transparency

The Trustbusters Circle The Wagons: Why?

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

Why do they always do this?

"Thank you, Sen. Reed, for your comments. You can stop spinning now."

“Thank you, Sen. Reed, for your comments. You can stop spinning now.”

Republicans, Democrats—why? Why do they think, when they are caught in an obvious example of misconduct, it is smarter and more useful—it certainly isn’t honest, courageous or ethical—not to simply confess and apologize, even if it’s with hardly an ennobling statement no better than, “You got us. Yeah, we were lying. That was wrong. Sorry,'” rather than continue to lie? The now ridiculous contortions of Democrats (and their knee-jerk supporters in the public and the media, but forget about them, for they are merely pathetic) are doing independent harm, because they destroy trust in government generally, and that, for a democratic republic, is potentially fatal.

Way back in September, when U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice disgraced herself by going on five Sunday talk-shows and stating with deceitful certitude ( “our current best assessment”…”we believe”)  that the deadly attack on the U.S. outpost in Libya was solely the result of spontaneous outrage on the part of extremists over a video, and not an organized terrorist attack, critics said that the Administration was covering up what really happened, and lying about what they knew. The accusation was shouted down and indeed ridiculed by Administration officials, Democrats in Congress, and the Obama-promoting media (it was in the middle of an election campaign) as a partisan smear, but in fact the critics, partisan though they were, were right. Rice was disseminating disinformation. The Administration and its State Department were intentionally blaming a video when they knew better. Why is another story: conservative pundits believe it was to avoid having to admit, mid-campaign, that the signature accomplishment of the President’s term, killing Osama bin Laden and supposedly crushing al Qaida, was not quite the complete victory the Democrats were claiming. If that was the reason, it was a stupid reason, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way. Hiding inconvenient facts before an election is despicable, but lying to the public and the world is serious enough, whatever its motive.

When she was questioned in Congress about the misleading descriptions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled that the Administration was in cover-up mode, both by lying outright (“I did not say … that it was about the video for Libya.”) and making her infamous and ethically indefensible statement,  ”With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided to kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?” Now, thanks to multiple revelations, the testimony of whistle-blowers, and newly released e-mails, there is no question that Clinton’s State Department took the lead in scrubbing the CIA talking points that immediately attributed the attack in Benghazi to identifiable terrorist elements connected to al Qaida, and not a spontaneous demonstration against the video. Not only are the Administration’s defenders refusing to admit that what happened happened, they are recycling old tactics from other scandals to do it, which if nothing else is lazy and boring:

  • “This is old news.” Or, as (Liberal! Obama-loving!) NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd termed it, “It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.” Dowd also correctly identified this as a classic from the Bill Clinton playbook, used for too many bona fide scandals to list. Continue reading →

The Ghostwriting Ethics Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

ghostwriting

The ease with which former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ op-ed denigrating opponents of the Manchin-Toomey background check provision was accepted as her words and sentiment has prompted me to focus again on a persistent ethics issue of long-standing: ghost-written articles, op-eds, articles and other printed statements. This is the epitome of a slippery slope issue, because finding the dividing line between what is acceptable ethically and harmfully deceptive is so difficult, most people don’t even bother to try to make ethical distinctions. We have to, though, and the Giffords piece shows why.

A published opinion piece by a prominent individual can have several uses, intentional and otherwise: Continue reading →

Wikipedia Ethics And The Gosnell Trial

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Ah, sunlight! When all the machinations are revealed, it's a lot harder to be unethical.

Ah, sunlight! When all the machinations are revealed, it’s a lot harder to get away with  being unethical.

Apparently Wikipedia almost joined the media outlets operating a cover-up of the Gosnell baby-killing trial. For a while a debate raged on the site, with an editor advocating that the article about the abortion doctor at the center of the horrific allegations and testimony be deleted entirely, because Gosnell’s trial is only a “local multiple-murder story in Pennsylvania.”  Yes, and the Newtown murders are just a multiple-murder story in Connecticut. Outright hoaxes stay on the site for years, puff piece entries on virtual non-entities and insignificant organizations clog it, but a case with major policy implications bearing on a contentious national, bioethics  and human rights issue of long-standing isn’t worthy of a page? The editor in this case, whoever he is, is too biased and incompetent to hold the position. Had his argument prevailed, Wikipedia’s credibility and perceived trustworthiness would have been severely diminished, for an encyclopedia cannot have an ideological agenda, and the desire to marginalize the Gosnell story is smoking-gun proof of one.

Luckily, Wikipedia got it right in the end, and the article survived. What saved Wiki was transparency. The argument about the Gosnell article was open and public, and ethics always benefits when transparency reigns. You would think that would be one of the news media’s mottos…but not, apparently, when it means letting the public know how it is that certain stories get buried, marginalized and ignored.

