Happy Anniversary From Paul Krugman

Shorter Krugman: John Ashcroft is the worst Attorney General in history because, after a major arrest of possible domestic terrorists, Ashcroft did not hold a press conference to promote it. No, seriously.

Paul Krugman is worried that John Ashcroft is neglecting domestic militias while focussing on, and publicizing, foreign terrorist groups. Since this is roughly the second anniversary of Nick Kristof's column with an identical theme, we applaud the consistency of the Times columnists.

Briefly, the Justice Dept. arrested, indicted, and eventually convicted William Krar and others for possession of an impressive arms cache including the chemicals to make a cyanide bomb. However, John Ashcroft's Justice Department has not been keen to promote this seeming success against domestic terror, as Prof. Krugman tells us:

Strangely, though, the attorney general didn't call a press conference to announce the discovery of the weapons cache, or the arrest of William Krar, its owner. He didn't even issue a press release. This was, to say the least, out of character. Jose Padilla, the accused "dirty bomber," didn't have any bomb-making material or even a plausible way to acquire such material, yet Mr. Ashcroft put him on front pages around the world.

Now, Prof. Krugman lives in a world with a totally passive press corps and no political party operating in opposition to the Republicans. In that world, if a tree falls in the forest but John Ashcroft does not hold a press conference to announce it, it does not make a sound. Fortunately, Paul Krugman, Truth-Seeker and Recycler, is on the case:

At this point, I have the usual problem. Writing about John Ashcroft poses the same difficulties as writing about the Bush administration in general, only more so: the truth about his malfeasance is so extreme that it's hard to avoid sounding shrill.

And just what is the nature of the extreme malfeasance?

In this case, it sounds over the top to accuse Mr. Ashcroft of trying to bury news about terrorists who don't fit his preferred story line. Yet it's hard to believe that William Krar wouldn't have become a household name if he had been a Muslim, or even a leftist. Was Mr. Ashcroft, who once gave an interview with Southern Partisan magazine in which he praised "Southern patriots" like Jefferson Davis, reluctant to publicize the case of a terrorist who happened to be a white supremacist?

Let's regroup briefly - according to CNN, this was "one of the most extensive domestic-terrorism investigations since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Here we are told that the investigation made the Presidential Daily Brief. So it doesn't appear that the extreme malfeasance was in the investigation; evidently, the extreme malfeasance was a failure to promote this particular arrest.

Which prompts another question - if this story is so important, why did the NY Times not cover it? A search of their website for "Krar" turns up one previous story. Has Krugman declared the death of investigative journalism? Does this mean that the "All Abu Grahib, all the time" era never happened?

And similarly, shouldn't some earnest Democrat be screaming about this case, if publicizing it is so important? Perhaps we should be hearing calls for a Congressional investigation into the timing and content of John Ashcroft's press conferences.

A bit of a clue to this media silence can be found in the Times' coverage of the case Nick Kristof cited two years ago. The Times didn't splash a lot of ink on David Burgert, either. However, their big story opens thusly:

A Far-Right Militia's Far-Fetched Plot Draws Some Serious Attention
By BLAINE HARDEN

KALISPELL, Mont., March 2, As its secrets began to spill out here this week, Project 7 sounded suspiciously like a Monty Python sketch.

A Monty Python sketch - we're having fun now! If the Times is taking the militias just this seriously in June of 2002, how seriously should their readers be taking them now? (Sorry about the vague pronoun - feel free to take either the militias or the Times lightly).

Now, as to the question of why Ashcroft did not promote this arrest - despite Krugman's self-promoting posturing (he's Bold but Shrill!) I find it extremely plausible that this arrest did not fit Ashcroft's story line any better than it fit the NY Times story line. So what?

