Month: July 2005

Still Wrong, Always Wrong

Kevin Drum’s got some interesting stuff up today. He is one of the blogosphere’s resident experts on the Plame story — he was the go-to guy when it broke and he seems to to remember a lot of details I’ve forgotton (or never knew.)

He reminds us today (via Mickey Kaus) of this Howard Fineman analysis from 2003 in which Fineman speculates that the leak was really an attempt to smear Wilson and his wife as being part of a “pro-Saddam” CIA cabal. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

I am told by what I regard as a very reliable source inside the White House that aides there did, in fact, try to peddle the identity of Joe Wilson’s wife to several reporters. But the motive wasn’t revenge or intimidation so much as a desire to explain why, in their view, Wilson wasn’t a neutral investigator, but, a member of the CIA’s leave-Saddam-in-place team.

I think this may very well have played into at least some of the participants’ thinking at the time although since they’ve never made this explicit in the smear, I think it may have been meant more for beltway kids and the wingnut choir than for broad public consumption. This is inside baseball stuff.

The big players in this turf war are the neocons and Dick Cheney, who is only sort of an honorary neocon. He and Rummy are more simple craven power mongers. (He doesn’t give a shit about democracy which the neocons sorta, kinda do, even though they think we should create it by force, which is incoherent.) Anyway, it’s imnportant to remember that within this administration are a whole bunch of people who think that the CIA is made up of a bunch of hippies who don’t understand How The World Works.

What’s interesting about them is that they have always been wrong about everything. If there was no other reason not to back the war in Iraq, it was that it was being pushed by people who have either hugely overestimated every single threat this country has faced for the last 30 years or gotten the nature of the threat completely upside down.

Lawrence Korb wrote a piece about this subject in August of 2004, called “Time To Bench Team B”:

The reports of the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence miss the real problem facing the intelligence community. The real problem is not organization or culture, but the Team B concept which began in 1976, and the real villains are those hardliners who refuse to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of intelligence professionals about the threats facing the country.

[…]

To be sure, the intelligence community has made misjudgments. That is to be expected. But given the fact that the intelligence community has been second-guessed and publicly embarrassed when it tried to present unbiased objective assessments of threats from the Soviets, China, and rogue nations, it is not surprising that it caved in on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. While there was no formal Team B pressure, the hardliners were now back in power.

And from the Soviet threat to China to rogue states to Iraq, the neocons and hardliners were wrong each and every time. And they weren’t just wrong on some details, they massively, abundently wrong about everything. Korb discusses one particular fact in his piece that I think illuminates their rather insane view about terrorism:

In 1981, after the publication of Clare Sterling’s book, “The Terror Network,” which argued that global terrorists were actually pawns of the Soviets, leading hard-liners asked the CIA to look into the relationship between Soviets and terrorist organizations. The agency concluded that although there was evidence that the Soviets had assisted groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization with weapons and training, there was no evidence that the Soviets encouraged or approved these groups’ terrorist acts. However, hard-liners like Secretary of State Alexander Haig, CIA Chief William Casey and Policy Planning Director Wolfowitz rejected the draft as a naive, exculpatory brief and had the draft retooled to assert that the Soviets were heavily involved in supporting “revolutionary violence worldwide.”

Since they never adjust to changing circumstances or admit any new evidence that doesn’t fit their preconcieved notions, this was still the framework they were working from when bin Laden came on the scene. It’s why the neocon nutcase Laurie Mylroie was able to convince people in the highest reaches of the Republican intelligensia that Saddam had something to do with bin Laden, even though there was never a scintilla of evidence to back it up. They simply could not,and cannot to this day, come to grips with the fact that their view of how terrorism works — through “rogue states” and totalitarian sponsorship — is simply wrong.

When Clare Sterling’s book came out CIA director William Casey was said to have told his people, “read Claire Sterling’s book and forget this mush. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards who I pay $50,000 a year.” Wolfowitz and Feith are said to have told their staff in the Pentagon to read Laurie Mylroie’s book about Saddam and al Qaeda. Richard Clarke, in “Against All Enemies” quotes Wolfowitz as saying: “You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.”

This, then, is simply how they think. It’s as Rob Cordry says, “the facts are biased.” (That’s the state of mind that led neocon Judith Miller to make her bizarre incomprehensible comment “I was proved fucking right!”) They truly believe that even though they have been completely wrong about everything for the past thirty years that it just can’t be so.

