I finally saw Zero Dark Thirty the other day, and all the top-secret/administration giving up classified debate aside, I found it pretty slow.  Including the culminating hit at the end.  I wasn’t on target, but if they moved in real life like the molasses actors did on screen, Osama bin Laden would have been in India before they reached the third floor.  The movie did, however, remind me of a paper I’d written a long time ago.  I haven’t blogged in awhile because I’m buried in security work and deadlines, so I though I’d post it.

Today is the publication date of General Stanley McChrystal’s book MY SHARE OF THE TASK.  I’m looking forward to reading it, but have already seen press reports stating he barely discusses the Rolling Stone article that brought about the end of his career.  He simply assumes responsibility for the entire affair, as I would absolutely expect.  When the article first appeared and the whirlwind began – over two years ago, right before the publication of ONE ROUGH MAN – I wrote a blog about it.  I never posted it due to competing demands of publishing and a little pressure from others not to aggravate the very media industry that would be reviewing ONE ROUGH MAN.  To this day, I regret that decision, and figured better late than never.  General McCyrstal is one of the smartest officers our Army has ever produced, and it’s tragic his career ended because of a flawed journalist with an agenda.  Michael Hastings took the Rolling Stone article and wrote a full-length book, which lost one publisher when the Army finished its investigation and couldn’t corroborate his story.  Today, Hastings continues his agenda, now trashing GEN Petraeus every chance he gets.  Anyway, General McChyrstal will never refute the story, but I can. The original Rolling Stone article can be found here.  The following is an uncut blog from over two years ago, so do some math when you see dates, timeframes, etc.

It’s been a couple of years since I blogged about the damage Wikileaks has done, and the founder is back in the news.  Julian Assange has holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the United Kingdom, after fleeing from authorities who wanted to extradite him to Sweden for alleged sex crimes.  And yet, his entire existence still revolves, remarkably, around some fanciful plot that the United States is trying to get him, with Assange himself spending his last moment in the sun denouncing the US “Witch Hunt”. What “witch hunt” is he talking about?  The United States has never once tried to arrest him in any manner whatsoever.  In fact, he’s never even been indicted for anything in the United States (although in 2010 the Wikileaks spokesman said it was “imminent”).  But he has for real in Sweden.

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, and I find it strangely symbolic given the ongoing debate about the current spate of leaks plaguing this administration.  Watergate was the breaking point for any restraint in the press; the end of responsible journalism where writers weighed the ramifications of a story before publishing it.  Prior to Watergate, American journalists felt they had an obligation both to their newspaper and to their country.  Now, it’s a free-for-all, the only obligation being to make as much of a news sensation as possible, using whatever information you have.  Not only do modern journalists not seem to care, it’s as if they feel it’s their duty to publish everything they find, regardless of the consequences to national security.

On Mother’s Day I read two news stories that really got me thinking about what drives our foreign policy.  Twin car bombs were detonated in Damascus killing fifty-five people.  This set off a worldwide media frenzy about how fragile the current truce is and how the UN better get on the ball.  On the same day, a bus was found in Mexico with the bodies of upwards of seventy people butchered, their heads, hands and feet cut off.  The gruesome discovery was just a blip in the news cycle.