The national section of today's New York Times includes a graphic listing "Other Major Recent Espionage Cases in the United States." The graphic, which is organized by year, is credited to the Associated Press, but the Times has some responsibility for choosing to run it instead of a similar chronology that could have been generated by the Times staff. The list of "Major Recent Espionage Cases" includes that of Felix Bloch, who was never charged with spying, and of Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel, a country friendly to America. But it strangely omits the case of Theresa Squillacote and Kurt Stand. Squillacote, a Pentagon lawyer, and Stand, a regional representative for the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations, were dedicated communists who were recruited by East Germany while they were campus radicals at the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s. They were caught in 1997 and convicted in 1998.
Predictable: A "Ramallah Journal" article in the international section of today's New York Times reports on an exhibit honoring Palestinian Arabs killed in the uprising against Israel. "Israeli critics would say that the exhibit, '100 Martyrs -- 100 Lives,' glorifies death and encourages the cult of the shaheed, or martyr," the Times reports. That is, Israeli critics "would say" that, if they had actually been called or quoted by the Times, rather than having their criticisms assumed. Funny how the Arabs in the article are interviewed and allowed to speak for themselves, rather than having their views summarized by a reporter estimating what they "would say" had the reporter bothered go to the effort to ask.
Come to think of it, this technique could be used throughout the paper and could be a way of greatly reducing the Times' phone bills and labor costs. Rather than having to actually report the news, Times writers could simply sit around and speculate about what figures in the news "would say" about various events. The technique is particularly useful with Israelis and conservatives because it allows the Times reporters to avoid the distasteful task of having to actually talk to any of them.