Media Monitors

Happy Ending for Lab Whistleblower
Crime In Iraq Versus Washington, D.C.
Bad News for Friends of China
Fair and Balanced on Fox?
More Homeland Security Worries
Racism in Federal Hiring
The Passing of a Great Scientist
Liberal Media Protects Extremists
Media Censor Secretary Rumsfeld
Media Undercut U.S. In Iraq

Happy Ending for Lab Whistleblower

The University of California has agreed to pay Glenn Walp $930,000 to avoid a public trial that could do further damage to the reputations of the University and Los Alamos National Lab. Walp and Steven Doran were fired in November 2002 after they had uncovered fraud, mismanagement and lax security at the scandal-plagued New Mexico lab. Doran had reached an earlier agreement with the University and now oversees security at three labs run by the University.

Critics of the lab said that the settlement represents a "solid victory for all Americans." The Energy Department’s national labs, which include Los Alamos, are federally funded. Los Alamos’ budget last year was $1.7 billion. The university holds the management contract for two other labs, adding one billion dollars to its annual take. These labs are notorious for their treatment of whistleblowers and the university is reported to have several additional whistleblower cases pending.

The settlement is the largest ever granted to a whistleblower from inside the Energy Department’s national lab complex. One of Walp’s attorneys said the settlement confirms allegations made by Walp and others of a "culture of retaliation at these labs against anyone who stands up against management." Last winter, Walp and Doran charged that lab managers had obstructed their investigation of alleged fraud and mismanagement at Los Alamos. When they persisted, the lab first reassigned them and later abruptly fired them.

The Walp/Doran firings were only the latest in a string of scandals afflicting the nation’s premier nuclear warhead design lab. Los Alamos has never fully recovered from the public revelations about its shoddy and haphazard security practices in the wake of the Wen Ho Lee case and the mystery of the missing computer hard drives. Walp and Doran uncovered nearly three million dollars worth of missing computers during their investigation. Many had processed classified information inside highly restricted lab facilities. A later Energy Department inspection confirmed that lab controls over computers are inadequate and do not meet basic security requirements.

Cynics suspect that the large settlement is an attempt by the university to fend off more criticism of its management of the lab. In the aftermath of the Walp/Doran scandal, the Energy Department announced that it would invite bids for the lab-operating contract for the first time in history. The University has held the contract unchallenged since 1943 when Los Alamos was first established. University officials say that all of the management problems at Los Alamos have been solved. But Walp countered that these problems would not be eradicated until the labs came under new management.

Walp and Doran owe a debt of gratitude to the media. Adam Rankin of the Albuquerque Tribune kept the story alive locally. The big break came when Sharyl Attkisson of CBS Evening News broke the story nationally. Her reports led to congressional hearings that further exposed lab misdeeds and corruption.

Crime In Iraq Versus Washington, D.C.

The Federalist, a conservative Internet news service, claims that the streets of Baghdad, Iraq, are safer than those of Washington, D.C. On a recent weekend, there were three more murders in Washington, D.C. It says, "The District’s strict gun-control laws did nothing to prevent these murders. Two of them were committed with knives."

Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld came in for criticism weeks ago for saying something similar—that Baghdad has less violent crime than the U.S. capital. "You’ve got to remember that if Washington, D.C. were the size of Baghdad, it would be having something like 215 murders a month," Rumsfeld said. "There’s going to be violence in a big city."

Critics of the administration noted that the Baghdad city morgue counted 470 bodies with gunshot wounds in July. But it’s not clear if those deaths occurred in just one month. A few months before the war, Saddam Hussein freed some 100,000 prisoners, most of them hardened criminals. The Associated Press quoted a Baghdad police officer as saying Saddam "probably hoped the armed gangs would confront the Americans." But Rumsfeld’s point about the relative danger of Baghdad and D.C. is worth examining. Last year D.C. was once again the nation’s "Murder Capital," according to a study released by SafeStreetsDC.com. This group compared the annual number of murders per 100,000 residents in American cities with populations greater than 500,000. This was the same standard used to determine D.C.’s previous rank as murder capital. In compiling the data, the group relied on homicide statistics from the FBI and police department homicide units.

This year, according to the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, murder in the District is up over 21% from last year, and at the current pace, Washington could see 325 murders this year compared to last year’s 262. The situation in Washington is making headlines as far away as Chicago, where the Sun-Times ran an August 22 story noting that, "Since mid-July, [D.C.] police have averaged 851 arrests per week. That is about 120 more per week than in March. Spread over an entire year, that would be more than 44,000 arrests, an astonishing figure for a city of 572,000 people." The paper noted that police Chief Charles Ramsey has declared a crime emergency.

