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Was Revisionist History Something for the former U.S.S.R., or the U.S.A. in the 2010s?

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Former Bush strategist Karl Rove, on MSNBC last week:

It [was] a worldwide consensus. You can go back and try and rewrite history, but at that moment we as a nation were faced with the belief that [Iraq] had WMD.

The show’s host, Matt Lauer, did not act simply as a promotional talking parrot for all of Rove’s revisionism. Thus, the extreme far right “Media Research Center” described Lauer as having “assaulted” Rove. That is, pointing out discrepancies between specious claims and the facts, as a journalist actually asking questions, is, according to the Media Research Center “an assault.” Here’s the claim, and the actual interview.

Regarding Rove’s claim: One of the main reasons why 3 out of the 5 permanent members of the U.N. Security Council explicitly voted no on authorization to use military force for the enforcement of U.N. Resolutions regarding potential Iraq WMDs, was because of the belief that Iraq may not in fact possess WMD’s.  In other words, no “world wide consensus,” as Rove asserts.

Just prior to the October 9, 2002 Senate Vote on the U.S. Resolution authorizing the use of force to rid Iraq of WMDs, Senator John Kerry said on the floor of the Senate:

“In order to force inspections, you need the [real] threat of force.”Kerry, then, verbatim, again just before said vote, clearly stated: “Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the President is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of WMDs, if we can not [achieve this through] ….inspections in joint concert with our allies.”

Prior to Kerry’s speech, it had been four years since weapons inspectors had been in Iraq. Moreover, inspections prior to that had for years been considered non probative because with no real threat of force Iraq had not cooperated. As a result, almost every single intelligence agency report noted that our beliefs about Iraq WMDs were assumptions rendered “in the absence of credible data.”

After Kerry argued that the resolution was necessary in order to force legitimate inspections, weapons inspectors, on November 27, 2002 went back in Iraq and were able to conduct real, viable inspections, for the first time in numerous years. And as reported (albeit very meekly) in both the Washington Post and the NY Times, inspectors were not finding anything, and were unequivocally saying to “wait” and let them finish their jobs.

There was some skepticism even before the inspectors went back in. England’s leading newspaper, the Guardian, reported three days after the October 9, 2002 Senate vote on the U.S. resolution that Soviet President Vladimir Putin, for instance, “rejected Anglo-American claims that Saddam Hussein already possesses weapons of mass destruction and told Tony Blair [the day before] that the best way to resolve the conflict of evidence is not war, but the return of UN inspectors to Iraq.” Putin:

Fears are one thing, hard facts are another.

Some inspectors, who had the best angle on this information, claimed after going back to Iraq that the Bush Administration was not sharing its alleged “intelligence information” on Iraq with the very people charged with finding proof of it.  For example, as the conservative London Times reported on December 6, 2002, Demetrius Perrico (who later succeeded Hans Blix as head of the U.N. Inspection Commission), frustrated at not finding anything after more than a week in Iraq and lack of Bush Administration “information,” stated:

What we’re getting and what President Bush may be getting is very different, to put it mildly.

On the most hyped up charges, there was even more doubt:

In a December 8, 2002 aired interview with Bob Simon of CBS’s 60 Minutes, physicist David Albright, a leading weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s, had the following exchange with Simon:

SIMON: It seems that what you’re suggesting is that the administration’s leak to the New York Times, regarding aluminum tubes, was misleading?
ALBRIGHT: Oh, I think it was. I think — I think it was very misleading.
SIMON: So basically what you’re saying is that whatever nugget of information comes across, the Bush administration puts it in a box labeled ‘nuclear threat,’ whereas it could go many other places.
ALBRIGHT: That’s how it looked, and that they were selectively picking information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent than it is, and in essence, scare people.

And as Joby Warrick reported in a January 23, 2003 front page Washington Post story:

Moreover, there were clues from the beginning that should have raised doubts about claims that the tubes were part of a secret Iraqi nuclear weapons program, according to U.S. and international experts on uranium enrichment.

By the time of the last inspection report in early March, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency reported to the Security Council that there was no evidence encountered of renewed nuclear programs or that Iraq had attempted to import Uranium since 1990, while again noting “inspections in Iraq are moving forward.”

