Mark Follman is a senior editor at Mother Jones. He is a former editor of Salon, and a cofounder of MediaBugs. His reporting and commentary have also appeared in Salon, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Arrive, and PBS.org.
There's a new low in the highly charged Trayvon Martin case. According to a report from Florida TV news station WKMG, an unidentified entrepreneur aimed to profit by selling paper gun targets depicting the unarmed teenager slain in February. The targets, which were advertised for sale online until Friday, feature a hoodie with crosshairs over the chest—the place where George Zimmerman shot Martin at point-blank range. While there's plain black in lieu of Martin's face, tucked into the hoodie's arm are a bag of Skittles and can of iced tea like the kind Martin was carrying on that fateful night.
An advertisement for the targets had been posted on a popular firearms auction website, according to WKMG, in which the sellers stated that they "support Zimmerman and believe he is innocent and that he shot a thug." In an email exchange with WKMG reporter Mike DeForest, the seller acknowledged: "My main motivation was to make money off the controversy." The ad reportedly has since been removed, but the seller told the Flordia news station that the response was "overwhelming" and that the targets were "sold out in two days." Customers included two Florida gun dealers, he said.
Mark O'Mara, Zimmerman's attorney, offered condemnation in an interview with the TV station. "It's this type of hatred—that's what this is, it's hate-mongering—that's going to make it more difficult to try this case," O'Mara said.
A Huffington Post report linked to a cached version of a GunBroker.com web page (the link now appears to be broken) belonging to a seller named "hillerarmco" from Virginia Beach, Va., which showed the paper targets being sold in packs of 10 for $8. The product description read:
Everyone knows the story of Zimmerman and Martin. Obviously we support Zimmerman and believe he is innocent and that he shot a thug. Each target is printed on thick, high quality poster paper with a matte finish! The dimensions are 12"x18" ( The same as Darkotic Zombie Targets) This is a Ten Pack of Targets.
Meanwhile, Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, has appeared in a poignant new gun control video rolled out for Mother's Day in which she advocates against Stand Your Ground, the Florida self-defense law which allowed Zimmerman to walk free for six weeks before he was eventually charged with second-degree murder. We'll have much more on Stand Your Ground laws—now on the books in various forms across 25 states—in our forthcoming July/August issue of Mother Jones; in the meantime, catch up on essential background and developments in the case with our comprehensive Trayvon Martin explainer.
In an essay exploring her love of sentences in last Sunday's New York Times, the great writer Jhumpa Lahiri put together some awful sentences. I say "put together" intentionally: The sentences themselves were mostly fine, at turns even terrific, but in several places they were assembled quite awfully. This surprised me in light of Lahiri's literary talent and the reputable publication to which she was contributing. Where the heck was her editor?
A few paragraphs into the piece (inaugurating a Times series called, ahem, "Draft"), Lahiri explained how artful sentences are essential to great literature—that they "remain the test, whether or not to read something." The rest of the paragraph was a demonstration of a writer allowing her impulse for metaphor to spring off the page, wrestle her to the floor, tie her to the desk, and run out to the corner store for a six-pack and a lottery ticket. She continued:
The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.
This seems to taste like chicken, but is dissatisfying because you know it's not chicken. Chew on it again, this time with a brief annotation of its tangled metaphorical sinews:
The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. [chemistry, temperature] In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. [visual art, and possibly mechanics or magic] But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. [meaning what? tree roots? worms? gophers?] The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. [now they are human] Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. [with human traits and behaviors] But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates. [or objects possibly carrying electricity]
I decided to keep reading even though there was additional metaphorical muck to wade through. ("Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel." A nice harmonic touch there with "mortar" and "motor," but say what?) I'm an admirer of Lahiri's work; her first collection of short stories, the exquisite Interpreter of Maladies, was a touchstone for me as a MFA student and resides in my cherished-books section at home. Even here, with her very next paragraph, Lahiri takes your hand and pulls you close, sharing her enthusiasm for reading in a foreign language and what that can teach the true lover of language. It’s the same length as the prior paragraph but uses only one metaphor.
Maybe I’m being a little unfair here—after all, the piece was in a newspaper, not one of the Pulitzer prize-winning author's books. And Lahiri did include a few lines I found memorable: "The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life." Now that’s an impulse I can relate to.
If anything, Lahiri’s essay underscores a truth that most of us who spend our days crafting sentences know: Unless you were born the equivalent of Mozart or Michael Jordan, you not only appreciate but also demand having a good editor to back you up. Even if the only one available is, well, you.
On the evening of February 26, Trayvon Martin—an unarmed 17-year-old African American student—was confronted, shot, and killed near his home by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman has not been charged with a crime. Since Martin's death and the revelation of more details, the case has drawn national outcry and sparked hot debate over racial tensions, vigilantism, police practices, and gun laws.
