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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (19494)	4/18/2006 4:38:46 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Thank you, Mark Steyn Posted by Scott Power Line Mark Steyn comments on my post "A Pulitzer Prize for treason" in the Ports of Call sidebar of his SteynOnline site. Steyn writes: <<< This Powerline analysis is devastating and correct. One of the reasons "big" journalism is becoming ever more contemptible to the wider public is because it's so hicky and parochial: Journalistic institutions like the Pulitzers see the media as a world in and of itself rather than as merely observers of the real world. Whether or not to scuttle the NSA surveillance program is not about winning a prize but about winning a war - and the inability of the press to understand that reflects very poorly on them. I used to criticize the Pulitzer winners mainly because they were unreadable - like that incoherent gay-marriage burbler from The Rutland Herald who won a couple of years back - and, whenever I did so, I'd get leftie e-mails saying it's just 'cause I'm a loser who hasn't a hope of ever nailing a Pulitzer. As it happens, I'm ineligible. British newspaper awards are open to writers published in British newspapers and Canadian newspaper awards are open to writers published in Canadian newspapers but the wee delicate Pulitzers are only open to US citizens. So I'm ineligible. And, after the quasi-collaborationist AP photo awards and the national security-damaging NYT awards, that's just as well because I wouldn't want the thing in the house. >>> Then he adds, a propos of the post by Betsy Newmark on last week's Washington Post story on the anger of the port side of the blogosphere: <<< Betsy Newmark's commentary on this Post piece is very shrewd. The difference in tone between the left and right wings of the blogosphere is not to the Democrats' advantage. A large segment of the soft left is heavily invested in the idea that they're the "nice" party - Bill Clinton understood that with all the "it's about the future of all our children" piffle. The more Kossified the Dems get the more unelectable they become. >>> powerlineblog.com powerlineblog.com steynonline.com betsyspage.blogspot.com

To: Sully- who wrote (19494)	4/19/2006 8:30:22 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

"How can Yassir Arafat be thought a terrorist? Why, he's a Nobel Laureate!" Politicized Pulitzers Inoculating “us” against “them” Andrew C. McCarthy National Review Online By sheer coincidence, the winners of journalism's Pulitzer Prizes were announced on the same day the Sami al-Arian terrorism case finally ended. The two make an interesting combination. Of course, there are many Pulitzers, and some of them may be richly deserved in the merit-based sense of outstanding reportage and writing. The intention here is to focus narrowly on the ones awarded for what is called "Beat Reporting" and "National Reporting," but would be better understood as the Prizes for Excellence in the Compromising of National-Security Secrets. These awards unmistakably announce that organized journalism, a.k.a. the mainstream media, is embarked on its own version of the al-Arian defense for Dana Priest, James Risen, and Eric Lichtblau. These are the reporters who, along with their powerful newspapers (respectively, the Washington Post and the New York Times), took it upon themselves to decide what national-security secrets were not important enough to keep confidential in wartime — notwithstanding that those secrets (viz., how our intelligence community houses high-level al Qaeda detainees and how it searches for potential terrorists operating within the U.S.) are designed to keep Americans from getting killed by the enemy. Sami Al-Arian, who finally pled guilty to supporting terrorism and will be deported, proved very hard to convict (indeed, for years he was essentially impossible to indict) in large measure because he ingratiated himself with powerful government officials throughout the 1990s. Down the road, predictably, his defense — regardless of what the evidence showed about his ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a barbaric terror organization — was: How bad a guy can he really be if he has access to high-level political actors who certainly don't seem to be treating him like a terrorist? With these Pulitzers, organized journalism is inoculating its operatives the same way: How can this reporting, which reveals national-defense secrets critical to wartime intelligence gathering, be deemed treasonous or otherwise against the public interest? After all, pillars of journalism like the elite writers, editors, and academics on the Pulitzer committee have recognized it with these coveted awards? This ups the ante to a degree commensurate with the prestige of the award. As expertly explained in an important essay by Gabriel Schoenfeld in the March 2006 issue of Commentary, the publication of at least some of the stories the media have chosen to honor may be felony violations of the federal espionage act, which proscribes the revelation of certain national defense secrets, including signals intelligence (which is at the heart of the NSA-surveillance program disclosed by Risen and Lichtblau in December 2005). If you buy that we are at war (and 150,000 young Americans in harm's way would suggest to some that we are), if you buy that we are confronting an enemy hell-bent on murdering as many of us as possible (as nearly 3,000 dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the wreckage of Flight 93 would seem to attest), this kind of reporting is not praiseworthy; it is incomprehensible. Yet, to criticize, let alone to indict, the conduct of the reporters and their newspapers, you must now rebuke the entire community that has lauded them. A community which still profoundly influences the public narrative of events, and which has just sent you a patent signal that they intend to fight you every step of the way. A similar example used to be: "How can Yassir Arafat be thought a terrorist? Why, he's a Nobel Laureate!" And if organized baseball had a similar award right now, you can bet they'd give it to Barry Bonds, who is being investigated for steroid use, etc. It's an old strategy, but all the latest incarnation does is cheapen the Pulitzers. Once an award — any award — is politicized, it no longer has any claim on being about excellence. Assuming it ever really had one. The Pulitzers are not so much a ceremony of craft as a Left-wing agape. The unavoidable fact is that modern liberals are behind these awards, and modern liberals decide who gets them. They don't control much anymore, but they still control that. And they are hardwired to revere an alternative reality that bleaches out everything other than their own pieties. In that solipsistic universe, these awards are perfect. But make no mistake, these awards are not about who performed the best reporting or churned out the most skillful piece of writing. They are a reflection of the us-versus-them divide, and of who has best served the "us" faction. — Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. nationalreview.com washingtontimes.com commentarymagazine.com

