Month: December 2005

Ask Junior

by digby

Newspaper columnist Robert Novak is still not naming his source in the Valerie Plame affair, but he says he is pretty sure the name is no mystery to President Bush.

“I’m confident the president knows who the source is,” Novak told a luncheon audience at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh on Tuesday. “I’d be amazed if he doesn’t.”

“So I say, ‘Don’t bug me. Don’t bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is.’ “

[…]

Novak said his role in the Plame affair “snowballed out of proportion” as a result of a “campaign by the left.”

But he also blamed “extremely bad management of the issue by the White House. Once you give an issue to a special prosecutor, you lose control of it.”

And here I thought the president believed that they would never know who it was because reporters always protect leakers.

I also wonder exactly how Novak’s role in the Plame affair snowballed out of proportion because of a campaign by the left. Last I heard, Novak was the preferred wingnut Karl Rove used to out a CIA agent for revenge so that he could “get it out there” and then circulate the story all over town. Was his “role” actually less significant than that? What does Bob think worked the best for “the left’s” non-existent campaign —all the non-existent Democratic congressional hearings or the non-existent non-stop coverage by the liberal cable networks? I know the lefty blogs are very, very heavy duty political players and all, but as I recall they were the only form of “media” that cared about this story for more than five minutes. IIRC, the guy who really kicked things off was a senior administration official who told the washington post that the outing was done purely for revenge. Unless he or she is a lefty plant, the “campaign” really took off from there.

Once again, it’s comforting to see that right wing victimology hasn’t been diminished by its enormous power.

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Deep Throat

by digby

Something has gone terribly wrong at the Washington Post. And I’m not just talking about pauvre tinkerbell.

Get a load of Cohen:

To read George Packer’s “The Assassin’s Gate” is to be reminded that the Iraq war is not the product of oil avarice, or CIA evil, but of a surfeit of altruism, a naive compulsion to do good. That entire collection of neo- and retro-conservatives — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and particularly Paul Wolfowitz — made war not for oil or for empire but to end the horror of Saddam Hussein and, yes, reorder the Middle East.

They were inept. They were duplicitous. They were awesomely incompetent, and, in the case of Bush, they were monumentally ignorant and incurious, but they did not give a damn for oil or empire. This is why so many liberals, myself included, originally supported the war. It engaged us emotionally. It seemed . . . well, right — a just cause.

It would be nice if Hollywood understood that. It would be nice if those who agree with Hollywood — who think, as Gaghan does, that this is a brave, speaking-truth-to-power movie when it’s really just an outdated cliche — could release their fervid grip on old-left bromides about Big Oil, Big Business, Big Government and the inherent evil of George Bush, and come up with something new and relevant. I say that because something new and relevant is desperately needed. Neoconservatism crashed and burned in Iraq, but liberalism never even showed up. The left’s criticism of the war from the very start was too often a porridge of inanities about oil or empire or Halliburton — or isolationism by another name. It was childish and ultimately ineffective. The war came and Bush was reelected. How’s that for a clean whiff?

I detect a whiff of something, that’s for sure. And it’s definitely the good shit.

I suppose you could call Bush an idealist. That whole smoking gun in a mushroom cloud thing was quite the inspiration. It’s right up there with “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

How about this for a new and relevant liberal argument: anyone who supported the war was a fool or an asshole because it was patently obvious by 2002 that this country was in the hands of an insane megalomaniacal Republican machine and the braindead sycophantic mediawhores who gratefully dined on their droppings. Anyone with half a brain knew that it wasn’t a good idea to give a blank check to crazed power mad freaks to start invading, torturing and killing at their discretion. Most of the world agreed. Not complicated. Not idealistic. Plain. Fucking. Common. Sense.

Clearly, Cohen is the model for a “good” liberal at the Washington Post these days. He doesn’t upset the White House or Patrrick Ruffini one little bit.

November 24, 2000:

“Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.”

What a good boy. He just loves him some Junior.

