I’ve been noodling with the issues around the ‘cocooning’ effect of mainstream media and the impact of blogs – and conversely, the ease with which blogs could become a new layer in that cocoon.

My thinking hasn’t gelled yet, but I’ll toss out three blog posts for your consideration.

Over at MyDD, Jerome Armstrong starts listing the ‘perks’ mainstream commentators are getting – speaking fees, sinecures, etc.

Over at Zonkette, Zephyr Teachout comments on the notion of buying blog mindshare by hiring bloggers, and notes that the Dean campaign did just that.

On my own post on ‘astroturf’ blogging, I’m still trying to gather cases where bloggers have become financially or professionally tied to partisan organizations. Clearly blogging is a recruiting tool – smart bloggers have the opportunity to move into advocacy or policy roles, and the visibility their blogs gives them may help that happen. But it also opens the door to a (relatively inexpensive) way to buy buzz and mindshare.

I’m not pointing this out to target Kos or Jerome (both of whom were on the Dean payroll, according to Teachout, in some part because of their blogfluence). I do want to kick open a discussion of the impact of the web of influence on each of us, and the ways that web extends itself to pull in voices that otherwise might challenge it.

I’m interested in all your comments and thinking as I try and work my way toward a conclusion on this.

And here’s a – literally – dissertation on Islamist terrorists in Europe [pdf], courtesy of ‘Secular Blasphemy‘ – it’s work sponsored by Petter Nesser at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment.

The dissertation, however, lays out the sociology and ideology of the part-Westernized Islamists in frightening detail. While this is much more Dan’s territory, I’m going to be reading and digesting this for a while.

The four conspiracies analyzed below involve transnational contacts and cooperation between Islamist radicals in several European countries and also between Europe-based Islamists and local Islamist insurgents in the Middle East, North Africa and Chechnya. The militants have traveled extensively both inside and outside Europe. Some of the conspiracies seem to have been initiated outside Europe, but planned, financed and prepared in several European countries. The first case, the “Strasbourg plot” was, for example, planned and financed from the U.K., prepared in Germany, and the attack was going to be launched in France.

The cases show the relevance of combining “levels of analysis” when studying Islamist terrorism in Europe. The militants originated from the Middle East and North Africa, they were situated in the European diaspora prior to their arrests, and the vast majority of them had been influenced by “global mujahidin” when training in Afghanistan. The militants’ actions and statements strongly suggest that they have been influenced by the Salafi-Jihadi doctrine. There is available information on the backgrounds and organizational affiliations of the militants, the nationality and type of target they selected for terrorist attacks, and their justifications and excuses for taking part in terrorism inside Europe.

The sources gathered for this report suggest the extremist milieu in Europe is relatively small and the most fanatic and violent Islamists probably can be counted as hundreds, rather than thousands.The case-studies show that there have been multiple links and contacts between militants involved in the different conspiracies. Although the Europe-based Islamist radicals surveyed here belong to movements that in theory emphasize the “local jihad” more than the “global jihad” or the vice-versa, it is important to note that despite differences in their emphasis, the movements’ ideologies are largely compatible. In training camps run by al-Qaida and like-minded groups in Afghanistan, personal relationships were established between members of different movements. These personal contacts seem to have lived on in Europe, in the sense that Islamists belonging to different movements supported each other on an operational level. For example, Islamists perceived as mainly committed to the “local jihad” have supported operations against targets typically associated with the “global mujahidin”.

From a ‘Adventures of Chester’ a conservative ex-Marine, who doesn’t appear to have a larger axe to grind.

This still leaves the question unanswered as to who is right bout Iraq, Rummy or the generals? We believe both. In fact, the most cogent part of Friedman’s analysis above is that Rumsfeld has misjudged the pace of “transformation.”

What do we think of transformation? Well . . . that is a big question. Assuming that you mean Rummy’s version of it (there are several versions, many contradictory), we agree with him that information technology can make the armed forces dramatically better at killing people and destroying things on the battlefield, and that this will mean a smaller, lighter, faster force can do much the same as the larger forces of yesterday.

But at the same time, we can’t help but think that we mustn’t think that war will become a standoff, sterile activity, conducted by computers, robots, and UAVs. Man makes war and man will always have an integral role to play not only in its conception, but in its execution as well.

He doesn’t serve us a conclusion yet, but he sets an interesting table.

I’ll be watching to see what he says next, and you should, too.

OK, here’s another fun blog game from Mixolydian Mode via normblog; take the list of books, and look in your shelf for the authors.

If you’ve got them on the shelf, leave them. If you don’t, insert an author you do have and bold it.Sadly, I seem to have very little overlap with Norm; he’s a professor and British, while I’m a random guy and a Californian…sigh.

For the new books, I decided to pick from the lefthand stack of shelves in the dining room, just to limit the amount of walking around and looking I’d have to do.

