Protests May Only Harden Chinese Line

Dialogue Over Tibet Grievances Seems Increasingly Less Likely, Analysts Say

By Jill Drew
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 24, 2008; A09

BEIJING, March 23 -- To many Chinese, it was a brutal, unprovoked attack against innocent civilians by Tibetan hoodlums bent on breaking China apart. To many Westerners, it was an eruption of anger provoked by harsh crackdowns on peaceful protests against authoritarian Chinese rule.

The two starkly different views of the March 14 riot in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, are being reinforced each day. And a dialogue to cool the passions that sparked the demonstrations, which have spread to other Tibetan areas in western China, "seems less and less likely," said Rebecca MacKinnon, a media studies professor at the University of Hong Kong.

"There are two alternate realities that are not connecting," she said.

When the Olympic torch begins its 130-day, 85,000-mile journey on Monday from Greece's Ancient Olympia to Beijing, this clash of views is likely to be exacerbated as international advocacy groups vow to spotlight several high-profile grievances against Chinese policy in protests planned along the relay route. At least 1,000 police officers are expected to ring the 2,600-year-old Temple of Hera to protect the lighting ceremony, but controversy has already marked the run. A Thai torchbearer announced Sunday that she was pulling out to protest China's actions in Tibet.

China analysts say such protests will probably push China to adopt more hard-line positions to salve its national pride. Protests will not "spark more subtle policy debates in China," MacKinnon said. "The regime will go more and more on the offensive."

"Sovereignty and control is more important to them than international image," a Western academic who looks closely at Chinese politics said on condition of anonymity. The Tibet crackdown is a "sign to other opposition groups that this is what happens if you make problems."

Among many Chinese here and overseas, resentment is building over Western media portrayals of the Lhasa unrest. Although China blocks most of the reports, many people access them by getting around the government's online firewalls.

Rao Jin, 24, the founder of a small technology company in Beijing, said he was so angry about what he sees as foreign journalists' prejudice against China that last week he created a Web site, http://www.anti-cnn.com, to document what he calls mistakes and bias in Western media. He said more than 1,000 people have e-mailed, volunteering to spot errors.

"They said that we should hit back," Rao said. "The untrue reports triggered a lot of anger because it is not what really happened in China."

On Sunday, government-controlled media began running videotaped interviews with foreign tourists who witnessed the March 14 riot in Lhasa. The interviews included descriptions of that day's violence but did not discuss the protests led by monks and nuns that began March 10 and were broken up by police. Several monks and nuns were arrested, and police confined thousands of others to their monasteries.

"Thank you, the West, your fair news media had never stop attacking other countries' sovereignty," wrote one Internet user who posted a seven-minute video, in English, challenging the coverage. The video, titled "Tibet was, is and always will be part of China," attracted almost 1.2 million viewings and more than 72,000 comments in three days, according to a blog monitoring site.

Kang Xiaoguang, a sociology professor at Beijing's Renmin University, said, "Many foreigners understand this event in Tibet as an anti-Communist Party or anti-government event. But Chinese people don't think so. Chinese people regard this event as anti-China."

An Internet user identified as Si Si said in a comment posted on a Chinese site, http://tv.huo360.com, "Several innocent girls were burned by those mad people. We drove away people who hurt the innocent; the U.S. calls it a crackdown. When the U.S. invaded other countries, ordinary people were also killed by soldiers. Isn't this a double standard?"

As international advocacy groups step up their protests against Chinese policies, the government might soon find itself fighting over its image on several fronts.

"I have been telling my students for years that as China becomes a world power, there is going to be a lot more scrutiny and criticism," said Michael Pettis, a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. "Just as Americans have learned to deal with it, the Chinese are going to have to learn to deal with it. My hope is that after the anger there will be some reflection on the complexity of these issues."

Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.

China's Patchy Tibet Blackout

Officials Control Domestic News, Hasten to Spin Outside Reports

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 20, 2008; A08

BEIJING, March 20 -- As news reverberated around the world that bloody disturbances had erupted in Tibet, a star journalist for a leading Chinese newsmagazine was asked if he had any good sources in the remote mountain region. "Why?" he asked, unaware that anything was going on.

