Dr. Sanity on denial–sing it!

The New Neo Posted on by

In a way, my post today on Juan Cole and the Left is really about denial.

Well, Dr. Sanity’s the expert on that. And if she ever quits her day job, she has a future as a lyricist. Here’s still another in a long line of her clever parody offerings. This one happens to fits in quite nicely with the theme of the day–the Left’s denial of some hard but basic truths.

To the tune of “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” Dr. Sanity writes:

An’ just take dese newsfolk
As if dey’s a big joke,
‘Cuz when it bleeds it’ll lede.

Which reminds me to put in another Orwell quote that I came across here, while researching the previous post:

Orwell was perhaps even less kind to the press than Hitchens; when he was not censuring their mangling of proper English (he was once “upset for days” when the Tribune printed “verbiosity” in one of its articles), he was abusing them as “professional liars” and “halfwits.” “Early in life,” he wrote, “I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”

Orwell was a great writer. But he didn’t set it to music, like Dr. Sanity.

Denial, Juan Cole and Ahmadinejad, and Munich

The New Neo Posted on by

Christopher Hitchens (previously no special friend of Israel’s) deconstructs Juan Cole’s Dowdification of Ahmadinejad’s threats to Israel in this Slate article (via Austin Bay) entitled “The Cole Report: when it comes to Iran, he distorts, you decide.”

Hitchens’s contention is that, contrary to Cole’s statements that Ahmadinejad never threatened to wipe Israel off the map, Cole is playing fast and loose with the quotes, and that it’s indeed what Ahmadinejad has said, several times over.

Cole is an excellent example of the repeated tendency of some on the Left to make excuses for outright declarations of annihilative intent by third-world tyrants. This tendency on the Left is both understandable and dangerous.

After all, many people (and not all of them are on the Left by any means, although a great number on the Left do fit this description) believe everyone pretty much resembles them in the way they operate. And my impression is that many on the Left see the use of words as a sort of harmless game.

It was George Orwell, a member of the Left but a different sort entirely (he knew the dangerous excesses of the Left up close and personal, and spent much of his writing life warning us about them, as well as musing on the extraordinary power of words themselves), who famously told us:

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

Plus ca change…

Hitchens, who recently wrote an entire book in praise of Orwell, clearly considers himself to be in the same mold: a straight-talking leftist who’s not afraid to break out of the circle dance.
The signers of the recent Euston Manifesto have also stepped out of the leftist ring and stated their unequivocal opposition to tyranny and their refusal to apologize for it:

We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently “understand”, reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy ”” regimes that oppress their own peoples and movements that aspire to do so. We draw a firm line between ourselves and those left-liberal voices today quick to offer an apologetic explanation for such political forces….

People like Juan Cole are the ones they are up against. What else might be motivating him, besides a lightness about the meaning of “mere words?” My guess is that it’s the need to keep his conceptual world intact, to continue to dance in that circle to which he’s grown accustomed without feeling undue guilt or cognitive dissonance.

And what is that conceptual world? It includes, but is far from limited to, the idea that almost everything wrong with the world today is the fault of the US and past abuses of power by Western nations. And a further corollary–perhaps a more important one–is that human beings are basically well-meaning and reasonable (with the example, of course, of Bush, Cheney, et al).

The latter principle of general reasonableness applies even to tyrannical and dictatorial leaders who have unequivocally stated the desire to destroy the US and Israel (the famous “Big and Little Satans”). If the words of those such as Ahmadinejad are unequivocal, don’t worry; Cole will do the honors and equivocate for him.

Twas ever thus. Or at least, it’s been thus ever since the debacle of WWI made the fear and knowledge of war’s destructive costs far greater, the dream of peace ever more powerful, the need to believe in the goodwill of dictators more intense, and the ability to equivocate and deceive oneself about said goodwill more likely.

Witness, please, exhibit B: the British Parliamentary debate on the Munich Pact, which took place on October 3, 1938. Duff Cooper, speaking in the House of Commons, said:

Prime Minister [Chamberlain] has confidence in the good will and in the word of Herr Hitler, although when Herr Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles he undertook to keep the Treaty of Locarno, and when he broke the Treaty of Locarno he undertook not to interfere further, or to have further territorial aims, in Europe. When he entered Austria by force he authorised his henchmen to give an authoritative assurance that he would not interfere with Czechoslovakia. That was less than six months ago. Still, the Prime Minister believes that he can rely upon the good faith of Hitler; he believes that Hitler is interested only in Germany, as the Prime Minister was assured….

The Prime Minister may be right. I can assure you, Mr. Speaker, with the deepest sincerity, that I hope and pray that he is right, but I cannot believe what he believes. I wish I could. .

Here is a portion of Chamberlain’s reply to Cooper (note, especially, the Pitt quote that ends the excerpt):

My right hon. Friend [Duff Cooper] has alluded in somewhat bitter terms to my conversation last Friday morning with Herr Hitler. I do not know why that conversation should give rise to suspicion, still less to criticism. I entered into no pact. I made no new commitments. There is no secret understanding. Our conversation was hostile to no other nation. The objects of that conversation, for which I asked, was to try to extend a little further the personal Contact which I had established with Herr Hitler and which I believe to be essential in modern diplomacy. We had a friendly and entirely non-committal conversation, carried on, on my part, largely with a view to seeing whether there could be points in common between the head of a democratic Government and the ruler of a totalitarian State. We see the result in the declaration which has been published, in which my right hon. Friend finds so much ground for suspicion….

