FBI Director Christopher Wray On The Cops Who Didn’t Come Home

The below op-ed by FBI Director Wray was published in the Wall Street Journal on January 13^th.

While many Americans celebrated the holidays with their families in the final week of 2021, law enforcement kept working. And, tragically, four officers didn’t make it home to their loved ones that week. They were murdered while doing their job keeping others safe.  

Baltimore Police Officer Keona Holley, ambushed while alone in her car, died on Christmas Eve. Five days later in Illinois, Wayne County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Riley was killed during a call for assistance. On Dec. 30, also in Illinois, Bradley Police Department Sgt. Marlene Rittmanic was shot while attempting to locate the owner of dogs left in a car. And on New Year’s Eve, Cleveland Police Officer Shane Bartek was killed in an attempted carjacking. 

These four murders brought the total number of officers feloniously killed in the line of duty in 2021 to 73, the highest annual number since the 9/11 attacks. That’s the equivalent of one officer murdered every five days. In a year when homicides and violent crime reached distressing levels, this 20-year high hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

Especially troubling is that a record number of officers killed—nearly half—had no engagement with their assailant before the attack. Each story is heartbreaking: A 30-year Florida deputy murdered one shift shy of retirement; an officer ambushed on his first day on the job, leaving behind a wife and 6-month-old son; a combat veteran and his police dog killed while serving together.  

At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we experienced loss in 2021, too. Special Agents Laura Schwartzenberger and Daniel Alfin were murdered while doing the difficult job investigating crimes against children. FBI Task Force Officer Greg Ferency of the Terre Haute, Ind., Police Department was ambushed and killed outside an FBI office.  

When I started as FBI director, I made it my practice to call the chief or sheriff of every officer intentionally killed in the line of duty. I have now made more than 200 such calls. Each conversation reminds me that behind the uniform, the badge, and, yes, sometimes the flashing lights in your rearview mirror, there are real people. With each call, I think about the families and friends who lost someone they loved, the children who will grow up without a parent, and the communities deprived of a public servant.  

We owe it to them to redouble our efforts to take the most violent offenders off the streets and to make sure officers have the resources, equipment and training they need to do their jobs safely. Even more, we need to ensure the brave men and women know that the communities they serve have their backs. 

Every day, officers willingly put themselves at risk not knowing what dangerous situation or traumatic event they might encounter. I won’t pretend every person who carries a badge is beyond reproach, but the overwhelming majority do the job with the professionalism and commitment to equal justice citizens rightly expect.  

I meet frequently with chiefs and sheriffs across the country, and they are concerned about morale and the challenges of recruiting the next generation of officers. They understand that trust and transparency are vital to safety, and they are committed to finding ways to improve interactions. And while respect must be earned, if we are going to recruit and retain the kind of people willing to put their lives on the line to protect others, we have to show that we value their sacrifices. 

Civic and business leaders, government officials and responsible citizens need to consider how we talk about engaging with law enforcement. When police are miscast as lacking humanity—devoid of empathy and compassion—everyone suffers. Departments lose good officers who are hard to replace, and communities are less safe.  

As we reflect on 2021, let’s honor the memories of those who lost their lives protecting others. Let’s commit to making communities safer, finding ways to improve interactions between law enforcement and those they serve, holding everyone to the high standards befitting men and women in uniform, and valuing those who do their jobs with honor.  

The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, An Unbreakable Code, And the FBI's Hunt For America's Stolen Secrets

Howard Schneider offers a review of Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's The Spy Who Couldn't Spell for the Wall Street Journal.

In December 2000 Steven Carr, a special agent in the FBI’s counterintelligence unit in Washington, D.C., received a parcel from the bureau’s New York City office. It contained stolen American military secrets that had been passed on to the New York FBI by an informant in the Libyan consulate. The secrets had been mailed to the consulate along with encrypted cover letters from an individual who, the bureau would conclude, clearly worked in an American intelligence organization. The letter-writer offered to supply Libya with more secrets in exchange for money. Carr was assigned the job of finding the anonymous renegade. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s “The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets” is an excellent, highly engrossing account of the search for a man who was cunning, avaricious—and a dreadful speller.

