Tilting at windmills: outed farmers * plane too far * careless cooks Philby of the FBI * NBC's shame * bribes for admission.

AuthorPeters, Charles
PositionBrief notes

BOB WOODWARD AND DAN Balz have written a series for The Washington Post called "10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet." It's one of those hour-by-hour, day-by-day accounts that's called a "tick-tock" in the news business ("At 9:32 a.m.," etc.). These stories are often heavily laden with portentous quotes. Sometimes, however, authors have to stretch a bit in their search for drama. This seems to have happened with Woodward and Balz as they recounted the events after the airliner crashed into the Pentagon. They tell of Donald Rumsfeld rushing to the scene, helping the victims, then announcing, "I'm going inside."

If he had meant he was going inside the burning wreckage to rescue victims, that would have been dramatic. But all he meant was that he was going back to his office on the other side of the Pentagon. Similar quotes continue throughout the series. After Bush approves the final version of his September speech to Congress, his words, "Let's go tell Congress," are deemed momentous enough that they are not only quoted but also repeated in a photo caption. The series concludes with Bush's statement about his return to the White House on September 11: "Once I got back here, I said, `I'm here.'"

THE PICTURE OF THE UNDERpaid civil servant lingers despite several decades of annual raises. It is true that federal pay is not competitive with Hollywood, Wall Street, or professional Sports. But the average federal worker in the Washington area now makes $68,652 a year, according to The Washington Post's Stephen Barr. If this figure were better publicized--along with the fact that the salary is accompanied by vacation, health, and pension benefits far more generous than those offered by most of the private sector--it might inspire increased interest in government careers around the country. Sixty-eight thousand dollars may look modest in a few big cities, but to most Americans it represents a very nice income indeed.

DEMONIZING IRAQ MAY BE justified, but why did Bush feel he had to include Iran and North Korea when there seemed to be a prospect for improved relations with those countries? I'm especially suspicious about North Korea, which I strongly suspect has to be made into a bad guy so that Bush can justify his anti-ballistic missile program. Is there any evidence that North Korea is sponsoring terrorism today? Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times says the last instance was in 1987. And the danger from their missile program seems almost laughable. They do not have a missile that could come close to the United States, and they know that if they developed one and fired it at us, we would obliterate them.

DID YOU KNOW THAT MORE than a decade ago, the FBI traitor Robert Hanssen's brother-in-law, Mark Wauck, who was himself an FBI agent, told his superiors that "Hanssen had an extraordinary amount of cash at home and had been spending too much money for someone on an FBI salary"? According to The Washington Post's David Vise, "He told Bureau officials that he suspected his brother-in-law was spying for the Russians." What happened next? Nothing. There can be only two possible conclusions: One is that the FBI is even less pulled together than we thought. The other is that there was and maybe still is another Russian spy sabotaging an investigation of a fellow agent, as Kim Philby's ring in England did.

IF YOU SENSED A PRO-ADMINIStration tilt to journalism in the months after September 11, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenteil of the Project for Excellence in Journalism say it isn't just your imagination: "Less than 10 percent of the coverage of administration policy offered significant dissent."

THE 100 TO 1 DISPARITY between sentences for drug offenses involving crack cocaine and powder cocaine is one of the great disgraces of the criminal justice system. Its racial character--blacks tend to use crack; whites, powder--is nothing less than repugnant. The good news is that two conservative Republican senators, Orrin Hatch and Jeff Sessions, are proposing to do something about the problem. The bad news is that their bill would still leave a disparity of 20 to 1 in the number of grams of cocaine required to put an offender in prison for five years.

One clearly desirable provision of the Hatch-Sessions bill would allow for lower sentences for bit players--the girlfriend who is asked to transport some drugs and does so unthinkingly. "We have provided tougher sentences for the organizers who used violence," Sessions tells Gary Fields of The Wall Street Journal, and "easier sentences for those who were small role players."

DICK CHENEY IS FAR MORE CONservative than I am, but...

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