Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Depends On What The Definition Of “Secret” Is

I confess that I’m feeling more than a bit of schadenfreude reading the rightwing bloggers’ responses to the Plame scandal over on the Daou Report. It so sucks being on the receiving end of the drip, drip, drip, doesn’t it?

Here’s one that’s fairly typically uninformed from Captain’s Quarters (all links available at the Daou Report), in which he, taking his cues from the RNC, piles on the ridiculous assertion that Plame was not covert, even if her status was labeled “secret.”

“Today’s Washington Post article on the State Department memo detailing Valerie Plame’s involvement in sending her husband to Niger lacks a great deal of context. Bloggers appear to assume that the (S) described in the article denotes the status of Plame’s identity, but a more careful read of a poorly-written article shows that it doesn’t mean that at all. Most people don’t understand that “secret” is the second-lowest classification grade possible. I would hope that NOC lists have much higher classification than that, and surely they do.

It all depends on how you look at it. It’s also the second-highest classification. There are only three levels of classified material: confidential, secret, top-secret. According to the very Washington Post article he quotes, covert agents are all classifed as “secret.”

Apparently, these people think that the government has a whole string of classified levels, many of which you don’t have to take seriously. Like “secret” which doesn’t really mean secret, it means kinda-sorta secret but not if you need to smear a political opponent. They assume that there also must be a bunch super-duper-double-cross-your-heart secret levels that you really, really, really shouldn’t tell the media about. But “secret?” Not a problem. Go ahead and spill your guts to Bob Novak.

Google is your friend:

Classified vs. Unclassified Information

In the U.S. information is called “classified” because it has been assigned one of the three levels, confidential, secret or top secret. Information which is not so labled is called unclassified information. The term declassified is used for information which has had its classification removed, and downgraded refers to information that has been assigned a lower classification level, but is still classified. Many documents are automatically downgraded and then declassified after some number of years. The U.S. government uses the term sensitive but unclassified (SBU) to refer to information that is not confidential, secret or top secret, but whose dissemination is still restricted. Reasons for such restrictions can include privacy regulations, court orders, and ongoing criminal investigations as well as national security. Information which was never classified is sometimes referred to as “open source” by those who work in national security.

Levels of Classification used by the U.S. Government

The United States Government classifies information according to the degree which the unauthorized disclosure would damage national security:

Top secret

This is the highest security level, and is defined as information which would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if disclosed to the public. Despite public mystique, relatively little information is classified at “Top Secret” (when compared to the other levels of classification). Only that which is exceptionally sensitive (weapon design, presidential security information, nuclear-related projects, various intelligence information) is classified at the Top Secret level.

Secret

The second highest classification. Information is classified secret when its release would cause “serious damage” to national security. Most information that is “classified” is held at the secret sensitivity.

Confidential

The lowest classification level. It is defined as information which would “damage” national security if disclosed.

Unclassified is not technically a “classification”, this is the default, and refers to information which can be released to individuals without a clearance. Information that is unclassified is sometimes “restricted” in its dissemination. For example, the “law enforcement bulletins” often reported by the U.S. media when United States Department of Homeland Security raises the U.S. terror threat level are usually classified as “U//LES” or “Unclassified – Law Enforcement Sensitive.” This information is only supposed to be released to Law Enforcement groups (Sheriff, Police, etc.) Because the information is unclassified, however, it is sometimes released to the public as well. Information which is unclassified, but which the government does not believe should be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests is often classified as U//FOUO – Unclassified-For Official Use Only.

It is very serious if they were collecting and disseminating cheap political dirt from a classified document labeled “secret.” The definition of secret is secret, and it’s a big deal.

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Father Tim And The Leak

Two top White House aides have given accounts to the special prosecutor about how reporters told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to persons familiar with the case.

Lewis “Scooter’’ Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn’t tell Libby of Plame’sidentity.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who was first to report Plame’s name and connection to Wilson. Novak, according to a source familiar with the matter, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor.

