The escape of a New York Times reporter from seven months of captivity in Pakistan recalls the shock of Daniel Pearl's beheading there seven years ago and prompts second thoughts about the uses of secrecy in a tell-all media age.
Unlike Pearl's captors, the kidnappers of David Rohde did not release videos of their work, and his family and employers chose to maintain secrecy in trying to arrange his release.
“From the early days of this ordeal," says Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, "the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several government and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages. The kidnappers initially said as much. We decided to respect that advice.”
Other news organizations went along, and after climbing over a wall with an Afghani reporter who had been captured with him, Rohde is on his way back to his family, a rare happy ending in a time when political murder is a public act, and journalists are both the targets and, unwillingly or not, accomplices in the spectacle.
Add that as a postscript to the debate on "the public's right to know" everything in the Age of Transparency.
Showing posts with label secrecy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label secrecy. Show all posts
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Backseating-Driving the Banks
After its vaunted stress tests, the Obama Administration is telling us, through unnamed officials, that banks are "in better shape than many people think" but will "probably need to be bailed out again, either by private investors or, more likely, the federal government." After billions of taxpayer bailout, some still need more capital.
The picture of Treasury hovering over American banks with constant questioning and advice, like a backseat driver, is not reassuring. It recalls a time when I had to explain to a lifelong politician turned company president why Time Magazine had called him an "amateur":
If a division head is doing well, the president should support him; if not, replace him. Anything else is like having people sitting next to the coach during a game whispering advice into his ear. That looks amateur.
The banks these days need supervision, especially over the use of taxpayer money, but, according to the New York Times, "it is becoming increasingly clear, industry insiders say, that the government will use its findings to press certain banks to sell troubled assets. The hope is that by cleansing their balance sheets, banks will be able to lure private capital, stabilizing the entire industry.
"In some cases, however, the investments of existing shareholders could be severely diluted by large sales of new stock.
"Some of the banks could also face more stringent restrictions on employee compensation or be ordered to change their boards or management. In extreme instances, the government could wind up taking larger, perhaps even controlling, stakes."
From the cheap seats, this kind of piecemeal supervision by pressure and without public disclosure looks amateur--nationalization by slow drip--and creates a no-win situation for taxpayers, blaming government interference for failures, no matter how badly individual banks are managed.
Within the limits of not creating public panic, the bank bailout could use a lot more Obama transparency and less of the traditional "trust us" secrecy by the Treasury, Federal Reserve and FDIC.
The picture of Treasury hovering over American banks with constant questioning and advice, like a backseat driver, is not reassuring. It recalls a time when I had to explain to a lifelong politician turned company president why Time Magazine had called him an "amateur":
If a division head is doing well, the president should support him; if not, replace him. Anything else is like having people sitting next to the coach during a game whispering advice into his ear. That looks amateur.
The banks these days need supervision, especially over the use of taxpayer money, but, according to the New York Times, "it is becoming increasingly clear, industry insiders say, that the government will use its findings to press certain banks to sell troubled assets. The hope is that by cleansing their balance sheets, banks will be able to lure private capital, stabilizing the entire industry.
"In some cases, however, the investments of existing shareholders could be severely diluted by large sales of new stock.
"Some of the banks could also face more stringent restrictions on employee compensation or be ordered to change their boards or management. In extreme instances, the government could wind up taking larger, perhaps even controlling, stakes."
From the cheap seats, this kind of piecemeal supervision by pressure and without public disclosure looks amateur--nationalization by slow drip--and creates a no-win situation for taxpayers, blaming government interference for failures, no matter how badly individual banks are managed.
Within the limits of not creating public panic, the bank bailout could use a lot more Obama transparency and less of the traditional "trust us" secrecy by the Treasury, Federal Reserve and FDIC.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Show-and-Tell for Cheney
The Vice President has never been a gushy kind of guy, but his innate modesty and shyness will have to give way to a court order today to preserve his records so the rest of us may eventually get some idea of how he was running the country in total privacy for the past eight years.
Responding to the suit of the watchdog group CREW, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the VP's records are not excluded under the Presidential Records Act, which gives the national archivist custody of the material when Bush and Cheney leave office.
Their lawyers had sought a narrow interpretation to allow the VP to withhold as much as possible from National Archives, but the judge said no.
