The code name for Osama Bin Laden, “Geronimo,” is offensive to Native Americans. See ABC News, ” Congress to Examine “Inappropriate” and “Devastating” Use of “Geronimo” Codename in bin Laden Mission .” And at the Syracuse Post-Standard , ” Onondaga Nation leaders blast ‘Geronimo’ codename for Bin Laden “: Onondaga Nation Territory — Leaders of the Onondaga Nation blasted as “reprehensible” the code name used for Osama bin Laden in the commando assault that killed him: “Geronimo.” “We’ve ID’d Geronimo,” U.S. forces reported by radio Sunday to the White House. Later, word came that “Geronimo” was dead. Geronimo was an Apache leader in the 19th century who spent many years fighting the Mexican and U.S. armies until his surrender in 1886. “Think of the outcry if they had used any other ethnic group’s hero,” the Onondaga Council of Chiefs said in a release Tuesday. “Geronimo bravely and heroically defended his homeland and his people, eventually surrendering and living out the rest of his days peacefully, if in captivity.” “Geronimo is arguably the most recognized Native American name in the world,” the chiefs said, “and this comparison only serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about our people.” More at the link . Not the brightest idea for a code name. Good thing they didn’t take out Osama with a Tomahawk missile. Also at Wall Sreet Journal , ” Osama Bin Laden Was No Geronimo .”
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Code-Name Geronimo
The latest WikiLeaks dump could be breaking a record for provoking debate. I’ve said a lot already. But I’m thinking back to how badly the MFM and progressive manchild bloggers got beat on the Apache video last April. Jawa Report was doing yeoman’s work, for example, ” For The Idiots Who Still Say There Was no RPG — UPDATED: Wiki Leak as Left Wing Propaganda .” Liars and hypocrites. And lots more in the news. For example, at The Guardian ‘s reader-response interview, Julian Assange refused to answer this question : Julian. I am a former British diplomat. In the course of my former duties I helped to coordinate multilateral action against a brutal regime in the Balkans, impose sanctions on a renegade state threatening ethnic cleansing, and negotiate a debt relief programme for an impoverished nation. None of this would have been possible without the security and secrecy of diplomatic correspondence, and the protection of that correspondence from publication under the laws of the UK and many other liberal and democratic states. An embassy which cannot securely offer advice or pass messages back to London is an embassy which cannot operate. Diplomacy cannot operate without discretion and theprotection of sources. This applies to the UK and the UN as much as the US. In publishing this massive volume of correspondence, Wikileaks is not highlighting specific cases of wrongdoing but undermining the entire process of diplomacy. If you can publish US cables then you can publish UK telegrams and UN emails. My question to you is: why should we not hold you personally responsible when next an international crisis goes unresolved because diplomats cannot function. Julian ASS -ange More later … PREVIOUSLY : ” Progressive Manchildren and WikiLeaks .”
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WikiLeaks’ Dishonesty and Hypocrisy
It’s a question as old as the discipline, discussed at Inside Higher Ed . And it won’t go away anytime soon. Political science for the most part is about theory-building and knife-sharpening. Even international relations can be an irrelevant pain sometimes, although I think my subfield has a better edge than American politics, surprisingly. (IR sees lots of cross-pollination from the super-scholarly literature to the popular magazines like Foreign Policy .) In any case, the American Political Science Association held its annunal meeting over the Labor Day weekend, so there’s some follow-up buzz going around. At the image below is Ezra Klein, and also Matthew Yglesias, c/o The Monkey Cage . And my sense is that’s another reason for the dismal prospects for political science, the discipline’s disastrous left-wing bias. Sure, there are lots of professors who are rigorous and avoid hack partisanship, but as a whole I’m underwhelmed by the attempts. ( Henry Farrell was at APSA as well, and earlier this year, after repeated comments at Crooked Timber, he never did respond to my queries on the lies of the WikiLeaks Apache video — such otherwise smart people, so bogged down with deathly ideology.) Anyway, an interesting passage from Inside Higher Ed . One of the most biting critiques came from Bo Rothstein, the August Röhss Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden. Rothstein, who noted that this was his 20th APSA meeting and who has held visiting professorships at several leading universities in the United States, said that maybe the problem to discuss isn’t whether political science is relevant, but whether American political science is relevant. “If you want to be relevant as a discipline,” he said, “you have to recruit people who want to be relevant.” And in this respect, he said, American political science departments are not doing well. He described his experiences teaching at Harvard University, where he was tremendously impressed with the 20 seniors in his seminar on comparative politics. One day he asked how many were planning to go to graduate school in political science and was “stunned” to find out that the students — many of them idealistic about changing the world — had to a person ruled that out in favor of law school. Their view was that “to be relevant, you have to have a law degree.” In Sweden, Rothstein said, this would be viewed as a terrible thing. “No such persons” like those Harvard seniors he taught “would dream of going to law school,” which they would see as “boring and technical.” But while American universities tell those who want to change the world to go to law school, they attract other kinds of students to grad school. “I was not at all impressed by the graduate students” at Harvard, he said. “They wanted to stay away from anything relevant.”
