Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Libby’s Whale

My oh my, it appears that Libby was stalking Wilson all the way up until April 2004 when the white house finally put a stop to his psychotic obsession:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was so angry about the public statements of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration critic married to an undercover CIA officer, that he monitored all of Wilson’s television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public campaign against him, former aides say.

Those efforts by the chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, began shortly after Wilson went public with his criticisms in 2003. But they continued into last year — well after the Justice Department began an investigation in September 2003, into whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the CIA operative’s identity, say former White House aides.

[…]

Libby’s anger over Wilson’s 2003 charges has been known. But new interviews and documents obtained by The Times provide a more detailed view of the depth and duration of Libby’s interest in Wilson. They also show that the vice president’s office closely monitored news coverage.

On one occasion, the office prohibited a reporter from traveling with Cheney aboard Air Force Two, because the vice president’s daughter said Cheney was unhappy with that newspaper’s coverage.

Libby “would see something had appeared in the newspaper or on television and wanted to use the White House operation to counter it,” one former official said.

After Wilson published a book criticizing the administration in April 2004, during the closely fought presidential campaign, Libby became consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair to Cheney, former aides said. He ordered up a meticulous catalog of Wilson’s claims and public statements going back to early 2003.

The result was a packet that included excerpts from press clips and television transcripts of Wilson’s statements that were divided into categories, such as “political ties” or “WMD.”

The compendium used boldfaced type to call attention to certain comments by Wilson, such as one in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, in which Wilson was quoted as calling Cheney “a lying son of a bitch.” It also highlighted Wilson’s answers to questions from television journalists about his work with Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Yes, it’s now entirely believable to me that Libby just “heard” something in casual conversation with a reporter and had no idea that Valerie Plame was a covert agent. His friend Mary Matalin doesn’t help when she characterizes him like this:

“Scooter is the most methodical, detail-oriented and comprehensive worker of anybody I’ve ever worked with in my life,” said Mary Matalin, a former Cheney advisor who worked as a consultant on the 2004 campaign.

“He leaves no stone unturned, and it doesn’t matter what the topic is,” she said. “That’s the nature of Scooter, and that’s why he’s such a superior intellect and why Cheney and the president and everybody over there respects him.”

It seems to me that someone like that would find out specifically what Wilson’s wife did at the CIA.

The White House has obviously decided that Scooter is a goner so they are planting the idea that Wilson was his white whale. But that doesn’t leave our friend Karl off the hook. Libby may have had a special hatred for Wilson but Karl had a special reason for wanting him destroyed. An earlier LA Times article had this:

Prosecutors investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson’s wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, and Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson’s credibility, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

Although lower-level White House staffers typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.

A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove’s interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove reportedly responded: “He’s a Democrat.”

This is that everyday political hardball the beltway chatterers like Andrea Mitchell and William Kristol are all worried will be “criminalized.” Back in Nixon’s day, the media, at least, were incensed to find out that he was using the taxpayers resources to pursue his political enemies. Now it’s business as usual, the poltical press content to be nothing more than the Republican party’s bitches, begging for juicy scraps from Karl and Scooter’s table.

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“This Is Just Not Going To Happen”

Hoo boy:

Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA regional director, told a Senate panel investigating the government’s response to the disaster that he gave regular updates to people in contact with then-FEMA Director Michael Brown as early as Aug. 28, one day before Katrina made landfall.

In most cases, he was met with silence. In an Aug. 29 phone call to Brown informing him that the first levee had broke, Bahamonde said he received a polite thank you from Brown, who said he would check with the White House.

[snip]

Later, on Aug. 31, Bahamonde frantically e-mailed Brown to tell him that thousands are evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that “estimates are many will die within hours.”

“Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical,” Bahamonde wrote.

Less than three hours later, however, Brown’s press secretary wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. “He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes,” wrote Brown aide Sharon Worthy.

“We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you.”

Remember what Michael Brown said when he “stepped aside?” How he was gonna go home and have a margarita and some yummy Mexican food ? Y’know, I think he may have a heckuva eating disorder. The poor guy.

But let’s not dwell on the past, shall we?

