How Stupid Do You Think We Are?
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (48) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
A few years ago, while sucking at the public mammary as a civil servant, I went looking for a different job. I really liked my agency and the people and felt the work was useful. Unfortunately, the agency didn’t have a lot of money and most of us were classified as “term” employees, working on two-year contracts which could be renewed… or not. A less than ideal situation given my deep reservoir of tolerance. I found another position, less interesting, but one that provided tenure, applied, and was selected. I then approached my boss to tell her I was leaving.
She asked me to not make a decision, that they really wanted me to stay, and give them a chance to make a counteroffer. They’d been pretty nice to me and I would have preferred to stay there so I put off accepting the new job. Their counteroffer was that they would renew my next two-year term appointment a year in advance.
My first thought was, “How stupid do you think I am?” Decline a tenured position that would require me to commit a felony at work before I could be fired in favor of a two-year appointment? And then I was immediately able to answer my own question. Damned stupid. They think I am damned stupid. How could you come to any other conclusion?
So I had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu this morning when I read an otherworldly attempt by the WaPo’s Walter Pincus to convince us that the New York Times hadn’t revealed anything secret at all when it blew the whistle on how the US Treasury Department was monitoring terrorist finances.
Read on.
The June 23 article by Eric Licthblau and James Risen wasn’t a big deal. It only ran on the front page, above the fold, and said:
Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials. …
Administration officials, however, asked The New York Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the SWIFT program could jeopardize its effectiveness. They also enlisted several current and former officials, Democrats and Republicans, to vouch for its value.
That’s what the NYT Times does, it runs stuff everyone already knows on the front page under a screaming headline
Sort of like the obituaries but just not as accurate.
Now comes Walter freakin Pincus to tell us that the administration is really overreacting:
Bush administration officials attacked the newspapers for publishing the articles, which they said hurt the war on terrorism. Vice President Cheney said at a campaign fundraiser on June 30, "Publishing this highly classified information about our sources and methods for collecting intelligence will enable the terrorists to look for ways to defeat our efforts."
But over several years, public testimony and documents have described those kinds of methods for tracking terror suspects….
"I don't think anyone who deals with this topic could have been surprised" about using those organizations, said Victor D. Comras, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer who participated in the U.N. group.
Nice diversion, there Wally. But the real question is did the average person know about SWIFT and the possibilities for tracking financial transactions before this story? No. Obviously not. And the NYT knew virtually no one knew about this system otherwise they wouldn’t have put it on the frontpage of their paper and made a big deal about the Administration asking them not to publish it.
The press has a habit of doing this. We know, by way of page 127 of the 9/11 Commission Report that the CIA had been able to track bin Laden’s movements by his use of a particular brand of satellite telephone until that bit of information was revealed in the press. Now you can make a case here, just as Mr. Victor D. Comras, retired U.S. Foreign Service officer, did that anyone who deals with sat phones knew this. True. But bin Laden didn’t know it until he read it in the paper.
A lot of people know that emails reside somewhere virtually forever, but no so many that criminal investigations don’t routinely find emails that people tried to erase.
Incredibly, one of the bits of evidence that Pincus trots out is
In February 2002, Jeffrey P. Neubert, president and chief executive of the New York Clearing House Association LLC, described the intelligence-gathering system at a hearing of the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations. Neubert said under the proposed system, government agencies would electronically send the names of suspected terrorists or terrorist organization to financial institutions "seeking account and/or transaction 'hits' which would be returned to the respective [government] organizations."
Read the testimony for yourself and decide if this provides anywhere near the specificity of the New York Times story.
The fact is that a lot of people know a lot about a lot of things. But very few of us know a lot about systems and processes that we don’t deal with. Even when we are vaguely familiar with processes we don’t necessarily have the time, inclination, or ability to use those processes in the way a group of very smart, mission-focused people might use it. I know the number of lands and grooves for a weapon firing an NATO 5.56mm M198 ball cartridge. I know the cyclic rate of fire for the M-240B machinegun, the muzzle velocity of a .45 ACP round fired from a M1911A1 pistol. I can even enumerate for you the number of times and the circumstances where a square of British infantry has been broken by a cavalry charge. But I had never heard of SWIFT or Fedline before this story, much less been aware of how they could be used to track the movement of funds.