And no matter what, in their minds the the CIA is always trying to screw them.

So the political environment in which Valeria Plame was outed was virtually hallucinogenic. There may have really been some part of certain members of the Bush administration’s dysfunctional lizard brains that really thought in July of 2003 that the CIA had been trying to set them up and used Joe Wilson to do it.

But it’s not July of 2003 now, is it? It’s two years later and we know for a fact that the analysts, including Wilson, who said the Niger deal was bullshit were right and we know that the analysts who doubted the evidence about Saddam’s WMD were right too.

Not that this will stop the Team B neocons from insisting that “they were proved fucking right.” They really are delusional and they always have been.

Karl Rove, however, is a lot of things, but delusional isn’t one of them. He just put out the hit on Plame and Wilson to shut down the questions Wilson was raising. He was taking care of business. But others in the administration may have made a good case, at least in their own beautiful minds, that they were the victims. God knows these people love to be victims.

I don’t know if you saw Wilson on the Today show, but I thought he acquitted himself very well — mainly because he kept on the topic of the larger Iraq lies. I really think this is a key to making people understand this story.

There is a confluence of events right now with the bad news on the ground in Iraq, the Downing Street memos, the London bombings and Rovegate flaring up that are beginning to filter into the body politic. A new conventional wisdom is being written. I think that people are putting these things together which is why you are seeing the preciputous dip in the president’s approval ratings. It’s not that people know, or even want to know, the details. Only junkies like me (and you) get this into it. But the ground has shifted and people are understanding that something went terribly wrong.

The president’s right hand man exposing a covert CIA agent for political puposes perfectly symbolizes the entire fetid mess.

Update: Looks like Rush got the memo. According to Bradblog:

Rush’s final words at the end of the show (referring to the Press Conference scheduled by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) to happen shortly): “Chuck Shumer is Joe Wilson’s ‘handler’ in this agency plot to bring down the President.”

Are the dittoheads buying this?

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No Longer A Beer Buddy

Finally, it’s not just honesty where Bush is taking a hit. Only 50 percent of those polled gave him high ratings for being easygoing and likeable, down from 57 in January; 43 percent gave him high ratings for being smart, down from 50; 40 percent gave him high ratings for being compassionate enough to understand average people, down from 47; and only 29 percent gave him high ratings for being willing to work with people whose viewpoints are different from his own, down from 33.

I’m not the greatest judge in the world because I’ve always thought he was a dominating, unlikeable, dumb, arrogant intolerant asshole. A bunch oif people thought he’d be fun to hang around with, though, and it’s a big reason why he got re-elected. Without his personal popularity, what has he really got?

The good news is that this should finally kill off the “enormously popular” president meme that refused to die. I’m sure Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert are in mourning today.

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Bookmark This

From Bloomberg:

Wilson’s Iraq Assertions Hold Up Under Fire From Rove Backers

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The Source

It’s nice to be able to fit another piece into the Rovegate puzzle. This Kos diary by PollyUSA is an excellent rundown of the original source of the Plame information — a classified state department document from 2002 that was then circulated all over Washington after Novak’s column ran. Clearly, most people following the case closely already know this because it’s all in the public record. I hadn’t connected the dots even though I’ve written about this document in a couple of different contexts.

In a nutshell:

There is a leaked classified state department document from 2002 in play in this case. It is widely considered to be the likely source of the information that Plame worked for the CIA.

It says that Valerie Plame recommended her husband for the job.

It was leaked to a bunch of news organizations during 2003 and is a piece of evidence in the Senate commission report.

This is the same document that was on the Africa trip with Colin Powell and the president.

The CIA has publicly disputed the accuracy of the memo, saying that the author of the memo could not have been at the meeting and therefore didn’t know what he was talking about.

PollyUSA rounded up a number of newpaper articles that discussed this document but here are just a couple of them:

WSJ October 17, 2003:

An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo.

The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.

WaPo December 26th 2003:

Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband’s trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.

It is a crime to leak classified information, so this may well be an element of Fitzgerald’s case. In an interesting sidenote, it was this document that JD Guckert referenced when he interviewed Wilson and it got him a visit from the FBI. (After preening about confidential sources for a while, Guckert eventually said that he’d read about the document in the Wall Street Journal.)His story confirms that the FBI was following up on this document and that means it probably was still classified when Guckert wrote about it in October 2003, however.

