Thinking about thinking...

Yesterday's ramble about search engines simply underscored the need to question what the world hands to you as The Answer to any one of your problems. People who uncritically accept what an Internet search engine gives them simply help accelerate the process of turning everything into some drab shade of gray, with little content or meaning.

But I guess I'm getting way too serious way too soon. Over stuff that's probably not all that important.

What can I say? I've been locked up here in the office for the entire afternoon, after spending the morning doing the Usual Thing at the store.

Inquiries are picking up day by day, though that won't prevent August from being the second worst month for billings this year. Client R from Georgia faxed 15 pages a little while ago, but I probably won't get to them until later this week. I finished the rush item for client U and am continuing with the stuff for client M (which I am so tired of!).

The over-the-transom work query from last week wanted to proceed with the work a couple of days ago, so I asked him for contact information, company data, etd. He was sparse in his response, and I could not find any listing for his company anywhere (an example of the shortcomings that qualifies his response to me as "sparse"). So, I hit him with some pretty stringent payment conditions (half in advance; the rest on delivery), and he's backed off for now, saying he'll get back to me on Friday once he takes care of some immigration-related issues. We'll see.

Anyway, ceteris paribus, I am really going to have to buckle down to get everything done that I want to get done, and on time.

Easy to say. Hard to do. But not impossible.

I'm going to go for a walk.

Cheers...

What is said... and what is not said... and by whom...

I was doing some headline-skimming of the Denver papers and the USA Today periodical the other day when I noticed an item that said a secret federal court rejected a Justice Department request for new powers to combat terrorism because the government had, in plain terms, lied and misled the court numerous times in the past.

Frankly, I was not terribly surprised.

Later that day, the story was on one of the big-network affiliates out of Denver (and I presume, on the other networks, too), and they made it sound, for all the world, that the abuses in question are some kind of new phenomenon, and that they have occurred since George Bush took office.

To tell you the truth, I was still not surprised.

Then I took a closer look at an article published online by The Washington Post, written by a pair of "journalists" named Dan Eggen and Susan Schmidt, which says - under a headline that reads "Secret Court Rebuffs Ashcroft. Justice Dept. Chided On Misinformation" - the following:

The department discovered the misrepresentations and reported them to the FISA court beginning in 2000.

Interesting. This was beginning to smell of that old Radio Erevan joke whose punch line is: "Our Premier came in second, while the American President finished in next-to-last place."

So, I went off to see what else there was on the net about this... I tried The New York Times, which carried the story under the headline:

Secret Court Says F.B.I. Aides Misled Judges in 75 Cases.
Clinton-Era Problems Cited in Sharing Intelligence with Criminal Investigators

Even more interesting. So Bush is not entirely to blame for the problem, although there is no mention of Janet Reno in the article.

Now let's compare what was said by ABC's Peter Jennings during the evening news:

We are going to begin tonight with the first ever published opinion from a secret court. The court which operates inside the Justice Department says the Bush administration is not adequately protecting the privacy of American citizens and permanent residents.

with what CNN's Wolf Blitzer reported:

The court cited more than 75 mistakes committed by the FBI in obtaining warrants for terrorism investigations. Most of those mistakes were committed by the FBI during the Clinton administration.

with what FNC's Brit Hume said:

A court that works in secret is now publicly accusing the FBI of giving it misleading information in order to get wiretaps and surveillance on spies and terrorists. The 75 cases the court cites took place during the Clinton administration. The same court has also shot down Attorney General John Ashcroft's request for new procedures the judges say would give prosecutors too much leeway in counter-intelligence investigations.

Jennings' remark is an excellent example of how modern "journalists" are no longer content with telling you what happened... in fact, they're no longer interested in telling you what happened, they want to tell you what it means! Blitzer is echoing the Times, while Hume plainly states that the Justice Department's current headaches are the result of sloppy work done by the FBI during the Clinton years (the same FBI that couldn't keep track of its records, and left boxes of them lying around the White House, or so they say...)

If you want the straight, unvarnished skinny, at that point my surprise level was so low, it was barely detectable.

Coming full circle, I went back to the Post, where I called up the editorial published on the same day as the piece written by Eggen and Schmidt. It reads:

In September 2000, the judges recount, the government "came forward to confess error in some 75 FISA applications related to major terrorist attacks directed against the United States." These errors almost uniformly "involved information sharing and unauthorized disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors." They included an "erroneous statement" by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and misrepresentations in the FISA applications of FBI agents concerning "the separation of overlapping intelligence and criminal investigations." They also included "omissions of material facts from FBI FISA affidavits relating to a prior relationship between the FBI and a FISA target." Furthermore, the judges complain that they have yet to receive any explanation of how they came to be misled, despite the fact that internal investigations have been ongoing "for more than one year."

Attorney General John Ashcroft is not blamed for these transgressions. Most or all of the misstatements appear to have taken place during the prior administration, and the court notes that the department and bureau wrote new rules last year to ensure the accuracy of FISA applications. The judges, moreover, appear to have no complaints about the quality of applications since Sept. 11. But the fact that dozens of FBI representations to a federal court handling issues of such sensitivity could turn out to be false raises questions both about current proposals to expand the government's FISA powers and about other situations in which the government asks judges and the public to accept its actions and statements on faith.

Gee! It looks like the Post's editors are in the same general vicinity as Brit Hume!

Clearly, it'd be nice to keep a check on excesses by any government agency, and in the final analysis, it's not terribly important to identify the Administration under which any excesses did occur. (Or is it? The newsies seem to think it is, as long as it's a Republican one).

What I find sad is that the folks upon whom so many depend for knowledge about the world are more interested in making The Other Side look bad than they are in telling us what actually happened. What makes it sadder is that there's less than Wallace's "dime's worth of difference" between the two parties today than when evil Geoge made his remark... and there's been a powerful lot of inflation since then. (Somewhere, I've got a link to a Libertarian Party press release that shows how well Bush's Administration is hewing to the general objectives of the Gore platform, but it's buried under a mound of paper...)

My, but I am in a curmudgeonly mood tonight... I must've missed my calling.

Cheers...