Wow

ABC News: Time Reporter Says He Learned Agent's Identity From Rove

Yeah, we knew that part. But the website also says this:

Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper also said today in an interview with "Good Morning America," that the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, confirmed to him that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA operative.

I had not heard that. I wonder if he told Fitz that. I'm not sure which part of the mens rea for the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is still open to question.

Bush knew

My next OpEd is a diatribe against the Washington press. Here, prior to completion, is the money quote:

Perhaps the most repugnant thing to come out of Fitzgerald’s investigation is this: smart and experienced senior White House officials were willing to bet their lives and careers by banking their entire criminal enterprise on their certainty that journalists would protect them by strenuously resisting the efforts of the special prosecutor to pull their toothless gums from the teat of easy access. That is what journalism has become.

But in working on that piece, and thinking about that thesis, a light bulb just came on. Look at this oft-replayed quote from Bush back in 2003:

Q Mr. President, how confident are you the investigation will find the leaker in the CIA case?
...
Randy, you tell me, how many sources have you had that's leaked information that you've exposed or have been exposed? Probably none. I mean this town is a -- is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth. That's why I've instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators -- full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is -- partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers.

It won't be good enough to get a conviction all by itself, of course. But it is good enough for me. It tells me that Rove and/or Cheney sat down with our moron in chief and explained the strategy to him -- slowly, using small words, but enough times that it sank in. The strategy pleased him because it used the press corpse's venality to the Administration's benefit. And Bush, through a combination of hubris and cranial density, could not help but lay out the game plan to the very enablers of his scheme.

How elegant. How sickening.

So mark my words. Bush knew about the cover-up of the leak no later October of 2003.

Victor Davis Wingnut undone

Blogger Nitpicker delivers a superb, detailed, dead-on dismantling of Wingnut theoretican VDH. I've gone after him myself, but Nitpicker does it with Vic's own words.

Nicely done.

Poker with Sun Tzu

Prolific commenter "Anonymous" counters my downbeat assessment of the prospects of further inPlamation by arguing, in effect, that (a) if Scooter doesn't flip, Fitz will charge treason, and (b) Shrub wouldn't dare pardon him for that.

I hope Anonymous is right, but I am still skeptical that his (her? Anonymous is one of those nonspecific names like Pat or Chris) view is correct.

So let's take another look at this. Assume you are Fitz. Assume you believe that Very Bad Things happened, but you need Scooter to roll to really make your bones. Assume that you are a big time poker player. Now let's work through two scenarios:

1. I've got bupkus: Assume that, based on what you actually have in hand, you don't think you can make a case against anyone but Libby, and can't tag Libby for more than the perjury/obstruction charges. Remember Sun Tzu's advice: appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. So the logical bluff is to put out a bomb-proof limited indictment, and signal via the additional facts that seem to imply more shoes may drop, that you have not yet begun to fight. But if nobody buys the bluff, you're done.

2. You're all toast: Now assume that you really have the nuts of Libby and Rove and who knows who else in a vise. Your biggest danger is that the White House ends the game too soon by painting you as a partisan witch-hunter and then issuing smothering, investigation-ending pardons. How do you snooker them into letting the game go on? Sun Tzu again provides the answer: appear weak (which in Bushworld means honorable and principled). The really savvy play is to start out by indicting the designated fall guy alone, and on the counts that minimally implicate others. You can then reasonably expect that part of the White House firewall strategy will be to sing your praises for the limited nature of the indictments -- which is exactly what has happened so far. Why is that important? Because when you drop the next payload of indictments, it will be a helluva lot harder for the smear machine to double back and Swift boat you and for Bush to issue pardons.

So which is it? What makes this maddening for the rest of us is that the right way to play Fitz's hand is the same in both cases, which means we have no way to reverse engineer from the cards he is showing.

WTF?

Isikoff confuses with Karl Rove: Last-Minute Evidence

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's decision not to indict deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove in the CIA leak case followed a flurry of last-minute negotiations between the prosecutor and Rove's defense lawyer, Robert Luskin. On Tuesday afternoon, Fitzgerald and the chief FBI agent on the case, Jack Eckenrode, visited the offices of the D.C. law firm where Luskin works to meet with the defense lawyer. Two sources close to Rove who asked not to be identified because the probe is ongoing said Luskin presented evidence that gave the prosecutor "pause." One small item was a July 11, 2003, e-mail Rove sent to former press aide Adam Levine saying Levine could come up to his office to discuss a personnel issue. The e-mail was at 11:17 a.m., minutes after Rove had gotten off the phone with Matt Cooper—the same conversation (in which White House critic Joe Wilson's wife's work for the CIA was discussed) that Rove originally failed to disclose to the grand jury. Levine, with whom Rove often discussed his talks with reporters, did immediately go up to see Rove. But as Levine told the FBI last week, Rove never said anything about Cooper. The Levine talk was arguably helpful to one of Luskin's arguments: that, as a senior White House official, Rove dealt with a wide range of matters and might not remember every conversation he has had with journalists.

Huh?

I can certainly understand the abstract argument that evidence that a guy tends to forget things supports an argument that he forgot something. But how does the fact that Rove declined to tell one of lackeys about the breach he committed only minutes before support a claim of amnesia? Isn't it at least equally supportive of an inference of knowledge of the impropriety of his actions?

Oh, and how far has the bar been lowered if avoiding indictment is considered a victory on the current White House scale?

I plead nolo comprende.

Update: This time Lady Jane agrees.

OMG

Random meandering led me to a blog called the Witlist, which seems well written and damned funny in spots -- witness this:

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald declined to announce a deadline for the removal of a team investigating the leak of a CIA agent's identity, declaring that such a move would only encourage the insurgents currently occupying the nation's capital.
...
If the prosecutor were to bring new charges, he would have to impanel a second grand jury. Fitzgerald refused to comment on whether a new jury had been selected. However, he said his team has made excellent progress in training Congressional Democrats to defend their own territory.

"As they stand up, we will stand down," he said.

But then I scrolled down and found another post that I was sure had to be a spoof, but isn't: the Watergate/Traitorgate story I didn't know is that a bit player in Watergate, and a protege of Donald Segretti, was a then-greenhorn Karl Rove. Really.

Gaming it out

Best case scenario: Libby flips. Fitz charges Rove. Fitz charges Cheney. Fitz names Bush as unindicted co-conspirator.

Worst case scenario: Libby pleades guilty to all charges, refuses to talk about anything. Fitz throws the book at him. Libby receives presidential pardon. Fitz goes home, Libby goes home, everybody else goes on with business as usual.

If I had to bet, I'd put my money on the worst case. Precisely because a trial would be so toxic to the Administration, I think they will try to keep it from happening. (The normal way a trial is avoided -- a plea bargain -- would happen here only if Libby flips, and the White House doesn't want that, either.) The only way I see for them to pre-empt a trial is to ask Smithers to take the fall and promise him there will be mattresses there to soften the blow. And don't forget, it is exactly how Daddy skated on Iran-Contra.

If it goes down that way, it will be the Architect's greatest masterpiece. And cause for rejection of the beatification of St. Patrick Fitzgerald.

Update: RedHedd @ Firedoglake differs, but a bunch of commenters to this post agree with me. And to build on what someone there pointed out, nobody in Congress who voted for this clusterfuck of a war is going to be too keen on focusing the country on what a cockup the whole thing was. Too much blood on too many hands.

Deep thoughts from Sully

Well, one of his readers, actually. But Sully agrees. I won't go that far, but I do hope he's right, which I don't say every day.

Shorter Plame defense

from The Cunning Realist:

All along, the line from the administration and its apologists has gone something like this: No one in the administration was involved, ok some might have been involved but no crime was committed, even if a crime technically was committed it wasn't intentional, even if it was intentional it wasn't serious, even if it was serious there was no real harm done. Fitzgerald addressed the last claim today. What will the apologists try to foist on us next, and how much of their remaining credibility will they surrender?

drip....drip....drip.... (part 2)

Was today all there is?

Drip.

Fitz refuses to say. Rove's greek chorus was madly spinning last night, telling all who would listen that Rove was not out of danger. Fitz made it clear that he COULD take another bite.

Drip.

Shrub says he wants to get back to doing his "job," but there are possible felons and certain witnesses still walking into 1600 every day. None of them can be sleeping very well.

Drip.

