At my shul, the brotherhood is hosting a talk by sports journalist Peter Schmuck. (See picture)
I understand how parents might be reticent regarding changing their surname, even if it is “Schmuck”, but to compound this by naming your kid “Peter”?
That’s just wrong.
Elementary school must have been hell for this guy.
Living in an America where pretty much every FBI anti-terrorism operation involves paying an informant to entrap some loser, it is heartening that a German prosecutor has been given the sack over investigating journalists for treason:
Netzpolitik.org, the website at the centre of the treason scandal in Germany, is the real winner in the whole furore as a senior German official was forcibly retired over the scandal, editor Markus Beckedahl told el Reg this morning.
Last night, Germany’s chief federal prosecutor Harald Range was given the boot by German Justice Minister Heiko Maas over his handling of the affair. Technically, Range resigned, but it was his decision to pursue Beckedahl and fellow journalist Andrew Meister for treason that led to his downfall.
The journalists, meanwhile, have seen donations to their website come flooding in. The pair were under investigation for treason for supposedly betraying state secrets after they published leaked documents relating to plans to monitor Twitter and Facebook chats, as well as a €2.75m project to process massive online data sets.
This sort of law enforcement and prosecutorial overreach gets promotions in the US.
It’s nice to see that there are countries where this bullsh%$ is not tolerated.
A few weeks back, the New York Times reported on how Disney was laying off IT workers, and forcing them to train their H-1B (Gastarbeiter) replacements.
Now that this has come to light, and generated a sh%$ storm of condemnation,. Disney has decided not to lay off its workers:
In late May, about 35 technology employees at Disney/ABC Television in New York and Burbank, Calif., received jarring news. Managers told them that they would all be laid off, and that during their final weeks they would have to train immigrants brought in by an outsourcing company to do their jobs.
The training began, but after a few days it was suspended with no explanation. In New York, the immigrants suddenly stopped coming to the offices. Then on June 11, managers summoned the Disney employees with different news: Their layoffs had been canceled.
“We were read a precisely worded statement,” said one of the employees, who was relieved but reluctant to be named because he remains at the company. “We were told our jobs were continuing and we should consider it as if nothing had happened until further notice.”
Although the number of layoffs planned was small, the cancellation, which was first reported by Computerworld, a website covering the technology business, set off a hopeful buzz among tech employees in Disney’s empire. It came in the midst of a furor over layoffs in January of 250 tech workers at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. People who lost jobs there said they had to sit with immigrants from India, some on temporary work visas known as H-1B, and teach them to perform their jobs as a condition for receiving severance.
Let’s be clear on this: If you have to train your replacements, and your replacements are brought in under H-1B (or the related L-1) visa, and you have to train them, then you are violating the law.
It is required that the visa recipients have, “highly specialized knowledge,” and if they need months of training, as is reported in the Disney World stories, they clearly do not have this knowledge.
It’s not about, “highly specialized knowledge,” it is about getting cheaper and more docile (they have to leave the country if they leave the job) workers, and about depressing wages in the field.
Many people suggest that the solution is aggressive enforcement, but I disagree.
The solution is to ensure that the cost of an H-1B visa is always more than that of hiring a citizen or Green Card holder.
You can either do this through setting the fees high, or conduct monthly auctions for the right to make applications (I favor the latter because it fits into the “free market” ethos that seems to dominate national political discourse).
If tech companies have to pay a guest worker significantly of what they would pay an American, the number of visa applications would fall,and tech workers’ salaries would rise.
In a discussion at the Stellar Parthenon BBS about the FIFA prosecutions, the discussion digressed, as it often does, into a discussion of how much of what is on cable (Sports “Journalism”, Fox News, Reality TV, etc.) is not just useless, but it is like fingernails on the chalk board.
At this point, Greg Muir (his blog is here), notes:
I have taken to straight out unplugging televisions in waiting rooms.
There is so much win in doing this.
Their writing staff just voted to unionize, marking the first time that a digital news site has assumed the union label:
Wednesday night, Gawker Media voted to unionize. The stats: 107 of 118 eligible voters cast secret ballots, 80 of whom voted yes. Just like that, Gawker will become the first digital-only news site to have a union.
Hamilton Nolan, longtime Gawker writer, announced the editorial staff’s decision to organize in a post this April. At the time, he listed the motivations: that a union “is the only real mechanism that exists to represent the interest of employees in a company,” the continued pursuit of fair and transparent salaries, and the ability to make a little history as the first major site of its kind to organize.
