Cliff Kincaid
When FBI Director Louis Freeh testified before the House Committee on Government Reform in December 1997, he was asked about a charge that Ray Wickman, the former head of the FBI intelligence unit monitoring Chinese operations, had resigned rather than accede to Attorney General Janet Reno’s demand that he give them the names of his sources. Bob Novak had revealed this reason for Wickman’s retirement in his column three weeks earlier. He said that senior FBI officials claimed that “when Ray Wickman decided to resign, he was asked to turn in his sources on the Chinese account, but he declined to do so because he was concerned about their ‘low quality.’”
Novak said that colleagues close to Wickman derided that explanation. They said that Wickman’s sources were “the best in the bureau” and that they were “the most sensitive kept by the FBI.” He said that Reno’s demand for access to these most sensitive files had sent shock waves through the FBI. He added that Janet Reno was being blamed for this and that she was “viewed with fear and loathing throughout the FBI.”
Committee Chairman Dan Burton asked Freeh if he had looked into this and, if so, what could he tell the committee about it. Director Freeh replied that Ray Wickman had never indicated that he was leaving for any other reason than his desire to retire. He had been extended beyond the mandatory retirement age of 57. Freeh said he had been told that there was no truth to the story that Wickman retired because of demands that he reveal his sources to the Justice Department. Chairman Burton asked him to look into the matter further, and Freeh promised to do so.
Rep. Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat on the committee, denounced the column as “another off-the-wall Bob Novak story.” Freeh demurred, saying, “You raised a serious issue. It was a serious issue when it was raised in the article. I asked that people make an inquiry. I haven’t gotten back a written report, but as far as I have been told, he did not leave because he was being forced to turn over files and the notion that he had sources that he took with him. That’s not the way we do business....It’s a serious enough allegation that I will look into it more fully.”
The members of the committee brought up other matters, but as they were about to adjourn, Freeh said his general counsel had given him a note about Ray Wickman. It said that Wickman had been concerned about Justice Department attorneys seeking access to asset files. Those are files that give the names and addresses of informants. Freeh said they are the bureau’s most sensitive files. He said, “I am told that once the Department of Justice attorneys understood that the asset files were not substantive, that was the end of that issue. But let me get some more information, and I will report back to you.” This implies that Wickman retired rather than explain to the Justice Depart-ment that the files it had requested contained highly sensitive names and addresses of informants, not substantive information the informants had provided.
That is highly implausible, and Chairman Burton asked Freeh to do something that implied he wasn’t buying it. Burton asked him to find out if Wickman’s successor had given the Justice Department attorneys any information from those highly sensitive files. Freeh said, “I would be shocked if that is the case, but I have been shocked before. Let me report back to you.” Wickman recently told AIM that he did not know whether or not the asset files had been given to the Justice Department. The committee staff does not know what, if any, additional information Freeh gave the committee.
It is hard to believe that the director was telling the truth when he testified that he had been told that Wickman’s retirement had nothing to do with demands that he give the Justice Depart-ment the names and addresses of his secret Chinese sources
Freeh must have known the real reason for Ray Wickman’s retirement, but he didn’t take any action to stop it. At a minimum, he could have informed Reno that what her attorneys were demanding was highly improper and that she should tell them to cease and desist. He should have demanded the names of those who were trying to get Wickman’s sources, together with an explanation of why they wanted them. Better yet, he should have ordered a thorough counterintelligence investigation, and its results should have been made known.
Freeh’s claim that he didn’t know if any of the names of Wickman’s sources had been turned over to the Justice Department attorneys is shocking. Who has been responsible for this entire matter has been hushed up for nearly four years. We have heard a lot about the success of the Chinese in getting highly secret information from Los Alamos about our most advanced nuclear weapons. It appears that there may have been a similar effort on the part of China to get highly secret information out of the FBI via the Justice Department. This cries out for an investigation.
On July 12, Bob Novak revisited this matter. He had said in his 1997 column that the primary source of the information he had been given was a high official in the FBI. In his July 12 column he revealed the identity of that official, breaking the rule against revealing confidential sources. He had good reason to do so. That official was Robert P. Hanssen, the FBI counter-intelligence expert who has confessed to spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. Novak says Hanssen seemed genuinely worried about the FBI sharing its most sensitive secrets with the Justice Department. He quotes him as saying, “The purpose of the FBI is to safeguard sources. The whole idea is to keep sources secret from the Justice Department. If Justice is going to have full access to our files, we have no purpose.” Hanssen, the spy, apparently believed someone in Justice was spying for China. He tried to expose it, going to Novak, not Louis Freeh. He told Novak that Freeh had lied when he told a congressman he knew nothing about Wickman’s resignation.
