Dona: Iraq Veterans Against the War held their Winter Soldier event. We covered it last week and Ava and C.I. cover it again this week in their TV commentary. That's really going to be it. The original plan was that this week we'd do an article on resistance based on the testimonies at Winter Soldier rounded out with other details. We had two other features as possibilities. Those features, all of them, were killed. If you read a feature posted here, it's done by The Third Estate Sunday Review. Whether it's Ava and C.I. doing a TV commentary or anything else, it's done by this site. We did not appreciate it when The Nation magazine elected to go around this site by rushing off to C.I. and we do not appreciate the fact that people participating here last week, the same ones participated this week, received private lobbying by one person. If you have a beef with the site -- not that I personally care that you have a beef -- you bring it up to this site. You don't start e-mailing others participating to attempt to lobby them. Last week's edition, 03/16 - 03/23, featured 13 pieces. Ten of them noted Winter Soldier. Some of the ten were strictly about Winter Soldier. But all noted it. "Negative Critisicm of Winter Soldiers Investigation" resulted in one person attempting to privately lobby people who participated in that feature. We do not accept that, we didn't when The Nation ran to C.I. to 'tattle' on us. In that article, we noted that sexual attraction is not the same as sexual assault and, we could have stated more clearly, that any fool who thinks it is really needs help. We were kinder than we wanted to be because C.I. was urging niceness. Despite that and despite the fact that we appear to be one of the only ones to address the very serious issue of "Veterans Healthcare," one little idiot wanted to e-mail a private lobbying campaign and an offensive one where she insisted to women participating that the comments in it weren't very feminist and questioned their committment to feminism. Sexual attraction is not sexual assault. I don't know how to make that any clearer to you, you stupid, stupid, stupid twit. We were offended for many reasons including the veterans healthcare article results in no comment from the twit -- and again, we were one of the few to cover the issue and we were certainly the only ones to tie it into Congress. But as a general rule, when you go try to lobby people about things that appeared here, we shut off any coverage because we find it offensive. Other people began getting e-mails on Tuesday. Had we seen an e-mail here, we didn't, it may have gone straight to spam, we wouldn't have seen it prior to Tuesday morning. We rarely check the e-mails here on Monday when we're still tired and living our lives. Tuesday is generally the first time anyone dives into the e-mails. There are usually at least a thousand waiting on Tuesday and there is no rush to the top of the list. Ty, Jim or myself will read from the most recent. We do that on our time. Since we were all in Boston on Monday, we didn't even get back home until mid-day Tuesday and, no, no one had checked Tuesday morning. But already someone was e-mailing other sites to lobby. That's offensive. We never got your dumb ass e-mail to begin with but there was no reason to e-mail anyone else involved with anything other than "Could you pass this on Third, I'm not sure they got it." Instead, a lobbying effort took place and we do not support that, we think it's cowardly and I'm offended that, among the ones dragged in apparently was C.I. I'm offended because I'm one of the ones working the public account of The Common Ills. That's me, that Jess, that's Ava, that's Eli, that's Martha and Shirley and now Heather as well as C.I. That's because there are so many e-mails coming into the public account. No one needs to clog up that account with anything not related to Iraq or to what has gone up at The Common Ills. If that's not clear to you, it's because you're an idiot. There was never any reason to clog up The Common Ills public account with your lobbying efforts about a piece that ran here. It is noted, nearly every week in Jim's note, that Ty is checking the e-mails Sunday morning as things go up and that we won't be checking again until Tuesday at the earliest. Had your e-mail been received -- it never was -- it would not have been the only one to arrive nor do you have some special rank that allows you to jump ahead of anyone. We don't even make a point to start with our longterm readers. That's something Jim, Ty and I discussed this week as a result of the twit. We have decided that starting this week, we will scan the first 25 displayed before opening any and longterm readers will be read first. Prior to that decision, we read them from the top, which was the most recent. You seem to have a strong sense of entitlement and, funny, checking our weekly credits for this site, I don't see your name on it. If you don't like what we write, get over it. I think Jess wanted to speak on this.
Jess: In the words of Paul Kantner, "F--k you, we do what we want." Ty and I added a note to that piece which points out what should be obvious to even the most challenged visitor, "The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Cher: 'If you can dig it then I'm happy and if you can't then I'm sorry.' We're not really sorry, we just wanted a 'dig it' quote. Don't like it? There are millions of sites online -- move along, you're blocking the view." That's displayed at the top of the site, at the top of any feature you read at the site. You didn't commission us to write an article, you didn't pay us to write an article. If your beef was just taken to this site, we'd address it or ignore it as we saw fit but we are damn sick of people lobbying others about what we write here.
