Those of us with tiny ears can relate. You should hear my woeful tales of earbuds and earpieces popping out of my petite and childlike auricles.
But I’ll spare you.
Assange and Ellsberg: together at last
When I wrote this post I perceived the philosophical connections between Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers renown. But little did I know that their ties are even more concrete than I thought.
For instance, Assange appeared as special guest (courtesy of Skype technology) at a conference organized by Ellsberg back in June, where Assange paid explicit homage to Ellsberg by stating, ““Dan is a hero of mine.”
More quotes from the conference:
Ellsberg had said that rather than go through the laborious work of photocopying the [Pentagon] papers on primitive machines, and then schlep them across the country, he wished he had been able to use the Internet to leak the documents…
“Dan has a wonderful statement that we’ve used. And that is that courage is contagious,” said Assange, citing a leaker who spoke to Ramparts magazine in 1972, who credited Ellsberg as his inspiration.
At the end of the day the two said they would “keep in touch.” And so they apparently have; last Friday the two appeared together at a London news conference:
Mr. Ellsberg, who said he had flown overnight from California to attend, described Mr. Assange admiringly as “the most dangerous man in the world” for challenging governments, particularly the United States. He said the WikiLeaks founder had been “pursued across three continents” by Western intelligence services and compared the Obama administration’s threat to prosecute Mr. Assange to his own treatment under President Richard M. Nixon.
I wonder whether Ellsberg thinks a government shouldn’t try to prosecute security leaks. It’s hard to imagine a government on earth that wouldn’t try to do so; any government that did not would probably not last very long.
Ellsberg knew he was risking prosecution when he gave the Papers to the media, but his case never went to trial because charges were dropped due to the transgressions of the Watergate perpetrators. You may or may not remember why they originally called themselves “plumbers” [emphasis mine]:
The White House Plumbers, sometimes simply called the Plumbers, were a covert White House Special Investigations Unit established July 24, 1971 during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Its task was to stop the leaking of classified information to the news media…
The Plumbers’ first task was the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s Los Angeles psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding, in an effort to uncover evidence to discredit Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The operation was reportedly unsuccessful in finding Ellsberg’s file and was so reported to the White House.
Government is constrained by laws against this sort of thing, and rightly so. Its power and potential for abuse is ordinarily far greater than that of the average citizen. But the consequence of it all is that leakers now seem to be able to breach national security with impunity, at least most of the time (I offered some suggestions on how to deal with this phenomenon here and here).
In addition, like many on the Wikileaks staff, Assange is not a US citizen, so it’s hard to see how those particular people could be prosecuted for anything. Also, the internet helps him not only disseminate the information, but affords extra layers of anonymity to the leakers who are US citizens. What’s more, it allows Assange to organize the whole thing much better and to increase the number of players; in contrast (at least as far as I know), Ellsberg acted mostly alone, although he needed the cooperation of the MSM to broadcast the information.
And cooperate they did. Most people got their ideas about what the Papers contained by what parts the MSM chose to highlight and summarize. As I wrote in 2006:
We all know the drill [presented by the MSM]: fearless Daniel Ellsberg, at the risk of prosecution, spirits away classified information…and gives it to the press, who publish it in brave defiance of government efforts and a Supreme Court case trying to enjoin them from doing so. But Ellsberg’s”“and the Times and Post’s”“devotion to truth won out, the American people were informed of the government’s deceptions, and we finally disengaged from an unwinnable battle…
A fascinating piece on the subject of war coverage by the MSM”“both then and now”“was written by James Q. Wilson and appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. Take a look at this, on the Papers:
Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.
In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.
The internet giveth and the internet taketh away. It may make it easier to dump the information and get away with it. But it may make it harder for the left to control the message for those who want to think for themselves. For example, already it has become evident that some of the recent Wikileaks information on Iraq tends to implicate Iran and its apologists on the left. And, wonder of wonders, even the NY Times is reporting as much.
No thanks go to…those like Sy Hersh who wrote again and again that American forces were operating in Iran, and who warned that the Bush administration first, and now the Obama administration, were planning a shooting war against the Islamic Republic. Hersh and the various Giraldis, Lobes, Cannistraros, and their echo chambers on the wacky left should take the opportunity to apologize for failing to report what was actually going on: the Iranians were waging war against us, while we were doing precious little to fight back, despite a high cost of life and limbs.
