Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Harmony

by tristero

Via The Daou Report, I learned that courageous investigative journalist and Bush-fluffer Stephen Hayes is trying to obtain access to documents in Harmony, a database of purported Saddam-era documents from Iraq that was developed by the Pentagon. The documents have some very intriguing titles as they appear to be evidence of efforts by Saddam to hide wmd before the Bush invasion. Here are a few, according the intrepid Mr. Hayes:

Possible al Qaeda Terror Members in Iraq
Money Transfers from Iraq to Afghanistan
Iraqi Intel report on Kurdish Activities: Mention of Kurdish Report on al Qaeda–reference to al Qaeda presence in Salman Pak
Locations of Weapons/Ammunition Storage (with map)
Iraqi Effort to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals
Formulas and information about Iraq’s Chemical Weapons Agents
Denial and Deception of WMD and Killing of POWs
Fedayeen Saddam Responds to IIS regarding rumors of citizens aiding Afghanistan
Document from Uday Hussein regarding Taliban activity
Chemical Gear for Fedayeen Saddam
Memo from the IIS to Hide Information from a U.N. Inspection team (1997)
Chemical Agent Purchase Orders (Dec. 2001)
Correspondence between various Iraq organizations giving instructions to hide chemicals and equipment
Cleaning chemical suits and how to hide chemicals
Secret Meeting with Taliban Group Member and Iraqi Government (Nov. 2000)

Now, I know, folks, you think this is just moonbat nonsense. We’d have heard of this stuff by now if there was any there there and even Hayes admits that “most” of the documents retrieved in Iraq were forgeries. And I’ll bet some of you are even thinking, “Don’t let Hayes pollute the discourse any more than it’s already been by reprinting this trash.”

But I agree with Hayes for once, especially since most of these docs, he says, are unclassified. Let’s see them, all of them. Let’s see the originals. All the originals.

Now I’m not saying we will find copies of the Niger forgeries among these documents – I frankly doubt it. Nor am I saying that the Harmony database is evidence of a conspiracy to forge massive documentation to “prove” the Bush case for war, documentation which was never, or only partly, deployed. Or that Harmony was simply an organized campaign of disinformation. Or that the name of the collection supports that kind of interpretation as it sounds like one of those spy jokes: documents in “harmony” with the “case for war.”

But I wouldn’t dream of distrusting my Pentagon that much. I’d just like to see exactly what’s in Harmony. And if it turns out they are a collection of Pentagon forgeries – or more likely, simply category titles with no or little reliable or interesting documentation collected under them, I expect Stephen to tell us in the Weekly Standard loudly and clearly. And long before the next election.

Good luck, Stephen. Keep us posted. Oh, and if you come to New York, I’d love to take you on a tour of Times Square. We can play the shell game. You can make a fortune if you guess right!

UPDATE: Stephen Hayes has now been correctly credited with the information about Harmony.

The Greatest Doughy Pantload

by digby

It’s a sad day when Jonah Goldberg’s shallow little musings are in Robert Sheer’s space on the LA Times op-ed page. His first column features the word “moonbats” and compares FDR to Bush explaining that great presidents lie to us for our own good. He even tells us that we didn’t know WWII was a “good war” until the Holocaust and Hollywood showed us this was true. History, you see, will show that George W. Bush, like FDR, will be remembered as a great president even though he lied because of his bold action in the middle east.

Apparently, he remains blind to the fact that Iraq threatened no one at the time we invaded — and that post world war II, the main legal argument against Germany was that it engaged in a war of aggression. (Germans could have disagreed, of course, arguing that they were only following the “Hitler Pre-emption Doctrine.” We would not have found that persuasive.)

I think it’s rather sad that these doughy little boys dream so of being a Greater Generation that they have to pretend that Iraq, or even the threat of Islamic terrorism, is on the scale of WWII. If FDR lied about WWII, at least we knew at the time that the German and Japanese threat to Europe and China was real — they were invading all over the place; the argument was always about whether it was real to the US until Pearl Harbor. In those days “the national interest” was a fetish for the right. Today, not so much.

.

Meanwhile, Outside The Beltway

by tristero

Juan Cole rounds up the latest about the consequences of all the lies and distortions that finally the msm noticed. “Noticed?” Hell, one of the most damning themes in the Woodward story is the extent to which the msm actively contributed to the lies, distortions, and serial failures of this administration. But I digress, here’s the latest from Iraq:

Al-Quds al-Arabi: First, the Pentagon was forced to admit that it had in fact used white phosphorus as a weapon (and not just as a smokescreen) in Fallujah, though it insisted that it was used only against combatants, not civilians. (When you attack a civilian city, how could you be sure who was who?)

