How about some on Joe Katzman's moment of fame --the "Maine Teachers' Controversy," how it tarred every teacher in Bangor, Maine without them having any way of refuting it (because it was based on unnamed informants and unspecified incidents) how it got picked up by the right-wing polemicists Limbaugh, O'Reilly, WorldNetDaily, et al. and how it was used as a propaganda point to attack the anti-war movement and "liberals" generally.

Or even, how about the "weapons of mass destruction" themsleves?

Oh yes, they're in Syria now.

As Jon Lovitz used to say: "Yeeeah, that's it, they're in Syria now."

Klaatu -
Yeah, how about that? Except that the people involved in breaking the Maine teachers' story in the first place have largely admitted that they may have overreacted based on the initial reports they received. I don't see anyone - to this day - maintaining that Maine teachers are abusing military dependents. So perhaps this is an example of effectively combatting a myth.

With regards to weapons of mass destruction - I believe Saddam did have them, and that we'll find them (either in Iraq, or as you so rightly pointed out, Syria) eventually. If we don't, I stand ready to admit that our primary justification for going to war was wrong. If we do find them, will you admit the facts of the matter? Or will you make up a conspiracy theory claiming they were planted by the U.S. government?

Actually, Celeste, I don't think we did enough to frame that one, and that lack leaves us open to just the kind of slam that Klaatu aims our way.

In practice, I think that one (Maine) is relatively minor and the other (CIA/Crack or Israel/WMG) more serious - but that requires a longer explanation than I have time for right now. Suffice it to say that we need to be damn careful, and that this whole discussion is a process which I hope will lead to thoughfulness on all sides.

A.L.

I posted links which cite original sources about the Arab accusations against Israel in the "sex gum" comment thread. These appear in major newspapers in the Arab world, have been going on for a long time, and are rarely retracted.

We should also remember that there are people out there who foment these conspiracy theories for fun and profit, knowing full well what they do.

The KGB's disinformation people started a lot of the weirder rumors about the CIA and Americans (that rich Americans were ripping the organs out of poor people, that the CIA was responsible for AIDS, etc, etc.).

Celeste -

I think this problem is certainly not one only faced here in the good ole US of A, but worldwide. It's simply a, and I hesitate to use the word, paradigm issue. There are plenty of people, probably most of them, who want to believe that the "other side", be it the left of the right, or the Muslims or the Christians, or whoever, are the bad guys and are worthy of contempt. That's what they have grown up believing, even without any supporting evidence. A.L.'s "Unsettling Dinner" is a perfect example. There is certainly no evidence to support 75,000 civilian casualties inflicted by the US on Iraq, but hey, we are the Great Satan, so the possiblity isnt such a great leap of faith for some who think that way. The CIA (big brother), Jewish Sex Gum and so many others are just further examples of the same mentality gone astray.

How do you fight that? Aside from flat denial with evidence presented to the contrary what can you do. As long as their are groups on different sides of the field in society, as so eloquently stated in the "Limits and Societal Progress" essay posted by Joe yesterday, there will always be people out there wanting to believe the worst of someone else, and jumping at the chance to do so. Usually this jump is not accompanied by a parachute as Aziz has found out.

The mind eraser ray might work, or maybe a nice Djarum to make them think about something else for a while, but that gets expensive.

I don't see the Maine teachers' thing as less serious at all. For the polemicists who used it, it served its purpose. It was given more credence by being broadcast by Clear Channel and Fox News. It is probably more serious because it was used to inflame public opinion in the country with immense military and economic power. See Orcinus, "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism," at http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

By contrast, the people who would believe about the CIA and crack or "sex gum" have little power.

Not to mention the whole WMD thing. People "believe" that Iraq had WMD, as if on faith. Maybe so. But if you believe that we went to war for that reason, well, I got a bridge to sell you.

This is part of the reason why old Andy Rooney, who lived through the Depression and WWII, was compelled to talk about how these times are the grimmest he has lived through.

Greg -
Yeah, djarums do get expensive, but they still taste better than marlboros.

And Klaatu -
I don't believe that Iraq had WMD because I prayed on it. I believe it based on the intelligence reports I read when I was a government contractor. I believe it based on the numerous news accounts I've read.

And A.L. is right - as the site that helped break the Maine teacher's story, we should have done more to make the fact that it has fizzled known too.

Just about everyone is guilty, at some point or another, of believing a 'big lie'. The questions are: How much damage do they cause? And how do we counter them?

Conspiracies are odd things.

