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December 04, 2005

Hey Captain Ed, what about Able Danger?

Ed Morrissey was on Reliable Sources this morning. I was hoping the topic of Able Danger might come up, as it did with Tim Russert on Meet the Press for once, but it did not. I realize of course that the guests do not get to pick the topics, but there might have been a place to slide a reference in regarding lack of media attention, or even mention it off camera to Howie. Why isn't it getting more coverage? Anyway, here is the transcript:

KURTZ: Joining me now here in Washington, "Los Angeles Times" Pentagon correspondent Mark Mazzetti, the man who broke the story. Also with us, two bloggers from opposite sides of the political fence, John Aravosis, who writes at AmericaBlog.com, and in Minneapolis, Ed Morrissey of CaptainsQuartersBlog.com.

Welcome.

Mark Mazzetti, when you were working on this piece, did anyone argue to you -- with you, there is no story here, this is what happened in war time, you should not write this story?

MARK MAZZETTI, "LOS ANGELES TIMES": There are -- there were a few -- some people in the Pentagon who argued that and said that, you know, information operations are a part of war time, which we would concede as well. But, there is plenty of people within the military who have a big problem with this type of operation. They feel that something like this will inevitably damage the credibility of the U.S. military, something that they've taken decades to build up after Vietnam.

So there is real debate within the military about this.

KURTZ: Ed, I want to read you a couple of the headlines on these bought and paid for stories. "Iraqi Soldiers Improve Leadership Skills." And my personal favorite, "Iraqi Forces Capture al Qaeda Fighters Crawling Like Dogs."

Since the Iraqis newspapers believed, I guess, these were legitimate pieces of journalism, isn't this fundamentally deceptive?

ED MORRISSEY, CAPTAINSQUARTERSBLOG.COM: Well, there's reasons for that. I mean, this is -- this is a war that's being fought on several fronts, as we've been told all along, that there is going to be several different fronts on this war. There is going to be an information war, there is going to be a regular hot-fire shooting war, there is going to be an intelligence war.

But I do tend to think that whatever the short-term tactical advantages are of -- of that type of approach, I think there are going to be serious long-term strategic issues and damage that's going to be done to our credibility and the credibility of the Iraqi media. And that is a deep concern, I think, and I think might be an overriding concern in this particular case.

KURTZ: These things always seem to leak out.

John Aravosis, let me read you a column in the "LA Times" by retired Brigadier General Walter Jaco (ph).

"Even third-rate countries routinely used information and disinformation as an instrument of foreign policy, often against the United States. The U.S., in turn, cannot win the war of ideas by speaking softly or keeping its mouth shut." JOHN ARAVOSIS, AMERICABLOG.COM: Yes, except what these third- rate countries do is they do a good job when they start to pretend they're going to be, like, spooks. I mean, you don't go buying off journalists and let the whole world find out, explode in your face, you look like idiots, and then no one believes you in the future.

KURTZ: Wait, wait. You're saying...

ARAVOSIS: We did a bad job.

KURTZ: ... it's OK for the U.S. to do this, but we're not doing as good a job as third-rate countries?

ARAVOSIS: Potentially. What I'm saying is that it is nothing new. The Bush administration did not create the policy out of thin air that we buy off journalists and start posing stories around the world. This has been done by the CIA for a very long time.

I mean, you know, Mark's report -- I mean, Mark and I have discussed this. This is a common practice in journalism, or I should say in spookdom maybe, not journalism.

KURTZ: I didn't know about it.

ARAVOSIS: But -- well, now you know. But what's important is you've got to look at when you use this kind of tactic. And it's not clear that the Defense Department should be adopting CIA tactics to start with. And if you're going to do it, don't be so sloppy about it that the whole world finds out, because now we look like idiots. And I think it has harmed our reputation.

KURTZ: Mark Mazzetti -- go ahead, Ed.

MORRISSEY: What I was going to say is I think you have to look at what our long-term strategy in Iraq is. You know, in terms of what John is saying, John is absolutely right. And what we're trying to do in Iraq is we're trying to build a democracy in the middle of the Middle East. And in order to do that, we want that to be a model so that other -- the whole -- the whole strategy of this war is to build a model of democracy in the middle of the Middle East. And part of that is building a reliable press corps for the Iraqi people so that they can learn to trust some -- varied information sources.

And I think -- again, I think that there is some good tactical reasons for doing what the Pentagon is doing, if they do it right, if they handle it properly. But I think long term, strategically, I think it goes against what the mission is about. And I think that's what the Pentagon really needs to focus on.

KURTZ: Let me jump in here, Mark Mazzetti. What I'm hearing from our bloggers here is this is not a bad idea, they just got caught. And they got caught because some people, including what you describe as a senior Pentagon official, talked to you about this.

So what's your take on whether this would have been fine if nobody knew about it? And why would a senior Pentagon official tell you this very secret and sensitive information?

MAZZETTI: There is a big battle right now in the Pentagon over the role of information in wartime, the role of truthful and accurate information in wartime. And the people -- the military people who talked to us for this story, as I said before, are very concerned that this type of thing will only damage the reputation not only of senior officers, but of the average person -- average soldier on street. And that if it looks like they're trying to subvert democracy, subvert the free press, then your average soldier is going to be -- you know -- well, the average person won't be listened to, the average general talking, giving interviews on CNN isn't going to be listened to.