Probably not exactly what Assange had hoped for from Wikileaks.
[NOTE: Two of my previous posts on Daniel Ellsberg and his influence on military whistleblowers and security leaks may be of interest: this and this.]
Fear and racism
The brilliant Richard Fernandez on the new blasphemy against PC thought:
But there are indications that blasphemy, far from being dead letter, is alive and well. Wikipedia, in discussing the subject, warns the reader to also consult the entries for “hate speech”. That is now the alias the blasphemy lives under and it certainly has that effect among modern true believers…
Reuters reports that “the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favor and 11 against, with 13 abstentions” making insults to Islam a human rights violation. What those insults may be is the rub. If there are just some things the blasphemers don’t instinctively “get” or which they wrongfully assume is protected under such quaint notions as freedom of speech, then too bad.
I distinctly remember when I first encountered the new blasphemy, although the subject matter was not Islam. It was twenty years ago, and I had returned to the university to get my Master’s degree. Every now and then I was required to take a course that featured mainly undergraduates, and one of those was called Human Sexuality.
At the time, the campus had been shaken by a disciplinary action against a professor, sparked by a student who objected to something he said in class. I no longer remember exactly what it was, but I do remember this: it was a supposedly sexual reference he made to no one in particular, illustrating some point in his lecture, and it was so mild as to be remarkable only for its inoffensiveness. And yet it had offended one person, a female student in his class, who reported him to the proper Thought Police authorities.
I’d been away from college for some time, and it came as quite a shock to me that it had been taken over by PC thinking. To a woman (there were very few men in my Human Sexuality class, which was made up of future social workers and therapists), the youngsters in the class backed the protesting woman student against the old geezer goat of a professor.
I rose and spoke of my puzzlement at their stance. Did they really think he should be disciplined merely because he offended someone’s tender sensibilities? Shouldn’t there be like, you know, something objectively offensive about what he had actually said?
No, they answered. It was enough that she felt what she felt. She had a right to never be offended, and he needed to be re-educated. As I recall, he had been forced to take classes in gender sensitivity in order to keep his job.
I looked around at these lovely young women, all fresh and bright and intelligent and eager, and felt the cold chill of something dreadful creep up my spine. And then I shook my head sadly and sat down, because I had no way of reaching them.
Wikileaks again
The latest Wikileaks dump is the most recent salvo in an information counterwar that’s been going on for quite some time. Here’s one of the better articles about it, if you want some information about the major issues and players.
I’ll only add that when I say this counterwar has been going on for quite some time, I mean a very long time. One of the first shots fired was the Pentagon Papers, which helped establish the willingness of the MSM to print what heretofore would have been considered secret documents counterproductive to a war effort in which we are still engaged. I wrote about the phenomenon and its aftermath here:
…[I]t appears that national security whistleblowers are being encouraged to act as virtual moles within their own organizations, remaining in their jobs in order to gain more of the sensitive material and to reveal it as they see fit, according to the dictates of their individual consciences, and often for political reasons. And the idea that there will be any serious legal consequences for the whistleblowers has been weakened; Ellsberg expected to be charged with treason (and was, [although he never came to trial; charges were dropped because of Watergate]), but many whistleblowers today seem to consider such possibilities to be idle threats.
There is now an entire cottage industry dedicated to this sort of thing, composed of self-righteous crusaders against any sort of war in which the US in engaged. Since they can’t pin enough atrocities on the US, their main goal, they now resort to something like the latest Wikileads data, which implicates the Iraqi forces who were allied with us.
Of course, Wikileaks is silent on the much greater atrocities committed then—and now—by the enemy in Iraq, both by Saddam’s government before the war and then the “insurgents.” The folks at Wikileaks have no solution to the problems of aggression, terrorism, evil, or the carnage committed by our enemies, and they don’t care that their work is going to hurt our soldiers and give the enemy aid and comfort and fuel for its own propaganda war. It’s almost as though the enemy doesn’t exist for them, except as victim.
[NOTE: I have not read the Wikileaks data itself, only the descriptions of it.