The reporter's reaction was not unusual. When rioting by outraged Tibetans shook Lhasa last Friday, the Communist Party's censorship apparatus tamped down news of the rampage, leaving most of China's 1.3 billion people in the dark. Government-controlled television news ignored the crisis for the first few days, and Chinese newspapers were restricted to skeleton dispatches from the official New China News Agency.

The immediate clampdown illustrated the party's abiding determination to control the flow of information in China, which officials regard as an important way for President Hu Jintao and his lieutenants to retain their monopoly on power.

But the party's subsequent moves, loosening controls this week to allow officially supervised reporting, also showed how difficult traditional censorship has become in an age of cellphones, Internet connections and satellite TV.

The Tibetan crisis, which drew global attention, in some ways constituted a test case for the Chinese government, which in January last year issued a regulation allowing foreign correspondents to report without official interference until after the Beijing Olympics this August. For human rights and press freedom activists, the results were disappointing.

Domestic reporting was first blocked by censors, they noted, then carefully oriented to depict Tibetan protesters in a bad light and the exiled Dalai Lama as a hypocritical agitator willing to spill blood to further his political aims, despite his advocacy of nonviolence. Reporting by foreign correspondents, which is not censored, was nevertheless restricted by security forces, who sealed off travel to Tibet and expelled foreign reporters from other areas where ethnic Tibetans mounted protests, including Beijing's Central University for Nationalities.

A dozen Hong Kong television reporters who made it into Lhasa on the strength of their Chinese passports were expelled Sunday after local officials burst into their hotel rooms and demanded they turn over all photographs and video footage of what was going on in the streets. But by then, they had transmitted images to their stations back in Hong Kong, which were then relayed on television news around the world.

"China has not kept any of the promises it made in 2001 when it was chosen to host these Olympics," said Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based press freedom advocacy group. "Instead, the government is crushing the Tibetan protests and is imposing a news blackout."

People's Daily, the main party newspaper, set the tone for the first stage of censorship. On Saturday, the day after 13 Han Chinese were killed by pillaging Tibetan monks and lay youths in Lhasa, it published two paragraphs on its back page under the headline, "Tibet Autonomous Region's authorities respond to New China News Agency reporter's questions."

"In the last few days, an extremely small minority of people in Lhasa carried out beating, smashing, robbery and burning activities, disrupting social order, endangering the lives, property and safety of the people and the masses," the dispatch quoted officials as saying. "There is ample proof that this was organized, plotted and masterminded by the Dalai Lama clique."

The next day's People's Daily carried no news at all on Tibet. China Daily, the party's English-language newspaper aimed at foreign residents, followed suit in its weekend edition, blaming the Dalai Lama and quoting an official saying, "The sabotage has aroused the indignation of, and is strongly condemned by, the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet."

Many Chinese, including those who had learned of the extent of the violence from foreign reports, seemed to take the censorship as a matter of course. Inured after years of such controls, most Chinese long ago lost any sense of indignation at being deprived of straight news by party censors.

Those who want more information -- and who have the means -- have learned to seek outside reporting on the Internet or to watch the news on Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based satellite station that broadcasts into China in Mandarin. Phoenix news programs have traditionally maneuvered between Hong Kong's free press atmosphere and the realities of Beijing's power over the owners. The result has been broadcasts that skirt the most sensitive issues but report more thoroughly than mainland television.

"We saw it all on Phoenix TV, burned shops and everything," said a retired hospital director whose Beijing home has cable service on a limited basis and who, like others questioned about censorship, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Despite the party's strictures at home, reporting from abroad filtered into China swiftly. Broadcasts by CNN and the BBC, available in hotels and in apartment complexes housing foreigners, were cut off only sporadically by Chinese authorities, including a news conference by the Dalai Lama on Sunday from Dharmsala, India.

By Monday, in the face of the crescendo of news from abroad over the weekend, the party had changed tactics and gone on the offensive.

Champa Phuntsok, the Tibetan regional governor, was flown to Beijing to meet with reporters in a hastily organized news conference. He blamed the Dalai Lama for the outburst and urged those who had committed arson and pillaging to turn themselves in.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao held a second news conference Monday evening, using identical language to excoriate the Dalai Lama and reiterate that the issue was not Tibetan human rights and freedom of expression but Chinese territorial sovereignty.

