Look to the company one keeps

photo credit: Ernest vonRosen, www.amgmedia.com
Whom to trust? Finding out whether the information we get from "authorities" is trustworthy, for bloggers can be a difficult and time consuming process. How should we assess the credibility of someone who appears on television, or writes authoritatively about an issue? The truth we need from them is about what is happening to our nation since the Republicans took over.
Authority/authors - My thinking then turned to the various authors I had watched on C-SPAN this past weekend. Did they have the truth for which I am always looking? Why should I believe what they were saying? Why might I benefit from reading their books?
How believable - are speakers or writers? A good journalist checks news sources. What is the background of authorities? What is their motivation or agenda? Where do they come from. With whom or what are they associated?
Associations - Someone to whom I listened this past weekend - I wish I could remember who - said that the Iraqi culture is "relational." In other words, that one of the country's cultural norms is to assess people by who their family is, how are they connected to the group, and what is their background. We in the West do not take such factors so much into account; we are much more individualistic than group oriented.
Sleuthing - Because I believe the Iraqis have something we have lost - their relational view - and because my mom used to tell me that one can tell something about a person's character "by the company they keep," I needed to find out more about these authors. Their credibility is not dependent on the prices of their books or where to find them. So for this post, in which I at least planned to promote those authors, I spent some time in web research, "detective work" others would call it. And I wanted the sources to be as "primary," as original as possible.
The authors under my magnifying glass were James Bamford, Thomas Ricks and Mark Danner, a research cohort population of three. Do they really know and understand what has been going on in the Republican administration, and will they talk about it to us?
What I needed to know was whether these writers/occasional TV guests were reaching my "leftish" biases or not. I wanted to find out about their "street cred" from other authorities whom I knew better and trusted more than the men I was researching. They are:
1) James Bamford: The hot news this weekend was an article entitled "Iran: The Next War." How timely! The author, James Bamford-posted 7/24-in Rolling Stone , began with,

Even before the bombs fell on Baghdad, a group of senior Pentagon officials were plotting to invade another country. Their covert campaign once again relied on false intelligence and shady allies. But this time, the target was Iran.

Checking out Bamford's critics - Slate Magazine's "War Stories" columnist, Fred Kaplan reviewed James Bamford's book in 2004 called, "A Pretext for War." Kaplan, who wrote "The Wizards of Armageddon" in 1983 and more recent books on Gore Vidal and Mark Twain, was not overly complimentary of the author. However, to his credit, Kaplan is often critical of John Bolton. Here are his latest reflections in Slate Magazine on the recent Bolton confirmation hearing. Other critics at the Metacritic website were more generous in their Bamford book reviews.

Who listens to Bamford? Bamford has been interviewed several times on NPR. And he has been published in The Atlantic Monthly. "Big Brother is Listening", for instance, appeared in April of 2006 Atlantic. One of my favorite bloggers, Steve Clemons, endorses Bamford, and that carries considerable weight with me. Here is an entire post on 11/21/05 from Steve Clemons - on Bamford.
2) Thomas Ricks: the Senior Pentagon Correspondent at The Washington Post was in an online discussion on 7/24/06 regarding his new book titled, "Fiasco: The American Military's Military Adventures in Iraq." Hat tip to op-for, at the Military.com site for the link to that WaPo transcript. It begins with a summary of impressive Ricks credentials,
(Ricks) . . . was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2000 for a series of articles on how the U.S. military might change to meet the new demands of the 21st century. Ricks also was part of a Washington Post team that won the 2002 Pulitzer prize for reporting about the beginning of the U.S. counteroffensive against terrorism.

Ricks Reviewer, Michael O'Hanlon reviewed Ricks' book July 28, 2006 at Slate Magazine. Quoting the opening,

It is not an exaggeration, or at least not much of one, to say that with his new book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas Ricks has changed the debate over Iraq. Others have criticized much of the decision-making of the Bush administration—on going to war in the first place, on hyping Saddam's purported links to al-Qaida and his progress in pursuing nuclear weapons, and most of all on the shoddy, cavalier preparation for the post-Saddam stabilization of Iraq. But almost all these previous critiques focused on President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other civilian leaders of the Bush administration.
Ricks hardly spares the war's civilian architects, but his is the first major book to take on the U.S. military as well.

