Charles Johnson has a few choice words about the New York Times’ culture of disloyalty.

Can anyone imagine a photographer employed by an American newspaper happily collecting pictures of a Jap sniper firing at US forces in WWII? (There is even worse at the beginning of the slideshow.)

New York Times Leakmeister Eric Lichtblau, writing with Scott Shane, on Saturday, exposed a secret and undisclosed May 18th letter from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra to President Bush. The Times treats the story as the revelation of another Administration secret Counterterrorism program.

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

The letter from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress.

I’m not sure that the Times’ interpretation of the story is correct.

Tom Maguire, the right Blogosphere’s specialist in these matters, reviews the guesses as to the object of Chairman Hoekstra’s wrath from various MSM and blogosphere sources, which suggest:

1) the SWIFT program.

2) the missing Iraqi WMDs.

3) some “more explosive secret” previously alluded to by NSA-leaker, and renowned stalker, Russell Tice.
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I have a wildly speculative alternative theory. It just might be that the Times has completely missed the point.

Mr. Hoekstra was also interviewed on Fox News (Allahpundit has the video). In that interview, Chairman Hoekstra referred to his committee having a passion about three things:

1. Getting the right people in the right leadership positions in the Intelligence Community.

2. Implementing the establishment of the office of Director of National Intelligence.

3. Complete and aggressive oversight of all the programs pursued by the Intelligence Community.
——————————————
Number one is clearly referring to the appointment of Stephen R. Kappes (Previously mentioned here)

In the Times-revealed May 18th letter to President Bush, Hoekstra objects vehemently, and at length, to Kappes’s appointment, writing:

the choice for Deputy Director, Steve Kappes, is more troubling on both a substantive and personal level…

Regrettably, the appointment of Mr. Kappes sends a clear signal that the days of collaborative reform between the White House and this committee may be over… Individuals both within and outside the Administration have let me and others know of their strong opposition to this choice for Deputy Director. Yet, in my conversations with General Haydon it is clear that the decision on Mr. Kappes is final…

I understand that Mr. Kappes is a capable, well-qualified and well-liked former Directorate of Operations (DO) case officer. I am heartened by the professional qualities he would bring to the job, but am concerned by what could be the political problems that he could bring back to the Agency. I am convinced that politicization was underway well before Porter Goss became the Director. In fact, I have been long concerned that a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the Administration and its policies. This argument is supported by the Ambassador Wilson/Valerie Plame events, as well as by the string of unauthorised disclosures from an organization that prides itself with being able to keep secrets. I have come to the belief that, despite his service to the DO, Mr. Kappes may have been part of this group. I must take note when my Democratic colleagues – those who vehemently denounced and publicly attacked the strong choice of Porter Goss as Director – now publicly support Mr. Kappes’s return.

Further, the details surrounding Mr. Kappes’s departure from the CIA give me great pause. Mr. Kappes was not fired, but, as I understand it, summarily resigned his position shortly after Director Goss responded to his demonstrated contempt for Congress and the Intelligence Committees’ oversight responsibilities. The fact is, Mr. Kappes and his deputy, Mr. Sulick, were developing a communications offensive to bypass the Intelligence Committees and the CIA’s own Office of Congressional Affairs. One can only speculate on the motives but it clearly indicates a willingness to promote a personal agenda.

The subject of the House Intelligence Committee’s wrath seems not to be the Administration, but rather the Administration’s adversaries.

I’m going to climb way out on a limb with a speculation of my own. I think, perhaps, the “secret program” Chairman Hoekstra is indignant about, which he says is in violation of the law, may not be an Administration program at all. He may actually have been referring to the briefing of the Congressional oversight committees about a very secret Intelligence Community program, viz., the Anti-Bush Administration Intel Operation, described by a reluctant Administration at Congressional request.

Suppose Pete Hoekstra is fed up with the Administration’s failure to expose and prosecute the cabal of Pouting and Leaking Spooks behind the Plamegame, the NSA flap, the renditions story, and all the rest, and is now trying to hold the President’s feet to the fire in order to force him to act. Investigation, exposure, and prosecution of the leakers and conspirators could be initiated by Congress itself, instead of the Justice Department.

I could be completely wrong, of course.
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The (Australian) Advertiser seems to read this story the same way I do.

In Today’s Times, reported Edmund L. Andrews grudgingly acknowledges “surprising” (and soaring) federal revenues, and undaunted by mere facts, demonstrates how to spin one’s way out of such damaging admissions.

Democrats and many independent budget analysts note that overall revenues have barely climbed back to the levels reached in 2000, and that the government has borrowed trillions of dollars against Social Security surpluses just as the first of the nation’s baby boomers are nearing retirement.

Just treat the democrat partisan slant as conclusive, throw in some unspecified “independent analysts” ’ opinions as confirmation, and point accusingly at federal standard budgetary operating procedure (spending Social Security revenues) as supposedly unique to this administration and this congress.

John Hinderaker goes after the Times story here.

The American Spectator has learned from Treasury and Justice Department officials more scarifying details about the US Government’s attempts to persuade both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to refrain from publishing the SWIFT story.

According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories.

“We didn’t give them specifics, just general information about regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on SWIFT, and we thought the pressing nature of the investigations might sway them, but they didn’t,” says a Treasury official.

In fact, according to a Justice Department official, one of the reporters involved with the story was caught attempting to gain more details about one of the investigations through different sources. “We believe it was to include it in their story,” says the official….
“We thought that once the reporters and editors understood that one, these were not warrantless searches, and two, that this was a successful program that had netted real bad guys, and three, that it was a program that was helping us with current, ongoing cases, they would agree to hold off or just not do a story,” says the U.S. Treasury official. “But it became clear that nothing we said was going sway them. Whomever they were talking to, whoever was leaking the stuff, had them sold on this story.”

To that end, the Justice Department has quietly and unofficially begun looking into possible sources for the leak. “We don’t think it’s someone currently employed by the government or involved in law enforcement or the intelligence community,” says another Justice source. “That stuff about ‘current and former’ sources just doesn’t wash. No one currently working on terrorism investigations that use SWIFT data would want to leak this or see it leaked by others. We think we’re looking at fairly high-ranking, former officials who want to make life difficult for us and what we do for whatever reasons.”

The fact that this last especially outrageous violation of national security appears likely to motivate the Justice Department to get serious about catching the Pouting Spooks responsible, and bringing them to justice, sheds a single ray on sunshine on the appalling situation. The truth of the matter is, all they need to do is get one cowardly squealer to talk, and they can probably bag the whole lot. In that company, too, cowardly squealers are probably a dime a dozen.

Rabbi Aryeh Spero explains in Human Events:

Why does the Times do whatever it can to demoralize our troops, cast them as blood-thirsty, bring about humiliation of President Bush and America, and even offer its pages for op-eds by a known al Qaeda terrorist, romanticizing the jihadist cause? Why is it helping our enemies and imperiling our safety and the safety of our children?

It is because the New York Times is not some inanimate object but the propaganda organ of a particular crowd, real people on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, who wish to run the country and control our domestic and foreign policy even though they have not been elected to do so. Because this crowd sees itself as superior to the rest of us and our institutions, and smugly scorns that which was once termed “the American Way,” they have placed themselves in a battle mode hostile and counter to all we hold dear. Our defeat is their victory.

