by hilzoy
Remember back in 2000, when Republicans earnestly assured us that if we elected George W. Bush, we wouldn't have to put up with slippery statements like "that depends what the meaning of 'is' is"? That was before we found out that when the President assured us that no one in his administration was leaking classified information, leaks at his direction didn't count since he could declassify anything at will; that when he assured us that he would only employ surveillance methods in accordance with the laws and the Constitution, he was interpreting the laws and the Constitution to say that the President can do more or less whatever he wants during what he decides is a time of war; and all the other delightful locutions we've come to know and love.
Tomorrow's Washington Post contains one more tale of straight talk from the Bush administration:
"On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remains classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. (...)
The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned valves, tapped gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path through feed tanks and reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain valves, and into discharge tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds of photographs.
By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views about what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers were not.
"Within the first four hours," said one team member, who like the others spoke on the condition he not be named, "it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs." (...)
The group's report and members of the technical team also dismissed the notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.
"It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket," said Rod Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and former member of the survey group."
Yep. George W. Bush: he says what he means, and he means what he says. No slippery verbal tricks from him. Ha ha ha.
Gary: I've read that Wired piece a number of times over the years, Anarch, but since you cited it, I had to go back to check that, indeed, he says absolutely not one thing about his concern, lack of concern, or anything about the fact that his Law is so endlessly mis-cited. He mentions Cliff Stoll's version that re-states it, and says nothing about the fact that it's the version that's commonly been substituted for, and called, "Godwin's Law."
Mike Godwin, from the link supra, emphasis added:
So he approvingly cites the fact that the meme has been mutating, argues that this is a success by his standards, and that such memetic engineering may be a necessary component of net.interaction in the future... and from this you conclude not only that he apparently expressed no particular opinion on these matters but that it was equally (non)descriptive of his feelings towards his wife? No offense, Gary, but might I recommend you carefully re-read the piece a third damn time?
Posted by: Anarch | April 12, 2006 at 09:42 PM
Well, Anarch, you seem to be going from completely general observations by Godwin about memes to a presumption that he somehow is commenting on the re-substitution in the minds of many that I don't see any support for in the actual text, though I don't know that the negative is incorrect. I just don't see anything specific there about it at all.
Talking about memes and counter-memes in general is something endless numbers of people have done; that's what Mike's article is about. If there's something there to the effect that, say "many people have adopted Cliff Stoll's version as what 'Godwin's Law
is; that's fine by me," I'm still missing it.
But why I'd care how much Mike Godwin cares about it, even if he wrote at length about it, I dunno. Sorry. Still don't see how it would make the factual observation incorrect in the slightest. I dunno how what Mike Godwin thinks about it matters whatever.
Is this really worth going on about? I mean, okay, but I kinda doubt I have more to say, myself.
Posted by: Gary Farber | April 12, 2006 at 10:44 PM
WRT Pearl Harbor, &c., Gary Farber has covered the topic quite well (no surprise there), so I'm only going to express some of what he said from a different angle.
Everyone knew that Japan was getting ready for war with America. Well, not everyone (it depends on what the meaning of 'everyone' means, I suppose), but anyone who was paying attention in the late 1930s. (The invasion of Manchuria and then China; the expulsion from the League of Nations; the occupation of French Indochina; the US freezing of Japanese assets - these were all pretty obvious clues.) Thus the existence of a particular set of secret memos announcing this general likelihood adds little to our knowledge.
Knowing of such preparation, however, is not equivalent to prediction of an exact attack, much less preparation for defense against it. For about 40 years, during the Cold War, we also "knew" that the Soviet Union was getting ready to attack us. Yet, in the event, they didn't, at least not in a way that would precipitate WWIII. Think of pre-Pearl Harbor America as being an earlier version of Cold War America: conscious of who the enemy was, sure that someday, someplace he would attack - but when? where?
The more serious charges against FDR were not that he was unaware of this general threat, but that he had specific knowledge that the war was going to begin by an attack on Pearl Harbor in the first week of December 1941. If this were true, as his enemies alleged, then he could be said not only to have lied, but to have deliberately sacrificed American lives to bring about the war, a heinous deed in the view of his accusers, and possibly posterity in general.
