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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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.
Two Tense Weeks
After reading my post about the WHIG group from last night, conservative journalist Robert George wrote in to give me a heads up about a post he wrote earlier (and cross posted on the Huffington Post) about “those two tense weeks in July” on both sides of the atlantic. This was the same period, you’ll remember, in which the “sexed up” British dossier came to a head and resulted in the suicide of one of the major players in that saga.
Judy Miller, the Zelig of Iraq lies, was right in the middle of that too.
George wrote:
“… if we go back to our timeline tracking the furious developments that were going on in both the U.S. and the U.K., we note that July 12, 2003, was the one of the two days not really accounted for in previous news stories. In between the first and second times Miller and Libby spoke, the following things occurred:
* On July 9, in the UK, Blair’s government has orchestrated the outing of scientist David Kelly as the source of BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan’s explosive report that the Blair government “sexed-up” its Iraq intelligence dossier. In the U.S., Robert Novak talks with Karl Rove (Wilson’s op-ed had appeared three days before).
* On July 11, George Tenet releases a statement asserting that the “16 words” about yellowcake uranium shouldn’t have been in the president’s State of the Union address. The same day, Karl Rove talks to Matt Cooper about, among other things, Joseph Wilson and his wife.
[…]
Why was Miller behind bars for three months concerning sources to a story which that she never wrote about?
The answer is obvious: Judith Miller emerged as a central figure because she MADE herself a central figure and, arguably, BECAUSE she didn’t “writ[e] a story about the case.” This is the Judith Miller who, four days later, wrote words of encouragement to British scientist David Kelly: “David, I heard from another member of your fan club that things went well for you today. Hope it’s true, J.”
These don’t seem like the words of a disinterested journalist. These are the words of someone who has some sort of interest in how a witness performs in a parliamentary hearing.
How is it that – two years later and after Judith Miller has spent 90 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with a criminal investigation – not one media organization has deemed it important to wonder: Who is the other “member of [Kelly’s] fan club”? Is it Scooter Libby? Is it John Bolton (who visited Miller in jail and we know was questioned by the State Department Inspector General the same day Kelly’s body was found)? Is it someone else? If it is indeed an American, exactly what is that person’s interest in a British Parliamentary inquiry?
Judith Miller is the missing link between two different investigations. She’s not a mere reporter. How do we know? Because, she has “reported” none of this.
Read the whole post because he’s going to be doing a follow-up shortly.
Judith Miller wrote that e-mail and Kelly responded the next afternoon with:
“I will wait til the end of the week before judging — many dark actors playing games. Thanks for your support. I appreciate your friendship at this time.”
He killed himself that same day.
The thing to keep in mind is that all these things were connected. For instance, the White House propaganda operation had been closely involved with Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s communication guru.From a September, 2002 article that discusses another White House propaganda operation called the Office of Global Communications:
Now Campbell is also a member of the Band [an early version of the Office of Global Communications] and is working in tandem with the White House. When Prime Minister Tony Blair meets with Parliament next week, for example, he will release a “white paper”—the detailed argument—that backs up George W. Bush.
That white-paper turned out to be the “sexed-up” dossier, the veracity of which was being questioned all over the papers in Britain during the same period that Joe Wilson was making waves about the Niger yellowcake claims here in the states. The wheels seemed to be coming off the cart.
The two countries had been working closely together since the very beginning to con their respective citizens into supporting the war:
The techniques that proved so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom were first tried out during the campaign to build public support for the US attack on Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld hired Rendon Associates, a private PR firm that had been deeply involved in the first Gulf War. Founder John Rendon (who calls himself an “information warrior”) proudly boasts that he was the one responsible for providing thousands of US flags for the Kuwaiti people to wave at TV cameras after their “liberation” from Iraqi troops in 1991. The White House Coalition Information Center was set up by Karen Hughes in November 2001. (In January 2003, the CIC was renamed the Office for Global Communications.) The CIC hit on a cynical plan to curry favor for its attack on Afghanistan by highlighting “the plight of women in Afghanistan.” CIC’s Jim Wilkinson later called the Afghan women campaign “the best thing we’ve done.”
Gardiner is quick with a correction. The campaign “was not about something they did. It was about a story they created… It was not a program with specific steps or funding to improve the conditions of women.”