I believe there are many who will feel with me that such a declaration, signed by the German Chancellor and myself, is something more than a pious expression of opinion. In our relations with other countries everything depends upon there being sincerity and good will on both sides. I believe that there is sincerity and good will on both sides in this declaration. That is why to me its significance goes far beyond its actual words. If there is one lesson which we should learn from the events of these last weeks it is this, that lasting peace is not to be obtained by sitting still and waiting for it to come. It requires active, positive efforts to achieve it. No doubt I shall have plenty of critics who will say that I am guilty of facile optimism, and that I should disbelieve every word that is uttered by rulers of other great States in Europe. I am too much of a realist to believe that we are going to achieve our paradise in a day. We have only laid the foundations of peace. The superstructure is not even begun….

As regards future policy, it seems to me that there are really only two possible alternatives. One of them is to base yourself upon the view that any sort of friendly relation, or possible relations, shall I say, with totalitarian States are impossible, that the assurances which have been given to me personally are worthless, that they have sinister designs and that they are bent upon the domination of Europe and the gradual destruction of democracies. Of course, on that hypothesis, war has got to come, and that is the view–a perfectly intelligible view–of a certain number of hon. and right hon. Gentlemen in this House”¦.

If that is hon. Members’ conviction, there is no future hope for civilisation or for any of the things that make life worth living. Does the experience of the Great War and of the years that followed it give us reasonable hope that if some new war started that would end war any more than the last one did? No. I do not believe that war is inevitable. Someone put into my hand a remark made by the great Pitt about 1787, when he said:

“To suppose that any nation can be unalterably the enemy of another is weak and childish and has its foundations neither in the experience of nations not in the history of man.”

Read it and weep. Weep for the opportunities lost, for what Chamberlain himself called “facile optimism:” so noble, so hopeful, so well-meaning, so deadly, so fatally wrong about the benign intents of totalitarian dictators who threaten others.

Ah, the joy of organizing: going through old papers

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know about you, but I’m not the most organized of people.

Oh, I’m not all that bad. My desk doesn’t pile up too much before I clear it. You can walk a straight line through my house and not run into any large obstacles, such as stacks of magazines or old clothes.

No, the house is relatively neat. The parts that aren’t are mostly safely hidden away in my “office.” I’m not really sure why I put in the scare quotes–it is an office, a small bedroom with a skylight revealing a view of a beautiful old birch tree on this rainy day (which, through the magic of digital photography, I can show you even as we speak):

The office isn’t as photogenic as the tree. So I’ll post no photo of that. Best to leave it to your imagination.

This is what you would see, though, if you were here (besides neo-neocon herself, sans apple):

A bookshelf filled with literary and poetry journals, as well as books on poetry and writing, a dictionary, thesaurus, and rhyming dictionary; some framed prints on the wall featuring old pens and books; a calendar with paintings of women reading; two poorly functioning remote telephones (I can’t seem to find a good one); and a bed for guests. There’s also a large flat desk that holds my shiny newish computer. And a chair for said desk.

But on that desk we see the first evidence of problems to come: an old Brother word processor, circa–oh, I don’t know, maybe 1980-something-or-other? I still remember when I exchanged my old electric Smith-Corona for it; the Brother seemed the latest word in typing advances. The ability to make corrections without needing erasable typing paper! Spellcheck! No more white out! Oh, it was wonderful, wonderful–although now it seems about as modern as a Model-T.

Why is it here? All my writing from the 80s and early 90s is still on it. I’ve been told there’s no way to transfer the information except to laboriously enter it into my computer in the old-fashioned way, by keyboarding it. Needless to say, that’s not my top priority now. So, there it sits, gathering the proverbial (and metaphoric) dust.

And those two file cabinets up against the wall are only half full. On the floor next to them, and spread out on the guest bed, are piles of papers.

I’ve got a master plan. Quite a while ago (how long ago I dare not say) I bought a system of files. Hanging files and regular folder files, tabs and accessories, all color-coordinated to allow me to separate my papers into categories: writing, memorabilia, photos, medical, financial, etc.–you get the idea.

I’m going to do it. I know I will. And yesterday I actually started. But one of the problems with starting is that it makes me confront what I already knew–that this is a large task. I know, I know–like hitting one’s head on the wall, it will feel so good when it’s over. But it’s very far from over, despite my having put in about five hours last night.

But I’ve already realized some benefits. No, I haven’t located everything I was looking for. Some official papers missing from my “offical papers” file, for example, are still AWOL. But I found the text of a children’s book I’d written about twenty years ago, which had been lost for the last five. Some papers I need in connection with my license were, remarkably enough, in a large envelope marked “For license,” which had been buried under a pile of others.

Going through much of it is a strangely emotional experience. Old cards–birthdays, anniversaries, loves gained and lost. Photos of me and my boyfriend who went to Vietnam, and his last letter, the only one I saved (for those of you who haven’t read my posts on that subject: yes, he did return, but no, we didn’t marry). Photos from college–me, impossibly young, sporting one of those long flippy “do’s” that required setting on rollers the size of beer cans; old friends from that era, some of them now dead. Poems that make me cry when I stop to read them. My diplomas. A photocopy of the check from Central Casting Corporation I got for doing a “silent bit” as a dancer in the film “The Turning Point” (see this).

In one file entitled “School–grades and awards” are all my old report cards (height: 48 1/4 inches, weight, 51 pounds, first grade). Even now those report cards have the power to stir a hint of anxiety in me, remembering the drama of the reading of the names and the doling out of the little cardboard squares representing so much work. My SAT scores. My GRE scores. My scholarships, and some newspaper clippings announcing same. A little card of commendation with a gold star on it, given to me in third grade for a bunch of poems I wrote, illustrated, and compiled into a scrapbook for extra credit and for fun (“Snowflakes falling, down, down, down…)

Letters from a few famous people I wrote to who had the decency to write back, some at great length (Oliver Sacks, for one). A huge file of poetry I like that isn’t anthologized in any books I own. My own poetry, with many different alternative drafts (ah, my biographer will be so grateful!) A folder filled with the condolence letters people wrote my mother when my grandmother died in the late 60s, which still have the power to evoke her warm presence and vitality.