Then there was more bad news when 8 GIs were killed within 24 hours. They included 5 Marines killed while fighting in al-Ubaidi in western Iraq near the Syrian border. The Marines killed 16 guerrillas in the battle. Also on Wednesday, the US Department of Defense announced that 3 GIs were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad.

In a third wave of bad news, the scandal of the tortured Iraqi prisoners has continued to grow. The Iraqi Islamic Party demanded an international investigation, and also called on Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual guide of the Shiites, to condemn the torture.

[Snip]

A major contracting scandal is breaking that involves enormous graft on the part of officials of the Coalition Provisional Administration, the American government of Iraq in 2003-2004

And that’s just one day’s news, from just one of the monumental catastrophes this administration has created. No one can claim the past five years have been boring. Nail biting, terrifying, infuriating but never a dull moment.

And still, slightly more than 1/3 of Americans approve of Bush. Think about it, like what that number actually means, mull it over in your mind, come up with thought experiments to make 34% concrete for you. And then marvel as full understanding of how incredibly high that number really is dawns upon you.

Man, that’s a shitload of ignorant morons running around.

Fallen Hero

by digby

Here’s a very nice essay by Will Bunch about Woodward and what he meant to a generation of reporters. I didn’t become a journalist like he did, but I became a political junkie, watching the Watergate hearings that summer so long ago. I too was a Watergate geek — and Woodstein were my heroes.

I haven’t revered Woodward in a long time. And I still mourn the loss of my youthful faith in what Woodstein stood for — that the truth will out. Woodmill (hat tip to my pal) has been the sad reality ever since.

.

Too Many Marts

by digby

I think it’s really great that Bob Woodward is such a stand up guy who refuses to divulge his sources no matter what the consequences. He has always shown excellent journalistic judgement in these things so we can trust him to know what is important and what isn’t.

For instance, in his examination of the presidency “Shadow : Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate” he discusses how dumb it was for Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton not to just tell what they knew right away and get it all over with:

After Watergate, I never expected another impeachment investigation in my lifetime, let alone an actual impeachment and a Senate trial. Nixon’s succesesors, I thought, would recognize the price of scandal and learn the two fundamental lessons of Watergate. First, if there is questionable activity, release the facts whatever they are, as early and completely as possible. Second, do not allow outside inquiries, whether conducted by prosecutors, congressmen or reporters, to harden into a permanent state of suspicion and warfare.

Good advice, I’m sure. Yet somehow this high minded cautionary tale devolved in the second half into a full-on insider tabloid expose of President Clinton’s dick. Literally:

“Bennett had tried … to obtain the details from the statement Jones had made about Clinton allegedly having ‘distinguishing characteristics’ in his genital area. It hadn’t worked, but Bennett wanted to make sure there were no such characteristics.

At first Bennett thought it might be a mole or birthmark. So he started asking longtime male Clinton friends who might have seen him in the shower at one point or another in his life. Had they seen anything? No one had.

Later, Bennett was in the Oval Office with Clinton, and the president had to go to the washroom. For a moment, Bennett thought of following the president into the Oval Office bathroom to see what he might see, but he decided against it. ‘We can’t have president of the United States’ penis on trial,’ Bennett finally said to Clinton directly. ‘There is an ugh factor in politics.’ ‘It’s an outrage,’ Clinton replied. ‘It’s totally not true. Go to all my doctors. It’s just false…[Bennett said]”The only step that was not taken was to ask the doctor to induce an erection to reduplicate the circumstances that Jones had alleged. That was unthinkable.”‘

That’s the good judgment I’m talking about. Woody’s very good at keeping secrets. He prides himself on it. But this particular bit of information was essential for the public to know. Apparently, he believed that if only Clinton had dropped his pants on national TV, he could have moved beyond his problems.

Frank Rich wrote a review of this book back in 1999 in which he excoriated Woodward for his insider bloviating, making the case that Woodward and the Quinn contingent were reflexive antagonists of every president. Little did he know that Woodward would take his criticism so to heart that he would become a mindless hagiographer for the most callow, vacuous leader this country would ever produce.

In his review he discusses at some length Woodward’s prudish judgmentalism toward the presidents:

Ford is chastised for bringing into the White House ”a Congressional lifestyle, which often included alcohol at lunch.” Woodward uncovers one scandalous occasion in Denver when the President ”skipped several dozen pages of his remarks because he had what his aides called a few ‘marts,’ for martinis, before speaking.” You’d think that Ford’s skipping several dozen pages of luncheon remarks would be a blessing for those in attendance, or at least something less than an indictable offense. But in ”Shadow,” it’s another cue for Woodward to seize the moral high ground and condemn a benighted President Who Did Not Escape the Shadow of Watergate.

