On the occasion of the first annual Izzy Awards from Jeff Cohen's Park Center for Independent Media, the son of progressive journalism icon I.F. Stone, Jeremy Stone (Consortium News, 4/1/09), describes Stone's most journalistically valuable quality--"his capacity for thinking independently"--along with its rewards and consequences:

In the McCarthy era, because he spoke in defense of Jeffersonian principles, people were afraid to be seen with him. When he supported the rights of Palestinians, Jewish institutions would not invite him to speak. And when the National Press Club refused to serve his black guest lunch, he quit the club, isolating himself from his colleagues....

Today's Izzy Award winners do have points of resemblance to I.F. Stone. Glenn Greenwald is a close reader of official documents and a principled critic of the tendency of the Executive Branch to exceed its rightful powers. He has been a fearless critic of government officials and complacent reporters. He has shown a willingness to challenge conventional pieties, including unthinking support for Israeli hardliners.

Amy Goodman's career also has similarities. She speaks up for the disenfranchised and gives her audience facts they don't hear from the traditional media. She is an investigative journalist and writes often about human rights.

Jeremy goes on to identify a key factor in Goodman's success: "Like I. F. Stone and his weekly, she founded a vehicle, Democracy Now!, that takes no advertising or money from corporations or government. She confronts authority no matter how high."

Right-wing historians are back again with more claims that the renowned progressive journalist I.F. Stone was a KGB operative. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev have an article on Commentary's website headlined "I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent--Case Closed." "Until now,"  they write, "the evidence was equivocal and subject to different interpretations. No longer."

So what is this unequivocal, case-closing evidence, subject to only one interpretation? It's notes from  co-author Vassiliev's notebooks, made when the former KGB agent was allowed to examine Soviet intelligence files in the early 1990s.  He says he had to leave the notebooks behind in 1998, and retrieved them in 2002.  And now, in 2009, he notices that they contain damning evidence about one of the right's major villains. OK.

Only, when you lay it out, it's not all that damning.  They've got a KGB note from April 1936 giving Stone the code name "Pancake," describing him as a "lead."  Then there's another note a month later saying:

Relations with Pancake have entered the channel of normal operational work. He went to Washington on assignment for his newspaper. Connections in the State Dep. and Congress.

The Commentary writers gloss the phrase "channel of normal operational work" as meaning that "Stone had become a fully active agent." If you enter "normal operational work" into Google with "KGB," you get two hits, one to the Commentary article and one to Stone's Wikipedia article quoting Commentary; if you put those key words into Nexis, you get no hits at all. So the implication that this is how the KGB routinely describes its operative work is dubious; on its face, the expression means nothing more than that Stone is being dealt with in the usual way that intelligence agents deal with their contacts.  If the KGB officer had gotten any information from Stone more exciting than the fact that he was being sent to Washington, don't you think he would have mentioned it to Moscow?

The article takes a long digression into the kinds of things that journalists might do for spy agencies--planting false stories, slanting the news, helping to find people who will steal documents and so on--and then says that "Stone assisted Soviet intelligence on a number of such tasks." But what are the tasks that Vassiliev et al actually have Stone carrying out? Gossiping, basically. Here's the longest quote from the KGB files that Commentary provides:

Pancake reported that Karl Von Wiegand works in Berlin as a correspondent for the Hearst agency Universal Service. He had been ordered to maintain friendly relations with Hitler, which was supposedly dictated by the fact that the German press was buying the agency's information. Hearst is in a deal with German industry to supply the latter with a large consignment of copper. Wiegand does not agree with Hearst's policy. He turned to Pancake's boss for advice.

Put aside the fact that in a sensible world, allegations that a major news outlet had been pushing a pro-Hitler editorial line in order to protect its parent company's economic relationship with Nazi Germany would be bigger news than any alternative journalist's supposed relationship with the KGB. Is there really anything in that paragraph that seems surprising in the context of a conversation between a reporter and a foreign government source? Should Stone have treated what he had heard about Hearst's Nazi sympathies as some kind of state secret? If so, why?

The Commentary piece continues:

Commenting on Stone's work as a KGB talent spotter and recruiter, the KGB New York station reported, "Pancake established contact with Dodd. We wanted to recruit him [Dodd] and put him to work on the State Dep. line. Pancake should tell Dodd that he has the means to connect him with an anti-Fascist organization in Berlin."

