Month: July 2006

Some commemorations of the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme today. This is one of the more moving ones. The author found 2 relations’ names in his search of the registry: I found 352 names in my search.

Cemetery for soldiers killed in the Battle of the Somme. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty

I wrote a paper on this in my college days, and still remember reading over the statistics and other details of the period. It’s not for nothing that WWI is considered the beginning of the modern age, with mechanized warfare, poison gas, aerial combat and bombardment, U-boats, all products of industrialization.

Thirty-five years ago, the NYTimes published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, allowing Americans to more fully understand what their government was doing in Vietnam.

When Do We Publish a Secret? – New York Times:

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people.”

This week we have heard repeated calls for the NYTimes to be censored, for its management to be executed.

Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., wants to pull the Congressional press credentials for the New York Times. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., asked the administration to assess what damage the stories caused to the tracking program. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., accused the paper of “treason,” and Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., said, “The New York Times is putting its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people.” King asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to begin a criminal investigation of the paper.

Hysteria ensues:

San Francisco talk show host Melanie Morgan believes that Times editor Bill Keller should be jailed for treason for approving the publication.

The maximum penalty for treason is death.

“If he were to be tried and convicted of treason, yes, I would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber,” Morgan, whose show airs on KSFO-AM, told The Chronicle on Wednesday. “It is about revealing classified secrets in the time of war. And the media has got to take responsibility for revealing classified information that is putting American lives at risk.”

Eeew: And Now, Your Adam Yoshida Moment of Zen

And these people claim to be true patriots. They have more in common with the monsters who conducted Soviet-era show trials and “disappearances.”