David Corn offers up the “rebuke” scenario and also speculates that the White House might be flogging that poor old dead pony, “the CIA did it.” (You really have to wonder what they are giving Tenet if this turns out to be true. It would have to be on the order of a small monarchy somewhere or a trip around the world with Paris Hilton.)
When Fitzgerald first pursued Miller and Cooper, it was easy to dismiss him as an overzealous prosecutor interested more in a vendetta than in making a case. But as the Cooper portion of this episode demonstrated, Fitzgerald was after information crucial to his investigation. From Cooper he obtained material that showed Rove had discussed the CIA identity of Wilson’s wife with a reporter. Though Fitzgerald and Miller have clashed on non-Plame business previously, perhaps he has been seeking information just as critical from her.
For anyone following the matter, it’s impossible not to guess about what’s going on and what Fitzgerald will do. His grand jury expires at the end of October. He could impanel a new one and keep investigating. But all indications suggest he’s close to done. One person who recently had contact with Fitzgerald and his attorneys says that they seem confident about whatever it is they are pursuing. The Miller matter was something of a sideshow that at times drew more attention than the central issue.
Tantalizing, isn’t it? If the Punchin’ Judy play is the sideshow, the main attraction must be a doozy.
I hesitate to get into this because people are sick of my preaching, but the hell with it. The fact is that Bill Bennett’s racist statement is actually just one of many that are apparently happening all over right wing radio in the wake of Katrina:
As if Hurricane Katrina victims didn’t have enough going against them, now they’re the latest targets of hate radio. Just listen to WFTL-AM (850), the 50,000-watt home of the Florida Marlins. It’s also the home of some of the most radical right-wing voices in America.
One regular syndicated host, Atlanta-based Neil Boortz, contended after the disaster struck that a “huge percentage” of the evacuees from New Orleans were “parasites, like ticks on a dog.” Then he warned, “They are coming to a community near you.”
When a caller remarked that most of the evacuees were fat, Boortz readily agreed. “They didn’t drown because you couldn’t push them underwater if you had to,” he chortled.
Then there’s Kelley Mitchell, who spent a week broadcasting at the Houston Astrodome among flood victims. Mitchell, a big-boned blond who spent years on South Florida television news stations, didn’t seem too concerned about the harrowing stories from the people in the stadium. Instead she was virtually obsessed with the reports of looting and railed for days against the alleged behavior of poor New Orleans blacks during the disaster. She took to calling the state “Lose-iana” and announced she was boycotting any monetary donations to the victims.
“If I heard, ‘I’m looking for my mom, my dad, and my baby daddy again,’ I would cringe,” she said, referring to the victims who had lost relatives. “Everybody knows it’s important to speak English but these knuckleheads.”
[…]
Another Mitchell gem: “When I see bad behavior … that’s when it became about race. Whoever got over deep-seated prejudices is now wondering if it was right to do so.”
[…]
“We need to let black America know we do want you, but we want you on the terms of the United States of America,” she explained in a voice that sometimes sounds eerily similar to that of similarly built actress Kathy Bates. “And we want you to be full and complete human beings.”
Isn’t that special? “We” do want you. Apparently, black Americans, many of whom had ancestors wwho ere here a century or two before many right wing racist assholes’ are now provisional Americans who have to adhere to certain “terms of the United States of America.” I guess she wants to send them “back” to Africa if they fail to comply.
Ugh.
And, by the way, Bennett’s crime is that he essentially said “blacks are born criminals.” Certainly, you can say that aborting any number of discrete demographic groups could have an effect on the crime rate, but attributing it to race suggests something immutable. Males commit more crimes than females at least partly because of biological characteristics. Poor people of all races commit more crimes (at least a certain kind of crimes) because of their economic circumstances and cultural influences. Statistically, Blacks may commit more crimes than whites because of both of the above reasons, but there is nothing in the color of their skin or their DNA that makes them more likely to commit crimes than anyone else.
