By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
I'm always fascinated that anyone quotes my little blog in their article or book, let alone scholarly dissertation -- and often, given their wild prejudices in the Silicon Valley milieu so uncritical of tech and the Internet, they get it absolutely wrong.
So let me refute the many errors in this thesis by Jeremy David Johnson, published in 2014 regarding my own blog. It's scary to me that an academic could get a degree based on false reading like that, and today, be teaching others, and it doesn't matter. It's yet another indication of how people don't read online; they only scan for search-strings that fit their limited preconceptions .
Not a Conservative
There author is puzzled why "the conservative writers" for this site would quote the left-wing Guy Debord. Well, that's because I'm not a conservative writer (PS, there is only one of me, and no other authors here -- most people don't click on "about me" and they feel articles are "anonymous," which is silly, given that my name is under "about me," but that's why I try to remember to put in a by-line.) How did Johnson get the idea there were "conservative authors"? Because he didn't bother to click on "about me" and discover there was one. But more than that, he assumed that if somebody said something -- anything! -- critical about the Obama Administration's handling of the Benghazi tragedy, they "must" be conservative -- or worse! If they raised gamer Sean Smith, who died serving his country in Benghazi, as apparently Glen Beck has (although I hadn't seen anything from Beck at the time or now), my blog "must" be a "conspiracy theory". It's a very good example of force-field interpretation. If you say something "like" what someone has said in some other political grouping, regardless of what you actually said on that point or numerous others, you "must" be associated with that same political grouping. It's called "cluster thinking". I'm not a cluster thinker.
I'm a registered Democrat; I voted for Hillary Clinton. Some of my criticism of Russia, socialism, technology, open-source culture, etc. feels like it is "conservative" to some readers. I would suggest then that they do not have a very grounded understanding of the humanities and particularly human rights principles; I think my critique is liberal, not conservative, but ultimately I don't care, as I read conservatives as well as liberals and leftists every day and don't feel compelled to defend an identity. But clearly for Johnson, anyone criticizing any Democratic official, even someone who voted for the Obama Administration, must be "conservative". There can't be criticism!
But I don't have a conspiracy theory about Benghazi, and don't think it's a cover-up by Democrats. I do think it was a planned attack, not a spontaneous riot reacting to a movie that offended Muslims -- it seems the planned nature of Benghazi on the part of the terrorists is not in dispute now, but was at the time.
Benghazi Was Not Spontaneous But a Planned Terrorist Attack
THAT was the issue at the time I wrote the blog -- a "version" of the story put out initially by some elements of the Obama Administration, consistent with their beliefs, that the attack was "spontaneous". It was not. And that is no longer in dispute today. I voted for Obama for his first term (and voted for Romney because of Obama's awful policies on Russia and Iran). I'm as critical of Victoria Nuland as anyone (including most bashers of "neo-cons," which I am not, either -- although I have absolutely no problem with her handing out bagels to the demonstrators on Maidan). I fail to see why we can't question statements coming out of the Obama Administration then or now, regardless of our political persuasions.
As I've made clear in another blog post, I think the tragedy of Benghazi isn't about what most people debated -- whether or not President Barack Obama was soft on terrorism and he and the State Department failed to hear warning signs or covered up the true nature of the tragedy. Yes, there are debates to be had about what happened in Egypt and the US Embassy there, and in general about Obama's reluctance to condemn terrorists, but that's separate from the facts on the ground about Benghazi as such. Yes, Rice gave out a version of the story based on her own internal briefings that does not seem a full account of the indications of the planned nature of the attack, which you can later read on CNN, if you don't want to hear it from me. Eventually, Obama's own director of national intelligence said that in his report that the attack wasn't a spontaneous mob, as initially believed (due to events in Cairo) but was a planned, terrorist attack. So what? State Department briefings, like journalism, are a first draft of history.