Once inspectors were back in Iraq and with the credible threat of force backing up their actions were allowed to do their job for the first time in many years, the results were little short of remarkable in contrast with the almost old Soviet style revisionism being played out now (and that for the most part the media has mildly enabled, never covering the issue properly (see second half of this letter to Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald on the characterization and history of the run up to the Iraq war, for example), by far right wing elements in America.  Inspectors simply were not finding evidence of any relevant WMDs, and were repeatedly saying “wait” on any military action and to let them finish their jobs.

On February 20, 2003, in a followup to Perricos’ claim that the Bush administration was asserting one thing and repeatedly sharing another, CBS reported that:

So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they’ve been getting as “garbage after garbage after garbage.” [In fact, the CBS article notes that the source used another, cruder word, in addition to "garbage."]

The CBS story also reported that while only the votes of the 5 permanent members of the Security Council matter (3 of whom ultimately voted against authorization on precisely these grounds), that a “majority of the 15 council members are opposed to war at least until U.N. weapons inspectors report in mid-March.”  (After the March 7 report, — the last of five reports to the UN Security Council between December 19 and the initiation of military action — which offered nothing new in the way of new information or evidence of relevant weapons programs and noted the need to continue the process, the status did not change.)

On March 16, 3 days before the U.S. under the Bush Administration initiated military action, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reported:

…..Senior intelligence analysts say they feel caught between the demands from White House, Pentagon and other government policymakers for intelligence that would make the administration’s case “and what they say is a lack of hard facts,” one official said. …

As Hans Blix, the head of the Inspections team in Iraq, later noted:

In January 2003, we had performed quite a lot of inspections to sites which were given by intelligence and they had not shown any weapons of mass destruction, so we began to be doubtful. And among the 700 inspections that we performed, none brought us any evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

Weapons inspectors who are criticizing U.S. leads as “garbage,” who are repeatedly saying to “wait,” who are stating that while they can not be certain of everything yet they can not find much of significance to support the claim of WMD programs, multiple member contries of the U.N. Security Council who were skeptical, including three of five members who voted no against military action to enforce resolution 1441 (which had passed by a 15-0 vote) on the grounds that it was not clear that Iraq even had WMD’s, hardly sounds like a “worldwide” consensus.

After botching the real story — including most notably that of falsely alleged John “Iraq flip flopping” Kerry for years (again, see second half here); is the main stream media going to stand by now and allow leading national spin that approaches pure pre-Soviet collapse revisionism right here in our own country?

Frank Rich, in Saturday’s New York Times, comments on the dismal state of affairs that has far right wing elements now trying to literally rewrite American history based upon not upon the facts, but upon pure, unadulterated and highly misleading political spin and propaganda:

Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office.

For more on how militant Keep America Safe is, consider their ad impugning Department of Justice officials as terrorist sympathizers, only one step removed from the wacky, radical theories of years yore that accused the Bush Administration of knowing about, if not being complicit in, the 9-11 attacks before hand. Obama Green Jobs advisor Van Jones was forced to resign from office for allegedly signing a petition (that he later disavowed) that was not nearly so radical as that.

Also consider the false propaganda like argument that the incoming administration was without blame with respect to the the events of September 11, 2001, while the prior administration (along with their top counter terrorism expert holdover — which severely and repeatedly tried to warn the new, incoming administration about the threat (to, of course, repeatedly deaf ears), bears of course all the responsibility. But the reality is:

September 11 did not come out of the blue, but came less a year after the bombing of the USS Cole killing 17 America Sailors; less than 10 months after the outgoing National Security Advisor personally met with incoming NSA head Condi Rice to tell her that the Bush Administration would be spending “more time specifically…on al-Qaeda, than any other subject;” less than eight months after Richard Clarke urgently requested a principals level meeting to discuss the al-Qaeda threat (which never met, despite subsequent requests); less than two months after a President’s Daily Brief warning of the severe and growing threat of Al-Qaeda; and less than eight months after Paul Bremer (later Bush’s Ambassador to Iraq) actually warned:

The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there’s a major incident and then suddenly say, ‘Oh, my God, shouldn’t we be organized to deal with this?

In fact, not only did September 11 not come “out of the blue,” it came on the heels of an absolutely startling record of issue avoidance and lack of relevant awareness.

Rich suggests; “the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless,” and correctly concludes, “History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.”

Whatever one thinks about the multitude of strategic international decisions and statements by the Bush Administration, one thing is certain. Just as “secrecy, and a free, democratic government don’t mix,” as former President Harry Truman once put it, abject revisionism history, and free democracies, ultimately don’t either.