1. Evelyn Waugh
2. Vladimir Nabokov
3. Robert Stone
4. Joyce Carol Oates
5. Richard Yates
6. Tim Powers
7. Flannery O’Connor
8. Larry Brown
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. William Shakespeare

> Same game, new list. This one’s non-fiction:

1. Atul Gawande
2. Max Horkheimer
3. I.F. Stone
4. Kevin Phillips
5. Primo Levi
6. Lewis Minkin
7. Julian Jaynes
8. Ferdinand Hayek
9. Thomas Merton
10. H.L.A. Hart

For much of my life as a teen and an adult, I’ve been involved in risky things.

I walked steel while my father built highrises; I’ve sailed offshore, climbed rock and mountains, raced cars and bicycles (the most dangerous!) and motorcycles. I like doing those things and the people who do those things, in no small part because they have very little bullshit in them.

If you lie to yourself about where you are and what you’re doing while sailing a small boat from San Francisco to Los Angeles, you are in a world of trouble. If you lie to yourself while setting protection on a rock face a thousand feet above the ground, you’re going to die.

I don’t like a lot of what the Republican party has to offer; that’s OK, I think we need a national dialog to make good policies. It takes two.

But given that, it may be puzzling to some (hey, JC, how’ re you?) why it is that I bash the media for their blind partisanship toward establishment liberalism, instead of cheering them as an ally.It’s because I find myself in a risky place surrounded by people who have lost the ability to tell bullshit from reality. Our party is wounded, leaking ideologically and demographically, and we sit here drinking quack nostrums made from apricot pits and listening to fake spirit mediums tell us everything will be OK because our dead ancestors FDR, JFK, and LBJ are looking over us.

They’re not.

Instead we get incredible nonsense like this defiant screed from Mary Mapes, victim:

Much has been made about the fact that these documents are photocopies and therefore cannot be trusted, but decades of investigative reporting have relied on just such copies of memos, documents and notes. In vetting these documents, we did not have ink to analyze, original signatures to compare, or paper to date. We did have context and corroboration and believed, as many journalists have before and after our story, that authenticity is not limited to original documents. Photocopies are often a basis for verified stories.

Read the whole unbelievable thing. The go read Appendix 4 of the CBS report itself, which concludes:

Tytell concluded, for the reasons described below, that (i) the relevant portion of the Superscript Exemplar was produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, (ii) the Killian documents were not produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, and (iii) the Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle . Tytell acknowledged that deterioration in the Killian documents from the copying and downloading process made the comparison of typestyles “to some extent a subjective call.” However, he believed the differences were sufficiently significant to conclude that the Killian documents were not produced on a typewriter in the early 1970s and therefore were not authentic.

Now I will leave to others the question of why this conclusion which seems both pretty obvious and well-proven were glossed over in the report itself; there is no other typographic analysis of the documents, as far as I can tell.

Both mainstream Democratic liberalism and free American journalism have been incredibly valuable to our country and to the world.

But when their leadership gets cocooned in – bullshit, there’s no other word for it – what they do is disastrous on two fronts.

First, we can’t decide on good actions because we have no idea what reality looks like.

Second, we won’t get elected because the voters don’t believe we’re connected to any reality that they recognize or that we can prove.

Both are bad for the Democratic Party, bad for journalism, and bad for the country. Are only the Democrats like this? Of course not. But right now, we’re the party stuck in the mud and sinking.

So I’m happy to stand here and swing away at what I see at the absolutely catastrophic detachment from reality. I wouldn’t risk my life by climbing with people who were like that, and neither would you.

The L.A. Times today has a recounting of the death of Lana Clarkson, who was shot in Phil Spector’s home here in L.A., quite possibly by Spector in a drunken fit of sexual frustration. It’s quite a read; the product of multiple reporters, it reads in part like a detective novel:

An hour before sunrise at the end of a very long night, Officer Michael Page was struggling to pin Phil Spector as the famed music producer wrestled with Alhambra police in the foyer of his hilltop mansion.

Page pressed his knee into Spector’s back and held down his arms. The officer had discarded his Taser after two shots from the stun gun failed to drop Spector, and now Page’s submachine gun was slipping off his back. Another officer grabbed the weapon before it fell within Spector’s reach.

Page turned to make sure his Taser wasn’t lying close by, and that’s when he saw the woman in the chair.

She was blond, tall, freckled. She slumped, half in, half out of the seat, her long legs extended in front of her. Her head lolled to the left, and a great deal of blood had flowed from her face down to her chest.

In the struggle, she had escaped Page’s notice. But on first sight the officer knew she was dead.

It was a depressing read for me; a recounting of two sad people, one blessed with success in the world and one not.

Biggest Guy is in town for a week, and I’m home, and so we’ve been sitting and talking a fair amount. I realized this morning that my whole objective as a parent is to keep my children from becoming either Phil Spector or Lana Clarkson, each victims in a way of their belief that a hit movie or record, a Mercedes, and a big house will make you whole or happy.

Reading about Spector, I was reminded so much of Harlan Ellison’s great book ‘Spider Kiss‘; I know it’s about Elvis, but in truth it’s about our worship of the “bitch goddess success,” and the lives we throw away at her feet.

