and copies of the cult DVD “America: Freedom to Fascism.”

But the truth is, and here I hope the Ronulans will give me a break (even if I did just call them Ronulans), these people are not all supporters of Ron Paul. They stand along the fringe with him, and include many who are not Republican Party members. Some of them can be found in the Constitution Party, one example being “Unfit for Command” co-author Jerome Corsi, who reportedly

also wonders when people will realize that Thompson, who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a globalist who would push for open borders.

Corsi is also known for promoting the theory that President Bush is pushing for a single North American state much like the one imagined in David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” (albeit with fewer Quebecois wheelchair assassins, one presumes.) As PostPolitical puts it,

Of course, why these absolutists suspect they’ll get a better society from the empowerment of the advocates of open borders, atheism and bureaucratic statism, is anyone’s guess. … This one has been sneaking up on us for awhile. It’s increasingly difficult to distinguish the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Michael Badnarik, Lou Dobbs and Ron Paul from each other, as representing different schools of political philosophy. That’s a very recent phenomenon and it bodes ill for the GOP.

So, this much we know about their leanings:

They don’t like Fred Thompson
They don’t appear to like many Republican politicians
Only Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo (and sometimes Duncan Hunter) pass muster
They conflate globalization with immigration
They make little distinction between legal and illegal immigration
They fear the Council on Foreign Relations
They hate “neocons”
Some of them think the U.S. government may be behind 9/11

This fear of a unified world government is like nothing so much as the conspiracy-minded views of the old John Birch Society, a group evicted from the GOP by one William F. Buckley Jr. nearly 50 years ago. Though the Birchers oppose government-backed wealth redistribution, they also (in its current, withered form) oppose government-backed free trade agreements. And they are, to put it mildly, weird people.

Like the Birchers, who at least managed to correctly identify international communism as an existential threat, Ron Paul is not wrong to maintain healthy fear of government encroachment on individual liberty. But one need not be a Bircher to fear communism, and one need not be a Truther to distrust the government.

Unfortunately for Ron Paul, he has cast his lot with them, and with that, has cast himself out of today’s mainstream Republican Party.

P.S. It should be said, our Basil is not this Basil (as far as I know).

Tragedy 2.0

William Beutler — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 03:35:25 +0000

Post-Columbine, post-9/11, post-Iraq, are we desensitized to mass murders these days?

Doesn’t seem to be: The tragedy at Virginia Tech has at least captivated the mainstream media, pulling it out of its embarrassing, Anna Nicole/Imus-obsessing doldrums to a hypertensive level not seen since the aforementioned debacles plus Katrina.

Each major media disaster story since at least the dot-com bubble reveals new voices and resources from the online mediasphere, and to the extent that we know to follow them — that we can devise filters to locate them — it helps us understand these things better than we did back when most of the media we consumed was on glossy paper.

And since Drudge and MSNBC and others have already reported the name and online profile of Emily Hilscher, the first victim of yesterday’s horrible awfulness* — and as an antidote to Wayne Chiang, the Asian-American Hokie gun fetishist with girl troubles and a Livejournal account — I might as well share this screen shot from Facebook:

Her page is not public, and I suppose it will probably remain as much in the hands of her friends and family. But there are also 27 groups with her name in their main content and with hundreds of members, which grew literally overnight.

Part of me thinks there’s something invasive in writing about this, but ultimately it’s all part of the record. Here there are no candles and no songs — but it’s a digital vigil. It doesn’t convey how it actually feels, but it does show that people feel.

P.S. Via Techmeme, I see Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls and Xeni Jardin have been thinking along the same lines. And somehow, Slate’s Michael Agger managed to write an entire article about the massacre and social networking without a single mention of Facebook. Plus, according to Hotline On Call, producers from ABC and NBC have been posting interview requests to Facebook:

Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the horrific tragedy at Virginia Tech. In our ongoing coverage, we want to speak with people that knew Cho Seung-Hui. We have anchors and producers on campus that would love to meet with you.

