NY Times wants Congress to codify leaks

[American Patriot]

NY Times wants Congress to codify leaks
Stop the New York Times ^ | July 9, 2006

Share secrets with the enemy and their lawyers, the NY Times says --

Yesterday's New York Times editorial said Congress should make sharing secrets with the enemy the law of the land:

“...Congress could create a new kind of military commission, operating as closely as possible to United States military law. That is the proposal of Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, one of the Senate’s experts on military law, and Arlen Specter, the Judiciary Committee chairman. It sounds reasonable, as long as lawmakers resist pressure from the administration to deny the prisoners any real rights, barring them from seeing classified evidence...”

The editors of New York Times apparently do not like the term ‘unlawful combatants’ for they referred to them only as, “terrorists who are not in any army.” Unfortunately, for them, our Supreme Court has consistently recognized unlawful combatants do exist...

(Excerpt) Read more at stopthenewyorktimes.org ...

http://stopthenewyorktimes.org/?p=15

[American Patriot]

Troubled times ahead for the New York Times
RealClearPolitics.com ^ | 01/05/2006 | Former Mayor Ed Koch

January 5, 2006

Troubled Times Ahead for the New York Times? By Ed Koch

Are troubled times ahead for The New York Times? I believe so.

President Bush warned the Times that publishing a story on the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program would do great harm to American security. After holding the story for a year, the Times went ahead and published it anyway.

In the past the President has not hesitated to go after those whom he has charged with violating national security laws. When the media demanded the administration find within its own circle those who violated the law by unmasking the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s ensuing investigation led to the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and the jailing of Times reporter Judith Miller until she provided information to the grand jury about her sources. This case unnerved many people who never dreamed that the media itself would end up as a target of investigators. Now it appears that the Times is in hot water again.

Over a year ago, a Times reporter told his editors that the National Security Agency -- whose responsibility it is to electronically monitor security-related phone conversations -- was doing so without the authorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. This court was specifically created to review NSA requests to surveil telephone calls and e-mails coming from overseas or initiated in the U.S. where one of the participants is a person known to the government to be affiliated with terrorism.

Ordinarily, telephone taps of domestic calls are only permitted by regular court order based on a showing of probable cause of criminal activity sufficient to meet the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. However, the NSA is subject to a more relaxed standard. It merely needs to show the FISA court that one of the participants in an overseas call is associated with terrorism.

Since the NSA’s surveillance program commenced in October 2001, the FISA court has denied surveillance authorization in few instances. On December 27, 2005, the Times reported, “From 1995 to 2004, the court received 10,617 warrant applications, according to figures compiled by the Federation of American Scientists. It turned down only four, all in 2003 for unexplained reasons.” Nevertheless, the administration has generally refrained from seeking FISA court approvals. The administration has stated that it believes, based on the advice of career lawyers in the Department of Justice and Attorney General’s office, that the President does not need a court order to direct the NSA to intercept overseas calls since 9/11, after which Congress authorized war against international terrorism.

Further, the administration believes, notwithstanding the ease with which court orders are granted and the fact that retroactive court orders and 72 hours emergency surveillance without a court order are permitted, that it has and should have the right to proceed in these cases without a court order.

The administration says it monitors the surveillance program carefully and reauthorizes it every 45 days. On one occasion in March 2004, while Attorney General John Ashcroft was in the hospital, the administration was told by Ashcroft’s Deputy, James B. Comey, that he would not recertify the program.

The Times describes the situation as follows: “Officials with knowledge of the events said that Mr. Ashcroft also appeared reluctant to sign on to the continued use of the program, and that the Justice Department’s concerns appear to have led in part to the suspension of the program for several months. After a secret audit, new protocols were put in place at the N.S.A. to better determine how the agency established the targets of its eavesdropping operations, officials have said.”

