“The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one’s breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry “caste.” In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either “poverty” or “consumerism.” In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry “alienation.” In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry “oppression.” In a society of boundless private charity, they cry “avarice.” In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the “exploitation” of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry “injustice.” In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like “liberty” in quotation marks when these refer to the West.”

Alan Charles Kors ~ 2003

This is excerpted from posts at the blog of the incomparable Kate of Small Dead Animals.

h/t:LGF

Remember the early post 9/11 phrase, if we don’t —, the terrorists have won! Well, the Hizbollah, linked to rogue states Syria and Iran, who’s president, you might call, vows to wipewout Israel, have won.

Despite the fact that Arab response to the IDF’s counter attacks has been muted compared to Western Government’s.

Here is an interesting perspective from the Ayn Rand Istitute:

“The obscene premise governing so many of the West’s leaders is the belief that we have no moral right to defend ourselves against the forces of Islamist barbarism.”

Over at the patron of the Democrats, Daily Kos, an essayists presents the case against Israel’s existence.

The comments following this essay redeem the nonsense that an Israel state is illegitimate, because the writer said so, and mention more than a few facts inconvenient to the shallow analysis regarding the origins of Israel.

It is both perplexing and odd to me that at a time of crisis thoughtful people adopt a overly nuanced view of a crisis to the point that they side with terrorists and the raving anti-semetic President of Iran. What is it about western democracy, distance and relativism that inspire otherwise normal individuals to adoptamatuer revisionist historical perspective.

The IDF will stop when the soldiers kidnapped are returned safely period. Hostage takers, especially the terrorist variety, are illegal organizations committing illegal acts to suit their fanactical agenda.

The proportionate response is to force them to give up their hostage.

The serious escalation of violence on Israel’s border has helped expose some of the hypocrisy of the left and the “usual suspects” within the anti-war crowd. I wear my bias on my sleeve when it comes to the existence of Israel and Israel’s security. Just like Oriana Fallaci, I unabashedly support Israel and its people against the terror tactics of the Islamofacists.

In general, the anit-war movement in the US enjoys broad support from the left wing of the Democrat Party. I respect their views on the legality of the war in Iraq and their calls for withdrawal of US troops from what they term as the occupation of Iraq. The crystalization of those opinions are at the center of Ned Lamont’s campaign for US Senate in the Democrat primary in Connecticut. I certainly don’t agree with their views and their retrograde politics.

Their neo-isolationist, anti-military politics seem to ignore the real dangers of terrorism and Islamofacism in the world. The shrillness of their condemnation of Israel’s defence of its security and soveriegnty against militant muslim terrorist groups operating on their borders belies a dangerous world view. That these shrill attacks on Isreal’s legitimate response to threats venture into ad hominem is no surprise to me. That they come from professional civil servants within the US government does.

That this security professional doesn’t understand Israel’s strategy demonstrates that politics has taken over rational thought and the political left partisanship lacks an underlying principle with real benefits for the American public. That this blatant partisanship operates within a covert security agency responsible for national security should alarm the American public.
So it leads me to believe that this is all about winning seats in the Congress. That Israel is threatened by terrorism sanctioned and sponsored by Iran and Syria doesn’t matter to neo-isolationist. That these same countries’ rhetoric threatens the West , especially Americans, doesn’t matter because the anti-Bush, anti-Republican partisans are willing to throw just anything under the “get re-elected” bus. The vacuity is startling. This naked partisanship will be unsuccessful, ultimately, because middle America will not be fooled by small minded Democrats during war time.

And the IDF’s smashing of Hezbollah and Hamas is the precusor to dealing with hateful regime in Iran. The convenience of the G8 summit at a time of dangerous escalation of violence in the Middle East means a anti-terrorist, anti-islamofacist consensus will be communicated by world leaders rendering the isolationists, appeasers and partisans their small world view for all to see.

Opinion at LGF

Hezbollah 

This simulation and case study with security video and still pictures of the wreckage at the Pentagon on 9/11/06 is just incredible.

It should help the moonbats and MSM  pause from their conspracy theories long enough to re-group and prove there damn theories. Or just be quiet already.