Okay, I feel a bit less of a ghoul now.

*I don’t know what else to call it, I’m never very good writing about these things, and I’ve already blown the chance to suspend blogging, which I might as well have because I didn’t have a Benchmark Poll ready to go today.

Myth Busted: Oprah Winfrey and the 9/11 Ticket Agent “Suicide”

William Beutler — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:06:31 +0000

In mid-September 2006, a moderately amusing slapfight broke out among Brendan Nyhan, then writing for The American Prospect, and various contributors to top-shelf lefty blog Eschaton. To most rubberneckers, it looked like a case of one academic/moderate type accusing an activist/progressive type of going overboard in criticizing President Bush, and it was just rorschachy enough to leave alone. But the basis for the disagreement was another story. As I wrote at the time:

I’m distracted from whatever I was going to say about it because… the incident giving rise to the debate — the alleged suicide of a ticket agent who had checked in Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari on the way to crash Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center — appears to be an urban legend, hoax or mistake.

I looked hard. I scoured the Nexis database. I studied the 9/11 Commission Report. Whatever is the Google equivalent of an oceanic trench, I dove into it. But I found no independent verification of the unsubstantiated story of an American Airlines agent supposedly so filled with grief and misplaced guilt that she took her own life. Yes, I did find the incident mentioned in a couple news and magazine stories, but they all shared the same source: US Airways employee Michael Tuohey, who had kickstarted this horrific buzz by telling the tale on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Even after I collected my findings and hit “Publish,” I had intended to follow the story. As a reader correctly noted in a comment on that post, “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.” But a bit of resistance from American and a lot of work-related obligations conspired (as it were) to keep me from getting to the bottom of it.

And then, just this afternoon, the following e-mail dropped into my inbox (emphasis added):

William,

I stumbled on to your blog today as I was doing an Internet rumor search. You’ll easily guess what rumor I was tracking down. ABC’s Nightline called today asking about a rumor that an American Airlines agent in Boston had checked in Mohamed Atta and then killed herself later out of guilt. I couldn’t remember the name of the US Airways agent who had fabricated the rumor and that is how I came upon your blog – through the omniscient Google, of course.

Because of privacy policies, I can’t give you a ton of information. However, I can tell you that the American Airlines agent who checked in Mohamed Atta is alive.

I realize this is coming to you several months after your blog string, but you’ve now got this for closure.

Best regards,

Tim Wagner
Spokesman
American Airlines

Being the natural skeptic, I checked the headers on the e-mail address, and found no evidence of spoofing — indeed it came from aa.com. I then consulted the same Oracle at Mountain View, which returned no shortage of confirmation that Tim Wagner is in fact a spokesman for American Airlines.

Throughout the afternoon I’ve traded a handful of e-mail messages with Wagner, getting permission to post this and pressing for any more available details. Unfortunately, there isn’t much more to add. Despite his first writing that Tuohey “fabricated the rumor” as mentioned above, he doesn’t know what Tuohey’s motivations were for telling this story about Atta’s alleged suicidal ticket agent. One would have to ask Tuohey. And while I had never heard of Tim Wagner until today, I find him credible on the main point of fact. He would know that.

So, I still don’t know whether to properly categorize this as “urban legend, hoax or mistake,” but now I do know it is one of the above.

Photoshop: Still Harder Than You Think

William Beutler — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 23:51:18 +0000

Yesterday afternoon, Michelle Malkin and Charles Johnson reported more or less simultaneously on a curious image (since removed) from the front page of the DNC website, purporting to show a U.S. soldier “hurting” because of “GOP broken promises.” To wit:

Only problem: The pictured soldier is actually Canadian, and Johnson’s readers quickly located more stills, providing conclusive evidence that a Democratic Photoshopper had doctored the image to remove a medal evidently believed to be a dead giveaway (but embarrassingly leaving another — the funny lapel pin).

