Why I'm glad I'm an ex-Catholic, reason #139. This one's not about the Times, though the institution in question does take a similar stance on its own infallibility:

The Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, the most ardent champion of priestly sex abuse victims among America's Roman Catholic clergy, has been fired by his archbishop and is currently forbidden to lead public Masses.

Doyle said Thursday that Archbishop Edwin O'Brien of the Archdiocese for the Military Services withdrew his endorsement of Doyle as a U.S. Air Force chaplain last Sept. 17. Doyle remains a priest, but cannot celebrate sacraments until his career as an Air Force major ends this summer.

The stated reason was disagreement over providing daily Catholic Masses at military bases with few priests. But victim advocates see payback for Doyle's 18 years of activism and sharp criticism of the hierarchy's handling of molestation scandals.

AP, "Archbishop fires abuse victim advocate"

More precisely, that "disagreement" involves Doyle, a degreed expert on canon law, having written a memorandum clarifying the Archbishop's guidelines on the provision of daily Masses, as those provisions related to the staffing of the chaplaincy. (Keep in mind the dire state of priestly vocations throughout the Catholic Church and the increasing difficulty finding celebrants for a full slate of Sunday and daily Masses.) The Archbishop decided to construe the memorandum as contradicting his directive, calling it an "attempt to provide an alternative authority," and dismissed Doyle forthwith. The dismissal has only now come to light.

Sound trumped up to you? Like the Bish found an opening to do a number on Doyle, and jumped at the chance? Let His Excellency, commenting to Daniel Wakin of the Times, disabuse you:

Speaking from Bamberg, Germany, Archbishop O'Brien rejected suggestions that he was punishing Father Doyle. He said that since he became archbishop seven years ago, he had tolerated the priest's criticisms of the hierarchy even if they were sometimes "over the top."

He also said he could have waited until Father Doyle retired in August and avoided the turmoil. "But I can't abdicate my pastoral responsibility because of what some others who are rather deeply involved in the sex-abuse issue would conclude," he said.

"Catholic Priest Who Aids Church Sexual Abuse Victims Loses Job"

As if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. But, Excellency, isn't that exactly the point? With Doyle set to retire in a few months, O'Brien could have waited and spared himself all the tsuris. Except that wouldn't have sent anybody any messages, would it?

O'Brien's action, says Wakin, came after a lay employee of the Catholic ministry at Doyle's base found the memorandum and became concerned, thinking "it meant she would lose her daily Mass." (Wakin, by the way, bends over backwards to put O'Brien in the best possible light.) This is a Church, let's remember, whose episcopacy has historically discharged its "pastoral responsibility" by quietly shifting pedophile priests from parish to parish over decades, rendering the entire hierarchy morally if not legally complicit in the resulting abuse. The victims of that abuse the good bishops treated with malign neglect, if not actual contempt. But a technical disagreement over whether Catholics have the right under canon law to daily Masses? An upset laywoman? That, my friends, is a call to arms.

Googling around, I notice that O'Brien's name has frequently arisen in stories speculating on replacements for bishops who've been removed or retired over the sex abuse scandal—he was mentioned, among others, for Law's place in Boston. Think maybe the Archbishop's bucking for a promotion?

posted by michael  5:52:29 PM  
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We're journalists. It's not our job to remember things. As Eric Umansky notes, writing in Slate's "Today's Papers" column (suddenly it's Slate day here at Reading A1), Thom Shanker's A1 lead ("Hussein's Agents Are Behind Attacks in Iraq, Pentagon Finds") is so hedged with "we don't really know if any of this is true"-type caveats that the report practically disappears from the page as you read it:

The NYT says the Pentagon report that Saddam's henchmen are behind some bombings is apparently based on interrogations and other specific intelligence. The story, which is datelined Washington, acknowledges that the paper didn't actually see the report and is relying on descriptions and quotes from "United States government officials and military officers." In other judicious tush-covering language, the NYT says, "It is not known whether [the report] represents a fully formed consensus or whether there might be dissenting assessments. ... The report does not address the question of how broad-based support for the insurgency is."

Maybe I'm naive, but if I were a Times editor, I'd do a few skeptical double-takes on being presented with a story summarizing anonymous Administration officials summarizing a classified Pentagon study my reporter wasn't allowed to look at, the truth of whose conclusions there is absolutely no way independently to verify. A study which, by the way, is being used to headline the "issue" of Saddam's remnant secret service at a time when there happens to be a bloody mass revolt taking place in Iraq in front of everybody's eyes. (Assuming, that is, that the Times actually has a standard for relevance that it wants to adhere to.) And if I ran it, I sure as hell wouldn't devote splashy A1 real estate to it.

Is there nobody at the Times who remembers the paper getting its fingers burned back in February when it flogged the alleged Zarqawi letter? When we were all supposed to get jacked up over the news that Al Qaeda was about to start running the anti-American show in Iraq, thus proving the Administration's claim that this was the "central front" of the TerraWar? As in that instance, the appearance of this latest "secret" report seems to be entirely dictated by somebody's idea of the current PR imperatives: for the CPA/Pentagon, there's no such thing, in virtually an a priori sense, as popular uprising in Iraq. If we can't work the foreign-fighters line just now, well, we still have the Baathist-dead-enders to throw a few jabs at. (Which begs the question, just who do they think is the audience for this stuff? I'll make the prediction, and a pretty safe one it is, that these latest dramatic revelations will slip quietly from view in almost no time, just like their cousins before them.) Given how reliable Pentagon-produced (and Pentagon-hyped) intelligence has proven to date, wouldn't prudence at least, if not news judgement, dictate a more muted response from the Times?

Update (Friday, 4/30): Can't believe I missed pointing out the obvious yesterday—namely, that this stuff about Saddam's old henchmen being responsible for attacks on U.S. forces comes at a moment when re-Baathification is rapidly emerging as the order of the day (thanks to Juan Cole for the link). Which would probably make our no doubt Chalabi-oriented Pentagon leakers the real dead-enders in this scenario.

posted by michael  12:41:59 PM  
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Okrent, MIA. Quickly noted, a fine column by Slate's Jack Shafer, "The Right To Be Wrong: And the elephant in the New York Times newsroom." Shafer has continued to hold the paper's editorial feet to the fire over Judith Miller's grossly misguided reporting about Iraqi WMD programs in the runup to the war, and—more important, from the standpoint of the Times' moral authority—over the paper's unwillingness to set the record straight on Miller's lapses as a reporter and its editors' lapses in judgement and oversight.

As I've argued for almost a year now, Miller and the Times got taken by her sources on the subject of Iraq's WMD, a swindle the paper has never acknowledged with even a side glance. Yesterday (April 27), for example, the Times ran a piece about Ahmad Chalabi's fall from the Pentagon's good graces ("White House Favorite Is Becoming Its Headache") without giving any hint that it was Chalabi who, with Miller, stoked the Times with what turned out to be lies about Iraq's WMD capabilities. Tweak yesterday's piece a little and change a few names, and you could retitle it "New York Times Favorite Has Become Its Headache." ...

Rather than addressing the issue, the New York Times has ignored how Miller's sources used the paper to exaggerate Iraq's non-conventional weapons capabilities.

Read the whole piece, and ask yourself: Why does Jack Shafer have to go on prodding the Times' institutional conscience from the outside? Isn't that what a "public editor" is supposed to do?

posted by michael  10:40:26 AM  
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Measures of contempt. Jodi Wilgoren's contempt for any politician (any Democratic politician, at least) that crosses her path is well documented—let's recall the way she gloated on A1 back in January after what she seems to have regarded as her own personal triumph taking down Howard Dean. So it was no surprise—dispiriting, but no surprise—to be confronted this morning with another of Wilgoren's "I'm-the-brattiest-little-girl-on-the-playground" exercises planted squarely top left, above the fold ("Part Butler and Part Buddy, Aide Keeps Kerry Running"), in what is fast becoming the Times' canonical space for John Kerry-taunting. I'm not going to bother running this one through the snark-o-meter: because it tires me, and because anyway why repeat what the Daily Howler's already incomparably done for Wilgoren? Nobody brings the outrage like Bob Somerby, who, I'm not kidding, must have an extra spleen or something.

Here's the thing that struck me, though, that the Howler doesn't comment on. Look closely at the article's Graf of Justification, Wilgoren's version today of the standard journalist's ploy of informing readers why the article was written and what they should take away from it:

To spend a day in ["chief of stuff" Marvin] Nicholson's shadow is to see the minutiae underpinning the multimedia production that is a modern-day presidential campaign. It also gives a rare look at a candidate entering an increasingly scripted and sheltered phase of the campaign. Mr. Kerry is comfortable being catered to. He has his moods and his myriad personal needs. A social loner, he is happy with an aide half his age.

The highlighted bit is what Wilgoren is formally supposed to be interested in—you know, something resembling her job. The bolded stuff, on the other hand, is what she's actually interested in. Notice the gap between them, which is a different measure of contempt: not for John Kerry, in this case, but for Wilgoren's audience and for her profession.

The "minutiae" line is strictly a sop: something for the rubes (be they readers or editors) who think journalism is supposed to be about matters of public significance, and who might (quaintly) find the display of relentless fucking triviality in her article somewhat troubling. Wilgoren couldn't care less about such stuff. In her world—a world she shares, sadly, with the Times' designated Kerry-plaguer, David Halbfinger—snark is practically self-justifying.

Actually, strike that. Wilgoren, like Halbfinger, does seem to have a justification for her snark: the quoted graf is hiding it in plain sight. She and Halbfinger both are animated by a really poisonous class resentment: simply put, "How dare that rich nerd Kerry lord it over me? When I'm so smart and clever!" That, for Wilgoren, is the substance of her anti-politics, which is very much the anti-politics of the larger press corps. Wilgoren and Halbfinger are, of course, as top political correspondents for the NY Times, just about the most privileged of their tribe: but whatever privileges they have, they're not enough—and you're really not good enough to deserve Jodi, whether you're a candidate or one of her unfortunate readers. (Which, I guess, makes Wilgoren a natural Republican, doesn't it?) Of the process that socializes such venom in people like Wilgoren, and installs them in places where they can do damage, I don't have much insight, having never worked myself as a journalist. I just know that when I read the Times, I'm surrounded by them, and it's getting harder and harder to take.

posted by michael  5:26:29 PM  
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Okrent's Law. That's what Lambert at Corrente calls it:

The pursuit of balance can create imbalance, because sometimes something is true.

Danny Boy's quoted making that statement in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece detailing the involved (and completely ridiculous) process by which the Times has now decided, for good and all, that the 1915 genocide of Armenians may, as a point of style, now actually be called a "genocide" in the august pages. Thus is the shape of history determined.

Neither Lambert nor the New Yorker mention the thing that leaps out at me from the Okrent quote, which is that Dan's obviously been studying lately at the Donald Rumsfeld Institute of Poetics.

posted by michael  3:45:03 PM  
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Rip Van Risen. Josh Marshall has a somewhat milder reaction to James Risen's below-the-fold article on the alt-intelligence shop run by neocon jihadist Douglas Feith ("How Pair's Finding on Terror Led to Clash on Shaping Intelligence") than my own:

I must confess to being slightly baffled by James Risen's piece in Wednesday's Times on Doug Feith's Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, the shop which had Michael Maloof and David Wurmser trying to find ties between terrorist groups across sectarian lines as well as ties between al Qaida and states like Iraq.

You can color me drop-jaw flabbergasted. As Josh goes on to note, the story—most of whose substantive reporting has already been presented by Knight-Ridder's Washington Bureau—offers "almost entirely the [Feith] group's apologia for their own work." "It's rather like writing a narrative about interagency battles in 2002 in which those claiming the most maximal views about Iraqi WMD are valiantly fighting the forces of bureaucratic fuddy-duddyism to bring the truth light"—without much bothering to take note of the fact, again in Josh's words, "that the fuddy-duddies turned out to be right."

Valiantly, indeed. Check out the panting, spy-novel scene-setting grafs in which Risen introduces what (with studied cuteness) he calls "Mr. Feith's little intelligence shop":

Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop in a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries.

The men culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the C.I.A. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Michael Maloof, one of the pair. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any mention of it in the C.I.A.'s finished reports."

They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of the year, as the rubble was being cleared from the World Trade Center and United States forces were fighting in Afghanistan, the men had constructed a startling new picture of global terrorism.

Old ethnic, religious and political divides between terrorist groups were breaking down, the two men warned, posing an ominous new threat.