According to Gawker senior writer Sam Biddle, who answered questions via email, “The origin of the union isn’t any particular grievance or crisis—we all love our jobs and our workplace, and thought a union would be a great way to protect that, and make it even better for ourselves and our colleagues.” In his five years at Gawker, he doesn’t recall unionizing being “seriously discussed.”
“I think it happened now because the [Writers Guild of America, East] was so enthusiastic about making this happen for us,” he said. “It didn’t take very much convincing, to be honest.”
One hopes that this jumps to HuffPo, which is according to some comments to a Gawker post, such a bad place to work that, a former assistant to Hunter S. Thompson only lasted two weeks.
The first, from the Columbia Journalism Review is likely to gain the most currency. It’s a fairly conventional analysis, and notes that Hersh’s critics have been lazy and knee jerk in their dismissal of his latest story:
Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.
Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.
Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear.
Hersh’s many critics, almost word-for-word, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.” Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his anonymous sources?”
………
Largely ignored in this is debate is the opinion of longtime New York Times Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent Carlotta Gall, who has more knowledge of the region in one finger than most of Hersh’s critics put together. She wrote in the Times this week that she “would not necessarily dismiss [Hersh’s] claims immediately” and that “he is following up on a story that many of us assembled parts of.” Of his claim that an informant, rather than a courier, led the CIA to bin Laden, Gall wrote that “my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s.”
………
Within months, of course, Hersh’s stories would be on the front page of The New York Times. He soon started reporting on intelligence agencies. In 1974 he broke the story that the CIA was systematically spying on Americans in violation of federal law. The rest of the media ridiculed it. They questioned his sourcing while calling the story “exaggerated” and “overwritten and under-researched.” A year later, CIA director William Colby was forced to admit to Congress that it was all true.
Over at Pando, the redoubtable Mark Ames focuses more tightly on the 1970s CIA spying revalations, which to my mind makes for a more compelling critique of the recent press wank-fest, if just because the reaction seems identical to the last time:
………
Hersh has pissed off some very powerful people and institutions with this story, and that means the inevitable media pushback to discredit his reporting is already underway, with the attacks on Hersh led by Vox Media’s Max Fisher, CNN’s Peter Bergen, and even some on the left like Nation Institute reporter Matthieu Aikins. Yesterday Slate joined the pile-on, running a wildly entertaining, hostile interview with Hersh.
Such attacks by fellow journalists on a Sy Hersh bombshell are nothing new—in fact, he used to relish them, and probably still does. He got the same hostile reaction from his media colleagues when he broke his biggest story of his career: The 1974 exposé of the CIA’s massive, illegal domestic spying program, MH-CHAOS, which targeted tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly antiwar and leftwing dissidents.
Hersh is better known today for his My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib exposés, but it was his MH-CHAOS scoop, which the New York Times called “the son of Watergate,” that was his most consequential and controversial—from this one sensational exposé the entire intelligence apparatus was nearly taken down. Hersh’s exposés directly led to the famous Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses, the Rockefeller Commission, and the less famous but more radical Pike Committee hearings in the House, which I wrote about in Pando last year. These hearings not only blew open all sorts of CIA abuses, assassination programs, drug programs and coups, but also massive intelligence failures and boondoggles.
………
And it was the Washington Post that led the attacks on Hersh’s reporting. In early January 1975, the WaPo ran an editorial, “The CIA’s ‘Illegal Domestic Spying,’” attacking Hersh for relying on anonymous sources—this from the same paper that relied on the most famous anonymous source in history, Deep Throat. The WaPo editorial went on:“While almost any CIA activity can be fitted under the heading of ‘spying,’ and while CIA activities undertaken on American soil can be called ‘domestic spying,’ it remains to be determined which of these activities has been conducted in ‘violation’ of the agency’s congressional charter or are ‘illegal.’”
………
A common line of attack was to call Hersh’s series “overwritten and under-researched.” Gossip in the Washington press corps at the time claimed that WaPo’s famous editor Ben Bradlee denounced Hersh’s stories as “overwritten and under-researched”; and when Hersh was passed over for the Pulitzer that year, to everyone’s surprise, one columnist wrote Hersh didn’t deserve it anyway, calling his MH-CHAOS exposes “overwritten, overplayed, under-researched and under-proven.”
………
Hersh might’ve been buried by his own press colleagues, who were only interested in discrediting his reporting, if not for CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Senate in mid-January, 1975. Hersh himself reported it for the Times, which led:“William E. Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, acknowledged at a Senate hearing today that his agency had infiltrated undercover agents into antiwar and dissident political groups inside the United States as part of a counterintelligence program that led to the accumulation of files on 10,000 American citizens.”