From the CBS report:

The Panel does not find a basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having a political bias. The Panel does note, however, that on such a politically charged story, coming in the midst of a presidential campaign in which military service records had become an issue, there was a need for meticulous care to avoid any suggestion of an agenda at work. The Panel does not believe that the appropriate level of care to avoid the appearance of political motivation was used in connection with this story.

and this, an August 31 email from to Ms. Mapes from Michael Smith, a producer working with her:

Today I am going to send the following hypothetical scenario to a reliable, trustable editor friend of mine…

What if there was a person who might have some information that could possibly change the momentum of an election but we needed to get an ASAP book deal to help get us the information? What kinds of turnaround payment schedules are possible, keeping in mind that the book probably could not make it out until after the election.

(emphasis added)

Now just who the hell do they think they are kidding?

[Update:Note the correction – the email was to Mapes from her assistant, not from her.]

From the now-dormant ‘Disgusted Liberals‘ website on the election:

Scheiber describes some of the institutional factors, including Democrats’ persistent hard money disadvantage, that lead to reliance on a few, centrally-managed pollsters. But he ignores the key characteristic of the modern Democratic Party that leads most directly to misuse of pollsters: the fact that Democrats are, by and large, a post-ideological party, a party driven more by polls and interest groups than by conviction or principle.

In short, although many Republican ideas are bad, at least they have them. Until the same can be said about Democrats, they will continue to lose — especially in the current environment, where the existence of big, scary problems makes the electorate more receptive to ideological solutions.

…hat tip to MyDD, in a post about Amy Sullivan’s great Washington Monthly column ‘Fire the Consultants.’

Newsweek broke the ‘death squad’ story this week, in which they describe a range of possible rules of engagement that involve using proxies or Special Forces-led proxies to covertly attack – i.e. assassinate – the leaders of the B’aathist/Islamist forces.

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called “snatch” operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Personally, I’m strongly against an organized effort to create assassination squads, and have said so for quite some time.

I assume that we have Special Forces troops and friendly Iraqis mingling where they can to gather intelligence – and also that we ought to have more of them. I’m not at all opposed to ‘opportunistic’ use of those forces to target and kill or capture enemy leaders.But to create a whole force specifically to do that and wage a ‘shadow war’ would be – as I’ve said in the past – far more damaging than helpful.

It would be damaging largely because by their nature such efforts must be covert, and thus unaccountable. They deal in death on a retail level, and the people who must practice and control such efforts must become used to operating outside even the boundaries of civilized violence and mayhem. So in creating such a force, we’d be creating and subsidizing a group whose explicit mission was to kill outside of any accountable control, who would necessarily associate with people who don’t have much regard for the rules of civilization and whose activities would take place deliberately away from any kind of scrutiny.

When I read the article, I assumed that the antiwar folks would leap on it as a way to tie Iraq back to the discredited (justly or unjustly? At some point I need to learn enough history to know…) wars in Central America. I find that deliciously ironic, as many of those same antiwar folks argued two years ago that – as an alternative to invasion – we should just go covertly track and kill the leaders of terrorist groups.

Back in April 2004, Jim Henley said:

For one thing, I would continue to harry the men and organization behind the September 2001 atrocities to the ends of the earth. “Don’t Tread on Me” is my policy, and that’s what Al Qaeda did. Bite back hard.

…

What if Iraq becomes a weak state complete with Al Qaeda training camps and weapons labs? See scare quotes around “wait” and the part about harrying the people behind the attacks on the US to the ends of the earth, above. If camps set up, we pound hell out of them. It’s not like we don’t know how to bomb Iraq.

Today, he says:

And speaking of inevitable atrocities, get ready for Iraqi death squads.

All together now: Saddam was worse! In terms of body count in Iraq this is true, though the man had a big head start on us, so we ought to be allowed a couple of decades to catch up. But what about the world ? Is it better? And are we? We have gone from a time in which the tyrant of an oil patch with a broken army and 23 million inhabitants practiced a tyranny which all decent people abhorred, to a time in which the largest and most powerful country in the history of mankind justifies torture and contemplates assassination teams – we should call them terror squads – as official policy. And the people who most consider our virtue unchallengeable are the quickest to publicly avow our need to torture and murder. That is quite a change. Is it hard to see why so much of the world regards it as unwelcome?

Jim, I hate to break it to you – and all the others I’ve argued with over the last two years – but your policies of covert action and assassination that you though were viable alternatives to invasion?

This is what they look like.

And for you to have advocated them – and Jim is certainly not the only one (I’ll add links as I have time to do some searching) who did – and then stand pointing at this ill-advised proposal as evidence of the Administration’s moral bankruptcy is a joke. Be consistent, folks, at least.

Check out the new group blog on counterterrorism, from a group of people for whom it’s part of their day jobs…

The Counterterrorism Blog

…go check it out. It’ll be interesting to see what the grownups in the field have to say for a while.