The FBI’s target turned out to be Brian Patrick Regan, a most improbable traitor: He was a former Air Force master sergeant whose last assignment before retiring from the military was at the National Reconnaissance Office, a secretive agency “responsible for managing the nation’s spy satellites.” Regan was born in 1962 and raised on Long Island by strict Irish Catholic parents. His life was troubled from an early age because he was dyslexic. His behavior and speech were peculiar, and even his “friends” mocked and harassed him. But he had a gift for “spatial intelligence” and a “knack for stealth” (as a teenager he burglarized a neighbor’s house). He also cultivated a desire to overcome his problems and make something of himself. When he was a high-school senior, he cheated on a military aptitude test and scored high enough to allow him to enlist in the Air Force. After basic training he was assigned to study signals intelligence and analysis, and notwithstanding his past shoddy schoolwork, he succeeded, working harder than he ever had to master his lessons. As an intelligence analyst, Mr. Bhattacharjee writes, he discovered that his disability was actually an advantage: Dyslexics’ “global view helps them make connections between disparate pieces of information and recognize patterns in data that might elude more linear thinkers.”

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/treason-the-easy-way-1482446149

Trump Can End The War On Cops

Heather Mac Donald, author of The War On Cops: How the New Attack On Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, offers a piece in the Wall Street Journal on how Trump can end the war on cops.

Donald Trump’s promise to restore law and order to America’s cities was one of the most powerful themes of his presidential campaign. His capacity to deliver will depend on changing destructive presidential rhetoric about law enforcement and replacing the federal policies that flowed from that rhetoric.

The rising violence in many urban areas is driven by what candidate Trump called a “false narrative” about policing. This narrative holds that law enforcement is pervaded by racism, and that we are experiencing an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men.

Multiple studies have shown that those claims are untrue. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. Yet President Obama has repeatedly accused the police and criminal-justice system of discrimination, lethal and otherwise. During the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down in July by an assassin who reportedly was inspired by Black Lives Matter, Mr. Obama announced that black parents were right to “fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door”—that the child will be fatally shot by a cop.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-can-end-the-war-on-cops-1481931231

Note: I read Heather Mac Donald's excellent book and I plan on interviewing her after the New Year holiday. You can read the Q&A with her on this site.

A Bronx Tale: Chazz Palminteri’s Move From Mean Streets To A Tuscan-Style Villa

Writer, actor and producer Chazz Palminteri talks about his life, his art and his move from the Bronx to a villa in up-state New York in a piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Chazz Palminteri, 64, is an actor, screenwriter and producer. The 
musical version of his “A Bronx Tale,” co-directed by Robert De Niro and Jerry Zaks with music by Alan Menken, opens Dec. 1 at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre. He spoke with Marc Myers.

Only the wiseguys had money when I was a kid. I grew up in the Belmont section of the Bronx, a great Italian neighborhood. Most parents there didn’t have much. They worked hard to make a better life for their families. For me and my friends, it was paradise. I saw a guy kill a man when I was 9. Other than that, we had fun.

I was blessed with Ozzie and Harriet parents. My father was a city bus driver. All he cared about was making sure his son and two daughters graduated from high school. We all went on to college.

To protect your space, you had to learn how to fight. Fortunately, my father, Lorenzo, trained boxers in the neighborhood. He taught me how to box when I was 4. By the time I was 11, I could hold my own.

... At one point we had to read Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and write what we felt about the book. I got an A. The teacher asked how I saw all of the things I wrote about. That’s when I realized I was a writer.

In 1986, I moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. But things didn’t work out as planned. One day, I was sitting in my dumpy apartment on Vineland Avenue and said to myself, “If I can’t get a part, I’ll write one for myself.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/chazz-palminteri-moves-from-mean-streets-to-a-tuscan-style-villa-1479225315 

You can also read my Philadelphia Inquirer Q&A with Chazz Palminteri via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2016/10/my-philadelphia-inquirer-q-with-chazz_4.html 

'A Torch Well Lit' And 'Open To Debate': Two Books That Look Back At William F. Buckley

Clark S. Judge offers a good review in the Wall Street Journal of two recent books about the late conservative author, columnist and editor/founder of National Review, William F. Buckley.

One book, Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line by Heather Hendershot, looks back at Buckley's TV series Firing Line, and the second book, A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century, edited James Rosen, offers Buckley's view of the great and famous people of his time.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/reading-bill-buckley-in-the-age-of-trump-1475267507

Note: I was an avid viewer of Firing Line and I've read all of William F. Buckley's books. I never met him, but thankfully I was able to review two of his books for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

You can read my reviews of his books below:

President Ronald Reagan On The U.S. Navy

The Wall Street Journal offers President Reagan's remarks on the U.S. Navy while visiting the aircraft carrier USS Constellation in 1981.