After the CIA chief’s confirmation of Hersh’s story, his media detractors had no choice but to grudgingly walk back their criticism. Quoting again from Kathryn Olmsted’s book, after Colby’s admission,
“The Washington Post reported that Colby’s disclosure had ‘confirmed major elements’ of Hersh’s stories, and Newsweek agreed that Colby’s testimony had substantiated ‘many basic elements of the original story if not all the adjectives.’”
Today we’re seeing some of the same grudging, qualified acceptance of Hersh’s Bin Laden bombshell from the establishment press.
Later in 1975, the great Bill Greider—who was then an editor at the WaPo—summed up the attitude of the press to Hersh’s revelations:“the press especially tugs back and forth at itself, alternately pursuing the adrenal instincts unleashed by Watergate, the rabid distrust bred by a decade of out-front official lies, then abruptly playing the cozy lapdog.”
My how we’ve grown so much in the 40 years since.
I don’t know how much of Hersh’s story is true, but the press response at this point seems to exquisitely lame.
Background, and underlying story here.
Well, today, we have some more data points that seem to point to his story being accurate, at least in part.
First, we have a report from NBC saying that there was a Pakistani source inside the country’s state security apparatus:
Intelligence sources tell NBC News that in the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a retired Pakistani military intelligence officer helped the CIA track him down.
While the Pakistani intelligence asset provided vital information in the hunt for bin Laden, he did not provide the location of the al Qaeda leader’s Abottabad, Pakistan compound, sources said.
Three sources also said that some officials in the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.
The asset was evacuated from Pakistan and paid reward money by the CIA, sources said. U.S. officials took pains to note he was one of many sources who provided help along the way, and said that the al Qaeda courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, remained the linchpin of the operation.
The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking the courier.
The new revelations do not cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency’s operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission.
NBC qualifies as a reputable source, and this appears to be confirmation of a part of Hirsh’s story.
It should be noted though, that this omission from the official story might very well be an issue of “Sources and Methods” as well as diplomatic reality, both of which would mitigate against revealing the complicity of Pakistani security.
What’s more, this is precisely the sort of stuff that Hersh would uncover.
It’s significant, and embarrassing, and makes authorities look far less heroic, which history shows to be Hersh’s favorite kind of reporting.
Another interesting data point is that another reporter, R. J. Hillhouse, is claiming that he took her story without attribution:
Seymour Hersh’s story, “The Killing of Bin Laden,” in the London Review of Books has a fundamental problem: it’s either plagiarism or unoriginal.
If it’s fiction–as some have implied, it’s plagiarism. If it’s true, it’s not original. The story was broken here on The Spy Who Billed Me four years ago, in August 2011:
“Bin Laden Turned in by Informant — Courier Was Cover Story”
“Questions Raised by Real Story of How US Found Bin Laden”
On August 7, 2011, I wrote, among other things:
………
I have had great respect for Seymour Hersh, arguably one of the greatest investigative journalists of our time. I do not believe his story is fiction. I trust my sources–which were clearly different than his. I am, however, profoundly disappointed that he has not given credit to the one who originally broke the story.
Hillhouse has writeen extensively on the US state security apparatus, including stories on outsourcing of intelligence activities that have drawn responses from the Director of National intelligence.
So, we have confirmation from NBC that someone inside Pakistan’s intelligence establishment came to the administration at least a year before the raid, and two very similar accounts of the events of May 2, 2011 which appear to have been derived from different sources.
What’s more, according to what appears to be an interview with Hillhouse in The Intercept, the account of SEALS throwing bin Laden’s body, or body parts, out of a helicopter because they believed that the official story was going to be a drone strike, was something that she had been told by one source, but could not confirm, which provides some additional credibility to both accounts:
Hillhouse also claims that one of her sources told her a particular detail that she did not include in 2011 because she could not confirm it: that the Navy SEALs threw bin Laden’s body out of the helicopter while traveling over the Hindu Kush mountains from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Hersh’s story includes an assertion from his main source that “during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains.” While this seems bizarre in retrospect, it would be plausible if the SEALs had believed at the time that the Obama administration planned to say publicly that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike.
Hillhouse believes that “Everything that [Hersh] has said has been spot on” but “You can’t help but notice that everything he is saying in the story, which is true, was first broken by me.”
So this account is definitely plausible.
The journalist “debunking” at this point seems to be loosely sourced accusations that Hersh has gone off the deep end.
The lesson here is that blithely dismissing reporting from Seymour Hersh is not a good idea.
His reporting, at the very least, merits serious due diligence by anyone following that event.
But if Sy Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is even ¼ true, this is the biggest story that he’s ever broken:*
It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.
The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’
This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.