Meanwhile, at a separate hearing, lawmakers considering Louisiana’s request for $32 billion for Gulf Coast rebuilding were told that Mississippi would need tens of billions of dollars of its own to restore its coastline.

Gulf Coast lawmakers and state officials have been pushing for vast infusions of federal aid since Katrina hit Aug. 29, killing more than 1,200 people and forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate.

“It will be in the billions, with a ‘b,’ level, it may be in the tens of billions; it won’t be in the hundreds of billions,” William W. Walker, head of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, told a House transportation panel.

But Rep. John J. Duncan (news, bio, voting record) Jr., chairman of that panel, earlier had said flatly that Congress cannot afford Louisiana’s request. “This is just not going to happen,” he said.

Got that?

Hardest Working Devious Minds In The Business

Winner of the Palme D’Rovegate Speculation Award goes to Jane and Emptywheel for their mousetrap theory.

As Jane says, “note to self: do not EVER play poker with Patrick Fitzgerald.”

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It Ain’t The Crime It’s The You Know What

Apparently lawyers for Rove and Libby have been told that their clients are in serious legal jeopardy. Not much news there. The leaking lawyers seem to be quite sure that Fitz will not indict them under the Toensing statute (I’m sure that Richard “Joey Bishop” Cohen will be shrieking to high heaven if he indicts for the cover-up crimes) but others may not be so lucky (Wurmser, Hannah?)

Since these leaks are obviously coming from Rove and Libby, I take it with a grain of salt. They cannot know yet what (or who) Fitz has up his sleeve so they cannot know that he is planning cover-up indictments. This could be a coordinated “criminalization of politics” shot across the bow. (Which, by the way, should be met with “I know. It’s terrible. We really need to get the criminals out of politics.” Make them sputter and explain what they mean.)

It is news to me, however, that Fitzgerald knows who Novak’s original source is (described by Novak as not being a partisan gunslinger) and that person does not work at the white house. This could mean that they don’t currently work at the white house but once did — Ari Fleischer or Mary Matalin or any number of others. Or it could mean that this person never worked at the white house, like the head of the CIA, even. Or maybe it’s Tim Russert …

I don’t trust Novak’s definition of what constitutes a partisan gunslinger — Novak himself is a partisan gunslinger and calls himself a journalist. He could be talking about John Bolton for all we know.

I had my money on Andy Card early on but he still works at the white house. So, who is it?

One thing that I continue to find fascinating. The final paragraph of this NY Times article:

In Mr. Libby’s case, Mr. Fitzgerald has focused on his statements about how he first learned of Ms. Wilson’s identity, the lawyers said. Mr. Libby has said that he learned of Ms. Wilson from reporters. But Mr. Fitzgerald may have doubts about his account because the journalists who have been publicly identified as having talked to Mr. Libby have said that they did not provide the name, that they could not recall what had been said or that they had discussed unrelated subjects.

Gosh I wonder who those “journalists” could be? Perhaps they’ll share it with the public when they write their memoirs.

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Buying Into The Program

In a sane political world, Press The Meat this Sunday would be a very interesting show. This is because over the past couple of days it’s become obvious that Karl Rove is selling the line that he found out about Plame from Libby and that Libby says that his source for the Plame leak was none other than Tim Russert. It’s long past time that the King of the Kewl Kids got the kind of treatment that Judy Miller has received. He’s up to his neck in this thing.

Here is what NBC released after Russert testified:

Mr. Russert told the Special Prosecutor that, at the time of that conversation, he did not know Ms. Plame’s name or that she was a CIA operative and that he did not provide that information to Mr. Libby. Mr. Russert said that he first learned Ms. Plame’s name and her role at the CIA when he read a column written by Robert Novak later that month.[emphasis mine]

As I and others have been writing since the summer, that is a very carefully worded statement that leaves open the clear possibility that Russert did tell Libby that “Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA.”

It is long past time that Russert was asked about this. He has grilled everyone from Wilson to Novak on his show about this matter and has never mentioned the fact that he was questioned by the prosecutor, nor has he explained the overlawyered answer. And the Washington press corpse has been much too polite (or intimidated) to mention it, as far as I can tell, anywhere. (Sidney Schanberg wrote about this in the Village Voice.)