Newspapers were authorized to report on the comments by Champa Phuntsok and Liu, and the official Central China Television began broadcasting images of the damage, with emphasis on the injuries to Han Chinese and the damage to their businesses. By Thursday, Chinese state media were reporting that protests had spread to provinces beyond Tibet.

Resorting again to what appeared to be coordinated language by Beijing officials stepping up to the cameras, Premier Wen Jiabao pressed the offensive Tuesday in his annual news conference at the close of the National People's Congress's two-week session. "They wanted to incite the sabotage of the Olympic Games to achieve their unspeakable goal," he said of the rioters.

Asked by a foreign correspondent why journalists were not allowed to travel to Tibet to cover what was happening, Wen assured his questioner that everything was returning to normal and suggested that, soon, the government would organize a reporting trip for correspondents.

China plays victim for its audience

Government media images of Tibetans as the aggressors stoke support at home.

By Mark Magnier
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 17, 2008

LANZHOU, CHINA — Even as China faces global criticism for its crackdown on Tibetan Buddhists, it's winning the battle that it most cares about: support for its policies among Chinese back home.

One key factor is a media strategy that, while still blunt and heavily reliant on censorship and propaganda, shows more nuance than usual for the lumbering Communist Party.

This last week the government has used something it traditionally viewed as a big negative, any suggestion that it's not in total control, to its advantage by going large with print, still and video coverage of Tibetans attacking Han Chinese in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and destroying their property.

Not only does this rather ironically paint the Chinese state and its massive police force as something of a victim, analysts said, but it also stirs up feelings of fear and anger among many Han, the nation's majority population, that add a personal dimension to the riots.

At a political level, the coverage has also bolstered the government's assertion that its archenemy, the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, is masterminding the protests from abroad and the atheist government's long-standing contention that Tibetan monks are anything but neutral, nonpolitical and peace-loving.

Many of the videos of the riots on the state-run CCTV website have been shot and edited to point up crimson-robed monks bashing and burning with the best of the mob. And to the extent the Dalai Lama has stopped short of outright condemning the monks and the protest, China gains points.

"In this crisis, their strategy has been pretty effective," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley. "They've been able to portray it as 'we Chinese' versus 'they Tibetans' and seen public opinion go their way."

This policy is a case of making a virtue of necessity given that absolute control of information has become increasingly difficult.

The state's information guardians have also picked up a few other tricks. They're using more individual stories of Han families who were victimized in Tibet, aware that a personal narrative is far more powerful than vague propaganda language. And they've sprinkled their official dispatches with such terminology as "bloggers," "netizens" and "blogosphere" to look more current and inclusive.

At the same time, the approach is more of a paint job than a renovation as China's propaganda ministry continues to use many traditional tactics honed in dusty Soviet offices decades ago.

Unrest is blamed on "outside" elements, Tibetans are urged to report on other "troublemakers" and there are hints, although no guarantees, of leniency for those who turn themselves in.

On other fronts, the "Great Firewall," China's Internet filtering and monitoring system, has been in overdrive during the last week, deleting comments furiously and blocking Internet searches of such terms as "Tibet," "Lhasa," "demonstration" and "March 14" -- the day of protests in which at least 10 people were killed.

Some pro-government comments have found their way onto the Internet, though many are anonymous and there is no fast way to determine their origin.

"I strongly condemn the Dalai clique trying to undermine China's prosperity," said an anonymous posting from the southern city of Guangzhou on the popular Sohu portal.

Independent views opposing the government are strongly discouraged. The government has banned travel by foreigners to Tibet.

"The control strategy comes from the very top and it's well orchestrated," Xiao said. "It's more intense than I've ever seen."

Although international opinion is important, particularly as Beijing prepares to hold the Olympics in August, all politics are local, even in China. And for the party, maintaining its monopoly political grip on its far-flung empire is central to its strategy and continued existence, underscoring its vow that Tibet will never be allowed independence.

The strategy has been well received among members of the country's often strongly nationalist Chinese-language community. The government "should send more auxiliary police and arm each one with a rubber stick" against protesters, said a post on the Internet bulletin board Douban.

The themes of national unity and respect for the integrity of the motherland have also struck a chord with many in the more sophisticated overseas Chinese Internet community.

