The Washington Post has published massive amounts of secret intelligence material in the interests, they say, of improving US national security. The two authors, Dana Priest and William Arkin, complain about a national security enterprise that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11. The reveal in detail the firms working for the US intelligence community including their location, contracts, and work subjects, whether border security, cyber-security or counter proliferation.

There are two common explanations for the story. First, it is juicy story. It has lots of secret information. And for two reporters, pursuing a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, well isn’t this what reporters do? The second explanation: their view is that the national security establishment represented by the $75 billion intelligence community and its network of firms, organizations and contractors is not serving the American people, that it is bloated, redundant and need of serious downsizing. But all, mind you, to make our security better.

There may be a third explanation. It may be they think little if any of this intelligence work is necessary. Nearly a decade ago, on October 12, 2002, William Arkin, the co-author of the article, spoke at the Naval War College. One key part of his talk is nearly identical to the thesis of the Post article.  He said: “More than 30 billion of our tax dollars each year go towards government generated intelligence information. We had, and have, a CIA and an intelligence community that has a fantastic history of failure, that is mostly blind to what is going on in the world, that seems to know nothing and at the same time is so bombarded and overwhelmed with stimuli from its millions of receptors it can hardly sense what is happening.”

Arkin goes on in his 2002 speech to blame America for the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  He says our military prowess forced our adversaries to use attacks against our vulnerable infrastructure, such as airplanes or trains because they could not successfully fight our military. And he says our support for Gulf autocracies and stationing troops there gave cause for the attacks of 9/11. The implied solution is very simple: stop supporting harsh regimes, withdraw our forces from the Gulf and terrorism disappears.

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A memo obtained from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicates the Washington Post is preparing to “publish articles and an interactive website that will likely contain a compendium of government agencies and contractors allegedly conducting Top Secret work.” You can view the memo below.  The series is likely to launch Monday.

WaPo’s Dana Priest

According to another memo from Art House, the director of communications for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the series will be written up by Dana Priest and culminates two years of research. He postulates Priest is likely to advocate:

• The intelligence enterprise has undergone exponential growth and has become unmanageable with overlapping authorities and a heavily outsourced contractor workforce.
• The IC [intelligence community] and the DoD have wasted significant time and resources, especially in the areas of counterterrorism and counterintelligence.
• The intelligence enterprise has taken its eyes off its post-9/11 mission and is spending its energy on competitive and redundant programs.

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic reports, “Priest’s story is said to focus on redundancies, particularly the number of individual counter-terrorism analytical cells costing the government billions of dollars. Some of the redundancy is deliberate because of the nature of intelligence work. But a lot of redundancy, especially in terms of information technology, is probably just wasteful.”

The Washington Post is also working on a television component with PBS’s Frontline. (more…)

No sign of desperation at CNN these days. Nooooooooo. After all, what TV producer wouldn’t jump at the chance to premiere a new prime-time political show this fall with a disgraced former attorney-general/governor-turned-high-end-john?

Yes, that’s right—CNN jumped first. They’ve just announced their new hour-long show with “conservative” 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner Kathleen Parker and 2008 Booby Prize winner Eliot Spitzer. This program has class writ large all over it. It’s low class—but it’s still class.

Once details of his secret life as “Client No. 9” in a haute-poitrine call-girl business emerged back in March 2008 (and after he subsequently resigned as New York’s governor), no doubt the TV offers just poured in for Eliot Spitzer. “The usurer hangs the cozener,” complains King Lear. And in Spitzer’s little tragedy of pimp and prejudice, the john hangs the hooker. (more…)

Unable to discuss facts in any logical, coherent way, or even engage in civil discourse, the modern left has two modes of argumentation: tu quoque and ad hominem. The former translates roughly as “and so are you,” while the latter means to attack the person instead of the point. In logic, both of these tactics are considered the lowest form of debate, but for the intellectually bankrupt and emotionally overwrought left, they’re the only tactics they have.