And here is another piece I’ve written about Ellsberg, in this case about his “Truth-Telling Project.” Here is a description:
“The Truth-Telling Project””“now, what might that be? Wretchard quotes from its web page, which offers the following description of the organization’s purpose and function:
“The Truth-Telling Coalition, comprised of high-level national security truth-tellers, as well as non-profit whistleblower organizations, provides a personal and legal support network for each other and for government insiders considering becoming truth-tellers.”
So, according to its own description, the group appears to be an organization dedicated to supporting the spilling of secrets by national security officers in the interests of “truth.”
Please read the whole post.]
Brilliant Sharron Angle ad
Obama’s words come back to haunt him—and Harry Reid:
Methinks…
…that Juan Williams is mad (as in “angry”).
He’s also right (as in “correct”).
History Channel Tivo alert: “I Am Alive: Surviving the Andes Plane Crash”
I first read the superb book Alive back when it came out in the mid-70s, and immediately became fascinated by the harrowing tale it tells of the survivors of the 1972 Andes plane crash. I wrote a little bit about them in this piece for RightNetwork about leadership under extreme conditions, comparing and contrasting their situation with that of the Chilean miners.
Then, coincidentally, I noticed there was a documentary being shown on the History Channel Wednesday night entitled, “I Am Alive: Surviving the Andes Plane Crash.” It’s recent, and excellent. Even though I knew the story of their 72-day ordeal very well and thought there wasn’t much new for me to learn about it in a 2-hour film, this one was loaded with information I’d neither heard nor read before, as well as visuals that made previously murky facts very clear.
But best of all were the interviews with Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa and a couple of the other now-60ish survivors, and a trip back to the site by an experienced climber who tried to retrace their steps and found how extraordinarily difficult their feat was (they had never seen snow before their ordeal began, nor done any mountain climbing). Even watching TV in the warmth and safety of one’s home, the mind reels at the shots of the terrain that faced them—rugged mountains stretching as far as the eye could see into a vast distance—and at the knowledge that, nevertheless, the young Parrado and Canessa climbed out of there while starving, unequipped and freezing, spurred on by the knowledge that the search had long ago been called off, and that this was the last and only chance for them—and for the fourteen other young men they had left behind to wait in the plane’s fuselage for rescue or for death.
The documentary is an unusual combination: part sensationalist adventure/endurance story, part psychological thriller, and part testament to the human spirit and the overwhelming power of love. At the end, there were tears streaming down my cheeks.
If you want to watch it (or Tivo it for later), the film repeats on the History Channel at 5 PM Eastern time on Saturday, Oct 23. And if all else fails, you can buy it.
Poll says Barney Frank way ahead…
…but the score stands at 49% for him, 37% for Bielat, and 12% undecided.
How could anyone be “undecided” at this point about Frank? If all those votes end up going to Bielat (unlikely, but possible), and the Republican turnout is greater than expected (somewhat more likely), then…well, you do the math.
NPR and its “standards”
James Rainey at the LA Times points out the obvious: that the policy NPR cited as its reason for firing Williams—that one that says correspondents in its employ can’t give opinions—is violated regularly and with impunity by others in the NPR lineup. This, for example, is a well-known instance:
Ha, ha, ha, Nina, funny joke, that, including the grandkids! And NPR apparently just smiled, too, when it happened—which was back in 1995. Totenberg is still with them, when last I checked—although now that their hypocrisy is so deeply exposed by the Juan Williams firing they might try to apply their policy more consistently ex post facto, and clean house by firing Totenberg, et al, too.
Of course, one problem would be that such a wholesale housecleaning would make it more difficult to fulfill one of NPR’s main raisons d’éªtre, which is to spew out liberal opinions onto the airwaves in the guise of supposed “objectivity” in those tony, neutral-sounding voices.
[NOTE: Stephen F. Hayes reminds us of a few other times Totenberg has violated the (wink-wink) “standards” of NPR.]
Juan Williams responds to NPR firing
His response is excellent, just another indication of his basic upfront reasonableness. But that’s not acceptable at NPR any more; PC thought has trumped and eradicated it:
[ADDENDUM: Williams has more to say about it.]
Hubris, nemisis, and partying like its 1773
My new article is up at PJ. Enjoy the party.
Juan Williams steps on the NPR third rail
NPR, that public radio station that we all help fund, has fired longtime senior news analyst Juan Williams for making the following comments on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor:”
“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.
