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The NYT: Keeping it fair since 2001You know, in a “real” war, like the ones we fought against Germany and Japan during the last century, or even during the Cold War, the conflict was always being fought on at least two levels. At the top, and most visible level was the kinetic campaign – ground troops on the march, in trenches, or locked in mortal embraces and the great clash of fleets, both aerial and naval. But always, always operations were driven by intelligence: Shadow warriors prowling in darkened alleys, diplomatic dinners and locked offices, signals intelligence technicians casting broad electronic nets to capture waveform strands to weave into coherent wholes, long range reconnaissance photographs from patrol airplanes, from U-2 jets, from satellites. Huge teams of dedicated, driven men and women wove together all of these separate strands of reporting to create actionable intelligence on their adversary’s dispositions and intentions, his tactics, techniques and procedures. Because knowledge is power. The problem is that the world wide Islamist jihad doesn’t have that kind of capability. Oh, sure, if you just want to flay the girl next door’s skin off her bones for not wearing a headscarf, murder local policemen, saw the neck of possible neighborhood “collaborators,” or bust a few unaimed caps at any crusaders and Jews that happen to roll by, then, yeah: They’ve got that. And for offensive actions, how much intelligence does it take to, say, figure out peak hours to blow up bombs on subway trains? It’s when there’s people on them! Duh! But getting the good stuff, the operational and strategic intelligence, that takes resources. Usually the resources of a modern nation state, and well, at least since the Taliban fell in 2001, the jihad has been rather short of those, and even when they had one, the Mullahs weren’t broadly known for their enthusiasm towards a domestic, space-based reconnaissance program. When those guys looked towards the heavens there were visions of Not to worry though, world-wide terrorist people! The New York Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller knows you don’t have the personnel or materiel resources to ferret out what your enemy is doing. And because he’s dedicated to keeping it fair, his paper has your back.
Now, obviously the Gray Lady’s been taking some heat for this decision – I mean, there’s at least 40-50 per cent of the nation who believes we’re actually at war, and another 40 or 50 who don’t believe we are, but who want to bring the troops home anyway. And you could, if you were so disposed, come to the conclusion that the Times, by exposing what it admits is a perfectly legal exercise in overseas surveillance, is offering aid and comfort to the enemy. That either does or does not exist, and if it does not exist, then bringing the troops home ASAP will stop this non-existent enemy from killing any more of them. Because the killing has to end at some point. Even though it isn’t actually real. Because if it were real, then the enemy would have uniforms and everything, and we’d be compelled to treat them in accordance with the Geneva Conventions instead as unlawful combattants, but let’s just let that go for now, because it’s not the point the Times’ editors are trying to make. It’s this:
So damn puzzling that they couldn’t figure it out. So they decided (along with others) to kick it out there in the sunlight, and see what the rest of us could make out of it. You and me and all those financiers of terror that haven’t yet been caught or prosecuted, and now are not going to because, hey: You want to So what if that re-routed money ends up carving out new smoking holes in New York or Washington, London or Madrid? So what if, terror being terror and doing what terror does – it can do no other – that money inevitably ends up costing tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of innocent people their lives? Sure, the program itself was legal. Sure, we all sort of expected that our government would be doing something like this, although we didn’t know the details. Sure, whoever leaked the details to the Times not only broke the law, but his or her own personal oath to the country that gave him birth and now pays his bills. Sure, the innocents who have to die are dying in the name of a monstrous cause. Just don’t question Bill Keller’s motivations or patriotism. And don’t try to put the blood of the innocents at his door, when the time comes. And if you do? Just try to prove that sh!t in a court of law, pal. – More here, and here. Shorter version of Keller’s “How much I agonized about it before helping the terrorist cause” letter here. 92 comments to The NYT: Keeping it fair since 2001 |
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RJL of #47 . . . although obviously “gratingly pedantic,” you are actually not too late. Indeed, you have done well!