Today, military adventurism and subversion threaten in faraway areas of the world. Providing security for the United States is the greatest challenge and a greater challenge than ever, but we’ll meet that challenge. We’re committed to a 600-ship Navy, a Navy that is big enough to deter aggression wherever it might occur. Let friend and foe alike know that America has the muscle to back up its words, and ships like this and men like you are that muscle.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-reagan-on-the-u-s-navy-1452124467

You can also read my interview with President Reagan's Navy Secretary, John Lehman, via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/04/command-of-seas-my-q-with-former-navy.html

Note: The above White House photo shows President Reagan aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation watching a weapons training exercise with Captain Dennis Brooks, Admiral James Watkins and other Naval officials and Ed Meese. 8/20/81. The bottom photo is of the USS Constellation at sea.

Mark Twain's Christmas Hope

The Wall Street Journal offers a look at Mark Twain's Christmas hope, expressed in a letter he wrote to a newspaper editor in 1890.

You can read the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-mark-twain-1450913993 

Secret Agents, From Babylonian Tablets To James Bond: How Ian Fleming’s Series Reflects The Real Spy World

British/American historian Amanda Foreman, author of World On Fire, offers a defense of Ian Fleming's James Bond thrillers for the Wall Street Journal.   

James Bond may have won the hearts and wallets of audiences world-wide—“Spectre,” the latest movie in the series, opens Friday after shattering box-office records in the U.K.—but armchair experts have always grumbled that Ian Fleming’s world of spies is too exciting to have any relationship to reality or history.

The critics are wrong. Fleming, who died in 1964, packed his books and plots with real historical allusions, beginning with the secrecy classification “for your eyes only.” The origins of the term go back to the Mesopotamians.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/secret-agents-from-babylon-tablets-to-james-bond-1446654155

Note: I highly recommend Amanda Foreman's book on the British role in the American Civil War. 

Edward Conlon: The Racial Reality Of Policing

Edward Conlon, a former NYPD detective and the author of two outstanding books, Blue Blood Red and Red On Red, offers his interesting and insightful take on race and the police in the Wall Street Journal.

... Since last August, when a cop shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., accounts of the deaths of African-American men at the hands of police have dominated the news. The names of the dead—Brown, Garner, Crawford, Rice, Harris, Scott, Gray—have an Everyman quality about them. The cases have provoked outrage. Rep. Hank Johnson, an African-American member of Congress from Georgia, took to the floor of the House to say that “It feels like open season on black men in America.”

Others have compared the incidents to an epidemic, even to genocide. Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei has tweeted about Ferguson. Michael Brown’s parents were flown to Switzerland to address the U.N. Committee Against Torture, and many see the activism that has emerged since Brown’s death as the onset of a great moral awakening.

It’s not up to me to decide what activists should protest, but after years of dealing with the realities of street violence, I don’t understand how a movement called “Black Lives Matter” can ignore the leading cause of death among young black men in the U.S., which is homicide by their peers.

In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 129 instances of black men killed by “legal intervention”—that is to say, by cops. The figure is incomplete because of a lack of national reporting requirements, and it says nothing about the circumstances of the killings or the race of the officers involved. But it gives a sense of the scope of the problem.

By contrast, in that same year, 6,739 black men were murdered, overwhelmingly by young men like themselves. Since 2001, even as rates of violent crime have dropped dramatically, more than 90,000 black men in the U.S. have been killed by other black men. With fatalities on this scale, the term epidemic is not a metaphor. Every year, the casualty count of black-on-black crime is twice that of the death toll of 9/11. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-racial-reality-of-policing-1441390980

Japan’s Biggest Yakuza Mob Group Splits Under Money, Police Pressure

Alexander Martin at the Wall Street Journal offers a piece on the yakuza organized crime syndicates in Japan.

TOKYO—The Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest and most powerful yakuza crime syndicate, is undergoing a major split on its 100th anniversary after years of police crackdowns and financial strains, raising fears of a bloody gang war.

News broke in late August that groups within the Yamaguchi-gumi were parting ways with its sixth-generation don. The result is the creation of a rival syndicate, also based in central Japan.

