Posted July 11, 2013

The cat-and-mouse Edward Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) scandal has fueled the summertime news cycle with a high tech — though drawn-out — version of a police chase.

Reporters flocked to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to search for the contractor who revealed secret NSA surveillance activities, and booked seats on flights to countries where Snowden might find refuge from the long arm of the United States government — only to discover he was a no-show.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic posturing of Latin American officials who feel the U.S. is bullying them into refusing asylum to Snowden added a side drama to media coverage of the actual crime — assuming that the courts will judge his actions a crime.

But the core issues have been more difficult to pursue.

While revealing that the NSA was able to scoop up all the calls from a willing Verizon network, the crime story for the last two weeks has overshadowed the larger issues:

• What information has the NSA absorbed into its electronic storage facilities?
• How long it will keep such “metadata?”
• Will Americans have the right to know more about what the government is doing in the name of national security?

Only in the last few days has the media, specifically The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, revealed more of the underpinnings of the operations that Snowden described.

On Sunday, The Times reported, “In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects,”  but also others who may harm national security.

Since 2007, according to The Times, the 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, “has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court” that alone decides what amount of surveillance of Americans and others is permissible.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal followed up with its own front page story that claimed the FISA court has expanded the definition of “relevant” data to include essentially everything the intelligence agencies want to collect. Officials have defended their actions, saying that they are not recording individual conversations or text messages.

They claim that there are safeguards in place.

That may be true at the moment. But in her blog early last month, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer warned about the government’s use of metadata. She quoted Susan Landau, a security expert and author of Surveillance or Security on the impact of metadata.

“The public doesn’t understand, it’s much more intrusive than content,” Landau told Mayer. “(Learning) who you call and who they call.  If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening — you don’t need the content.”

These reports seem to buttress earlier warnings by two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado.

The Journal noted that both men “have argued repeatedly that a “secret interpretation” of the Patriot Act is being used to collect the electronic data of almost all Americans.

The notion of a secret court allowing the government to follow secret rules is mind-boggling.  Interpretations of other court decisions that could extend the intrusiveness of the state into the private life of every citizen seem impossible to justify, whatever the goal and the marginal risk.

I suspect that most Americans are only vaguely aware of the amount of information the NSA and other intelligence agencies are collecting to track potential terrorists.  Even as more becomes known, I also suspect that most Americans would not complain if some of that information includes their own records and movements.

That governments go beyond their own laws to seek ever greater control is neither surprising nor new.

David T.Z. Mindich, a professor of media studies, journalism and digital arts at Saint Michael’s College, in  an op-ed column for the Times, described how Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in 1862 received permission from President Abraham Lincoln to control the country’s telegraph lines, and then used that power to impose censorship.

The difficulty, of course, is that some secrets need to be kept.

There is a legitimate reason to work the “dark side,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney insisted, just as Stanton argued that the government must have control of the telegraph traffic to ensure a Union victory.

The Snowden affair has made it painfully clear that the Obama administration — and the Bush administration before it — have stretched our thinking about national security law and how the courts should deal with state secrets.

But the job of the media is to throw light on such subjects, especially where the government may be overreaching, violating the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights and threatening civil liberties.

Given the secret nature of the FISA court and the NSA programs, it’s unfair to blame journalists for not having all the details.

But reporters need to pursue the story with members of Congress and the Internet providers who are cooperating in the wholesale collection of information about Americans.

It is not enough to accept the “trust us” language of administration officials, or the nice round number of “50 terrorist plots” they claim were stopped or prevented by these intrusions. How about releasing one or two or three good examples, and let them be tested to see if the metadata collection is really warranted?

There is a proposal to appoint an adversarial attorney who would look at the government’s presentations before the FISA court — something that should have been in place from the beginning.

It is never enough to have just sincere government assurances; the role of a free press is to challenge and test those official explanations

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” — a saying often attributed to Thomas Jefferson but in fact widely used by many thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries — should be in every reporter’s DNA.