I stand corrected on my ellipses’ usage (that’s the plural form, and not a typo).
My “better reference” was likely a faulty memory, or perhaps a British rather than an American-English reference. (In the future, watch where I place my quote marks; I often flip-flop between both conventions . . . and I don’t really care.)
Pedantic style-warfare can often be difficult if not ruthless. But hopefully it is harmless and mostly enjoyable. (I enjoyed your retort.) And unlike a few skeptical, Commie-fixated people’s zingers, it will usually invite my humble response.
PS: If you find mistakes in the above, just accept them. It’s too late for me to please the pedantic. . . . Tonight.
I often merely scan a post, to see if it is of any interest . . . especially the longer ones.
#42 Diplopius Disqualificata’s longer post did not earlier attract my attention, primarily because of his flip, closing statement.
However, upon further review, there may be intelligent life to be considered here. Give me time, and I will re-read and re-think what he posits ?
Gosh, oh great commie-killer, I’ll certainly be on tenterhooks while waiting for your engaging if so warranted.
Seeing as how you’re so important to this blog and all.
Chap # 53
May I ask, as one who took the oath, and did his duty under great duress; who lost a number of close friends’ and mates’ lives to the enemy; who was most successful yet humble in my service to my country over a difficult period of time . . . how should I respond to your insolent and irreverent post?
I shouldn’t . . . except to remind both of us of the political “animosity” that is poisoning our country ?
“….there may be intelligent life to be considered here.” Commenter #52 notwithstanding.
About those dead commies…
To think that I, at one time, defended the rights of such ungrateful buggers. Top of the list would be Free Guy who, by his own admission, would be perfectly content to feed his chickens under a nazi flag rather than thank the men who died for him at Normandy. Go ahead, meet the assualt rifles at the road with your pitchfork. Not even enough sense to arm himself properly.
You fought a good fight, Lex. Ignore the bastard and keep up the good work. He’s not worth it.
How should you respond? Perhaps by thinking about why I said it.
Insolent? On the Internets? For an unknown, anonymous commenter on someone else’s blog?
Heh.
This sound familiar?
Figures the [del] tag doesn’t work. I’d say PIMF but there isn’t a preview.
So therefore all may disregard my last because there was no delete tag.
BEACAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!
FWIW, I think he’s BS’ing too. Not saying that it couldn’t be true, just doesn’t that none of this has the right vibe. Vets I’ve met simply don’t talk like that in front of strangers, and they don’t bring it up first – you have to dig it out of them.
I just didn’t think it was worth making the story about him. He might disagree.
May I just say, as one who spoke oaths under great duress; who regularly and repeatedly lost his life (as well as the lives of friends, acquaintances, and housepets) to the enemy; who was gracious in victory and ignorant of defeat; who magnanimously ordered his troops to render a military salute to the surrendering enemy at Appomattox Court House; who is extremely handsome and attentive to his personal appearance, yet not at all vain or self-obsessed . . . I decree that you should all stop being insolent.
Understated irreverence is acceptable, however, provided that it reflects the appropriate amount of public admiration toward me and/or my opinions.
P.S. I know that at least 30% of you will find my public defense of fliterman to be “objectionable.” This of course makes it an “act of bravery,” which is not “at” all uncharacteristic of me “since” I am very brave and “also” courageous.
My question for the NY Times is why must additional burden be placed on warfighters and law enforcement and intelligence officials in their fight against jihadists if there has been no law broken and briefings were made to Congress? Warfighters are already strapped with so many restrictions and politically correct obstructions, they can’t fight a war and win quickly because of sentiments like the following:
“All I?
Ten points to RJL and the Snark Of The Week!
Micah Wright would be so proud…
10 points? Well, it did make me smile; but I’d still only give it, maybe three.
I also had to Google “Micah Wright” to learn who he is.
Finally “Chap” ?
Heh.
I’ve seen better.
