Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Engine Seizure

What a morning.

Instead of discussing the biggest story in town (in which he happens to be intimately involved) Russert spent almost the entire hour helping Louis Freeh smear Bill Clinton. This was after letting Condi Rice get away with saying, “we could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda…or we could take a bolder approach.” Too bad about the terrorism.

On ABC Joe Klein, George Will and Fahreed Zakaria might as well have been wearing powdered wigs and sniffing snuff with their pinkies raised as they rolled their eyes and knowingly pooh-poohed the leaking of classified information, deploring the wanton criminalization of politics that has taken place under King George’s reign.

Stephanopoulos, to his credit for once, actually reported the story everyone in Washington actually cares about and even got Joe DeGenova to admit that Fitzgerald not only should pursue charges if anybody in the white house lied to him — he had a duty to do so. Apparently, he and his ball and chain, Victoria Toensing, aren’t yet on the same page about Fitz — she said the other day that he had “lost it!” He’d “gone over the edge.!”

Steph also surprisingly called on the perfumed courtiers on their casual dismissal of powerful government officials outing undercover CIA operatives to cover-up their lies about the reasons for an illegal war of aggression. Perhaps he was stung by the fact that in order to join the Kewl Kidz he was forced to turn on his political mentor with all the breathless sanctimony of a born again drug addict while the kewl kidz now thinks its terribly droll that the powers that be play political games with national security. IOKIYAR, Stephie. Remember that.

I didn’t hear anybody mention this, and it’s big:

Even before testifying last week for the fourth time before a grand jury probing the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, Bush senior adviser Rove and others at the White House had concluded that if indicted he would immediately resign or possibly go on unpaid leave, several legal and Administration sources familiar with the thinking told TIME.

Resignation is the much more likely scenario, they say. The same would apply to I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the Vice President’s chief of staff, who also faces a possible indictment. A former White House official says Rove’s break with Bush would have to be clean—no “giving advice from the sidelines”—for the sake of the Administration.

From, the way his lawyers are talking, they seem pretty convinced that Rove is likely to be indicted:

Rove’s defense team asserts that President Bush’s deputy chief of staff has not committed a crime but nevertheless anticipates that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald could find a way to bring charges in the next two weeks, the source said.

Of course Rove will be giving his advice from the sidelines, but without him being on the spot, his power and influence will be a shadow of what it was. And frankly, I’m not sure if I’m more nervous at the idea of Karl Rove staying in the White House or leaving it. George W. Bush has had Karl Rove at his side for his entire political career. Every minute. It’s impossible to imagine him functioning without him.

George W. Bush is a creature of Karl Rove’s imagination. He invented him. I would bet money that Dick Cheney is no longer a trusted second in command. It looks like he and his little dog Scooter may have taken Turdblossom down with them. If Rove goes, for better or worse (and I don’t actually think it could be worse) the United States will effectively no longer have a president.

I wonder if James Baker is on call. He’s the loyal Texan the Bushes usually call to clean up their shit. If he’s not up for it this time it looks like Andrew Card or Ed Gillespie will be running the most powerful nation on earth for the next three years. Jesus.

Keep in mind that the political machine is also on the defensive from all directions — DeLay, Abramoff, Reed, Norquist, Frist even Lou Sheldon and James Dobson are now in the sights of federal prosecutors. And then there’s Ronnie Earle. The Harriet Miers crack-up may just be a preview. The top-down, centralized Republican machine is seizing up and it’s about to explode.

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Judy’s War, And Matt’s

Five more American soldiers died in Iraq. They died not only because Saddam surely had Weapons of Mass Destruction. They also perished for America’s noble mission to spread democracy where once trod the heavy boot of tyranny.

Christ, this war make me sick.

The Trifecta

Abramoff quietly arranged for eLottery to pay conservative, anti-gambling activists to help in the firm’s $2 million pro-gambling campaign, including Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, and the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. Both kept in close contact with Abramoff about the arrangement, e-mails show. Abramoff also turned to prominent anti-tax conservative Grover Norquist, arranging to route some of eLottery’s money for Reed through Norquist’s group, Americans for Tax Reform.

It’s late. Am I dreaming?

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Question

For any of you professional journalists out there: how common do you suppose it is for the pentagon to give a reporter “clearance to see secret information?”

I think we need another conference on blogger ethics because I’m getting all confused again.

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Libby’s Defense

It occurs to me in reading Judy’s description of her testimony that the very nature of the investigation has required Fitz to at least peripherally examine the bogus WMD claims. If somebody goes to trial, this is going to be an issue. Judy went into some detail about what the administration was selling during the summer of 2003:

As I told the grand jury, I recalled Mr. Libby’s frustration and anger about what he called “selective leaking” by the C.I.A. and other agencies to distance themselves from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments. The selective leaks trying to shift blame to the White House, he told me, were part of a “perverted war” over the war in Iraq.