Add to this the fact that it is hard to believe that the average al Qaeda operative spends hours each day scouring congressional testimony for comments by functionaries from the “New York Clearing House Association LLC” and is able to do so in anything approaching fluent English, much less contemplate the idea that Mr. Neubert’s testimony might have been translated in Arabic and widely disseminated in the tribal territories of Pakistan or in the Sudan.
The New York Times, Washington Post, and other major papers, however, are readily available online, accessible world wide, and, most importantly, major stories in major American dailies will be quickly translated and will drive coverage in major papers throughout the world.
Pincus essentially wants us to believe that because scientists knew atoms existed and Einstein had published his famous E=mc2 formula that there would have been no-harm-no-foul in divulging how an atomic bomb could be made. I think Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would probably disagree.
Which brings me back to the original question of “how stupid do you think we are?” A major newspaper runs a frontpage story exposing what they term a SECRET program and they guffaw about the rubes in the Administration wanting them to not publish it but First Amendment and all that. And now we are expected to believe that there was really no secret exposed because some people knew this could be done.
I guess we have the answer to that question, don’t we?
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With the mentions of "neocons" and "Karl Rove" but... it leaves me feeling like you could have done so much more.
Gotcha.
Apropos of nothing, the scene that I thought you were referencing was great. It went like this: Cash had gotten an audition with his band and... well, hold on:
[after record producer Sam Phillips stops Cash's band a couple of verses into their audition]Sam Phillips: You know exactly what I'm telling you. We've already heard that song a hundred times. Just like that. Just... like... how... you... sing it.
Johnny Cash: Well you didn't let us bring it home.
Sam Phillips: Bring... bring it home? All right, let's bring it home. If you was hit by a truck and you were lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song. Huh? One song that people would remember before you're dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth. One song that would sum you up. You're telling me that's the song you sing. That same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio, all day. About your peace within, and how it's real, and how you're gonna shout it? Or... would you sing something different. Something real. Something you felt. Cause I'm telling you right now, that's the kind of song people want to hear. That's the kind of song that truly saves people. It ain't got nothin to do with believin' in God, Mr. Cash. It has to do with believin' in yourself.
Johnny Cash: I got a couple of songs I wrote in the Air Force. You got anything against the Air Force?
Sam Phillips: No.
Johnny Cash: I do.
[Begins tentatively singing and playing Folsom Prison Blues]
...and the whole d*mn movie was like that.
I was actually remembering the diary that asked "am I a Republican?" and he talked about various policies and his libertarian impulses here, his statist impulses there, and so on and so forth and one of the replies said something to the effect of "you may be a rethugican".
I read that and howled. What a brilliant meta-comment! It did a great job of gently tweaking the author's doubts and navel-gazing while, at the same time, doubly mocking Kossacks and their deeply unserious approach to these issues.
And then I looked at the comment history...
And realized, nope, this wasn't a meta-comment... it was just a comment.
And it stopped being funny.
And I found myself asking "if you knew that you would be banned within seconds of posting, would you really just call someone a rethugican and leave it there?"
I didn't comment in that thread and have regretted it ever since.
I didn't want to relive that regret a second time.
Have you seen your brothers-in-arms before? I dare say the stinky guys and broads protesting the war, Haliburton, Bush, etc. are far from the mainstream of the country in appearance or thought. College liberals (the radicals) are people with little or no social skills that have finally located others with similar social retardation. Their interaction happens to manifest itself in radical politics. The views adopted appeal to them because they are outside the mainstream--just like them. They are the outcasts. Perhaps someday you will realize the country is laughing at you but I doubt it.
BTW-You're probably banned by now, but if not I would love to hear your rebuttal to my thesis on college liberals.
There's a call-in program that'd be perfect for ya.
Ciao, boychik.
Before you got banned...
If you only had one group of paragraphs to throw in the face of someone you disagreed with...
If you knew that you could only write one post...
Would you write this one?
For one thing, there is no mention of Hitler. There is no mention of Cheney, Haliburton, or Rumsfeld. There is no comparison of the president to a monkey, nor Satan. There is no mention of Katrina, Global Warming, nor stealing the election 3 elections in a row.
