Who Burned Burns? John Burns of the New York Times was the best reporter on the ground in Iraq before the war. His reporting consistently gave Times readers a sense of real life in Baghdad, telling stories unavailable elsewhere in the Western media. Burns has generated much buzz in the past week with a scathing indictment of his media colleagues in Iraq, published in “Embedded,” a new oral history of reporters who covered the Iraq war.
Said Burns:
Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that [Iraq] was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.
In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people’s stories–mine included–specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper. Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance.
All of this got Jack Shafer, the media critic for Slate magazine, to wondering: “Who ratted on John Burns?”
Excellent question. We tried unsuccessfully to reach Burns, first at his home in England and again on assignment in Israel. As a last resort, THE SCRAPBOOK devoted an afternoon to rereading the most sycophantic pre-war reporting from Baghdad in an attempt to uncover the offender. No luck. There was way too much toadying to narrow down the list of possible offenders.
Surely some of the other reporters based in Baghdad before the war have a good idea of who this feculent soul might be. It’s time to out him.
Weaselly Clark
General Wesley Clark, Democratic candidate for president, is under fire for not being, well, Democratic enough. It turns out that Clark, who discovered his party affiliation earlier this month, a few days before joining the presidential race, gave a speech at the Pulaski County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner in Little Rock, Arkansas, on May 11, 2001. He took the occasion to heap praise on the administration he’s now trying to dethrone.
In his speech to Republicans, Clark said Ronald Reagan was “a great American leader.” He called George W. Bush a man of “courage and vision.” And he expressed his approval that Bush & Co. held national office: “I’m very glad we’ve got the great team in office,” Clark said. “Men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice . . . people I know very well–our president George W. Bush. We need them there.”
NBC anchor Brian Williams asked Clark at the beginning of last week’s Democratic primary debate a simple question: Did the general believe those words when he spoke them? And does he still believe them?
Clark responded that he and the rest of the country, like the cat and the dog in the children’s classic, had taken an “incredible journey” in the days since May 2001. “We elected a president we thought was a compassionate conservative. Instead, we got neither conservatism nor compassion,” he said. “We got a man who recklessly cut taxes. We got a man who recklessly took us into war with Iraq.”
Now, THE SCRAPBOOK is well aware of Clark’s confusion on Iraq. A day after entering the presidential race, Clark told a group of reporters that he “probably” would have voted to authorize war with Iraq. The next day, he said that he wouldn’t have.
But it’s the “recklessly cut taxes” leg of Clark’s incredible journey that we’re still trying to figure out. Because the president’s tax agenda was clear long before Clark addressed the Pulaski county GOP in May 2001. A month before Clark heaped praise on Bush, the Senate passed the $1.2 trillion tax cut that still sends most Democrats into cardiac arrest. And a month before that, the House passed an even larger tax cut.
Was Clark unaware that Bush was responsible for the largest tax cut in history when he addressed the Arkansas Republicans? Or are his convictions shaped by the prevailing political winds? (We’re not really expecting an answer to that.)
Revisionist History
Hillary Clinton is “amazed and outraged” to hear that she has been censored by the Chinese government-owned Yilin publishing house that bought the rights to her “Living History.” THE SCRAPBOOK cannot muster the same shock–as far as we can tell, it’s business as usual in Beijing.
An editor at another government-owned printer is quoted by CNN as saying that “editors and publishers are well aware of the need to take out embarrassing topics and materials” from foreign books.
So many printers operate on the “better safe than sorry” principle. They simply delete all references to China with or without the authors’ consent. The sections removed from Hillary’s “History” include passages dealing with the case of Harry Wu, a human rights activist held in a Chinese labor camp. In the original version, she explains how the circumstances surrounding Wu’s imprisonment nearly kept her from attending a 1995 U.N. women’s conference. In the Chinese version, Wu makes only a brief appearance where he is described as a man “prosecuted for espionage and detained awaiting trial.” References to Tiananmen Square, as well as sections about the lack of religious freedom and freedom of speech in China were also removed.
Simon & Schuster posted Chinese translations of the censored pages after Yilin’s changes became public. No word yet on whether the site has been blocked by China’s Internet police.
Does Laura Know?
QUESTION: As president, do you think the government should, and would it under your leadership, impose any kind of price controls on prescription drugs?
SEN. GRAHAM: Well, I can tell you this, there will be nothing done about the price of prescription drugs as long as George W. Bush is president. He is literally in bed with pharmaceutical companies.
–Bob Graham scoops the world on George W. Bush’s unorthodox sleeping habits, during the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate in New York City, September 25.
Congratulations
The inaugural “Bradley Prizes” have been announced. Sponsored by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the $250,000 awards honor individual achievement in areas that are consistent with the foundation’s mission of strengthening American democratic capitalism. We’re biased, of course, but we don’t think a better group of winners could have been selected to launch this annual endeavor: our contributing editor Charles Krauthammer and the distinguished scholars Thomas Sowell, Mary Ann Glendon, and Leon R. Kass.