Every administration says it is working in the best interests of the United States. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that leaders will often justify anything they wish to accomplish by drafting opinions, often in secret, about how to apply the law.

It is also clear that vigilance is needed, even if we think government intentions are benign.

What seems benign may seem like a violation of privacy when the secret attention of the state is focused on you or me.

Tim McNulty is co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Imitative and a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He was a longtime foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Chicago Tribune. He helped direct the newspaper’s coverage of the September 11 tragedy, the American strike into Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.

Well into a summer of shelling, street fighting and sniper fire, several of the scores of correspondents covering the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 would joke, a bit wistfully, about the “courage not to file.”

That summer was long and, despite the Mediterranean breezes, the air was steamy and fear prevailed one day to the next. Fighting between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israelis surrounding the western half of the city was sporadic and intense, and from early June to the end of August stories of the destruction and urban warfare dominated front pages around the world.

Writing about military conflict has its dangers, of course, but adrenaline-infused reporting also carries a strange excitement. Some reporters and photographers become known as “war junkies” because they often move from covering one conflict to another. For many, a quote attributed to a young Winston Churchill describes the experience nicely:  “Nothing is as exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

Reporters recorded the events but soon recognized that even accounts of bombings and shooting can sound the same or only marginally different from the day before.  Beyond recording the incremental news, the latest outrage or attempts to create a cease-fire, journalists became hungry for sidebars, those intriguing stories that personalize the conflict or explore a quirky consequence.

One day, for instance, I was delighted to interview a tall and elegant French prostitute who retired to Beirut to open a tiny, checked-tablecloth restaurant.  “You must tell me when to leave,” she said rather plaintively as I sat down with two other reporters for lunch. It was a week or so into the conflict and the Israeli Defense Force had dropped notices over the city telling civilians to leave and detailed a number of safe passage streets they could use in the next day or two. Everyone believed that street-to-street fighting was inevitable and would be vicious.

I suggested to the retired and anxious woman that if she was afraid for her life, she should get out immediately.  No, that wasn’t the concern, dying is easy, she replied, her worry was being disfigured.

A week or so later, I walked past the shuttered café and learned that she finally had left, after gunmen aiming to settle a private score with others had burst into the restaurant. In the exchange of gunfire, they shot her pizza oven, fatally.

Such stories, though ephemeral, gave readers a taste of life and the people in a besieged city.  They also gave reporters a chance to of get away from the daily grind, the “feeding the beast” mindset of so much journalism that we practiced then and even more now in the era of a 24/7 news cycle.

Richard Ben Cramer
(SOURCE: Simon & Schuster)

The death of an old friend and colleague a few months ago reminded me not only of my own mortality and of such primitive tools of journalism, but his passing also brought back memories of that odd longing for the “courage not to file.”

Richard Ben Cramer, the friend who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of Middle East conflict and went on to win accolades for his extraordinary book What It Takes, about the 1988 presidential campaign, exemplified the admonition that arose in the heat of reporting so many scores, hundreds of relatively easy front-page stories.

Cramer understood what it takes to have that courage, and he was supported by the legendary Gene Roberts, then executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, but who worked before and after at The New York Times.

A Telex machine. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

The PLO had agreed to a cease-fire and accepted international offers to evacuate their fighters onto freighters and with their safe passage guaranteed, to sail into exile in Tunisia.  Other events were yet to come in that tumultuous time, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by Christian militias was not long away; the following year, the American embassy in Beirut would be destroyed by a bomb; and later, a suicide bomber would drive his truck through the gates of a U.S. Marines compound at the Beirut airport, killing 241 servicemen. Yasser Arafat would return to Lebanon once again, but this time further north in the town of Tripoli, to fight and flee from a Syrian-backed force.

But this day was the denouement of the deadly summer-long fight, and almost every journalist in the city was focused on seeing and recording the climatic departure of PLO fighters from the port. The news would be atop every front page in the U.S., Europe and throughout the Middle East and Africa.

