Posted on 03/27/2008 9:25:20 AM PDT by jpl
Press freedom shouldn't mean defending the guilty at all costs
Steve Chapman | March 27, 2008
Years ago, Ray Donovan, Ronald Reagan's Labor Secretary, was prosecuted for corruption, only to be acquitted. After the verdict, Donovan asked plaintively, "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?"
Steven Hatfill knows where to go to get his reputation back. But upon arriving there, he finds the door blocked by someone who says her privileges are more important than his good name. That someone, of course, is a journalist. And, not surprisingly, she enjoys the broad support of other journalists, who have proved to be slow learners about the obligations they share with their fellow citizens.
Hatfill was a casualty of the anthrax scare of 2001. Just after the 9/11 attacks, someone mailed letters containing anthrax spores to several news organizations and a pair of U.S. senators. Some 22 people were infected, and five died. In the aftermath, the Justice Department labeled Hatfill, who had done research on biological warfare for the army, a "person of interest." Secret information leaked to the press suggested he was the terrorist behind the attacks.
But the suspicions were wrong. Hatfill asserted his innocence, and he was never charged in the case. He sued the government, The New York Times and others for damages. Federal Judge Reggie Walton concluded that the claims have "destroyed his life" even though "there's not a scintilla of evidence to suggest Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with" the anthrax attacks.
Years later, Hatfill is still awaiting vindication. Last week, he inched closer when the judge ordered Toni Locy, a former USA Today reporter, to disclose her sources about Hatfill—or else face fines of up to $5,000 a day for contempt. A host of news organizations, including Tribune Co., filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging that she be spared from providing evidence.
Here we find ourselves on depressingly familiar ground. Back in 2005, Times reporter Judith Miller refused to say who told her that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. She went to jail for contempt before finally acknowledging it was vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Five reporters didn't want to reveal their sources about Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was tarred for alleged espionage but convicted only of a single minor count of mishandling classified data. Their demands got nowhere, forcing their employers to reach a costly settlement with Lee.
The news media keep losing these cases, yet journalists and their attorneys refuse to recognize reality. They continue to insist on their right to keep evidence of wrongdoing and lawbreaking from the courts, no matter what the collateral damage.
Locy reported on the suspicions about Hatfill based on interviews with confidential sources in the Justice Department and the FBI, who may have violated federal law in leaking information about him. Since she discarded her notes and says she can't remember which of 10 people told her about Hatfill, the judge says she has to turn over the names of all 10 so Hatfill's lawyers can question them.
Judge Walton found that the identity of her sources "goes to the heart" of his case, and that there is no other way he can get the information. Without Locy's testimony, the damage done to Hatfill would go unpunished and unrepaired.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and its allies also think the $5,000-a-day fine, which the judge says she must pay herself, is outrageously excessive. But the point of such fines is not to accommodate the financial resources of the person who is defying the law—it's to force her to comply, in the interests of justice.
Justice should not be at odds with the job of the news media. But in this instance, it is. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, one of the premier experts on the First Amendment, thinks the press has overstepped. "It's important to remember here," he told me, "that these sources were not blowing the whistle on government wrongdoing but were allegedly doing something wrong in revealing the information about the identity of the suspect."
Journalists and citizens may disagree on the proper role of the news media in a free society. But when the press finds itself protecting the guilty at the expense of the innocent, it's made a wrong turn somewhere.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Ping.
You misspelled “all”.
There are good members of the media.
They are outnumbered by yellow journalists who fabricate news.
Don't be so sure. Whenever you post news on FR you become a member of the media. :-)
Which is why the old media is dying.
"The media" is an imprecise term. Although movies and fictional television is also dominated by leftists, it is specifically journalism which our main opponent. It is journalism, even more than the official Democratic Party which is joined at the hip with journalism, which threatens our liberty. It was journalism which instigated McCain to write McCain-Feingold, and it is journalism (not movies or fictional TV) whose practitioners are in the dock in the matter discussed in this article.You may recoil in horror at that characterization of what styles itself as "the press," and think I am attacking the Constitution and the First Amendment. This thread will explain the difference between journalism and the press.
