All posts by Rand Simberg

French Perfidy (Continued)

I just thought I’d pick up a new thread to move this discussion closer to blogtop.

Dave asked in comments there what Stasi-like files I was referring to. The story is here.

The records would stretch 91/2 miles if laid end to end, the officials said. They contain not only the names of nearly every Iraqi intelligence officer, but also the names of their paid foreign agents, written agent reports, evaluations of agent credentials, and documentary evidence of payments made to buy influence in the Arab world and elsewhere, the officials said.

The officials declined to name individuals who they believe received funds or to name the home countries of the alleged recipients. One official said the recipients held high-ranking positions and worked both in Arab countries and in other regions. A second official said the payments were the subjects of “active investigations” by U.S. government agencies.

The recipients of the Iraqi funds were described by U.S. officials not as formal intelligence agents, but as prominent personalities and political figures who accepted money from Iraq as they defended Hussein publicly or pressed his causes.

What’s Lawyers Got To Do With It?

It looks like CBS won’t be airing that hatchet job on Reagan after all. I haven’t said much about this, but this is one aspect of the story that I’ve found galling from the beginning:

CBS lawyers had reviewed the miniseries and given it the go-ahead, but Moonves ordered lawyers to give it another look and for CBS to cut out certain portions.

This is most disingenuous. I assume that we are supposed to come away from this statement with the idea that it was fact checked. But in real fact, lawyers have nothing to do with facts–the only reason for a lawyer to look at it would be to determine if airing it would put CBS in legal jeopardy, not to determine whether it was factual or not.

Since Ronald and Nancy Reagan are public figures, there’s almost nothing that CBS could have aired that would have gotten them into hot water, from a libel standpoint. Having lawyers “give it a look,” is meaningless, because said lawyers would do so, and then simply inform the network execs what I just did–that they could air it without fear of a lawsuit, and facts be damned.

Had Moonves been honest, rather than a duplicitous worm, and wanted to reassure people that it was truly fair, he’d not have talked about lawyers. He’d have said, “we’ve had the script reviewed by historians and people who knew the Reagans closely, and they’ve assured us that it is historically accurate.”

But of course he couldn’t say that, because it would have been an outright lie, easily disprovable by talking to people like Lou Cannon. So instead he prevaricated, and hoped that no one noticed. Fortunately, he hoped wrong.

What’s Lawyers Got To Do With It?

It looks like CBS won’t be airing that hatchet job on Reagan after all. I haven’t said much about this, but this is one aspect of the story that I’ve found galling from the beginning:

CBS lawyers had reviewed the miniseries and given it the go-ahead, but Moonves ordered lawyers to give it another look and for CBS to cut out certain portions.

This is most disingenuous. I assume that we are supposed to come away from this statement with the idea that it was fact checked. But in real fact, lawyers have nothing to do with facts–the only reason for a lawyer to look at it would be to determine if airing it would put CBS in legal jeopardy, not to determine whether it was factual or not.

Since Ronald and Nancy Reagan are public figures, there’s almost nothing that CBS could have aired that would have gotten them into hot water, from a libel standpoint. Having lawyers “give it a look,” is meaningless, because said lawyers would do so, and then simply inform the network execs what I just did–that they could air it without fear of a lawsuit, and facts be damned.

Had Moonves been honest, rather than a duplicitous worm, and wanted to reassure people that it was truly fair, he’d not have talked about lawyers. He’d have said, “we’ve had the script reviewed by historians and people who knew the Reagans closely, and they’ve assured us that it is historically accurate.”

But of course he couldn’t say that, because it would have been an outright lie, easily disprovable by talking to people like Lou Cannon. So instead he prevaricated, and hoped that no one noticed. Fortunately, he hoped wrong.

What’s Lawyers Got To Do With It?

It looks like CBS won’t be airing that hatchet job on Reagan after all. I haven’t said much about this, but this is one aspect of the story that I’ve found galling from the beginning:

CBS lawyers had reviewed the miniseries and given it the go-ahead, but Moonves ordered lawyers to give it another look and for CBS to cut out certain portions.

This is most disingenuous. I assume that we are supposed to come away from this statement with the idea that it was fact checked. But in real fact, lawyers have nothing to do with facts–the only reason for a lawyer to look at it would be to determine if airing it would put CBS in legal jeopardy, not to determine whether it was factual or not.

Since Ronald and Nancy Reagan are public figures, there’s almost nothing that CBS could have aired that would have gotten them into hot water, from a libel standpoint. Having lawyers “give it a look,” is meaningless, because said lawyers would do so, and then simply inform the network execs what I just did–that they could air it without fear of a lawsuit, and facts be damned.

Had Moonves been honest, rather than a duplicitous worm, and wanted to reassure people that it was truly fair, he’d not have talked about lawyers. He’d have said, “we’ve had the script reviewed by historians and people who knew the Reagans closely, and they’ve assured us that it is historically accurate.”

But of course he couldn’t say that, because it would have been an outright lie, easily disprovable by talking to people like Lou Cannon. So instead he prevaricated, and hoped that no one noticed. Fortunately, he hoped wrong.

If He’d Only Listened To Me

Dick Gephardt says that everything is screwed up in Iraq because President Bush didn’t take his sage advice.

Bush relied too heavily on Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and not enough on moderate voices like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Gephardt said, adding that Bush also refused to listen to critics outside of the White House, including Gephardt.

“I told the president four times in the White House that we needed help,” the US representative from Missouri said. “This is going to be difficult. He literally did not answer my questions.

“It’s five months after he landed on that aircraft carrier in his flight suit and we still don’t have the help that we need,” Gephardt said.

What’s missing of course, is any explanation of how having international troops, or even more American troops, would improve the situation, other than increasing the number of targets.