O'Reilly, a pre-kindergarten teacher in the Chicago public schools, is not alone in his adulation of Dr. Ayers. Over 3,200 educators and academics have endorsed this petition of support.

Ayers stands out as an admirable character in this year's carnival. He's never been coy about his passions, never engaged in with-a-wink reformulations of his core beliefs. He didn't achieve his professional eminence (Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at UIC, V.P.-elect of the American Educational Research Association, Founder and Co-Chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge's Collaborative, 1995-2002) by soft-pedaling his hard-left, authoritarian agenda.

It's true that some politicians see Ayers' embrace as electoral poison. Long-standing professional relationships? No, he's just some guy in the neighborhood. Raising questions about the depth and breadth of that relationship: slime.

Bill Ayers: obscure ivory tower denizen with slightly daft ideas victimized by sliming, and beloved, accomplished, mainstream-accredited powerhouse leading the Good Fight against Patriarchy and Hegemony.

There is cognitive dissonance lurking nearby. Not with the unrepentant Dr. Ayers or Paddy O'Reilly's fellow fanboys and fangirls flocking to the Ayers-Ward Churchill-Hugo Chavez banner. They're rail-straight. Nor is this a cross for the ambitious and calculating Barack Obama to bear: ends, not means, are what matter.

In a little-visited graveyard in the Italian countryside, the shade of Antonio Gramsci is chuckling. With the Tanning Bed Media, or at it? Perhaps Columbia's Professor Rashid Khalidi has insight into this question.

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UPDATE, 24 Oct 2008 -- Valued commenter Chris challenges the premise of this post and offers extensive critiques in the Comments, culminating in #103.

UPDATE 2, 12:25 pm on 26 Oct 2008 -- Steve Diamond of the Santa Clara School of Law and the 'Global Labor and Politics' blog is one of the foremost researchers on the nature and extent of the connections between Sen. Obama and William Ayers. He contributes to the Comments, starting with #110.

UPDATE 3, 28 Oct 2008 -- Comment thread re-opened. New comments (past #123) limited to 300 words.

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To review, in his third dispatch, Shock Troops, Beauchamp offers three anecdotes. These are:

• Beauchamp and a buddy loudly mock and curse an IED-disfigured woman in FOB Falcon's crowded chow hall. The many soldiers who overhear find this behavior unremarkable. None object.

• At a gravesite described as "a Saddam-era dumping grounds of some sort," one of Beauchamp's fellow privates prances about with a child's skull as a crown. His capering provokes laughter, not disgust. He wears a piece of skull with rotting flesh under his helmet, through the day and night, and on a mission. No witness to these actions reprimands the soldier, or reports him.

• Another private uses the Bradley Fighting Vehicle he drives to smash buildings and market stalls, and to run over dogs. He tallies his kills and reports them over the unit's radio net. No one objects. The many soldiers who hear the report of a dog-slicing escapade over the radio roll with laughter.

Beauchamp uses these stories to shine a light on the behavior and beliefs of the soldiers he serves with.

The choices are few.

• These events might have happened much as Beauchamp describes (although Milbloggers have assailed his account on a slew of details).

• Some events might have happened somewhat in the way that Beauchamp related, but with literary license used to alter important details. For instance, if Beauchamp and a buddy had insulted an injured woman, danced about with children’s' skulls, and killed dogs in secret, we would view the account with very different eyes. If Beauchamp turned out to be reworking urban legends and campfire tales into a gripping first-person account, that would, likewise, influence our perceptions.

On Beauchamp's outing (or self-exposure), I made the unremarkable prediction that other voices from Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, 2nd BCT, 1ID would soon be heard.

Blogger (and retired Sgt.) Cheryl McElroy posted on July 27 that she had emailed the 1st Sergeant in Beauchamp's unit. She vouches for the authenticity of the reply she received:

[UPDATE 8:30 pm on Jul 29, 2007 -- I removed this message at the request of its recipient. The one-paragraph email claimed overall honorable conduct on the part of the company's soldiers.--AMac]

(Hat tip: commenter mesablue at Confederate Yankee.)