So the benefits of going through papers aren’t limited to getting organized. And in fact, that has yet to happen. But the folders are now in stacks, roughly sorted out. The next step is to toss about half this material–although not the half I just listed, of course. Wonder when that will happen.

Question authority: Part IV–national security leaks to the press: what to do?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I]
[Part II]
[Part III]

Under what circumstances should a national security employee decide to disclose classified information, and to whom should he/she disclose it? Should the leaker be met with penalties for these actions, and, if so, what should the punishment be? And what’s the role of the press? Should it be allowed to publish any leaks short of treason, no matter what the national security consequences? And if not, how should those consequences be judged, and by whom?

Those who argue that leaks to the press are never justified, and should always be punished severely, believe that the framers have already put sufficient checks and balances in place so that the system can deal with any situation that could come up without the need for the press to get into the act and sensationalize and publicize the situation prematurely. The proper course of action for a national security employee would be to launch an internal investigation within his/her own agency, and if that fails to remedy the prolem, to go to the committee in Congress charged with Congressional oversight. The legislative branch would be acting in time-honored fashion as a curb on the executive branch, just as the Constitution intended.

Those who disagree with the above base their contention on two ideas: distrust of government oversight (fostered by such events as the initial My Lai coverup, as discussed in Part II), and the public’s right to know. In general, they also tend to routinely downplay the security repercussions of disclosures such as the CIA detention centers in Europe (I discuss the origins of this attitude here and here).

Recent events indicate that some seem to consider national security employees to be justified in making their own individual decisions to act as watchdogs, spilling the beans and breaking their oaths of secrecy if they merely happen to believe there’s an illegal act on the part of the CIA, and to believe that an internal complaint and investigation (the usual procedure) wouldn’t get the results they’re looking for, without actually launching one:

“This a matter of principle,” said Ray McGovern, a former fellow CIA analyst, “where [McCarthy] said my oath, my promise not to reveal secrets is superceded by my oath to defend the constitution of the U.S.”…McCarthy’s supporters say if she revealed classified information, it’s because she strongly believed what was happening was wrong. With unsympathetic superiors and a Congress that has been reluctant to investigate, she had no one to turn to but the press.

Did McCarthy (or whoever the leaker actually was) really have no avenue but the press? If the leaker’s conscience was troubled by confidential information gained in the line of duty, didn’t that person also have a duty to go through internal channels or to Congress? Was this ever done in the detention center case, or did the leaker simply cut to the chase (and the press), assuming an internal investigation would go nowhere?

When that process is short-circuited, the leaker unloads his/her information in the most public way possible, which can end up being the most damaging way. Right now the only people deciding how bad that damage might be before it occurs are the leaker him/herself–hardly the most objective judge of that–and the press (ditto). Once the story is published, it’s too late: the cat is out of the bag, the horse is out of the barn.

The judiciary was meant to act as the check and balance on potential leakers and the press–and in the past, of course, we also had more self-imposed restraint on the part of the press, especially in times of war. Now, however, not only does the press see itself in the role of government adversary and whistleblower, but personal repercussions are few and far between, short of treason (a very hard case to make in most situations).

The landmark Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers case gave a relatively free reign to the press in such matters, freeing it from the fear of prosecution except in the most egregious of cases (the excerpt that follows is from the post of mine that I just linked):

In 1997, Adam Clymer of the Times wrote, in a review of a new book–The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case, by David Rundestine:

“The Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 decision in the Pentagon Papers case was a monumental victory for The New York Times and The Washington Post and a huge defeat for the Nixon Administration. In practical terms, it meant that the United States Government bears an awesome — perhaps impossible — burden before it can censor the press. But the opinion written by Justice William J. Brennan did not tell courts how to weigh that burden, though it made clear that a just claim of injury to the national security is not enough.”

So, “a just claim of injury to the national security is not enough.” Think about it: what would be enough? How bad an injury to the national security is sufficient to muffle a story, and how certain does this injury have to be?

So that brings us to where we are today. And Houston, we’ve got a problem (although I’m sure some would disagree with me!)

How do other countries with a tradition of a free press deal with the situation? Some punish security violations far more stringently. Britain, for example, has a statute called the National Secrets Act, which establishes penalties not only for the leaker, but for the press publishing the information. And there is no discretion given to the leaker or the press on such matters:

…due to the extreme strictures of Britain’s Official (National) Secrets Act, certain topics can be designated as matters of national security of which any published (or public?) discussion is completely forbidden ; if this order is violated, the “offenders” can be immediately incarcerated, their publication facilities etc. closed/dismantled; further, if any mention whatsoever of those actions (i.e. against the publisher of the forbidden information) is made by any other publisher, the publishers of that subsequent information are likewise subject to the exact same penalty…According to other terms of this National Secrets Act, any publisher/news organisation who receives information, publication of which would violate the previously noted terms, is obliged to inform British authorities of that fact — as well as the source of the information.

The British law represents the opposite extreme in dealing with the problem of leaks to the press–perhaps too extreme? In the US at present, the only possible legal penalties (as far as I know) are charges such as espionage and treason, very high crimes indeed–and very difficult, if not impossible, to prove in instances that don’t actually involve outright spying. Loss of job and/or security clearance is of course also possible. Some ways to stretch the espionage laws to cover the situation of leaking to the press have also been tried, most notably in a 2003 case involving a leak by a lobbyist to the Israeli officials.

Should we pass a law as stringent as Britain’s? At the moment, I’m not sure what my opinion is on that; I don’t know how the British law has been working so far, for example. However, in doing research for this post, I discovered that a law something like the British Official Secrets Act actually was passed in the US–amazingly enough, prior to 9/11, under the Clinton administration.