Read on for the rest of our primer, or jump to these latest updates:
Martin, a Miami native, was visiting his father in Sanford and watching the NBA All-Star game at a house in a gated Sanford community, the Retreat at Twin Lakes. That evening, Martin walked out to the nearby 7-Eleven to get some Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea. On his return trip, he drew the attention of Zimmerman, who was patrolling the neighborhood in a sport-utility vehicle and called 911 to report "a real suspicious guy."
"This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something," Zimmerman told the dispatcher. "It's raining, and he's just walking around looking about." The man tried to explain where he was. "Now he's coming towards me. He's got his hand in his waistband. And he's a black male...Something's wrong with him. Yup, he's coming to check me out. He's got something in his hands. I don't know what his deal is...These assholes, they always get away."
After discussing his location with the dispatcher, Zimmerman exclaimed, "Shit, he's running," and the following sounds suggest he left his vehicle to run after Martin.
"Are you following him?" the dispatcher asked. Zimmerman replied: "Yep."
"Okay, we don't need you to do that," the dispatcher warned.
Several minutes later, according to other callers to 911 in the neighborhood, Zimmerman and Martin got into a wrestling match on the ground. One of the pair could be heard screaming for help. Then a single shot rang out, and Martin lay dead.
Are the 911 recordings available to the public?
Yes. After public pressure, the city of Sanford played the tapes for Martin's family, then released the audio recordings. Here are some excerpts. You can also read a full transcript of George Zimmerman's initial police call here, along with an examination of whether he used a racial epithet, as some listeners have suggested.
George Zimmerman mug shot from a 2005 arrest. Courtesy Orange County Jail
What happened to the shooter?
So far, not much. Zimmerman told police he'd acted in self-defense. ABC News reports that he had wanted to be a police officer, and Sanford police didn't test him for drugs or alcohol after the shooting (such tests are standard practice in homicide investigations). He was licensed to carry his gun, and police initially told Martin's father that they hadn't pressed charges because Zimmerman was a criminal justice student with a "squeaky clean" record.
That wasn't entirely true, however; in 2005, Zimmerman was arrested for "resisting arrest with violence and battery on a law enforcement officer"; those charges were dropped. Media investigations and Martin family attorneys suggest that Zimmerman was a vigilante with "a false sense of authority" in search of young black men in his neighborhood. Police records show Zimmerman had called 911 a total of 46 times between Jan. 1, 2011, and the day he shot Martin. (Florida guidelines for licensed gun owners state: "A license to carry a concealed weapon does not make you a free-lance policeman.")
How are Florida's self-defense and "stand your ground" laws key to this case?
Zimmerman may have benefited from some of the broadest firearms and self-defense regulations in the nation. In 1987, then-Gov. Bob Martinez (R) signed Florida's concealed-carry provision into law, which "liberalized the restrictions that previously hindered the citizens of Florida from obtaining concealed weapons permits," according to one legal analyst. This trendsetting "shall-issue" statute triggered a wave of gun-carry laws in other states. (Critics said at the time that Florida would become "Dodge City.") Permit holders are also exempted from the mandatory state waiting period on handgun purchases.
Even though felons and other violent offenders are barred from getting a weapons permit, a 2007 investigation by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel found that licenses had been mistakenly issued to 1,400 felons and hundreds more applicants with warrants, domestic abuse injunctions, or gun violations. (More than 410,000 Floridians have been issued concealed weapons permits.) Since then, Florida also passed a law permitting residents to keep guns in their cars at work, against employers' wishes. The state also nearly allowed guns on college campuses last year, until an influential Republican lawmaker fought the bill after his close friend's daughter was killed by an AK-47 brandished at a Florida State University fraternity party.
Florida also makes it easy to plead self-defense in a killing. Under then-Gov. Jeb Bush, the state in 2005 passed a broad "stand your ground" law, which allows Florida residents to use deadly force against a threat without attempting to back down from the situation. (More stringent self-defense laws state that gun owners have "a duty to retreat" before resorting to killing.) In championing the law, former NRA president and longtime Florida gun lobbyist Marion Hammer said: "Through time, in this country, what I like to call bleeding-heart criminal coddlers want you to give a criminal an even break, so that when you're attacked, you're supposed to turn around and run, rather than standing your ground and protecting yourself and your family and your property."
Again, the Sunshine State was the trendsetter: 17 states have since passed "stand your ground" laws, which critics call a "license to kill" or a "shoot first" law. The law has been unpopular with law enforcement officers in Florida, since it makes it much more difficult to charge shooters with a crime and has regularly confounded juries in murder cases; many Orlando-area cops reportedly have given up investigating "self-defense" cases as a result, referring them to the overloaded state Attorney's Office for action. A 2010 study by the Tampa Bay Times found that "justifiable homicides" had tripled in the state since the law went into effect.
Slate's Emily Bazelon has more background on the evolution of "stand your ground," its predecessor (the "castle doctrine"), and why Zimmerman hasn't yet been arrested and charged. And we have a more detailed legal explanation of exactly why the law makes it so hard to get a prosecution or conviction.
Why is the history of the Sanford Police Department in question?
