Presswatch/Silly Seasonings
Ledeen, Michael
PRESSWATCH SILLY SEASONINGS by Michael Ledeen I t's the silly season, and not just because of the nominating conventions of what are misguidedly called our political parties. For two days in the...
...But the easiest way to summarize the dilemma is to state the unfortunate fact of life in contemporary American politics: the underlying principle of our entire legal system—a man is innocent until proven guilty—has been turned topsy-turvy...
...They may have considered the postwar Soviet Union an ally (the Rosenbergs carried out espionage well after the war was over), but the United States government certainly didn't...
...Israel bowed to the pressure...
...Their activities took place during World War II, when America and Russia were allies . . .) Yet like the Pollards, the Rosen-bergs received a sentence much harsher than that of non-Jews convicted of similar offenses .. . It is too late today to reverse the harsh and unjust sentence received by the Rosen-bergs and restore them to life...
...I expected to see dozens of angry columns and letters in our major media, but I didn't see any...
...For a while, the New York Times declined to print some of the information because, in the words of an internal memorandum written by Times editor Max Frankel, "we do not want to let unidentified official sources use us to circulate charges against identifiable people when they provide no named complainants or other verifiable evidence...
...But it's not the most important point...
...government doesn't have to help the Kremlin keep its citizens on the other side of the Iron Curtain...
...espionage is not made any the less heinous if ostensibly carried out for a friendly country...
...Why have Evans and Novak, the self-appointed overseers of high morality in the Middle East, not given us the inside story of Syria's adoption of the Sharon plan for West Beirut...
...Treason is not in the eye of the beholder...
...Nowadays, when a person is accused in the press, he is considered guilty until he manages to prove his innocence...
...So they buried it...
...Double Standards Have you noticed that the Syrian army in recent months has driven the PLO out of Beirut, and carried out a massacre in a Palestinian "refugee camp" south of the city...
...In addition to the excellent book by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton (The Rosenberg File) of a few years ago, William Corson and Robert Crowley tell us in The New KGB that The incontrovertible evidence of the Rosenbergs' complicity was never used...
...It consisted of NKVD cipher traffic, intercepted and decrypted by the United States, which identified the members of the net by name...
...For two days in the middle of July, there were virtually no bylines in the Washington Post, because of a labor dispute between the owners and the Writers Guild...
...Stops Giving Visas in Moscow...
...First of all, if an official of the United States government wants to help an ally, he has many official ways in which to do it...
...Which brings us to point number two: if one is recruited by foreign intelligence officers, one does not necessarily know for whom those officers are really working...
...This irresponsible revelation—of a story known to every major publication, yet unreported because of the danger to the people involved—may have cost the lives of several thousand Ethiopian Jews, and certainly prevented or at least delayed the exodus, as the airlift was immediately suspended...
...Here and there you might have read some sparse coverage of these events...
...But the editorial page spoiled the fun, and carried only signed columns...
...Now the same publication gives us an editorial (June 23) on Jonathan Jay Pollard, comparing him to the Rosen-bergs (Julius and Ethel, the American Jews who stole American nuclear secrets at the behest of the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s...
...it is a specific, illegal, and despicable act...
...The Jewish Week is out of line...
...How else to explain the decision by the United States government to "stop granting exit interviews to those seeking to emigrate [from the Soviet Union] until October because of insufficient funding in the U.S...
...And did treason not carry a death sentence...
...This from the Washington Post's fine Moscow correspondent, Gary Lee, on July 9. Can you believe it...
...But don't stop there...
...That in itself is worthy of note...
...The former chief of the FBI unit that handled the case has unsuccessfully sought the public release of the intercepts .. . Second, the notion that the Rosen-bergs were only helping an "ally...
...Remember the plaintive call of Ray Donovan: "Where do I go to get my reputation back...
...The Pollards did it, andthey deserve to sit in jail for a very long time...
...And so we bestow upon them their bronze grapes...
...The claim that the Pollards should have been given lenient treatment because they were "helping an ally" of the United States simply doesn't stand up...
...If you were an intelligence officer of the KGB, would you not try to recruit some Americans to help you by claiming that you were an official of some friendly government...
...So write to your Congressthing and tell it that the gulags are bad enough...
...Almost all the original information given to the press came from government officials under conditions of anonymity...