To: Sully- who wrote (19494)	4/20/2006 12:38:49 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

The Pulitzer Prize…ugh By Jerry on Intellectuals Common Sense and Wonder <<< Bennett: Pulitzer Winners Risen, Lichtblau, Priest ‘Worthy of Jail’ By E&P Staff NEW YORK On his national radio program today, William Bennett, the former Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration official and now a CNN commentator, said that three reporters who won Pulitzer Prizes yesterday were not “worthy of an award” but rather “worthy of jail.” He identified them as Dana Priest of The Washington Post, who wrote about the CIA’s “secret prisons” in Europe, and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times, who exposed the National Security Agency’s domestic (a.k.a. terrorist) spy program. Scott Johnson of the popular Powerline blog also weighed in today, under the heading “The Pulitzer Prize for Treason,” declaring “Today’s Pulitzer Prize award to the Times brings a new shame to the Pulitzer Prize committee.” According to an E&P transcript of the audio of his radio program, Bill Bennett said that the reporters “took classified information, secret information, published it in their newspapers, against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others, that they not release it. They not only released it, they publicized it — they put it on the front page, and it damaged us, it hurt us. “How do we know it damaged us? Well, it revealed the existence of the surveillance program, so people are going to stop making calls. Since they are now aware of this, they’re going to adjust their behavior . . . .on the secret sites, the CIA sites, we embarrassed our allies….So it hurt us there. “As a result are they punished, are they in shame, are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No, they win Pulitzer prizes - they win Pulitzer prizes. I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award - I think what they did is worthy of jail, and I think this investigation needs to go forward. ” He urged his listeners to write the top editors of the two papers and said their addresses were posted on his Web site. Bennett said he was not opposed to Pulitzer prizes “to liberals” or even those at The New York Times. He hailed the Pulitzer for the Times’ Nicholas Kristof. “But these people who reveal our secrets, who hurt our war effort, who hurt the effortsof our CIA, who hurt efforts of the president’s people–they shouldn’t be given prizes and awards for this, they should be looked into– the Espionage Act, the investigation of these leaks,” he advised. “I’m telling you, I’m hot. I want you to write Bill Keller, I want you to write Len Downie. You can read Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post and decide if you want to write him.” Kurtz wrote today: “Strikingly, the Pulitzer board honored two reports — on the secret prisons and domestic surveillance — that President Bush personally urged the editors not to publish.” Meanwhile, Stephen Spruiell, who writes the Media Blog at National Review Online, commented that “the major journalism awards this year went to reporting based on anonymous sources who sought to damage the Bush administration or to commentary that shared the same goal. Sadly, the Pulitzers were no exception.” http://commonsensewonder.com/?p=481 editorandpublisher.com

To: Sully- who wrote (19494)	4/28/2006 8:51:03 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

