Correcting Where It Counts: an excellent piece in by John Hinderaker demonstrating the exquisite sensitivity of the NYT to any hint of bias in trivial stories, but blindness when it counts.
…Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who took part in terrorism investigations in New York after the Sept. 11 attacks, said that both The Times, for its disclosures about the eavesdropping program, and The Post, for an article about secret C.I.A. prisons, had violated the 1917 law. The Times, he added, has also violated the 1950 law.
“It was irresponsible to publish these things,” Mr. McCarthy said. “I wouldn’t hesitate to prosecute.”
The reporters who wrote the two articles recently won Pulitzer Prizes.
Technorati Tags: NSA
Harold C. Hutchison posits that Al Qaeda is defeated in Iraq. Maybe - I suspect Hutchison is correct, in six months I think we’ll know:
April 30, 2006: Despite the many brickbats of the media, al Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq, and is now retreating to lick its wounds where it can. If it can. Just over four and a half years, al Qaeda has gone from being the dominant terrorist group in the world to a defeated shell of its former self. In trying to defeat the United States, al Qaeda made three big mistakes: They fought the last information war, they underestimated the American leadership, and they also managed to anger the Iraqi people.
Powerline highlights a London Times report saying “Zarqawi and his al Qaeda associates are changing their strategy, due to a “shortage of foreign fighters willing to undertake suicide missions.”
Thomas Bray writes his last column for The Detroit News. Sorry to see Tom leave - this is another example of sound economics - a quantity that’s nearly impossible to find in typical MSM reporting:
Republicans from George Bush on down caved last week to the latest round of hysteria by agreeing, among other ideas, to yet another investigation of gasoline prices. Never mind that every time the matter has been reviewed, the verdict has been the same: Market forces account for virtually all of the supposed “gouging.”
Not that one needs to have warm fuzzy feelings toward the oil companies and their extremely well-paid executives. As the founder of economics, Adam Smith, observed in 1776, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”
“I worried a lot about terrorism,” Mr. Shultz told me, “and I didn’t think we had an adequate strategy.” So in that 1984 speech, the next sentence says this: “The question posed by terrorism involves our intelligence capability, the doctrine under which we would employ force, and most important of all our public’s attitude toward this challenge.”
Shultz was the first A-level pol to talk straight (1984) about confronting terrorism. Here he is interviewed by Daniel Henninger - ranging over a number of topics, from retired-general complaints to the Cold War.
“I don’t know how you define ‘neoconservatism,’ ” he replied, “but I think it’s associated with trying to spread open political systems and democracy. I recall President Reagan’s Westminster speech in 1982–that communism would be consigned to ‘the ash heap of history’ and that freedom was the path ahead. And what happened? Between 1980 and 1990, the number of countries that were classified as ‘free’ or ‘mostly free’ increased by about 50%. Open political and economic systems have been gaining ground and there’s a good reason for it. They work better. I don’t know whether that’s neoconservative or what it is, but I think it’s what has been happening. I’m for it.”
Both books are reviewed here by Steven F. Hayward for the Claremont Review of Books:
… Above all, no credit could be given to Reagan, because acknowledging him would be an implicit reproach of the establishment intelligentsia. It is simply unthinkable that the Hollywood bumpkin Reagan could deal effectively with the Soviet Union if he rejected the irenic ministrations of the Council on Foreign Relations. Admitting that Reagan bested the foreign-policy smart set would have the most searching consequences for those who, as Reagan once put it, “make a fetish of complexity.” Reagan proved that the simplicity of Occam’s razor is what is most needed in foreign affairs. Historical argument over the Cold War, like argument over the French Revolution or the American Founding, is a proxy for the fight over fundamental political principles, and has relevance for the present moment. September 11 raised the stakes: It’s a straight line from the “evil empire” to the “axis of evil.”
The latest entries in the battle of the books are Reagan’s War by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and The Fifty-Year Wound by Derek Leebaert, a professor of government at Georgetown University and founding editor of the journal International Affairs. Although very different in style and approach, both come to the same conclusion: Reagan won the Cold War—though not quite, as Margaret Thatcher put it, without firing a shot.
