Won't someone please think of the widows? When is a story about bare-knuckle, high-stakes politics not a story about politics? Evidently, when it's about women, and the women are victims, or victims' advocates. Sentimentalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg icks all over the 9/11 commission Family Steering Committee, or rather over its four most prominent widow members, the "Jersey girls," Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Lorie Van Auken and Mindy Kleinberg.

The story of how they helped move a seemingly immoveable bureaucracy is at once the tale of a political education, and a sisterhood born of grief. ... On Capitol Hill, lawmakers were pressing for a commission; in December 2001, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, had proposed a bill. By the spring of 2002, Ms. Kleinberg had befriended the father of a victim of Pan Am Flight 103, the plane that was bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. "He said, `The bill is languishing. If you want it to go anywhere, you have to make it happen.' "

The women went to Home Depot, sawed wood for signs and staged a Washington rally; 300 people came out in the blistering heat. They staked out lawmakers and boarded the elevators marked "Senators Only." They wheedled their way into the White House. Jay Lefkowitz, a former Bush domestic policy adviser, recalls giving them chocolate chip cookies, even as he successfully opposed some demands. ... In the Capitol, they cried, they pleaded, they cajoled.

The questions themselves that the committee want answered just disappear from the piece, as does any sense of a political process that isn't about powerful men responding to, or trying to resist, emotional coercion. (See the committee website for its list of unanswered questions.) Somehow I think if it were a group of men in the forefront of the organization, Bill Keller wouldn't have his paper serving up this kind of treacle.

Update (Fri., 4/2): For a look at an acutal news article that honors what the 9/11 widows have done by treating their work as substantive, and not just as women's-magazine inspirational, check out Joe Conason today in Salon.

posted by michael  4:35:36 PM  
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A local uptick. John F. Burns' A1 news analysis in the wake of yesterday's atrocity in Falluja is remarkable, among other things, for how deliberately its lead sets out to ridicule Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq:

Hours after the deaths of the four American civilians who were dragged from their vehicle and mutilated in Falluja on Wednesday, an American general went before reporters in Baghdad with the air of measured assurance that has characterized every daily briefing on the military situation across Iraq.

"Despite an uptick in local engagements, the overall area of operations remains relatively stable with negligible impact on the coalition's ability to continue progress in governance, economic development, and restoration of essential services," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, 51, the former paratrooper who is chief spokesman for the United States military command.

Nearly a year into the insurgency, the command, in lock step with the civilian administration headed by L. Paul Bremer III, remains relentlessly positive.

"U.S. Optimism Is Tested Again After Ambush Kills 4 in Iraq"

It's not that Kimmitt's bloodless bureaucratese ("an uptick in local engagements") doesn't deserve it, just that I'm surprised to see this on the front page of the Times.

Burns uses Falluja as the occasion for a comprehensive, summary critique of the history of official narrative promulgated by American forces during the course of the Iraq insurgency. I find it particularly remarkable that Burns focuses on the so-called "Zarqawi letter," which the Times' own rather credulous reporting flogged when it first surfaced, as a prime example of American military propaganda.

By February, American generals had begun to say that the worst of the "Saddamist" insurgency was over ...At the same time, senior officers around Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the American commander, said that Hussein loyalists were increasingly being replaced as America's principal enemy in Iraq by Islamic terrorists with at least loose links to Al Qaeda.

On Feb. 8, United States officials produced a document that became known as the "Zarqawi letter." In this, they said, a man they believed to be responsible for several major attacks, including the August bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed 22 people, had urged Qaeda leaders to support further attacks aimed at provoking a civil war in Iraq — and halting American progress toward the establishment of a Western-style democratic state.

Questions remain about the letter, including whether the writer really was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Islamic militant. But it provided the Americans with a ready-made template for their new interpretation of the war. They said the letter, found on a computer disk carried by a Qaeda-linked courier, was proof that the conflict in Iraq had been transformed from a battle to restore Mr. Hussein into a regional theater for the worldwide war against terrorism.

Mr. Zarqawi's photograph was posted in operations centers at American bases across Iraq, and soldiers in their Humvees began cursing Mr. Zarqawi more than Mr. Hussein. Virtually every briefing for reporters tied developments in the war to the growing role of the Islamic militants and the receding threat from what military jargon calls F.R.E.'s, or former regime elements.

Pretty strong meat for A1, especially that last paragraph. Burns goes on to note how little real evidence there is for foreigner-incited violence as a central concern in Iraq (of 12,000 detainees in American camps in the country, fewer than 150 are foreigners—though how many of the detained Iraqis are legitimately detained Burns doesn't ask). "The United States command has occasionally announced the arrest of a suspected Islamic terrorist," Burns adds, "but has then fallen silent."

Burns ends his piece with a dangerous, and for A1 rare, gesture toward the bleeding fucking obvious:

Several Iraqis interviewed on Wednesday, including middle-class professionals, merchants and former members of Mr. Hussein's army, suggested that that the United States might be facing a war in which the common bonds of Iraqi nationalism and Arab sensibility have transcended other differences, fostering a war of national resistance that could pose still greater challenges to the Americans in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.

Given how much space A1 has provided in the last couple of weeks for CPA cheerleading, let's hope this marks an "uptick" of more robust skepticism on the front page.

posted by michael  4:06:13 PM  
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