Similarly, the Carter Administration becomes an excuse for Woodward to rehash ancient charges of cocaine possession against the White House aide Hamilton Jordan. Though Jordan was ultimately cleared, he was not ”totally innocent” after all — for he ”liked to drink beer and loved chasing women” and ”did go to places like . . . Studio 54,” where other patrons might have behaved naughtily, thereby making Jordan ”a magnet for allegations.” Jordan, it seems, is guilty by association with nightspots.

Under Woodward’s moral tutelage, Jordan recants his past in ”Shadow,” belatedly seeing the errors of his partying ways of two decades ago. But Jordan’s real problem back then, Woodward suggests without irony, may have been partying with noninsiders. ”Shadow” reports that Jordan ”stiffed the Washington establishment and its dinner-party circuit with particular relish” — apparently a hanging offense. The punishment, Woodward reports, was a long 1977 article in The Washington Post Style section ”about the strain between the Carterites and Washington.”

And then along came Clinton’s penis.

Woodward, like Broder and Sally and Richard Cohen and Cokie and the rest of the moribund DC establishment, are obsessed with the social and personal activities of their King (and their own relationships to him) and have absolutely no interest or insight into the corrupt, depraved, malevolent political force the Republican Washington establishment has become. (It’s hardball politics!) As long as they are getting their due deference and nobody’s slip is showing, they are more than happy to keep any behavior that the unwashed masses might find unpalatable under wraps — things like war or institutionalized character assassination. The only scandals worth reporting are “too many marts” and “trashing the place” — behaviors that imply the courtier’s social mores are unimportant. Tsk tsk tsk.

.

Harper’s Is Good This Month

by tristero

I’m reluctant to take the focus off Woodward’s incredible behavior – and for the record, I think Digby is absolutely right regarding his suspicions as to where Woody learned Plame’s name – but I want to urge folks to be on the lookout for the latest issue of Harper’s on the newsstand. They usually don’t post the articles online so you’re gonna have to buy it (or got to a library) but it’s worth it.

Lewis Lapham has a rant against the Bush Cheney administration’s corruption in the Katrina reconstruction that is so blisteringly furious it makes The Rude Pundit appear like that Gautama Buddha. Lapham collects in one place all the sickening details. The corruption is endemic, and the absence of simple human decency so profound, it’s enough to make a grown man weep.

In addition, Stanley Fish gives the clearest exposition I’ve come across of the intellectual and rhetorical hijinks behind the marketing of “intelligent design” creationism. He makes the point many of us have made, that there’s a cynical hijacking (and distortion) of postmodern arguments by the rightwing, but he is able to provide far more information on how this is accomplished than I’ve seen before. The article is probably similar to this lecture Fish has been giving entitled “Three on a Match: Intelligent Design, Holocaust Denial, Postmodernism.”

As I’ve discussed numerous times, the marketing techniques on display in the “intelligent design” wars are the template for numerous other far right cultural battles. Really, you shouldn’t miss what Fish has to say.

Waiver-ing

by digby

Dick Stauber, Matt Coopers lawyer, just made a very good point on Hardball.

Woodward’s souce apparently came forward and told the prosecutor about their conversation. Yet Woodward still says that he is under a confidentiality agreement and needs special permission to reveal what he knows. Stauber asks, “if coming forward and admitting something to a US Attorney isn’t waiving confidentiality, then what is?”

Truly, Woody no longer has to worry about crawling up on that cross with Saint Judy. His source spilled the beans to the law. Whatever jeopardy he would be in by revealing his name (and certainly the contents of the conversation) legally or professionally, no longer applies. This means that nothing other than perhaps public embarrassment or some sort of backroom deal between Woodward and the Bush administration are at stake. That is not good enough. There is no reason for Woodward not to report this story.

Matthews and everybody else seems to think that Woodward is protecting Cheney. Jane thinks it’s Fleitz. Jeralynn thinks it’s Wurmser. I’m intrigued by the idea that Fitz was seen visiting Bush’s lawyer during this period. Among all the beltway courtiers, Woodward is the one who has the most direct access to the president. And Junior trusts him.

WDTPKAWDHKI?