Ty: I just want to add, as co-author of that note at the end of the article that Jess and I added Friday, that the panel was offensive to me as a gay man. Marcia's noted that at her site, she and I were both offended as gay people. We could have gone on at length about that. And maybe we should have? But what we wrote is what we wrote. Don't like it? Oh well, as Cedric says. We saw the damage article control article on that Sunday evening and laughed at it when we noted how little of that article came from the panel. That's because the panel offered so little that even a 'friendly' couldn't be counted on to focus on it. The idea that IVAW members who complained to C.I. about that article would want to talk to you is laughable and they don't want to talk to you but how dare you ever write any outlet and expect them to give you a hook up? They know you. If they wanted to talk to you they would. And how dare you include that in your lobbying to other sites. Did you really think, for example, that Mike's going to say, "Okay, here are the names . . ."? My belief will always be that you went lobbying to other sites to find out the names of who complained and though I am not planning to ever work as a paid journalist, I do have a degree in that and I find that extremely offensive. Sources are confidential unless they choose not to be. How dare you attempt to find out their names by lobbying individuals who participated in the writing of that article. Not only did you run tattleing to other people with your insulting e-mail, you also then expected others to tattle back to you.
Jim: Is there anything anyone else wants to say on this topic?
Betty: I meant to check my e-mail when I heard about the lobbying effort but never got around to it. I've got a full time job, three kids that I'm raising by myself and limited time. I'm not going to be anyone's penpal. But had I seen such an effort in my inbox my response would have been blistering. And I will note again that Winter Soldier was not supposed to be about endorsing political candidates. I will note I didn't hear anything like that on any other panel. I will further note that the rules for every other panel were if you weren't a civilian, you served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. That panel didn't follow the rules and I could go on at length about it. I brought it up in a roundtable we did and you can blame me for getting the ball rolling on the story but it was only when we were working on other things and calls came in from IVAW members bothered by and, yes, offended by the panel that we decided we would write about it. Even in the article labeled clearly as "negative criticism," we still stressed some positives. But we don't write for you. And the minute we start being dishonest to try to please others, we really have nothing left to say of any value.
Jim: C.I., Ruth and Kat continued to cover Winter Soldier last week after the e-mails became news. The rest pretty much stopped. Everyone was soured on it due to that lobbying effort which we saw as sneaky and underhanded.
Cedric: Well, Wally and I posted a video in our posts on Friday morning. But, it did become a huge problem and it's really hard to get excited about covering something when all the coverage -- community wide -- of it is not even acknowledged by some idiot who wants to show and whine over one article. Dona's statement of "we were the only one" is worded that way because there may be other articles but we didn't see them and we were looking. We saw no other article at all that addressed the healthcare issue as an important issue. What we saw were the same stories over and over about abuses in Iraq. Adrienne Kinee's revelation about the decision by the VA not to screen for traumatic brain injury should have been a HUGE focus and I didn't even catch Amy Goodman's coverage emphasising that. It certainly didn't result from any of "The life is grand, I listened on my radio and watched on my satellite TV" b.s. columns. I think it was Marcia, and maybe Ruth, Mike as well that blogged that the article was the thing they were proudest of writing ever. And that was before the week continued and we found that no one else was covering it. So it is offensive that some idiot wants to argue that sexual attraction is sexual assault in an e-mail campaign and can't even bother to note, while arguing with us, "Hey, that's a good article on veterans healthcare." I mean, I was proud of it. And I'll toss to Wally because he was one of the ones advocating that article.
Wally: C.I., Elaine, Mike and I have been arguing for that article repeatedly and if Winter Soldier hadn't included a panel on healthcare, it might not have gotten written. In terms of importance, that was the most important panel, the one that needed to be covered, because all the stories are important, the testimonies on the panels by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but in terms of what Americans can do right now it is healthcare. Congress isn't going to end the war this year. Press them, I know I call my senators' offices and my rep's office, but realistically, it's not happening in the middle of an election year. The testimonies about a wife miscarrying and being denied healthcare, being denied an ambulance, the testimonies about the refusal to screen for TBI because they didn't want to pay out benefits, are things that can have immediate results. The same Congressional crowd that won't end the illegal war wants to be seen as caring about the troops. This was the one area that the peace movement could have focused on and the media as well and brought about change, especially because this is an election year. And as C.I. has repeatedly pointed out, if it's not dealt with before the illegal war's over, it's not going to be dealt with seriously. While the illegal war continues, people care. 2016, if the war's over, the attitude's going to be, "I'm so tired of talking about Iraq!" It happened to the Vietnam veterans and they still have to fight for the benefits they are owed. So that was an important article and it was an important panel.