Sanford PD's officers have suffered a series of public missteps in recent years, according to local reporters. In 2006 two private security guards—the son of a Sanford police officer, and a volunteer for the department—killed a black teen with a single gunshot in his back. Even though they admitted to never identifying themselves, the guards were released without charges. In 2009, after an assailant allegedly attempted to rape a child in her home, the department was called to task for sitting on the suspect's fingerprints, delaying identification and pursuit of the attacker.
Perhaps the most significant incident occurred in late 2010: Justin Collison, the son of a Sanford PD lieutenant, sucker-punched a homeless black man outside a bar, and officers on the scene released Collison without charges. He eventually surrendered after video of the incident materialized online. The police chief at the time was ultimately forced into retirement. "Bottom line, we didn't do our job that night," a Police Department representative told WFTV of the incident. The TV station later learned that the Sanford patrol sergeant in charge on the night of Collison's assault, Anthony Raimondo, was also the first supervisor on the scene of Trayvon Martin's shooting death.
As a result of these incidents and their initial handling of Martin's death, the Sanford Police Department has been under increased scrutiny. Martin's parents have suggested they might call for Police Chief Bill Lee to resign.
What has been the reaction to the case?
The case garnered national attention thanks in large part to the reporting of Huffington Post's Trymaine Lee, who kept on the story since it broke. It caught major national media attention last week, when the police tapes were released, and the New York Times' Charles M. Blow and The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that the case deserved greater scrutiny. Celebrities like Russell Simmons, John Legend, and Janelle Monae have taken to social media to comment on the case. A petition at Change.org was recently posted demanding that Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, the local state attorney, and Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee prosecute Martin's killer. The petition currently has more than 350,000 signatures, and had been averaging more than 10,000 signatures per hour.
The local state Attorney's Office, which has the option of pursuing a case against Zimmerman, said this weekend that it received so many emails—more than 100,000—demanding prosecution, that the office's servers temporarily shut down.
Judge Richard Cebull at the Missouri River Federal Courthouse in 2009
A racist email sent around by Richard Cebull, the chief US district court judge in Montana, not only showed blatant disrespect for the president of the United States but also may have broken federal ethics rules. Cebull, who was appointed to the court by George W. Bush in 2001 and became chief judge in 2008, appears to have violated the US Code of Judicial Conduct on at least one count with his behavior, legal experts say.
Cebull sent the nasty email about President Obama on February 20 to six of his "old buddies," as he put it. The subject line read: "A MOM'S MEMORY." He used his official court email account, according to the Great Falls Tribune, which first exposed the email on Wednesday. "Normally I don't send or forward a lot of these," he wrote, "but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine." The enclosed "joke"—suggesting that the racially mixed president is the spawn of a dog—read:
"A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?'
"His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'"
Cebull denies he's a racist, and says that the email wasn't intended to be public. But on Wednesday he admitted publicly that the email was both racist and motivated by partisan politics. "The only reason I can explain it to you is I am not a fan of our president, but this goes beyond not being a fan," he said. "I didn't send it as racist, although that's what it is. I sent it out because it's anti-Obama."
"Cebull's circulation of such a disgusting message makes one wonder if he is competent to serve as a judge."
The US Code of Judicial Conduct mandates that a judge "should personally observe high standards of conduct so that the integrity and independence of the Judiciary are preserved." It also says that a judge "should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities"—which applies to both professional and personal conduct. With regard to politics, it says judges "should refrain from partisan political activity" and "should not publicly endorse or oppose a partisan political organization or candidate."
Where to draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate speech by judges is a complicated matter, says Jeffrey M. Shaman, a judicial-ethics expert at DePaul University College of Law. But there seems to be little doubt that Cebull crossed over the line. "Offensive, racist speech such as this clearly diminishes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary, and therefore should be considered a violation of the Code of Judicial Conduct," Shaman told me. "Judge Cebull ought to know better, and his circulation of such a disgusting message makes one wonder if he is competent to serve as a judge."
What might the consequences be for Cebull?
"While I certainly see why this type of joke raises serious and legitimate concerns, I am not convinced that it warrants punishment beyond the current (and justified) public criticism," wrote George Washington University legal scholar Jonathan Turley on Thursday. "The judge is claiming that he thought he was sending this to a handful of friends. It would be akin to a bad joke at a party being repeated later."
Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) and President Obama shared a hug as he entered the chamber of the House of Representatives to deliver the State of the Union address.
There was overwhelming bipartisan agreement on Tuesday night that Gabrielle Giffords' arrival for President Obama's State of the Union address was the most compelling moment of the evening. Watch the footage and there's simply no arguing with that—the Arizona congresswoman looked terrific. Her incredible comeback from a near-fatal shooting one year ago seems all the more remarkable each time she appears in public. (Not that she doesn't face challenges ahead; a video she released over the weekend, in which she announced that she's stepping down from her congressional seat to focus on her further recovery, is equally moving.) Her story is as potent a mix of painful and inspirational as there is, and you'd hope that it could stand as something of an antidote to the poisonous politics of the era.