The law was promoted by none other than the now very beleaguered George Tenet, who was head of the CIA under Clinton and during Bush’s first administration. The bill was in fact passed by Congress in 2000, on Clinton’s watch; and it even had Democratic support at the time (any bets on whether that would happen now?), according to this Scripps-Howard article from October of 2000:

The ship of state, some say, is the only ship that leaks from the top.

So many high-ranking officials could theoretically get tossed in the brig under a sweeping new law about to be signed by President Clinton. The law, drafted without public hearings, for the first time makes it illegal to leak any classified information.

“Because of the seriousness of the leaks and the releasing of classified information, we needed to take some additional steps,” said Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif., who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “We hope it helps.” Condit said he and other Democrats attempted to modify the measure to account for some concerns. But the full implications of what critics are calling America’s first Official Secrets Act remain unclear – for whistle-blowers, for journalists, and for security officials themselves…

“This is like a sea change,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies. “Congress has never even gone half this far.”

But the sea didn’t change, after all. The article’s prediction turned out to be incorrect: Clinton did not sign the bill. He vetoed it, instead. The article doesn’t say why, and I could find no further information on that. And the 2000 bill never contemplated penalties for the press, by the way; it limited punishment (a fine of up to the relatively paltry sum of 10,000 dollars, and a possible imprisonment) to the leaker him/herself. Still, it failed to garner enough votes to override Clinton’s veto.

So, what about some version of the British act? Is it overkill, causing more potential problems than it fixes? Does anyone actually know how the act is working in Britain–its pitfalls and its accomplishments? If so, I invite you to come forward in the comments section–inquiring minds want to know.

It seems logical to me that in order to have any sort of workable national security at all, it should only be breached for extremely serious governmental offenses, and then only after other ordinary channels have been exhausted and found wanting. My suggestion would be penalties for national security leakers who go to the press first, without trying other remedies, as well as penalties for the press if the information damages national security as defined by the courts (and I would hope they would define it at least somewhat less narrowly than in the Pentagon Papers decision).

The goal of instituting these changes would be to motivate both leakers and the press to cease and desist except in cases in which (a) the leak involves a very major governmental offense; (b) has already been reported to the proper authorities in the way the Constitution envisioned; and (c) has been covered up. The idea is to create that situation I spoke of in Part III, in which the needs of national security and the public’s right to know would come into better balance.

Untrammeled executive governmental power is dangerous. But we also can’t afford to ignore the danger of individual leakers and journalists with an agenda, setting themselves up as unchecked arbiters of what secrets should be leaked and publicized around the world. It makes a mockery of national security, and of the oaths taken by those sworn to protect it.

Beautiful day

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been out most of this beautiful day, and now I’m going to take a pizza over to my mother’s. So I’ll just say see you tomorrow, with Part IV–the final one in the series, I think.

Question authority: Part III (Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers)

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I]
[Part II]

The initial coverup of My Lai in the late 60s, discussed in Part II, helped make Americans more cynical–more likely to believe the government couldn’t be trusted to uncover wrongdoings through the mechanism of internal investigations. The press came to be seen as the more reliable watchdog, and whistleblowers were now more likely to go directly to the media to report governmental offenses. The media, in turn, felt freer to oblige without fear of negative consequences to itself.

My Lai had some special (perhaps even unique) characteristics that make it the purest example of an event that needed a whistleblower. The offenses involved were of an extraordinarily serious and profound nature, and the initial coverup was virtually complete. Furthermore, the whistleblower was not bound by any vow of secrecy. Whether he needed to go to directly to the media (as Ridenhour eventually did, after the second investigation–sparked by his letters–was already in progress and had led to Calley’s being charged with murder) is unclear, however.

Another seminal case from the 60s, somewhat more analogous to present-day leak situations, is that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. It is perhaps the most famous example of someone in a national security position leaking classified information to journalists. Far more than My Lai, the Ellsberg case has certain parallels with the present situation involving the CIA detention center leaks.

At the time he gave the Pentagon Papers to the press, Ellsberg was not a CIA employee. But he was an employee of the RAND Corporation, with access to classified information; one can safely assume he had taken an oath to keep those papers secret. His growing disillusionment with the Vietnam war (although, interestingly enough, Ellsberg had been strongly against the war from his earliest exposure to it, way back in 1961) led him to copy the classified documents with the idea of making them public and exposing the cynicism and duplicity with which he felt the Vietnam war had been conducted.

Ellsberg hoped that the publication of the Papers would cause people to become upset on learning they had been lied to by their government, and then to clamor for the war to end. As such, his position was essentially political–although it was not narrowly partisan, since the Pentagon Papers was an equal-opportunity disclosure; the information obtained therein implicated both Democrat and Republican administrations.

Like Ridenhour, at the outset Ellsburg did not release the documents to the press, but sought instead to persuade certain sympathetic antiwar Senators (chief among them J. William Fulbright) to go public with them on the Senate floor. His motivation for this scheme was that he knew he would be liable to prosecution if he went to the press, and he fully expected to be sent to prison as a result, whereas Senators would be immune from such prosecution.

But no Senator would take the bait, not even Fulbright. As a result, Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the media. Initially, he made an effort to escape prosecution by hiding out:

Although the Times did not reveal Ellsberg as their source, he knew that the FBI would soon determine that he was the source of the leak. Ellsberg went underground, living secretly among like-minded people. He was not caught by the FBI, even though they were under enormous pressure from the Nixon Administration to find him.

However, Ellsberg surrendered voluntarily to authorities only a few weeks later:

On June 28, Ellsberg publicly surrendered to the US Attorney’s Office in Boston, Massachusetts. He was taken into custody believing he would spend the rest of his life in prison; he was charged with theft, conspiracy, and espionage.

