Smith College President: Damaging racism hoax exposed by NY Times was matter of “perspective”
Smith College is the Oberlin College of Massachusetts: “Rest assured we will not allow any newspaper story to define us”
Smith College whistleblower Jodi Shaw exposed the toxic atmosphere generated by race-shaming “antiracism” training, and now has resigned citing a racially hostile work environment. Shaw’s story’s has received widespread media coverage.
Shaw has filed a state agency discrimination claim, the first step in gaining permission to sue in court.
Shaw repeatedly pointed out that the toxic atmosphere directly grew out of a false claim in 2018 of racism lodged by a Smith College student against several staff members. Picking up on Shaw’s revelations, The NY Times ran a brutal exposé on that racism hoax and how it ended up ruining the lives of falsely accused staff members, and instilled fear in others. Smith College President Kathleen McCartney came across as incompetent, at best, complicit at worst.
We covered the background and the Times’ story in NY Times reveals the devastation after Smith College capitulated to a false claim of racism.
In light of the devastating facts revealed by Shaw and confirmed by The NY Times, you would think McCartney would show some contrition. You would be wrong. McCartney has dug in.
On March 3, 2021, McCartney issued a Letter assuring the communithy that there is nothing to see here, move along (emphasis added):
Dear students, staff, faculty and alums:
I suspect many of you had strong reactions to the recent round of media coverage about Smith College. As I read the stories, I was reminded of what a community member shared with me at the time of the July 31, 2018, incident: “We all think we know the story. We only know the perspective we bring to it.” Issues surrounding identity are complex and nuanced; yet, for the most part complexity and nuance have been absent in the recent public conversation. Rest assured we will not allow any newspaper story to define us, especially those that misrepresent the facts or shade the truth.
I am not going to revisit the events of July 31, 2018, in this letter. Instead, I want to share three observations about the context in which we live and work.
First, ample data shows that people of color face discrimination in the areas of education, health care, criminal justice, and housing, among many others. This is why education on structural inequalities matters.
Second, many studies prove how bias, whether explicit or implicit, operates—and can lead to racial profiling. To take just a few examples, a person with a name that résumé screeners associate with Black people is less likely to get a job interview; Black people are more likely to be stopped for traffic violations; and Black people are more likely to be followed by security guards in stores. This is why education on bias matters.
Third, today’s college students came of age witnessing killings or assaults of Black people that onlookers captured on their cell phones. Elizabeth Alexander, poet and president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, wrote a poignant New Yorker essay about the impact of racial violence on young people: “I call the young people who grew up in the past twenty-five years the Trayvon Generation. They always knew these stories. These stories formed their world view. These stories helped instruct young African-Americans about their embodiment and their vulnerability. The stories were primers in fear and futility. The stories were the ground soil of their rage. These stories instructed them that anti-black hatred and violence were never far.” This is why education on racial justice matters.
We are living in a moment of profound division in this country, as the media coverage of the past week has underscored. Smith College is an educational institution that prides itself on being a continuous learning community. As members of this community, we are called to engage with complex issues using rigor and evidence, ensuring every individual feels heard, inside and outside the classroom. This work is hard, but it is the foundation for change.
Let us give one another grace as we seek the courage to have the critical conversations that will move us forward.
Sincerely,
Kathleen McCartney
President
In other words, McCartney and Smith College have learned nothing. Truth, to them, is a matter of perspective.
Smith College is the Oberlin College of Massachusetts.
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Comments
Look at that mug,
– translucent white skin
– blond hair
– dazzling blue eyes
The perfect candidate to self-cancel.
Will she put her career/high position where her liberal mouth is?
The betting is now open. The odds favor . . .
It’s creepy how many people there are like this that really and truly believe they’re the “good” white person. It’s all the rest of the “bad” white people that are the problem.
New England has got to be loaded with these types. Probably just about every college town nationwide too.
Fake but accurate strikes again!
There are not enough students to keep every college alive, she has signed Smith College’s death certificate.
Completely agree. These small liberal arts colleges that offer no valuable skills for the tuition money should be allowed to die on the vine. They contribute nothing to a modern economy centered on preparation for advanced STEMI degrees, or directly marketable STEMI majors. No employer should give a damn about some idiot with a leftist arts degree in [Insert “Victim” description][Insert “arts”, “studies”, etc.] will somehow contribute anything but to the oversupply of snotty, encrusted baristas or future toilet brush movers are just kidding themselves,
Entire generations of “attendance trophy” brats will contribute to the idiocracy that elected a senile old leftist Biden. And now they got what the deserved—someone so out of touch he Depends on everything.
Many of these places gave them selves the highfalutin title, “college”. Many of them were simply finishing schools for wealthy girls. Maybe if they were honest of their advertising and return to the name, “finishing school”, they might have more clientele.
Well, as a factory to turn out ignorant, woke lesbians, it excels.
Smith used to be considered elite. I’d say it’s throwing that away as hard as it can. Maybe it considers that a good thing.
It’s hard to tell because everyone’s test optional now and I assume Smith is as well, but I wonder what the trend in their freshman SAT scores will be.