And the questions. As we all chew through the new data, there will be growing pressure on Bush to answer some uncomfortable questions: Why didn't you fire Libby and Rove before? Why don't you fire Rove now? Why didn't you investigate? What did you know and when did you know it?

Drip.

And then there is the prospect of Dick Cheney under oath in a public court room.

Drip.


Drip.

Next

So what happens now?

Libby is looking at up to 30 (realistically, 10) years hard time. That is a big price to pay for a 55-year old used to the good life. He's been a loyal Smithers to Cheney's Mr. Burns, but that loyalty is now being tested. What can the White House offer him to convince him to take the dive? Not much that I can think of -- a promise to give him a confirmed bottom as a cellmate? And their communications with Libby will be closely watched.

Fitz, on the other hand, can offer a great deal -- I have no idea if he can offer a free pass, but he can certainly make Libby's life materially better. And those conversations are very much favored under the law.

Let the reading of tea leaves continue. What do y'all think?

Update: Ms. Hamsher thinks "Let's Make a Deal" is indeed the order of the day.

Frog marching time

When it's frog marching time in the White House,
When it's frog marching time in the White House,
When it's frog marching time in the White House,
Then it's frog marching time in the White House.

drip.......drip.......drip......

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
-- Albert Einstein

And staring at the unopened presents on Fitzmas morning while waiting for the adults to wake up seems like an eternity.

Has a nice ring to it

(thks, esoder)

But (a) I doubt Fitz is interested and (b) last I checked, sainthood requires proof of at least one miracle. I'll review his aplication this time tomorrow.

But tomorrow is a holiday...

BoBo Brooks just said on the News Hour that he thinks Shrub will nominate a replacement nominee for the Supremes tomorrow.

Why the hurry, guys? Something happening tomorow you want to de-emphasize?

OK, DO let the door hit you in the ass

From the New York Observer via Next Hurrah, Miller Negotiating Terms of Potential Departure:

Reporter Judith Miller and The New York Times are in negotiations over the terms under which she would possibly agree to leave the paper.

According to a source familiar with the discussions, there are three issues on the table. The first is how much severance Miller would receive, the second concerns whether she will be given space on the Op-Ed page to answer critics and the third is whether the Times and Miller will issue a joint statement defining the terms of her departure.

Miller declined to comment. Miller’s attorney, Robert Bennett, and Times lawyer George Freeman, did not return calls for comment.

Multiple sources sympathetic to Miller’s case said they did not anticipate Miller leaving until her conditions were met.

“The sense I have is that it’s not a question of dismissing her. If she won’t go, she won’t go,” said one source.

On Monday, the Observer reported that Miller had met with publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that the meeting had touched on severance.

Miller's potential departure is complicated by the fact that she is protected by the Newspaper Guild’s contract with the paper. The contract limits the paper’s ability to fire employees at will.

A source with knowledge of the proceedings said Miller has not ruled out legal action if her proposed conditions are not met.

“She will not leave under these circumstances, not in a defamatory atmosphere,” the source said.

Couple of things. If Miller is not an at will employee, she can only be fired for cause. So, Pinch, in case you don't have anyone there suggesting these things, here are a couple of causes you might want to take a look at:

- Incompetence
- Insubordination
- Incompetence
- Theft of company property (aka conversion)
- Oh, and did I mention incompetence?

Judy Miller, enabled by the Pinch she had firmly between cheek and gum, has already hijacked the newspaper of record and made it into a neocon mob propaganda rag. Are you really going to ransom off what is left of your reputation to the very buffoon who decimated it?

Yes, I believe you will. And I'd wager the reason has precisely nothing to do with Judy's reputation. What this elaborate dance is really about is the dirt she has on you, isn't it, Pinch? I just cannot imagine another reason you have let her fuck up for the last two decades on your nickel.

So I'm betting you'll pay, and auction off your soapbox to buy her silence on your personal matters.

Do us all a favor, Pinch. Fire Judy, and then resign. Then the both of you can take your soiled linens to the Jerry Springer show, where I am sure they will be appreciated. And give us back our goddamned newspaper.

So, Dr. Bookmaker...

Believe it: White Sox are finally champs

Let me know if you are having trouble covering any of that 15-1 White Sox action. I might be able to arrange to have some friends of mine extend a very reasonable kneecap-secured loan to help you out.

The only sports prediction I can remember making in this space was about the self-destruction last year of the L.A. Kobes. It was one of those rare occasions when bile and logic aligned. (I was right, of course, but we'll leave that aspect out of the discussion.)

I think we should both stick to politics, in which it is a lot harder most of the time to be proven wrong.

DeLay Acknowledges Failure to Report Money

OK, now DeLay's story is working its way past troubling and around the backside into funny.

Rep. Tom DeLay has notified House officials that he failed to disclose all contributions to his legal defense fund as required by congressional rules.

The fund is currently paying DeLay's legal bills in a campaign finance investigation in Texas, where DeLay has been indicted, and in a federal investigation of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The lobbyist arranged foreign travel for DeLay and had his clients pay some of the cost.

DeLay, R-Texas, has denied wrongdoing in both cases.

DeLay wrote House officials that he started an audit and it found that $20,850 contributed in 2000 and 2001 to the defense fund was not reported anywhere.

An additional $17,300 was included in the defense fund's quarterly report but not in DeLay's 2000 annual financial disclosure report — a separate requirement. Other donations were understated as totaling $2,800 when the figure should have been $4,450.

Two things of note here. First is the fact that his malfeasance is so hardwired that even his legal defense fund is illegal. Second, he was salting away a legal defense fund five years ago? As best I can tell the TRMPAC troubles date from no earlier than 2002.

None of my friends have earmarked legal defense funds. Then again, none of my friends are Congresspersons. Is this SOP for all who sit in Congress? All Republicans? Or just all the Republicans who know they are so dirty that they are eventually going to get caught?

Un-QuagMiered

Under withering attack from conservatives, President Bush ended his push to put loyalist Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court Thursday and promised a quick replacement. Democrats accused him of bowing to the "radical right wing of the Republican Party."

The White House said Miers had withdrawn her name because of a bipartisan effort in Congress to gain access to internal documents related to her role as counsel to the president. But politics played a larger role: Bush's conservative backers had doubts about her ideological purity, and Democrats had little incentive to help the nominee or the embattled GOP president.

The withdrawal stunned Washington on a day when the capital was awaiting potential bad news for the administration on another front — the possible indictments of senior White House aides in the CIA leak case. Earlier in the week, the U.S. military death toll in Iraq hit 2,000

The interesting thing to me here is how the story is covered -- here's what Bush says,but here are the real reasons; and we weren't expecting this bad news, we were expecting this other bad news.

Next we will get a foam-at-the-mouth son (or daughter) of Robert Bork, and the battle will be joined. The Democrats' keep-the-powder-dry strategy worked well, but now I think they are going to need every ounce of that powder.

"Please, sir... I want some more..."

Traitorgate. Plamegate. Niger forgeries.

Sure, I run through all the blogs listed on the roll every few hours, but it just isn't enough.

So, fellow seekers, where else do you look? What other blogs are feeding your Plame habit?

Sunk costs

The Cunning Realist, as a self-confessed conservative, has special gravitas on this absurd Bush argument: that we dishonor past sacrifices unless we sacrifice some more.

Yesterday, President Bush said the following: "And the best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and lay the foundation of peace by spreading freedom."

And this today from Andrew Sullivan, who's been a great read recently on other issues: "For the sake of the 2,000 who have already died; and the countless, innocent civilian Iraqis who have borne an even greater burden, let's do all we can to make this work."

This is a lazy and deceptively appealing line of reasoning that must be rejected. It is not only specious, it's dangerous---because anything less than the establishment of a utopian paradise on earth will necessarily fall short for those espousing it. This is the main reason Vietnam became such a quagmire; year after year, a succession of political and military leaders kicked the withdrawal can down the road by citing the "sacrifice that has already been made." Breaking news: in Iraq, there will always be another election. There will always be another "crucial milestone." And there will always be another "terrorist."

It sounds cold and heartless in this context, but it is the theory of sunk costs. It is being ignored only because the people making the decisions are not the ones being sunk.

Oh, and it does my heart good to see another conservative smacking down the stupid half of Sully's brain. (Conservatives usually attack the part of Sully I agree with.)