Note the nefarious interpretation of the relatively innocuous behavior described in the KGB memo: A memo that supposedly shows "Stone's work as a KGB talent spotter and recruiter" actually says that Stone contacted Dodd, a lefty whose father was the U.S. ambassador to Germany. The rest of the memo is about what the KGB wanted Stone to do; supposing that he did those things because the KGB wanted him to do them is a classic example of assuming what is to be proved.

The last description of Stone's supposed KGB cooperation contains no quotes, so we have to rely, unwisely enough, on Commentary's interpretation of the memos. As the authors put it:

Stone briefly functioned as Dodd's intermediary with the KGB, providing him with a contact in Berlin when he went to join his father at the embassy. Stone also passed on to the KGB some information Dodd picked up from the American military attaché in Berlin about possible German military moves against the USSR and the name of a suspected pro-Nazi embassy employee.

Again, what did Stone do? He introduced somebody the KGB was interested in to someone in Berlin. That this was done on behalf of the KGB is Commentary's undocumented assertion. He also passed on information about a possible German attack on Russia and a supposed Nazi sympathizer; this is supposed to be suspicious behavior, telling someone you heard Hitler was going to attack their country? Journalists do often talk to intelligence sources, and the intelligence sources often glean information from these conversations; you have to show more than that was happening to show that Stone was not acting as a journalist.

The website describes the piece as a "Special Preview"; is there more evidence held back that actually proves the case? Apparently not; the authors write, "There is only one other reference to I.F. Stone's cooperation with the KGB in the 1930s, a note listing him as one of the New York station's agents in late 1938.... It is likely that he broke relations with the KGB in late 1939."

As the piece notes in passing, the word "agent" doesn't mean a whole lot; there's another memo from 1945 that lists (by code name) both Stone and the New York Herald-Tribune's Walter Lippman as among the KGB's "agent capabilities." Lippman, Commentary writes, knew his KGB contact "only as a Soviet journalist with whom he traded insights and information."  The articles says that "Lippmann's inclusion in the list...makes it impossible to determine the nature of Stone's relationship to the KGB in 1945"; more accurately, Lippman's absence from the list would have allowed Commentary to claim that the list proved something that it obviously doesn't.

Was Stone too sympathetic to the Soviet Union in the 1930s?  Stone later came to think so, denouncing the 1939 Hitler/Stalin pact, and more comprehensively denouncing Soviet Communism in the 1950s. Is there any reason to think that his relations with Soviet officials were not those of a friendly journalist toward his sources? Commentary hasn't given us any.

Blogging from his regular Salon perch (4/20/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald notes that the public wants to investigate U.S. torture (that's what the polls tell us), but:

These facts about public opinion are virtually always excluded from establishment media discussions, and those who advocate investigations and prosecutions--the view held by large percentages, if not majorities, of Americans--are virtually never heard from. That's because the belief that elites should be exempted from all consequences when they break the law is as close to a trans-partisan religious tenet of Beltway culture as it gets.

Consider yesterday's Meet the Press panel discussion of this issue involving David Gregory and five exceedingly typical Beltway insiders--the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein, Fortune's Nina Easton, Time's Rick Stengel, former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former "moderate" Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. That's three ostensibly non-partisan journalists, a right-wing fanatic, and a New Republic/DLC Democrat from Tennessee whose career was built on proving how much he embraces GOP policies--that's called "diversity of views" in Establishment Media World.

Writing that, "exactly as one would expect, they were all in full and complete agreement that there must be no investigations or prosecutions," Greenwald heard "not a syllable uttered that political officials should be treated the same as ordinary Americans when they got caught breaking the law"--not that this should surprise anyone much: "As always, only the suffocatingly narrow Beltway consensus is heard in our political debates, even when huge percentages of Americans reject it." Listen to the recent FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Mark Danner on Torture" (4/10/09)

Taking the brave position (ScholarsAndRogues.com, 4/20/09) that the National Review Online is so bad that it makes William F. Buckley's print version look "semi-respectable" by comparison, former U.S. Navy Commander Jeff Huber writes that in his April 11 NRO post, "military historian and former classics professor Victor Davis Hanson comes across like a rabid war mongrel":

Frothing over the recent Somali pirate caper involving a U.S. flagged merchant ship, Davis insists that, "To end Somali piracy, disproportionate measures against the shore should be taken--for every one pirate assault, a lethal air assault should immediately follow." It's perhaps understandable that Hanson doesn’t mention what Somalia offers in the way of suitable air strike targets; underdeveloped nations like Somalia don't have any. Hanson probably doesn't understand that, because like so many hawkish military historians, he doesn't understand anything about the military. He doesn't know much about warfare theory, either. He calls for extreme (though ineffectual) military measures in response to something he admits "may not be a matter of American national security" committed not by a peer competitor or a group of global extremists but by "two-bit pirates." When a giant purposely crushes an anthill, he's not pursuing a political objective; he's feeding his perversions. That, like waterboarding someone 183 times, is not the sort of thing a global hegemon needs to be doing, Victor.