Which is why some news out of Missouri on Tuesday was particularly stomach-churning: Just hours before Giffords made her way into the nation's Capitol, an unknown provocateur was stalking the halls of the Missouri Capitol, tagging the doors of lawmakers—most of them Democratic women—with images of rifle crosshairs. From the Columbia Daily Tribune:
Orange stickers with an image of rifle crosshairs were found Tuesday on the office doors of several Democratic state senators, prompting an investigation by Missouri Capitol Police, Senate Administrator Jim Howerton said. The stickers were on the doors of all four Democratic women in the Senate—Jolie Justus and Kiki Curls, both of Kansas City, and Maria Chapelle-Nadal and Robin Wright-Jones, both of St. Louis, Justus said. One similar sticker was found on the nameplate outside the door of state Rep. Scott Dieckhaus, R-Washington.
"If anyone thinks this was a prank, it is not a prank," Justus said after discussing the discovery of the stickers on the Senate floor. "You don't joke about someone's personal safety." A sticker also was found on the door of Sen. Victor Callahan, D-Kansas City and the Democrats' floor leader.
Sen. Chapelle-Nadal herself weighed in on Twitter and didn't mince words, emphasizing her disapproval with "#DisgracefulCowards." (Her tweets are "protected" but one was posted by St. Louis Activist Hub.)
It's an apt moment to recall that Giffords once criticized Sarah Palin for using a map that literally put political enemies in the crosshairs. "We need to realize that the rhetoric…for example, we're on Sarah Palin's 'targeted' list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we're in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC in spring 2010. "When people do that, they've gotta realize that there are consequences to that action."
We all know what followed.
Palin and other conservatives strongly rejected the notion that their imagery and rhetoric had anything to do with the bloodbath in Arizona a year ago. And no one can know what was truly in the deranged mind of Jared Loughner. But common sense says that when enough targeted political vitriol mixes with enough guns, bad things will eventually happen.
[NOTE: This post is being regularly updated with new developments, including reactions from US authorities, the Taliban, and the media. Scroll to the bottom for the latest.]
The Marine Corps is investigating a YouTube video posted early Wednesday that appears to show four Marines urinating on the heads of Afghans they'd just killed in a firefight. "Have a great day, buddy," one of the Marines can be heard saying on the footage.
The video was posted to YouTube by a user calling himself "semperfilonevoice," a play on the Corps' "Semper Fidelis" motto that suggests the poster might be a Marine with regrets about the warfighters' conduct. (The video, posted by London's Daily Telegraph and TMZ earlier today, is also reposted below. Warning: It contains graphic content.)
The poster of the video alleges that the urinators are members of Scout Sniper Team 4, an elite advance combat unit within the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based Third Battalion, Second Marines. Their identities remain unknown at this point, but the video does contain at least one clue suggesting that's plausible. One service member in the video can be seen holding an M40 rifle, which is typically issued to sniper teams, but not to regular line units. Elements of the 3/2 Marines have seen some fierce fighting in Afghanistan, including a deployment last year to the province of Now Zad—called "Apocalypse Now Zad" by some—in which seven American fighters lost their lives.
Attempts by Mother Jones to contact the poster of the video were unsuccessful; calls to the 2nd Marine Division—the 3/2's parent unit—and to the Pentagon seeking further information about the video were not immediately returned. But a Marine spokesperson told TMZ that the video would be "fully investigated." "While we have not yet verified the origin or authenticity of this video, the actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps," she said. It's also important to note that it remains unclear as to where and when the video footage was taken.
According to the Geneva Conventions, which the US military observes, combatants must "at all times, and particularly after an engagement...search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled." They are also required to "ensure that the dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged, that their graves are respected, grouped if possible according to the nationality of the deceased, properly maintained and marked so that they may always be found." (The UK's rules for its military members are even more explicit, threatening court-martial for any soldier for "maltreatment" of a dead enemy.)
Sentiments were divided among some YouTube commenters regarding the video. "You must be living under a rock, have you EVER seen the videos of the Taliban with dead body pieces," one defender of the alleged Marines wrote. "This video is nothing, ABSOLUTELY nothing compared to what they did to us Americans."
But one commenter, who identified himself as a veteran, was less willing to dismiss the behavior in the video: "Thanks fellas, you just pissed away everything me and my boys fought for."
UPDATE 1, Thursday, Jan. 12, 7:00 a.m. EST: The original video has been removed from YouTube by the user; thanks to MoJo reader Craig Boehman for providing the copy below.
UPDATE 2, Thursday, 10:00 a.m. EST: In a statement to the BBC, Pentagon spokesman and Navy Capt. John Kirby said: "We are deeply troubled by the video. Whoever it is, and whatever the circumstances—which we know is under investigation—it is egregious behaviour and unacceptable for a member of the military." The Marine Corps headquarters gave a similar message: "The actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps. This matter will be fully investigated.''