Ray Wickman has steadfastly refused to discuss his case, probably because what he has to say would reflect badly on Louis Freeh and other senior officials at the FBI. He told AIM that he has no idea whether his successor bowed to the demands of the Justice Department lawyers. Freeh professed not to know the answer to that question when Chairman Dan Burton asked it, a dubious claim. Three months after Wickman’s retirement Freeh was saying he still didn’t know how the serious controversy with Justice had been resolved.
This is an important question. With Hanssen confessing having been a spy for the Russians, it is not unthinkable that agents of the Chinese were operating within the FBI and the Justice Department. What valid reason could explain the efforts of Justice Department attorneys to get the names and addres-ses of Ray Wickman’s sources, forcing him into retirement in the process? What could explain Hanssen’s use of Bob Novak to expose it, rather than going through normal channels?
Paul Sperry in an article for WorldNetDaily quotes David Schippers, who prosecuted Clinton before the House Judiciary Committee, as saying that Lee Radek, the chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, was running the department under Janet Reno. He said his investigators had “information that Radek colluded with the White House on the direction of the Chinagate investigation.” Sperry says Schippers told him, “That was the guy we wanted. We wanted him bad. He was the one we planned to bring in, demand documents, and when he didn’t bring them in, we planned to put him in jail until he did.”
If David Schippers is right about Lee Radek running the Justice Department, could Justice Department attorneys have tried to get the China asset files from the FBI without Lee Radek’s knowledge? An investigation would seem to be in order. And why is Lee Radek still chief of the Public Integrity Section? Paul Sperry discloses that Robert S. Mueller, Bush’s nominee to succeed Freeh, has close ties to Lee Radek. Sperry says, “FBI agents frustrated with what they say has been the politicization of not only the bureau, but the entire department, have their doubts about Mueller’s will to clean house.” He points out that it was Mueller, who headed the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in the Bush I administration, who made Radek the chief of the Public Integrity Section. He says Radek, who feared for his job when Gore lost the election, breathed easier when Robert Mueller was nominated for the FBI post.
Jack Cashill, the producer of “Silenced: Flight 800 and the Subversion of Justice,” a new video that shows the evidence that TWA Flight 800 was shot down by missiles, was invited to appear on “The Point,” a show hosted by Greta Van Susteren on CNN, on July 17, the fifth anniversary of the shootdown that took the lives of 230 people. Cashill’s appearance had been arranged the day before. He was to be the only guest. The next day the producer told him that he would be joined by James E. Hall, the former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, who cooperated with the FBI in covering up the evidence that the plane had been shot down by missiles
A few hours before the show was scheduled to begin, the producer called Cashill to tell him that Hall had refused to appear with him. Instead of reverting to the original plan to have Cashill on by himself, he was disinvited. Jim Hall was free to reiterate the official line without facing anyone who could show how he had collaborated with the FBI to discredit the hundreds of eyewitnesses who had seen a missile intersect with TWA Flight 800. In a column on WorldNetDaily, Cashill commented, “Someone upstairs told her (the producer) that responsible journalism means I can’t appear on the show without a counterbalance, but it’s okay for Jim Hall to appear by himself.” Bruce Perlmutter, the executive producer of the show, had a lame excuse for that decision. He said it was a legitimate decision because “it was the five-year anniversary of that event, which he (Hall) obviously had a big role in.”
Jim Hall’s Role In The Cover-up
Hall had a big role. Unfortunately it was to help cover up the real cause of the explosion that killed 230 people. Crash investigations are supposed to try to find out what caused the crash, not to cover up or discredit the evidence. That is what the NTSB and the FBI, with help from the CIA, did in the TWA 800 investigation. That is demonstrated in both Cashill’s video, which he produced in conjunction with James Sanders, and in Accuracy in Media’s video, “The Search for the Truth.”