The cliff notes version of this, courtesy of The Stranger, is:
(emphasis original)
The American press has been completely dismissive of Hersh’s report, and, it’s fair to say that the sourcing is not as solid as I would have liked.
Then again, when you look at the biggest supporter of the “Zero Dark Thirty” narrative, the CIA, we know that they are still lying about torture, that they still nave not come clean about spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and basically wrote the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”.
I know that the movie version is false, at least as to whether torture worked, the Senate Intelligence Committee report proved that.
I’m not sure where the truth lies, and any dealing with the machinations of the “war on terror” in general, and the Pakistani state security apparatus in particular. is a bag full of cats.
At this point, I’ll go with Charlie Pierce’s:
What’s clear is that, in the war on terror, or whatever it is in which we’ve been engaged since we handed the military policy over to the spooks and thrown international crisis diplomacy into the vast, deep underbrush of myth and legend generated by the conjuring spells of the intelligence world, that we willingly surrendered self-government to magic and spellcraft. And Osama bin Laden is still dead, and his body is still at the bottom of the sea. Maybe.
I’m not clear what the truth is, except (of course) for the fact that the CIA tortured, that it did not work, and that Langley lies about everything.
I is confuzzled.
*And yes, I mean that statement. If is just ¼ true, this is the biggest story that Seymour f%$#ing Hersh has ever broken. Think about that for a moment.
The editor of the editorial page most likely to be shown as factually inaccurate by the front pate, that of the Wall Street Journal, has been named as the Chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board:
Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor and vice president of The Wall Street Journal, has been elected chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, Columbia University announced today.
Gigot succeeds Danielle Allen, a scholar and author who is the incoming director of the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. The Pulitzer Board chairmanship is a one-year appointment. Board members serve a maximum of nine years.
Gigot’s career at The Wall Street Journal spans 35 years. He has held his current position since 2001. He is responsible for the newspaper’s editorials, op-ed articles, arts criticism and book reviews. He also directs the editorial pages of the Journal‘s Asian and European editions and the OpinionJournal.com website. He is the host of the weekly half-hour news program, the Journal Editorial Report, on the Fox News Channel.
Gigot joined the Journal in 1980 as a reporter in Chicago. He became the Journal’s Asia correspondent in 1982, based in Hong Kong. He won an Overseas Press Club award for his reporting on the Philippines. In 1984, he was named the first editorial page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong. In 1987, he was assigned to Washington, where he contributed editorials and a weekly column on politics, “Potomac Watch,” which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
The Journal‘s editorial page is the most fact averse in the nation. (with the Washington Post‘s OP/ED page being an embarrassingly close 2nd)
Putting him in charge of the prize is on a par with making Mary Mallon* the New York State Commissioner of Health.
*Aka Typhoid Mary.
The reports of the EM Drive appear to be greatly exaggerated:
………
Perhaps we should take a long cool drink at this point. Let’s start with the “NASA validates” part. NASA is a huge agency, with more than 18,000 employees. The testing was done by five NASA employees in a lab devoted to exploring unorthodox propulsion ideas. The team leader is a researcher named Harold “Sonny” White, himself a proponent of ideas about faster-than-light warp drives that most of his colleagues have classified as physically impossible. The lead author is one of White’s Eagleworks teammates, David A. Brady. Calling this group “NASA”—as almost every popular news story has done—is a gross oversimplification.
till, science is science: What matters are data, not motivations or semantics. Did White et al actually validate Fetta’s version of the EmDrive? The abstract of their paper, which was presented at a propulsion conference in Cleveland, is freely available online. Reading it raises a number of red flags. The methodology description makes it unclear how much of the testing took place in a vacuum—essential for measuring a subtle thrust effect. The total amount of energy consumed seems to have been far more than the amount of measured thrust, meaning there was plenty of extra energy bouncing around that could have been a source of error.
Worst of all is this statement from the paper: “Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust.” In other words, the Cannae Drive worked when it was set up correctly—but it worked just as well when it was intentionallydisabledset up incorrectly. Somehow the NASA researchers report this as a validation, rather than invalidation, of the device.
Did I say that was worst of all? I may have take that back. In the paper by White et al, they also write that the Cannae Drive “is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.” That last bit stopped me. What’s a quantum vacuum virtual plasma? I’d never heard the term, so I dropped a note to Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist whose work dives deeply into speculative realms of cosmology and quantum theory.
Carroll wrote back immediately, with a pointed message: “There is no such thing as a ‘quantum vacuum virtual plasma,’ so that should be a tip-off right there. There is a quantum vacuum, but it is nothing like a plasma. In particular, it does not have a rest frame, so there is nothing to push against, so you can’t use it for propulsion. The whole thing is just nonsense. They claim to measure an incredibly tiny effect that could very easily be just noise.” There is no theory to support the result, and there is no verified result to begin with.