The coordination between the propaganda engines of Washington and London even involved the respective First Wives. On November 17, 2001, Laura Bush issued a shocking statement: “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish.” Three days later, a horrified Cherie Blaire told the London media, “In Afghanistan, if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out.”
Misleading via Innuendo Time and again, US reporters accepted the CIC news leaks without question. Among the many examples that Gardiner documented was the use of the “anthrax scare” to promote the administration’s pre-existing plan to attack Iraq.
In both the US and the UK, “intelligence sources” provided a steady diet of unsourced allegations to the media to suggest that Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists were behind the deadly mailing of anthrax-laden letters.
It wasn’t until December 18, that the White House confessed that it was “increasingly looking like” the anthrax came from a US military installation. The news was released as a White House “paper” instead of as a more prominent White House “announcement.” As a result, the idea that Iraq or Al Qaeda were behind the anthrax plot continued to persist. Gardiner believes this was an intentional part of the propaganda campaign. “If a story supports policy, even if incorrect, let it stay around.”
In a successful propaganda campaign, Gardiner wrote, “We would have expected to see the creation [of] stories to sell the policy; we would have expected to see the same stories used on both sides of the Atlantic. We saw both. The number of engineered or false stories from US and UK stories is long.”
The US and Britain: The Axis of Disinformation Before the coalition invasion began on March 20, 2003, Washington and London agreed to call their illegal pre-emptive military aggression an “armed conflict” and to always reference the Iraqi government as the “regime.” Strategic communications managers in both capitols issued lists of “guidance” terms to be used in all official statements. London’s 15 Psychological Operations Group paralleled Washington’s Office of Global Communications.
[…]
The Coalition Information Center with offices in the London, Islamabad and the White House started work in mid-2002 (six months before it was officially authorized by an Executive Order). In 2003, the CIC morphed into the Office of Global Communications, staffed by Tucker Eskew, Dan Bartllett, Jeff Jones, Peter Reid.
The OGC works closely with the White House Iraq Group, which consists of Karl Rove, Condi Rice, Jim Wilkinson, Stephen Hadley, Scooter Libby, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, and Nicholas Callo.
There was an elaborate propaganda machine ginned up in both the US and the UK to sell the Iraq war. During those “two tense weeks in July” a lot of information about that was seeping out in the press in both countries. It threatened to overwhelm the administration.
They were able to calm the waters, slow the story down, stonewall any Justice Dept investigation for months:
The Financial Times writes, “While allowing the official investigation into the leak to progress, the White House has done an extraordinarily effective job of suffocating the story,” refusing to provide the press with the type of updates that the Clinton administration regularly made available during the Whitewater investigation. “We have let the earth-movers roll in over this one,” one senior White House official told the Times on the condition of anonymity.
The problem was that somehow (another story yet untold) Ashcroft stepped on his manhood and had to appoint a special prosecutor. (And perhaps after their experiences in the 90’s the GOP made the mistake of thinking that all prosecutors could be trusted to be Republican partisans.) Patrick Fitzgerald does not seem to be a political climber.
I don’t know that this grand jury investigation could go to the heart of the WHIG and the rest of the US/UK British propaganda effort at this point. Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller for her notes about anything pertaining to Iraq and uranium, so it’s possible. If people are indicted the whole thing could explode. As Judy has shown, jail time tends to make one’s priorities very clear.
Regardless of the criminal aspects of this, I would hope that the press, burned and still smoking over the WMD lies and the manipulation by their own compatriot the Blessed Virgin of the First Amendment, would at least start to look into this story and expose it. This stuff has been hiding in plain sight.
This sounds like tin-foil hat conspiracy crapola, but it isn’t. There was a concerted, organized propaganda campaign out of Downing Street and the White House to sell the Iraq war. It wasn’t bad intelligence. It wasn’t even “sexed-up” intelligence. It was lies and propaganda, pure and simple. When Dr Kelly and Joseph Wilson pulled back the curtain in the spring of 2003, the powers that be on both sides of the atlantic played the hardest of hardball.
Update: I notice that Victoria Toensing is rolling out the inevitable slime and defend. On Hardball, she breathlessly characterized Patrick Fitzgerald with, “He’s lost it! He’s gone over the edge!” Wilson, of course, came in for a “Why would they (CIA) pick this idiot?”
Her coup de grace was that the press hates Bush so they focused on the silly CIA stuff instead of the real issue, which is … nepotism.
Man, do these Republicans have brass, or what?