Ah, but there is, there is! Facts, truth, who needs them? We can get away from them by the simple act of firing people who speak them, especially if they commit the thoughtcrime of owning up to unpleasant but honest feelings of nervousness that they nevertheless resist acting on, such as the sort of religious-garb-while-flying emotional “profiling” that Williams is owning up to (see Jesse Jackson, of “I hate to admit it, but I have reached a stage in my life that if I am walking down a dark street late at night and I see that the person behind me is white, I subconsciously feel relieved;” or Obama’s typical white grandmother).
And that’s just what NPR did—fired Williams:
NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”
No surprise there. NPR long, long ago abandoned all pretense of objectivity or common sense to the great and higher goal of pure PC-bs.
Every now and then I’ve caught Juan Williams on Fox, and it began to occur to me a few weeks ago that his days at NPR might be numbered, since he’s been sleeping with the Fox enemy for too long and is therefore tainted. And, although a liberal, he’s far too reasonable and straight-shooting for NPR’s taste.
In fact, this move by NPR has probably been brewing for quite some time. I would wager they’ve been lying in wait for him to make a false step so that they can use it as an excuse to dismiss him. This idea is given further credence by the fact that, “In February 2009, NPR said it had asked that he stop being identified on ‘The O’Reilly Factor’ as a ‘senior correspondent for NPR,’ even though that title was accurate.”
As Drew M. at Ace’s writes:
I’m sure in the coming days people will dig up plenty examples of NPR reporters insulting Christians, America and other groups but not losing their jobs over it. As always, it’s just one group that gets super-protected status and it just happens to be the one that is so peaceful, they will kill you for insulting them.
And then there’s this news, which came the very same day that Williams got the boot. Coincidence?:
Media Matters, the liberal activist group that wages a rhetorical war against Fox News Channel and others in the conservative press, will announce on Wednesday the receipt of a $1 million donation from the philanthropist George Soros…[T]he organization says it plans to use the money to intensify its efforts to hold the Fox host Glenn Beck and others on the cable news channel accountable for their reporting.
“Fox has transformed itself into a 24-7 G.O.P. attack machine, dividing Americans through fear-mongering and falsehoods and undermining the legitimacy of our government for partisan political ends,” the group will say in the statement, to be released Wednesday afternoon.
In an accompanying statement, Mr. Soros, a billionaire who has a history of supporting liberal politicians and causes, accused Fox News hosts of “incendiary rhetoric” and said he hoped that his money would be used “in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.”
Oh, and what was the Williams comment that sparked NPR to make that 2009 request that his affiliation with them not be trumpeted on Fox? This:
Michelle Obama, you know, she’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going. If she starts talking, as Mary Katharine [Ham, a conservative blogger] is suggesting, her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I’m the victim. If that stuff starts coming out, people will go bananas and she’ll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross.
Williams, in case you don’t happen to know this already, is black. That might have made it more difficult for NPR to pull the plug on him—difficult, but not impossible, as we have seen.
It used to be that racism was a question of how one acted towards others. Now it’s built on thoughtcrime, and the best way to prove one’s own non-racist bona fides is to come down hard on anyone who dares to admit to a frisson of fear or a possibility of making a mental or emotional connection between Muslims and the vile outrage that was perpetrated in the name of Islam on 9-11.
[ADDENDUM: Ed Morrisey makes the point that, just after the remarks in question, Williams was careful to note that it’s important for commenters to make the distinction between moderate Muslims and extremists. Too little, too late, Juan; you’re outta there.
Here’s the whole segment:
Pretty ironic, huh? Especially when Williams says, “You’ve gotta be careful!”
Bernie Goldberg call’s NPR’s action “the death of liberalism.” I’ve got news for you, Bernie—that sort of liberalism died a long time ago.]
[ADDENDUM II: Matt Lewis makes a good point at Politics Daily:
…[J]ust as Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar chose to storm of the set of “The View” during a recent appearance by O’Reilly, the politically correct guide to debate often involves cutting off discussion, not encouraging more of it.
There’s a simple explanation. That’s because it’s about proving themselves as champions of the oppressed underdog Muslims, and therefore non-bigoted. It’s not about the discussion or the issues, stupid.]