Update:

In his most recent book, Bush at War, Bob Woodward brags that he was given access to the deeply classified minutes of National Security Council meetings. He also noted, not long ago, that the President sat for lengthy interviews, often speaking candidly about classified information. This surprised even Woodward, who observed, “Certainly Richard Nixon would not have allowed reporters to question him like that. Bush’s father wouldn’t allow it. Clinton wouldn’t allow it.”

.

Hard Target

by digby

Woodward, who has had lengthy interviews with President Bush for his last two books, dismissed criticism that he has grown too close to White House officials. He said he prods them into providing a fuller picture of the administration’s workings because of the time he devotes to the books.

“The net to readers,” Woodward said, “is a voluminous amount of quality, balanced information that explains the hardest target in Washington,” the Bush administration.

Here’s some of that quality, balanced information from “Plan of Attack”:

Rove said he wanted the president to start that February or March and begin raising the money, probably $200 million. He had a schedule. In February, March and April 2003, there would be between 12 and 16 fundraisers.

“We got a war coming,” the president told Rove flatly, “and you’re just going to have to wait.” He had decided. “The moment is coming.” The president did not give a date, but he left the impression with Rove that it would be January or February or March at the latest.

“Remember the problem with your dad’s campaign,” Rove replied. “A lot of people said he got started too late.”

“I understand,” Bush said. “I’ll tell you when I’m comfortable with you starting.”

And then his codpiece exploded all over the living room.

I’ve been hearing all the television gasbags try to explain what impact this “bombshell” is going to have on Fitzgerald’s case. Victoria Toensing is on CNN pushing the Libby line that Fitzgerald is inept because he didn’t know about this Woodward conversation. (She’s making very little sense because she doiesn’t know what to make of this revelation and can’t figure out quite how to play it.)
But one thing seems obvious to me that nobody is mentioning. We know Libby leaked about Plame to reporters. We know Rove leaked about Plame to reporters. We now know that some other administration figure leaked to Woodward and another one (perhaps the same one) leaked to Novak. What is it going to take for the media to start calling this what it was — a conspiracy?

I don’t know if Fitz can prove such a thing. But common sense says that if a bunch of different White House sources are talking to the most powerful journalists in Washington about the same subject, it isn’t just idle gossip. Woodward knew that. So did every other top reporter in town. They just preferred to pretend otherwise.

At the next blogger ethics panel we should call upon some of these great sages of journalism and ask them why it took a special prosecutor to back up Wilson’s story that that the White House had engaged in a coordinated smear campaign. What other kinds of sleazy behavior are they covering up for their masters … er, sources?

I do not buy the fact that Woodward didn’t have an obligation to come forward publicly. He’s a reporter. His job is to tell the public what he knows. With all of his great sources, you’d think that he of all people could have done some actual reporting and gotten to the bottom of the story two years ago.

It’s my fervent belief that when the government is spinning the press, whether it’s Ken Starr selectively leaking like a sieve or Scooter and his grubby little friends smearing Joe Wilson, it is the duty of journalists to report what they are doing. If their ever so valuable sources dry up because of that, then all the better. The sources are using them for a political agenda, not to get important information out to the public. These are not whistleblowers — they are flaks and what they are doing is fundamentally dishonest.

If all the administration wanted to do was shed light on Wilson’s alleged lack of credibility they could have called a fucking press conference and offered their evidence. It’s not like they can’t get anybody’s attention. The very fact that they were dropping this into the ether like it was idle gossip is the reason that Bob Woodward, Judy Miller and all the rest should have written front page stories about it. It’s not difficult. They could do what Matt Cooper did. He wrote that the White House was engaging in an underground war on Wilson. That is and was the story.

This crap about protecting anonymous sources is simply cover for the fact that these people are protecting their access to official lies. It’s bullshit and it’s why they are in trouble today.

Update: I just watched Wolf Blitzer try to pin Len Downie down on the fact that Woodward never bothered to write that he knew of another source. Blitzer asked him why, after Woodward revealed his information to Downie on October 28th that the paper didn’t write about it then — without revealing the source. Downie dance around, saying that the prosecutor got involved and then they couldn’t talk. Blitzer pressed and said that they had several days before this “source” inexplicably (and we are apparently supposed to believe coincidentally) went to the prosecutor with the news that he had spoken to Woodward. Downie had no good answer for that and just hemmed and hawed his way through it, ending with his story that they must protect their sources.

Protecting sources in Washington apparently means not only protecting their identities, it’s also means not revealing information they impart. I have to ask then — what’s the fucking point? Apparently the reporter’s privilege is like a priest’s or a shrink’s. It’s not the identity that’s sacrosanct, which is what I always assumed. It’s the information. And there is evidently no obligation to do more investigation so that you can get the story out.