One of the main ways they spring up is in the void of real information.

People will make up stuff to fill the voids.

Secrecy creates voids - intentionally.

Like the whole thing about the Roswell incident. People said, look, they are covering something up. For decades, they (the Air Force) said, no, we're not covering anything up. Just a mistake, a weather balloon all along. And then they said, whoa, waitaminute, we were covering something up, it was a detection program. But we are telling the truth now.

Then there are the just wack theories, like the Roosevelt/ Truman/ Eisenhower/ Kennedy/ Johnson/ Nixon/ Reagan/ Bush/ Clinton/ Bush (never seen it attributed to Carter) secret executive order that will cancel the elections and round everyone up that doesn't believe in the New World Order to put them in reeducation camps.

The CIA and other government agencies get hit on both sides. First, they have covered up things in the past. And if they have to keep secrets, they really can't refute the crazy stuff. Like the crack cocaine stuff.

What is even stranger is that conspiracy like this is not a sign of inbred trailer parkness. I have seen a study that among African Americans, belief that AIDS was a CIA plot to kill the black man increased with education. I knew an African American Ph.D. who believed, really believed, that Newt Gingrich had Ron Brown's plane shot down because he was a black man in a powerful position.

Not to mention the stuff our Arab friends believe to be true.

And the worst part about the conspiracies is that the lack of evidence is just further proof of the conspiracy - why else would there be so little evidence than someone cleaning up behind?

I guess my answer is I have no idea how to combat big lie propaganda. Education seems to make it worse.

Confronting the believers just gets you tagged as part of the conspiracy, or brainwashed by the media which is part of the conspiracy.

What you didn't hear about the CIA/crack/Watts story was that about a year after it broke the CIA admitted it was true.

As you know from my drug article here I follow the drug war quite closely.

I believed the crack story when it came out (not necessisarily the CIA intentions part but the CIA behavior). I believed that the CIA facilitated selling crack in Watts because I have read the Iran/Contra transcripts. I have read parts of McCoy "The Politics of Heroin in SE Asia".

http://www.pir.org/sources/PF.html
http://www.akha.org/humanrights/drugwar/mccoy/chapters.htm
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/3674/mccoy1.html
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/3674/mccoy2.html
Amazon.com for book
http://serendipity.magnet.ch/wod/levine.html
http://www.balkanpeace.org/our/our03.shtml

So you can see that selling drugs to help finance black operations is a well established CIA tactic.

The only part of the original CIA denial that rings true is that they did not intentionally target Watts or the black community. I believe that is true. They were just trying to sell their drugs to whoever could move them.

What is interesting to me in the current context is that the CIA took advantage of the loonieness of the tinfoil hat brigade to disparage a report that was in the main factual even if it's conclusions about CIA intentions were over the top.

Which just goes to show that not every thing believed by the "conspiracy brigade" is false. The brigade is quite useful to cover up artists who want to smear a story.

You know the bit "it is just another loony conspiracy theory, like the Oswald didn't act alone nuts."

Except that Congress came out many years after the fact with an investigation that said that Oswald wasn't alone. David Lifton's book "Best Evidence" convinced me many years before Congress came to it's conclusion.

One must investigate and then investigate some more. The thing is to look for patterns. Possibilities. Probabilities. Inconsistiencies. And the ability to parse statements. One nice thing about our government is that it rarely lies (except for the DEA). But you must be able to parse "is" correctly. You must look at every statement for hidden meaning. What is left out. Where is there misdirection.

The truth is out there. The question always is can you find it in the rush of current events. The net makes it much easier. If you can figure out where to look. In hard cases the noise to signal ratio is 20:1 or worse. There are no easy answers.

Which is why a reporter's or publication's reputation is everything.

Which is why sometimes when the coverup artists can't damage a story they try to damage reputations if they want to keep things hidden.

The people who murdered Daniel Pearl and produced a recruitment/snuff video weren't Arabs, blaster. They were British-born and British-raised Muslims whose families originated in Pakistan.

The big lies about Jews permeate the Islamic world.

The difference between a wrong story about teachers in Maine, and what we've recently been discussing here on this blog, is that no one is getting militias out to shoot teachers in Maine. I didn't follow the controversy because I was certain that it had been distorted or blown out of proportion, and also because I figured it was nonsense. Which eventually it was proven to be. And your point is?

What we're discussing here are monstrous lies that have the potential to kill people. What we're discussing here is the fight between people who are willing to be reasonable and admit mistakes and those who are not.

Oho! So this is the difference between the "big lies?"