Sneers and Stripes Forever

Perhaps not what John Phillips Sousa had in mind, but a bit 'o Photoshopping helps pass the time 'till Fitzmas.

Dissonance

The good news is that moribund relics like the WaPo are waking up. Witness today's editorial, Vice President for Torture:

Vice President Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.

Well and good. But I understood the world in which the MSM just plain ignored the blood on our Administration's hands, and even handed them the soap. What I don't understand is how one can acknowledge such horrors and yet give them the same tsk-tsk weight given to Ted Stevens' Alsaskan bridges to nowhere.

These are war crimes we are talking about. This is the de facto head of state advocating war crimes. Treating this story as politics as usual evidences a pervasive moral rot almost incomprehensible in scale.

I understand denial, however disgusting and dysfunctional. And I'm down with outrage. What I don't understand is bland acknowledgement.

CNN.com - Poll: Few doubt wrongdoing in CIA leak

Now this is interesting.

Only one in 10 Americans said they believe Bush administration officials did nothing illegal or unethical in connection with the leaking of a CIA operative's identity, according to a national poll released Tuesday.

Thirty-nine percent said some administration officials acted illegally in the matter, in which the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, was revealed.

The same percentage of respondents in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll said administration officials acted unethically, but did nothing illegal.

The poll was split nearly evenly on what respondents thought of Bush officials' ethical standards -- 51 percent saying they were excellent or good and 48 percent saying they were not good or poor.

The figures represent a marked shift from a 2002 survey in which nearly three-quarters said the standards were excellent or good and only 23 percent said they were fair or poor.

This actually surprises me -- I thought the whole Plame outing was still an inside the Beltway thing, and that middle America didn't know or care yet. The good news is that the "move along -- nothing to see here" MSM spin has not kept the story fromo creeping into Joe Sixpack's consciousness.

The bad news: it seems to me that the actual handing out of indictments will not have as dramatic an effect on the numbers as I expected. Perhaps it is analagous to the efficient market hypothesis way of looking at the stock market -- folks have already factored Plamegate into their view of Bush. Think about that: nearly forty percent of our fellow citizens know about it and still support him. Church of Bush and all.

The other interesting thing in the article was this:

With the grand jury investigating the leak set to expire Friday, FBI agents interviewed a Washington neighbor of Plame for a second time.

The agents asked Marc Lefkowitz on Monday night whether he knew about Plame's CIA work before her identity was leaked in the media, and Lefkowitz told agents he did not, according to his wife, Elise Lefkowitz.

Lefkowitz said agents first questioned whether the couple was aware of Plame's CIA work in an interview several months ago.

If Fitz is only persuing perjury/obstruction, I don't think Plame's covert status is going to be terribly relevant. So this line of questioing suggests to me that Fitz is still at least considering bigger game.

Update: others agree.

And ye shall receive

Dialogue, duologue, diatribe

Sorry esoder -- was working on responding to the request for an email address. It will be displayed on the template shortly.

No "pimp my ride" pix, folks -- cute idea, but 'round here you are just going to have to lie about something else.

Instead -- who can (without resort to Google) identify that lyric?

And nota bene: I googled to make sure I remembered it right and went to a site that pumped an assload of malware into my computer -- be careful out there.

See Jane slam

In which Firedoglake's Ms. Hamsher makes a compelling pyschological case for Junior's active, Nixonic involvement every step of the way in the getting of Joe Wilson -- on Oedipal grounds, no less.

Slam Jane, slam.

Community (and lack thereof)

When I look at our web stats, I am struck by the fact that we actually have a small but loyal base of folks who come here pretty frequently. Yet we get very few comments.

I'd like this blog to be a bit more interactive. Most of the other blogs I frequent seem to have rather lively conversations going on. Why not here? Please share your thoughts -- about the blog, why people aren't posting, what we can do to make this a better blog, whatever.

2000

CNN.com - U.S. military death toll in Iraq reaches 2,000 - Oct 25, 2005






And no, Ms. Malkin, I am not celebrating.

1999

As U.S. military deaths in Iraq approached 2,000 on Tuesday, the chief spokesman for the American-led multinational force called on reporters covering the conflict not to look at the event as a milestone.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, director of the force's combined press center, described the number as an "artificial mark on the wall."

"I ask that when you report on the events, take a moment to think about the effects on the families and those serving in Iraq," Boylan said in an e-mail. "The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives."

The U.S. military on Tuesday announced the deaths of two Marines killed in fighting with insurgents last week in Baghdad. Their deaths raised to 1,999 the number of members of the U.S. military killed since the war started in March 2003, according to an AP count.

Bastards.

Punchin' Judy

This picture reminds me of a snippet of pretentious art rock from my younger days:

The face that launched a thousand ships
Is sinking fast,
that happens you know,
The water gets below.

Genesis, Ripples, from "A Trick of the Tail," 1976

Anyways.

Editor & Publisher has put Miller's response to the NYT Public Editor Byron Calame's Sunday smackdown up on its website here.

What is perhaps most important about this (from Miller's standpoint, at least) is that she has clearly lost her big soapbox. The fact that the only way she can hit back is through Inside Baseball trade mags like E&P tells us that her excommunication from the Times is fait accompli even if Pinch can't bring himself to pull the trigger.

... Now on to the specifics. In scratching back at her (former) enablers, Judy makes three arguments. First:

You chose to believe Jill Abramson when she asserted that I had never asked her to pursue the tip I had gotten about Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger and his wife’s employment at the C.I.A. Now I ask you: Why would I – the supposedly pushiest, most competitive reporter on the planet -- not have pushed to pursue a tantalizing tip like this? Soon after my breakfast meeting with Libby in July, I did so. I remember asking the editor to let me explore whether what my source had said was true, or whether it was a potential smear of a whistleblower.

In other words, Saint Judy, patron saint of the First Church of the Chalabi Hobby,
expects us to believe that (a) she is telling the truth while her editor is lying, and (b) that she was willing to seriously entertain the possibility that she would turn on her neocon buddies. Suuuure. Perhaps you could point us to a few of your previous examples of such searing exposes tearing Scooter et al new ones. No? Thought so. (Oh, and "the supposedly pushiest..."? Some of the goodest writing I ever seen.)

Judy dearest, your credibility is a bit suspect. You have already asked us to believe that you "forgot" how the name "Valerie Flame" ended up in your notebook, and and that you don't remember who your original source was on the story you claim to have brought to your editor. So credibility here goes hand in hand with the concession that you are one sorry-ass reporter. You might want to let this one drop.

Judy continues:

My second journalistic sin in your eyes was agreeing to Libby’s request to be considered a “former Hill staffer” in his discussion about Wilson. As you acknowledged, I agreed to that attribution only to hear the information. As I also stressed, Scooter Libby has never been identified in any of my stories as anything other than a “senior Administration official.”

Oh, now I get it. You told Scooter-pie you were willing to tank your nano-scale integrity in order to help him mislead hoi polloi -- but "only to hear the information." So what does that mean, exactly? Does it mean that despite promising him his requested attribution, you would have run with "Senior Administration official" -- that is, that you were willing to lie to him to get your story? How do we square that with your claim that you went to jail for him? How does telling us you lied to a source help rehabilitate you? Or does it mean you never intended to use the information, which proves your previous argument false?

And finally:

The third “troubling” ethical issue you raised – my access to secret information during my embed in Iraq – had been fully clarified by the time you published.

"Clarified?" I must have missed something here. You strongly implied that you had a security clearance in your mea non culpa swan song in the Times. Does the fact that the DOD disavowed any knowledge of you having such a clearance -- that is, marking you as a grandiose serial fibber -- count as clarification?

The normal metaphorical tool of the reporter is a pen. Judy's is the shovel -- both before and after her release from jail, it was her instrument of shit stacking. Now she has found a second use -- digging herself into a hole.

Never again

My outrage at the horror I first mentioned here is now up at The Raw Story.

Fate of Iraqi charter in balance

via BBC NEWS:

Two Sunni-dominated provinces in Iraq have rejected the country's draft constitution, according to partial results given by election officials.
Electoral rules mean the document will fail if three out of the 18 provinces vote "No" by two-thirds or more.

Salahuddin and Anbar both heavily voted against but Diyala, also Sunni, has backed the charter.

Now all eyes are on the largely Sunni province of Nineveh where the result is due to be announced within two days.