I saw Richard in the lobby and invited him to join me on a ride out to the port. “Naw,” he replied.  “I think I’ll give it a pass today.”

He and his editor had decided to use the wire service reports, allowing Richard to concentrate on finishing the long piece he had been working on:  the life of raggedy but disciplined Palestinian fighters and their street fighting ways against a powerful, indeed overwhelming, army.

To devote that day to writing his narrative and to ignore the surefire front-page story of the climax of a three-month war was simply astounding to me.  Scores of other reporters were conscientious, hardworking and all the rest; Richard’s (and his editor’s) belief was that it was more important to give readers a well-reported and fascinating read into the minds and actions of these young fighters.

The attitude was audacious and exemplified ever after for me what the “courage not to file” really meant. So much of that summer and the years before and after were absorbed in daily, dutiful stories.  Perhaps even more than my fair share appeared on the front page, but so many of them are not memorable, not really worth the time and attention I gave to them. As Frank Sinatra sang, “Regrets, I’ve had a few. . .” and this was one that I never fail to mention.

Richard showed the same confidence and courage in more peaceful circumstances as he wrote about outsize sports figures such as Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. But his major work began in 1988 as we followed presidential candidates around the country.

He knew his book exploring the background and emotional motivations behind each candidate wouldn’t come out for at least a year or even longer. Actually it appeared four years later, in time for the 1992 election. But he believed it was essential as a good journalist to tell a more developed and important story about what it takes for a candidate to believe he should be the president. 
For many, Cramer’s book is a classic of political reporting, outliving dozens of campaign books before and since. Twenty years after Cramer’s book came out, a young reporter at the Medill school at Northwestern asked me about the best political book I ever read. I told him, “What It Takes.”

When Richard died earlier this year, there were many tributes to him and his craft. Among them, this Washington Post blog, his obituary in The New York Times, and a Daily Beast appreciation.

There are many fine examples of the type of literary journalism practiced by Richard and those who preceded him as far back at John Hersey and even Stephen Crane. Their ranks include contemporary writers from the New Yorker’s John McPhee, Susan Orlean and, more recently, Katherine Boo.

But most of contemporary journalism, or what passes for it, is focused on shorter, quick-hit, daily, perhaps hourly updates.  These stories are not memorable nor are they meant to be.  They address a hunger for the latest information; they feed the beast not in large, satisfying meals but in spoons full of fact or, worse, just attitude.

I don’t mean to crank that daily reporting is not worthwhile; it is the lifeblood of good journalism.  How else would we keep track of political shenanigans and corruption; how many organizations would send observers to sit in courtrooms and take note of justice denied; how many would devote the time and expense required to expose the operations of shady businesses?

But what I learned from Richard and others who had the “courage not to file” was that so much of what passes for reporting is not worth your time.  I learned that it is better to follow your instincts when you come across a good story that demands your attention and takes serious effort.  These stories won’t all win Pulitzer Prizes, or become best-selling books or be transformed into successful screenplays.

What they will do, however, is give you stories for years to come, and memories of how you spent a life of reporting.

Tim McNulty is co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Imitative and a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He was a longtime foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Chicago Tribune. He helped direct the newspaper’s coverage of the September 11 tragedy, the American strike into Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.

President Obama’s decision to withhold the images of Osama and his sea burial also has merit. He didn’t want others using them for propaganda and incitement for retaliation. Obama also told CBS’ 60 Minutes: “That’s not who we are. You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.”

FBI's Most Wanted flyer image

Displaying images of corpses provokes strong arguments on all sides but for administration officials it is never a matter of just taste or civility but a moment of cold political calculation for both foreign policy and domestic politics.

There are times when the decision is to expose the reality of violent death.