USNews will probably give them a bump up in their college ratings for “diversity” or something though. Can’t allow any truth out there without adding the “nuance”.
Would that it were true but with an endowment approaching $2B Smith isn’t going away any time soon.
That Trayvon Martin lie just won’t die, will it?
That is Thugvon Martin, a product of piss poor parenting and culture. Outcome from parenting and culture is all white’s fault. How dare anyone defend themselves from their thuglets.
Yep, here’s a college president, who says she cares about investigating claims with “rigor and evidence” quoting false garbage like this:
“I call the young people who grew up in the past twenty-five years the Trayvon Generation. . . . The stories were the ground soil of their rage. These stories instructed them that anti-black hatred and violence were never far.”
Trayvon Martin’s death had absolutely nothing to do with race or anti-black hatred. It had everything to do with the fact that Trayvon Martin was a vicious gangsta thug wannabe who wanted to prove what a great street fighter he was, and saw an opportunity with the overweight and timid Zimmerman, who Martin sucker-punched and then proceeded to pound while sitting was on top of him. Unfortunately for Martin, he miscalculated in picking Zimmerman as his target. Zimmerman was, as Martin correctly deduced, a soft, easy mark. But Zimmerman was also carrying a loaded gun, something Martin had not anticipated. And that’s why Martin ended up dead. Because Zimmerman decided to use his gun to defend himself against a thug who was beating on him.
It’s lucky for Zimmerman that the jury at his trial actually listened to the evidence, instead of the fabricated Twitter-verse version of events that people like this ludicrous college president accept as truth.
“Truth, to them, is a matter of perspective.”
No, to them there is no such thing as truth. Hence their rejection of the idea of objective truth as “white supremacy.” Only white supremacists value truth, reason, or facts. Hence the leftist push that 2+2=4 “reeks of white supremacy” and that teaching for “social justice” requires politicizing math in barely disguised Marxist terminology.
And of course the STEM subjects must be politicized as well if not outlawed all together as “white supremacist,” bigoted, racist and now transphobic.
Note that anthropologists only ever discover male and female human/pre-human primate bones. How transphobic! I was amused the other day when I pointed out that medical researchers and biologists have documented the FACT that male and female brains differ in structure, hormonal effects, blood flow, and processing abilities. Some of those typical male/female differences can only be studied in live subjects, but the structural differences from deceased subjects (size of the hippocampus which is the memory center of the brain as well as the density of nerves connecting it to the emotional and speech centers), the number and location of speech centers (women have more speech centers located in both hemispheres whereas men have fewer and they are only located in the left hemisphere), etc., are so pronounced researchers can identify whether or not the deceased was male or female and be right over 80 percent of the time. So they’re not just guessing; the differences are real.
And I was told on this forum that it didn’t matter; that was the wrong way to go about proving that men and women are in fact built differently. Wrong! that was exactly the right way to do it, because now that the left have shut people up on that subject they are now saying the differences in pelvic bone structure and the physical genitalia are themselves mere social constructs. They are confident they’ll shut people up in other scientific disciplines as well. So am I; that’s the consequence of always deciding that such-and-such is “the wrong hill on which to die.” We’re out of hills now. Given all the attacks on actual justice in the name of social justice (whenever anyone modifies the word justice by placing another word in front of it such as “social,” “economic, “racial,” “economic,” etc., they are really placing the prefix “in-” in front of “justice”) we now have “academic justice.” This requires eliminating “academic freedom” just as all forms of hyphenated justice requires eliminating freedom of speech, and replacing “academic freedom” with “academic justice.” This requires “academic equity” (along with “grade equity) with equity meaning equality of outcomes rather than opportunity. Grades must be distributed “equitably” among all the groups that make us the identity politics caste system the left intends to impose (guess who they’ve identified as the “untouchables”) regardless of individual achievement.
The very idea of individual achievement of course being a pillar of the “white supremacist culture” that created our “systemically racist” system.
Of course all this was foreseen by many, including Orwell. In a letter he wrote to one of his correspondents in 1944 (before D-Day, so Hitler was still in power and the outcome of WWII was not yet guaranteed) he wrote:
https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-explains-in-a-revealing-1944-letter-why-hed-write-1984.html
“…In it we find this missive, also published in full at The Daily Beast (note: you must be a subscriber to see the full letter at that site), sent in 1944 to one Noel Willmett, who had asked ‘whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade” given “that they are not apparently growing in [England] and the USA’:
‘…I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible…’
This is exactly the situation we’re in now. We must abandon objective scientific research (those H8R scientists!) and what passes for science will have to conform to the leftist “PC” narrative. The Bolsheviks, Maoists, and fascists (i.e. the international and national socialists, no real difference exists between Naziism and Stalinism/Maoism/Chuche (the ideology of the NORK regime)) were merely more honest about what they were about. The American/western left will have to use euphemisms to obscure what they’re doing. Just as Sinclair Lewis wrote in “It Can’t Happen Here” ten years before Orwell decided to write “1984.” The worst of the worse will simply use the word “anti-” to claim they aren’t what they actually are and smear their enemies with that label. Hence “Anti-fascism” or Antifa or “anti-racists” who are in fact stone cold racists. But they’ve built a rhetorical fortress in that they don’t have to listen to the people they hate and therefore smear.