Paradoxically, my guess is that Iraq will actually be better off and violence will be reduced if the constitution is voted down.

Privilege

President Bush said Monday that he will not release any records of his conversations with Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers that could threaten the confidentiality of the advice that presidents get from their lawyers.

"It's a red line I'm not willing to cross," Bush said.

Both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are demanding more documents on Miers, including from her work at Bush's counsel.

"People can learn about Harriet Miers through hearings, but we are not going to destroy this business about people being able to walk into the Oval Office to say, Mr. President, this is my advice," Bush said after a meeting with his Cabinet.

Ok, Mr. Preznit, we'll walk this past you real s-l-o-w. If you want to preserve the confidentiality of the discussions you have with your counsel, we'll back you up on that, withhin normal limits. (For example, the privilege should not extend to communications "made for the purpose of getting advice for the commission of a fraud or crime". But I can't imagine that you would need to worry about that.)

And if you want to get Harriet Miers onto the Supreme Court -- well, I'm still a bit skeptical, but I'll support your demand that she be given a fair hearing. That's your privilege.

But here's the thing. You can't have both. Vetting nominees to the Supreme Court is an essential, Constitutionally mandated process. The Senate needs to see her work product in order to do their job -- especially since in Harriet's case they have nothing else to go on.

I know you have made a living ignoring the rules, sir. You've had a helluva life claiming your own special privilege. But that dog just won't hunt anymore.

So the answer is so simple, Mr. Preznit. If you want to preserve the attorney-client privilege, don't nominate your lawyer to the Supreme Court.

Thanks for listening. And say "hi" to Pat Fitzgerald for me.

Timing

With indications building to suggest that Fitzmas is only a few days away, I am starting to think that it would be best for that glorious day to be postponed briefly, my own monomania to the contrary.

When the indictments come, they will blot out all other stories. And another story will need to be heard in the next few days.

The Iraq death toll for US service personnel stands as of today at 1996, which means number 2000 is only days away. (I haven't seen offical numbers for today; maybe we are already there.) Number 1999 and 2001 and 2002 and 3002 will be every bit as much the uneccessary tragedy that number 2000 will be, but the media will take greater note when the odometer rolls up a number with a lot of zeros.

We don't know what crimes Fitz will charge the Bush Administration with violating. But causing the needless deaths of 2000 American soldiers sure ought to be one of them. (So should the tens or hundreds of thousands of uncounted Iraqi deaths, of course, but Americans seem much less concerned about those.) And so if I had my druthers, that charge would be read over the airwaves before Fitzgerald lets fly. The Plame investigation is finally bringing the debate we should have had three years ago to the fore. I think this important data point ought to make it into the mix.

I'm not suggesting that Fitz will or should play politics this way. He doesn't seem to be that kind of guy, and I applaud him for it. And I'm not wishing for more or quicker deaths. I just hope things line up so that uneccessary death number 2000 does not get lost in the indictment frenzy.

An infinite supply of shoes to drop

Karl Rove's playbook says you win by attacking the other guy's strength. So what Larry Johnson reports @ the Booman Tribune is especially meaningful:

The CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, has finally got approval to publish his book, which will hit the streets on December 27, 2005.

The CIA has sat on the book for more than a year and tried to stop its publication. Although the book is not intended as a criticism of President Bush, it will land another body blow to the beleaguered Bush Presidency.

Bernsten's key point in the book is his testimonty that he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members.

According to NEWSWEEK, "Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora--intelligence operatives had tracked him--and could have been caught. He was there."

Look for General Tommy Franks image as the great commander to be further tarnished.

This book will have the unintended effect of reminding all Americans that George Bush did not finish the job of tracking down Bin Laden. Instead, he shifted key military and intelligence resources and started a war of choice in Iraq.

As best I recall, the only issue on which Shrub still polls better than colon cancer is the GWOT. Assuming he is still in office come December, this book could well change that.

Frank Rich connects the dots

Frank Rich: Karl and Scooter's Excellent Adventure

There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon planning for securing the peace should bad stuff happen after America invaded. Why, exactly, did we go to war in Iraq?

"It still isn't possible to be sure - and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq war," writes the New Yorker journalist George Packer, a disenchanted liberal supporter of the invasion, in his essential new book, "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq." Even a former Bush administration State Department official who was present at the war's creation, Richard Haass, tells Mr. Packer that he expects to go to his grave "not knowing the answer."

Maybe. But the leak investigation now reaching its climax in Washington continues to offer big clues. We don't yet know whether Lewis (Scooter) Libby or Karl Rove has committed a crime, but the more we learn about their desperate efforts to take down a bit player like Joseph Wilson, the more we learn about the real secret they wanted to protect: the "why" of the war.

The what connected to the why: this is a great summary. It is what the high school history book ought to say about the lead-up to the Iraq quagmire 50 years from now.

Essential reading on Fitzmas Eve.

No way

The Agonist, and a few others, seriously suggest that Dubya will dump Cheney, choose his father to replace Cheney as Veep, then resign to elevate his father back into the big chair.

I'd normally ask the person floating a crazy idea to stop bogarting the glue, but I don't want any of whatever these guys are on.

I don't buy the "everything is bigger in Texas" thing, but they just don't make Oedipal complexes bigger than the one Junior Bush carries around. That is why Brent Scowcroft's smackdown is going to really smart, and why Dubya will beg evil Unka Dick for the launch codes before he lets any more adults from Team 41 back in the house. In fact, I'll be that as the adults start piping up, Dubya's reportedly estranged relationship with Cheney (who was, after all, the adult who was supposed to reign in the dauphin) deteriorates in parallel.

1996

et tu, MoDo?

via Steve Gilliard, MoDo goes where Pinch needs to take Judy: out back, with a garrotte.

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

So sayeth Ms. Dowd. Interpreteth Gilliard:

Ok, after calling her a drama queen and a whore, tropism being a fancy word for women who likes powerful men and fucks them, she then goes after her bosses for not supervising her and letting her hurt the paper.

Then she suggests that Miller's jail stint had other motives.

Then, finally, calls for her to be fired.

And Gail Collins might as well have cosigned it.

Why? It ran on the op-ed page, she's her nominal boss.

This is call putting your business in the street. This is the consensus opinion of the Times staff, except for the open hatred some folks had for Miller.

Dowd didn't write one fucking word, not one, in defense of her. And her first column on this basically calls her a drama queen whore who needs to be fired. There is no question this has worked Dowd's last nerve and she, cleverly, put all this shit in the street.

I think Pinch's coffee will be ejected from his mouth when he reads this. Keller won't be much happier.

Because she's also accusing Miller of being on the pad. Not corrupt in the way people think, but having gone native with her sources, having taken sides with them and not her paper

This is the a direct challenge and an open statement saying Judy "your newsroom pass has been revoked." This couldn't appear if Miller had newsroom support.

All true. But think about how pathetic it is -- what fetid chaos the Times newsroom must now be. Ms. Fucking Miller, Pulitzer winner, walker on water, getting her de facto pink slip from a columnist. To paraphrase the Queen of Iraq, Dowd is "fucking right" about this, and has announced Miller's demise in the most public and unequivocal imaginable way.

Of course, the verdict is not universally supported. Witness the willingness of someone in power to give Ms. Fucking Miller a platform to respond to Keller's slo-mo satori. (Although, on further reflection, the point may have been to give her a shovel -- every time Judy opens her yap, she seems to dig herself in deeper.)

Nice work, Judy. You brought a wee bit of Iraq back with you, and planted it on 43rd Street.

Piling on

Evidence is mounting to support my cascade failure hypothesis. Now Steve Clemons @ The Washington Note tips us off to more megaton ordnance falling on the House of Bush: Brent Scowcroft trash talks team Junior in Monday's New Yorker.

The Bush administration is bracing for a powerful new attack by Brent Scowcroft, the respected national security adviser to the first President George Bush.

A Republican and a former Air Force general, Scowcroft is a leading member of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, and his critique of both of the style and the substance of the Bush White House, is slated to appear in Monday's editions of the New Yorker magazine.

The article also contains some critical comments on the handling of U.S. foreign policy by the current President Bush from his father, whose 1989-1993 presidency is hailed for deft management of the end of the Cold War, German unification, the first Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The new attack comes hard on the heels of the denunciation of "the cabal around Cheney's office" by Col. Larry Wilkerson, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell in a widely reported speech to the New American Foundation in Washington this week. Wilkerson said the national security decision-making process was effectively "broken."

