Peter Arnett = TRAITOR?????

[Geoff_M]

fklhou,

Sorry, but none of the links you posted stated, as Baghdad Pete did, that the US plan had "failed". It's all in the reading comprehension. Likewise, the notion that he put forward that the number of people opposed to the war was growing in the US is not supported by the facts according to anyone's difinition.


Here's a funny blurb on the subject from the WSJ. Even Uncle Walter hints at the "T" word with regard to Arnett:

Mirror, Mirror, off the Wall
If you've been lying awake nights worrying about where Peter Arnett's next meal is coming from, you'll sleep well tonight. The disgraced journalist has landed a job with the Daily Mirror, London's virulently anti-American tabloid. According to some reports Arnett had apologized for participating in an Iraqi propaganda show, but he makes clear in his first Mirror column that this was an April Fool's joke.

"I am still in shock and awe at being fired," he wails. ("Shock and awe"--way to turn a phrase there, Peter!) "Overnight my successful NBC reporting career was turned to ashes. And why? Because I stated the obvious to Iraqi television; that the US war timetable has fallen by the wayside."

Arnett's column is incoherent. It's titled "This War Is Not Working," but later he declares: "The US is bringing enormous firepower to bear which it believes will grind the Iraqis down. I have seen it before and it has been enormously effective. The US optimism is justified." Then he throws up his hands and says: "I don't think you can tell how it will end, there are many scenarios." This is the kind of incisive analysis you can only get from a reporter on the scene in Baghdad.

In a New York Times op-ed, Walter Cronkite uses the T-word:

Under the Constitution, giving "aid and comfort" to a wartime enemy can lead to a charge of treason. So far as I know no one has yet suggested that Peter Arnett be charged with that capital offense. But it seems that Mr. Arnett hangs by a rope of his own weaving.

Notice how Cronkite introduces the idea of a treason charge while being careful to avoid actually endorsing the idea. Remember the fog of sanctimony that tried to block out the New York Sun when it did the same thing a while back?

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110003280

 

[Laz]

Someone with Legal knowledge ring in with this question. It was mentioned to me (and I posted this earlier) that Bagdad Pete couldn't be charged with treason because the war was never declared by Congress. Thoughts??

 

[Galahad]

War does not have to be "declared" for treason to exist. Would he be convicted, probably not. That doesn't make his acts any less treasonist.

From Dictionary.com:

Violation of allegiance toward one's country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one's country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies.
A betrayal of trust or confidence.

 

[Grog]

As noted, Mr. Arnett was out of work for less than a day.

True, but if you look at where he is working now it is comparable to a Master Chef reduced to flipping burgers.

 

[fklhou]

Here is a footnote from one treatise on constitutional law on the concept of aid and comfort. See http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/constitution/article03/24.html

Justice Jackson had declared that this phase of treason consists of two elements: ''adherence to the enemy; and rendering him aid and comfort.'' A citizen, it was said, may take actions ''which do aid and comfort the enemy . . . but if there is no adherence to the enemy in this, if there is no intent to betray, there is no treason.'' Id., 29, Justice Jackson states erroneously that the requirement of two witnesses to the same overt act was an original invention of the Convention of 1787. Actually it comes from the British Treason Trials Act of 1695. 7 Wm. III, c.3.

This basically means that one must take an overt step to comfort the enemy with the intent to betray the United States. Even assuming that stating what has been stated on numerous other media outlets is giving comfort, one has to prove intent to betray the coountry. I will check my copy of Tribe tonight and see where he comes out on this issue.

 

[kdibattista]

Here's another vote for him staying over there with his friends

P.S. Baghdad Pete is the one on the left.

 

[fklhou]

Here is an editorial on why it is silly to attack Arnett for making statements that were being carried on other media outlets. See
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7524

When NBC -- which is owned by General Electric, a prime military-industrial complex contractor -- decided to fire Peter Arnett for the thought crime of plain speaking, it was undoubtedly responding both to pressure from the White House (which accused Arnett of "pandering" to the Iraqis) and to the imperatives of its MSNBC ratings chase against the gung-ho, pro-war frothers of Fox News.

What provoked Arnett's defenestration? In an interview he accorded on Sunday to Iraqi television (which an MSNBC spokesperson initially described as a "professional courtesy"), Arnett allowed as how media reports of civilian casualties in Iraq "help" the "growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another plan.

Of course, these are rather commonsense observations of the sort that can be read daily in the pages of our newspapers, and which even find their way onto U.S. television....

But, as the French man of letters Paul Valery once wrote, "Politics is the art of making people indifferent to what should concern them." And that's also the meaning of the firing of Peter Arnett

 

[Geoff_M]

The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another plan.

Of course, these are rather commonsense observations of the sort that can be read daily in the pages of our newspapers, and which even find their way onto U.S. television....

So, it's a commensense that the plan has "failed" (as Arnett "factually" stated it). How many of the pundits and armchair generals have read the actual plan and all of its contingencies so they can be in a position to pronounce its "failure"? Personally, if what we're doing now in Iraq is "failing", then I hope we "fail" a lot more!!! I'm not sure how much more of our "failure" Saddam's armies can take!