"Defendants were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation of the PRA's statutory language," Kollar-Kotelly said in her order. This position "heightens the Court's concern" that some records would not be preserved without an injunction.
As we learned in the Valerie Plame case, pinning down what Cheney said and did is not easy, but today's judgment will go some distance toward helping historians breach Cheney's cone of silence as he helped lie us into a disastrous war, violated the civil rights of anyone who disagreed with him and pulled the strings of a puppet president.
A while back, when he deigned to give an interview, Cheney was asked about public disapproval of the Iraq war. His answer, with a shrug, was "So?"
Today's court decision is the first step toward getting more definitive answers than that.
Responding to the suit of the watchdog group CREW, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the VP's records are not excluded under the Presidential Records Act, which gives the national archivist custody of the material when Bush and Cheney leave office.
Their lawyers had sought a narrow interpretation to allow the VP to withhold as much as possible from National Archives, but the judge said no.
"Defendants were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation of the PRA's statutory language," Kollar-Kotelly said in her order. This position "heightens the Court's concern" that some records would not be preserved without an injunction.
As we learned in the Valerie Plame case, pinning down what Cheney said and did is not easy, but today's judgment will go some distance toward helping historians breach Cheney's cone of silence as he helped lie us into a disastrous war, violated the civil rights of anyone who disagreed with him and pulled the strings of a puppet president.
A while back, when he deigned to give an interview, Cheney was asked about public disapproval of the Iraq war. His answer, with a shrug, was "So?"
Today's court decision is the first step toward getting more definitive answers than that.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Cheney's Busted Flush on Iran
If the Vice President were a publicly traded stock, the Exchange would have start thinking about de-listing him. Even the truest-believing Neo-Cons will soon have to stop buying.
The latest bad news to hit the ticker is that the Iran card is getting harder to play. With rioting, stone-throwing and mass protests over the rise in gasoline prices, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is looking less and less like Saddam Hussein every day.
Cheney won’t be in a position to make any more rousing speeches on the decks of aircraft carriers any time soon, even if he can get out from under all rioting against him in Washington about the price of secrecy.
The latest bad news to hit the ticker is that the Iran card is getting harder to play. With rioting, stone-throwing and mass protests over the rise in gasoline prices, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is looking less and less like Saddam Hussein every day.
Cheney won’t be in a position to make any more rousing speeches on the decks of aircraft carriers any time soon, even if he can get out from under all rioting against him in Washington about the price of secrecy.
Salad Dressing Secrets and Our Own
Sometimes American culture looks like one of those circus riders straddling two horses pulling in different directions.
Today’s equestrianism is about individuality. Under one foot is the report that a New York restaurateur is suing a former employee for theft of intellectual property by copying elements of her establishment from the décor to the menu.
Going in another direction is Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column titled “The Whole World Is Watching,” which says:
“When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer--and each of us so much more transparent.”
There are echoes here of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where “everybody belongs to everybody else,” and you don’t have to be Ayn Rand to find some of the implications troubling, even while cheering on the kind of open society that people like Dick Cheney hate.
Chef Rebecca Charles will likely not have much luck with legal remedies for claims about appropriation of her recipe for Caesar Salad dressing and touches like little packets of oyster crackers at each place setting, but her sense of feeling violated is understandable.
We may not live in a Brave New World--yet--but it makes sense to be thinking about where all this transparency is taking us while we can still rein in the horses.
Today’s equestrianism is about individuality. Under one foot is the report that a New York restaurateur is suing a former employee for theft of intellectual property by copying elements of her establishment from the décor to the menu.
Going in another direction is Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column titled “The Whole World Is Watching,” which says:
“When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer--and each of us so much more transparent.”
There are echoes here of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where “everybody belongs to everybody else,” and you don’t have to be Ayn Rand to find some of the implications troubling, even while cheering on the kind of open society that people like Dick Cheney hate.
Chef Rebecca Charles will likely not have much luck with legal remedies for claims about appropriation of her recipe for Caesar Salad dressing and touches like little packets of oyster crackers at each place setting, but her sense of feeling violated is understandable.
We may not live in a Brave New World--yet--but it makes sense to be thinking about where all this transparency is taking us while we can still rein in the horses.
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