Comey has since left the government and one of the FISA judges, James Robertson, who apparently had some disagreements with the actions of the FISA court, resigned from it in December 2005. On January 2, 2006, the Times quoted President Bush as saying, “Not only has it been reviewed by Justice Department officials, it’s been reviewed by members of the United States Congress…It’s a vital, necessary program.”

Now there is a hue and cry that the President -- by authorizing taping without court order in these cases -- has violated the law and should be held accountable. He can traditionally be held accountable by impeachment during his term, by declining to reelect him or by pursuing him criminally after his term expires.

The ACLU recently took a full-page ad in the Times showing two pictures. The first is of President Nixon with the caption, “He lied to the American people and broke the law.” The second picture is of President Bush alongside the statement, “So did he.” The words constituting the alleged lies of each of the two presidents are set forth. There is no picture or description relating to President Clinton who is not mentioned and no comment concerning his impeachment trial and its outcome. In my judgment, the ACLU -- by implicitly proposing impeachment -- has injured its credibility as an institution that seeks to protect the security of the citizens of this nation, particularly during wartime.

Many are surely wondering what if anything will happen to the New York Times for having made public the existence of a national security program in a time of war, after the President personally and expressly warned Times publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. and Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller not to do so. The two apparently accepted the request of the President and did not publish the story for a year and then chose to make it public in December 2005. The Times publisher and executive editor must have given consideration to the consequences that might follow the violation of secrecy laws covering the NSA program.

Millions of Americans, myself included, would not want to have the Times, its publisher, editors and reporters punished for breaching censorship laws in a situation like this. I have no doubt that they believed they were performing a noble public service in alerting the nation to what they perceived to be a subversion of the constitution by the President and his administration.

They decided as many patriotic whistle-blowers have done before them to violate the law as I expect in the future, some patriotic law enforcement officers in a ticking bomb situation will use torture to locate the bomb in order to save thousands of lives. But no one is above the law. Not the President. Not anyone in his administration. And not The New York Times. Those who violate the law in such situations can hope for jury nullification, declination of prosecution by law enforcement or presidential pardon. Yet that is not enough. The Times or any potential whistle-blower in a comparable situation should be able to bring the matter to the FISA court for its consideration.

Presently there would be no standing for such an individual or institution and the court could not accept jurisdiction. In my view, Congress, while considering all other aspects of this case, should provide a proper means for such whistle-blowers to bring their complaints to an appropriate forum without jeopardizing the country’s security -- and their own, as well.

Ed Koch is the former Mayor of New York City.

[American Patriot]

Sen. Accuses Times of Endangering U.S. [New York Times - Sen. John Cornyn.....]

A Republican senator on Saturday accused The New York Times of endangering American security to sell a book by waiting until the day of the terror-fighting Patriot Act reauthorization to report that the government has eavesdropped on people without court-approved warrants.

"At least two senators that I heard with my own ears cited this as a reason why they decided to vote to not allow a bipartisan majority to reauthorize the Patriot Act," said Republican Sen. John Cornyn (news, bio, voting record) of Texas. "Well, as it turns out the author of this article turned in a book three months ago and the paper, The New York Times, failed to reveal that the urgent story was tied to a book release and its sale by its author."

Cornyn did not name the senators in his remarks on the Senate floor.

A call to The New York Times' Washington bureau was referred to spokeswoman Catherine Mathis, who could not be reached immediately.

Times reporter James Risen, who wrote the story, has a book "State of WAR: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," coming out in the next few weeks, Cornyn said.

"I think it's a crying shame ... that we find that America's safety is endangered by the potential expiration of the Patriot Act in part because a newspaper has seen fit to release on the night before the vote on the floor on the reauthorization of the Patriot Act as part of a marketing campaign for selling a book," Cornyn said.

Since October 2001, the super-secret National Security Agency has, without court-approved warrants, eavesdropped on the international phone calls and e-mails of people inside the United States.

(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...