Investigation of this charge, however, did not lead to conviction anywhere but in the minds of those who had already convicted FDR in their hearts. There were major official (Congressional) investigations at the time (during as well as after the war, I believe) and serious historians have revisited the question periodically since then.
I've read some, but by no means most, of this material, and what I come up with is the following:
1) Among the thousands of messages relaying scraps of information in the weeks and months before Pearl Harbor there were in fact a few which, if they had been recognized as accurate, would have led to our anticipation of the attack when and where it occurred, and presumably a defense against it.
2) There were also thousands of other bits of information, equally plausible at the time, pointing in different directions.
3) There is NO good evidence that FDR (or anyone else alleged to be implicated in the conspiracy) actually recognized the few vital "true" bits of information pointing to the attack, much less put them together correctly. (In fact it's not clear how many of these key bits FDR himself eyeballed.) The most one can say - and I suspect the same is true of 9/11 - is that perhaps a better intelligence-sifting system could have succeeded in sorting out the wheat from the chaff a bit better, so we would not have been so surprised.
Of course, YMMV.
I suspect at the root of our intellectual problem is the general human desire to find patterns, even meaning, in existence, a desire which is unsatisfied by the possibility of happenstance playing too large a role in our fates. This predilection is of course played on by our writers and directors, especially of thrillers, who only introduce extraneous bits of information as deliberate CLUES, not as the miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam that reality actually strews on our shores. (There's an old rule in the theater: If you show a loaded gun in Act I, it must be fired by Act III.)
I've never been an intelligence analyst, but I've been a historian for long enough to know that most of the information on almost any topic is irrelevant, if not downright wrong. The answer to most questions is not to be found in the Missing Document (which everyone knows to be Vital), but in figuring out which of the thousands of documents you already have access to are actually pointing you toward the truth.
If anyone wants to argue that GWB, having commissioned a team of experts to actually study suspected bioweapons mobile labs, and then rejected their unanimous report in favor of others' pre-wrapped conclusions (which led to a desired course of actions), is in the same state of ignorance as FDR in 1941, and therefore no more culpable of misstating the actual situation, they may try - but it won't fly past any real historian, or, for that matter, any reasonable spectator.
Posted by: dr ngo | April 13, 2006 at 12:52 AM
WRT Pearl Harbor, &c., Gary Farber has covered the topic quite well (no surprise there), so I'm only going to express some of what he said from a different angle.
Everyone knew that Japan was getting ready for war with America. Well, not everyone (it depends on what the meaning of 'everyone' means, I suppose), but anyone who was paying attention in the late 1930s. (The invasion of Manchuria and then China; the expulsion from the League of Nations; the occupation of French Indochina; the US freezing of Japanese assets - these were all pretty obvious clues.) Thus the existence of a particular set of secret memos announcing this general likelihood adds little to our knowledge.
Knowing of such preparation, however, is not equivalent to prediction of an exact attack, much less preparation for defense against it. For about 40 years, during the Cold War, we also "knew" that the Soviet Union was getting ready to attack us. Yet, in the event, they didn't, at least not in a way that would precipitate WWIII. Think of pre-Pearl Harbor America as being an earlier version of Cold War America: conscious of who the enemy was, sure that someday, someplace he would attack - but when? where?
The more serious charges against FDR were not that he was unaware of this general threat, but that he had specific knowledge that the war was going to begin by an attack on Pearl Harbor in the first week of December 1941. If this were true, as his enemies alleged, then he could be said not only to have lied, but to have deliberately sacrificed American lives to bring about the war, a heinous deed in the view of his accusers, and possibly posterity in general.
Investigation of this charge, however, did not lead to conviction anywhere but in the minds of those who had already convicted FDR in their hearts. There were major official (Congressional) investigations at the time (during as well as after the war, I believe) and serious historians have revisited the question periodically since then.