I have a couple of thoughts about this.

In order to stay out of legal and political trouble, members of Bush administration simply have to claim that they didn’t know Valerie Plame was undercover. So, if this classified report is the source of the leak and it only says “Wilson’s wife suggested he go on the mission” with no mention of her status, then it appears that not one person who saw that document — whether it was Colin Powell on Air Force One or whether it was Cheney and Libby with the entire Iraq Group holding their hand towels in the mens room —– not one bothered to raise a flag about this CIA “employee’s” status before Rove et al blabbed the story all over town. If they are innocent of purposefully outing a CIA Agent this is what we must believe.

I don’t have a top security clearance and I don’t work in Washington and I am as far out of the war planning for this country as you can get. Yet I know that I would have wondered whether it might be a matter of national security to tell the press that someone was a CIA employee. Anybody who watches “Alias” would know that for gawd’s sake. We are supposed to believe that top presidential advisors took the information from one state department document and ran with it without ever checking the details.

Could be. Nobody ever thought the president would personally authorize the break in of the Democratic National Committee, but he did.

Second, the CIA has disputed the characterization of Plame’s role in getting her husband the assignment. I don’t know or care whether she did or not — it’s a red herring. But nonetheless, it’s worth pointing out that is has been challenged by the CIA from the beginning. From Newsday July 22, 2003:

A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked “alongside” the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.

But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. “They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,” he said. “There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,” he said. “I can’t figure out what it could be.”

I think we’ve figured it out.

But what’s interesting about that is that this classified document that people consider the source of the leak was written in 2002. I’m assuming it was part of a report on what Wilson’s findings, although I have no proof of that. And I don’t know who wrote this memo (although it’s certain that some members of the press do, since they’ve seen it) but he or she has been described as an analyst at the INR — the state dept intelligence division. I have to wonder what was the purpose of putting in this little tid-bit about Plame in the first place?

It would be nice to know who wrote it if only to prove or disprove the speculation that Bolton’s cabal was involved. If he was, then this is a whole new ballgame. I would be very tempted to think that Bolton had spiked Wilson’s report from the get. On the other hand, Bolton and his minions apparently have not been called to the Grand Jury so perhaps that’s unlikely. If I had to guess, I’d say this tid-bit about Wilson’s wife was a throw away line that caught Rove and Libby’s attention as a possible way to feminize Wilson.

I’m speculating that when they got wind that Wilson was going to spill the beans they looked for dirt.(Wilson says he was told that when the yellowcake story was falling apart in March the VP’s office ordered a “work-up” on him.)This classified state department document contained the information that Wilson’s wife got him the job. The character assassins decided that this was their weapon — Wilson’s CIA employee wife got him the job for either nepotistic, partisan or treasonous reasons. Maybe something else. (Maybe all three if you ask John Gibson.) And the optics of it were that Wilson was an effeminate loser whose wife had to find work for him (“little wifey got it for him.”) It sure sounds like a Rove special.

And at the end of the day, the simple truth remains: they either knew she was undercover and outed her with malice aforethought or they were so stupid and sloppy that they never bothered to find out what her status was. Which explains why they are so intent upon making people believe that Plame wasn’t undercover. It’s their only decent defense.

I’m also reminded today of Murray Waas’ account of Roves testimony to the FBI:

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Everytime I read that I’m amazed. If that is true it is a truly damning confession of character assassination by the man who is the president’s most trusted advisor. Regardless of any actual crime being committed, I think that if the American people knew this a large majority would demand that Rove be dismissed. He basically admits that smearing opponents is something he does with the help of the entire Republican infrastructure. We know this stuff exists in politics, some on both sides. But to insist it’s “legitimate” and admit freely that you do it is something else.

But I mention it here because that passage contains something that may or may not be legally problematic for Rove. It depends upon his precise words, which we don’t have:

Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column.

I suppose it depends on what the definition of “circulate” is, if he even used that word at all. But, generally speaking, if he insisted that he hadn’t been talking about Plame before Novak’s column, he lied to the FBI. We know he spoke with Cooper.

And then there’s the classified document being passed around to every wingnut in town.

Rove is in an unpleasant box. He’s claimed that his aggressive smear campaign to to leak and disseminate derogatory information about Bush’s critics through partisan channels was completely legitimate — but that he didn’t know that Plame was undercover or that this document was classified. I hope for his sake that’s not actually his defense. I’ve long said he’s no genius, but nobody will believe he’s that stupid. I doubt Patrick Fitzgerald is that stupid either.