The crime problem has been making more big news in the Washington Post ever since several of the District’s transgender prostitutes were killed. One individual told an on-line discussion sponsored by the Post, "…what do these transgender people expect when they take cash under false pretenses, which is what they do when they act as prostitutes, convincing unsuspecting johns that they are getting sexual acts from women, when they are really men? Is it not understandable that violence ensues from such a situation?"

In an editorial on August 23rd, the Post declared that, "athough police have made more than 32,000 arrests and seized 1,250 firearms so far this year, the criminals keep coming." It sounds as bad as and more bizarre than Baghdad.

Bad News for Friends of China

The Washington Post is reporting that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is choking off internal debate about political reform and constitutional change. The Post says that Chinese academics, economists, and legal scholars have been enjoying considerable freedom in recent months to discuss such formerly taboo topics. But Party leaders are worried that the trend has gone too far and have begun a security crackdown.

That’s bad news for proponents of strategic engagement and commercial diplomacy with China. Promoters of these policies insist that greater openness and more political freedom for Chinese citizens will inevitably flow from more contact with the West. The Post article does depict the recent crackdown in terms of Party reformers versus the old guard within the CCP. The confrontation has extended into China’s news media, with government recently issuing new bans on media coverage of a variety of topics.

But surveys of China’s media and especially the government’s handling of the SARS outbreak demonstrate little real change in China’s continuing restrictions on the freedom of expression and the media. Reporters Without Borders has learned that the Chinese government employs nearly 30,000 people just to monitor and censor the Internet in China. Beijing uses filters to block transmission of any news or messages that contain "banned words." These include any criticism of the Chinese government or any messages deemed by the watchers to be "subversive" or "likely to quote jeopardize state security."

A recent congressional study determined that free speech in China is reserved primarily for those who enjoy enough political status to avoid prosecution. The study refers to this group as the "free speech elite." It seems limited to senior government and Party officials and some approved academics. These elites may write about sensitive topics, but only within guidelines established by the Party leadership.

The penalties for ignoring these rules can be severe. Several Internet participants have recently been sentenced to long prison terms for posting articles critical of the government. One claimed that he had been beaten and tortured with electric shocks in a government effort to obtain a confession. Another Internet operator got a five-year sentence for posting an essay calling for the prosecution of those responsible for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. He didn’t write the essay, but simply permitted others to post the article on his website.

The congressional study alleged that Beijing’s suppression of any news about SARS permitted the spread of the epidemic. It was only when SARS began killing people in Hong Kong that the world and PRC citizens became aware of the disease. Reporters Without Borders noted, however, that Beijing’s censorship of the Internet would not be possible without the support of Western companies like Microsoft. They charge that these companies have cooperated with China’s censorship policies and permitted Beijing’s cyberpolice to monitor their networks.

Fair and Balanced on Fox?

When Bill O’Reilly says Fox News is not conservative, he may have in mind John Gibson, who came from MSNBC. He has his own Fox show, "Big Story," but recently filled in for O’Reilly and treated conservative professor and noted author David Lowenthal in an unfair and unbalanced way. The issue was the so-called Ten Commandments monument that Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore refused to move from his courthouse.

I say "so-called" because one of the noteworthy omissions from many stories about the case is that the monument also bears the phrase, "Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God," from the Declaration of Independence; our National Motto, "In God We Trust"; the "One Nation Under God" reference from the Pledge of Allegiance; and "So help me God" from the Judiciary Act of 1789, which established a federal court system and describes the oath of office taken by Supreme Court Justices. The oath refers to upholding the constitution of the United States and ends with those words seeking God’s help.

The Constitution is the key to the case. Gibson said Moore was a rabble-rouser defying higher court rulings. But Lowenthal noted that the federal courts have no jurisdiction over Alabama in this kind of matter. "How can you defend what he’s doing?" Gibson thundered. "The defiance of judicial orders is undermining the authority of his very position." Lowenthal replied that, "You’re assuming the thing to be contested. Which is that the federal judiciary has jurisdiction over this matter." Gibson interrupted Lowenthal at about that point to go to his other guest, a liberal professor who agreed entirely with Gibson.