BTTT
News Without Reporters
...
Now, the Internet is eliminating the reporter as middleman by connecting audiences directly with the real sources of news - politicians' offices, PR firms, whistleblowers, think tanks, courts, police departments, and everyone else with a news ax to grind. These entities have always been capable of writing their own stories in a usable form, but have previously needed reporters to get their stories distributed. Nor will we miss investigative reporters, who had always been dangerously untrained in the skills needed to do their job properly (e.g. forensics, law) and often unfairly destroyed the reputations of innocents. Society has many alternative, more responsible ways to right wrongs, and the blogosphere can easily fill this void.
...
(excerpt)
Great point.
The article on the face of it is from someone who has no connection to Ayman Zawahiri, the guy who headed Al Qaeda’s anthrax weaponization efforts. In keeping with fashion the Jamestown Foundation author refers to the mystery of the anthrax mailings as unsolved. Jamestown is a highly regarded source for open intelligence. It has never delved further into the open source intelligence of who was responsible for the anthrax mailings. In this recent article, it merely has reported on some internet poster’s biology 101 lesson to the effect that anthrax can be found in the soil. But we can do this at home folks. You don’t need any special equipment.
Biographer Draper in Dead Certain reports that on October 4, 2001, Bush teared up during a speech at the State Department thanking them for their hard work after 9/11. Back at the White House, Bush motioned Fleischer into the Oval Office. “A Boca Raton tabloid editor had checked into a Florida hospital yesterday, Bush told Fleischer. Anthrax. The veil of resoluteness fell away from the president. His shoulders were hunched. Fleischer had never seen him more upset. Neither man said a word — neither had to: This was it, the second wave.” Then, on or about October 6, 2001, someone sent very fine powderized anthrax to US Senators Leahy and Daschle with a similar message. An infant visiting ABC was one of the first affected, which should have been prohibited (haram) in anyone’s book. Five people died, including an elderly woman and a hospital worker. Former Defense Secretary and liberal hawk William Cohen recently wrote in Slate that long before the press was talking about Cipro he had bought some after an indirect tip from someone with the Administration.
The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief (”PDB”) to the President Bush explained that Bin Laden planned to hijack some aircraft as part of an effort to free the blind sheik. A little noticed December 1998 PDB to the same effect to President Clinton, however — declassified and included in the 911 Commission Report — reported that the aircraft and attacks were being planned by the brother of Sadat’s assassin, Mohammed Islambouli. Islambouli was in a cell with Khalid Mohammed (”KSM”), who by November 2001 had come to lead the cell planning anthrax attacks in the United States. The anthrax was sent on the date of Sadat’s assassination and the date the Camp David Accords were approved. Sadat’s peace with Israel was a key reason the militants killed Sadat.
On October 22, 2001, anthrax was found on an automatic slitter used to open letters at a military facilities across the Potomac River. Unless just cross-contamination of mail, this meant the White House was a target of biological terrorism: `I think the seminal event of the Bush administration was the anthrax attacks,’ someone close to the president told Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the online daily magazine, Slate. `It was the thing that changed everything. It was the hard stare into the abyss.’” “I sat through the most gruesome briefing in the Oval Office about anthrax, how it could spread, and how we had no defenses,” Bush’s first press secretary, Ari Fleischer told the book author in the summer of 2007. “Dick Cheney was the strongest advocate of the possibility of attack and the need to prepare for it.” After 9/11, the Secret Service began monitoring the air inside and outside the White House — the chimneys of bio-detectors were visible from the front lawn. Cheney reportedly began traveling with a biohazard protective suit. At some point, fifty members of the mail-handling staff in the executive office buildings were taking Cipro.
