• AtticusInk Newsvine Column

  • My Interview With Norman Finkelstein March 6, 2009
    This is a transcript of an interview with Norman Finkelstein last November, which was conducted by Atticus Mullikin and arranged and filmed by Bernd Kapeller, Associate Producer at the European Journalism Centre. The video was recorded following Mr. […]
    Atticus Mullikin
  • Comment Deletion Policy March 6, 2009
    In order to more effectively and consistently moderate my own discussion forums, this Comment Deletion Policy will apply to all visitors to my column. Visitors will see a disclaimer among the first comments on my posts that includes a link to this page. […]
    Atticus Mullikin
  • How home became homeland September 8, 2008
    Roger Cohen laments what the American nation is quickly becoming, and what it could have been. Whatever happened to Lincoln's "last, best hope?" […]
    Atticus Mullikin
  • Bush wants to redeclare war in time for the election. August 30, 2008
    Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush's defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda. […]
    JoulesBeef
  • Conservative Andrew Bacevich on the End of American Exceptionalism August 29, 2008
    Conservative professor of history and international relations at Boston University and twenty-three year veteran of the US Army, Andrew Bacevich, speaks with Amy Goodman about his new book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. A quote from the interview: […]
    Atticus Mullikin
  • Jon Stewart rips media's false sense of urgency August 27, 2008
    Case in point: the recent sniping between the presidential campaigns after presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain couldn't remember how many houses he owned. As Stewart watched the campaigns trade attack ads over the comment, he said he thought of President Franklin D. […]
    TheJonesGirl
  • "Contemporary Energy and Military Policies Virtually Indistinguishable" August 26, 2008
    A new documentary based on the work of Professor Michael Klare reveals the inextricable link between American foreign policy and energy supply over recent decades. The following is a synopsis of the film from the website. […]
    Atticus Mullikin
  • Taking Issue With "Why We Fight": A Reaction From the Author August 25, 2008
    WARNING. This is as long as the original article, as I wanted to be as thorough as possible. However, everything is organized under convenient subtitles, so you don't have to read the whole thing if you don't want to. -------------------- […]
    Atticus Mullikin
  • Ron Suskind says Iraq Intel Forged August 24, 2008
    Terry Gross interview's Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind on his allegations that the head of Iraqi intelligence told the British there were no weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion of Iraq. […]
    Atticus Mullikin
  • Why We Fight...Conservatism: A META, Meta-article August 15, 2008
    *SEPTEMBER 8TH UPDATED DISCLAIMER & WARNING* "Why We Fight" in the title of this article refers to a series of propaganda films made by Frank Capra during the Second World War, which you can link to via my Recommendations. […]
    Atticus Mullikin

In August 2007, NPR featured a story entitled One Year Later, Vestiges of War Fading in Israel, about life on the border between Israel and Palestine one year after the 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Accompanying the story was a photograph so beautiful that, at first, I temporarily forgot the subject matter. An Israeli plane was dropping fire-retardant where Hezbollah rockets had fallen. The contrast between the photographic artistry and the violent confrontation it depicted was profound.

The photographer’s name is Yoav Lemmer, and he seems to work for the Agence France-Press. He photographs life and conflict in and around Israel/Palestine, Sudan and Eritrea, and other parts of the developing world. I did a quick internet search and, although I couldn’t find a biography, his photography is ubiquitous, most often labeled AFP and appearing mostly in French news publications.

One of the most striking photos was Settler’s Block, taken in 2004 and depicting Israeli border police in a confrontation with Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The sheer amount of action, the posture and facial expressions of the people, the upright, armored horses of the border guard, and the overcast, moody-blue haze give the picture all the texture of a painting in the Louvre, a romantic hearkening to Napoleon or ancient Rome, with one difference. The photo shows reality without the filter effect of a fat commission from a wealthy patron, a reality where each side is flawed and has much to lose, and where there is no obvious winner or solution.

Mr. Lemmer’s images, and there are thousands of them, are available at Getty Images.

Also posted on my Newsvine column.

This article was originally published on Atticus Mullikin’s Newsvine column.

USMC General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine of his time, made allegations in 1934 that he had been approached by Wall Street financier Gerald MacGuire, representing some of the wealthiest businessmen in America, who wanted him to lead a 500,000 man force in a march on the White House to unseat then President Roosevelt.

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This article was originally published on the European Journalism Center’s Magazine section, and was republished on Atticus Mullikin’s Newsvine column.