Soon after the Iraq invasion in 2003, President George W. Bush okayed the release of death photos of the Saddam Hussein’s two grown sons, Uday and Qusay. Their father had not yet been captured and Bush didn’t want Iraqis thinking there might be a stalemate or doubting the war spelled the end of Saddam.

“Now, more than ever,” Bush said after the sons were killed and as they were photographed in the morgue, “all Iraqis can know that the former regime is gone and will not be coming back.”

A striking image of death can be used to address a complex political equation.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and well into the war in the Pacific, the American public had never seen a photo of a dead U.S. soldier, sailor or Marine.

There was a tacit pact between the media (mostly newspapers and magazines) and the Roosevelt administration to avoid images they thought might demoralize the citizenry and hurt the war effort.

In 1943, however, the war had been going on for nearly 18 months and thousands of soldiers had died fighting in the South Pacific and elsewhere.

In September of that year, with the blessing of the White House, Life magazine published a full-page photo—a sad, lonesome image really—of three dead American soldiers in the sand of Buna Beach, Papua New Guinea, a half-submerged landing craft in the background.

The battle had occurred seven months earlier but the White House was concerned about complacency and a rise in public grumbling over shortages and food rationing at home. Roosevelt gave Life the go-ahead because he wanted to show civilians that other Americans were making far greater sacrifices.

The Internet, of course, has made that kind of control almost impossible. Just a day after the raid on Bin Laden’s Pakistan hideaway, Reuters put up photos of two men and Bin Laden’s son who also were killed in the house.

Bogus images of Bin Laden also emerged. Some were crude Photoshop manipulations of screen grabs from movies and from other photos. They were quickly dismissed.

Often a president has no say in whether the world sees an image of a dead American.

The photo of a nearly naked dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadishu created outrage among the American public and prompted the Clinton administration to withdraw from that bedeviled and failed nation.

Releasing images of dead enemy bodies has been common throughout American wars of the 20th century, but is never as fraught as showing American soldiers dead or at the moment of death.

From World War II through the invasion of Panama, Americans saw the return of thousands of American soldiers in flag-draped caskets to Dover Air Base in Delaware. In the lead-up to the first Gulf War, however, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney forbade photographers from recording the arrival of the caskets. The ban lasted 18 years until Obama reversed the decision and personally attended the return of several soldiers and set out new rules for the families to decide whether they wanted media coverage.

One of the more recent controversies about using graphic images came in September 2009 when the Associated Press published a photo and story about a fatally wounded soldier in Afghanistan. The family objected to showing the soldier slumped on a hillside just after a rocket-propelled grenade struck him.

He takes note in this terrific discussion (video) that during that same era of mutually assured nuclear destruction, the United States prospered socially and economically, as well as engaging in many remarkable events, including the Civil Rights movement, the race for outer space and the Vietnam War.

Earlier this month, marking the eighth anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security, C-SPAN aired this discussion featuring Ridge, his successor, Michael Chertoff and the current Secretary of DHS, Janet Napolitano.  The moderator is NBC news correspondent Andrea Mitchell and the event was sponsored by The Aspen Institute and Georgetown University.

While the program is long — 91 minutes — it is an enlightening primer on many aspects of homeland security and the pressures on the department.  As noted in the introduction, DHS combined 22 federal agencies in the largest government reorganization since President Harry Truman ordered the armed services to combine into the Department of Defense.

The discussion, as you would expect considering the participants, offers a sympathetic look at the department’s responsibilities,  including the role that TSA plays beyond annoying airline travelers with rules about shoes and tiny bottles of liquids.  Issues include border security (Napolitano is a former governor of Arizona),  civil liberties (Chertoff is a former federal appellate judge and Justice Department official), and the failure of the government to adequately address the disaster of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.

You can expect many anniversary pieces marking the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but this one helps remind us all of the changes in our society and out thinking about security and what is now the “new normal” in our culture.