...Normally, in America, the winners get the headlines, and those (like the Post in this case) who finish tied for second and third place get honorable mention further down in the story...
...Syria did not receive any pressure, and carried out the policy...
...Under this cheery headline, the lead paragraph bragged: The Washington Post has received 28 design awards this year from the Society of Newspaper Design, ranking The Post among the top three papers in the country in the number of awards for layouts and artwork in a newspaper...
...As for the massacre in the refugee camp, one wonders what happened to all those noble American journalists who gave us so many column yards about Sabra and Shatila...
...Third, the notion that the Rosenbergs' sentence was "unjust...
...Story of the Month I Bet You Missed I don't think much of conspiracy theories as a general rule, but there was one little story in mid-July that really got me thinking deeply about the possibility of secret collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Are Palestinians murdered by Syrians less noble than Palestinians murdered by Phalangists...
...It was fun to have an entire front page with bylines like "Washington Post staff writer," and try to figure out who had written what...
...But the Post people, for whom magnanimity is believed to be an antacid rather than an appropriate attitude for journalists and editors, couldn't bring themselves to announce that their sole competitor had beaten them at something...
...And the Post, to its credit, even had the right headline: "U.S...
...the U.S...
...Again...
...Where, for that matter, are the leaders of the various Arab-American organizations, who have been curiously silent during the Syrian assaults...
...This cherished trophy (a bronze casting of the original bunch of sour grapes) was earned by the unsigned story on page 6 on July 9: "Post Wins 28 Newspaper Design Awards...
...Among a tiny handful of scabs who put their names on their articles: Walter Pincus, Jim Hoagland, and William Branigin...
...And so great is the impact of the media coverage that even if you are ultimately cleared, you have been severely damaged...
...Speaking of the Post (and what better publication to speak of during the silly season), we have awarded it and its Michael Ledeen's new book, Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair, will be released by Scribner's in September distinguished editor, Benjamin Bradlee, Sr., the spoil sport award for July...
...Where is John Chancellor...
...This is known as "false flag recruitments," which go on all the time...
...The language is astonishing: Like the Pollards, the foreign state the Rosenbergs allegedly had worked for had 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 been an ally, not an enemy, country and the motive was ideological, not mercenary...
...The real issue is whether allegations in the form of leaks, without supporting evidence, should be published at all...
...Would that more of your colleagues in the media took it slow, refrained from publishing right away, and thought harder about the consequences of publication...
...Was passing American nuclear secrets to the Kremlin not treason...
...However, you have to read all the way down to the sixth paragraph to find out that "the Washington Times won the most design awards this year, 38, including one for the best of the show...
...But perhaps something can still be done for the Pollards...
...It is hard to imagine a more wrongheaded editorial...
...The Disgrace of Washington Jewish Week Little known outside journalistic circles and of course the Washington Jewish community, the Washington Jewish Week made a bit of a name for itself a few years ago when it was the first publication in the civilized world to reveal that there was a secret Israeli program to evacuate Ethiopian Jews...
...That brings us to the Pollards...
...More next time...
...The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" is a fine one, and is every bit as important as the First Amendment...
...budget for settling political refugees...
...Dear Max Frankel: full marks for your ethical concerns...
...Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when you are accused of something in the press, officialdom treats you as a moral and ethical leper...
...First, the idea that the Rosenbergs "allegedly" worked for the Soviet Union...
...First, the editorialists at the Week complain about the treatment of the Rosenbergs (maybe they weren't guilty, how could the Jewish judge and the Jewish prosecuting attorney have been so vigorous in their treatment of the Rosenbergs, why did the "establishment" Jewish organizations not do anything for the Rosen-bergs...
...It is useful to remind ourselves that when Israel threatened to drive the PLO out of Beirut in 1982, the entire world moved as one to prevent it, and the American media unleashed a torrent of hostile reportage on the possible consequences of such a step...
...This month I have only enough space to raise the issue...
...Take on the ethical dilemma in its entirety...
...and then compare that case with Pollard...
...The Ethics of Anonymous Sources There is a bit of quiet hand-wringing going on within the journalistic community in Washington following the revelations of Pentagon influence-peddling...
...next month I'll devote most of the columnto this matter...
...It's a good point (although the Times, along with every other publication and network, caved in shortly thereafter, once the information appeared elsewhere...
Vol. 21 • September 1988 • No. 9