Lowenthal could have enlightened Gibson and the Fox audience. A professor emeritus of political science at Boston College, his book, Present Dangers (Spence Publishing Company), is an excellent examination of First Amendment issues. He virtually pleaded for the opportunity to make his case. "If you would let me simply explain…" Lowenthal told Gibson. "It’s a simple basic point. Must Alabama bow down to the federal judiciary? Every justice and every federal employee is sworn to uphold the Constitution, not the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution."

Gibson claimed to really be on Moore’s side and that he believed the Constitution allowed such a monument. Yet he didn’t want to understand why their ordered removal was the unlawful and unconstitutional act.

In an interview, Lowenthal explained that, contrary to Gibson’s claim, it isn’t Moore who is defying the law, it is the federal court. Lowenthal compared Moore’s position to a soldier who receives an illegal order and is bound by his oath to disobey it. The second point, which Lowenthal was not allowed to make on the show, is that the First Amendment prohibition against establishing religion was designed by the founders to make sure that Congress didn’t establish a national religion or church like they have in England. He said it has nothing to do with states displaying the Ten Commandments, and any ruling to the contrary employs "fancy footwork" rather than relying on the actual text of the Constitution. Lowenthal says that when the First Amendment was ratified about half the states had their own official churches or religion.

Lowenthal said he had never thought Gibson was going to treat him in such an insulting manner. "If I had thought he was going to do anything like that, I just wouldn’t have appeared," he said.

If a federal judge has the jurisdiction and authority to order that monument out of the Alabama courthouse, consider what might happen to the Supreme Court chamber in Pennsylvania, a state founded by William Penn as a haven of religious freedom. Visitors can see a beautiful religious mural in the courtroom of its Supreme Court that shows Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, and they are listed. Another shows Jesus giving the Beatitudes, and they are listed as well. Other murals depict William Blackstone and his commentaries.

It is possible that a federal judge could order Pennsylvania to rip down those murals, based on the fiction that the U.S. Constitution somehow prohibits their display. But it should be obvious to John Gibson and any American with an understanding of the Constitution and U.S. history that such an order would be unlawful and unconstitutional on its face and should be resisted.

If it isn’t obvious to Gibson, he should invite Professor Lowenthal on his "Big Story" show to explain it. Gibson owes Lowenthal a "fair and balanced" opportunity to explain the facts, the law and the Constitution. This time, Mr. Gibson, listen and learn.

More Homeland Security Worries

The Washington Post is reporting that the new Department of Homeland Security is not yet up to its mission of protecting the U.S. from terrorism. The Department has only been in existence for six months. But its budget already exceeds $36 billion and it now has more employees than any other government agency. However, Post Reporter John Mintz charges that the Department is having money troubles, is too disorganized, and lacks consistent support from the White House.

The Department was supposed to be the central clearinghouse within the government for all intelligence information concerning terrorism. But that mission has been severely hampered by inadequate resources and the Department’s inability to fill senior intelligence positions. According to Mintz, at least 15 people have declined administration requests to even apply for the top intelligence job.

As Accuracy in Media has reported, one senior intelligence official at the Department was forced to retire after he admitted that his unit was understaffed and underfunded. He also said that his unit lacked secure communications, which prevented effective information sharing with other U.S. intelligence agencies. Early on, CIA Director George Tenet said he would not permit CIA to share any raw intelligence data with the new department. That leaves the new department wholly dependent on other agencies for finished intelligence. The unwillingness to rely on the CIA, given its track record on preventing surprise, is a key reason the Department has been unable to attract top talent for this mission.

And Mintz reports that many department operations have been hampered by funding shortfalls. Earlier this summer, for example, the media reported that air marshals on high-risk domestic airline flights were being cut back to save money. The timing of the proposed cuts was particularly unfortunate, since the department was simultaneously warning of increased terrorist threats to the airlines. The budget cuts were later rescinded.

Meanwhile, at a recent hearing, Senators heard that the department has seriously underfunded the nation’s first responders. Firemen, policemen, and emergency medical personnel still lack operable communications, sufficient protective gear and other equipment, according to testimony at the hearing. Although a recent study projected a $100 billion shortfall over the next five years for first responder support, most witnesses said that no one really knows how much this support will cost.

Representative Chris Cox, who runs the House committee on homeland security, said that more than $14 billion have gone to first responders since 9/11. But he said that the government has yet to develop a methodology to ensure that this funding goes where it is needed most. Cox said that future monies would be allocated only after a "hard-nosed threat assessment" identified the most significant risks. But without a robust intelligence capability, its not clear how the department could make such assessments.