If they can bring down the military, they can force the United States to go the negotiation route where they, not the generals, hold sway. If they can demonize the soldier, they assume we will look to them for “working things out” with the outside forces. If America can be defeated, then “the American Way” of strength against our enemies will be discredited, thereby opening the way for them, the cosmopolitans and transnationalists, to determine within their international fraternity the destiny of America. Bottom line: they wish to control America’s destiny…

What type of person possesses such arrogance? Elitists, like the New York Times crowd who know they are superior. A crowd that does not accept you as an intellectual, social and political equal. They “care” for you only as their ward, with they above and you below—all in the name of compassion and equality.

This crowd points to America as the source of all trouble in the world, as do the Europeans, because they think like Europeans, not Americans. They admire Paris, not Peoria. They live here, get rich here and gain power here, but respect the “sophistication” of Stockholm more than the “plainness” of Missouri. They want to reshape America into a Europeanism. Michael Wolff of New York Magazine bragged: “I’m not an American. I’m a New Yorker.” In other words, they are cosmopolitans of the world, above the plebians in Witchita.

The liberalism of the New York Times is different, for example, than that of the millions of individual liberals across the country or even that of, say, the Washington Post. The New York Times expresses the views of a specific crowd that congregates in a physical location primarily in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and, now, upper east side. It is a crowd that has never been comfortable with mainstream America and Americanism. Thus its anti-Americanism comes naturally, and easily. The anti-Americanism that horrifies us is part of their decades-old mindset. It comes with that neighborhood.

Unlike the liberalism of ideology seen in other parts of America, the anti-American leftism of the Upper West Side/New York Times crowd is akin to a heritage, passed down from generation to generation within the families living there. Additionally, contra-Americanism is their identity, a raison d’etre of this particular community. With all its wealth, power and privilege, it still feels alien to historic America and hopes and works for historic America to be replaced by a different America.

For them, it is not a hobby or pastime but a mission. They will never stop nor be satisfied. As the country becomes more permissive, this crowd keeps redefining what it means to be moral and tolerant so as to continually remain “above” the rest of America. It is a one-upmanship. This has led, for example, to their silly new definition of torture: playing loud music in front of Islamic terrorists.

More than mere liberalism, unique to the Upper West Side crowd is a haughty anti-Americanism reinforced by members living in a cocooned, chosen ghetto apart from and disdainful of the American people and “the American way.” This crowd routinely snickers at regular Americans and views the military as unrefined, as red-neck types.

Its university-educated youth redrink what they already imbibed from mother’s milk, namely, that America is racist and imperialistic. It finds, therefore, common cause and political identity with any group—be it domestic or foreign—that condemns American society or the American people. For them, groups that are anti-American are comrades.

I think the rabbi’s indictment is pretty accurate, but I wouldn’t restrict its applicability to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I wasn’t born early enough to read Walter Duranty lying about famine in the Ukraine, and otherwise shilling for Joe Stalin, but I was around in the late 1950s, when Herbert L. Matthews helped Fidel Castro “get his job through the New York Times.”

I still vividly remember (with cold anger) the Times’ Sunday Magazine’s cover the week Saigon fell. It displayed a napping Vietcong guerilla sitting in a folding lawn chair, Kalashnikov assault rifle across his knees. The Times’ headline read: “THE BLESSED PEACE.”

And I remember the Times spectacularly studied silence, which went on and on and on, when news of the holocaust in Cambodian began appearing in the Western Press.

But it was undoubtedly, too, another grand landmark in the New York Times’ long-standing, much-celebrated tradition of dishonest journalism, when the inveterbrate sycophant Byron Calame timorously succeeded (leaving a glistening trail behind him) to the supposed Times-Ombudsman position of Public Editor.

Time Executive Editor Bill Keller’s pathological hatred of the Bush Administration recently led him to ignore bipartisan requests from government officials and proceed to publicize a key international Counterterrorism financial surveillance program. In the minds of most Americans, Keller earned himself a place on the jury in some future Broadway production of The Devil and Daniel Webster that day.

And the American public’s watchdog Byron Calame is on the job, speaking truth to power. “You were absolutely right, boss!” brave Sir Byron wrote this Sunday.

The Times, in the course of a remarkable response from its readers, heard from more than a thousand, and Calame concedes “about 85 percent of them (were) critical of the decision to publish the story and a large fraction venomous.”

But the Public Editor reflected long and hard about who paid his salary, and went right to work typing out an editorial telling the public to get lost, Bill Keller had behaved perfectly correctly, and Eric Lichtblau is a true patriot.

You see, there was no wrongdoing on the part of the New York Times at all, since everyone (including all the terrorists) already knew all about the SWIFT program. There was no news here, after all.

But, it was necessary for the Times to defy government requests and print this story, you see, because it was terribly important that the public learn of the program, so that it could receive public scrutiny. So there was vitally important news, which had to be reported, after all.

(Isn’t it great being a liberal? You have no problem simultaneously accepting as true two completely contradictory propositions.)

And, finally, you and I may have skipped over that part of the Constitution, but The (unelected) Times, a privately-owned business organization which makes its money selling processed wood-pulp and advertising, you see, has its own Constitutional function: monitoring and oversight.

You and I waste our time going out to the polls and voting to elect presidents, and congressmen and senators, but the real bosses are Bill Keller and Eric Lichtblau, who are Constitutionally empowered to supervise all of their work.

If Keller and Lichtblau feel those mere elected officials’ work isn’t up to par, their approach questionable, or their manners distasteful, it is up to the Times to decide whether efforts to apply surveillance to International Terrorism shall be permitted to continue.

If the Times dislikes the elected administration; or if the Times isn’t selling enough woodpulp that week and needs a big story; or if it’s the wrong time of the month, and the Times is just feeling a bit cranky, obviously the Times (meaning Mr. Bill Keller) is perfectly entitled to don its robes of Constitutional Authority, assert its powers as “Monitor of Government in Chief,” and disclose any national security information it pleases.

(Wasn’t General Eisenhower lucky that Bill Keller was not around at the time of the D-Day Invasion? Keller might have decided that the Pas-de-Calais was a much better landing site, or might just have taken a dislike to FDR.)

Mr. Calame finally concludes, these kinds of decisions are a judgement call, and

The best judgment of these two editors (Keller and Lichtblau) served their readers well in the case of the Swift story. In the face of intense administration pressure in a country that’s unusually polarized politically, they correctly decided to make sure their readers were informed about the banking-data surveillance.

And I’m properly grateful. I had, of course, like any other normal American citizen, been planning to transfer a large sum of money to my favorite personal charity, an illegal terrorist organization of Lithuanian fly fishermen and fox-hunters. Now that I know all about that nefarious Bush Administration SWIFT program, I’ll simply tie hundred dollar bills to the legs of migrating Houbara bustards, which will be taken by Kazakh falconer allies, and forwarded via European Eagle Owls to those fiendish Baltic fly fishers. (Thank you, New York Times!) Aren’t you glad that you too can covertly support the terrorist movement of your choice with no interference from the authorities?