If this is true, the wingnuts are going to have to call Father Tim and poor old Bob Novak liars. I have no doubt they will do it if they have to. But this game gets more and more dangerous for them every day.

And the thing about Libby is just delicious. WTF, did Scooter just blurt out Tim Russert’s name without thinking? If he lied about the Monsignor he was making a grave error. There aren’t many media figures in Washington who are viewed with any reverence anymore, but he’s one of them, as sad a comment as that is. It’s a fatal error to get into a he said/she said with a guy like him — if there’s a trial, he’s the guy who will be believed.

Oh what a hissy fit these allegedly slick operators had over this one piece of criticism. Anyone with any sense would have known this was just the beginning, as it was becoming obvious that there were no WMD to be found. If they’d have kept their poweder dry for a few days they probably could have come up with a better explanation, but they lost their heads, just like always do under pressure. There really could not have been a worse crew in charge after 9/11. This little episode, in microcosm, is why we are in Iraq today, throwing billions of dollars down the tube, losing our credibility by the boatload and seeing thousands of people die for with no end in sight. No grace under pressure.

Needless to say, this could also be bullshit. William Safire once famously claimed Hillary Clinton was going to be indicted. Rove (or a person who “has been briefed on the matter”) already revealed that he learned Plame’s name from Novak and then said “Oh I heard that too” or “Oh, you’ve heard about that?” depending on who’s telling the story. We’ve all been under the impression that Novak agreed that Rove confirmed the story, but maybe he didn’t. Or maybe there is some convoluted way in which his behavior can be explained as both learning about it and confirming it at the same time. There’s obviously more to this story than we know — perhaps Fitzgerald is putting together a bigger case than just perjury. Or maybe, as I said, this is bullshit.

But this is getting fun.

Update: According to the NY Times, friends of Rove and Libby are trying to make the case that the two were not trying to out Plame or discredit Wilson — they were working together on Tenent’s statement with Stephen Hadley. It’s hard for me to see how this helps them — it suggest coordination if not conspiracy.

There is one interesting little tid-bit, however: they say Ari testified that he never say the memo on AF One. We’ve certainly heard otherwise, so Ari may be in a little bit of a pickle too.

All this leaking is looking more and more like internecine fighting among the “subjects.” This could get ugly.

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Scandal As Metaphor

In an entertaining piece comparing the sad small scale corruption of Duke Cunningham to the titanic all encompassing corruption of Tom DeLay, Noam Scheiber brings up something I think is important:

But it’s worth pointing out that, if DeLay loses his job, it won’t be because of the machine he has built. It will be thanks to a handful of smaller offenses, such as allowing a lobbyist to pay for his overseas travel–offenses more in line with … Duke Cunningham’s.

How to explain these little perversities? The answer has to do with the press. Most news organizations are profoundly uncomfortable making subjective judgments, however obvious. Instead, the preoccupation is with small, easily provable allegations. When it comes to political discourse, as my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out, the result is that politicians get nailed for tiny embellishments but get away with statements that are technically true but spectacularly dishonest, such as George W. Bush’s claims about the size of his 2001 tax cut. Likewise with corruption, where the press practices a kind of literalism that dwells on what is officially illegal or improper (like an affair with an intern) while ignoring behavior that is technically OK but ethically obscene.

I think all of that is true, but it’s also because scandals that expose human frailty are easier to understand. A fall from grace is the original story, isn’t it?
And they are often emblematic of a bigger narrative that is instinctively understood but more complicated in detail than people need to know.

Just as a third rate burglary was a perfect window into an abusive and paranoid Nixon administration, Rovegate is a perfect illustration of the intimidation and arrogance that characterizes Bush. The Lewinsky matter could be said to show the indiscipline that characterized Bill Clinton; Iran-Contra the disconnectedness of an aging, disengaged president.

I’m not saying all those things are the only lessons to be taken from these scandals; far from it. But they engaged the public and the press because they spoke to bigger issues by using people’s highly developed instinctive understanding of human character. I don’t necessarily think it has to be this way, but it usually is. People seem to need to see and feel the human dimension in order to understand the big picture.