Hat tip to Grand Moff Texan in the comments.

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Connecting The Dots With Invisible Ink

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog to find that I’m more than a little glad to finally see General Geoffrey Miller finally exposed for the sadistic incompetent that he is — even a little bit. Apparently, he might be “reprimanded” for his sadistic tactics at Gitmo. But maybe not. I sure hope it doesn’t go that far because I’m sure it would really, really hurt his feelings. Testimony today before the Senate Armed Services Committee says that practices condoned by Miller (and approved by the pentagon) at Gitmo went too far:

Investigators described their findings before the Senate Armed Services Commttee Wednesday. They were looking into allegations by FBI agents who say they witnessed abusive interrogation techniques at the Guantanamo prison for terrorist suspects.

The chief investigator, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, described the interrogation techniques used on Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

It was learned later that he had tried to enter the U.S. in August 2001 but was turned away by an immigration agent at the Orlando, Fla., airport. Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was in the airport at the same time, officials have said.

Schmidt said that to get him to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra, forced him to wear a thong on his head, told him he was homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator, Schmidt added, and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women and forced him onto a leash, to act like a dog.

Still, he said, “No torture occurred.”

He was kept in solitary confinement for 160 days. Interrogations went on for 18 to 20 hours a day, for 48 out of 54 days. Apparently, however, this wasn’t torture because “torture involves inflicting physical pain or withholding food, water or medical care, none of which took place.”

Well, sure. Being forcibly “strip-searched” is a walk in the park. I would imagine that anybody who is captured by the enemy ought to be mighty careful going forward. If this is true, guards putting their fingers in orifices to break them isn’t actually torture. In fact, under this definition, sexual assault may not be torture at all since it might not feature the appropriate level of physical pain.

There is one teensy little problem with this AP story, however:

Miller, a subject of criticism by human rights groups, took command of the prison camp at Guantanamo in late 2002 with a mandate to get more and better information from prisoners. He later went to Iraq to oversee detainee operations there. He is now stationed at the Pentagon in a position unrelated to prisoners.

True. Except he was the guy who was sent to Abu Ghraib with the express orders to use his fabulous Gitmo techniques on Iraqis, who at the time, nobody was considering terrorists. We know what happened after he got there. It’s a fairly significant part of this story, I would think. Expecially since at least half of the techniques described in this report were the exact same “abuses” perpetrated by the low life bad apples on the night shift at Abu Ghriab! We’ve got pictures, ferchristsakes, doesn’t anybody remember that? How in the hell did Lynde and her friends just happen to come up with exactly the same college hijinks that were used on a top level prisoner in Gitmo???

We’re told that these techniques eventually resulted in the “20th hijacker” offering “useful” information. Perhaps. But I have to reserve judgement since virtually everyone involved has been lying their asses off from the beginning. Especially that sadist Geoffrey D Ripper, the artillery officer turned interrogation expert, who will undoubtedly skate on this whole thing.

Too bad about America’s reputation, though. It sure does make it tough to see the moral clarity through all the whitewash.

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Firing Offense #456

Matt Coopers lawyer said today:

For the last year or so, Matt has been a subpoenaed witness in a grand jury investigation.I advised him and he accepted the advice that he should not have private conversations with other people who may be witnesses in the grand jury proceeding. I was concerned about the perception. I was concerned about what Mr. Fitzgerald might think. And so it was on my advice that he did not personally contact his source.

For me to contact Mr. Rove’s lawyer at the time, prior to the time that Mr. Rove had been identified as Matt’s source, would have
actually been a breach of confidentiality. My conversation with Mr.
Rove was not privileged and would not have been privileged — with Mr. Rove’s attorney.

There was no indication that we had that Mr. Rove or his lawyer
were interested in receiving such a request. And it was really only
in the last few days, when Mr. Luskin started making some of his
comments, especially the one that I just quoted to you that was in the Wall Street Journal that led us to feel that we were on firm footing picking up the phone and calling and saying, “Based on your public comments, we would ask for an express and personal…,” and that’s what we did.

Rove could have made it clear, though legal channels, during the solid year that Fitzgerald was litigating this, that he didn’t expect Cooper to keep his confidence, if that’s what he was doing. He obviously knew that there was a battle royale going on between Time magazine and the special prosecutor and he knew that he’d spoken to Cooper. He could have let it be known that if Cooper was going to all this trouble over him, he needn’t bother.