Experts say the split reflects the harsher environment facing the yakuza following the adoption of anti-gang laws that have choked off revenues. Gang members are finding it harder to make money from traditional sources like protection rackets.

“Clampdowns against the yakuza have been enforced at all points, making it increasingly difficult for them to rack up profits,” said Yoshiaki Shinozaki, an attorney with decades of experience fighting organized crime.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-gangsters-find-extortion-no-longer-pays-forcing-yakuza-split-1441773870

Note: The above spells out yakuza in Katakana.   
    

Elmore Unfiltered: Charlie Martz and Other Elmore Leonard Unpublished Stories

Anna Russell at the Wall Street Journal offers a piece on the late, great crime writer Elmore Leonard's posthumous book of unpublished stories.

About 15 years ago, the late crime novelist Elmore Leonard drew up a list of 10 rules for writing. They were characteristically succinct, and included such maxims as “Never open a book with weather” and “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue.” They were slyly funny as well: “Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said’…he admonished gravely,” read one.

Half a century earlier, however, as a young writer and father of four in a suburb of Detroit, the author was breaking his own rules left and right. A new collection, “Charlie Martz and Other Stories: The Unpublished Stories,” out from William Morrow next week, brings together 15 short stories, 11 previously unpublished, from Mr. Leonard’s early career.

Written in the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, when the author was in his early 30s, the short works show a writer struggling to refine his voice—what he called his “sound.” This is “Elmore unfiltered, warts and all,” said the author’s son Peter Leonard, who helped put the collection together.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/when-elmore-leonard-broke-his-own-rules-1434042233

'The Blacklist' Star Megan Boone: 'A New Liz Is Born' In The Season 2 Finale

My wife and I have been watching the The Blacklist since the first episode and we enjoyed the season 2 finale this week.

Jason Evans at the Wall Street Journal interviewed actress Megan Boone on her character's changing role.

As “The Blacklist” heads into the end of season two, the show has become less and less about James Spader’s Raymond Reddington character, and more and more about Elizabeth Keene, played by Megan Boone. The story, at this point, is largely focused on Liz’s past and the mystery surrounding her parents, especially her KGB-agent mother.   

It is extremely rare for the show to spend more than a minute or two on a scene that does not feature Liz. So, with the season finale only hours away, I spoke to Boone about how season two is going and where Liz is headed next. You will also see I got a surprising answer to the biggest question that has been asked about ”The Blacklist” since the show first debuted.

I want to start with where we are on the show. Liz has been framed for being a Russian spy and appears to be on the run. How will she handle this latest setback, especially not having her FBI buddies to help her out?

Liz is really working in a different realm now. She is no longer working within the law. But she’s still going to approach it in the same way. She’s tenacious and able and facile and somehow she tends to find a way out of it. That’s what makes her an everyman kind of superhero. But, she’s transitioning into an anti-hero. It’s a very interesting character in that way. She certainly didn’t start off as an anti-hero, but that’s what they are developing, that’s her arc.

Are you referring to where she is right now or where she will go in season three?

You’ll see it start to happen in the finale. A very dark side of her is revealed and she begins to regain memories of her past and what happened in the fire. A new Liz is born.

Wow, that’s quite a tease. I can’t wait to see that. Last week, my favorite scene was Red and Liz having parallel conversations. Liz saying to him, “Tell me about my mother, tell me the truth about the fire, I need to know what is going on here” and Red was saying back to her, “There’s a terrorist who is about to attack America,” and Liz almost seemed to not care about that.

You can read the rest of the interview via the below link:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/05/14/the-blacklist-star-megan-boone-a-new-liz-is-born-in-the-season-2-finale/

The Iraq War and Stubborn Myths

Judith Miller, a former New York Times reporter and editor and the author of The Story: A Reporter's Journey, offers a piece in the Wall Street Journal that dispels many of the myths about the Iraq War.

I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.

OK, I had some help from a duplicitous vice president, Dick Cheney. Then there was George W. Bush, a gullible president who could barely locate Iraq on a map and who wanted to avenge his father and enrich his friends in the oil business. And don’t forget the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon who fed cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, to reporters like me.

None of these assertions happens to be true, though all were published and continue to have believers. This is not how wars come about, and it is surely not how the war in Iraq occurred. Nor is it what I did as a reporter for the New York Times. These false narratives deserve, at last, to be retired.