As I wrote last summer, all it would take is for one intrepid journalist (or guest on Tim’s show) to ask:

Prior to Bob Novak’s column in 2003 did you tell anyone who works in the administration that Joseph Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA?

In a healthy media climate, that would not be a problem. But our political culture in Washington has become dangerously removed from reality. Unsurprisingly, James Wolcott says it best:

If it looks as if Cheney has to resign and Bush himself enters the Nixon danger zone, we’ll hear the same frets and cries from the pundit shows about the country being torn apart and Americans losing faith in their government. But it isn’t the country that will be torn apart by Plamegate any more than the country was torn apart during Watergate (which provided daily thrilling news entertainment value that bound citizens together); it’s the Washington establishment that will be torn apart. And it should be torn apart. It’s failed the country, and it’s played by its own rules for too long, and “criminalizing politics” is exactly what should be done when political criminals deceive a nation into a war with Judith Miller serving as the Angie Dickinson to their Rat Pack and Richard Cohen auditioning for the part of Joey Bishop.

I would also point out that the media pearl clutching was an important aspect of the Florida Recount (orchestrated by Karl Rove) in which the likes of Jeff Greenfield quivered like little old ladies every night fretting about how the country wouldn’t survive if the election wasn’t decided within minutes. This is an old trick.

This story is about a lot of different things. First and foremost, it’s about this country going to war on false pretenses, the real reasons for which are obscure and inscrutable. It’s about a powerful GOP political machine that thought it could foist off the village idiot as president and became so seized by hubris that it literally thought it could get away with anything.

But it is also about a toxic political culture in the nation’s capital that has abdicated its responsibility to behave within certain norms of decent behavior. After eight long years of being fed the juiciest tabloid lies from a masterful Republican disinformation campaign and a group of friendly GOP special prosecutors, the media became joined with the republican establishment and took on its cheap ethics and ruthless attitudes. They began to identify with them. They helped them destroy Bill Clinton’s reputation and piled-on to keep Al Gore from the presidency with a puerile smear campaign which they admitted to waging just because they found it amusing. And when George W. Bush became president, their condescending refrain to the majority of the country who didn’t vote for him was “get over it.”

That cozy relationship among the purveyors of Republican cant led directly into an unquestioning acceptance of administration lies after 9/11. The country would have rallied temprorarily regardless of the media’s complicity in GOP messaging during that time, but the previous 10 years of confederacy between the hungry media and the Republican noise machine established a system in which it was possible to perpetrate one of the most outrageous frauds in history — the Iraq war. The culture that marginalized dissent, that mocked anything other than manufactured beltway conventional wisdom and that normalized character assassination as “fair game” created a jingoistic circus that can be best illustrated with the allegedly liberal icon Dan Rather, saying: “I would willingly die for my country at a moment’s notice and on the command of my president….”

Tha media then created a hagiography of George W. Bush that was hallucinogenic. From Howard Fineman:

So who are the Bushes, really? Well, they’re the people who produced the fellow who sat with me and my Newsweek colleague, Martha Brant, for his first interview since 9/11. We saw, among other things, a leader who is utterly comfortable in his role. Bush envelops himself in the trappings of office. Maybe that’s because he’s seen it from the inside since his dad served as Reagan’s vice president in the ‘80s. The presidency is a family business.

Dubyah loves to wear the uniform—whatever the correct one happens to be for a particular moment. I counted no fewer than four changes of attire during the day trip we took to Fort Campbell in Kentucky and back. He arrived for our interview in a dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. When he greeted the members of Congress on board, he wore an open-necked shirt. When he had lunch with the troops, he wore a blue blazer. And when he addressed the troops, it was in the flight jacket of the 101st Airborne. He’s a boomer product of the ‘60s—but doesn’t mind ermine robes.

Ermine robes and flight jackets. That was the apogee of mainstream media Republican worship and it carried this administration right into an illegal war, unprecedented debt, and even a torture regime. The beltway press, which eagerly assisted the Republican party in the political battles of the 1990’s quite naturally fell into line when the “winners” of that war decided to use real guns and bullets for political purposes.