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Spinning Fitz

by digby

Last night it looked as though Jim VandeHei had broken the Plame case wide open when he said on Hardball that Stephen Hadley had told Rove about Plame. Today, the WaPo is backtracking, saying that VandeHei meant Libby, not Rove. VandeHei wrote last October:

White House adviser Karl Rove told the grand jury in the CIA leak case that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, may have told him that CIA operative Valerie Plame worked for the intelligence agency before her identity was revealed, a source familiar with Rove’s account said yesterday.

In a talk that took place in the days before Plame’s CIA employment was revealed in 2003, Rove and Libby discussed conversations they had had with reporters in which Plame and her marriage to Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV were raised, the source said. Rove told the grand jury the talk was confined to information the two men heard from reporters, the source said.

This is very likely to be the “official A” conversation mentioned in the Libby indictment:

On or about July 10 or July 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke to a senior official in the White House (“Official A”) who advised LIBBY of a conversation Official A had earlier that week with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson’s wife was discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson’s trip. LIBBY was advised by Official A that Novak would be writing a story about Wilson’s wife.

(Assuming he isn’t covering for a sourse who told him Hadley was Rove’s original source) VandeHei’s comment yesterday indicates that he thinks it makes sense that Rove “learned” about Plame in the very same conversation in which he told Libby he’d confirmed Plame’s CIA status to Bob Novak. I think that’s ridiculous and I suspect that this is one of the bizarre Rovian explanations that keeps Rove in Fitz’s sites.

I was trying to explain how we got to this point to a friend who had lost the threads of this story and so I wrote a little primer, as I understand it. I thought that some readers might find it useful:

The Rove version of events seems to be that Rove heard about Plame from “someone outside the white house” whose identity he can’t remember. Although he lied about it to the FBI, he admitted to the Grand Jury that he confirmed that Plame was CIA to Bob Novak and that Novak told him that he was going to write a story about it. But he also said that it wasn’t until July 10th or 11th, when he happened to be chattering in the office to Libby about this Novak call, that he really learned about Plame. He then spoke to Matt Cooper (on the morning of the 11th) spilled the beans about Plame, shot off an e-mail to Hadley saying that he “didn’t take the bait” — and then forgot all about that Cooper conversation and the e-mail.

He didn’t remember talking to Cooper when, just a week after the conversation, all hell broke loose in Washington when Novak’s column came out and it was revealed that Plame was an NOC.

He didn’t remember when he was asked to search for any documentation about Wilson and he didn’t find that e-mail to Hadley either.

He didn’t remember the conversation with Cooper when the FBI talked to him and he didn’t remember it when he first testified before the Grand Jury.

It wasn’t until the following spring when Viveca Novak “pushed back” Bob Luskin, revealing that she knew Rove was Cooper’s source and Luskin then fortuitously “found” the missing e-mail, that Rove apparently remembered the conversation.

Oddly, throughout this time he apparently did remember the Novak confirmation. And it would seem (although we don’t know this) that he remembered the Libby conversation from the beginning while completely forgetting he talked to Cooper or wrote an e-mail to Hadley on the very same day.

After the miracle e-mail appears, Rove testifies to the GJ in October of 2004 about his conversation with Cooper. He has no reason to worry about what Cooper might say because even though he issued a “waiver”, Cooper is refusing to testify and he and TIME are fighting all attempts to get them to cooperate.

At this point, it appears that all anyone knows is “gossip” that Cooper and Rove spoke. Rove says the Plame matter was a passing reference in a conversation about welfare reform.

But TIME, surprisingly, gives up the notes the next summer when the Supreme Court refuses to take the appeal and Cooper’s lawyer finds a way to get Rove to release Cooper from his promise on the day he is slated to go to jail. Unfortunately for Rove, Cooper testifies (and his notes confirm) that Rove never mentioned welfare reform and spoke at greater length and in much greater detail about Plame than he had testified to earlier.

Again,it seems that Rove has not been completely forthcoming with the prosecutor.

Fitzgerald apparently did not buy the convenient Hadley e-mail memory restoration business. (He may have been convinced that other aspects of Rove’s story don’t add up either.) He was ready to indict. It is supposedly at this point that Luskin comes forward with yet another piece of previously undisclosed information — reporter Viveca Novak is the one who set him on the trail of the Hadley e-mail back in the first part of 2004, long before Karl could have known that Cooper was on the hot seat. How this is supposed to exonerate Rove, we still don’t know.