Jacob Weisberg in the 2008 The Bush Tragedy writes. “Inside the administration, the October bioterror attacks had a greater impact than is generally appreciated — and in many ways greater than 9/11. Without the anthrax attacks, Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq.” He explains: “The anthrax attacks in New York and Washington created a sense of vulnerability that was in many respects greater than the mass murder at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. As horrific as September 11 was, it was a discrete crime, whose perpetrators were quickly identified and pursued. The anthrax letters, by contrast, killed only a few people, but remained unsolved.”
It perhaps was more than a happy coincidence for Ayman Zawahiri and Mohammed Islambouli that an active supporter of the Taliban and supporter of jihad was a US biodefense insider. Al-Timimi worked in the same building as famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey, who would come to publish a lot of research with the “Ames strain” of anthrax. Al-Timimi was a current associate and former student of Bin Laden’s spiritual advisor, dissident Saudi Sheik al-Hawali. He would speak along with the blind sheik’s son at charity conferences — the blind sheik’s son would serve on Al Qaeda’s WMD committee. Al-Timimi’s mentor Bilal Philips was known for recruiting members of the military to jihad. The first week after 9/11, FBI agents questioned Ali Al-Timimi, a microbiology graduate student in a program jointly run by George Mason University and the American Type Culture Collection (”ATCC”). Ali, according to his lawyer, had been questioned by an FBI agent and Secret Service agent in 1994 after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He had a high security clearance for work for the Navy and years earlier for two months had worked for the White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card when he was Secretary of Transportation. As time off from his university studies permitted, Ali was an active speaker with a charity Islamic Assembly of North America, whose spin-off Help The Needy was based in Syracuse, New York.
After an October 2001 bombing raid at a Qaeda camp in Darunta, Afghanistan US forces found 100+ printed, typed, handwritten pages of documents that shed light on Al Qaeda’s early anthrax planning. The Defense Intelligence Agency provided me the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents confirmed that it was Zawahiri’s plan to use established specialists and the cover of universities and charities as cover for weaponizing anthrax. 90 of the 100 pages are the photocopies of journal articles and the disease handbook excerpts. It was not clear whether or not they had yet acquired virulent anthrax or weaponized it, but it was clear that the planning was well along. When Vice President Cheney was briefed on the documents in late 2001, he immediately called a meeting of FBI and CIA. “I’ll be very blunt,” the Vice President started. “There is no priority of this government more important than finding out if there is a link between what’s happened here and what we’ve found over there with Qaeda.” At one point, security personnel thought that the home belonging to Elizabeth Cheney, his daughter, had been hit by an anthrax attack. Elizabeth had to call her nanny to get her to take the kids to be tested for exposure. A June 1999 memo from Ayman to military commander Atef said that “the program should seek cover and talent in educational institutions, which it said were `more beneficial to us and allow easy access to specialists, which will greatly benefit us in the first stage, God willing.’ “Thus, in determining whether Al Qaeda was responsible for the anthrax mailings in the Fall of 2001, the FBI and CIA had reason to know based on the growing documentary evidence available by that December, that Al Qaeda operatives were likely associated with non-governmental organizations and working under the cover of universities. From early on, the evidence suggested that charity is as charity does.