Muslims around the world look with joy, and more than a little trepidation, at the expressions of freedom under way in the Middle East and North Africa,

The celebration against tyranny began in Tunisia, spread famously for 18 days in Egypt and sparked passionate protests in a half of dozen other countries, including Iran and now Libya.

Lessons about peaceful protest provided hope and enthusiasm; they fueled the imagination of millions who previously believed there was no non-violent way to overcome dictatorship, or no alternative but radical fundamentalism.  Instead, their yearning is clearly focused on a more democratic system.

But instead of celebrating that joy and promise, some American congressional leaders are eager to create a different focus in the next few weeks.  A controversial congressional hearing aims at American Muslim communities to highlight the threat of the most radical among them.

Call it the triumph of the spirit of fear.

Supporters of the hearing set to begin on March 10 say they see nothing but danger in the unchecked rise of  “Islamofascism.”  Anything that contradicts that view is considered just being “politically correct” and wrong-headed.

But others insist that plans for the hearing are just a method of political grandstanding that is as likely to serve as an al-Qaeda recruiting tool by alienating American Muslims from the larger community.

Overseas, the Obama administration has been trying to weave carefully between support for traditional allies and strategic interests while recognizing that the protesters have legitimate and longstanding grievances and are showing the world a peaceful path toward democratic change.

Seeing the remarkable transformation in states that have been run by royalty and the ruthless, it’s more than odd for the U.S. Congress to shift suddenly on a search for the enemy in our midst.

Feeding on what is clearly a strain of Islamophobia in the U.S., the hearings are political theater to make it seem that Rep. Peter T. King (R-NY)and his fellow Republicans are more concerned about security than Democrats and the Obama Administration.

As national religious and rights groups have repeatedly pointed out, the planned hearing puts suspicion on a specific ethnic and religious community in much the same way that Americans rounded up Japanese-Americans at the start of World War II.

Rather than allow law enforcement and counter-terrorism investigators their own pursuit of suspects, the divisive hearings raise the fear of disloyalty toward America by an entire population.

It smacks of the witch hunt tactics of the McCarthy era when Americans were threatened, their jobs imperiled and reputations ruined if they had even an association with anyone or any group considered sympathetic to Communism.

On Friday, Newsday reported that local religious and community leaders are asking King to cancel the hearings on Muslim “radicalization.”

Newsday quoted Sister Jeanne Clark, a Catholic nun from the Peace group Pax Christi, who said:  “It’s very dangerous to speak about a whole group of people as one sweeping thing.  What this could do is make all the Muslim people feel fearful.”

Rejecting calls by representatives of all faiths urging him to reconsider, King said it’s important to recognize the terror threat within the Muslim community.

“I am disappointed that these religious leaders and peace advocates wish to obstruct my search for the truth,” he replied in an e-mail to a local group of advocates. “Obviously, I am going forward.”

King also swept aside a proposal to expand the hearings to investigate American extremists of all kinds, such as radical militia members, neo-Nazis, etc.  Instead, he said he wanted Muslims to appear and make his case that their leaders have failed to cooperate with law enforcement in identifying terror threats.

[field name=”embed1″]However, a report from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security put a great deal of perspective in the numbers, something that is unlikely to occur in the planned hearings.

The Center report found that 48 or the 120 Muslims suspected of plotting attacks since 2001 were turned in by fellow Muslims, including parents, mosque members and even one Facebook friend. (Full report, right).

The study also provided these statistics:

• The number of Muslim-Americans engaged in terrorist acts with domestic targets declined from 18 in 2009 to 10 in 2010.
• 75% of the Muslim Americans engaged in terrorist plots in 2010 were disrupted in an early stage of planning. This is consistent with the pattern of disruption since 9/11 (102 of 161 plots – 63%  — were disrupted at an early stage of planning).
• Less than one-third of the perpetrators did not come to the attention of law enforcement until after an attack was executed.  However, a large majority of these Muslim American terrorist activities (35 out of 46 individuals) took place outside the United States.
• Domestic plots by Muslim-Americans are more likely to be disrupted than foreign plots.  48 of 69 individuals that plotted against domestic targets were arrested at an early stage of their activities.
• Eleven Muslim Americans have successfully executed terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11, killing 33 people.  This is about 3 deaths per year.  There have been approximately 150,000 murders in the United States since 9/11.  According to the FBI there were approximately 15,241 murders in the United States in 2009.