[...] Oh, I know thoughtful people can disagree about what courage is. Some people think it’s standing in your field with a pitchfork waiting for the bad guys to break through the outer lines. Like that’s going to happen. [...]
“Well I was on 9/11 and I?
Gee, Ima – don’t you think you’re coming across a little heavy-handed with all of that “king-loving right wing,” on the one hand, as opposed to some theoretic, heroic and virtuous left on the other? Broad brush strokes indeed, and much of the American left has gone a very far distance from John F. Kennedy’s words in the last 30-odd years.
What 9/11 proved to this country is that those who would harm us are limited not by any humanistic notions of scale or proportion, but rather by the scope of weaponry that they can fashion to the purpose. Which is why so many chins were pulled over Saddamite WMD’s, in case that conversation has slipped your mind.
And I’ll repeat the question I asked of “Free Guy” – can you name one civil right you had on September the 10th, 2001, that you do not have today?
Forty years ago I quit college to join the Marines. There was a war on and, like so many of my generation, I was inspired to enlist by President Kennedy, who challenged us to ask not what our country could do for us, but to ask what we could do for our country. I loved the Marine Corps and, even now, with my memories of Vietnam receding and my 60th birthday approaching, I am intensely proud that I once had the privilege of wearing its uniform.
What about the the civilian ideologues who poisoned America’s well with their strange, selfish, paranoid ambitions? These radicals, masquerading as “conservatives,” lusted after the chance to invade Iraq so they could steal its oil and indulge their bizarre delusions of world dominance. Craven chickenhawks, most of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger or seen a dead Marine up close, they consolidated their influence to twist intelligence until it suited their purposes, brushed aside the indispensable lessons of Vietnam with a few handy talking-points and led our country straight through the looking glass into another meat-grinder guerrilla war that simply can never be won.
The civilians ultimately responsible for our debacle in Iraq profess that military service is merely another job choice — for somebody else’s children, of course — and that dying is just an incidental part of the downside. They’ve hidden our flag-draped caskets, declared the Geneva Conventions quaint and thus inoperative, sent too few troops off to fight their battles, dispatched them without a strategic plan and supplied them with inadequate armor and defective equipment.
Because of their deceit and incompetence, our civilian leaders have managed to make the United States a global pariah, they have caused the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people and they are breaking the back of our military. It’s hard to believe, but we have now been in Iraq for as almost as long as we fought World War II. At this point, however, instead of being on the verge of victory, our soldiers are exhausted and their families are disintegrating. And nobody is able to say what victory is or how it can be attained.
As citizens of this democracy, we cannot permit this debacle to continue. When the ghost of President Kennedy rises up to ask us what we can do for our country, the answer is stone simple. What we can do for our country is accept the reality that we cannot win this war and end it now. What we can do for our country is bring our soldiers and Marines home to their families, make amends and start healing our wounds.
While I honor your previous service, Terence, I disagree with just about everything else that you have written here. At least, I suspect I would – once I see the word “chickenhawk” in print, a number of assumptions click into place unfortunately, the combination of which make the author’s writing “skim” material at best.
That was a weak and threadbare trope the moment it was first uttered, and usage has not improved its aspect in the interim. Neither Abraham Lincoln nor FDR had any military service to speak of – I’ll stipulate Lincoln’s weeks in the Illinois militia, during peacetime – and few sensible people claim today that they were ineffective wartime leaders.
The rest of it is hardly worth the trouble of debunking: War for oil, strategic plan, armor and the rest. Where did you cut and paste it from?
Lex,
I?
Please don’t misunderstand me: I’ve got no problem with liberals qua liberals. Liberals are builders, which we need, but conservatives are defenders, which we also need. Maybe especially now.
I do enjoy a civil conversation about ideas, though. During such conversations, at least to my lights, interlocutors grant their rhetorical adversaries the virtue of good faith belief in their actual arguments as they make them. Far too much of the current dialogue tends to go the other way, imputing bad faith on those who merely disagree with us.