Just like the Bolsheviks did when they smeared their rivals in the communist revolution as the Mensheviks. Bolshevik simply means the majority faction while Menshevik means the minority faction even though the two groups were actually in the opposite positions numerically. This was perhaps the greatest feat of false advertising since the Vikings labeled the fertile island with the climate moderated by the warm Gulf Stream “Iceland” in an effort to keep it their secret and encouraged follow on settlers to move on to the deceptively named “Greenland” which of course surrounded by Arctic currents and ice covered was hardly green except for narrow strips of coastline during the brief summer months even during the Medieval Warm Period.
The MSM, who are in competition to see who can best serve as the Pravda/Xinhua News Agency to the American descendants of the CPSU and are now the wholly-owned subsidiary of the CCP, the Democrat Party, do the same thing as their spiritual ancestors when they label policies such as building a border fence and enforcing immigration laws “extreme” despite having overwhelming support among voters. The voters are the Mensheviks according to the leftist propaganda machine. Meanwhile leftists who don’t hold a majority outside of the newsrooms of nearly all media outlet, faculty lounges, and of course the deep state hold “mainstream” views such as open borders, turning the U.S. into one big open air welfare benefits fair, abortion on demand up to the moment of birth, etc., which are wildly unpopular among actual voters but no matter; as we’ve seen recently the voters don’t actually count for anything. They’re the Mensheviks despite their overwhelming numbers.
Just remember that when the Democrats claim to be defending the Constitution, they’re not defending the U.S. Constitution. The constitution they’re actually defending, the one they really love, is the old Soviet constitution. I’m more familiar with that one than the PRC’s, but I’m sure that the PRC’s is just as much a “living” constitution as the Soviet one. In that it can be replaced with three words.
Might makes right. Ever notice that Washington D.C. looks like Beijing’s after the CHICOMs crushed the pro-Democracy movement. And increasingly our injustice system looks like their system as well.
Agree generally but two comments:
(1) Bolshe means more (Bolshoi Ballet is the “big ballet”), menshe means less, so the Bolsheviks were the radicals and Mensheviks were the moderates, even if the latter contained more people. So it fits the current situation even more exactly than you say.
(2) The Constitution has been blamed for everything and it doesn’t say much. I guess it says whatever SCOTUS decides it says. For example if SCOTUS decides not to rule on whether states followed the Constitution in the election, then it was just fine. The fact (and tens of thousands of National Guard) are on the ground to attest to it.
Agree generally, but one comment:
Thanks to SCOTUS in Marbury v Madison the Constitution does mean what SCOTUS says it means, and to understand the ponderous manner in which SCOTUS proceeds and operates, you have to be familiar with the Ashwander Rules, which are assidiously applied.
As much as it is becoming cliched, the purging of unacceptable people and their science etc., cancelling and running people out of town (doxxing) just echoes what Nazi Germany did to the Jews.
“… they are really placing the prefix “in-” in front of “justice”) we now have “academic justice.” This requires eliminating “academic freedom” just as all forms of hyphenated justice requires eliminating freedom of speech, and replacing “academic freedom” with “academic justice.” This requires “academic equity” (along with “grade equity) with equity meaning equality of outcomes rather than opportunity. Grades must be distributed “equitably” among all the groups that make us the identity politics caste system the left intends to impose (guess who they’ve identified as the “untouchables”) regardless of individual achievement. …”
Yep – This is what Herbert Marcuse wrote about in ‘Repressive Tolerance.’ He wrote it as guide to take down a majority culture.
“today’s college students came of age witnessing killings or assaults of Black people that onlookers captured on their cell phones.” Wrong.
They came of age witnessing killings of Black people highlighted by biased TV networks for weeks on end, while ignoring virtually every white persons killed. They also witnessed Democrats in Washington hold elaborate funerals for career criminals, for no other reason than to pander to Black voters and to ‘Woke’ liberals like Kathleen McCartney.
It’s what they do. They started decades ago, trying to ruin GM pickup trucks in the ’90s. They just added a little dynamite, and said that ‘only 1 minute’ of the ‘expose’ was fake, but the credibility of NBC news was supposedly irreparably damaged. Hah!
I guess people just love to believe fake news. The left has zillions invested in this stuff, and the public keeps eating it up. What’s it going to take?
I remember that incident and never watched NBC news again. They blamed some 20 yr old intern.
If one examines the “say their names” poster one must note that it takes a 15 year stretch to get 20 names. Even then, most of them were criminals that the media has decided are saints. Being dead is the only reason that they weren’t prosecuted.
Now, compare that 20 people/15 years that is the basis of BLM with the fact that the UCR stats for 2018 indicate that 2925 blacks were killed and 2600 of these were by other blacks, or roughly 90%. Seems that black lives don’t matter as much to blacks. But we all know this isn’t about fixing a problem, it is about finding a target and shaking it down. FWIW, if you use these numbers in a discussion with a liberal, they will just accuse you of being a white supremacist, now that calling someone a racist is meaningless.
it takes a 15 year stretch to get 20 names
Here in Canada, we never had slavery as the institution was abolished by the British Empire before the first Act of Confederation. Black people make up around 4% of the population, and the vast majority of them have immigrated from Somalia and Jamaica since 1990.