Racism in Federal Hiring

The media recently celebrated Martin Luther King’s "I have a dream" speech about the promise of a color-blind society. But a civil rights organization called Adversity.net has sent over 300 press releases to the major media showing not only that federal agencies are using quotas in the hiring of minorities, but that they are exceeding their quotas by enormous margins. The results, obtained through an analysis of a report issued by the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM), demonstrate massive federal reverse discrimination against white males. Tim Fay, chairman and founder of Adversity.net, said his analysis of the OPM data "has not received any coverage whatsoever."

The OPM report was supposed to be about "Federal Equal Opportunity." But Fay says it has nothing to do with equal opportunity. It is about massive overhiring of protected racial groups. His analysis shows that the federal government continues to hire a far higher percentage of minorities than their proportion in the civilian work force. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for example, has employed 614% more blacks than their proportion in the civilian workforce, and the U.S. Department of Education employed 473% more blacks.

The protected minority groups include blacks, Hispanics, Asians/Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and women. The OPM Report for 2003 shows that, of the new federal jobs created, only 22.9% were filled by white males and other "non-minorities." Tim Fay comments, "It wasn’t a very good year for white guys to apply for a federal job."

While there is obviously no such thing as "overrepresentation" for the protected or preferred minorities, there is such a thing as "underrepresentation." And that’s what gets the press attention. Federal Times newspaper ran a story under the headline, "New Push for Diversity: OPM Moves To Address ‘Underrepresentation’ in Senior Ranks." The story noted that, "Overall, percentages of blacks, Asians and American Indians in virtually all federal pay grades meet or exceed those of the national work force overall. But in the Senior Executive Service and equivalent senior pay grades, all minority groups are underrepresented as compared with their percentage in the national work force overall."

The terms "meet or exceed those of the national work force overall" reflect what Tim Fay calls overhiring. But rather than focus on that, the media now want to push for ever more hiring of minorities, to the detriment of white males and other "non-minorities," in senior ranks. And the Bush administration is behind such a push.

Tim Fay points out that, "In order to push minorities into those positions the feds have to bypass a really enormous group of whites who should get the senior jobs. The only way to do that is to reduce qualifications and/or to practice outright discrimination against the white guys and often against Asian Americans as well." So the reverse racism that is now being practiced may get worse in the years ahead. But that’s not a story for the media.

The Passing of a Great Scientist

Edward Teller, often called the "father of the H-Bomb," died recently at age 95. Teller was one of the first to urge Albert Einstein to warn President Roosevelt about the awesome power of nuclear fission. And he went on to become one of the most influential scientists of the second half of the twentieth century. For his contributions to U.S. national security, he received many awards over the years, including the National Medal of Science. In July, President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Despite his many accomplishments, the liberal media emphasized the more controversial aspects of Teller’s public life. Every retrospective focused upon Teller’s putative role in the government’s decision to lift J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance in the mid-1950s. Teller testified that he had never doubted Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States. But by the time of Teller’s testimony, the government already knew that Oppenheimer had betrayed his country.

Similarly, the liberal media vilified Teller for his "ardent promotion of nuclear weapons." The New York Times, for example, criticized him for not arguing against the use of atomic bombs against Japan, "unlike many atomic scientists," who were not identified. One prominent Los Alamos scientist, who would later become lab director, did express his regrets. On an anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Teller told an audience his only regret was that America had only two bombs to drop on Japan. He was hardly alone in his "advocacy."

Both the Times and the San Jose Mercury News alleged that Teller was the model for Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie. The Times writes that Strangelove had an artificial arm and a "Central European accent." In fact, Strangelove had a heavy German accent and his "arm" would uncontrollably give Hitler "Seig Heil" salutes repeatedly. Teller was a Hungarian Jew who had fled the Nazis before World War II. Most critics believe that Strangelove was based on German rocket scientist Werner von Braun and the Rand Corporation’s Herman Kahn. The linkage of Teller to Strangelove was a gratuitous insult to the scientist’s memory.

USA Today labeled Teller a "persuasive Cold Warrior." Teller was deeply suspicious about the former Soviet Union. But his accomplishments strengthened our strategic nuclear deterrent immeasurably and helped the U.S. win the Cold War. He is also credited with persuading Ronald Reagan of the value of space-based ballistic-missile defenses in the early 1980s. Although liberals now deny it, many Russian defense experts have acknowledged that "Star Wars" was a major factor in the eventual demise of the Soviet Union.