Jim Hall meekly honored demands by the FBI that at its December 1997 public hearing, it (1) not allow any eye-witnesses to testify; (2) not show the CIA video; (3) not release any of the 244 FBI eyewitness reports that had been sent to the CIA for use in preparing their video; and (4) not invite any experts to testify on the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
The Dec. 3, 1997 letter signed by FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom emphasized that the NTSB should not do anything that might “undermine the CIA’s work.” This was a reference to a CIA-produced video that tried to prove that the hundreds of eyewitnesses who reported seeing a missile going toward TWA 800 were all mistaken. Kallstrom, who headed the FBI’s investigation knew that the CIA’s video and the theory on which it was based would be demolished if they were subjected to any expert critical scrutiny.
Documents Prove The 100 Percent Lie
Interviewing Hall on her show, Greta Van Susteren first asked him if he could say with 100 percent certainty that the people who say TWA Flight 800 was shot down are wrong. Hall avoided answering the question, giving a long spiel about the victims, their families and the “four-year exhaustive investigation.” Van Susteren tried again, asking, “Does that mean, Jim, that you are 100 percent certain that the conspiracists (sic) ...who say they saw a white light traveling skyward, zigzagging, disappearing, and then an orange ball of fire, can you say with 100 percent certainty that they’re wrong?” Hall responded, “Greta, in my mind, with 100 percent certainty, our investigators, based on the facts that we developed, they are wrong. They are incorrect."
The alleged proof that they are wrong, is found in an 85-page transcript of a talk given to the NTSB witness group by an unnamed CIA analyst on April 30, 1999. It is Appendix FF to the NTSB report on the TWA 800 crash. [It can be found on the NTSB Web site and on Bill Donaldson’s Web site, twa800.com.] The analyst said they had been trying to figure out what source there could be for the streak of light that 260 eyewitnesses said they had seen. He said that at 10 p.m., Dec. 30, 1996, he got the idea “that you can explain what the eyewitnesses are seeing with only the burning aircraft.”
He claimed this idea came from the FBI reports (called “302s,”) of their interviews of one man, who, he said, “may be one eyewitness” who saw the whole thing. He did not identify that eyewitness, but AIM was able to do so, thanks to two slips made by the FBI. He is Michael Wire, who six days after the crash told the FBI in a phone call what he had seen and then provided greater detail in an interview six days later. An FBI typist had neglected to capitalize the W in Wire’s name one time in one of the 302s. The person responsible for blacking out names before the 302s were made public didn’t recognize “wire” as a proper name and left it in, enabling us to locate him.
The FBI 302s say that standing on a drawbridge near Westhampton, Long Island, Michael Wire saw a zigzagging white light going “skyward from the ground” at about a 40-degree angle. He first saw it “just above the rooftop” of a house that blocked his view of the beach. It arched over and headed out to sea on a southeasterly course. He lost sight of it just before he saw an orange fireball falling into the ocean, trailing fire. It disappeared behind a house east of the one where he first saw the white light. He then heard the first and loudest of four explosions. It shook the 70-ton bridge.
This clearly did not fit the CIA analyst’s theory that the white light Wire saw was TWA Flight 800. Wire told the FBI he had seen the white light come “off the beach” and “off the ground,” first appearing just above the rooftop of a house. It was climbing at about a 40-degree angle and zigzagging. That could not have been TWA 800, which was about ten miles out to sea at an altitude of 13,800 feet, ascending gradually. It could not have appeared to Michael Wire as coming from behind a two-story house, zigzagging upward at a 40-degree angle and then going out to sea.
The CIA analyst knew that what Wire told the FBI did not support his theory. He told the witness group that there was a problem with Wire’s first interview, because if what he saw was TWA 800, it had to be higher in the sky when he first saw it. Trusting that none of the members of the witness group would take the trouble to check the FBI 302s, he told them that the CIA had the FBI do another interview and that Wire, whose name he never mentioned, had said that the FBI was mistaken and that what he saw was well above the rooftop when he first spotted it. The analyst didn’t mention the problem of the forty-degree-angle-zigzagging ascent. There are only two FBI reports of interviews with Michael Wire. One says he saw the white light coming “off the beach” and the other says “off the ground.” Both interviews were conducted five months before the CIA analyst dreamed up his theory. Wire says that he was interviewed only twice, that he has never changed his story and that the CIA claim that all that he saw was TWA Flight 800 is nonsense.
