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• Saturday, May 10, 2008 09:43 AM

  Brilliant

  Glenn,

  There are so many good things to say about this post (and yesterday's, and your entire series on the military analysts story) that I barely know where to start. A random offering:

  * This story is in some ways a sideline to the entire list of atrocities that have been perpetrated as this group have hijacked one after another of our institutions (public and private) for their own variously defined gains. But it's illustrative of the whole in some glaring ways. Thanks for focusing your attention and powers on it.

  * I'm excited to see the way you've done it, i.e. focusing on the actual mechanisms employed by the perps and their enablers, demonstrating the impact, and emphasizing the chain of accountability.

  IMHO, one part of what has made 'our' criticisms ineffectual is that 'we' often paint with too broad a brush and rely on high-level narratives and tropes which, although reasonably accurate, leave too much to the imagination and offer too many opportunities for refutation by counter-example. Specificity, precision ... this is what happened in this instance, who-what-when-where-why-how (especially how), using the actual words of the actual participants is much stronger. Wish we had more of this ... dare we call it 'investigative journalism'?

  * I've mentioned in the past the work we did overseas for the past several years nurturing independent media in the 'developing world'. I wish we had had an example this clear, and this good, to teach with. If we do any more of that work (exhaustion and dillusionment argue against it), I'll certainly use this and your FISA enterprise as examples.

  * You did this in a matter of days with the Pentagon's FOIA-coerced data dump. By contrast, media outlets will make budgetary decisions on investigative reporting (almost always an enterprise piece) based on assumptions about its extended cost and development time. Obviously, it took Barstow a while to put it together, to get the FOIA through, to develop his timeline and his sources ... but look at all the 'secondary' content you've developed from that ... and how much more impact you've had from that. Should be an eye-opener.

  I could go on and on ... but I'll stop here out of consideration for length.

  Thanks again

  —quickstrategy Read quickstrategy's other letters
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