"The difference between a wrong story about teachers in Maine, and what we've recently been discussing here on this blog, is that no one is getting militias out to shoot teachers in Maine."

Not yet, (Maine militias being different from militias in other partos of the country) although there were physical assaults and threats against anti-war protesters all over the USA, and that story contributed to the general and growing atmosphere of hatred against "liberals" in this country. If you go back to those posts, you can read for yourself the attacks on me when I questioned the authenticity of the stories.

The USA is the country that I live in, not Pakistan, and I'm more concerned at this point about fascism in the USA than about foreign-origin terrorism. Not today, not tomorrow, but in ten or twenty years.

Think about it: in ten or twenty years is it more likely that we'll be suffering from frequent Islamist terrorist attacks, or that we'll have seen many of the articles of the Bill of Rights abrogated or abriged?

And no, that "Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction" lie didn't get anyone killed, did it? Nor is it indicative of a fascist will to manipulate mass opinion, is it?

By the way, is this the same "Diana" I was reading about in the New Yorker? The one who ran off with that blogger-alleged-to-be-from-Baghdad's personal info, his alleged confidences? The one who couldn't put her name in the magazine quickly enough?

Well, maybe we'll be finding him along with those WMD, right? The ones that my military friend in now Iraq called a "hoax." Unless he was for real and Ambassador al-Douri subscribed to the New Yorker, right?

I

Klaatu, on the topic of Diane and Salam Pax: you are full of crap. Diane has gone out of her way to try to shield him, and Joe K, Meryl, myself, and some others know that. In the interest of keeping Diane's and Salam's confidences, that's all I'm going to say.

But your sneering and ignorant accusations tell me a lot about you.

I'm getting rather tired of Klaatu's focus on the Maine story. Mostly because his charges have far less honesty in them than our work here.

• First, read what we actually wrote, especially our concluding post. The story was most certainly NOT false, as our research made clear.

• Nor did it ever tar every educator in Maine. It was quite clear at all times that this was limited to a minority, and I never claimed anything else.

• The crisis was 100% defusable at its inception - IF the education officials had acted properly and dealt with it in a serious manner. When they didn't, the Guard went back to the press... and the rest is history.

• We made a point of being clear, several times, on what was known and what was less clear. I'll put that record up against, say, CNN's record of disclosure any day.

• The story ran out of steam in the media because parents chose not to come forward to the media, instead dealing with the issue through regular channels. The Guard then declared the issue closed, which is NOT the same as a hoax by any stretch.

• At all times we relied on reporting of a breaking story by local news organizations, and by national sources. Our role was mostly as a clearinghouse, keeping the focus on the issue and networking among sources by web, email, even by phone.

• Our coverage of the story included vigorous debate, both in our comments sections and among the team.

• We absolutely did do everything in our power to show people the story's evolution, from the Coverage History that was moved up every time we reported new material, to extensive promotion of each and every article we put out.

I don't apologize for one word that I wrote.

Hey Klaatu:

I'm the guy here who counselled caution on the Maine story, and I think you ought to be ashamed of your last two comments in this thread.

I'm an honest-to-God liberal with a capital L who is tired of beating my forehead against my keyboard when I read what the people on my team -which I infer would include you - write.

When we've had twelve years of GOP hegemony, will some people on the left begin to get the idea that Rush Limbaugh's tirades work because he manages to tap into a core of belief; that without that core of belief - an ideological core that is conspicuously lacking in the Democratic and further left - it's just a temper tantrum?

There's a real point to make about the ways in which people tend to build stories that fit their beliefs, and how this shows up everywhere -yes, even in these august pages.

But with your mixture of self-pity, ad-hominem attacks, and footstamping, you've just blown the chance to have that discussion.

A.L.

A.L.,

From what I can see politics in America is undergoing a radical shift.

The essence of that shift is that economically we are now all on the capitalist road. Marx is dead.

What will remain is a libertarian oriented left the "I want to be left alone" crowd and the cultural conservatives.

The left will still be interested in social programs, unlike the strict Libertarians, but they will be as much as possible market oriented.

Liberals will be going back to their original definition of removing, as much as possible, government restrictions. And looking out for the people near the bottom economically and socially. Still rooting for the underdogs without believing that the underdog is always right. Welfare to work is the program of the new liberal.

The current resent on the left is that their God is dead and they are bitter. In fact the old left has much in common with the cultural conservatives: command and control. We know now without a doubt that it does not work economically. The next 100 years will prove it doesn't work socially either.