………
That’s part of why this space-drive story bothers me so much. Abandoning known science when it feels good to do so is a dangerous proposition. As Carroll later tweeted, “The eagerness with which folks embrace sketchy claims about impossible space drives would make astrology fans blush.” I am personally a huge space enthusiast; I would love to see a new type of propulsion that would make it easier to explore the universe. But having your heart in the right place is no excuse to walk away from normal critical thinking. It is not materially different than the approach of people who reject science when they don’t like what it says about climate change, vaccines, or genetically modified organisms.
(Emphasis Mine)
Let’s be clear here: The tests are dubious, the detected “thrust” being, “Between 30-and-50 microNewtons, where the limit of the measuring device is 10-to-15 microNewtons,” which makes the setup vulnerable to subtle errors and confirmation bias.
I am not saying that it’s true, but I am saying that we don’t have even the vaguest model to describe this phenomenon, and the scientific method requires skepticism, and this sounds like the Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion fiasco of the late 1980s.
There needs to be a lot more testing, and some theories that could actually reliably predict the results, before we should start buying Star Trek uniforms.†
*Actually, I do want to harsh your buzz. Seriously. This appears to be complete bullsh%$, or at least irresponsibly immature, and I can feel virtuous by shooting it down.
†On my part, I will not be buying a Star Trek uniform. As an engineer, I would be wearing a red shirt. I do not like those odds.
If just because the old one was run by a racist who would have directed the magazine write something about white anxiety in Baltimore, while the post Marty Peretz version actually calls out the Washington Post‘s Baltimore PD source as a liar:
………
Ever since we first saw citizen video evidence of his arrest shortly after it happened and learned of the fatal injuries he suffered, we’ve all been wondering exactly what happened to Gray. Up until last night, we only know that Gray suffered some kind of “forceful trauma” that nearly severed his spine and crushed his voice box; we also learned he received no medical treatment from the officers on hand. But on Wednesday night, the Washington Post published a report that stemmed from that police leak, containing the alleged account of a prisoner who had been placed in the same police van as Gray after his arrest. The unnamed prisoner, who is still in jail, could not see Gray in the van—yet according to the Post, he told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.” The Post story hadn’t been published for more than an hour before local journalists like WBAL’s Jayne Miller began debunking it, saying that it didn’t match her earlier reporting: Police commissioner Anthony Batts told media last Thursday that the second prisoner in the van said that Gray was “mostly quiet” and that there was no evidence that Gray was causing himself any harm. “We disagree with any implication that Freddie Gray severed his own spinal cord,” said Jason Downs, a Gray family attorney. “We question the accuracy of the police reports we’ve seen thus far, including the police report that says Mr. Gray was arrested without force or incident.”
Let’s entertain this notion, for a moment, that Gray had decided to injure himself or end his life over an arrest that began with an errant look at an officer, or because he happened to be carrying a switchblade. Is it realistic to believe he would have succeeded to this tragic degree? Whoever at the Baltimore Police Department leaked this clearly relied upon us not understanding how much physical force is required to nearly sever one’s own spine and crush a voice box, all while handcuffed. One doctor told the Baltimore Sun that Gray’s injuries were more consistent with those seen from high-speed vehicle crashes. The van made several stops while he was in it, but did not crash even at a low speed.
Granted, this wasn’t the first time someone tried to explain away what common sense tells us was police brutality. Conservative outlets had circulated nonsense about Gray having a pre-existing spinal condition that required surgery days before his arrest. But now we have the Baltimore Police Department, using the Post as an uncritical conduit, trolling the public and the media. Yes, that seems unwise in light of the violent unrest we’ve seen this week. Far more disturbing than a question of their policing strategy, however, is what this leak indicates about this department and the answers it’s willing to offer.
No matter how many shouts are heard or windows smashed, the Baltimore police have asserted that they control the narrative, and that they alone determine what we get to know about why Gray died. They have no respect for Baltimore’s anger. That’s a lot more chilling to me than teenagers tossing bricks.
The language is a trifle florid, but this is also much better than what the “Old” New Republic would written, which would have at its focus comforting the comfortable.
Jonathan Chait decided to determine how many times that conservative legacy admission William Kristol invoked Hitler, Churchill, Chamberlain and Munich:
Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, writing in opposition to the Iran deal recently, observed, “One is reminded — as one so often is these days — of Churchill’s great speech in Commons after Munich … ” It is true that Kristol is often reminded of Churchill and Munich these days. This may not tell us anything about the current situation with Iran, however, since Kristol is reminded of Churchill and Munich on a great many days. It is a historic reference he has used to explain a great many episodes.