As the rubble was being cleared ... Adverbial phrases like that are never used innocently: Risen wants to make sure we regard the labors of our Feithian warriors in their "windowless, cipher-locked room" as of a heroic piece with the 9/11 aftermath—thus demonstrating rhetorically his underwriting of the (as we all know, completely unproven and presumptively false) conclusions reached by Maloof and David ("Dean") Wurmser that "connected Iraq and Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden."

Reading Risen this morning, it's as if the last eighteen months had never happened. If I hadn't seen Risen recently bylined, I might have imagined that he'd been writing this piece in late 2002 when he fell into a coma: waking up just a couple of days ago and finishing it under pressure before really getting a chance to blink and look around a bit at the changed landscape. But no, it seems he hasn't been sealed in a time capsule all this while. So, James, have you got any other explanation for this piece of crap?

posted by michael  11:52:29 AM  
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They're Muslims, aren't they? What more do you need to know? (Still catching up with yesterday's edition ...) Let's place Patrick Tyler and Don Van Natta's shabby report on European Islamic extremists ("Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and the Rule of Islam") alongside Neil MacFarquhar's ugly and insensitive response to last week's Riyadh bombings ("Ha, Ha, Saudis, Terrorism's Not So Much Fun When You're the Targets," though I may be misremembering the title), to take note of a disturbing little flowering of Muslim-hating on A1.

What's shabby about the Tyler and Van Natta piece? Let's start with their standards of evidence. All it takes are the recent arrests of a handful of bomb conspirators in Britain, the statements of two radical clerics (an unnamed third is paraphrased in a quote from a "senior official"), mixed with the unverified and anonymous quotes of "counterterrorism experts," and just like that Europe is about to run red with Christian blood:

The call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered, counterterrorism officials say. ... A small group of young Britons whose parents emigrated from Pakistan after World War II have turned against their families' new home. They say they would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair dead or deposed and an Islamic flag hanging outside No. 10 Downing Street. They swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and his goal of toppling Western democracies to establish an Islamic superstate under Shariah law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. ...

On working-class streets of old industrial towns like Crawley, Luton, Birmingham and Manchester, and in the Arab enclaves of Germany, France, Switzerland and other parts of Europe, intelligence officials say a fervor for militancy is intensifying and becoming more open. ... Hundreds of young Muslim men are answering the call of militant groups affiliated or aligned with Al Qaeda, intelligence and counterterrorism officials in the region say.

Even more worrying, said a senior counterterrorism official, is that the level of "chatter" — communications among people suspected of terrorism and their supporters — has markedly increased since Mr. bin Laden's warning to Europe this month. The spike in chatter has given rise to acute worries that planning for another strike in Europe is advanced.

[The highlighted phrase is especially telling: Tyler and Van Natta are deliberately eliding the difference between Al Qaeda agents in place and the young European Muslim sympathizers who are the subject of the article. They do the same thing a bit later, when they mention that the "anger" of those sympathizers is being stoked by "some of the same fiery Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11 attacks"—or did it slip their minds that the 9/11 attackers were not European Muslims? Similarly slippery, that plural of "clerics" resolves in the reporting to a single example, Abu Hamza, who has been accused of "tutoring" would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid.]

Tyler, who is credited with reporting from Slough, appears to have been present when the other clerical subject of the article, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke at a community center there:

On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden's offer of a truce — provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months — Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.

"All Muslims of the West will be obliged," he said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death — that is what they are looking for."

I find it interesting that Tyler seems not to have bothered to count the number of young men listening to Sheik Omar, who presumably were right there before his eyes—just as neither reporter asks any of the anti-terrorist Muslim community leaders they quote how many young punks they think they're dealing with. Or attempts to develop any other way of accounting for this supposed tide of radicalism, other than repeating the vague, scary "hundreds" or "thousands" in the claims of unnamed counter-terrorism officials.

One thing Tyler and Van Natta are quite certain of, though, is what they'd like to see happen. The article is unapologetically slanted toward a preferred course of action:

Though the British home secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to strip Abu Hamza of his British citizenship and deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while Abu Hamza keeps calling down the wrath of God. ...

In an interview on the BBC over the weekend, Mr. Blunkett advocated a stronger deportation policy ... The authorities say that laws to protect religious expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of foreigners, they say they are often left to seek deportation, a lengthy and uncertain process subject to legal appeals, when the suspect can keep inciting attacks.

That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective means, such as mouse-trapping Islamic radicals with immigration violations in hopes of making a deportation case stick. "In many countries, the laws are liberal and it's not easy," an official said.

Damn civil liberties! How can we fight this menace with one hand tied behind our backs?

Articles like this give me a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Is the Times really preparing to take its readers down this path?

posted by michael  5:50:31 PM  
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Honesty about the limits of one's ability to report—a willingness to acknowledge dubeity in dubious situations—is not something most journalists are good at doing, and something Times journalists seem schooled at avoiding. So, very big props to Ian Fisher, who yesterday wrote one of the best articles I've seen in the Times in weeks ("Attack in Iraq: Many Versions, Obscure Truth"), on the death of an American soldier Sunday morning, killed when his Humvee was blown up by a roadside bomb, and the subsequent firefight that killed at least one Iraqi teenager. "The kind of attack so common in this war that it no longer makes headlines," as Fisher puts it, but an object lesson in how narratives cohere—and fail to cohere—in the swirl of guerilla war.

In recent weeks, it has become harder for Western reporters to sift through conflicting accounts of incidents like this one. They venture outside only briefly. Many are afraid, mostly ensconced in hotels and houses protected by huge concrete blast walls, because of the recent wave of kidnappings and killings of foreigners. (And this reporter, who arrived at the attack scene about six hours afterward, stayed only about 45 minutes — far less than he might have several months ago.)

Fisher's depiction of himself on scene is rare enough for the Times, rarer still his acknowledgement that his ability to observe and draw conclusions is compromised by the deterioration of security in Baghdad. Most impressive, Fisher makes this graf the article's pivot point, and creates journalism out of his compromised platform. Having led the article with a clear, routinely unambiguous narrative of the incident, Fisher then takes that story apart, piece by piece, to reveal just how many ambiguities the authoritative voice of his lead has concealed, and deliberately concealed.

Reality, at this pivotal moment for the Americans in Iraq, is a kaleidoscope of versions.

Iraqi witnesses said not one child, but four, possibly five, had been killed. The American military had no count. But according to the military, gunmen fired on the soldiers from rooftops, provoking return fire. No Iraqi witness mentioned that.

Several Iraqis there did say [that] children had been incited to jump around the burning Humvee by a cameraman for Al Arabiya, an Arab news channel, which American officials say is guilty of stoking a much broader anti-Americanism among viewers around the Arab world. The station denies that its cameraman did anything but film.

With real art, Fisher moves concentrically outward, from his nearest witnesses to the incident through to neighbors and parents and aid workers, finally to the relevant authorities: the Baghdad bureau chief for Al Arabiya, and Gen. Mark Kimmitt, who Fisher places "inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified command center for the American occupation," both denying their respective responsibility in provoking or inflaming the incident. Only in the voices of those latter respondents, the furthest removed from the action, does ambiguity disappear—and by the time it does, the pattern of Fisher's narrative has already provided all the critique needed to understand how and why.

This isn't just a question of Fisher's skills deserving praise, as much as they do. This is ethical journalism, in a deep sense. Structuring his story as he does, Fisher gives his readers a chance to see how stories like this inevitably are structured, and he invites his readers to maintain their skepticism about any pronouncements of authority on the war in Iraq—even those that might come under Fisher's own byline. Brilliant work; A1 needs a lot more where this came from.

posted by michael  1:05:26 PM  
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A sense of scale. The Times seems to have an almost fastidious dislike of mass protest. Robin Toner's assemblage today ("Hundreds of Thousands March for Abortion Rights," which combines the work of four other reporters, all women, natch) is vague to the point of being disinformative about the size of the march. The article devotes a minimum of space to the question of how many people showed up—which is, when you get down to it, the crucial question for assessing the political accomplishment of a mass march—it refuses to assess numbers and refuses to place the numbers it won't assess in historical context. Here are the two grafs the piece devotes to the issue, the first near the beginning, the second near the end:

Organizers asserted that the marchers numbered more than a million, in what they said was a clear demonstration of political clout. There was no official estimate of the crowd size from law enforcement authorities; the United States Park Police stopped providing counts for rallies after bitter disputes over past estimates.

[big snip]

Organizers said they were elated by the size of the march, which took more than a year to arrange. But crowd estimates for Washington demonstrations are a source of enduring controversy, particularly since the park police stopped making its own estimates. One of the few hard numbers came from the city's subway, which registered 320,138 riders from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., compared with 133,448 during the same period last week. But many of the marchers did not use the subways.

In other words, the only "hard number" Toner reports—a number massively beneath organizer estimates—is one that she admits is essentially useless as a measure of crowd size.

Compare the (in almost all respects vastly better) WaPo article, which without especially wasting words manages to inform readers pretty clearly about how to rate not just the size but the importance of the crowd:

Organizers of the March for Women's Lives said they had drawn 1.15 million people, which would make it the largest abortion rights gathering in history. ... Police would not issue an official estimate, but some veteran commanders said the crowd was at least the biggest since the 1995 Million Man March, which independent researchers put at 870,000 people. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey would say only that he thought the march had met and perhaps exceeded its organizers' expectations. Their march permit was for as many as 750,000.

[also big snip]

Police would not make a formal estimate. Veteran officers who had been on hand for marches and demonstrations in years past said it was the biggest such gathering since the Million Man March in 1995, a gathering whose size was hotly disputed and that led to the discontinuation of crowd estimates by U.S. Park Police. ... Officers disagreed about whether the march matched or surpassed the number at the Million Man March, but many veterans of such gatherings put the figure at at least 500,000. Acting Park Police Chief Dwight Pettiford flew above the crowd in his agency's helicopter and said the "entire Mall was covered with people." "I don't know if they achieved their numbers or not, but there were lots and lots of people," Pettiford said.

Cameron Barr and Elizabeth Williamson, "Women's Rally Draws Vast Crowd"

Not so hard, is it? Let's just add that the "largest abortion rights gathering in history" topos has been featured routinely in coverage of the rally, but Toner can't bring herself to say such a thing anywhere in her piece. Her version, "first large-scale abortion rights demonstration here in 12 years," instead emphasizes the interval between rallies, implying a historical gap or failure of effort.

Read the WaPo article to get a sense of reporters taking an event, and their job of covering it, seriously. Toner's listless performance, by contrast, is fragmented, incapable of finding a through line, unable or unwilling to suggest the human scale of the march. She and the Times are just going through the motions here.

posted by michael  12:14:22 PM  
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Dry holes. Back at the beginning of February, Times public editor Daniel Okrent (Motto: "A Fierce Advocate for All Who Think The Times Is Pretty Much Fine as It Is") published some mild strictures about the paper's "not-invented-here attitude"—its habit of "diminishing or disregarding" stories that Times reporters hadn't broken. I imagine Danny was patting himself on the back yesterday, then: bang on the top left of A1 was David Halbfinger's lengthy review of John Kerry's antiwar activism ("Kerry's Antiwar Past Is a Delicate Issue in His Campaign"), a piece that featured absolutely no original reporting whatever.

Halbfinger's hook for this hash of public-record biographical information and previous reporting is the latest phony "controversy" about Kerry's activist career, namely the possibility that the Senator-to-be was in attendance at a November, 1971 meeting of Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) at which discussion took place about a firebrand's vague idea of assassinating pro-war members of the Senate. [The controversy's a phony because, as all participants, including the idea's author, agree, the proposal was never taken seriously, nor can anyone remember Kerry having any part in any discussion surrounding it.] Halbfinger's nice care for the facts is evident when he acknowledges the prior work:

Several news organizations, including The Kansas City Star and The New York Sun, have recently reported that Mr. Kerry also attended the meeting of the group in Kansas City, Mo., in late 1971 where killing opponents of the war was discussed.

For the record—though, as Danny O has made clear today, the Times is emphatically not the Paper of Record—this is simply untrue. Only the right-wing Sun has reported Kerry's attendance at this meeting. Both the KC Star and the Boston Globe have accurately reported (the Star just a day after the first, slanted article in the Sun) merely that recollections differ: The Star has two participants remembering Kerry at the meeting, while Scott Camil, the author of the "assassination plot," is sure Kerry wasn't there; in the Globe's later account, one of the two who remember Kerry, Randy Barnes, admits that he may have confused the November meeting with an earlier one and is no longer sure. And the Globe has further noted that the contemporary account of Kerry's attendance on which the story is based—coming apparently in a single report from an FBI informant (not from more reliable agents)—is unverifiable and remains at odds with Kerry's assertion, backed by the memory of other VVAW members, that he had already quit the organization following a July 1971 meeting in St. Louis.