Nonetheless, we had massive BLM marches and demonstrations so we could show that we’re a Serious Country just like the US. At a couple of these I asked random people to name the last five black Canadians killed by police. I got blank stares and “ums” because you the total number of people killed by police annually in Canada is basically zero.
One enterprising fellow dug up a Toronto Star article on the topic only to be derailed by the fact that it’s natives who tend to get shot in disproportionate numbers by police in Canada.
The whole thing was just a perfect example of how the whole thing is just so much gaslighting.
Here in the USA, on average twice as many unarmed white people are killed by police every year than unarmed black people.
Name one unarmed white person killed by police, other than Ashli Babbitt.
Name the officer who shot her?
They are doing their best to hide who he is and the real reason he died, those are enough to know that this is more Dem BS in the same vein as election fraud.
They seem to pick the worst for those lists.
There was a black guy in South Carolina a few years ago, Walter Scott, who was running away from police. They were there because he was behind on child support. That’s not great either but, since he didn’t have the money, I find it far more sympathetic. And he was running away peacefully and was shot in the back and killed. Why don’t they use that guy on their lists, he never attacked anyone in his life. But no, it’s guys like Trayvon Martin that make their lists. All aggressive guys.
While I agree the Scott shooting was one of the few “bad shoots” out there, you missed a few facts in your description.
Scott was pulled over for a traffic violation, not failure to pay child support. The fact that Scott had a debtor’s warrant for failure to pay is why he probably didn’t comply with officers orders, but it had nothing to do with the stop.
You left out the physical struggle between Scott and the officer. Scott and the officer tussled on the ground and it was alleged that Scott gained control of the officer’s taser during that time, so not exactly a “non-violent” guy.
The shoot itself though was bad. Scott was clearly running away and was no longer a threat to the officer.
Even with all that additional info, the Scott shooting was horrendous but I believe the officer in that incident was convicted and is serving a long sentence so the system worked.
Martin, even though he was not shot by a white police officer but an hispanic citizen’s watch guard, got so much attention because the media constantly used the photo of him when he was about 12 which provoked much sympathy.
Is the world a better place without Scott?
She makes a good point, if not quite the point she intended, in bringing up the “Trayvon Generation”. It’s a fact that we now have a generation of black people who have been brought up to genuinely believe that it is dangerous for them to have any interaction with policemen, because some significant minority of policemen are liable to kill them at a moment’s notice with no provocation. That they must therefore treat policemen like sharks or deadly snakes, who most of the time will let them pass by unharmed, but at unpredictable intervals will strike them.
And that, to a much lesser extent, all white people are like that too; random white people may not actually kill you, but you never know when they will show the nastier side of their character and treat you like **** for no particular reason.
And as proof of this they have been raised on a diet of these stories; just as earlier generations of black boys were raised on true stories like that of Emmett Till, the current generation has been raised on the false stories of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Rodney King, and all those other names that we’ve been exhorted over the past year to say. These are the false martyrs on which a false consciousness has been created, and now we have a generation that believes in it.
We also have a generation of young white people who’ve been raised on the same stories, and believe them just as strongly, and are therefore full of shame at their own whiteness and feel the need to protect their black friends from this, and from themselves.
For another example, consider the “Palestinians”. Every “Palestinian” under 70 has been raised with the stories of Jews massacring them, driving them out of their ancestral land where their families had lived from time immemorial, and stealing their houses to live in. They believe this, and it’s therefore no wonder that they do whatever they think it takes to reverse it. We would too, if we believed such things. I don’t see a solution to the “Palestinian” problem; and the time is coming when there may not be a solution to the BLM problem either.
BTW I think this may explain Mark311. I get the impression that he’s young and doesn’t remember most of these things when they were happening, but has read about them and believes what he was told.
“It’s a fact that we now have a generation of black people who have been brought up to genuinely believe that it is dangerous for them to have any interaction with policemen, because some significant minority of policemen are liable to kill them at a moment’s notice with no provocation.”
With the exception of the word “kill,” savvy white people believe exactly the same thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
A quick “fact check”: Trayvon was not killed by the police, but by an armed citizen he chose to attack. He was essentially dead before the first police personnel arrived at the scene.
But your analysis of Mark311 may be very close to fact. He obviously did not follow the blow-by-blow of the Zimmerman trial by Andrew Branca that was published on this blog, real time.
Thugvon was a victim of poor parenting. His parents were good a PR, and leveraged Thugvon’s death to rake in gobs of money. It was a damn shame that they did not have that level of interest in Trayvon form the time he was born.
The Thugvon story had fingerprints on it of a high profile con. I spent a large part of my life fighting cases which were built on falsehoods, and that drove me to have empathy for George Zimmerman.
I knew that Zimmerman was doomed without a robust defense. And while I do not think Zimmerman is very smart, I saw plenty of admirable traits, yes I do recognize good people can have low IQ and pieces of crap may have higher. I think that Zimmerman is a good person who has been badly used and abused.