Another unhappy evolution now churning to the top of the partisan foam is the ever-increasing use of strawman arguments. These make for great sermonizing-to-the-choir, but do little to illuminate the debate.
There has always been a tension between executive power and the legislature – there always will be. That tension is even higher when the executive, with troops engaged in combat far from home is on a war time footing, while many in Congress seem to disagree. The Supreme Court, as is their duty, resolved in the Hamdan case the limits of presidential power.
But the president’s argument was not a throw away line – there was solid legal reasoning to support the idea that unlawful enemy combatants captured overseas and detained outside the 50 US states cannot claim access to the rights due US citizens – or US nationals – within the US.
You can disagree with him – 5 SCOTUS justices did to a degree, while confirming his executive privilege to hold these men for the “duration of hostilities” – without presupposing or averring that his actual intention is to take away your civil liberties.
There, at least in my mind, you exceed the threshold of reasoned, mutually respectful intercourse.
The issue of natural or “God given” rights – try that line in the halls of the ACLU – without responsibilities is an interesting one. Historically, the Founders used that notion as a way of insisting that the rights of the individuals were what governments were properly instituted to protect, that there was not, in other words, a “divine right” of kings.
A revolutionary notion.
As I read these enumerated rights, chief among them being “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” I see a prioritization scheme, life being foremost among them. It galls me a little when people like “Free Guy” for example tell me they care little about the lives of those who died on 9/11, and next to nothing about those who might die in the next attack so long as no one threatens their civil rights – which no one has done in any case!
It is not fear mongering to state the obvious – our enemies want to kill us, as many of us as they can, irrespective of individual or collective responsibility for anything but being born or living here. There is something unseemly to my eyes about waving all of that away because “it probably won’t happen to you.”
[...] The conversation continues below the fold on that “The NYT?Ǭ
This is all part of a bigger problem.
I suppose the most worrisome thing in all this is the need to choose sides. There is no middle ground, no room for debate, no moderation of discussion or civility to it. What way is our country going, will we be rent in two becoming the United Red States of American and the United Blue States of America?
I don’t agree with the Iraq war and how we got there, but that is water under the bridge. Now that we are there, we must finish the job. We are honor bound to the 2,500+ americans who lost their lives and to the Iraqi people themselves.
What the NYT is doing is disgusting. I would call it pot stiring not journalism. I thought I was done commenting on this one until I read about the brave NYT photog embeded with the terrorist sniping at US troups. The brave thing to do would have been to run out of that room and go find the troups he was sniping at and tell them where to find this guy.
The liberal left is an exclusive club. If you don’t agree with everone of there core values you are a “wingnut” I don’t like how the left is using photos of flag draped coffins to further there cause.
I don’t like how the right has become the moral guide, the party under God as it were. I don’t think God is paying much attention.
IMA (#70),
Stipulated: Citizens of the US have recourse in US courts to the US writ of habeas corpus.
Are you saying that citizens of foreign powers, actively taking part in hostilities (as individuals) against another sovereign nation (US), when not serving in the forces of (and acting on behalf of) their own nation, accrue the same exact rights to our own legal constructs and processes??
#66 & #70: I’m the “…pious mealy-mouthed…” poster you referenced above – nice, very nice.
To quote you: “…Four planes, two buildings down – one damaged, three thousand dead. IT WAS A F__KING SCRATCH! To avoid that, you?
Ima: you said here – http://www.neptunuslex.com/2006/07/16/profiles-in-courage-2/#comments – in comment #12:
“Why must we break into insult?”
Physician, heal thyself.
Heh-heh.
*Tickled by Kris, in New England*
[...] It’s from comment #14 on this post… And as you crack open your undergraduate psych texts in your jejeune attempt to analyze my motives either in posting here or for the quarter century spent in service to my country, what I?
