hunterbishop.com

I’m usually of a mind to let the lunatics just howl into the night by themselves. But I’ll let myself be goaded into paying some attention to this one since the CIA episode at UH-Hilo has gotten so much good play.

Unfortunately Grant Jones’ comment that, “It seems for some "journalists" presenting both sides of an issue is presenting one side too many,” presumes another side actually exists somewhere in the tripe written by Andrew Walden, reprinted in part on Jones’ own site, The Dugout . I actually read Walden’s piece again and if it’s in there, maybe Jones could point it out to me.

But I’ll take the bait anyway since there really is some entertainment value in Walden’s twaddle, like a carnival house of mirrors with all those funny distortions. I’m really surprised that anyone truly takes what Walden says seriously. But it seems he has elevated himself to bull goose loony of the right in Hawaii. Like so much of his other work, Walden's latest angry screed is a disjointed ramble through a tangled thought process that relies mostly on flights of unrelated fancy and alleged guilt by association to reach the conclusions he apparently conjured up before setting out on his misguided journey.

In this example, as far as I can tell, there are two points. One, that “anti-American war activists (sic) attempted to expose the identity of a CIA ‘clandestine agent’ at a University of Hawaii-Hilo event,” and two, that some students’ “right of free assembly was obstructed by 10 protesters including faculty, an administrator, and local Democratic Party figures.”

I’ve covered quite a bit of ground on the first point, here  and here . And on the second point, I’d submit that the only person truly obstructed at the meeting was the Hawaii Tribune-Herald photographer who was just trying to do his job when a heavy-handed university official, at the behest of a self-important CIA recruiter, shut him down to save embarrassment at being photographed with demonstrators.

After all, the Internet is rife with photos of other CIA recruiters talking to students on college campuses all over the country.

No one was trying to “out” any covert operators as Walden might imagine. No one even knew there were any present at the openly advertised, public-invited event until university officials announced that CIA recruiter "Joe Dorsey" was a “clandestine operator,” the absurdity of which rises to Heller-like proportions.

Then Walden starts raining down the smears because otherwise he’s got nothing much else to write about. For example, he repeats the tired and scurrilous charge -- offered first and only by Walden as far as I know -- that the campus group Global Hope “suggested” that Israelis carried out the 9/11 attacks, or that the CIA carried them out, or that the U.S. Air Force carried them out, because movies making these charges had been screened at Global Hope-sponsored events in the past.

Then, because protest leaders Jim Albertini and Justin Avery are (gasp!) registered Democrats, Walden heads way out into left field to somehow tie the Sierra Club and Councilman Stacy Higa to the alleged outing of the CIA agent. Walden then throws in a token red herring by invoking the Solomon amendment as though there is evidence that someone was trying to prevent the military from being on campus.

Maybe this next part is the other side Jones is talking about.

Walden quotes Norm Stahl, “a retired Marine and director of the UHH Career Center,” who explained that the protesters “came into the room and interfered with our students (sic) right to get career information free of distraction.” Students interested in CIA careers were forced to move into Stahl’s office so they could have a discussion without disruption, Walden said. And Beau Butts, former UHH student association president, told Walden there was “(s)nickering and inappropriate muttering … throughout the entire presentation and continued interjections and allusions of CIA conspiracies regarding 9/11.”

Which would lead me to ask, if there were these troublemakers disrupting the event, why didn’t Stahl evict them instead of going after the photographer?

Walden also wonders incredulously why no one noticed that the agent’s name, Joe Dorsey, was “conspicuously inconspicuous,” apparently a clever CIA ruse that Walden apparently knows well if no one else does.

Then Walden reaches in with a cheap shot at Justin Avery for allegedly misspelling his own step-father’s Hawaiian name which has little to do with anything as far as I can tell. But in Walden’s mind, seemingly, it helps prove Avery guilty of a federal offense. You might recall that Walden slandered  Opihikao residents with the charge of being drug abusers because a majority of them voted for the Democratic candidate for governor.

Finally, to finish with a flourish, Walden repeats the widely discredited claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain uranium in Niger, and that Valerie Plame was not a covert agent, but that CIA recruiter “Joe Dorsey” was.

Walden the wing nut – righty tighty.