So I called his attorney’s office, and left a message suggesting that they start a fundraiser for his defense. About two weeks later they had one up.
I strongly believe that both Zimmerman and Officer Wilson have suffered grave injustice. I am not anywhere near as well informed about subsequent cases. Still, they all, more or less, look like the same kind of shit.
I do not want to see qualified, honest, hard working blacks harmed. I do want to see unqualified, grifters with entitlement attitudes, pay for all the crap they have been pulling.
On the 5th anniversary of the Ferguson riots, Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted out her condolences to Michael Brown’s family, “on the anniversary of his being MURDERED BY A WHITE POLICE OFFICER.”
Hmmmm. Trying to stir up some outright racial animosity, hatred & division much?
I hope she gets called out for this when she eventually meets her Lord and Savior, because nobody here on earth ever had the guts to call her out on that.
One has to wonder if black police officers are no longer black in the eyes of the left, or is it simply that that blue trumps black in persecutions.
Postmodernism strikes again. Almost too painful to read.
I’ve come to believe that the only way to fix colleges like Smith, Oberlin and Evergreen is with a Caterpillar D9.
Based on my experience as a naval intelligence officer I am convinced of the same thing about the CIA, FBI, and Dept. of State. I can’t really say I worked with all of them. I can say that I was exposed to all of them. Field FBI agents are OK, Diplomatic Security Service agents at State are good people, the operators at CIA are fine, but the other types (analysts, administrators, etc.) are worse than useless. They’re a danger to national security. I’ve said for years I wanted to be Trump’s DCI, and on my first day I’d order everyone out of CIA HQ at Langley, destroy the building, and salt the earth so nothing would grow there again. Then I’d move on to FBI director, and after that take the job of SecState, and do the same thing to their HQs in D.C. and Foggy Bottom.
Since I can’t discuss my personal experiences I’ll use a famous example reported in the MFM. Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson and their attempt to sabotage the Bush admin. Note: I am not a fan of the Bush family for too many reasons to go into. But the actions of Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, and whoever decided to send an amateur like Wilson to Niger as if an ambassador is trained in HUMINT, and a whole host of clowns at State as well as CIA were positively criminal.
Here are links to a couple of fawning articles written about Plame and Wilson by the usual leftist suspects who tried to paint the couple as heroes for opposing “Chimpy McHitlurburton’s war” against Iraq.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/01/plame200401
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/plames-role-cia/
The first article makes the claim that Plame was somehow covert under Non Official Cover (such agents are called NOCs). And that identifying her as a CIA agent was a federal crime.
“Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and his wife, C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame, are at the center of controversy over President Bush’s bogus claim, in last year’s State of the Union address, that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Africa. The Justice Department is investigating who leaked Plame’s covert status—a federal crime—to columnist Robert Novak, presumably as payback for her husband’s public suggestion that the White House’s intelligence was false. The author gives an intimate portrait of the couple that the administration has tried to ‘slime’ in order to ‘defend’ Bush’s Iraq policy.”
The article itself goes on to debunk the claim.
“In 1997, Plame moved back to the Washington area, partly because (as was recently reported in The New York Times) the C.I.A. suspected that her name may have been on a list given to the Russians by the double agent Aldrich Ames in 1994.”
Actually, we know it wasn’t Aldrich Ames who blew Plames cover, such as it was. It was the CIA and the DoS. The CIA sent a list of covert agents to DoS. And some bonehead at State sent the list to the American Interests Section at the Swiss Embassy in Havana. It was of course intercepted by the Cuban intelligence services.
This is the CIA’s idea of operational security. They knew in 1994 the Cubans had all this information. And yet the CIA didn’t recall Plame until 1997? And the idea that this somehow put Plame in danger is absurd. All the communist intel services knew exactly who she was, and were pointing and laughing. Since she was already compromised they’d never harm a head on her hair as they could use the fact that she had no cover against the CIA and, of course, to the detriment of the U.S. She’d be the most ineffective “secret agent” in history and since she didn’t know she was compromised a very well placed dupe.
Are you getting the picture? Why I find the CIA to be a bunch of dangerous incompetents? And why I never wanted to share intel with State, since I correctly figured out that telling them anything was the same thing as sending an email to Moscow or Beijing. Just look at Hillary Clinton’s flagrant disregard for security. Those practices were malicious and of course criminal, but flagrant disregard for security was the hallmark at State. When I was on active duty during the Clinton era Madeleine Albright (as was widely reported at the time; hardly a secret) had to pretend to read the riot act to DoS employees about their loose security practices. They just never took it seriously since blabbing about classified material made them feel important. Of course, Albright wasn’t serious either but just going through the motions.
I’m not the only one who has contempt for CIA tradecraft. As a good friend of mine put it, when you compare their tradecraft to that of our enemies it’s like putting an eighth grader in a debate against a room full of PhDs.
So what does the law the Bush administration supposedly violated actually say (the link is to a PDF file from the Congressional Research Service):
Ҥ 421. Protection of identities of certain United States undercover intelligence officers,
agents, informants, and sources.