Seriously, if you knew that you would only have one post to write before you got caught... wouldn't you want to include all of these things? As it is, you just showed up, got banned, and now we're talking about how much better your one shot could have been.
That's no way to live.
It's hard to believe that the Times and her supporters aren't acting wilfully to hamper our side against the terrorists. In fact, I don't believe they're innocent, I do believe they are intentionally helping our enemies.
Strangely enough, not because they want them to win, but because they just want us to lose. They don't believe we're really in a war for survival, they think it's just a big board game, and they want to be one of the players.
They think "lose" means that Bush will be discredited in history as a failed President (motive: hate), and Democrats will regain their rightful place in charge of the US government (motive: power). They don't grasp that it will mean living like Israelis within reach of Hezbollah. Checking your vicinity to make sure nobody's walking away from an abandoned backpack. Staying away from any traffic disturbance. Knowing that your next movie may be your last. We're already having parcels searched at the subway. Or maybe they just don't care.
While I have some minor quibbles with the NYT over this (mainly with their sources...), I have to say that when I first heard the story, I went: "Well duh".
It's hardly a stretch for anyone technologically minded, and who has watched the behavior of our government in the last five years or so, to strongly suspect that our government is monitoring a whole lot of things (legally or not) in secret. Bank transactions are one of the more obvious things for the government to be watching - heck, the IRS monitors them for tax reasons. Phone conversations, radio communications, internet communications are all a no brainer.
Frankly, only the most stupid of terrorists would make the assumption that any of this stuff would not be monitored, and take necessary precautions against detection. And I have to admit there are some stupid terrorists out there -- and they'll continue to be stupid even with articles like this smacking them in the face.
The stupid ones aren't the ones we need to worry about anyway. We'll often catch them before they can do damage, unless they're very very lucky. The smart ones, on the other hand, don't raise warning flags, communicate with readily available encrypted and disguised means that no amount of secret monitoring is likely to break (and may not even notice), and transfer money through a wide variety of untraceable mechanisms. They're the ones we need to worry about.
Frankly, the only people really that the NYT article informed about these programs are the uninformed general public. And since I've always believed that secrecy breeds corruption, I can't help but see that as a good thing.
and I really hate to nit pick a post like that, but please, redact the expletives.
I assume that's what Moe meant by "Ciao, boychik."
leebermantherepublican's body lies a-mouldering in his grave
Will someone with a BigStick™ BLAM this maroon? The last two paragraphs certainly justify it.
if Ann Coulter had had sex with HIM...
You say,
"The smart ones, on the other hand, don't raise warning flags, communicate with readily available encrypted and disguised means that no amount of secret monitoring is likely to break (and may not even notice), and transfer money through a wide variety of untraceable mechanisms. They're the ones we need to worry about.
Frankly, the only people really that the NYT article informed about these programs are the uninformed general public. And since I've always believed that secrecy breeds corruption, I can't help but see that as a good thing."
That's a strong assertion. Where did you find the facts to support it?
How do you know that the "smart ones" can't be caught by this program? What would you say about another super-secret program that is monitoring the "smart ones?" Why aren't you also afraid of the "dumb ones?" If you're so smart, why aren't the people who have been in this business for years just as smart? Why do they think it was a program worth pursuing?
You seem to be quite willing to believe the Times's version of the story, but unwilling to believe the words of the very people that we ALL elected to public office (knowledgeable people in both parties tried to get the Times to hold the story). You are willing to abdicate all the decision-making power the US Constitution grants to citizens, giving it instead to ONE unelected leaker inside the CIA, and the TWO unelected decision-makers at the New York Times, Sulzberger and his toady, Keller. Oh, yes, and you, with nothing to hang your hat on but an opinion, you make four.
How do you know that all three of them don't have an ulterior motive for their action? Why do you think eveybody in the world needed to know about that program? These are serious questions, and I really do want to read your answers.
Finally, let's have you write a letter to the Times, telling them that "secrecy breeds corruption," and instructing them to annouce the name(s) of their leaker/informer(s). They shouldn't keep any secrets, either, should they?
You manage to combine stupidity with racism, then you pull the trifecta by insulting your hosts.