According to VandeHei, Luskin says that this conversation took place in January of 2004 and Luskin told Rove about it before he went before the grand jury:

One possible explanation of why the date is so important is that Luskin could contend it would have been foolish for Rove to try to cover up his role when he knew — because of Novak’s disclosure to Luskin — that a number of people knew he had talked to Cooper and that it probably would soon become public.

The “why would he do something so stupid” defense rarely works and Luskin knows it. If this is his story he just threw the Hail Mary to the wrong end zone. In fact, the story is so absurd that VandeHei’s the only one who’s reporting it.

The conventional wisdom is that Luskin claimed that he started the e-mail search after he talked to Viveca Novak in either March or May, prompting Rove to go before the grand jury in October to say the e-mail jogged his memory and he now remembered the whole thing. We all assume that this is a crappy defense because it wouldn’t have taken between March and October (or May and October) to locate this e-mail. (But as Jeralyn points out, it’s possible that Luskin turned this e-mail over and offered up Rove’s recantation earlier than October and that Fitzgerald just didn’t call him to testify before then for unknown reasons.)

I don’t know how relevant it is but there seems to be a discrepancy between what Luskin and Viveca Novak told Fitzgerald. According to Novak, Fitzgerald spoke to her informally for a couple of hours on Novemnber 10th. She says that she couldn’t remember when she spoke with Luskin but it was most likely May. We know that he then put Robert Luskin himself under oath on December 2, 2005. (By all acouunts, it is highly unusual to put a suspect’s lawyer under oath.) Fitz then called Novak and requested she come in again to testify under oath this time. She says that she discovered by that time that that she had also spoken with Luskin in March but she still doesn’t know when she spilled the beans about Rove and Cooper.

I’m sure there are missing elements in what we know of Rove’s story, but this is the gist of what we know:

He lied to the FBI about being Novak’s source. He says he has forgotton important conversations and when he belatedly does remember them, he remembers them very differently than others do. He only “finds” important documents months after they are subpoenaed and when they can be used to bolster his evolving explanations. At the final hour, just as he is about to be indicted, his lawyer comes forward with yet more undisclosed information.

Time after time, Rove has played Fitzgerald for a chump, doling out bits of information only as he has to as if he were playing the Washington spin game instead of dealing with a federal prosecutor. But unlike the credulous DC press corps, who seem to have trouble keeping this story straight in their minds, Fitzgerald has a cadre of prosecutors and FBI agents, as well as a memory like a steel trap, that is keeping track of all this. Rove can’t spin his way out of this.

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Bada Bing

by digby

The reporter editor who raises questions about the appropriateness of Dan Froomkin’s column is John Harris — the same guy featured in this interview:

Paul McLeary: You covered the Clinton presidency for the Washington Post from 1995 to 2001, and during that contentious second term, what was your general take on the mood of the press corps in response to Clinton and his policies?

John F. Harris: The mood of the press corps was oftentimes kind of sour — sour in both directions. People tend to forget, for understandable reasons because the Lewinsky scandal was such a sensational affair, that 1997 was in its own way a very sullen, snippy, disagreeable year in the relationship between the White House and the press. Most news organizations — the Washington Post included — were devoting lots of resources, lots of coverage, to the campaign fund-raising scandal which grew out of the ’96 campaign, and there were a lot of very tantalizing leads in those initial controversies. In the end they didn’t seem to lead anyplace all that great.But there were tons of questions raised that certainly, to my mind, merited aggressive coverage.

Now who exactly, was asking all those “questions” do you suppose? And who, exactly, is giving John Harris and the rest of the Washington Post a hard time about Dan Froomkin today? If you guess that it’s Republicans, you’d undoubtedly be right.

Here’s a fun example of how this works:

Russert: Libby called me to complain about something he had seen on MSNBC…

Imus: What did he complain about on MSNBC, do you remember?

Russert: I haven’t gone into it,–you know-publicly-cause I just didn’t want to get involved with all that viewer complaints, but I do remember it because of his language that he chose and that’s why- I actually called Ben Shapiro, the president of NBC news and said I just gave your direct line to this guy named Lewis Scooter Libby, who is upset about something he watched on TV and you may hear from him.