This phenomenon is common enough now that such images have come to merit their own word: Fauxtoshop. In November 2005, MoveOn.org ran a TV spot conservative bloggers found politically outrageous, and which luckily happened to be an example of this burgeoning trend. Much like this latest imbroglio, the uniforms of foreign troops (this time, British) were modified to look more American:

In both cases, one wonders just how hard it would be to find a genuine photograph of members of the U.S. armed services looking vaguely aggrieved or lining up for a plateful of slop. The circumstances were slightly different in one of the earliest instances of blog-era political fauxtoshoppery, an image from the front page of the Bush-Cheney ‘04 official website, offending sections encircled by an unidentified Kossack:

Here, the idea was to make it look a lot cooler, as if this wall of troops just went on forever. Just as their counterparts on the right saw leftist perfidy in later fauxtoshop jobs, this manipulation was seized upon by the nascent netroots as another strike against A”W”OL.

But what should we make of all this? Be assured, neither side is above manipulating images of American troops for political expediency. These incidents say a lot less about comparative patriotism than than about the primacy of images in propaganda. Good visuals are hard to come by, and if a deceptive visual is more striking than a real image, unfortunately, that’s considered good enough.

P.S. There is also, of course, the recent case of photo manipulation by Lebanese Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj, also brought to light at Little Green Footballs:

While it falls beyond U.S. partisan considerations and does not involve soldiers per se, it is also probably the biggest Photoshop fraud uncovered by those pesky bloggers, and certainly deserves mention here.

P.P.S. Any journalism professor worth his whiskey makes sure freshman communications students hear about the distortive power of photographs. Already in the curriculum, I’m sure, is the recent case of an ambiguous photograph by Thomas Hoepker of young Brooklynites observing South Manhattan on Sept. 11, which has been the recent subject of debate at Slate:

Unlike the military-themed images above, this photo underwent no changes. When it’s hard enough to tell what undoctored images mean, one might hope that propagandists would use images in their proper contexts — but one might be hoping for an awful long time.

The Oprah Winfrey-9/11 Ticket Agent Suicide Myth?

William Beutler — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 04:51:15 +0000

Update, Jan. 2007: Resolved. See: “Myth Busted: Oprah Winfrey and the 9/11 Ticket Agent ‘Suicide.’”

Note: The question mark in the above headline may be removed, depending on how this all plays out. I may also be grievously wrong — but I don’t think so.

Note 2: All updates have been moved to the end of this post. As of early Friday afternoon, the issue remains a mystery. All I can say for certain is that there is no actual proof that an American Airlines ticket agent committed suicide after a brush with 9/11 terrorists.

Earlier this week the political blogosphere witnessed an interesting and fairly infrequent occurrence — a minor blogfight pitting an academic left blogger against an activist left blogger: At the Prospect’s newest blog, Horse’s Mouth, former Spinsanity co-writer Brendan Nyhan slammed Eschaton for taking a callous shot at President Bush. Nyhan initially mistook guest poster Avedon Carol for Atrios himself, and chaos ensued. That’s interesting and all, but I’m distracted from whatever I was going to say about it because… the incident giving rise to the debate — the alleged suicide of a ticket agent who had checked in Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari on the way to crash Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center — appears to be an urban legend, hoax or mistake.

You take your pick. Here’s why I think this…

Early on Wednesday morning, Nyhan wrote:

TWO LIBERAL BLOGGERS POLITICIZE A SUICIDE. In a guest post on Eschaton, the blog of Duncan Black (aka Atrios), the blogger Avedon Carol quotes approvingly from a Suburban Guerilla post that uses the tragic suicide of an American Airlines ticket agent to take a swipe at President Bush … Is nothing sacred? And do they want Bush to commit suicide out of remorse, as the post suggests? This is just vile.

As cited by both Carol and Nyhan, Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla had written on the morning prior:

The American Airlines ticket agent who checked in Mohammed Atta on 9/11 later committed suicide – unlike the man in charge who, being briefed on the potential threat, told his briefer, “Okay, you’ve covered your ass.”