Scowcroft's criticisms will be taken seriously at the highest levels of the Bush administration because he is seen as a mentor by some of its senior figures, notably Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose political career began when she worked under Scowcroft as an adviser on Soviet affairs.

Like I said (and after about 1000 posts I am entitled to quote myself now and again), "Silence is not bought from the living; it is merely rented." Team asshat isn't getting away with kiting rent checks any more.

Worth a "heh" AND an "indeed."

Smackdown of the liberal hawks

Lots of bloggers have cited to it, but I finally got around to reading the Yglesias/Rosenfeld piece inAmerican Prospect Online, "The Incompetence Dodge." Great stuff.

Most liberal hawks are willing to admit only that they made a mistake in trusting the president and his team to administer the invasion and occupation competently. An August 29 New York Observer article featured a litany of semi-chastened hawks articulating this sentiment. “Someone wrote that you knew who the surgeon would be, so you knew what the operation would look like,” said George Packer, New Yorker writer and author of the new book The Assassin’s Gate. “And there’s some truth to that. I was not as aware as I should have been of just how mendacious and incompetent the surgeon was going to be.” The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier added, “I think that it is impossible, even for someone who supported the war, or especially for someone who did, not to feel very bitter about the way it has been conducted and the way it has been explained.”

The corollary of these complaints is that the invasion and occupation could have been successful had they been planned and administered by different people. This position may have its own internal logical coherence, but in the real world, it’s wrong. Though defending the competence of the Bush administration is a fool’s endeavor, administrative bungling is simply not the root source of America’s failure in Iraq. The alternative scenarios liberal hawks retrospectively envision for a successful administration of the war reflect blithe assumptions -- about the capabilities of the U.S. military and the prospects for nation building in polities wracked by civil conflict -- that would be shattered by a few minutes of Googling.

The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge -- a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place.

I'm not sure I agree with all the larger conclusions drawn elsewhere in the piece. But on the narrow issue, what they say is dead on. And the whole thing is worth a read. The fact that the opening graf looks a lot like my opening graf in this piece is just icing on the cake.

The long hack

One of the many puzzling aspects of the whole Plamegate/Traitorgate story is why the Times has let itself be ripped apart by "that woman." A dKos piece has a bunch of insight from Judy's tainted history in Establishing Cover? Judith Miller during the Iran-Contra Years

Notable facts:

• Judy has been chummy with Pinch Sulzberger for roughly 30 years

• Judy was John Poindexter's megaphone during Iran-Contra

All of which proves nothing. But it sure is interesting.

John Dean, wet blanket

Via the Poor Man, I see that Constitutional crisis emeritus John Dean is more than a little skeptical about the prospects of a Merry Fitzmas. I agree that we need to all calm down and temper our expectations. But Dean's specific reasoning does not persuade me.

The leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert identity, if it was part of a plan to discredit her husband's report on his trip to Niger, is directly related to issues of "national security." After all, the Niger uranium claim was part of the basis for the Iraq War, and Joe Wilson's claim that it was bogus, and the President ought to have known as much, is intimately related to the politics of going to war - and also to national security in the sense of responding to genuine, and only genuine, threats to the United States.

But national security is a very gray area. Was the Bush/Cheney White House operating in the best interest of the country, or did they have a private agenda (oil fields in Iraq)? Did Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby believe they had national security reasons to discredit Wilson's claims, and act accordingly? This is an area where there is no law, and it compounds the assessment of the actions of those involved.

It is difficult to envision Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuting anyone, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, who believed they were acting for reasons of national security. While hindsight may find their judgment was wrong, and there is no question their tactics were very heavy-handed and dangerous, I am not certain that they were acting from other than what they believed to be reasons of national security. They were selling a war they felt needed to be undertaken.

In short, I cannot imagine any of them being indicted, unless they were acting for reasons other than national security. Because national security is such a gray area of the law, come next week, I can see this entire investigation coming to a remarkable anti-climax, as Fitzgerald closes down his Washington Office and returns to Chicago.

John Dean has earned some credibility in matters of epochal constitutional crises, of course. But I think he is out to lunch here.

A full statement of his premise from an objective standpoint -- that outing a CIA operative to multiple reporters somehow enhances national security -- is self-refuting. The idea just doesn't pass the smell test. So what he must be claiming is that there is a subjective standard -- that there is a safe harbor for otherwise illegal acts are they are done because the actor believed they had a noble greater purpose.

In effect Dean is adding a purely subjective defense to all possible crimes -- a defense not contained in most of the relevant statutes. And that element would create a pretty reliable get- out-of-jail free card. If outing a CIA agent can be cleansed in this manner, what couldn't?

I'm sure Richard Nixon and the rest of his Watergate cronies believed that there were national security justifications for their actions. And we all know how that one turned out. So there are lots of reasons to keep our champagne corked for now. But Dean's isn't one of them.

and back to it

OK, I am still deeply dusturbed by the Afghanistan massacre story, but I am busy rending myself into an OpEd on the subject. We now return bluememe to its regularly scheduled programming.

Fuck

In the poisonous post-9/11 atmosphere, liberals seeking some kind of middle ground tended to compromise by supporting the war in Afghanistan even as they opposed the invasion of Iraq. Here is a chilling refutation of our "just war" moral authority in the form of a documentary -- “Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death .”

The film provides eyewitness testimony that U.S. troops were complicit in the massacre of thousands of Taliban prisoners during the Afghan War.

It tells the story of thousands of prisoners who surrendered to the US military’s Afghan allies after the siege of Kunduz. According to eyewitnesses, some three thousand of the prisoners were forced into sealed containers and loaded onto trucks for transport to Sheberghan prison. Eyewitnesses say when the prisoners began shouting for air, U.S.-allied Afghan soldiers fired directly into the truck, killing many of them. The rest suffered through an appalling road trip lasting up to four days, so thirsty they clawed at the skin of their fellow prisoners as they licked perspiration and even drank blood from open wounds.

Witnesses say that when the trucks arrived and soldiers opened the containers, most of the people inside were dead. They also say US Special Forces re-directed the containers carrying the living and dead into the desert and stood by as survivors were shot and buried. Now, up to three thousand bodies lie buried in a mass grave.

This is sickening beyond words. America is now complicit in yet another echo of evil.

Tomorrow I will be angry. Today I am mute with horror.

Conservative cannibalism

FT.com: Cheney 'cabal' hijacked foreign policy

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.


In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

The more bites the real conservatives take out of the neocon goon squad, the more blood in the water, the more emboldened others will be. And so on.

And on.

Heh.

Daily Kos: Fitzmas Carols!

Daily Kos: Fitzmas Carols!
I thought about doing this, but someone @ dKos beat me to it:

O Aspen Tree

O Aspen tree,
O Aspen tree,
Your roots are all connected.
O Aspen tree,
O Aspen tree,
But your sources aren't protected.
How shall we sell the war to them?
Just send some lies to Judy M.
O Aspen tree,
O Aspen tree,
Your roots are all connected.

I am drunk on all this Fitzmas eggnog. If Santa Prosecutor leaves coals in our stockings, the hangover willl be too horrible to contemplate.

Anti-talking points memo

Think Progress has a handy summary of right-wing myths about the leak investigation, and the corrective facts, complete with citations.

We in the reality-based community know all of this. But it is well summarized here, and these whack-job talking points are going to get a serious work-out over the coming weeks, so this is a good tool to have handy.

(Not anti-Josh Marshall, of course.)

Fitzmas fare: Yellowcake!

Niger Uranium Forgery Mystery Solved?- by Justin Raimondo

If true, this is huge:

According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen played an important role in the "arms for hostages" scheme by setting up meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Not all that unexpected coming from a self-proclaimed advocate of Machiavelli's amoralism. Today, Ledeen is among the most visible and radical neoconservative ideologues whose passion for a campaign of serial "regime-change" in the Middle East is undiminished by the Iraqi debacle.

Making the Frog March the official dance of the Bush White House is a laudable goal, to be sure. But tying the Plame leak to the big picture, which exposing the yellowcake story can go a long way toward doing, is an even bigger service.

So sing it with me: All I want for Fitzmas is my two jailed thugs, my two jailed thugs, my two jailed thugs....

Rupert Murdoch Up for Auction on Ebay

Rupert Murdoch Up for Auction on Ebay

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is offering himself as a lunch date on the Internet site eBay...