I think it's likely that other individuals from Beauchamp's unit will enter the fray. (In that regard, this is reminiscent of the Civil War, when private soldiers corresponded often and at length about their experiences, good and bad.) Insights from additional accounts should help us to judge whether depravity has become the norm in that unit, or whether Beauchamp is some mixture of fabulist and headcase.

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Opening 'graph:

Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's transactions "drug deals" – but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old.

And Evans' conclusion:

One of the few things Ryan and Tyler agree on is their scorn for America's attempt to secure and rebuild Iraq. Tyler rages that the US military "couldn't bother to protect" the road between Baghdad and Anaconda, or even the four-kilometre stretch between Baghdad International and the Green Zone. And he found that when most other Americans dealt with Iraqis, "they were very insulting, they were often very condescending, and in many cases I felt that they treated them like subhumans."

Both of them lament the sorry state of the electrical system. "Not having power was probably the single biggest problem that created animosity among Iraqis," Ryan says. "The US tried to rebuild it in the Western industrialized-country model. The way Iraqis install a power system is, they put a bunch of small generators on neighbourhood blocks, with power cables running to everyone's house, and just sell them access directly. And it's easy to have a market-driven pricing mechanism. But the US solution was to give large US companies business here … If they'd had electricity working within a month or two of the invasion, there probably wouldn't have been near as much violence."

Iraqis desperately want to work. "You don't see people begging for money. You see people selling gas for money, selling cigarettes by the side of the road," Ryan says. Tyler agrees: "I interviewed a lot of people, and I never met one that wasn't so painfully eager it almost hurt to turn them away." But their economy remains paralyzed.

"The best way to deal with terrorism in the long run is to fix the underlying conditions that create terrorism," Ryan says. "It's difficult to fix their ideology, but it's easy to fix their infrastructure. But the US has done a bad job … It's like a feedback loop. They got on the wrong side of the feedback loop." Iraqi frustration breeds insurgents; insurgent violence cripples reconstruction efforts; and the resulting lack of power, communications, finances, and jobs breeds more frustration.

In the face of this feedback loop, American forces have withdrawn into heavily guarded enclaves. SSI's modern, globalized, best-of-both-worlds strategy, bringing Americans and Iraqis together to help rebuild the shattered country, has faltered. Blue Iraq's neo-colonial approach, living and working exclusively on military bases, continues to thrive. The seeds Tyler has helped to plant – a team of crack engineers still erecting dishes around the country – may someday help drag Iraq into the 21st century, one satellite link at a time. But not until the rain of insurgent bombs and bullets has ended. And neither Ryan nor Tyler expects that to happen for years.

I was struck by the picture Evans paints of the U.S. reacting to the successful initiatives of our enemies. In the run-up and the aftermath of the invasion, planners did not mind Gen. Franks' oft-used aphorism, the enemy gets a vote. Of course, most of the U.S. media never knew, and still don't care. Note, for example, the routine use of the passive voice ("a minibus rigged with explosives detonated on a busy street") in this typical AP account from April 17th. Bombs "go off" in Baghdad for inscrutable reasons--rather than as the organized centerpieces of mercilessly crafted political campaigns.

Blog readers can, if they choose, read about the battle space as it appears to Westerners and Iraqis in Iraq. They can discern the not-very-hidden hands of Al Qaeda and elements of the Iranian government in shaping that space. I suspect that narratives of mystifying, terrible, and depressing carnage obscure this basic point to many newspaper readers.

Accounts like Evans' won't tell us what the least-bad policy options are for Iraq. But they do help to inform us about the realities of the situation there.

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In mid-September, Winds covered the shoddy work of the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun. By far the most insightful and complete coverage of the Hoax has been provided on a daily basis by Brooklyn College Professor of History K.C. Johnson, at his web-log Durham-in-Wonderland. Johnson has been unparalled in keeping the spotlight on the maneuverings of many participants in the affair, as they attempt to toss their contributions to Injustice down the 'Memory Hole.' Recently, the author of an extensive writeup of the case aptly characterized Johnson as the Emile Zola of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax.