[…]

As I told Mr. Fitzgerald and the grand jury, Mr. Libby alluded to the existence of two intelligence reports about Iraq’s uranium procurement efforts. One report dated from February 2002. The other indicated that Iraq was seeking a broad trade relationship with Niger in 1999, a relationship that he said Niger officials had interpreted as an effort by Iraq to obtain uranium.

My notes indicate that Mr. Libby told me the report on the 1999 delegation had been attributed to Joe Wilson.

Mr. Libby also told me that on the basis of these two reports and other intelligence, his office had asked the C.I.A. for more analysis and investigation of Iraq’s dealings with Niger. According to my interview notes, Mr. Libby told me that the resulting cable – based on Mr. Wilson’s fact-finding mission, as it turned out – barely made it out of the bowels of the C.I.A. He asserted that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, had never even heard of Mr. Wilson.

As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby also cited a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, produced by American intelligence agencies in October 2002, which he said had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium.

[…]

Although I was interested primarily in my area of expertise – chemical and biological weapons – my notes show that Mr. Libby consistently steered our conversation back to the administration’s nuclear claims. His main theme echoed that of other senior officials: that contrary to Mr. Wilson’s criticism, the administration had had ample reason to be concerned about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities based on the regime’s history of weapons development, its use of unconventional weapons and fresh intelligence reports.

Needless to say, further events proved Mr Libby and the rest of the adminstration to be asses. That, however, is only partly relevant to the fact that this testimony seems to lead inexorably to an examination of the WMD claims that Libby referenced. There’s a lot of detail there that will have to be dealt with if there’s a trial. Perhaps we now know something of what is in those 8 pages of redacted evidence that convinced Judge Tatel that this case was important enough to send Miller to jail for.

And if Libby wants to defend his version of events to Judy Miller, keep this in mind, from that little noticed column from last month referring to a classified Inspector General report that places the blame for 9/11 and the WMD failures on George Tenent:

Mr. Tenet’s decision to defend himself against the charges in the report poses a potential crisis for the White House. According to a former clandestine services officer, the former CIA director turned down a publisher’s $4.5 million book offer because he didn’t want to embarrass the White House by rehashing the failure to prevent September 11 and the flawed intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Tenet, according to a knowledgeable source, had a “wink and a nod” understanding with the White House that he wouldn’t be scapegoated for intelligence failings. The deal, one source says, was sealed with the award of the Presidential Freedom Medal.

Now that deal may be off…In deciding not to become the fall guy, Mr. Tenet has made a fateful decision. The latest salvo in the ongoing wars between the CIA and the White House may be about to burst. Until now, Mr. Tenet has kept silent about what Mr. Bush knew and when he knew it. Mr. Tenet’s decision to defend his own role in September 11 puts the White House back in the spotlight. The only way he can push off responsibility is to push it higher up the ladder.

There is a lot of pressure building on the Iraq lies coming from a lot of different directions.

For a thorough rundown of the feud between the white house and the CIA, read this post by ReddHedd at firedoglake.

For a historical view of the neocons and the CIA (and the difference between the left and right’s view of the spooks) read this moldy old post of mine.

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Victor/ Victoria

There is much to chew over in Judy’s magnum opus and I’m going to have to give it some quality time tomorrow. But the first thing that jumps out at me is this weird “Victoria” thing.

Somebody was calling Valerie Plame, Victoria — Judy isn’t the only one to make that mistake. Kevin Drum caught this in October:

NEEDED: ONLINE EDITOR….Howard Fineman in Newsweek yesterday:

I’ll stipulate that it is a felony to disclose the name of an undercover CIA operative who has been posted overseas in recent years. That’s what the statute says. But the now infamous outing of Victoria Plame isn’t primarily an issue of law. It’s about a lot of other things….

Um, anyone notice the problem here? And it’s repeated three more times. Maybe Newsweek needs to hire Dan Weintraub’s editor.

In the comments one of his commenter noticed others:

A quick Google search shows several incidents of the name Victoria Plame such as in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the International Herald Tribune.

It’s certainly possible that a whole bunch of people made the same mistake about her first name. It’s odd, though. One might think that it is more likely that it was one person who consistently referred to her by the wrong name — who was speaking to a bunch of reporters.

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Our Tax Dollars At Work

The New York Review of Books links to this recent heartbreaking, enraging account of systematic torture of Iraqis by American troops, CIA types, and others by Human Rights Watch. It demands a detailed accounting from this government but of course it won’t get one, partly because not even American moderates take seriously anything a group like Human Rights Watch says concerning US human rights abuses. These are our tax dollars at work, present tense intended. The recent resolution from Congress condemning torture surely will be ignored.

