The Seditious MSM

The NYT is helping terrorists to kill our troops. Its writers should learn that their actions have consequences.

Frederick Turner at TCS reports:

A recent article by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams in the New York Times revealed the use of aircraft charter companies by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, together with specific aircraft markings, bases, routes, and other information helpful to identification of such flights.

Mr. Turner has a buddy flying out to Iraq and takes it personally. Mindful of the recent downing of an RAF transport, so do I.

No Pasaran comments:

Were it in 2005, they would have given away the plans for D-day

Actually, the NYT is following a tradition of US MSM infamy.

Len Deighton in Blood Tears and Folly (a very good history of WW2) reports (page 597 of Pimlico edition – all ellipsis are mine):

On 4 December 1941 – in one of the potentially most damaging scoops of the century – the isolationist Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald published details of a secret document…which had been stolen from the US Army’s War Plans Division. It was a contingency plan, of the sort that all armies and navies prepare in peacetime, outlining the strategy should the United States go to war with both Germany and Japan.

The newspapers angrily offered it as proof that President Roosevelt was secretly planning to expand the army and navy and send them to fight overseas. The timing seemed calculated: Congress was debating an $8 billion supplementary defense bill. It was no doubt hoped, by those involved, that publication of America’s war plans would deter Roosevelt and Congress from giving the armed forces more money. Three days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Of course the Japanese attack was not triggered by the articles – Yamamoto was en route to Hawaii at the time, however it did trigger Hitler…

The Japanese attack (on 7 December) ensured that the sensationalized revelations had little effect in Washington. But, in one of those curious twists of history, Hitler was provided with translations of of the newspaper accounts, and it was these that persuaded him that that Germany too must go to war against the United States. Hitler referred to the Chicago Tribune in the speech he made at the Reichstag on Wednesday 11 December, the day on which Ribbentrop (German Foreign Minister) summoned the American chargé, Leland Morris, and shouted at him: “Your president wanted this war, now he has it”.

Deighton continues:

In fact it was most unlikely that Congress would have agreed to go to war against Germany.

I suspect it would have declared war, at a time of Roosevelt’s choosing. However Deighton points out the consequences of encouraging Hitler to attack before the US was ready:

…the short-term effect (of the German declaration of war) was a shock to America. U-boats sought targets along the American coast from the St Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. In the following 6 months, over two million tons of shipping were lost.

And many of the men sailing those ships were killed or injured.

A Chicago Tribune and Washington Times Herald still exist, although I don’t know if they are the descendants of the 1941 papers.

It would be instructive to determine whether the people who published these seditious articles survived WW2. I do hope not.

And I do hope that Shane, Grey and Williams read this post.

Great Stuff On The EU

American Future, always a pleasure to read, points at some excellent data collated by EURota showing how the Anglo model is leaving Old Europe in the dust. Here are two samples:

Unemployment rates:

Growth rates:

Rules of War

Rottweiler fisks a NYT oped piece that wants to shut down Gitmo. One statement caught my eye:

Over more than two centuries of peace and war, the United States has developed a highly effective legal system that, while far from perfect, is rightly admired around the world.

Right, and that includes the Rules of War, under which an enemy operating in disguise can be executed as a spy. This would solve the NYT’s problem & might cause the killers back home to pause before disemboweling the next aid worker.

Executing unlawful combatants (undocumented combatants?) was SOP during the Revolutionary War, when as today’s American Spectator says of Nathan Hale:

The British sometimes simply imprisoned American spies. Had Hale been captured one night earlier, he might have been merely incarcerated. As it was, he was strung up.

It worked both ways – Washington hanged the remarkable Major John Andre:

Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in New York, did all he could to save him. He appealed to George Washington to be executed by firing squad, but by the rules of war he was hanged at Tappan on October 2, 1780.

Both were brave men who went to their deaths without complaint. Surely the Islamic killers would be at least as stoical, given the 73 virgins awaiting them?

Taxing Brit Drivers

Having forgotten to mention it during the recent election campaign, Blair’s government just announced it plans to put GPS trackers into every vehicle in the UK and then tax them by the mile. Clever taxing but lousy science.