Any way that is how I see it as a former socialist liberal. What do you think?

M. Simon wrote:

"So you can see that selling drugs to help finance black operations is a well established CIA tactic."

AFAIK, there are two interpretations to this:

1) as a matter of policy the CIA and other officials used drug smuggling as a way of financing policy;

2) as a matter of policy, the CIA and other officials used and associated with people who used drug smuggling as a way to make a living.

There's a pretty substantial difference between the two, and while a substantial body of evidence supports 2), I've seen no credible reports that support 1).

From my point of view, I have a hard time imagining that you can do intelligence or other covert activities while only associating with Dudley Do-Right. I have some direct contact with police officers, and it is clear from talking with them that they can't do their jobs without associating with and using people who they really ought to be arresting.

It's a judgement call...

A.L.

Well, I'll let y'all know that I followed Armed Liberal to this page, but was really dismayed by the Maine teachers story. Hence my focus on it.

The facts about it are this: no attribution, no names, no locations, no direct quotes. No credibility. But a great vehicle for Limbaugh, O'Reilly, WorldNetDaily, Savage, Hannity, Coulter, etc.

I'm upset because I think that either (1) some teacher DARED to express some opinion against the war and was pounced upon by the right wing part of the crowd who believe that noone should ever hear anything that "upsets" them, or (2) some parent exaggerated an incident to act out their own internal crisis or personal problem.

You just don't get it, Joe: it's the very lack of specificity in the charge that would tend to chill and suppress free speech. Hence the legal doctrine: "void for vagueness."

So I hereby declare and ajudge the charges against the teachers of Bangor, Maine "void for vagueness."

And I'm not going to be ashamed of this:
"Think about it: in ten or twenty years is it more likely that we'll be suffering from frequent Islamist terrorist attacks, or that we'll have seen many of the articles of the Bill of Rights abrogated or abriged?"

because I think it's true.

Klaatu:

There's one large problem with your latest construction; the fact is that the previous administration - a Democratic one AFAIK - wasn't exactly a huge supporter of civil liberties either. So it's hard to make this the progressive/conservative issue as I see you attempting.

We have two fronts on which we need to struggle...we need to find a way to solve the problem of terrorism AND we need to do it in the context of defending our civil liberties. the problem is that doing one - defending civil liberties doesn't improve our odds on the other -- fighting terrorist-supporting ideologies; but it does work the other way around - successfully fighting terrorist-supporting ideologies DOES improve our odds of defending our civil liberties.

Makes the priorities relative straightforward to me.

A.L.

A.L. I agree with you about the Clintonites.

There is no party of freedom in this country, unless you count the rag-tag bunch which includes people like Bob Barr, Dick Armey, Norman Mailer, Lewis Lapham, and a few others. And what do they have in common?

Please don't make me out to be a "progressive." I'm not. I grew up in the city and had to live through all the "progressives" bright ideas in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

But this Bush crew is much scarier than the Clinton crew. Ashcroft has a lot more momentum than Janet "protect the children" Reno ever had. Funny that Ashcroft himself was considered a civil libertarian, concerned with religious-rights issues, when Clinton was in power. And this whole right-wing media thing - what a mobilization of the mob! Don't get me back on the Maine teachers.

There may have been good ideas for going to war with Iraq. I told some near and dear to me - one who's there now, one who's going soon (for a year) that it'll be good for the Iraqis, one way or the other. It just may not turn out to be good for the US.

Whatever the case, the whole WMD thing was the Big Lie.

It reminds me of the one invasion I participated in, little Grenada (although the casualties were almost as many as Iraq, I recall). That was about "rescuing medical students."

In uniform, we knew it was about geopolitical struggle and the imperative to deny the Sovs the Point Salines airfield and an English-speaking Marxist-Leninist outpost in the Caribbean.

To me, it would have been better to have said "We don't want the Cubans and Sovs to have this island."

As it would be better to have laid out the full plans for the region and not leave it to us to speculate whether we're invading Syria or Iran next.

Klaatu:

Actually, I agree with you. I think that the overture was badly played. I think the excuse was that we were anxious and weren't willing to take the heat that honesty would have generated. That's too bad, because I think that in the next round of diplomacy, candor will be our most powerful tool. And I think we're starting to get it, although the jury is still out on whether it is bluster or real candor.

I think that the short and intermediate term will be worse for us than if we had done nothing; but I think our long-term future is brighter.

Now for the major task of doing it all while fighting back the encroachments on our civil liberties...want to help figure that out?

A.L.