Rove’s lawyer has been bloviating all week — and the RNC shills are repeating it like a mantra — that Rove had waived the privilege long ago and had nothing to hide. But he was willing, apparently, to let Cooper go to jail without lifting a finger to clarify that fact. I wouldn’t call that “fully cooperating with the investigation,” which is what both Scotty and Junior have been emphasizing is the prime directive.

He let Fitzgerald spend millions of taxpayer dollars to get Cooper to testify. He certainly had no legal obligation to help. But his boss, the president, did say that he wanted his staff to fully cooperate. Rove knew very well that Cooper was way out on a limb, and it was probably because of him, and he said nothing. And now he’s acting like he was a big hero.

He should be fired for that too. And asked to pay back the money that was spent by the prosecutor getting Cooper and TIME to reveal their source when all Rove had to do was make it clear through his lawyer that if Cooper was holding out because of him, he didn’t need to.

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Mehlman on Matthews

I think the RNC has made a mistake in going back into the original Wilson smear. Chris Matthews just showed footage of Cheney on Press The Meat. He was talking about how he’d personally been interested in the Niger story. It seems to back up Wilson. And the last thing they want is to have Cheney’s mug all over this story.

They also are making a mistake by pounding the fact that the entire leadership of the Democratic party including Kerry and Clinton are calling for Rove to resign. Mehlman even seemed a little gobsmacked by it. The problem is that almost everybody in the country believes that Democrats are the last people on the planet to go out on a limb. Without realizing it, Mehlman is being hoist by his own petard. Somebody just turned to me and said, “Jesus, if they’re saying it, he must be toast.”

Calling Democrats wimps for 20 years has its effects. It means that when they actually do say something people automatically assume that they aren’t acting out of political courage. They assume that there is no risk involved.

Mehlman also said that everyone knows that Karl Rove has the highest ethical standards. Hahahahahaha. To quote the Clenis — that dog won’t hunt. Once again, they are hoist by their own petard. You can’t go around telling everyone who’ll listen that Karl Rove is a cross between Sun Tzu and Machiavelli for years on end and then suddenly portray him as a simple, straight shooting public servant. Only the most ardent neanderthals are going to buy this. Certainly not one member of the press will.

This was a very weak performance. They aren’t on their “A” game.

Oh and the new NBC Wall Street Journal Poll is out and it ain’t good news for Bush. Check this out:

Bush honesty rating drops to lowest point

[…]

Only 41 percent give Bush good marks for being “honest and straightforward” — his lowest ranking on this question since he became president. That’s a drop of nine percentage points since January, when a majority (50 percent to 36 percent) indicated that he was honest and straightforward. This finding comes at a time when the Bush administration is battling the perception that its rhetoric doesn’t match the realities in Iraq, and also allegations that chief political adviser Karl Rove leaked sensitive information about a CIA agent to a reporter. (The survey, however, was taken just before these allegations about Rove exploded into the current controversy.)

Drumbeat.

Update: here’s a better link to the WSJ poll.
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“It Turns Out Little Wifey Did It”

If anyone would like to see the full manifestation of the Rove smear against Plame and her pathetic, henpecked husband in all it’s glory, you only need to watch the video (via Crooks and Liars) of John Gibson’s insane rant yesterday.

Newshounds has the transcript. Here’s just a little taste:

You wouldn’t send a peacenik to see if we should go to war, if we need to go to war, now would you? That’s exactly what happened, as they say in the news biz, inquiring minds now want to know how the heck did this happen? Well, it turns out little wifey did it.

[…]

So why should Rove get a medal?

Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitudes about the war in Iraq – she was married to him – and sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies. Where I come from, we want to know who that is. We do not want secret spymasters pulling the puppet strings in the background. That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it.

Yeah. Senior white house advisor and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove was an interepid whistleblower, putting himself on the line exposing government wrongdoing when he outed Plame. He is the Daniel Ellsberg of the Bush administration bravely risking all to let the people know what its government was doing.

My head hurts.