I understand that the press comes under tremendous pressure when they write negative things about the administration. Their access dries up. They are frozen out of the scoops. Their bosses are called and they are asked to explain themselves. The other day when all the news outlets were gleefully reporting that Bush had come back up in the polls a bit, I could understand that the reporters were tremendously relieved to get the Republican attack dogs off their backs with a little good news for their boy.

That’s how things work. We get that. But please don’t blow smoke up our asses about “credibility” ok? We know what’s going on. The Republicans operate like the Sopranos. And they’re just as dumb. If the media would report this crap up front, we could put an end to this nonsense.

Update: Harris shakes out his lace cuff, takes a long whiff of snuff and puts Froomkin in his slaggardly, bloggy place.

Fine. Fuck it. Change the name if it bothers the “real” white house reporters so much. Call it The Whorehouse Report. It amounts to the same thing.

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Novakula Rises

Via Kos, I see that Bob Novak is reporting that Republicans are begging Katherine Harris to drop out of the Florida senate race. Wasn’t that the issue that old Bob and James Carville were bantering about when Novak lost it on the air?

ED HENRY: katherine harris went onto the house of representatives. now she wants to move over to the united states senate. today she got the news that the speaker of the florida house won’t challenge her for the republican nomination. she is blaming unnamed newspapers for tarnishing her image by doctoring her makeup with photo shop. that computer program. bob, have you been investigating this story?

BOB NOVAK: no, but i’ve had the same experience that she did. a lot of my trouble in the world is they’ve doctored my makeup and the colorized me in a lot of newspapers on my picture. i sympathize with her.

HENRY: who did it?

NOVAK: i can’t tell you.

JAMES CARVILL: yeah, the two happiest people in america today about this decision is bill nelson and jay leno. i mean —

HENRY: bill nelson the democratic senator.

CARVILLE: and jay leno. they’re going to go nuts over this. they’re messing with my makeup. you don’t know who it is. i mean, let’s say this. she’s going to be good for the humor circuit and the speech circuit. she’s good for a lot. i think that nelson, it’s no secret the white house wanted the speaker to run. i suspect the nelson people are feeling pretty good here today.

NOVAK: a couple of points here. the first place, don’t be too sure she’s going to lose. all the establishment’s against her. i’ve seen these republican — anti-establishment candidates do pretty well. ronald reagan, i guarantee you the establishment wasn’t for him. we just elected a senator from oklahoma, senator tom colebert, everybody in the establishment was against him. she might get elected. [CROSS TALK]

NOVAK: let me finish what i’m going to say, james. i know you hate to hear me

CARVILLE: he’s got to show she is right wingers he’s got backbone. show them you’re tough.

NOVAK: i think that’s bullshit and i hate that. just let it go.

I don’t know that this has anything to do with anything. I just thought it would be fun to relive the moment when Novak was forced to go back into his coffin for the duration.

Transcript via Wonkette.

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Closure

I have turned off all the cable news stations for the rest of the day. Watching the macabre death watch of Stanley Williams gives me the same sick feeling in my gut that seeing those videos of hostages in Iraq does. The endless slide show of pictures of the guy while a little clock in the corner counts down the hours until he will be killed is beyond my ken. I just don’t see how this helps anything. Life without parole sounds like civilized justice to me. This state sanctioned cold-blooded execution stuff is something else entirely.

In other news, Mexico just outlawed the death penalty, leaving the United States among the following countries that allow it:

* Afghanistan
* Antigua and Barbuda
* Bahamas
* Bahrain
* Bangladesh
* Barbados
* Belarus
* Belize
* Botswana
* Burundi
* Cameroon
* Chad
* China (People’s Republic)
* Comoros
* Congo (Democratic Republic)
* Cuba
* Dominica
* Egypt
* Equatorial Guinea
* Eritrea
* Ethiopia
* Gabon
* Ghana
* Guatemala
* Guinea
* Guyana
* India
* Indonesia
* Iran
* Iraq
* Jamaica
* Japan
* Jordan
* Kazakhstan
* Korea, North
* Korea, South
* Kuwait
* Kyrgyzstan
* Laos
* Lebanon
* Lesotho
* Liberia
* Libya
* Malawi
* Malaysia
* Mongolia
* Nigeria
* Oman
* Pakistan
* Palestinian Authority
* Philippines
* Qatar
* Rwanda
* St. Kitts and Nevis
* St. Lucia
* St. Vincent and the Grenadines
* Saudi Arabia
* Sierra Leone
* Singapore
* Somalia
* Sudan
* Swaziland
* Syria
* Taiwan
* Tajikistan
* Tanzania
* Thailand
* Trinidad and Tobago
* Uganda
* United Arab Emirates
* United States
* Uzbekistan
* Vietnam
* Yemen
* Zambia
* Zimbabwe

Interesting company, isn’t it? With the exception of Belize, Guatamala and some Caribbean islands we are the only country in North America, South America or Europe to have the death penalty.

Can someone explain to me again about how we are defending western civilization against the barbarians. I don’t think I quite understand it.

Update: Guyana is in S. America and Belarus is in Eastern Europe. My bad. Point stays the same.

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Push Back

by digby

Is it really true that it’s ethical for one journalist to reveal a colleague’s confidential source to a third source?

I’m in desperate need of an emergency panel on blogger ethics because I’m confused. David Corn says that Viveca Novak screwed up by not telling her editors that Luskin was using a conversation she’d never mentioned to anyone as a get out of jail card for Karl Rove. That sounds right to me. She really should have told her editors. This was a big story and had they known about Luskin’s reaction perhaps they would have pursued the story differently and gotten the truth out to the public.

But Corn also says that she did nothing wrong when she told Luskin that Rove being Matt Cooper’s source was all over TIME magazine, which I really don’t understand at all. Novak herself admits that it was a mistake:

Toward the end of one of our meetings, I remember Luskin looking at me and saying something to the effect of “Karl doesn’t have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt.” I responded instinctively, thinking he was trying to spin me, and said something like, “Are you sure about that? That’s not what I hear around TIME.” He looked surprised and very serious. “There’s nothing in the phone logs,” he said. In the course of the investigation, the logs of all Rove’s calls around the July 2003 time period–when two stories, including Matt’s, were published mentioning that Plame was Wilson’s wife–had been combed, and Luskin was telling me there were no references to Matt. (Cooper called via the White House switchboard, which may be why there is no record.)

I was taken aback that he seemed so surprised. I had been pushing back against what I thought was his attempt to lead me astray. I hadn’t believed that I was disclosing anything he didn’t already know. Maybe this was a feint. Maybe his client was lying to him. But at any rate, I immediately felt uncomfortable. I hadn’t intended to tip Luskin off to anything. I was supposed to be the information gatherer. It’s true that reporters and sources often trade information, but that’s not what this was about. If I could have a do-over, I would have kept my mouth shut; since I didn’t, I wish I had told my bureau chief about the exchange. Luskin walked me to my car and said something like, “Thank you. This is important.”

She says she was uncomfortable. She hadn’t intended to “tip Luskin off.” If she had a do-over, she would have kept her mouth shut. Yet Corn insists that she did nothing wrong.

Although Corn expends a great deal of energy lighting up the straw man, I haven’t seen anyone accusing her of being a right wing operative. It’s not her politics that are at issue. It’s her ethics. “Pushing back” shouldn’t include exposing her colleague Matt Cooper’s source to a third party. She ended up becoming part of the story and the investigation because of that. It’s a major screw up that shines yet another bright light on the curious ethical habits of the DC establishment.

Apparently others at TIME magazine, not just Cooper and his editors, knew that Karl Rove was personally blabbing to the press that Plame was CIA. (Half of Washington seems to have known it.) Viveca Novak knew and blabbed it to Karl Rove’s lawyer over drinks at Cafe Deluxe, Lawrence O’Donnell knew and kept it secret for months because he didn’t want to be subpoenaed and God knows how many other people knew it and passed it on to other privileged insiders or kept it to themselves for selfish reasons. Can’t reporters like Corn understand why we poor hapless rubes out here in the hinterlands (not to mention the Justice department) find their shrieking for the last year and half about the sanctity of the confidential source just a little bit self-serving?