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Media’s Deep Freeze in Headline Accuracy II — Foments Further Anti Science Info Passed of as “News”

Sunday, March 7th, 2010
March 7, 2010

The New York times might well be America’s Leading Newspaper. Yet last month, The Times ran an otherwise passable piece on climate change that had a sensationalistic and highly misleading headline about the “deep freeze” we were ostensibly in, and that played into the false balance idea that scientific analyses over climate patterns and mocking anti science skepticism are almost two sides to a reasonable “discussion.”

Such skepticism — a healthy attribute in science in general — is on the issue of climate change routinely based upon ideological belief and yet offered up as ostensible “science.”

Precipitation is not temperature.  (Moreover, in 2009 the U.S. Global Change Research Program predicted the possibility of increased precipitation in the Eastern U.S. as part of the climate change phenomenon.)

And one region over a short term period relative to long term global trends, given inherent weather variability, is about as relevant as what the temperature is at 3:00 p.m. v. 2:35 p.m. on a mid October day in terms of determining if we are moving into winter or summer.

Yet sites that veer into anti science –or simply exhibit great misunderstanding of the subject matter — continue to play upon common misperceptions on the basic science and argue that unusually large snowstorms mean that the phenomenon of climate change is less likely.

As other sites have pointed out, here for example is the far right wing site Newsbusters on the recent Washington, D.C. snowstorm:

With Washington, D.C. buried beneath at least 20 inches of snow, and with more in the forecast, common sense would suggest global warming alarmists look elsewhere to make the argument to raise awareness for their concerns.

But no, Dylan Ratigan thinks it’s ridiculous to suggest all the snowfall totals could cast doubt on the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Such sound bites as these are easy to assert yet reflect an almost complete misunderstanding of the subject matter, and tend to greatly further misinformation on the subject matter.

As a further example of how this process of misinformation takes place, and just how prevalent it is, consider what happened when the very next day after the misleading NY Times article appeared, Britain’s leading Newspaper ran the following highly misleading headline:

Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels.

This headline implies that the claim of sea level rise was being withdrawn. In fact, what was being withdrawn was a very specific paper on the conservative end of such claims.

The real problems with such headlines is that they are then often mistakenly used by “climate change” skepticism sites and so called experts, most of whom are actually expert at passing off erroneous and misleading information as logical and scientifically based, and adding to the level of confusion, misunderstanding, and false assertions on the topic.

The Wonk Room at the liberal leaning site Think Progress, with little partisan spin, does an excellent job of powerfully illustrating how this climate headline and paper retraction report was in turn, and immediately, used by numerous ideological sites to further misinformation on the subject of climate change.

If all one read was the introduction, a reader might get the false impression that sea level rise from global warming is in doubt. The misleading Guardian headline was picked up — as per usual — by the Drudge Report and Marc Morano’s conspiracy site Climate Depot. Right-wing bloggers, unsurprisingly, latched on to the headline without any comprehension of the story:

Betsy Newmark: Another global warming claim that has had to be retracted because of problems with the data.

Sammy Benoit: OOPS Never-mind! Climate scientists withdraw IPCC-related article claiming sea is rising.

JammieWearingFool: Another global warming myth comes crashing down. No warming since at least 1995, no melting glaciers and now no rising sea levels.

Jules Crittenden: Warmal scientists are compelled to admit (again) that they don’t know what they’re talking about, retract study that predicted up to a nearly three-foot sea level rise by 2100.

Law professor William A. Jacobson: But now the seas are not going to rise? My dream of a waterfront home is melting away faster than the glaciers.

Caleb Howe: Yet another card removed from the geodesic dome of cards that is AGW hysteria.

Joe Romm from Climate Progress — a much heralded site which has its ups and downs but which is generally very informative and painstakingly researched — aptly, if generously, summarizes the phenonemon here:

Another dreadful media headline, another round of anti-science confusion.

Some of it may be confusion.  But some of it also clearly appears to be ideological blindness and or desire driving the multiple analyses and efforts to seek out belief reinforcing mistakes.

The Guardian article itself notes in the very first sentence:

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the finding

But the article then goes on to note in the very next few paragraphs that the paper that was retracted was used to support the IPCC estimates for sea level rise — estimates that as the paper also notes, many scientists have criticized as far too conservative.