Calling things "even wackier at the other end of the nut farm," Huber further points to one issue of the Weekly Standard in which both "Barnacle Bill Kristol" and Seth Cropsey call for U.S. troops "going ashore in Africa to destroy the pirates' safe havens"--a bellicose position lamentably popular across many right-wing media.

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (4/18/09) samples the response to Mike Allen of Politico's quote of "a former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush" calling the publishing of U.S. torture memos "damaging because these are techniques that work":

This, from Andrew Sullivan, is a representative example of the reaction:

Allen is allowing a member of the administration that broke the Geneva Conventions and committed war crimes to attack the current president and claim, without any substantiation, that the torture worked. He then allows that "top official" to proclaim things that are at the very least highly questionable. What journalistic standard is Allen following in allowing such a person to speak anonymously?

But things get really interesting when, in Allen's "attempt to explain his behavior," he wound up "revealing the devouring black hole of corruption at the heart of Washington 'journalism'":

While I was writing the piece, a very well-known former Bush administration official e-mailed some caustic criticism of Obama’s decision to release the memos. I asked the former official to be quoted by name, but this person refused, e-mailing: "Please use only on background." I wasn’t surprised....

I figured that readers could decide whether the former Bush official’s comments sounded defensive or vindictive. And Politico readers aren’t so delicate that we have to deceptively pretend there's no other side to a major issue.

Schwarz explains that what Allen is "accidentally telling us here" is "that the Bush official initiated the contact, and without Allen agreeing to any conditions. In other words--even if Allen believes there's some value to printing unsubstantiated, blatantly self-serving assertions--he had absolutely no obligation to ask permission to quote the official, by name or otherwise. But since he's a well-trained little lad, he did anyway."

NBC Today show host Matt Lauer introduced Today's exclusive interview with Wal-Mart's new CEO by saying, “If you really want to know how the economy is affecting the average American, he's the guy to talk to.” Trust the corporate media to see a wealthy CEO as the most-qualified source to tell the public about ordinary people's experiences of economic hardship!

It was an inauspicious beginning for a program in which the host himself repeated the business lobby's false claim that a proposed law that would make it easier for workers to form unions would eliminate the secret ballot in union elections.

As a new FAIR Action Alert points out, Lauer's claim that the Employee Free Choice Act "would do away with the secret ballot" is false:

Under the proposed law, workers would still have the right to vote in a National Labor Review Board (NLRB) "secret ballot" election if 30 percent of the workforce signs cards, just as they do now. Under current law, employers rather than workers get to decide whether unionization requires a card check or a vote. The false claim that EFCA would eliminate secret ballots has been a major talking point of anti-EFCA campaigners.

Lauer then went on to ask the new CEO of Wal-Mart--an adamantly anti-labor corporation that was recently exposed for forcing workers to attend anti-EFCA meetings--what he thinks of the proposed pro-labor bill.

FAIR's Action Alert calls for people to

ask the Today show to correct host Matt Lauer's false claim that Employee Free Choice Act "would do away with secret ballots." And ask them to interview a supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act--someone who can counter the arguments made against the bill by Wal-Mart CEO Duke.

Please share your letters to the Today show with other readers by posting them in the comments section below.

When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave U.S. President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's book The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent at last weekend's Summit of the Americas, the corporate media appeared to be caught off guard.

In its initial report, CNN (Newsroom, 4/18/09) appeared to be completely unaware of Galeano's classic 1971 treatise on the history of European and U.S. imperialism in Latin America, failing to correct Obama's initial mistaken belief that the book was penned by Chavez himself.

Both CNN (CNN Newsroom, 4/18/09) and AP (4/19/09) contrasted the immediate surge in the book's sales on Amazon with its previous "obscurity":

It's gone from obscurity to bestseller overnight. In just hours, it zoomed to No. 14 on Amazon.com's bestseller list, and on Friday, it was ranked number 60,280, making its way to the top of the list very fast.--CNN, 4/18/09

The publicity about the gift of the Galeano book helped propel it from relative obscurity to No. 13 on the Amazon.com list of bestsellers by Saturday night.--AP, 4/19/09

The book may not have ranked highly a month ago on Amazon, but it can hardly be described as "obscure." A classic Latin American history text that was banned by several military dictatorships, with its author "forced into exile as the book grew in popularity," according to the New Yorker, the book boasts more than 50 Spanish editions, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. As demonstrated by Chavez's choice, it still has currency with Latin American political leaders.

