June 27, 2006
When You Call Me That, Smile Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:50 AM EST In response to John Steele Gordon’s post yesterday, a few points. 1. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is not, as Mr. Gordon bizarrely claims, a member of the “loony-left,” whatever that term is supposed to mean. He is a veteran House Democrat who was first elected to Congress in 1976 and who has been an advocate of stronger environmental and consumer rights laws and a leading voice against political torture. He is, to be sure, conventionally liberal, but unless Mr. Gordon is writing off the entire center-left position on the political spectrum as “loony,” Markey is no more “loony” than Sen. John McCain—who is, of course, not “loony,” but merely a committed conservative. You can find a good rundown of Markey’s positions here. A website devoted to history would do better to characterize and analyze the political positions of lawmakers past and present, rather than write them off as “loony” if they should happen to disagree with one of our writers on matters of public policy. 2. A propos of my characterization of the Bush administration’s bank surveillance program, which I called a “sweeping, warrantless probe of private bank accounts in the United States,” Mr. Gordon writes: “[T]hat is a grotesque—I’m tempted to say propagandistic—mischaracterization of the program under discussion.” But, in fact, it isn’t. The program has monitored thousands of bank transactions, which by any reasonable definition makes it sweeping. Several lines later, Mr. Gordon continues: “Sweeping? Well, I would certainly hope so.” I suppose, then, that he concedes the point. Furthermore, the operation was carried out without court warrants. Which makes it warrantless. Finally, it targeted private bank accounts. To recap, my statement—that the program was a “sweeping, warrantless probe of private bank accounts in the United States”—is entirely accurate. 3. Mr. Gordon writes: “Joshua Zeitz is correct in that I inaccurately characterized what The New York Times wrote regarding the legality of the federal government surveilling international bank records in order to track terrorist cash flows. They did not say it was legal; they raised questions and quoted ‘experts’ (if Ambrose Bierce were alive today, he’d define ‘expert’ in this context as anyone who agreed with The New York Times) who had ‘doubts.’ . . . a major newspaper can always find an ‘expert’ who has ‘doubts’ about whether the sun rose in the east this morning, let alone a necessarily clandestine intelligence program.” Now, I know that in this faith-based age we’re living in, it’s unfashionable to invoke ideas like “expertise” and “facts.” But call me a sucker for the reality-based world. Among those experts who have voiced concerns about potential illegalities in the program are officials at the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the Brussels-based financial consortium that was responsible for forking over private records to the U.S. government; lawyers in the Treasury and Justice departments, who debated the program’s legality but ultimately concluded that it was legal; L. Richard Fischer, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes on banking privacy law; and numerous unnamed officials in the federal government who worked on the program. These individuals would know far more about American and international banking law than I would, and I daresay they know more about it than Mr. Gordon, too. 4. Mr. Gordon cites a letter by a soldier currently serving in Iraq, who points out that many of the insurgents firing on American servicemen may have been financed with money that terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda launder through American banks. Fair enough. It’s a point worth discussing—as, I might add, it’s worth discussing how Iraq ever became a breeding ground for Al Qaeda operatives in the first place. It sure wasn’t before the U.S. invaded that country. But it does not follow from this debate that (in Mr. Gordon’s words) “there is blood-American blood-on the hands of The New York Times.” This is a strange and somewhat hysterical statement, especially coming from someone (Mr. Gordon) who defended—on this website—the leaking of the identity of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame. That leak jeopardized the lives of Plame’s contacts. Which is why we have laws against knowingly leaking the names and identities of covert operatives. Mr. Gordon seems to write off leaks by Bush administration officials as acceptable, and leaks by the NYT as criminal and murderous. Which is why it’s sometimes difficult to take his posts seriously. 5. Finally, Mr. Gordon writes: “What would Mr. Zeitz and his fellow travelers on West 43rd Street want? That we ask Osama Bin Laden if it would be all right (please, pretty please) to take a peek at what accounts he’s sending large sums of money to in the United States?” Readers of this website are, by definition, interested in history, so most of them don’t need me to remind them what the term fellow traveler means. But for those who may not be familiar with the peculiar history of American anti-Communism, it’s worth noting that fellow traveler was a widely invoked term in the 1940s and 1950s referring to associates of, and aiders and abettors of, Communism. In short, a fellow traveler was a domestic dupe of the Soviet regime in Moscow. It’s unclear whether Mr. Gordon is calling the folks at the NYT offices on West 43rd Street my fellow travelers, in which case I am the totalitarian blood-letter and the NYT staff are simply the dupes. That would seem a little harsh, but it’s the grammatical implication of his sentence. Or, Mr. Gordon could be calling us all fellow travelers, in which case, we are all dupes of Osama bin Laden. Either way, the implication is unfair. Mr. Gordon will, of course, respond that he wasn’t comparing me to a totalitarian or totalitarian-apologist, but if he has proved himself a rather ungracious sparring partner in his last post, he is still a smart man with a wide-ranging knowledge of history, and he knows what these words mean. There are other loaded terms in American political history, like fascist. In the popular parlance of the Popular Front era (roughly the 1930s through the early 1940s), many people on the left casually wrote off conservatives of every stripe as fascists. Mr. Gordon is very conservative, but I would never, even jokingly, call him a fascist, because a) to do so would be puerile; b) such terms only coarsen the public discourse; and c) there is obviously no moral equivalence between a 1930s fascist and a regular, homegrown American conservative. The same applies in the other direction. I hope that in the future, Mr. Gordon will be more circumspect in his choice of words.
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