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As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause -- a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator -- and I wasn't giving up before I had my story.
Patrick Howley
Editorial Assistant, The American Spectator
Here's a story from the annals of fools posing as journalists.
After a pepper spray melee [1] October 8th at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC in which several people I know were painfully sprayed, it was revealed that one of at least two provocateurs whipping up the guards and cops was a writer from a right-wing magazine, The American Spectator.
Op-ed News photographer Cheryl Biren [2] was at the museum and noticed a beefy man in a black t-shirt whose aggressive actions seemed to her the actions of a "provocateur." She sent out a query with 27 shots of the man to see if anyone knew who he was. He's seen charging a guard in Biren's photo below; the man directly behind him in a tan jacket is American Spectator Editorial Assistant Patrick Howley.
The beefy man shoves the guard, with Patrick Howley behind him by Cheryl Biren/opednews
Those of us who have worked for decades as non-violent antiwar peace activists talk about these sorts of individuals in cretinous terms. They are the bane of our existence. Why? Because they intentionally whip things up to a frenzy to distract from a protest's intended message. They do this by provoking the police into what might be termed cop-riot-mode where they feel the need to indiscriminately whack people with batons and/or spray them with pepper spray.
This is exactly what happened October 8th at the Air and Space Museum, where these men and possibly others shoved their way into the museum lobby and went a long way toward creating a melee out of what was to be a moral protest of the US drone program.
The Economist, a highly respected international news magazine, wrote about Howley's operation in the Air and Space Museum and called him a "conservative jackass." [3] The online Economist writer M.S. was making both a reference to the TV show "Jackass," where people do stupid, dangerous things on camera, and, presumably, reflecting on Howley's thinking as he was rushing around in the Air and Space Museum like John Wayne hitting the beach at Iwo Jima.
Patrick Howley marching with protesters, and his staff shot at The Am. Spectator by Right: Cheryl Biren/opednews
Howley, then, wrote an article in The American Spectator on-line bragging about his agent provocateur mission [4]. In an odd turnabout, he ends the article by stroking the very cops he provoked to pepper spray him. "I deserved to get a face full of high-grade pepper," he writes, "and the guards who sprayed me acted with more courage than I saw from any of the protesters."
As for his journalistic ethics, M.S. from The Economist says it best:
"It's an interesting question whether provoking a conflict under false pretenses is more or less culpable than simply inventing things that never happened, as Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair did. ...It's reminiscent of the videos in which James O'Keeffe dressed up as a bizarre version of a 1970s neoconservative's ethnic-ghetto pimp bogeyman, in order to reveal how ACORN employees would respond to being confronted with a bizarre version of a 1970s neoconservative's ethnic-ghetto pimp bogeyman."
The obvious question is why would a young aspiring journalist go to the trouble to do all this -- then brag about it? It clearly has something to do with the dehumanized and reductive view deeply etched in this young man's mind as to who the men and women are he's trying so hard to "mock and undermine." Thanks to his own bizarre efforts, in the end he may be the one who is "mocked and undermined."
It's still unclear who the energetic beefy man in the black t-shirt is. Despite being pepper-sprayed directly in the face, photographer Biren dedicated herself to taking his picture. "I was shooting in-between choking and saline flushes," she says. A week later she was still complaining of a sore throat. She, of course, was only doing her First Amendment-protected job when she was pepper sprayed by upset museum guards.
Biren wrote that the black t-shirted man "escalated things right before the spraying and then continued to agitate. ...At first, I thought he was creating a distraction so that the Howley punk could get in, but he was getting in the cops' face later - even a SWAT team member - and they didn't do anything to him. I know sometimes it's not in their interest to arrest, but I really couldn't believe they didn't take him down, especially since they had SWAT backup. He even looks like a cop. But he could just be a right-wing agitator. I thought he might be a vet, but no one seemed to know him."
