For those who were not online this afternoon to watch this unfold, I offer the following gripping narrative from the perspective of a minor player. I invite those who were more involved to chip in with their own reflections.
It's 3:30, eastern standard time. I'm sitting in my office, as I always am at this time of day. Catwoman has already started a thread in LBN about MSNBC's translation of the dreaded Osama Bin Laden tape, and I'm reading through it.
Now, understand that I normally greet the announcement of "hey, we found another tape made by Osama Bin Laden!" with the response, "Yes, and how long did it take that poor CIA lackey to cobble it together from a bunch of old Nixon White House tapes?" The 'finding' of these tapes strikes me as about as convincing as Milo Bloom's announcement that he has discovered Elvis's secret diaries in a compost heap, and that in them he wills his entire fortune to 'an obscure political organization known as the Bloom County Meadow Party." (Berkeley Breathed, why did Bloom County have to die before we REALLY needed it?) So I am initially reading the thread just to watch some folks scorn its authenticity along with me.
However, it has already become clear by the time I read the thread that this tape, by some strange mischance, does not in fact do what Powell said it was going to do. This becomes clear, in fact, at 3:26, when Librechick gleefully proclaims that the translation has just informed us that "UBL tells Iraq people to overthrow Saddam!"
And after that, the celebration, mixed with occasional disbelieving interjections of, "No shit! Did he really say that?" You can go to the thread and see just from the headers the leve of excitement:"Did he really say.." "YES!" "Wait, are they really reporting..." "YES!" URLs are posted, new threads are spawned, the downfall of the administration is predicted, one DUer gleefully announces that Powell has definitively "jumped the shark," and why, you ask, all this celebration for something that is after all not that surprising, given that as we all know Saddam Hussein is a secular leader and therefore not at the top of osama's "To Be Hugged" list?
It's simple. You can see it in those initial responses: we were all convinced that finally, FINALLY, Powell and the war media had been confronted with something that could not be spun. And for us, this was the equivalent of Dorothy's house falling of the sky and killing the Wicked Whore of the Media dead.
I follow the link to the MSNBC story, and there, tucked in amongst all the stuff about OBL calling for the Iraqi people to rise up and slay us any which way they can, is one sentence that gives us that tiny, tiny nugget of unspinnable matter which is worth its weight in gold:
"At the same time, the message also called on Iraqis to rise up and oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who is a secular leader."
One sentence. One fucking sentence out of a whole piece which otherwise was spun in the complete opposite direction, and yet, we were hailing it as if it had come to deliver us from Egypt.
Way back in the days of Clinton's first Presidential campaign, I watched his speech at the Democratic convention. When he reached the passage about us having " 'them'med ourselves to death," and went through his list of the people who had been marginalized and scapegoated for the previous, oh, 12 years, he put us on it. " 'Them' the poor, 'them' the African-American, 'them' the gays'..." As soon as we got to the "gays" part, the cameras immediately went to the audience, found all the gay and lesbian activists therein, and showed them in close-up. Many were weeping. I was choked up too. I was trying to explain to a straight friend in a letter later on why three words in a political speech got to me that way. As I said, it wasn't simply that this was the first time a presidential candidate had acknowledged our oppression like it was a BAD thing. What I said was, "We cried because it's so much more than we're used to getting...but still so much less than we need."
So, too, with the now-infamous MSNBC Sentence. It was so huge, and yet so small, at the same time, that even our celebration had the urgency of despair. But celebrate I did. I bounced around to all the different threads to read the chortling. I IMed a friend I was chatting with on AIM to explain about how Powell had the tape blow up in his face. I pasted in the URL to the MSNBC story. I complained that the headline was misleading, given the spin-busting magical powers of The Sentence. She was confused. Didn't the headline pretty much say what the rest of the story said, and didn't all that pretty much back up Powell's claims?
I went back to the GD forum. And there, in all caps, at 4:14 pm, a_random_joel explained my friend's confusion: "MSNBC SCRUBBED IT!!!!"
I followed the link again. Sure enough. The Sentence was not there.
Multiple "SCRUBBED! AAAAAGH!!!" threads erupted simultaneously. In threads that had started with "WOOHOO, Powell Just Got HIs Ass Handed To Him!" and suchlike, you could start to see the posts of people who came late to the party popping up: "Where does it say this?" "Where on this transcript does it say Osama wants Saddam killed?" And over and over people had to paste in the section of the document and explain that it had been there once, and now it was gone.
Watching this, I felt my body temperature drop right through the floor.
There was no way to recover the original version of the article; if you went back to the link the Sentence was gone. People kept trying, but it never worked. And you could start to see the tone changing to a kind of bewildered insistence: "I *did* see it just 10 minutes ago!" Soon people, including me, were exhorting each other to hound MSNBC about The Sentence. But even as I was doing that, I was starting to ask myself: Did I *really* see that sentence?