(The mainstream media, not surprisingly, didn’t cover the Wikipedia debate, either.)

_______________________________________

Sources: Daily Caller1, Daily Caller2, Newsbusters

 

 

To: FBI, Re: Roswell…If You Can’t Do Better Than This, Please Shut Up.

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

fbi-ufo-memo-lgThis is exactly the kind of thing that causes the American public to distrust its government, not to mention believing all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories.

For reasons unknown, the FBI, apparently in need of fresh content for its website, decided to “explain” the remarkable memo in its files that has been cited as the “smoking gun” of a Roswell cover-up. The memo, send to FBI director J.Edgar Hoover in 1950, was not written by a crackpot but by Guy Hottel, then the head of the FBI field office in Washington, D.C. He wrote,

“An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico,” Hottel writes. “They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots.”

Now, whatever this is, an explanation was and is in order. The memo was not made public until 2011, and to say it raises questions is a masterpiece of understatement. If this didn’t happen, why was the memo written? If it did happen, what was the government’s response? If Hottel and Hoover didn’t know whether it was true or not, what did they do about it? If the FBI investigated, what did it find out?

Instead of answering any of these questions, the FBI website this week posted this about the memo:

“A few facts to keep in mind:

“First, the Hottel memo isn’t new. It was first released publicly in the late 1970s and had been posted on the FBI website for several years prior to the launch of the Vault.

“Second, the Hottel memo is dated nearly three years after the infamous events in Roswell in July 1947. There is no reason to believe the two are connected. The FBI file on Roswell (another popular page) is posted elsewhere on the Vault.

“Third, as noted in an earlier story, the FBI has only occasionally been involved in investigating reports of UFOs and extraterrestrials. For a few years after the Roswell incident, Director Hoover did order his agents—at the request of the Air Force—to verify any UFO sightings. That practice ended in July 1950, four months after the Hottel memo, suggesting that our Washington Field Office didn’t think enough of that flying saucer story to look into it.

“Finally, the Hottel memo does not prove the existence of UFOs; it is simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated. Some people believe the memo repeats a hoax that was circulating at that time, but the Bureau’s files have no information to verify that theory.

“Sorry, no smoking gun on UFOs. The mystery remains…”

What? Continue reading →

Ethics Catch-Up: The Revolting Hillary Clinton Testimony

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
No wonder she's laughing.

No wonder she’s laughing.

I know I neglected my duty to highlight a truly nauseating example of American political shams at their worst with last week’s dual appearances by outgoing Sec. of State Hillary Clinton on the Hill, where she was ostensibly going to inform Americans what really happened in Benghazi, and why. I apologize. I was preoccupied with the earth-shattering matter of  Beyonce’s lip-syncing, and also, I admit, was having a hard time enduring both Lance Armstrong’s act and a Clinton performance in such close proximity. I’m only human, after all. Still, I need to go back a week and examine, if briefly, the ethics stinker that was Hillary on the Hill:

1. Members of this administration keep using the word “responsibility,” but to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I don’t think the word means what they think it does. Clinton had stated unequivocally that she “accepted full responsibility” for the Benghazi tragedy in October, reiterated that statement last week, and then repeatedly shifted the blame to others or otherwise denied responsibility. She wasn’t responsible for the decisions regarding security, she said. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know about cables from Ambassador Stevens’ a month earlier requesting more protection, because “1.43 million cables come to my office. They’re all addressed to me.” Well, who’s “responsible” for a system in which urgent, perhaps life and death messages not addressed to the Secretary of State never reach her desk? She blamed a lack of funding ( a claim that appears to be untrue) was also responsible for the tragedy, and naturally, she can’t be held responsible for that. Clinton’s definition of “responsibility” reveals itself during her testimony as meaning responsible for fixing the problems and systemic failures that led to the deaths of the four Americans, but not really accepting responsibility for what happened–responsibility, in other words, without accountability. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Hypocrisy!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

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Fox News reporter Jesse Waters in his spare time

Fox News reporter Jesse Waters in his spare time

Hypocrisy is a concept that is widely abused by critics, who misidentify it with startling regularity. Someone who has engaged in conduct that he now opposes is not necessarily a hypocrite, for example. It is not hypocrisy to reform or change one’s mind. Nor is it hypocrisy for someone to criticize conduct that he or she knows is wrong, but cannot control in his own life. Someone who opposes official approval of status that the individual secretly holds is not necessarily a hypocrite either. A closeted gay public official who publicly opposes gay rights may be self-loathing, but not hypocritical. A gay public official can plausibly believe that gay marriage is not necessary, or that marriage is a tradition that can only refer to a couple of opposite genders: holding a sincere position that is self-critical or against self-interest isn’t hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is a lie, not mere inconsistency. It is knowingly posing as something you are not, pretending to believe something you don’t believe, demonstrated by not making an effort to meet the standards you insist that others follow. D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, lecturing children about the evils of illegal drug use while smoking crack in his spare time, was a hypocrite. Law enforcement officials who intentionally break the law are hypocrites. Rep. Joe Walsh,  the Tea Party, “family values” Congressman who refused to meet his own child-support obligations, stands out among the many hypocrites in government.