I recently asked New York interns Claire Landsbaum and Claire Voon to compile a list of Kristol’s public references to the Munich agreement and its main players. This research ordeal, presented in reverse chronological order, represents the sort of character-building exercise, I am sure Kristol would agree, that today’s youth badly need.
I’m sorry, I think that you are torturing Claire Landsbaum and Claire Voon.
Forcing them to read everything that Bill Kristol has written back to at least 1997 constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
Among other things, he appears to be calling out the New York Times, though not by name, who publishes his opinion pieces:
So there’s a lot of buzz about alleged scandals involving the Clinton Foundation. Maybe there’s something to it. But you have to wonder: is this just the return of “Clinton rules”?
If you are old enough to remember the 1990s, you remember the endless parade of alleged scandals, Whitewater above all — all of them fomented by right-wing operatives, all eagerly hyped by mainstream news outlets, none of which actually turned out to involve wrongdoing. The usual rules didn’t seem to apply; instead it was Clinton rules, under which innuendo and guilt by association were considered perfectly OK, in which the initial suggestion of lawbreaking received front-page headlines and the subsequent discovery that there was nothing there was buried in the back pages if it was reported at all.
Some of the same phenomenon resurfaced during the 2008 primary.
So, is this time different? First indications are not encouraging; it’s already apparent that the author of the anti-Clinton book that’s driving the latest stuff is a real piece of work.
The link that he mentions it sites dates that are wrong, conflating paid and unpaid speaking gigs, and the use of hoax press releases by parody sites.
I really don’t want to defend Hillary Clinton.
The dynastic issue is of concern, and it is clear, notwithstanding her recent statements regarding finance and inequality, that she is a tool of the banksters. (And then there is that whole frothing at the mouth war monger thing)
So damn the Times and the Post for making me defend her.
The only bright note to this, as Krugman observes later in his post, is that, “There’s a much more effective progressive infrastructure now, much more scrutiny of reporting, and the kinds of malpractice that went unsanctioned 20 years ago can land you in big trouble now.”
Truth be told, I don’t think that the progressive infrastructure will make a difference, but I do think that things like Twitter and Facebook, which make it a lot easier to point out unprofessional journalism, have become a much bigger part of the media landscape, if only because they influence what organizations like Politifact, the WaPo‘s Fact Checker, and FactCheck.org, who do a little bit of separating the wheat from the chaff.
NBC News on Wednesday revised its account of the 2012 kidnapping of its chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, saying it was likely that Mr. Engel and his reporting team had been abducted by a Sunni militant group, not forces affiliated with the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
In a statement posted on the NBC News website Wednesday evening, Mr. Engel said that a review of the episode — prompted by reporting from The New York Times — had led him to conclude that “the group that kidnapped us was Sunni, not Shia.” He also wrote that the abductors had “put on an elaborate ruse to convince us they were Shiite shabiha militiamen.”
Mr. Engel and his team were kidnapped in December 2012 while reporting in Syria. They were held for five days. Just hours after emerging, they appeared on the “Today” show.
“This was a group known as the shabiha, this was the government militia, these are people who are loyal to President Bashar al-Assad,” Mr. Engel said on “Today,” citing information he had gathered from the group. In that and other appearances on NBC, and in a Vanity Fair magazine article, he said that he had been rescued by Sunni rebels. At least two people died during the course of the captivity, he said in some versions of the account.
Interviews by The Times with several dozen people — including many of those involved in the search for NBC’s team, rebel fighters and activists in Syria and current and former NBC News employees — suggested that Mr. Engel’s team was almost certainly taken by a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the loose alliance of rebels opposed to Mr. Assad.
The group, known as the North Idlib Falcons Brigade, was led by two men, Azzo Qassab and Shukri Ajouj, who had a history of smuggling and other crimes. The kidnapping ended, the people involved in the search said, when the team was freed by another rebel group, Ahrar al-Sham, which had a relationship with Mr. Qassab and Mr. Ajouj.
Mr. Engel and his team underwent a harrowing ordeal, and it is a common tactic for kidnappers in war zones to intentionally mislead hostages as to their identity.
NBC executives were informed of Mr. Ajouj and Mr. Qassab’s possible involvement during and after Mr. Engels’s captivity, according to current and former NBC employees and others who helped search for Mr. Engel, including political activists and security professionals. Still, the network moved quickly to put Mr. Engel on the air with an account blaming Shiite captors and did not present the other possible version of events.