Still waiting to hear about the dead commies…
No?
Liar.
I regretted my “killing Commies” reference immediately following my post, and ever since ?
Fair enough. Dead horse.
Capt Lex,
A right fair post and comment thread this is. Sir Winston would be proud. I, however, find that I am wearing out the pages of my dictionary. (who said nukes were smart? not me.)
I also find that fairness and free speech, as well as the pursuit of happiness, are all alive and well and living in the kingdom of Neptunus Lex.
Godspeed, good Capt.
Subsunk
From my study of history, I see that the power of the king can be used to stamp out liberty. In 1215, society took a huge step forward by limiting the power of the King.
From my study of law, I see that there is a way for military commanders to deal with issues pertaining to captured enemies. It is called the UCMJ. In the code is a fair way for the captured to protest the way they are being detained. It, and the various codes that came before it served us well for the 200 some years we were a nation.
When George Bush tries to limit the Great Writ he is tearing apart the foundation of the republic.
911 changed nothing. The cave dwelling nutjobs were out there in 1805, and our host has heard a little ditty which points out how we should handle them.
We need to bring our troops home, TONIGHT. Stop with the absurd, Pottery Barn, analogy. You break it, you bought it! We are the rouge nation! “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?”
As the great liberal once said:
Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct. And can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that in the course of time and things the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?
Now my friend, you’re hyperventilating. Breathe into the paper bag. The troops aren’t coming home tonight. The cost of leaving is not just our shattered prestige, influence and future purchased death and degradation, but in an immediate blood debt that will run into the hundreds of thousands. Real people. Just like you. People without the luck to be born into the freedoms you inherited by virtue of previous generations who bled and died to ensure that you could stand upon your soap box and shriek that one or more of them might be threatened, keep this up. People who hope that will we be that which we have promised to be. This is the most “liberal” cause of the last 60 years, and you are on the wrong side of history.
Courage, man – the hurt cannot be much.
By the way, the UCMJ – as you must know – applies to members of the US military. It’s the Laws of Armed Conflict, and the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war you must have been thinking about. Which apply to signatory nation states and their armed forces, as identified by uniforms, badges or markings.
Which don’t apply to stateless terrorists.
Sometimes I wonder that I have to argue these points. It makes me despair of human nature.
Lex, don’t despair…people like this will eventually crawl back under the rock from which they came. And look at it this way – maybe, just maybe your eloquence will somehow educated the great unwashed. Just maybe…I’m hoping…
I posted a powerful quote from a JAG officer who also sits in the U.S. Senate on your other thread. I fully agree with the thought that how we treat the other side says more about us than them.
How do we know they are, “stateless terrorists?” Arn’t they just accused until we prove them to be terrorists? We have picked up innocent people and slapped them in jail for years. If Bush had his way they would be there still.
Here is what a hippie peacenic said about my theroy. “We have the UCMJ, which we know is the gold standard, that achieve the protection of fundamental rights,” said Brig. Gen. Kevin Sandkuhler, a staff judge advocate for the Marines.
The lit crit in us all know the importance of words. When you use the phrase, “stateless terrorists,” it does sound new. However, the real name for them is “pirate.” Naval officers know how to handle pirates.
Lex,
Terence at 68 is not cut and paste. He is one heavy mo-fo; a four-striper in the world of New York lawyers. He is a Christian Brothers Academy graduate (1964) who quit college to join the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. Left the military after being seriously wounded in combat during the Tet Offensive in 1968. He could be the best lawyer in New York!
You are attracting some heavy thinkers indeed.
Passer By – I’ll stipulate the CV you attribute to Terence, and reserve the right to disagree with him comprehensively.
And, point out, ironically enough, that the whole text of his comment was cut and pasted from another website – his own writing.
It must have been so… perfect!
Ima – de minimis non curat lex
Whoa. Getting all pre-medieval on the man.
1. I?
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