Hubris. Mind-blowing arrogance. A stunning inability to grasp of the astoundingly obvious. And I'm talking about your comments. You'd best have some RS cred built up previous to now, because this one is just mud-throwing.
Minor quibbles with the nyt? Let's see, blatantly violationg the Comint statute in publishing classified information that undeniably shoots down a successful program (that even the nyt admits there appeared to be no illegalities of) that had nabbed big-name terrorists and was netting ongoing results. I say undeniably, even though you, incredibly, deny it. Ah, well. Water is wet. Deal with it.
only the most stupid of terrorists would make the assumption... ah, well, since LOTS of them were continuing to wire money back and forth and we were marking them, following them, and letting the money trail lead us to the big fish, then apparently LOTS of them are that stupid. But not stupid enough to miss a front-page nyt story detailing a secret program in which we were exploiting their stupidity.
secrecy breeds corruption. Yep, that's why the offense calls plays in the huddle 15 yards from the line of scrimmage, because there just MAY be some utility in not letting the opponent know every little stratagy, tactic, and tool you are using to defeat them. Ponder this a bit, it seems to be something you never considered.
And now that the terrorists know that the Belgians have been helping us in the GWOT, only an idiot would not expect them to be a target. And you can believe THAT will be a thought in the back of the mind of any government we ask to help us with a secret program to identify and catch terrorists. Does that cause you a minor quibble with the nyt?
I don't care if you hate Bush, don't trust Bush, or whatever the bug up your arse is. The nyt published (yet again) a story that makes it more difficult to defend the nation from those who would fly jets into our buildings or turn the New York harbor and Manhattan into a glowing radioactive pit in the earth. The nyt did it intentionally.
Bye now.
Real piece of work, Eh?
I feel like the D's and L's in the Congress, who always want to raise our taxes,believe we should send as much of our earnings to them as possible, so they can "spend it properly" always left me feeling like THEY were the Elitists. They believe they're smarter than we are, and they know how better to spend our hard earned money than we do.
And after going to college as a 29 year old Veteran, instead of an 18 year old mush-head, I didn't have much trouble figuring out that Academia is full of highly educated men and women living in a "bubble", hiding out from reality and teaching the "mush-heads" their Utopian Fantasies, and Socialist Collectivist dogma.
Amazing that this moonbat has it all the other way around. Leeberman the Republican? THAT really sets it off. With the exception of the Iraq War, Joe Lieberman is more of a liberal than Feingold. But since he's not kissing the butts of the wacko fringe groups, he's a pariah.
I do want to mention that Liberals don't hate America. They just don't feel like they belong, so they call themselves "members of the World Community", like the UN wants them to.
I actually had a professor in college tell me that (in 1988). I asked him how much time he had spent living outside the US. Of Course,he had never left the country except for short vacations in Mexico and Canada.
I let him know that people around the world risk their lives fighting for the same freedoms he took for granted. That people in South Korean villages come out of their houses and shook our hands during manuevers because "US Marines keep Communists away", and those people didn't have dirt, yet they were waiting for us and brewed and served us barrels of hot tea, and picked baskets of persimmons to give us as we came through. We gave the kids our C ration candy, and most of us were blinking back tears as we continued into the mountains.
That kids and adults in Lebanon told us how they wished they could come to live in the USA,that they would risk their lives to get here, and not care if they arrived with a penny because if they worked hard, they could achieve their dreams in the USA. Some even said if they would be allowed to enter the US, they would happily join the military for 6 years, go and fight wherever they had to, for the privilige of becoming an American.
And if he wanted to be a "member of the world community, he should renounce his US citizenship, move to whatever country he thought would be better, and find out just how things are in the REAL WORLD. If he didn't want to do that,he should stay in his protective bubble in Academia, teach English Literature, and shut his damn pie hole, because with all his education, he didn't know shit.
My Classmates,mostly 18-20 year old Mush-heads, stood up and applauded. I did "A" work in the class, but he awarded me a "C" for being contrary. He couldn't fail me as I had all my grades recorded electronically, But he told me if he could have failed me, he would have.
Colleges are joining Country Clubs and Cemetaries as the biggest wastes of Prime Real Estate.
the thread you linked to and I must say your interpretation is one of the most outrageously bizarre bits on nonsense I think I've ever read.
