Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Judy’s Job Description

Atrios points to this very informative article about Judith Miller by Russ Baker. There’s a lot to it, but he mentions one thing in particular that has long puzzled me:

Fine. But they owe the rest of the country’s journalists — whose future ability to work with confidential sources and to operate with public credibility is affected by this — a far greater sense of what Miller’s role was in the affair, and of what “nuances” are involved. This can be done without naming the source. For example, Miller could explain what the source told her, and if it was one or more sources, and whether she called the source or the source called her, without revealing the source’s identity — which is the only issue involved in the confidentiality pledge.

This is what I don’t get. Why can’t Judith Miller write an article about what she knows without revealing her source? She is, allegedly, a reporter.

Matt Cooper wrote an article. Robert Novak wrote an article. Walter Pincus wrote an article. All three have dealt differently with the special prosecutor on the subject of confidential sources. But they ALL wrote articles about what they were told, which means that if they decided to protect their source, they were doing it in service of performing their jobs. And just because she didn’t write one at the time doesn’t mean she can’t write one now. She’s still employed by the NY Times.

Reporters write articles in order to inform the public. That is the essence of their job. In order to do that they sometimes have to keep their sources confidential. Miller has not done the one thing she must do to justify keeping her source confidential — inform the public of what she knows about the story. Neither is there even a bit of evidence that she was ever even working on a story about this subject.

Woodward and Bernstein kept Mark Felt’s confidence for decades — but at the time they were using his information to unravel a complicated story that they were writing about every day. Miller has not written one word on this subject. Even if we grant that she has an obligation to protect liars who use the news media for character assasination, we can’t say that she should be able to do this in service of anything but doing her job as a journalist — either as part of an investigation or a story. And if she has a story, she should be forced by her editors to write what she knows (protecting her source if necessary, just as Cooper did) or be fired for not doing her job.

How she deals with Fitzgerald is up to her. I think when a reporter is used by a powerful members of the government, in their official capacity, to destroy political opponents with lies, that a reporter should be automatically released from any confidentiality agreement. Otherwise, it is nothing but outsourced government propaganda. Others disagree. But that has no bearing on her responsibility as a journalist and employee of the most important newspaper in the world.

Miller may now be saving her information for the blockbuster book she’s planning to write, but that doesn’t explain why the NY Times didn’t insist that Miller do her job and write a story about what she knows, even if she can’t reveal who told her about it. It’s in the public interest, all the other journalists have done it, why can’t she?

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Losing Their Touch

So the White House press corps is all up in arms because the Bush White House lied to them about Clement.

I wrote the other day that I couldn’t think of one good reason why they would have done it. Many people wrote in to tell me that it was because they wanted to float a woman or distract from Rove or any number of other reasons. I agree that they could have done it for these reasons, but I didn’t think those were good reasons, mostly because there was something strange and clumsy about it. But there is one reason that I hadn’t considered: it was done for no other reason than to mislead the press just for the day, for purely theatrical reasons.

I read over on bartcop yesterday that Bush was reportedly “furious” that Roberts’ name had been leaked before he could announce it in his bizarre, unprecedented, prime-time, no-questions-allowed little pageant. If that’s true, then it’s likely that they leaked Clement not to assuage people’s fears that he hadn’t considered a woman and not to put the liberal interest groups off base, and not to float her to get reaction from the Christianists — but purely to misdirect the press so Junior could unveil a big surprise on National Teevee. Kind of like pulling a rabbit out of the hat, only with the Supreme Court.

That was not the brightest public relations decision they’ve ever made under the circumstances. So, I stand by my belief that it was a mistake. And it’s looking like it was a bigger mistake than I realized at the time.

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“I’m A Source Not A Target”

Yup. That’s what the button says.

I’m not kidding.

courtesy of the AP/Frankfurt Times via Crooks and Liars — go there for larger pic and full story.

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President Barney

“What I’m telling you is that we’re focused here,” Bush said from the Port of Baltimore, where he got a waterside demonstration of cargo-screening techniques. “When you’re at war, you can’t lose sight of the fact that you’re at war.”

Among the state-of-the-art techniques Bush observed were computerized systems, sophisticated radiation detectors and advanced X-ray equipment.

“You can look inside in the truck, and you don’t even have to get in it,” Bush said afterward to an audience of state and local officials and port employees. “That’s called technology. And it’s working. It makes a big difference.”

What is he, 6?

Jesushchrist! What in the hell has happened to this country?

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Yankee Doodle Judy

Gene Lyons has written an interesting column about Judith Miller and her crusade to protect powerful whitehouse souces who use the NY Times to destroy their critics. Lyons, many may recall, has some particular knowledge of the NY Times and its sources, having chronicled its massive journalistic failure in the Whitewater matter in his book “Fools For Scandal.” Let’s just say that the Times has a very credulous relationshihp with its sources. In fact, they’ve made a virtual fetish of being willing tools of lying Republicans over and over again.