The story of the Kansas City VVAW meeting, then, is murky as regards John Kerry's participation and utterly trivial as regards his antiwar activism (not to mention his Presidential candidacy). [The Bush blog was all dudgeony about the Sun story, of course, the next day; the GOoPer line is that Kerry should have "alerted authorities to a conspiracy" to assassinate Senators (one we can be sure he didn't take seriously even if he knew about it), and that his failure to do so amounts to "covering up for potential assassins."] But Halbfinger's going to lay it on for whatever he's worth, so he begins and ends his piece with the complaints of the one meeting participant who's sure he remembers Kerry there:

When questions were raised last month about whether a 27-year-old John Kerry had attended a Kansas City meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War where the assassination of senators was discussed, the Kerry presidential campaign went into action.

It accepted the resignation of a campaign volunteer in Florida, Scott Camil, the member of the antiwar group who raised the idea in November 1971 of killing politicians who backed the war. The campaign pressed other veterans who were in Kansas City, Mo., 33 years ago to re-examine their hazy memories while assuring them that Mr. Kerry was sure he had not been there.

John Musgrave, a disabled ex-marine from Baldwin City, Kan., who told The Kansas City Star that Mr. Kerry was at the meeting, said he got a call from John Hurley, the Kerry campaign's veterans coordinator.

"He said, 'I'd like you to refresh your memory,'" Mr. Musgrave, 55, recounted in an interview, confirming an account he had given to The New York Sun. "He said it twice. 'And call that reporter back and say you were mistaken about John Kerry being there.'"

So: A potentially embarrassing report surfaces based on an old FBI document, one that contradicts Kerry's memory of his VVAW history, and the campaign reaches out to Kerry's old comrades to ask them to think hard about what they do and don't remember. (Did Hurley lean too hard on Musgrave, or is Musgrave unduly sensitive—or maybe more sensitive than he might be now that some doubt's been cast on the accuracy of his memory?) As much as Halbfinger exerts himself to make it seem that Kerry's got some guilty knowledge to hide, I'm hard put to see anything in this narrative but standard damage-control procedure.

The breathless tone of Halbfinger's lead obscures it, but that account of Musgrave's that he's "confirmed" here is one that the Sun reported more than a month ago. Not quite as newsworthy as Halbfinger wants it to seem. Given that talking to Musgrave seems to be all the legwork Halbfinger's done for this story, why has it taken so long for the piece to get into print, you might wonder? But let's recall that it was just a couple of days ago that Kerry's Vietnam service records were released—to the sound of another made-up controversy fizzling. With nothing to be got out of that dry hole, why not take another crack at smearing Kerry for his antiwar activism?

Yeah, that suggestion—implying as it does that Halbfinger's piece was being held in wait for an opportune moment—puts me a bit close to tinfoil-hat territory. But the Saturday version of A1 has been so devoted in the recent past to publishing RNC oppo that it's hard to avoid one's suspicion of an agenda being pursued.

posted by michael  6:02:47 PM  
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Perspective. Following the Bush campaign's decision in mid-February, under unwonted media pressure, to release (some, not the promised all, let's remember) of the records related to Dubya's service in the Texas Air National Guard, the NY Times produced five articles reviewing the documents and the controversy over the Bush service record—the first on Feb. 11, the last, by David Barstow ("In Haze of Guard Records, a Bit of Clarity"), on Feb. 15. [To put that activity in perspective: the Times has printed four articles this past week on the "controversy" over the release of John Kerry's military service records.]

In the same week, the Times also featured an article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on Kerry's antiwar activities following his return from service in Vietnam ("Conservatives Shine Spotlight on Kerry's Antiwar Record"). [The article, a notably sloppy bit of reporting, accepted a doctored photo of Kerry and Jane Fonda appearing on the dais at an antiwar rally as more or less genuine, and the doctorer, a known stealth operative for Bush, as an independent, unaffiliated source. As Big, Left, Outside noted at the time, the photo had already been discredited before Stolberg's article was published.] Since then, three more substantial articles directly addressing Kerry's brief stint as an antiwar activist have appeared in the Times; two of them—a piece by Todd Purdum, on which I posted at the time, and yesterday's article by David Halbfinger—have been given above-the-fold prominence on A1. (If you add Jodi Wilgoren's report on Kerry's Meet the Press appearance last Sunday, which focuses on "contentious statements" Kerry made after his return from Vietnam about atrocities and war crimes, it's four, but we'll let that one slide.)

Three articles on Kerry's antiwar past, two on the front page, in the seventy days since Barstow tried to summarize the state of play on the Bush Guard controversy. (With two more articles close at hand.) And the count of NYT followups to said controversy in that seventy days? Zippo. Zilch. Not on the front page or anywhere else. But you already knew that, didn't you? About Kerry as a war protestor, well, the Times just can't seem to wrap its head around that one. But on Bush's dubious Guard service, the "bit of clarity" David Barstow managed to see on Feb. 15 remains all the clarity the paper can stand.

posted by michael  3:31:31 PM  
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You asked for it, Abdul. Neil MacFarquhar appears to think that the Saudis who died in Wednesday's suicide bombing in Riyadh were probably all just TerraSymps anyway, and had it coming:

On Wednesday morning, just hours before a suicide bomber demolished a Saudi police building in downtown Riyadh, the family of a young man was accepting congratulations for his death in the jihad over the border in Iraq, the one that enjoys no small support here. ...

In Saudi Arabia, a strategic ally of the United States, violence against the occupation in Iraq is seen by many as jihad, or a holy struggle, but virtually no one accepts violence as jihad when it unrolls here at home, in the heart of what is supposed to be the most Muslim of countries.

"Saudis Support a Jihad in Iraq, Not Back Home"

This is pretty much the entire burden of MacFarquhar's newsless above-the-fold screed (not labelled as analysis), which has to represent some kind of low point for A1 in reporting on Islamic concerns: The Saudi people are moral midgets who want all the fun of supporting jihad with none of the blowback.

In Iraq, attacks by American troops serve as evidence to some that the United States occupation of a Muslim land must be reversed. Requests for God to avenge American actions pour down from mosque minarets, and some women university students sport Osama bin Laden T-shirts under their enveloping abayas to show their approval for his calls to resist the United States.

But many Saudis consider the attack here on Wednesday a shocking and unsettling crime, especially since the attackers chose for their first major government target an office building that virtually every adult male must visit to collect a license or car plates. ...

"May God curse you, you vermin, you people of filth and not jihad," said a posting on one of the same Web sites where [a claim of responsiblity for the bombing] was posted, adding, in case anyone missed the point, a picture of coffins draped in American flags over the caption, "This is jihad."

Experts on the topic believe that most Saudis do not view the two battles as even remotely related.

Gee, Neil—is it possible they don't see the relation between the two "battles" because they aren't, in fact, remotely related, except maybe in the wet dreams of our own neocon jihadists? Because on the one hand we're talking about violent struggle in a neighboring Muslim country against a foreign, non-Muslim occupying power, and on the other about violence perpetrated by Muslim extremists on innocent Muslim victims?

MacFarquhar can only write as he does to the extent that, for him, jihad means terrorism pure and simple—and all terrorism is only a single, global phenomenon. Is this the best understanding of the question you've been able to manage in your career living and writing in the Arab world, Neil? Beyond that, the article's tone is motivated by a really unpleasant Western self-righteousness: you supported violence against us, well now you've got what you deserved. At the very least, I'd have expected more sensitivity in the wake of an awful terrorist atrocity on the part of the Times.

posted by michael  5:57:14 PM  
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Spawn of Rutengourney. If you mated Adam Nagourney, Official Spokesman of Democratic Hand-Wringers, and Jim Rutenberg, the Times' Brent Bozell-approved "media analyst," what would the offspring look like? Well, naturally, it'd look like a hand-wringer worrying at Kerry's weakness in the face of Dear Leader's unstoppable media juggernaut:

Senator John Kerry on Wednesday began what aides said would be an increasingly visible and combative challenge to President Bush, starting with a bus trip through the distressed Midwest and a television advertisement attacking Mr. Bush's Iraq record. ...

The television advertisement and the energized schedule came after two months in which Mr. Bush battered Mr. Kerry in advertisements intended to undercut him while he remained largely unknown to most of the country.

Mr. Kerry's aides repeatedly described Mr. Bush's spending as a waste, contending that voters were not paying attention to the race this long before Election Day.

But two newspaper polls this week found that Mr. Bush had succeeded in raising doubts about Mr. Kerry's credibility and ideology. That finding, coming after three weeks of unwelcome news for Mr. Bush from Iraq and a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, unsettled many Democrats. Republicans said on Wednesday that Mr. Bush's overwhelming advantage over Mr. Kerry on the issues of terrorism and foreign affairs overrode any concerns voters might have had about the news that has besieged the White House in recent weeks.

"Kerry Opens New Bush Attack, Focusing on Iraq and Economy"

[Notice, by the way, how the rhetoric of objectivity in those last two grafs marks what "Kerry's aides repeatedly" say about the Bush ad campaign as mere assertion, while the Republican counter about "Bush's overwhelming advantage" is assimilated to the reporters' own allegedly factual rebuttal.] Yeah, about those polls ... Nagourneyberg don't have any real interest in them except as they make it possible to reinforce the Approved Kerry Narrative. Which narrative would have less force if it were to acknowledge a few inconvenient facts at the margins, say as the LA Times did:

A USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday found Bush leading Kerry, 50% to 44%, among likely voters, while a Washington Post-ABC News Poll of registered voters showed Bush ahead, 48% to 43%. In both cases, the spread between the two candidates fell within the margin of error. Several other polls this month have found Kerry slightly ahead.

"Bush Campaign Spent Monthly Record of $50 Million in March"

This isn't much by way of analysis, but it's a damn sight closer than anything Rutenenburgey offer. For actual thought, check out DemFromCT on Daily Kos here, along with an earlier post by Kos written when the Gallup and ABC polls were announced, and which gives you the gospel:

In the last month, Rasmussen has had Bush between 48 and 42. And he has had Kerry between 48 and 43. That is not a wide spread, and shows that much of the float at this point is not necessarily shifts in popular opinion, but statistical float and the movement of very soft, very unfocused voters. (It's early, remember?)

In addition, Bush has been under 50 percent in the vast majority of polls. The Gallup Poll has Bush over 50, but also has no undecideds. They pushed the leaners strong. And while that type of polling make sense the week before the election, it's less salient a full six months plus before voters hit the booths.

Some juggernaut: Bush has spent $50 million in a month to generate essentially no discernible movement in public opinion. But there's an Approved Narrative in place, and Nagournenberger are servants of the Narrative, not of fact. The next passage from the article shows the degree to which their subservience to the Narrative will take them:

Evidence of Mr. Bush's continued strength renewed questions about the decision by Mr. Kerry's advisers to ignore the Bush attacks for now.

As late as Friday, Mr. Kerry's campaign indicated that he would not begin his national television campaign until next week. Mr. Kerry's campaign announced Wednesday morning that instead, the advertisements would begin on Wednesday. An aide said that there had been no change in the timetable in response to the polls and that the advertisements began as soon as production was completed.

So: the Kerry campaign moved up its ad launch by a few days, because they decided to go when the ads came ready. (Me, I wonder if maybe they were trying to gain a little tactical surprise by jumping the schedule—but what do I know? I'm not a Professional Political Reporter.) And that's all Nagourtenberg need to insinuate desperation, and they're insinuatin' just as hard as they can: there are "renewed questions" in the air! Obviously the Kerry camp is rushing into the breach, hoping to keep intrepid scribes like Rutneybourgey from taking the scent. Arrgh, too late!

In the world according to A1, when the Bush camp announces an attack strategy, it's cause for a fireworks show, copiously annotated with snakish (and usually anonymous) commentary from Republican operatives on the other guy's failings. When Kerry does the same, it's a sign of his inability to find his footing, and occasion for Democrats to question his direction. Because that's the permanent narrative of this campaign, for the Times: Bush strong, Kerry weak. Is Kerry not responding to Bush attacks? He's weak! Is he going on the attack against Bush? Must be trying to shore up his weakness!

posted by michael  6:23:43 PM  
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Block that stereotype! In a mostly straightforward and unobjectionable inner-page report on the release of John Kerry's service records ("Navy Records Show Positive Marks for Kerry"), Kit Seelye nevertheless can't quite manage to resist the lure of a favorite cliché:

The military records offered no hint of atrocities, but repeatedly cited Mr. Kerry's initiative in battle and patrician manner.