The EU and UN Security Council are behaving in an entirely loathsome, but predictable, manner in pretending to care about Palestine. Their collective complaints against Israel’s response to Hizbollah’s and Hamas attacks is baseless and Orwellian. Forgeting completely UN Resolution 1559, as mentioned in the editorial in the National Post, their abject failure to lead and resolve middle east tension is dropping the ball for the USA to pick once again.

They are no less than collaborationist and appeasers. 

An incident that was hardly minor hate mongering played out on the blogs yesterday and seems to have momentum still.

A troll by the handle of South(west) Paw [aka Deb Frisch] spewed forth hateful venom at insightful blogger Protein Wisdom [can’t go there; he’s been attacked by 3 consecutive Denial of Service [DOS] from the supporters of this disturbed person.]

You can read all about it all over and I mean, all over the place!I first picked it up at SDA yesterday.
It’s not soemthing that should be repeated except that this persons profile as a Professor at University of Arizona [I should say ex-prof as she has resigned] and her bilious attack will run around for awhile. Heck, she is meant to be interviewed on FoxNews this monday!

During the last few days after the New York Times published the governments counter terrorism tactics, we were treated to a curious exchange from the NYT and the Walla Street Journal.

I have posted both here [NYT] and here [WSJ]. I guess I have violated at least a few agreements as both of these fine publications are subscriotion only. You’d think they would want the wider public to know why they did what they did but that’s not how they think.

It’s funny how people could be judged by stating which of these two papers has it right. I get and read both but get more annoyed by the NYT. It isn’t the politics of the paper as much as it seems to be the news, and its reporters are often in the broader media. Maybe its me but I loath “media on media” punditry as much as loath partisanship, which has its place but that seems to be everywhere these days.

I get annoyed at the WSJ too and I have alway thought that it needed to make its pages online open. The WSJ is as self-important as the NYT but it is tolerable to me because it is about business and covers it well.

On balance, I think the NYT’s self importance did it in this time. I felt the same way when Microsoft tried to take on the Clinton DOJ. The government’s role is subject to dissent but they are still the government and they make the rules. The public need not know about SWIFT, or that it’s operations were monitored by the US government. The NYT news department is crusading and this one made them look like they thought they were our betters in judging the motives of the government.

All of us should be suspicious of secrecy and covert government control. The government had everything to gain by monitoring the SWIFT activity of payments in a nuanced battle of counter terrorism. The NYT less so. They thought by revealing the governments practices they’d be serving the public. However, they were serving themselves. So too the WSJ. But where the WSJ explained facts theretofore not known, the NYT rationalized.

When Do We Publish a Secret?

SINCE Sept. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in covering the government’s efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. On other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information over strong objections from our government.

Last week our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism — revived an emotional national debate, featuring angry calls of “treason” and proposals that journalists be jailed along with much genuine concern and confusion about the role of the press in times like these.

We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day. We apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent newspapers. We agree, however, on some basics about the immense responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country.

Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in cities that have been tragically marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both our papers braved the collapsing towers to convey the horror to the world.

We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism.

But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people.”

As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government’s passion for secrecy and the press’s drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote.

Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price.

In recent years our papers have brought you a great deal of information the White House never intended for you to know — classified secrets about the questionable intelligence that led the country to war in Iraq, about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of suspects to countries that are not squeamish about using torture, about eavesdropping without warrants.

As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, asked recently in the pages of that newspaper: “You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America’s name, shouldn’t Americans understand how it is being waged?”

Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall Street Journal and others to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department’s efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary’s team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration’s relentlessness against the terrorist threat.

How do we, as editors, reconcile the obligation to inform with the instinct to protect?

Sometimes the judgments are easy. Our reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, take great care not to divulge operational intelligence in their news reports, knowing that in this wired age it could be seen and used by insurgents.

Often the judgments are painfully hard. In those cases, we cool our competitive jets and begin an intensive deliberative process.

The process begins with reporting. Sensitive stories do not fall into our hands. They may begin with a tip from a source who has a grievance or a guilty conscience, but those tips are just the beginning of long, painstaking work. Reporters operate without security clearances, without subpoena powers, without spy technology. They work, rather, with sources who may be scared, who may know only part of the story, who may have their own agendas that need to be discovered and taken into account. We double-check and triple-check. We seek out sources with different points of view. We challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges.