Historic newspaper supplied to Scott Johnson by Les Baitzer.

A Never Yet Melted original, featuring words of wisdom from the Sage of Walden Pond.

Michelle Malkin’s offering of the day includes a delightful tribute to Bill Mauldin’s classic WWII Willie & Joe cartoons.

Michelle Malkin has an amusing new video, focussing on those leaking leftwing newspapers, which includes a WWII Private Snafu cartoon, written by Dr. Seuss and featuring the voice of Mel Blanc.

Pettifog did a very nice one.

The Republican Administration, at the present time, clearly needs to be reminded that it is the Party of Lincoln.

On August 15, 1861, a grand jury was convened in New York to investigate the conduct of a number of opposition newspapers.

The records of that grand jury state:

There are certain newspapers within this district which are in the frequent habit of encouraging the rebels now in arms against the federal government by expressing sympathy and agreement with them, the duty of acceding to their demands, and dissatisfaction with the employment of force to overcome them…

The grand jury are aware that free governments allow liberty of speech and of the press to the utmost limit, but there is, nevertheless, a limit…

The conduct of these disloyal presses is, of course condemned and abhorred by all loyal men; but the grand jury will be glad to learn from the Court that it is also subject to indictment and condign punishment.

On August 22, the newspapers named by the grand jury were suspended from the mail by order of the New York postmaster.

When their next issues were delivered to Northern cities by train, the United States marshall for the Eastern District seized all the copies, in accordance with the War Department’s General Order No. 67.

That order specified that “all correspondence and communications” which put the public safety at risk should be confiscated, and that, in future, the punishment for creating such correspondence and communications would be death.
—Robert S. Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 1951, pp.114-116.

The same New York Times, which on Friday overruled the strenuous arguments of officials of the elected government and proceeded to publish detailed information about a vital program monitoring international transfers of currency;

Administration officials, however, asked The New York Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the Swift program could jeopardize its effectiveness. They also enlisted several current and former officials, both Democrat and Republican, to vouch for its value.

Bill Keller, the newspaper’s executive editor, said: “We have listened closely to the administration’s arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

the same New York Times, which today divulged details of “closely held secret” plans of possible reductions in US forces in Iraq, supplied by “American officials who agreed to discuss the details only on condition of anonymity;”

this same New York Times devoted a front page article in the Week in Review section to a prolonged meditation on the ethics of dining and the fate of the lobster (and a variety of other critters) destined for the dinner table.

Chin-stroking foodie journalist Michael Pollan got himself a Times magazine article, recyclable for his latest book, by purchasing a steer, and following its career on to feed lot and slaughterhouse. Frank Bruni, author of today’s “It Died For Us” lobster article, shares an anecdote of Mr. Pollan’s intended to allow Sunday Times’ readers to chuckle with a sense of superiority,

After the article appeared, Mr. Pollan received appeals from readers willing to pay large sums of money to buy and save the steer. One reader, he recalled, was a Hollywood producer who wanted to let the animal graze on his lawn in Beverly Hills, Calif.

“He kept coming after me,” Mr. Pollan said, describing a crusade that culminated in an offer of a meal at a famous emporium of porterhouses in Brooklyn. “He finally said, ‘I’m coming to New York, we’re going to have dinner at Peter Luger to discuss this.’ I’m like, ‘Excuse me, we’re going to have a steak dinner to discuss the rescue of this steer?’ How disconnected can we be?”

But we are all reading a newspaper guilty of a lot worse than popping a lobster into the cooking pot, or dining on beefsteak.

How disconnected is the Times?

How disconnected are all of us who buy it and read it, as it carries on its vicious partisan campaign against an elected administration, proceeding even to the point of repeatedly compromising National Security and endangering American lives?

Michelle Malkin continues today her excellent series of anti-NY Times posters created by her crack Army of Photoshoppers. Not to be missed.

Michelle Malkin suggested that some WWII posters were in need of updating, and her Photoshop-armed readers have responded with a nice collection of very apt images.

Clarice Feldman thinks the Attorney-General should also be targeting the Times. Right now.

§798. Disclosure of Classified Information.

(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information—

(1) concerning the nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government; or

(2) concerning the design, construction, use, maintenance, or repair of any device, apparatus, or appliance used or prepared or planned for use by the United States or any foreign government for cryptographic or communication intelligence purposes; or

(3) concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government; or

(4) obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government, knowing the same to have been obtained by such processes—Shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

(b) As used in this subsection (a) of this section—

The term “classified information” means information which, at the time of a violation of this section, is, for reasons of national security, specifically designated by a United States Government Agency for limited or restricted dissemination or distribution;

Section 798 continues:

The term “communication intelligence” means all procedures and methods used in the interception of communications and the obtaining of information from such communications by other than the intended recipients;

The term “unauthorized person” means any person who, or agency which, is not authorized to receive information of the categories set forth in subsection (a) of this section, by the President, or by the head of a department or agency of the United States Government which is expressly designated by the President to engage in communication intelligence activities for the United States.

Rick Ballard thinks Al Qaeda has overlooked one of America’s most important symbolic targets.

You will be amused at this romance feature from the Sunday Times Style section. Sophia Raday, a typical Berkeley peacenik devoted to everything trendy leftie, recounts the story of how she fell for a West Point graduate, Oakland cop, and National Guard colonel.

MY husband is like the Lone Ranger: he leaves a trail of bullets in his wake. Not silver bullets, but gold 9 millimeters, orange “simunitions” and menacing hollow-points with bronze tips.

I find them at the bottom of the washing machine, next to the pile of mail in our front hall or mixed in a heap of change. He is a police officer in nearby Oakland, Calif., a former SWAT team member, and a colonel in the Army Reserve. Sometimes when I gather the cool bullets in my palm, I stare at them and wonder: How did I, a Berkeley resident, a former peace activist, someone with a “Bread, not bombs” button, end up married to The Man?

I like to tell people we met because he pulled me over, and I avoided the ticket with my feminine wiles. It’s not true, but our partnership is almost that unlikely. After all, I’ve been arrested several times in political protests and once for possession of marijuana. I’ve even trespassed onto a naval base to spray-paint protest messages over the sloganeering billboards.

My husband, on the other hand, subscribes to a magazine about wound ballistics, calls people he doesn’t like “communists” and distrusts anyone with a beard. He gets his hair cut at least twice a month. He loves to rub my hand over his spiky scalp while bragging about how especially “high and tight” it is this time.

The truth is, I met my husband on a blind date set up by a cousin who had gone to West Point with him. It amused me that on Tuesday night I was going out with a motorcycle-riding lesbian while on Wednesday I had a date with a soldier/cop. I wore a short skirt that showed off my long legs. When he arrived, I was charmed by his old-fashioned formality, how he called me “Miss Sophia” and pulled out my chair.

It was on our third date that I discovered he never left the house without a firearm. We went to see “Heat,” a crime drama with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and when we were driving home, I asked, “So when you’re off-duty, do you ever carry a gun?”

He laughed. “Always. Got one on my hip right now.”