As a Detroit Free Press headline explained in 2004, “Unproven weapons claim led to Islamic charity raid in [mid-December]`01.” Global Relief Founder (”GRF”) cofounder Rabih Haddad had worked for years for Bin Laden’s Makhtab al-Khidamat, which was headed by Mohammed Islambouli in Peshawar. Benevolence International Foundation (”BIF”) head Arnaout, a Syrian, was at the meeting at which Al Qaeda was founded. GRF and BIF attorneys in unison explained that the US had supported Makthab al-Khidamat in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Bosnia in the 1990s. The 2007 prosecution of the Florida cell members, to include Kifah Waed Jayyousi, an ardent supporter of blind sheik, confirmed that the authorities had long known that Jayyousi “was transferring money intended for Chechen militants through the Global Relief Foundation.” Investigation of the two charities was well underway prior to 9/11, although plagued by lengthy unnecessary delays emanating from headquarters. The 9/11 Commission Report notes that on April 21, 1999, upon weekly dumpster diving, FBI “agents had recovered from BIF’s trash a newspaper article on bioterrorism, in which someone had highlighted sections relating to the United States’ lack of preparedness for a biological attack.” (The article quoted famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek who was at George Mason University in Falls Church, Virginia.) The FBI had a better relationship with the CIA in the investigation of BIF than with GRF. The 9/11 Commission noted that “[t]he Chicago agents believed the CIA wanted to shield certain information from the FBI because of fears of revealing sources and methods in any potential criminal litigation in the United States.” Chicago agents benefited from the New York Office files on the two charities but the New York FBI office personnel were overwhelmed and working their own leads. The Illinois-based investigations remained an intelligence gathering exercise with no thought given to a criminal prosecution to disrupt the financing of Al Qaeda until after 9/11.
Alkifah in Brooklyn became the headquarters of Abdel-Rahman’s supporters in the US. After the anthrax mailings, the Amerithrax investigation naturally considered whether the solution to the mystery had its roots in Brooklyn. Abdel-Rahman was the spiritual leader of both Egyptian Islamic Group and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and close to Ayman Zawahiri, known to be head of Al Qaeda’s anthrax weaponization project. FISA warrants were initiated immediately after 9/11 but did not prove fruitful. At Fitzgerald’s urging, a criminal investigation of the two charities was opened in October 2001. The 9/11 Commission Report notes that in December 2001, “[t]hese plans were dramatically accelerated when CIA analysts, drawing on intelligence gathered in an unrelated FBI investigation, expressed concerns that GRF could be involved in a plot to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).” On December 14, 2001, the FBI raided the charity offices of Benevolence International Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation. BIF and GRF offices were raided in Illinois — a BIF office in Newark, New Jersey also was searched. Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor who handled the prosecution of Bin Laden earlier that year in the case involving the bombing of the 1998 embassy bombings, was furious that Germs author and New York Times journalist Judy Miller or a colleague on December 13 called the GRF office in Illinois the night before the search. Authorities had planned on waiting and watching to see how the US charity personnel responded to a search of offices abroad, but their hand was forced when GRF officials in Illinois began shredding documents.
At a White House press conference on December 17, 2001, Ari Fleischer said: “There is nothing that has been final that has been concluded. But the evidence is increasingly looking like it was a domestic source. But, again, this remains something that is not final, nor totally conclusive yet. I can just report to you the information that I’ve heard. I can’t give you the scientific reasons behind it. But you can assume that they’re based on investigative and scientific means.” He emphasized: “There’s a big difference between the source of it and who sent it, because the two do not have to be tied.” In March 2002, the FBI raided the offices of the Muslim World League at 360 Washington St., the small building that also housed Al-Timimi’s Dar Arqam Center.