(a) Disclosure of information by persons having or having had access to classified
information that identifies covert agent
Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a
covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any
individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information
disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States IS TAKING AFFIRMATIVE MEASURES TO CONCEAL SUCH COVERT AGENT’S INTELLIGENCE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNITED STATES, shall
be fined under Title 18 or imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both.
(b) Disclosure of information by persons who learn identify of covert agents as result of
having access to classified information
Whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified information, learns the identity
of a covert agent and intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to
any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information
disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative
measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States, shall
be fined under Title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
(c) Disclosure of information by persons in course of pattern of activities intended to identify
and expose covert agents.”
Joe Wilson wrote his op-ed for the NYT (always a reliable anti-American outlet), “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” in July 2003. According to the narrative peddled by Wilson, Plame, Vanity Fair, The Nation, et al, the Bushies outed Plame as revenge for that article.
And, again, these articles that peddled the narrative that the Bushies put national security at risk to smear Wilson and Plame at the expense of dedicated American super-patriotic super spy again debunk that very narrative.
Remember she returned to the “Washington D.C. area” in 1997 per the Vanity Fair article because the CIA recalled her. What was she doing after that? The roughly contemporaneous article in The Nation reports she was working at CIA Headquarters. Their source of course being the same as Vanity Fair’s; Valerie Plame.
“In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come spring 2001, she was in the CPD’s modest Iraq branch. But that summer–before 9/11–word came down from the brass: We’re ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.
There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson’s supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists–in America and abroad–looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam’s WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked. “We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq,” a CIA official recalled. “We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock.” Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming–wrongly–were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government’s top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)
The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds–fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough–or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam’s WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.)
When the war started in March 2003, JTFI officers were disappointed. “I felt like we ran out of time,” one CIA officer recalled. “The war came so suddenly. We didn’t have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs…. How do you know it’s a dry well? that Saddam was constrained? Given more time, we could have worked through the issue…. From 9/11 to the war–eighteen months–that was not enough time to get a good answer to this important question.”
When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator–to rise up a notch or two–and then return to secret operations.”
Note the law says the USG must take affirmative action to conceal the agent’s intelligence relationship with the United States for there to be a violation. Having her commute from her home in Georgetown to CIA HQ everyday is the opposite of taking “affirmative action to conceal the the agent’s” intelligence relationship with the CIA. It is in fact an example of taking action to acknowledge and affirm the agent’s relationship to a U.S. intel agency. Which the statute acknowledges is an absolute defense against the charge of exposing a cover agent. Moreover, there’s a five year limit on when a violation has been committed. Since she was recalled in 1997 she was outside the window when identifying her as a covert agent because of the fact she had been overtly working at CIA HQ for six.
And are you comprehending the level of stupidity here. She said after working openly as an analyst at CIA HQ she was, six years later, in the process of converting from Non-Official Cover to Official Cover. I want to slap her and yell at her that “CIA analyst” is not official cover. “Cover” hides the fact she works for the CIA. Working at CIA HQ doesn’t hide the fact that they work at the CIA. It confirms it.
Again, the Vanity Fair article debunks the notion she was a NOC, at least not initially and I don’t see how she ever was.
“…Meanwhile, Plame learned Greek—she can also speak French and German—and was sent to Athens. There she had what is known as “State Department cover.” The only lie Plame had to tell her friends then was that the State Department was her only boss.”
You know what’s another term for “State Department cover?” “Official Cover.”
And the frightening thing is I’d bet Valerie Plame is still stupid enough to believe she can work openly at CIA HQ as an analyst yet somehow still believe she’s “covert.” There’s nothing more overt than that. She’s probably such an incompetent that she’d forget to wear her CIA security badge into Starbucks to pick up coffee for her morning commute to Langley. She probably wore it grocery shopping on her way home. As if our adversaries don’t know who’s driving into work through the security perimeter at Langley.
They had her license plate number and her home address. But after going into personal management AT FREAKING CIA after working overtly for six years AT FREAKING CIA to get a couple of promotions AT FREAKING CIA she could ever return to “secret operations.” Which, of course HADN’T BEEN FREAKING SECRET SINCE 1994 when the CIA and DoS joined forces in a “moronic convergence” to out to a whole list of supposedly covert agents to the Cuban commies.
Normally I’d chalk this up to the premise that they aren’t stupid enough to believe their own BS, but the think the rest of us are stupid enough to believe it. But no, having been exposed to these people I can believe they are stupid enough to believe their own BS.
Recall that when Fitzpatrick prosecuted and convicted Scooter Libby for lying to investigators he pointedly did not even charge Libby with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Because for the reasons I’ve outlined above he couldn’t. For the reasons I’ve listed above there is no possible way Libby could have violated the IIPA.
But he tried to convince the judge to sentence Libby to a longer term AS IF he had convicted Libby of outing a NOC. And that dweeb DCI Hayden tried to lend credence to the effort by claiming that Plame was a part time NOC (and therefore proving Plame was lying when she claimed she was still a NOC when she was an analyst and attempting to convert to “official cover” so she could work at the HR department at CIA) who worked openly for the CIA Monday through Friday but covertly on the weekends.
