Greenwald VS. Pillar On Rosen, Leaks

Glenn Greenwald is going to the mattresses.

New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ’s attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests – something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist – something done every day in Washington – and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for “espionage”.

The focus of the Post’s report yesterday is that the DOJ’s surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters. The FBI tracked Rosen’s movements in and out of the State Department, traced the timing of his calls, and – most amazingly – obtained a search warrant to read two days worth of his emails, as well as all of his emails with Kim. In this case, said the Post, “investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.” It added that “court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist”.

Fishing For Divisions Between Beijing and Pyongyang

When not proliferating nuclear devices, North Korea also specializes in various other means to get cash, like piracy. That’s why it’s easy to see incidents, such as the May 5 seizure of a private fishing vessel owned by a Chinese citizen, Yu Xuejin, and the resulting kidnapping of its 16 crew members, including its captain, through the perspective of North Korea’s current high-profile status as a problem child. One year ago, three fishing vessels and 29 crew members were involved in a very controversial incident, because the North Koreans stripped the vessels of everything from fuel to pencils. China and North Korea aren’t the only protagonists in these dramas involving fishing vessels. On May 9, a Taiwanese citizen was killed when a Philippine Coast Guard patrol boat peppered a Taiwanese fishing vessel with 59 bullets near the Batanes islands between The Philippines and Taiwan. And, even more sensationally, in December, 2010, Chinese vessels and the South Korean Coast Guard were the protagonists. And, just so you don’t think this is an “Asian thing” or a recent phenomenon, there are the Cod Wars between Britain and Iceland in the 1950s. International law and geography are the main culprit behind these and other incidents, which devolve into nationalistic feeding frenzies. And, like any other controversial story, national television is involved.

At  7 a.m. on May 6, Yu Xuejun received a phone call from the captain of a fishing boat he owns. “I asked him what the problem was,” Yu told state broadcaster China Central Television in an interview broadcast Monday, “and he said one of the ships was missing” from off the coast of Liaoning, a Chinese province that borders North Korea.

Thus began the bizarre, opaque, and as-yet unresolved saga of the North Korean kidnapping of 16 Chinese fishermen.

Seattle Puts MAP Into Its Proper Role

We can debate a policy that takes the most prudent course between accepting students as they are and motivating them to join the mainstream, but a school district in Seattle has exposed the hypocrisy of requiring public schools must administer the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP test, while private do not, and, indeed, choose not to administer it.

AMY GOODMAN: Jesse Hagopian, Garfield High School didn’t start this boycott. Explain the origins of it and how it links in with other protests against high-stake testing around the country.

JESSE HAGOPIAN: Well, we’ve seen movements against high-stakes testing all over the nation, you know, from parents opting their students out of these tests across the country to the principals’ associations in New York state saying we’ve had enough of these high-stakes tests.

But I think, in a way, you’re right: Garfield didn’t start the boycott. In my view, the boycott of the MAP test really began with the elite private schools, who never give these tests. They want their students to have access to corporatecritical thinking skills and creativity. They want their students to be prepared to be leaders in the world today, and so they don’t inundate their students with these high-stakes tests like they expect to be done in the public schools. So, in that way, you could say this boycott really began of the elite schools. But, in actuality, you know, Garfield, I think, was the first school to unanimously vote, of all the faculty, “we refuse to give this test.”

And it’s a real crisis, I think, for these corporate education reformers, people like Michelle Rhee, who wrote an editorial in The Seattle Times against our boycott. And I think it’s a crisis for them, because their whole system of ed reform rests on these data points, on reducing teaching and learning to a single score that they can use to close schools, like you’re seeing being proposed in Chicago and Philadelphia, that they can use these data points really to degrade education and profit from it and privatize our schools, turning them into charters. And this boycott represents a threat to their ability to reduce teaching and learning to a single score. And I think that’s why you see Michelle Rhee and these corporate education reformers so upset that we stood up to their tests and refused to give them. And I think that’s why so many teachers and parents and students across the nation are celebrating this victory, including the Garfield High School PTSA that voted unanimously to support us.

Valerie Strauss highlights the lack of discretion the MAP’s supporters deploy when even the tests’ corporate supplier advocates caution

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