Liberal Do-Good Mindset
I personally think the tragedy is rooted rather more specifically in the ambassador's -- and State Department's -- liberal culture of do-goodism and better-worlding. There is not enough understanding of evil and evil actors in the world, and too much assumption that these evils are fixed with improved nutrition, one laptop per child, Internet access, and clean water. Meanwhile, the reason the UN calls a situation like Benghazi a "complex disaster" is because it is complex, i.e. man-made as well as natural, planned as well as random.
And it is a tragedy -- a story of human error -- and not a conspiracy, as far as I can tell. I myself have some insight into the "do-good culture", because I have been immersed in it in the human rights movement my whole life. Few want to blame the ambassador or his immediate superiors -- they wanted to blame Hillary Clinton or Susan Rice -- neither of whom are to blame whatsoever in my view, despite their roles at the time. (The lawsuit by the victims against Hillary failed, and that's as it should be.) Nor is Obama -- except to the extent that he is part of this overall culture of misplaced optimism about foreign places at war.
Declared Unsafe by the UN, Attacked Before Benghazi
It is much more about the local story, and what shaped the perception of local factors. If you thought you could ignore the UN in Benghazi, whose staffers explained that it was not safe there and their convoys had been attacked in April (5 months before the September 11 Benghazi attack), then you either hate the UN (a common position among US conservatives) or you are more liberal or less informed than they (it happens). The ambassador went out jogging alone in a place where Ian Martin of the UN said was not safe -- I know Martin and have the utmost respect for him. (Later Martin said the attack on the compound and the murder of Amb. Stevens and others was a "wake-up call" -- but he had given the "wake-up" call earlier when he was there himself to discuss the "transition to democracy" and his convoy was bombed). If you thought the war was over, and it was time to have hospital wing openings (Amb. Stevens was to attend one, but ended up a deceased patient there), it was because your belief in the ability to have democracy-building trumped the reality of reports -- including UN reports -- on the ground.
Not the Marines, But the Martyrs
The single most telling factor in this tragedy, to me, is that it was not the Marines guarding this American compound, which was shy of a consulate or embassy, even with an ambassador. Normally, Marines DO guard embassies abroad. Why weren't the Marines there? Because Libya did not allow the Marines into the country to provide this duty; they did not want US troops there. I've been to many US Embassies abroad and heard many UN briefings about UN missions abroad, so I have some understanding of this issue. While sub-contracted to a Wales group, the guards included members of something called the 17 February Martyrs' Brigade who, not surprisingly with a name like that, turned out to be related to Al Qaeda.
The "Police"
My point in the blog about Sean's last words is that he describes his doubts about these guards -- he called them "police" in quotation marks in game chat, and noted they were taking pictures. That was suspicious behaviour, surely. Why were they taking pictures? They may have used them to plan the attack later. MY ONLY POINT is that Sean flagged the suspicious nature of these guards in his game chat. That meant he (and possibly others) had developed qualms about that. There's nothing in his words, or my reporting of them, that suggests any government conspiracy! How did Johnson pull that out of my blog?!
Because he had a default set to combing the Internet for writings that he felt fit his thesis about conservatives who engage in conspiracies and thus misunderstand personas online.
EVE Online
I asked questions about why Sean was playing EVE Online instead of doing his job -- that's perfectly normal, and not about a conspiracy. But I also pointed out that we cannot be sure of the time he was playing and I delved into all the mechanics of the date stamps, which are meaningless because they can be set to game time, i.e. where the developers are located; your local time, or just a random date stamp set when you make an account which you are supposed to change but may never have done so. It's not forensic proof of anything. There's also the fact that Sean could have talked on Jabber literally at any time, on a computer or phone (although cell phones were less ubiquitous then) without actually being logged on to the game -- that is common gamer's behaviour.
At no time do I suggest that this game chat constitutes proof that Sean was "playing a game" DURING the attack. We do not know that, and can't know that without internal data like his log-on times that his compound's computer systems might show. It seems unlikely he would be sitting a computer DURING an attack. In fact, his chat, if anything, internally, points to a time hours before the attack, in the morning or afternoon. Sean writes grandly if ominously, "assuming we don't die tonight," suggesting that "tonight" is still some time in the future. It's the sort of swaggering thing people in RL government and law enforcement say in games all the time -- it's a personality type. Let me suggest that if Sean was actually already in a position where he was under attack and could die, he would be running for his life, not sitting at a computer.