As the Wonk Room further notes:

However, the retraction instead admits that the paper’s calculations for an upper bound to future sea level rise were incorrect, and sea level rise could be much worse. [The] study used paleoclimate reconstructions to predict that sea level rise from global warming would be constrained to between 7 cm and 82 cm (3 to 32 in) by the end of the century, in line with the estimated sea level rise in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which excluded possible effects from ice sheets.

…The best scientific estimates of future sea level rise continue to worsen, as it becomes evident that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass much more rapidly than estimated before 2007. December’s “Global sea level linked to global temperature,” published…in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences projects a catastrophic rise of 0.75 to 1.9 m (2.5 to 6 feet) by 2100:

In other words, estimates of sea level rise were based upon numerous studies and projections, not upon this one study, which was notable only in that it tended to support the earlier IPCC sea level estimates, which had been criticized for having been too low.   The retraction of this report only further supported critiques of the IPCC estimates as too low; quite the opposite of what the seeming anti climate science crowd crowed about –believing, or falsely implying, that it undermined the idea of and support for projected sea level rises.

The retracted study appeared in the Journal Nature GeoScience in July of 2009. In a post written seven months earlier, in December, 2008, entitled US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections, Romm notes:

A major new report warns that on our current emissions path, we face the severe risk of abrupt climate change impacts. The basic conclusions themselves are nothing new — see “Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100” and “Australia faces the “permanent dry” — as do we.”

But what is stunning is that these warnings come from the United States Geological Survey —the Bush Administration (!). This new science-based report, Abrupt Climate Change, is thus a sobering book-end to the fantasy-based talking points released by the Administration today on how the President has “Taken Constructive Steps To Confront Climate Change.”

This is a first-rate report from the USGS’s Climate Change Science Program. I highly recommend reading, Chapter 2, “Rapid Changes in Glaciers and Ice Sheets and their Impacts on Sea Level,” and Chapter 3, “Hydrological Variability and Change.” The chapters are much more readable than the IPCC reports, and the two together will make anyone an expert on what are perhaps the two most dangerous climate impacts that threaten this country.

The sea level rise conclusion, “based on an assessment of the published scientific literature” is:

Recent rapid changes at the edges of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show acceleration of flow and thinning, with the velocity of some glaciers increasing more than twofold. Glacier accelerations causing this imbalance have been related to enhanced surface meltwater production penetrating to the bed to lubricate glacier motion, and to ice-shelf removal, ice-front retreat, and glacier ungrounding that reduce resistance to flow. The present generation of models does not capture these processes. It is unclear whether this imbalance is a short-term natural adjustment or a response to recent climate change, but processes causing accelerations are enabled by warming, so these adjustments will very likely become more frequent in a warmer climate.

For the record, our prediction is that narrow range estimates are valuable in so far as predicting expected general direction, but of very limited worth as exercises in precision. The guestimation here is that save for noting the fact that sea levels are likely to rise. Assuming a slow to moderate anthropomorphic response to the challenge, sea levels will rise between 3 to 20 feet over the next 100 years, and more likely, between 6 and 18 feet. This does not mean it can’t rise more (or less, although less than this is very unlikely). And this takes into broader account more of the uncertainties inherent in speculating such a complex, futuristic phenomenon, as well as some of the potential feedback effects from increasingly decreasing surface albedo, increasingly energy (and carbon dioxide) absorbing ocean systems, and potential increases in both wildfires and terrestrial permafrost melting, among other phenomena.) But the eventual 100 year results could still very reasonably be outside of even these much broader ranges.  (Although, barring a complete reversal of ocean patterns that shut off the flow sub tropical warm waters northward along with other factors, results outside of the lower end seem exceedingly unlikely.)

Note that said “slow to moderate” response will be almost inconsequential to the problem. This will likely lead at some point in the future, well after the causes of these changes will have implemented, to potentially radical responses when anti science furor and complacency switches over to panic. It is hard to predict just when such a similarly unproductive shift will occur, as climate is a slow acting phenomenon as well as a long term trend with excessive shorter term variability which tends to mask our ability to accurately assess precisely what is going on, from shorter term data. Further complicating the picture here is the fact that potential masking inherent variability aside, there is an enormous lag time (several decades if not more) between cause and effect regarding the full impact of climate change, so that if we constrain ourselves to acting upon what is thus observable and provable, we will always be many decades behind the curve: In other words, acting to remedy a created problem that will have been greatly exacerbated via anthropogenic forcing input not yet reflected by then current observations.

