Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Day 2000

The Daou Report directs us to a national memorial marking the sadly inevitable passing of the 2000th US combat death in Iraq. Please consider attending a local gathering.

Such a terrible milestone should be a somber moment that the entire country, as one, should acknowledge. After all, pro-war or anti-war, no one wants our friends, our neighbors, and our children to die. It is clearly a time when all of us should support the troops by making sure they understand all Americans share in the mourning.

But no. Michelle Malkin, Peter Daou informs us (and I sure as hell won’t pollute Digby’s blog with a link to her), thinks we’ll be partying, i.e. celebrating, on Day 2000.

And to prove it, no doubt Ms. Malkin and her fellow maniacs will grab their digicams and stalk the memorials, like the good fascist volunteers they are, looking to capture any and all grimaces of grief that could possibly be construed as a triumphant smile. After all, they photog’d us during the war protests, pretending the occasional nut represented all the middle-class marchers with families who were there. So they’ll do it again on Day 2000. And they’ll call us traitors again.

Well, Michelle, ma belle, I think we know who the real traitors are, don’t we now? Oh, I’m not only talking about the clowns who placed loyalty to Texas Moses above their country’s security. I’m also thinking of the people who sent American soldiers into battle with inadequate armor, inadequate intelligence, and deliberately false information on what they could expect in terms of a reception among the people they had been repeatedly told they were “liberating.”

Below, Digby makes the point that Republicans have for a long time been the preferred party of criminals. Not just Republicans like Nixon and the goons who did Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Starr witchhunt. Not even Libby, Rove, Lay, DeLay, Frist, Franklin, Wurmser, Brownie, Allbaugh, Abramoff. But also a huge felonious database, brimming with GOP scoundrels, statutory rapists, corporate thieves and assorted unclassifiable scumbags so large, there isn’t a server on the internet big enough to store all their names and their multiple serial crimes against their country. Face it, Michelle: For every decent Republican like Jim Jeffords, who finally had to quit his longtime party in disgust, it seems there’s 50 or more DeLay clones snorking around the pigsty, just waiting to pork honest taxpayers and other rubes.

No, Michelle. Those of us opposed to the crooks you admire will not be celebrating on Day 2000; we’ll be weeping.

But if there’s a day that these bastards who got us into this insane war, who ruined all Americans’ reputations by authorizing systematic, repeated torture and murder, who abandoned America’s most vulnerable parents, children, and workers, to a horrible death from flood and neglect –

If ever there’s a day that the fuckers who did all this, and so much more, start getting hauled in front of the courts of law they have been conspiring so long to subvert and ruin – We, the people, who love our country and revere its traditional liberal values, we will raise a huge… what’s the word, I’m thinking of? oh yes…Hullabaloo!

The (French) champagne will flow like water; the banners will fly in the (globally warmed, hurricane-strength, another rightwing fuckup) winds. And we’ll dance to the Dixie Chicks all night long.

And the next day, we’ll recycle the empty bottles, give any leftover brie to the homeless shelter, and then drink a very strong double espresso latte. We’ll get right back to work, making sure that you and your far-right asshole buddies are never taken seriously in American politics again.

Of course, that’s a huge if…

Judy’s Enablers

I have been unable to find a complete copy of Craig Pyes’ e-mail, the reporter who refused to share a byline with Judy Miller back in 2000 on the al Qaeda series. Howard Kurtz quoted pieces of it last week:

“I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller… I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies,” and “tried to stampede it into the paper.”

The LA Times today has a few more choice quotes today:

“A reason I don’t have my name on any of her stories is precisely because of this sloppy, single-source reporting,” warned Pyes, now a contract reporter with the Los Angeles Times, in the e-mail. “Which, believe me, when she reports closer to home, you’re going to pay for someday. You heard it here first.”

Has anyone seen this entire e-mail? This guy was prescient, as were a lot of people who worked with Miller.

The LA Times article delves deeply into how Judy was given so much rope to hang herself on the WMD stories — it was clearly the work of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, both of whom resigned over the Jayson Blair scandal.

After the prize-winning Al Qaeda series, then-Executive Editor Howell Raines (later forced out by the scandal over fabrications by reporter Jayson Blair) reportedly urged Miller to “go win [another] Pulitzer.”

That directive made her even bolder, colleagues said.

