Disinformation

WASHINGTON -- Resuming its politically popular offensive against lawyers, the Bush administration unveiled its controversial legal-reform legislation yesterday, appealing to Americans to end their "love affair" with litigation.The most controversial element of the plan involves civil cases. On an experimental basis, winning parties would be allowed recover legal fees from the losing side. Other recommendations would require federal courts to promote mediation and arbitration as alternatives to expensive court trials.

I have a small group of Romanian friends who are different and more delicate than my other friends. We live and work outside Romania and part of what draws us together is our love for our birthplace.One of these people, a gentle religious scholar named Ioan P. Colianou, was murdered last week in Chicago. It was a brutal and mysterious murder. He was found in a locked bathroom stall at the Divinity School of Chicago, shot in the head. No money or valuables were taken. Someone had shot him over the top of the next stall.

Boston -- Over the years, I have developed a grudging -- truly grudging -- appreciation of the great American tobacco pushers. These guys have a disinformation campaign that would put the old KGB to shame.The tobacco lobby has spent almost four decades countering research that links smoking with cancer, heart disease, emphysema -- the whole health catastrophe. Each time another doctor or surgeon general blasts them with a new piece of evidence, their hired hands grab the nearest microphone and insist that no one has yet ''proved'' that cigarettes ''cause'' these diseases.

NRA PurposeEditor: Raymond Tabak Jr. claims that "The Sun is on a disinformation campaign against the National Rifle Association.'' He says that everything the legislation in Montgomery County calls for in gun safety has been carried on by the NRA for years.Mr. Tabak is correct that gun safety used to be a major purpose of the NRA, but that purpose has been subverted by the present NRA leadership. All the evidence shows that the NRA leadership's main purpose is to make guns more readily available and more easily accessible to anyone.

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.

WASHINGTON -- The CIA has determined that its espionage operations inside the Soviet Union and Russia in the 1980s and early 1990s were riddled with double agents who fed streams of disinformation back to the United States, going undetected for years until after Soviet mole Aldrich H. Ames was arrested.What's more, some CIA officials may have realized that their operations had been compromised by the Soviets -- and failed to inform the White House or senior U.S. policy makers of just how badly U.S. spy operations had been penetrated.

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.

IMAGINE YOU ARE Ronald Reagan or George Bush or Bill Clinton. Into the Oval Office comes a packet of top-secret, need-to-know, for-your-eyes-only reports on the Soviet menace from the CIA.Only problem is, the so-called intelligence you are getting is bogus. It is phony. It is disinformation right out of a Cold War spy novel. A CIA agent, let's call him Aldrich Ames, has turned traitor and tells his KGB handlers which Soviet nationals are working for the CIA. Some are executed. But others turn double-agent, feeding Americans a clever mix of lies and semi-truths about Soviet operations.

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.