There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them. The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war. Before the 2003 invasion, President Bush and other senior officials cited the intelligence community’s incorrect conclusions about Saddam’s WMD capabilities and, on occasion, went beyond them. But relying on the mistakes of others and errors of judgment are not the same as lying.   

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-iraq-war-and-stubborn-myths-1428087215

Sources: Bin Laden Docs Conflict With Obama's Talk Of Al Qaeda Demise

Foxnews.com offers a report on claims the documents captured in the bin Laden raid tell a different story than the Obama administration is pushing.  

A trove of documents that could hold the key to Al Qaeda's future have been gathering dust, say critics who believe the Obama administration is ignoring them because they don’t say what the White House wants to hear.

In fact, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials quoted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Thursday, the 1.5 million documents swept up in the Pakistan compound where Navy SEALs killed Usama bin Laden in May 2011 prove that bin Laden was still running Al Qaeda, and that the terror group was not in retreat, as the administration claimed just a year after the raid.

To date, the public has seen only two dozen of the 1.5 million documents. The haul included hard drives, cell phones, thumb drives, handwritten materials, tapes, magazines, data cards, video tapes, audio, newspapers and DVDs.

 

At the time, an interagency team led by the Central Intelligence Agency gave the cache a quick “scrub” looking for actionable intelligence, according to the op-ed, written by Weekly Standard senior writer and Fox News contributor Stephen Hayes, and Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. According to the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, that team produced 400 separate reports based on the documents.

But then, the article claims, the documents remained untouched “for months – perhaps as long as a year.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/03/07/sources-bin-laden-docs-conflict-with-obama-talk-al-qaeda-demise/

Rob the Mob: True Crime, True Love, True Story

Don Steinberg at the Wall Street Journal offers a piece on a new film about organized crime called Rob the Mob.

"Rob the Mob," the latest film from director Raymond De Felitta, shares certain key traits with his prior movies. It is based in a blue-collar neighborhood of a New York borough. It features a lively script and fleshed-out characters who explode with heart, played by surprisingly recognizable actors for an indie film (including Andy Garcia and Ray Romano). And it's destined to be severely underappreciated. 

... Set in 1992 and based on a true story, "Rob the Mob" tells of a young Queens couple who become a working-class Bonnie and Clyde. Tommy (Michael Pitt of "Boardwalk Empire") is an ex-con without a plan until he discovers, by watching the trial of mobster John Gotti, that in mafia social clubs they don't keep any guns on the premises. He figures they're ripe for robbery and gets himself an Uzi. Exacting revenge on the kind of wiseguys who harassed his father is a bonus. Nina Arianda, a Tony-Award winner who played the sassy secretary in the movie "Win Win," steals scenes as Tommy's devoted girlfriend and accomplice. Their crime spree attracts the attention of a newspaperman (Mr. Romano), a philosophical mob boss (Mr. Garcia), and the FBI.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303725404579461292851154288?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303725404579461292851154288.html

You can also watch the film's trailer via the below link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQR2sEdqBDk

Note: I look forward to seeing the film. Good cast with Andy Garcia, Michael Rispoli, Burt Young, Ray Romano and others. I also enjoyed director Raymond De Felitta's earlier film, City Island.

Mafia Is Down - But Not Out

Sean Gardiner and Pervaiz Shallwani at the Wall Street Journal offer a piece on the current status of  La Cosa Nostra organized crime in New York.

For more than two decades, New York City's five organized-crime families were plagued by convictions brought on by strengthened federal laws and the increasing habit of higher-ranking members cooperating with the government.

 

Those years of high-profile decline created a perception that the city's mafia is on the verge of extinction. But law-enforcement officials and mob experts say the five families, while not the force they once were, are far from sleeping with the fishes. They have survived, the experts said, because of their persistence and ability to adapt.

 

"I don't know that I'd say La Cosa Nostra was what it was in its heyday but I wouldn't say by any means it's gone away," said Richard Frankel (seen in the above FBI photo), special agent in charge of the Criminal Division for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York office.

 

You can  read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626804579363363092833756?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304626804579363363092833756.html   

Taking On The Snowdenistas

Edward Lucas offers a piece on NSA leaker Edward Snowden in the Wall Street Journal.

Most of my media colleagues think Edward Snowden is a saint and proto-martyr. The fugitive NSA contractor has bravely exposed American spy agencies' tricks and mischief. But the theft and publication of secret documents is not a heroic campaign. At best it is reckless self-indulgence, and at worst sabotage and treason.