But Ellsberg never went to prison. In a stunningly ironic turn of events, the actions of Nixon’s “plumbers” (who later carried out the Watergate burglary, but whose nickname came from their earlier attempts to fix Ellsberg’s “leaks”) ended up inadvertently freeing Ellsberg. As in a Shakespearean tragedy, Nixon’s wild overreaching against Ellsberg sowed the seeds of Nixon’s own downfall, through the mechanism of those very same plumbers:

In one of Nixon’s actions against Ellsberg, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in September 1971, hoping to find information they could use to discredit him. The revelation of the break-in became part of the Watergate scandal. ..Because of the gross governmental misconduct, all charges against Ellsberg were eventually dropped.

Earlier, the administration had sued the Times to try to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers on the grounds that such publication would threaten national security. The case went to the Supreme Court; here’s an excerpt from a review of a book written about it, “The Day the Pressed Stopped,” by David Rudenstine:

Despite Americans’ constitutional right to a free press, certain government information–particularly that concerning military affairs–has been placed beyond the realm of public access. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1971, however (brought about when the Nixon administration sued the New York Times) knocked a howitzer-sized hole in that theory when the case allowed the New York Times and the Washington Post to print excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000- page document regarding U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

I haven’t read Rudenstine’s book–although I’ve added it to my ever-growing, always-daunting, reading list–but the above quote describes what a watershed event the publication of the Papers was. Before then, newspapers would have been reluctant to print such things–whether out of loyalty to the government or out of fear of repercussions, or both. After the 1971 case, the gloves were off.

(For anyone interested in reading some original sources around that groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling–I confess that I’ve not yet done so, myself–this site looks to be an excellent place to start. And, by the way, on the question of whether the publication of the Pentagon Papers actually did pose any true threat to national security, the Rudenstine book supports the controversial contention that they did).

Fast forward to now. National security officers presently are encouraged to spill information with which they disagree–and are provided with support groups, networking, and free legal advice–organized by none other than Daniel Ellsberg himself.

It’s now almost assumed that the proper course of action for such whistleblowers is his final course of action: going to the press, rather than launching an internal investigation or going to Congress with the information. As I wrote previously, it 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), but many whistleblowers today seem to consider such possibilities to be idle threats.

I believe that, as in so many things, the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. We would not want go back to the era when something of the scope of a My Lai could be successfully covered up. The exposure of My Lai was a shock, but one of the benefits is that My Lai has been studied in depth and used as teaching tool by the military, which has instituted reforms that make such an event far less likely to ever happen today.

But it hardly seems necessary–or productive–to allow national security employees to leak like sieves to the press, much of the time about matters that are not clearly illegal, and motivated sometimes by pure partisanship. And it hardly seems good to allow the press to be the final arbiter of whether their own disclosures will damage national security or not.

The next post in the series will deal with suggestions as to how the pendulum might swing back to a more evenhanded position, one that balances the public’s need to know with the need to protect national security. One thing’s for sure: it won’t be easy.

Chayefsky: ahead of his times?

The New Neo Posted on by

The Anchoress recently watched a video of the 1976 film “Network,” written by Paddy Chayefsky. She found the movie’s satire to be strangely prescient, featuring TV networks that would do nearly anything to make a buck, including suck up to terrorists.

I saw the film when it first came out, but I can’t say I remember too much about it except the always-arresting Peter Finch , and Faye Dunaway’s nervous edginess. Maybe I’ll have to rent it again to refresh my memory.

I had developed a mild crush on Peter Finch in his younger incarnation in “The Nun’s Story,” which turns out to have been his favorite movie of the ones he made prior to 1968. And, by the way, doesn’t Finch look just the tiniest bit as though he might have been the somewhat glum father of the smilier Tony Blair? (don’t want to start a rumor, but…):

After reading the Anchoress’s post, I got curious about Chayefsky, and looked him up. There wasn’t a whole lot of information, but I found this in Wikipedia, indicating that Chayefsky may have not only been prescient, but that he also didn’t shy away from speaking up and speaking out himself:

[Chayefsky] is known for his comments during the 1978 Oscar telecast after Vanessa Redgrave, when she went to accept her award for Best Supporting Actress in Julia, made a controversial speech denouncing extreme elements of Zionism. He made a comment during the program immediately after hers in which he stated that he was upset by her using the event to make an irrelevant political viewpoint during a film award program. He said, “I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple ‘Thank you’ would have sufficed.”

Question authority: Part II (My Lai and the press)

The New Neo Posted on by

I continue to be impressed by how many current trends in public life appear to have their roots in events of the 60s. Beginning at that time, there seems to have been a growing conviction that internal investigations are futile and can only end in coverups and failure, and that going to the press with the story is the only way to redress institutional or governmental wrongdoing.

One of the seminal events that led to this perception was the horrific and shocking My Lai massacre, and the subsequent initial investigation/coverup. I believe that some of the current tendency to go directly to the press without even attempting redress a problem through the usual channels–the checks and balances established by the Constitution (Congressional oversight, for example) or internal investigations by the military, the CIA, or the body in question–can be traced to the trauma of this event.

The massacre at My Lai was a turning point in America’s perception of itself. It represented a loss of innocence about the military, who until then had been thought incapable of the kind of atrocity that occurred there. It also made Americans more cynical towards the military command and its ability to investigate its own wrongdoings. And lastly, the press was seen in the role of heroes bent on publicizing the truth.

The facts of My Lai were sensational, and they make shocking reading today, even in our far more jaded age. I’ve written about My Lai before, here. It was an event of great complexity, and I highly recommend this must-read teaching case study on the subject, which comes as close to explaining what happened there–and why it happened–as I think anything ever could.