Madrak’s source was a September 11, 2006 diary at Daily Kos by one teresahill, apparently a “Novelist, former newspaper reporter, soon to be massage therapist in Greenville, South Carolina.” She had written:

AA employee, checked in Atta on 911, later commits suicide, [sic]
by teresahill

One of Oprah’s guests today was Michael Tuohey, an employee of US AIR who checked in Mohammed Atta and one of the other hijackers on the morning of Sept. 11.

A 37-year employee of US Air, Touhey said he’s recently started to see Atta’s face staring at him from cabs that pass by on the street or even at his local mall, that even though he knows it’s not him, Atta looks as real to him today as it did on Sept. 11.

Two ticket agents checked in Atta that day, Touhey and a woman with American Airlines in Boston. Touhey said the woman has already committed suicide, and he didn’t seem far from it on the show. (No warning by Atta’s name at all, BTW, you idiots at ABC. Nothing. ID checked out. Ticket checked out. Nothing to tell this broken man he shouldn’t send Atta on his way.)

That diary made the Recommended list and picked up 262 comments. I haven’t seen the show (an Oprah.com preview is of no help) and I can’t get my hands on a transcript [Update: See updates], but the the dKos diarist apparently saw it herself. The show’s official write-up, available on the site, offers the first and only independent report about the alleged suicide:

Plagued by sleepless nights and visions of Atta, Tuohey felt another layer of guilt when he learned the ticket agent in Boston who checked in Atta and Alomari for the last leg of their flight committed suicide.

Tuohey: I’m saying, my God, if I had just done the job the way I was supposed to she never would have seen these people.

Oprah: But this is the thing … If you’re going to beat yourself up and be guilty about it and say, “What I could have done,” what could you have done?

Tuohey: Basically nothing.

Oprah: Well then…

Tuohey: Yeah, I know. I know that. … But try to convince your mind.

But where’s the proof? I’ve searched Google up and down for any combination of “ticket agent” suicide, and the same terms plus atta and 9/11 and boston, to no avail. Nor is there anything at Google News. In short, there is no mention of it on the known Internets predating Oprah’s interview of Tuohey. ~~I don’t have Nexis anymore, but if anybody out there can run the Nexis search on these terms, please let me know.~~ [I now have a pretty good set of Nexis search results -- hundreds of articles and transcripts. More on this soon.]

I’ve been thumbing through my copy of the 9/11 Commission Report, but it’s no help in identifying who the Boston ticket agent was:

Between 6:45 and 7:40, Atta and Omari, along with Satam al Suqami, Wail al Shehri, and Waleed al Shehri, checked in and boarded American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles. The flight was scheduled to depart at 7:45.⁴

Following that footnote, it seems the answer may lie in the “AAL response to the Commission’s supplemental document requests,” but that doesn’t seem to be on the web.

Also inconclusive but pointing toward “myth” — or urban legend — is the skepticism of commenters on the message boards at Snopes. However, by late morning on the 13th the thread had died without resolution.

For what it’s worth, Michael Tuohey’s story has been well-documented — he’s been the subject of myriad web columns, blog posts and a few CNN appearances, and until this ~~September 12 appearance~~ 9/11/05 appearance on Oprah, had said nothing at all about a ticket agent committing suicide. If it happened, it was not reporteed in the press at all.

A minor mystery here, at least for the moment, is when the show first aired. Oprah’s season premiere is Sept. 19 — that’s the McGreevey interview. All it would mean is that the myth had been broadcast to millions, unchecked, at least months earlier, and nobody seems to have investigated the claim. [Update: Nexis seems to indicate the show was first broadcast on 9/11/05.]

So: In the absence of independent confirmation of this story, I am left to conclude that there probably was no suicide. And of course, this raises another question: Who was the ticket agent at Boston’s Logan airport who did check Atta and al-Omari through?