 

Mr. Snowden has not proved systematic abuse by the NSA or partner agencies. The PowerPoint slides he stole are for the most part ambiguous and out-of-date. His story has been told naively and hysterically, with a huge dose of hypocrisy.

 

Espionage is inherently disreputable: It involves stealing secrets. Enemies of the West—notably Russia and China—are spying on us. France runs a mighty industrial espionage service. Germany has an excellent signals intelligence agency, the Kommando Strategische Aufklärung.

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579350481345357224?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303519404579350481345357224.html

Note: In my view, Snowden is a sneak thief, spy and traitor.

Ernest Hemingway's Havana Retreat

Finn-Olaf Jones at the Wall Street Journal visited the old Cuban home of one of my favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway, and offered an interesting piece.

The Finca's current pristine condition is a testament to Hemingway's continual hold even now among the most divergent of readers. The author who in life provoked three divorces, international controversies and a few memorable punch-outs, has, in death, created an unlikely alliance between two belligerent nations.

 

Since 2005, a team of U.S. engineers, conservationists and architects under the auspices of the Boston-based Finca Vigía Foundation has been working with Ms. Rosale's team to restore the 19th-century building, replacing the sagging roof, installing a new drainage system and rebuilding interior walls. They've also sorted, preserved and cataloged some 3,000 original documents moldering in the tropical humidity.

 

They are in the midst of digitizing the archives so they can be seen for the first time outside of Cuba.

 

"This is a labor of love for us," says Mary-Jo Adams, the foundation's director. "Most of the consultants have been doing this pro bono, and we can't import construction materials. But we have the longest-running cross-cultural program in Cuba. U.S. politicians from both sides of the political aisle—such as Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern —have supported us. Hemingway unites a lot of people."  

 

You can read the rest of the piece and view some good photos via the below link:

 

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304439804579206022406525070 

Former CIA Officer Charles McCarry Writes Novel That Takes On Spying In China

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at the Wall Street Journal offers an interview with Charles McCarry, author of one of my favorite spy thrillers, The Tears of Autumn.

Author Charles McCarry, sometimes described as the dean of American spy writers, tackles  America’s complex relationship with China in his new novel “The Shanghai Factor.”

Without revealing too much, Mr. McCarry uses a young American spy to provide a look inside a fictitious multi-billion dollar Chinese corporation and the power it wields across the globe.

Being on the inside is something Mr. McCarry knows firsthand: he worked overseas as a CIA agent under cover for about a decade. He’s also on record defending the CIA, writing an essay for this newspaper in 2009 under the headline “Let’s Give the CIA Its Due.”

“The Shanghai Factor”  is the latest in a string of spy books written by Mr. McCarry dating back to 1973. The author was interviewed by telephone. 

"The Shanghai Factor” is being published early next month by the Mysterious Press.

You can read the interview via the below link:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/05/09/an-ex-cia-agents-novel-take-on-spying-in-china/

The Terrorist Suspects Next Door: Security & Safety Should Trump Political Correctness

 

The Wall Street Journal offers a piece on the brothers Tsarnaev, the terrorist suspects who live next door to us in America.
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Events in Boston were moving so quickly on Friday that it's impossible to draw too many conclusions. But the emergence of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the chief terror suspects who paralyzed a great American city deserves at least some reflection.

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... The "homegrown" radical threat is really an argument for vigilance, especially within communities prone to producing terrorists.

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This means surveilling foreign student groups in the U.S., certain immigrant communities that have produced jihadists, and, yes, even mosques and other Muslim venues. The key is to be familiar enough with these communities, to know and be trusted enough by their leaders, so those man and women will alert law enforcers when someone appears to have become radicalized.

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This offends some civil libertarians, and the Associated Press excoriated the NYPD for the practice in a series of stories in 2011. In the wake of Boston, this looks notably misguided. New York's police say they've kept at it, under appropriate legal safeguards, and we hope they will continue.

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The U.S. government watches right-wing extremist groups because we know they are dangerous. The police shouldn't refrain from doing the same to Muslim or immigrant groups merely because that is deemed less politically correct. As the week's events in Boston show, the costs of doing otherwise are too high.
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You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323809304578432952673799328.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Note: The above photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was provided by the FBI.