I was delighted. This was high adventure. I liked having covert awareness of hidden things under his clothes. Dangerous things. And I liked the idea that I would try to tame him, that I would be the one to put a daisy in his gun.

I mentioned this story to my wife, particularly noting the detail of the husband referring to people he doesn’t like as “communists.” My wife sniffed, and said, “That’s exactly what you do!”

John B. Roberts II, in the Washington Times, points out the latest damaging Intel leak in the War on Terror.

Two-and-a-half years ago, I first learned of the CIA’s covert program to use secular warlords to contain al Qaeda in Somalia. As early as 2002 intelligence officials concluded that al Qaeda had re-established an operational network in Somalia after being routed in Afghanistan. Some reports even suggested that Osama bin Laden crossed the Arabian Sea in a dhow and found sanctuary in Somalia after escaping the noose in Tora Bora.

Until now, I refrained from writing about the Somali front in the war on al Qaeda because of its extreme sensitivity and its vital importance. Regrettably, State Department career officials, in order to condemn the program, have now confirmed to the New York Times the existence of the covert operation being run by the CIA station in Nairobi, Kenya. This is an unconscionable breach of security that ought to outrage us all.

How long will it be before the leakers are prosecuted for treason in time of war? Or will it take another 9/11?

The New York Times reports one of the more dubious psychological studies I’ve heard about to date, purportedly demonstrating that merely handling a gun increased aggressiveness. It seems actually to show that people who handle guns wind up preferring spicy foods.

A lot of people (this blog included) laughed at poor little Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, just because he didn’t know how to work the FN M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) machinegun, and C.J. Chivers at the New York Times thinks we were being unfair. He’s even found some experts he can quote defending Zarqawi.

(You know how it is: Whenever any enemy of the United States is under attack, you can count on the New York Times to come bustling to his defense.)

An effort by the American military to discredit the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by showing video outtakes of him fumbling with a machine gun — suggesting that he lacks real fighting skill — was questioned yesterday by retired and active American military officers…

But several veterans of wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, as well as active-duty officers, said in telephone interviews yesterday that the clips of Mr. Zarqawi’s supposed martial incompetence were unconvincing.

The weapon in question is complicated to master, and American soldiers and marines undergo many days of training to achieve the most basic competence with it. Moreover, the weapon in Mr. Zarqawi’s hands was an older variant, which makes its malfunctioning unsurprising. The veterans said Mr. Zarqawi, who had spent his years as a terrorist surrounded by simpler weapons of Soviet design, could hardly have been expected to know how to handle it…

An active-duty Special Forces colonel who served in Iraq also said that what the video showed actually had little relationship to Mr. Zarqawi’s level of terrorist skill. “Looking at the video, I enjoy it; I like that he looks kind of goofy,” said the Special Forces officer, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on military matters. “But as a military guy, I shrug my shoulders and say: ‘Of course he doesn’t know how to use it. It’s our gun.’ He doesn’t look as stupid as they said he looks.”

Oh, is that so, now?

Well, even Zarqawi’s defenders in the Times admit that he looked awkward handling the M249 SAW, and was unfamiliar with its mechanism.

Experienced shooters undoubtedly also noticed that Zarqawi is holding that machinegun tucked under his arm, Hollywood gangster fashion, and is making no effort actually to use the gun’s sights.

“Many days of training” may be required to teach soldiers how to disassemble and reassemble such a weapon by feel in the dark, how to maintain it, repair it, and to inculcate intimate familiarity with its shooting characteristics and capabilities; but, on the other hand, all semi-automatic and full automatic weapons have in common the same kind of operating lever, used to pull back the bolt and chamber the first round, or to clear a misfed cartridge.

An “older variant” might have a greater tendency to jam, but there is no difference whatsoever in the way you clear the jam between that M248 SAW and the AK-47 or the M16, or even the Remington 1100 semi-auto shotgun you use for pheasant hunting or to shoot trap for that matter. You just do what Zarqawi’s jihadi helper did: you pull back the lever, ejecting the misfed round, and then release it to go forward and chamber another one. That is not a complicated procedure, and it works essentially identically on all semi- and full-auto weapons. Anyone basically familiar with guns could do it without assistance.

Zarqawi looked and behaved exactly like somebody who had never shot a gun in his life.
———————————-
And Times’ Reporter Quivers even finds another expert to make yet another point defending Zarqawi’s honor, and to warn us to watch out about whom we speak disrespectfully.

But the retired and active officers said the public presentation of the tape did not address elements that were disturbing, rather than amusing: the weapon was probably captured from American soldiers, indicating a tactical victory for the insurgents. And Mr. Zarqawi looked clean and plump.

“I see a guy who is getting a lot of groceries and local support,” said Nick Pratt, a Marine Corps veteran and professor of terrorism studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. “You cannot say he is a bad operator.” He added, “People should be careful who they poke fun at.”

Captured in combat? Right! Zarqawi won how many engagements against American forces? That SAW was either pre-war Iraqi army stock, looted from some military arsenal, or it just “fell off the truck” in the course of being delivered to Iraqi army or police units.
————————-

UPDATE

Patricia, in a comment at Tim Bair:

Can you imagine the effort it took for reporters to locate and call sympathetic ex-military and solicit quotes about what a he-man Zarqawi is? Stunning, especially for a paper that is supposedly the gold standard of world news.

That sound you hear is their stock price hitting bottom…

Sister Toldjah: Zarqawi looks like a fool on camera, and MSM utilizes its excuse-making machine.

Confederate Yankee asks: Who do you choose to believe?

Jason at COUNTERCOLUMN goes into CNN’s echo of the Times story in detail.

On April 26th, the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial titled Our Rotten IntelligenCIA:

The press is… inventing a preposterous double standard that is supposed to help us all distinguish between bad leaks (the Plame name) and virtuous leaks (whatever Ms. McCarthy might have done). Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie has put himself on record as saying Ms. McCarthy should not “come to harm” for helping citizens hold their government accountable. Of the Plame affair, by contrast, the Post’s editorial page said her exposure may have been an “egregious abuse of the public trust.”

It would appear that the only relevant difference here is whose political ox is being gored, and whether a liberal or conservative journalist was the beneficiary of the leak. That the press sought to hound Robert Novak out of polite society for the Plame disclosure and then rewards Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen with Pulitzers proves the worst that any critic has ever said about media bias.

The deepest damage from these leak frenzies may yet be to the press itself, both in credibility and its ability to do its job. It was the press that unleashed anti-leak search missions aimed at the White House that have seen Judith Miller jailed and may find Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen facing subpoenas. And it was the press that promoted the probe under the rarely used Espionage Act of “neocon” Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin, only to find that the same law may now be used against its own “whistleblower” sources. Just recently has the press begun to notice that the use of the same Espionage Act to prosecute two pro-Israel lobbyists for repeating classified information isn’t much different from prosecuting someone for what the press does every day—except for a far larger audience.

We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job. But then that’s part of the reason we didn’t join Joe Wilson and the New York Times in demanding Karl Rove’s head over the Plame disclosure. As for some of our media colleagues, when they stop being honest chroniclers of events and start getting into bed with bureaucrats looking to take down elected political leaders, they shouldn’t be surprised if those leaders treat them like the partisans they have become.