Stuffed bunnies were hopped up on meth, federal agents say
By Steve Strunsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com on March 24, 2015 at 1:15 PM, updated March 24, 2015 at 4:51 PM
Federal drug agents at JFK airport found a pair of plush toy bunnies stuffed with an unusual and illegal substance: a kilo of meth.
Drug Enforcement Administration agents at JFK recognized Lucas Dasilva, a suspected drug methamphetamine dealer wanted on drug charges in Florida, after he stepped off a flight to JFK from California on Friday, the New York Post reported.
Investigators said the 35-year-old was carrying a Brazilian passport with a fake name, plus luggage containing the two bunnies, according to the Post.
“A search revealed two stuffed rabbits which were unusually heavy and made a crunching noise when squeezed,” stated court papers quoted by the Post.
One of the bunnies was big and brown, while the other was small and white, the Daily News reported.
This is epic.
H/t Jim Romenesko.
It appears that the White House and its head florist have parted ways, and some reporter who really needs to get a life demands to know why:
When White House chief pastry chef Bill Yosses left the executive mansion last summer, the president publicly mourned the loss of “the crust master’s” mysteriously addictive pies. And when the first family’s personal chef and pal, Sam Kass, left in December, Michelle Obama heaped praise on Kass’s “extraordinary legacy of progress” in an official White House statement.
But the recent exit of head florist Laura Dowling, who’d been in the job since 2009, has been a much quieter affair. So hush hush, in fact, that most outside of 1600 Penn knew nothing about it. There’s still no official comment on why Dowling is no longer at the White House, but according to a source with close ties to current residence staffers, she was escorted from the building on Friday, Feb. 13.
The East Wing initially confirmed via a very brief e-mail that “Laura left her position earlier this year” but provided no further details. Later, the first lady’s office (not quoting the first lady specifically, mind you) sent this enhanced statement:“As Chief Florist, Laura Dowling and her team treated guests of the White House to their beautiful floral arrangements. Ms. Dowling’s creations were always lively and colorful, reflecting not only the season but the unique and historic rooms which they graced. No two arrangements were ever the same and each one left guests with a lasting impression of the elegance and history of the People’s House. We are grateful for her contribution over the years and wish her well”
………
Hours after we put in a call to Dowling’s Alexandria floral design shop, Intérieurs et Fleurs, she issued a statement via the law firm Sidley Austin.“After almost 6 years as Chief Floral Designer at the White House, I have resigned in order to pursue exciting new opportunities and explore my passion for floral artistry and design. Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be launching a new platform for my work as an author, speaker, instructor and design consultant that builds on the creative ideas and partnerships I’ve formed during my tenure there. It’s been such an honor to work at the White House and I will always be grateful for this incredible opportunity.”
There is then a followup article, which seems to indicate that it was that Michelle Obama wanted to move the White House aesthetics in a new direction, with an equally breathless tone:
………
In this town, matters of taste — much like positions on marriage equality — can “evolve” over time. Just ask Dowling, who left because her “fussy style” was not in line with the first lady’s emerging modern and clean aesthetics, several sources said.
Laura’s work “is just different. I’m not sure if it was right for the White House,” said one top floral designer in the area who has done freelance florist work for splashy big events at 1600 Penn. This designer, like many we talked to, spoke on the condition of anonymity because “the floral community is very small, and nobody wants to put down anybody’s work.”
I understand that this needs to be covered, and I understand that the author, Helena Andrews, is, “The co-author of The Reliable Source,” the Washington Post‘s Society/Gossip column, but the breathless tone is a bit over the top.
Truth be told, I do not blame her. I blame her editors.
The editors should have told her to walk back the tone a bit.
It’s one thing to ask for comment from a subject of a story, but preclearing the story with your subject before publication is not journalism, it’s PR:
Leaked emails from Sony suggest that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd promised to show Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal’s husband, Bernard Weinraub, — a former Times reporter — a version of a column featuring Pascal before publication.
The end result was a column that painted Pascal in such a good light that she engaged in a round of mutual adulation with Dowd over email after its publication. It also scored Pascal points back at the studio, with Sony’s then-communications-chief calling the column “impressive.”
The exchanges were uncovered in a trove of Pascal’s emails released as part of a massive hack on Sony carried out by the group known as “Guardians of Peace.” The column, published after the Academy Awards earlier this year, lamented how “Oscar voters and industry top brass are still overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged.”
I’ve never understood the allure of MoDo.
She writes about the great issues of the day like a middle schooler dissing another girl’s choice of shoes.
I expect that her job is safe,. but I really hope that her editor cuts her a new one about this.
“Get Me Off Your F%$#ing Mailing List” is an actual science paper accepted by a journal
(%$# mine)
It’s actually an interesting story, about how phony scientific journals are proliferating.