Rovegate is quite interesting in this way, not because it centers around the president but because it centers around the one person who most personifies the modern conservative movement’s strategy. And he is the one person who is feared and respected for his effectiveness by people on both sides — almost to the point of being gifted with magical abilities to tell the future and shape events.

He serves a purpose for both sides in this way, explaining for Democrats their sense of impotence and justifying for Republicans their excesses. None of this is really their doing, you see, and there is nothing they can do to change it; it the product of a brilliant political alchemist who is beyond the scope of normal human behavior or understanding. Fear him or follow him but do not question him.

So, Rove being exposed in a petty, unnecessary act of revenge and overreach, pathetically reaching for Clintonian legalisms and falling back on infantile excuses is a bit of a jolt. Whether by hubris or error, Rove’s naked vulnerability is a very useful parable with which to explode the myth of Republican omniscience and explain something that is vastly complex and difficult for average people, much less the compromised kewl kidz, to get their arms around.

Bush’s Brain is not omnipotent. The administration that sold itself on simple homespun values and manly virtues has been caught in an act of waspish backstabbing to cover its dishonesty. The war was based on lies and now we are losing it. How could this masterful white house screw this up so badly? These questions can now be asked outside the context of the simple narrative that’s been constructed about Bush’s honor and Rove’s supernatural talents. The scandal opens it up. What has, up to now, been hailed by both sides and in the press as unassailable political mastery is exposed as gross arrogance combined with gross incompetence. That’s the story: Mayberry Machiavellis.

Regardless of whether Karl escapes the noose, which he may very well do, Roveism — defined as politics of the supernatural — is dead. Cutthroat Republican tactics will be alive and well as they always has been. Roveism was actually never anything more than that.

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Feeling Safer

So they’ve released a few more prisoners from Guantanamo because they “no longer represent a threat to the United States.” I’m glad to hear that being as they must have been terrorists and all. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been in there in the first place, right?

So, how do we know they are “no longer a threat?” Did they promise never to be terrorists again, cross their hearts and hope to die? Did they swear on the Koran and the Bible and the TV Guide that they will be good-for-goodness-sake?

Gosh I sure hope they did because otherwise I might be tempted to think that they weren’t terrorists at all — which would mean we are holding innocent people down there for long periods of time without due process.

Surely, we wouldn’t do any such thing, now would we?

Here’s Looking At You Kid

This is rich. Christopher Hitchens is defending outing Plame in the press. He has gone completely down the rabbit hole.

I don’t know if any of you remember a little episode of a few years ago in which Hitchens was personally involved in a similar situation, but let me refresh your memory if you don’t. In the waning days of the Monica Lewinsky impeachment case, Christopher Hitchens dicided it was his patriotic duty to reveal to the House managers that Sidney Blumenthal had revealed at lunch one day that Monica was a stalker. He signed an affidavit to that effect and it resulted in Blumenthal being one of only three witnesses in the Senate Impeachment trial.

Here’s the thing. Hitchens worked himself into a frenzy about this because he claimed this was a concerted effort by the White house to smear Monica Lewinsky, which he believed was a possible criminal act. Hitchens took his boozy self all over TV to moralize endlessly about the White house abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

In this new article in Slate, Hitchens seems to have another view. 9/11 changed everything to mean that up is down and black is white. It’s now perfectly legitimate for the White House to blow CIA agents’ covers as long as you believe that they aren’t sufficiently slurring the word “islamofascism” at every turn and sending the proper messages about freedom by endorsing the liberating of thousands of innocent people from their lives. The infallible cult leader George W. Bush had every right to do whatever was necessary to make these people pay. Besides, everything was the CIA’s fault anyway.

Blumenthal on the other hand should be in jail and President Clinton should have been convicted and removed from office because Blumenthal gossipped about Monica’s obsession with Bill at lunch one day.

Ipdate: Billmon makes the excellent point that this is a good career move for Hitch.

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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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