Nevertheless, the CIA produced a video based on this fabrication, showing a simulation of what their analyst claimed Wire saw—the plane high in the sky in line with the first house and a fireball falling into the sea in line with a house farther to the east. It shows a simulation of the crippled jet, minus its nose, climbing like a rocket, exploding again, and falling into the ocean. The FBI showed this video when they announced that they were ending their investigation. Portions of it were aired by the TV networks. Not one of them interviewed aeronautics experts who would have told them that the 3000-foot rocket-like climb was impossible. The NTSB had radar data that showed that after the explosion that blew off the plane’s nose, its speed accelerated sharply, showing that instead of climbing it went into a free fall.
One reason Jim Hall would not go on Van Susteren’s show with Cashill is because he didn’t want to be confronted on national television with the proof of the falsity of the government’s claim that every single eyewitness who said they saw a light streaking toward TWA Flight 800 had seen only the plane itself. Hall knows that the CIA video was based on a lie because the proof is in three documents his agency released— Appendix FF to the NTSB report on the TWA 800 crash and the two FBI 302s of eyewitness #571, Michael Wire.
Greta Van Susteren’s reference to those who thought they saw a missile as “conspiracists” was, to say the least, unfortunate. It implies that the hundreds of people who were interviewed by the FBI had met and agreed to tell similar stories. The fact is that very few of them have ever met. They are people who saw a terrible tragedy and thought they had a duty to tell the FBI what they had observed. A 1997 NTSB analysis of 458 eyewitness reports found that 96 of them said they had seen something going up from the surface.
The CIA Fabricates An Explanation
At first, some thought it was a flare and others thought it was fireworks. Others saw it when it was already high in the sky, streaking toward the jumbo jet. They realized that it was a missile when they saw TWA Flight 800 blow up and crash into the ocean. The government didn’t like that explanation. The CIA was apparently asked or ordered to come up with a way of discrediting all the eyewitnesses who said they had seen what appeared to be a missile. Unable to find a valid way of doing so, a CIA analyst came up with a scenario that ignored the descriptions given by Michael Wire and other eyewitnesses. Moreover, it defied the principles of aeronautics and ignored the radar data that showed that the plane did not climb after its nose was blown off by a high velocity explosion.
It is a shame that CNN decided that Jack Cashill should not be allowed to confront Hall with the proof that the government’s rejection of the eyewitness evidence was based on a Big Lie that originated in the CIA and was accepted by the FBI and the NTSB. All three were in possession of the evidence that proves that it was based on a fabrication. CNN’s substitution of Hall for Cashill in the name of “responsible journalism” was a disgraceful disservice to its audience. Hall has been concealing the truth about TWA Flight 800 for five years. It is time the television news divisions and the print media focused on those who have studied the evidence and exposed the lies our government has told to conceal the truth that the plane was shot down by missiles.
CNN’s disgraceful treatment of Cashill was reported on the Internet by WorldNetDaily, which is marketing the Cashill-Sanders video, and NewsMax.com. AIM brought the matter to the attention of Philip Kent, the president of the CNN News Group. We wanted an explanation of why Cashill was disinvited. Kent promised that we would get an answer from Rick Davis, the vice president in charge of program standards, within an hour. Thirty hours later we had still not heard from Mr. Davis. A public relations staffer eventually told us that Hall was thought to be the best person to have on the program because he had been in charge of the investigation. She couldn’t explain why it was better to air one of the architects of the cover-up instead of an investigator who had evidence proving that there was a cover-up that the establishment media, including CNN, had never reported She said they were considering doing another program to present the other side. Van Susteren’s executive producer, Bruce Perlmutter, later called and confirmed that this was being considered. A week later, Perlmutter informed us that this program would air on Aug. 2 and that we would like it. In the meantime, we sent out a column about the cover-up and CNN’s unfair treatment of Cashill. Copies went to a number of well-known journalists, but we have seen no criticism of CNN's treatment of Cashill except on the Internet
“Reliable Sources” Takes A Pass
We called the matter to the attention of Howard Kurtz, the media reporter for the Washington Post and host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” a weekly program that critiques the media. Kurtz promised to look into it, but not a word about it was said on his next program, which was mainly devoted to a discussion with Bob Woodward of the Post about the late Katharine Graham’s support of his and Bernstein’s investigation of Watergate, a cover-up the Post helped expose.
Bernard Kalb, Kurtz’s co-host commented that investigative reporting seems to have become an endangered species. He asked Woodward if the “journalism of Watergate” had “evaporated.” Woodward replied, “No, there is a lot of serious investigative reporting, particularly in the Washington Post. They’ve won two Pulitzers on major investigations about the city in recent years. I think it lives on.”