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Should Political Science Be Relevant?
It’s strange, since I was just listening to a 20 minute interview with Julian Assange yesterday at TED. I had planned to write about that as soon as this latest breaking news cycle winds down (JournoList, Shirley Sherrod, etc.), and now we’ve got the release of the Afghanistan war logs, which had been expected. Yeah, since the Iraq Apache video smear (and the detailed coverage at Jawa Report , et al., and my own), I’ve been gaining a sharper understanding of Assange and his hard-left enablers worldwide. It’s simply more clear by the day that America’s enemies are not just on the battlefield, but also among the global transnational issue networks working to bring down the United States and its Western allies. I need to research the war logs and find out more on this, so expect updates. Below is a clip featuring Julian Assange for The Guardian . There’s also a big exposé at The Guardian as well, so it’s clear that the newspaper’s coordinating its coverage with WikiLeaks. See, ” Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation .” And of course, the New York Times is on the case, seemingly as deeply involved as is The Guardian . See, ” Inside the Fog of War: Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan .”Also at NYT (FWIW), ” Piecing Together the Reports, and Deciding What to Publish “: The articles published today are based on thousands of United States military incident and intelligence reports — records of engagements, mishaps, intelligence on enemy activity and other events from the war in Afghanistan — that were made public on Sunday on the Internet. The New York Times, The Guardian newspaper in London, and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the material several weeks ago. These reports are used by desk officers in the Pentagon and troops in the field when they make operational plans and prepare briefings on the situation in the war zone. Most of the reports are routine, even mundane, but many add insights, texture and context to a war that has been waged for nearly nine years. Over all these documents amount to a real-time history of the war reported from one important vantage point — that of the soldiers and officers actually doing the fighting and reconstruction. The Source of the Material The documents — some 92,000 individual reports in all — were made available to The Times and the European news organizations by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds, on the condition that the papers not report on the data until July 25, when WikiLeaks said it intended to post the material on the Internet. WikiLeaks did not reveal where it obtained the material. WikiLeaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing. The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today. The three news organizations agreed to publish their articles simultaneously, but each prepared its own articles. Classified Information Deciding whether to publish secret information is always difficult, and after weighing the risks and public interest, we sometimes chose not to publish. But there are times when the information is of significant public interest, and this is one of those times. The documents illuminate the extraordinary difficulty of what the United States and its allies have undertaken in a way that other accounts have not. Most of the incident reports are marked “secret,” a relatively low level of classification. The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests … There’s more at the link , but I stopped at this line. ” The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests “? Don’t believe it for a second. The New York Times has been the radical left’s institutional organ working to bring about an American defeat in Iraq and the War on Terror, and now in Afghanistan. Recall Heather MacDonald’s piece from 2006, on the Times ‘ reporting that helped killed the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. See, ” National Security Be Damned “: BY NOW IT’S UNDENIABLE: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives. The Times’s latest revelation of a national security secret appeared on last Friday’s front page–where no al Qaeda operative could possibly miss it. Under the deliberately sensational headline, “Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror,” the Times blows the cover on a highly targeted program to locate terrorist financing networks. According to the report, since 9/11, the Bush administration has obtained information about terror suspects’ international financial transactions from a Belgian clearinghouse of international money transfers. RTWT . See also, Michelle Malkin, ” NY Times Blabbermouths Strike Again .” I’ll have more later after I read and research a bit. Meanwhile, readers can check WikiLeaks directly: ” Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010 .” And the Der Spiegel piece is here: ” Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It ” (via Memeorandum ).
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WikiLeaks and the Afghanistan War Logs