In the case of the eavesdropping story, President Bush and other figures in his administration were given abundant opportunities to explain why they felt our information should not be published. We considered the evidence presented to us, agonized over it, delayed publication because of it. In the end, their case did not stand up to the evidence our reporters amassed, and we judged that the responsible course was to publish what we knew and let readers assess it themselves. You are welcome to question that judgment, but you have presented no basis for challenging it, let alone for attributing it to bad faith or animus toward the president.

In the final paragraph of your broadside, you include the following disclaimer: “We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job.” That’s nice to hear, and squares with what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set out to protect a vibrant, inquisitive press. It’s just hard to square with the rest of your editorial.

Who does the Times think it’s kidding?

From Walter Duranty’s award-winning concealment of the horrors of Stalinist collectivization, to Herbert Matthews’ press agentry for Fidel Castro, to the studiously overlooked coverage of the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia, the Times has compiled, for nearly a century, a record of leftwing partisan mendacity that rivals Pravda’s.

Today’s New York Times editorial mendaciously asserts that the widely-adopted contemporary approach to execution featuring lethal injection, like all other forms of capital punishment, is “unconstitutional.” The editorialist is clearly historically illiterate. They executed convicted felons in every single one of the 13 states at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.

The same authority ascribes cruelty to lethal injection, on the basis that Human Rights Watch has declared that “there is mounting evidence that prisoners may have experienced excruciating pain during their executions.” One wonders exacty what that mounting evidence might be, since no reports of executed murderers coming back to complain have been so far appeared in the newspapers.

But, if lethal injection is too cruel for liberals, there is an obvious answer.

Washington Post reports that Mrs. McCarthy’s not guilty, and you can’t prosecute her successfully either, if she is.

A lawyer representing fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy said yesterday that his client did not leak any classified information and did not disclose to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest the existence of secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected terrorists.

The statement by Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the Washington office of Hogan & Hartson who said he was speaking for McCarthy, came on the same day that a senior intelligence official said the agency is not asserting that McCarthy was a key source of Priest’s award-winning articles last year disclosing the agency’s secret prisons.

McCarthy was fired because the CIA concluded that she had undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Priest, in violation of a security agreement. That does not mean she revealed the existence of the prisons to Priest, Cobb said.

Cobb said that McCarthy, who worked in the CIA inspector general’s office, “did not have access to the information she is accused of leaking,” namely the classified information about any secret detention centers in Europe. Having unreported media contacts is not unheard of at the CIA but is a violation of the agency’s rules…

..Though McCarthy acknowledged having contact with reporters, a senior intelligence official confirmed yesterday that she is not believed to have played a central role in The Post’s reporting on the secret prisons. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing personnel matters…

..Where Cobb’s account and the CIA’s account differed yesterday is on whether McCarthy discussed any classified information with journalists. Intelligence sources said that the inspector general’s office was generally aware of a secret prison program but that McCarthy did not have access to specifics, such as prison locations…

..Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University, said he does not think the Post article includes the kind of operational details that a prosecutor would need to build a case.

“It’s the fact of the thing that they’re trying to keep secret, not to protect sources and methods, but to hide something controversial,” he said. “That seems like a hard prosecution to me.”

Kate Martin, executive director of the Center for National Security Studies, said that “even if the espionage statutes were read to apply to leaks of information, we would say the First Amendment prohibits criminalizing leaks of information which reveal wrongful or illegal activities by the government.”

And the New York Times unlimbers its Ouija Board and channels a warning from a Pouting Spook.

A criminal trial would be devastating for Langley,” said one former C.I.A. officer, referring to the agency’s Virginia headquarters. He spoke about a possible prosecution on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

Well, they’ve double-dared Porter Goss and the Administration to try to do anything about the Press leaks and the Anti-Bush Intel Operation. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.

There is always something inadvertently funny in the New York Times, Sunday edition. This week, there was a man-bites-dog story on the theme of New York City Leading the way nationally in Politeness. What supposedly setting a new national example with respect to civility consisted of, was first of all, punishing rowdy fans for entering playing fields and disrupting ballgames. Secondly, establishing a $50 fine for cellphones for using a cellphone in a theatre.

And finally, and classically New York, teaching other cities that when you have a problem caused by municipal government’s failures, let George do it! Just pass a law that the victim of vandalism (also, frequently, the victim of rent control) clean up the damage that New York City law enforcement failed to prevent.

When community groups from Toronto to Washington looked for new ways to fight graffiti, they turned to New York, which passed a law in January that makes building owners responsible, for the first time, for cleaning up after the vandals.

On the back page of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Bathsheba Monk goes back home to Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region (where this blog’s author also grew up), to teach a course at the community college in Tamaqua, hoping she can help others to escape. Her message of hope is not well received.

Having read the Sunday New York and Washington’s newspapers of records’ weekly imitation of Tokyo Rose’s WWII reporting today, I can only point in reply to this year’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media Report and its polling results on just how much confidence today’s readership has come to place in Times and Post reporting.

Fragmentary selections of the contents of captured Iraqi tapes featuring Saddam’s pre-war conversations and plans have been appearing bit by bit for some time now, shedding light on what the dictator and his senior advisors were actually thinking and planning. But, the New York Times today has all the answers.

Apparently, the Times has gained acesss to a secret history prepared by the US military in April 2005, titled “Iraqi Perspectives on Operation Iraqi Freedom, Major Combat Operations.” An unclassified version of the study is to be made public soon. Not altogether surprisingly, according to the Times, this study confirms every key liberal meme about the war.

Saddam was far more concerned about the dangers of a Shiite uprising, or a domestic coup, than a US invasion, says the Times.

Mr. Hussein did take some steps to avoid provoking war, though. While diplomatic efforts by France, Germany and Russia were under way to avert war, he rejected proposals to mine the Persian Gulf, fearing that the Bush administration would use such an action as an excuse to strike, the Joint Forces Command study noted.

In December 2002, he told his top commanders that Iraq did not possess unconventional arms, like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, according to the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the C.I.A. to investigate what happened to Iraq’s weapons programs. Mr. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Mr. Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.

To ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.

Mr. Hussein’s compliance was not complete, though. Iraq’s declarations to the United Nations covering what stocks of illicit weapons it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Mr. Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where United Nations officials could interview them outside the government’s control.

Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator’s goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons — a strategy General Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a television interview “deterrence by doubt.”

That strategy led to mutual misperception. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the Security Council in February 2003, he offered evidence from photographs and intercepted communications that the Iraqis were rushing to sanitize suspected weapons sites. Mr. Hussein’s efforts to remove any residue from old unconventional weapons programs were viewed by the Americans as efforts to hide the weapons. The very steps the Iraqi government was taking to reduce the prospect of war were used against it, increasing the odds of a military confrontation.

Isn’t it pretty to think so, if you happen to be a liberal and an administration adversary, who has been peddling the no WMDs line ever since seeing Michael Moore’s movie.

The problem is that believing all this requires ignoring the factual precedent of the evacuation abroad of the entire Iraqi air force prior to the First Gulf War to avoid the capture or destruction of an especially prized military asset, and it requires dismissing reports at the time of the US invasion of large convoys departing in the direction of Syria, along with more recent statements by the former Israeli Chief of Staff General Yaalon and former second-in-command of the Iraqi Air Force General Sada on the transfer of Iraqi chemical weapons to Syria.