I’ve never quarrelled with Matt Cooper taking his promise to keep Karl Rove’s name confidential all the way to the Supreme Court. (I wondered about Judith Miller being entitled to the reporter’s privilege when it was clear that she had not written a story and had not been assigned one, however.) I understand that reporters need to keep their sources identities secret at times. What I don’t understand is the practice of going back to powerful sources who lie to you again and again and granting them anonymity so that they can spread scurrilous stories without having to take responsibility for them. I don’t understand why it’s ok for a reporter to spill the name of a colleague’s confidential source over drinks at Cafe Deluxe or why the public should accept that a newsroom and friends and cocktail party guests should know the names of these confidential sources, but the people (even “the people” as represented by the government) should not. I don’t know why a reporter can keep important information on ice for months and years because they want to break the news in a book long after it has any relevance. It seems to me that the Beltway press corps wants it both ways. They don’t want to be forced to tell the law or the public who their confidential sources are but they reserve for themselves the pleasure of blabbing it to their friends, other sources and each other.

The DC press corps has no idea how they look to the rest of the country after more than a decade of running with GOP trumped up scandals, pimping for impeachment, trivializing the effects of an unorthodox presidential election in 2000, and then saluting smartly and following Dick Cheney over the cliff on Iraq. We liberals never thought of the press as particularly partisan. We thought of it as competent or incompetent. But for a lot of reasons, for the last 15 years the DC press corps have far too often aligned themselves with a manipulative GOP political establishment to the point where it’s been hard to see where one ends and the other begins. It’s not a matter of political preference. It’s insiderism. And when you become an insider in a corrupt system, for money, access, fame, fun whatever … you become corrupt yourself.

I’m not surprised that the WaPo staffers don’t like links to bloggers and others on the WaPo site. We are very critical. And I’m sure that we are often unfair and often flat wrong. But it would behoove these guys to stop consoling themselves with the notion that they “must be doing something right” if both sides are mad at them, and take a good look at the nature of these complaints. The right has spent the last quarter century in an organized campaign to work the refs and push the dialog to the right. The complaints coming from the left are the result of pent-up frustration at the tabloidization, the celebrity chasing, the insiderism. We have no organized campaign and we don’t see the media as being politically biased. We see it as abdicating its duty to sort out the important from the trivial and connect the dots in these confusing times that are ruled by spin, PR and marketing on all sides.

This country cannot survive without proper journalism. Blogs can’t do it. We need newspapers and news broadcasters who keep foremost in their minds the fact that they are indispensible to a functioning democracy. For the last fifteen years Washington politics have been covered as if they are high school with money. The DC press corps needs to reacquaint themselves with the idea that their purpose is not to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can keep their confidences. Their job is to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can get to the truth and write about it.

Update: Firedoglake has more on the WaPo ombudsman letter linked above that discusses the dissatisfaction of the staffers about linking and Dan Froomkin. Jane sets the story straight as only she can.

Crooks and Liars weighs in too.

Update II:

Thank you Dan Froomkin:

There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same approach with John Kerry, had he become president.

This column’s advocacy is in defense of the public’s right to know what its leader is doing and why. To that end, it calls attention to times when reasonable, important questions are ducked; when disingenuous talking points are substituted for honest explanations; and when the president won’t confront his critics — or their criticisms — head on.

The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so — not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.

Update: For those who don’t understand why it is wrong to reveal Cooper’s source to the source’s lawyer, it’s called the law of unintended consequences, which I think this story illustrates quite well. She had no way of knowing how blurting that information out would affect the story, or the case, but she does now. The rule of thumb is that if you know the name of your colleague’s source, keep your mouth shut. Period. She could have “pushed back” in any number of ways that didn’t include revealing Rove’s name. It was careless and cavalier and she’s paying for it (and the proverbial cover-up) now.

UpdateII: More here

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Father Knows Best

Aside from being a bad son (like his hero, Junior Bush) and publicly disrespecting his much more accomplished father, Chris Wallace is an idiot. Via Americablog:

Asked about DNC chair Howard Dean’s recent prediction that the U.S. would lose the war in Iraq, Wallace told Carr:

“We are in a war. We do have 150,000-plus American soldiers over there. I mean, it’s Tokyo Rose, for God sakes, going on radio saying we can’t win the war.”