SPIES & LIES . . . AND PRIZES FOR WARTIME TREASON Ralph Peters NEW YORK POST Oped April 28, 2006 IF a street-corner thug knowingly receives stolen goods for profit, he goes to jail. If a well-educated, privileged journalist profits from receiving classified information - stolen from our government - he or she gets a prize. Is something wrong here? Media outlets, including the generally responsible Washington Post, have had fits over a few retired generals' unclassified criticism of the Secretary of Defense, while simultaneously insisting on their own right to receive and publish our nation's wartime secrets - and to shield the identities of unethical bureaucrats who betray our nation's trust. Since the Vietnam era, reporters have convinced themselves that they are the real heroes in any story. The archways above our journalism faculties soon may sport the maxim: "The Press can do no wrong." But the press can do wrong. And it does it with gusto. Let me tell you what the illegal receipt and exploitation of our nation's secrets used to be called: Espionage. Spying. Yet today's "real" spies cause less harm to our national security than self-righteous journalists do. A NATION at war must keep secrets. The media can't plead that classified documents just fell into their hands, obligating them to publish our secrets out of a noble respect for truth. That's bull, and every journalist knows it. Could a punk down on the block claim that, since he was offered a gun, he was obligated to aim it and pull the trigger? Many in the media not only want to re-write election results and change national policies - they've been re-writing history, too. On the entertainment-and-propaganda side, George Clooney produced a gorgeous, seductive and whoppingly dishonest film about journalism last year, "Good Night, and Good Luck." Deftly re-arranging the fall of Sen. Joseph McCarthy - by slighting the fact that only the Department of the Army had the guts to stand up to Tailgunner Joe at the height of his powers (a civilian lawyer for the Army asked the famous question, "Senator, have you no shame?") - the film leads the viewer to believe that a lone journalist, Edward R. Murrow, broke the senator's evil spell. Of course, crediting the Army with the courage to defend the Constitution would have played havoc with the left-wing view of civil-military relations. But the greater omission had to do with Murrow's background. He made his bones with courageous radio coverage of the London Blitz. And he didn't feel compelled to tell the Nazi side of the story and help us feel Hitler's pain. Edward R. Murrow kept secrets. Lots of them. He wanted the Allies to win. He even respected those in uniform. So he - and other journalists - remained silent about the landing exercise that went tragically awry at Slapton Sands, and about many another bad-for-morale event that might've made a hot headline. He kept D-Day-related secrets, too. Do even our most self-adoring journalists really think that Edward R. Murrow would have published secret documents about prisons for senior Nazis during wartime? NONE of us wants our media to engage in propaganda. We'd just like them to refrain from harming our country for selfish ends. Which brings us to the Pulitzer-Prize-winning (and still not confirmed) story that claimed to reveal secret prisons holding a few high-ranking terrorists in Eastern Europe: If such facilities existed, what harm did they do to our country or the world? On the other hand, proclaiming their existence played into the hands of terrorists and America-haters. That Pulitzer Prize wasn't really for journalism. It was a political statement. No one's going to get a journalism award for reporting on the War on Terror's successes or progress in Iraq. Only left-wing children get a prize. AFTER laboring in the intelligence vineyards for over two decades, I can assure you of a few things: First, there are no super-top-secret, black-helicopter, kidnap-American-Idol-judges conspiracies hidden since 1776. Second, there are legitimate secrets that must be protected - usually because revealing them would tip our collection methods or operational techniques to our country's mortal enemies (as the secret-prisons story did). I can assure you of a third thing, too: If an intelligence professional saw a genuine threat to the Constitution or to the rights of his or her fellow citizens, he or she would step forward - and be justified in doing so. But pique over your presidential candidate's defeat or mere disagreement with a policy does not justify anyone - intelligence professional or political appointee - in passing classified information to a party not authorized to receive it. This applies to White House staffers, too, no matter how senior. The law should take its course, in every case, from the briefing room to the newsroom. The Washington culture of leaks is a bipartisan disgrace - and a real-and-present danger to our security. WE face savage enemies who obey no laws, honor no international conventions, treaties or compacts, and who believe they do the will of a vengeful god. Under the circumstances, we need to be able to keep an occasional secret. So I would ask three questions of those journalists chasing prizes by printing our wartime secrets: * Can you honestly claim to have done our nation any good? * Did you weigh the harm your act might cause, including the loss of American lives? * Is the honorable patriotism of Edward R. Murrow truly dead in American journalism? If you draw a government (or contractor) paycheck and willfully compromise classified material, you should go to jail. If you are a journalist in receipt of classified information and you publish it to the benefit of our enemies, you should go to jail (you may, however, still accept your journalism prize, as long as the trophy has no sharp edges). And consider yourself fortunate: The penalty for treason used to be death. When a journalist is given classified information, his or her first call shouldn't be to an editor. It should be to the FBI. Ralph Peters' latest book is "New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy." nypost.com