Or, it is possible that this silence is based on an FBI strategy, which I will label "Even paranoids have real enemies, but why goad them by publicizing it?" My casual impression is that the black helicopter/FEMA takeover-backed-by-NATO-troops crowd is motivated by a sense of persecution by the government. Maybe the FBI has concluded that the net effect of publicizing their efforts against these groups is inflammatory and counterproductive. A similar effect would not obtain with the juihadists, who have other reasons for acting. Just a thought (although I am quite pleased with it).

The question of whether the Justice Department is devoting sufficient resources to domestic groups seems to be separate, quite legitimate, and hard to answer. Despite Oklahoma City, I am inclined to suspect that after Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Atlanta Olympic bombing debacle, domestic terror is not seen as the golden route to promotion at the FBI. That said, we haven't had another Oklahoma City, so how are we doing? Perhaps the issue of potential domestic terror is the media/poltical blind spot of 2004, as foreign terror was in Campaign 2000.

Let's give the Big Finish to Daniel Levitas. The Times buried his story on a Saturday in December, but we love this quote which appeared elsewhere:

"Excuse me, a chemical weapon was found in the home state of George Bush," says Levitas. "I'm not saying the Justice Department deliberately decided to downplay the story because they thought it might be embarrassing to the US government if weapons of mass destruction were found in America before they were found in Iraq. But I am saying it was a mistake not to give this higher profile."

MORE: The Earnest Prof also criticizes Ashcroft's focus on other grounds:

The concerns of the Justice Department, however, appear to lie elsewhere. Two weeks ago a representative of the F.B.I. appealed to an industry group for help in combating what, he told the audience, the F.B.I. regards as the country's leading domestic terrorist threat: ecological and animal rights extremists.

Here is some relevant testimony on that score. now, I have to admit that Oklahoma City scared me more than the Unabomber, but here we have the FBI terror report from 1999, back when the oh-so-competent Janet Reno was in charge:

Despite the fears of international plots in the United States, 1999 was, in fact, characterized by a sharp increase in domestic terrorism, driven by a troubling upswing in activity carried out by animal rights and environmental extremists. These special interest or single issue terrorists committed eight of the ten terrorist incidents recorded in the United States during the calendar year (the remaining two incidents
were carried out by rogue right-wing extremists). (p. 7 of 68 in the .pdf file)

They go on to note that the ALF/ELF attacks resulted exclusively in property damage; the two right wing extremists killed and wounded people. More on ALF/ELF here.

STILL MORE: The Terrorism sectionDOJ Strategic Plan for 2003-2008 has a strong international focus. From p. 12:

FY 2008 OUTCOME GOAL

There will be NO terrorist acts committed by foreign nationals against U.S. interests within U.S. borders.

Troubling. Unless the Dept. of Homeland Security has moved that function elsewhere (which is not what John E. Lewis, Deputy Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division, said on May 18, 2004).

Hmm. International, not domestic, in both the FY 2005 Budget request and Mueller's recent speech. The CFR has thoughts on domestic terror here.

Comments

[Barry N. Johnson]

Krugman's latest column is remarkable. He can't accuse Ashcroft of not doing his job (the terrorist plot was thwarted), so he blasts him for not holding a big enough press conference afterward.

When Krugman starts writing tripe like this, it's as sure a sign as any that the economic recovery is well under way.

[Jim Glass]

I'm waiting for Krugman to go after Keller and Pinch for not reporting this story just because they didn't get a release about it from Ashcroft. You know, the way Kristoff went after Pinch in his column a couple months ago that savaged CEOs who hold on to their power and big-dollar pay through personal connections in spite of a record of performance that couldn't get them a salaried job anywhere else. (Though to be fair, perhaps the recent happy newsroom days with Howell and the rest of Pinch's hand-picked team weren't a leadership failure but a followship failure?)

In the meantime, which may last a while, one can wonder at how the nature of an investigation varies by the eye of the beholder:

Krugman: "Mr. Krar's arrest was the result not of a determined law enforcement effort against domestic terrorists, but of a fluke..."