"The government has done well," said Robert Liu, a blogger who has been studying economics in the U.S. for the last six months. "They're doing better and have a more mature approach, although they still have a long way to go."

Growing domestic support of its policies gives the Chinese government political cover to restore order to the restive ethnically Tibetan areas of the Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai and Gansu provinces as it sees fit, knowing that accounts of heavy-handed tactics will inevitably surface in an increasingly porous society.

This is a different dynamic than in 1989 when many Chinese identified with the students rather than the government in Tiananmen Square.

Images of Tibetan rioting are also being employed to bolster the government's core message that foreign human rights groups and activists such as the Dalai Lama are bent on ruining the Olympics to keep China down. The Dalai Lama said Sunday that China deserves to host the Olympics and that the Games should not be boycotted.

Although China lacks the democratic institutions, vocal critics or opinion polls that would gauge the effectiveness of its strategy and public perception of its Tibet policies, one indicator may be its censorship of coverage by television networks BBC and CNN inside the country.

Instead of blacking out all such Tibet reports, leading to long and annoying instances of blank screens early in the week, the government allowed more of them to air as the week wore on. A BBC report that aired Sunday in Beijing ran 20 minutes, including a five-minute excerpt with the Dalai Lama.

"The government is showing more confidence and learning more about spin," said Michael Anti, a well-known Chinese blogger on a Nieman fellowship this year at Harvard. "They've learned more PR tactics from Western people. They see the way the White House and the Pentagon do it."

mark.magnier@latimes.com

Gao Jing of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

Iraqi feel-good stories prove elusive

Some American readers clamor for upbeat reports, but positive news is not easy to find.

By Garrett Therolf

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 16, 2008

BAGHDAD — Afew days after arriving in Iraq early this year, I followed Army Gen. David H. Petraeus on a walk through a marketplace on the capital's east side.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq didn't wear a helmet, and he gently scolded his security detail for encircling him. "I want to get close to people. They need to feel comfortable coming up to me," he told them.

Boys and girls recognized Petraeus from television, and they moved around him. He talked to them about soccer and their neighborhood, and he turned to me and said, "See, they say they feel safer now."

The outing, despite its made-for-TV quality, gave me a hopeful feeling. During a tour of Iraq a year earlier, I encountered mostly pessimism among the Iraqis I interviewed. A reader wrote me to say that I was an "Al Qaeda cheerleader" for a story that included quotes from U.S. soldiers troubled about the difficulties of fighting insurgents. Many more asked, "Isn't there some good news to report?"

The Petraeus appearance was an early indication that I would be able to show there was. Clearly, it seemed, I would be able to move more freely, to interview more candidly. At the time, I couldn't tell by how much, but Petraeus' media advisor suggested that I should be able to safely drive to many more sections of the city, interview people openly on the street and linger for an hour or so in homes and businesses.

Over the following weeks, I traveled across Baghdad with private security to write about a man who had allegedly been tortured by a provincial police chief and about errant U.S. military airstrikes that killed civilians. I also was embedded with the military to report on the lack of a legitimate process to resettle displaced Iraqis who returned to their homes and found squatters unwilling to leave.

I gave equal time and attention to reporting what might be called "good news" stories.

One line of inquiry concerned a bank branch in Amiriya, a Sunni Arab neighborhood on the west side of the capital that the American military said was one of Al Qaeda in Iraq's most important strongholds last year.

When I had visited the district in May, members of the Army unit responsible for the area said they were fighting desperately to open a branch of the state-owned bank. Many of the residents were former civil servants, and without the bank, they couldn't pick up their pensions.

Over the course of more than a year, the military paid to have the facility rehabilitated, sought to cajole the Finance Ministry into sending a shipment of cash and helped vet the bank's guards.

"The bank is probably one of the most important things in the neighborhood. Opening it told people the government still cares about you," Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl said when I called him shortly after he returned to the U.S.

Meanwhile, I learned of another possible story: about a Chinese restaurant that had been opened in Baghdad's Karada district by three laid-off steelworkers from China's Hubei province -- the first eatery here to be owned and operated by someone from outside the Middle East in years.

A local Times reporter, Saif Hameed, was so inspired by the willingness of the Chinese to come to Baghdad that he wrote them a welcome letter, which he got translated into Mandarin.