Ok kidz. Judy’s lawyer Bob Bennett just told Wolf Blitzer that Judy’s agreement with Fitzgerald was limited to “the Valerie Plame matter” not just Libby. Wolf pressed. Fitzgerald Bennett reiterated that it was “the Valerie Plame matter.”
Judy was worried that Fitzgerald was going to pursue her bogus WMD claims.
Bolton and Cheney and Rove all the rest aren’t off the hook on Plame. Do you suppose that includes Niger?
My blogger friend Joe Vecchio lost his wife to illness this week. She was quite young. Any of you who have enjoyed Joe’s “the voice of the working man” blog over the years, (and those who’ve not had a chance) can go over and pay your respects — and donate little bit if you can. He’s been out of work while his wife was very ill and the family could use some help.
Via Liberal Oasis, here’s the latest from rightwing land on the new supreme nomination:
“Shell shocked,” “confused,” “stumbling,” “full of doubt.” These are all words I have heard used to describe the current White House effort to find Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement. Batchelder, Williams, and Owen have all been interviewed, but the process continues to sputter along.
Several have told me not to buy into the Miers trial balloon. It is, I’m told, just that — a trial balloon. Another tells me, “The President wants Gonzales. That’s what is dragging this thing out. They’re sending out people to say he is conservative as if by telling us that enough we will say, ’sure, he really is one of us.’ That is not going to happen.”
The process is still moving. Those I have talked to in the past twenty-four hours tell me we should expect a minority or woman. The odds are that it will be a woman. Sykes’s name has gotten little play in the past twenty-four hours and Luttig’s name has gotten none. Larry Thompson’s name continues to surface. One person disputes all my sources and tells me that Thompson, not Clement, was the almost pick last time.
The jury is still out on the nominee. Says one from a phone call this morning, “The White House has gone into second guess mode. They want another Roberts, an enigma who will slip through and turn out to be a conservative. They are second guessing their picks. That, I would think, increases the chances of a Thompson or a Gonzales — someone the President’s gut tells him is conservative. My gut tells me we have to keep the pressure on or we’re [screwed].”
They don’t want to put another woman on the court. Not really. The conservative Sandra Day O’Connor, who was personally distraught at the idea that Bush might not have won the 2000 election and made sure he was installed anyway, is now seen as some sort of left wing bra burner on the right. Clearly, women can’t be trusted.
This is not an accident. There is a serious movememnt afoot to denigrate women’s issues, and therefore, pressure Bush not to nominate another woman. Check out this story by Dahlia Lithwick on the “chick-baiting” that’s going on around this supreme court nomination:
A few weeks ago I suggested that race and gender should not be the only—or even the primary—filter through which we consider Supreme Court nominees. I rejected the arguments that minority candidates serve as proxies for minority views (whatever those might be), or that they create the appearance of a court that “looks like America.” I was wrong. We need another woman on the Supreme Court. And while we’re at it we need a few more women on the Senate judiciary committee.
[…]
I wonder why both Ginsburg and O’Connor—who differ on virtually everything—feel so strongly that there should be two women on the Supreme Court that they’d use their offices to publicly urge the president to appoint one.
And I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with the ways in which gender politics are starting to infect our discourse about the courts. Consider this commentary by Bruce Fein this week in the Washington Times: Fein lines up Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then levels potshots at them as believers in Supreme Court justices as “apostles over the law” because of their concern for John Roberts’ positions on women’s and civil rights. Oddly enough, Patrick Leahy, Joseph Biden, Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, and the other male Senate Democrats who called for Roberts’ views in this area are never mentioned.
Mark Steyn is positively bilious about this feminization of the Democrats in the Washington Times on Monday. Again Feinstein (and only Feinstein) is blistered for wanting to hear Roberts “talking to me as a son, a husband and a father.” For which Steyn’s prescription is that she “get off the Judiciary Committee and go audition for ‘Return To Bridges Of Madison County,’ or ‘What Women Want 2’ (‘Mel Gibson is nominated to the Supreme Court but, despite being sensitive and a good listener, is accused of being a conservative theocrat’).”
