Japan prepares to blast North Korean missile out of the sky
The missile launch is believed to be a military test, though Pyongyang insists it is launching a satellite.
By Arthur Bright Christian Science Monitor
Japan has authorized its military to shoot down a North Korean missile that is being prepared for launch in the coming weeks, should it endanger Japanese territory.
The Washington Post reports that the Japanese government has ordered two anti-missile destroyers into the Sea of Japan and is moving Patriot missiles to the coast to intercept the North Korean rocket or its debris.
The orders punctuated a week of rising tensions in Northeast Asia, as North Korea moved its rocket to a launchpad and warned the outside world not to interfere or impose sanctions for its planned launch of what it describes as a "communications satellite." The launch is scheduled for sometime between April 4 and 8.
Japan, South Korea, and the United States have repeatedly asked North Korea to cancel the launch, calling it a provocative pretext for the test of a long-range ballistic missile, which may be able to strike Alaska. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the launch could harm talks aimed at helping North Korea with food and fuel in return for abandoning nuclear weapons....
Japan took pains Friday to explain that it was preparing for a possible accident, not for an attack. Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said he issued orders "to prepare for an event in which a North Korean projectile falls onto our country in an accident."
Reuters writes that the North Korean missile is a multi-stage long-range rocket, and that while the rocket's boosters are expected to crash in the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean, "a failed launch or accident could result in one of the stages of the rocket, or bits of it, falling on Japan and endangering lives and property." Reuters adds that Japan would have only 10 minutes notice if the missile or its debris were to threaten Japanese territory.
However, the Associated Press reported earlier this week that some in the Japanese government are not convinced that its military will be able to successfully intercept the missile or its debris.
Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone said "it would be difficult" to shoot down fragments from a failed launch of the North Korean missile.
"Our country has never done this before. And we don't know how or where it may come flying," Nakasone told reporters Tuesday.
He was echoing an unidentified top official, who said Monday that "there is no way you can hit a bullet if you exchange pistol fire in a distant duel," according to Kyodo and other Japanese media.
The Associated Press adds that Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada disagreed with the foreign minister's assessment.
Japan's order to prepare to intercept the North Korean missile comes a day after Dennis C. Blair, the US National Intelligence Director, issued "the most pointed US challenge so far to Pyongyang's repeated assertions that its upcoming rocket launch is for peaceful purposes," reports the Los Angeles Times.
"Most of the world understands the game they are playing," National Intelligence Director Dennis C. Blair said. "I think they're risking international opprobrium and hopefully worse if they successfully launch it."...
"They're trying to use the rationale of a legitimate space launch for a missile, which is in its foundation a military missile," Blair said, describing the rocket as a Taepodong, a multistage missile that may be capable of reaching Alaska.
Gerald Warner, blogging for TheDaily Telegraph, adds that the US has dispatched two anti-missile destroyers, the USS McCain and the USS Chafee, to Japanese waters as well.
North Korea earlier this week reiterated its claim that the missile was for a peaceful satellite launch, and warned that any attempt to shoot down would be considered an act of war, reports The Korea Times.
"We will retaliate any act of intercepting our satellite for peaceful purposes with prompt counter strikes by the most powerful military means," a spokesman for the General Staff of the Korean People's Army was quoted as saying, specifically naming South Korea, the US, and Japan.
"Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war," the spokesman said in a statement carried in English by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Agence France-Presse reports that Russia, which typically has supported the North Korean government, today recommended that North Korea refrain from the missile test.
"North Korea would be better off refraining from it," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin told reporters in Moscow, Russian news agencies reported.
"There is no need to ignite passions around this problem," he said. "All the issues that arise in connection with the planned launch one way or another need to be decided by way of dialogue and consultations."
Russia, he said, "understands that the situation in the region of Northeast Asia is tense therefore it would be best if our partners from North Korea refrained from this launch."

How thee Saudi's read the recent attacks on Charles Freeam

Ex-US envoy slates Israel influence
The influence of the Israeli lobby on US politicians has been condemned [GALLO/GETTY]
A former US ambassador has blamed conservative Israeli activists for his decision to withdraw his candidacy for a senior US intelligence post.
Charles "Chas" Freeman, told Al Jazeera's Riz Khan on Thursday that groups "closely aligned" to parties such as Likud and perhaps Yisrael Beitenu made it clear they would use his presence in the role to "discredit" US intelligence reports.
Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, withdrew his nomination for chairman of the National Intelligence Council earlier this month, saying thepro-Israeli lobby in the US had used "despicable methods" to try to discredit him.
"In this case it was a small group of people who are closely aligned with Likud and perhaps the Yisrael Beitenu movement in Israel, the far right in Israel, who have their supporters here as well," Freeman said on Thursday.
"They took this up and essentially they created a situation in which it became apparent that my presence at the National Intelligence Council would be constantly used to denigrate its products and to discredit them.
In Video
Riz Khan speaks to Charles "Chas" Freeman"I concluded with Admiral Blair [Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence] that it would be in the best interests of the council and my country for me to step down."
Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister-designate and leader of the Likud party, is attempting to form government that could see Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of Yisrael Beitenu, become foreign minister.
Freeman also told Al Jazeera that members of US congress had a "basic intolerance ... for any viewpoint that didn't conform to their preconceptions or policy preferences".
Taboo 'eroded'
Freeman, currently president of the Middle East Policy Council think-tank in Washington DC, also said the controversy over his nomination raised concerns that intelligence could be "sliced and diced" to suit people's agendas.
"Is intelligence simply ammunition for polemic and arguments on behalf of policies that are already decided?" he said.
"The whole incident raises a serious question about the extent to which our intelligence community will be allowed to be objective."
However, he said the fact his withdrawal had sparked such public interest had "eroded a taboo" for public discussion on how much power groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) wielded.
"I hope that our media and public debate can now open up and allow criticism of Israeli policies that people like myself regard as deeply injurious to Israeli as well as to our own country's public interests ... That has not been the case," he said.
Members of pro-Israel groups in the US and both Republican and Democratic politicians raised concerns over Freeman's nomination, citing comments the former ambassador had made over "the brutal oppression of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation" which they said showed bias.
Freeman countered shortly after he withdrew his nomination that the lobby had plumbed "the depths of dishonour and indecency" in a "barrage of libellous distortions" regarding his public record.
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies

Pragmatic Leadership in Action
Andrew Sullivan

Last night's presser was fascinating to me for one core reason: it was the first moment that this new president found an equilibrium between campaign and government. It was the end of the very beginning.
Sometimes, we forget just how momentous this past election was. It was momentous because it culminated in a rejection of the politics of the past eight years, and also, to some extent, an understanding that a very new direction was required given the gravity of the many crises facing the US and the world. The only reason Barack Obama is at that podium is the crisis we are in. In any other time, Hillary would be standing there, or McCain. He was elected to change things profoundly, and as he took office, the hurricane forces of economic collapse strengthened. We all know this. Without this context, none of it makes sense. With this context, everything makes sense.
I'm not sure the press corps fully gets this, and I'm not sure that matters very much. Their job is to be polite assholes, asking questions the president would prefer not to answer, and generally being loathed by the public. They did their job better last night than until now, I thought, because they are finally settling in with the new president. They're human too. They had to cover a phenomenon wrapped in a campaign and then a historic transition. They had to prove they weren't saps but also make sure they weren't being unreasonable of a new president with a mountain of problems just weeks into office. After two months, it's beginning to feel normal - with the banter and sharpness and interaction a healthy relationship with the press requires. They did good. But Obama also noticeably avoided the MSM hierarchy. He gets the mood. And seriously: he's obviously up to the job. That was as competent a presser as I've seen in my years covering politics, and light years better than his predecessor's.
And what does Obama's response to these multiple crises look like two months in at this point? It looks to me like relentless, detailed, reasonable pragmatism. It is what I hoped for. The Geithner package is neither right nor left: it's about solving the problem within the existing structures as far as possible. Will it work? I cannot know. But it is not dividing one half of the country against another; it is resisting the most radical and irreversible move; it is part of an entire package designed to move the world economy out of a dangerous abyss; if it fails, nationalization remains a list-ditch option. I see it as a good faith effort, and prepared meticulously in the time-table dictated by the crisis and simple human competence - not a political product to be wheeled out as marketing. It is a serious project that the president asks us to keep close track of and for which he will remain accountable. What more can we ask for at this point?
For me, the big imponderable is Obama's insistence that we move forward on energy, healthcare reform, and education while navigating this economic storm. He kept saying that these things are essential for growth and growth is essential to rescuing our public finances. He's not wrong about this. But we are perfectly entitled to question the methods and means.
I remain unconvinced that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to transition ourselves into a new energy world without depressing the economy. On healthcare, I fear that restraining costs means rationing in the end and expanding the power of the public sector in ways that will reduce patient choice and slow innovation and research. At the same time, I can see that the combination of our current expectations and the revolution in medical science will mean huge increases in spending which, because healthcare is distributed through third party insurance, is very hard to curtail without more government.
But Obama is right to ask back: so what do you propose? On energy, I'd say a gas tax hike balanced by a payroll tax cut. On healthcare, I'm not so sure. It's hard to oppose the upgrade in information technology as a cost-saver. I can see the merits of getting more people insured. As long as any reform is careful to prevent the private sector being squeezed out of business, I'm open to persuasion. But I'm more cautious on this than most, I guess. I value the private healthcare system in the US, that, for all its faults, has innovated medicines that have saved my life. Education? Sure - but only if there's real accountability for bad teachers.
What about the mounting long-term debt? That's the biggie. What I heard from Obama last night was: let us get through the next couple of years and then I promise we'll tackle the long-term problem. He didn't say that explicitly, but that's the sense I get. Am I wrong to trust him? Maybe. But I don't have to trust him on this for long. If he doesn't make a serious effort on entitlement reform in his first term, screw him. But this also means those of us who favor it need to argue for its fiscal merits - as well as ensure that defense is pruned as well.
Obama is a president who is eager to lay it all out. He understands that the elites - who are used to thinking ideologically - will be the hardest audience. But if he can talk directly, pragmatically, specifically to average Americans, he thinks he can talk them round. His confidence in this is a little breath-taking. And yet, when you see him in action, it seems foolish to under-estimate him.
I said it in the campaign and I'll say it again. He has flaws; he deserves pushback; he needs criticism. But we're lucky to have him right now, in my fallible judgment. Extremely lucky

Daily Dish The Atlantic Blogs

Bonfire of the Inanities
by Christopher Buckley
Enough with the Leno gaffes and trumped-up AIG outrage. I supported Obama because I thought he was a serious man. So let's hope he can manage the economy better than the Special Olympians of Wall Street and Congress.
I’m back from a week in the Alaska bush following the Iditarod sled-dog race. Faithful followers of this space may be thrilled to hear that I managed to land our Cessna all by myself at the Nome airport—or for that matter, may not give a hoot, but I assure you it was thrilling to me.
I did not see a paper, or hear so much as a susurrus of news during that whole time. And now I am back, with the flu (minus-60 wind chill will do that), to a Sunday cornucopia of media, 90 percent of which seems to be about French Revolution-level outrage about the AIG bonuses. The remaining 10 percent is about our commander-in-chief’s cracking wise about his inept bowling on The Tonight Show.
It is fine to burn a witch every now and then, and I would gladly supply some good, dry kindling myself at the base of these stakes, but let’s get it over with and move on.
This may be a feckless or even ill-advised comment coming from one who makes much of his living poking fun at life’s moving (and stationary) targets, but taking my metaphor from Jay Leno’s signature facial feature, let me lead with my own chin and ask: Are we a serious nation anymore? Are we becoming, finally, silly?
I voted for Barack Obama largely on the basis of his temperament, which I thought superior. He is only 47 years old, but to me seemed older than that: a man of precocious aspect and judgment. In the French wording, un homme sérieux.
Shows like Leno’s have been de rigueur venues for politicians for almost two decades now, so there is no point any longer in wringing one’s hands about that. I remember in the ’90s watching Vice President Al Gore go on the Letterman show with a top 10 list of why it’s fun to be vice president. Reason No. 1—drum roll, please—was: “Secret Service code name: Buttafuoco.” (I’ll let you Google Buttafuoco; it’s too depressing to explain.) I laughed at the time, but I remember thinking, “OK, but let’s not hear any more from you about ‘Respect for the office.’” Indeed, by the end of the Clinton administration, that phrase was pretty much dead on arrival.
But Obama’s appearance is the first time a sitting president has made the late-night show rounds. His comment about being a Special Olympian bowler was just one of those things, and he duly, and ritually, apologized. If any deeper good comes of the gaffe, it would be a cessation of such appearances. It seems as good a time as any to ask: Ought a sitting president be cozying up to late-night comedy show hosts?
I know, I know—I feel like a fusty old crank merely posing the question. (Maybe it’s this darned flu.) But it’s hardly as though the president of the United States lacks for venues, and such appearances have a way of trivializing any issue. Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on Laugh In in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.
Which brings me—achoo—to the other matter: the AIG bonus business. Yes, it’s appalling that “retention payments” (why we can’t call things what they are?) should have been paid out. But it is also appalling that the US Congress, in a fine foam of pique, should attempt to solve the problem by passing, willy-nilly, a confiscatory tax bill that aims to reduce such payments to a net of 10 percent. I am no homme sérieux when it comes to financial policy, but I know the maxim that “bad cases make bad law.”
One of the backers of this idiotic measure is the distinguished senator from Connecticut, Christopher Dodd, who inconveniently has received $300,000 in campaign pelf from…AIG. Congressional reasoning at times resembles a Mobius strip of hypocrisy. Meanwhile, give that man the Captain Renaud “I’m shocked, shocked!” award.
The larger point is that we are in danger of becoming distracted by our own outrage. It is fine to burn a witch every now and then, and I would gladly supply some good, dry kindling myself at the base of these stakes, but let’s get it over with and move on. There are larger conflagrations burning, and they will consume us all unless we begin to calm down and focus. And that focus should come from on high.
In the midst of this bonfire of inanities, President Obama is pressing ahead with a $3.6 trillion budget, predicated on utterly unrealistic economic growth, even as the Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that this year’s deficit will soar past $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the US economy. This would amount, as the Washington Post reports, to “the deepest well of red ink since the end of World War II.” According to the Post, the CBO is warning, ominously, that the result of this kind of borrowing and spending could lead to an exponentially expanding national debt that would “exceed 82 percent of the overall economy by 2019.”
President Obama came to office proclaiming that he aims to solve problems, not hand them on to our children. Most presidents say that sort of thing. But now we are in very dire straits, and that being the case, he will be held to account. It’s your legacy, sir, and let’s not hear any more about “inheriting the crisis.” You asked for the job. Meanwhile, let us hope that his talent for mastering a sérieux financial crisis are not on a level with the Special Olympians of Wall Street, and Congress.
Achoo!