I guess he’s unaware of Tokyo Rose’s story (which is typical because he’s a rightwing moron):

Iva Ikuko Toguri is the woman who was tried as Tokyo Rose. She is a first-generation Japanese-American who happened to be visiting a sick relative in Japan in 1941. When war was declared between Japan and the U.S., Toguri was trapped in Japan and pressured by Japanese military police to renounce her American citizenship. She refused. Instead, she learned Japanese and took two jobs to support herself while she sought a way to return home.

One of her jobs was as a typist for Radio Tokyo. There she met American and Australian prisoners of war who were being forced to broadcast radio propaganda. Toguri scavenged black-market food, medicine, and supplies for these POWs. When Radio Tokyo wanted a female voice for their propaganda shows, the POWs selected Toguri. She was one of many female, English-speaking voices on Radio Tokyo, and she took the radio name of “Orphan Ann.” Her POW friends wrote her scripts and tried to sneak in pro-American messages whenever possible.

After the war, several reporters went to Japan to find and interview the infamous Tokyo Rose, offering a large cash payment for an interview. A woman at Radio Tokyo pointed the reporters to Iva Toguri, and Toguri, thinking that she and her new husband, Felipe d’Aquino, could use the money, agreed to be interviewed. She even signed a contract stating that she was the infamous Tokyo Rose. A reporter gave the interview notes to U.S. Army Counter Intelligence, and in 1945, the U.S. arrested and imprisoned Toguri in Japan. She was released in 1946, but was arrested again in 1948, and taken to the U.S. to be tried for treason.

Her trial was considered the most expensive in American history at that time. The U.S. government stacked the deck against Toguri and her meager defense, and the judge later admitted he was prejudiced against her from the start. Toguri was found guilty of only one of the eight treason charges — “That she did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships.” She was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000. Because she was a model prisoner, Toguri was released early in 1956, although she was served with a deportation order which took two years to fight.

In 1976, the TV news show 60 Minutes told the Tokyo Rose story from Toguri’s point of view. This led to a full pardon for Toguri from President Gerald Ford in 1977.

Chris should have listened to his father. He might have learned something.

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CRS* Disease

by digby

In the spring of ’04, responding to to Karl Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin saying out of the blue over drinks one night, “Karl doesn’t have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt,” Viveca Novak just happened to let it slip that it was all over TIME magazine that Karl Rove was the leaker. Luskin said “thank you. This is important.”

She didn’t tell her editors or the public during the entire time a first amendment challenge was being waged against her magazine all the way to the Supreme Court. She said nothing as her colleague Cooper faced jail time up until the last possible moment, not even when Rove’s lawyer essentially AGAIN, more than a year after she told him otherwise, said those magic words — this time to the Wall Street Journal (“If Matt Cooper’s going to jail, it’s not for Karl Rove.”)

She didn’t tell her editors or the public when Luskin informed her that she was going to be called by the prosecutor nor did she tell them when she hired a lawyer and gave the prosecutor a statement. It was only when she was actually called to give a deposition under oath that she decided that she needed to reveal that Luskin had proferred her as Rove’s alibi.

She made no notes of her numerous conversations with Luskin even though she claims that she was working on the Rove story. And she can’t remember when the conversations specifically took place. Apparently, she didn’t think it was important to make a note of it, even though she was allegedly working on the story at the time.

She wishes she could have a do-over. She says she would do it differently. Like, for instance, she wouldn’t go around revealing Matt Cooper’s sources. Cuz, it’s like mortifying. Totally.

Most amazingly, after she had already talked to the prosecutor for the first time and still not told her editors of her own involvement (or had told them that day) she wrote her story about about Bob Woodward:

But he said nothing then or in the months that followed as Fitzgerald launched his investigation and all Washington was consumed by a debate over spies and secrets and sources. Woodward kept what he knew secret even from Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. But as the case heated up this fall and Woodward joined in the reporting, “I learned something more” about the leak, he told TIME, which prompted him to finally tell Downie of his 2003 conversation.