"The fact that you left your families behind and came here lifts my spirit and deserves the greatest respect," Hameed wrote. "I couldn't sleep yesterday, no matter how hard I tried, thinking about you and admiring you."

I visited them and they agreed to a future interview.

Within weeks, I heard back from the military regarding Amiriya. The bank was no longer something the military was willing to highlight.

"The unit operating in the same area as the bank doesn't categorize the bank operations as a top priority because they don't directly affect the good of the community of Amiriya," an Army spokesman, Maj. Mark Cheadle, wrote in an e-mail. "So, the bottom line is they would rather not sponsor an embed or visit for something they don't deal with on a regular basis." My request for a follow-up "embed" was denied.

I tried to arrange a visit that would not involve the military, but the neighborhood is surrounded by checkpoints that were judged too dangerous for us to pass. Without being accompanied by soldiers, there was no way for me to tell the story.

Cheadle proposed that I instead write about a videoconference that allowed schoolchildren in Baghdad and Texas to ask questions of each other. I declined.

A few days later, the restaurant employees said they had changed their minds about the interview. They were too scared to raise their profile through a news story. And a Chinese Embassy spokesman said his office had persuaded them to return home, although they were still operating in recent days. "The situation is far too dangerous for them to work here," the spokesman said.

Because of such fears and the inefficiency that pervades the capital, these "good news" stories evaporated before I could tell them. After only a month in Iraq, I once again left having filed mostly "bad news" stories.

garrett.therolf@latimes.com

The Press Faces Climate of Fear in Gaza

BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was freed by Hamas. But the media remains under fire in the chaotic territory—where reporters face attacks, censorship and a climate of fear.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Kevin Peraino
Newsweek
Updated: 2:15 p.m. ET July 5, 2007

July 5, 2007 - In the language of political spin doctors, the television images beamed around the world yesterday were the kind of "good optics" money can't buy. Alan Johnston, the BBC correspondent who had been held in Gaza for almost four months by a criminal gang, emerged from his captivity grinning, laughing and sharing his breakfast with Hamas's top political leaders. After seizing power in Gaza two weeks ago, the Islamists have been eager to try to convince the West—and particularly Europe—that they are the only ones who can bring law and order to the chaotic territory. Springing Johnston has been a goal from Day One, and the journalist seemed (understandably) grateful for the effort. "I'm pretty sure that if Hamas hadn't come in and put the heat on, I'd still be stuck in that room," Johnston told reporters yesterday.

But while Johnston's release may let foreign correspondents breathe a little easier in Gaza, hundreds of local Palestinian reporters are still wary. According to a new report by the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedom (PCDMF), more than 30 Palestinian journalists were attacked in Gaza and the West Bank last month, the highest in the territories' history. Already three reporters have been killed this year, compared with only one fatality in the preceding three years. Three radio stations were raided during the fighting in June, and Palestine TV, considered sympathetic to Fatah, has at least temporarily shuttered its Gaza operation. Late last week a prominent Gaza correspondent for the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV station fled to Norway with his family. The Hamas takeover "has had a terrible negative impact on the media," says Musa Rimawi, the director of the PCDMF. "Journalists are scared. They're panicking."

Freedom of the press is always a tricky proposition in the Middle East; here, as elsewhere, it belongs only to those who own one, as A.J. Liebling famously observed. Even in relatively liberal capitals like Beirut, media outlets tend to have close ties to political movements, or simply wealthy individuals. After seizing control of the Gaza Strip last month, the Islamists considered local TV and radio stations to be legitimate booty. To be sure, many of those who are complaining loudest now are simply Fatah publicists who have lost their cushy jobs and fear reprisals from long-held grudges. (Even before Hamas took over, Fatah security forces had been known to launch their own crackdowns on unfriendly commentators.)

Yet genuine advocates of press freedom have some legitimate fears. Correspondents I spoke with yesterday in Gaza said the only newspaper currently available there is the Hamas-run Fallastin. And Hamas's mass-media efforts have never been known for being particularly even-handed. One popular children's show, called "Tomorrow's Pioneers," stars a Mickey Mouse lookalike named Farfour, who urges kids to fight for "a world led by Islamists." The final episode last week featured Farfour being clubbed to death by an Israeli soldier.