I really couldn't be sure. I thought I remembered seeing it there; but I couldn't swear that I hadn't seen it quoted in a fellow DUer's post rather than actually on the site. And of course the more I thought about it the more uncertain I became. At the same time, I *was* sure I'd seen it. I remembered reading it. At least I thought I remembered reading it. Where was I remembering reading it from--the last 30 seconds when I saw someone explaining to a late arrival what had happened? The first time it was quoted in a post? Or had I really actually seen it on the MSNBC site?
This is the part of the story that scares me the most. The mere fact that the Sentence had disappeared made me doubt my own memory of having seen it. I have a website; I know how easy it is to update a file; I 'scrub' things from my own site all the time when I revise or update or whatever. I certainly ought to know that the fact that something is not at a particular site right now doesn't mean it wasn't there 10 minutes ago. But all the same, without the written record, I still couldn't be *totally* sure that I remembered seeing the original.
You remember *1984* and the memory holes? Winston's job at the Ministry of Truth is censorship; he throws unwanted bits of information and history down "memory holes," where they are incinerated and never seen again. Later on he has an argument with another character about whether, once every single copy of a document has been consigned to the memory hole, the history contained in that document is also destroyed. If nobody remembers something, did it really happen?
And now there was no evidence. At least not on the MSNBC site.
I fired off an email to MSNBC.com anyway. Travisleit got the phone number and started exhorting people to call in. I didn't call--and again, it was because I wasn't totally sure I had seen it actually on their site.
Now unbelievably spooked--at what was going on in my head as well as what was going on on the Web and in the world--I developed a serious "refresh" tic. Finally, after refreshing the GD Forum board again, I saw announced in glorious capitals with many beautiful exclamation marks the fact that matcom had saved a screen capture of the original version. I opened the thread. And by God, there it was, just as I had seen it.
I swear I wanted to cry.
This is where things stand with me now. My own President could go on TV and tell me water is wet and I would not believe a word of it. Ditto for Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, Scott Simon, Cokie Roberts, even Peter Jennings for whom I have always had a soft spot. But seeing a post by some one or some thing named matcom, who I have never met in real life and would not know if I ran into on the street, posts an image of the thing that I cannot be totally sure that I remember having seen, and I know he's seen it too, and what's more he can prove it, I am just about ready to weep with gratitude.
The world is a strange place, and this part of it is getting stranger every minute.
*NOW* I'm ready to call MSNBC, those fuckers. But lo, other DUers have been before me, and behold, they have done miracles. Travisleit has got someone on the phone saying it was a "translation error and is being reviewed." Liberchick has talked to their Arabic translator and has an explanation: this 'error' does not substantially change the sense of The Sentence but the threat may not have been stated quite as baldly as in the original version. Further down the thread, someone reports that the person he talked to said they were "inundated with calls." Later on, another poster describes the good people of MSNBC.com as "TESTY!"
So they're annoyed. Good. They're feeling hounded. Good. They're defensive. Fabulous. They feel that they are being bombarded with hostile messages from every side, too many and too fast for them to deal with all at once. Excellent. WELCOME TO OUR WORLD! How do you like it, punk?
Finally, an amended version goes up on the web. In it, The Sentence is softened and reduced to a clause: "While Bin Ladin did refer to Saddam as an 'infidel,' he also called for the people of Iraq to eat our babies and burn them in their beds yada yada yada." A parenthesis afterwards notes that an earlier, "extemporaneous translation" reported that Bin Ladin had called for Hussein's ouster.
It ain't much. But it's something. It's something important, too.
What did I learn from this? Well, some things that are depressing:
1) There is nothing--NOTHING--that cannot be spun. All the networks are presenting this tape as proof of the SH-OBL link, despite our efforts to reinstate The Clause.
2) The media really are leagued against us. How conscious this is on their part I do not know. The "translation error" thesis is not, on its face, totally implausible; slapping shit up before you've verified it is what 24-hour cable news coverage is all about. All the same, I still feel that chill just remembering those two hours.
But, then, I already knew that, really. Here are the new things I learned that are actually hopeful.
1) Next time, I will trust my own goddamn memory.
2) "The media" is not a faceless totalitarian mass. There are actually people who write these stories and put them up. They can be reached by telephone. They can be badgered. They can be made to feel shame. Well, not shame, maybe; but at least discomfort. And it is important for us to take every possible opportunity to do that whenever something like this happens.
3) MSNBC knows we're watching. They also know, now, that they cannot scrub stuff this important and get away with it. Whether or not this was a deliberate scrub or a "translation error," they've gotten an important lesson today: We watch, we read, and we remember. And because we remember, they cannot make this not have happened.
4) I am very lucky to have you guys, and I deeply, deeply appreciate it. Everything from matcom's sanity-bolstering screen capture to Elementary Penguin's anguished, froth-generating rantings about how "THEY CANNOT DO THIS!!!" to Catwoman's running commentary on the original thread...it was all crucial, it all helped, and it all mattered. Thank you all for being there, and for pulling off what I will now call:
OPERATION JUST CLAUSE.
Thank you and goodnight,
The Plaid Adder
Wanna see last week's critique? Go here.
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