I read the original NBC report (on which is was based) yesterday: nbcnews.com/politics/natio…. NBC's is the one that bothers me, because it was written by their "national security and military reporter" who covers, "intelligence and national security issues,"
as well as their other "national security reporter." This means they should have some passing familiarity with something as significant as the Gülen movement, right? But I'm guessing from the article they'd never heard of him before ("known as Gulenistas"?)
It's so weird that none of the reporting, the research, the investigations, the testimony about who he is and why he's a problem ever penetrates public consciousness. It's as if he's got a magic Sunshine-of-the-Spotless-Mind memory-eraser.
I can't quite think of any other national security issue where the disjunct between "knowledge you'd have if you did a Google search" and "what reporters seem to know" is so big, can you? There's not even an allusion in the piece that would help readers make sense of this.
"'At first there were eye rolls, but once they realized it was a serious request, the career guys were furious,' said a senior U.S. official involved in the process."
They didn't know enough to think, "Wow. Why exactly are the career guys furious?"
They didn't know enough to think, "Wow. Why exactly are the career guys furious?"
They don't know enough to be skeptical of the claim that theres "no basis for his extradition and that no new evidence to justify it has emerged."
They don't know it's false that "there is no evidence that Gulen has broken any U.S. laws."
They don't know it's false that "there is no evidence that Gulen has broken any U.S. laws."
So they have access to all these senior people--who *really* need to be asked tough questions about this, but no idea which questions to ask, and no intuition that they're being fed a steaming meal of horseshit.
In this case, maybe it's useful to have a president who knows nothing about anything. Because no one else ever asks, "Who is this guy and why is he here, anyway?" And unlike the question, "Why can't we just nuke them," I suspect the answer is no longer obvious at all.
We have no popular memory of him, so why do we assume there's institutional memory? It may well be that no one now working in our national security bureaucracy knows who he is or how he got here, and no one has dusted off the files that might have answers to those questions.
I'm guessing the way you get to be a "national security reporter" for a news organ like that is by cultivating friendly connections with senior natsec officials and being an open receptacle for leaks who doesn't know enough to ask questions.
And certainly, you need such a reporter on the team--but you also need someone at the desk, with a functional memory, who can put this stuff in context. And that's clearly gone, if it ever existed.
