Posted by
wht on Tuesday, July 11, 2006 1:15:47 AM
Good Cop/Bad Cop
I truly appreciated the way that the
NY Times
dug into the secretive financial monitoring program now widely known as
the Swift operation. Opponents claim that the NYT should never have
published the story because the administration told them not to. But
right there in the initial story, you can see that the administration's
people had laid it out for all the world to see,
on the record:
Viewed
by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a
hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001
and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast
Asia, the officials said. The program, run out of the Central
Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has
provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of
terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our
authorities," Stuart Levey, an undersecretary at the Treasury Department,
said in an interview Thursday. The program is grounded in part on the
president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple
safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted
searches of Americans' records.
What, you say, that the NY Times would have printed the story even if Mr. Levey had not talked
on the record?
Au contraire,
the reporters Lichtblau and Risen used the old reliable technique known
to everyone who has watched their fair share of cop shows. They
basically emptily threatened to publish leaked information, and the
traitorous Levey, acting as the only named source, spilled all the
information. Dear Mr. Leakey, how ignorant of you, anybody in your
position of authority should know better not to fall for this kind of
*bleeping bleepity-bleep* stuff.
I don't understand why no one in the media has pointed out this classic
"good cop/bad cop" trick that the NYT pulled off.
At
its bare bones, it is nothing more than a variation of the 'good cop,
bad cop' scenarios that we have seen on other TV shows. Pembleton is
warm, cordial even pleasant to Tucker, while Bayliss unrelentingly
questions him on the facts and inconsistencies that have developed in
the Araber's story trying desperately to cause a crack in this man's
facade. This goes on for half the episode.
Then about halfway
through comes an exceptional sequence. In it Bayliss and Pembleton
begin to speak in precise rhythm drilling in to the Araber's head what
they know--- that he killed her..
And it happens again with the Wilson/Plame affair, whereby
Novak revealed that Karl Rove acted as his secondary source in outing the CIA agent.
A secondary confirming source leaking information should rate the same
as a primary source, as Rove, just like Levey, should not have fallen
for this likely bait-and-switch ruse.
Rove should go to jail for
leaking this information and join Levey; let them stew away for several
years, all the time wishing that they had watched more cop shows in
their youth.
We can only hope that oil executives and OPEC members would prove this
gullible. If they had, we would have long ago figured out our global
oil reserves.
But they better watch their backs, as
this guy looks like a good cop/bad cop rolled into one.