Rebecca: The e-mail I read took offense to "wet panty response." Grow up. A woman gets up and tells a bulls--t story about going to an adult night club and seeing a man in a recruiters t-shirt and likening that visual to a sexual assault it just being stupid. The same woman repeatedly stressing that he's her "type" and that he's a "big, strong man" is expressing a hormonal response she had. Repeatedly. It was embarrassing to have that passed off as sexual assault. And wet or damp panty response describes it perfectly. You may not like the word choice, but you remembered it.
Marcia: When Elaine wrote about it, she noted something C.I. had said and that must have been outside of the writing of the piece.
Elaine: It was. C.I. said it while the hearing was being broadcast and while C.I. was between phone calls.
Marcia: Okay, well the comment was that the testimony in that case was like the spoken raps between songs on The MisEducation of Lauryn Hill and that really is the perfect analogy. It wasn't about assault in most cases or harassment in most cases -- it was, "Hey, girls, you think you know about love, l-o-v-e, but I'm going to tell you about love." Between providing time to a witness to declare he was gay and never had any problems with homophobia -- so why are you on the panel -- and between offering dissections of "third world" drivers, it was not about homophobia or sexual assault or, for that matter, gender. I don't remember who came up with damp panty response, it may have been Rebecca --
Rebecca: I wish it was me.
Marcia: But whoever it was, I agreed with it instantly. And unlike the message KPFA chose to distill from that panel, that sexual assault begins at recruitment which was from the speech about sexual attraction passed off as sexual assault, I thought it was hilarious. Long before I started my site, I was a community member who read C.I. and this site and Rebecca and the others as they emerged. It's exactly that sort of observation that kept me coming back. You don't like it, then you're not the intended audience, go away. You don't like the way things are written here, find another site to read.
Elaine: Obviously sexual attraction is not sexual assault. One of the motivating factors of human kind is desire. When you pass off your attraction to someone else, attraction that is never acted on, as a sexual assault, you're offensive to the actual victims of sexual assault. I remember a psych conference in the 80s when a man was trying to explain that he was "raped of" some belief and the therapists, male and female, who worked with sexual assault victims being outraged by that usage and comparison. As one of those lobbied by e-mail, let me be very clear here that I've had many patients who were the victims of sexual assault and I will never be silent when anyone tries to convey that a sexual attraction is the same thing as a sexual assault. That is offensive. Offensive, uninformed and uneducated.
Jim: Listeners will enjoy the deadly finality in Elaine's voice on that. Ruth had wanted to share a positive note.
Ruth: I just wanted to point out that there were so many testimonies and, even if you listened the whole weekend live, you would have to go to the bathroom or answer the phone or fix something to eat or whatever. I missed Dahlai Wasfi's testimony live. Kat wrote about it during last week ("Dahlai Wasfi: Rock Star") and I caught it yesterday. Dr. Wasfi was well worth hearing. I think there were probably others like that, others that I missed and I know our plan was to focus on those but I do understand why everyone felt a sour taste in their mouths over the lobbying campaign.
Mike: Well, I mean, we're not going to play along with that crap. We haven't let the right-wing intimidate us from day one. When others have come along from the corporate peace movement left, we haven't let them intimidate us. The first person I called, when I read the e-mail, was Jim and his attitude was very clear: We're not going to be pushed around. And we're not going to be. Not by the right, not by the left, not by the PTA or the CIA. Like Betty was pointing out, the moment we start censoring ourselves, we're useless. We're one more section of an echo chamber. I've got people who read me just cause they disagree with what I say. That's cool. A few years ago, I wouldn't have thought so. But one thing I've learned over the last few years is you can find out a lot about who you are by what you agree with and what you disagree with. And look at the disgusting left today, all on the same page with Obama. Is that what I want to be? One more voice in the choir? Forget that it would be lying, do I really want to use my time to type up the same chorus lines? No. I have no interest in that not only because it's dishonest but also because what's really the point? On your best day, you can write something that makes a difference to someone, maybe someones, but at least someone. And you're never going to do that if you're grabbing a script to write from. You either tell your truth or you don't and if you don't, people will catch on and stop reading.
