The Washington Post has an interesting piece on the CIA's drone program in Pakistan (2/21/11), pointing out that the drones are killing plenty of Pakistanis, but not the "high-value" ones:

CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed at least 581 militants last year, according to independent estimates. The number of those militants noteworthy enough to appear on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists: two.

Despite a major escalation in the number of unmanned Predator strikes being carried out under the Obama administration, data from government and independent sources indicate that the number of high-ranking militants being killed as a result has either slipped or barely increased.

The piece seems to present a pretty clear story-- until they  allow anonymous U.S. officials to weigh in to defend their assassination program. Hence we hear from "U.S. officials familiar with drone operations":

"This effort has evolved because our intelligence has improved greatly over the years, and we're able to identify not just senior terrorists, but also al-Qaeda foot soldiers who are planning attacks on our homeland and our troops in Afghanistan," said a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program.

"We would be remiss if we didn't go after people who have American blood on their hands," the official said. "To use a military analogy, if you're only going after the generals, you're likely to be run over by tanks."

An unnamed former government official is also quoted comparing the drone assassinations to the HBO series The Sopranos and to a game of chess. Readers are told that drone advocates "say that empirical evidence suggests that the ramped-up targeting of lesser-known militants has helped to keep the United States safe." Sounds like the sort of thing Bush administration officials liked to say all the time about anything they were doing.

Yesterday the Guardian reported that Raymond Davis, the American held in Pakistan on charges of killing two men last month in Lahore, was working for the CIA. The Davis case has received sustained coverage in the U.S. media and is the subject of intense U.S lobbying. All the while U.S. officials referred to Davis as a "diplomat."

Today the New York Times has posted a story on its website catching up with the Guardian. The most notable revelation, though, comes when the Times admits that it knew Davis' status--but obeyed a government request to keep it quiet:

The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis' ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. Several foreign news organizations have disclosed some aspects of Mr. Davis' work with the CIA, and on Monday, American officials lifted their request to withhold publication.

So is the lesson here that if you're interested in what your government is doing, read a foreign newspaper?

UPDATE: Michael Calderone at Yahoo! News notes that several U.S. outlets-- the Post, the New York Times and the Associated Press-- knew about Davis' status. The Guardian was asked by U.S. officials to keep Davis' status under wraps, but decided not to:

Ian Katz, deputy editor of The Guardian, told The Cutline that "similar representations were made to the Guardian to those received by U.S. media." But unlike its U.S. counterparts, The Guardian went ahead with the story.

Katz noted that two senior Pakistan government sources officially confirmed that Davis was a CIA operative and explained in an email why it was relevant to report.

"We believe Davis's role in Pakistan is unavoidably connected with both the legal case surrounding him and with the U.S. government's attempts to seek his release," Katz said. "And since Davis is already widely assumed in Pakistan to have links to U.S. intelligence, we did not accept that disclosing his CIA role would expose him to increased risk."

The New York Times has a curious reference today concerning the White House's strategy on a United Nations Security Council resolution critical of Israeli settlements:

 The new White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said Thursday that he would not say whether the United States would invoke its rarely used veto power in the Council.

The United States vetoes Security Council resolutions more often than any other country. (The Soviet Union once racked up an impressive record in a short amount of time, but since 1970 or so the United States has led by a wide margin.)

Many of those vetoes concern resolutions critical of Israel--by now, this is fairly well-known, well-documented phenomenon. 

Is it opposite day?

UPDATE:

Phyllis Bennis writes (AlterNet, 2/18/11):

In fact, the U.S. veto in the Security Council was consistent with a long and sordid history. As of 2009, fully half of the vetoes ever cast were to protect Israel from being held accountable in the UN for violations of international law and human rights. Another one-third were to protect racist regimes in southern Africa -- South Africa and pre-independence South-West Africa -- from the same accountability. Taken together, fully five out of six, or more than 80 percent of U.S. vetoes, have been cast to protect Washington’s allies accused of apartheid practices.

New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie is the object of intense devotion among some on the right (Glenn Beck in particular). No surprise, then, that he'd get a lot of attention for going to Washington and delivering a stern lecture about how to fix the deficit. And no surprise that he'd talk about Social Security. It has nothing to do with the deficit, but that's another matter.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was on hand to cheer on Christie's message (2/16/11). Christie pokes fun at his weight, which apparently makes his truth-telling even more appealing:

But his physique also works to his advantage by reinforcing Christie's appeal as something other than the blow-dried politician who says whatever the voters want to hear. Christie isn't pretty, and he tells ugly truths.