I looked hard for load calculations, demolition specs, etc. You know real information. And I didn't find any.
I mean you might consider, "dumb idea" and "use a bigger bomb" as secret but that would be a rather strange opinion which would lead to the classification of my entire collection of SGT Fury, SGT Rock, and Haunted Tank comics.
to be christians...because everyone knows that christ endorsed war. how do you think he and his jewish followers defeated the romans? with the nuclear option, fool, not love!! get real
whoops! sorry! dont ban me oh redstate! keep your finger off the itchy republican trigger! oh yeah and heres this thing about redstate being a home of oppressed conservatives, dont track mud into this site...
WELL YOU GUYS TRACKED BILE AND MUD INTO OUR GOVERNMENT!
bush for president of Iraq(if he cares so much)
let someone with a brain govern america...
...who was born in Brooklyn, grew up in NJ and whose alternate work commute into Manhattan was the WTC, up to until three months before 9/11. Do not think to presume that you know me, or my opinion of either the city or of the people who live there.
Do we understand each other on this?
As for the rest... you seem very determined to ignore the fact that the New York Times did something bad, which is your privilege; but that's also not our problem.
there has to be an element of humor. A prerequisite, mate.
And we aren't unionized here yet, though the SEIU has been sniffing about, so a response is a response. Mate.
let someone with a brain govern america...
Well, it's obviously not going to be you!
BTW, Proper nouns are capitalized.
"if there's a secret program and we know about it, or suspect that it exists, are we allowed to talk about it, just not in specifics?"
If you're a newspaper dealing with sensitive information regarding a successful counterterrorism program, you ask somebody first. And if they tell you no, you either don't talk about it, or you do - and take your lumps, which is something that the NYT is busily trying to avoid having to do.
As to your other point - agitprop aside, RedState is not affiliated with the US government and does not deal in classified material, so your snark has been circular-filed as being essentially irrelevant to the matter of the New York Times deliberately wrecking an existing and successful government counterterrorism program. But feel free to t use the Contact Us link in the future for all further requests to have people banned; those sorts of missives provide us with much amusement over our port and cigars*.
Moe
*Not actually a suggestion.
the point is that we didnt know about it specifically until the Times leaked it. That is very different that discussing a public event such as the tunnel episode. Apples to oranges.
Now, if the Times obtained classified information, which they seem to have admitted, then shouldnt they then be charged with a crime? I remember reading that in US statutes it is not only the leaker who is liable but the person who furthers that information along, knowing it is classified.
I am all for an open government to a point. i dont want the US to become a soviet style KGB run operation. Having said that I also believe there is some information that needs to be confidential. Do you believe nothing should be confidential? I will not speak for you but I would find that hard to believe. So, if you do believe some thing should be confidential, then the quesiton is, who gets to choose what is or isnt? The New York Times? Are they charged with the security of our Nation? No.
If you think that too many things are confidential then that is an argument between you and your lawmakers to change the laws as they stand. Not to applaud constant end-runs around them.
there isn't a point in here somewhere, i'm just wondering where you think it is. if there's a secret program and we know about it, or suspect that it exists, are we allowed to talk about it, just not in specifics? or are we allowed to talk about it, just not on the front page?
just the other day, when some would be terrorists tried to flood lower manhattan (yes they are stupid), we had some posters giving advice on how to properly blow up a tunnel. get a guy in here to engage them a bit and you'd end up with a virtual how-to manual. granted there were no timetables provided or lists of departments responsible for policing the tunnels, but maybe we should start barring redstate posters from writing on things of which they have expert knowledge?