In a major world religions class in college, the teacher used the opening scenes of the secular film Jerry Maguire to introduce us to the concept of epiphany. For those who haven’t seen it, the protagonist, Maguire, begins as a rich and successful sports agent, aggressively pursuing clients, all smiles and pretence and talk. After he tries to convince the son of a client that the kid’s father should keep playing sports despite four concussions, he asks himself, “Who had I become? Just another shark in suit?” He breaks down in a hotel room and writes a mission statement for his company that proscribes less clients, less money, and more attention to the people his firm represents – in essence, ethical business. The epiphanic moment – and the reason our teacher showed us the clip – was when Maguire finishes his mission statement and realizes, “Suddenly, I was my father’s son again.”

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This article was originally published on the European Journalism Center’s Magazine section, and was republished on Atticus Mullikin’s Newsvine column.

It was with no small level of gratification that I noticed, last week, that the prestigious Poynter Institute published an E-Media Tidbit about Milblogging, and that milblogging was featured prominently in Salon’s We are the Thought Police. With such good company it seems only reasonable to keep up my own commentary.

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This article was originally published on the European Journalism Center’s Magazine section, and was republished on Atticus Mullikin’s Newsvine column.

I stumbled across a blog this week called MedienKritik: Politically Incorrect Observations in the German Media by David Kaspar and Ray Drake. It is a blog that intends to act as “…a watchdog site dedicated to the documentation of anti-Americanism in German media and the negative influence it has on Germans’ perceptions of the United States.” Hey, I’m American. Why not?

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This article was originally published on the European Journalism Center’s Magazine section, and was republished on Atticus Mullikin’s Newsvine column.

Increasingly, US military personnel and people in war zones are talking about war from the inside. These testimonies, which would have been very difficult if not impossible before the information age, often offer a stark contrast to the message presented by government and corporate media. There are literally hundreds of blogs about war and conflict. Check out Yahoo’s Iraq War Blogs and Diaries and at Hereinreality.com’s Iraq Blogs and especially Milblogging.com.

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This article was originally published on the European Journalism Center’s Magazine section, and was republished on Atticus Mullikin’s Newsvine column.

That’s right. I’m objective. My capacity to sit down and write means that I have no biases, preconceptions, prejudices, politics or agendas. I arrived, fresh from Mars, to view the media landscape with complete and unhindered truthiness. So sit back, read and relax in the confidence that what you’re seeing represents reality as it is.

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This article was originally published on the European Journalism Center’s Magazine section, and was republished on Atticus Mullikin’s Newsvine column.

As I write this, I’m helping to revolutionize journalism. No, really! I am. I can take this article, paste it, link it and tag it on dozens of websites in view of millions of people. I can establish hundreds of threads between my words and the world, and I can do it at no cost, every day, as much as I want. Usually, I’ll even do it for free.

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PBS’s Frontline just started a new season with the release of Cheney’s Law, the most recent in a series of politically charged documentaries about the Bush Administration. A short-list of related episodes, all of which you can watch online…

2002

• The Man Who Knew – The jazzy, dark story of John O’Neil, an employee of the FBI and expert on Al-Qaeda, who tried to warn the Fed about a pending attack on the WTC. Ignored by the Bushies, he was sidelined by jealous FBI bureaucrats and so took a job as head of security for the World Trade Center, where he died on 9/11.

2003

• The War Behind Closed Doors – The “grand strategy” behind the Bush administration’s push to invade Iraq
• Truth, War and Consequences - What went wrong in the lead up to the war in Iraq.

2004

• Rumsfeld’s War – An examination of former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and how he’s brought the US military to the verge of collapse.

2005

• The Torture Question – In the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a look at the legal justification of torture by the American government

2006

• The Dark Side – See it as a prequel to “Cheney’s Law”
• Return of the Taliban – How the Taliban, forced out of control by the US invasion of Afghanistan, have fled to the wild border regions of Pakistan, and how the Pakistani government has colluded with them
• The Lost Year in Iraq -A followup to Truth, War and Consequences. How the US did just about everything wrong in its prosection of the occupation of Iraq
• Endgame -The most recent report on Iraq, and why the US will be stuck there into the foreseeable future.

PBS’s Frontline has over sixty documentaries and hundreds of pages of archives available online.

When I’d just gotten out of the Marine Corps, I got a factory job making sheet plastic. I spent the entire day watching molten plastic come out of an extruder in a column, and it rose up into a tower to cool, was folded by a set of molds, and then it came down, ran over a razor blade that opened the sheet and wrapped itself around a cardboard tube on a spindle machine.