And what was this ugly truth? The need to cut Social Security benefits. As Milbank put it, Christie is brave enough to "to scold both parties in Washington for their failure to talk about what must be done to solve the debt crisis. " He writes:

Christie, however, is talking about it. "You're going to have to raise the retirement age for Social Security," he said. "Whoa-ho! I just said it, and I'm still standing here. I did not vaporize into the carpeting, and I said it."

Now for this to be any kind of truth--ugly or not--it has to be, well, true. As Matthew Yglesias pointed out:

Closing the projected actuarial gap in Social Security requires some combination of more immigration, higher taxes and lower benefits. Relative to higher taxes, lower benefits tend to be preferred by richer people. And of all the different ways to reduce benefits, raising the retirement age is the one that does the most to punish the poor and demands the least sacrifice from the rich.

Robert Reich, who was once a Social Security trustee, wrote a column laying out a much easier fix--raising the cap on income subject to the Social Security tax, which in 1983 was designed to hit 90 percent of income. It no longer does that, because rich people have gotten substantially richer. Reich writes:

If we want to go back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax would need to be raised to $180,000.

Presto. Social Security's long-term (beyond 26 years from now) problem would be solved.

So there's no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical response to the increasing concentration of income at the top is simply to raise the ceiling.

If Christie's "ugly truth" isn't true, why does Milbank think it is? It might be because he has a record of Social Security scaremongering, writing a column in 2007 warning that Social Security was going to be "insolvent" due to the retirement of the Baby Boomers.  His response to FAIR's criticism was that he was writing about the combined effects of Social Security and Medicare--which is problematic on an entirely different level.

Chris Christie wasn't speaking the truth. But he was sending the same kind of message that people like Milbank want to hear: that workers should get benefit cuts in order to preserve tax cuts for the wealthy. It's ugly, but it's not the truth.

A Newsweek report (2/21/11) looks at the CIA's aerial drone assassination program through the agency's eyes--leaving questions about civilian deaths and the effort's dubious legality for a couple of brief paragraphs at the end. To encourage Newsweek to take critics of the drone program seriously, see FAIR's new Action Alert. Please leave copies of your messages--or comments on the alert--in the comments thread here.

The Guardian published a piece yesterday (2/15/11) based on an interview with "Curveball," the Iraqi exile whose fraudulent claims about Iraq's WMDs helped the Bush administration sell the Iraq War. "I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime," he explained.

The piece is pretty revealing--as Curveball watched Colin Powell's UN address in February 2003, the Guardian reports that "he had not met a U.S. official, let alone been interviewed by one."

One "flight of fantasy" Curveball delivered was the  claim that Iraq was manufacturing mobile bio-weapons labs. These did not exist. But if you were watching U.S. television news during the war, you got to see them discovered by at least two networks:

ABC:

On April 26, ABC's World News Tonight led with a major scoop. Anchor Claire Shipman announced at the top of the broadcast, "U.S. troops discover chemical agents, missiles, and what could be a mobile laboratory in Iraq. An ABC News exclusive." But ABC's "exclusive," as it turns out, appears to be false.

And on NBC (5/11/03):

May 11, 2003

—NBC anchor John Seigenthaler introduces a story about trailers found in Iraq that some U.S. officials say are mobile biological warfare labs: "There is new evidence tonight that Saddam Hussein's regime was capable of building weapons of mass destruction." Reporter Jim Avila concludes the report by declaring that the findings present "a set of circumstances military sources contend is very close to that elusive smoking gun."

May 12, 2003
—In a follow-up report, NBC Nightly News correspondent Jim Avila declares that two trailers found by the U.S. military in northern Iraq "may be the most significant WMD findings of the war." Former U.N. nuclear inspector David Kay performs an impromptu inspection—armed with a pointer, he rattles off the trailer's parts: "This is a compressor. You want to keep the fermentation process under pressure so it goes faster. This vessel is the fermenter...." Avila expresses little doubt about the discovery: "A mobile lab capable of manufacturing anthrax or botulism from the back of a truck, with equipment manufactured as late as 2003."

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's Teach for America column today (2/15/11) demonstrates a real problem with logic. "Cut Teach for America Funding and We'll Be Closer to Flunking the Future," declares the headline, with Cohen kicking things off this way:

The best teacher in America was in Washington over the weekend. So was the best principal. I cannot name these individuals because they are early in their careers, and the truth of the matter is that I am just playing the odds. They are members of Teach for America, a kind of Peace Corps for the school room--a program so select that most applicants had an easier time being admitted to their college than they did getting into Teach for America. No matter. Its funding is being cut.