Female correspondents in Gaza are particularly concerned about the new regime. After Johnston was released yesterday, I called Najah Awad, one of Gaza's best-known broadcast journalists. She hosts a show called "Family Journal" on Palestine TV. When the fighting broke out, she had been working on a documentary series called "My Body," about a woman who had been raped in Gaza. Awad describes herself as politically independent, but since the Islamists consider Palestine TV to be a Fatah mouthpiece, the station's 700 employees have mostly stayed away from the studio for fear of confrontations. Awad hasn't been to work since the fighting started, and has no immediate plans to return. Her documentary is on hold. "I sit at home," she told me. "I do nothing." She says a Hamas Web site recently accused the station's female broadcasters of being "loose women"—one more reason to stay away. To Awad, Johnston's release seems little more than a PR ploy. "Hamas is flexing its muscles for political reasons," she says. "I don't think they really care about Alan Johnston."

Still, Hamas leaders are politically savvy enough to know that the news media is one of their most effective weapons against Israel—and one that is virtually useless if Palestinian reporters are too scared to leave their homes. Often a single powerful photograph has been enough to rally international opinion or unite feuding factions. When 13-year-old Fares Odeh was photographed hurling a stone at an Israeli tank during the second intifada, the image quickly became iconic. (Yasir Arafat liked to tell audiences of children that they should try to be more like Odeh; Palestinian bureaucrats hung framed prints on office walls.) As the fighting intensified in September 2000, a series of pictures showing 12-year-old Mohammad Durra being shot to death in front of his father sparked an international outcry. Last spring, as Gaza degenerated into a low-grade civil war, only the heartbreaking image of a disconsolate Huda Ghalia—whose entire nuclear family had been wiped out during a beach picnic by what Palestinians say was an Israeli artillery shell—had the power to unite Hamas and Fatah loyalists. (Israel denied responsibility.)

Hamas leaders argue that the real danger to press freedom comes from small, radical splinter groups like the one that held Johnston—just the kind of organizations that would be likely to proliferate if the U.S. and Israel continue to isolate Hamas. Last month a previously unheard-of Islamist organization calling itself the "Swords of Truth" issued a leaflet threatening to behead female Palestinian broadcasters if they didn't start wearing headscarves. Najah Awad says she collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital when she heard about that threat. A senior Palestinian intelligence officer, who didn't want to be identified because his work is classified, told NEWSWEEK that he knows virtually nothing about the new group, which has also claimed credit for a series of attacks on Internet cafes and Christian bookstores. Hamas leaders have a point when they insist that they're more politically pragmatic than some of these renegade splinters. But Gaza's new rulers will need to be careful as they consolidate control over the territory's media outlets. Good photo-ops like the Johnston release are virtually useless, after all, if there are no longer any credible reporters there to record them.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19617377/site/newsweek/

Rumsfeld vs. The Press

Sometimes you wonder if the press doesn't like Donald Rumsfeld. After Thursday's "contentious" DOD press briefing, wonder no more.

The press clearly see Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as lacking a fundamental understanding of the press's function in a democracy:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters today to "just back off" and "relax" instead of looking for differences between U.S. and Iraqi officials on benchmarks for progress in Iraq toward political and security goals, and he rejected the idea of penalizing any failure to hit the targets.

Of course, it didn't help that Rumsfeld mocked reporters, said that the press was creating "mischief" and shouted down Jim Miklaszewski when he asked a question not precise enough to be worthy of a Rumsfeld answer. Telling the press to stop doing what they do is ridiculous.

Senator John Kerry's staff clearly saw that Rumsfeld's arrogance and defensiveness weren't working in his favor and took the opportunity to pounce, saying that "Today a secretary of defense, who should have been fired a long time ago, lost even greater touch with reality." Rumsfeld's beleaguered, and I'm sure the press will have its chance to mock him when he's gone.

My biggest problem is that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld revealed that the benchmarks supposedly being set for security in Iraq -- rejected by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, but no matter -- won't be real benchmarks, because those would affect American and Iraqi public opinion and help us determine whether the war is succeeding on the Administration's own terms.

And this Administration does not want to let anyone, let alone the public, determine whether the Iraq war is going well based on any set of criteria that can be reviewed and reported on by the press, even if those criteria are ones of its own choosing. Be prepared to be disgusted when those benchmarks come out.