Then we listen. No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials, so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages.

Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public’s interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.

When we come down in favor of publishing, of course, everyone hears about it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was The New York Times’s decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled away the administration’s case for secrecy.

But there are other examples. The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism initiatives that are still in operation. In April, The Los Angeles Times withheld information about American espionage and surveillance activities in Afghanistan discovered on computer drives purchased by reporters in an Afghan bazaar.

It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it. Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration’s request, agreed not to name the specific countries that had secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details.

Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program, but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight.

We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.

— DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive editor, The New York Times

The following editorial from the June 30, Editorial page of the Wall Street Journal recounts the events before, during and after the New York Time’s decision to release the counter intelligence tactics of the US Government this past week.

Fit and Unfit to Print
June 30, 2006; Page A12

‘Not everything is fit to print. There is to be regard for at least probable factual accuracy, for danger to innocent lives, for human decencies, and even, if cautiously, for nonpartisan considerations of the national interest.”

So wrote the great legal scholar, Alexander Bickel, about the duties of the press in his 1975 collection of essays “The Morality of Consent.” We like to re-read Bickel to get our Constitutional bearings, and he’s been especially useful since the New York Times decided last week to expose a major weapon in the U.S. arsenal against terror financing.

President Bush, among others, has since assailed the press for revealing the program, and the Times has responded by wrapping itself in the First Amendment, the public’s right to know and even The Wall Street Journal. We published a story on the same subject on the same day, and the Times has since claimed us as its ideological wingman. So allow us to explain what actually happened, putting this episode within the larger context of a newspaper’s obligations during wartime.

* * *

We should make clear that the News and Editorial sections of the Journal are separate, with different editors. The Journal story on Treasury’s antiterror methods was a product of the News department, and these columns had no say in the decision to publish. We have reported the story ourselves, however, and the facts are that the Times’s decision was notably different from the Journal’s.

According to Tony Fratto, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, he first contacted the Times some two months ago. He had heard Times reporters were asking questions about the highly classified program involving Swift, an international banking consortium that has cooperated with the U.S. to follow the money making its way to the likes of al Qaeda or Hezbollah. Mr. Fratto went on to ask the Times not to publish such a story on grounds that it would damage this useful terror-tracking method.

Sometime later, Secretary John Snow invited Times Executive Editor Bill Keller to his Treasury office to deliver the same message. Later still, Mr. Fratto says, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, made the same request of Mr. Keller. Democratic Congressman John Murtha and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte also urged the newspaper not to publish the story.

The Times decided to publish anyway, letting Mr. Fratto know about its decision a week ago Wednesday. The Times agreed to delay publishing by a day to give Mr. Fratto a chance to bring the appropriate Treasury official home from overseas. Based on his own discussions with Times reporters and editors, Mr. Fratto says he believed “they had about 80% of the story, but they had about 30% of it wrong.” So the Administration decided that, in the interest of telling a more complete and accurate story, they would declassify a series of talking points about the program. They discussed those with the Times the next day, June 22.

Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information. Mr. Simpson has been working the terror finance beat for some time, including asking questions about the operations of Swift, and it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter. Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times, which was pushing a violation-of-privacy angle; on our reading of the two June 23 stories, he did.

* * *

We recount all this because more than a few commentators have tried to link the Journal and Times at the hip. On the left, the motive is to help shield the Times from political criticism. On the right, the goal is to tar everyone in the “mainstream media.” But anyone who understands how publishing decisions are made knows that different newspapers make up their minds differently.

Some argue that the Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn’t mind seeing in print. If this was a “leak,” it was entirely authorized.

Would the Journal have published the story had we discovered it as the Times did, and had the Administration asked us not to? Speaking for the editorial columns, our answer is probably not. Mr. Keller’s argument that the terrorists surely knew about the Swift monitoring is his own leap of faith. The terror financiers might have known the U.S. could track money from the U.S., but they might not have known the U.S. could follow the money from, say, Saudi Arabia. The first thing an al Qaeda financier would have done when the story broke is check if his bank was part of Swift.