But even more difficult are the required intellectual acrobatics necessary to reconcile the intrinsically conflicting notions of Saddam desperately trying to avoid war by a “crash effort” at compliance with WMD disarmament, while at the same time fecklessly steering his regime into full-scale conflict with the United States by a continued charade of WMD possession, and (unmentioned by the Times) resistance to inspections.

One wonders why the same analysis isn’t also being applied to Iran and North Korea. Maybe they both really have no nuclear weapons programs underway at all either, and are just bluffing, too. Isn’t that an inevitable theoretical next step?

Ralph Peters mocks the other MSM Big Lie of the past week.

I’M trying. I’ve been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I’m looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can’t find it.

Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view’s clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn’t give me the right skills.

And riding around with the U.S. Army, looking at things first-hand, is certainly a technique to which The New York Times wouldn’t stoop in such an hour of crisis.

I’m from Pennsylvania, and I’m proud that my old regional newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, published at least one of the Danish cartoons, when the yellow-bellied, hypocritical, National Security-betraying, so-called paper of record, the New York Times, would not. Good work, Inquirer!

Remember what Henry David Thoreau said. Read not the Times; read the eternities.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

They sure did. Gabriel Schoenfeld has a must-read article in the upcoming issue of Commentary, discussing the legal context of the New York Times’ decision to run the NSA electronic surveillance story last December:

The Times has led the pack in deploring Libby’s alleged leak, calling it “an egregious abuse of power” equivalent to “the disclosure of troop movements in wartime,” and blowing it up into a kind of conspiracy on the part of the Bush administration to undercut critics of the war. That its hysteria over the leak of Plame’s CIA status sits oddly with its own habit of regularly pursuing and publishing government secrets is something the paper affects not to notice. But if the Plame case reveals a hypocritical or partisan side to the Times’s concern for governmental secrecy, it also shows that neither the First Amendment nor any statute passed by Congress confers a shield allowing journalists to step outside the law.

The courts that sent Judith Miller to prison for refusing to reveal her sources explicitly cited the holding in Branzburg v. Hayes (1972), a critical case in the realm of press freedom. In Branzburg, which involved not government secrets but narcotics, the Supreme Court ruled that “it would be frivolous to assert . . . that the First Amendment, in the interest of securing news or otherwise, confers a license on . . . the reporter to violate valid criminal laws,” and that “neither reporter nor source is immune from conviction for such conduct, whatever the impact on the flow of news.”

The Plame affair extends the logic of Branzburg, showing that a journalist can be held in contempt of court when the unauthorized disclosure of intelligence-related information is at stake.10 Making this episode even more relevant is the fact that the classified information at issue—about which Judith Miller gathered notes but never published a single word, hence doing no damage herself to the public interest—is of trivial significance in comparison with disclosure of the NSA surveillance program, which tracks the surreptitious activities of al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S. and hence involves the security of the nation and the lives of its citizens. If journalists lack immunity in a matter as narrow as Plame, they also presumably lack it for their role in perpetrating a much broader and deadlier breach of law.

Hat tip to Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The Times originally posted this picture, captioned: “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border ” The same photo with corrected caption is now here.

Skeptics on Free Republic and Reason noticed that the photo actually featured an (unfired) artillery round. Thomas Lifson of American Thinker supplies the whole story.

One more instance of MSM misreporting has been debunked by the Blogosphere, and this one demonstrates all too clearly the unbecoming eagerness of the MSM to publish, in time of war, when US forces are operating under fire overseas, reports damaging to the reputation of American forces, reports calculated to manipulate the emotions of its readers in favor of the enemy. So eager is the liberal MSM to engage in this kind of journalistic treason that it will consistently publish uncritically, not only staged propaganda photographs like the one above, but also the most hostile and partisan characterizations of US war actions , and evaluations of their results, by foreign adversaries.

The Anchoress takes on the Times leak theme. A lot of blogs, including this one, have commented on the obvious connection between yesterday’s news of large-scale disposable cell-phone purchases by suspicious persons in a variety of cities and last month’s New York Times’ story on secret NSA communications surveillance, but no matter how many of these you have already read, you’ll still want to take the time to read this one. I see 23 trackbacks already, but I’m adding another.

William Tate, writing in the American Thinker, notes the Times’ partisan double-standard on Executive branch electronic surveillance:

The controversy following revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies have monitored suspected terrorist related communications since 9/11 reflects a severe case of selective amnesia by the New York Times and other media opponents of President Bush. They certainly didn’t show the same outrage when a much more invasive and indiscriminate domestic surveillance program came to light during the Clinton administration in the 1990’s. At that time, the Times called the surveillance “a necessity.”

When you see one of these over Manhattan, Washington, or San Francisco, be sure to thank the New York Times for publishing its December expose of NSA surveillance of terrorist communications.

Terrorists read the papers too, and have responded to the Timely warning by switching to disposable cell phones. ABC News reports today:

(1/13/06) – Federal agents have launched an investigation into a surge in the purchase of large quantities of disposable cell phones by individuals from the Middle East and Pakistan, ABC News has learned.

The phones which do not require purchasers to sign a contract or have a credit card have many legitimate uses, and are popular with people who have bad credit or for use as emergency phones tucked away in glove compartments or tackle boxes. But since they can be difficult or impossible to track, law enforcement officials say the phones are widely used by criminal gangs and terrorists.

“There’s very little audit trail assigned to this phone. One can walk in, purchase it in cash, you don’t have to put down a credit card, buy any amount of minutes to it, and you don’t, frankly, know who bought this,” said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI official who is now an ABC News consultant.

Law enforcement officials say the phones were used to detonate the bombs terrorists used in the Madrid train attacks in March 2004.

“The application of prepaid phones for nefarious reasons, is really widespread. For example, the terrorists in Madrid used prepaid phones to detonate the bombs in the subway trains that killed more than 200 people,” said Roger Entner, a communications consultant.

The FBI is closely monitoring the potentially dangerous development, which came to light following recent large-quantity purchases in California and Texas, officials confirmed.

In one New Year’s Eve transaction at a Target store in Hemet, Calif., 150 disposable tracfones were purchased. Suspicious store employees notified police, who called in the FBI, law enforcement sources said.

In an earlier incident, at a Wal-mart store in Midland, Texas, on December 18, six individuals attempted to buy about 60 of the phones until store clerks became suspicious and notified the police. A Wal-mart spokesperson confirmed the incident.

The Midland, Texas, police report dated December 18 and obtained by ABC News states: “Information obtained by MPD [Midland Police Department] dispatch personnel indicated that approximately six individuals of Middle-Eastern origin were attempting to purchase an unusually large quantity of tracfones (disposable cell phones with prepaid minutes attached).” At least one of the suspects was identified as being from Iraq and another from Pakistan, officials said.

“Upon the arrival of officers, suspects were observed moving away from the registers appearing to evade detection while ridding themselves of the merchandise.”

