OCT. 9, 2003: SPY GAMES
Mark Steyn has the best, clearest, and of course funniest summation I’ve yet read of the Wilson/Plame affair in the current Spectator:
Some choice quotes:
“[A]n agency known to be opposed to war in Iraq sent an employee’s spouse also known to be opposed to war in Iraq on a perfunctory joke mission. And, after eight days sipping tea and meeting government officials in one city of one country, Ambassador Wilson gave a verbal report to the CIA and was horrified to switch on his TV and see Bush going on about what British Intelligence had learned about Saddam and Africa. ….
“No political leader is obliged to accept a particular intelligence finding. Invariably, you’re presented with contradictory pieces of information and evidence, and you’re obliged to choose. If President Bush chooses to believe British and French Intelligence over the CIA, that’s his prerogative. It’s also a telling comment on the state of the agency. …”
“If sending Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger for a week is the best the world’s only hyperpower can do, that’s a serious problem. If the Company knew it was a joke all along, that’s a worse problem. It means Mr Bush is in the same position with the CIA as General Musharraf is with Pakistan’s ISI: when he makes a routine request, he has to figure out whether they’re going to use it to try and set him up. This is no way to win a terror war.”
And the reaction to the Wilson/Plame affair offers some telling commentary on the state of our media. I had a call the other day from a journalist at a prestigious publication asking for my views on the “spy story.” For a moment, I misunderstood: “Guantanamo Bay?” “No, no – the Wilson spy story.”
My mistake was inexcusable. In the eyes of our press, the discovery that terrorist sympathizers apparently infiltrated Guantanamo Bay – had even even allegedly recruited one of the army’s Muslim chaplains to their cause – is a minor story, a police investigation. Even the most basic facts of the story remain a lightly reported mystery: Was there a spy ring at all? How much damage did it do? As for the clamoring follow-up questions, nobody seems to care about them at all: How did the ring get missed? Did political correctness deter appropriate investigations? Is the post 9/11 drive to recruit more Arabic speakers for the intelligence services and the military opening opportunities for the terrorist enemy?
<font size=4>
Meanwhile the Wilson story tops the news.
The Wilson story excites journalists because it accuses the Bush administration of abusing its powers for political advantage – and there is nothing that journalists enjoy more than abuse-of-power stories, at least during Republican administrations. The Wilson story ratifies journalists’ prejudices, and so journalists revel in it.
Meanwhile, the Guantanamo story challenges those prejudices – and so it is neglected. For six months, we have been presented with pages of news stories and dozens of hours of network broadcasting, all of it premised on the claim that civil liberties are being threatened by post 9/11 over-reactions. The Guantanamo story suggests that this reporting is itself an over-reaction:<font size=3> That even now, two years and more after 9/11, the U.S. government is still hesitant to acknowledge and act against its enemy. It is absolutely astonishing that the government would appoint an Islamic chaplain for Guantanamo without rigorously investigating his background and loyalties – and yet that seems to be just what happened, and it seems to astonish no-one.
nationalreview.com |