And here’s George Will this week, also taking his nasty stick to Sen. Feinstein: “Dianne Feinstein’s thoughts on the nomination of John G. Roberts as chief justice of the United States should be read with a soulful violin solo playing, or perhaps accompanied by the theme song of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show.’ Those thoughts are about pinning one’s heart on one’s sleeve, sharing one’s feelings and letting one’s inner Oprah come out for a stroll.” Will’s contempt for Senate efforts to know something about the next chief justice’s “temperament and values”—to understand his heart—is absolutely laser focused on the senator from California. Odd. Never a mention of Biden, Schumer, Mike DeWine, and Dick Durbin—each of whom similarly deployed the language of hearts and feelings in their questioning of Roberts.
Now, I am not come today to praise Sen. Feinstein. Her performance during those hearings probably set the women’s movement back a decade. From her ingenuous “Now, I’m not a lawyer …” questions to her tendency to turn even declarative sentences into halting questions, she hardly projected the air of mastery and confidence I’ve seen in her in the past. I’m not sure I can sign off on her self-appointed task of representing all 145 million American women at the hearings. I can’t even get behind her efforts to force a clearly private man into vomiting up mawkish personal revelations onto the hearing-room floor.
But I do wonder why it became so very easy to blast only the woman who wanted to cut through Roberts’ repeated claims to be a lean, mean law-making machine. I wonder why the woman who worried about his aloofness and disconnection from poverty or suffering was singled out for derision. Is it because the stereotype of the pathetic, whiny, “but how do you feel” nag fits so much better if the asker is wearing curlers and a housecoat? Is it a cynical effort to paint all women as hysterics or merely all Democrats as women? Or is it, in the end, the consequence of having only one woman on the committee?
I’m sure it’s just an accident that Fein, Steyn (weird name-coincidence or conspiracy?), and George Will each singled out only Feinstein as their judiciary committee poster-person for the strange quest-for-feeling that characterized the Roberts hearings. But it certainly evokes something Ginsburg mentioned in her remarks yesterday at Wake Forest. According to the report, she noted that “she started in law school in the 1950s—a time when law students and law practitioners were predominantly male. She said she felt pressure to excel, to break the stereotypes about women. … ‘You felt like all eyes were on you. If you gave a poor answer in class, you felt like it would be viewed as indicative of all female students.’ “
Imagine being judged and ridiculed as a lightweight, when—as sole representative of your gender—you feel you must defend the achievement of all women. The solution for both Ginsburg’s problem and Feinstein’s is simple: Give the critics more targets. Load up the courts and Congress with enough women, and then maybe blaming them for being women in the first place will stop sounding like a legitimate critique.
Is it a cynical effort to paint all women as hysterics or merely all Democrats as women?
It’s both. And one follows from the other. Lithwick says she’s sure it’s just a coincidence, but it isn’t. These things don’t come out of nowhere on the right.
One thing I hope that people think a little bit about is that this distaste for women’s issues is one that can easily be internalized on both sides of the political fence. Indeed, it already has in some ways. This, like race, is much simpler for the right to deride than it is for the left to defend. These are complicated issues. Nonetheless, we have no choice. It is the essence of what we stand for — liberty, equality. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Dan Kennedy writes about Michael Isikoff taking TIME and the NY Times to task for not following up on the Plame story. Isikoff has a very checkered past in these matters, but in this case he is correct. The fact that TIME and The NY Times dropped the ball on these stories because their reporters refused to reveal their sources is really unconscionable. They should have pursued the stories more vigorously, not less.