These two books may not be quite in the class of the latest from John Lewis Gaddis, “The Cold War: A New History”, but together you have a good basis for some study of what really happened during the half-century from WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Technorati Tags: Cold War
How is it possible that we have not heard these stories before? — Scott Johnson, Powerline.
Brain-stretching for today by three of SeekerBlog’s reliable sources: Reuel Marc Gerecht reviewing Mark Bowden, with commentary by Scott Johnson. Gerecht’s Wall Street Journal review is subscriber-only — yet another time I’m happy I subscribe. If you do not subscribe, hunt down a copy if you can.
Retired spook Gerecht’s lede:
In 1985, when I first visited the Iran desk in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va., my attention was quickly drawn to the Iranian-published volumes of the CIA and State Department cable traffic that had been seized by the Iranian “students” who took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. That was the year, lest we forget, of the shah’s overthrow and the victory of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The Iranians, post-takeover, had painstakingly reassembled most of the embassy’s CIA cables and diplomatic telegrams — paper that had been insufficiently burned or shredded by the besieged American diplomats. (The U.S. government developed much better shredders in response.) At Langley six years later, an old woman — a real-life, chain-smoking Le Carré sort who had amazing recall of the CIA’s operations — was reviewing the volumes for sensitive material. No one else on the Iran desk seemed to care.
The desk was plastered with posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini and various references to nefarious clerical behavior, but the Islamic Revolution’s defining moment was mostly forgotten history. And little wonder. Officers who had served in Iran before the revolution — the CIA station had once been fairly large — were usually disconnected from the place, since virtually none of them spoke any Persian and most, in the course of their time in Tehran, had pursued “third country” targets (Soviets, East Europeans, communist Chinese), not Iranians.
In “Guests of the Ayatollah,” Mark Bowden revivifies this crucial episode by parachuting us back to 1979 and enveloping us in the thoughts and experiences of the American hostages — the diplomats, security officers, U.S. Marines and spooks seized and abused by the “Students Following the Line of the Imam,” as they called themselves. The hostages numbered 66 in all; 14 were released before the end of the crisis, which lasted 444 days. Three were held in the more civilized confines of the Iranian Foreign Ministry. (Mr. Bowden does some of his finest writing recounting the increasingly surreal existence of this second small group, who became “guests”-cum-prisoners.)
[…]
John Limbert, an academically trained, Persian-speaking diplomat — who probably has the softest heart for Iran among the hostages — is in solitary confinement in the city of Isfahan, 200 miles from Tehran, after the failed Desert One rescue mission. (President Carter, after long delay, had sent fuel-tanker planes, gunships and helicopters to recapture the embassy; in a night-vision-goggle debacle set into motion by a sandstorm, a helicopter and a plane collided in the desert; the aborted the mission left the burnt remains to be toyed with by revolutionary clerics.) Mr. Limbert has no idea regarding the whereabouts of his compatriots until an Iranian guard, whom he is tutoring in English, asks him the meaning of the words “raghead,” “bozo,” “mother-” and “c-sucker.” “Limbert laughed,” Mr. Bowden writes. “It warmed his heart. Someplace nearby, his captors were still coping with the United States Marine Corps.”
Tigerhawk is guest-blogging this week at Belmont Club. He has just posted there an updated version of his December 2005 essay “Considering victory conditions in the wider war and the importance of ideology”. For clear thinking on the long war, I recommend the latest version, hopefully to be read in conjunction with Tigerhawk’s November 2005 commentary on Steven den Beste’s “strategic overview”.
For motivation, here is just one segment on the logic for promoting democracy in al Qaeda-world:
Since the region’s clown governments lack credibility and citizens who are willing to take great personal risks to defend them, al Qaeda is able to create spaces in those countries in which to operate (see, e.g., southern Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s “tribal regions”). Where al Qaeda flourishes, it is able to cajole and coerce the local population — the Average Abdul — into cooperating. This creates a local base from which it can “vex and exhaust” the apostate regime.
We need Average Abdul to stop cooperating with al Qaeda and to start turning in the jihadis in the back of the mosque. Unfortunately, he won’t turn in the jihadis because he is more afraid of them than the local regime and he will not bear any risk to defend the clown regime. The jihadis will kill him and his family for blowing the whistle, but the clown regime will neither punish him for keeping silent or induce him to fight the jihadis out of patriotism. Average Abdul, simply put, is unwilling to risk his life for the clown regime, which has not earned his devotion, even for money.