The war with Iraq could not have happened without them and they have a lot to answer for — most especially for uncritically supporting an insane decision to unilaterally attack a country which had not attacked us and then affirmatively helping the administration cover-up the fact that they lied about the reasons for it — with cocktail party gossip no less.

Maybe someday a member of the press corpse will ask Tim Russert whether he helped the White House expose an undercover CIA agent, but I’m not holding my breath. There are only a handful of people in Washington who seem to have even a modicum of courage and I’ve yet to see a member of the mainstream press among them.

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Grover’s Sagging Tent

It’s very hard for me to feel any sympathy for Grover Norquist who is being battered by the religious zealots for daring to speak at a Log Cabin Republican meeting. Very hard. After all, he’s the main guy responsible for creating bullshit ideas like this:

“If he was a serious economic conservative, Grover Norquist would not have accepted the invitation or the honorarium for speaking at a fund-raiser for a group bent on the destruction of traditional families.”

He built a vote machine of ignorant saps who really believe that economic conservatism has something to do with hating gays and traditional families. When you let the nutballs into the tent and give them real electoral power, this is what you get.

Wait until Big Business understands that after they get their tax cuts and deregulation they’ll have to contend with a generation of creationist witch burners to sustain a first world economy.

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Finally.

Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias hit one out of the park. Just read it all. It looks like finally Matt’s begun to get it. Whew! I dunno what prompted this. Perhaps Sam and Matt simply faced reality. Perhaps they sensed a genuine worry that the compelling arguments from longtime war opponents might lead to a sea change in power centers amongst liberals, affecting their career prospects if they didn’t openly acknowledge that some of our most important objections were correct. Perhaps both. Whatever. They have done good. But if they want to write for the New Republic anytime soon, they may not be getting their phone calls returned right away…

My only serious bone to pick, which is fairly minor given the extent of the insight and about face exhibited, is that Sam and Matt still privilege, albeit critically, an Isolationist/Realist dichotomy. This was never a good way to frame foreign policy debates, and is not terribly relevant anymore. We need better, more “realistic” – in the sense of closer to how the world works – models and as far as I can tell, no good alternatives are around. (I’ll take a pass on Walter Mead’s Jacksonians, Jeffersonians, et al. As Schlesinger once got Mead to admit, according to Walter’s definition Jackson himself wasn’t a Jacksonian.)

Finally, finally Yglesias is beginning to get it. They even addressed the cynical careerism in the liberal hawks’ position (although bizarrely, they appear to find little wrong with that; their writing is quite unclear on this). I’ve been saying most of this stuff for three years now and I was truly beginning to despair, not that I personally wasn’t getting anywhere: political punditry and analysis is not my career and I don’t care to make it one. I’ve just wanted to see some sanity in the present discourse where there has been very, very little. So in all seriousness, I’m very glad – relieved– something somewhere has finally started to permit some smart folks, whose grasp on consensual reality seemed quite fragile for a while, to start the long road back to clear-eyed sanity.

Go thou and read.

The Mind Boggles

As we saw in the marketing of the “new product” – the Bush/Iraq war – success (whatever that meant) rested on the assumption that nearly all steps of the most optimistic scenario would unfold as predicted. Those of us who snorted and said, “that’s impossible!” were accused of not realizing that nothing is certain in foreign affairs.

Likewise, those of us who marvel at the wonders of science and read about the extraordinary discoveries and mind-stretching new theories of the last few years with a sense of genuine awe are accused of being close-minded and incurious if we strenuously object to cynical efforts to pollute the teaching of science with blatantly obvious lies.

Now, sooner or later, the national embarassment known as “the controversy [sic] over ‘intelligent design’ ” will hit the Supreme Court because whichever side loses has promised they will appeal the Dover trial decision. All I can say is this. If the Supreme Court chooses to side with the “intelligent design” crowd, America will deserve all that is coming its way. And it won’t be purty. Genuinely new levels of sheer idiocy are being achieved by proponents of “id.” Read this and weep, dear friends:

A leading architect of the intelligent-design movement defended his ideas in a federal courtroom on Tuesday and acknowledged that under his definition of a scientific theory, astrology would fit as neatly as intelligent design.