The Country is beginning to recognize Richard Cheney for the thug that he is...

Some Truth about Guantanamo

Lawrence Wilkerson (Washington Note)

There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.
The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.
This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to "just get the bastards to the interrogators".
It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway).
The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.
But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.
The third basically unknown dimension is how hard Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage labored to ameliorate the GITMO situation from almost day one.
For example, Ambassador Pierre Prosper, the U.S. envoy for war crimes issues, was under a barrage of questions and directions almost daily from Powell or Armitage to repatriate every detainee who could be repatriated.
This was quite a few of them, including Uighurs from China and, incredulously, citizens of the United Kingdom ("incredulously" because few doubted the capacity of the UK to detain and manage terrorists). Standing resolutely in Ambassador Prosper's path was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who would have none of it. Rumsfeld was staunchly backed by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney. Moreover, the fact that among the detainees was a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90, did not seem to faze either man, initially at least.
The fourth unknown is the ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.
Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.
Another unknown, a part of the fabric of the foregoing four, was the sheer incompetence involved in cataloging and maintaining the pertinent factors surrounding the detainees that might be relevant in any eventual legal proceedings, whether in an established court system or even in a kangaroo court that pretended to at least a few of the essentials, such as evidence.
Simply stated, even for those two dozen or so of the detainees who might well be hardcore terrorists, there was virtually no chain of custody, no disciplined handling of evidence, and no attention to the details that almost any court system would demand. Falling back on "sources and methods" and "intelligence secrets" became the Bush administration's modus operandi to camouflage this grievous failing.
But their ultimate cover was that the struggle in which they were involved was war and in war those detained could be kept for the duration. And this war, by their own pronouncements, had no end. For political purposes, they knew it certainly had no end within their allotted four to eight years. Moreover, its not having an end, properly exploited, would help ensure their eight rather than four years in office.
In addition, it has never come to my attention in any persuasive way--from classified information or otherwise--that any intelligence of significance was gained from any of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay other than from the handful of undisputed ring leaders and their companions, clearly no more than a dozen or two of the detainees, and even their alleged contribution of hard, actionable intelligence is intensely disputed in the relevant communities such as intelligence and law enforcement.
This is perhaps the most astounding truth of all, carefully masked by men such as Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney in their loud rhetoric--continuing even now in the case of Cheney--about future attacks thwarted, resurgent terrorists, the indisputable need for torture and harsh interrogation and for secret prisons and places such as GITMO.
Lastly, there is the now prevalent supposition, recently reinforced by the new team in the White House, that closing down our prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay would take some time and development of a highly complex plan. Because of the unfortunate political realities now involved--Cheney's recent strident and almost unparalleled remarks about the dangers of pampering terrorists, and the vulnerability of the Democrats in general on any national security issue--this may have some truth to it.
But in terms of the physical and safe shutdown of the prison facilities it is nonsense. As early as 2004 and certainly in 2005, administration leaders such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, and John Bellinger, Legal Advisor to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and, later, to that same individual as Secretary of State, and others were calling for the facilities to be shut down. No one will ever convince me that as astute a man as Gordon England would have made such a call if he did not have a plan for answering it. And if there is not such a plan, is not its absence simply another reason to condemn this most incompetent of administrations? After all, President Bush himself said he would like to close GITMO.Recently, in an attempt to mask some of these failings and to exacerbate and make even more difficult the challenge to the new Obama administration, former Vice President Cheney gave an interview from his home in McLean, Virginia. The interview was almost mystifying in its twisted logic and terrifying in its fear-mongering.
As to twisted logic: "Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo (sic) during the Bush administration...have gone back into the business of being terrorists." So, the fact that the Bush administration was so incompetent that it released 61 terrorists, is a valid criticism of the Obama administration? Or was this supposed to be an indication of what percentage of the still-detained men would likely turn to terrorism if released in future? Or was this a revelation that men kept in detention such as those at GITMO--even innocent men--would become terrorists if released because of the harsh treatment meted out to them at GITMO? Seven years in jail as an innocent man might do that for me. Hard to tell.
As for the fear-mongering: "When we get people who are more interested in reading the rights to an Al Qaeda (sic) terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry," Cheney said. Who in the Obama administration has insisted on reading any al-Qa'ida terrorist his rights? More to the point, who in that administration is not interested in protecting the United States--a clear implication of Cheney's remarks.
But far worse is the unmistakable stoking of the 20 million listeners of Rush Limbaugh, half of whom we could label, judiciously, as half-baked nuts. Such remarks as those of the former vice president's are like waving a red flag in front of an incensed bull. And Cheney of course knows that.
Cheney went on to say in his McLean interview that "Protecting the country's security is a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people and we are not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek." I have to agree but the other way around. Cheney and his like are the evil people and we certainly are not going to prevail in the struggle with radical religion if we listen to people such as he.
When--and if--the truths about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be revealed in the way they should be, or Congress will step up and shoulder some of the blame, or the new Obama administration will have the courage to follow through substantially on its campaign promises with respect to GITMO, torture and the like, remains indeed to be seen.
On that revelation and those actions rests much of the credibility of our nation's return to sobriety and our truest values. In fact, on such positive developments may ultimately rest our entire future as a free people. For there shall inevitably be future terrorist attacks. Al-Qa'ida has been hurt, badly, largely by our military actions in Afghanistan and our careful and devastating moves to stymie its financial support networks.
But al-Qa'ida will be back. Iraq, GITMO, Abu Ghraib, heavily-biased U.S. support for Israel, and a host of other strategic errors have insured al-Qa'ida's resilience, staying power and motivation. How we deal with the future attacks of this organization and its cohorts could well seal our fate, for good or bad. Osama bin Laden and his brain trust, Aman al-Zawahiri, are counting on us to produce the bad. With people such as Cheney assisting them, they are far more likely to succeed.
-- Lawrence Wilkerson