The frightening thing is they just might have been doing that. It’s the stupidest thing in the world, but did I mention their eighth grade level of tradecraft in a world of PhDs? Actually that’s an insult to eighth graders as I don’t believe normal 13 y.o.s would be that stupid and incompetent.
Recall this revealing acknowledgement of the CIA’s own incompetence.
“The war came so suddenly. We didn’t have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs…. How do you know it’s a dry well? that Saddam was constrained? Given more time, we could have worked through the issue…. FROM 9/11 TO THE WAR–EIGHTEEN MONTHS – THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH TIME–that was not enough time to get a good answer to this important question.”
I don’t think this guy is stupid enough to believe all his BS, but I believe he’s stupid enough not to notice his story is so internally contradictory that it self-destructs.
Eighteen months wasn’t enough time? They had twelve years to “get a good answer to this important question.” Note in the very same article in The Nation that the Iraq desk already existed at the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division when Plame chose to head it in 1997. Why, boys and girls? Because the U.S. military was enforcing Iraqi compliance with the cease fire agreement, the Safwan accords, since 1991. The Safwan Accords remain secret (again, I wish I could go into all the reasons I despise the Bushies but this comment will be long enough without that; it goes without saying I despise Bush1’s successor Billy Jeff, too) but we can get a general sense of what’s in the cease fire agreement from the U.N. Resolutions the USG pushed for considering Saddam Hussein was in flagrant violation of the cease fire within weeks of his regime agreeing to them. And many resolutions concerned his WMD programs. Refresh my memory; how many times did the UN WMD inspectors leave Iraq either of their own accord or they were forced out? How many strikes did we launch against Iraqi targets we suspected of being components of Iraq’s WMD program? Does anyone besides me remember Operation Desert Fox in 1998 (the only U.S. operation ever to be named after a Nazi general; the left always claims conservatives are the Nazi fanbois, but it took a Democrat to do that)? The justification for that four day bombing campaign was that Iraq was refusing to cooperate with U.N. resolutions and interfering with UN Special Commission inspectors searching for WMDs.
These clowns at the Iraq section of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division had one job to do; populate a data base. They had 12 years to do it. But they didn’t get to work on the project until after 9/11? I can believe that. I can believe they sat on their asses for 12 solid years because, again, I’ve had the chance to observe some of them. These are the same clowns who entirely missed the the Iranian revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union. They also provided “slam dunk” intel to Billy Jeff about a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was making VX gas and had ties to Al Qaeda. So Billy Jeff struck that plant with cruise missiles. No, not to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal; perish the thought! No, because the CIA told him this chemical weapons plant posed an imminent threat. It turned out of course the WMD they were manufacturing was … aspirin.
These characters have a nearly unbroken record of not being able to find their @$$es with both hands. Without being able to pour water out of a boot if the instructions are written on the heel. They didn’t have “enough time to get a good answer to this important question?” 12 years wasn’t enough? 1200 years wouldn’t be enough for this crew.
But I don’t chalk up everything the clowns at CIA (and DoS, and the hacks at the FBI) does to incompetence and stupidity alone. There’s also the malevolence.
“…In fact, a tug-of-war had been building for months between the C.I.A. and the Bush administration. The latter, it was felt at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia, had been cherry-picking intelligence to suit its own purposes and, even worse, essentially cutting the C.I.A. and other agencies out of the general vetting of raw intelligence…”
The deep state strikes back. Trump didn’t invent the swamp. The CIA and other agencies have considered themselves above the law, Constitution in particular, and above the elected branches for decades. How dare the chief executive interfere with “sovereign” executive branch agencies!
The only thing these villains are good at is political infighting. So, why did Plame suggest to her CIA bosses (at a meeting at CIA HQ, no less; some NOC) that her husband be assigned the mission of going to Niger to investigate illicit sales of yellow cake to to Iraq? Why would anyone in their right mind (well, we are talking CIA) think an ambassador would be the right candidate for this “spy mission.” And in Wilson’s own words he just sat around and drank tea and schmoozed with government officials who all assured them that no officials of the government of Niger were doing anything illegal. Well, when third world government functionaries assure you that everything in their country is legal and above board you can take that to the bank. Yesiree bob! And, pray, why wouldn’t anyone at CIA think to have Wilson sign a non-disclosure agreement? Because that NYT op-ed and the subsequent s***storm was the goal all along. The permanent bureaucracy is the resistance any time a Republican is President. Even Republicans as spineless, compliant, gullible, and completely lacking in anything remotely resembling a core conservative principle as any of the Bush family, a McCain, or a Romney.
Of course, countries who don’t rely on the CIA had the same intel. And countries like Germany used the certainty that Iraq had WMDs as a reason NOT to join the 2002 coalition; they didn’t want to put their troops at risk, they said, and risk starting a war that couldn’t be limited.
But the important thing to the swamp was protecting its own turf. Even if it had to discredit their own intel to do it.
That said, I’m also for bulldozing leftist colleges to the ground and salting the earth there, too.
This is pure gold. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
Phenomenal. Thank you for this.
Awesome.