Lyons says that Miller should testify:

In a haughty tone familiar to anybody who’s ever caught the newspaper with its metaphorical pants down, the editors reminded the prosecutor that they’re The New York Times, and he’s not. “Mr. Fitzgerald’s attempts to interfere with the rights of a free press while refusing to disclose his reasons for doing so, when he can’t even say whether a crime has been committed, have exhibited neither reverence nor cautious circumspection.”

What rubbish. Reverence, indeed. (To be fair, it’s an allusion to James Madison, not a demand to be worshipped.) In making its argument, the Times states it wouldn’t print information that “would endanger lives and national security.”

So here’s my question: In a post-9/11 world, what information could possibly be more sensitive than the identity of a covert agent charged with preventing nuclear proliferation?

Answer: None.

Let’s put aside the fact that Judith Miller has long been a passionately outspoken ally of Bush administration neo-conservatives who pushed for war with Iraq. She gave paid public speeches urging Saddam’s overthrow. Many journalists have asked why such a partisan was given the Iraqi WMD assignment to begin with. The answer? Access, access and access.

What everybody’s ignoring here is that Fitzgerald already knows Miller’s sources. That’s not what he wants to ask her. His prosecution brief urging her incarceration stipulates that “her putative source has been identified and has waived confidentiality.”

Even editor Bill Keller has conceded that there’s no imaginable journalist’s shield law that would protect her. It’s Miller’s patriotic duty to talk.

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Along Comes Mary

Sorry for the non-existent posting. Busy day. But here’s a little Rovegate nugget to ponder: Mary Matalin was called to the Grand Jury to testify. I think we all assumed it was because she worked for Cheney and was a member of the iraq Group. But Mary Matalin left the White House at the end of 2002, six months before the Wilson op-ed and all the hoopla. (And you’ll notice that Karen Hughes, also a member of the Iraq Group, was not, to my knowledge, called to testify. She left in 2002 also.)Matalin was hired back after Novak’s column broke, specifically to handle the media on the Wilson matter.

He also subpoenaed the guest list for a White House party for Gerald Ford that took place on July 16th, days after the Novak column ran. I would take a wild guess that someone had told the FBI that Plame was mentioned (maybe as “fair game”) at the party and Fitzgerald wanted to talk to others who had attended to see if it was being spread around.

He subpoenaed the records of the Iraq Group from July 7th to July 30th, which includes the two weeks after the leak had already been out there.

This brings up one of the questions I think is being overlooked in the Fitzgerald investigation. He seems to have been quite interested in how the White House behaved after Novak’s column ran, which makes the most sense if he thinks there was a cover-up or that continuing to spread the information (as Rove admits to doing) was a violation of the law in itself. And, of course, people may have lied to the FBI or before the Grand Jury about all this, which would be criminal, but we don’t know.

It’s just a curiosity that I have long wondered about. It sure looks like he was thinking, at one point anyway, that he had a potential conspiracy case of some kind. I wonder if he still thinks so?

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The Good Old Days

Via Think Progress, we are reminded of Ronald Reagan’s words upon signing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act

Whether you work in Langley or a faraway nation, whether your tasks are in operations or analysis sections, it is upon your intellect and integrity, your wit and intuition that the fate of freedom rests for millions of your countrymen and for many millions more all around the globe. …

Like those who are part of any silent service, your sacrifices are sometimes unappreciated; your work is sometimes misunderstood. Because you’re professionals, you understand and accept this. But because you’re human and because you deal daily in the dangers that confront this nation, you must sometimes question whether some of your countrymen appreciate the value of your accomplishments, the sacrifices you make, the dangers you confront, the importance of the warnings that you issue.

He continued

But that’s not true. As long as you are provably loyal to the Republican Party above all else and promise to fit intelligence to our preconceived notions, we appreciate everything you do. Otherwise you are fair game.

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Back Scratch Fever

In case anyone is wondering if Roberts really is a partisan hack or not, Jeffrey Toobin’s book “Too Close To Call” sheds some light on that subject:

The president’s first two nominations to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia curcuit — generally regarded as the stepping-stone to the Supreme Court — went to Miguel Estrada and John G Roberts Jr., who had played important behind-the scenes roles in the Florida litigation.

“Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But, until that day, accept this justice…”

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Up, Up And Away

A commenter asks why I think Clement was floated earlier in the day and it’s a good question. I don’t think it served any purpose. The only reason to float trial balloons on Supreme Court justices is to guage how they’ll be accepted. That is an irrelevant concern for this White House except for one consituency — the radical religious right. But they have a very direct pipeline to the the leaders of that constitutency and they don’t need to float a name publicly to find out how it will be seen by these people. They just have to pick up the Jesus phone.

I think it was a mistake. And I’m surmising that it might just be because things are breaking down a little bit in the vaunted white house message center. Perhaps people are a little bit distracted and not keeping their eye on the ball the way they should? Wonder why?

Honestly, I can’t think of a single good reason to do it.

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Demographically Correct

Is it just me or is it a little bit odd that the allegedly liberal Washington Post is advertising on this conservative DC blog and not advertising on this liberal DC blog?

It seems particularly odd considering that the conservative blog gets only 1/6th the weekly traffic that the liberal blog gets.

That damned liberal media sure is biased.

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