"Patrician manner," as should be obvious, is code for everything that Seelye and her Kewl Kids ilk have decided they don't like about John Kerry. As should also be obvious, nowhere in Kerry's evaluations do his commanders use anything like that phrase. What phrases do they use, to prompt Seelye to slip it in about Kerry's suspect class identity?

When Mr. Kerry was an ensign on the Gridley on his first Vietnam tour in 1967, his commander described him as ... "polished, tactful and outgoing" and "a brilliant conversationalist." "He uses the English language expertly, both orally and in writing," the commander wrote. ... "He is a polished diplomat at ease in distinguished company" [another commander wrote] and "is impressive in appearance and always immaculate." ... "He presents a very neat appearance and meets people well," [still another] captain wrote. "For his age and experience, he writes and speaks exceedingly well."

Enough, it's starting to hurt! Kerry as a young man was neat in appearance, polished in manner, and he spoke well—what more do you need to disqualify him from being President?

Yes, this is a minor, passing example of bias; no, the rest of the piece isn't unfair to Kerry. It is, however, bias, and an example of the kind of thoughtless stereotyping that goes on on the press bus (at least when Kit Seelye's along for the ride). It's also the sort of thing that any half-awake editor ought to have noticed and excised from the piece. So how about it, NYT—is keeping your eyes open not part of an editor's job description any more?

posted by michael  3:06:09 PM  
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Come on, Arik how about a little smile? For me? If you want to read an article about King Abdullah's snub of Bush, and Hosni Mubarak's protest over the recent shift in U.S. policy toward the Israeli settlements, that actually expends a bit of intellectual effort suggesting what's important about the story—in other words that isn't the sort of tired, couldn't-care-less hash that Steven R. Weisman tossed off as yesterday's A1 lead article—read Ewen MacAskill and Suzanne Goldenberg reporting in the Guardian today ("Arab ally snubs Bush amid 'unprecedented hatred' for US"):

A growing rift between America and the Arab world was exposed yesterday when two Middle Eastern allies delivered damaging rebuffs to President George Bush's policies in the region.

King Abdullah of Jordan flew home from the US after abruptly cancelling a meeting planned for today with the president in Washington. The king's move came as the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, said there was more hatred of Americans in the Arab world today than ever before.

King Abdullah and Mr Mubarak are two of the most moderate leaders in the Middle East and the two normally closest to the US.

Imagine that! In just three paragraphs I know all the main features of the story and have a quick read on its significance. That's the sort of thing that happens when reporters pay attention to their craft, and editors hold them to a standard. If Weisman ever knew how to do this sort of thing, it appears he's long since abandoned it in favor of parroting his fave anonymous neo-con sources, while Bill Keller does what he does best, namely look the other way. [After looking at the Guardian article, check out Billmon for a fuller, passionate analysis of the bellwether implications of the Abdullah and Mubarak protests.]

One thing about the Guardian story—call it a grace note, or a disgrace note—I haven't seen attested anywhere in the U.S. press.

Mr Sharon secured his deal [on the settlements] with Mr Bush partly through brinkmanship, sitting at Ben Gurion airport for three hours last week and threatening to cancel his Washington visit. Mr Bush caved in.

The Guardian doesn't, however, add the part about Bush meeting the Sharon plane with a bouquet of red roses and a big box of truffles ...

posted by michael  10:53:10 AM  
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Today is Diplomatic Embarrassment Day on A1: the paper leads with King Abdullah of Jordan snubbing our own Dear Leader in the wake of his tryst last week with Ariel Sharon:

King Abdullah of Jordan dealt a rebuff to President Bush on Monday, abruptly putting off his visit to Washington scheduled for later this week. Jordanian officials said the visit had become impossible in light of Mr. Bush's recent support for Israel's territorial claims in the West Bank.

A statement from Jordan said the king, who was in California on Monday and went home rather than to Washington, would not meet with Mr. Bush this week as planned. ... A Jordanian official said the statement, in deliberately cool tones, was meant to send a message of displeasure.

Steven R. Weisman, "Jordanian King Puts Off Meeting Bush Over Israel"

The piece is a confused, desultory foreign-affairs grab-bag; half of it summarizes the state of play with coalition forces in Iraq following the announcements of the Spanish and now Honduran pullouts there. Meanwhile, some actual news about Sharon's Gaza pullout plan, reported by James Bennet, is relegated to A9:

Israel will invest tens of millions of dollars in West Bank settlements as it withdraws from the Gaza Strip, the Israeli finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Monday. ... Such a move would appear to run counter to Mr. Bush's own peace initiative, the road map, which calls for a halt to "all settlement activity." ... Mr. Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel could now "fortify our hold" on blocs of West Bank settlements. He told Israel radio on Monday that he would approve investment for settlements that would not be enclosed on Israel's side of the new barrier it is building against West Bank Palestinians.

"Israel Planning Big Investment in Settlements on West Bank"

Seems like somewhat inverted news judgement to me.

And in the off-lead position, Dick Cheney forgot to read the fine print when he demanded and won the opportunity to speak live and uncensored on Chinese television:

Anyone who tuned in to CCTV-4, China's all-news television channel, shortly after 10 a.m. on Thursday could watch Mr. Cheney deliver an address to students at Fudan University in Shanghai. A State Department translator provided simultaneous interpretation.

But the broadcast received no advance promotion or even a listing in the Chinese news media and was not repeated. The authorities promptly provided leading Web sites with a "full text" of the vice president's remarks, including his answers to questions after the speech, that struck out references to political freedom, Taiwan, North Korea and other issues that propaganda officials considered sensitive. ... Bush administration officials said they had not negotiated how the Chinese transcript would be handled. When the excised version came to their attention, they worked to prepare their own Chinese version. ... [A] consular official said the American side had tried to anticipate how the Chinese might censor Mr. Cheney's remarks but could not prevent all alterations. "It's a challenge," the official said.

Amusing as this is, in a gang-that-couldn't-shoot-straight kind of way, this is a trivial, back-page item at best. What's it doing above the fold on A1? At the same time as two separate pieces on the brewing tempest over charges contained in the new Woodward book ("Bush Officials Deny Money Was Diverted for Iraq War," Richard Stevenson and Carl Hulse; "Kerry Accuses Bush of 'Secret Deal' With Saudis on Oil," David Halbfinger and Jodi Wilgoren) get dropped into A8 Iraq coverage and A16 campaign coverage, respectively.

posted by michael  3:19:15 PM  
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Haven't we already seen this movie? Steven R. Weisman is back on A1, renting himself out yet again as a neo-con billboard:

For more than a year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his aides have tacitly acknowledged that he was concerned before the war about what could go wrong once American forces captured Iraq.

But Mr. Powell's apparent decision to lay out his misgivings even more explicitly to the journalist Bob Woodward for a book has jolted the White House and aggravated long-festering tensions in the Bush cabinet. ...

Critics of Mr. Powell in the hawkish wing of the administration said they were startled by what they saw as his self-serving decision to help fill out a portrait that enhances his reputation as a farsighted analyst, perhaps at the expense of Mr. Bush. Several said the book guaranteed what they expected anyway, that Mr. Powell will not stay as secretary if Mr. Bush is re-elected.

"Airing of Powell's Misgivings Tests Ties in the Cabinet"

As is depressingly typical for Weisman, the piece is a land-grab for Bush officials who want to be quoted saying snarky things about their opponents (or anybody they just want to knife in the back) anonymously.

This piece of insider gossip—whose only sustained interest is in whether or not Colin Powell and Dick Cheney are willing to talk to each other at parties—goes below the fold on A1. And in the midst of all the other Woodward-related stuff that one might want to discuss—as, for instance, Bush's self-evidently unconstitutional misappropriation of $700 million in Afghanistan funding for Iraq war planning, or his deal with the Saudis (whose Prince Bandar was informed about the Iraq war decision before Powell, incidentally) to have them depress oil prices just prior to the November election—this is the only aspect of Woodward's book the Times sees fit to notice today.

Is the Times simply incapable of embarrassment, or incapable of learning? Or was Bill Keller just not paying attention to how the story developed after his staff came out ready to facilitate the White House's Two-Minute's Hate against Richard Clarke last month?

posted by michael  5:02:59 PM  
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So, how soon will we get the Times' puff piece for this one? Calling Dexter Filkins: John Negroponte is on his way to Iraq (via AP).

In Honduras, Negroponte played a prominent role in assisting the Contras in Nicaragua in their war with the left-wing Sandinista government, which was aligned with Cuba and the Soviet Union.

For weeks before [the] Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing [on his nomination as U.N. ambassador], Negroponte was questioned by staff members on whether he had acquiesced to human rights abuses by a Honduran death squad funded and partly trained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Negroponte testified that he did not believe the abuses were part of a deliberate Honduran government policy. "To this day," he said, "I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras."

"He's a diplomat's diplomat," said Bernard Aronson, the State Department's top Latin America official in the first Bush administration, when Negroponte was ambassador to Mexico.

I threw that last graf in to help you get started, Dexter.

posted by michael  1:00:13 PM  
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But it felt so right at the time ... David Brooks' mea minima culpa of Saturday has been eliciting some interesting responses around the liberal blogosphere. My own version of a shorter David Brooks:

I was wrong about Iraq, and fully expect to be vindicated.

And while we're at it, here's a shorter Matt Yglesias, whose own (genuine) mea culpa in response to Brooks has kicked off a round of commentary:

I was wrong about Iraq, and should have opposed the invasion, but that doesn't mean I'm one of those greasy antiwar types.

[For that commentary, look particularly to Atrios, Brad DeLong, and Kos. Ezra at Pandagon offers his own admission of error, which looks to me a great deal more forthcoming than Matt's.]

OK, I'm being a little unfair to Yglesias, but only a little. What regularly cheeses me off about mainstream liberals is that, when push comes to shove, the gut-level horror they feel at their caricatured notion of left-wing protest trumps any concern they have about getting in bed with the other side. They'll do somersaults to avoid association with the hippies and weirdos and loonies—the people who (gasp!) chant at antiwar rallies, to take a snarky aside from Matt Y. Those people aren't serious, after all, they're not adults. When push comes to shove, in other words, it's the moral and intellectual standard of the Wolfowitzes and the Perles by which the mainstream libs prefer to be judged. I've seen this sort of thing far too often in my (intermittent) career as a lefty activist not to recognize the symptoms. [If you want to see the disorder in full flower, pop up the comments to Matt's post and look for commenter SamAm.]

My hopeful position here is that one outcome of the Iraq debacle will be that the self-described "realist" liberals—the position that underlies the more transient one of war liberal—are forced to understand the political cost of their reflexive disdain for those of us to their left. Matt's post gives evidence that the lesson is at least partially learned, though his continued insistence that the anti-war movement was advocating a "bad policy"—as if, in the pre-war crisis, anyone opposed was advocating any policy at all except not going to war—shows that he has a way to go yet:

Neither the policies being advocated by Bush nor the policies being advocated by the anti-war movement (even at its most mainstream) were the correct ones. What I wanted to see happen wasn't going to happen. I had to throw in with one side or another. I threw in with the wrong side. The bad consequences of the bad policy I got behind are significantly worse than the consequences of the bad policy advocated by the other side would have been. I blame, frankly, vanity. "Bush is right to say we should invade Iraq, but he's going about it the wrong way, here is my nuanced wonderfullness" sounds much more intelligent than some kind of chant at an anti-war rally.

To all you "realist" liberals: we were the realists in this one. Most of the people I know who chanted (as uncomfortably as always, in my case) at rallies—and marched, and got spat at by "patriots," and risked arrest—got there having informed themselves about Iraqi history and sociology and having taken a cold, hard look at the motives of the Bush regime and what we could expect from a Bush war. We knew the chances for promoting democracy at the point of a gun, we knew who was in office and we could extrapolate sufficiently from the way we were being run up to war to have a good idea about how that war was going to be conducted and how likely it was to have a good aftermath. Some of us, many of us, may have opposed the war on moral grounds, some of us (horror!) may even have been convinced pacifists—but those moral objections didn't fail to map onto realistic political calculation.

So, Matt, my question now is: are you prepared to listen to us loonies a bit less judgementally next time?

posted by michael  12:04:33 PM  
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Shell game. Another 9/11 obituary: this one, though, announces the death of some information the Times wants to bury.

On Wednesday, in the wake of George Tenet's 9/11 commission testimony, the WaPo's Dana Priest led a story from the commission ("Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings") with news about the titles and content of PDBs that Dubya was given well in advance of the infamous Aug. 6 briefing:

By the time a CIA briefer gave President Bush the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," the president had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush's top national security team, according to newly declassified information released yesterday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community headlined some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real."

