LOL!
And, if Christopher Hitchens was half as ballsy as he made himself out to be in his chest-thumping article, those "callers" would have names and be known to one and all. Cowards should be publicly exposed--but the only one I can name is Mr. Hitchens. Guess he likes being an inside player too much to do any public service...
You are now asserting that the hallmark of a responsible journalist is the willingness to EXPOSE his sources?
What a novel concept!
But, since you've opened that can of worms, how about you validate YOUR incessant (and uber-ballsy) "chest-thumping" by telling us who YOU are???
No, I'm not REALLY expecting you to adhere to the same standards you demand of OTHERS.
Cue crickets...
In extreme circumstances, yes. (BTW...he exposed his sources to the folks most likely to know who they were--the sources themselves--and he did so in a very unflattering manner. Methinks they quit talking to him anyway.)
I'd definitely expose sources who were racing to get out of DC (and warning their close buddies) while apparently not notifying the national command authorities of an imminent nuclear threat. (If they had done so, the government would have executed JEEP, and that mess would've been on CNN live, followed shortly thereafter by a Free Republic live thread.)
Dereliction of duty on the part of senior intelligence weenies, cowardice in the face of the enemy on the part of the above-mentioned senior intelligence weenies, and a potentially decapitated United States had the reports of the threat been accurate...that's the sort of story a Pulitzer Prize is made of.
But, since you've opened that can of worms, how about you validate YOUR incessant (and uber-ballsy) "chest-thumping" by telling us who YOU are???
You first. I'm just a Kumeyaay living in Boulevard, CA, spouting off on the 'Net--after doing my homework. (BTW, a good source is the late Chuck Hansen's Swords of Armaggeddon, which is a CD-ROM chock full of declassified documents on nuclear weapons design and the history of US nuclear weapons production. The full set's about $350 or so, but it's worth the purchase price.)
In my experience, real worries (about any topic) get addressed with very real actions appropriate to the worries. Real worries about a nuclear bomb in the hands of al-Qaeda would get addressed by such actions as dispersing the line of Presidential succession and taking better care to secure weapons-grade nuclear materials and nuclear weapons.
Instead, we get a lot of rhetoric, a lot of "studies" from the usual gang of Beltway Bandits (nothing wrong with doing ONE study of a problem, but there's everything wrong one can think of with voluntarily succumbing to "Analysis Paralysis"), and a bunch of pie-in-the-sky R&D work to do everything except take real, concrete steps of the sort addressed above.
I'll take this whole mess seriously when I see the government doing so.