Cohen goes on to explain that the program's funding likely won't be cut. But the bigger problem is the assumption that Teach for America teachers are the best--he's just "playing the odds" here, predicting that the best educators of the future will be drawn from the ranks of this "Peace Corps for the school room." His evidence for this could charitably be called "thin." Teach for America, he writes,

is supposed to produce smart students. It also produces incredible statistics. This year it got 48,000 applicants and accepted 5,300 of them. About 18 percent of the Harvard senior class applied; so did 27 percent of Spelman's, a traditionally black women's school.

Note that these statistics don't say anything at all about whether Teach for America actually produces "smart students."  But that's all that Cohen comes up with.

What are the real odds that Teach for America teachers will be the best, or even good? I have no idea. Barbara Miner's profile of Teach for America in the Spring 2010 issue of Rethinking Schools points out that one of the chief criticisms of the program is that many who go through the two-year program don't stick around the classroom. But are they better teachers? One study found "no instance where uncerti­fied Teach for America teachers per­formed as well as standard certified teachers of comparable experience levels teaching in similar settings." Yes, the program attracts a lot of applicants. But it also seems designed to promote career paths outside the classroom:

TFA, meanwhile, actively promotes the value of joining its teaching corps, especially for those thinking of gradu­ate school or immediately transition­ing to a corporate job. Its website boasts of TFA's partnership with over 150 graduate schools offering TFA alumni benefits such as two-year de­ferrals, fellowships, course credits and waived application fees. The most popular schools for TFA alumni are Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Northwest­ern and the University of California-Berkeley--with Harvard the overall top choice. Its employer partners, which ac­tively recruit TFA alumni, are equal­ly prestigious and include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, KPMG, Credit Suisse, McKinsey & Company and Google.

Cohen's column is yet more example of corporate media's fondndess for Teach for America. "If the maniacal budget cutters have their way, the best teacher in America will become another investment banker," he writes.  But Cohen provides no evidence that Teach for America produces such teachers--and apparently doesn't think he needs to.

For a good example of how not to report the Afghan War, check out the lead story in today's USA Today (2/15/11):

General: Taliban 'Beaten' by Surge
Momentum Shifts in Afghanistan

The piece--by Jim Michaels, who has an unfortunate history of this kind of reporting--is mostly sourced to Richard Mills, the Marine general who's in charge of the fight in Afghanistan's Helmand province. Unsurprisingly, he thinks he's doing a bang-up job; Michaels' story begins:

Coalition forces in Afghanistan have beaten the insurgency in an important stronghold of Taliban fighters, though pockets of resistance remain, a U.S. commander said Monday in an interview with USA Today.

Mills provides a variety of self-congratulatory quotes to Michaels: "This is really the heart of the insurgency.... I believe they have been beaten."... "They've suffered defeat after defeat on the battlefield."... "You saw a population that turned on the Taliban."

But surely USA Today doesn't believe you can make an entire story out of somebody talking about what a good job they're doing? No, Michaels also turns to a representative of a right-wing think tank to tell you what a good job Mills is doing:

The progress in Helmand province "shows you the momentum is shifting," said James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Loosening the Taliban's grip on the drug trade "could have a cascading effect in the years ahead," he said.

Michaels also gets a quote from military analyst Anthony Cordesman, a former McCain aide known for his faithful following of the military line. He cautions that the success in Helmand doesn't mean that the United States will be able to leave Afghanistan anytime soon: "We haven't shown that Afghan forces can hold. It's going to be a couple of years before we know what these accomplishments mean."

Compare this credulous, boosterish coverage to the approach of Politics Daily's David Wood, whose story from yesterday (2/14/11) begins:

The top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, likes to describe the tactical gains his troops are making against insurgents. But a stream of independent data and analysis suggests a wide gap between those battlefield gains and the strategic progress needed to convince a skeptical President Obama, Congress and the public to stay with the war effort for at least three more years.

Rather than relying solely on the military itself and cheerleading analysts to evaluate the state of the war, Wood turns to knowledgeable independent experts, like the NGO Safety Office, a group helping humanitarian groups in Afghanistan, whose report finds "indisputable evidence that the situation is deteriorating.'' The full report, which Wood links to, describes the Taliban as "securing new strongholds in the north, west and east of the country," with "momentum...unaffected by U.S.-led counterinsurgency measures." The military's "massive interventions in Helmand and Kandahar," the report found, "achieved little other than to diversify and diffuse the insurgency."

Why is this picture so different from the one presented by U.S. military officials? The military's public pronouncements, explains NGO Safety Office director Nic Lee, "are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion.'' Judging by this article, USA Today would seem to have the same intention.