The intelligence included reports of a hostage plot against Americans. It noted that operatives might choose to hijack an aircraft or storm a U.S. embassy. Without knowing when, where or how the terrorists would strike, the CIA "consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil," according to one of two staff reports released by the panel yesterday. ...

The information offers the most detailed account to date of the warnings the intelligence community gave top Bush administration officials, and it provides the context in which a CIA briefer put together a memo on Osama bin Laden's activities in the Aug. 6 brief for Bush.

Today, the Times deigns to take (as far as I can tell its first) note of this information. From the way David Johnston and Jim Dwyer's off-lead article starts ("Pre-9/11 Files Show Warnings Were More Dire and Persistent"), you might even think it was going to be treated as news:

After three weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by Al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government.

The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on Al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration.

While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings — including one that Al Qaeda seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country — had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks.

You would, however, be wrong. It requires in fact another 35 paragraphs (in this 46-graf-long opus) before the one sad, solitary graf in which Johnston and Dwyer acknowledge those rather damning PDB titles. Thirty-five paragraphs of slogging through more of what seems Johnston's trademark numbing accumulation of this-and-that detail about intelligence lapses and failures of bureaucratic command, recycled through a listless chronology that starts, as always, with the Clinton administration. Narrative and intellectual focus neither required nor permitted. The notion that the article is going to discuss Presidential leadership and its failures—as suggested in the article's lead, and in another graf midway through the piece, which mentions the commission finding that "in the first eight months of the Bush administration ... the president received far more information, much of it dire in tone and detailed in content, than had been generally understood"—the writers raise the idea solely to swamp it in the miasma of their summary approach.

Which seems the point. I have to think that Johnston—who has perpetrated this sort of thing before, at least three times that I can recall since Richard Clarke's testimony blew up all over Dubya's smirking mug—is doing precisely what the Times wants him to do with this story. The editorial direction the paper consistently follows with respect to the work of the 9/11 commission seems to have two principles: (1) produce the appearance of journalistic energy, while in reality doing nothing at all to put the paper in front of the story; (2) let Bush off the hook as far as possible by burying his Administration's 9/11 failures in gestures of balance and comprehensiveness. Specifically, that latter aim requires that the summary review focus equally on Bush- and Clinton-era "failures," with the material always presented chronologically (so that consideration of any failings of the current Administration are generally withheld until the back half of the article); that the question of leadership be whisked off the table, vanished in various layers of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo; and that the line adopted be some version of "there's enough blame to go around"—thus pre-empting any specific or urgent critique of what Bush's team did or didn't manage to do. (While a full accounting of 9/11 of course requires consideration of the Clinton record, isn't it a bit more pressing that we focus on the actions of the sitting President, the man who occupied the White House on 9/11 and who is currently up for re-selection in November?)

There's so much wrong with today's report, in large scope and in incidentals, that I'll need another post or two to get to the salient features. Just wanted to point out now the kind of shell game the Times seems content to play with the most important public-policy story of our generation.

posted by michael  3:47:07 PM  
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As an addendum to the preceding post, which was getting kind of long, I wanted to note the kind of yeomanlike work that Zalmay Khalilzad is doing as our ambassador to Afghanistan, as cited approvingly by Amy Waldman:

Mr. Khalilzad is also trying to shore up support for Mr. Karzai's government by providing visible signs of reconstruction, an effort that could provoke resentment from other factions as the elections approach. Recent weeks have brought choreographed announcements about hundreds of schools and clinics to be built or rehabilitated in the next few months — more than has been done in the last two years. Critics say such haste, along with the government's lack of money and trained personnel, risks littering Afghanistan with unstaffed buildings.

But Mr. Khalilzad is pressing ahead. At an afternoon briefing, he showed Mr. Karzai where the schools would be built. "I have already discussed with a couple of provinces to trade two or three elementary schools for a larger high school," Mr. Khalilzad said, not bothering to hide his ability to barter with American money.

The United States has hired a Washington-based communications company, the Rendon Group, to bolster Mr. Karzai's communications office. And in a brief huddle at the palace, Mr. Khalilzad and the head of intelligence, Amrullah Saleh, discussed how the Afghan people regarded the government — and, as Mr. Khalilzad put it, "things we could do to help the standing of the government without working through the government."

It's so much easier to build Potemkin villages, isn't it, when you don't have to bother pretending to the press that they're real, or account for where the money's going, or answer to any power other than your own? Admirable, all that pressing-ahead energy Khalilzad seems to have, but then that's what it's like being King. Good thing Ms. Waldman isn't in the business of news reporting, or she might have had to ask a few questions about all this—she might even have had to lead with this stuff, instead of dropping it in the last third of her piece.

And as long as we're in the see-no-evil department—did you notice that reference to the Rendon Group? Something else Amy Waldman doesn't want to flag for you: Rendon is one of those CIA-connected "public opinion" firms much beloved of the neo-cons and the Bush crime family. Rendon came into its own, alongside the better-known Hill & Knowlton, working in Kuwait during the first Gulf War; Rendon also practically invented the Iraqi National Congress, at least as a marketing entity, and served as a conduit of CIA money to the organization. (It also has a lighter, disinformation side.) Just so you have a feel for how completely corrupt the background is over which Waldman is pulling her happy-face scrim.

Does Rendon have an in at the Times? No way of knowing, though it wouldn't surprise me. But whoever bought this pricy piece of A1 real estate today, I'm sure they feel Amy Waldman's given them their money's worth.

posted by michael  6:26:28 PM  
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Puffing the proconsul. Talk about your imperial bias! Amy Waldman reports today on A1 that the American ambassador to Afghanistan is running Hamid Karzai's regime as a puppet government, and without the least attempt at putting a facade over the operation. Ms. Waldman does not report this in a tone of outrage, or even of mild disapproval. Ms. Waldman seems, in fact, to find the situation absolutely charming. She begins with an extended nut graf:

"So what are we doing today?" Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, asked the United States ambassador, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, as they sat in Mr. Karzai's office.

Mr. Khalilzad patiently explained that they would attend a ceremony to kick off the "greening" of Kabul — the planting and seeding of 850,000 trees — in honor of the Afghan New Year.

Mr. Karzai said he would speak off-the-cuff. Mr. Khalilzad, sounding more mentor than diplomat, approved: "It's good you don't have a text," he told Mr. Karzai. "You tend to do better."

The genial Mr. Karzai may be Afghanistan's president, but the affable, ambitious Mr. Khalilzad often seems more like its chief executive. With his command of both details and American largesse, the Afghan-born envoy has created an alternate seat of power since his arrival on Thanksgiving.

As he shuttles between the American Embassy and the presidential palace, where Americans guard Mr. Karzai, one place seems an extension of the other.

"In Afghanistan, U.S. Envoy Sits in Seat of Power"

The article is meant to portray Mr. Khalilzad—who, in addition to being "affable" and "ambitious," is also "energetic," "impatient" (in a restless-to-get-on-with-it way), an experimenter, and has a "distinct laugh" that you can hear "echoing from the president's inner sanctum"—as the dedicated, purposeful guy in charge, and it certainly gets the job done. (That incidentally it potrays Hamid Karzai, in the excerpt above, as little better than a child, I imagine is par for the puppet-regime course.) Why is the Times devoting a puff piece to Khalilzad, why now? Who the hell can tell? Let's note, though, that this sort of blowjobs-for-the-empire thing keeps cropping up of late on A1; Dexter Filkins (whose byline has since vanished) was the designated cheerleader last month for both Jerry Bremer and Ahmed Chalabi.

Minimal respect for the record requires that Waldman note a few, well, inconvenient things about Mr. Khalilzad's past service, though the rules of the blowjob require her to approach them with a certain degree of delicatesse. She manages artfully (and perhaps to the tune of David Bowie's "Changes"):

[Khalilzad and Karzai] have known each other for 20 years, since Mr. Khalilzad became involved with supporting the anti-Soviet mujahedeen. Then an official in the Reagan administration, he helped funnel support and Stinger missiles to Islamic fundamentalists, some of whom, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, later became America's fiercest opponents.

Mr. Hekmatyar "is your old friend," a former Hekmatyar commander named Sabawun, who now is advising Mr. Karzai, told Mr. Khalilzad during a brief palace encounter. Old friends become enemies, they agreed, and left it at that.

Mr. Khalilzad himself knows how compasses change. In the mid-1990's, he briefly defended the Taliban while working as a consultant for Unocal, the oil company that was then trying to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. He later became one of the Taliban's fiercest critics.

Less artful with respect to some of these same facts, but a bit more straightforward, is Issam Nashashibi, whose piece of last April ("Zalmay Khalilzad: The Neocon's Bagman to Baghdad") was reprinted in Counterpunch.

While Khalilzad worked at the for-profit Cambridge Energy Associates, he conducted a risk analysis for UNOCAL. By 1997 he was a participant in UNOCAL's negotiations with the Taliban. Moreover, as paid lobbyist for UNOCAL, he urged the Clinton administration to take a softer line on the Taliban.

Khalilzad's attitude to the Taliban seems to have correlated well with UNOCAL's efforts to build the pipeline. At the time, he defended the Taliban in an opinion published in The Washington Post. "The Taliban do not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran," he wrote in 1996. "We should...be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction. It is time for the United States to re-engage," he concluded.

In 1998, however, when the Taliban were implicated in the attack on the U.S. embassies in East Africa, UNOCAL ended its contact with the Taliban, and Khalilzad changed his tune. In the Winter 2000 issue of the Washington Quarterly, he co-authored "Afghanistan: Consolidation of a Rogue State".

So much for Khalilzad's "brief" defense of the Taliban, and the timing of unspecified "later" in which (while ignoring his motivation) Waldman finds him "changing his compass."

As Nashashibi's piece points out (well supplemented by, for instance, the Right Web profile of Khalilzad), the ambassador is a longstanding Republican operative, a well embedded PNAC neo-con, an old friend of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, a protege of Dick Cheney's (who led the Defense Department section of the Bush-Cheney transition team), and before taking the ambassadorship (displacing a career foreign service officer), Dubya's official representative to none other than Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (official title, "Ambassador at Large for the Free Iraqis"). None of this information Waldman sees fit to include in her article. But I guess that might have produced a rather different story.

Story being: our take-charge proconsul in Afghanistan is another goddamn crony-capitalist, neo-con ideologue, his hand buried up to the wrist in just about every policy failure that his cabal has promoted since the Reagan era. That's the tough-but-caring activist administrator Waldman wants us to feel good about. I can't help wondering: has she not noticed, for some reason, where Khalilzad's pals have lately led us in Iraq?

posted by michael  6:05:21 PM  
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Bias isn't just the big, obvious, I'm-a-happy-tool-of-the-Right kind of Rutenbergish or (Bu)Milleresque thing that we often find plopped onto A1. And I realize that I don't do enough of the harder job of noticing the more insidious kind of bias, the kind that so completely frames a story that it all but disappears as you read. Take Weisman and Sanger's lead today, "U.S. Open to a Proposal That Supplants Council in Iraq," which reports the Bush administration's acquiesence to new proposals from U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi for a caretaker Iraqi government that would receive sovereignty on July 1 in place of the to-be-defuncted Iraqi Governing Council. Here's the meat of the piece:

The Brahimi plan would replace the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council with a transition government whose leaders would be appointed by the United Nations, after consultations with the United States, the governing council and other Iraqis. It could include members of the current governing council, but it is unclear how it would balance religious and regional rivalries within Iraq. By endorsing the Brahimi plan, the administration seemed to accept diminished American influence over the Iraqi political process as self-rule approaches and after power has passed back to Baghdad. The move was the latest abandonment of an element of the plan the Americans arrived at on Nov. 15, specifying the June 30 transfer.

But administration officials asserted that, even with the United Nations overseeing the selection of a caretaker government and then holding an election and helping the Iraqis write a constitution, American influence on the process would be considerable — not least because the United States is to remain in charge of military and security matters, and will be the country's main source of economic aid.

In addition, Ms. Rice's chief deputy for Iraq, Robert Blackwill, has been working side by side with Mr. Brahimi in Iraq to come up with the plan proposed on Wednesday, several officials noted. The surge of violence in Iraq in recent weeks effectively forced President Bush's hand, administration officials said.

In their own voice, the authors make a critical assessment of the current state of play—events have required the Administration to accept a weaker position in Iraq than it wanted to have—then, in the typical balancing gesture of "objective" journalism, report the assertion of (unnamed) officials that "considerable" influence on the Iraqi political process remains in American hands.