I make it clear, from my extensive delve into the time stamp details and so on that WE DO NOT KNOW when his chat was. ALL we know is that he was suspicious of the police. And you don't need a conspiracy theory to accentuate that point -- it merely bolsters the facts of the story that are not disputed, that the guards hired by the US for their compound in Benghazi turned against them, and that their idealized understanding of their mission in Benghazi as already in the "transition of democracy" phase instead of the "war-stopping" phase got them killed. There's no conspiracy or cover up here, nor did I claim there was one; these are the facts on the ground.
Conspiracy Theory About Sean
Johnson writes:
The insinuation here is that Smith was actually a plant for the State Department (or CIA if you ask Glenn Beck) who helped to fan the media flames by talking about the attacks within the game. In the strangest part of the death of Sean Smith, EVE Online becomes, at least for some conservatives, a tool
through which the United States government enacts fraud and treachery. Smith's death and his conversations in EVE Online are, for them, evidence of a conspiracy to fabricate an attack. EVE, then, is not so separate from the “real” world—it is a tool of politicians to shape world events.65
I don't make any such insinuation, and I really am baffled how Johnson could pull this out of my straightforward blog -- except that clearly he started with a deep prejudice. At the time I wrote about Sean Smith's words in the game, NO ONE had covered the topic. I did not see it in any news reports or anything at the time. I don't think as much attention was paid to games and gaming culture at that time -- this was pre-GamerGate. People forget how news progresses and information and conspiracies form. I didn't see anyone making any such claim about Sean nor did I make one; if they came later, that's on them.
Sean was an employee of the State Department, and not a "plant" for anyone, and I make no claim whatsoever that he is a "plant". He is merely a personality type who brags in games about RL, which may not be quite as glamorous (information officers are not CIA commandos) and who happened to say a telling thing about the "police". The ONLY point I wanted to come out of this was that Sean had an important piece of evidence about these "police" -- and studying them, their suspicious behaviour, their provenance, etc. was the direction the investigation should take.
CIA Cover?
Is there some indication that Sean was working a "cover" position and in fact was in the CIA? I don't see any evidence of that, nor did I say that. If anything, a real CIA agent would be more trained in tradecraft and wouldn't brag about his RL position in a game.
As for some conspiracy about EVE Online and the US government, I find this preposterous, and I've never claimed anything remotely like it, and if someone has, I wonder how they could concoct it. I made a character in EVE Online years ago, but I never got beyond the spaceship -- I am not a war gamer and couldn't figure out how to do battle and just gave up, bored. EVE Online was sort of a niche game that did not have a lot of players -- while larger than, say, "Tale in the Desert," it was a more elaborate social game than World of Warcraft or other MMORPEGs. I thought EVE had some elements of mining or strategy that might be compelling (I had read about game properties trading for huge amounts of money); EVE was discussed a lot in the Second Life circles where I was at the time and some of my friends played it. But it's a game created by a developer from Iceland, who I think playfully called his company "CCP" (Star Wars? USSR in Cyrillic? Something else?) and who has nothing to do with the US government -- quite the opposite. (EVE Online was sold last year to a South Korean game company). Did the CIA or DoD use EVE Online unbeknownst to its makers or players to do some kind of nefarious spying or RP games? I don't see any evidence of that, either, although it is always speculated about all games. And absolutely nothing in my text made any conspiratorial point like this -- it is merely Jeremy David Johnson "reading into" it with a set of knee-jerk prejudices.
Was Sean somehow "narrating" or "anticipating" some dark, manipulated event by making his comments about his RL situation in-game, as Jeremy implies I have said (wrongly) or some conservative at all? No, not at all, and I don't say it. He's merely chatting because for him, these worlds are seamless; his friendship and socialization are real, even if based in a fictional world. So he talks about RL, as all people in such situations do. Perhaps young Jeremy has never been in a game.