The winning bidder will be treated to lunch with four friends at the New York headquarters of Murdoch’s News Corp.

The opening bid has been set at $25,000.

$25K sounds about right to me. But it is a very personal decision. How much would they have to pay you to sit down with Murdoch for an entire hour?

The new fodder unit: Karl Rove

New York Daily News: Bush whacked Rove on CIA leak

An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News. "He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."

Puhleeze.

This is just too convenient. I'm not entirely surprised that Pinocchio would be throwing Gepetto overboard. So the fact that this story is being leaked does not surprise me. It does bear the mark of a Rove plant, which is a bit confusing, but his minions must have learned something over the years. And asking (or making) a tainted underling fall on his sword is SOP inside a corrupt enterprise under attack.

The part I don't buy is the idea that Bush wagged a finger at Rove for his tactics. Bush has never shown any sign of ethical or legal compunctions about any of Rove's gutter tactics. And I simply refuse to believe, in the context of all the other ways in which Bush has trashed the CIA and sent thousands of people to pointless deaths, that the outing of a CIA operative was any different.

Bush is too dense to appreciate the subtleties, but I think he does understand that dirty tricks are how the Architect got him where he is. So my bet is that, if they discussed the Plame leak at all, they both had a good chuckle about it back in 2003.

And how useful do they really think this story is going to be? If Bush knew about this from the git go, at the very least he admits that his whole posture has been a sham. At worst, he admits complicity in a coverup.

Update: Josh Marshall is all over it.

All Plame, all the time

The New York Times finally gets around to mentioning the Plamegate story, and sho0ws an uncharacteristic sense of humor:

In his daily news briefing, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday that a successful completion to the inquiry would be one in which Mr. Fitzgerald would "determine the facts and then outline those facts for the American people."

Asked if that meant the White House would favor a public report if there were no indictments, Mr. McClellan said that the decision was Mr. Fitzgerald's, but that "we would all like to know what the facts are."

Now, Scottie... are you suggesting that you don't already know the facts? Because you seemed pretty damned sure you knew them when when you blew smoke up everyone's ass about them.

Toles

Me & Stephen: We's just friends

Me:

Post-Enlightenment folks tend to think of knowledge as an empirical thing: knowledge is the product of evidence that comports with a theory or world view. As such, we seek data, and when the data are inconclusive or inconsistent with expectation, we admit that we don’t know.

That, I submit, is not what George Bush means when he says he knows something. He knew Karl Rove was innocent in the same way he knew that there were WMDs in Iraq, and that Osama got birthday cards from Saddam. More to the point, he knew it the way he knew God wanted him to be president.

In other words, he knows Rove is blameless in the way he knows his religious beliefs are true—based not upon a survey of facts, evidence and expertise, but upon an inventory of only the desolate, monochromatic landscape of his own interior.

Bush knows Rove is innocent because that is what Bush’s heart tells him; his brain is incapable of grasping the resulting circularity. This kind of knowledge, so widely and deeply embraced by his supporters, was the basis for Bush’s elevation to the White House. It explains his intransigent stance on Social Security, on John Bolton, and virtually everything else he has wrought since; the light of reason is not allowed to reach the dark place where Bush holds his beliefs.

Stephen Colbert, on the debut of the Colbert Report:

I don't trust books. They're all fact and no heart. And that's exactly what's pulling our country apart today. Because face it, folks, we are a divided nation... We are divided by those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart.

Consider Harriett Miers. If you think about Harriett Miers, of course her nomination's absurd! But the President didn't say he thought about this selection, he said this:

President Bush: "I know her heart."

Notice that he didn't say anything about her brain? He didn't have to. He feels the truth about Harriett Miers. And what about Iraq? If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for war. But doesn't taking Saddam out feel like the right thing...right here in the gut? Because that's where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen...the gut.

Karl Marx:

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Arianna nails it

Judy Miller's Reporting: A Cancer on the New York Times?

Yesterday Josh Marshall speculated about dark, unseen forces that could explain the otherwise inexplicable behavior of Judy's enablers at the Times. I don't want to rule out the possibility that there are even darker forces at work here, but I think the point Ariana makes can explain much of the absurdity: the Times has acquiesced in her malfeasance for so long that they are no longer victims, but co-conspirators.

We now know that Miller's bosses were being warned about serious credibility problems with her reporting as far back as 2000 -- a warning that came from a Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague of Miller who was so disturbed by her journalistic methods he took the extraordinary step of writing a warning memo to his editors and then asked that his byline not appear on an article they had both worked on.

In today's WaPo, Howard Kurtz quotes from a December 2000 memo sent by Craig Pyes, a two time Pulitzer winner who had worked with Miller on a series of Times stories on al-Qaeda.

"I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller... I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies," and "tried to stampede it into the paper."
It's the journalistic equivalent of Dean telling Nixon that Watergate was "a cancer on the presidency." But while the Times corrected the specific stories Pyes was concerned about, the paper, like Nixon, ignored the long-term diagnosis.

If you blame Bush for the failings of Brownie, you have to blame Pinch and Keller for the failings of Miller. So that is at least part of the story; these asshats knew that Judy could bring them down with her, which is why they tried so hard to prop her up. But their efforts to hang together were for naught; in the end they will still hang separately.

Did Judy get anything right - ever?

Poynter has a piece from Barabara Crosette, former UN bureau chief, reminding us that Judy's post WMD work was horseshit, too:

Obscured behind the large issues of weapons of mass destruction and Joseph Wilson's links with the CIA is another story. Over the last year or so, Judith Miller also wrote a series of damaging reports on the "oil for food" scandal at the United Nations -- in particular, personally damaging to Secretary General Kofi Annan because the reports were frequently based on half-truths or hearsay peddled on Capitol Hill by people determined to force Annan out of office. At the UN, this was interpreted as payback for the UN's refusal to back the US war in Iraq. As a former NYT UN bureau chief [now retired] I have been asked repeatedly by diplomats, former US government officials, journalists still reporting from the organization and others why Times editors did not step in to question some of this reporting -- a lot of it proved wrong by the recent report by Paul Volcker -- or why the paper seemed to be on a vendetta against the UN.

One of the many things the Times has to do to rehabilitate itself is go back and score every one of her stories, going back at least five or ten years, for veracity. As it did with the merely embarassing Jayson Blair kerfluffle, the Times needs to come clean on just how badly Judy played her putative employer. The stakes, for the Times and the country, are much higher this time.

One way or another, Judy's head is going to end up on a pike. The Times must choose between doing the piking and joining her there.

What's the big deal?

AP Wire 10/15/2005 Miller presents First Amendment award to "Deep Throat" relative

I don't understand why the blogs are so up in arms over this. Deep Throat was an important landmark in the evoution of the First Amendment. And Judy's performance in the biggest story of our day had much in common with that of the leading character in that historic advance. Who better to do it?

So if Judy Miller gets to give an award to one of Linda Lovelace's relatives, that is fine by me.

The Big Picture

AfterDowningStreet.org co-founder David Swanson has an important reminder at truthout called "Peering under the Plame Outing." The money quote:

There are those who believe in such a thing as a just war. Many of them supported this war early on and have since changed their minds. And you can see why. Because, if there is such a thing a just war, this is the opposite. A just war, if we can fantasize about it, would be fought by the people who decided to wage it, would be fought purely in self-defense, would be decided upon in a democratic process with public information, would be based on generally honest information, would be fought with respect for the subsection of human rights that international law holds to apply even in war, and would not be exploited to limit rights domestically, destroy useful domestic programs, or transfer public wealth to the wealthy.

This short intermission in the feasting on Judy Miller's entrails is for the purpose of reminding us why we are feasting on Judy Miller's entrails.

Carry on.

Quick! Offer it on eBay!

via Google Sightseeing: Face of Jesus Found In Sand Dune




Maybe the Golden Nugget will bulldoze an ad on his forehead.

Earth to Sulzberger

To Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.:

I know you are known as Pinch in the trade, but may I call you Junior? It seems much more appropriate about now. The destruction you have wrought on your empire offers remarkable parallels to the mess made by that other Junior running a somewhat bigger show about now.

Anyway, I am not yet feeling motivated to go through the 5800 words of "hide the ball" you published line by line to point out every question begged, every outrage softpedaled, and every lie unchallenged. But there is a rather critical point that has not come up in the commentary I have been reading, brought up by this stunning and revalatory passage:

“In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.”