Douglas Frantz, then Miller’s boss as investigative editor — and more recently a Los Angeles Times reporter who this month was named an L.A. Times managing editor — said he and then-Foreign Editor Roger Cohen were undercut when their doubts led them to delay publishing several of Miller’s stories on weapons of mass destruction.

After Miller complained, the New York Times’ then-Managing Editor Gerald Boyd instructed the lower-ranking editors to get out of the star reporter’s way, according to Frantz.

“Judy Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter,” Frantz recalled Boyd telling him, “and your job is to get her stories into the paper.”

Frantz said that despite that admonition, he blocked a Miller story about claims of 1,000 weapons sites in Iraq and also a profile of exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a source of many of the overblown weapons reports.

Boyd could not be reached for comment.

I had not realized until I read this that Raines and Boyd had been around the paper as late as June of 2003. This clears something up for me. I have found it completely bizarre that Miller claimed she pitched the story to an editor and yet her editor, Jill Abramson, says it never happened. Miller refused to name the editor yesterday, which means she’s either lying outright or she has a reason not to name the person.

The White House had been agitated about Wilson since the spring, particularly about Nicholas Kristoff’s NYT columns in May, using Wilson as an anonymous source.
Raines and Boyd resigned on June 5, 2003.

I think it’s likely that Miller pitched the idea to Raines or Boyd before they left, which means that she was on this Wilson beat weeks before she admits to it. And it explains why she won’t say to whom she pitched it.

It also means that she could have been operating independently during this period, before Bill Keller was named executive editor and pulled her off the WMD beat. Keller wasn’t kicked upstairs until July 14, 2003, coincidentally the day that Novak published his famous column.

Somebody should probably try to get Gerald Boyd and Howell Raines on the record.

Update: Expert Plame Kremlinologist Emptywheel writes in to remind me that Joseph Lelyveld was the interim editor during the period between Raines’ and Boyd’s resignations and Keller’s promotion. I had assumed that the writers of the big story had asked him if he turned down Judy’s pitch, but there is no record of it, so perhaps they didn’t. If they haven’t, they should.

If there is an editor (current or former)at the NY Times who knew of Judy Miller’s interest in writing this story they need to come forward. And somebody needs to ask Judy why she’s refusing to name him or her.

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The Sinning Choirboy

And little Karl too:

… in at least one instance, [Ralph]Reed acknowledges he used his White House access for Abramoff. In December 2001 the lobbyist was eager to prevent Angela Williams from being appointed head of the Interior Department’s Office of Insular Affairs, which oversees the government’s dealings with the Northern Mariana Islands, an important Abramoff client. Williams is married to former Federal Trade Commissioner Orson Swindle, who was a Vietnam pow with Senator John McCain. The subject header of Abramoff and Reed’s e-mail exchange (it is unclear who initiated it) contained a misstatement about Williams that is practically Freudian in what it reveals about their animosity toward McCain: “Were you able to whack McCain’s wife yet?” Reed assured Abramoff he had “weighed in heavily” with the White House personnel office to block her appointment but had received no commitment. “Any ideas on how we can make sure she does not get it?” Abramoff asked. “Can you ping Karl on this? I can’t believe they just don’t get this done?” Reed replied, “I am seeing him tomorrow at the WH and plan to discuss it with him as well.” Baron says, “Ralph passed the information on to the White House. He is confident the Administration’s decision was based on the merit.” As for Rove, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy tells TIME, “It is my understanding that Mr. Rove does not recall any of these incidents.”

[…]

Reed has rested his defense on fine distinctions, saying the payments he received from Indian tribes didn’t come from gambling. But that line may be tested when the Senate Indian Affairs Committee—chaired by his old nemesis McCain—holds another hearing on the Abramoff scandal next week. Reed has not yet been called to testify, but the hearing will focus on the Louisiana Coushattas, whom Abramoff arranged to pay more than a million dollars to Reed for his services.

Inconveniently, the tribe has no profitmaking ventures other than gambling.

Imagine that. Saint Ralphie Reed supporting gambling and then lying about it.

If I were a member of the religious right I’d start to think I’d been royally conned. It turns out that Reed and Abramoff’s buddy Grover Norquist not only consorts with gays (*gasp*) he also launders pro-gambling money for his pal Abramoff, which he excuses by saying that he supports gambling “on libertarian grounds.”