Other reports have come in from other cities, including Dallas, and from authorities in other states. Authorities in Pennsylvania, New York and other parts of Texas confirmed that they were alerted to the cases, and sources say other jurisdictions were also notified.

Here is the theory of governance advanced by the New York Times reporter James Risen, explaining (to Katie Couric on the Today Show) why the Times’ 12/16 NSA terrorist surveillance story had to be published:

RISEN: Well, I—I think that during a period from about 2000—from 9/11 through the beginning of the Gulf—the war in Iraq, I think what happened was you—we—the checks and balances that normally keep American foreign policy and national security policy towards the center kind of broke down. And you had more of a radicalization of American foreign policy in which the—the—the career professionals were not really given a chance to kind of forge a consensus within the administration. And so you had the—the—the principles (sic)—Rumsfeld, Cheney and Tenet and Rice and many others—who were meeting constantly, setting policy and really never allowed the people who understand—the experts who understand the region to have much of a say.

COURIC: You suggest there were a lot of power-grabbing going on.

Mr. RISEN: Yes.

Mr. Risen clearly subscribes to an idiosyncratic school of Constitutionalism in which real governing authority is based upon “expertise” and “centrism,” and reposes in the hands of career bureaucrats, who are entitled to take drastic measures (even compromising National Security by leaking to the Press, if necessary) to defend their policy-making prerogative against usurpation by mere temporarily elected amateurs. Michael Barone also had some sarcastic things to say about this on Monday.
—————————————————————————————-

The Times was not inhibited from proceeding with this story, either by a request to refrain from publishing information injurious to National Security in time of war by the President of the United States, or by consideration of the questionable motives and psychological health of their informant Mr. Tice.

Tice, Risen, the New York Times and its editor and publisher have all committed very serious crimes.

As was already pretty darned clear, Russell Tice today is revealed to be at least one source for the New York Times’ NSA Flap story.

Tice Admits Being a Source for The New York Times

The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times’ reporters. But Tice maintains that his conscience is clear.

“As far as I’m concerned, as long as I don’t say anything that’s classified, I’m not worried,” he said. “We need to clean up the intelligence community. We’ve had abuses, and they need to be addressed.”

The NSA revoked Tice’s security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him. Tice calls that bunk and says that’s the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. Today the NSA said it had “no information to provide.”

ABC video

NSA letter to Tice
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Background on Tice here and here.

Stephen F. Hayes in the Weekly Standard reveals that a treasure trove of up-to-now unreleased captured Iraqi documents and photographs provide clear refutation of one cornerstone position of critics of the US invasion—the belief that the secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein would never work with radical Islamist organizations:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps—in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak—and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis…

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million “exploitable items” have been thoroughly examined. That’s 2.5 percent.

Apparently, opinions on releasing the material were fiercely divided within Congress and the Bush Administration. Many were eager to release nearly all of the massive collection of information, but some influential officials of the Defense Department, having been burned before, feared that the

mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. “There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to ‘prove’ that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we’d spend a lot of time chasing around after it.”

Scott Johnson, one of the three attorneys publishing the Power Line blog, discusses the New York Times’ violation of federal law 18 U.S.C. § 798:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information—
(1) concerning the nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government; or
(2) concerning the design, construction, use, maintenance, or repair of any device, apparatus, or appliance used or prepared or planned for use by the United States or any foreign government for cryptographic or communication intelligence purposes; or
(3) concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government; or
(4) obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government, knowing the same to have been obtained by such processes—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

VIPS-hunter extraordinary Clarice Feldman is on the job at American Thinker identifying the connections between the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) organization and Russ Tice:

Tice is a member of a group formed in August 2004 called National Security Whistleblowers. Here’s their website.

But if you look at the NSW group you may notice that the founder, director and chief spokesperson of the group is Sibel Edmunds. She has faced a real uphill battle in her struggle with the FBI, which dismissed her. And her story about why she was fired from the FBI has a number of variations, although she, like Wilson/Plame, numbers among the darlings of the Bushitler crowd.

Then look at the group’s list of members. Along with more familiar names like Daniel Ellsburg, you’ll see Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer on the list. You’ll also find Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. These are members of VIPS, the group that encouraged intelligence agents to leak, shopped Wilson and his story (Johnson was in the agency with Plame and is close to her.) As I noted earlier here, they seem to have been behind much of the Plame/Wilson story. I smell the same public relations/media campaign .The same phony claims of maltreated government employees. If Tice was a source for Risen, and it’s not clear he was, the reporter was certainly casting a broad net. For as Mr. Gertz notes in his article:

“Mr. Tice said yesterday that he was not part of the intercept program.”

The only significant difference between the original Plame/Wilson scandal and the revival at NSA is that the same folks who moaned about a major intelligence breach that had to be punished when Valerie Wilson’s desk job at the CIA hit print are now openly supporting a leaker and claiming he is entitled to protections — even though he hasn’t gone through the channels established by law.

Rick Moran at RWNH agrees with the hypothesis I lean to myself: that Tice is the spook who had the information, and who could be persuaded by the VIPers managing the Anti-Bush Intel Operation to leak the NSA story to the New York Times. I would also suppose that the letters from Tice to the Congressional Intelligence Committees in the news today were a key part of their plan, intended to get him off the prosecutorial hook by offering the not-very-subtle hint that he is entitled to be immunized as a “whistleblower” to Congress, disclosing Watergate-style Executive Branch crimes, not a deservedly discharged stalker seeking personal revenge on his former agency, even at the price of damaging National Security.

He probably already told the New York Times, and now he wants to tell Arlen Spector and a room full of salivating democrats all about it. Chances are this is a tactic of desperation, a final gesture expressing the futile hope that Congress is going to save him from being prosecuted for breaking the law and gravely injuring National Security. The Washington Times reports:

A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Russ Tice, a whistleblower (sic – should be: “traitor”) who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA. “I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency,” Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times.

RussTice 2

Russ Tice 3

Russ Tice Letters to Congressional Intelligence Committees

National Security Whistleblowers Coalition

Sibel Edmonds

Liberty Coalition
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AJStrata links MacRanger, who suggests an explanation for the behavior which led to Tice being fired:

this Tice guy was harassing this poor woman. What set him off is a mystery. But I bet you she either showed him up once and embarrassed the hell out of him, or he had some ‘feelings’ for her and was not happy when he was rebuffed – most likely in an embarrassing way.

Clarice Feldman, in her latest, is experiencing schadenfreude at the plight of the New York Times.

ShrinkWrapped nails it.

It seems that almost every day the New York Times prints another story that is destructive to our war effort and threatens to damage its (the Times’s) swiftly declining, now almost negligible, credibility. Today’s example is a story, Muslim Scholars Were Paid to Aid U.S. Propaganda, in which the reporters reveal that the United States, as part of our war effort in Iraq, used the traditional means of money to get opinion leaders in the Iraqi Sunni communities to come over to our side. This is not really news, but the story is prominently featured on the front page of the Times, it appears, primarily because it can damage our war effort, and endanger people who are working with the American forces in Iraq. If the story had been leaked by a foreign national spying on the United States, no one would question whether or not they deserve, at the least, a long jail term, but since the information is printed in the pages of the New York Times, we are all supposed to ignore the harm it can do and let it slide.