There is no question that the government has done this before. CIA does it. But the question is, should the Pentagon be doing it?

KURTZ: John Aravosis, do you see any connection between this effort in Iraq, paying Iraqi newspapers, disguising information that came from a contractor as being legitimate journalism, and the $240,000 paid to Armstrong Williams by the Education Department...

ARAVOSIS: Right.

KURTZ: ... to talk up the president's policies? The fake Medicare video news releases that said, "I'm Karen Ryan (ph) reporting," when she was a contractor? Both of those efforts branded illegal by the Government Accountability Office.

Do you see a connection between that and what's going on in Iraq?

ARAVOSIS: Yes. I mean, the main connection that's going on here is that the Bush administration wants to fight an information war rather than a real war. They think that they're right, everybody will accept them as being right, and they can win, whether it's on domestic policy or foreign policy, if they can just get their message across.

KURTZ: But all administrations fight information wars.

ARAVOSIS: Sure.

KURTZ: The question is, do you do it honestly and openly?

ARAVOSIS: Well, it's not just do you do it honest and openly, but it's also do you realize that it's not just, if you can just get the right talking point you can win, but actually you'd have to have a policy that's a good policy. It seems the Bush administration, at least from a left perspective or a Democratic perspective, they don't want to come up with good ideas, they just good want to come up with good ways to sell them. And I think that's what we're seeing in Iraq vis-a-vis the American public.

The Bush administration won't tell us the truth. They want to tell us, we're winning, it's victory.

KURTZ: Ed Morrissey, you want to briefly respond to that?

MORRISSEY: Well, first off, I think that you can draw some sort of comparison with the Armstrong Williams debacle. And I done think there is anybody who is really defending the Armstrong Williams deal.

The difference is, is that I think that the Bush administration has greater hurdles in getting -- in getting their message out for two reasons. One, I think they face a more hostile media environment than the previous administration did. And the second thing is that they just don't get the message out.

They're not very good at getting the message out. And they need to -- they need to improve that.

This is -- we're going to talk maybe a little bit about George Bush's speech a little later on. And we're just not hearing enough directly from the administration on the -- on the ways in which we're winning the Iraq war and the ways in which their policies are better.

KURTZ: OK.

MORRISSEY: They need to be out front, in front of the cameras more often, talking about this.

KURTZ: OK. Let's talk about the president's speech right now in Annapolis, laying out the goals in the war in Iraq. One network took it live among the broadcast networks.

Was this big news or basically a repackaging, more of the same, Mark Mazzetti?

MAZZETTI: Well, actually, I think in the run-up to the speech, news organizations were unclear how big a deal to make of it. But then the morning that President Bush made the speech, the White House came out with their 35-page document issuing a strategy, and also the environment this was in. This is two weeks before -- or two weeks after Republicans demanded the White House come up with a strategy. And here it was.

So it became a big deal. And there was not a lot of new detail, but it was the president laying out a case for how -- what is the victory in Iraq. But it was really how to get out of Iraq.

KURTZ: John Aravosis, did the press do a good job in pointing out discrepancies between what the president was saying about the readiness of Iraqi forces and the realities on the ground in Baghdad and surrounding areas?

ARAVOSIS: Yes, I think so. I mean, one example, I think it was the "TIME" magazine reporter who came forward and said, you know, the president said that Iraqi troops were leading the way to Tal Afar, or some town like that. And he came out and said, you know, "I was embedded with those troops. The Iraqi forces didn't lead the way, it was U.S. forces."

So I think what you've got is, you k now, some people on the right may feel the media is being unfair. But, you know, ask Bill Clinton how friendly the media was to him.

KURTZ: All right. ARAVOSIS: The media is also going to be a curmudgeon. And in this case, they are taking on the people in power.

KURTZ: Ed Morrissey, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi originally had opposed any U.S. withdrawal. When Jack Murtha proposed it, now she says she is for U.S. withdrawal. I didn't see a lot of stories accusing her of flip-flopping.

Do you think that the media kind of gave Pelosi a pass here?

MORRISSEY: Yes, I do think they gave Pelosi a pass, but I think the problem -- I think what they were focusing on was the fact that the Democrats sort of fell apart after the -- after the vote in the House which -- on November 18. They have gone -- they have gone in completely different directions.

You had John Kerry, who was saying, I'm not talking about timetables, I'm talking about timetables. You had Nancy -- and at the same time, saying nobody here is talking about precipitous withdrawal. And Nancy Pelosi, just right afterwards, saying, I want a precipitous withdrawal. Steny Hoyer coming out and saying, I don't want to withdraw at all, I want to win -- I want to win the mission.

KURTZ: So plenty of different positions for journalists to write about.

I've got to call a halt right there. Thanks to our bloggers, Ed Morrissey, John Aravosis. Mark Mazzetti, of the "LA Times," thanks very much for joining us.

Posted by Mike at December 4, 2005 12:39 PM

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