[snip]

The cross-examination of Professor Behe on Tuesday made it clear that intelligent-design proponents do not necessarily share the same definition of their own theory. Eric Rothschild, a lawyer representing the parents suing the school board, projected an excerpt from the “Pandas” textbook that said:

“Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact, fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings, etc.”

In that definition, Mr. Rothschild asked, couldn’t the words “intelligent design” be replaced by “creationism” and still make sense? Professor Behe responded that that excerpt from the textbook was “somewhat problematic,” and that it was not consistent with his definition of intelligent design.

Mr. Rothschild asked Professor Behe why then he had not objected to the passage since he was among the scientists who was listed as a reviewer of the book. Professor Behe said that although he had reviewed the textbook, he had reviewed only the section he himself had written, on blood clotting. Pressed further, he agreed that it was “not typical” for critical reviewers of scientific textbooks to review their own work.

[snip]

Listening from the front row of the courtroom, a school board members said he found Professor Behe’s testimony reaffirming. “Doesn’t it sound like he knows what he’s talking about?” said the Rev. Ed Rowand, a board member and church pastor.

“Doesn’t it sound like he knows what he’s talking about?”

Well, who knows, right? I mean, like, let’s not limit ourselves. Anything’s possible! After all, Doesn’t it sound like he knows what he’s talking about? And y’never can tell, there’s a genuine possibility it could be true.

I think I’m going to vomit.

Preznit Enforcer

Finally we have come to the real question. WDTPKAWDHKI?

Considering today’s NY Daily News story reporting that Bush knew Rove had taken out a hit on Wilson, (and was angry that he’d been so sloppy about it) it’s worthwhile to revisit some of the compassionate conservative’s past dealings with the press and those he considers disloyal:

In 1990, he told writer Ann Grimes, “I was the enforcer when I thought things were going wrong. I had the ability to go and lay down some behavioral modification.”

[…]

As one might expect, much of Bush’s work for his father’s presidential campaigns was done behind the scenes. Yet it’s clear he was steeped in political minutiae and imposed few limits on what he was willing to do to get the job done.In 1986, veteran reporter Al Hunt predicted that Jack Kemp would receive the 1988 Republican presidential nomination instead of George H.W. Bush. When George W. saw Hunt dining with his wife and 4-year-old son at a Mexican restaurant in Dallas, he went up to their table and said, “You fucking son of bitch. I won’t forget what you said and you’re going to pay a fucking price for it.” Bush didn’t apologize until 13 years later, when the incident resurfaced in the context of his own presidential campaign.

[…]

After his father was elected president in 1988, Bush was placed in charge of a group called the Silent Committee (aka the “scrub group”), which was made up of “about fifteen blood-oath Bushies,” according to the Texas Monthly. The purpose of the group was “to ‘scrub’ potential appointees for their loyalty and past service to Bush.” The Washington Post noted at the time that George W. had a “somewhat more developed sense of political loyalty than even his father.”

Although Bush left Washington after the campaign concluded, his role as loyalty enforcer remained largely unchanged. In November 1991, for example, then White House chief of staff John Sununu told a reporter the president had “ad-libbed” an ill-advised line during a speech about credit card interest rates. The younger Bush was infuriated that Sununu didn’t defend his father. George W. told another White House staffer, “We have a saying in our family: If a grenade is rolling by the Man, you dive on it first. The guy violated the cardinal rule.”

George W. was dispatched to Washington to deal with the Sununu situation. He met with Sununu and told him he should resign. On Dec. 3, 1991, Sununu — also facing criticism for his misuse of government vehicles — stepped down. Asked about the confrontation, George W. would only say, “The conversations between me and Mr. Sununu are going to be private. I talked to him, and then he and Dad reached an agreement.”

Bush and Rove come from the same school of thuggish politics. Bush not only has no problem with such behavior, he endorses and expects it. The only thing that matters is results. In that respect Rove (and Cheney) failed him.

When looked at in that light, the following comment can be seen as Bush doing his own damage control:

“I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers,” he said. “You tell me: How many sources have you had that’s leaked information that you’ve exposed or had been exposed? Probably none. I mean, this town is a town full of people who like to leak information.”

