GUEST: Howard Kurtz, Washington Post: Online Ugliness

My column on General Peter Pace drew the ugliest flaming I have ever experienced; so disgusting, in fact, that I only shared it with a couple of friends. Thus I am very glad to see Howard Kurtz addressing this issue. -Rosie

Online Ugliness

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 26, 2007; 7:36 AM

One of the unique qualities of Internet discourse is its freewheeling, no-holds-barred nature, where passionate arguments are often accompanied by some choice expletives and a virtual finger in the eye.

But what happens when the talk turns ugly, racist and violent?

In recent weeks, some of those who post comments on the conservative blog Little Green Footballs have said they wished that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had succeeded in what the Gitmo prisoner says was a plot to kill Jimmy Carter. And some who posted comments on the liberal Huffington Post have expressed regret that the suicide bomber at a military base in Afghanistan failed to take out the visiting Dick Cheney.

No corner of the Net is safe from this bile. The Washington Post's Web site has been grappling with a surge in offensive and incendiary comments.

The really gruesome stuff represents a tiny minority of those online. But is there a way of policing the worst stuff without shutting down robust debate?

The comments about Cheney at the Huffington Post included: "You can't kill pure evil." "If at first you don't succeed . . . " "Dr. Evil escapes again . . . damn." Founder Arianna Huffington wrote that "no one at HuffPost is defending these comments -- they are unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed."

The comments about Mohammed and Carter at Little Green Footballs included: "Can we furlough him -- just so he can realize the Carter plot? Please?" and "Even this schmuck had some good ideas."

The site's founder, Charles Johnson, wrote on Little Green Footballs that such comments "reflect only the opinions of the individuals who posted them" and doubted that they "rise to the level of hatred that showed up in Arianna's readers' Cheney-related comments."

Some conservatives and liberals seized on the incidents to denounce the other side, but no conclusions should be drawn from wackjobs on the fringe.

Since last summer, washingtonpost.com has allowed registered users to post comments on any news story. A recent report about New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who said the slow recovery of his city was part of a plan to change its racial makeup and leadership, led to a number of offensive or inflammatory remarks:

"Some Black politicians are [expletive] idiots." "IF a white MAN were to speak as you do, you'd look for a lynching party." One person described Nagin as a racist and a women's sanitary product.

Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says he does not have the resources to screen the roughly 2,000 daily comments in advance. He has one staffer deleting offensive comments after the fact, and banning the authors from further feedback, based on complaints from readers. Brady plans to devote more staff to the process and to use new filtering technology.

"The medium allows for readers and journalists to engage in conversation, and to say we're not going to take advantage of that doesn't make a lot of sense to me," he says. "I'd rather figure out a way to do it better than not to do it at all."

But Post reporter Darryl Fears is among those in the newsroom who believe the comments should be junked if offensive postings can't be filtered out in advance. "If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments," he says. "You're starting to see some of the language you see on neo-Nazi sites, and that's not good for The Washington Post or for the subjects in those stories."

After Post reporter Darragh Johnson wrote in February about a Northeast Washington teenager who was fatally shot while being chased by police, some readers posted comments, including racist comments, criticizing the boy. Johnson says the 17-year-old's father cited the comments in declining to answer most questions about his son.

What is spreading this Web pollution is the widespread practice of allowing posters to spew their venom anonymously. If people's full names were required -- even though some might resort to aliases -- it would go a long way toward cleaning up the neighborhood.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/03/26/BL2007032600347_pf.html

General Peter Pace, Have You Ever Been To a Prostitute?

Published on Monday, March 19, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

General Peter Pace, Have You Ever Been To a Prostitute?

by Rosa María Pegueros

General Peter Pace, have you ever been to a prostitute?

When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff makes a pronouncement on what he considers to be a moral question, it naturally brings to mind all of the matters on which the Reverend General could rule. Most people believe that prostitution is immoral, either because it exploits women or because it violates sexual mores, so I was just wondering, have you ever gone to a prostitute?

And while we’re at it, have you ever issued a directive that any soldier who patronizes prostitutes will be summarily dismissed from the armed services? Will he get a dishonorable discharge? Lose his pension?

Were you to issue such an order, would your fellow generals laugh at you as you stride around the Pentagon? Or would it be ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge,’ public morality, private perversion?

If there is one tell-tale sign of the presence of American soldiers in a war or occupation it is the trail they leave behind of babies with American fathers. In the past, marrying the mothers of those children was discouraged by the armed services; special permission to marry was required. Most soldiers’ relationships were purely proprietary; money on the table, with no thought for the woman or the illegitimate children that might result.