I heard in early January that Professor John Doe (a pseudonym) of Duke University believed:
* that D.A. Mike Nifong was acting unscrupulously,
* that virtually all of his faculty colleages recognize that the events of the spring amounted to a rush to judgement, and
* that there is a widespread desire to set things right with the two suspended students.

I initiated contact with him to find out more about his thinking. After a useful exchange, Prof. Doe gave me permission to post extracts of our correspondence. Why pseudonymously? Because he doesn't think it's appropriate for him to speak on behalf of Duke faculty.

From: doe-at-duke.edu
To: amac-at-windsofchange.net
Date: January 5, 2007

I wanted to share a few observations you might find helpful...

• [The bloggers and blog commenters who assume that there is] some kind of university-wide strategy to come out in favor of the LAX players to avoid liability are just wrong. Universities are very decentralized organizations (largely as a result of tenure). I have taught at [numerous prestigious universities] and never seen or heard of a central administration telling faculty what they can or can't say on matters of public importance. I am not aware of any direction by the Duke administration on what we should or shouldn't say about the matter.

It definitely is not the case that the hard left has intimidated anyone. The main issue behind the lack of a "counter petition" [to the 'Group of 88's' Listening Statement' ], I suspect, is two-fold.

• First, most of the faculty, like most people in America, are not political activists. We don't draft and circulate petitions in our private or in our professional lives. There was a petition circulated a few months ago, right before the general election, that properly decried the lack of due process protections, but it also denounced a number of other tangentially related issues that, in my view and likely in many others, were too over-the-top to sign.

• Second, [there has been intense focus by bloggers on the above-mentioned "Listening Statement."] I certainly didn't view it as a defining event nor, I suspect (though I can't be sure) have many others on campus. Indeed, I had never even heard the term "Group of 88" until [recently reading blogs on the case]. I was aware that a group of faculty had published a critical open letter early on, but then heard no more about it. I assumed at the time (and still do) that this was a diverse group -- some signed because the event satisfied their ideological bent (the hard left you refer to), some because of a preexisting concern over the role of athletics within the university, and many because they were genuinely outraged by what [District Attorney] Nifong said had occurred. While you may find this view surprising, you need to understand that it was published at a time of frenzied media coverage. This story went from a local item to international news in a matter of days. The main parking lot was literally overflowing with news media trucks and the story was being debated every night by talking heads such as [CNN host] Nancy Grace and others. The open letter was simply one more blur along with protests of banging pots and pans (mainly by local residents angry about off-campus parties, not students or faculty as some of the posts seem to assume), denunciations by many media figures, release of the inflammatory email by the student about skinning the strippers (not known until later to be a paraphrase from a book [sic-actually, a parody of American Psycho, studied in class-AMac]), etc. People on campus do talk about the small number of faculty who publicly condemned the players in a rush to judgment, but they are definitely not viewed as a monolithic group.

In terms of public statements by the faculty once questions started to be raised about Nifong's conduct, all I can say from my own view is that [Duke Law School professor] Jim Coleman is a national expert on criminal procedure and has done a great job speaking out on the issue. This struck me as entirely appropriate. I make public statements on issues I know a lot about, that Jim is publicly silent about. Now that the econ department has distributed [ their early January letter ] in support of the return of the accused students, it will be interesting to see if other departments do so, as well.

In an ideal world, where professors from across the political spectrum undertook to speak as "public intellectuals" about matters of concern to the Academy and the Citizenry, this post would be superfluous. While Duke's Hard Left has often been inane, sometimes vicious, and all-too-often disingenuous ( revisionism / critique ), nobody can doubt their willingness to proclaim their beliefs. During the criticial first nine months of the Hoax, it's was the Decent Left, the Center, and the Right that were largely missing from the the fray. Perhaps the Economics Department's welcome-back to the falsely accused students will be the harbinger of a change, as this travesty approaches its paper anniversary.