UPDATE 3, Thursday, 1:30 p.m. EST: A Taliban spokesman tells the Christian Science Monitor that the video makes no difference in the group's ongoing peace talks with the Western powers. "It's not a new thing that has happened. It's normal with the American forces and their allies. The foreign forces have always discriminated and abused human rights in Afghanistan," Qari Yousef Ahmadi told the news site. He added, however, "It's an act that makes a person feel ashamed to watch it or talk about it."
As media reactions to the video go, few so far are as powerful as this one from Hamilton Nolan of Gawker, titled "Piss on War: Death, Desecration, and Afghanistan." It must be read in its entirety, but here's a graphic excerpt:
Excerpt from "Piss on War": Courtesy Gawker
UPDATE 4, Thursday, 1:40 p.m. EST: A Marine Corps source speaking anonymously tells Reuters that the service has confirmed the video is authentic, and it's identified the unit shown in the tape. It's believed to be a contingent of the 3/2 Marines, which is consistent with the statements of the anonymous user who originally published the video to YouTube.
At a press conference, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed what she called the "deplorable behavior" in the video, adding that "the United States remains strongly committed to helping build a secure, peaceful, prosperous, democratic future for the people of Afghanistan":
UPDATE 5: Thursday, 4:00 p.m. EST: My colleague Adam Serwer flags a blog post from Islamophobe extraordinaire Pam Geller extolling the video. She writes: "I love these Marines. Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial." Surprisingly, there's more fascinating backstory here, and Adam's got it.
UPDATE 6: Thursday, 6:45 p.m. EST: Reuters reports that two of the four Marines seen in a video have been identified. Apparently the footage could be from last year: According to an unnamed Marine Corps official, the two men identified are still part of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, based out of Camp Lejeune, and their unit served in Afghanistan's Helmand province from March until September of 2011.
UPDATE 7: Thursday, 8:30 p.m. EST: Geller isn't the only right-winger to offer a repugnant response to the video. Radio host Dana Loesch—who is also employed by CNN, where she appears regularly as a political commentator—cheered the Marines' behavior and said, "I'd drop trou and do it too."
UPDATE 8: Friday, Jan. 13, 1 p.m. EST: Where do the GOP presidential hopefuls stand on the Marine video? There's no way of knowing, because not one has released a statement on it, and no reporter has yet pressed them for an opinion. Even though 2008 presidential nominee John McCain said the video "does great damage" and makes him "sad," and the commandant of the Marine Corps condemned it, and a Medal of Honor recipient said there was no excuse for it, and a bevy of Marines and other combat veterans past and present have said they're "universally disgusted by it and ashamed," there's been nary a word of condemnation—or even acknowledgement—from the GOP 2012 field. The candidates have long attacked President Obama's anti-terrorism and war strategies and made the case that they can keep America safer, but on this issue they're curiously silent. There are three more Republican debates between now and Tuesday, when voters in South Carolina select their preferred candidate; it remains to be seen whether the aspiring commanders-in-chief will address the Marines' behavior, and its implications for US foreign policy and a culture of respect, dignity, and the rule of law.
UPDATE 9: Friday, 2:10 p.m. EST: CNN pundit Dana Loesch has doubled down on her comments from yesterday. "I was using absurdity to highlight absurdity," she says, claiming that progressives have distorted her message and are attacking her unfairly. Decide for yourself what she meant—here's a more complete transcript of what she said on her radio show on Thursday:
Now we have a bunch of progressives that are talking smack about our military because there were marines caught urinating on corpses, Taliban corpses....Can someone explain to me if there's supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I'd drop trou and do it too. That's me though. I want a million cool points for these guys. Is that harsh to say? Come on people, this is a war. What do you think this is?
Loesch also said this morning that the "Left is attacking me so they can avoid calling this Obama's Abu Ghraib. It can't be Obama's fault like it was Bush's." It's long been known that the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were the result of policy designed and directed from inside the Bush White House. On what basis does Loesch equate the behavior of these four Marines? That's a question she's not answering.
Meanwhile, CNN—which has paid Loesch since last February to be part of the "Best Political Team on Television"—is distancing itself from the situation. Spokesperson Edie Emery said in a statement to Politico, "CNN contributors are commentators who express a wide range of viewpoints—on and off of CNN—that often provoke strong agreement or disagreement. Their viewpoints are their own."
UPDATE 10: Friday, 3:15 p.m. EST: The Marines have appointed a general to handle the investigation into the urination video and decide what disciplinary action should be taken against the service members who appeared in or distributed the video, Stars and Stripes reports. Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser's investigation will be in addition to a criminal probe already set up by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Additionally, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan announced the military will run mandatory training for all troops on how to handle casualties. "I require all [NATO] personnel to treat all coalition, Afghan National Security Forces, civilians and insurgent dead with the appropriate dignity and respect," the commander, Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, said Friday.