King, whose congressional district is a swath of conservativism in a largely liberal New York landscape, has a history with his Muslim constituents, one that seemed to change radically after the September 11 tragedy.

He even has addressed the issue of Muslim extremism from his literary side.  King is the author of “Vale of Tears,” a 2004 novel about a congressman who heroically stops a terrorist plot hatched in a Long Island mosque that also involves remnants of the Irish Republican Army.

See the current issue of The Nation for a more complete and dire examination of King’s views.

In the immediate hours after two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, reports of the death toll claimed as many as 10,000 killed.

Several years later, the mayor of New Orleans gave the national media the same figure in his early estimate of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Beware the lure of the 10,000.

Whether a huge terror strike against nation’s security or a natural disaster, authorities in the U.S. and elsewhere are likely to provide the most convenient and usually the largest number that journalists are willing to accept, or at least unlikely to challenge.

And that is what makes 10,000 not a fact but just a symbol representing a large and uncertain number.  It is misleading for journalists to use and almost always unjustified.

A word largely out of fashion—myriad—means exactly the same thing and comes from the Greek number 10,000.  Other languages, from Chinese to Hebrew, also have a specific word that basically means a big honkin’ number.

In tragedy, it’s meant to magnify the disaster.  In the aftermath of the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra-Shatilla neighborhoods in southern Beirut, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official claimed that 10,000 residents had been killed.

I replied that that was nonsense because nowhere near 10,000 people lived in the concrete block homes of those established refugee camps and that many had already fled when the Christian Lebanese militia came to kill.

The actual number killed in those Beirut camps is still hotly disputed, ranging from a low estimate of in the 400s to more than 2,000.

A more certain number came a year after the 9/11 attack when the Center for Disease Control reported there were 2,726 death certificates filed.

Katrina killed an estimated 1,400 in the city, although there is still controversy about how authorities counted the locations and cause of the deaths.

These events are no less tragic with lower numbers, but the credibility of journalism is at stake among readers and viewers when reporters accept a bogus round number as fact.

In the Northeast Christmas storm in 2010, the number 10,000 was used both for flights canceled and airline employees laid off in recent years.  Both signify a lot. That why “myriad” comes in handy though it seems a bit archaic and most would not recognize it.

Still, the sense of a large number has uses in more benign areas of life and counting.  Has anyone challenged whether Minnesota really is the land of 10,000 lakes?

Also the number is present in worship, as the lyrics of the classic hymn “Amazing Grace” tells us:

When we’ve been here ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.

It may have been as popular a measurement in the 18^th Century as it is now because another hymn, Come You Sinners Poor and Needy, from that period makes this claim:

I will arise and go to Jesus,
He will embrace me in his arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior;
O there are ten thousand charms.

I suspect it has never gone out of fashion.

The number is used in modern science to signify a large, unknown number of neurons in the brain; in history the army of 10,000 referred to troops both in ancient Greece and in the American Civil War; and there are scores of references in art, literature and music (the rock group 10,000 Maniacs), also in films and games.  The long distance race in track is 10,000 meters.

It’s a great number, with dozens of biblical references including one that counts the number of angels as “ten thousand times ten thousand.”  We often think of charting that same number in geologic time and, in San Francisco, there is a prototype of a clock that is designed to be accurate for the next 10,000 years.

Up until 1969, the U.S. Treasury printed the highest denomination, a $10,000 bill, with the portrait of Salmon P. Chase.  (For a very brief time in the mid-1930s, there was bill 10 times that — a $100,000 bill graced by Woodrow Wilson.)