Update II: To clarify, we do know why Fitzgerald was appointed. However, the circumstances, like so many other things in this case, have not been fully reported in the mainstream media. See this post at Needlenose for the full enchilada.
The Question All America Is Asking
What’s your favorite popcorn? Looks like it’s gonna a super jumbo size show this fall!
A newly released report published by the CIA rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq.
Policymakers worried more about making the case for the war, particularly the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, than planning for the aftermath, the report says. The report was written by a team of four former CIA analysts led by former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr.
“In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right,” they write.
[snip]
The report determined that beyond the errors in assessing Iraqi weaponry, “intelligence produced prior to the war on a wide range of other issues accurately addressed such topics as how the war would develop and how Iraqi forces would or would not fight.”
The intelligence “also provided perceptive analysis on Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda; calculated the impact of the war on oil markets; and accurately forecast the reactions of ethnic and tribal factions in Iraq.”
[snip]
Intelligence analysts, the report says, failed to question their assumptions that Iraq had maintained chemical and biological weapons and had reactivated nuclear weapons development. Doubts about the intelligence received little attention, “hastening the conversion of heavily qualified judgments into accepted fact.”
Hat tip to BlondeSense
A Distinction With A Very Real Difference
I want to follow up on my previous post which elicited a considerable amount of intelligent criticism, some of which I responded to in the comments. But among the most important critiques was this one from commenter “aw, come on” and it deserves a bit more extended response (apologies for the length of this post):
[Yglesias is] saying the chances of success were so remote that the risks weren’t even close to being worth undertaking the effort.
You’re saying the chances of success were zero, so that the risks weren’t worth undertaking the effort.
(Putting the analogy criticism aside – which also strikes me as petty) your criticism is that he’s not willing to say that the Iraq war was doomed to failure to an absolute certainty? That’s what some people call a distinction without a difference between Matthew’s outlook and my own.
As for whose judgment I’d trust more in the long run — I’ll always take the guy who’s willing to recognize that there [are] no certainties in life.
The point is well taken because it goes to the heart of contemporary political/intellectual discourse. I’ll try to explain why I drew such a seemingly fine distinction and why I think there is a major difference. I’ll also address why I think “aw, come on” may wish to reconsider his opinion of whose judgment to trust.
Most folks are poorly equipped to assess risk and probability. Even highly experienced statistics professors often get confused about seemingly straightforward odds like those in coin tosses and the like. Nevertheless, all of us have share a very rough consensus about what terms like “risky,” “very risky,” and “extremely risky” mean.
Let’s say, for example, that an operation to avert a life-threatening condition with about a 30% chance of failure leading to death is one we would call risky. An operation with approximately a 50% chance of failure most of us would call very risky and one with around an 80% chance of failure extremely risky. Sure, we can argue about the percentage of grades of riskiness forever, move them around by a factor of ten, and cleverly point to all sorts of contingencies that modulate our sense of difference between high risk and extremely high risk and when extremely high risks are justified.
But there are very few among us who would seriously argue that an operation with a 99.999999999999999999999999% chance of failure leading to death is, in any real-world sense, an extremely risky operation! We would call such an operation ” impossible.”
Any physician who called an operation with those kinds of odds merely “extremely risky” and left it at that is clearly guilty of grossly misstating the facts. I doubt any judge in a wrongful death suit would accept the defense that the patient and family were adequately informed of the risks prior to an operation so clearly doomed to fail in such circumstances (if I’m wrong, I’d love to see a link to the case.) I think calling such odds “extremely risky” is not exactly what Frankfurt means by bullshit but it sure smells very similar.
Unscrupulous people work this con all the time. Among the most cynical, of course, are the state lotteries which are nothing more than an unfair tax on the innumerate. Hey, y’never know! Well…actually, we do know. You can’t win the state lottery. Sure, someone will win, but except in the most abstruse, arcane mathematical sense, you have no chance in hell of winning. If you truly understand the odds -and lottery designers are extremely clever at hiding the actual risks- then you know that betting “only” a dollar is a complete waste of your hard-earned cash. You might as well use that buck as toilet paper – at least it would be of some practical direct use to you.
And it was only in this highly technical, mathematical way that a “successful” invasion of Iraq was “extremely risky.” In reality, it was impossible. But that’s not how the liberal hawks understood it.