I've read some, but by no means most, of this material, and what I come up with is the following:
1) Among the thousands of messages relaying scraps of information in the weeks and months before Pearl Harbor there were in fact a few which, if they had been recognized as accurate, would have led to our anticipation of the attack when and where it occurred, and presumably a defense against it.
2) There were also thousands of other bits of information, equally plausible at the time, pointing in different directions.
3) There is NO good evidence that FDR (or anyone else alleged to be implicated in the conspiracy) actually recognized the few vital "true" bits of information pointing to the attack, much less put them together correctly. (In fact it's not clear how many of these key bits FDR himself eyeballed.) The most one can say - and I suspect the same is true of 9/11 - is that perhaps a better intelligence-sifting system could have succeeded in sorting out the wheat from the chaff a bit better, so we would not have been so surprised.
Of course, YMMV.
I suspect at the root of our intellectual problem is the general human desire to find patterns, even meaning, in existence, a desire which is unsatisfied by the possibility of happenstance playing too large a role in our fates. This predilection is of course played on by our writers and directors, especially of thrillers, who only introduce extraneous bits of information as deliberate CLUES, not as the miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam that reality actually strews on our shores. (There's an old rule in the theater: If you show a loaded gun in Act I, it must be fired by Act III.)
I've never been an intelligence analyst, but I've been a historian for long enough to know that most of the information on almost any topic is irrelevant, if not downright wrong. The answer to most questions is not to be found in the Missing Document (which everyone knows to be Vital), but in figuring out which of the thousands of documents you already have access to are actually pointing you toward the truth.
If anyone wants to argue that GWB, having commissioned a team of experts to actually study suspected bioweapons mobile labs, and then rejected their unanimous report in favor of others' pre-wrapped conclusions (which led to a desired course of actions), is in the same state of ignorance as FDR in 1941, and therefore no more culpable of misstating the actual situation, they may try - but it won't fly past any real historian, or, for that matter, any reasonable spectator.
Posted by: dr ngo | April 13, 2006 at 12:54 AM
I apologize for the double post, but my browser is playing silly buggers, and showed me only a truncated version of this message after I tried posting the first time. So I tried again, before the draft disappeared down the memory hole ...
Let me also take this opportunity to tweak the timing a little, not that anyone (except maybe Gary and LJ) will care: in referring to "the late 1930s" I should have included 1940 and 1941 (up to December 7) as well.
Posted by: dr ngo | April 13, 2006 at 12:56 AM
Returning the wuv, I agree with everything Drngo (Bond villain, or historian?; you decide) said, enough that it's worth saying twice.
I also agree that I don't specifically blame Bush and co. for not anticipating September 11th, although there's plenty of fault to be placed insofar as there's a long list of things, both structurally and specifically, that could and should have been done far better.
But none of them would have guaranteed that the right clues would have led to September 11th having been figured out in time.
New York magazine had a Big Piece the other week on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, and their popularity. That sort of thing makes me sad and angry, and it was in the back of my head when writing my previous caution, though that caution is always in the back of my head. (But, then, I believe in checking everything for myself 3 times; the only times in my life I go wrong is when I fail to follow that principle.)
Yeah, there are real conspiracies sometimes; sure; we could run through a list.
But FDR didn't engage in one regarding Pearl Harbor, and for all that I think George W. Bush has been a horrible President, I don't remotely think that he deliberately let 9/11 happen, let alone caused it to happen. Just to mention.
Now, if we want more controversial historical debate, I can defend the bombing of Dresden as a justifiable military target to prevent counter-attack on the Russians, who were only 90 miles from that rail center....
Posted by: Gary Farber | April 13, 2006 at 01:25 AM
Gary: But why I'd care how much Mike Godwin cares about it, even if he wrote at length about it, I dunno.
Gary, previously: That a lot of people who think they know what it says don't, in fact, know, really isn't Mike Godwin's fault.
If you don't care what Mike Godwin thinks about Godwin's law, that's fine... but then step up and take responsibility for the finickiness here and stop dumping it off on him. To be more specific, if you want to get pissy about what you perceive to be incorrect invocations of Godwin's law then don't invoke the specter of Mike Godwin as a proxy (especially as some kind of fatuous appeal to authority) when he a) clearly doesn't care and b) seems to have in fact intended some form of memetic mutation (viz the linked article, its apparently woeful lack of overly-pedantic exposition notwithstanding).