No question the number is fine, enormous and seemingly complete, but we ought to pause every time someone uses the number 10,000 as a legitimate amount, and ask them how they came to that account, or just say, “Do you really mean that?”

Military and economic relations almost inevitably will become more strained in the future, so expect to hear “hegemony” again and again from diplomats and commentators; a word that is always meant in its darkest, most accusatory, sense.

The most common synonym is “dominance,” as in one state being dominant over others. And in the tug-of-war between the U.S. and an ascending China, it represents power, at least perceived power.

The recent visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to the White House was, as all state visits are, carefully choreographed to display agreements, not the bubbling tensions that were, nonetheless, hard to miss.

President Obama, President Hu Jintao and Army Col. David P. Anders at the White House, Jan. 19, 2011. (US Army photo)

President Obama provided Hu with all the charm and elegance of an official visit—something the Chinese had been denied during the Bush administration.  But a State Dinner and sweet talk could not disguise the disagreements over economic and monetary policy, anger at China’s stubborn support of North Korea, and a general sense that China is eagerly on the road to replacing America as a dominant power regionally in Asia and in global economics.

For decades during the Cold War, the Chinese complained about U.S. hegemonic interests in military, economic and cultural fields.  Now the U.S. worries that the Chinese want to supplant American authority in a desire for more political power and natural resources, especially in Latin America, Africa and throughout southeast Asia.

It is a legitimate worry.

“Hegemony” is derived from the Greek word for leader or leadership.  In the most recent (2008) edition of Safire’s Political Dictionary, the word is considered “laudable” when applied to an individual, but “predatory” when talking about a nation.

That’s precisely how it’s been used, whether referring to the Prussians of the 1860s or to America’s control over Central America a hundred years ago.  After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, at least one American intellectual, Noam Chomsky, extrapolated that experience to a book-length accusation, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.

Americans tend to think of U.S. policy as generally benign. But that isn’t the case if you are in the way of a powerful nation’s interests.

Safire’s dictionary also notes that the French referred to the U.S. “manipulation of the world’s currency markets” as recently as 1993, a complaint that the Obama administration echoes now about China.

Though he lived in a far different China, one that still had vivid memories of Japan’s attacks and takeover of Chinese lands during World War II, Chairman Mao Zedong, that old guerrilla leader, famously exhorted his people to “dig deep tunnels, store grain everywhere and never seek hegemony.”  That last bit may have been a cunning reference to the break in relations with the Soviet Union, but Mao, Deng Xiaoping and their successors have repeated the caution against hegemony in every decade since.

During most of that time, the U.S. considered China an inward-looking country that was not competitive and had little interest in political dominance outside its borders.  Yes, it supported the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese against the U.S. and other nations, and it wanted to be considered a leader of a Third World bloc of nations that included not only African and Middle East countries but the other sleeping giant, India.

But the Chinese were mostly concerned about internal stability (still the most critical interest among Communist Party leaders, of which Hu is the leader) and the pressure of a population rapidly expanding past one billion people created its own priorities.

In the last 30 years, however, the success of Chinese trade to the U.S. and around the world—and the need to satisfy the growing expectations of its 1.3 billion citizens—is fueling a more ambitious outreach.

Several years ago, for instance, China was the first nation to sign a broad agreement on mineral rights with Chile; it has negotiated for huge tracts of teak and other forests in southeast Asia; an estimated six to seven percent of its oil comes from Sudan, only one of many African nations where the Chinese are building roads and infrastructure in exchange for shares of natural resources.

Some in Congress and in the American media wanted to confront Hu about human rights abuses in China, though he so clearly was not interested in discussing that subject.  His goal, including an overnight visit to Chicago to speak with business and trade leaders, was meant to cement those relations and calm U.S. fears of a more obvious rivalry.  China is patient as it gears up its worldwide influence.