OK, please concentrate real hard here, and perhaps ask someone to help you with the hard words:

Unless you cut some special, extra-stupid deal with your molotov cocktail of a reporter, the notes in question aren't "her" notes, Junior -- they're yours.

As an employee of what is at least nominally still a newspaper, her work product belonged to her employer. I don't think there is much question that a reporter's notes are work product. She would therefore have no right to withhold the notes from you or others demanding them on your behalf. You would be completely justified in (a) firing her for refusing to turn them over and (b) getting a court to force her to do so. You might want to direct your high-powered legal team to the law of conversion.

Of course, if Judith Fucking Miller was not actually an employee of the Times -- if she was, say, an employee of WHIG, or the CIA, or some such, then the notes might indeed be hers. You might want to clear that one up for us.

Thanks, and have a great day.

More like American democracy than I thought

Few polling sites in western Iraq, activists claim. 15/10/2005. ABC News Online

Human rights activists in Iraq claim there are no polling stations in parts of the predominantly Sunni province of Anbar, in western Iraq, for a referendum today on the country's new constitution.

Anbar, Iraq's largest province, runs from Baghdad to border Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia and is also the heartland of the Sunni-led insurgency.

Much of the population is expected to vote against the US-backed constitution.

"There are no voting centres in cities like Haditha, Hit, Rawa, Qaim, Ana, Baghdadi and the villages around them," said Mahmoud Salman al-Ani, a human rights activist in Ramadi, listing locations across the western province.

"There aren't actually any voting centres or even voting sheets in these cities ... Nobody knows how and where to vote if they decide to," he said of the predominantly Sunni Arab region.

Anybody know where Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell are these days?

The Times on Miller: where's my back hoe?

The Miller Case: From a Name on a Pad to Jail, and Back - New York Times

I've read it over once. Tomorrow I'll go through it in detail. For now, it seems to say far more in its silences than in what is explicit. And even through the whitewash, Judy comes off as the self-impressed delusional hack.

Spongedob does a Pat Robertson on Miers

I believe George Bush has made an outstanding selection of Harriet Miers. You won't hear a lot of this in the media, but it is there. For one thing, she is a deeply committed Christian. She has been a believer in Jesus Christ since the late 1970s. I know the individual who led her to the Lord. I know the church that she goes to. I know it's very conservative church. I know that she is a tithe-paying member of that church. I know that she has deep convictions about things. And I have talked at length to people that know her and have known her for a long time. Some of them have been a close personal friend of hers for 25 years. And I trust these people because I know them. I know who they are, and I know their character, and I know what they stand for, and I know their love for the Lord. And they have said to me, "This is a good woman who will do the right thing when the chips are down. She will not be a disappointment, and you cannot go wrong by seeing her in one of the most powerful positions in this country" -- that being the justice who replaces Sandra Day O'Connor on the court. I've heard that over and over from people who are not giving me hearsay. They are saying, "This is my personal friend. I know what she cares about." And I believe -- George Bush cannot say that, and Harriet Miers cannot say that, and maybe I shouldn't say that, but I know it to be true. And that is part of why I have confidence, because I have confidence in those individuals.

James Dobson, Radio Broadcast, October 5, 2005

In a private conversation designed to garner support for the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, White House aide Karl Rove told a key conservative Christian leader that the Texas lawyer had once fought for a policy that "would not be supportive of abortion."
...
Dobson made the disclosure in a radio address taped Tuesday, following threats that the Senate Judiciary Committee might subpoena him and force him to describe his conversation with Rove.
...
Dobson said Rove told him in an Oct. 1 phone conversation that Bush wanted to name a woman to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and that Miers was on "the short list" of nominees.

Dobson said Rove described Miers as "an evangelical Christian from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life," who had "taken on the American Bar Association on the issue of abortion and fought for a policy that would not be supportive of abortion." She had also been a member of Texas Right to Life, Dobson said.

But Dobson stressed that they "did not discuss Roe v. Wade in any context or any other pending issue that will be considered by the court. I did not ask that question." The 1973 decision legalized abortion.

Knight-Ridder, October 12, 2005

"What the Democrats have concluded in their wildest speculation is that Mr. Rove laid out for me a detailed promise that Ms. Miers would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and revealed all the other judicial opinions that she has supposedly prejudged. It did not happen, period."

James Dobson, Radio Broadcast, October 12, 2005

negative pregnant

n. a denial of an allegation in which a person actually admits more than he/she denies by denying only a part of the alleged fact. Example: Plaintiff alleges Defendant "misused more than a hundred thousand dollars placed in his trust in 1994." Defendant denies the amount was more than a hundred thousand, and denies it was given to him in 1994. Thus, he did not deny the misuse, just the amount and the date.

law.com dictionary

"Thou shallt not bear false witness against thy neighbor"

Moses, a few thousand years ago

Plame and simple

More Rawness. Read it before this hits the wires, at which point it may be moot.

2 percent

U.S. Newswire : Releases : "AfricanAmericans Give Bush 2 Percent Approval Rating"

According to the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll President Bush's national approval rating has declined to 39 percent, the lowest level during his Presidency. And among African-Americans, Bush has only a 2 percent approval rating

The poll had a margin of error of 3.4 points. Think about that for a minute. The margin includes zero. The Holocaust must poll better than that.

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged - Yahoo! News

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged - Yahoo! News

That's not me editorializing, kids -- that's the Yahoo headline on this AP story.

Something tectonic in scale is happening here.

Learning from the masters

MercuryNews.com: Inaction in Indonesia stirs fears it may become pandemic's cradle

BOGOR, Indonesia - Despite worldwide pressure for Indonesia to contain avian flu, it's taking little action, increasing the odds that a global pandemic could ignite among its islands.

Indonesia resists killing large numbers of chickens to stamp out the disease and has yet to pay farmers for the small number of fowl culled earlier this year.

The inaction has frustrated some global health experts, who say a more deadly strain of the avian flu virus may be mutating in Indonesia and preparing to spark a global catastrophe.

Indonesian authorities are battling the perception that they care less about setting off a global health calamity than they do about protecting a huge poultry industry.

"We care about a pandemic. We do care. But so far, there is no scientific evidence of human-to-human transmission,'' said Mathur Riady, the director-general of livestock services at the Agriculture Department.

And where did our friends in Indonesia learn how to stonewall against scientifically predicted disaster like that? 'Tis a puzzlement....

Blumenthal:Uranium fallout

from the Guardian Unlimited:

Unlike in Watergate, which was largely advanced by the press, this scandal has unfolded despite much of the press corps' efforts to avoid, demean or restrain the story. Also, unlike in Watergate, major influences in the press have been aligned with their sources in the administration, not with the professionals in the government acting as whistleblowers. Bob Woodward, who has written two books describing events from the perspective of the Bush administration, supported the White House version of the Niger incident by charging in July 2004: "There were reasonable grounds to discredit Wilson."

When the Plamegate story is fully written, someone outside the mainstream press will have to write it. The major media have recused themselves from the truth.

Evangelists reject faith

Atrios links to a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirier online about the Miers meltdown that seems to indicate that The Daily Show is now scripting wingnut talking points:

Jan LaRue, chief counsel at Concerned Women for America, a conservative grassroots group, said yesterday: "My goodness, we keep being told to just believe the President. I was on a conference call - everybody was - with [GOP national chairman] Ken Mehlman, and the whole message was 'Trust us, trust us, trust us.' But we've never had to just rely on trust before. There was always credible information to look at before. But, with this nominee, I can't determine what she really believes in, and I can't find anything in her record even remotely related to constitutional law."

Got that? The folks who reject Darwin, think the Earth is six thousand years old, and that the Bible is 100% literally true are uncomfortable relying on trust. "Give us credible information," they plead.

"Jan LaRue"simply must be a pseudonym for Stephen Colbert.

Mrs. Greenspan fingers Ari Fleischer

viaDemocratic Underground - Andrea Mitchell IDs Colin Powell's role in Plamegate

Plame obsessives will remember a Washington Post article in which a "Senior administration source" is quoted as having seen several administration officials, including Ari Fleischer, peruse a classified memo that identified Valerie Plame. This occurred on July 7, aboard AF1, as Bush and his entourage were en route to Africa. The memo was prepared for Colin Powell, who was aboard the flight. Many have assumed that it was Powell himself who not only observed these administration officials read the memo, but also saw them call reporters while still on board. Many have guessed that Powell testified to this before Fitzgerald and also leaked this information to the WP. According to the WP, the "senior official" said of the leak: "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge."