And that, my friends, is the direct result of the wildly successful efforts of the Bush right to marginalize all organizations and individuals that fail to hew to a right to far right attitude regarding American foreign policy.

Human Rights Watch is neither left or right (this would go without saying if our political discourse wasn’t so grossly distorted, but it bears repeating in the present climate). It simply details human rights abuses everywhere regardless of the polarity of the government. It is incredible, truly incredible, that even today Americans, even Americans unalterably opposed to torture, believe that reports like HRW’s need to be “balanced” with the official propaganda line of the Bush government in order to arrive at the real truth about Iraqi torture, which “surely lies somewhere in between.” It doesn’t. Plain and simple, HRW’s account is horribly accurate and Bush’s assurances are lies that should receive only minimal coverage by responsible reporters.

It is long overdue for groups like HRW to get accorded the “moderate US mainstream” respect they deserve, and get acknowledged for the incredible courage it takes to report these kinds of abuses. While it is a secondary issue to the sheer immorality of torture, if ever there was a program designed to make overseas travel and work by Americans more dangerous, it is a policy of systematic torture of prisoners.

Once again, the Bush administration demonstrates that they are prepared to dangerously undermine American interests while branding all critics as leftwing scoundrels and traitors. And once again, they are full of shit.

Don’t Look At Me

Read this very interesting Hardball transcript of a discussion between Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell as they dissect the body of public evidence we have about Fitzgerald’s investigation. They speculate grandly about what Fitzgerald’s up to — and you can see that there is some serious trepidation about Fitz coming in and trashing the place by expecting Republicans to uphold the law.

But there is one tiny bit of information that they both fail to mention in their wide ranging discussion of all things Fitzgerald: the fact that both of them were subpoenaed in the case! And neither of these fine reporters have actually, you know, reported what that was about.

I especially love questions like this: “Yes, I think we are looking at something. What do you think, Jim? What do you know, actually?”

What do you know Chris? You’re allegedly a reporter. You’re the guy who talks incessantly about manly men and how they behave. Tell us your impressions of Patrick Fitzgerald. Presumably you’ve met him. What was he like? What did he ask you? What did you tell him? Can you not say anything because your lawyer had advised you not to? If so, why?

This story is the weirdest kabuki dance I’ve ever seen. I thought it was absurd when the news anchors held the exit poll results but winked and nodded all day about the outcome. (That’s become so bizarre after the last two elections, however, that their winks and nods will be meaningless in any close election.) But this is ridiculous. We have big time reporters in the Washington press corps who know a lot more about what is going on than they are saying. A number of them have been interviewed by the Justice department or testified. They are part of the story. And yet they pretend that they are “objective” reporters who have no personal knowledge of events and don’t even feel the need to issue a disclaimer saying that they had been interviewed or they testified and can’t talk about it.

I have been hard on Judith Miller for not writing anything, but I’m beginning to really believe that she is in legal jeopardy. (That doen’t excuse the NY Times, of course, for their failures.) For the life of me, I can’t understand any journalistic ethics that would hold that it is ok for Chris matthews and Andrea Mitchell to discuss the ins and outs of a highly detailed story, speculate about the prosecutor and who he’s talking to, without having to say that they are personally involved in the case. But then I’m just an amoral, psuedonymous blogger from nowhere who can’t be trusted.

I won’t even mention the BMOC (big man on channel) Tim Russert, who is clearly not only involved in the case, he is at the very center of it. (The Anonymous Liberal nicely connects those dots, here.) I can find no evidence that Russert has ever admitted or been asked on the air that he had anything to do with the case at all. Apparently this strange DC journalistic omerta precludes people from mentioning that fact even while they are being grilled by Russert on their own knowledge of the case.

After reading this laughable pile of offal by Richard Cohen today (who, as usual, writes precisely the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time)I’m more convinced than ever that something very sick has happened to our politics. Andrea Mitchell said on Hardball last night: “Chris, we should point out that there is a difference between playing political hardball, which people in Washington play and people in this White House play, and anything that approaches a crime.” This idea that character assassination has become so normalized that even the outing of a CIA agent for political purposes is considered business as usual is outrageous and it explains a lot about what has gone wrong with our government.

The subjects of this investigation are the most powerful people on this planet. The case involves not just politics as usual but a concerted effort to conceal information about the rationale leading up to this misbegotten war. When the administration was confronted by critics, they could have laid out the reasons why Wilson was incorrect. Instead, they chose to forcefully discredit him with a ridiculous nepotism charge and in the course of that, whether purposefully of out of carelessness, they revealed a CIA agent’s cover.

