[Newspoetry] verdict

[gillespi]

Dear the Public I,

Your latest issue (2:6) was well worth reading, and I have read every 
word. It is only at the insistence of the wonderful Belden Fields that I write 
this letter. Specifically, he is calling upon me to do my civic jury duty and 
determine whether the Bush administration is innocent or guilty of the 
crime of engineering the recent attempted coup in Venezuela. His 
argument for the guilt of the Bush administration seems to rest upon the 
following evidence: the coverage of the coup was skewed in our national 
corporate press, which seemed to follow the lead of the Bush 
administration; the temporarily ousted Hugo Chavez had made himself 
unpopular with the Bush administration for a number of reasons, which 
can be summarized as disobedience; the U.S. has a history of 
engineering antidemocratic coups, especially in Latin America; and three 
appointees of the Bush administration (Assistant Secretary of State for 
Latin American Affairs Otto Reich, National Security Council staff member 
Elliot Abrams, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John 
Negroponte) have been implicated in antidemocratic, criminal, and 
terrorist activities in Latin America. As a reader, thinker, voter, and 
Newspoet, I find the reasoning of Belden Fields to be quite convincing. 
However, as a jury member, I have to suppress my cynicism and assume 
that the accused is innocent until proven guilty, so the question is whether 
the evidence presented by Mr. Fields constitutes proof. I have to conclude 
that the evidence presented here is all circumstantial. The laserous 
Belden Fields has demonstrated to my satisfaction that the current 
administration (as well as numerous previous administrations) has the 
motive and character to commit the crime of which it has been accused, 
but this alone does not constitute proof that they did. Fields has proven 
only that the Bush administration could have committed the crime. There 
is no smoking gun, no fingerprint, no method. Since you asked. 
Nevertheless, the article is fascinating and informative, and it would not 
surprise me if more substantial and incontrovertible evidence emerges in 
time.

As long as I am writing this letter (you don't have a letters section, and 
your paper seems to suffer from no compulsion to offer balanced or 
opposing viewpoints, so I fear that this is just a rhetorical exercise on my 
part), I thought I'd bring up my opinion of issue 2:6 in general. I have 
already mentioned that I like it, and it is only because I like it that I feel 
compelled to point out what I consider to be its flaws. It is my hope that 
this letter will serve as input to future issues, particularly with regard to 
making your arguments convincing for those who don't already agree with 
them. I, for example, already agree with much of what is presented here, 
but I would hope that the intended audience of the paper and its 
arguments is not its writers or those who share their viewpoints, but 
rather those who remain yet unconvinced, whether out of skepticism or 
apathy.

The paper relies heavily on other sources, which is good, but your 
formatting makes it unclear whether you are lifting passages directly from 
those sources or paraphrasing. The ambiguity of this leaves you open to 
charges of plagiarism (if you care, and you should), and doesn't help your 
credibility in the eyes of a skeptical reader. If you are lifting paragraphs 
directly from major newspapers, indicate this. Not only will this help orient 
the reader as to whose words they are reading (indeed, in addition to it 
being unclear whether you are quoting sources directly, many of the 
articles bear no explicit authorship), but it will also protect you against 
accusations of improper attribution or falsification (if you are directly 
quoting a source that happens to be wrong but the reader can't tell that 
the quote is direct).

Proofread. Spelling errors may be unimportant, but they are avoidable and 
undermine your credibility in the eyes of those who seek reasons to 
discredit your efforts. I am aware that the Public I is a volunteer-run 
periodical, but none of the typos I found would have required any 
professional training to spot. Unfortunately, I cannot offer my services as 
proofreader at this time because I am involved in a heated disagreement 
with your editor John Wason about whether "grammatic" or "grammatical" 
is correct (or, more specifically, whether it makes a difference), and 
whether "address poetry to power" is an appropriate or good rewording of 
"speak poetry to power." (I shudder to think what corrections he would 
make to this letter, but he's still a good man, a true Newspoet, and, as I 
mentioned, working for free.)

Within this issue's cover story, there are a lot of arguments made, both 
explicitly and implicitly, among them the argument that the Bush 
administration had specific foreknowledge of the events of September 
11th and allowed these events to happen, or even were somehow 
responsible for engineering said events. This is a highly paranoid claim 
for which there is only circumstantial evidence (as with the article by the 
Belden Fields), and it bothers me to see this argument mixed in with 
other paranoid arguments that are clearly and inarguably true: financial 
connections between the Bush and bin Laden families, to give just one 
example. Please note that I don't think paranoid arguments are 
necessarily false: paranoia and veracity are separate things. For example, 
it is paranoid to argue that, during the 1980s, the C.I.A., acting on orders 
from the White House, facilitated the importation of tons of cocaine into 
this country in order to fund an illegal terrorist war whose purpose was to 
undermine a democratically elected government in a tiny country no sane 
person could possibly consider a military threat, resulting in a nationwide 
drug epidemic during what that same White House called a "war on 
drugs," but this actually happened, and has by now been thoroughly 
documented, even in reports issued by the C.I.A. itself, as well as a 
government investigation that occurred quietly in the shadow of the 
watery, nationally televised Iran-Contra hearings. What I am arguing for is 
not less paranoia, but more separation of arguments than a reader could 
get by reading your nonlinear (albeit cleverly-designed) "Who's Who" and 
"Connecting the Dots" sections. I think it would have helped the 
presentation (again: helped the presentation persuade the yet-
unconvinced) to have more explicit framing of facts and speculation. The 
Bush administration is composed of people with ties to large oil 
companies, Osama bin Laden's history is intertwined with both the Bush 
family and the C.I.A., big U.S. oil has everything to gain from removing the 
Taliban government, F.B.I. agents had discovered potential terrorists 
enrolled in flight schools, Mohamad Atta (your spelling) was allowed to 
cross our border freely with an invalid Visa: all of this is true, and as a 
Newspoet, reader, and voter I am ready to expatriate A.S.A.P., but as a jury 
member I have to say that this evidence, while overwhelming, still does 
not prove that the Bush administration facilitated the attack on the 
Pentagon and World Trade Center. I don't want to believe that they did 
(though I have nothing but contempt for them), and I am not alone in this. 
But this letter isn't about me, it's about your presentation. The War on 
Terrorism is an act of terrorism. In order to argue that it is ferociously 
unjust and even criminal to bomb one of the poorest countries in the 
world because a crime may have been committed by the employees of an 
individual who might live there, to argue that the removal of the Taliban 
will likely have huge financial benefits for big oil companies with close 
ties to the current administration, indeed even to argue for the removal of 
the current unelected president and his corrupt administration on the 
basis of their history of corporate and international crime, it is not 
necessary to make the paranoid and ultimately unsubstantiated claim, 
whether implicitly or explicitly, that the Bush administration facilitated the 
events of September 11th. In so doing, you are diluting the facts, which 
are frightening enough.

Nevertheless, I remain:

Your devoted reader,
William Gillespie