[American Patriot]

The Dishonesty Of The New York Times
Captains Quarters ^ | Jan. 18, 2006 | Edward Morrissey [WEEKLY STANDARD]


The New York Times puts out another article attacking the inclusion of the notorious "sixteen words" in the 2003 State of the Union address that the Bush administration long ago conceded should not have been in the speech. These 16 words started the CIA on its mission to discredit George Bush by sending its partisan, spook spouse and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger for a couple of drinks with the country's Prime Minister. On his return and oddly unencumbered by the normal non-disclosure agreements that the CIA requires for other contractors, he leaked his impressions through Nicholas Kristof at the Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post before writing an op-ed under his own name, declaring that Bush had lied about uranium sales to Iraq.

Once again, Eric Lichtblau and the NYT rehash this issue, and once again, they handle it dishonestly:

A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department. Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send "25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers" filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.

The analysts' doubts were registered nearly a year before President Bush, in what became known as the infamous "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Lichtblau even gets a quote from Joe Wilson himself at the end of the article, but Lichtblau's framing highlights the dishonesty at the heart of this article and Wilson's three-year passion for attacking the Bush administration:

Mr. Wilson said in an interview that he did not remember ever seeing the memo but that its analysis should raise further questions about why the White House remained convinced for so long that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa. "All the people understood that there was documentary evidence" suggesting that the intelligence about the sale was faulty, he said.

Once again, the Times conflates two different questions and in doing so misrepresents the intelligence that both the British and Wilson himself found. The first question, which prompted this release of material, is whether the Nigeriens were likely to sell and transport uranium to Iraq. The second question is whether Saddam Hussein was still making the attempt to buy uranium at all, from Niger as well as anywhere else. All of Iraq's uranium had been sealed by the UNSCOM team and was out of Saddam's reach, at least while UNSCOM remained in Iraq. Had Saddam sought uranium from any other source, it would prove that Saddam intended to rebuild his WMD nuclear program.

It really shouldn't be that difficult to figure out that the two questions are not mutually exclusive, and that they mean two very different things. Joe Wilson found that out himself and reported it to the CIA, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence determined in 2004:

[Wilson's] intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mayaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999,(REDACTED) businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq." As has been discussed many times in the past, the Nigeriens only export four commodities: livestock, cowpeas, onions, and uranium -- and only one of those would require secret negotiations with Saddam's Iraq. Mayaki told Wilson that he was sure that Saddam was trying to procure another source for uranium and declined to meet with the Iraqi delegation.

That showed the CIA assessment to be accurate -- that an actual sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq would be unlikely to proceed. However, it also showed that Saddam Hussein, as late as 1999, continued in his efforts to procure uranium to replace that which UNSCOM had confiscated. Why would Saddam need uranium? The only reason was to restart his moribund nuclear-weapons program.

Reread the opening paragraphs from Lichtblau again. He deliberately varies from one question to the other as if the two have an identical meaning. It's the same trick employed in Wilson's original op-ed; both start off by talking about the fact that no sale had been completed -- a true statement -- and then substitute that for no attempt to purchase uranium had been made, a complete falsehood that Wilson's own report proves.

Bush, in fact, turned out to be correct in his "sixteen words," a fact not lost on British intelligence, who have all along insisted that Saddam had tried to buy uranium, and not just from Niger. The SSCI report makes this dodge very transparent, but the Paper of Record never bothers to research its findings whenever reporting on this subject.

[American Patriot]

Indict The New York Times
Henry Mark Holzer - Newsletter ^ | Mon, 09 Jan 2006 | Henry Mark Holzer

INDICT THE NEW YORK TIMES

Henry Mark Holzer

It is an article of faith on the Left and among its fellow travelers that the Bush administration stole two elections, made war on Iraq for venal reasons, tortured hapless foreigners, and conducted illegal surveillance of innocent Americans. A corollary of this mindset is that the press, primarily the Washington Post and The New York Times, has a right, indeed a duty, to print whatever they want about the administration—even if the information compromises national security.