This is not an important story in the greater scheme 0f things. The Times campaign of leaks and innuendo which seems to have the goal of disarming the United States in a global (partly informational) war against Islamic fascists who want nothing more than to kill large numbers of infidels and destroy our country has been ongoing for months, perhaps years, and there have been many more dangerous stories, like the leaks about the NSA program that the Times has recently been bruiting about. No, the issue with this story is not its power to harm our interests, though it can and will, but the fact that it is such a minor story of so little import, without even a patina of justification based on the supposed concerns over civil liberties that so much of the left uses to legitimize their opposition to American self-defense. It begs the question: why would the Times print such a minor story on the front page at such a time?

The primary job of the editors of the New York Times, indeed, of any news organization, is deciding which stories among the plethora of news they collect everyday, deserves to be printed. Of even greater import, which stories should be on the front page. These are the stories that the derivative news organizations all the way down the line to the local news casts and local papers, will feature as their important news stories of the day. When the Washington Post and the Times printed stories about the NSA program to monitor communications, they could justify their breaches of national security by believing that civil liberties concerns trump national security concerns, and that any risk they might run in printing the stories was worth the benefit that would accrue from the American public knowing what was being done in their name. So far, the American public doesn’t buy their justification, if the polls are accurate, but at least they can claim to be standing on principle in printing the stories.

A story about using the time honored approach of bribing tribal leaders and religious leaders to support our policies, in a part of the world where this has been standard operating procedure for centuries, is a non-story, which can only harm our war effort and can in no way be justified by high minded rationalizations of supporting our civil liberties. This is anti-war, anti-American, behavior, and as such, adds to a mounting body of evidence that the Times has lost its way.

Jack Kelly quotes the Anchoress, who describes a recent conversation with a neighbor at the supermarket on democrat partisanship and MSM coverage of the NSA Flap. The Democrats and the press seem to have lost all seriousness and all credibility regarding national security, ” says the Anchoress , to which her neighbor (a democrat) responds:

“Oh, you said a mouthful, kid! I’m so disgusted with my party I’m thinking of sittin’ out the next election, because these people have lost any sense of what their jobs are; they seem to think they were put into office to destroy Bush, and that is all that motivates them – it’s all they can think about, and they seem to think this is what they were charged with, when we put them in office. Hello? I didn’t freaking vote for Schumer to shove his face into every camera, promote himself and play obstruction games when we have a war to fight. I did not vote for Hillary so she could sit around waiting for opinion polls to tell her what to do before she runs for president, and you know what, if she doesn’t mean to be a senator then she shouldn’t be running for the seat in ‘06! Let her step aside, and be honest for once, and start her freakin’ presidential campaign, already, and let a serious legislator run for her seat – her office is rude and unresponsive, anyway – she’s useless! At least you call Schumer’s office, they are respectful – if you look for help, they actually respond, even if they don’t do anything, they send a freakin’ letter letting you know they know you’re alive and they need your vote again. Hillary’s office? They can’t be bothered with anyone! And don’t get me started on this Patriot Act nonsense! When I saw Reid saying they killed it I flipped out! I FREAKIN’ FLIPPED OUT! FOUR YEARS and we haven’t been attacked – what are Reid or Schumer or Hillary gonna say if they let the Patriot Act die and six months from now we’re attacked? They’re gonna blame Bush? Of course, they are, but they’re gonna have a hell of a time convincing the country that Bush is responsible for an attack when THEY were the ones who dropped the Patriot Act! And this FISA baloney is just that: BALONEY! I want to know whose (sic) leaking this crap! We had a big investigation on that stupid Valerie Plame deal, and who was she – she’s a nobody at a desk at Langley – we have two freakin’ years of investigations on that stupid issue, and it’s all probably Tim Russert’s doing, anyway – end it, already – let’s investigate who’s freaking LEAKING real national secrets! Whose leaking the CIA work? Whose leaking the surveillance? That’s what we need to know! THAT’S what we should be investigating, and if we find out who did it, we arrest the scum and throw him in jail, I don’t care who he is! I read that Jonathan Alter piece and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to puke my guts up! You know why? Because I remember something that maybe Alter has forgotten, that when 9/11 happened, Bush said he’d use ‘every tool’ at his disposal, and we all applauded that! Remember? We all said, THANK FREAKIN’ GOD this man is in charge, and he clearly means this! I haven’t forgotten it. I haven’t forgotten what downtown NYC smelled like for weeks after the attack. I haven’t forgotten the big freakin’ hole in the city. I haven’t forgotten what it felt like to look at a plane taking off from the airport, and me worrying that it was going to be blown up before my eyes from some freakin’ crazed assh*le with a bomb in his shoe, or someone on the ground with a surface-to-air missile – I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN - and I’m getting damned fed up with my party leadership that seems to have forgotten, and I’ll tell you what, they had better start REMEMBERING, real soon, or they’re gonna find their asses tossed OUT, come November if they don’t get with the program! And don’t even get me started with the papers, I cancelled the freakin’ papers – I’m fed up with all of them! What do I need the papers for, so I can read how everything bad that happens in the whole world is Bush’s fault? I can predict what they’re gonna write! Now, I want news, I go look at the internet, I turn on C-span and watch things for myself! I’m an educated woman, and I can think for myself, I don’t need newspapers if they’re not gonna gimmee news!”

What if they gave a scandal and nobody came? asks one of Roger L. Simon’s commenters.

Posted by: chuck at December 24, 2005 05:07 PM
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The New York Times’ James Bamford cheerfully tells us all about “the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word – which itself is secret,” and in the omniscient manner of journalists everywhere proceeds to evaluate the ultra-secret NSA’s current operations as “struggling to adjust to the war on terror.”

Jokingly referred to as “No Such Agency,” the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.

But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward.

Bamford naturally understands NSA’s mission better than its own leadership, or that of the elected administration. And he understands better too the limitations of data mining:

Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country… “Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands.”

Ignoring these insurmountable obstacles, Bamford scolds, the Bush Administration heedlessly proceeded to engage in automated data-mining, which he refers to as “eavesdropping.” Impersonal and automated monitoring of international communications searching for keywords, he thinks, should be out-of-bounds. US intelligence and defense agencies should be forced to investigate only on an individual basis, filling out the proper pile of paper work, and going to court, presenting a case, and obtaining an individual warrant. Such practices push the boundaries of the law, and might lead to tyranny.
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The Washington Post’s Susan Spaulding editorializes indignantly that the Bush Administration went right ahead, and covertly conducted an impersonal and automated search for potential terrorist communications in such secrecy “that Congress was [only] briefed ‘at least a dozen times’ in the four years since the wiretap program started.”

Presumably, the president should have funded an international advertising campaign to notify everyone what he was plannng to do, then conducted a full-scale national political debate before proceeding with a secret intelligence operation in time of war:

Even assuming that these classified briefings accurately conveyed all relevant facts, it appears that they were limited to only eight of the 535 senators and representatives, under a process that effectively eliminates the possibility of any careful oversight.

EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.

Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree.

Another spy scandal and Bush will be at 60%.