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) wrote an email, published by the Weekly Standard, castigating critics of the Marines shown in the video. "All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?" He conceded that the Marines should be punished administratively, the lowest level of discipline permitted under military law, and added, "As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell." West, an Iraq vet who resigned from the Army after "menacing" and allegedly "mock executing" an Iraq police officer during an interrogation, is a tea party GOP freshman who's gained notoriety for uncivil and Islamphobic statements in the past.
By contrast, TIME magazine's Nate Rawlings, who also served two tours in Iraq as an Army combat officer, writes that while killing is a part of the job, it is "not a sport or a game." "You can't teach someone how to be human," he writes, but "you can lead and inspire and teach and cajole and most importantly supervise young troops. That’s the way to prevent these things from happening again."
UPDATE 11: Sunday, 1:30 p.m. EST: A Republican presidential candidate has finally weighed in on the video controversy—expressing outrage at an alleged anti-military bias in the US government, rather than at the Marine "kids" shown urinating on corpses in the video. "These kids made a mistake, there's no doubt about it," Rick Perry told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday morning (video below). "But to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top." Perry also suggested that Patton and Churchill had engaged in similar behavior in their times. "Obviously, 18, 19-year-olds make stupid mistakes all too often," Perry said. "What's really disturbing to me is just, kind of, the over-the-top-rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military." As previous updates show, the Marines, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the three-star Army general in charge of Western forces in Afghanistan all took clear stances against the video and initiated the criminal investigations. It's unclear whether Perry meant to argue that these military institutions, too, were showing "disdain for the military."
UPDATE 12: Sunday, 3:30 p.m. EST: Animal activists are using the Marine video furor to draw attention to another video, uploaded anonymously to the internet last November, that appears to show US Army soldiers beating a sheep to unconsciousness (and possibly death) by repeated blows to the head with an aluminum baseball bat. (Warning: The video is graphic and disturbing.) Several of the soldiers can be heard laughing as the sheep attempts to stand up and is hit, again and again.
PETA President Ingrid Newkirk discussed the video on Huffington Post Friday. "PETA did what it always does when someone blows the whistle on these incidents of gratuitous cruelty: We wrote to Secretary of the Army John McHugh [PDF] and then, when no answer was forthcoming, to other high-ranking officers," she wrote. "No one—not PETA and not the thousands of people who have seen this video and are rightly disturbed by it—has received any acknowledgment, not even a single comforting word, that an investigation has been started."
By now you've heard about politicians denouncing the anti-Wall Street uprising, from Eric "Beware the mob" Cantor to Herman "Get a job!" Cain. The hostility from the political right is hardly a surprise. But in recent days things have taken a curious turn among the right-wing commentariat, with a fixation on feces, urine, drugs, and sex. For these folks Occupy Wall Street isn't so much about an economic crisis or even class warfare—it's crass warfare, with "Revenge of the Dirty Hippies" invading a city near you!
Read on for the best of the worst, gathered up using Storify.
Earlier this week I wrote about a piece published on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com that relies so heavily on flawed assertions about a new global-warming study that it's ripe for a retraction. Not only did the piece wrongly attribute an author to the new study, published in Nature in late August, but it also recycled an old quote from that person to promote its claim that the study definitively refuted human-caused climate change. (The study, as I explained in detail, did nothing of the sort.)
Multiple attempts the prior week to reach Breitbart and the writer of the piece, Chriss W. Street, about the erroneous contents had failed to get their attention. But apparently my story (and subsequent posts in The New York Times, Salon and Media Matters) did: An editor's note appeared on the Big Government piece later the same day. Unfortunately, it's more of a wreck than it is rectifying. Breitbart.com's "in-house counsel" Joel Pollak says in the note:
Earlier today, Mother Jones...accused Andrew Breitbart of a "global warming blunder" because the piece below cited Jykri Kauppinen as an author of a Nature study on cosmic rays. The author of the piece, Chriss W. Street, has indicated that Kauppinen is the author of a separate submission to Nature in 2010 that also contests the UN Climate Panel's "consensus" view on the degree to which human activity contributes to global climate change. Street stands by his argument, regardless of the minor citation error that Breitbart's habitual critics on the left have attempted to magnify.
Why Street failed to "indicate" in his piece the true orgin of Kauppinen's comments, and why he passed them off as a conclusion of the study just published in Nature, Pollak doesn't say. Nor does Pollak explain why the piece continues to state, erroneously, that Kauppinen is one of the new study's authors. (Chalk it up, perhaps, to the stuff of "minor citation.") As for Big Government's blatantly wrong claim that the new studydebunks overwhelming scientific consensus on humanity's role in climate change, it seems that one was, well, simply too hot for them to touch.
On September 6, an article on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site announced that the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change had been debunked once and for all. Nature, "the world's most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth's atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man," the article said. "One of the report's authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: 'I think it is such a blatant falsification.'"
The article, written by "nationally recognized financial writer" Chriss W. Street, then revisited the smear campaign known as "Climategate" (which had implicated Nature) and asserted that the study was "a tectonic rejection by academia" of international efforts to combat climate change.