At least until you get a big fat seven figure advance — at which time it’s ok to let the world know what you know, even as you protect your sources.

Deep Throat was misnamed. It’s Bob himself who specializes in that particular act.

Woodward said today:

“I hunkered down. I’m in the habit of keeping secrets.”

Funny, here I thought that reporters were supposed to be in the habit of revealing secrets.

Update II: Atrios has the transcript of the Blitzer Downie exchange. WTF.

.

All The Presidents Stooges

by digby

I can’t tell you how impressed I continue to be with the elite journalists in this country. After finding out that top reporters from The NY Times, The Washington Post and NBC all withheld information from the public about their leaders, I can only wonder what else they may be keeping back because of their cozy relationships, book deals, or political sympathies. This is a crisis in journalism.

Matt Cooper was leaked to by Karl Rove in the summer of 2003 and he fought to keep from revealing his source. But he fulfilled his responsibility as a journalist by writing a story and it was the real story about what was going on. Here’s the first paragraph of Cooper’s first article on the subject back in 2003:

Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps.

I don’t know why all the other reporters who were being leaked this nasty bit of business didn’t write articles with that lead, but they should have. As we all know, that was the story then and it’s the story now. Instead it’s only after the long arm of the law reaches into the newsrooms that we find out dozens of reporters, including some of the most famous and powerful, were involved in this little episode.

It turns out that Bob Woodward, who worked hand in glove with the administration to create the hagiography of the codpiece, has known for years that the White House was engaged in a coordinated smear campaign against Joe Wilson. Indeed, he was right in the middle of it. In the beginning he may have thought that it was idle gossip, but by the time he was on Larry King defending it as such he knew damned well that it had been leaked by Rove, Libby and his own source all within a short period of time. He’s been around Washington long enough to know a coordinated leak when he sees one.

Novak took the bait and dutifully regurgitated the information. Matt Cooper smelled a rat and wrote about it. It’s amazing how many other journalists heard the tale and dismissed the significance or went out of their way to “protect” sources by talking about the case on television every chance they got while pretending they were uninvolved. But none pooh-poohed the story and its significance in public with quite the same fervor as Bush’s friend Woody.

I had thought that Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell were the Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh of this story with their endless “speculation” about an investigation in which they had information that could clear up many of the questions they were fielding. Woody takes the cake. His has been an Oscar worthy performance to rival Meryl Streep. He chewed the scenery so many times on Larry King that he should be given a lifetime achievement award:

(Cue “Battle Hymn of the Republic”)

WOODWARD: If the judge would permit it, I would go serve some of her jail time, because I think the principle is that important, and it should be underscored. It’s not a casual idea that we have confidential sources. It is absolutely vital. And I’ll bet there are all kinds of reporters out there, if we could divvy up this four-month jail sentence — I suspect the judge would not permit that, but if he would, I’ll be first in line. It’s that important to our business.

I don’t think they could have made a cross big enough for the both of them.

Woodward and Miller have been willing tools of this administration from the get. Bob Novak was an open partisan on television, so everybody knew that they funneled information to him and he printed it for political purposes. These two (and their supporting players in television news) were the most important journalists in Washington working for the two most important papers in the country and the national news outlets. Among all the journalistic players in this, the only one who wrote the real story, in real time, was Matt Cooper. He’s the one who should be getting the journalism awards, not Judy Miller. He’s the only one who fulfilled his duty as a journalist and told his readers what their leaders were doing.

Perhaps this is the natural outcome of the press corps joining the entertainment industrial complex. It’s ironic that one of the men who kicked off this new celebrity journalism with Watergate should emerge as one of the major players in this era’s biggest “gate” scandal. I suspect that this time he’ll have it in his contract to play himself in the film. After all, he’s now bigger than Redford. And he’s proven over the last couple of years that he’s one of the best actors of his generation.

.

Call Anyway

From what I gather, the two new proposed compromises to the Lindsey Graham Cojones Project are recondite and vague.

I agree with Marty Lederman at SCOTUS blog that this is surely a case for testimony from experts and a thorough discussion. Pushing through changes to the most fundamental underpinnings of our system of government in order to meet arbitrary deadlines is a very bad idea. The compromises seem to be better than what came before, but that really isn’t good enough. History shows that cutting deals on fundamental liberties is dangerous business.

It looks as though it’s going to happen, but it is probably still worthwhile to call your representatives and ask for a delay so that the congress can give this important legislation due consideration.

.