The taxing is clever because the Brit Finance Minister, Brown, knows all about the Laffer curve. So, he spreads his tax net as wide as possible, and keeps them at lowish levels. Road taxing is a dream. By upping the per mile cost on a single road, he can pull in extra revenue without going near parliament. And he’ll be smart and spread the pain geographically & chuck in a few nostrums about global warming, cutting accidents and so on.

The lousy science is that they don’t understand Graph Theory – how complex networks function. Because people respond to tiny price differences, putting up fees on say, Motorways (Interstates) will cause drivers to move to lower cost routes, doing complex time/cost calculations. Alternate routes will in many cases go through towns, which because they mix people and traffic have higher accident rates. So health care, emergency services etc. costs will increase.

I used to run through country lanes just wide enough for a horse & cart around where we lived in the UK. Then the local town shut down a very lightly used access road so that drivers from one of 8 directions could not go through its center. Immediately, all the surrounding country lanes become full of cars. Turned out that they’d blocked a key node on the drive to the local supermarket.

There will be a million other unintended consequences, all bad.

And to cap it all, Blair plans a “pilot” experiment! Which, being unbounded will simply displace traffic outside of the pilot area, and produce useless data.

The good news is that the scheme will trigger the growth of starts-ups building covert GPS jammers and location spoofers. Might need a fake ID card as part of the spoofing. Hmmm.

Never, Never Negotiate With Terrorists

Reuters and the Jerusalem Post claim that the US is considering negotiating with Hamas, the terrorist organization. As Britain has proved with the IRA, negotiating with the killers will simply destroy support for the Palestinian moderates. And then, confronted with wall-to-wall killers, the only choice left to the State of Israel will be war.

Here’s a Googled sample of Hamas’ exploits:
Palestinian Hamas murders 7 Israeli students and injures 86
HAMAS VICE SQUAD MURDERS GAZA GIRL FOR ‘UNISLAMIC’ SUNSET STROLL
Arafat’s Terror Murders 17 In Israeli Bus Bombings
A Massacre in Kosovo A member of the United Nations police force murders his American colleagues.

So, a similar outfit to the IRA – a bunch of psychopaths building a Fear State.

When Blair signed his Good Friday agreement with the IRA back in 1998, the two main political parties in Northern Ireland were moderate, one representing the Catholics and one the Protestants.

Blair argued that the way to get the “peace process” to work was to confer political legitimacy on the IRA. To alleviate the skepticism of the people of Northern Ireland he published a handwritten pledge.

No change to the status of Northern Ireland without the express consent of the people.

The power to take decisions to be returned from London to Northern Ireland, with accountable North-South co-operation.

Fairness and equality for all.

Those who use or threaten violence to be excluded from the government of Northern Ireland.

Prisoners to be kept in prison unless violence is given up for good.

The problem with Blair’s approach was that he didn’t understand that the IRA was doing very well financially out of killing people, and was never going to give that up. Plus it was made up of people who enjoyed killing – it’s easy if you have the right equipment and choose safe targets.

So the IRA did not disarm and tightened its grip on the Catholic community, killing people, and expanding its drug trade. Blair however honored his part of the deal, allowing the IRA’s party to run for election, and its releasing their imprisoned murderers – including the man who de-limbed old Louie Mountbatten and his young grandsons.

So, then what happened?

Well, observing that a political party with killers was getting a better deal than the moderate one, the Catholics deserted the latter for the IRA’s front party.

And then what? Well, the Protestants, took the same lesson to heart, and deserted to the excellent (but immoderate) party of Dr. Ian Paisley.

And, with the community now totally polarized, sometime soon there’ll be a war.

Still, at least Blair is consistent, since it seems the Hamas negotiation is his idea (my ellipsis).

The shift (in US policy) also follows a behind-the-scenes push by European allies, including Britain and France, for Washington to drop its call to dismantle Hamas completely.

I don’t think the President should be too polite when he rejects this craven suggestion.