American recognition of China’s ambitions were not lessened prior to Hu’s Washington visit during the Beijing meetings of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose trip coincided, to everyone’s surprise, with the first test flight of a new Chinese stealth fighter plane.

When the language of the two nations begins with cross accusations of “hegemony,” we all will know that China feels confident enough to act and react like a superpower and relations with the West and with America in particular will be familiar to those who still remember the Cold War.It’s hard to argue that a stealth plane is a defensive weapon. Despite all assurances that it was just a coincidence, American analysts believed it was either a sign that the Chinese military have independent control from Beijing’s political leadership, or that it was a very deliberate message to the U.S. that China is no longer so inward looking.

There is a danger in overstating the tension of this relationship.  With commentators talking about the “Chinese Century” replacing the last “American Century,” they conjure up images of an imperial reach exerted throughout history by other powers, Roman, Ottoman, British and, of course, American.

In the foreseeable future, there is no question of U.S. dominance in the military arena. But China’s insistence on extending its territorial waters and its irritation whenever the U.S. conducts joint exercises with Korea and Japan are factors that could have further economic consequences. The U.S. ought not dismiss those Chinese concerns; it involves more than pride.

China’s serious objection to continuing U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, for instance, could lead to military conflict if any Taiwanese leader promoted formal separation from the mainland; it is a matter of national destiny to the Chinese and we would be foolhardy to dismiss it as anything less.

The exercise of power is both shifting and dynamic: For some years, American influence appeared waning in the capitals of southeast Asia, but that may be reversing now because of China showing new muscle in foreign affairs.

At the same time, for countries in Africa, the Middle East and in other developing areas, a more robust China may be just the counterweight they have wanted to help balance America’s post-Cold War dominance.

When the language of the two nations begins with cross accusations of “hegemony,” we all will know that China feels confident enough to act and react like a superpower and relations with the West and with America in particular will be familiar to those who still remember the Cold War.

On a more professional level, it is even more gratifying when journalists uncover the nation’s policies that clash and contradict. In these cases, they range from the absolute hypocritical to the simply inept.

Whether the two front-page reports in The New York Times in recent weeks will have any lasting impact remains to be seen, but they revealed how our ostensible allies in the Kurdish region of Iraq are supplying oil to Iran in contravention of American calls for an embargo. The Times noted with interviews and photos that this trade is not a surreptitious activity but a daily caravan of more than 1,000 oil tanker trucks traveling U.S. protected roads that are helping Iran sustain itself against the embargo.

On another topic that is even more directly contradictory, the Times reported that the IRS allows tax deductions for religious groups that are funding Israeli settlement activity in the Palestinian West Bank, contrary to U.S. declarations, agreements and policy interests in the region. Whether the interests are political or religious, The Times’ story showed interest groups can find support and work around policy despite the nation’s expressed intentions.

You might uncover dozens of examples of such policy contradictions but finding the journalists and the institutions willing to fund that type of international reporting is becoming more difficult. Sure there are inspector general reports and there is at least some congressional oversight, but without independent eyes and ears paying attention to hypocrisy and two-faced policy, it will be a lot easier to get away with it.

Finally, it’s not that the press comes through unscathed by its own hypocrisy and contradictions: A study conducted by students at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University looked back at reporting during several years of the Bush administration and detailed how the most influential print news media generally stopped using the word “torture” after administration officials insisted on using the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe waterboarding prisoners.

Officials, from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on down, were adamant that waterboarding was not “torture.” Almost overnight, according to the study, the nation’s largest newspapers changed their language. Almost as soon as it was challenged by the administration’s political supporters, the media stopped using the word “torture” supposedly because they didn’t want to “take sides” in the debate. Of course, as Glen Greenwald of Salon and other commentators have pointed out, that is taking a side, the administration’s side. Never mind that the media have used the word “torture” for decades to describe the same painful and frightening interrogation technique. It was correct to call it that from the Middle Ages to Japanese treatment of American POWs in World War II, but not between the years 2004-2008.