Is President Bush guilty of war crimes?

To even ask the question is to go far beyond the boundaries of mainstream U.S. media.

A few weeks ago, when a class of seniors at Parsippany High School in New Jersey prepared for a mock trial to assess whether Bush has committed war crimes, a media tempest ensued.

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Top officials in the Bush administration have often complained that news coverage of Iraq focuses on negative events too much and fails to devote enough attention to positive developments. Yet the White House has rarely picked direct fights with U.S. media outlets during this war. For the most part, President Bush leaves it to others to scapegoat the media.

Karl Rove’s spin strategy is heavily reliant on surrogates. They’re likely to escalate blame-the-media efforts as this year goes on.

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On Saturday, during her national radio response to the president, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the Bush administration of “incompetence” in the Iraq war.

What would be a competent way to pursue the war in Iraq? How would you drop huge bombs on urban neighborhoods in a competent way? How would you deploy cluster munitions that shred the bodies of children in a competent way? How would you take hundreds of thousands of people from their home land and send them to a country to kill and be killed — based on lies — in a competent way?

How do you ravage the housing and health care and education of communities across the United States, while war-profiteering corporations post bigger profits — how would you do that in a competent way?

Senator Feinstein went on to say that it’s so important, for the war in Iraq, for the United States government to “do it right.”

How does one do this war right, when every day it brings more carnage? The only way to do this war right is to not do it at all…

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The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion is bound to attract a lot of media coverage, but scant recognition will go to the pundits who helped to make it all possible.

Continuing with long service to the Bush administration’s agenda-setting for war, prominent media commentators were very busy in the weeks before the invasion. At the Washington Post, the op-ed page’s fervor hit a new peak on Feb. 6, 2003, the day after Colin Powell’s mendacious speech to the U.N. Security Council…

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As each new season brings more waves of higher-tech digital products, I often think of Mark Twain. Along with being a brilliant writer, he was also an ill-fated investor — fascinated with the latest technical innovations, including the strides toward functional typewriters and typesetting equipment as the 19th century neared its close.

Twain would have marveled at the standard PC that we take for granted now. But what would he have made of the intrusiveness of present-day media technology — let alone its recurring content?

It’s getting harder and harder to drive out of cell-phone range — that is, if you really want to. And judging from scenes at countless remote locations, many people would rather not forfeit 24/7 phone access for conversations that involuntary eavesdroppers hear half of. (Virtually always, it seems, the more boring half.)

These days, mainstream media fascination with blogs and the bloggers who love them often seems to assume that the very use of the Internet enhances the content or style of what has been written. It’s a seductive cyber-fantasy. Speed is useful, and so are hyperlinks and visuals-on-demand, but — fortunately or not, depending on your point of view — there’s no digital invisible hand that can move any piece of writing very far along the road to worthwhile reading…

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Evidently the president’s trip to India created an option too perfect to pass up: The man who has led the world in violence during the first years of the 21st century could pay homage to the world’s leading practitioner of nonviolence during the first half of the 20th century. So the White House announced plans for George W. Bush to lay a wreath at the Mahatma Gandhi memorial in New Delhi this week.

While audacious in its shameless and extreme hypocrisy, this PR gambit is in character for the world’s only superpower. One of the main purposes of the Bush regime’s media spin is to depict reality as its opposite. And Karl Rove obviously figured that mainstream U.S. media outlets, with few exceptions, wouldn’t react with anywhere near the appropriate levels of derision or outrage.

Presidential rhetoric aside, Gandhi’s enthusiasm for nonviolence is nearly matched by Bush’s enthusiasm for violence…

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Death is always in the news. From local car crashes to catastrophes in faraway places, deadly events are grist for the media mill. The coverage is ongoing — and almost always superficial.

It may be unfair to blame journalists for failing to meet standards that commonly elude artists. For centuries, on the subject of death, countless poets have strived to put the ineffable into words. It’s only easy when done badly.

Yet it’s hard to think of any other topic that is covered so frequently and abysmally in news outlets. The reporting on death is apt to be so flat that it might be mistaken for ball scores or a weather report.

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When Dick Cheney surfaced on Wednesday long enough for an interview with Fox News eminence Brit Hume — an event that CNN’s Jack Cafferty promptly likened to “Bonnie interviewing Clyde” — the vice presidential spin emerged from a timeworn bag of political tricks. Cheney took responsibility. Whatever that means.

The New York Times website swiftly made its top headline “Cheney Takes Full Responsibility for Shooting Hunter.” Just before Fox News Channel aired interview segments at length, the summary from anchor Hume told viewers that Cheney had accepted “full responsibility for the incident.” Hours later, the Washington Post’s front-page story led this way: “Vice President Cheney accepted full responsibility yesterday…”

Ironically — while news outlets kept using the phrase “full responsibility” — the transcript of the interview posted on FoxNews.com shows that Cheney never used any form of the word “responsibility.”

Whatever their exact words, the politicians who can’t avoid acknowledging culpability are often the beneficiaries of excessive media plaudits for supposedly owning up to what they’ve done wrong. But those politicians rarely do more than just what the spin doctor ordered…

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The current flurry of Western diplomacy will probably turn out to be groundwork for launching missiles at Iran.

Air attacks on targets in Iran are very likely. Yet many antiwar Americans seem eager to believe that won’t happen.

Illusion 1: With the U.S. military bogged down in Iraq, the Pentagon is in no position to take on Iran.

But what’s on the
horizon is not an invasion — it’s a major air assault, which the
American military can easily inflict on Iranian sites…

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