Blogger, Mark Karlin did a lengthy interview with Danner at Buzzflash (blog ranked #276 on Technorati) May 2, 2006. Quoting from the interview (Karlin's link),
3) Mark Danner - This author and California professor at Berkeley began his writing of the book in question with ground-breaking articles in The New York Review of Books, an obscure publication. that were a prelude to what was to come the next year, his articles expanded into book form. The initial article contained the first American publication of the full text of "The Downing Street Memo." Mark Danner's new book is titled, "The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History."
New York connections - NYT writer Frank Rich also wrote a piece about Danner's work in the NYT Review on April 6, 2006. Hat tip to Tom, at Tom Dispatch - Tomgram, who posted in May about Danner's pending article. TomDispatch is connected with The Nation Institute, based in New York. That organization's Board Chariman is Hamilton Fish (V), former owner of The Nation Magazine, and according to Wikipedia, an advisor to George Soros. Also on the Board is Katrina vanden Heuvel, one of my favorite pundits.

BuzzFlash: We are offering The Secret Way to War – The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History as a premium to our BuzzFlash readers. This book includes a series of articles you wrote for The New York Review of Books at a time that the issue of the Downing Street memo found no traction in the mainstream media. Why did you think the memo and its phrase about fixing intelligence to fit the policy were so important, but the mainstream media gave it such short shrift?
Mark Danner: I first read the memo on May 1st of 2005, after I read about it having been published in the Sunday London Times. I expected that the American press would cover it and publish it fairly quickly. A few days passed – there was no interest whatever. I called up Robert Silvers, the co-editor of The New York Review of Books, and urged them to publish it. What is fascinating about the Downing Street memo, which is simply the record of a Cabinet meeting – is that there’s nothing obscure about it. It’s just the minutes of a Cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, held at 10 Downing Street, the British White House.
To me, the importance is that it confirms a number of things that we know anyway – confirmation because it records what actually was said by the highest officials of the British government - the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, the Attorney General, and others, including the head of MI6, which is the British equivalent of the CIA. And because all of these officials are in very close touch with their American counterparts, the memo gives us a very clear picture of what’s going on, not only in the British government, but in the American government, in July of 2002, which is about eight months before the war against Iraq is actually launched

Against Danner - Blogcritics.org carried a blurb in January of 2003 announcing a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner. I quote from the piece (their links),

Danner's op-ed opposing war against Iraq appeared in the New York Times last October. He is a staff writer at the New Yorker and teaches at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He has done some of the best writing and reporting on international issues including on the Balkins and a book-length article in the New Yorker on the massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador. He has also worked on documentaries on Bosnia and Haiti for ABC News.
Hitchens probably needs no introduction. He is the 2003 I.F. Stone Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Much of his recent writing on Iraq (and other topics) can be found here.

Enough said - Just finding that Hitchens was against Danner was enought to convince me of Danner's credibility.

My research findings - All three authors have credibility as far as I am concerned. I feel free to recommend that you watch their TV appearances, and read their writings, though I have not read any of their books yet.

Street cred, critics and credentials - Kaplan's criticism of Bamford probably comes from his own biases, and may relate to writing style more than substance. My "favorite" Clemons likes Bamford, which frees me to do so, also. Ricks seems to have credibility within the military, despite his sharp criticism of that establishment, including naming names. It was his depth of immersion in Iraq that was convincing to me. And the fact that Christopher Hitchens opposed Danner tips the balance for me there. And Danner's New York/California credentials are impeccable. Three Thumbs Up!

Tags: blogging Bush administration credibility foreign policy Iraq war authors literary criticism writing journalism leadership authority