To a lefty, starved as we routinely are for oxygen on A1, the fact that Weisman and Sanger hinge their piece on a criticism of yet another BushCo backdown might seem like a small breath of air. That was certainly my first reaction. But notice what that criticism assumes, completely unthinkingly: that the only real story here is about American power and prerogative, and the extent to which the Administration may have damaged them in this instance. Weisman and Sanger take it for granted—so utterly for granted they can't even tell that's what they're doing—that the maintenance of Iraq as an American client state is the normal, natural, desirable outcome of our policy. And the ostensible goal of that policy? And everything that's happened since it was put in place? The writers drop that stuff into a hurried, deeply uninterested background paragraph toward the end of the piece, which waves dismissively at all they're happiest ignoring:

The 25-member Iraqi Governing Council was the product of efforts led by L. Paul Bremer III, the American occupation administrator, when he first arrived in Baghdad at the close of what President Bush called major combat. At the time, American officials praised it as representative of Iraqi aspirations and perhaps even the most representative government in the Arab world. Since then, however, the council has lost much credibility in Iraqi society, American officials say.

In what sense, outside of the "praise" of (obviously entirely disinterested) American officials, was the IGC ever representative, even of "Iraqi aspirations" (a nice way of fudging the notion that representative governments are usually understood to be representing people)? And isn't there a bit of a story in the process by which the council "has lost much credibility in Iraqi society"—enough, in fact, that a sane and unbiased observer might have made that (recently quite bloody and violent) process the context for a story about the diplomatic turn of events? As opposed, that is, to wondering how much room Americans were going to continue to have to pull the puppet strings.

Call it imperial bias. It's everywhere in coverage of the Iraq mess, and not just everywhere in the Times. And it leads Weisman and Sanger into a truly bizarre and nasty final paragraph:

United States armed forces have tried to counter attacks by Shiites and Sunnis and create a stable environment in which the political process could be installed. Meanwhile, military commanders have complained that a lack of progress on the political front has hampered their own efforts to stabilize Iraq.

Lovely language, isn't it? So that's what all that fighting's been about lately! We're not killing innocent civilians in Falluja—we're stabilizing them. So that we can "install" a "political process"—much the way you'd want a stable platform to install a light fixture. And some distance from how you'd approach the question of fostering democratic self-government.

posted by michael  6:32:37 PM  
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Cynical Republican asshole of the week award goes to ex-NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik. (This has nothing to do with the Times, but I can't resist it.) Ceci Connolly of the WaPo reports on a phony public hearing held Wednesday by the federal task force on drug importation (thanks to Dimmy Karras, Ceci's watchblogger, for the link)—phony because, as Connolly notes, "many of the speakers at yesterday's hearing turned out to have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, which has vehemently opposed efforts to legalize buying prescription drugs from Canada or elsewhere." And thus, Bernie Kerik. Let Ceci tell it (with my emphases):

Bernard Kerik, the former police commissioner who now runs a consulting firm with former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R), said allowing Americans to buy lower-cost drugs from countries such as Canada could invite terrorists to launch a biological attack under the guise of a legal purchase.

"We are very concerned if wholesale importing is permitted, it will make this country's medicine supply extremely vulnerable to terrorist intervention," said Kerik, who said in an interview later that he has been hired by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America to investigate the safety of drug imports. Kerik said he believes drug counterfeiting profits are already supporting terrorists.

Really, an impressive performance! Bernie's hit the GOP cynicism jackpot: I count as many as six distinct winners here. Whoring for Big Pharma leads, of course, tied closely to hijacking a public process for corporate ends; and his testimony offers two separate instances of Terra-war fear-mongering. (The second's an especially deft maneuver, adapting as it does the drug-war shibboleth about recreational drug use financing terrorism.) Then there's the smear by association—notice the way Kerik elides the difference between legal importation of low-cost drugs and the shady business of drug counterfeiting. Possible sixth count is faith-based policy pronouncements, since I don't know, but I've got a strong hunch that Bernie has exactly as much evidence as he needs (i.e., none) for his "belief" about where drug counterfeiting profits are going.

Keep it up, Bernie—anybody who can sell his soul as aggressively as this has certainly got dibs on some prime real estate in Hell.

posted by michael  4:02:23 PM  
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Subtle but substantial. Having allowed Steven R. Weisman to take a turn as Elliott Abram's ventriloquist dummy on the front page yesterday, the Times plays Elisabeth Bumiller's straight-news piece on the Bush declaration of support for Sharon's disengagement plan ("Bush to Accept West Bank Plan in Talks With Sharon") back on A6. It hasn't ignored the story, though: James Bennet's news analysis ("Sharon Coup: U.S. Go-Ahead") is slotted on A1, giving us the unusual configuration, for the Times, of a major Presidential announcement which (a) doesn't lead the paper and (b) has the analysis fronted in place of the news report. I'm happy to note that Bennet is saying pretty much what I did yesterday in my post about Weisman's obscurantist triumph:

By throwing his support on Wednesday behind an Israeli plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, President Bush provided diplomatic assurances that represented a victory for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Mr. Sharon wanted three commitments: backing for the Gaza withdrawal, American recognition that Israel would hold on to parts of the West Bank, and an American rejection of the right of millions of Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and their descendants to return to their lands in what is now Israel. He got them all by promising to trade something Israelis overwhelmingly do not want any more: the Gaza settlements and a handful of settlements in the West Bank. And he got them without having to negotiate with the Palestinians.

Palestinian officials knew that Israel strongly opposed yielding the whole West Bank or accepting the "right of return," and they had explored compromises in the past. But they relied on both demands as formidable negotiating levers. Mr. Bush has now moved to pluck both from their hands. ...

For the first time in American diplomacy in the Middle East, Mr. Bush announced that major Jewish settlements on the West Bank had achieved the status they aimed for: rooted "facts on the ground," or, as Mr. Bush called them, "already existing major Israeli population centers." The innovative, though risky, element in Mr. Sharon's strategy was to trade his concessions in Gaza and the West Bank not to the Palestinians as part of a negotiated agreement but to the Americans, over outraged Palestinian opposition.

eRobin at Fact-esque has some strictures on Bennet's piece, but I think this is pretty tough stuff, especially for the Times, and gets a great deal right; Bennet doesn't fail to mention that the "facts on the ground" settlements strategy has been a feature of Sharon's politics—he's the one "who drew up the settlement plan in Gaza"—since the 1970s.

And where Bennet's analysis doesn't go, Billmon's does.

The net result of this nasty little backroom deal won't just be further violence and random butchery in the territories and in Israel proper. It's also going to contribute to the progressive degeneration of the war against terrorism into the war against the Arabs -- if not the war against the entire Islamic world. The line in front of the Al Qaeda recruiting office is going to get a little bit longer; the struggle to stabilize a rebellious Iraq is going to become a little harder, and a future in which a large part of a major American city disappears in a nuclear firestorm is going to become a little more likely.

But the worst thing about this neocon smash-and-grab job is that it's probably irreversible. In the loopy world of the "special relationship," a presidential statement like this is regarded as the equivalent of a treaty with Israel ("Ratification? We don't need no stinkin' ratification!") It's a commitment that can't be walked back by any subsequent administration -- not without triggering the mother of all battles with the America Israel Political Action Committee and its various assets and instrumentalities on Capitol Hill.

So there you have it: George W. Bush, the accidental president, has now locked the United States into permanent, full-fledged support for the creation of an apartheid Israel -- complete with bantustans. And even if Bush gets the pink slip in November, there doesn't appear to be a damned thing John Kerry can do about it, even if he wanted to, which I strongly suspect he would not.

Be sure to read the whole post, which is well up to Billmon's eloquent norm.

Keep in mind that this development—the Bush Administration's utter trashing of a decades-long, bipartisan commitment to maintaining a position for the U.S. as an honest broker of Middle Eastern peace, replacing it with an explicit recognition of Israel as America's negotiating partner—is what Steven Weisman yesterday labeled, with massive understatement, "a subtle but substantial shift in American policy." Any chance that the Times' fronting Bennet's news analysis today reflects some embarrassment over Weisman's neo-con blowjob?

posted by michael  5:33:50 PM  
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Damn Bob Somerby for incomparably beating me to the punch on Jim Rutenberg's latest A1 thing ("I'm a Proud Drummer in the RNC Marching Band," I think it's called)—this one a repetition of the latest GOoPer spin point about those dastardly 9/11 commissioners playing politics by, you know, talking about their work in public:

Democrats and Republicans alike have raised concerns about the degree to which commission members are discussing their deliberations on television and, even, in newspaper columns — to the point that they are spinning their views like the politicians that many of them are.

Americans can hardly turn on a television or pick up a newspaper these days without seeing or reading about a member of the commission. From the Fox News Channel to ABC to newspapers including The Wall Street Journal, panel members have been providing a running commentary about the investigation as it unfolds, sometimes drawing blunt conclusions months before the final report is to be published in late July.

Probably you already know what to expect from the Howler: That the "Democrats and Republicans" line is purest bullshit cover, that there isn't a single Democrat criticism to be found in Rutenberg's 1400 RNC-scripted words.

Thanks, Bob! Rutenberg was my nice, big, fat target of the day, and Somerby had to go ruin it for me.

To get some back from the Howler, by way of alleging my own incomparability, let me just mention that this isn't the first time Reading A1 has taken notice of Rutenberg's water-carrying. [Rutenberg is apparently A1's newest, favoritest neo-con media critic; note the second paragraph in the quote above, which justifies today's performance by claiming it for a media story. The same thing happened when Rutenberg was assigned a repetition of anti-Kerry spin points in March, positioning it as a story about the Bush campaign's media strategy.] Check this post, which watches the Rute flacking for wingnut Brent Bozell's Media Research Council, detecting—in the purest, most neo-connishly entire absence of facts—a liberal conspiracy among TV producers inserting anti-Bush memes into their shows.

posted by michael  12:31:39 PM  
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The anonymity flag is thrown by Eric Umansky, writing Slate's "Today's Papers" column (scroll down):

Let freedom ring true, or giving Al Siegal the finger ... Reporting on the White House endorsement of Sharon's plan, the NYT's Elisabeth Bumiller quotes a "senior administration official who asked not to be identified because he wanted to speak more freely." Referring to Palestinians' anger, the gutsy SAO said, "I don't think that reaction is going to stop progress because there are real benefits here for Palestinians, and they're going to see those benefits here clearly."

Al Siegal, for those of you not following the link, is the Times standards editor who wrote the paper's recently articulated anonymous-sourcing rules. And yeah, I'd have to say that Lizzy Boo isn't even offering a fig leaf with this one—she's just letting Siegal know who's boss.

posted by michael  9:26:09 AM  
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Admin tool. Steven R. Weisman, who's never met an administration official he wouldn't offer deep background to at the drop of a hat, is serving up his slice of A1 today as a billboard for the big BushCo Likudniks ("Bush to Accept West Bank Plan in Talks With Sharon"). Weisman writes as a Times foreign-policy mandarin, which means that he has the delicate task of producing simultaneously maximum opacity (for the general public, aka us ordinary schmoes who read the Times) and maximum clarity (for the crowd who have the decoder chip already implanted). But if you, an ordinary schmo, would like to get a glimpse of what's really going on behind the curtain, it's simple: just invert pretty much everything Steven R. Weisman tells you, and you too can play along just like the big boys. On those terms, Weisman's written a pretty informative article. Here are the key points:

Bush is set to give Sharon everything he wants on the issue of West Bank settlements. Weisman reports that "President Bush is planning to issue a declaration on Wednesday that his aides say will recognize Israel's right to retain some Jewish settlements in the West Bank as part of any peace accord with the Palestinians." Further, Bush will "assert that Palestinian refugee families that once lived in Israel should live in a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, rather than in the Israeli lands they continue to claim." And here's the key: Weisman claims that these declarations "appear to fall short of what Mr. Sharon had been seeking — an acceptance of five specific settlement blocs and an outright rejection of the Palestinian "right of return" to Israel." (Weisman later calls the planned declarations "limited concessions," just to nail it down.) In other words, Bush's upcoming statement will "fall short" of fulfilling the Sharon wish list in exactly the way that the dealer's extra-super-because-he-likes-me discount (with a rustproofing bargain thrown in!) on that new car falls short of what he tells me he quotes the suckers. If Bush doesn't actually read from a Sharon-provided script, apparently that counts as not giving Arik everything his heart desires.