There is no question that My Lai was an atrocity, and the shock of learning that the American military could be guilty of such a thing was a great factor in turning people against the Vietnam War. Another terrible aspect of My Lai that led to great distrust was that the original field investigation of the events conducted by the Army was unquestionably a coverup (read the case study for the details, as well as a discussion of how the normal and recommended Army procedure for dealing with events involving possible atrocities was not followed in the case of the initial My Lai investigation).

Present at My Lai on that dreadful day were those who witnessed the massacre but did not participate. There were also some who tried to stop it from happening to the point of threatening to shoot their fellow soldiers if they did not cease the indiscriminate killing.

But such a thing couldn’t be covered up for long; too many people knew about it, and the facts were so shocking that they motivated those in the know to eventually speak out.

How did the truth finally come to light? Many of you are no doubt familiar with the fact that reporter Seymour Hersh is credited with publicizing the story, and that he received a Pulitzer Prize for his work. But it was actually a less well-known man named Ron Ridenhour who was responsible for bringing the My Lai massacre to the attention of the authorities–after the initial coverup, but before the press ever got hold of it.

Ridenhour had served in Vietnam but was not a member of the company responsible for the My Lai killings, nor was he a witness to them. Here is how Ridenhour’s knowledge and disclosure occurred (keep in mind that the My Lai massacre itself had taken place in March of 1968):

Ridenhour learned of the events at My Lai from members of Charlie Company who had been there. Before speaking with Hersh, he had appealed to Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon to investigate the matter. The military investigation resulted in Calley’s being charged with murder in September 1969 — a full two months before the Hersh story hit the streets.

Over a year after My Lai occurred and the original investigation/coverup was closed, Ridenhour composed this letter about My Lai and sent it off to the White House, the Defense Department, the State Department, and various members of Congress. It is credited with motivating the Pentagon to begin a new official investigation of My Lai about a month after the letter’s receipt.

It is significant to me that Ridenhour did not initially go to the press (nowadays, I’m almost sure that would be where he’d go first). In his letter, he gives his reason for approaching the matter the way he did initially [emphasis mine]:

Exactly what did, in fact, occur in the village of “Pinkville” [My Lai] in March, 1968 I do not know for certain, but I am convinced that it was something very black indeed. I remain irrevocably persuaded that if you and I do truly believe in the principles, of justice and the equality of every man, however humble, before the law, that form the very backbone that this country is founded on, then we must press forward a widespread and public investigation of this matter with all our combined efforts. I think that it was Winston Churchill who once said “A country without a conscience is a country without a soul, and a country without a soul is a country that cannot survive.” I feel that I must take some positive action on this matter. I hope that you will launch an investigation immediately and keep me informed of your progress. If you cannot, then I don’t know what other course of action to take.
I have considered sending this to newspapers, magazines and broadcasting companies, but I somehow feel that investigation and action by the Congress of the United States is the appropriate procedure, and as a conscientious citizen I have no desire to further besmirch the image of the American serviceman in the eyes of the world. I feel that this action, while probably it would promote attention, would not bring about the constructive actions that the direct actions of the Congress of the United States would.

So, at first, Ridenhour was very sensitive to the damage that going immediately to the press could cause to the nation and to the military. Instead, he went to the proper investigative authorities charged with oversight, rather than seeking to sensationalize the issue by widespread press coverage.

But later on he apparently changed his mind, and did go to the press. Why?

From a reading of this article about Ridenhour by leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn, which appeared in the Nation in 1988, I’ve pieced together the following story:

Ridenhour had been initially shocked and traumatized by hearing about the My Lai massacre. and felt he needed to do something about it because of the early coverup. He went through a period in which he agonized over whom to tell, which he resolved by writing the letter previously quoted and sending it to the proper authorities.

This is how Ridenhour (who later became an investigative reporter, by the way) described what happened after he wrote the letter and sent copies off:

“I was in Arizona, waiting to go to school and working in a popsicle factory,” Ridenhour said. “They came and interviewed me, and then some of the people I mentioned in the letter-maybe five other soldiers-gave them more names. It sort of bumped and grinded along from late April to September, when they charged Calley.

So far so good. But the news of Calley’s arrest only agitated Ridenhour:

I was convinced there was a cover-up going on, that these guys were not sincere in pursuing the business. They stopped accepting my calls. Then they called me and said they had arrested Calley. I waited to see what would happen, and then, when no one else was arrested, I knew what they were going to do. They were going to flush Calley, claim that this was the act of a wild man and then let it go. That’s when I started trying to get in touch with the press.”

It’s clear that Ridenhour had been outraged at the initial coverup, and feared another. It’s also clear that, by this time, he had a definite agenda: he had decided that the problem was not Calley, but rather a systemic military policy set by the higher-ups, and he was determined that his version of who bore the true responsibility for the massacre was going to be the one heard.

Then Hersh came on the scene:

[Ridenhour] talked to a man from The Arizona Republic. Nothing got published. The Army had put out a brief statement-two paragraphs long-saying that it had charged a lieutenant, Calley, with the murder of an unknown number of civilians. The Associated Press carried the story, but no one picked it up. As Ridenhour tells it, a general who had worked on the Calley investigation became indiscreet at a cocktail party in Washington, let drop details of My Lai and the Calley arrest to a relative of Seymour Hersh, who duly passed on the news. Hersh found the brief item mentioning Calley’s arrest and interviewed Calley, who was being held at Fort Benning, Georgia. (Hersh says he had already been working on the story after a tip-off from a public service lawyer.)

Hersh’s first story prompted The Arizona Republic to print its article, which Hersh, in turn, saw. He flew out to talk to Ridenhour, who gave him the names and addresses of the people who had been at My Lai. Hersh asked Ridenhour to hold the story from anyone else for three days and went about his business. “I was glad to give him the three days,” Ridenhour said. “He was the first person to respond. He went off and started finding those other kids, and they told him those horrible stories.”

