How dumb is Gabriel Schoenfeld? Pretty damned dumb, if we take his recent series of blog posts at Commentary as indicative of his mental capacity: he’s written a whole series of posts directed at former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, the latest one entitled (for some reason”) “The Cheese Danish Affair and Ron Paul,” which, in his rush to spill his bile on his target, manages to get everything wrong: instead of smearing Scheuer, he only manages to embarrass himself (and Commentary).
For the past week, Schoenfeld has been asserting that Scheuer had “spilled the beans” on the kidnapping by the CIA of Talat Fouad Qassem, an Egyptian Islamist who had been granted asylum in Denmark and was subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” as Schoenfeld put it, while on a trip to Croatia, sent to Egypt, and executed. This is hardly a secret, as anyone familiar with Google could have easily discovered, but Senor Schoenfeld already knew what he wanted to “prove” — that Scheuer had revealed the “secret” rendition to the Danish publication Politiken, and therefore is liable for prosecution for revealing “secrets” — and so didn’t bother to do any research: instead, he rushed to demand that Scheuer be charged, and jailed. After all, if poor “innocent” Larry Franklin — who got 12 years in prison for stealing US secrets for Israel — could be so charged with revealing classified information, he “reasoned,” then why not Scheuer?
Scheuer answered him in the pages of Antiwar.com, here, showing that the Qassem rendition was public knowledge, and had been for quite some time. Yet that didn’t stop Schoenfeld, who now admitted he “will happily acknowledge” that he was “remiss in having raised a question about our hero to which the answer turned out to be readily available in the public domain. Let us give Scheuer his due. He is right about this matter and [I] was wrong in suggesting that he had done something wrong and/or illegal with regard to the Danish affair.” Okay, fine and good: but, unfortunately, Schoenfeld doesn’t leave it at that — he just keeps digging a hole from which there is no extrication. He makes the mistake of making a big deal about the web site on which he first noticed Scheuer’s answer, an obscure blog known as “The Jingoist,” which nobody has ever heard of:
“As I predicted, he has been compelled to move from the mainstream to the margins. The latest sighting has occurred not in one of the mass-media outlets where until recently he had regularly appeared, but on a website called The Jingoist: When the Righteous Make the Wicked.”
Schoenfeld then goes on for three paragraphs, ranting about the content of “The Jingoist,” which apparently involves a lot of references to Jews as the Secret Masters of the Universe, and then avers: “Now that we illuminati have illuminated the stage from which our hero wishes to speak, let us turn to the substance of his comments.” Except that Schoenfeld illuminates nothing but his own cluelessness, because “The Jingoist” simply appropriated Scheuer’s piece, without permission from anyone: to tar Scheuer with what is posted on “The Jingoist” is utter nonsense. People take copyrighted material and post it on their own little web sites all the time: for example, here is a piece by Schoenfeld that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, posted on a web site that seems dubious at best. Did Schoenfeld post it there? I doubt it. Is Schoenfeld — who, after all, has had his work purloined – really responsible for the thief’s political views? Of course not: not even by Senor Schoenfeld’s rather dubious morality.
Schoenfeld then asks, at the end of his dumb-ass peroration, a number of questions which I will answer here:
“1. What does Michael Scheuer’s posting on The Jingoist tell us about him?”
Answer: Absolutely nothing, since Scheuer did not post anything on “The Jingoist.” Instead, this tells us a lot about Schoenfeld, starting with the rather obvious fact that a) he knows nothing about the Internet, and b) he’s a vicious nut-bar who is obsessed with defending a convicted Israeli spy and smearing a patriotic man.
“2. What does it tell us about the officials at the CIA who put him in charge of countering Osama bin Laden?”
Again: it tells us nothing about Scheuer, and everything we care to know about Schoenfeld.
“3. What does it tell us about the television networks that continue to employ him as an expert consultant?”
It tells us that they know how to do basic research, and Schoenfeld doesn’t care to know.
“4. Is Scheuer currently an official or unofficial adviser to Ron Paul?”
Neither — and what does Rep. Paul have to do with any of this? Answer: Absolutely nada. But, hey, what the heck: why not throw in another gratuitous fantasy-based smear, just for the heck of it?
“5. If elected, would President Paul appoint Scheuer to run the CIA?”
Schoenfeld really hates doing research, doesn’t he? Because, as anyone who knows the slightest thing about Ron Paul can tell you — and I include his enemies as well as his friends — there wouldn’t be a CIA if Rep. Paul had anything to say about it.
Research, Gabe — research!
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