Worse
The deep state strikes back. Trump didn’t invent the swamp. The CIA and other agencies have considered themselves above the law, Constitution in particular, and above the elected branches for decades. How dare the chief executive interfere with “sovereign” executive branch agencies! ”
IIRC, when FDR shut down the OSI because “gentle men do not read each others mail,” they never shut down, disregarding his order. Because they knew better. From ‘the Puzzle Palace,’ I think. Same crap 80 years later.
There’s nothing wrong with the campuses, just the inhabitants and their legal connections to the campuses. Although we do need to figure out what to do with excess campuses; we’ll have a number of them around the country unless the Dem education establishment, led by Jill EdD, able to force us to educate illegal aliens there.
Biden needs a place to store the illegals. The empty campuses are the perfect location. The progs in the area can take care of them.
Jill will have us paying through the “immigrant assistance” NGOs that will probably spring back to life. So far they haven’t got that end straightened out.
The Biden credo: “We choose truth over facts.”
He plagiarized that, too.
“Truthiness”
Lunatic. And she has no idea she is a racist pawn.
$he probably doe$. But there i$ probably one very good rea$on $he i$ $uch a willing pawn.
Follow the money.
Def: Racism: Making decisions based race.
McCartney and Smith College may soon have their wished for opportunity “…to have the critical conversations that will move us forward” …in a court of law. If that happens, neither McCartney nor Smith need be concerned about being defined by the press, they will self define. Given the state of both laws and courts today the process and outcome may well be less open than we’d hope, if not outright shrouded in secrecy, but it’s a start. She and Smith may be surprised to find that people find them rather ugly and nasty, McCartney’s “complexity and nuance” notwithstanding.
I found her rationalizations entirely typical: “Although things didn’t happen the way they were portrayed to have happened, according to our narrative, they very well could have, and certainly have in unspecified other places, so our outrageous reaction was entirely justified. Even though some actual individuals got punished for things they never actually did, they were avatars for those who had, and therefore deserving.”
They call that stuff “nuance” and act as if it’s a good thing. It’s just so freakin’ tedious. To read anything by them you have to pick out the “nuance” to get to the actual thing they are logically saying.
aka “Fake, but accurate”.
Clueless, the veritable archetype of what is systematically defective in the cult of liberal education.
I’m reminded of a line from Bing Crosby in White Christmas. “Go to Smith! She can’t even spell Smith!”
There couldn’t be a better essay to represent the current state of the academe. And an insight to the mentality available in the entry level workforce these days.
Very well crafted. Near perfect grammar. Highlighting sufficient numbers of key woke-points. Lengthy. Saying nothing of substance in the context of the topic. Beauty on the outside. Nothing on the inside.
Every time a race topic comes up. that letter could be issued with the same effect. Essentially generic.
“Rest assured we will not allow any newspaper story to define us. We don’t need a newspaper to make us look ignorant. We can do that all on our own.”
A matter of perspective….
Yes, ma’am. Just as a tidal wave is just “a little moisture”.
“Truth, to them, is a matter of perspective.”
Indeed. Until you understand this, you will be very confused when arguing with a progressive. It’s a very difficult concept for others to grasp, as it requires abandoning logic and reason.
Math is racist to the left precisely because there is one universally correct answer to a question or problem. That answer cannot be manipulated by narratives. Manipulation by narratives is required to get people to follow progressive principles. So, math must be abolished as it embodies the essence of objective truth. As long as it stands, it creates a difficult conundrum.
Objective truth must be discarded as it reduces the power one can gain from being a “victim”. As we see with these hoaxes, someone wants to grab a little power for themselves so they gin up a hoax. That enables them to unfairly achieve a result, but of course eventually the hoax may be discovered and have the opposite effect. The left needs to maintain this ability to maximize the power of victimhood while preventing any negative consequences if the real truth is known, so they must discard objective truth and replace it with “perspective”.
All of her “facts” are false, but in one way, she is quite correct. The students she is talking about grew up in a world in which the “facts” were presented to them by people like herself, acting as authorities. If they had been functioning as adults they would have known better. These students are the Children of Political Correctness https://rdcu.be/bMBqr
There are no facts or truth anymore, according to the left–just feelings.
Let’s take the players in the original summer 2018 incident and bucketize them as privileged and not privileged. We have:
– The white dining facility woman likely working for $15/hour or less.
– The white custodian who initially saw someone in a location where he/she was not supposed to be and followed the rules by reporting it. He probably makes less than $20/hour cleaning up after college students which must be great fun.
– The white security guard who looked pretty old and is probably working because he has to. He may be making $20/hour.
– The Black student from NYC who went to a $60,000/year boarding school in CT and was attending a somewhat prestigious, $70,000+/year college in MA.
– The white college President who likely makes >$500,000/year and probably has free on campus housing in the equivalent of a mansion or a large housing stipend if she lives off campus plus innumerable other perks.
Who goes in which bucket?
Who stood up for those without privilege?
Who oppressed those without privilege?
Boy, does she look sincere.
As the old saying goes, SJWs never admit defeat, they double down on the BS.
McCartney decided to address it by saying “Oh look – squirrel”
Has this been forwarded to Lee Plakas?