There was one little problem with the Big Government piece, though. Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, supplier of the "blatant falsification" comment, was not one of the study's 63 authors. And it turns out that the article's breathless summary of what the study shows is (shockingly!) flat-out wrong.Doh! Al Gore's crowning achievement zapped by cosmic rays. Screen shot: BigGovernment.com
The quote from the non-author caught the attention of New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin, who submitted an error report about it at MediaBugs, a nonpartisan site that helps get errors in the news media corrected. (Disclosure: I'm one of the site's creators.) MediaBugs then alerted Breitbart to the mistake using Big Government's online feedback form, and also sought a response from him multipletimeson Twitter. Breitbart has not responded and has ignored the mistake. (I also emailed Street for a response, to no avail.)
Breitbart's silence may seem unsurprising. Then again, accurate reporting is something that the right-wing media gadlfy has claimed to care a lot about lately. When the Huffington Postwrongly accused Breitbart of doctoring a video related to the debt-ceiling battle in August, he threatened war via Twitter, and then celebrated when HuffPo issued a retraction and apology. After publishing lewd photos that brought down Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) back in June, Breitbart elbowed his way to the front of a major press conference seeking vindication for his work. He boasted to the New York Times that political conservatives bring him scoops to publish because "They know I'm willing to march through the fire with them."
But apparently he's not really sweating his site's global warming blunder. The dramatic opening of the Big Government piece simply plopped in a quote from Kauppinen—one that appears to have come from a Finnish newspaper article from more than a year earlier. Trumpeting the quote as a conclusion of the study helped inject the fundamentally flawed piece into the digital media stream.
The study in Nature actually shows no conclusive link between cosmic rays and climate change. As RealClimate's Gavin Schmidt noted in late August when the paper came out, "It is eminently predictable that the published results will be wildly misconstrued by the contrarian blogosphere as actually proving this link. However, that would be quite wrong." Schmidt, a climate modeller at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, then explained in detail why anyone arguing that the study definitively satisfied the criteria necessary to prove that link "will be going way out on a limb."
According to Revkin, the Big Government piece is a classic example of what could be called "single-study syndrome," which tends to turn up whenever a political agenda is threatened or supported by a specific line of scientific inquiry. "Some new finding, however tentative, gets highlighted while the broader suite of research on a tough subject is downplayed or ignored," Revkin told me in an email. "And few questions are tougher than clarifying the role of clouds in climate change." The appetite for headline-grabbing conclusions, he said, gives rise to fast-and-loose science coverage that torques public discourse until it's mainly hyperbole.
But Breitbart seems to have been yearning for credibility lately. A friendly profile of him in the New York Times suggested that he stands out among conservative media personalities because of his accessibility. "He gives out his cellphone number in speeches and passes along his personal e-mail address to almost anyone who asks," the Times piece gushed. "If you write him, chances are you will hear back."
A US Army soldier and his dog jump off a helicopter ramp during water training in March 2011.Manuel J. Martinez/U.S. Air Force Handout
Editor's note, 5/1/12: A year after the US killed Osama bin Laden, questions remain about who knew where he was hiding, who may have helped him, and precisely how he met his end. A new book by Peter Bergen, "Manhunt," underscores conflicting details about the raid: Contrary to prior reports, everyone shot by the Navy SEALs at the compound, Bergen writes, was unarmed. He doesn't specify who fired bullets into bin Laden. And while he reports on the SEALs' use of night vision goggles, he makes no mention of their recording the entire raid with helmet cameras.
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be still scratching your head about the end of Osama bin Laden. Between the Obama administration and major media reports, there have been multiple divergent accounts of the Navy SEALs' mission in Abbottabad, Pakistan, with the story seeming to be colored by politics, sensationalism, and outright fantasy. In some respects that's unsurprising for one of the most important and highly classified military missions in modern memory‚ the outcome of which, many would argue, is all that really matters. But precisely because of its importance, it is worth considering how the tales have been told, and where history begins to bleed into mythology.
Lots of praiseflowed in early August for Nicholas Schmidle's riveting story in TheNew Yorker of the SEALs' raid on bin Laden's compound. It added many vivid details to what was publicly known about the death of America's arch-nemesis in early May. But Schmidle's exquisitely crafted reconstruction also contradicted previous reporting elsewhere and sparked some intriguing questions of its own.
It underscored what we still don't really know about the operation. Schmidle's depiction of the tense scene in the White House situation room, as President Obama and his top advisers monitored the action with the help of a military drone, included a notable refutation. The SEALs converged at the ground floor of bin Laden's house and began to enter, Schmidle reported, but:
What happened next is not precisely clear. "I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on," [CIA chief Leon] Panetta said later, on PBS NewsHour. Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone's video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS.