One has to wonder how long the Christian Soldiers on the right are going to put up with that crap. Beverly LaHaye just woke up with a gay-loving libertarian gambler in her bed.

hu·bris Pronunciation Key (hybrs) also hy·bris (h-)
n.

Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance

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Monsignor Tim

Surprise, suprise. Nobody asked (and he didn’t offer) an explanation about his own role in the Plame affair this morning despite discussing it in great depth during the program. Apparently, there is nothing even remotely relevant about the fact that his only public statement sounds like he’s covering his ass from here to next Tuesday:

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]

It appears that the first we will learn about Russert’s role in this when he appears as a witness at Scooter Libby’s trial. And yet he still a revered figure in DC journalism and considered the toughest interviewer on television. Interesting standards we have these days.

I’m beginning to wonder if he’s covering somebody’s ass other than his own.

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The Good Aspen

This article in the Columbia Journalism Review is the first I’ve seen that comes to the same conclusion I did about Judy Miller’s mea culpa:

The more you analyze Miller’s story (I have read it four times now) the less it seems like a straightforward recitation of events and the more it seems like a carefully scripted message to Libby, and perhaps to other sources with whom Miller spoke about Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson.

I confess part of this impression may stem from my own legal background. I know too well that once a prosecutor starts circling, especially a super predator like Patrick Fitzgerald, it can get very hard for parties to communicate with one another without stepping on a landmine. This, for example, is why Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate, went ballistic when Floyd Abrams, one of Miller’s lawyers, suggested that Libby had “signaled” to Miller that she shouldn’t testify. To reporters such a request might be a normal part of the reporter-source relationship, but to a prosecutor it’s witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Abrams put Libby on the spot. That’s why Miller’s insistence on a personal letter or telephone call from Libby releasing her to testify was so problematic. Anything much beyond “please testify” could easily be construed as an attempt to influence Miller’s testimony. As Libby, a seasoned lawyer in his own right surely knows, a more complex communication is what obstruction charges are made of.

Which makes it all the more amazing that Libby wrote just such a letter to Miller while she was still in prison. The September 15 letter pointedly reminded Miller that no other reporter subpoenaed in the investigation had testified that Libby had discussed Valerie Plame with them. It also contained a loaded reference to how “out West where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters because their roots connect them.” Their roots connect them? Is it a coincidence that Libby and Miller shared a long-held concern about the intersection of WMD and Islamic militantism? Miller’s story implies in several places that she didn’t know Libby all that well (going so far as to point out she didn’t even recognize him when she bumped into him on a trip out West, a trip that Libby mentions in his letter to her). But it doesn’t address the key question of whether Libby was a source for Miller’s post-9/11 WMD reporting, or whether he helped arrange meetings with the Iraqi defectors who were peddling fabricated stories about Saddam’s weapons.

In analyzing Miller’s account, several themes emerge. First, with Fitzgerald clearly probing Vice President Cheney’s office, the administration would obviously have a concern that Miller’s notes might cause problems. But in her account in the Times Miller goes out of her way to stress that Libby protected Cheney at all times. This is key. While there seems little doubt that Libby would fall on his sword to protect his boss, a reporter is an altogether different matter. Miller’s account clearly signals that her notes don’t give Fitzgerald an avenue of attack on Cheney.

Second, as many have noted, Miller makes the suspect claim that she now can’t recall who gave her Valerie Plame’s name. Obviously then her direct testimony won’t be the lynchpin that lets Fitzgerald make a case that Libby or anyone else supplied Valerie Plame’s name, though the presence of her name in the same notebook as the notes of the Libby interview could allow a grand jury to draw a strong inference. Miller says she doesn’t recall who gave the name, which, by default, doesn’t finger Libby. But neither does it clear him.

It was a strange meandering account written using the odd affectation of “what she told the grand jury” instead of a straightforward, chronological account of what she knows about the case. I felt from the beginning that its purpose was to signal Libby as much as it was to inform the public. She was, as I wrote last week, a good little aspen and let them know she didn’t do any “turning” on the crucial stuff.

I would bet money that her very bizarre anecdote about accidentally meeting up with Libby in Jackson Hole was a message to him as well. Can any of you say that you could spend two hours looking across a table at someone and not recognise them a few weeks later? Please. I would recognise Scooter Libby even if he were dressed up as Howdy Doody, and I’ve never been within a hundred miles of him.