Why should Americans care that Koreans, for example, shun mixed-race persons? What about the thousands of American-Vietnamese children?

Of course, the “fighting men” could not be expected to remain celibate during their tours of duty. In the past, it has even been the policy of the army to issue condoms and treat sexually-transmitted diseases with no questions asked, the assumption being that boys will be boys. Besides, it helps the local economy so everybody’s happy. The girls need the money, right?

So I was wondering, have you ever been to a prostitute? Have you turned a blind eye to your troops’ dalliances in town while on leave?

You may be a straight-arrow kind of guy who has never and would never visit a whorehouse but if we are talking morality, do you condemn the “johns” in your command with the same animosity that you direct towards gay soldiers? If not, why not? Or is “don’t ask, don’t tell,” your policy in this case? Do you believe that it is moral for soldiers to spend their leaves in brothels but not to seek the love of another man? Or are you a homophobe, plain and simple?

The issue of sex and the troops is taboo. Despite its artistic representations from the 19th-century Puccini opera, Madame Butterfly, to the Vietnam War version in Miss Saigon, male sexual behavior in war zones is so taken for granted that nobody talks about it. Consider some other aspects of the problem. The recent rape and murder by an American soldier of a young Iraqi girl and her family may deviate from the usual behavior of American soldiers; it is certainly against the stated ideals of the armed services but it is not as rare as we would hope.

What about Tailhook in 1991, where dozens of female members of the Navy were assaulted and sexually molested; where the participation of senior officers in the incident was concealed and the whole thing was covered up to avoid publicity? Finally, two years after the incident, 140 officers—officers!—were being considered for prosecution for public exposure, assault, conduct unbecoming an officer, and lying under oath to the Pentagon investigators. Then the top brass granted immunity to a number of them undermining the prosecution. The only reason that any disciplinary action was taken against the male officers in the Tailhook incident was because of outside pressure. Boys will be boys, eh?

Tailhook may seem like ancient history but the mistreatment of women in the military has continued to be the norm. Sixteen years later, female soldiers make sure that they go nowhere alone because even in the presence of other soldiers, they can be sexually assaulted and no one will intervene.

In 2006, Col. Janis Karpinski who had been the commandant of the prison at Abu Ghraib, reported to the International Commission of Inquiry On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq gave the order that the real cause of the deaths of some female soldiers was to be concealed. They had died of dehydration because they were afraid to go out after dark because they were afraid of being assaulted and raped by their own comrades. To avoid the trip to the latrines, they didn’t drink water late in the day. Lacking adequate water in the terrible heat of Iraq, they died of dehydration.

No matter how good female soldiers are in their jobs, no matter how dedicated that they are to our country, to many of the men in the armed services they are little better than whores. They are always at risk for sexual assault or rape, and the brass will do little to protect them; boys will be boys, and the big boys cover for them. If you go out after dark, girls, you’re asking for it.

Writing on Salon.com in The Private War of Women Soldiers, Helen Benedict quotes Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21 “There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke.” “[Abbie Pickett, 24, a specialist with the 229th Combat Support Engineering Company] told me, "It's like sending . . . women to live in a frat house."”

Furthermore, says Benedict, the situation has gotten worse for female soldiers since the armed services have drastically lowered their entrance requirements to induct men with criminal and violent records, women soldiers are at an even greater risk. Add to that the constraints of operating in a Muslim country where there are no prostitutes are available, and women soldiers become even bigger targets.

Pace should take a leaf from General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s playbook. During the post-World War II occupation in Europe, Eisenhower heard rumors that there were many lesbians in his command, so he called one of his aides, WAC Sergeant Johnnie Phelps, and told her to collect the names of all the lesbians so that he could get rid of them. Estimating that some 95% of the women in the 900 women in the battalion were lesbians, Phelps told him that she would make the list but that it was one of the most decorated companies in the army, with the lowest number of venereal diseases and pregnancies. He would be losing all his top staff, all his clerical help, and furthermore, her name would be at the top of the list. Eisenhower gave up on the idea.

So General Pace, if you want to win this war, give the valiant gay and lesbian soldiers the respect they deserve and stay out of their bedrooms. If you want to clean up the sexual morals of your troops, you have your work cut out for you.

[This piece appeared in Commondreams.org and was picked up for Smirkingchimp.com. Two small corrections to clerical errors appear in this version.]