The New York Times stuck it to the former Defense secretary in a Sunday magazine interview:

People sometimes call you a war criminal. Does that bother you?

For the record, Rumsfeld did seem slightly bothered, because it's "totally untrue. And life goes on."

From the Washington Post piece today (2/15/11) about TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky's resignation:

"We're fine with critics," said one Treasury official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak more candidly. "[But] he's been consistently wrong about a lot of big things."

That's a pretty serious charge to level at someone--which is probably why you'd do so anonymously, since then you don't have to back it up.  Why the Post would print it is another matter entirely. The fact that they would refer to this as a "candid" assessment is totally puzzling. Read the rest of the article, though, and you come away with a sense that Barofsky upset the wrong people:

He quickly emerged as an aggressive overseer, viewed as a much-needed cop monitoring for waste and fraud within TARP by some lawmakers and watchdog groups, and, by Treasury officials and financial-industry representatives, as a self-promoter whose overreaching investigations scared some needy banks away from participating in the federal aid program.

In his sometimes scathing reports to Congress, Barofsky showed little reluctance in criticizing administration officials on everything from how their lack of transparency was fueling "anger, cynicism and distrust" to how their foreclosure prevention efforts had fallen well below expectations.

If the Post really believes that Barofsky was "wrong about a lot of big things," it should explain--or get someone else to do so.  Giving a government official--who has presumably been on the receiving end of Barofsky's criticism--a chance to hit back anonymously is poor journalism.

A New York Times op-ed today (2/15/11) by Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro ("Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?") uses William Shakespeare as exhibit A in their case for copyright, noting that theater flourished in 16th century England because playwrights were able to make money by charging people to enter their theaters.

This they translate into a sweeping argument against attempts to reform copyright law, disparaging

a handful of law professors and other experts who have made careers of fashioning counterintuitive arguments holding that copyright impedes creativity and progress. Their theory is that if we severely weaken copyright protections, innovation will truly flourish. It's a seductive thought, but it ignores centuries of scientific and technological progress based on the principle that a creative person should have some assurance of being rewarded for his innovative work.

It's actually not counterintuitive at all--and, in fact, Shakespeare is exhibit A here. Many of Shakespeare's most famous and beloved plays, written in the late 1500s and early 1600s, borrowed heavily from other works that, under current U.S. (or British) copyright law, would have been off-limits to him. (In turn, many of those works were themselves based on other sources in a long derivative chain of what today would be called massive copyright infringement.)

Shakespeare's classics Romeo and Juliet, Othello, As You Like It and Measure for Measure, among others, were based on works of fiction published in the decades before Shakespeare's career. They thus would have been illegal under current U.S. copyright law, which keeps works out of the public domain for 70 years after the death of the author, or a total of 95 years for works for hire. Copyright protection for decades after Shakespeare's death would have had no impact on his ability to produce work and limited impact on his incentive to do so--while the inability to retell contemporary stories would have directly restricted his creativity.

Turow, Aiken and Shapiro warn, "We tamper with those [copyright] rules at our peril." Too bad lawmakers hadn't gotten that warning earlier; they've extended copyright from 28 years to a maximum of 95 years over the course of U.S. history, and have lengthened it by 39 years just since 1976 (Extra!, 8/10). It's impossible to say how many literary masterpieces have not been written as a result.

The subhead sums up the point of USA Today's lead story today (2/14/11) about Barack Obama's budget proposal:

Obama Proposes Cuts to Trim Deficit; GOP, Others Want More

The piece by Richard Wolf and Mimi Hall begins, "President Obama will send Congress a 2012 budget today that would trim the budget deficit by $1.1 trillion over the next decade, but Republicans and nonpartisan budget experts are already saying that's not enough." And that's how the story is framed: You've got the White House vs. the Republicans, and "nonpartisan budget experts" who agree with the Republicans.

"We're going to make tough choices," promises the White House budget director--who is countered by USA Today: "Those choices aren't as tough, however, as the ones made by Obama's bipartisan fiscal commission in December." Two sources--described a second time as "nonpartisan budget experts," in case we missed it the first time--concur: Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, accuses the White House of "a political unwillingness to tackle the tough issues," while Robert Bixby, director of the Concord Coalition, described as "a fiscal watchdog group," charges that "the entitlement and tax reform agenda will apparently be deferred yet again."

So everybody who's not a partisan or an amateur, apparently, believes that Obama's cuts don't go far enough? Of course that's not true; USA Today's "experts" actually occupy a narrow strip of ideological terrain, with both the groups they represent receiving funding from billionaire deficit hawk Pete Peterson. The Concord Coalition is a Peterson creation; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in addition to its backing from Peterson, is part of the New America Foundation, whose "Leadership Council"--people who give them at least $25,000 a year and as a result "participate in the intellectual life of the Foundation in numerous ways"--has included executives from such companies as Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs and a variety of other financial industry firms.