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Lying Accomplices

Kevin makes note of the eery sameness of Novak and Miller’s contention that Plame was idly brought up in unrelated casual conversation and asks that these assholes (my paraphrase) stop insulting our intelligence with this nonsense. He points out that someone within the White House spilled those beans long ago when he or she told the Washington Post:

A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife…”Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.

It’s clear to me that it was meant to discredit Wilson, but even if you take away that explanation, the mere fact that six different reporters (at a minimum) were “casually” told in “idle converstaion” ought to be enough for Judy to have gotten a fucking clue by now.

And let’s not forget that Novak sang a different tune when he was first questioned about this:

“Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information,” New York Newsday reporters Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce wrote. They quoted Novak saying: “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.”

That doesn’t sound like idle water cooler talk to me.

Kevin concludes with this:

I have no doubt that these officials did their best to make their disclosures sound casual. Miller and Novak either fell for it, or else were willing accomplices. Neither option speaks well for their ability to do their job.

Considering the histories of both of these “journalists” I would have to say that they are lying accomplices. These are two reporters with many decades of national security reporting between them. They knew exactly what they were hearing.

The question still remains as to what Miller was doing. She claims that she wasn’t writing an article because she had pitched the idea to “an editor” and was turned down. The editor to whom she supposedly reported says that no such conversation occurred. Yet, Judy was making agreements with Libby that she would refer to him as a “hill staffer” because she “assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson.” Seen by whom? If she wasn’t writing a story, if this was casual conversation, why would Libby be concerned about how she would portray him. Why wouldn’t the conversation just be on backround and leave it at that?

Judy said:

Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether I ever pursued an article about Mr. Wilson and his wife. I told him I had not, though I considered her connection to the C.I.A. potentially newsworthy. I testified that I recalled recommending to editors that we pursue a story.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked my reaction to Mr. Novak’s column. I told the grand jury I was annoyed at having been beaten on a story. I said I felt that since The Times had run Mr. Wilson’s original essay, it had an obligation to explore any allegation that undercut his credibility. At the same time, I added, I also believed that the newspaper needed to pursue the possibility that the White House was unfairly attacking a critic of the administration.

It is quite clear that she was writing a story and that she was writing the story that Novak actually published — outing Valerie Plame. She admits that she was annoyed that she was “beaten” to it. Indeed, she felt the Times had an obligation to explore allegations that undercut Wilson’s credibility.

And there is not one piece of evidence that she was concerned in the least that the White House was unfairly attcking a critic of the White House. All during the period when she and Libby were buttering each other’s toast at the St Regis (thank you James Wolcott) and chatting on the phone and agreeing that she would refer to him as an ex hill staffer, Judy never once called Joe Wilson to get his side of the story.

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Focus Pulling

I am with Billmon on this. I find it highly doubtful that Fitzgerald is going to indict on charges unrelated directly to the Plame leak and ensuing cover-up, but I do think he’s going to indict. As much as I’d like to believe that he’s spent the last 22 months getting to the bottom of the forgeries and Iraq lies and the inner workings of the propaganda campaugn that led us to war, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

First of all, I think he would have sought a specific expansion of his mandate (which he helpfully supplied here on his brand new web site yesterday.) As Billmon points out, it was almost certainly done to show that he was charged with more than investigating the potential violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act — and that the Justice Department explicitly gave him the power to investigate charges of perjury, obstruction etc in a second follow-up letter dated February 6, 2004. Fitzgerald asked for this explicit permission in order to make it very clear that he wasn’t going outside his mandate by investigating a cover-up. Posting this on his web-site was very likely done to quell the predictable GOP line of defense that he is an out of control prosecutor who strayed far outside his mandate. (I doubt that he was asleep during the Starr investigation.) For this reason I don’t think he’s gone far outside it.

This, however, doesn’t mean that these issues are not going to finally get an airing. Judy Miller’s little drama is a crucible for the Washington press corps. If any of them hope to save their journalistic souls, now’s the time to do it. They are already publishing articles about the WHIG, about Cheney’s monomaniacal insistence on the war. Critics are coming out of the woodwork (better late than never, I guess) and the lies that perpetrated this debacle in Iraq are being examined.