One article compared him unfavorably with his Russian counterpart, Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov was considered the father of the Soviet H-bomb, but in later years campaigned against nuclear weapons. In fact, late in his life, Teller decried the secrecy that surrounds nuclear-weapons science and urged that everything be made unclassified and public.

Liberals Al Franken and Joe Conason are out with books claiming that the news media are not as liberal as they seem. But the network news coverage of the rally marking the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington demonstrates that the media have moved far beyond liberal bias. In this case, network news correspondents concealed the hijacking of the civil rights movement by political extremists, Muslim activists, and Marxists.

One speaker, Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society, called President Bush a "modern-day Pharaoh." He used his speech to promote an upcoming October 25 march on Washington to protest U.S. policy on Iraq that is being sponsored by International ANSWER, a front group of the communist Workers World Party. International ANSWER was a co-sponsor of this 40th anniversary event designed to honor Martin Luther King and celebrate his "I have a dream" speech of 40 years ago.

Another speaker, James Zogby of the Arab American Institute, insisted that the U.S. brought the people of Iraq "untold pain and chaos" by liberating their country. He attacked Attorney General John Ashcroft for rounding up suspected Muslim terrorists in America after the 9/11 attacks. Marxist Leslie Cagan of United for Peace and Justice complained that, in Iraq, Vietnam and Korea, the U.S. had been responsible for the "senseless, cruel deaths" of "people who are not white."

Billy Thye of the American Indian Movement said the real terrorist in the world was the U.S. government, while Obi Egbuna of the Pan African Liberation Organization praised black racist Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and urged the lifting of the economic embargo of communist Cuba. He said, "We must stand behind Mugabe," the African dictator whose policies are starving half of his population. On the other hand, he called U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell "a murderer." Damu Smith of a group called "Black Voices for Peace" attacked what he called the 4 "Cs"—Colin Powell, Justice Clarence Thomas, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Ward Connerly. They were considered despicable for associating with conservative or Republican causes.

Why would the media ignore these controversial speakers? If the media had noted that Democratic Party presidential candidates Howard Dean, Al Sharpton and Carol Mosely-Braun had attended the rally, it could leave them tainted in the public mind with having participated in an anti-American rally at a time when most voters already view the Democratic Party with suspicion on national security issues.

It is significant that Sharpton himself spoke to the crowd, reminding them that Martin Luther King had used the first part of his "I have a dream" speech to press his demand for the cashing of a check made payable to black people. Banners and posters seeking financial reparations for slavery were visible in the crowd. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations says blacks are owed trillions of dollars. If elected president, Howard Dean may try to pay them off.

Media Censor Secretary Rumsfeld

During a recent trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the U.S. news media of ignoring "the story of success and accomplishment" in Iraq. He said the reconstruction effort "dwarfs any other experience I’m aware of," including Germany and Japan after World War II. In a September 10 speech to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., he went into detail about this. But his remarks about significant progress in Iraq were disrupted by a few "anti-war" protesters who made more news than the speech itself.

This is the lead from the Agence France Presse story: "Protestors briefly disrupted a speech by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to the National Press Club, chanting, ‘How many children did you kill today?’" Of the ten paragraphs in the story, the first six were devoted to the protesters. A Reuters story carried by MSNBC began, "U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was heckled by protesters against the Iraq war during a speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday and brushed aside a question on whether he might resign."

AFP and Reuters are foreign news organizations, and their stories are picked up by many outlets abroad and circulated to an international audience. The AFP story, for example, was carried on an Australian website under the headline, "Protesters Disrupt Rumsfeld Speech." By contrast, an Associated Press story about the speech ignored the protesters and focused almost exclusively on Rumsfeld’s comments, during the question-and-answer period, about the fate of suspected terrorists being held at a U.S. prison camp in Cuba.

Vernon Loeb’s Washington Post story also ignored the protesters, while Eric Schmitt in the New York Times mentioned in his 19th paragraph that the hecklers had "briefly interrupted" the speech. This is the same paragraph in which Schmitt mentioned Rumsfeld’s talk of "the accomplishments" in Iraq without identifying what they actually were. Loeb’s article completely ignored talk of accomplishments. Instead, Schmitt and Loeb focused on criticism of the administration’s policy and a bid for U.N. support for more troops.

What the media did not report is that Rumsfeld said military attacks on our troops are down from about 25 to 26 incidents to about 14 or 15 a day, and that they last about two or three minutes. Most of the time, he said, U.S. forces are helping the people of Iraq fix schools, dig wells, repair hospitals, provide medical and dental assistance, and even prepare soccer fields for the children.