Howard Kurtz, who knew that CNN had just canceled an invitation to a guest who was to discuss the investigative reporting that exposes the lies of the NTSB, the FBI and the CIA about the TWA Flight 800 crash, said nothing. Nor did he mention it in his next column in the Post. Bringing it up might have been taken as criticism of both his employers, neither of which has lifted a finger to do for the two greatest scandals of the Clinton administration--the cover-ups of the cause of the crash of TWA Flight 800 and the murder of Vincent Foster—what the Washington Post did for Watergate.
Send the enclosed cards or your own cards or letters to Bill Keller, Managing Editor of the New York Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Philip I. Kent, President, CNN News Group.THE PLAN OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION TO LEGALIZE THE STATUS OF THREE MILLION Mexicans who are in the United States illegally has met with the approval of the politically correct media. It has also evoked strong criticism. This is very unfair to those who have waited in line for years for permission to immigrate legally, and it can only make our southern border even less controllable. President Reagan said that a country that can’t control its borders is not a country. It would appear that we are rapidly heading in that direction, or at least in the direction of becoming something far different from the America we know and love.
PRESIDENT BUSH APPEARS TO BELIEVE THAT GREATER ETHNIC AND RACIAL DIVERSITY will strengthen and improve our nation. Through most of our relatively brief history we had great success in assimilating immigrants and converting them into good, loyal Americans. The success of the melting pot in the past is no guarantee that it will succeed in the future. Indeed there are already abundant signs that it will not. Diversity is fine up to a point, but if minorities that resist assimilation expand to the point where there is no majority capable of maintaining law and order, government of the people, by the people and for the people may well perish from this part of the earth.
WHITES FELL FROM 80 PERCENT OF OUR POPULATION IN 1980 TO 69 PERCENT LAST YEAR. The percentage of Hispanics, who may be of any race, nearly doubled. They now narrowly outnumber blacks, who made only a modest gain to 12.3 percent of the total. As a group, Asians, Pacific islanders and Native Americans made a big gain, rising to over 9 percent of the total population. Whites made the largest gain numerically, but in percentage terms they were the only group whose percentage of the total fell, and it was a huge fall—11 percentage points. The Census Bureau sees these trends continuing through the year 2060, when it estimates whites will fall below 50 percent and become America’s largest minority. It predicts that nearly all of the erosion of the white majority will be the result of a big increase in the number of (1) Hispanics and (2) Asians, Pacific islanders and Native Americans. If the predictions it made five years ago are any indicator, the Census Bureau is underestimating the increase in the Hispanic and Asian populations. The predictions of what last year’s census would show were far short of the actual increases for those two groups.
DIVERSITY OF RACE, LANGUAGE, CUSTOMS AND CULTURE TENDS TO DIVIDE, NOT UNITE. We have had two serious race riots by blacks in Seattle and Cincinnati this year. In recent months, England has experienced race riots in the Midlands between whites and immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh that lasted for days and left behind great property damage and seething anger. In California, Mexican immigrants who have risen to positions of power openly talk about the reconquista of the territory Mexico lost in the Mexican-American War. In Africa, blacks are butchering blacks of different tribes; millions have been killed in recent years. In the Balkans, white Christians and Muslims are at each other’s throats. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese and Tamils have been fighting a bitter war for 15 years. Our European-American majority is losing ground rapidly, but we blithely encourage more and more immigrants who are not easily assimilated.
LITTLE OR NO THOUGHT IS BEING GIVEN TO WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE KIND OF COUNTRY we bequeath to our children and grandchildren. Many people worry about global warming over the next 100 years, but we seem to have no official worriers about the long-term consequences of the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of our population. That began with changes in the immigration law in 1965 that discriminate against migration from Europe. The INS claims that few Europeans want to come here, but last year nearly five million applied to do so. Only 92,911 were approved. A return to the pre-1965 law would help correct this.