Jess: It is an issue of speaking your truth and the lobbying effort trying to divide the group, all of us, who wrote that by pinning it on "one blogger" was offensive. That piece was written by all of us and all of us are not "bloggers." This is an online magazine, it says so at the top. At his site, Mike's a blogger. When he's working here, he's a contributor to a magazine. The e-mails were offensive for many reasons but how about you try to get your facts right before you write? How about you start out there?
Marcia: I don't think C.I. plans to speak in this, because I was teasing beforehand, "Don't speak! Obama will steal your words again!" But I am ticked off about that. But to be clear, The Common Ills was ground central for the Winter Soldier hearings. I blogged about that on Friday. And while C.I. carried the weight on it, as Elaine had stated ahead of time would happen, it's equally true that we were all doing our best to highlight them while they were going on. Not after the fact. And to get that creepy e-mail just really did sour you on it. I found The Real News Network videos and I posted one of those and others posted them as well and that allowed us to continue to note Winter Soldier without writing about it. But you do start thinking, "What's the point?" I mean, after we wrote the piece on healthcare and some twit wants to ignore that and screech about the laughable panel on nothing being called out, what's the point of knocking yourself out to write about Winter Soldier?
Betty: I agree completely. I was narrowing down, all week, who I was going to highlight on Saturday. But after those e-mails, my attitude was why bother? If my honest opinion isn't going to be appreciated, I have other things to do at my site. I've got an outline I'm working from, I've got key plot points to get to. You think I'm going to try to work in Winter Soldier again after that lobbying effort? No. I've got better things to do and, as Marcia noted, we covered it. While it was going on.
Elaine: As of last Friday morning, Mother Jones, supposed radical magazine that reads like Consumer Reports for the semi-left, had offered nothing on Winter Soldier. Including David Corn, whom, as C.I. pointed out, had a veteran praising his book. If there was time for a lobbying effort, it certainly wasn't to people who participated here. Include Trina in that too because she covered Winter Soldier and provided the links, like we all did, to live coverage while the hearings were going on. What did Mother Jones do? Nothing. What did CounterPunch do? Nothing. Common Dreams printed Jeff Cohen's miserable article and then reprinted a column from a newspaper and that was pretty much it for their 'coverage' until Amy Goodman's column on Friday. During a Democratic presidential candidate debate, they can fill up their homepage with one attack on Hillary after another and run continued attacks day after day. Winter Soldier is apparently not very important to them. So if you've got time for a lobbying effort, you need to be lobbying the outlets that aren't covering Winter Soldier. A highly conservative estimate would find forty piece written by this community of which one was negative. That's easily thirty-nine positive pieces but that's not good enough for you. I don't know what would you live in, but thirty-nine for and one against is an amazing number for anything presented publicly, be it a concert, a play, a film, a hearing, what have you.
Wally: And again, the veterans healthcare panel was ignored by others. It was a very important panel. With over forty pieces filed, we consider our work done. We did our bit. We noted what happened. We didn't write, "I was in my car and it had me thinking about . . ." We presented actual voices. And Ruth and C.I. and Kat can be nice about it but no one, not even them, are tolerating this insulting e-mail campaign.
Rebecca: Just to share, C.I.'s not tolerating it. Don't read C.I.'s refusal to comment on this -- in this roundtable or outside of it -- as disagreement. With kids, C.I.'s own or other people's, if one of them threw a tantrum, they got the same freeze out that's going on right now. So don't read C.I.'s expressionless expression on this to be "I disagree" or "I have no opinion." I know that response and it's the response a child gets when they throw a tantrum. C.I. not only doesn't reward that behavior, C.I. generally makes clear after the tantrum just how much the tantrum cost the person throwing it. It's something Flyboy and I have been discussing because C.I.'s children never threw tantrums in public and we don't want to raise a spoiled brat ourselves. So Marica's joking is probably not the reason C.I.'s saying nothing, it probably goes to C.I.'s belief that to comment on it would reward attention seeking bad behaviors.
Mike: Well, like Wally said, we covered it. We had planned to cover it more and then came the e-mail campaign, which was a tantrum, Rebecca's right. And, we're not rewarding that. We've never rewarded anyone going to others to tattle. We covered it. C.I. and Ava cover it here this edition and C.I. plans to wrap up The Common Ills coverage in Monday's snapshot. There are other things going on. At a time when Mother Jones can't even offer a blog post, the fact that this community did over forty pieces on it and the tantrum thrower has no appreciation for that means we're done.
