Last Monday, Oct. 16, a stunning memo arrived at the Voice of America. Officials at the State Department had decided that a VOA editorial condemning the terrorist attack on the USS Cole should not be broadcast to foreign countries. "This editorial will reach an audience that is caught up in the violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories," the memo explained. "The 17 or so dead sailers [sic] does not compare to the 100+ Palestinians who have died in recent weeks where we have remained silent. The people that hear this will not see the separation we are trying to make and relate it directly to the violence."
In other words, as long as Palestinians are dying, the United States has no right to complain about the murder of its own citizens by terrorists. That, apparently, was the official view of the Department of State. VOA held the editorial. And that's where things stood, until the memo was leaked late the following day.
Then this magazine's editor read the memo on Fox News. It was posted by Matt Drudge on his eponymous website, as well as on weeklystandard.com and other sites. On Wednesday morning, naval officers arriving for work at the Pentagon read about it on the Drudge Report. Outraged, several of them called Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who promptly drafted a letter to Madeleine Albright demanding an explanation. (Two of the sailors injured in the Cole bombing are from Alabama.) Just as promptly, the State Department issued a statement disavowing its own memo. The memo, a spokesman declared, was "wrong" and in no way a reflection of U.S. policy. By the end of the day, the editorial had been broadcast.
All set now? Not so fast. Several questions remain, beginning with, How did this happen? At a briefing on Wednesday, State Department deputy spokesman Philip Reeker tried to explain. Reeker repeated the now-official position that the memo had not been "cleared" by the "appropriate" authorities. Wait a minute, said a reporter, "this specific memo, if it wasn't cleared, how did it get on official State Department stationery with people's phone numbers?" "Right," said Reeker, "I was just getting to that."
But he didn't. Instead, Reeker launched into an eye-glazing account of bureaucratic protocol at the State Department. He followed with something vague about "this age of e-mail," in which "text can be moved so quickly." And that was about all he said. He never answered the question. Nor did he reveal who wrote -- or e-mailed or moved the text of -- the memo. "I don't think that needs to be an issue that we need to get into," Reeker said, in a brush-off that was brazen even by the standards of Clinton administration flacks. "This is not a question of pointing to somebody."
Oh, but it should be. The fact remains that someone at the State Department with significant enough authority to write such a memo wrote such a memo. That person should probably be fired on grammatical grounds alone, judging from the tortured wording and odd spelling. And there is evidence that more than one person was involved, that the memo was not simply, as Reeker put it, a "glitch." At the bottom of the document is a line stating that the State Department's counterterrorism staff (S/CT) "concurred with this." At the briefing Reeker was asked repeatedly if this was true. He never denied it.
In some ways, the State Department's defense of itself is valid. No one believes the memo reflects official U.S. policy, or that most American diplomats would agree with it. There are serious people at the State Department. But there are also people there with destructive, un-American attitudes -- people who would write a memo like this, and others who would let it out of the building. THE SCRAPBOOK, alas, has not yet been granted subpoena power. But Congress has. Let's find out whodunnit.