The rest, of course, is history.

No more Mr. Nice Guy: Ahmadinejab and the UN

The New Neo Posted on by

I would say that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad (and is anyone else besides me incongruously reminded of food–trout almandine, for example–by his name?) is dropping any show of being amenable to pressure from international bodies such as the UN–if he’d ever given any sign of such tractability in the first place.

What I don’t understand is those who believe he cares about such things as the UN. But perhaps because they care so much, they have a difficult time giving up the hope that he does. No doubt such true believers will say this current pronouncement is just strategic bluster, and that he doesn’t really mean it. Or, alternatively, that he is stating the truth when he says he’s just interested in atomic energy for electrical power and such.

So, now we hear this from our dear friend Ahmadinejad, on the UN and its effort to slap Iran’s wrist for its nuclear program:

Iran won’t give a damn” about any U.N. resolutions concerning its nuclear program, its president said Friday, hours before an expected finding that Tehran has failed to meet a Security Council deadline to suspend uranium enrichment.

The anticipated finding by U.N. nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei will set the stage for a confrontation at the Security Council.

If Iran does not comply, the council is likely to consider punitive measures against the Islamic republic. While Russia and China have been reluctant to endorse sanctions, the council’s three other veto-wielding members say a strong response is in order.

And what sort of “confrontation” is it that the UN contemplates? Unclear, if NATO is any indication:

However, NATO foreign ministers meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, did not offer any specific threat of sanctions against Iran, in part to avoid a rift with Russia and China.

“On Iran, there was unanimity,” Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told reporters. “Although the clear message to the Iranian authorities is one of firmness, we have to continue with the diplomatic path.”

If that’s “firmness,” I’d hate to see flabbiness.

From Secretary Rice:

Rice said it was time for the Security Council to act if the world body wished to remain credible.

“The Security Council is the primary and most important institution for the maintenance of peace and stability and security and it cannot have its word and its will simply ignored by a member state,” Rice said….

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton already has said he plans to introduce a resolution requiring Tehran to comply with the council’s demand to stop its enrichment program. The resolution would not call for sanctions now, but it would be introduced under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which allows for sanctions and is militarily enforceable.

Ah, that’s the game Saddam played, as I recall. The one we decided to end by the Iraq War.

And then there’s this:

Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Javad Zarif, said Tehran will refuse to comply with such a resolution because its activities are legal and peaceful. Enrichment can be used to generate fuel or make the fissile core of nuclear weapons.

“If the Security Council decides to take decisions that are not within its competence, then Iran does not feel obliged to obey,” he said Thursday in New York.

I’m afraid that most decisions undertaken by the UN are not within its competence. On that, if nothing else, Javad Zarif and I seem to be in agreement.

[CORRECTION: I noticed I spelled Ahmadinejad’s name incorrectly in the title of the post. Freudian slip, no doubt.]

The “United 93” premiere: not too soon for some

The New Neo Posted on by

Some say it’s too soon for a movie about Flight 93. I don’t understand that argument; how can nearly five years from the event be too soon? After all, this is not an in-depth exploration of the event’s historical ramifications. It’s a movie depicting the event itself, in real time.

It seems to me that those who say we’re not ready yet are really saying they don’t want to face the truth–not then, not now, not ever.

Some people who had to face the truth were present at the movie’s NY premiere. They were ninety family members of those who died on Flight 93.

It sounds as though viewing the movie was a deeply emotional experience, both for those family members, and for many others in the audience:

The sobbing at the back of the auditorium was not the sentimental sniffling you normally hear at the cinema. It was the full-throated grief more typically heard in a hospital or a funeral home.

On Tuesday night anguished families wailed as they watched the last moments of their loved ones’ lives unfold on screen at the world premiere of United 93…

“It’s horrific to see my brother, Edward, on the screen, knowing what is going to happen,” Gordon Felt said. “It’s shattering, but it needs to be. This is a violent story.”

Despite the ornate surroundings of the Ziegfeld Theatre in Manhattan, the event was almost certainly the most sombre film premiere in the history of New York. The audience gave the victims’ families a standing ovation before the screening but were overwhelmed towards the end by the open weeping of the relatives and left the auditorium in stunned silence.

The article mentions that the film was made with the cooperation of the victims’ families, in addition to the surprising–at least to me–fact that some air controllers and Federal Aviation Authority officials played themselves in it. I wonder if that was therapeutic for them, or difficult. Or both.

The movie’s British writer/director Paul Greengrass gives some perspective that sounds more realistic than the usual facile Hollywood cliches:

The writer-director, whose features include Bloody Sunday, said that he was chastened by his experience of working in Northern Ireland.

“Northern Ireland is one of the few examples of where political violence has been negotiated away, thanks to the political engagement of all the parties in a peace agreement,” he said. “My time making films there has shown me it takes a long time.”

Greengrass seems like an interesting figure, with a background primarily in documentary filmmaking. Here are a few quotes from an interview with him:

I think in the end that movies are the principal means of mass-communication. They’re the principal way that we tell stories about the way we’re living to each other. We tell stories to entertain ourselves, and to divert ourselves, and we tell stories that are wonderful pieces of escapism, to give us a nice time on a rainy day. There are all sorts of reasons why we like to tell stories to tell each other. But one of the things we do is tell stories about the way the world is. I believe in a movie industry that operates across the board ”“ it makes all sorts of different types of films. Including films about the big stuff facing us. Hollywood has always done that, throughout it’s history. It’s always done that, as well as all the other things. And it will have to grapple with 9/11 because it’s the single most important event that’s occurred in our lifetime…

…you had forty people ”“ or slightly less, as some had been killed ”“ essentially you had a small number of people on an airplane who were the first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world. For all the rest of us, whether we were in civilian air traffic control, Presidential bunkers, or just ordinary folks like us watching on TV, we knew something terrible was happening, but we didn’t really know what. We maybe knew it was terrorism, but we didn’t know what. But for those people on the airplane they knew exactly what it was, they could see what was facing them, and here’s the thing ”“ they faced a terrible, terrible dilemma. The dilemma was: what do we do? Do we sit here and hope for the best? Or do we strike back at them before they do what we think they might be about to do? In the course of action of whatever those two choices we make, what are the chances of a good outcome from either of those two choices?