I suspect this is part of how they were snookered. Their first mistake was the fallacy of the appeal to authority. “Brilliant, thoughtful, geniuses” like Wolfowitz, who had enormous political power were telling us the Bush/Iraq War was extremely risky but “winnable.” Could such brilliant, influential men be completely wrong? Let’s take what these experts say seriously, despite our misgivings. Hey, y’never know!
The second mistake was assuming “extremely risky” meant “some slight chance it could possibly work.” But it obviously couldn’t, not in the real world. The third mistake was the slippery slope fallacy – an “extremely risky” venture is one that is often characterized, as Bush/Iraq was, as audacious and bold, or in Nicholas Lemann’s fatuous description of PNAC’s proposal from whence Bush/Iraq sprung, a “breathaking vision.”
Well once you have a “breathtaking vision” coupled with “extreme risk,” hoary American myths start to kick in. Americans, after all, are risk takers, we are a people of breathtaking vision. And here’s a splendid chance to…do some real good for a change! Hey, y’never know! It could work.
Well many of us absolutely knew it couldn’t. It wasn’t wrong because the chances of success were slim, but because it was, by any rational standard, absolutely impossible. If in the real world an invasion of Iraq ever was “successful” (in terms of democratization and increasing regional stability), then everything we knew to be true about that real world would simply have to be wrong. It would mean not only that Bush and Rumsfeld were competent, but that imposing democracy by invasion works almost all the time (Carnegie Endowment calculated before the war at best a 25% success rate and those successes were in situations not comparable to Iraq), that atrocities like Abu Ghraib would be minimal, that an analysis of the possible reception of a US invasion that stemmed from an agency that can barely read Arabic was in fact precisely accurate, that the rest of the world would line up to cheer us on, if not publicly, at least privately; and -the least likely of all- the relatives of the victims of American war actions would welcome us with kisses and flowers.
By characterizing the chances as exceedingly slim, but real, an utterly stupid idea is given a weight it simply doesn’t deserve. You can discuss how slim the possibilities are, after all, and hey! y’never know, do you? No, folks: You call ideas as bad as the invasion of Iraq exactly what they are: completely nuts. That, to use an overused word, accurately frames the discussion.
Had the mass public discourse been so framed, there would have been no Bush/Iraq War with all the attendant horrors. In fact, that is exactly how Josh Marshall and other ex-liberal hawks framed the debate over Social Security: Bush’s plan is not risky, but impossible. Well, who knows? They’re extremely risky but they could work, right? Actually, no they couldn’t, except in some alternative universe.
That is why this is a distinction with a genuine difference. Matthew makes an elaborate philosophical argument about the morality of high risk taking, complete with intellectually daunting verbiage, the ex ante and the complex sentence structure. But whatever its merits, it’s utterly irrelevant to Bush/Iraq. This is not a case where the morality of risk taking would ever apply because the Bush/Iraq War wasn’t risky at all. It was impossible. The liberal hawks’ failure to understand this (and, of course, the administration’s, the media’s and public’s’) is extremely distressing because the mistakes in reasoning are so fundamental, and so terribly naive.
As for trusting those who say there are no certainties in life, well it sure sounds like a reasonable idea, but only if you’re dealing with reasonable people. Would you trust someone’s judgment who said there’s a slight but very real probability that there was a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet? Most of us wouldn’t, but hey, y’ never know, and a lot of people in the Heaven’s Gate suicided so they could travel to that comet. Hey, y’never know, they may be right.
And that, my dear friend “aw, come on” is the problem. In listening to Wolfowitz and Perle, many of us knew immediately we were listening to the foreign policy equivalent of Do and Ti, the intellectual leaders of Heaven’s Gate. True, uncertainties abound in life. But there are limits and the failure of Very Authoritative Experts to understand that the Bush/Iraq War was crazy from the get-go and immediately label it as mad and impossible is a failure of such immense stupidity, it will boggle the minds of historians for centuries.
After all, even Bush the Father was street enough to label the Perle gang as The Crazies.
(PS If you need links, lemme know. I assume everyone knows the references by now, but if you don’t, just ask.
PPS I’m aware that “Aw, come on,” like Matthew and the other war supporters, also finesses the real reasons the Bush/Iraq War was wrong, namely that it was immoral and illegal, flying in the face of thousands of years of common law. That it couldn’t work in a very real sense is not the main issue. But that’s another discussion (grin).)