Clay Shirky
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
* * *
The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
* * *
Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
* * *
If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.
For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.
The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.
The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.
* * *
Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.
In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Can Underground rise again?
By BILL TORPY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On a September morning in 1990, thousands of residents gathered at Underground Atlanta and exploded with joy when they learned the 1996 Summer Olympics were coming.
It was a stirring event where all Atlantans — young, old, black white, rich, poor — united in shared civic enthusiasm. It was the kind of moment former Mayor Andrew Young envisioned 15 months earlier, in June 1989, when he yanked a ribbon that sounded a train whistle signifying downtown’s $142 million rebirth.
This was going to bring people back, the exuberant mayor said. “What we’ve done is put in a new heart for the center of the city.”
A Gwinnett County man’s comment was the front-page headline in the Atlanta Constitution: “Very definitely, we’ll be back.”
It is unknown if the man ever returned to Underground. That day marked the second time the downtown attraction opened to rave reviews — the first was in 1969. And both times it fizzled at maintaining a steady flow of return visitors
Underground has long lost money. Twenty years after its reopening, the city still ponies up $8 million a year to pay off the construction bonds. The ongoing woes have brought forward yet another plan to remake Underground as a destination. This time it’s a $450 million proposal to gut the venue and build a video gambling center with hotels. And maybe change the name.
Dan O’Leary, whose company has run Underground since 1999, says its public perception is so bad a new name can’t hurt.
The reasons for Underground’s troubles are many. Not the right shopping mix. Not enough entertainment. The rise of competing attractions. Not enough attractions nearby. The no-man’s land that is the adjoining Five Points MARTA plaza. But one reason permeates all. “Underground” has become a civic shorthand for many as a dangerous inner-city white elephant.
Midtown resident John Genter is a patron Underground would love to have. The young accountant came to Atlanta six years ago and soon learned from friends the downtown venue wasn’t really an entertainment option.
“You hear the jokes,” he said, “that you need chain mail or bullet proof vests.”
Crime worries — founded and unfounded — have plagued incarnations of Underground since its late-’60s beginning. Early on, merchants complained that the media unfairly reported crimes as far away as Buckhead or Sandy Springs as “near Underground.”
Underground rising — then falling
Joe Martin, who headed the organization that rebuilt Underground, grows sad discussing his beloved project.
“It was a classic public-private partnership. We pulled it off. It was fully leased with all the big things,” Martin said. “Then one thing after another happened.”
In 1990, just weeks before the Olympics announcement, a man was shot to death at the entrance of Underground in a gang fight police said was between the Crips and Bloods. The story lived for months in the media.
In 1992, Los Angeles policemen were acquitted for beating Rodney King, spurring violent disturbances throughout downtown Atlanta. Groups of black teens and young men rampaged through Underground breaking windows and overturning carts.
“It lasted 10 minutes, but the psychological damage was devastating,” Martin said. Mall sales dropped 40 percent the next month. “It shows how fragile perceptions are. Underground never recovered.”
A “vicious cycle” ensued, he said. “Underground had less and less of a mixed audience,” which reinforced opinions of many whites that it was not for them, so they stopped coming back, he said.
“It’s almost as if Underground Atlanta is a monument to racial perceptions and fears.”
Golden years, bitter years
When discussing Underground, longtime Atlantans invariably harken back to the good old days when thousands of partygoers ambled the cobblestone streets, swilled Flaming Hurricanes, listened to Piano Red pounding out blues and ate at Dante’s Down the Hatch. The nightlife scene, a labyrinth of turn-of-the-last-century storefronts forgotten when the city raised its streets, was opened in 1969.
It was new, youthful and energetic. Atlanta had just landed major league baseball and football teams and the city was feeling good about its growth. Underground also had little to compete with in the city and the region.
But the golden era was fleeting. Surrounding counties softened their liquor laws, siphoning off revelers. And with the election of black mayor, Atlanta was experiencing a white flight.
In 1974, The Atlanta Journal wrote a story headlined “Problems mount for Underground.” Crowds had dwindled. Its proprietor was in financial trouble. The story, as news stories have for 35 years, had a cop assuring the public the mall itself was safe. It added that many Atlantans, especially white suburbanites, feared the area was crime-ridden. There was talk of fencing it in, which later occurred.
Construction of the MARTA rail line in the late 1970s gouged a huge hole out of the declining attraction, and it closed in 1980.
Racial Underground
The new incarnation seemed to follow a similar arc. It opened to fanfare in 1989 but five years later, dozens of stores had closed and the complex owed the city millions in back rent. A city official, in a news story, called it a “sinking ship.” An aide to then-Mayor Bill Campbell said the mall’s theme was not in line with the city. He suggested civil rights or Afrocentricity.
The book “Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle in Integration,” published in 1998, recounted Underground’s constant struggles. The late Lawrence Gellerstedt Jr., the Atlanta building magnate who was on the founding board of Underground’s oversite committee, put it this way in the book: “Underground is the best place to put the thermometer for race relations. It’s a tribute to the progress we’ve made. But it documents: we ain’t solved the problem yet. And it still may belly up on account of race relations.”
Money Underground
Andy Young disagrees. He says Underground’s shortcomings are more marketing and mall mix rather than race relations. The attraction is 20 years old and has gotten tired. All malls need reconfiguration after 10 to 15 years, he said.
In the 1980s, he envisioned Underground as an Atlanta version of Baltimore’s harbor rehabilitation. Young hasn’t been to Underground in a while — he doesn’t like its parking setup. But he still thinks Underground can be Atlanta’s Main Street. “It has to be a good-time place,” he said, adding, “I’m not sure what it takes to make it a good-time place.”
Maybe a new variety of music scenes, including country and western, could be a draw, he said. (The city tried a new music mix in 2004, after rolling back bar closing times citywide and extending Underground’s to 4 a.m. Several clubs were brought in but the venture never really caught on.)
Underground’s bad image isn’t race, he said. It’s more culture and class. “I don’t think we had a crime problem but we had large numbers of teens hanging around; they ran off the tourists,” said Young. Atlanta has many poor people. “And poor people tend to hang around downtown.”
Bad neighbors?
By the time Dan O’Leary’s firm took over the mall’s operation the mall in 1999, the vacancy rate was less than 50 percent. O’Leary purchased the troubled South DeKalb Mall in 1996, upgraded it and later resold it for a profit. He has similarly tried to draw in tenants and shoppers at Underground and says the occupancy is now 75 percent.
Albert Maslia, who once had three stores in Underground, calls the venue “safe, very safe.” But he complains it is a victim of the shabby surrounding streetscape populated by vagrants, loiterers, panhandlers and street vendors. He said the city has failed to address the problem.
“You have that no-man’s zone from Five Points to Underground,” he said. “It’s a disgrace.”
Nothing will occur until the city addresses that, he said. It’s a common complaint.
O’Leary agrees. From the start, he has been up front about Underground’s less-than-appealing perception. “I’m there every day. I know what’s our visitors’ experience,” he said.
He promises to spend $5 million a year on security if the new grand plan is put into action because “we will not make a half a billion dollar investment and not make sure it’s safe, secure and clean.”
Then he added, in ambitious, almost Youngian Atlanta speak: “To make Underground the success it should be, it’ll take a really big idea.”
If Atlanta bites on the plan, he vows history won’t repeat itself.