Not true. The press is not exempt from laws that apply to everyone else.. The press is not exempt from laws protecting our national security. The New York Times is not exempt from the Espionage Act, as we shall see in a moment.

But first, it’s necessary to understand what an indictment of the Times does not involve.

First, an Espionage Act indictment of The New York Times would not even remotely constitute an attack on a free press. As Justice White wrote in Branzburg v. Hayes, “[i]t would be frivolous to assert . . . that the First Amendment, in the interest of securing news or otherwise, confers a license on either the reporter or his news sources to violate valid criminal laws.”

Nor would an indictment of the Times constitute an attempt to restrain it from publishing news. The anti-anti-terrorists who seek to justify the Times revealing the NSA’s domestic surveillance program and thus prevent their flagship paper from being indicted, rely on a Supreme Court decision entitled New York Times Company v. United States, better known as the Pentagon Papers Case. Their reliance is misplaced.

In 1971 a disgruntled anti-war activist delivered a classified study—“History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy”—to The New York Times and the Washington Post. The government sued to enjoin publication—seeking to impose a prior restraint. If there are any fundamental principles in modern First Amendment law, one is that the burden on government to restrain publication (as compared, for example, with later punishing its publication) is extremely heavy. Accordingly, in a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled for the newspapers, and the publication of the embarrassing Pentagon Papers went ahead.

Thus, New York Times Company v. United States, where the Court rejected a government-sought prior restraint on publication, would have no precedential value in a case where, after publication, the government sought to punish the Times for violating the Espionage Act.

Third, not only was there no legal impediment to the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, there was abundant authority for it. The President possesses broad powers as chief executive and Commander in Chief under Article II of the Constitution. Congress has repeatedly delegated to all presidents considerable war-related powers, and especially post-9/11 to President Bush. It was Congress that created and empowered the National Security Agency. The Executive Branch’s NSA domestic surveillance program, aimed at obtaining intelligence about the foreign-based terrorist war on the United States, was/is an integral element of our national security policy and its implementation. No Supreme Court decision has ever held that the Presidential/Congressionally-sanctioned acquisition of that kind of intelligence was constitutionally or otherwise prohibited.

Accordingly, it is pointless to consider whether the NSA’s domestic surveillance program was legal. It was! If a case involving that program ever reaches the Supreme Court, that’s what its ruling will be.

Fourth, the interesting history of the Espionage Act is irrelevant to whether the Times may have violated it.

Finally, it is a waste of time to consider whether the Act is constitutional. It has been expressly and impliedly held constitutional more than once.

This brings us to whether The New York Times is indictable (and ultimately convictable) for violating the Espionage Act.

The facts are clear. The NSA was engaged in highly classified warrantless wiretaps of domestic subjects in connection with the War on Terror, and the Times, a private newspaper, made that information public.

It is to those facts that the Espionage Act either applies, or does not apply.

Title 18, Section 793 of the United States Code, provides that “(e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of . . . any document . . . or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates . . . the same to any person not entitled to receive it . . . (f) . . . [s]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both. (g) If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.” (Section 794 is inapplicable. It deals with “gathering or delivering defense information to aid [a] foreign government.”)

“It is,” said the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in assessing Section 793 (e) in United States v. Morison, “difficult to conceive of any language more definite and clear.”

Let’s break down the statute into its component parts.

“Whoever”: this would mean the New York Times company, publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., editor Bill Keller, and anyone else privy to the information upon which the story was based.

“Having unauthorized possession”: the information was classified, and the Times was not authorized to have it.

“Of any document . . . or information”: certainly the Times had information, because it published it; it is inconceivable that the newspaper did not have documents of some kind, because the newspaper would never have gone that far out on a limb without at least some corroboration beyond an oral report(s).

