Wednesday, May 14, 2003

Top British Spy in IRA unmasked--or was he? Boy, this one is almost as weird as the iLoo (and I will spare you that link). Saturday night, three Irish papers decide to run stories naming a Belfast construction worker as the highest-ranking British spy in the Irish Republican Army. This man, code-named StakeKnife, was allegedly also head of the IRA “Nutting Squad,” charged with shall-we-say disciplining agents and traitors to the Irish cause. The papers run the story because the British Defence Ministry tells them that they have gotten him out of Ulster and in hiding.   So the scandal breaks. One day later, Military Intelligence says they thought the code name was “Steak Knife,” while the construction worker contacts Sinn Fein and asks them for advice. Today, the construction worker appears, with his lawyer, to say he’s not a spy, not head of the Nutting Squad, and hadn’t been involved in politics for 13 years. But now his life was in danger because the papers had declared him a terrorist AND an agent!   So Wednesday rolls around and the construction worker appears at a press conference with his lawyer (solicitor for those of you living across the pond) to declare that he's just an ordinary guy, but the media turned his life upside down. Here's another link, from the Irish American Information Service.   As an Irish-American (and my German half agrees), I hope that both this man, whether he is StakeKnife or not, finds justice. I also hope that StakeKnife, whoever he is, finds justice as well. All successful rebel movements (and plenty of unsuccessful ones) have been dogged by agents provocateurs; this one is no different.   Nothing will change unless and until the British Army leaves the whole of Ireland. Then perhaps we can get rid of the terror that has dogged the island for a very long time. 10:52:57 PM

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Jayson Blair revisited Three interesting perspectives here: Greg Mitchell in Editor & Publisher, NarcoNews and (my favorite) Alexander Cockburn. Cockburn writes: “He made up quotes, invented scenes and plagiarized the work of other reporters, and if senior Times editors had not been as optimistically forgiving as, say, the Catholic hierarchy in dealing with a peccant priest, Blair would, and should, have been promptly fired after his second major screw-up.”   There has already been a lot of cluck-cluck about this, but this affair really does emphasize the point of how easy the ‘Net makes it to (not) do journalism. Although I doubt we’ll ever hear Blair’s side of the story, the questions I want answered are: Was he just afraid to get on an airplane? Were there hitmen waiting for him in Baltimore? How could he live on the telephone (which tells me he wasn’t fearful of interviewing strangers), but not want to go talk face-to-face with his subjects?   As Cockburn and others have pointed out, what Blair did was fairly small-time compared to what happens in the editorial offices of The Times regularly. Bad stories that do not inform are written every day by people who visit the places their datelines reflect, and talk to people who are not necessarily clued in.  There once was a magazine called “Lies of Our Times” that chronicled the paper of record’s problems in covering (or not covering) what happens in our world. It did not cease publishing because it ran out of things to write about.    Update: I was wrong about never hearing from Jayson himself, though it remains unclear how much we will hear. 10:33:47 PM

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