PARSING SILBERMAN

In the 10:10 issue of Wired magazine, contributing editor Steve Silberman wrote an article  ("The United States of America v. Adam Vaughn") sympathetic to Adam Vaughn, a police officer who pled guilty to possession of child pornography. When I read the article, I found Silberman's sympathetic portrait unconvincing and wrong: Vaughn was fairly charged and pled guilty because, in fact and law, he was guilty.  I put aside the article, thinking that Silberman was likely embarrassed to have written it.  He has since written more in Wired, in the May 2003 issue, defending his original -- and false -- implication that Vaughn was railroaded.  

Here is an analysis of Silberman's article, Silberman's words in plain text, and with my comments appearing immediately thereafter in bold.  Of the entire article, I have selected only parts that are representative of the whole, revealing all the rationalization and excuse-making that one author for Wired could possibly produce.     

1.          Silberman:  "He was a stand-up Marine, a beloved cop, and a local hero — until the government branded him part of the largest kid porn ring in history."

Slinkard:  Silberman wants us to think that Vaughn didn't commit a crime, but that something was done to him.  He was supposedly "branded," and was supposedly the victim here, the way People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would say that a steer was the victim of a ranch's brand.  Was the supposed branding irrational, or did it bear some relationship to Vaughn's conduct?  In fact, Vaughn was part of the largest child pornography ring in history.   

Does it matter that he was a Marine, a cop, a local hero [for his work in New York immediately after September 11th]?  I think that it matters only to Vaughn's detriment, to the extent that he disgraced his public office.  To whom much is given, must is expected, and Vaughn gave less than anyone should expect or deserve.    

2.          Silberman: "...kid porn..."

Slinkard:  Why not call it child pornography?  Because, I suspect, by using the diminutive "kid porn" Silberman thinks that he diminishes the significance of the crime, by substituting a slang expression for a more conventional description.  

3.          Silberman: "[After being charged]....Vaughn changed from a beloved neighborhood cop into a pariah."  

Slinkard:  The community became aware of a defective part of his character, and his reprehensible conduct, but Vaughn was responsible for this change in community opinion.  He was a pariah because, frankly, decent and caring people do not have an inclination to view and collect child pornography, and understandably shun those who do. 

That Vaughn did not become a pariah sooner is a consequence of his secretive conduct (and perhaps the community's unwillingness to believe that a police officer or former Marine could commit such crimes).    

4.          Silberman:  "For a young agent in Texas named Geoff Binney, that press conference marked the public debut of a yearlong investigation. Binney's father, David, is a legend at the FBI; the former deputy director, he was a lead investigator in cases that are still the stuff of bureau lore, such as the Pizza Connection heroin busts in the 1980s. Geoff, a charismatic, ambitious 33-year-old who wanted to follow in his father's footsteps since he was 4, was the Houston case agent for the FBI's task force known as Innocent Images."

Slinkard: Silberman wants you to believe that Geoff Binney was  possessed of an overweening ambition.  As though, "since the age of 4," Binney wanted so much to be an investigator that, years later, his childhood dream had metamorphosed into a desire to railroad innocent suspects.  Plenty of young children want to become firefighters, and those who do seldom become pyromaniacs.  We have no reason, other than Silberman's aspersions, to believe that Geoff Binney was unjustifiably zealous merely because he had a childhood dream to follow his father's career. 

5.          Silberman: "As a geeky kid who learned to read by immersing himself in comic books, Vaughn instantly felt at home in virtual space. He created hybrid versions of games, grafting the tank from Conquest of the World into the universe of K. C. Munchkin."

Slinkard: Vaughn had poor reading skills, so the limited text, and abundant graphics, of comic books suited him better than the school books he had trouble reading.  

6.          Silberman, quoting Vaughn:  "I was ecstatic about joining the military....I was so bored at school. What my teachers taught in a month, I learned in two days....I wanted to get away from everything and do something challenging."

Slinkard: Vaughn was a poor student, who imagines that his academic failure was the result of some great gift or talent that made conventional schooling dull -- a mediocre man who imagines himself so gifted that he's beyond conventional learning.  If he really had a learning capacity approximately ten to fifteen times that other students, I would imagine that he would have achieved at least a bit more than he did.  America might even have a commercially successful fusion program by now.        

7.          Silberman:  "His [U.S. Marine] first section leader required that his infantrymen spend an hour a day absorbing books like Sun Tzu's The Art of War. But Vaughn's favorite reading in the curriculum was Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game, about a gifted boy named Ender Wiggin who is recruited by the military to play war-game simulations. At the end of the book, Ender realizes that the games are real, and that his agile mind is being employed as a weapon in a war against an enemy race."

Slinkard: Rather than read the classic and relevant works that his superiors recommended, Vaughn read pulp fiction. 

8.          Silberman: "Vaughn worked his way up through the ranks to become a lance corporal."

Slinkard:  Vaughn worked his way up the first two rungs of the ladder.