There’s a new power in America – atheism
The faithless are a growing force as the churches duck the challenges of the age
Andrew Sullivan
There is one thing that is not allowed in American national politics – and that is atheism. “In God We Trust” is on the currency; and the number of congressional members who avow no faith at all are about as plentiful as those who are openly gay (none in the Senate; five in the House).
Under the last president, religious faith – evangelical Christianity or Benedict-style Catholicism – was a prerequisite for real access to the inner circle. But the requirement is not just Republican. Among the more excruciating campaign events of last year was a faith summit for the Democrats in which candidates vied with one another to express the most piety. Barack Obama’s Christianity – educated, nuanced, social – is in many ways more striking than that of, say, Nixon, Truman or Eisenhower.
Americans are losing faith, though; and those who have it are moving out of established churches. The nonreligious are now the third biggest grouping in the US, after Catholics and Baptists, according to the just-released American Religious Identification Survey. The bulk of this shift occurred in the 1990s, when they jumped from 8% to 14% of the population – but they have consolidated in the past decade to 15%.
As elsewhere in the West, mainline Protestantism has had the biggest drop – from 19% to 13%. Despite heavy Latino immigration, the proportion of Catholics has drifted down since 1990, and their numbers have shifted dramatically from the northeast and the rust belt to the south and west. Take South Carolina, a state you might associate with hardcore Protestant evangelicalism. It certainly does exist there – but in that southern state, the percentage of Catholics has almost doubled since 1990 and the percentage of atheists has tripled.
America, it turns out, is a more complicated spiritual place than the stereotypes might imply. Islam is still tiny – and integrated and largely successful. Catholicism, while buoyant among new Hispanic immigrants (who are, nonetheless, drifting rapidly towards evangelicalism in the southern hemisphere whence they came), has plummeted in its heartland. Think of Massachusetts, the home of the Irish and Italian and Portuguese. In 1990, Catholics accounted for 54% of all residents of the Kennedys’ state. That’s now 39%.
The bulk of these ex-Catholics joined no other faith group – and the number of residents claiming no religion at all jumped from 8% to 22%. Of course, the sex abuse scandal played a powerful part. One of the chief enablers and protectors of abusive priests, Cardinal Bernard Law, was based in Boston and escaped real accountability by being given a prestigious sinecure in Rome. The Irish and Italians in Massachusetts did not forget.
In many ways the most interesting dynamic is that between mega-church, politicised evangelicalism and atheism. Mega-churches have emerged in many suburban neighbourhoods in America and serve as community centres, as social-work hubs and as venues for what most outsiders would think of as stadium-style Sunday rock shows, in which religion looks like a form of fandom. Charismatic preachers – like the now disgraced Ted Haggard or the politically powerful Rick Warren – have built massive congregations.
The movement has spawned its own shadow pop music industry, coopts the popular culture as any brand-conscious franchise would and has a completely informal form of worship. Go to one of these places and it feels like a town in itself – with shops, daycare centres, conference rooms and social networking groups. The car parks feel like those in sports stadiums; and the atmosphere evokes a big match. In 20 years, the number of Americans finding identity and God in these places has soared from 200,000 to more than 8m.
This is not, one hastens to add, an intellectual form of faith. It is a highly emotional and spontaneous variety of American Protestantism and theologically a blend of self-help, biblical literalism and Republican politics. This is, in many ways, how George W Bush reframed conservatism in America – and with one in three Americans now calling themselves evangelical, you can see the political temptation. The problem was that the issues the evangelicals focused obsessively on – abortion, gays, stem cells, feeding tubes for those in permanent vegetative states – often came to seem warped to many others. Those who might once have passively called themselves Christian suddenly found the label toxic, if it meant identifying with such a specific political agenda. And so as evangelicalism rose, atheism and nonaffiliation emerged as a reaction.
It is impossible to know where this is heading, but the latest survey is a reminder to exercise a little scepticism when you hear of America’s religious exceptionalism. Yes, America is far more devout than most of western Europe; but it is not immune to the broader crises facing established religion in the West. The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming. As one evangelical noted in The Christian Science Monitor last week, “being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence”.
The quality of the Catholic priesthood has also drifted downward: the next generation of priests is more orthodox, but also more insular and less engaged with the wider world. There are a few exceptions: the 29-year-old orthodox Catholic Ross Douthat has just won a treasured opinion column slot in The New York Times. But he is sadly an exception that proves a more general rule. American Christianity may be stronger in some pockets, but it is dumber too. In the end, in the free market-place of ideas and beliefs, that will count.
What one yearns for is a resuscitation of a via media in American religious life – the role that the established Protestant churches once played. Or at least an understanding that religion must absorb and explain the new facts of modernity: the deepening of the Darwinian consensus in the sciences, the irrefutable scriptural scholarship that makes biblical literalism intellectually contemptible, the shifting shape of family life, the new reality of openly gay people, the fact of gender equality in the secular world. It seems to me that American Christianity, despite so many resources, has ignored its intellectual responsibility. And atheists, if this continues much longer, will continue to pick up that slack.

