Monday, July 03, 2006

protein wisdom

protein wisdom: "I don’t blame certain press organs for their zealousness. I blame them for irresponsibility and violation of the public trust when their self-evident ideological leanings cloud their editorial judgment, putting all of us—regardless of political affiliation—in danger. In short, I despise the kind of arrogance that presumes to speak on behalf of “the public good” when it comes from those whose understanding of the classified military and intelligence programs on which they are “reporting” is so tenuous as to barely be able to hold the weight of their own self-serving pronouncements, and whose idea of the “public good” is aligned almost entirely to their very specific ideological worldviews."

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You read my mind. I was going to post about this as well. Like Goldstein I did not know the following:


To wit: in the course of a long piece on the media’s propensity for leaking, AJ Strata points to this bit in the Times article:

[...] in a 1986 speech, [former WaPo publisher Katharine Graham, who died in 2001] warned that the media sometimes made “tragic” mistakes.

Her example was the disclosure, after the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, that American intelligence was reading coded radio traffic between terrorist plotters in Syria and their overseers in Iran. The communications stopped, and five months later they struck again, destroying the Marine barracks in Beirut and killing 241 Americans.

“This kind of result, albeit unintentional, points up the necessity for full cooperation wherever possible between the media and the authorities,” Ms. Graham said.

I admit to having never heard this before, so allow me to get my bearings here: the WaPo’s “scoop”—that our intelligence services were reading coded terrorist radio transmissions—alerted the Syrian terrorists and their Iranian task masters that we’d cracked their communication chain, and convinced them to find other means of communication, which they then used in the run-up to the Marine barracks bombing? Is this common knowledge?

And was it really a “tragic mistake”?

Good question..