by Patrick Lang
I had many levels of security clearance during my long government life as well as access to many “compartments” of information involving projects and intelligence “products” so dear to the state that access to them was limited to those on special “bigot lists.”
 Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including PBS’s Newshour, and most recently on MSNBC’s Hardball and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” His CV and blog are linked below the fold. |
I understood that with that access came an obligation to the state to protect the secrets of the American government. This obligation was entered into freely as a member of “the team.” At times a written undertaking of confidentiality was required before access was granted. I accepted that because I was a public servant.
It could be argued that as historic events recede in time this obligation becomes problematic when confronted with the need to complete the public record, but at the time when access is granted there was not and is not any doubt that someone who accepts secret information from the government, any government, has accepted the government as his/her master,
What then are we to make of the news that Judith Miller was granted some sort of security clearance by the Defense Department so that she could participate in the hunt for Iraqi WMD and presumably “write up” the successful result of that search when it occurred. She had previously written in breathless anticipation that such weapons would be found in Iraq after an American invasion, and now we know that the government provided her with access to classified information to facilitate a continuation of her attempt to validate the causes for which we fought. This continued validation was to be conducted in the pages of the New York Times (“All The News That Is Fit To Print”). This knowledge of her status as a “trusted person” in the eyes of the Bush Administration and her continued “stonewalling” of her colleagues at the Times with regard to the details of her relationship with Administration personalities leads me to the OPINION that her loyalties were divided in at least two directions.
Was she alone in this bifurcated allegiance (government and the news)? It hardly seems likely. There were other nationally know journalists who were treated in a very special way by the Bush Administration. They were welcome guests of the various people of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, were briefed there regularly, given access to serving military officers to make their “research” more authoritative. No. we should not believe that it was only Miller who in my OPINION owed the “right” story to the government.
In Kubrick’s brilliant film, “Full Metal Jacket,” “Joker” the enlisted “Stars and Stripes” reporter is told by the Saigon bureau chief, a marine lieutenant, that he is to go out and find good news because the “troops need it.” “Stars and Stripes” is a “house” newspaper for the armed forces.
Are the New York Times and other media who have gone out to find “good news because the troops need it? house media of the government?
How many more “Millers” are there?
Pat Lang
LIST of articles continued BELOW:
THREATS AND RESPONSES: BAGHDAD’S ARSENAL; White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons
… By JUDITH MILLER and MICHAEL R. GORDON …View free preview
THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE IRAQIS; U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS
… By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JUDITH MILLER …
U.S. Germ Warfare Review Faults Plan on Enforcement
… By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JUDITH MILLER …View free preview
U.S. and Russia Seek New Ways To Detect Cheating on Test Ban
… By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JUDITH MILLER …View free preview
………………………………………………….
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib <a href="Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
Col. Lang, your analysis’ keep getting better and better as time goes on. Don’t ya just know that this is truly a farse for the American ppl to consume. Watched a documentary last noc about VN and a group of infantry ppl who got caught in an ambush. Can’t recall the lot of their numbers..but Hoy was the biggest duck in the puddle of this bru ha ha. The debriefing was just like you said..make it look good!!!! oh Hell nothing ever changes…does it? :o) Thanks for being honest with us here to tell it like it is, for the most part…
I don’t think her allegiance was bifurcated. She wasn’t reallly a reporter as much as a person who liked the excitement of reporting. That excitement came from the government, not the New York Times.
Whoever provides her the excitement is the source of her pleasure. She is not capable of being loyal, she is only interested in gratificationl.
So the word allegiance is misleading, I think. She’s not evloved enough. She’s a little girl. Look at her manner. She;s just a little girl, with a little girl smile, haircut. She giggles.
This is what Amy Goodman said yesterday on MSNBC’s Hardball:
ALSO: I heard that the Pentagon has denied that she had a security clearance.
.
As far as I remember, sharing confidential info is only permitted on a need to know basis. Just because a colleague has an equivalent status, you do not share confidential information unless it’s needed for his job.
“The fundamental intellectual assumptions that have guided our Intelligence Community’s approach to managing national security information for half a century may be in some respects crucially flawed,” he writes.
Along the way, he challenges some longstanding practices that are so deeply-rooted that no one normally thinks to question them, such as the application of the “need to know” standard for sharing information.
“It may not be true,” Sen. Shelby proposes radically, “that information-holders — the traditional arbiters of who can see ‘their’ data — are the entities best placed to determine whether outsiders have any ‘need to know’ data in their possession. Analysts who seek access to information, it turns out, may well be the participants best equipped to determine what their particular expertise and contextual understanding can bring to the analysis of certain types of data.”
But information sharing is not exactly the solution either, “inasmuch as ‘sharing’ connotes ownership by the party that decides to share it, an idea that is antithetical to truly empowering analysts to connect all the right ‘dots’.”
Discussion yesterday :: read on »»
By Ivo Daalder @ America Abroad
Having now waded through The Times’s articles on Judy Miller, one new fact struck me as particularly bizarre — Miller, by her own admission, was cleared to see secret information as part of her assignment as an “embedded” reporter in Iraq.
I had no idea journalists could receive security clearances — and I had no idea that the mainstream media would allow their reporters to have such clearances. After all, one of the most important obligations of a person receiving security clearances is not to reveal that information at any time, while one of the most important obligations of a reporter is precisely to reveal information the public has a need and right to know.
Can someone explain why this glaring conflict of interest is acceptable?
Some expert comments – read on »»
<embedded>The critics
Bill Vann (WSWs) suggested that Miller’s listing as a speaker for the Middle East Forum, a right-wing lobbying group, could be a violation of Times ethics guidelines, which barred reporters from participating in groups that seek to shape public policy.
Soon after, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reported on a conflict within the Times staff. Quoting an irate e-mail from Baghdad bureau chief John Burns concerning a Chalabi story that he had assigned to another reporter, Kurtz included some of Miller’s response, shedding even more light on how dubious her sources might have been: “I’ve been covering Chalabi for about 10 years. . . . He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.” More troubling still, it turned out, the army unit in which she was embedded was “using Chalabi’s Intel and document network for its own WMD work.” [6]
No accountability–not then, not now
As Vice President Dick Cheney candidly admitted during the first Gulf War, when he served as defense secretary, “I do not look on the press as an asset. Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed.” [17] During the second Gulf conflict, more than 600 reporters were “managed” as “embeds,” agreeing to sign contracts with the military limiting when and what they could report. Each was able to provide a small slice of the war almost instantaneously; access was good, and the general feeling was that it worked well for both sides. [18] But were they able to draw the line between propaganda and journalism?
Daniel Pipes – Middle East Forum – Judith Miller
The article having leapt from The Times’ front page, my dissection of it below will not be the first. Any reading of the piece should perhaps occur in light of Miller’s relationship with the Middle East Forum, run by the controversial Daniel Pipes, who has been in the news of late as a Bush nominee to the congressionally chartered U.S. Institute of Peace. A non-profit, the forum was founded in 1994.
▼ ▼ ▼
Judith Miller, regrettably be just the tip of the iceberg as far as intelligence agents masquerading as journalists.It is hard to know who is or who isn’t a plant.Given the large scale herd instinct of our media and the near totalitarian unanimity of views in both the print and visual media, I would venture to guess that this disease is widespread and may well have contaminated our well.
In these matters, I proceed on the assumption that what William H.Colby, ex CIA Director told a Senate Commmission: ” Anyone who is anyone in the news business is directly or indirectly under the control of the CIA”. Many things that remain unclear become suddenly clear when you assess that statement and accept its premise.