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Reviewer Levine appears to be knowledgable about the events surrounding the 9/11 attack, and is properly critical of most of the dramatizations that have been released to this point. This newest effort is, unsurprisingly, a dramatization of the 9/11 Commission Report. That's good in some ways and bad in others--Dan Darling wrote contemporaneously at Winds on some of the report's numerous shortcomings. Then there's the glaring omission of Able Danger. Other analysts, including Stephen Hayes, have also been unkind to the Report that the movie is based on.

Still, for all its failings, the report did provide a timeline and a narrative framework in which to locate events and people. Its faults appear to lie mainly in errors of omission and interpretation, rather than in outright misstatements of fact.

The IMDB entry on "The Path to 9/11" will be here.

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Iraninan-born Taheri is based in Europe and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The National Review, and many other periodicals. Further background at this spiteful Wikipedia biographical entry.

In his July 15 "Asharq al-Awsat":http://www.asharqalawsat.com/english/default.asp column, Taheri wrote:

[Hamas and Hezbollah] are capable of pursuing a low intensity war against Israel virtually forever. And that, like all low intensity wars, would aim at breaking the spirit of the enemy, persuading more and more Israelis that their homeland is not a place in which to have a normal life and raise children, and that their best bet is to head for safe havens elsewhere. Low intensity war is also bad for any nation's economy. People cannot think of long-term investments when they see missiles raining on them.

At the opposite side of the fight, Hamas and Hezbollah are also facing existential threats... If Hamas ends up by tearing up its own charter and recognising the legitimacy of Israel's existence, it would spell its own doom as a radical Islamist movement. If, on the other hand, it persists with its no compromise stance it will be seen by many Palestinians as responsible for all the hardship they now suffer...

[Hezbollah's prestige] is based on the myth that it defeated the Israelis and drove them out of occupied southern Lebanon... Hezbollah without arms would become just another Lebanese political party, garnering around 20 per cent of the votes.

The Hezbollah faces another, perhaps bigger, problem: it must develop its policies within a broader strategy worked out by the Islamic Republic in Tehran and the Baa'thist government in Damascus. As a result, it cannot simply decide to defuse the situation in the hope of keeping its military organisation intact. Iran, coming under growing pressure on the nuclear issue, is desperately looking for a diversion. And what better diversion than a mini-war that could keep international attention focused on the Israel-Lebanon-Palestine triangle? Syria, for its part, could profit from a limited war, between Israel and Hezbollah, by pointing out that its own presence in Lebanon had been a stabilising force and that efforts to exclude it from the Lebanese scene have generated greater instability.

In a sense, therefore, what we are witnessing is the opening shots in a proxy war between the Islamic Republic and Syria on one side and Israel on the other.

The rest of Taheri's essay is here.

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On April 14, The Baltimore Sun published an article on Page A3. Its conclusion:

[Negroponte's deputy Michael] Hayden tried to counter the criticism that the Iraq war has diverted resources from possible threats such as Iran, saying he couldn't recall "being forced to make a trade-off." The officials said that although Iran announced this week that it had produced 164 centrifuges to enrich uranium, it would take years to produce the 54,000 centrifuges needed to build a nuclear weapon.

"The assessment of the timeline was broad enough that the recent events, particularly until they're well understood ... won't be affected," said Kenneth Brill, head of the new National Counterproliferation Center. Iran could be exaggerating its accomplishments, as it has in the past, he said. Asked whether there had been any disagreement among U.S. analysts about Iran's nuclear timeline, [analyst Thomas] Fingar said there had not.

Alert readers of Winds of Change will immediately recognize that the bolded clause is downright false, and very misleading. But most newspaper readers would not. Trusting this reporting and editing would lead them to conclude that, yeah, a nuclear-armed Iran might possibly be a threat--but if it is, government intelligence officials are confident that it is a distant one.