Today the New York Times is reporting that waterboarding was used far more often than we have been told--almost 300 times on two prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah. This stands in rather stark contrast to what we heard about the instant, positive effects of waterboarding--as the Times notes:

A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

Of course, someone who relented in "35 seconds" would not need to be waterboarded 83 times. And as been several accounts discussed, the information Zubaydah offered was of debatable value.

Those ABC reports by Brian Ross stood out at the time because they seemed so eager to take this information at face value. Listeners to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin on December 21, 2007, heard this critique of ABC's reporting:

On December 7, the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two high-ranking Al-Qaeda detainees. The tapes reportedly offered the most direct evidence of just exactly what types of interrogation techniques--including torture-- were employed during the 2002 sessions. The ensuing controversy has been big news. But three days after the story surfaced, ABC reporter Brian Ross offered up his version of a blockbuster exclusive-- a report that amounted to a defense of the CIA's torture.

Ross scored an exclusive interview with a former CIA field officer who was part of a team that waterboarded one detainee--Abu Zubaydah. His story must have been music to the White House's ears: Zubaydah wouldn't talk, but once they began torturing him he spilled the beans, and they disrupted dozens of attacks. But ABC's Ross never once raised the most basic question in all of this: Does torture actually produce reliable information? The consensus among law enforcement and military officials is that it does not. But that inconvenient bit of perspective could not find its way into Ross' breathless reporting.

The problems with Abu Zubaydah's interrogation have been well-covered by several other outlets, including Vanity Fair. There are serious doubts about whether any of the information he offered was of any value whatsoever-- facts that were laid out most recently by the Washington Post.

At the close of Brian Ross' report, anchor Charlie Gibson asked why this CIA source had come forward now to talk about torture. The answer would seem pretty clear: The administration's torture policies were once again under critical review, so that would make it a good time to present the argument that torture works. All that was needed was a credulous journalist to air this story. That's exactly what they found in ABC's Brian Ross.

Regular NewsHour left/right panelists Mark Shields and David Brooks were off on April 18. Sitting in on the right was former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. In the liberal chair was Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who is not exactly known for her strong progressive views.

And in fact, Marcus established that fact right from the start on the debate over torture, showing (once again) that a good TV leftist is usually not, well, a leftist:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ruth, to you first. The release of these Bush administration-era interrogation memos and, simultaneously, the decision not to prosecute the CIA agents who carried them out--right move, wrong move by this administration?

RUTH MARCUS, Washington Post: Right move on both, and a very brave move on both. The president opened himself up, as he knew he would, to criticism from the right, as in the Wall Street Journal op-ed that was referenced in the previous piece, that by disclosing this he was making America weaker.

And he opened himself up to a firestorm of criticism from the left that he was--I know actually how much criticism you can get for this, because I wrote a few months ago that I didn't think these folks should be prosecuted, and I was called a torture-enabler. And I don't think of myself that way.

And so the left is very unhappy about the failure of prosecutions. They're latching onto this hope that maybe some of the higher-ups will be prosecuted, and I honestly do not think that that's going to happen.

In a world where torturers don't think of themselves as torturers, it's not surprising that torture-enablers don't think of themselves as torture-enablers. But what else are you supposed to call people who argue that laws against torture shouldn't be enforced?

Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (4/8/09) asks if maybe it's "Already Too Late for the Truth" in cable news coverage of U.S. military spending, considering that directly "after Defense Secretary Robert Gates unveiled his recommendations for restructuring military spending--and boosting the Pentagon budget by $21 billion (4 percent)--the response was immediate: The Obama administration is trying to cut defense in a time of war. It wasn't true. It didn't matter."

Quoting a former defense secretary telling MSNBC viewers a "clearly false" tale of "deep cuts in military spending," Benen notes that anchor Contessa Brewer had asked him "to address the administration's proposed 'cuts'--not 'what some are calling "cuts,"' just matter-of-fact 'cuts,' as if this were plainly true." The fact that it was the former official himself who "eventually noted, 'By the way, it's not a cut. It's a 4 percent increase,' gives Benen

the sense the train has the left the station, and it's not coming back. News outlets--including real ones, not Fox News--have already accepted the bogus notion that Gates' plan cuts defense spending. Republican lawmakers aren't just repeating the false claim, they're practically apoplectic about it. The political world has apparently skipped right over the "some critics of the administration charge...." and gone right to accepting false GOP talking points as fact without debate.

