All praise for the triumphant work of the glorious security forces of our great homeland. Anybody remember that National Guardsman from Washington State who was ready to use the Internet to sell us out to his Al Qaeda buddies? Who was caught in the greatest intelligence sting since the cold war? Nah, me neither. Never mind, though, because we've got another one: sad, temp job-hopping, emotionally disturbed Susan Lindauer, whose crime appears to be her belief that she was a force for world peace ("Former U.S. Aide Accused of Working With Iraq"):

Federal law enforcement officials said that despite Ms. Lindauer's extensive contacts with the Iraqis, there was little evidence to suggest that she had harmed national security by passing any sensitive intelligence to the Hussein government.

Instead, she was largely perceived, even by some law enforcement officials, as a woman who fancied herself a peacemaker. "She thought maybe she could do more than she really could as an intermediary" between Washington and Baghdad, said a law enforcement official.

This perhaps, is another installment of that "Greatest.Sting.Ever" the Times' Sarah Kershaw was all breathless about last month:

Ms. Lindauer [allegedly] met last summer with an undercover F.B.I. agent posing as a Libyan intelligence officer seeking help in supporting resistance groups inside Iraq. She twice left documents for the undercover agent at designated spots in Takoma Park, the indictment said. It did not provide any details about the documents.

Yeah, we're so much more secure now that she's on ice. Next up, Ashcroft's goons start collaring random homeless people who think Bin Laden's controlling their thoughts via satellite.

At least the Times didn't give this the A1 treatment—though the paper did see fit to devote fully half an interior page, and two credulous reports, to the arrest. Me, I'm with Charlie Pierce on this one (scroll down): "I will bet all the money that Lucianne Goldberg gives to her worthless spalpeen as an allowance that the case of The Spy Who Was Andy Card's Cousin dries up and blows away the way the earthshaking case of The Muslim Chaplain Who Threatened Our Kids But Turned Out To Be Just An Online Perv has."

posted by michael  7:28:24 PM  
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Jumping on the corpsewagon. It's a world chock-full of news, but for the third day in a week A1 is devoting significant below-the-fold inches to CadaverGate, the body-parts-trafficking scandal at the UCLA Willed Body Program. Today, a look into the gritty world of "black-market" cadaver transportation: "In Science's Name, Lucrative Trade in Body Parts," written by John M. Broder (from his own and team reporting), the lead on what amounts to the Times' new corpse beat.

The society of those who deal in black-market body parts is a small one, said Vidal Herrera, who has logged more than 30 years in the business of death and dissection. It occasionally comes to light, as it did last November when Federal Express employees at a depot near St. Louis noticed a package leaking what looked like blood. Inside were a human arm and two legs packed in dry ice. The parts were addressed to a freelance body broker, Richard Leutheuser, who operated from his home in suburban Kirkwood, Mo.

"It's no secret," Mr. Herrera said while sitting at a dissection table in his gray, windowless storefront morgue in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. "Everybody knows who to call — the buyers, the sellers, the disarticulators, the schools, the crematoriums. It's a lucrative business."

I like a good, gruesome tale of the dismemberment trade like anybody else, but I'm still going to have to throw a flag for roughing the cadaver. Three times in a week with this?

I thought it was a pretty borderline judgement that put the first story on the front page—the UCLA case, the result of a class-action suit brought by the aggrieved families of body donors, is basically an inside-page National Report item except for the whole thing about electric saws and human remains packaged for resale—but I let it slide. The longer I look at today's piece, though, the worse it gets. Broder carelessly tosses together the legitimate, necessary-but-indecorous business of supplying cadavers for medical training and scientific research, with documented recent instances of abuse of dead bodies, with the claim, attributed in the article to a single source (the aforementioned Mr. Herrera), that a "thriving underground market" exists in body-selling, "a direct descendant of the grave robbers who supplied cadavers to doctors and researchers." That last quote will tip you to Mr. Broder's sense of journalistic decorum—as will the fact that he makes it without acknowledging that a key part of the class-action claim against UCLA alleges that the school supplied a nationwide black market in body parts. (Is Herrera, a former director of the UCLA Willed Body Program who sued the university for wrongful termination in 1993, associated with the class-action suit?)

In several places Broder simply uses rhetorical tricks to blur the distinction between legitimate research and illegal traffic in parts. On no evidence, he insinuates that the understandable unwillingness of researchers to publicize what they do with cadavers is equivalent to ethical blindness with respect to a putative black market:

There is little controversy in the medical community about the use of donated bodies in teaching and research, although few discuss the topic openly and many prefer not to ask where the body parts they use come from.

The parts are supplied by a largely invisible network of brokers who make handsome profits for processing and transporting human remains

Notice how invisibility smears backward onto silence, making an almost subliminal accusation.

More egregious is Broder's account of what looks, from the reporting, like a wholly legitimate and even scrupulous Memphis-based supplier for medical experimentation, the Medical Education and Research Institute. He prefaces with a paragraph referencing the current Harper's and "books, movies and urban myths" for "chilling" aspects of the "grisly trade" in bodies and body parts. Having described the institute's procedures for accounting for parts (to allow for reassembly for cremation), the care it takes to assign staff to accompany body parts to research seminars, Broder concludes by saying

The Memphis operation and several like it, including a Philadelphia company called Innovations in Medical Education and Training and a cadaver transport company called National Anatomical Services, on Staten Island, are the aboveground sector of the industry.

Uglier than the pun is the implication made by "aboveground" that the legitimate operations are of a piece with, even camouflage for, the "thriving underground market" that Broder's very next graf insists on. It's the kind of rhetoric that might seem close to actionable to an interested party. Me, I just wonder why everything Broder touches has to turn lurid.

Even giving this piece every benefit of the doubt—is there anything like a genuine social problem here, one that requires A1 space for its airing? At best, this is moderately interesting magazine journalism. At worst, Broder and the Times are using a news peg to sensationalize a somewhat unsavoury business parasitic on the practice of medical research into a vast, "chilling," "grisly," criminal enterprise. To the extent that hyping a thing like this on its front page discourages people from donating to legitimate research programs—with the added possiblity of collateral damage to organ donation—the Times is making profoundly irresponsible use of the A1 franchise.

posted by michael  6:42:05 PM  
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