That evening, I wrote to the reporter, copying the <i Sun's managing editor and public editor:

Today's story "Officials confident about data on Iran" is troubling for the picture it paints of high-ranking Americans who think they have a good grasp of the state of the Iranian nuclear program. Among other lessons, the past few years of the Iraqi experience should have taught these officers that modesty about the limits of their knowledge is rarely misplaced.

Well, the press' job is to report such official foolishness, not correct it, so fair enough.

Unfortunately, the fourth-to-last paragraph of your article is a misstatement of fact that will be very misleading to readers trying to understand the progress of Iran's Manhattan Project for themselves. Here's your paragraph:

"The officials said that although Iran announced this week that it had produced 164 centrifuges to enrich uranium, it would take years to produce the 54,000 centrifuges needed to build a nuclear weapon."

The naive reader would calculate that Iran has 0.3% of the needed number of centrifuges to enrich enough uranium for one weapon.

Here's one recent story on the subject. Quoting, [Asst. US Sect'y of State] Rademaker said the technology to enrich uranium to a low level could also be used to make weapons-grade uranium, saying that it would take a little over 13 years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon with the 164 centrifuges currently in use...Iran has informed the IAEA that it plans to construct 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz next year, Rademaker said. "We calculate that a 3,000-machine cascade could produce enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon within 271 days," he said.

Even these presumably-correct calculations make two assumptions.

1. The starting feedstock is unenriched uranium, i.e. Iran does not have hundreds of kilograms of reactor-grade material already. Material that might (or might not) have been obtained from Pakistan, North Korea, China, or Russia.
2. There are no relevant undeclared Iranian programs. IAEA director el-Baradei stated this week that he thinks that Iran does have secret programs. Western officials have said much the same thing. [AMac note: like the Green Salt Project, unreported by The Sun.]

In short, an intelligent but uninformed reader will actually have a worse understanding of the state of the Iranian nuclear program after reading your article. I hope that, at a minimum, The Sun will correct the glaring factual error I outlined above.

I heard back from the reporter: I'm convinced this was an honest mistake on a complex topic. But, more than a week later--not one word from the editors or ombudsman, to this email or others. Including one asking specifically about how The Sun's handling of this factual error squares with their stated policy, that "The Sun is committed to providing fair and accurate coverage."

And no correction.

This might not matter except on principle: but for the support that the tainted article lends to The Sun's own editorial position on Iran, Don't Go There. First line--"Leave it to a diplomat to offer the most candid assessment so far of the idea that the United States would attack Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions: 'completely nuts.'" Echoed two days after the article by Fariborz Fatemi's letter, Open real dialogue with Iran's leaders.

It's one thing to urge putting all our marbles in good-faith negotiations with a country that is, say, 0.3% of the way to building a bomb--with US Intelligence Officials confident that that is the case.

Quite another thing to steer that course in the world as it actually is: a world that is being hidden from the view of the readers of this newspaper.

Posts on the misbehavior of mainstream media institutions sometimes prompt commenters to suppose that this is the result of some dark conspiracy. Aside from being both unlikely and unprovable, this explanation is unnecessary. Jeff Jarvis has blogged about how coverage suffers when a diversity of viewpoints is absent from the newsroom. Hugh Hewitt and others opine regularly about how mistakes such as this one stem from absence of "genuine intellectual diversity" from many newsrooms and studios.

That--and the self-regard that comes from being the only best paper in town--is what causes the national and international coverage of The Sun to suffer. This is not the first time that ideological blinders have hampered The Sun's reporting on a politically-charged topic, and it will hardly be the last. Cori Dauber has commented knowledgably about the NYT and Washington Post. Patterico has occasionally had things to say about The Los Angeles Times. Second-tier papers deserve brickbats (and praise) as well. In one form or another, the mainstream media will be around for a long time to come. The more honest and nimble they become--and the more willing they become to correct their missteps--the better for all of us.

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