Defeating Freeman: A Patriotic Duty

Alan Dursowitz (Huffington Post)
Those who successfully challenged the nomination of Charles W. Freeman, Jr. to become chairman of the National Intelligence Council should be praised for an act of high patriotism. It would have been disastrous for the United States to have, as the person responsible for overseeing "policy-neutral intelligence assessments" for the president, a zealot who is anything but policy-neutral when it comes to two of the most important areas of international conflict.
Freeman not only has extremist views regarding the Middle East and China, but he has been beholden to lobby groups that are anxious to influence intelligent assessments regarding Saudi Arabia and China. Freeman bowed out when it became clear that his highly questionable financial ties to the Saudi and China lobby would be deeply probed by inspectors general, congressional staffers and the media. He couldn't handle the truth about his financial ties to these lobbies which do not serve the interests of the United States. The heavy thumbs of the powerful Saudi and Chinese lobbies would have subtly, and perhaps invisibly, weighed on Freeman's intelligence assessment.
Freeman is an ideologue who apparently believed that China should have been more aggressive in its crackdown on the peaceful Tiananmen Square protestors. At the same time, he has been critical of American support for Israeli efforts to stop violent terrorists from blowing up Israeli schools buses and firing rockets at Israeli kindergartens. There is only one rational explanation for why a smart intelligence official would be so irrational as to express more sympathy for brutal Chinese repression of peaceful dissent than for Israeli self-defense against violent terrorism: Freeman has been bought and paid for by lobbies that he does not wish to alienate. He has a long history of playing the tunes selected for him by those who have paid him. He is an ideological zealot when it comes to the Middle East. Senator Charles Schumer correctly characterized his views as "over the top" and an "irrational hatred of Israel."
Freeman acknowledged that he is deeply and emotionally committed to a fundamental change in US policy toward Israel. That is certainly his right as a private citizen or even as an elected official. But his extremist views would not have served him, or our nation well, as the person responsible for what are supposed to "policy-neutral intelligence assessments." An ideologue with such heavy financial baggage is simply incapable of policy-neutrality, and he should have known that.
If there was ever any doubt about his neutrality, he eliminated it by his over-the-top reaction to those who challenged his qualifications for the job based on his record. He railed against "the Israel lobby" blaming it, and it alone, for his failure to get the job. He ignored those human rights advocates who were outraged by his defense of the Chinese repression of the Tiananmen demonstrators and his unwavering support for the most repressive regime in the Middle East. He ignored environmentalists who worried that he was far too beholden to oil interests. And he ignored patriotic Americans who support the U.S. policy in the Middle East because they believe it is good for America, for democracy and for the war against terrorism.
Freeman was not alone in invoking the "power" of the Israel lobby and accusing it of unpatriotic actions. He teamed up with Stephen Walt, the discredited academic who has recently made a career of blaming all of America's ills on "The Lobby." Here is how Walt gleefully put it: "For all of you out there who may have questioned whether there was a powerful 'Israel Lobby' or admitted that it existed but didn't think it had much influence...think again." Walt ignored the fact that the powerful Saudi, China and foreign oil lobbies were supporting Freeman because they believed, quite correctly, that his assessment of intelligence would be anything but neutral when it came to protecting their interests. He also ignored the fact that AIPAC--which Walt considers the puppet master of the Jewish Lobby--took no position on the Freeman nomination, and that those who opposed it included critics of Israeli policies.
So let me understand the Freeman-Walt position. When the Saudis, the Chinese and foreign oil lobbies (with a small "l") exercise their influence, that is freedom of speech and the right to petition the government. But when the Israel Lobby (capital "L") challenges an appointment, such action is "dual loyalty," "un-American" and "unpatriotic." Their other position is that any time people of diverse backgrounds and views independently challenge a government decision that relates to the Middle East, this represents the collective action of the notorious and powerful Israel Lobby, rather than the heartfelt views of individual patriotic Americans.
The truth is that the Freeman appointment was bad for America, bad for peace in the Middle East, bad for human rights in China, bad for Tibet, bad for the environment, and bad for "policy-neutral intelligence." Those who challenged it performed a patriotic duty. They should be praised for helping the Obama administration avoid a serious blunder that threatened to compromise the president's ability to act in the interest of the United States on the basis of policy-neutral intelligence. All Americans owe them a debt of gratitude.

Clinging to the Wreckage
Andrew Sullivan

Blogging takes you into the ever instant-present, and the world's rapidly changing scene can prompt shifts in your outlook you never truly expected and don't yet quite understand. I realize that my passionate dismay at the Freeman affair, for example, was surprising to some, and even to me. I'm a passionate believer in Israel's right to exist and care about her security. But the changing world requires adjusting to new realities and past experiences. And sometimes events bring ruptures to the surface that reflect tectonic shifts underneath. And that requires some context. By its nature this post is therefore somewhat solipsistic. Please skip this post if my own internal angst is of understandably minimal interest to you. But I'm a believer in expressing conflicts, not inhibiting them. I don't work on background.
In the last decade, I realize that many of my most cherished institutions have failed - and failed in ways that are not trivial. Perhaps the institution dearest to me, the Catholic church, greeted the emergence of gay people in a way that never truly reflected the compassion of Jesus or the good faith arguments many of us offered as a way forward. This was sad to me, but not life-changing. I know the Holy Spirit takes time, as James Allison reminds us. But then came the sex abuse crisis. Like many others, the truth about the evil in the heart of the church, and the cooptation and enabling of that evil, and the refusal to take real responsibility for the evil, simply left me gasping for air. I realize now that my Catholic identity never recovered, even if my faith endures in a far more modest and difficult way.
Then my adopted country. Again, the frustrations nag, in my case the still-unresolved matter of how an immigrant who became HIV-positive a decade after arriving here can have a secure home and future. I still cannot, although I am hopeful the Obama administration will soon enact what the Congress last year voted for overwhelmingly and the Bush administration intended to change before it ended. And the fact that this country also treats my legal civil marriage as if it didn't exist, as if our love and family and commitment were worth nothing, wounds every day.
But again, I understand these things take time. I'm lucky to be here at all and have seen enormous progress in my lifetime. The real sucker-punch to my faith in American government was the embrace of torture against terror suspects. Since it came as part of a response to Islamist evil that I had supported, in a war I had aggressively mongered for, shock was intermixed with guilt, and guilt ceded to a kind of patriotic grief. It is the flipside of love - this kind of grief. It has not abated because there has been no real accounting and no real responsibility taken - just as in the church. The people who really held power, who really should have taken the fall: they are still unrepentant and defiant, even contemptuous of their critics.
The conservative movement is another institution of a sort that has come undone before my eyes. It really was a formative part of my identity as a young man, and yet, for all the reasons I spelled out in my last book, it is not a movement that I feel comfortable in any longer. It actually appalls me daily.
What I could once dismiss as minor flaws - supply-side nuttiness, near-idolatrous American exceptionalism, religious zeal - are now its core, defining features. The way it has responded to the economic crisis - a form of ideological autism - reflects a deep malaise. But, although Obama's pragmatic progressivism has many attractive qualities, I cannot be a liberal. I do not have liberalism's confidence in government activism, I do not share its collectivist instincts, I find its interest groups unappealing. I do not and never will belong.
Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it's a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.
Where to go? What to do? You read me flounder every day; and you can find many less conflicted bloggers to read. Maybe I should take a break and live a less examined life for a while. Or maybe I should do what I am still doing: trying to make sense of where I belong, stay praying in a church that has sealed itself off from modernity, cling to a conservatism that begins to feel like a form of solipsism, hang on in the hope that America can reform itself and repair the world a little. I think, in fact, that this is obviously the right and only serious choice. Life is always a temporary and losing battle, an engagement with the deadliness of doing. It just feels deadlier than usual in these past few years of brutally unsentimental education.
Or maybe I should laugh more.
Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

Inside Obama's War Room
by Leslie H. Gelb
(Daily Beast)

