Interesting decisions editors have to make sometimes about what they think is important, or not.

It reveals a mentality, in which the case at hand in this post is this week's cyber attack on a broad spectrum of U.S. government entities: they hit all the usual suspects if one was launching an attempt to destroy the United States.

To be fair to the NY Times, W.'s response to 9/11 in Iraq, of which I have eleswhere stated in other posts it is my firm belied was the result of a brilliant Russian intelligence manipulation viz the Italian Memo and Curve Ball etc, has created a climate in which we don't want to overreact, which of course also serves the Russians interests.

Enough of Russians for a minute.

The Times placed the story of the cyber attack on page 5, well before numerous other stories; the Wall Street Journal led with the story on the top of page one.

That reveals a very important difference in mentality insofar as one believes that the international environment is an intrinsically dangerous place or not.

I suppose the Times theory was that since the attack did not cripple the United States, that since the attack was physically launched from South Korea, it is possible that that the attack was actually some kind of South Korean counterintelligence operation to root out Northern sympathizers run amok; in either event, it would not merit much attention, yet.

(Former Air Force Alabama Duane told me a story about an American spy versus South Korean spy game that had his smalll town Alabama white boy ass spend 18 hours in a South Korean jail cell before receiving profuse South Korean, if not Air Force Special Investigative Services, apologies that is worthy of note in the counterintelligence operation context.)

I suppose the Journal's theory was that since the attack would seem to have been launched at the behest of North Korea, it was an act of war worthy of reporting.

It should be interesting to see who is correct in their theory of international politics.

It is worth noting in terms of Bayesian theories of knowledge that Russia is among the world's experts in intelligence and counterintelligence manipulation and cyber attack, e.g, the whole history of Russia as to the former and Estonia 2007 as to the latter.