Disinformation

Forty-five years have elapsed since Whitaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of having been a Communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.Hiss, a former State Department official, denied the charges and was eventually convicted of lying in making that denial. As the U.S. wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was turning into anti-Communist hostility, the case became a harbinger of a change in the nation's political mood from New Deal idealism to Cold War ideological combat.The publicity that the Hiss case garnered brought a little-known congressman from California, Richard M. Nixon, to national consciousness.

Yo, it appears some people in New Jersey, the nation's leader in auto thefts and toxic waste dumps, have a problem with Harford County. Harford County officials report that an e-mail circulated by unions representing workers at New Jersey's Fort Monmouth warns of an "active" Ku Klux Klan presence in Aberdeen and suggests local organic milk has a "high concentration" of a chemical found in rocket fuel. The e-mail is directed at workers soon to be transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground under the federal base realignment and closure process.

OPPONENTS OF A football stadium at Camden Yards are having a field day agitating the public but they are using phony figures to make their case. Were they to state the true numbers, their argument would lose its appeal.Here are some anti-stadium punch lines: "We need to use that $200 million for our schools!""This is the mother of all sweetheart deals. The football team gets all the profits and plays in the stadium rent free!""There are other ways to generate even more economic development at less cost."

The "commander-in-chef" whipped up quite a meal back in 2003. As late as March 2006, he was still trying to serve a version of it at a "strategy for victory" event - though he was no longer accompanying it with a dessert of cakewalk ice cream cake. Now the nation sits at a table with an oil-stained tablecloth, uncleared places, dirty dishes, used silverware and bones strewn everywhere. And if the meal doesn't give us heartburn, the multitrillion-dollar check will. For those with short memories, here is a handy recipe for Baghdad victory stew.

UNITED NATIONS -- The White House rejected yesterday a U.N. report stating that the Guantanamo Bay detention center should be closed and that U.S. treatment of detainees in some cases amounted to torture, calling it a "rehash" of old allegations. The report, released yesterday, prompted U.S. officials to emphasize that the U.S. military treats prisoners humanely and to assert that the U.N. team fell for disinformation spread by terrorist groups. "We know that these are dangerous terrorists that are being kept at Guantanamo Bay," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Lobbying is an honorable profession. Legislating ought to be, too. The Newseum wants to move to Pennsylvania Avenue, D.C., which is midway between the Puffery Gallery and the Institue of Disinformation. Republicans are frantically cutting taxes before the election, and can always raise them again afterward. They should make a horror movie about gypsy moths eating up Western Maryland.

A U.N. spokesman dismissed as "disinformation" a U.S. newspaper report that peacekeeping soldiers in SARAJEVO frequented a Serb-run brothel filled with captive Muslim and Croat women. He said that the brothel was in the suburb of Vogosca, to which as far as he knew U.N. troops never had access. He said the accusations against Canadian troops mentioned periods when they were no longer in Bosnia.U.N. peacekeepers reopened the SARAJEVO airport to relief flights after halting the air bridge Sunday because of an attack in which a French officer was wounded by gunfire.

CNN reporter Peter Arnett's dispatches from Iraq have made him the center of controversy. Some believe he is peddling "disinformation" with reports that are censored and perhaps choreographed by the Iraqi government. Others believe Arnett is following in a long and glorious journalistic tradition of reporting from behind enemy lines.Our question: Is Arnett the ultimate First Amendment champ or the ultimate chump?To register your opinion, call SUNDIAL, the Baltimore Sun's free directory of telephone information services at 783-1800 (or 268-7736 in Anne Arundel County)

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States would seek clarification from Russia about an American military report that it had helped pass information to Iraq before the 2003 invasion, but she declined to make any specific allegations. "I don't have any reason to doubt or confirm the report at this point," Rice said on Fox News Sunday. "I do think we have to look at the documents and look very carefully." She added that the administration would "take very seriously any suggestion that a foreign government may have passed information to the Iraqis" before the invasion and that "we will raise it with the Russian government."

Yo, it appears some people in New Jersey, the nation's leader in auto thefts and toxic waste dumps, have a problem with Harford County. Harford County officials report that an e-mail circulated by unions representing workers at New Jersey's Fort Monmouth warns of an "active" Ku Klux Klan presence in Aberdeen and suggests local organic milk has a "high concentration" of a chemical found in rocket fuel. The e-mail is directed at workers soon to be transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground under the federal base realignment and closure process.

