An Army of Bloggers

How to turn low-budget revolutionaries into respectable members of the establishment

David Weigel from the July 2006 issue

(Page 3 of 23)

p class="CRlargetext c3"> span class="c1">Hoekstra, the chairman of the Select House Intelligence Committee and a vocal supporter of the Iraq war, wanted to attach jumper cables to the debate over weapons of mass destruction. Three years had passed since weapons inspectors, following Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s directions, had failed to find deadly ordnance “in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” Hoekstra’s committee had a stash of declassified documents from before the war, and no one was translating them; since the WMD debate was basically over, there wasn’t much interest in what Saddam’s inner circle used to bluster about. But if these documents could be publicized, there would be a chance for war supporters to argue anew that the invasion was justified. Now, Hoekstra told Marcus, was the time to “unleash the power of the Net on these 55,000 boxes of documents to see exactly what went on.” Bloggers could translate the documents themselves, or at least pass around information and rumors about what the papers contained. If the intelligence community wasn’t interested, Hoekstra could put the papers online and “let the blogosphere go!” o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p class="CRlargetext c3"> span class="c1"> o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p class="CRlargetext c3">