I realize that this is too little too late to save the blood and the treasure that has been wasted since the media turned themselves into a group of evil teen-aged girls and helped Karl Rove propel his creature into the White House. But the country must recover somehow and we need the press to try to right itself. Democracy depends upon it.

Fitzgerald’s probe may focus on the Valerie Plame leak and it may only touch upon the larger issues peripherally. But it is the hook, the opening, that allows the media to revisit the run-up to the war and correct the jingoistic cheerleading they called journalism for the first two years after 9/11. It means that there is a second chance for the American public to learn the truth of what really happened then, outside the manufactured hysteria that engulfed the culture for the last three years.

This is the most important thing. Much of the public already know a lot of this subconsciously. This case gives them a way to understand what happened without losing face. The “grown-ups” who led them into this war were liars and criminals. We need to make sure they realize that the “grown-ups” are the Republican establishment.

Many of us wrote a lot about certain memes the Republicans used to make the Dems look bad during the last few years. We are “soft” on terrorism, crime, morals — whatever. Soft. It’s a powerful primal image that they have used to great effect to put us on the defensive and turn the country to the right with coded slogans like “law and order” and “fight em there so we don’t have to fight em here.” It works because they’ve been saying it so long, and there is just enough truth in it, that people have internalized it.

But the Republicans have some baggage of their own that goes back just as far. They have long been associated with corruption and criminality in office and their poster boy is Richard Nixon, the father of the modern Republican party. “I am not a crook” has a resonance far beyond that moldy time. People know this, deep down, in their subconscious, just as surely as they know that Democrats are flip-flopping libertines. “Republicans are crooks.” It just rings true.

These primitive heuristics cut both ways. If we choose to play that game, and we should, we have a perfect opportunity to portray the Republicans the way that people already think they are.

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Quote of the Day

[T]here is no question from private remarks and public grimaces, some reaching back to early 2001, neither Powell nor Armitage had or has much trust or respect for Rice, and they share with other senior Republican wisemen the conviction that Rumsfeld is quite literally mad, and Cheney a dangerous, vindictive monomaniac.

Chris Nelson, via Steve Clemons.

But it does the beg the obvious question. If you have this kind of a situation, aren’t you, you know, kind of obligated to speak up before an election? Doesn’t loyalty to country trump loyalty to party?

I think I just answered my questions. Never mind.

The Day After Fitzmas

Well, it really is looking like it’s gonna happen, don’t it, boys and girls? Maybe Rove, Maybe Libby, and maybe a whole bunch of other scuzballs – it looks like they just may be feelin’ old Mr. Law’s big paw on their shoulders soon. It will be a sad day for America, a tragedy shared by all, not a time for partisan gloating. Not. It will be a totally great day. And those fuckers brought it on themselves.

Yes, things can happen, so we shouldn’t count our chickenhawks just yet. There’s nervous speculation of presidential pardons (aka, pee-pees) and and even a potential reprise, as farce, of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, when Robert Bork, on Nixon’s command, fired the first Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox. IMO, I don’t think so, and therefore we should be prepared for the best. With that in mind, here’s the big question I’ve been mulling:

On the day after Fitzmas, what do you think a truly effective opposition party should do?

No fair trying to predict what the Democrats will do. Instead, what should they do? I’ll start the ball rolling:

They should demand a full independent investigation of the charges of encouraging and covering-up murder, torture and “extreme rendition” at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Any other ideas? Let your imaginations soar, dear friends…

[Update: Added a link to Billmon’s post that emphasizes the point I originally made with the remark about counting chickenhawks: that whatever happens may be less than overwhelming.]

1992

It’s still a bit untidy over there:

A defense lawyer in Saddam Hussein’s mass murder trial has been found dead, his body dumped near a Baghdad mosque with two gunshots to the head, police and a top lawyers union official said Friday.

In other violence, four U.S. service members were killed in two attacks Thursday, the U.S. military said. Three Marines died when a bomb hit their patrol in the village of Nasser wa Salam, 25 miles west of Baghdad, and other American troops clashed with gunmen, killing two insurgents and capturing four, the military said.

An American soldier was killed in the northwestern town of Hit by ”indirect fire,” a term that usually means a mortar or rocket attack, the military said.

Nineteen Americans have been killed in the past week. The latest deaths brought to 1,992 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the war in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

And it looks like we’ll hit the ghastly 2000 soldiers dead soldiers mark right around the time Fitzgerald makes an announcement.