Friend of the blog Robert C.J. Parry is running for City Council in Monrovia. His Web site, which has a handy donation button, is here. I feel confident he would work to make life there better.

Friend of the blog Robert C.J. Parry makes some news this morning in an op-ed in the L.A. Times. The op-ed addresses the aftermath of the tragedy in which a man named Jose Peña got high on cocaine, grabbed a gun, and threatened to kill himself and his 9-month old daughter Suzie, whom he was holding in his arms. He emerged from the building and fired at officers, hitting one. In the ensuing gun battle, Peña and his daughter were both killed.

Parry writes that Chief Bratton promised a board of inquiry to investigate the incident and make public recommendations. None of it happened:

Shortly after [Suzie Peña’s] death, Police Chief William J. Bratton appointed a board of inquiry to examine the incident. Its mission, he said, was to investigate the officers’ tactics and other factors in the shooting. “For the safety of the public and officers, we need to understand intimately what transpired in that incident,” he said at the time.

In fact, the board did nothing of the sort. None of the SWAT officers from the Peña shooting were even interviewed by the panel, according to multiple sources. Indeed, the board’s eight members included fewer tactical experts (one) than attorneys (three). In its final report, the board acknowledged that it had been “ultimately precluded from gaining a full and complete understanding of what transpired in Peña until after this report was finalized.”

What’s more, Assistant Chief Sharon Papa privately promised the team shortly after the incident that the report would be aired openly, according to officers who were present. That didn’t happen either. The final report — completed 15 months ago — has not been released. Many senior department officials have never seen it, and Times reporters have repeatedly requested it but have been turned down. I received a copy earlier this month from a source.

The report shows that instead of fulfilling Bratton’s promises, the board used the Peña case (with Bratton’s encouragement) as a way to push for a series of politically correct changes within SWAT — changes that many cops believe will have absolutely no benefit and that they believe will endanger the lives of citizens and cops alike.

It turns out that the attorney-heavy panel made a bunch of recommendations to make SWAT look more like Los Angeles. “The new test’s only physical challenges are a modest physical fitness qualification and a modified obstacle course. ‘My preteen daughter could pass that,’ one officer said.” If these recommendations are implemented, you are likely to see a mass exodus from SWAT.

There are two issues at play: 1) the P.C. proposal to revamp SWAT, and 2) the issue of why this board of inquiry didn’t investigate the case it was supposed to investigate, and why the findings were not made public. Robert concentrates on the first, which has to do with officer safety. I have a feeling that, the L.A. Times being what it is, we’re going to be hearing a lot more about the second, which has to do with Bratton’s integrity, and LAPD reform and secretiveness. Look for much more about this in coming days.

UPDATE: I originally said: “He emerged from the residence and fired at officers” — but it wasn’t a residence. This has been fixed.

Also, I am given to understand that Jack Dunphy may have a piece coming out on NRO which will have other interesting details about this. Stay tuned.

How excited are Republicans about their candidates? Robert C.J. Parry (a friend of this blog) was asked to write an op-ed explaining why he supports Mitt Romney. The result gives whole new meaning to the phrase “damning with faint praise”:

For my money (and, yes, my money is a big part of this), the only hope we have lies in one former Gov. Mitt Romney. Romney is the man with the right answers right now. That’s a bit scary. . . .

. . . . Mitt’s somewhat, um, cyclical … approach to position-taking over the years makes one wonder if his beliefs now will be his beliefs throughout those pre-election cycles.

But, all we can go on is the here and now. And for that, Romney wins hands down.

Translation: if you held a gun to my head and made me vote for one of the Republicans, I guess I’d vote for this guy.

That’s a good example of how excited we are.

As I mentioned yesterday, there is a new Outside the Tent piece at the L.A. Times today. It is titled Covering only the LAPD’s bad side, by Robert C.J. Parry. Kudos to The Times (and specifically Nick Goldberg) for publishing it. Here is a taste:

In its most recent editorial about the May Day demonstrations at MacArthur Park, The Times again showed its historic disregard for facts and history in its coverage of the Los Angeles Police Department and in its slavish devotion to the concept of police “reform,” regardless of cost, consequences or wisdom.

The editorial, published in response to the Oct. 9 release of the LAPD’s report on the MacArthur Park disturbance, described the scene at the park as “chaos” resulting from “missteps” by the department.