[…]

Challenged on his public statements as well as his private conduct, Woodward explained that he had “hunkered down” out of fear of being subpoenaed at a time when reporters like Miller and TIME’s Matthew Cooper were being jailed or threatened with jail unless they revealed their sources. Elsewhere in the newsroom, Post colleagues were none too happy. On an internal chat board, columnist Jonathan Yardley argued that “this is the logical and perhaps inevitable outcome when an institution permits an individual to become larger than the institution itself.”

I can guess what the internal TIME chat board will be saying tomorrow: “Oh, and fuck you very much Viv. Your glass house needs cleaning.”

She continued:

It was a rough week all around. The White House confronted another twist that could only prolong a politically damaging case. Fitzgerald confirmed that he would be presenting evidence to a new grand jury. Other possible targets had to be worried that there is still an aggressive investigation going on with the possibility of further indictments to come. And Fitzgerald, a tireless prosecutor with a reputation for thoroughness, had to wonder, after two years and millions of dollars and countless hours of hunting, what else is out there that he missed.

Yes, Fitzgerald was being uncharacteristically sloppy. Clearly, he should have rendered the entire press corps to Gitmo and injected them with sodium pentathol. After all, nobody in Washington takes any notes or has any conscious memory of any conversations they ever have, so there really isn’t any other way to get the facts.

Truthfully, I suspect that Fitzgerald was as sadly mistaken about how the media functions in this country as the public was. We all thought that journalists were chomping at the bit to reveal news and when they got a tip they worked hard to find a way to report it. In Viveca Novak’s case, had she just shared what she knew with her editors, for instance, they might have put it together with other information they had from other reporters and maybe found a way to publish a story.

I suppose we were all led astray by “All The President’s Men” (ironically) which showed journalists using anonymously sourced information as a tip to pursue stories further or confirmation of facts they already knew, not as social currency or exclusive information for a book to be published long after the information means anything. Our bad. Apparently, it’s fine for reporters to “gossip” freely among their fellow insiders about their sacred anonymous sources, but a federal crime to tell the public about it. We rubes are supposed to uncritically read their dispatches and buy their books so they can be well paid — and leave the democracy business to our betters.

*Can’t Remember Shit

Update: In retrospect, TIME should have pulled that story she wrote on Woodward or reported immediately that she had been called to testify. It looks bad. She was writing that story on November 18th and she knew she was even more implicated than Woodward. She told her editor on Sunday the 20th so perhaps they couldn’t pull it back by that point. I’m surprised she wasn’t fired on the spot, to tell you the truth. Her behavior is more egregious than Miller’s.

(And once again, why in the hell did Woodward pick her to talk to?)

Update II: James Wolcott calls for another panel on blogger ethics

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Who’s Wanking Now

In case anyone still wonder why the cheese eating surrender monkeys and the ungrateful bastards we liberated from Hitler didn’t join in our war party, here’s the reason:

More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service and a former CIA official, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.

The French conclusions were reached after extensive on-the-ground investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, where the uranium mines are controlled by French companies, said Alain Chouet, the French former official. He said the French investigated at the CIA’s request.

Chouet’s account was “at odds with our understanding of the issue,” a U.S. government official said. The U.S. official declined to elaborate and spoke only on condition that neither he nor his agency be named.

However, the essence of Chouet’s account — that the French repeatedly investigated the Niger claim, found no evidence to support it, and warned the CIA — was extensively corroborated by the former CIA official and a current French government official, who both spoke on condition of anonymity.

The repeated warnings from France’s Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure did not prevent the Bush administration from making the case aggressively that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons materials.

It was not the first time a foreign government tried to warn U.S. officials off of dubious prewar intelligence.

In the notorious “Curveball” case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany claimed to have knowledge of Iraqi biological weapons. Bush and other U.S. officials repeatedly cited Curveball’s claims even as German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable and might be a fabricator.

And remember, even our closest ally in the coalition of the willing was saying this at the time:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Let’s hear again about how every foreign government agreed with our assessment that Iraq had WMD.

Oh, and not that it matters, but let’s also remember what Karl Rove was telling Time magazine in July of 2003 about this:

“not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there’s still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger … “

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