And fyi, I've said all I care to on the subject. Should you care, I leave the final response to you.
Posted by: Anarch | April 13, 2006 at 01:35 AM
"To be more specific, if you want to get pissy about what you perceive to be incorrect invocations of Godwin's law then don't invoke the specter of Mike Godwin as a proxy (especially as some kind of fatuous appeal to authority)"
I don't understand your reading, I'm afraid. I said in the first place that people misreading Godwin weren't his fault. I don't know how that invokes him "as a proxy" other than the fact that Godwin's Law is Godwin's Law, and that people mis-cite it all the time isn't his fault.
I take full responsibility for saying this, and thinking it, and repeating it.
Posted by: Gary Farber | April 13, 2006 at 02:29 AM
Gary, I overreacted and must have been a slightly pissy mood when I did so, but you do come across to me sometimes as being a little pedantic when you know something that others don't, and the way you phrased it (not Mike Godwin's fault) makes it sound like maybe it's the fault of all the ignorant people like me who keep making the mistake. Well, so it is, but it'd be more polite just to correct me (as two others did) and let it go at that.
Anyway, enough of that. You already apologized.
Posted by: Donald Johnson | April 13, 2006 at 01:44 PM
you do come across to me sometimes as being a little pedantic when you know something that others don't, and the way you phrased it
Over a long period of time I have concluded that Gary usually does not mean it the way it sounds to me. I try to read his posts quite literally and without adding any 'tone' to them.
Posted by: dutchmarbel | April 13, 2006 at 03:58 PM
"Over a long period of time I have concluded that Gary usually does not mean it the way it sounds to me. I try to read his posts quite literally and without adding any 'tone' to them."
Thanks. I commend that practice.
Sometimes I definitely say things in overly strong or emphatic ways, and then regret that, and then apologize.
Sometimes I cross the line into outright rude, sometimes in momentary heat, other times utterly unintentionally; again, I regret that, and try to apologize.
Many other times people simply read things into what I wrote that are in their own imagination. I don't know what to do about that.
On occasion, I actually manage to write things that don't piss people off. I call that a good minute-and-a-half.
DJ: "...the way you phrased it (not Mike Godwin's fault) makes it sound like maybe it's the fault of all the ignorant people like me who keep making the mistake."
My only intent was to be slightly arch. Sorry.
Though, to be sure, all the people who mis-state Godwin's Law should suffer horribly and then die a death that would revolt even the most innocent of adorable children, and will be remembered for a thousand generations because it was so terrible.
Did I mention that sometimes I also write in a deadpan way that gets me into trouble?
Posted by: Gary Farber | April 13, 2006 at 04:36 PM
Though, to be sure, all the people who mis-state Godwin's Law should suffer horribly and then die
You forgot the part where they (and their kids, and kidskids, etc. ) would be labelled 'Donald' to make sure we all would be aware of the kind of perpetrators they are...
I know it bothers you, and rationally I know you do not intend to insult. It still takes effort to apply the rationale when the reflexive irratation strikes, but I work on it ;).
Posted by: dutchmarbel | April 13, 2006 at 05:03 PM
"Though, to be sure, all the people who mis-state Godwin's Law should suffer horribly and then die"
"You forgot the part where they (and their kids, and kidskids, etc. ) would be labelled 'Donald' to make sure we all would be aware of the kind of perpetrators they are..."
Yikes.
Posted by: Donald Johnson | April 13, 2006 at 07:41 PM
"Yikes."
Well, maybe not. I suppose we could just let everyone off with a warning.
Posted by: Gary Farber | April 13, 2006 at 08:14 PM
"bored now"
evilvampmarbel
Posted by: dutchmarbel | April 14, 2006 at 08:57 AM
"evilvampmarbel"
Best keep an eye out for sharp woodie objects.
But until then: enjoy playing with the kitty!
Posted by: Gary Farber | April 14, 2006 at 09:17 AM