Scrapbook
Scrapbook You Can't Find What You Don't Look For The war against Saddam Hussein hasn't started, but the war against George W. Bush is well underway—a war of leaks, that is. The leaking is...
...For instance, on September 10, the Washington Post ran a front page story headlined, "U.S...
...government has found no such links...
...In the 1980s, the last time crime reports went up as victimization declined, James Q. Wilson theorized that the trends stemmed from most neighborhoods' getting safer as inner-city areas got hammered...
...Embellishing the Threat Last Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that congressional Democrats were unmoved by classified briefings from President Bush's top advisers...
...Things are different now: Crime continues to fall in high-poverty areas of cities like New York and Chicago...
...It appears that lower crime rates have increased expectations of safety, while September 11 jitters made people more likely to call the police...
...The best explanation is that Americans driving unregistered cars or involved with criminal activity will, understandably, shy away from police stations after thefts...
...As more people register their cars and otherwise obey the law, they become willing to call the police...
...In Blurbo Veritas THE SCRAPBOOK had been under the impression that our colleague Fred Barnes was the first to blow the whistle on historian Stephen Ambrose's copy-catting, with his cover story for this magazine last January...
...But the latest numbers show that America's run of success against crime isn't over yet...
...Crime Implosion A little over two months after blaring headlines in the New York Times announced an end to America's decade-long crime drop, new statistics show that the nation continues to get safer...
...And that's why . . . we want to have inspections...
...Unlike the FBI's Uniform Crime Report statistics—which come from police departments around the country—the BJS collects victimization numbers through a national survey...
...Is it too busy...
...Statistics on car theft—a crime that people are almost certain to remember and want to report—provide evidence of this civilizing effect: Car theft rose significantly in the FBI statistics but remained stable in the victimization survey...
...Many people say quietly that Nelson Mandela made a fool of himself with this observation last week...
...Was she calling someone (the briefings were conducted by Condi Rice and George Tenet) a liar...
...That would bolster the hawks in the Defense Department at the expense of the dialogue-first forces in the State Department and the CIA...
...In other words, it's quite plausible that Saddam has direct, provable links to al Qaeda, but we're not certain because we haven't looked into it...
...And as this war goes on, we are learning that many career bureaucrats have developed sophisticated misinformation delivery systems...
...I steal from him shamelessly in my lectures...
...It's a thin reed," an unnamed intelligence source said...
...Better instead simply to leak stories claiming there are no links—even if those claims are undermined by the facts contained in those very same articles...
...But an alert reader points out that Ambrose himself had previously all but given the game away, with this blurb for John W. Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which won a Pulitzer and the 1999 National Book Award: "Without question, Dower is America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific...
...The article explained that the U.S...
...Even amidst lower crime rates and terrorist anxiety, however, people won't always call the police about minor incidents, but they will mention them in a survey...
...Much to the surprise of the Kurdish officials, U.S...
...Not Claiming Iraqi Link to Terror...
...But of course the story wasn't true...
...I do make sure to give him credit when I steal from his material in my books— Stephen E. Ambrose...
...Did Pelosi mean "a fictitious touch to a factual account," as Webster's defines the term...
...But "we don't know where the facilities are...
...And why hasn't the CIA asked the 15 to 20 captured al Qaeda members...
...For that matter, why hasn't the CIA set up an Iraq task force in its anti-terrorism network...
...The new survey doesn't provide reason for complacency, however...
...It was "more descriptive" and "not meant to cast aspersions...
...The leaking is conducted by members of the president's own administration, and seems designed to undermine his policies...
...In the FBI's data, over 60 percent of the total crime increase stemmed from increases in the "larceny/ theft" category, which includes offenses as trivial as stealing a candy bar...
...It was an artful leak by the intelligence community...
...As Pelosi had elaborated to Fox's Bill O'Reilly: "If we knew a target to make a preemptive strike against, as we had targeted certain facilities in the Sudan and Afghanistan, then that would be a different story...
...The Post noted that the Kurdish Patriotic Union, an anti-Saddam group in northern Iraq, has jailed 15 to 20 al Qaeda members...
...most of it after September 11...
...They have contempt for it...
...The Post quoted one U.S...
...So, as we understand it, Pelosi is saying it would be really nice if Saddam would just show us in which building he keeps the weapons of mass destruction, and then we could send a cruise missile to destroy them...
...Take it away, armchair Freudians...
...Iraq, they'd concluded, didn't pose an imminent threat...
...Reported crime rates, indeed, may have started to go up a bit because things are getting better...
...Or would that be an embellishment...
...Mandela's Dotage...
...What caught The Scrapbook's eye, however, was a statement from Nancy Pelosi, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee...
...It's not implausible that they are working with Saddam...
...According to June FBI data, meanwhile, violent crime rates fell fractionally while property crime rates rose about I percent...
...Why has victimization plummeted as reported crime rates rose...
...Maybe because if it investigated Saddam's links to al Qae-da, it might find some...
...All of the increase in reported crime, furthermore, happened after June 2001...
...This is not the view of The Scrapbook, but that is what is being said by many people...
...And if it found some, it would have to report them to the president...
...And what the story really revealed are the rather extraordinary shortcomings of American intelligence...
...During the 1990s, middle-class standards of civility were restored to many inner-city neighborhoods...
...official as saying, "We really don't know whether they are under al Qaeda or Saddam's control...
...But now that you've had black secretary generals like Boutros Boutros-Ghali, like Kofi Annan, they do not respect the United Nations...
...I did not hear anything today that was different about [Hussein's] capabilities," the Post quoted Pelosi as saying, just a few "embellishments...
...President Bush twice referred to Iraq's links to terrorist organization in his U.N...
...By all accounts, murder rose a bit during 2001, and robbery rates remain stubbornly stable...
...Many people say quietly, but they don't have the courage to stand up and say publicly, that when there were white secretary generals you didn't find this question of the United States and Britain going out of the United Nations...
...This is not my view, but that is what is being said by many peo-ple"—Nelson Mandela, in a Newsweek interview, September 10...
...Pelosi "does not dispute that Saddam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction...
...Pelosi was only saying that the briefing didn't serve up any new information...
...The story asserted that the government has dropped its claims that Iraq has links to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations...
...speech two days later...
...Better not to ask...
...A report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics released last week shows that criminal victimization in 2001 fell about 9 percent—to its lowest levels since data collection began in 1973...
...Daly further explained that Rep...
...She didn't mean it that way," press secretary Brendan Daly assures us...
...agents haven't even tried to interview these terrorists...
...His intel links into northern Iraq are very strong...
...The same logic extends to other categories of crime...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 2
