If I told you a really good story, then admitted it was based in large part on the word of a convicted liar, would you believe the story? If I never told you the source was a convicted liar but you found out later, would you ever believe me again?
Readers of The New York Times now face that dilemma because the paper is dancing around the perjury past of a prime source.
A front-page news article on May 11 and a Monday editorial both relied heavily on former Police Officer Bobby Hadid to criticize the NYPD for trying to recruit Muslims as informers. The program, started under the Bloomberg administration and continued by Mayor Bill de Blasio, tries to persuade Muslims accused of small crimes to provide tips on potential terrorists.
Hadid was the only police official, current or former, the Times cited as being critical of the anti-terror unit or its methods. No wonder his criminal case and firing got short shrift. He is too important to the Times’ agenda.
In the online version of the news article, between the third and fourth paragraphs, a well-dressed Hadid stands in front of a wall of what looks framed award plaques. The caption features his charge that the police program improperly involved questions about Islam and mosque attendance, quoting him as saying, “What does that have to do with terrorism?” His words were deemed the quote of the day.
But not until the 33rd paragraph, after repeating Hadid’s criticism, calling him a former sergeant in the anti-terror unit and a Muslim immigrant from Algeria who was a “well-regarded investigator,” does the article admit he was “eventually removed from the force after being convicted of perjury in a case unrelated to his counterterrorism work.”
“Eventually removed” is a nice way to say he was fired for lying under oath in a murder case. Even during his trial, he denied a romantic pursuit of one of the suspects, but emails and trips to France proved otherwise.
In other words, he lied then but can be trusted now because his crime was “unrelated” to the topic at hand. If that’s the new standard, Bernie Madoff can be trusted on anything “unrelated” to his Ponzi scheme. And prisons are jammed with good sources who can be trusted on anything “unrelated” to their crimes.
There is nothing illegal about the NYPD effort, which uses the routine police tactics used to gain informers on all kinds of issues.
But the Times article insisted the program creates a “potentially uncomfortable” nexus between crime-fighting and anti-terrorism.
The flimsy complaint takes political correctness to an extreme, and is a strange claim for a paper that wants law enforcement to have a bigger role against terrorism, including using civilian courts to try jihadists captured on foreign battlefields.
Still, the article was a paragon of journalistic virtue compared with the editorial, which uses Hadid’s inflammatory quote to incriminate the NYPD without even mentioning his name or perjury conviction and dismissal. It uses him as the linchpin for a broad-based attack, saying the department “has a long history of trampling on people’s rights” and making “inflated claims about the value of its intelligence operations.”
Any first-year journalism student who put so much credibility on an employee who was fired by the organization he’s now criticizing would be sent back to find better sources.
Hadid is a convicted liar with an ax to grind against the NYPD. He wouldn’t be taken seriously if he defended the program, so why should he be trusted to trash it?
He shouldn’t be trusted, period. But without him, the story falls flat, and that’s the paper’s problem.
The Times doesn’t like the department and its anti-terror efforts, and will take any ally it can find, taint and all.
Hadid fits the editors’ anti-cop agenda, so he’s good enough to print.
Good policy foreign to Obama
It’s not exactly “Mission Accomplished,” unless you believe that the 21st century is different from all previous centuries. In which case, President Obama speaks for you when he says the Afghanistan war is ending because “it’s time to turn the page.”
“This is how wars end in the 21st century,” Obama said at the White House yesterday.
That’s a curious justification for his policy. The idea that wars end on a fixed timetable, without victory or defeat, makes perfect sense in the faculty lounge. In the real world, it is a nuance too far.
Obama also played the 21st-century card to denounce Vladimir Putin’s takeover of parts of Ukraine, saying that “is not how international law and international norms are observed in the 21st century.”
That bizarre declaration of weakness suggested he can’t be held responsible because others are ignorant of modern mores. It’s as if he put an asterisk on the oath of office.
Obama is scheduled to expand on the theme today in a foreign-policy address at West Point. It would be honest of him to admit that global turmoil is due in part to the failure of his approach.
Forget it. He’ll find a way to blame others, because that’s who he is.
Grads get lesson for life
’Tis the season for commencement addresses, a ritual marked too often by vacuous speeches given by minor celebrities hired as philosophers for a day. They, and the students and families forced to listen to their rehearsed banalities, should take a seat and watch online or read the text of the truly great commencement address given by Adm. Will McRaven at the University of Texas.
As head of the US Operations Command, McRaven, a former SEAL commander, led the mission to get Osama bin Laden, but his “suggestions” amount to a universal guide to surviving and thriving under any circumstance.
Success starts with making your bed — seriously. As he put it, “If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.”
His lessons are drawn from the grinding training that SEALS undergo. The aim is to find the best by weeding out those who can’t endure the psychological and physical pain in a process that basically condenses life’s most extreme challenges to six months of hell.
Each of McRaven’s examples was a gem, but I was especially struck by the “sugar cookie” experience. He describes a training exercise designed to punish every cadet for next to no reason, just to see which ones can endure instructors’ brutal unfairness.
Personally, I will try to remind myself of that one the next time I’m stuck in New York traffic. Then again, the idiocy of gridlock caused by bureaucrats may be more than even a SEAL can endure.
Dough, pay, me
A Drudge headline says, “Envelopes of cash being hidden around San Francisco.”
Gee, that happens in Albany, too, and politicians always seem to find the “free” cash. Funny how luck works.