Average Abdul will, however, risk his life for an idea, just as al Qaeda’s jihadis do. Once, that idea was pan-Arabism, or Communism. Today, both are discredited. “Moderate Islam,” whatever that means in a dusty town in Syria, Jordan or Egypt, obviously does not have the fire to motivate Abdul to risk his life to fight the Islamists. The only idea with the juice to do the job is popular sovereignty. Democracy. This is the realist case for the Bush administration’s “democratization strategy” (although it is not entirely clear how many people inside the Bush administration understand the realist case for their most important strategy).
The jihadis understand this, and fight against democracy in the Arab world with everything they’ve got, even if it costs them their Ba’athist allies.
In fighting against democracy in the Arab world, the jihadis polarize Arabs. While many decry this polarization as “instability,” by its nature polarization creates more enemies of the jihad. Some of these new enemies of jihad will be disgusted with al Qaeda’s mass casualty attacks, or they will be “national aspiration” Islamists who are threatened by the jihad’s internationalist reach and ambition. Others will be inspired by their last, best chance at some form of representative government. Either way, enemies of the jihad pick up a weapon, walk a post and — most importantly — drop a dime on their enemy, even if they don’t like Americans. Wherever a reasonably representative government emerges, Average Abdul will start to turn in the jihadis in the back of the mosque, now for his own reasons.
Jack Kelly highlights a new Ralph Peters column:
IF a street-corner thug knowingly receives stolen goods for profit, he goes to jail. If a well-educated, privileged journalist profits from receiving classified information - stolen from our government - he or she gets a prize.
Is something wrong here?
Ralph Peters thinks so. His column in the New York Post today is a delight to read:
Media outlets, including the generally responsible Washington Post, have had fits over a few retired generals’ unclassified criticism of the Secretary of Defense, while simultaneously insisting on their own right to receive and publish our nation’s wartime secrets - and to shield the identities of unethical bureaucrats who betray our nation’s trust.
Since the Vietnam era, reporters have convinced themselves that they are the real heroes in any story. The archways above our journalism faculties soon may sport the maxim: “The Press can do no wrong.”
But the press can do wrong. And it does it with gusto. Let me tell you what the illegal receipt and exploitation of our nation’s secrets used to be called: Espionage. Spying. Yet today’s “real” spies cause less harm to our national security than self-righteous journalists do.
[…]
So I would ask three questions of those journalists chasing prizes by printing our wartime secrets:
* Can you honestly claim to have done our nation any good?
* Did you weigh the harm your act might cause, including the loss of American lives?
* Is the honorable patriotism of Edward R. Murrow truly dead in American journalism?
If you draw a government (or contractor) paycheck and willfully compromise classified material, you should go to jail. If you are a journalist in receipt of classified information and you publish it to the benefit of our enemies, you should go to jail (you may, however, still accept your journalism prize, as long as the trophy has no sharp edges). And consider yourself fortunate: The penalty for treason used to be death.
When a journalist is given classified information, his or her first call shouldn’t be to an editor. It should be to the FBI.
Michael Barone:
Finally, a front-page article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that puts flesh and blood on a point I made in my April 11 Journal column on immigration: Mexico’s birthrate is way down, which means that immigration from Mexico in the near future is unlikely to continue at the rate of the past 20 years. The future is not always just like the past, and the decline in Mexico’s birthrate will likely produce a flex point on the line in the immigration graph sooner or later.
Technorati Tags: Immigration
ABC’s The Note, Apr. 28. These guys all have press passes, so I suppose they are “professional journalists”, informing the public with their unbiased straight news reporting. They think only press insiders read “The Note”…
By Mark Halperin, David Chalian, Teddy Davis, And Matt Stuart, With Mike Westling And Dan Nechita
…Most Washington reporters want the Democrats to take control of Congress for various reasons (including that it is a better story than the alternative, and the Waxman leaks are missed), but they are willing to put that desire aside, and at least be semi-neutral, if the President’s jokes at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner are funny.
AND if he seems genuinely contrite, and willing to change his ways.
AND if he announces a troop withdrawal, an end to the “domestic” surveillance program (and he must call it that), and that he is putting root beer in the water fountains in the press room.
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