AN INDICATION OF THE TYPE OF CHANGE THAT LIES AHEAD CAN BE SEEN IN CINCINNATI. Since the race riot in April, crime has soared in Cincinnati, and 83 people, nearly all of them black, have been killed or wounded. There has been one more case of a white officer justifiably killing a black, but with few exceptions the shootings have been black on black. Ten blacks have been killed by civilians since the riot. That is a rate of over three a month, which compares with less than three a year killed by the police since 1995. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that Mayor Charlie Luken asked the Rev. Damon Lynch III, a prominent black leader, to assure the police that he wouldn’t criticize them for using force to halt the violence. Lynch didn’t agree, and the mayor called his remarks “divisive.” Lynch appeared on ABC’s “Nightline,” where he was asked if he would support the police taking action against violent criminals. His response was that it wasn’t up to him to tell the police how to do their jobs. He did, however, agree that the recent killing by an officer was justified
BILL CUNNINGHAM, A CONSERVATIVE TALK SHOW HOST ON CINCINNATI’S WLW, SAID on Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes,” “The police in Cincinnati now recognize reality. Black leadership does not want the kind of policing Cincinnati has had for over 100 years.” He said it started with blacks like “Al Sharpton and Kweisi Mfume descending on the city and whipping so many residents into a froth.” Charles Barron, a black guest on the show, said the police who were not doing their jobs should be fired and that white police were murdering blacks and getting away with it. The police are damned if they do their job effectively and damned if they don’t. Being sued, investigated by the Justice Dept., prosecuted and shot at by criminals and accused of murdering blacks, the Cincinnati police are understandably being cautious. Prominent black leaders refuse to sanction the use of legitimate force to halt the crime wave. The black residents of Cincinnati are paying a high price for this intransigent attitude. Bill Cunningham asked why the “rhyming reverends” are doing nothing to stop this bloodshed. The answer seems to be that those who stir up resentment and hatred among racial and ethnic minorities prosper financially. Those who condemn violence and strive for amity do not fare as well. Unless that is changed, the United States may well become Balkanized as the dominant majority becomes just another minority.
ON JULY 15, A 13,000-WORD ARTICLE TAKING UP MORE THAN FOUR PAGES OF THE SUNDAY New York Times ran under the headline “How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote.” This was the product of a six-month investigation by 24 Times reporters of Florida’s treatment of 2,490 overseas absentee ballots last November. The Times said 680 of these ballots failed to comply with state election laws, but they were counted because of intense Republican pressure. I believe the Times invested in this project hoping it would be able to report that Gore actually won the election. I say that because seven years ago, Dean Baquet, a Times reporter who was later promoted to national editor, was assigned to look into the Vincent Foster case to see if the Times should investigate it. After examining material I sent him, he said it raised some interesting questions, but he believed that an investigation would find nothing but more unanswered questions. He said the Times could not afford to devote resources to an investigation that would not find any answers.
THE TIMES DIDN’T FIND THE ANSWER IT WANTED IN FLORIDA. IT ASKED GARY KING, A Harvard expert on voting patterns, to examine the evidence and estimate what the final vote would have been if all the allegedly flawed overseas ballots had been rejected. King let them down. His best estimate was that Bush’s margin of victory would have been reduced from 537 to 245 votes and that there was only a slight chance that Gore would have been the winner. The Times did not send 24 reporters to Florida to study absentee ballots for six months to find that Bush would have won the state by 245 votes instead of 537. They made it appear that they had uncovered a big story by spreading it over four pages. It should have been given a modest burial. They found no evidence of fraud, Republican solicitation of late votes and no proof that the counting was flawed.
BOB ZELNICK, A FORMER ABC REPORTER WHO IS NOW TEACHING AT BOSTON U., SAID IN a column on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal that the Times had failed to report that Florida was required by federal law and a consent decree to count most of the overseas absentee ballots that the Times said were counted in violation of state law. Bill Keller, managing editor of the Times, responded with a letter claiming Zelnick was wrong on three points: (1) that a federal consent decree required Florida to count overseas military ballots with no postmarks: (2) that district judge Lacey Collier had ruled that Florida’s postmark requirements conflicted with federal law; and (3) that federal law required that federal write-in ballots be counted even though there was no proof that a ballot had been requested. Keller claimed the consent decree required that the ballots be counted only “if the ballot was postmarked no later than election day and received...no later than 10 days after the election.” Zelnick responded that pursuant to the consent decree Florida law had been changed to allow ballots without postmarks to be counted if they were signed and dated. He said Judge Lacey ruled this also applied to federal write-in ballots. That leaves the question of how many of the ballots without postmarks were signed and dated. What interests me most about this exchange is that the Times took advantage of the Journal’s policy of printing letters correcting errors, but it won’t print letters correcting its errors on its editorial page.