“Relating to the national defense”: no comment is necessary; indeed, the Times has conceded that targets of the warrantless wiretaps were persons who may have had some connection to terrorists.

“Which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation”: obviously the Times had “reason to believe,” because it withheld the story for a year.

“Willfully communicates . . . the same”: no comment is necessary; the story was front-page news.

“To any person not entitled to receive it”: even the Times can’t argue that subway straphangers, or any other member of the public, was “entitled to receive” information about the classified operations about one of this country’s most secret and highly protected agencies.

Several years ago Erika Holzer and I wrote a book entitled “Aid and Comfort”: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, which proved that her conduct in Hanoi made her indictable for, and convictable of, treason. We discovered that she was not indicted because of a political failure of will by the Nixon administration. To summarize a chapter of our book, suffice to say that the government was afraid to indict a popular anti-war actress who had the support of the radical left. Even today, three decades after Fonda’s trip to North Vietnam and three years after the publication of our book, we receive countless letters lamenting that Hanoi Jane was never punished for her conduct.

We tell them that it’s too late, that any possibility of seeing justice done for Fonda’s traitorous conduct is long gone. That is all the more reason why those of us who remember the Fonda episode, and who understand the nature and importance of today’s War on Terror, should not rest until the government calls to account The New York Times—in a court of law, with an indictment and hopefully a conviction, under the Espionage Act.

______________

Henry Mark Holzer, professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is a constitutional and appellate lawyer. His latest book—Keeper of the Flame: The Supreme Court Jurisprudence of Justice Clarence Thomas—will be published later this year.

[American Patriot]

Could this be the REAL reason for NYT doing what they did???

New York Times profit drops 52%
Market Watch ^ | Oct. 19, 2005 | David B. Wilkerson

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- New York Times Co. on Wednesday reported a 52% decline in third-quarter profit due to expenses related to job cuts announced earlier this year, as well as ongoing advertising weakness at its New England media properties.

New York Times said it took a pretax charge of $12.4 million related to a plan announced in May to eliminate about 200 positions. On an after-tax basis, the charge was $7.5 million, or 5 cents a share.

Including the charge, net income plunged to $23.1 million, or 16 cents a share, compared with a profit of $48.3 million or 33 cents a share in the year-ago period.

Revenue rose 2.2% to $791.1 million, topping the $787.8 million average estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call.

The company said it expects to take a charge of $35 million to $45 million over the next three quarters that's related to another round of layoffs announced in September.

Advertising revenue rose 4% to $518.2 million. Excluding About.com, the online information provider it recently acquired, ad revenue was only up 1.3%.

National- and retail-advertising sales were just about flat with the same quarter a year ago, said Janet Robinson, the company's chief executive, during a conference call with analysts.

As other newspaper companies have indicated, help-wanted and real-estate classified ads were "healthy," offsetting continued weakness in the automotive category. Overall, classified revenue rose 4%.

New York Times Co. said that a pattern of stronger ad growth at its smaller newspapers than its large markets continued in the third quarter.

Ad revenue at the New England Media Group, which includes the Boston Globe, declined 3% to $111.2 million, while circulation revenue fell 6% to $42.9 million. Lower ad sales reflected "continuing softness in the Boston economy," Robinson said in a statement.

(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...

[American Patriot]

The New York Times breaks silence
Powerline ^ | 02/12/2006 | John Hinderaker

In today's article on the investigation of the leaks underlying the New York Times's December 16 disclosure of the NSA terrorist surveillance program, the Times finally acknowledges its own legal jeopardy:

[C]onservatives have attacked the disclosure of classified information as an illegal act, demanding a vigorous investigative effort to find and prosecute whoever disclosed classified information. An upcoming article in Commentary magazine suggests that the newspaper may be prosecuted for violations of the Espionage Act and says, "What The New York Times has done is nothing less than to compromise the centerpiece of our defensive efforts in the war on terrorism." Unfortunately, however: Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said no one at the paper had been contacted in connection with the investigation, and he defended the paper's reporting.