That dilemma is the post-9/11 dilemma. It’s the dilemma we have all faced since then. The things we face in our world ”“ whether it’s Afghanistan or Iraq or Abu Ghraib, issues of world peace, issues of national security, it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter where you are on the political spectrum and how you view those issues. I would submit that all of us, whatever our persuasions are, all of us understand that that is the dilemma. What do we do? How do we deal with this thing?

To answer your question, we know from the fragments that we can we know from the airplane ”“ the phone calls, the cockpit voice recorders, the evidence we can deduce from the other planes ”“ we know they weighed, they debated the issue. They voted on it. In the end they acted, and there were consequences. I think that if you build this film up on a strong foundation of fact, that by the time you get to the last minutes of that airplane journey you’ll be inhabiting a debate that, whilst we cannot know exactly what it was, we know broadly how it goes ”“ because it’s our debate now.

And what of Greengrass’s politics? One might think he’s a neocon. But if one thought that, one would be wrong.

He doesn’t discuss his political opinions in any recent interviews I’ve read of his that promote “United 93.” But, from this article written in 2004, it’s clear that he’s against the Iraq War; he calls it “the most calamitous decision of our generation.”

Interesting, interesting, interesting. Greengrass doesn’t seem to have let his politics interfere with his desire to make this movie. He really does appear to be interested in just presenting the facts, and letting the viewer decide. And that seems both refreshing and unusual to me.

Slight delay

The New Neo Posted on by

Apologies. I got delayed by some personal matters both yesterday and today (some of them pleasant, fortunately), as well as by the fact that I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew with my plans for later parts of “Question authority.”

So, Part II should be coming along tomorrow, not today. And it may not deal with every issue I thought it would. But it’s on the way.

Question authority: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

[This is the first installment of a two-, three-, or possibly even four-part series. I plan to publish the posts in the series on consecutive days.]

The story of the CIA detention centers leak raises issues far bigger than the personal fate of the leaker, or even whether the particular information divulged in this case might have damaged national security.

What could be more important? The old, old question of individual conscience and responsibility.

For a person joining a group that requires confidentiality and/or obedience to a certain set of rules, when is it all right to disobey the rules and/or to break confidentiality? In fact, when does it become a duty to disobey or to break confidentiality? And, if so, how best to go about doing so? And what should the personal consequences be to the person who disobeys?

It’s the same issue raised during the Nuremberg trials, when defendants used the “we were just obeying orders” line as an excuse for egregious crimes against humanity. It’s a question that comes up in the life of nearly every military person, whose duty to obey goes hand in hand with a concomitant duty to disobey what is a clearly illegal order, if such an order should ever be given.

It’s an issue faced by psychotherapists and all others who are privy to confidential information and are duty-bound to protect it for certain obligatory exceptions. For example, ever since the landmark Tarasoff case was decided in 1976, therapists have struggled with the so-called “duty to warn,” which requires them to breach confidentiality whenever they receive credible information that their client is planning to harm another person.

CIA officers and others whose jobs involve national security are in a position of strict confidentiality, and the secrets they are sworn to keep ordinarily involve much higher stakes than therapists ever encounter. In fact, you might say that secrecy is the essence of the work of the CIA; it is impossible to imagine a functional intelligence agency without it.

The question of when and how the individual decides to breach confidentiality and rules is a basic one. If it happens too easily and often, the all-important functioning of institutions such as the military and the CIA is lost, and these vital institutions dissolve into impotent anarchy. If it never happens at all, the unchecked power of such institutions can foster terrible abuses.

Harvard Law professor Martha Minow deals with some of the issues involved in the case of the military in her recent article entitled “Living Up to Rules: When Should Soldiers (and Others?) Disobey Orders?” I confess that I’ve only read the beginning of the article so far (it’s very lengthy), but this quote seemed especially apropos:

Here is the central difficulty: Telling soldiers that they face punishment, unless they disobey illegal orders means telling them to think for themselves, and question authority. Taken to an extreme, directives to “think for yourself” and “question authority” would disturb the command structure and practice of drilled obedience in the military. As one military expert has explained, during military operations decisions, actions and instructions often have to be instantaneous and do not allow time for discussion or attention by committees. It is vital to the cohesion and control of a military fore in dangerous and intolerable circumstances that commanders should be able to give orders and expect their subordinates to carry them out.

All of us are often in a position where we are expected to obey laws, directives from a boss, assignments from teachers or clients, dress codes or the traffic directive of police officers … Even for civilians, individual thought and resistance jeopardizes the order sought by official rules and the rule of law itself.

Obedience seems to have become a bad word, post-baby boomer generation and post-WWII. And rightly so, at least to a certain extent; we’ve seen where absolute and rote obedience can lead. So those “Question Authority” bumper stickers are no joke.

But the kneejerk questioning of authority and the reflexive suspicion of all institutions of government (a suspicion which often amounts to certifiable paranoia; witness the number of emails I receive purporting to explain how Bush was responsible for 9/11), as well as the elevation of individual partisan personal opinion in those making the decision to breach national security, are crippling our ability to effectively fight those who would destroy us.

[Planned subsequent posts in the series (hope I actually get around to all of this!) will deal with issues raised by My Lai, the Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers case, and suggestions for dealing with national security leaks.

Tune in tomorrow for Part II…]