The other important thing Rumsfeld said is that U.S. troops are training the local police forces and border patrols and helping to form city councils. "It’s impressive, I think, that in just four and a half months, we have gone from zero Iraqis involved in their own security to 55,000 who are currently engaged in border patrols, site-protection units, local police, civil defense and the beginnings of a new Iraqi army unlike the old one," he said.

In Iraq today, said Rumsfeld, there are now over 100 newspapers offering different views. But just four and a half months ago, he noted, the Saddam Hussein regime was "still creating mass graves and filling them with bodies of innocent men, women and children. It still had prisons where they were executing people. It was still repressing thought and speech in that country, and that has ended. Those people are liberated."

Rumsfeld said it took three years after World War II to establish the independent central bank of Germany. In Iraq it took two months. The police in Germany were established after 14 months. In Iraq, they were established in two months. It took three years to establish a new currency in Germany. In Iraq, it took two and a half months. It took 14 months to establish a governing cabinet in Germany. Iraq has a cabinet today after only four months.

A Florida-based web site, www.gulf1.com , offers updates from the troops themselves, such as Major Trey Cate, the Public Affairs Officer for the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, Iraq. His latest dispatch says, "Many people have characterized this stage of Operation Enduring Freedom as being a quagmire reminiscent of Vietnam. That is just not true from my point of view…Those that wish harm upon the coalition are in a very small minority and they do not have the support of the people."

It is apparent that such stories are being ignored by foreign news organizations because they want to make the U.S. look bad. But our own media are ignoring them, too.

For his part, Rumsfeld may have thought that speaking to the prestigious National Press Club, a gathering place for prominent journalists in Washington, D.C., would make it more likely that he would see coverage of the good news that he had brought back from Iraq. But reporters are obviously more interested in making Iraq into a campaign issue for their allies in the Democratic Party.

Media Undercut U.S. In Iraq

President Bush’s speech on Iraq was prompted by media carping and criticism. Like in Vietnam, our media are reporting a daily body count of Americans killed or injured while ignoring the heavy losses inflicted on the enemy. The difference is that it took years for the media to turn against U.S. policy in Vietnam while it has taken only months for them to do so in Iraq.

A letter-writer to the New York Post captured the sentiments of those who do not want to see American sacrifices in Iraq made in vain. She said, "Too many Americans have given their lives for us now to allow the United Nations to make a mess out of it because the media are pressing for quick results." The irony is that Secretary of State Colin Powell says a new U.N. resolution on Iraq will only produce another 10-15,000 foreign troops. Some who were eager to go to war now want more American troops in Iraq, but U.S. officials argue that this will only increase the number of targets available for the terrorists.

One of the administration’s mistakes has been to assume that the media embedded with U.S. troops on the road to victory would remain on our side after the war. Instead, Dan Rather of the CBS Evening News has now gone to Iraq to interview "the guerrillas" killing American troops. The use of the term "guerrilla" rather than "terrorist" gives viewers the impression that they enjoy support from the Iraqi people.

Rather also interviewed Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of American forces in Iraq. Here’s one of Rather’s loaded questions to Sanchez: "A woman in South Carolina is quoted today as saying, ‘We’ve got a tar baby on our hands.’ Others have used the word ‘quick sand’ and ‘quagmire’ out of the Vietnam era. I’m gonna give you an opportunity to respond to those very serious concerns among Americans who support what you’re doing here, support our troops." Sanchez told Rather that "America needs to be told very clearly by, first of all, me as a military leader, and then by our press, that we’re not in a quagmire. The progress is unbelievable. We just have to make sure that…the American public realizes that and understands their sons and daughters are making a tremendous contribution to the peace and stability and the democratic future of Iraq."

The media attacks over Iraq, plus a sluggish economy, have taken their toll. A Zogby America poll shows that only 45% give Bush positive marks for job performance. The irony is that the U.S. may be a victim of success. The war to topple the Saddam Hussein regime went more quickly than anyone anticipated. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pointed out, war planners came up with strategies for dealing with environmental sabotage, the destruction of dams, and millions of refugees. None of that happened.

At the current time, the U.S. hasn’t lost as many soldiers in Iraq as were killed during one week at the height of the Vietnam War. Still, Dan Rather is raising the specter of "another Vietnam." The enemy must think they can win this one, too. With the help of our media, they might.

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