CNN: "... hundreds of subpoenas were issued ..."

~~
"A Monty Python sketch - we're having fun now!"

Now that PK's gone big time into the media world and become a critic of publicity management and all, maybe he'll go outright Hollywood? The Pythons aren't around any more but he could sign on as a screenwriter for Michael Moore. Next best thing.

[Sam O]

Thanks for the Kessler/UPI link.

It apears that Krugman is regurgitating old op-eds with very little value-added. While it ain't plagerism, surely the Times expects more from its columnists. And its readers should expect the Times' editorial page to be out in front of UPI's, at the very least.

Or should they?

[Brian]

Sam O,

Your comment is easily the most idiotic (and this coming from someone who tries to keep things civil). What proof is there that he basically copied the UPI piece? It had a lot of the same information? Well, if you write about the same story, you tend to have a lot of the same facts. Was the style the same? Not really. Even a brief scan shows that. Did he use some interesting phrase that would be a dead giveaway? I don't see one.

As for the others, you are pretty much distorting what Krugman says. It's that simple.

[Jim Glass]

"It apears that Krugman is regurgitating old op-eds with very little value-added."

Perhaps not just op-eds:
http://www.newpartisan.squarespace.com/display/ShowJournalEntry?moduleId=4763&entryId=19657

PK's been recycling other people's stuff with little value added for a long time.

A lot of his howler mistakes have come from doing it carelessly, not getting what he was recycling right, then exaggerating what he got wrong to make Republicans look bad and justify hurling a personal insult at somebody.

The first time was right after he started at the Times when he went on and on about how "right-wingers" led by John McCain were pushing the Internet Tax Freedom Act to repeal sales taxes on retail sales over the Internet -- concluding with the personal shot that McCain was either "pandering" or "confused".
http://www.pkarchive.org/column/21300.html

The only problem was that the ITFA had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with sales taxes. And it wasn't a "right wing" proposal but passed on bipartisan overwhelming vote.
http://www.ncpa.org/oped/bartlett/mar0100.html

And of course there was never any, "Oops, I was one who was confused" apology to John McCain either.

The delicious irony was that Krugman's whole column was an impressive-reading lecture on the economic principle that things should be taxed uniformly, without special exemptions here and double taxation there.

And that was the express *purpose* of the ITFA -- to bar discriminatory taxes against Internet businesses while leaving them subject to the same taxes that applied to other businesses, like sales taxes.

So Krugman had it not merely wrong but bass-ackwards -- he obviously couldn't even *imagine* that "right wingers" could be on the virtuous side of an issue, they must be the bad guys, so why check any facts before name calling?

He'd clearly gotten his whole wrong idea from garbling different lobbying lines that were being spun out by state tax people to fight the ITFA. "Why shouldn't we have the freedom to target special taxes against the Internet ... do you know, if we couldn't collect sales tax, how much tax we'd lose?"

So, having no understanding at all of what the heck he was writing about he, well, pandered to the pro-tax side just *because* they were the pro-tax side -- and told a Whopper topped by a personal insult that he never retracted or apoligized for.

That was back in 2000. I was kind of stunned when I read that piece, taxes being my business and realizing the whopper-ness of it. I'd formerly had a much higher opinion of Krugman. I was surprised.

But how many times has he done the same thing since? It was about 20 before I stopped reading his column.

So now he's damning Ashcroft for obeying the law in not using gun registration lists. He'd rather have an AG who throws away the law as an obstacle to be disregarded when looking for those whom be believes might be guilty.

And he's damning Ashcroft for not giving enough publicity to a story that the New York Times has deemed not worthy of *one word* in a news story. But he has no criticism of the Times, of course. ;-)

SOP. [yawn] What else is new?

[Jim Glass]

If that link above doesn't work or runs off the page, just go to...

http://www.newpartisan.squarespace.com

... then down to "Dare to Compare", Posted on 06.22.2004