P.S. So far as I can tell, only one person — anonyblogger T.S. from Martini Pundit, apparently a “a corporate whore living in Brooklyn” and former “newspaper columnist” — questioned the veracity of the story:

Chilling, yes, but also utter nonsense. If it were not, something would’ve turned up on Nexis and/or Google, I think.

And I may just be picking on the numerous bloggers who passed the story along, but hey, let’s have a look, shall we?

For example, Andrew Sullivan made it a Begala Award Nominee:

“The American Airlines ticket agent who checked in Mohammed Atta on 9/11 later committed suicide – unlike the man in charge who, being briefed on the potential threat, told his briefer, ‘Okay, you’ve covered your ass,’” – blogger Susie “Suburban Guerrilla” Madrak, linked approvingly on Eschaton. (Hat tip: Brendan.)

He might also have given it to Avedon, who followed up in a comment at Horse’s Mouth:

It breaks my heart to know that poor kid committed suicide for something that was Bush’s responsibility.

You really are a jerk if you don’t get that, Brendan.

Or Steve Gilliard:

Brendan, it’s really simple: George Bush has spent five years avoiding accountability for his actions. He wants Congress to make the illegal wiretapping and torture go away. He doesn’t even want these people to sue for their maltreatment in US custody.

Yet, the burden of guilt on this person was so great, they couldn’t live with it.

Have you ever seen a suicide? I’ve seen three. It is an amazing thing. I don’t think most people would trivialize it.

It also duped Oprah’s fans at Television Without Pity:

That is one of those untold stories from 9/11 and it was just fascinating. I felt so bad for the guy and especially the fact that he blamed himself for the other ticket agent in Boston committing suicide.

Aside from TS, Echidne of the Snakes also asked:

My question is: Is the woman portrayed in the [ABC "Path to 9/11"] docudrama as having just waved Atta on the same one who killed herself in reality? And had her memory smeared posthumously?

Unlike most of the others, she did ask questions. ~~Just not the right ones.~~ [Update: As the current update situation makes clear, I can't say this for sure without further inquiry.]

Early morning update: I said I might be wrong, and indeed I might be. I’ve been forwarded a magazine article indicating that Oprah’s producer had received a message from the woman’s husband:

Oprah Winfrey, with Tuohey as her studio guest, told 20 million viewers that a woman who’d worked at American Airlines in Boston had later killed herself. Earlier, Oprah’s producer had told Tuohey she had a message from the woman’s husband: “It’s not your fault.”

“When she said that,” Tuohey says, “it felt like a stone was lifted from my heart.”

But I can’t call it definitive, beause the source is still Tuohey, and there’s no indication that the producer was contacted for the magazine article. I’m certainly not going to accuse him of fabrication without knowing more, so stay tuned.

Late morning update: Alex Pareene at Wonkette has the Nexis access that I don’t, and the first report about this he finds is the UK Sunday Mirror on 9/11/05. Who’s the source? Michael Tuohey. Which settles nothing, but sure makes things more interesting.

Early afternoon update: I’ve just got my hands on the transcript of The Oprah Winfrey Show from 9/11/05. Here’s the relevant section, omitted from the Oprah.com summary:

WINFREY: Recently you learned that the woman who did the same job as you in Boston, who checked Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari in at the ticket counter committed suicide a few months ago.

Mr. TOUHEY: Yeah. That was another part of the guilt, and that’s another part of the problem. I didn’t realize that until a good friend of mine–he’s been working with American Airlines for 38 years. And he says, `That girl that checked in Atta committed suicide.’ I said `What?’ He said, `Yeah, she killed herself.’ I says, `You sure?’ He says, `Of course. They’re talking about it in the airport.’ Man, that just added another layer of guilt. I’m saying to myself, `My God, if I had just done the job the way I was supposed to, she never would have seen these people and maybe, you know, been around today, you know.’ It’s just…

So he heard it from a friend. That isn’t very solid sourcing, to say the least, and there’s no indication he followed up on it. On the other hand, it does not settle the issue of whether Oprah’s producer talked to the (supposed) ticket agent’s husband. There’s more to this story yet.