It's very clear that such entities have a definition of the kind of "tough" that would be desirable that is very different from the "tough" that would be advocated by equally nonpartisan experts at a group like the Economic Policy Institute, which is critical of the president's budget for being too quick to cut spending during an economic crisis.

But the only other sources in the story, besides the White House and the Peterson-affiliated deficit hawks, are House Speaker John Boehner--who says Obama's budget "will continue to destroy jobs by spending too much, borrowing too much and taxing too much"--and "150 economists" rounded up by Boehner who insist in an open letter that "to support real economic growth and support the creation of private-sector jobs, immediate action is needed to rein in federal spending." That one could find far more than 150 economists who would give you the standard economic line that cutting federal spending at a time of depressed demand is not a way to create jobs, private-sector or otherwise, is not even hinted at by USA Today.

From his Meet the Press interview with House Speaker John Boehner (2/13/11):

 On entitlements, like Social Security, you said the retirement age should be raised, but you said you don't want to get into negotiating how that happens just now until the problem is better defined.  Again, when it comes to leadership, when it comes to the need to, you know, have no limit on cutting, don't you think Americans understand what the problem with Social Security is?  What will it take for you to join with the White House to make real reform to deal with this piece of the budget?

When interviewers like Gregory demand more "leadership" on a given issue, it's not hard to figure out what they mean.  A question like this implies that Social Security is a big, big problem in need of a big, big solution--and that raising the retirement age (which is, remember, a benefit cut) isn't enough to deal with the problem.

Just a few months ago (FAIR Blog, 11/15/10), Gregory's NBC program featured a discussion of the White House's right-leaning deficit commission involving right-wingers Alan Greenspan and Newt Gingrich, with right-wing Democrat Harold Ford in the mix too. Gregory's point then was much the same:

I don't see why, for instance, some of these suggestions, Harold, on Social Security are going to be demagogued to death. Why, in 50 years, people can't look at raising the retirement age and have that be a serious discussion point?

As we noted back in that November post, the retirement age is already rising, which amounts to a benefit cut for the poor, and raising the cap on taxable income--which would be a tax hike on the wealthy--would take care of all the supposed long-term problems with Social Security's finances. But something tells me that you're not likely to see David Gregory demanding that any political leaders declare their support for this simple fix.

The Washington Post yesterday (2/13/11):

Mubarak Resignation Throws Into Question U.S./Egyptian Counterterrorism Work

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 13, 2011; A01

For decades, Egypt's government has been a critical partner for U.S. intelligence agencies, sharing information on extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and working hand in glove on counterterrorism operations. Now the future of that cooperation is in question.

That "work" and "cooperation" includes, among other things, rendition and torture.

It'd be more helpful if this were made clear from the outset, instead of being mentioned in the 11th paragraph of the story.

On Sunday (2/13/11), the Washington Post had an odd piece about Obama's budget proposal--starting with the odd headline, "Obama to Propose Spending Cuts in Budget Plan Aimed at Countering Conservatives." Republicans have been stressing spending cuts, so Obama is "countering" that with... spending cuts? Huh.

The piece tries to argue that these calls for austerity are merely the political system reacting to the will of the voters, particularly self-described independents:

Obama is sending a similar message, but to a different constituency: the independent voters who abandoned Democrats in droves last year and who are crucial to the president's 2012 reelection prospects. This bloc shares the tea party's alarm over the $14 trillion national debt but takes a more nuanced view of how to achieve fiscal balance.

As Dean Baker points out, the idea that voters in 2010--independents or otherwise--were sounding an alarm about the debt isn't supported by the evidence (though it's long been touted in the corporate media as the leading message of the midterms). But the point of some of the articles about the Obama budget is that it doesn't go far enough. Today's Post (2/14/11), for instance, has an article headlined "Obama Spending Plan Criticized for Avoiding Deficit Commission's Major Proposals"--a pretty clear sign that the budget critics worth listening to are the ones who want deeper spending cuts.

Unrelated to budgeting, the Sunday Post piece describes Republican ideas on education spending cuts that would

wipe out two decades of education initiatives by pulling nearly $5 billion from the Education Department, including funds for math and science and the popular Teach for America program, which puts well-trained teachers in needy schools.

The point of Teach for America is actually more like the opposite--sending novice teachers to go into "needy" districts for two-year stints in the classroom, it operates under the premise that children are well-served by educators who are not "well-trained."