It was not a good workplace. There was constantly carbon in the air from the melting plastic pellets. I almost got my arm caught in the machine several times. There were open circuit boxes with live wires hanging out. Some parts of the warehouse floor were actually caving in. For six bucks and hour I’d work 12-18 hour shifts, standing up, with two or three 10-minute breaks, and nothing but the sounds of the machines and the pneumatic system and idle conversation with my supervisor. Every so often, a buzzer would go off and I’d have to cut the plastic and start a new tube, take of the old roll, weigh it and write down the weight, dump the roll in a box, pull off some wet packing tape and seal the box, stick a label on it and stack it symmetrically on a wooden palette, make a new box and then turn back to repeat the process. If the plastic were thin, the whole thing would go FAST, and sometimes it was tough to keep up. I must have cut thousands of roles, and packed them, and sometimes I’ll still dream about it.

We had a beat-up stereo, the antenna of which I rigged with a length of wire and attached to the cooling tower, boosting the reception a bit. I used to float back and forth between WNCW in Spindale, NC, probably the best NPR station I’ve ever heard, and the local NPR affiliates around Anderson, SC. One Sunday, when the place was particularly quiet, I heard a show entitled Fiasco, with stories about a disastrous performance of Peter Pan, a badly planned corporate plot to pour boiling oil on invading Visigoths and intra-NPR conflict over car-talk programs. I laughed so hard that I lost track of the roller machine and had to cut the next roll almost a foot from the ground and get it over the new tube without breaking my fingers.

I found out the show was called This American Life, and after that I was hooked. It was a sort of story-journalism; each episode had a theme and the show would have several stories on that theme. I never missed it until, the next spring, I took off for a six-month hike on the Appalachian Trail and, as happens in life, time passed.

Three years later I’d finished my hike, worked a winter in Vermont and gone around the world on another six-month trip. I was so in debt from that latter that I worked 80-hour weeks at an inn in Vermont, with one day off (maybe) where I’d volunteer at a rock-climbing gym in Rutland. When winter ended and we were laid off, I had about two months of no work before I could go back to the inn as a gardener, and being that I was in so much debt I had to live on pasta and tomato paste and do NOTHING, except go to the rock-climbing gym and volunteer in the hopes that there’d be free pizza. The only splurge I allowed was a dial-up internet connection, where I almost exclusively listened to NPR, and I discovered that the three years of “This American Life” I’d missed were available for free on the internet. Other than the rock-climbing gym, that’s all I did.

I’ve been addicted to it ever since. I estimate that, if I were to stack up the hours I’ve spent with TAL in the background, I’ve devoted at least a month of my life listening to it, which is quite a bit if you think about it. I’ve heard almost every show, many of them several times. My favorites are the ones where the entire hour is devoted to a single topic, although there are many good stories on the multiple episodes, too.

In homage to all the lonely hours TAL’s stories filled, a list of my favorites…

• Christmas and Commerce – David Sedaris’s describes working as an elf in Macy’s during Christmas
• Dawn - Jack Hitt tells the story of the American south, of a man who became a woman and did voodoo
• Harold - One of the best, the story of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor
• Pray - Alix Spiegel goes to Colorado Springs, home of an American evangelical awakening, and finds it “medieval”
• Niagara - A whole hour of melancholy stories about Niagara Falls
• A Teenager’s Guide to God – Following a Christian youth group on a mission
• 24 Hours at the Golden Apple - 24 hours at a popular diner in Chicago. Surprising depth.
• Them - Act 3, Newfies, about two GI’s during WWII who end up in the German army.
• House on Loon Lake – Spooky
• Before and After – Before and after the September 11 attacks
• Act V – Prisoners perform Hamlet
• Teenage Embed Part II – Hyder Akbar follows his father to Afghanistan and keeps a record of his travels
• Starting from Scratch – Acts I and II, about the Puppy Channel and Vegas Joe respectively, are great stories
• Heretics - Carlton Pearson, an evangelical minister, stops believing in hell and loses everything
• What’s in a Number? – 2006 Edition – John Hopkins University study estimates 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq
• After the Flood – Stories from post Katrina New Orleans
• Godless America – Self explanatory
• Habeas Schmabeas 2007 – Show about the Bush Administration’s effort to dismantle the right of Habeas Corpus

Hope you enjoy

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