The Power Line blog has a post this morning on a surprising honest review in the Washington Post of the new book, Necessary Secrets. From the Power Line post:

The review is by Leonard Downie, Jr., who was the Post’s executive editor until 2008. Downie is obviously uneasy with Schoenfeld’s view that editors and reporters at the New York Times should be prosecuted and imprisoned for revealing two of the Bush administration’s antiterrorism programs – the warrantless intercept program for monitoring calls to the U.S. by foreign terrorists and the program though which the international financial transactions of terrorists were secretly tracked.

The exposure of these programs by the fearless reporters and editors at the Times unquestionably contributed to the prolonged detention of its reporter, David Rohde, because we lost the tools for finding to a kidnap victim in the tribal areas of Pakistan.  For that very reason the Times was forced to find “outside the box” options to try and gain Rohde’s freedom and apparently one of those options involved hiring civilian contractors who had contacts and access into the denied areas of the North West Frontier. Here is a quote from the first story the Times published on the subject: (more…)

The first rule in intelligence is to not get used.  This is something Robert Young Pelton and Eason Jordan should have learned before agreeing to become rock-throwers for the Central Intelligence Agency.

As I reported on Tuesday, Pelton and Jordan were upset because they “lost” an intelligence-gathering contract with the Department of Defense.  What stuns most people is that a man like Pelton (who thinks Al Qaeda is a myth, that the U.S. Military has killed thousands and thousands of people in Afghanistan and was publicly rebuked by the US Military and taken to task for his unprofessional conduct and reporting in Afghanistan) ever got close to a Department of Defense contract in the first place.

The level of incredulity is only added to by Pelton’s partner, Eason Jordan, a former CNN News exec who was forced to resign from CNN when he stated that American soldiers in Iraq had purposefully been targeting journalists.and that he deliberately covered up news in Iraq so as not to lose his Baghdad bureau.

Simply put, these two should never have been anywhere near the American military, much less a D.O.D. contract.  Thankfully at some point in the process, one man seemed to realize this. (more…)

I never thought I’d live to see the day when my daughter’s grade school newspaper had higher journalistic standards than the New York Times, but perhaps I just don’t dream big enough.

In all fairness, the articles at my daughter’s paper that appeal to the editorial board (longer vacations, less homework, a make-your-own-sundae-bar on every school bus) tend to get heavier consideration and better placement than others.  Unfortunately, the same can be said for articles that meet the heavily liberal bias at the New York Times.

But unlike the Times, my daughter’s school paper actually requires articles to be based on fact, be backed up with real sources, and it takes pains to guard against people who would like nothing more than to use it to grind a host of axes.

To that end, the latest axe-grinders granted access to the once venerable, now wrinkled Gray Lady’s anemic subscribership are Canadian Robert Young Pelton and anti-US military, ex-CNN News exec, Eason Jordan.  In a piece yesterday entitled Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants, Messsrs. Pelton and Jordan vent their rage at losing a Department of Defense contract and take outrageous outrage to new heights by claiming that not only did they lose the contract, but that the people they suspect took over are doing an even better job:

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