The "road map" is dead. Bush Middle East policy is, whatever helps our pal Arik. Wesiman quotes his backgrounders as saying that "by endorsing longstanding Israeli objectives, Mr. Bush was hoping to give Mr. Sharon political support for his plan to pull Israeli forces and settlers from Gaza and small parts of the West Bank." It looks like Ariel Sharon doesn't want to negotiate with any Palestinian entity that might, er, take a negotiating position, and that's just fine with Bush. Sharon's unilateral disengagement policy is intended, says Weisman, as "a substitute for the faltering negotiations over the last two years under the so-called road map pressed by the Bush administration, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations."

Before endorsing Mr. Sharon's withdrawals, the United States has managed to get Israel to say the pullout should not be seen as a substitute for the "road map" but only as a "parking place" while Israel waits for a suitable negotiating partner to emerge on the Palestinian side.

But as Mr. Sharon's visit approached, the administration has sounded increasingly supportive of his pullout plan. On Tuesday, Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said the plan represented "a historic opportunity to move forward" toward a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel.

Exactly—we're "moving forward" toward negotiating a Palestinian state by making sure that no negotiations with anything or anyone that might constitute such a state will take place. Gutsy, how the U.S. "manages" to get Sharon to agree to paste rhetorical fig leaves on his intentions. I'd say that "parking place" pun (get it? road map ...) indicates just exactly how serious everybody involved is at this point about the supposed Bush peace plan.

Big "Fuck you!" to the Palestinians. My favorite part of the article.

The [Bush] statement would be that Israel's future borders would have to recognize "demographic realities" since 1967.

That language, officials said, was code for at least some settlements in the West Bank, where Jewish settlers number some 230,000.

The language that would implicitly reject the complete Palestinian "right of return" would be similarly opaque, according to administration officials, in that it would simply reiterate Israel's identity as a Jewish state and suggest that Palestinians should move, in any final accord, to their own state rather than to Israel.

By offering such limited concessions to Mr. Sharon, the administration seemed to be hoping not to alienate the Palestinians, who have rejected Mr. Sharon's plan to keep some settlements.

"Seemed to be hoping ..." Shhhh! It's a secret! We're going to use language to confuse the Palestinians! Because, I guess, the Palestinians, alone among all the diplomatic players involved, don't read the New York Times. A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies ...

Dance, Colin Powell, dance! Weisman won't name his Administration sources, of course, but he's glad to offer a few hints:

[Richard Boucher] declined to specify the details of the negotiations with Mr. Sharon, but other administration officials said they had been extremely intense. On Mr. Bush's side, the negotiators have been Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser; Elliott Abrams, director of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council; and William J. Burns, chief Middle East diplomat at the State Department.

The Israel-firsters apparently hate William Burns, but notice who's playing the hand for the White House. And, in case anybody misses the point about who's in charge here:

The administration has also sought to win European and Arab support for Mr. Sharon's pullout plan, and understanding for the words Mr. Bush feels he must offer to facilitate it.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell talked Tuesday about the Israeli-Palestinian situation with Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia and Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher of Jordan, according to Mr. Boucher.

After which, he executed a series of smart backflips, looking for all the world as if he weren't dancing on strings, then folded himself back into his box ...

A small sugggestion: Could the Times see its way clear to providing some kind of translation key the next time Weisman produces one of these things?

posted by michael  3:26:36 PM  
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The ether ate my blog homework. Looks like my last post on Saturday didn't get properly uploaded to the Salon blog server. Sorry about that—I was away visiting family for a couple of days, on short notice. We now return to our regular posting schedule.


posted by michael  9:16:14 AM  
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The moving finger. As eRobin mentions in her last comment, à propos today's lead by Eric Lichtblau and David Sanger ("Bush Was Warned of Possible Attack in U.S., Official Says"), "the shock around the blogosphere at seeing this story in the NYTimes, to say nothing of it showing up on A1, gives a hint of how far the NYTimes has fallen." (For the second time in three days, by the way, A1 has seen the phrase "Contradicts White House" in a headline, which has to be some kind of recent record.)

President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday.

The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford.

The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders.

This isn't really news to anybody who's been paying attention: all Atrios had to do was publish a link to a 2002 WaPo article to demonstrate that. I'm more interested, myself, in how treatment of the story has shaken out in the last couple of days, through several drafts of the first draft of history.

David Stout's earliest, wildly inept, stab at running Condi Rice's testimony through the Info Chopper (only a revised version of which is available online) gave Rice absolutely every benefit of the doubt, obediently repeating her spin points about "silver bullets" and "structural problems," omitting crucial context, reporting her tone in the hearing as "calm, businesslike," "cool" and "unwavering." It was practically a parody of the worst of the suckup political reporting that's appeared in A1 in the last year. By the next day, Philip Shenon's straight-news lead had decided that the real story was going to be the August 6 PDB; Shenon smelled blood in the water:

Members of the commission, who have been allowed to read the August 2001 report but have not been allowed until today to discuss most of its contents, joined unanimously on Thursday in calling for the entire document to be declassified and made available to the public.

In response, the White House said it was hurriedly trying to declassify the report, and White House aides said it could be made public as early as Friday, an extraordinary reversal by the White House given its insistence a year ago that the contents of the President's Daily Brief were so highly classified that they could not be released even to the commission.

The White House appeared eager to release the entire Aug. 6 report to stem possibly damaging speculation about its contents ...

And Sanger's news analysis had decided that Condi's tone ("unapologetic," in Shenon's account) wasn't so much about her strength of character as about her characteristic (and BushCo-standard) unwillingness to concede any ground at all to criticism: "By the end of the three hours, her tone was so emphatic and unemotional that she may have created as many new debates about the administration's reaction as she settled old ones."

Lichtblau and Sanger repeat that narrative turn today:

The charges and countercharges [surrounding Rice's testimony] underscored the political challenge that the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has become for President Bush as he mounts his re-election bid. The White House sought this week to defuse the situation by allowing Ms. Rice to testify before the Sept. 11 commission after months of resistance. But her appearance served to raise new questions about the administration's efforts to deter an attack.

In this case, though, they're much more interested in leveraging the "new questions" line to pre-write the script for the coming week, which, with testimony scheduled from John Ashcroft, Louis Freeh (former FBI Director), Thomas Pickard (former Acting Director) and Robert Mueller (current Director) is going to be all about the FBI and the DoJ. And the fingers are already starting to fly:

Also on Friday, the White House offered evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation received instructions more than two months before the Sept. 11 attacks to increase its scrutiny of terrorist suspects inside the United States. But it is unclear what action, if any, the bureau took in response.

The disclosure appeared to signal an effort by the White House to distance itself from the F.B.I. in the debate over whether the Bush administration did enough in the summer of 2001 to deter a possible terrorist attack in the United States in the face of increased warnings.

[snip]

The finger-pointing will probably increase next week when numerous current and former senior law enforcement officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, testify before the Sept. 11 commission. In an unusual pre-emptive strike, Mr. Ashcroft's chief spokesman on Friday accused some Democrats on the commission of having "political axes to grind" in attacking the attorney general, who oversees the F.B.I., and unfairly blaming him for law enforcement failures.

[really big snip]

Offering a detailed preview of Mr. Ashcroft's testimony next week, [spokesman Mark Corallo] said the attorney general was briefed repeatedly by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. on threats posed by Al Qaeda and was told that the threats were directed at targets overseas. "He was not briefed that there was any threat to the United States," Mr. Corallo said. "He kept asking if there was any action he needed to take, and he was constantly told no, you're doing everything you need to do."

Aside from the fact that all this looks like it'll be loads of "Who, me?" fun—reading through Times coverage of the last few days, the drift of things seems increasingly apparent. Past whatever damage the Administration has or hasn't yet suffered with the populace, I think that they've just about exhausted their remaining stock of goodwill among the mainstream press corps. It's not just a matter of having shown weakness: what starts to come through is the sense that the press is rounding into a consensus (shades of the late-phase Clinton impeachment dance!) about the need for 9/11 contrition (and thank you, Richard Clarke), one whose obverse is disdain for the constant shifting of blame among these bozos. This isn't going to end, implies the Times, until somebody in office steps up and takes responsibility for something—and the reckoning may already have been postponed so long that there'll be no winning the press back when and if it happens.

posted by michael  1:49:19 PM  
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Rats with water wings. Billmon notices that Howie Fineman seems "dangerously close to turning on flight suit boy" in the wake of Condipalooza, and wonders if Fineman is "the proverbial canary in the mine": the early sign that Dubya is finally beginning to lose the media whores. Well, from NYT-land, it certainly looks that way. David Sanger—who was willing to whore for the notion that Spanish voters had cast for appeasement in last month's elections, even while his own paper reported facts to the contrary—thinks that the significant thing about Condi Rice's testimony is that it "stuck to the White House script," and that the White House script leaves something to be desired in dramatic range:

At every turn in her three hours of often-contentious testimony, she stuck to the White House script: Everything that could have been done to prevent the attacks had been done. She did not acknowledge failings, apart from the institutional tensions that have long plagued the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a culture that made it impossible for a succession of administrations to see the threat unfolding in front of them.

She also did not concede that the newly arrived Bush administration was part of that problem, or that it, too, underestimated what it confronted or was distracted by other issues like tax cuts, China and missile defense. Moreover, her tone—as controlled as her delivery at one of her Stanford seminars—left many panel members wondering if she was defending a position that several of them have publicly said is indefensible.

And Sanger adds—worried, I guess, that the unwonted provision of context in his mention of "issues like tax cuts, China and missle defense" might seem too wonkish—that even from the unwashed perspective there seems to be a problem:

For viewers who have not been following the details of the argument, there was the lingering question of whether anyone in the Bush White House is capable of admitting error—a step many of Ms. Rice's current and former colleagues said would help calm the political waters.

One recognizes in that phrase about "calming the political waters" a cry for help. If Sanger's not quite ready to jump ship yet, he certainly looks ready to ask for a rope. Let's remember just how bleak A1 looks today for Bushian leadership, with Condi on one side and Iraq on the other. If the waters don't calm soon, even Pravda on the Hudson might start getting a little seasick.

posted by michael  6:49:23 PM  
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Post-Condi tristesse. I'm feeling weirdly exhausted today, and not in much of a mind to scrutinize Times coverage of yesterday's Condipalooza—beyond noting that it turned out to be at least moderately skeptical (both straight-news lead by Philip Shenon and news analysis by David Sanger) and not nearly as inclined to let Rice off the hook, or recite her pre-made spin points, as I was afraid it'd be, based on the initial, really half-assed Web-only reporting from David Stout.

But I can't pass up Alessandra Stanley's inner-page "TV Watch" report on the Rice testimony ("Testimony Provides Breath of Racial Reality for TV"), which is one of the stranger performances I've seen in the Times since I started this blog. (And I say this mindful that A1 today features a piece on a kosher-for-Passover performance of the Ringling Bros. circus.) Apparently, for Ms. Stanley, the most salient thing about Rice's appearance was that she's a black woman, even though neither she nor anybody else makes a big deal about that, and it's really good to have a black woman appearing on TV in her capacity, namely as a witness before an investigative body, because ... well ... it's just good, OK?

There was absolutely nothing in Condoleezza Rice's neutral-toned suit, primly folded hands or calm demeanor to draw attention to her sex or race. Her answers, guarded, prosaic and a bit pedantic, were typical of any high-level Washington official.

But the last time the major networks interrupted regular programming to provide live coverage of a black woman testifying under oath in Washington was years ago when Anita Hill spoke out against Clarence Thomas in 1991.

[snip]

CNN and other news outlets had hyped her appearance as a kind of showdown, but as it turned out, Ms. Rice's much-anticipated moment in the spotlight did not shed new light on the administration's handling of terrorist threats before Sept. 11. If anything, her measured performance brought a breath of reality to a television universe too often clotted with distorted images of black women, most notably the angry Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth making her vengeful comeback on the NBC show "The Apprentice."

To which I can only say, "Huh?" I don't watch "The Apprentice," but am I to understand that a (presumably non-fictional) black woman is somehow less "real," more "distorted," to the extent she appears angry and vengeful? And that the proper point of reference for a sitting National Security Adviser testifying before the commission on terror attacks is a reality-show contestant?

Stanley goes on to mention a couple of recent moments where white guys (Garry Trudeau, Robert Novak, Lee Hamilton) might seem to have patronized Rice for her ethnicity: although I'm at a loss to understand how it's patronizing when Lee Hamilton praises Rice for being "articulate" while it isn't when Stanley lauds her "measured" performance as a corrective to the images of angry black women that apparently "clot" our imaginations. The piece stumbles into actual review territory after this, in its last few paragraphs—by which I mean, Stanley actually makes an effort to judge Rice as a performer on camera, rather than going on about what a credit she is to her race while insisting that nobody should go on about what a credit she is to her race—only to go completely off the rails by tossing in a little, well, black humor:

Mostly, Ms. Rice spoke as fast as she could to throw a protective cordon around the president. In an administration in which the president is rarely described as "articulate" and the taciturn vice president spends much time in undisclosed locations, Ms. Rice is one of the most familiar faces on television.