Still depicting helmet cameras worn by the SEALS from CBS News' digital reconstruction of the raid. Screenshot: CBS NewsThe contradiction has big implications. Martin's own story was in part a response to the famously mutating account from the Obama White House in the days following the mission. The administration had attributed its multiple revisions to "the fog of war" after backtracking from claims that bin Laden had engaged the SEALs in a firefight and used his wife as a human shield. Martin's piece stated he was putting forth "a new picture of what really happened" in Abbottabad; he reported that "the 40 minutes it took to kill bin Laden and scoop his archives into garbage bags were all recorded by tiny helmet cameras worn by each of the 25 SEALs. Officials reviewing those videos are still reconstructing a more accurate version of what happened."
Such footage obviously could go a long way toward a precise account. According to Schmidle's New Yorker piece, though, it doesn't exist.
There are other glaring discrepancies between The New Yorker and CBS reports concerning the climax of the raid. In Schmidle's version, the encounter involved two of bin Laden's wives, and one SEAL firing the kill shots:
The Americans hurried toward the bedroom door. The first SEAL pushed it open. Two of bin Laden's wives had placed themselves in front of him. Amal al-Fatah, bin Laden's fifth wife, was screaming in Arabic. She motioned as if she were going to charge; the SEAL lowered his sights and shot her once, in the calf. Fearing that one or both women were wearing suicide jackets, he stepped forward, wrapped them in a bear hug, and drove them aside…
A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden's chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed.…Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden's life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye.
But in Martin's version, the encounter involved bin Laden's "daughters" as well as one of his wives—and not one, but two SEALs firing the kill shots:
The SEALs first saw bin Laden when he came out on the third floor landing. They fired, but missed. He retreated to his bedroom, and the first SEAL through the door grabbed bin Laden's daughters and pulled them aside.
When the second SEAL entered, bin Laden's wife rushed forward at him—or perhaps was pushed by bin Laden. The SEAL shoved her aside and shot bin Laden in the chest. A third seal shot him in the head.
Then there is the question of how many SEALs were in on the raid: Martin reported that 25 of them stormed the compound. Schmidle reported that 23 did (along with a Pakistani American translator and a now legendary Belgian Malinois.)
What's going on here? Martin's piece was broadcast nearly two weeks after the raid; presumably the US government had its story straight by then. (The Guardian's roundup of White House revisions linked above was published on May 4.) Martin provided scant information in the piece about his sourcing. If it has turned out to contain inaccuracies, to date CBS News has given no indication.
It is also possible that Schmidle's piece contains inaccuracies, though it is more deeply reported and goes further in describing its sources. They include Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, and perhaps most significantly, "a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid."
Still, Schmidle wasn't able to interview any of the Navy SEALs directly involved in the mission, although his piece gave the impression he had. Instead, Schmidle told the Washington Post's Paul Farhi, he relied on the accounts of others who had debriefed the men. "None of them had any previous knowledge of the house's floor plan," Schmidle wrote conspicuously in his New Yorker piece, "and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections—on which this account is based—may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute."
Other reports deepen the confusion. The consensus became that bin Laden was unarmed when the SEALs shot him, but who else was in the room? An early May broadcast from NBC News matches neither CBS nor The New Yorker on that count. "As the SEALs stormed up the stairs two young girls ran from the room," NBC reported. "One SEAL scooped up the girls and carried them out of harm's way. The two other SEALs rushed the bedroom door." In this version only one of bin Laden's wives was in the third-floor room where he was killed. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported the prior day that one of bin Laden's sons was also there: "The son was shot dead in that room, too." (NBC and others reported the son was killed on the second floor.) According to the AP report, bin Laden acted aggressively when confronted: He had "appeared to be lunging for a weapon." According to a Fox News report, bin Laden had acted "scared" and "completely confused" and in a "cowardly manner."
Whether any footage of the raid would ever see the light of day is one matter. (There are obvious reasons why it would be kept secret.) But whether it exists at all is significant.
In a recent email exchange regarding the helmet-cam issue, Schmidle would only reply off the record to my questions about his certitude and sourcing. Last week I reached an executive at CBS News by phone; the executive was dismissive and would only speak off the record, even then providing no useful information and refusing to put me in touch with Martin or his producers.
From fraught US-Pakistan relations to conspiracy theories to partisan politics, it's an understatement to say that there is keen interest in knowing exactly how the killing of bin Laden went down. Faulty reporting may be to blame for standing in the way. Alternatively, the mind doesn't require much bending to imagine why military, CIA, or White House officials might have been happy at various turns to help muddle the story. A certain degree of imprecision or misdirection can serve the side of secrecy. Perhaps at a time when the White House declined, amid much clamor, to release photos of bin Laden's corpse, it was useful to let the world know that it also had video footage of the whole operation. Perhaps at a later point it was useful to quash the idea that the US government had raw footage with which it might address questions about the circumstances and legality of bin Laden's killing.
Whatever the case, one of two stories from major American media sources is flat-out wrong on a significant piece of information about the raid, and there is much conflicting information about other details as well. It may be that a precise account of the historic mission will elude us for a long time, just as its target so famously did.
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