How did this terrible situation come to pass? Well, the editorial noted, among other things, that training “seems to have lapsed perilously — the Metropolitan Division’s basic training course was cut in 2005.” It also described Chief William Bratton’s ongoing struggles with the department’s “cultural and institutional defects” connected to this lapse.

Yet, astonishingly, the paper failed to point out that it was Bratton’s own decision to eliminate that training. Instead, the editorial praised the chief’s “deserved” second term and his “impressive response” to the events of May 1. It seems that publicly condemning your subordinates for problems you helped cause impresses The Times.

Sadly, this intellectual dissonance is true to form. Looking back at The Times’ coverage of the LAPD, it’s easy to see decades of factual omissions, routine second-guessing of police officers and a consistent support of activist agendas.

Mr. Parry’s name should sound familiar, as he is a friend of this blog. Mr. Parry has allowed me to publish two very useful items on this site, which you should read if you haven’t read them already:

• An excellent essay titled When the Last Hero Leaves L.A., Will Anybody Notice?

• This post setting forth Mr. Parry’s extensive data regarding the effect of the LAPD consent decree.

The subject matter of both of these prior posts is alluded to in today’s piece, so if you’re looking for more background on the LAPD consent decree or on officers Zeeman and Gregson, click the links above.

But first make sure you read Mr. Parry’s piece.

Michael Hiltzik has a column titled A Chevron PR website pretends to be an objective news source. Hilztik complains that a site called the Richmond Standard is pretending to be something it is not: a community news site. For example, the Richmond Standard site has a piece that describes the “rude, messy, and smelly” people at the People’s Climate March — commentary that sounds like it is coming from the grass roots, but which is actually coming from Chevron. In his column, Hiltzik talks to the PR consultant for Chevron who runs the site, and confronts him about the fact that the site is nothing but, well . . . a sock puppet (you knew that term was coming!) for Chevron:

The site is “transparent” about its sponsorship, he says. That’s true, up to a point: The homepage states that it’s “brought to you by Chevron Richmond. We aim to provide Richmond residents with important information about what’s going on in the community, and to provide a voice for Chevron Richmond on civic issues.” Chevron corporate announcements are sequestered in a section labeled “Chevron Speaks.”

Is that sufficient disclosure? The answer is a resounding “no.”

“The disclosures don’t go very far to show how news can be corrupted,” says Ed Wasserman, a news media ethics expert who is dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

So, to sum up: this is Michael Hiltzik complaining about a sock puppet’s unethical lack of transparency.

Michael Hiltzik — the original sock puppet guy.

I assume most of you remember this, but if not, treat yourself to a stroll down memory lane. Back in 2006, I exposed the fact that Hiltzik was running around leaving nasty comments about me, Hugh Hewitt, Cathy Seipp, and other conservatives, all under assumed names. The details are in this long and joyous post. If you’ve never read it, do so now. My favorite part was when Hiltzik, under his own name, praised comments he had left under an assumed name at my site:

For anyone interested, Specter is getting his head handed to him over at the Patterico blog for trying to sleaze out from under his flat misstatements of fact. And that’s a conservative blog. Follow the link above, and enjoy the carnage.

The person who was supposedly handing Specter’s head to him was a guy named “Mikekoshi” — who, I showed, was Michael Hiltzik himself. So you had Hiltzik praising his own arguments and falsely implying that they were being made by a conservative (“And that’s a conservative blog.”). As a result of this dishonest inanity, Hiltzik lost his business column. As the Associated Press reported in 2006: Los Angeles Times Ends Column of Writer Who Used Pseudonyms.

The Los Angeles Times said Sunday that it was discontinuing the column and blog of a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter because he posted items online using assumed names.

The decision, reported in an editor’s note on The Times’s Web site, came a week after the paper suspended Michael A. Hiltzik’s Golden State blog. It said Mr. Hiltzik would be reassigned after serving a suspension.

Mr. Hiltzik “did not commit any ethical violations in his newspaper column, and an internal inquiry found no inaccurate reporting in his postings in his blog or on the Web,” the editor’s note said. “But employing pseudonyms constitutes deception and violates a central tenet of The Times’s ethics guidelines: Staff members must not misrepresent themselves and must not conceal their affiliation with The Times.”

. . . .

