Lest it need be said, Haditha is not an abberation. Only let's remember too, the folks who helped–and were paid handsomely–to put us there. If one only ever reads five things about Thomas Friedman, hack, let four of them be these.
Update: Crooked Timber has taken the "hackery" meme and run so, you could also go there (after clicking the links below, of course!).
Via the Cynic Librarian, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said he believes journalists can be
prosecuted for publishing classified information, citing an obligation to national security:
"There are some statutes on the books which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility," Gonzales said, referring to prosecutions. "We have an obligation to enforce those laws. We have an obligation to ensure that our national security is protected.
What is particularly chilling about this "jurisprudence of intimidation" is that it is being presented at the same moment the press has started doing its job - revealing government policies and procedures that are aimed at destroying opposition and dissent.
Geof Stone, a legal scholar over at the University of Chicago Law School has a post about the history of classified information and the Press. He indicates that a journalist has never been prosecuted for divulging "governement secrets" in the history of the United States.
Spurred in part by a passage from On the Natural History of Destruction posted at The Weblog and a recent re-reading of Arendt's The Human Condition and Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, that latter of which inspired in part by recent discussions of Marx on the occasion of his birthday (Angela, Shaviro, Nate).
Despicable socialist fantasies, or dedications to the memory of "political surrealism" in literary rag, n+1 (perhaps even those without subscriptions could, you know, opine about it). Anyway it reminded me of this. And there's some Hegel in the monster's tail. Mark Greif:
One of the lessons of starting a magazine today is that if you pay any attention to politics you will collect a class of detractors, who demand immediately to know What and Wherefore and Whether and How...Is it possible you have not endorsed a candidate, or adopted a party? Within the party, a position? If not a position, an issue? The notion that politics could be served by thinking about problems and principles, rather than rehearsing strategy, leaves them not so much bemused as furious.
Continue reading "He may as well be talking about weblogs" »
In anticipation of the upcoming symposium on Schmitt, I found a short piece by Simon 
Critchley discussing the "logic of the political" as it is used by the Bush administration. Many oberservors have noted the Schmittian influence on the current hegemons, but Critchley wishes to draw out a "crypto-Schmittianism" he sees at work. Initially his description is rather traditional: The political is the sphere that deals with external security and internal order. "The political is about the construction of an enemy in order to maintain the unity of the citizenry." This construct actually produces a "double fantasy:" the fantasy of the enemy and the fantasy of the homeland. "It is through the fantasy of the enemy that the fantasy of the homeland is constituted."
So far nothing very controversial. But Critchley believes that the Bush administration is "crypto- Schmittian" because of its hypocrisy regarding its "moralization of political judgement."
This is a guest posting by Carlos Rojas, from NakedGaze.
On this day in 1818, Karl Marx was born in a three story house in the town of Trier, the oldest town in Germany. Although baby Karl and his family only lived in the house for a little over a year before moving to a smaller one nearby, this house (which was not definitively re-identified until 1904, nearly a century later) has been made into a small museum in Marx’s memory.
Perhaps it was inevitable but the United States government has now acknowledged that it 
is monitoring the phone records of several major news organizations. On Monday, ABC News reported that the government is doing this in order to discover who are the confidential sources leaking sensitive material to the press. Among the news outlets targeted are the New York Times, the Washington Post, and ABC News itself. Government leaks have led to front-page stories detailing the NSA domestic spying program, the CIA’s network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe, and the mass compiling of private phone records.
Brian Ross, an investigative reporter with ABC News, has been warned by contacts within the CIA and FBI that he and other reporters are being targeted:
AMY GOODMAN: So, the F.B.I. is admitting this. And what are they saying further? Are they going to continue to do this?
BRIAN ROSS: That's part of a criminal investigation into who provided information to reporters, who leaked classified information, which would certainly include evidence of secret prisons or N.S.A. spying, and that's considered classified. The fact that that was leaked represents a criminal act in the view of the C.I.A., which has made referrals to the Department of Justice, and then they handed over to the F.B.I. So, essentially, they have squads of F.B.I. agents, and what they do is, according to the F.B.I. statement, they begin by getting the phone records that are easily available to them off of the government phones themselves, and then they say in this statement, which is a long sort of non-denial denial, that they take the next logical step, which is to get a reporter’s phone records.
And they do this, they say, legally. What that means is they use a provision in the PATRIOT Act -- which is designed to go after terrorists, but they're using it to go after reporters -- what they call a national security letter. Essentially, it’s a letter an F.B.I. agent writes, takes it to a phone company -- or anywhere, really -- but takes it to a phone company, and the phone company is then required under the provisions of the PATRIOT Act to turn over the information, and also a phone company is required not divulge to the customer, me or anybody else, that the records have been sought by the government.
AMY GOODMAN: And these national security letters, or NSLs, are not signed by a judge?
BRIAN ROSS: They are not signed by a judge.
How is it that blogs become sites of overinvestment? Rather than fora for discussion and disagreement, they all too quickly become stand ins for horrors, hopes, and disappointments of a sort clearly beyond their import. How easily we lapse into malign misreadings, or readings of another clearly in bad faith. How quickly we speed from disagreement to total disparagement.What sense can it possibly make to condense into specific exchanges on specific blogs the entirety of American first amendment jurisprudence, to speak of rights to own and to express and to own what one expresses? What is achieved by attacks masked as requests for clarification, attacks on others who offer themselves and their ideas, for nothing? Why do small exchanges come to stand for the entirety of the political situation of the world? For all of the history of philosophy? How is it that failure to agree comes to stand for the ultimate in complicity with evil? Surely we do not leap to such conclusions when we interact with others face to face, when we hear their voices.
After so much enmity in the blogosphere (if sometimes of a semi-affectionate nature), and given that this form seems particularly prone to dispute, occasionally ironized or celebrated as "snark," it's refreshing to see some reflections on friendship.
Angela is perhaps shy to mention it, but she's put up some interesting thoughts on mateship, in the wake of the mining melodrama in Beaconsfield. Glen responds. I wonder how nationally circumscribed that discussion is, the "mate" as Australian icon of a rather particular type. Indeed, that's partly what's at issue in the disagreement between Angela and Glen.
Meanwhile, over on Charlotte Street, Mark Kaplan continues an ongoing series of meditations on friendship, most recently with reference to Blanchot, Benjamin and Brecht, and Nietzsche.
Now, however much my friends are important, I've mentioned before I'm also keen on the limits to friendship, the indifference of what Alberto Moreiras terms the "non-friend," who can in some ways be equated with the subaltern. At issue here is the challenge of living together beyond like or dislike.
It's the question of community and exclusiveness. And then there's love.
Perhaps all of this will return when we start reading Schmitt.
Cross-posted to Posthegemony.
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