If a reporter has a confidential source who is giving them backround information, they are supposed to, you know, go look for things like documents and other witnesses so they can actually publish a story. Matt Cooper, to his credit, did at least write one story and he took the proper inference from the leak — that the white house was trying to discredit Wilson. The magazine then failed to properly follow-up and even withheld evidence in fear of swinging an election!
Miller never writing a story at all and the Times treating the whole thing like a pile of stinking garbage in which they didn’t want to dip their finely manicured hands is just shocking.
Arianna excoriates both today and asks the following very pertinent questions:
And so we don’t forget what this story is really about, and given that the aluminum tubes crap that Miller put on the front page of the New York Times was being heavily promoted by Cheney, how much of that bogus information came to Miller via Libby?
And here are a few questions for the Times:
Had a Plame/Wilson story been assigned to Miller or not?
What, if anything, did she say about the story to anyone at the paper at the time… and what did they say back?
Why did the Times hold back the story about Miller’s release and let multiple other news sources scoop them? Were they trying to miss the evening news cycle and avoid the overnight thrashing their spin has rightly received?
It would be nice if they spent the same amount of time handwringing about this as they did that puerile stunt by Jayson Blair, but I’m not holding my breath. When a newpaper is partially responsible for sending a country to war on false pretenses, they tend to circle the wagons. I thought the days of William Randooph Hearst were long dead history, but maybe not so much.
Update:
Just to be clear — in my post below where I say that Libby’s lawyers had better shut up, it was not because I thought their version of events with respect to the waivers was necessarily correct or incorrect. It was because it’s never a good idea for lawyers to anger witnesses who are going to appear before a grand jury the next day.
It’s kind of painful watching people talk about Libby and Miller this morning on television when it’s clear that they are just riffing. Jonathan Alter is a smart guy, but his main talking point (on MSNBC) is whether Fitzgerald will issue a report that “rebukes” Rove and Libby for discussing a CIA employee even though they didn’t do anything illegal. He seems to be resigned to the fact that there will be no indictments.
There does seem to be an emerging conventional wisdom (among my commenters at least) that Fitz will not indict. The fact that he doesn’t intend to ask Miller about anyone but Libby feels like some sort of capitulation but let’s keep in mind that any thoughts we had that he wanted to ask about anyone but Libby were always pure speculation. There was nothing in any of his court filings that indicated he wanted anything other than to question her about one specific person — Libby. The court issued its contempt order based upon that request alone.
There was never any reason to believe that Fitzgerald wanted to discuss Judy’s other sources, only that Judy didn’t want to discuss her other sources with Fitzgerald. We may never know what motivated her to become the Martyr of Times Square (Hat tip Billmon.) She’s a drama queen of the highest order and probably had a whole list of reasons. But Fitz has said from the beginning that he needed her testimony for one specific purpose and perhaps we snould believe that.
People are also saying that Judy will simply lie. To that I reiterate what I wrote in the post below. She never wrote a story so someone had to have told Fitzgerald that Judy and Libby spoke. Nobody knows who that was. Maybe it was Libby. Maybe it was someone that Libby told. Maybe it was someone Miller told. Judy cannot be sure what Fitzgerald knows or who he talked to. It would be very, very risky for her to lie.
Lifted from the comments down page, here’s some intersesting speculation from Emptywheel of The Next Hurrah (one of the best Fitzgerald kremlinologists in the blogosphere) about what Fitz might have and what Judy might bring to the table:
What did Fitz get?
Proof that Libby’s notes have been tampered with.
Notes that say WHIG carried out a plot to get Wilson (the conspiracy angle that gets Dick).
The crucial link in the chain of custody of the information.
Why did he agree to avoid other sources?
Because he already has the evidence. Before subpoenaing a journalist, you have to prove the journalist is the only source of the information. Someone else had/has that info for Fitz, so he doesn’t need Judy for it. (Although she’s going to look stupid in court when someone from the Times gets up and talks about her receiving some stuff from Bolton, but not testifying herself. But looking stupid never seemed to be a problem for her.)
