Hot Type, for the week of January 14, 2005 -- continued Marhoefer claims Hacker made at least two errors in her decision. One was to trust the records of the Turkish Security Court despite Parlak's insistence that he was tortured at its hands. The centerpiece of DHS's 'terrorist activity' case," Parlak's lawyers argued, "is a series of factual assertions supported only by the Security Court, and denied by Mr. Parlak. Specifically, DHS relies heavily on the notion that Mr. Parlak was a militarily-trained 'ARGK unit commander,' that his group carried 'rocket launchers,' that he led a 'revenge group,' that he 'fired his weapon' during the border incident. . . . The fundamental problem here is that the Security Court 'conviction records' are not reliable due to lack of independence and systematic use of torture. . . . U.S. courts exclude evidence procured by torture." Marhoefer also says it was an error for the judge to go off on a tangent and find Parlak guilty of conspiracy, something not even the security court had done. Hacker's duty, says Marhoefer, was simply to decide whether Parlak was deportable, not to convict him of new crimes back in Turkey. Journalists afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but at their own whim. I'm aware of one journalist who has stepped forward to take on Parlak's cause. She's Carol Marin, who's written two columns on Parlak for the Sun-Times and intends to write more. "What's really struck me," she says, "is that there is no evidence I can see that he's currently a terrorist. When we took him in, when he was allowed to stay in the U.S., the group to which he belonged wasn't a designated terrorist organization -- it only became so after he was here. The terms of his asylum were that he'd been tortured in a Turkish prison -- which seemed to ask and answer the question had he ever been arrested." "Right now," says Marhoefer, "it's still kind of a regional story. This thing needs to go national pretty fast." On December 29 Nightline did a half hour on Parlak, and Alex Kotlowitz is writing a story for the New York Times Magazine. To "go national" in the sense Marhoefer envisions would find journalistic alchemy turning Parlak from the defendant in a painful deportation case into a symbol -- a refugee from oppression whose new homeland turned on him. News Bites How to keep it clean. Tribune: "Before a 1992 news conference to announce charges of corruption at a driver's license facility, then-Cook County State's Atty. Jack O'Malley discussed possible additional probes, allegedly prompting an angry Ryan to swear at him and say, 'Jack, these are my guys.'" Daily Herald: "Ryan responded, '(expletive-deleted) you, Jack, these are my guys' (referring to secretary of state employees)." Daily Southtown: " '(Expletive) you, Jack,' Ryan allegedly told the state's attorney. 'These are my guys.'" Sun-Times: "Ryan had a blunt reply. 'F -- - you, Jack, these are my guys,' Ryan allegedly said." "Specialist [Patrick] Daley is now headed to Fort Benning for nine weeks of basic combat training," said a January 4 army press release. "After basic, Daley will remain at Fort Benning for 20 additional weeks for advanced infantry and airborne training. Once finished, he will be an airborne-qualified infantry Soldier -- one of many who serve as the backbone of the Army." The release, issued by the army's public-affairs office in Chicago, began with a quote from the Sunday Times of London: "He could have made a million. Instead he chose Iraq." It went on to proclaim that with his MBA from the University of Chicago, the 29-year-old son of Chicago's mayor "could have easily entered the Army as an officer -- taking command of Soldiers with his polished leadership skills." The army explained that his reasons for enlisting "were based on his need to start at the bottom and experience 'what the bottom people are going to experience. . . . If you look at some of the greatest military leaders, business leaders, religious leaders -- they usually started at the very bottom.'" That's right -- just another grunt. In 1996 reporter Gary Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News linking the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 80s to Nicaragua's contras, the CIA-backed army challenging that country's Marxist government. The sensational implication of Webb's "Dark Alliance" series -- that the CIA bore some responsibility for America's crack scourge -- guaranteed a counterattack. It came from the media. Papers such as the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times assailed Webb's reporting, the Mercury News finally repudiated it, and Webb resigned. Last month he shot himself in the head, and in the coverage of his death the "Dark Alliance" was debated again. There are two schools of thought. One is that Webb made mistakes, going beyond his evidence on occasion, but was fundamentally accurate -- and was calumniated by bigger papers that had been too timid to do the story themselves. The second is that Webb's "sweeping generalizations" -- to quote from a eulogy in the Mercury News -- fatally undermined the credibility of his reporting. On January 6 Don Wycliff, the Tribune's public editor, weighed in. Instead of sanctimoniously recalling Webb as other papers did, as a tragic example of journalistic overreaching, Wycliff came down firmly on his side. Thinking about it "from a black American's point of view," he found it easy enough to believe that the CIA had closed its eyes to the contras' schemes and scams. Hadn't President Reagan compared the contras to our Founding Fathers? Hadn't the White House set up an illegal back-channel deal with Iran's revolutionary government in order to fund them? "I think," Wycliff wrote after consulting with his viscera, "Gary Webb had it figured out just right." Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2005 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.