This was not just politics, it was a cover up using strong arm tactics. We may not have known definitively in the summer of 2003 that after all the administration’s so-called proof that there were no WMD in Iraq, but we sure as hell do now. Whether they technically committed a crime under the Victoria Toensing statute, or whether they perjured themselves or obstructed justice before the grand jury to cover their political crimes, it should be prosecuted. Richard Cohen and Andrea Mitchell may think this is trivial, but I doubt that most people in this country will find it so. They understand the difference between consensual blowjobs, character assassination and national security even if the beltway doesn’t.

This is at its essence about a toxic political culture. The press has abdicated its reponsibility to hold the powerful accountable. A highly centralized Republican political machine observes no limits. The opposition party is purposefully rendered impotent and irrelevant. The checks and balances are no longer in place.

The only institution that has the ability to cut through the spin, the lies, the strong-arm tactics is the justice system. Politics have become criminalized to be sure — by the political criminals and their friendly helpmates in the press. The law is all we’ve got left. God help us.

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Fredo, You Broke My Heart

Via Americablog, Murray Waas is quoted as saying:

…Apparently Lewis Libby and Karl Rove, during the course of the special prosecutor’s investigation, they almost certainly never thought that either Judith Miller or Matthew Cooper or the journals would cooperate. It’s been very rare that a prosecutor – a federal prosecutor has been [inaudible] to pressure journalists into testifying against their will. It’s very rare that journalists have testified, and it’s almost a historical thing now for Judith Miller to spend 85 days in jail. So, I think it was — Libby was apparently in the hope that Miller wouldn’t testify, as Karl Rove was, that Matthew Cooper wouldn’t.

If that’s so, they were no more assured than their big boss who was certain that reporters would never cooperate, back in October of 2003:

“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.”

….and if you want any more leaks you’ll keep your traps shut.

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Major Discoveries

First of all, More Hobbits found. This would seem to indicate that Homo floresiensis is a real new species discovery, but there are still a lot of scientists who think the skeletons represent modern humans with microcephaly. Also, in a different story about the new hobbit skeleton, there’s some speculation that hobbits may have descended not from Homo Erectus, as the main discoverers believe, but from australopithecines, hominids like the famous Lucy.

And then there are the first photos of a living giant squid. Before these pics, the most info we had about this critter (25 feet long and counting) came from dead or dying animals that had washed ashore.

Moving right along, a manuscript of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge was discovered on a shelf in a seminary’s library in Philadelphia. This is a piano four-hands arrangement of one of the greatest pieces of music I know. The link gives the NY Times article but if you go to the Times itself, you can see pictures of the manuscript and play a slideshow. This is easily one of the most important musicological finds of the past 50 years or more.

Equally important is the discovery and publication of John Work’s legendary study of the music and people of Coahoma County, Mississippi in the early 40’s. In a nutshell, back in ’42, a team of musicologists and folklorists from the Smithsonian and Fisk University traveled to Coahoama to document the music and life there. Alan Lomax, the Smithsonian man, was searching for the young blues master Robert Johnson, who unfortunately had died about five years before. Residents suggested he might want to hear another bluesman on the big plantation down there, a fellow by the name of McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters. Lomax made the first recordings of Muddy and they are incredible. By the way, if you don’t know the music of Muddy Waters, you don’t know America. Those who love Muddy know I’m not exaggerating.

Here’s the thing. There was another man at those plantation recording sessions, Professor John Work from Fisk University. As it happens, it was Fisk and Work who originally proposed the research trip, contacted the Smithsonian, and Lomax took charge from them. Lomax, of course, is one of the most important men in the history of American folk music, but for all the great things he did, he could be a bit of an opportunist. Lomax arranged for the release of some of Muddy’s recordings from that day (and many more treasures of African American folk musc) while Dr. Work patiently transcribed not only the Muddy Water’s recordings but at least a hundred others, which provide a superb overview of Coahoama’s musical life. This is the area known as the Mississippi Delta, the main stamping grounds not only of Robert Johnson, but Son House, Charlie Patton, Willie Brown, Howlin’ Wolf, and a host of other musicians whose contribution to American and world culture is so great, it defies calculation. He sent this precious manuscript into Lomax for publication and, well, Lomax “lost” it.

Well, Muddy’s biographer, and some others, found Work’s manuscript and also found some other papers from the same study. They are a treasure trove. I’ve been reading this book since this summer, playing through the music, learning about the famous Natchez fire and the levee floods and African-American life in the South during a period of profound transitions. These are essential documents, beautifully edited and published.