The notes are clearly key:
“One set of documents that prosecutors repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White House aides are extensive notes compiled by I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and national security adviser. Prosecutors have described the notes as ‘copious.’” [New York Times, 2/10/04]
For those who would like a quick refresher in who the administration players in this are and how they fit into the story as we know it, here’s Think Progress’ handy little primer.
(My good buddy Jim Wilkinson doesn’t appear, but I have a feeling that he’s lurking in this story somewhere too. He was a member of WHIG.)
Murray Waas reports on why Miller’s testimony is important to Fitzgerald:
What is perhaps left out of news accounts tonight is that Miller’s testimony is central to whether special Fitzgerald brings criminal charges against I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. Libby was unwavering in telling prosecutors and the FBI that he knew nothing of Plame’s covert work for the CIA, even though he spoke to Miller about at length about her and her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Whether that account is truthful is something only both Miller and Libby know. Miller’s testimony on that issue will be central to any final disposition of the criminal probe, sources close to the investigation have told me for some time now.
Just in case Judy didn’t know what Libby would like her to say to the Grand Jury, the Washington Post helpfully printed it up for her:
According to a source familiar with Libby’s account of his conversations with Miller in July 2003, the subject of Wilson’s wife came up on two occasions. In the first, on July 8, Miller met with Libby to interview him about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the source said.
At that time, she asked him why Wilson had been chosen to investigate questions Cheney had posed about whether Iraq tried to buy uranium in the African nation of Niger. Libby, the source familiar with his account said, told her that the White House was working with the CIA to find out more about Wilson’s trip and how he was selected.
Libby told Miller he heard that Wilson’s wife had something to do with sending him but he did not know who she was or where she worked, the source said.
Libby had a second conversation with Miller on July 12 or July 13, the source said, in which he said he had learned that Wilson’s wife had a role in sending him on the trip and that she worked for the CIA. Libby never knew Plame’s name or that she was a covert operative, the source said.
Miller is a made man. Why would Fitzgerald think she would tell the truth when it’s clear that Libby wants her to testify on his behalf?
Because somebody else has already spilled the beans. How else did Judy come to Fitzgerald’s attention in the first place?
Asked why prosecutors sought Miller’s testimony when she never wrote a story about Plame, Times attorney Floyd Abrams said, “We don’t know, but most likely somebody testified to the grand jury that he or she had spoken to Judy.”
Neither Miller or Libby can be absolutely sure what that person told the Grand Jury because neither of them can be absolutely sure that the other one didn’t tell someone about their conversation. Who knows how many people could have testified before the grand jury about Miller and Libby?
One thing is certainly clear. Fitzgerald doesn’t trust Judy as far as he can throw her. Here’s what he said about her in court when she was asking for home detention:
The question is whether Miller would defy a final court order and commit the crime of contempt and thereby obstruct an investigation of persons who may have compromised classified information.
She has no idea what he knows. She would be an idiot to lie.
One other thing to keep in mind. For those of us who are looking for him to broaden the scope of this investigation and look into a larger set of issues surrounding the Iraq lies, if Fitzgerald hands down indictments it is only a first step. Indictments tend to focus the mind, I would think. Perhaps some people will have more to say when they are faced with serious legal trouble.
And it would certainly explain the dismal political performance of the white house lately if high level advisors have been too busy negotiating plea bargains for themselves to keep a close eye on Junior.
update: Via Anonymous Liberal I see that there is some dispute emerging about this waiver business that I hadn’t heard before:
Also of note, is this conflicting account of the original waiver given by Libby to Miller over a year ago. First, from the Post.
[J]oseph Tate, an attorney for Libby, said yesterday that he told Miller’s attorney, Floyd Abrams, a year ago that Libby’s waiver was voluntary and that Miller was free to testify. He said last night that he was contacted by Bennett several weeks ago, and was surprised to learn that Miller had not accepted that representation as authorization to speak with prosecutors. “We told her lawyers it was not coerced,” Tate said. “We are surprised to learn we had anything to do with her incarceration.”