Just as dubious is the defense in a Times editorial this week that “The Swift story bears no resemblance to security breaches, like disclosure of troop locations, that would clearly compromise the immediate safety of specific individuals.” In this asymmetric war against terrorists, intelligence and financial tracking are the equivalent of troop movements. They are America’s main weapons.

The Times itself said as much in a typically hectoring September 24, 2001, editorial “Finances of Terror”: “Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities.” Isn’t the latter precisely what the Swift operation is?

Whether the Journal News department would agree with us in this or other cases, we can’t say. We do know, however, that Journal editors have withheld stories at the government’s request in the past, notably during the Gulf War when they learned that a European company that had sold defense equipment to Iraq was secretly helping the Pentagon. Readers have to decide for themselves, based on our day-to-day work, whether they think Journal editors are making the correct publishing judgments.

* * *

Which brings us back to the New York Times. We suspect that the Times has tried to use the Journal as its political heatshield precisely because it knows our editors have more credibility on these matters.

As Alexander Bickel wrote, the relationship between government and the press in the free society is an inevitable and essential contest. The government needs a certain amount of secrecy to function, especially on national security, and the press in its watchdog role tries to discover what it can. The government can’t expect total secrecy, Bickel writes, “but the game similarly calls on the press to consider the responsibilities that its position implies. Not everything is fit to print.” The obligation of the press is to take the government seriously when it makes a request not to publish. Is the motive mainly political? How important are the national security concerns? And how do those concerns balance against the public’s right to know?

The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations in anything close to good faith. We certainly don’t. On issue after issue, it has become clear that the Times believes the U.S. is not really at war, and in any case the Bush Administration lacks the legitimacy to wage it.

So, for example, it promulgates a double standard on “leaks,” deploring them in the case of Valerie Plame and demanding a special counsel when the leaker was presumably someone in the White House and the journalist a conservative columnist. But then it hails as heroic and public-spirited the leak to the Times itself that revealed the National Security Agency’s al Qaeda wiretaps.

Mr. Keller’s open letter explaining his decision to expose the Treasury program all but admits that he did so because he doesn’t agree with, or believe, the Bush Administration. “Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress,” he writes, and “some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government’s actions and over the adequacy of oversight.” Since the Treasury story broke, as it happens, no one but Congressman Ed Markey and a few cranks have even objected to the program, much less claimed illegality.

Perhaps Mr. Keller has been listening to his boss, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who in a recent commencement address apologized to the graduates because his generation “had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.

“Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” the publisher continued. “You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights,” and so on. Forgive us if we conclude that a newspaper led by someone who speaks this way to college seniors has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it.

* * *

In all of this, Mr. Sulzberger and the Times are reminiscent of a publisher from an earlier era, Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. In the 1930s and into World War II, the Tribune was implacable in its opposition to FDR and his conduct of the war. During the war itself, his newspaper also exposed secrets, including one story after the victory at Midway in 1942 that essentially disclosed that the U.S. had broken Japanese codes. The government considered, but decided against, prosecuting McCormick’s paper under the Espionage Act of 1917.

That was a wise decision, and not only because it would have drawn more attention to the Tribune “scoop.” Once a government starts indicting reporters for publishing stories, there will be no drawing any lines against such prosecutions, and we will be well down the road to an Official Secrets Act that will let government dictate coverage.

The current political clamor is nonetheless a warning to the press about the path the Times is walking. Already, its partisan demand for a special counsel in the Plame case has led to a reporter going to jail and to defeats in court over protecting sources. Now the politicians are talking about Espionage Act prosecutions. All of which is cause for the rest of us in the media to recognize, heeding Alexander Bickel, that sometimes all the news is not fit to print.

In the current crisis in the Middle East, and I have posted on this only a few minutes ago, I link to something Mort Zuckerman wrote recently about Hamas.

It is easy to dismiss the obvious, but believe it or not many who are either blatantly anti-Isreal or practice identity politics to the point of irrational thought, think Hamas is a government to be recognized owing to its election by the citizens of Palestine. Like the brutal Baathists in Syria and the former dictatorship of Iraq, this is like putting the Cosa Nostra in charge of the Congress because the were “elected.”