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Media’s Deep Freeze in Headline Accuracy

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
March 03, 2010

Apparently  sensational headlines trump accuracy, for the gray lady now too.  NY Times Headline, February 10, 2010:

Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze

What deep freeze? Times Reporter John Broder writes:

As millions of people along the East Coast hole up in their snowbound homes, the two sides in the climate-change debate are seizing on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments.

Oh.  That Deep freeze.  The one where temperatures (but for possibly a few days) were, essentially, within normal ranges.  And where, a bit to the West and north in Vancouver where the winter Olympics were being held, the record for the warmest monthly January average was broken by a full 1.6 degrees, and was a whopping full 7 degrees above the historic average January Temperature for the area.

As the Washington Post reported in February:

Before the massive snow-hauling began last week, the freestyle skiing course that will feature gold medal competition in moguls on Saturday sported little more than grass and mud, giving a double meaning to Vancouver’s environmentally conscious effort to put on the greenest Games in history.

As Joe Romm of Climate Progress points out, January temperatures across the continental U.S. were mildly above average. And the year that had just ended,was tied, according to NASA, for the second warmest year on record.

To get a sense of just how irrelevant and variable shorter term data is, and as a random example of potentially how variable it seems to be becoming, consider that temperatures in the U.S. in December, 2009, were 3.2 degrees colder than the long term average, whereas the month earlier, November, they were a whopping four degrees warmer than the 20th century average.   These are not daily temperatures, but the monthly average, for the entire contiguous United States, and represent wildly fluctuating patterns.

As for February, complete temperature data has not yet been compiled; but preliminary data indicates that February was not radically different, temperature wise, from January.

What February did see is a lot of precipitation, which if the temperature is around or below 32 degrees, will usually fall as snow. Temperature data is what it is — whether we have snow or rain is irrelevant to ascertaining whether it is “hot” or “cold” since we have thermometers.  So what matters as to whether we are in a “deep freeze” or not is temperatures,which again were wildly warm for November, unusually cold for December, a bit warmer than average for January, and somewhat normal for February. (Although if the Times headline was referring, more relevantly, to global patterns, we are in the midst not of a deep freeze, but an extremely warm winter.)

Periods of increased precipitation are also fully consistent with the phenomenon commonly referred to as “climate change;” as one of the underlying expectations for decades has been for a potential increase in unpredictable, volatile, and variable weather patterns. The United States Global Change Research Program, for whatever is it worth, constitutes the official U.S. word on climate change. In its detailed U.S. Climate Impacts report last year (as Broder, in his article, does finally get around to pointing out near the bottom), increased rain and snow, whether correctly or incorrectly, was predicted for the Northeastern United States. Heavy snow fall in the mid to northern Eastern Regions of the United States, amidst a broader period of both above average — as well has highly variable and unpredictable temperatures, is not even remotely inconsistent with any reasonably scientific assessment given on climate change, and if anything only serves as further, if statistically of limited value, evidence of precisely these types of increasing trends.

Yet anti science types — whether driven by misunderstanding, ideological zealotry, or both — jumped all over the snow as a chance to mock climate change, as Broder’s article went to great lengths to point out.

What Broder’s article did not go to great lengths to point out is how wildly misinformed as well as scientifically specious this is. Instead, several times in the article, he plays into elementary school remedial science class nonsense as if it were part of some legitimate debate; as for example, among other instances, when he writes:

As the first blizzard howled last weekend, the Virginia Republican Party put up an advertisement on the Web — titled “12 Inches of Global Warming” — criticizing two Virginia Democrats, Representatives Rick Boucher and Tom Perriello, who voted for the federal cap-and-trade legislation last year. The advertisement urges voters to call Mr. Boucher and Mr. Perriello to ask if they will help with the shoveling.

To be fair, Broder does slightly shift into offering up some explanation of some of these things, under the guise of “scientist say;” and the article, wildly misleading and sensational headline aside, is ultimately mildly informative.  But it also plays into the seeming reasonableness of the debate, instead of serving to illuminate the abject misinformation and wild misunderstanding (or, again, speciousness) which it is reflective of — and which is the far more relevant story here.  And in such, does very little to serve to correct it, rather than simply serve as a stenographic parrot for it all.

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