On Thursday, Mr. Abrams wrote to Mr. Tate disputing parts of Mr. Tate’s account. His letter said although Mr. Tate had said the waiver was voluntary, Mr. Tate had also said any waiver sought as a condition of employment was inherently coercive.
If Abrams is telling the truth, then Libby apparently did not give Miller the kind of waiver that she required. If Tate told Abrams that the waiver Libby signed was “inherently coercive,” then Abrams and Miller were correct to interpret that conversation as not amounting to a free and voluntary waiver. How else were they supposed to interpret such a comment?
Libby’s lawyers probably should shut their mouths.
Hunter at Daily Kos responds to the delicate pearl clutchers of the right who find themselves simply overwrought at the shocking prospect of all these corruption scandals being exploited for partisan gain. If there’s one thing they have never been able to abide it’s despicable underhanded politics. What is this world coming to?
Well…
Welcome to the world of the politics of personal destruction, you tubthumping, chin-jutting, Bush humping gits. Welcome to the nasty and partisan world that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and a legion of insignificant lowest-rung toadies like yourselves nurtured into fruition daily with eager, grubby hands, and now look upon with dull-faced faux horror.
[…]
Step back from the edge? You poor boy, asleep in the back of the car the whole trip, finally waking up and wondering where you’re at.
Swift boats. Aluminum tubes. Niger uranium. “Mushroom clouds”. Whitewater.
Vince Fucking Foster.
You can’t even see the edge from here. You left it behind a hundred miles back.
So don’t give me chest-thumping crap about civil wars, if your politicians are indicted. Don’t give me visions of a lake of fire, if all those who find you loathsome refuse to suck at your teats of scientific ignorance in the name of religion, racism in the name of freedom, and corruption in the name of the New World Order.
Get used to the world you have created, and the stench your worshipped heroes have unleashed.
Hear hear.
And might I just add … Republicans impeached a duly elected president over a trivial sexual matter and one year later installed a moron in the presidency by one vote on the Supreme Court. Handwringing from the likes of them about partisanship is a truly impressive and unprecedented act of phony, shit-eating Phariseeism — which is really saying something.
Just in case there’s been a massive memory loss on the right, here’s a little trip through the wayback machine:
1.The total effect of a person’s actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person’s existence, regarded as determining the person’s destiny.
Ezra Klein once asked something to the effect of “why would Bush send a seven foot tall white woman to aid our public face in the Islamic world?” It’s a good question, but more importantly, why would you send a seven foot tall white woman who speaks like a 6th grader to aid our public face in the middle east and convince the entire world that all Americans are as dim-witted as the president and that Osama bin Laden is right?
This week, Hughes embarked on her first trip as undersecretary. Her initial statement resembled an elementary school presentation: “You might want to know why the countries. Egypt is of course the most populous Arab country … Saudi Arabia is our second stop. It’s obviously an important place in Islam and the keeper of its two holiest sites … Turkey is also a country that encompasses people of many different backgrounds and beliefs, yet has the — is proud of the saying that ‘all are Turks.'”
Hughes appeared to be one of the pilgrims satirized by Mark Twain in his 1869 book, “Innocents Abroad,” about his trip on “The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.” “None of us had ever been anywhere before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty to us … We always took care to make it understood that we were Americans — Americans!”
UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: We’re going to be visiting, as you know, three unique and very important countries, three countries we have a very strong partnership with one of them. We also face very significant public diplomacy challenges in one of them. One of my missions is to go to listen. I hope to listen, to seek to understand, to show respect. Listening is a two way street, and so I hope that those people I meet will also return that open spirit and be willing to listen. I’m going to take a lot of questions, I’m going to participate in a lot of give and take and I hope they’ll be willing to listen to my discussion (inaudible).