9.          Silberman: "Once, a sergeant gave him a guided tour of adult chat rooms on AOL. Within minutes, pictures were arriving in the officer's inbox. 'I realized I wouldn't have to buy Playboy anymore,' Vaughn says."

Slinkard:  Hardly the realization of a mind a dozen times more advanced than his peers

10.          Silberman:  "...Vaughn, who was by then a sergeant, was honorably discharged from the Marines for "high year tenure" — in the aggressive quota system of the Corps, he hadn't been promoted fast enough."

Slinkard:  This is usually a complaint of those who have climbed fairly high -- to the rank of cornel, for example -- make when they are honorably discharged because they have not become general officers soon enough.  It's not a bad idea, though, as there is cause to think that it's not good to keep those stuck at one rank around too long.  Ask yourself: why didn't Vaughn climb higher?  Too much time in chat rooms, perhaps.

11.          Silberman: "When she [his wife] left, he read science fiction and watched cartoons. Then he logged on. With the Madison police band on his radio and the Huntsville band streaming in on RealPlayer, he checked out the latest anime, participated in discussion forums on cop sites, downloaded new codes for his GameShark, and hunted for rare comic books on eBay."

Slinkard:  He did more than that.  Silberman wants us to think that Vaughn was merely a case of arrested development, a fourteen year old forever, and a precocious one at that.  False, entirely false: Vaughn's appetites were entirely different from those of a normal person, adult or teenager.  

12.            Silberman:  "For decades, the federal government's war on child pornography focused on arresting the manufacturers and traffickers of the images. The target was alleged molesters — like those accused by the Customs Service in August of exploiting their own children and photographing the abuse — not people who simply possessed pictures at home." 

Slinkard:  The desire of some to possess child pornography, in their homes or anywhere else, supports and sustains the exploitation and victimization of children.  There is no such thing as "simply" possessing these pictures in one's home.  This is no normal possession, like a collection of stamps, coins, or shells.

13.          Silberman:  "As one FBI agent put it, 'Even my friends can't believe there's a federal offense that's so easy to commit. One click, you're guilty.' "

Slinkard:  Nonsense. It's impossible to commit, for those who avoid these sites like the ones that Vaughn visited. 

14.          Silberman: "Like his namesake in the Old Testament, Adam was curious. His inquisitiveness ranged widely, from fast cars, to marine biology, to model building, to sex."

Slinkard:  Like his namesake in Genesis? So absurd, it's offensive; so offensive, it's absurd. 

15.          Silberman: "He used search engines to explore free porn sites that served up every kind of sexual imagery he could think of — amateur, barely legal, gay, voyeur, and sites for sexy seniors."

Slinkard:  These aren't the same.  Unmistakable, though, how Silberman slips "barely legal" into categories otherwise involving adults.

16.          Silberman quoting Vaughn: " 'One link would lead to another, and then another, and then another,' Vaughn recalls. 'In my mind, I would say, 'You know this is wrong. You know you're not supposed to be doing this.' But I wasn't soliciting anyone. I wasn't uploading anything. I knew it was really bad, but I didn't know it was really, really, really bad'.... One of the many folders on his hard drive was called Too Young."

Slinkard: We knew, we know, and always will know that this conduct was entirely wrong.  

17.          Silberman on Vaughn: "An agent there [in Huntsville] found traces of more than 300 sexually explicit images of minors on Vaughn's hard drive, from teens to young children, "all the way down to diapers," as the agent later testified. Of these, 60 were in Vaughn's temporary browser cache, and 230 had been downloaded and deleted."

          Slinkard:  Vaughn is no victim. 

18.             Silberman Quotes a Better Authority: "The strongest argument you can make in court against child pornography," Lanning told me in June, "is what it does to the person in it. We don't know what percentage of people become molesters, but we know that looking fuels demand. Every time you download an image, there is an implicit message left behind: 'I like this. I want to see more of it. And when I come back, there had better be something new.'"

          Slinkard:  Lanning understands what Silberman ignores.

19.          Silberman on Vaughn's neighbors: "It's still the South. The air is thick and close, the tea is cold and sweet, and a sign on a roadside church advises, DUSTY BIBLES LEAD TO DIRTY LIVES. A pastor recently persuaded shop owners to cover up such salacious publications as Cosmopolitan magazine."

Slinkard:  Vaughn wasn't arrested and charged, did not enter a guilty plea, and was not sentenced because he didn't read the Bible, or because he did read Cosmopolitan.  Those community standards weren't the ones that Vaughn violated.

N.B. Shortly after Silberman wrote his first article on Vaughn, Mickey Kaus, of Kaufiles.com, wrote a brief critique of the article, on September 15, 2002,  and it's worth reading, although I think that Kaus is too cavalier about Silberman's sympathetic portrait of Vaughn (but correct that it takes a defense attorney's line.) 

FRANK GILBERT 

MAY 7, 2003