"Before running the story we gave long and sober consideration to the administration's contention that disclosing the program would damage the country's counterterrorism efforts," Mr. Keller said. "We were not convinced then, and have not been convinced since, that our reporting compromised national security."

Here's hoping the adminstration finds the intestinal fortitude to seek to convince a jury of Keller's peers.

[American Patriot]

Mao and the New York Times
The American Enterprise Online ^ | 11/1/05 | Ralph R. Reiland

Question: How many innocent people does a communist tyrant have to kill before the New York Times gets really mad? Answer: Way more than 70 million.

Seventy million isn't a bad estimate of the number of Chinese who perished under Mao's reign of terror and ineptitude, the victims of their own government's decades of torture, famine, forced labor, purges, assassinations, ethnic massacres, and class genocide.

Out of the tens of millions of alleged “counterrevolutionaries” and dissidents who spent long periods of their lives in Mao's system of prison-factories and corrective labor gulags, it's estimated that 20 million died during their “re-education” into collectivism, obedience, and communal selflessness.

Additionally, the human cost of Mao's ill-planned and ill-named Great Leap Forward of 1959-1961 might well have reached 40 million deaths from starvation, the result of the largest and deadliest famine in world history.

In 1968, Wei Jingsheng, 18, a Red Guard member, provided a firsthand account of how the Great Leap Forward had driven parents mad with hunger: “Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children.”

Countless other millions boiled weeds and bark to make soup and stripped the trees of leaves. Others, writes Jean-Louis Margolin, a lecturer in history at the University of Provence in France and a researcher at the Research Institute of Southeast Asia, were “reduced to searching through horse manure for undigested grains of wheat and eating worms they found in cowpats.”

In response to this widespread starvation that was the direct outcome of his forced collectivization of farming, Mao instructed: “Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel. The State should try its hardest to prevent peasants from eating too much.”

Added to the above are the direct murders of those who were too successful or too free to fit into Mao's vision of collectivized zombies.

Margolin describes the fate under Mao of landlords, intellectuals, small bosses, richer peasants, and those suspected of political incorrectness or independent thinking, i.e., non-communist thinking: “The whole people were invited to the public trials of 'counterrevolutionaries,' who almost invariably were condemned to death. Everyone participated in the executions, shouting 'kill, kill' to the Red Guards whose task it was to cut victims into pieces. Sometimes the pieces were cooked and eaten, or force-fed to members of the victim's family who were still alive and looking on.”

For those fortunate enough not be killed, eaten,or shipped to the gulags, there were mandatory “submission and rebirth” meetings for wayward intellectuals, as well as organized shunning, social exclusion and public acts of confession and self-criticism for alleged “right-wingers” and those suspected of “Westernism.”

I bring up all this history because I was halfway through reading Mao: The Unknown Story, the new book by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, when the New York Times published Nicholas Kristof's review of the book.

Now it's true that Kristof, an op-ed writer at the Times, judges the book to be a “magnificent biography,” and he does at least whistle past the graveyard, pointing out that Mao had slaughtered a quarter of the entire Red Army, “often after they were tortured in such ways as having red-hot rods forced into their rectums.”

Still, Mr. Kristof worries that Chang and Halliday might have painted too dark a picture. He wonders if the 70 million number is “accurate,” and if the book unfairly excludes “exculpatory evidence” about the upside of Mao's rule.

Arguing that “Mao's legacy is not all bad,” Kristof pays tribute to Mao's successes with land reform and women's rights. “Land reform in China,” he writes, “like land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today.”

What he doesn't say is that land reform in Japan and Taiwan was accomplished without the slaughter of millions of people.

Regarding women's rights, Kristof asserts that Mao “moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea.”

The perfect example of this enhanced equality, perhaps, is that the Chinese government has just banned this new book on Mao, for both men and women.

Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.