Among the supporters of these militant islamists were people like US scientist Ali Al-Timimi and Pakistan scientist Rauf Ahmad who blended into society and were available to act when another part of the network requested it. Two letters — one typed and an earlier handwritten one — written by a scientist named Rauf Ahmad detailed his efforts to obtain a pathogenic strain of anthrax. He attended conferences on anthrax and dangerous pathogens such as one in September 2000 at the University of Plymouth cosponsored by DERA, the UK Defense Evaluation and Research Agency. A handwritten letter from 1999 is written on the letterhead of the oldest microbiology society in Great Britain. The 1999 documents seized in Afghanistan by US forces by Rauf describe the author’s visit to the special confidential room at the BL-3 facility where 1000s of pathogenic cultures were kept; his consultation with other scientists on some of technical problems associated with weaponizing anthrax; the bioreactor and laminar flows to be used in Al Qaeda’s anthrax lab; a conference he attended on dangerous pathogens cosponsored by UK’s Porton Down and Society for Applied Microbiology, and the need for vaccination and containment. Rauf had arranged to take a lengthy post-doc leave from his employer and was grousing that what the employer would be paying during that 12-month period was inadequate. Malaysian Yazid Sufaat, who told his wife he was working for a Taliban medical brigade, got the job instead of Rauf. I have uploaded a scanned copy of a typed memo reporting on a lab visit, which included tour of a BioLevel 3 facility, where there were 1000s of pathogenic samples. The memo mentioned the pending paperwork relating to export of the pathogens. The documents were provided to me by the Defense Intelligence Agency (”DIA”) under the Freedom of Information Act. I also have uploaded a copy of earlier correspondence between Rauf Ahmad and Dr. Zawahiri from before the lab visit described in the typed memo. The handwritten letter was reporting on a different, earlier visit where the anthrax had been nonpathogenic. Finally, on the same linked page, there are handwritten notes about the plan to use non-governmental-organizations (NGOs), technical institutes and medical labs as cover for aspects of the work, and training requirements for the various personnel at the lab in Afghanistan.
Ali Al-Timimi was a celebrated speaker with the Islamic Assembly of North America (”IANA”). I drove by the charity’s spin-off, Help The Needy, each day — it was about a mile away from me in Syracuse. Al-Timimi was a graduate student in the same building where famed Russian bioweapon Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey worked at George Mason University. The three worked at the secure facility at Discovery Hall at the Prince William 2 campus. Dr. Alibek and Dr. Bailey headed a biodefense program funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(”DARPA”). Al-Timimi had a top security clearance and had worked for SRA International doing mathematical support work for the Navy. In 2000 and 2001, Timimi was a graduate student in computational sciences. His field was bioinformatics. Al-Timimi tended to travel to give speeches on interpretation of the koran only during semester breaks. Al-Timimi spoke in very moderate, measured tones in the UK, Canada, and Australia — once even in China. He spoke against feminism, about the unfavorable treatment of islam in the secular media, about signs of the coming day of judgment, the correct interpretation of the koran and hadiths, and the destruction of the Buddha statutes by the Taliban. Locally, he spoke regularly at the Falls Church center that also housed offices of the charity, the Muslim World League. Timimi was associated with the charity Islamic Assembly of North America (”IANA”), based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The group had a spin-off in Syracuse focused on Iraq, called Help The Needy. Ali’s colleague from the small DC-based Society for Adherence to the Sunnah, Idris Palmer, served as Vice-President. Al-Timimi’s speeches are widely distributed on the internet and tend to focus on religious rather than political issues.
A district court judge would say that his later speeches tended to favor violent jihad. After 9/11, they were removed from the website of the Center he had founded. The night of 9/11, he got in a heated debate with some colleagues. He said while islamically impermissible, the targeting of civilians were not impermissible where they were used as a shield. Others thought that it, at the least, was reckless to say that so soon after the 9/11 attack when emotions were so inflamed. Years earlier, the blind sheik’s son, Mohammed Abdel-Rahman was scheduled to come from Afghanistan to speak at the IANA 1993 conference alongside Ali Al-Timimi and former EIJ member Gamal Sultan. He spoke alongside the blind sheik’s son again in 1996, the year Bin Laden issued his Declaration of War against the United States. In July and August 2001, Al-Timimi spoke in Toronto and London alongside “911 imam” Awlaki and unindicted WTC 1993 “unindicted co-conspirator” Bilal Philips.
I'll format and post the rest if anyone is interested. It is from FReeper nw_arizona_granny's World Terrorism Thread...my post concludes her post #4101. Posts #4102-#4104 are a continuation with much more information. Dr. Hatfill is mentioned in those posts. (I'm getting tired. It's been a long day.)
Sounds like it could be important, and not posted at the end of a thread to only me. I’d read a thread started with this article, but don’t seem to be able to do all the critical reading it might deserve.
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