Then there is Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters. One week after President Obama was re-elected, Watters told Fox Head Bloviator Bill O’Reilly that the Obama voters were mindless zombies who supported the President “as long as there was Obamacare, gay marriage and abortion on demand.” Now Federal Election Commission records have surfaced showing that Watters himself contributed $500 to the President’s re-election campaign.

Yes, he is a zombie. Continue reading →

The Inconvenient Truth About The Second Amendment and Freedom: The Deaths Are Worth It

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

carl-with-a-gun-The shocking murder-suicide of of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher has once again unleashed the predictable rants against America’s “culture of guns” and renewed calls for tougher firearms laws. Yes, reasonable restrictions on firearms sales make sense, and the ready availability of guns to the unhinged, criminal and crazy in so many communities is indefensible. Nevertheless, the cries for the banning of hand-guns that follow these periodic and inevitable tragedies are essentially attacks on core national values, and they need to be recognized as such, because the day America decides that its citizens should not have access to guns will also be the day that its core liberties will be in serious peril.

Here is Kansas City sportswriter Jason Whitlock, in the wake of Belcher’s demise:

“Our current gun culture ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it… If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”

I don’t disagree with a single word of this. Yet everything Whitlock writes about guns can be also said about individual freedom itself. Continue reading →

Untrustworthy NIH

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is what the horror movie outbreak looked like. The real one? We don’t know.

In Barry Levinson’s (terrific, scary) eco-horror movie “The Bay,” slug-like sea creatures mutated by toxic waste eat their way through the faces and bodies of the residents of a Chesapeake Bay community, as medical authorities carefully keep the story under wraps from the rest of Maryland and the nation. At the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda last year, a different kind of monster bug was on the loose: the antibiotic-resistant bacteria known as Klebsiella pneumoniae.  For six months the bacteria spread, eventually infecting 17  NIH patients, killing at least six of them. Doctors took extraordinary precautions to keep the so-called “superbug” from getting out into the population, but such measures didn’t include telling the city, county or state what was happening, or informing non-physician staff, many of whom were at risk of infection, about the bacteria outbreak. The full story didn’t come to light until August of this year, when NIH researchers published a scientific paper describing the advanced genetic technology they used to trace the outbreak. Continue reading →

The Benghazi Express: It’s Hard To Hide An Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Did you hear the gross and inappropriate remark Joe Biden made to the father of one of the soldiers killed in the Benghazi attack? Of course not! Because it makes the Vice President appear to be a clueless and insensitive fool…we can’t have THAT…not before an election!

It’s pretty simple, really. The American people have a right to know what really happened in Benghazi, and as new questions keep arising, the appearance of a cover-up on the part of the Obama Administration keeps getting more difficult to deny.

  • On 9/11 of 2012, an armed attack on the American embassy in Libya left four dead, including the Ambassador. After the attack, the only official U.S. comment was on the website of the Cairo embassy, which had experienced a violent protest, disavowing an anti-Islam film trailer that had been posted on YouTube, essentially suggesting that the violence had been provoked by offensive American speech.
  • Many days afterward, that remained the official position of the Obama Administration, to such an extent that ten days after the raid the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. visited all the Sunday talk shows to describe the attack as spontaneous, not planned terrorist actions, and sparked by indignation over the video. President Obama went before the U.N., and again disavowed and blamed the video. Continue reading →

If You Liked “Enhanced Interrogation,” You’ll Love The “Disposition Matrix”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Is THIS the Administration’s secret weapon against terrorists?

The Washington Post launched a three-part series today about the U.S. drone strike program, in which terrorists abroad are targeted and assassinated from the sky. I’m not prepared to attempt an ethical analysis of this deadly tool against international terrorism, although I will acknowledge that my initial, gut level assessment is that the unique nature of terrorism requires adjustments in the ethics of national security and warfare, and drone killings seem to be a fair and reasonable adjustment.

Yet it is still killing. It is also controversial, with many human rights activists, international law specialists and ethicists vehemently condemning the tactic, especially when used against turn-coat Americans abroad without due process of law. Consequently, the Post’s revelation that the Administration’s “kill list” is called something else rings the ethics alarms.

The Post:

“Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.” The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.” Continue reading →