[…]
I just wanted to talk a little bit to answer your questions about, kind of, my approach. As I said I view this trip as the beginning of a new dialogue that is very much people driven — public diplomacy is people-driven and it’s policy driven, because our policies affect people’s lives. I don’t see this as a matter of opinion polls or public relations, I see this as a matter of policy. That’s really what drew me to public service in the first place. When I first decided to leave reporting and go to the political process it was because I realized that the decisions made in the political process made a very real difference peoples lives. So when I talk about people I’m talking about policies, I’m talking about our policies and the impact they have on people. I think that’s what we’ve got to focus on here. I also — I go as an official of the United States government, but I’m also a mom, a working mom, and so I hope that I could help, in some places, put a human face on America’s public policy.
[…]
… just one of the points that we’re going to make as we meet with people is, is talk about our American story and how it’s a collective story that’s written by individuals. We all have unique stories to tell. My own background as a granddaughter of a Pennsylvania coal miner and a Kentucky railroad worker. Dina, of course came here from Egypt, and we’re very proud that our first stop in Egypt we’re going to be taking someone who I think Egypt is very proud of Dina, the fact that she emigrated from Egypt as a young child, and has risen to the highest levels of our American government, and that’s a wonderful American story.
Karima has her own American story. She is the daughter of a Palestinian father and a German mother and I’m sure that Bill has some part of an American story, although I haven’t heard it yet (laughter) I’m sure he will be glad to share it with you. He currently lives in Wisconsin and I don’t know what his family roots are.
When she isn’t talking about being a mom, which she seems to think is a unique and important qualification for being the voice of American public diplomacy, she’s actually advancing jihad. From the Blumenthal piece:
Hughes’ simple, sincere and unadorned language is pellucid in revealing the administration’s inner mind. Her ideas on terrorism and its solution are straightforward. “Terrorists,” she said in Egypt at the start of her trip, “their policies force young people, other people’s daughters and sons, to strap on bombs and blow themselves up.” Somehow, magically, these evildoers coerce the young to commit suicide. If only they would understand us, the tensions would dissolve. “Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans’ lives,” she said. When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired why President Bush mentions God in his speeches, she asked him “whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our Constitution cites ‘one nation under God.’ He said, ‘Well, never mind.'”
With these well-meaning arguments, Hughes has provided the exact proof for what Osama bin Laden has claimed about American motives. “It is stunning … the extent [to which] Hughes is helping bin Laden,” Robert Pape told me. Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has conducted the most extensive research into the backgrounds and motives of suicide terrorists, is the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” and recently briefed the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center. “If you set out to help bin Laden,” he said, “you could not have done it better than Hughes.”
Pape’s research debunks the view that suicide terrorism is the natural byproduct of Islamic fundamentalism or some “Islamo-fascist” ideological strain independent of certain highly specific circumstances. “Of the key conditions that lead to suicide terrorism in particular, there must be, first, the presence of foreign combat forces on the territory that the terrorists prize. The second condition is a religious difference between the combat forces and the local community. The religious difference matters in that it enables terrorist leaders to paint foreign forces as being driven by religious goals. If you read Osama’s speeches, they begin with descriptions of the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, driven by our religious goals, and that it is our religious purpose that must confronted. That argument is incredibly powerful not only to religious Muslims but secular Muslims. Everything Hughes says makes their case.”
We know what happened when Bush put poor little Brownie in charge of federal disaster response and it wasn’t pretty. We’re going to be lucky if “Hurricane Karen” doesn’t set off WWIII.
The good news is that she’s listened and she’s learned and she’s bringing back to the White House some incredible insights:
Ms. Hughes promised to take what she learned from hearing dissenting views back to Washington. She was struck, she said, when a Turkish official told her to try to imagine the situation of Iraq, a next-door neighbor, sliding into possible civil war and engulfing Turkey from the perspective of “the common Turk.”
“I will be sure to bring that message back to President Bush when I get back to Washington,” she said.