Bragging In-Game
Regardless, there is only one subject here for me, and it's a narrow one, and my blogs made that clear: Sean Smith said something in game chat that indicated the attack was planned, and not spontaneous.
Johnson also writes that the following paragraph from my blog is "bizarre":
It's clear that Sean Smith was inured to danger, and his game buddies even bragged about how he told them of his dangerous assignments, which added to his allure -- it's typical in these anonymous virtual scenes that people use the coin of real life or "RL" as it is known to trump game-acquired skills and amplify them. Through the acceleration and amplification of virtuality, somebody who is an information officer can become Kissinger
or Brahimi.64
Why bizarre? Anyone who has played games, or merely studied them at least somewhat, understand this dynamic all too well, and I shouldn't have to explain it or defend it -- Johnson is the one misreading this and out of step here.
Indeed, real life is often used as the coin of the realm in virtual worlds to trump various things inside the virtual worlds. If someone is a "real" musician or "real" author in real life, they get more respect than those who play music or write stories only in Second Life. If someone is a real-life law-enforcer or military veteran, they are viewed as "better" in World of Warcraft, which may or may not be true. It also seems clear to me that Sean was inured to danger because he was in Benghazi! Hello! He had served in Iraq! Yes, State Department officials can be under great pressure to go serve in Iraq, for example, or see their careers stalled. But they can say "no". Someone who writes "we may die tonight" is somehow who has a somewhat valiant and idealistic view of both the danger of his situation and his role in it as a brave person.
I actually think that while Sean was uneasy seeing those "police" take pictures -- everything he knew about war zones and embassies would tell him that, and he was experienced -- he didn't think really they would "die tonight" at that moment. He said it merely as speculation to relieve his anxiety. After all, he hadn't been under constant gunfire at that point, like a combatant in Afghanistan. He was an information officer in a temporary US compound.
Why is this "bizarre" to assess his behaviour in this way? It's simply basic assessment of human nature. BTW, it's not a slam on Sean that he went into this situation, likely believing he was doing good and doing his duty, and that he played EVE. It's a type -- a common type in our world, to such an extent that people talk about how casually dropping that you are a Paladin in WoW or whatever can help you in certain types of job interviews. Critiquing this isn't "bizarre"; what's bizarre is not finding anything troublesome about it. THAT is what I mean about professors of communications these days, and how biased they are, and how uncritical of the Internet and Silicon Valley they are -- tending to ascribe any such criticism as "neo-con" or "the GOP" -- or worse!
Yet I'm just not following this strange thesis of Johnson -- my blog doesn't make claims for any fabricated attack designed in games by the US government or any of its officials -- that's insane. I merely pointed out that Sean's game chat is important to take seriously as indication of the true nature of the "police" -- a point which isn't about any conspiracy, but more about all the factors that went into this compound, which was not viewed as "permissive" for the US Marines. Let me suggest that such an environment that cannot stand US Marines is not one that is really in a "transition to democracy". I hope the US government, whether Democrat or Republican, understands that better now.
If Glen Beck picked up this theme of EVE Online, I didn't notice it at the time -- Benghazi was not an obsession of mine. I will have to go and study this at some point. But I assure you at the time I wrote -- which is clear from my blog and its links, and my other post about Benghazi -- Sean's "last words in a game" are only about his last words, and not the game, and not a conspiracy. The games are only a setting. We even have these words because he bragged to his pals in a game -- he was a type of personality that does that. It's normal and natural.
Real vs. Virtual
Johnson goes on at length debating whether Sean Smith the real human person was "like" his character "Vile Rat". Well, in the literal sense, no, because, um, he's a character in a game. He's like an author's fictional character, although a game is different, because the "typist" as they are often called is a real person wielding the character in real time in an immersive 3D environment -- that's not like a book or a movie experienced more passively.
But my blog isn't about the exploits of Vile Rat. It's about Sean, on Jabber (in or out of EVE Online) in which he was "OOC" or "out of character" talking about his RL job and compound security. My focus is only that, and that's not about his character. I don't have the patience to study "Vile Rat" as he is not material to this story; yes, people make characters that are extensions of and expressions of themselves, but the only thing relevant to the Benghazi investigation would be if he happened to give any other clues about the security or personnel at the compound, and it appears that he did not. End of story.