He has a history of strong-arming the press:

In 1987, the George H.W. Bush campaign gave unusually close access to Newsweek reporter Margaret Warner. That resulted in a cover story titled “Fighting the Wimp Factor,” in which Warner discussed “the potentially crippling handicap” that the senior Bush wasn’t tough enough for the job. George W. was incensed. He called the magazine and “told reporters that his father’s campaign would no longer talk to Newsweek.” According to White House reporter Thomas DeFrank, George W. told him that Newsweek was “out of business.” In his anger, however, Bush “went somewhat beyond the authorized message.” The following day, a Bush campaign spokesman announced, “We’re not cutting them [Newsweek] or anybody else off from their efforts to cover the campaign.” George W., apparently, has never gotten over the incident. In his memoir, “A Charge to Keep,” published more than a decade later, he wrote, “My blood pressure still goes up when I remember the cover.”

By the way, Thomas DeFrank is the same journalist who reported today that Bush knew about the leak two years ago and was only pissed that Karl got caught. Seems he’s been following this aspect of Bush’s character for quite some time. And it appears that there are some people who are beginning to recognise that they needn’t throw themselves on the grenade when the president is a 38% lame duck and sinking fast. The question is, who?

Update: Tangential question — the president and veep didn’t testify under oath. But my understanding is that it is a crime to lie to a justice department official regardless a la Martha Stewart. Bush and Cheney might not be subject to perjury charges, but it seems they could be charged with “making false statements to the government.” Here’s what Fitzgerald’s mentor James Comey said about this with respect to Martha Stewart:

“This case is about lying” — to investigators and to investors. “Lying” is a harsh word….But “perjury” is a much harsher word, meaning “lying under oath.” Martha Stewart has not been accused of perjury.

Normally, I would be outraged at the thought that someone not under oath could be indicted for lying. I thought Martha’s case was a total sham because the underlying crime was insignificant and commonplace. I’m not big on “send a message” prosecutions. But I’m willing to make exceptions when it comes to a group of criminal thugs who are bamboozling the press and stealing elections to gain power so they can start wars for no reason and bankrupt the country. I just don’t know what else can stop these people.

Clarification: I do not believe the president could be indicted. Impeachment is the only option for a sitting president and that ain’t gonna happen. He could, however, be named as an unindicted co-conspirator as Nixon was, for lying to the prosecutors under the Martha Stewart statute.

UpdateII: Josh Marshall has much more on Thomas DeFrank’s relationship with the Bushes. He’s definitely well-connected. Who on the inside is talking?

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Judy’s Silver Bullet

Puttering around I came upon this paper (pdf) that Judy Miller delivered to the Aspen Institute’s 2003 symposium called “In Search Of An American Grand Strategy For The Middle East” just days before she accidentally met up with Rootin-Tootin’ Scooter in Jackson Hole. It’s not particularly revealing — not even one mention of the roots or the turning. It’s only notable for its almost embarrassing incoherence, in which she tries to strike a neutral analytical pose but can’t seem to help slipping in her belief that those darned weapons just must have existed! Even as she pretends to be skeptical of the Bush Doctrine she says that our mission in Iraq has been successful because we’ve managed to scare the Mid East and Europe into doing our bidding.(The Tom Friedman “Our Guy’s Crazier Than Your Guy” theory.)

Despite the superficially balanced tone, she gives her little neocon self away in numerous small ways. For instance:

Absent profound reform, the nation’s six intelligence agencies, as currently structured and staffed, are unlikely to be able to detect such sophisticated, deeply hidden WMD programs. Given its record on the former Soviet Union, India, Pakistan, and Iraq, relying mainly on the CIA for good WMD intelligence seems ill-advised.

No matter how wrong the CIA eve was, they were never as wrong as Judy’s neocon pals who are now operating faith-based intelligence agencies under hacks and war criminals. But that’s another story.

One thing is clear, though. Relying on Judy for good journalism is definitely ill-advised:

The military should also continue the policy of embedding journalists with weapons hunting units and urge international organizations to do the same. For the U.S., the presence of journalists would help avoid charges of having planted incriminating evidence against a proliferator. It would also help keep such units and international agencies honest. Yes, the embedding experiment was problematic in many ways, but it was important in building Administration credibility and public support for such capabilities.