Tonight on Hardball, Mrs. Greenspan was discussing the possibility of indictments that went beyond the usual suspects, Libby and Rove. Mitchell said (I'm paraphrasing), yes, there definitely could be other indictments--Colin Powell said he saw Ari Fleischer read the memo identifying Valerie Plame aboard AF1.

Sure, the fact that Ms. Mitchell fingered Powell as loose-lipped matters, but not the way it would have a few months ago. Powell has already made himself at home in his own political twilight zone, and the White House is no longer capable of muzzling the multiude of whisperers these days.

But publicly fingering Fleischer is interesting. From an old Talk Left post:

People familiar with the inquiry say Fitzgerald also is reviewing testimony by former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, though it is not clear whether the prosecutor is focusing on him or seeking information about higher-ups. Fleischer last night refused to comment.

We know that Fitzgerald subpoenaed the complete transcript of his July 12, 2003 press gaggle conducted at a hospital in Nigeria. We know that he subpoenaed telephone records for Air Force One during a portion of the trip. We also know that he subpoenaed the July 6 to July 30, 2003 records of the White House Iraq Group, a public relations kind of task force formed by Cheney's staff to promote the Administrations' view of the war.

We also know that the White House won't release the names of those who accompanied President Bush on the trip, although we know that Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and Andrew Card were with him.

Why would Fitzgerald want these documents? I don't think it's to get Ari Fleischer. I think it's to catch Lewis Libby and others on Vice President Cheney's staff, and/or Karl Rove, who attended almost all the White House Iraq Group meetings, in a lie. Ari Fleischer's statements may lead Fitzgerald to the lie - and establish a conspiracy to out a covert agent or obstruct justice - or perjury or false statements to federal investigators by these White House officials.

Getting to the inflection point in prosecuting a complex, multi-layer conspiracy is a tough, long slog. But the fun part is where we are right now -- the prosecutor has enough to make sure someone falls hard, and those who once marched in lockstep begin to stumble about randomly in their attempts to dodge the blow.

Ari Fleischer probably stonewalled when he thought the thousand year reich would reward his adherence to omerta. Now that the junta has retreated to its bunker, and is likely to complete its fall by year's end, my guess is Ari is merely one of many offering up the goods in exchange for the indugence of Patrick Fitzgerald.

Frog marching Judy?

Needlenose notes that the Special Prosecutor, who seems to have caught Ms. Miller in an elegant perjury trap, has accomplished something wonderful:

Fitzgerald made her do something the New York Times never did: clean up her own mess.<'blockquote>

So thanks for looking elsewhere, Doctor Bloor, but I'm parking my ass right here where I can savor every exquisite turn of my favorite story.

I heart Jane Hamsher

Her Plamegate work has been superb. And boyoboy does she get why it matters.

Breathe....breathe...

The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are working on stories that point to Vice President Dick Cheney as the target of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name.

Please, please, purty please......

Soft Bigotry

Asked by host Matt Lauer if sexism might be playing a role in the Miers controversy, she said, "It's possible. I think that's possible. . . . I think people are not looking at her accomplishments."

Laura Bush, October 11, 2005

“We are challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

George W. Bush, January 8, 2004

Murray Waas: Libby's noose tightens

from the NATIONAL JOURNAL: Libby Did Not Tell Grand Jury About Key Conversation (10/11/05)

In two appearances before the federal grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative's name, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, did not disclose a crucial conversation that he had with New York Times reporter Judith Miller in June 2003 about the operative, Valerie Plame, according to sources with firsthand knowledge of his sworn testimony.

Libby also did not disclose the June 23 conversation when he was twice interviewed by FBI agents working on the Plame leak investigation, the sources said.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald apparently learned about the June 23 conversation for the first time just days ago, after attorneys for Miller and The New York Times informed prosecutors that Miller had discovered a set of notes on the conversation.

Of the many things to be marvelled at in this whole saga, in the end what may stand out most is the hubris of these horse's asses. They saw (indeed, helped facilitate) what Ken Starr did to Clinton, yet they felt they could lie their way past Fitzgerald. Had they done nothing else wrong, they would deserve their punishment for that folly alone.

It's good to be the king

via Raw Story:

An analysis released by a Democratic senator found that Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton stock options have risen 3,281 percent in the last year, RAW STORY can reveal.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) asserts that Cheney's options -- worth $241,498 a year ago -- are now valued at more than $8 million. The former CEO of the oil and gas services juggernaut, Cheney has pledged to give proceeds to charity.

My guess is that very soon we will find out that the charity of Cheney's choice will be the Richard Cheney Legal Defense Fund, though a mil or two might go to the Cement Galoshes for Patrick Fitzgerald Fund

What isn't in the Miers paper trail

There is a ton o' bipartisan buzz about the sycophantic drivel disclosed in the handful of documents the White House has handed over to the Senate about their hopelessley outgunned Supreme Court nominee.

Harriet Miers, President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, quickly developed a deep and almost gushing admiration for her boss from her earliest days in Texas government.

"You are the best governor ever - deserving of great respect!" she wrote in 1997, in a belated birthday note that was typical of the tone she used in her correspondence with then-Gov. Bush.

The letter was one of a handful of personal notes included in more than 2,000 pages of documents released Monday by the Texas State Library - most of them routine legal memos, press releases and transcripts. The letters offer a rare glimpse into the mutual admiration that sprung up between Miers and Bush after they began working together on Bush's first campaign for Texas governor in 1994.

All the scorn and derision are appropriate and, I think, encouraging. We have reached an important inflection point in the death spiral of the Bush presidency when right and left agree that the very thing that led Bush to pick Miers -- her blind, unblinking hero worship of the intellectual dwarf who hired her -- is persuasive evidence of her unsuitability for the job.

But there is something even more troubling in the slim folio of documents from which the Senate is supposed to divine her suitability for a seat on the highest court in the land -- or, rather, something that isn't there. Where is the evidence of Miers' legal skills? Put aside abortion and other hot-button issues -- where is evidence of the analytical ability, language facility and basic judgment we expect of a state court trial court judge?

When a fiftyish woman gushes "You are the best governor ever - deserving of great respect!" like a schoolgirl writing in a high school yearbook, and there is no countervailing record of gravitas, the evidence compels the conclusion that the author, like her sponsor, is an intellecual lightweight.

Missing Matter Found, Partially Squaring Cosmic Accounting Sheets

Judith Miller found it among the same dust bunnies that had hidden her Scooter notes.

Our WYSIWYG U.N. Ambassador

Reuters AlertNet - U.S. blocks U.N. briefing on atrocities in Sudan

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton blocked a U.N. envoy on Monday from briefing the Security Council on grave human rights violations in Sudan's Darfur region, saying the council had to act against atrocities and not just talk about them.

Bolton, joined by China, Algeria and Russia, prevented Juan Mendez, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special adviser for the prevention of genocide, from briefing the council on his recent visit to Darfur, despite pleas from Annan and 11 other council members that Mendez be heard.
...
But Bolton said he had objected to the briefing to make the point the council should be "talking more about the steps it can take to do something about the deteriorating security situation" in Darfur. He gave no new proposals.
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Council diplomats who wanted to hear from Mendez said it was a council tradition to give the envoy a platform when Annan called for a briefing from his adviser on genocide.

They noted Bolton had lined up with the three council members -- Algeria, China and Russia -- which have watered down action against Khartoum.

"He's playing into the hands of people who don't want to do anything," said one council diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to irritate Washington.

We all knew what we were getting when Bush shoved Bolton down the throat of the U.N. We knew he would sabotage the institution at every opportunity. But this is still unfrigginbelievable. It's like the new sport of kings is a running competition to see who can make the statement most outrageously inconsistent with their actions. Bolton is obviously a very competitive fellow, and isn't going to let Bush's Katrina and Social Security feints go unanswered.

If Bolton actually proposes action on the genocide in Darfur, I'll eat my words. But the far more likely explanation is the standard Bush-Cheney war on truth here -- silence the facts, live the lie, and who gives a damn if thousands needlessly die.