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States would seek clarification from Russia about an American military report that it had helped pass information to Iraq before the 2003 invasion, but she declined to make any specific allegations. "I don't have any reason to doubt or confirm the report at this point," Rice said on Fox News Sunday. "I do think we have to look at the documents and look very carefully." She added that the administration would "take very seriously any suggestion that a foreign government may have passed information to the Iraqis" before the invasion and that "we will raise it with the Russian government."

UNITED NATIONS -- The White House rejected yesterday a U.N. report stating that the Guantanamo Bay detention center should be closed and that U.S. treatment of detainees in some cases amounted to torture, calling it a "rehash" of old allegations. The report, released yesterday, prompted U.S. officials to emphasize that the U.S. military treats prisoners humanely and to assert that the U.N. team fell for disinformation spread by terrorist groups. "We know that these are dangerous terrorists that are being kept at Guantanamo Bay," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

For the millions of ordinary Iraqis following the war by radio, figuring out what's really happening must be confoundingly difficult. Official Iraqi radio and TV broadcasts have aired fevered calls for jihad, holy war, to drive out U.S. and British forces, along with accounts of imaginary Iraqi military victories. But competing with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime are a host of opposition broadcasters, most of them organized or financed by the CIA and U.S. military. They, too, have broadcast disinformation, including premature reports of Hussein's death.

Lobbying is an honorable profession. Legislating ought to be, too. The Newseum wants to move to Pennsylvania Avenue, D.C., which is midway between the Puffery Gallery and the Institue of Disinformation. Republicans are frantically cutting taxes before the election, and can always raise them again afterward. They should make a horror movie about gypsy moths eating up Western Maryland.

WE SUPPOSEDLY LIVE in the information age. You can turn on the latest news at an eyeblink. You can go on-line and read a document from halfway around the globe. Yet doctors at Crownsville Hospital Center weren't fully aware that individual referred to them for a psychiatric evaluation, Shwan A. Chowanetz, was a dangerous man.Thus, he was able to escape from the relatively insecure state hospital and nearly carjacked an elderly motorist's vehicle before police shot and wounded him. The case is troubling in light of a recent rash of mistaken releases of inmates from the penal system.

Imagine Sidney Blumenthal's surprise when he sat down at his computer in August, logged on to the "Drudge Report," a popular Internet gossip column, and discovered he "has a spousal-abuse past that has been effectively covered up."As Blumenthal, political journalist and newly appointed presidential assistant, told it through his attorney, this was news to him and to his wife, who directs the White House fellows program. They responded by slapping a $30 million libel suit on Matt Drudge, who writes the "Drudge Report," and on America Online, the Internet service that carries it. Meanwhile, Drudge, saying he had been snookered by his source, pulled the item and issued a retraction.

THERE is a major disinformation campaign under way about the meaning of American involvement in the Persian Gulf.The establishment news media, especially television, are regorging substantial amounts of misleading, superficial and often irrelevant ideas and images of this grotesque crisis. The result is that many people are left with the feeling that they know what's gong on when, in fact, the information they have been assimilating keeps them from asking the pertinent questions. If you ask the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers.

The "commander-in-chef" whipped up quite a meal back in 2003. As late as March 2006, he was still trying to serve a version of it at a "strategy for victory" event - though he was no longer accompanying it with a dessert of cakewalk ice cream cake. Now the nation sits at a table with an oil-stained tablecloth, uncleared places, dirty dishes, used silverware and bones strewn everywhere. And if the meal doesn't give us heartburn, the multitrillion-dollar check will. For those with short memories, here is a handy recipe for Baghdad victory stew.

WASHINGTON -- The media would have you believe that the greatest challenge to this week's NAACP convention in Pittsburgh is an old debate over busing and the integration of public schools. A far bigger problem, in my view, is how to reverse the damage done by the media on issues of affirmative action.Even the best newspapers in the land distort every discussion of the issue with headlines and other references to ''race preferences,'' indicating that they have already bought the line that through racial favoritism incompetent blacks and Hispanics are getting scholarships, jobs, teaching posts and other things that should go to more deserving whites.

OPPONENTS OF A football stadium at Camden Yards are having a field day agitating the public but they are using phony figures to make their case. Were they to state the true numbers, their argument would lose its appeal.Here are some anti-stadium punch lines: "We need to use that $200 million for our schools!""This is the mother of all sweetheart deals. The football team gets all the profits and plays in the stadium rent free!""There are other ways to generate even more economic development at less cost."