I'm TOTALLY pulling out my Haunted Tank comics this weekend! Go J.E.B. Stuart! LOL!
come on guys, this website is a one pony show...this guy streef is writing everything, event the replies to his own stuff! of course this post will be deleted...probably by streef himself. at least dailykos or even MSM sites have lots of participants, instead of a couple dozen bitter conservatives with a modem.
come on guys. this whole site is a copycat, just let it go, and let the people in closed backroom and smoky boardrooms discuss Republican plans. people on the internet, aka ppl like you and me, dont matter when it comes to discussing conservatism. conservatism is NOT something that involves everyone, like democracy. its about elitism, which is why this site should, and will, appropriately be dominated by a few hardcore conservatives(like you streef, one of the few who will see this post)
thats why college campuses across the country are dominated by liberal opinion, much lik the MSM according to you guys, whereas the conservative opinion is really just a few bitter white guys...
some things never change. modern day neocons are miscreants, social misfits and outcasts. the bush presidency legitimizes idiocy and greed more than any other ridiculous ideaology calling itself conservative ever has.
if karl rove had sex at some point in his life, btw, my guess is that the world would have been a much different place today.
and there was a reason i responded to moe and not to you; with him i at least had a chance of my comment being taken lightly :)
doing so, another question came to mind: How stupid do we think Pincus is? That's not a personal attack; rather, I'm questioning his prose.
A few incomplete dribs and drabs does not make a banner story exposing a specific program.
The article is not the swiftest piece I've read.
...and pure titanium, dude. They're ordinary mortals; and counterintelligence work is full of examples of well-trained, well-motivated and clever people getting tripped up by doing something stupid. Tradecraft only works when you do it, and given enough time, you stop doing it. Particularly when it doesn't seem to be all that necessary in the first place. In other words, people can get stupid... unless, of course, some dunderhead from the press helps them out by braying like a jackass about a program that only works when it's being run quietly.
Bottom line: information on this counterintelligence program (and others) was on a need-to-know basis, and you did not need to know about that. Neither did I. And the New York Times has no business making that decision for either one of us.
...intelligence sources claim daily occurence." will be tomorrows NYT headline if all they do is report the obvious.
thanks for the article, I got a good laugh out of it. I cant believe he doesnt know the difference between a proposal and actually specifics of an ongoing program.
Oh wait, he probably does.
-------
* sun's rising will warm the Earth tomorrow, more proof of GlobalWarming. Administration declines to comment on potential dangers.
You knew the scope of the program? The fact that we had cooperation from small overseas financial outlets and that even completely foreign transactions were being monitored? I seriously doubt it. If "everybody knew" about the program, why was NYT even reporting on it? It wouldn't have been much of a story if they weren't exposing our intelligence collection methods in a new and very detailed way.
Some of the countries cooperating with the program are already thinking about pulling out. The editor of the NYT might as well have just gone to an office building and shot up the place... because this will, just as certainly, get people killed. This stuff will all make it into the terrorist "how to avoid detection" manual.
"facetiousness" over "snark"...if i hadn't missed the conversation i would have joined in. i enjoy discussing more efficient ways of debilitating new york as much as the next new yorker, which is of course quite a bit. but maybe that's just our latte drinking, sushi eating, terrorist sympathizing way.
regardless, what i was getting at is the fantasy many here seem to suffer from. between the administration's sieve impression and the tabloid rush to cover the next secret program, "plug the leaks and shutter the publishers" isn't anything more than agitprop. "you either don't talk about it, or you do - and take your lumps" is at least a good chunk of pragmatism.
very much so.
If one is to take your comment seriously at all then one has to believe that John Gotti was never caught on tape plotting crimes.
One has to believe that Osama bin Laden always knew the CIA was tracking his sat phone.
One has to believe that Hambali just let himself be caught, oddly enough, through this program.
The stupid ones are the ones you need to worry about. Because, after the fact, we know that the 9/11 hijackers used their cellphones like there was no tomorrow. We were able to reconstruct their travels from their credit cards.
There is a common phrase included in confidentiality agreements signed by companies. It usually goes something like "Confidential Information disclosed hereunder shall not be deemed to be a part of the public knowledge merely because it is embraced by more general information available to the public." The point is, that by advertising that I make a super widget I haven't disclosed how I make the super widget.
Apparently the NY Times doesn't get this concept. In their eyes, the fact that the government has publicly stated "we're tracking their finances" then all methods involved in doing so are also public. Maybe given the NY Times' lack of business accumen (evidenced by their stock price) their inability to grasp the distinction shouldn't be so surprising.
why they think we are so stoopid. Their readers are leebermantherepublican and his fellow C-Span callers. Stooooopid. He has written so many letters to the editor, they are left with the impression that our collective IQ couldn't boil water.
Hence, their condescending treasonous ways.