When some people talk, the world listens!

Today in the news, actor Will Smith's name came up.

It seems that he recently was quoted in an interview published in the Daily Record, a newspaper published in Scotland, as commenting that he sees some good in all people. To elaborate on this point, he explained:

"...even Hitler didn't wake up going 'Let me do the most evil thing I can do today'. I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'..."

You can imagine that at least a few people in the world took offense at Mr. Smith's position!

Among those claiming outrage was the Anti-Defamation League. The organization's national director weighed in:

"...We welcome and accept Mr. Smith's statement that 'Hitler was a vicious killer' and that he did not mean for his remarks to be mistaken as praise...Words can be twisted by those with hate and bigotry in their hearts...this is why all celebrities bear a special responsibility to weigh their words carefully..."

One thing is most certainly true. People will always manage to hear what they want to hear and ignore the rest that doesn't agree with their ulterior motives. Is it any surprise whatsoever that the Anti-Defamation League, which exists to, in their own minds, to supposedly combat anti-Semitism, took note of this and got itself into the act?

It is most regrettable that some of their members or constituents and Lord only knows who else took it upon themselves to 'assign' that significance to Mr. Smith's statement. The poor guy's trying to assert that even Hitler wasn't totally evil all the way through, and he's catching enough heat from people who essentially put words into his mouth that he felt pressured to revisit the statement to make a 'clarification'.

Is it just me, or does anyone else smell a hint of duress here? An organization so bent on asserting is own justification for continuing to exist that it has to contrive meanings to statements that did not exist in the first place?

Perhaps it is forgotten that while the Jews were the most prominent victims of the Holocaust, they were by no means the only ones. Strangely, we never hear any cries from intellectuals, communists, capitalists, homosexuals, Czechs, British, French, Danish, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, and people of 'other than Aryan' descent whenever something like this happens. Curious, no?

Yes, celebrities need to watch what they say. No one ever seems to give them the benefit of the doubt anymore, huh?

Politicians are generally very good about weighing their words. They catch a lot of hell for what they DON'T say. Our current president sure does. He knows something a great many of us seem to be unaware of: when the President of the United States talks, the world listens. There's all kinds of things he dares not mention. We've all heard the old adage about 'with friends like that, who needs enemies?'. In this case, if we had a President who shared all kinds of pertinent information that most of us American citizens would really like to hear, no one would need to have agents in this country!

In the shadowy world of intelligence and counterintelligence, the rule is to keep your adversaries guessing. I can assure you that most of the things with a 'Top Secret' or above classification are quite unexciting. If you knew what most of these things were, you'd be shaking your head asking WHY such obvious facts are national security secrets. A lot of it boils down to not acknowledging that we know certain things about our global neighbors, even if it seems that anyone who has half a brain could easily figure them out.

I like to analogize it to my attitude toward parking lot security when I had to resort to driving my work truck on a daily basis: if someone wanted to get in, they were going to get in. However, I was going to force them to break the back window out with their hands or with their own tools; I wasn't going to provide anything for them to do it with! Therefore, I kept the bed EMPTY. Not even a spare tire back there that could be employed as a battering ram against that rear window!

There's no question that many things our Commander-in-Chief says in front of the news media are enigmatic, vague, and misleading. There are a great number of notable omissions, too. Everyone seems ready to denounce all this as lies, but has anyone ever thought how much damage could be done if even the wrong minute details were mentioned by accident?

In the late 1960's, the Lockheed SR-71A reconnaissance plane was the high tech, super secret jewel of the US Air Force, much as the F-117 Nighthawk and the B-2 Spirit would be a quarter of a century later when 'stealth technology' became all but a household word. His name escapes me, but a news reporter earned a lot of close scrutiny after he asked some questions that indicated he knew a whole lot more about this plane than had been released to the public. When questioned by government agents (might have been the FBI) about how he knew all this, he explained that he'd been following along and took a snippet from one source, another fact from elsewhere, and before long, had a very accurate, complete understanding of this aircraft's specifications and capabilities that the USAF would have NEVER knowingly disclosed lest they risk the Soviets figuring out how to neutralize it. Remember, if this reporter had been in the Soviet Union and done this, he'd have been tossed in the gulag in accordance with Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code: Crimes Against the State - Espionage. Instead, because he was an American citizen in America, he was released without too much further ado and the US Department of Defense took the hint and tightened up their Operational Security considerably!

Never forget: America's enemies watch EVERYTHING the US government and the officials therein say and do. This has been the case for as long as we've been a nation. In fact, would you believe the largest espionage rings in the US these days are Israel, France, and China? It doesn't take much for them to know us better than we know ourselves!

As I often like to remind myself, 'Silence is golden, keep your mouth shut'. Maybe that's why I'm a writer...

the TiGor