Newshounds came up with something else quite interesting about Gibson’s schizoid ramblings, however:

Notes: This is something I haven’t done before; I compared the transcript posted on FoxNews.com with what he actually said, reading along. The discrepancies are interesting:

website: conclusions from a Senate investigation
actual: conclusions from a joint investigation of Congress

website: Well, turns out the wife did it.
actual: Well, it turns out little wifey did it.

website: Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitudes about the war in Iraq and George W. Bush’s policies. Sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies.
actual: Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitudes about the war in Iraq – she was married to him – and sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies.

website: That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should own up to it.
actual: That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it.

website: Rove should get a medal if he did what he says he didn’t.
actual: Rove should get a medal even if he did do what he says he didn’t do.

Somebody didn’t think Gibson’s statement was quite the thing so they doctored it. But hey, they never said they told the truth, only that they were fair and balanced. Which isn’t true either.

Oh, and be sure to check out this extension of that theme from today’s Wall Street Journal: Karl Rove, Whistleblower.

Thanks to reader Four Legs Good for the tip.

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Wild In Beantown

Does anyone find it at all ironic that Rick Santorum is blaming Boston for the priest molestation scandal? Has he ever heard the phrase “banned in Boston?” Does he know where it comes from?

From the late 19th century until the mid-20th century, the phrase “Banned in Boston” was used to describe a literary work, motion picture, play, or other work prohibited from distribution or exhibition. During this time, Boston city officials took it upon themselves to “ban” anything that they found to be salacious, immoral, or offensive: theatrical shows were run out of town, books confiscated, and motion pictures were prevented from being shown—sometimes stopped in mid-showing after an official had “seen enough”. This movement had several effects. One was that Boston, arguably the cultural center of the United States since its founding, now came across as less sophisticated than many lesser cities without such stringent censorship practices. Another is that the phrase “banned in Boston” began to be associated in the popular mind with something sexy and lurid; many distributors of such works were happy when they were banned in Boston, as it gave them more appeal elsewhere; many distributors also advertised that their products had been banned in Boston when in fact they had not to increase their appeal.

It hasn’t actually changed all that much. I love Boston, but a free-wheeling sexual libertine town it ain’t.

In fact, if we were to accept Rick Santorum’s silly cause and effect it would probably make more sense to say that it was the repressive sexual attitudes of Boston combined with the unnatural state of celibacy that “caused” the priests to molest countless children.

This is, of course, completely ridiculous. But it actually makes more sense than Santorum’s armchair sociology, which isn’t saying much. It would also make more sense to say that the priests’ bodies had been taken over by demons. Which I’m sure Santorum also believes. Liberal demons, naturally. Is there any other kind?

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Judy, Judy, Judy

Gene Lyons writes in to point out this little tid-bit about our good friend Judith Miller. One of the things missed in all the paeans to Judy’s martyrdom to the confidential source is that the Jeanne D’arc of the Gray Lady had been known to burn her sources without a second thought if it suits her. Seems Judy has some shifting standards when it comes to betraying the reporter’s privilege:

In April, Miller interviewed an expert from the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington on background, then made up a quote and attributed it to the person, who she then named.

It infuriated colleagues and a senior editor, but it only merited a small editors’ note on April 9: “An article on Saturday about the search by United States forces for chemical, biological and radiation weapons in Iraq included a comment attributed to Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the [Stimson] Center, a research institute in Washington. Ms. Smithson was depicted as suggesting that Bush administration officials might be less certain of finding such weapons now than before the war. She was quoted as saying that ‘they may be trying to dampen expectations because they are worried they won’t find anything significant.’ In fact the comments were paraphrases of a remark Ms. Smithson made in an e-mail exchange for the Times’s background information, on the condition that she would not be quoted by name. Attempts to reach her before publication were unsuccessful. Thus the comments should not have been treated as quotations or attributed to her.”

This is actually what Miller did: the interview was conducted by e-mail, Miller added that “if I don’t hear back from you I’ll assume it’s OK to use.” Not hearing back, she used it. But the scientist didn’t check her e-mail further that day.

In fairness, it may be that this confidential source didn’t explicitly say she wanted to be on “super-double-secret-deep” backround and Karl Rove evidently did. So it was probably her own fault for thinking she could rely on “backround” alone to keep Judy from making up quotes and spilling her name all over the New York Times. She should have known better. And, after all, this source was questioning the evidence for WMD and Judy couldn’t really sanction that. Indeed, one might even wonder if she burned this source on purpose.

So, before we get all gooey about Judy’s great sacrifice in fighting for the reporter’s privilege, maybe we need to ask whether or not she believes in it in the first place. The evidence suggests that she doesn’t.

So why is she in jail?

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