Benen is left feeling that "our political discourse can be awfully frustrating sometimes"--especially when "reported" so awfully as this. Listen to the latest FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Miriam Pemberton on Military Budget" (4/17/09).

Norman Solomon is unable to resist the irony (Huffington Post, 4/11/09) of a lead New York Times article titled "Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory," inverting the futuristic character of news that scientists possibly "could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain" to look back on how "American media outlets have been pulling off such feats for a long time":

The scientists trying to learn how to wipe out "specific types of memory" are lagging way behind.

Don't need to remember the vast quantities of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs that the U.S. military dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s? Or the continuing realities of burn victims, dioxin poisoning and unexploded warheads?

Don't want to consider the many thousands of civilians killed by Salvadoran death squads, Guatemalan troops and Nicaraguan Contra guerillas during the 1980s, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers?

Don't care to recall the Pentagon's estimate that the Gulf War in early 1991 killed 100,000 Iraqi people during a six-week period?

Forget about it! That's what selective memory is for.

The Times' ethical concern that people "tempted to erase a severely painful memory" might "in the process [lose] other, personally important memories that were somehow related" prompts Solomon to further his metaphor: "Dominant media have blotted out countless painful memories--national or personal--if only by treating them as irrelevant or incidental." In other words, "Enough bleach in the spin cycles will do the trick."

Free Press Campaign Director Tim Karr (SaveTheInternet.com, 4/16/09) is celebrating Time Warner Cable having "shelved its plan to impose excessive Internet fees against those who use the Web for more than email and basic surfing." Karr details how

Time Warner Cable had been testing new Internet use penalties on people in Beaumont, Texas, and planned later this year to launch trials in Rochester, N.Y.; Austin and San Antonio, Texas; and Greensboro, N.C. If successful, Time Warner Cable execs planned to impose this cost structure upon the company’s 8.4 million broadband subscribers in 32 states....

The scheme would have forced consumers to pay up to $150 a month for full access to the Internet--an inflated pay-per-byte rate that the company hoped would dampen popular enthusiasm for online video watching, and stem the migration of viewers from cable television to online video sites like Hulu.com.

But good news came when "the company buckled under a withering barrage of negative press and consumer complaints" from Net Neutrality advocates: "Free Press activists sent more than 16,000 letters urging Congress to investigate Time Warner Cable. One grassroots group, StoptheCap.com, served as a clearing house for outraged customers."

Reading Wall Street Journal reporter Gary Fields' "point that a family making slightly over $250,000 doesn’t necessarily feel all that 'rich' when it comes to facing a tax hike from Barack Obama," Matthew Yglesias (Think Progress, 4/17/09) dubs his story "The Not-So-Compelling Plight of the Somewhat Rich" and notes that "what the story doesn't do is put this issue in the appropriate context of what an increase in the marginal rate really implies":

If you raise taxes on "people making over $250,000," that means an increase only in the 250,001st dollar and onward. It's not, in other words, as if a guy earning $249,999 and a guy earning $250,001 will be paying radically different amounts of taxes. In other words, though if you're earning $5 million a year, Obama's plan really will saddle you with a big tax increase, a person who's earning $260,000 and feels that he's facing a basically middle-class economic situation is only going to be facing a very small tax increase. And however much our $260,000 a year guy may feel not so rich, surely he can agree that $260,000 is a lot more than $130,000 or $65,000 so it's hardly absurd that he might pay a slightly higher rate.

After writing that, "even if you grant the premise of the story there's no actual problem here," Yglesias goes on to suggest ideas no career-minded corporate reporter would dare print:

That said, I wouldn't have a problem with launching a new, slightly higher rate, starting at $500,000 and a higher one starting at $1 million and another at $2 million another at $4 million another at $8 million and another at $16 million. I don’t see any reason to think that the progressivity of the scale should max out at $250,000 when obviously there's a huge difference between someone earning that much money and someone earning 10 times that amount.

While big media generally are terrified at the thought of such policies, a Gallup poll from this April 6-9 has 60 percent of respondents considering that "upper-income people" are "paying too little" federal taxes. (Fully 67 percent said the same of "Corporations.")

For more on corporate media having difficulty with the concept of marginal tax rates, see FAIR Action Alert: "CBS Cheats on Tax Coverage" (9/22/08).