The president rules his National Security Council meetings with an iron fist, making rapid-fire decisions. But Leslie H. Gelb says the team’s frenzied pace reveals a worrisome lack of strategy.
If you were allowed to perch inside the Situation Room at the White House and listen to a National Security Council meeting, you’d find the most centralized and controlled operation, well, ever. It is an Obama-centric system. The president sets the schedule of meetings, runs the discussions with an iron hand, actually calls on attendees to talk, and usually ends the session by making decisions at the table. And either because of his command personality and style or the moderate consensus of the participants or both, they are getting along with each other better than any group of NSC officials in memory.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that some of the Obama decisions fall into the category of change for change’s sake.
The principal participants in these meetings, besides the president, are: Vice President Joe Biden; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Defense Secretary Bob Gates; National Security Adviser Jim Jones; his deputy, Tom Donilon; another deputy, Denis McDonough (known as Obama’s enforcer); and intelligence chiefs Dennis Blair and Leon Panetta. Key aides from the departments and NSC staff also attend, depending on the subject.
Historically, the meetings have been more or less informal, with the national-security adviser running the sessions, asking questions, making sure the agenda gets covered. Participants joined in as they had something to say, often interrupting each other. Presidents, of course, intervened as they wished to comment or question. Only on rare occasions did presidents actually make decisions at the table. Usually they’d return to the Oval Office with the national security adviser and perhaps one or two others, and draft a decision directive, which they’d pass around to the secretaries of State and Defense informally before issuing it.
The Obama system doesn’t close off debate, and participants aren’t complaining about not being able to speak their piece. But I find it hard to believe—based on my own experience at such meetings—that the people at the table don’t feel more constrained than usual by the direct involvement and control of Obama. While his words certainly invite disagreement and dissent, his command manner may discourage it.
At this point, my main concern, however, is not the discussions, but the frequency and ease of the Obama decisions. Just in the last few weeks, he’s decided to reset relations with Russia; offer Russia a trade of not deploying US missiles in Eastern Europe in return for Moscow’s help with Iranian nukes; send envoys to Syria; invite Iran to a conference on Afghanistan; suggest the US would be willing to talk to the Taliban; assure China that our human-rights concerns would take a back seat to economic relations; and on and on.
It’s not that I quarrel with most of these calls; most are basically sensible. But to me, it’s not sensible to put them out one at a time and without first coming to terms with an overall strategy to deal with these particular issues. Don’t decide on sending more troops to Afghanistan and talking to the Taliban until you’ve first worked out your overall strategy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. For example, two weeks ago, the Obama administration criticized the Pakistani government for making a deal with the Taliban in a region not far from Islamabad. Only a few days later, the administration announced it was just fine for us to deal with the Taliban. The president will get himself into more and more such contradictions and tensions if he continues this pattern.
There is also the question of the frequency of major new decisions. It hardly seems that a day goes by without some new policy and some new front-page headline. It’s almost as if Obama’s clarion call for change has gone beyond an expression of need and become an ideology in and of—and for—itself. Again, I don’t quarrel with changing a great deal of what the former president did to us and the world. He did many awful things that require fixing. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that some of the Obama decisions fall into the category of change for change’s sake.
It’s one thing to know that Bush’s mistakes must be rectified and another to know precisely what the new approach should be. Obama should give himself more time in between policies announcing far-reaching departures. In doing so much, so fast, he also runs the risk of people coming to believe he’s not thinking these things through or that he’s arrogant, whether or not he’s making the right calls.
But for all of the frantic pace and all the decisions being made, one aspect of the Obama system cries for a shout-out: the harmony among the participants. The top dogs in this administration truly seem to be getting along with each other. There are none of the usual press leaks and public maulings between the secretary of state and the national security-adviser. Such brawls were legendary between Henry Kissinger at the National Security Council and Bill Rogers at State or Zbig Brzezinski at the White House and Cy Vance at Foggy Bottom, or between National Security Adviser Condi Rice and Defense chief Don Rumsfeld.
These brawls also caused great harm to American foreign policy because they opened up important differences to exploitation by domestic political opponents and foreign adversaries. By contrast, Hillary Clinton and Jim Jones and many of these players go out to lunch and dinner with each other and seem to like each other. They’re all cut from the same centrist, moderate cloth, and none are ideological or dogmatic. Bob Gates, the only major holdover from the previous administration, is more buttoned up than his colleagues and can be very pointed and direct in what he says. He both gets along with his colleagues and retains probably more independence than any of the other NSC principals.
And of course, Joe Biden is not to be forgotten in this mix—and the others certainly don’t get a chance to forget him. He could well be the most knowledgeable participant on the most issues who attends these meetings, and he has been quite contained and rarely goes off on the interminable tangents for which he became famous in the Senate. He’s probably the closest at the table to being a dissenter, and his colleagues admire him and his openness.
President Obama and his NSC contingent have yet to make major strategic decisions on such key issues as Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East, and Russia. And fortunately, they haven’t had to take on a major foreign-policy crisis on top of the daily economic crises they already juggle. But I have the strong suspicion that these experiences won’t change the style of the president or his main advisers very much at all. Obama simply won’t put up with his advisers trashing each other, let alone himself.
Leslie H. Gelb, a former Times columnist and senior government official, is author of the forthcoming HarperCollins book Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy, which shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Obama Intelligence Nominee Withdraws
by Max Blumenthal (Daiy Beast)
"Chas" Freeman, Obama’s pick to head the National Intelligence Council, has withdrawn from contention for the job. The Daily Beast’s Max Blumenthal reported that the leader of the campaign against Freeman was Steven Rosen, a former director of AIPAC awaiting trial on espionage charges, who has a long history of attacking and undermining anybody he deems hostile to Israel.
The assault on Charles “Chas” Freeman Jr., a former ambassador tapped to lead the National Intelligence Council, is the first blow in a battle over the Obama administration’s Middle East policy. Steven Rosen, a former director of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee due to stand trial this April for espionage for Israel, is the leader of the campaign against Freeman’s appointment. In his wake, a host of critics from the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to the New Republic’s Marty Peretz have emerged to assail Freeman’s comments on Israeli policies and demand that Obama rescind the diplomat’s appointment. The campaign against Freeman spread to Congress, where a handful of representatives including the top recipient of AIPAC donations, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), called for an investigation of Freeman’s business ties to China and Saudi Arabia.
Rosen’s tactics follow a familiar pattern he has displayed throughout his career, in which he viciously undermined anyone in the foreign-policy community deemed insufficiently deferential to Israel—even his own boss.
But it was Rosen who first publicly accused Freeman of unholy ties to foreign governments and Rosen who first attacked Freeman’s relatively benign statements about the Israeli occupation. His tactics follow a familiar pattern he has displayed throughout his career, in which he viciously undermined anyone in the foreign-policy community deemed insufficiently deferential to Israel—even his own boss. But with Rosen’s indictment for spying for a foreign government, his attacks are resonating less strongly than in the past.