Ava: I will note that if you missed Winter Soldier and can stream, it's available online online at Iraq Veterans Against the War, at War Comes Home, at KPFK, at the Pacifica Radio homepage and at KPFA, here for Friday, here for Saturday, here for Sunday. We think Aimee Allison and Aaron Glantz did a great job anchoring the coverage. We had hoped to do an article on that this edition and C.I. and I may pick that up ourselves at some point in the future. We do note Allison in our TV piece.
Jim: So I guess that's going to end it.
Ruth: No!
Jim: Okay, sorry. What's up?
Ruth: Jeff Cohen made some ridiculous statements on CounterSpin Friday. They included that only a few underground newspapers covered Winter Soldier. That is not the truth and, although I am the oldest, Rebecca, Kat, Elaine and C.I. are certainly old enough to remember the coverage.
Kat: Well, first off, "underground newspaper," the term he used, was not defined and many listening to him or reading this may not know what that is. As part of the Free Speech Movement, newspapers sprang up around the country. Many were weekly but some were dailies. They were "underground" because they were part of that movement which meant people spoke frankly and swear words weren't a problem. The Village Voice was an underground newspaper for decades. Today it's part of a conglomerate. We had a lot in my area, the Bay Area --
C.I.: The Berkeley Barb.
Kat: The Barb, and many others. The Berkeley Daily Planet, my opinion, is the only one remaining that holds true to the core beliefs. But they were all over the country and, no, Winter Soldier, the original one, was not covered in only a few. That's ridiculous. And as C.I. and Elaine pointed out a shortwhile ago, it was also covered in the GI coffeehouse newspapers.
Elaine: I agree with Ruth that Cohen was a complete idiot. Kat's correct about the newspaper coverage from the underground press. He sounded like a complete idiot, a Pollyanna bound and determined to stretch any fact, resort to any lie, to praise so-called 'independent' media today when, in fact, they did a lousy job with few exceptions. I'll just add to this one section. He claimed that electronically the reach was greater today. That may be but it was also diluted and didn't reach as many and that's partly due to those outlets that refused to publicize Winter Soldier and also due to the fact that with so many entertainment choices, radio listenership is not as high as it once was. In terms of the percentage of the population, you can be sure KPFA had a larger percentage listening during Vietnam than they do today. He may have also made the claim that people could stream around the world. If he made that claim, he was also stating that the foreign press covered Winter Soldier this go round and, if that is the case, I would assume that reached more people than online streaming. I'm not trying to undercut today's efforts but it's worth noting that many did not promote it so when you want to talk about issues like awareness, during Vietnam, you were aware of Winter Soldier. This go round, less so.
Rebecca: I will echo everything that's been said and, Kat's correct, this was covered here by Elaine and C.I. not so long ago. As I understand it, Cohen was at the original Winter Soldier so his survey of who covered it and who did not probably is based on the national coverage at that time and anything he could pick up in Detroit. Elaine and C.I. were bringing back articles on it from the road for weeks after -- they were on the road over and over speaking out against that earlier illegal war. A Nexus search isn't going to turn up, for instance, Berkeley Tribe, Other Scenes, etc. He was making ridiculous claims that he couldn't back up but he didn't expect anyone to fact check him, he thought he could play proud parent of 'independent' media and not critic. Peter Hart appeared to want to address 'independent' media in one question but it got passed over. Aimee Allison, interviewing him and John Stauber -- who didn't play cheerleader -- did note the silences from the left and if I can note one more thing quickly, I wasn't aware that CODEPINK sent out an e-mail two Fridays ago. That would be when Winter Soldier started their testimony. The e-mail doesn't mention Winter Soldier once. I don't know if anyone else saw that.
C.I.: I had. That's why I called them out on the second day of testimony. The e-mail didn't note Winter Soldier. It did take up the corporate peace movement's new talking point which is the illegal war costs too much. That's going to be the big talking point for the 2008 elections. Apparently, death and destruction won't sweep Democrats into office since they've done nothing to end the illegal war, so now they want to talk about the costs. The backfire there is that they can't make that argument and also continue to vote for funding -- a point they haven't grasped as we'll see play out in the next round of votes. The e-mail plugged actions as well but it did not include Winter Soldier. To be clear, because Monday the plan is to note Nancy Lessin in the snapshot, she's speaking about the costs. She's spoken out about the costs for some time. She's not part of that corporate peace movement. If she was, we wouldn't note her.
Jim: And on that note, we'll wrap it up.