Johnson's 174-page thesis appears to be about how we "shouldn't" accept various writers' online personas as "the same" as they are (he goes into detail about Edward Snowden and his persona TRUEHoohah). I don't have time to read it now but I suspect I may disagree, as I treat game characters with much more skepticism and don't indulge in breathless and idealized theories about their "transgressive" nature that somehow decouples them from real-life responsibility. it doesn't.
Jeremy David Johnson Got It Wrong
I'm just setting the record straight on this one misread of his regarding my writings on Sean Smith. He got them very wrong, and it was because he started out with a deep prejudice not uncommon among those in his field, and suffers from "search-stringitis" common to people cruising around the Internet and clipping things that "fit" and not reading seriously for context. Today, he, as we can find on his web page, he is a lecturer on communications at the University of Pacific in Stockton. His Twitter feed contains some things I agree with, some things I'd like a second opinion on, and others I don't agree with, like the idea that the GOP "deliberately" freezes upward mobility -- which sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. This accidental online encounter has only deepened my sense that such academics, like journalists with similar prejudices, are not honest brokers in devising policy about Silicon Valley; no, I don't have a copy of Rhetoric as Posthuman Practice handy. Sigh.
To re-cap, for the tl;dr crowd:
1. Jeremy David Johnson claimed I was a conservative merely on the vague sense that if I said ANYTHING critical about Benghazi I must be conservative. I'm not. I'm a Democrat and have voted straight ticket pretty much forever. Understanding my text shouldn't depend on my political categorization, and I shouldn't have to invoke it to defend myself, because:
2. Nowhere in my post do I espouse any conspiracy theory about Benghazi, having to do with any cover-up, or even some sinister master plan somewhere in which the victims are mere puppets and "Hillary" or "Obama" the puppet-masters. They aren't. Nothing of the kind can be found in any of my text. Instead, I said that do to a certain ideological mindset of do-good liberalism -- a mindset perhaps not unlike Johnson -- the parties to Benghazi tragedy did not heed the signs of danger and a decided "not transitioning to democracy" environment.
3. Nowhere in my post did I say that Sean Smith was a CIA agent, or in some kind of conspiracy or was some kind of hidden actor in a staged drama carried out through an online game-- what I say is that he is a gamer and a law-enforcement/government type who tends to emphasize his valiant nature -- and that he did when he said "assuming we aren't killed tonight". Nowhere do I say that he was chatting in the game at the time of the attack because I explained we don't know that, and it seems unlikely.
4. The only point to be gleaned from Sean's speech in a game is that Benghazi was planned, and not spontaneous, and the work of terrorists, not irate townspeople. He was suspicious of "police" who were taking pictures of their compound. And that's a fact, and that got more attention later. Since Johnson is writing in 2014, two years after Benghazi, surely he could concede this.
5. Nowhere in my post do I make any "bizarre" points but merely point out that a certain type of male who goes into danger zones in the military and plays war zones tends to brag about his exploits -- a normal point, and not "bizarre" unless you think there is no male bravado culture at all in reality or virtuality. I said that people brag about their RL to increase their reputation in games -- and in this game, Sean Smith played an intergalactic diplomat while in reality, he was an information officer in a remote US compound, to be sure, a war zone, but one in which the parties did not seem to fully assess as a war zone.
6. There are no references to any conspiracies, figures like Alex Jones or Glen Beck or anything of the sort in my blog. At the time I wrote it, I was the only one writing about his words in a game outside his gaming buddies.
So that's all there is to it. Instead, my search-strings have been harnessed to the cause of trying to prove how conservative narratives online distort reality, and how (to compress what Johnson likely feels is a very precious and nuanced thesis) people's characters in games should not be taken as who they really are. So what have we learned here, once again, as we did with the Covington boys and a host of other stories? Liberal/leftist ideological blinkers funnel the world their their prisms and distort reality as much if not more as conservatives.
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