“What’s so strange is that the face of the campaign against Freeman is Steve Rosen, and he is the weakest possible face,” said M.J. Rosenberg, a former colleague of Rosen’s at AIPAC who now serves as policy director for the Israel Policy Forum. “You couldn’t have picked anyone less credible to lead the charge.”
The effort to dislodge Freeman still has the potential to impact the Obama administration’s policies toward Israel, however discredited its architect may be. This is, of course, the underlying objective of many of Freeman’s critics. “Freeman is stuck in the latest instance of the deadly power game long played here on what level of support for controversial Israeli government policies is a ‘requirement’ for US public office…” foreign-policy analyst Chris Nelson wrote in his Nelson Report, an influential private daily newsletter read by Washington policy makers. “If Obama surrenders to the critics and orders [Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair] to rescind the Freeman appointment to chair the NIC, it is difficult to see how he can properly exercise leverage, when needed, in his conduct of policy in the Middle East. That, literally, is how the experts see the stakes of the fight now under way.”
The Israeli lobby’s mounting frustration with the intelligence community suggests another reason for its opposition to Freeman. As NIC director, Freeman would oversee the production of National Intelligence Estimates, the consensus judgment of all 16 intelligence agencies—essentially the official analysis of the U.S. government on global realities. When the December 2007 NIE found that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear-weapons program,” and that Iran was “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005,” advocates for a preemptive U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities reacted with anger and dismay. Neoconservative scholar Daniel Pipes—Rosen’s new boss at the Middle East Forum—decried the NIE as “a shoddy, politicized, outrageous parody of a piece of propaganda.”
“It’s clear that Freeman isn’t going to be influenced by the lobby,” Jim Lobe, the Washington bureau chief of Inter Press Service, remarked to me. “They don’t like people like that, especially when they’re in charge of products like the NIE. So this is a very important test for them.”
Hand-picked to lead the NIC by Obama’s director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, Freeman brings a wide-ranging resume to the job. He has spearheaded key U.S. initiatives from Africa to Europe to East Asia while gathering experience in the Middle East as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. Having cut his teeth as President Richard Nixon’s translator during his historic trip to China, Freeman is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. Pat Lang, a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces colonel, described Freeman as “a man awesomely educated, of striking intellect, of vast experience and demonstrated integrity.” A letter signed by 17 current and former ambassadors published in the Wall Street Journal underscored the career diplomat’s credibility. “We know Chas [Freeman] to be a man of integrity and high intelligence who would never let his personal views shade or distort intelligence assessments,” the ambassadors wrote.
But Freeman’s professional qualifications are irrelevant to Steven Rosen. “This is a profoundly disturbing appointment,” he wrote in a February 19 entry on his Obama Mideast Monitor, a blog he writes for Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum. Of particular issue to the former AIPAC director was a 2005 Freeman speech in which he partially blamed the failure of the peace process on U.S. support for the Israeli occupation on the West Bank. The next day, Rosen pronounced his alarm at a 2006 address by Freeman that called for “a break from the past” in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine, calling for a new peace process suggested by the framework offered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2002—a proposal praised by President Obama in his interview with al Arabiya. The Atlantic’s Goldberg echoed Rosen three days later, claiming Freeman was “well-known for his hostility toward Israel.” Goldberg’s sole piece of evidence was the 2006 speech Rosen had highlighted. From there, criticism of Freeman spread to the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and the New Republic.
Rosen’s campaign against Freeman follows the tactics he honed during a series of internecine battles within AIPAC against the Middle East peace process and to gain control of the organization. In 1988, Rosen overthrew his chief rival, legislative director and chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield, after the Reagan administration recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization. “Bloomfield was fired in a blast of unwelcome publicity airing AIPAC’s inner turmoil,” The Washington Post’s Lloyd Grove reported in 1991. “Rosen had won.” His method, according to the Post, “indulged an appetite for the ad hominem, warning of conspiracies among various Jewish organizations to undermine AIPAC's mission.”
According to M.J. Rosenberg, the former AIPAC staffer, Rosen then trained his sights on the man who hired him, AIPAC director Tom Dine. “Rosen didn’t like the fact that Dine was a Democrat,” Rosenberg told me, “and even more than that, he didn’t like having a boss.” When Rosen learned of alleged remarks by Dine that seemed to disparage Orthodox Jews as “smelly” and “low-class,” he rushed to AIPAC’s board of directors to complain. In short order, Dine was drummed out. But Rosen’s real agenda was to undermine the Oslo peace process initiated by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In 1993, the second-ranking AIPAC lobbyist, Harvey Friedman, a Rosen ally, called Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin "a little slime-ball" for advocating Rabin’s land-for-peace policy. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Itamar Rabinovich, demanded an apology, which was publicly offered by Dine. That prompted Rosen’s counterattack, Dine’s ouster, and his control of the group. According to Douglas Bloomfield, in an article published last week in the New Jersey Jewish Week, Rosen “coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.”
Rosen’s machinations eventually precipitated his undoing. In 2005, federal prosecutors indicted him and two other AIPAC staffers for allegedly violating the Espionage Act by furnishing top-secret U.S. documents to reporters and foreign officials. The one-time power broker suddenly became persona non grata on Capitol Hill. In 2007, Rosen announced a new mission to The Forward’s Nathan Guttman: avenging “the strong anti-Israel sentiment among individuals in America’s intelligence community, which he believes is what led to the investigation against him in the first place.” In November 2008, Rosen started blogging for the Middle East Forum, a neoconservative think tank founded by Pipes, who once called for “razing villages” in Palestine.
Rosen’s former employer denies any role in fueling the Freeman controversy. “We’re not really interested in Freeman,” AIPAC director of communications Josh Block told me. “It’s not something we’re working on.” But when I asked Block whether anyone at the group had circulated information about Freeman to reporters, he declined to comment.
Spencer Ackerman, a national-security reporter for the Washington Independent, first reported the rumors. “Reporter friends of mine have told me that AIPAC has been shopping oppo research on Freeman around,” Ackerman wrote on March 5. Ron Kampeas, a reporter for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, told me that after he published his first report on Freeman, “[Josh] Block called to say, ‘Wow, that’s interesting stuff you found out!’ But it wasn’t as if he had some material to give us,” Kampeas added. “We had the background on Freeman in the first place.” Kampeas said that many of the Freeman quotes furnished by critics “were not out of the mainstream in terms of Middle East policy… And a lot of what we’re seeing is smears.”
While AIPAC has attempted to avoid the appearance of being involved in any way in the attacks on Freeman, Rosen has taken a leading role. In assuming such a prominent part, he has violated his own rule: “A lobby is like a night flower,” Rosen once wrote in an internal AIPAC memo. “It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”
“The way it used to work in the case of someone like Freeman or people in Jewish community who broke from the consensus,” Rosenberg remarked, “you'd never know why he lost his job or didn't get the appointment. But now people focus on this and people know why it's happening. What did they think? That this wouldn't become a huge story?”
Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing fellow at The Nation Institute, whose book, Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books), is forthcoming in Spring 2009. Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.