Mr. Hiltzik had been in a blog feud with Patrick Frey, the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, who writes the conservative blog Patterico’s Pontifications. Mr. Frey recently contended that Mr. Hiltzik had been posting messages to his blog and other Web sites under assumed names.

Mr. Frey said he did not object to anonymity on the Web but rather to people using “pseudonyms to pretend to be something or somebody they aren’t.”

At the time, Dean Baquet (now editor of the New York Times) said that Hiltzik had to lose his column because he could no longer write about others’ dishonesty:

Baquet said he wasn’t certain sure how to punish Hiltzik until he read about Ken Lay’s trial last week and thought how the Enron saga would make great fodder for a business columnist. He realized then, Baquet said, that his business columnist—Hiltzik—could no longer write credibly about duplicity in the business world. There’s no place, he said, for dishonesty under the Times banner.

Well, sure there is, Dean Baquet. There’s all kinds of room for it! And nothing says so better than the utter gall of Michael Hiltzik criticizing business owners for using sock puppets.

Thanks to Robert C.J. Parry on Twitter.

Wasn’t there something of a brouhaha about the leak of information on Valerie Plame? I seem to remember a peep or two about in the national media. Maybe even a criminal prosecution or something.

So when someone pleads to identifying a covert agent to a reporter, you can bet the L.A. Times is going to publish a major story about it. And they will tell you whether the person responsible is a Democrat or a Republican. Because dammit! The public has a right to know.

I think fair use, in this context, allows me to reprint the entirety of this L.A. Times piece. I’m not stealing their market share, and I’m making a valid criticism. Please read this story and see if any questions occur to you:

A former U.S. intelligence officer with a long history at CIA headquarters and the agency’s Counterterrorism Center pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., to a single count of disclosing information identifying a covert agent.

He faces a 30-month federal prison sentence and $250,000 fine under a plea agreement with federal prosecutors.

John C. Kiriakou, a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, was charged in April with unmasking the 20-year covert agent to a Washington journalist who then shared that information with defense lawyers for terrorist detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

He had also been awaiting trial on separate charges that he disclosed to two journalists the name and contact information for a CIA analyst and his undercover work in capturing Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah. Those charges were dropped in return for the guilty plea.

The 47-year old Kiriakou had served as both an intelligence officer at CIA headquarters as well as in various classified overseas assignments. He held a top secret security clearance and had regular access to national defense information. Years ago he signed a secrecy agreement and acknowledged that should he reveal certain sensitive information it could “constitute a criminal offense.”

James W. McJunkin, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, called Kiriakou’s actions “a clear violation of the law.”

In an 11-page statement of facts signed by Kiriakou, he confessed that he also lied to FBI agents trying to track down the leaks, and feigned surprise when told that defense lawyers for the detainees now knew the identity of the CIA covert officer.

“Oh, my God. No,” he told the FBI. “Once they get names, I mean, this is scary.”

Eight paragraphs. No mention that the guy was a Senate staffer. More significantly, no mention of whose Senate staffer he was.

Who was the Senator who employed someone who leaked national security secrets to a reporter?

Why, somehow, that doesn’t appear in the story. And by now, with the help of the headline of this post, I’ll bet you’ve guessed why. For the dunce cap crowd, here’s The Hill:

Kiriakou, who worked for more than a year as an investigator for Sen. John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 25, 2013.

I never would have guessed!

Of course, disclosing details about covert CIA missions is no big deal to the L.A. Times. They have done it themselves.

Thanks to Robert C.J. Parry.

UPDATE: Thanks to Uppercase Matt, who corrected me on whether the L.A. Times even mentioned that the culprit was a Senate staffer at all. The post has been rewritten accordingly.

Failing to deport illegal criminals costs lives. Again:

The Obama administration released illegal immigrants who went on to commit more crimes, including charges of 19 murders, 3 attempted murders and 142 sex crimes, the House Judiciary Committee said in a report Tuesday.

All told, 16 percent of the nearly 47,000 illegal immigrants the administration was notified of but declined to deport between 2008 and 2011 under its Secure Communities program have gone on to be charged with other crimes, the committee said.

. . . .

While hundreds of thousands of aliens have been sent back home under the program, 159,286 were not put in deportation proceedings during the period under review, CRS said.

About three-quarters of those weren’t eligible for deportation because they were legal immigrants and their criminal records didn’t rise to the level of deportation.