Exhibit A — a masterpiece of the genre — comes in the form of this pre-Father’s Day column from Colbert King of the Washington Post: “On Father’s Day, hypocrites are all in the family.” And away we go:

Family, marriage and the contribution of fathers come together as topics for reflection on Father’s Day. So I’d like to know why Barack Obama, a husband and a father in a family structure that encompasses bonds deemed essential to our society, is constantly and savagely attacked by conservative leaders whose personal circumstances undermine the family values they espouse?

Consider Obama: Raised by a single mother in a middle-class family where hard work and education were watchwords, Obama graduated from two of the top schools in the country, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His legal scholarship was recognized when he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He married and, equally important, has stayed married to Michelle Robinson, a Princeton graduate and Harvard Law alumna. He lives with his wife, two children and his mother-in-law. Obama: constitutional law professor, civil rights lawyer, state legislator, U.S. senator, 44th U.S. president, family man.

Let’s set aside for the moment the misrepresentation that the Community Organizer was ever a “constitutional law professor,” when he was more a gloried graduate teaching assistant than a real professor. Let’s also overlook his background as state senator “present,” and his very brief tenure in the U.S. Senate — a seat he won not in the general election against the hapless Alan Keyes but earlier, by taking out both his primary challenger and the real Republican candidate through the mysteriously obtained (hello, David Axelrod!) divorce records of his opponents.

Having set up an amazingly irrelevant straw man, even by the low standards of the left, King proceeds to demolish it: (more…)

The Wall Street Journal must be doing something right, even if it doesn’t have the respect of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

The latest numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations show the Journal with a healthy gain of 3.37 percent over the six-month period that ended March 31. With an average circulation of 2,092,523 during the workweek, it remains the most-read newspaper in America.

Yet success on the newsstands hasn’t translated into recognition among the newspaper’s peers. Even though the Journal continues to innovate — recently launching a local edition to challenge an old rival, the New York Times — the newspaper hasn’t won a Pulitzer Prize since 2007.

In other words, the Journal hasn’t been awarded journalism’s most coveted prize since conservative publisher Rupert Murdoch acquired the newspaper.

As the New York Observer recently noted, former Journal editor Paul Steiger has won more awards running ProPublica, the liberal-leaning nonprofit, than the Journal has since Murdoch bought Dow Jones & Co., its publisher, from the Bancroft family.

What does the 18-member Pulitzer board have against the Journal? (more…)

Will 2004 Democrat VP nominee and two-time presidential candidate John Edwards soon be indicted by the feds for campaign-finance violations?  The National Enquirer says Edwards will be indicted — and in the John Edwards Scandal, where the Enquirer leads the Mainstream Media follow.

What a difference a few years make.

When Edwards was one of the leading Democrat presidential candidates, the Enquirer broke story after story while the MSM refused to ask, refused to report and refused to inform its readers of the events.  This continued for months, while Edwards was considered for both an Obama running mate and attorney general slot.

Even after the Enquirer caught Edwards visiting Hunter and their daughter in a late night rendezvous at the Beverly Hilton in July 2008, there was no coverage in the traditional press for weeks.  After initially labeling the Enquirer’s report as “tabloid trash,“ Edwards finally confessed on ABC’s Nightline on August 8, 2008. (more…)

For intellectual laziness, lackluster writing and sheer historical dishonesty, it’s hard to beat Frank Rich of the New York Times.  Week after week, and at tiresome length, Rich dishes out his regurgitated pensées regarding his pet hobby-horses, including the evil Bush Administration, gay rights, and the fact that, sooner or later, the Christian Right is going to get your mama.  In every way except the physical courage to actually be on the scene, Rich is a worthy successor to the Times’s disgraceful Stalinist apparatchik, Walter Duranty, whose tainted Pulitzer the Times has yet to return.

On Saturday, the undistinguished former drama critic, show-business wannabe and non-bestselling author — who unnaccountably occupies some of the most prime editorial real estate in the world — outdid himself with this eminently predictable yet nonetheless embarrassing and ludicrous piece of revisionism/wishful thinking: “The Axis of the Obsessed and the Deranged.” Lest you jump to a perfectly rational conclusion and think this is about the editorial board of the Times, think again:

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen. (more…)

Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)