Reading some of the latest headlines, one might think that Spanish investigations and possible indictments of six former Bush officials for alleged involvement in torture were dead in the water.  As the Associated Press banner put it (4/17/09): "Spain: No Torture Probe of U.S. Officials," while the Los Angeles Times headlined a news brief (4/17/09), “Spain; Prosecutors Reject Trying Bush Officials."

On the prosecutors' announcement, the AP story reported:

While their ruling is not binding, the announcement all but dooms prospects for the case against the men going forward. On Thursday, Spain's top law-enforcement official Candido Conde-Pumpido said he would not support an investigation against the officials--including former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

So perhaps Bill O'Reilly is be excused for celebrating the news last night (O'Reilly Factor, 4/16/09), though the Fox host may have gone too far when he claimed credit for Spain's reported change of heart: "I don't know if the Factor was a factor in this decision, but I am taking full credit for it," said O'Reilly, who went on to suggest that it was his recently threatened boycott that forced Spain's hand: "We were going to boycott Spain,' said O'Reilly, "and they folded pretty darn fast."

But according to Harper's legal blogger Scott Horton, the reports, and the O'Reilly boasts they seem to have prompted, are, at least, premature. Appearing on Democracy Now! on Friday, Horton criticized AP's reporting, pointing out that in the Spanish system, investigating judges make the call on indictments, not prosecutors.

Well, the Associated Press is giving you extremely faulty legal analysis, because a decision as to whether the case will go forward rests entirely with the investigating judge. The Spanish system is not like the American system, where prosecutors decide who and when to bring cases and who to prosecute.

And Horton explained that the investigating judge in this case, Baltazar Garzon, is not known for  acceding to advice from Spanish prosecutors:

In the Spanish system, the prosecution is managed by an investigating judge. In this case, it’s Baltasar Garzon. And you may recall he handled the case involving Augusto Pinochet, and he did that against the stern opposition of Spanish prosecutors, I think which shows you the weight that that recommendation may hold with him in his court.

Horton underlined another important fact, a point that was reported in some news media (e.g., New York Times, 4/17/09), but missed by others, including by O'Reilly: The Spanish prosecutor thinks the U.S. should prosecute the Bush officials:

But there's a different consideration to weigh in here, as well, and that is that this is a statement that was announced by the prosecutors at the Audencia Nacional in Madrid, and we know, in fact, that those prosecutors who have made this recommendation not to go forward in fact concluded that the case should be prosecuted.

They prepared a 37-page memorandum--and I've discussed, I've talked with several people in Madrid who have read it--that laid out the case, showed how it could fairly easily be brought, how it involved a joint criminal enterprise, how it could be sustained on the basis of documents, including some of those that were released yesterday. And that decision by the career prosecutors was overridden in a political act by Spain's attorney general, who's a political figure. He was a member of the cabinet of Prime Minister Jose Zapatero.

And Horton reports a story that to our knowledge has not been reported in U.S. corporate media thus far, that the top Spanish prosecutor's decision to oppose indictments was prompted by politics--high-level communications between the U.S. and Spanish governments. Because of this, according to Horton, the prosecutors objections were likely to be taken less seriously when and if indictments are considered:

Moreover, the attorney general's decision, which was announced yesterday morning in Madrid, came after several days of high-level discussions between Washington and the Zapatero government, during the course of which, I've been told, the Obama administration suggested very strongly that the pendency of this case was inconvenient and that it would be viewed as a great favor by Washington if Zapatero's government could do what was within its power to shut this down. And I think what we see here is an accommodating nod from Jose Zapatero.

So it has really nothing to do with justice, and it has nothing to do with the merits of the case. It's a political act. And it's certain to be understood by the judges of the Audencia Nacional as a political act, which means I don't think it really forms much of a barrier to the prosecution going forward.

Washington Post/Newsweek economics columnist Robert Samuelson was recently out plugging his new book at an event recorded by C-SPAN. Samuelson began his remarks (watch the video here, at the 4:20 mark) by saying:

I am not an economist. I'm a journalist. And so that anything I say that seems contradictory to what a freshman in college would learn in your basic Principles of Economics course, I should be absolved of any sin for that, because as I say I am not a card-carrying member of the fraternity.

No one is asking Samuelson to be an economist. But it sounds like what he's saying is that not being one frees him to write about things like trade, inequality or Social Security without the burden of knowing much about the issues.

Samuelson is one of the few mainstream pundits who still doubts the science on climate change. The problem there isn't that he's not a climate scientist, but that he doesn't believe they know what they're talking about.