It all started two weeks ago, on February 28, when the "Washington Wire" column of The Wall Street Journal reported (all emphasis in original):

"THE GOOD BOOK holds key to bin Laden whereabouts, author tells U.S.

"Michael Drosnin, author of bestselling 'The Bible Code,' gets meetings with Pentagon's top intelligence officer and CIA's No. 3, on his theory that bin Laden's hideaway is revealed in the Old Testament's ancient Hebrew.

"The Pentagon says it didn't know beforehand what specific evidence he had, but years ago he gave information about Soviet mind-control weapons. The CIA says he had 'pestered' them with faxes and calls. Drosnin says bin Laden is in the Mideast, but revealing where would compromise national security.

"'We've been criticized for not connecting the dots before, which is what Mr. Drosnin does,' says one spook."

Then about a week later, on March 8, Bill Keller's column in the New York Times repeats the story, with the meeting having morphed into a "briefing." Keller concludes by faulting the Bush Pentagon for wasting its time.

"Two weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims -- I am not making this up -- that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time."

Keller is right when he says "I am not making this up" -- he's recycling a week-old Journal story without acknowledging the source. Anyway... three days later, on March 11, a letter from author Drosnin was published in the Times, including the following statements:

"Both American and Israeli intelligence are now using the Bible Code to hunt for Osama bin Laden. What possible loss is there in that?...

"We have a real enemy to find and fight, the one who attacked us: Osama bin Laden. Discouraging top American intelligence officials from checking out information that might lead to the Qaeda leader is bad for our country."

No doubt the snobbish Times felt that Drosnin's letter hilariously confirmed and reinforced Keller's condescending comments. Liberal bloggers have caught the proper tone -- Charles Kuffner says "Unbelievable...just laugh. He deserves no better," and Atrios reproduced the text of the letter in full with nothing more than the snotty heading, "Lord Help Us." I'm sure there was more in the leftist blogosphere, but I can't bring myself to read very much of that kind of thing.

That should have been the end of it, anyhow. But now -- yep, you guessed it -- Paul Krugman has dredged up the incident once again and has inflated it to a new level of fraudulent misrepresentation. He mentions the Drosnin Pentagon meeting in a post on his personal web site Friday, citing it as evidence that the Bush administration is too stupid to engage in a particular conspiracy that has been proposed:

"I've been getting a number of emails from people suggesting to me that this impending war is all about money - specifically, to ensure that the dollar, and not the euro, remains the world's #1 currency. The idea is that the US economy will be in danger if OPEC members start demanding payment in euros rather than dollars.

"With respect to my correspondents, this isn't a plausible argument. It's politically implausible - who, exactly, in this administration is supposed to be thinking about the role of the dollar as a key currency? The same people who invited the author of The Bible Code to brief the Pentagon?"

So now, in just over two weeks, a reluctantly granted meeting with a couple officials was morphed by one Times columnist into a "briefing," and then by another Times columnist into a briefing of "the Pentagon" -- the whole damn building, it seems -- and a briefing that the Bush administration "invited." At this rate, next week Maureen O'Dowd will probably be writing that Bush begged Drosnin to come to the Crawford ranch and lead the Bush family in prayer.

>> Postscript... Strangely, it turns out that Bible codes have been associated with the Pentagon before, long before Bush ever took office. From the pages of The Bible Code itself we find Harold Gans, a "senior code-breaker" spending not just "several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time" but hundreds of hours, investigating the original Bible code research of Jewish scholars Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg:

"A senior code-breaker at the top secret National Security Agency, the clandestine U.S. government listening post near Washington, heard about the startling discovery in Israel, and decided to investigate.

"Harold Gans had spent his life making and breaking codes for American intelligence. He was trained as a statistician. He spoke Hebrew. And he was sure that the Bible code was 'off-the-wall, ridiculous.'

"Gans was certain he could prove that the code did not exist. He wrote his own computer program, and he looked for the same information the Israelis had found. He was surprised. It was there. The dates that the sages were born and died were encoded with their names.

"Gans could not believe it. He decided to look for entirely new information in the Bible code, and thereby expose the flaw in Rips' experiment, possibly even reveal a hoax.

"'If this was real,' said Gans, 'then I figured that the cities where these men were born and died ought to be encoded as well.'

"In his 440-hour experiment Gans checked not only the names of the thirty-two sages Rips finally used, but also thirty-four others from an earlier list, checking all sixty-six against the names of the cities, and the results made him a believer.

"'It sent a chill up my spine,' recalled Gans. The cities also matched the names of the sages in the Bible code.

"The Pentagon code-breaker, using his own computer program, had independently replicated the Israelis' results. Men who lived hundreds and thousands of years after the Bible was written were encoded in detail. Rips had found dates. Gans had found the cities. The Bible code was real.

"'We conclude that these results provide corroboration of the results reported by Witzum, Rips, and Rosenberg,' wrote Gans in a final report of his investigation.

"'In evaluating the Bible code,' he later said, 'I was doing the same kind of work I did at the Department of Defense.'

"'At first, I was 100% skeptical,' said the Pentagon code-breaker. 'I thought this was all just silly. I set out to disprove the code, and ended up proving it.'"

It's not at all clear from information available on the web, but from what I can tell Gans was probably retired from the NSA when he did this work. But be that as it may, on June 3, 1997, shortly after the book was first published and started to climb the best-seller lists, Gans issued a statement confirming what had been claimed about him in the book. While Gans is careful to assert that there is no scientific reason to expect that Bible codes can predict the future, he concludes,

"After exhaustive analysis, I have reached the conclusion that the only information that can be derived from the codes discovered in Genesis is that they exist, and the probability that they are mere coincidence is vanishingly small."

Gans continued with his experiments, and on March 24, 1998 he issued a second statement to quell rumors that his further investigations suggested lack of conviction in his original results. Needless to say, Bible codes and Gans' research in support of them has been the subject of significant skepticism from the scientific community (see here, here and here).

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:50 PM | link  

Friday, March 14, 2003