Clearly it’s journalists’ jobs to build Adminstration credibility and public support, so this is obviously a good idea. And lord knows that Judy has fulfilled her duty on that count. But Judy Miller seems to have some sort of conginitive dysfuntion about her own reporting. When Judy was embedded, “keeping the unit honest” was hardly her highest priority:

In “Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert” (Page One, April 21) Miller disclosed that she agreed to 1) embargo her story for three days; 2) permit military officials to review her story prior to publication; 3) not name the found chemicals; and 4) to refrain from identifying or interviewing the Iraqi scientist who led Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha to sites where he maintained Iraqis had buried chemical precursors to banned chemical weapons. Although Miller didn’t talk to the scientist, the military allowed her to view him from afar. She writes, “Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried.”

According to MET Alpha, the scientist also said Iraq had sent unconventional weapons technology to Syria, had cooperated with al-Qaida, had recently focused its WMD efforts on research and development, and had destroyed WMD equipment just days before the U.S. invasion.

The next day on the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, Miller described the unnamed Iraqi scientist as not just the “smoking gun” in the WMD investigation, but the “silver bullet … who really worked on the programs, who knows them firsthand, and who has led MET Team Alpha people to some pretty startling conclusions. …”

But Miller’s silver bullet tarnished overnight. The next day in the Times, she reported the military’s new “paradigm shift” from finding WMD to locating the people behind them. Then Miller abandoned the remarkable findings of her April 21 scoop. The silver bulleted “Iraqi scientist” and his “precursor chemicals” vanished from her reporting after her April 23 dispatch. (She reprised some of his allegations and described how he made contact with American forces.) By May 7 she was writing about MET Alpha’s search not for WMD but for an ancient copy of the Talmud! The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman reported May 11 that the leaders of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha is a part, had found nothing and were leaving Iraq. At a May 13 Pentagon press briefing, 101st Airborne Division commander Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus downgraded to “theory” status the allegations the Iraqi scientist allegedly made to MET Alpha about destroyed WMD.

Judith Miller’s writing and thinking is illogical and internally inconsistent. Her testimony before the GJ was too. (As a reader pointed out to me, why did she agree to refer to Libby as a “Hill Staffer” if she wasn’t writing a story?) She has almost no self-awareness.

How on earth does someone this vapid become an “expert” on national security issues for the New York Times?

Update: Christorpher Dickey writes a very illuminating analysis of Judy’s writing and the state of modern journalism, here:

Judith Miller takes good notes, but she doesn’t always know where they come from. That was one of the first lessons I learned about her when we were both based in Cairo 20 years ago, she for The New York Times and I for The Washington Post.

[…]

For some reason none of us had a tape recorder, so on the flight back to Casablanca we compared our notes from the one interview we’d had with a Moroccan general a few hours before. We wanted to be sure the phrases we’d scribbled down were accurate. But there was a problem. Judy had many more quotes in her notebook than I and another reporter had in ours. And Judy’s were much better. Then I realized why. I’d done a lot more homework on that particular story than she did, and I was asking much more detailed questions. She’d written them down, and now she thought they came from the general, but many of the quotes actually were from … me.

[…]

Judy’s great talent as a reporter is in gaining access. Full stop. She doesn’t always know what she has when she’s got it, and she isn’t always good at analyzing what she’s heard when she hears it. Indeed, that may be one reason so many very high level sources—kings, princes, dictators, presidents, politicians—have enjoyed confiding, through her, so many supposed scoops and secrets published in The New York Times.

All those who fret about the damage done to journalism and freedom of the press done by Fitzgrald’s investigation ought to ask themselves whether that ship didn’t sail some time ago. And they should ask how much Judy’s kind of reporting has contributed to it:

The righteous response is that such stories should not be made public until we can report them from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s what Craig Pyes believes, and one of many reasons he wrote a scathing memo to the Times editors back in 2000, when he was forced to team up with Judy on a reporting project about Al Qaeda that eventually won a Pulitzer. “I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller,” he wrote in the memo, which recently leaked to The Washington Post. “I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her … She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies.” Worse still, she had “tried to stampede it into the paper.”

That was in 2000.

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