Case in point, perhaps the highest profile financial reporter in the United States, the New York Times‘ Andrew Ross Sorkin, who has gotten the vapors over Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street:
Wall Street stenographer Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times complains this morning that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is making it harder for Wall Street veterans to take on government jobs overseeing the financial industry, calling the former Harvard law professor and longtime industry critic “misinformed” in her opposition to investment banker Antonio Weiss’ nomination to a key Treasury Department post.
Weiss, President Barack Obama’s nominee to be under secretary of Treasury for domestic finance, is currently head of global investment banking at Lazard, which advised Burger King on its merger with Canadian coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons — a so-called inversion that will help Burger King avoid taxes. Warren cited Lazard’s work on inversions in explaining her opposition to Weiss’ nomination, but Sorkin contends that her concerns are “misplaced.” Sure, tax avoidance may have been “a consideration” in the BK-Tim Hortons deal, Sorkin concedes, but they weren’t the “primary factor.” At any rate, Weiss was “simply as one of several advisers” of the merger — hardly its mastermind.
Sorkin — who has criticized some inversions in the past — apparently finds no fault with the Obama administration seeking to enlist Weiss even as it pledges to crack down on corporate tax avoidance schemes.
While the inversion issue formed the crux of Sorkin’s substantive defense of Weiss, Warren has also pointed to the nominee’s financial industry background as a broad concern in itself.
Sorkin has been thoroughly captured by the financial industry, and he cannot be trusted to report on wrongdoing in the financial industry.
It could be argued that his role never was to reporting on wrongdoing, but instead his job is to document the official actions of the banking sector.
He reports on things like mergers, interviews CEOs, etc.
Of course, if that IS is real role, he is not a journalist. He is a stenographer.
A CURRENT senior executive at Uber suggested opposition research against unfriendly journalists, including going after their families:
A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.
The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.
Michael, who has been at Uber for more than a year as its senior vice president of business, floated the idea at a dinner Friday at Manhattan’s Waverly Inn attended by an influential New York crowd including actor Ed Norton and publisher Arianna Huffington. The dinner was hosted by Ian Osborne, a former adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron and consultant to the company. At the dinner, Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick, boyish with tousled graying hair and a sweater, made the case that he has been miscast as an ideologue and as insensitive to driver and rider complaints, while in fact he has largely had his head down building a transformative company that has beat his own and others’ wildest expectations.
A BuzzFeed editor was invited to the dinner by the journalist Michael Wolff, who later said that he had failed to communicate that the gathering would be off the record; neither Kalanick, his communications director, nor any other Uber official suggested to BuzzFeed News that the event was off the record.
………
Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.
Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.
………
Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.
Michael at no point suggested that Uber has actually hired opposition researchers, or that it plans to. He cast it as something that would make sense, that the company would be justified in doing.
In a statement through an Uber spokeswoman, Michael said: “The remarks attributed to me at a private dinner — borne out of frustration during an informal debate over what I feel is sensationalistic media coverage of the company I am proud to work for — do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company’s views or approach. They were wrong no matter the circumstance and I regret them.”
………
[Uber Spokesman Nairi] Hourdajian also said that Uber has clear policies against executives looking at journalists’ travel logs, a rich source of personal information in Uber’s possession.
………
At the Waverly Inn dinner, it was suggested that a plan like the one Michael floated could become a problem for Uber.
Michael responded: “Nobody would know it was us.”
(emphasis mine)
He said, “Nobody would know that it was us.”
Yeah, no threat there.
Wanna trust that guy?
The Uber spokesman admits that they have logs of your personal travel that they could use against you, but they double pinky swear that they won’t, even though they could.
Particularly when this still employed at Uber senior executive said that he, Prove a particular and very specific claim,” about the personal life of Uber foe Sarah Lacy?
Gee, I wonder where he got that bit of information.
Wanna trust this company with your data about your comings and goings?
I think not.
A journalist is reporting on unflattering stories, and is further opining that the company and its senior executives are unethical in their business practices, and Uber wants to go after her family.
If Uber wanted to go through her professional behavior with a fine tooth comb, I would agree that it’s fair game, albeit a bit petty.
If she goes after your business ethics and competence, and you go after her business ethics competence.
You don;’t go after her family.
FWIW, Ms. Lacy has penned a blistering response, one which seems to imply that whatever Mr. Michael thinks he has, it’s not about her, but it’s about her family.
Do not give these motherf%$#ers your money.
Do not give these motherf%$#ers your personal information.
Do not give these motherf%$#ers your attention.
Delete the f%$#ing app from your phone.
Seriously.