But nearly a quarter could have been deported and weren’t, CRS said. They went on to commit the 19 murders, 3 attempted murders and 142 sex crimes, the Judiciary Committee said.

So, 19 people dead because of lax immigration policy. But what is that as compared to all the votes Obama will get?

Thanks to Robert C.J. Parry.

The L.A. Times has appended a “For the Record” notation on that Pat Tillman column I noted here this week:

For the record: An earlier version of this column said Pat Tillman had been “murdered by guys on his own team,” which was subsequently changed to “killed by guys on his own team” to match the version that appeared in the print edition.

The new Readers’ Representative, Deirdre Edgar, explains how it happened in a post at her blog:

[I]n the piece Dwyre submitted to the Sports desk, he had written “murdered” instead of “killed” — Tillman was “murdered by guys on his own team, other U.S. soldiers.”

A Sports copy editor working the story last Friday afternoon questioned the use of the word.

As The Times’ style guide states, “Murder is either a charge or a verdict, not a synonym for homicide. … Do not say that a victim was murdered until someone has been convicted of murder. Instead, say that a victim was killed or slain.”

Dwyre agreed that the wording should be changed to “killed,” and that’s how his column read when it appeared in Saturday’s print edition.

However, the column was edited earlier in the day by a morning copy desk editor and posted to the Web. The time stamp in the Web system shows it being sent at 5:47 p.m.; the Sports copy editor’s work — with the editing change from “murdered” to “killed” — was saved at 6:45 p.m.

When Dwyre discovered late that night that the column posted online read “murdered,” he contacted Assistant Sports Editor Dan Loumena, who changed the wording to reflect the print version.

She forthrightly acknowledges that “when the change was made from ‘murdered’ to ‘killed,’ that should have been noted in a For the Record.” Well done.

P.S. As long as we’re all being transparent, I messed up the timeline when relating the situation in my previous post, when I said: “after at least one person wrote an angry letter, they simply did a stealth correction.”

(more…)

The U.S. Government’s handling of Pat Tillman’s death was a disgrace. Tillman was killed by friendly fire, and the U.S. tried to cover it up. You can read all about it in an excellent book by Jon Krakauer called Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman. I read it several weeks ago and I recommend it to anyone.

Tillman’s memory was manipulated by the Bush administration for cynical political reasons.

But he wasn’t “murdered.”

His death was the result of an accidental incident — as the L.A. Times has previously acknowledged in a 2009 review of Krakauer’s book.

Ironically, when an L.A. Times writer recently claimed otherwise — as part of a complaint about the U.S. Government’s cover-up — the newspaper tried to cover up the mistake.

As I prove in this post, a writer claimed that Tillman had been “murdered” by his own comrades. Then, after at least one person wrote an angry letter, they simply did a stealth correction — changing the word “murdered” to “killed” — without any mention of what they were doing.

You see the irony, right? I don’t have to spell it out, do I? A cover-up of an error in a column about a cover-up . . . I mean, you get it, don’t you?

I guess they noticed that I was busy and thought they could slip this past me.

What they forgot is, I have readers.

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Jack Dunphy has a piece in Pajamas Media about Bratton and the SWAT changes. A taste:

Since Brattons plan was exposed, he has busied himself in denouncing anyone who dares to question the changes to the SWAT selection process, going so far as to threaten current team members with transfers if they are caught speaking out against them. Incredibly, he drew a comparison to the film The Godfather when discussing his plan for retribution against his critics. Youre all familiar with The Godfather movie he told reporters, and throughout most of the movie the Corleones are getting banged around pretty good and then Michael makes a statement that all debts will be settled. And at the end of the movie, all debts are settled in a very bloody way . . . Im more than willing to take the slings and arrows for a couple more weeks, but like Michael Corleone, Ill get my time.

Well now.

A very interesting choice of words. LAPD officers are now expected, evidently, to subscribe to Brattons very own code of omerta or risk some very unpleasant consequences. Chief Bratton may wish otherwise, but unlike members of the Mafia, police officers enjoy all the rights accorded by the First Amendment, most especially when addressing matters of public policy. Speaking on behalf of my colleagues, I can promise that any attempt to abridge those rights will be most vigorously opposed.

But in the meantime, if I see Chief Bratton carrying a violin case, Im going to run.

Like I told Robert C.J. Parry last night: it’s not personal. It’s strictly business.

But stick to your pseudonym, Jack, lest you wake up next to a horse head.