Yet even the camera-savvy Ms. Rice looked a little nervous while reading her opening statement, a text that steered clear of any apology or admission of error. ... And Ms. Rice looked most uncomfortable when Richard Ben-Veniste, a Washington lawyer and commissioner, asked her the title of the Aug. 6 document that she said carried no warning about an imminent terrorist attack in the United States. "I believe the title was 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,' " she replied stonily.

She got her groove back after a bracing exchange with Mr. Kerrey.

Well, that's sure as hell not patronizing, is it? Yeesh! Couldn't some editor have got to her before Stanley's racial subconscious exploded all over A14?

posted by michael  6:13:22 PM  
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Late to the party. From the department of Why Didn't You Mention This Earlier?—from James Risen's article ("Account of Broad Shiite Revolt Contradicts White House Stand"):

Although anti-Americanism is hardly universal among Shiites, an anti-American mood has been building for months. At the Grand Mosque in Kufa, where Mr. Sadr took refuge as his militiamen were seizing control of the city on Sunday, this deep vein of anti-Americanism feeds off every rumor.

And Christine Hauser's lead ("Iraq Uprising Spreads; Rumsfeld Sees It as 'Test of Will'"):

The intensification of the combat is sapping efforts to lay the foundations for a largely ceremonial transfer of political sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30.

Have you noticed how all of a sudden the press is paying attention to the fact that the sovereignty transfer is "largely ceremonial," that few or no facts on the ground will change (other than the CPA will magically transmute into America's largest embassy), that nobody's quite sure exactly what Iraqi government entity will be in place to receive the sovereignty we're handing off? Has anything in the pending June 30 arrangements changed in the last several days?

Well, obviously, no. It's just that it's becoming fashionable (or at least permissible) to regain the use of one's eyes—and hey, look, the Boy Emperor doesn't seem to be wearing any pants ...

posted by michael  5:16:46 PM  
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And I'm not even paying for the service. Looks like I don't have to do anything by way of taking out Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse for their dopey A1 thumbsucker about the political implications of the Iraq blowup ("Battles in Iraq Bring Troubles for Bush and Kerry as Well"). Go read Billmon, who does it better than I would've anyway.


posted by michael  4:53:56 PM  
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Quick reactions to the Times' early report on Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission, from David Stout ("Bush Understood Threat Posed by Al Qaeda, Rice Tells Panel"):

Guess Stout's still down with Dear Leader.

President Bush understood the deadly threat posed by Al Qaeda terrorists from his very first days in office, the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, testified today.

But she said the administration was hobbled by deep-seated problems in intelligence-gathering, notably a lack of communication between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Could you have come up with a more horseshit lead than that, David? And the second graph does Condi the favor of repeating her "structural problems" talking point, repeated ad nauseam in her appearance, and establishing it as the through-line for the piece.

And just so we're clear, Stout reiterates the point about Dear Leader's understanding in the fourth graf:

In her long-awaited appearance before the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Rice insisted under sometimes sharp questioning that Mr. Bush "understood the threat, and he understood its importance," as she put it in her opening statement.

I love that "long-awaited." No suggestion that the waiting, and the length of it, were dictated by Administration stonewalling and its ludicrous assertions of "precedent" and "constitutionality" trying to keep Rice away from public testimony. I notice that the WaPo staff report, while shorter than Stout's piece, quite handily manages the job, albeit leaving it till late in the report: "The commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, had feuded for months with the White House over access to government documents and witnesses, and Rice's agreement to testify came after weeks of refusals from White House lawyers." Too much heavy lifting though for Stout, apparently.

Condi testifies in "a calm, businesslike tone" early in the piece, then in a "cool unwavering tone" later on. "Her tone in the opening statement was not confrontational," even though she makes a "clear rebuttal of [the] recent charges" coming from Richard Clarke. Glad that tone issue is all wrapped up.

Stout devotes several grafs to Richard Ben Veniste's aggressive questioning, in particular wrt the Aug. 6 PDB: he picks up Rice's assertion that the PDB "was not a threat report to the president or a threat report to me," and yet won't condescend to mention Ben Veniste's insistence, evaded by Rice, that the briefing did indeed entail a threat report and that it should be declassified. (WaPo, again, does just fine with that.) He appears delighted to mention that "applause and laughter broke out" when Rice scored a point against Bob Kerrey:

Applause and laughter broke out later, however, when, in answer to a question from Mr. Kerrey about why the United States had not responded militarily to the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen, Ms. Rice quoted from a Kerrey speech saying that the best response to the attack would perhaps be to deal with "the threat of Saddam Hussein."

The applause that broke out when Kerrey, frustrated (like a number of the commissioners) with Rice's long, obfuscatory, off-point replies, told her to "stop filibustering me," however, is silent in Stout's article. (WaPo doesn't mention Kerrey's segment either way.) Stout completely ignores the unusual questioning arrangement, in which commissioners were each given only 10 minutes with Condi (instead of there being a couple of lead questioners with substantial time for follow-up), as he ignores Rice's tactics in answering and eating up question time. But, after all, we know what her "tone" was, and isn't that enough?

Stout makes sure Rice gets the ringing last word:

"After the Sept. 11 attacks, our nation faced hard choices," she said. "We could fight a narrow war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban or we could fight a broad war against a global menace. We could seek a narrow victory or we could work for a lasting peace and a better world. President Bush chose the bolder course."

And, of course, we all know how well that's been working out.

In short: big failing grade for Stout. Let's see if the Times cleans this mess up at all by the time it sees print.

Update (via Atrios): TAP is fact-checking Condi's ass, and she's just as big a liar as you might have expected. Here, and here.

posted by michael  12:57:50 PM  
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Sometimes the headline's where it's at. James Risen's article today, above the fold:

Account of Broad Shiite Revolt Contradicts White House Stand

Here's the lead:

United States forces are confronting a broad-based Shiite uprising that goes well beyond supporters of one militant Islamic cleric who has been the focus of American counterinsurgency efforts, United States intelligence officials said Wednesday.

That assertion contradicts repeated statements by the Bush administration and American officials in Iraq. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that they did not believe the United States was facing a broad-based Shiite insurgency. Administration officials have portrayed Moktada al-Sadr, a rebel Shiite cleric who is wanted by American forces, as the catalyst of the rising violence within the Shiite community of Iraq.

But intelligence officials now say that there is evidence that the insurgency goes beyond Mr. Sadr and his militia, and that a much larger number of Shiites have turned against the American-led occupation of Iraq, even if they are not all actively aiding the uprising.

That's how much damage this is doing to Bush: A1 is openly calling out the White House for refusing to acknowledge reality in Iraq—and its reporters are now being asked to give play (Judith Miller must be turning over in her grave!) to dissenting intelligence.

Risen is particularly interesting on the subject of the Hezbollah presence in Iraq, reprising and somewhat amplifying his report of last November. I didn't see it at the time, and it doesn't seem to have attracted much attention or follow-up. (I persist in thinking there's a great deal more to al-Sadr's recent, provocative embrace of Hamas and Hezbollah than we know yet.) So if there's an element of tooting his own horn in this (under the surface), I guess Risen ought to be allowed.

In the Shiite-dominated areas of Iraq, some Pentagon officials and other government officials believe that Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite extremist group, is now playing a key role in the Shiite insurgency. The Islamic Jihad Organization, a terrorist group closely affiliated with Hezbollah, is also said by some officials to have established offices in Iraq, and that Iran is behind much of the violence.

C.I.A. officials disagree, however, and say they have not yet seen evidence that Hezbollah has joined forces with Iraqi Shiites. Some intelligence officials believe that the Pentagon has been eager to link Hezbollah to the violence in Iraq to link the Iranian regime more closely to anti-American terrorism.

But C.I.A. officials agree that Hezbollah has established a significant presence in postwar Iraq. The Lebanese-based organization sent in teams after the war, American intelligence officials believe.

By implication, doesn't this rather put the lie to all the hype about the alleged Zarqawi letter and the supposed Al Qaeda (or Al Qaeda-ish) plan to foment Shia-Sunni violence this summer?

posted by michael  10:35:00 AM  
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Baiting the bear. Reading today's lead (Jeffrey Gettleman and Douglas Jehl, "Fierce Fighting With Sunnis and Shiites Spreads to 6 Iraqi Cities"), a statement from Moktada al-Sadr caught my eye:

In a statement issued Tuesday from Najaf, [al-Sadr] urged disciples to keep up the fight.

"America has shown its evil intentions," Mr. Sadr said, "and the proud Iraqi people cannot accept it. They must defend their rights by any means they see fit."

He also aligned himself with Iraq's most influential religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. "I proclaim my solidarity with Ali Sistani, and he should know that I am his military wing in Iraq," he said.

My immediate thought was, this guy is a pretty smart and pretty ballsy political tactician. Whether or not Sistani actually wants a military wing, I think it's safe to say he really doesn't want a Sadrist military wing. But al-Sadr has adroitly, and rapidly, maneuvered himself into a position where he may very well be able to force Sistani to swallow this little poison pill.

And, as we know, fortune favors the prepared:

Months ago, some of Mr. Sadr's rivals said he had only a few hundred armed men behind him. Hazim al-Aarji, Mr. Sadr's chief commander in Khadamiya, maintains there are 50,000 members of the Mahdi Army just in Baghdad. Mohammed Kadem, a 23-year-old Mahdi Army fighter from Khadamiya, said the force had been lying quietly for months, with arms they looted nearly a year ago. "We just kept them in our homes," Mr. Kadem said. "We knew this time might come."

Mr. Kadem detailed a training program in which he and other Shiite youths took buses to Sadr City to practice marksmanship in an open field. Marching orders are disseminating through mosques, Mr. Kadem explained, and ammunition is supplied by central offices.

Jeffrey Gettleman, "At Word of U.S. Foray, a Baghdad Militia Erupts"

Even abstracting whatever partisan exaggeration there may be in this, certainly the evidence of the last few days makes it obvious that a significant Sadrist infrastructure—one that coalition intelligence apparently had little if any knowledge of—has been in place for some time now, biding its moment.

It starts to occur to me that there's been quite a lot of fortune in this, all of it going in al-Sadr's direction. His newspaper is shut down, and he needs less than a week to respond to the provocation with a coordinated uprising? Which rolls into place just prior to the start of the politically charged Shiite festival of Arbain, commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a festival that finds hundreds of thousands of Shiite faithful pilgrimaging to Karbala and the Sadrist stronghold, Najaf? This, from Doug Jehl's article today:

A senior Defense Department official who outlined the likelihood of a slower approach said American concerns had been complicated by two dates now approaching — an anniversary and a holiday.

Thursday is the fifth anniversary of the killing of Mr. Sadr's father, a leading cleric, and his two elder brothers, deaths that occurred under the rule of Saddam Hussein. And Friday is the first day of the Shiite religious festival of Arbayeen, which will bring hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims to the Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

And let's not forget that this all comes conveniently in the midst of a major, scheduled American troop rotation in Iraq, and thus at a time of maximum tactical opportunity for any opposition.

Given the level of intelligence evident in the Sadr organization—and, sadly, the level of intelligence evident among Proconsul Jerry's bunch—the question of timing just begs to be asked. Bloggers have been wondering, like Lambert here, what American agenda was served by the CPA shutting down the Sadrist paper, then revealing a months-old arrest warrant against al-Sadr. The assumption has always been that, whatever the CPA was up to, they managed to force al-Sadr's hand. I can't help wondering whether the vice isn't versa, whether it isn't al-Sadr who took a chance—very successfully—at making his own luck. [One suggestion, whose source I can't recall right now, was that Administration neo-cons found al-Sadr's announced embrace of Hezbollah and Hamas too infuriating to be allowed to go unchallenged.] Did al-Sadr, seeing a window of opportunity, bait the bear, and give himself a pretext for creating the chaos he's now working to take advantage of?

posted by michael  5:04:03 PM  
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And I get to wear these cool combat boots with my suit, too! Douglas Jehl reports a new—as in, concocted in the past day—resolution on the part of the American authorities to "move slowly in carrying out any retaliation against Moktada al-Sadr" (a resolution events seem to have already made superfluous):

In seeking to portray Mr. Sadr as a criminal, American officials in Baghdad disclosed for the first time on Monday that a secret warrant for his arrest was issued months ago by Iraqi authorities in connection with the killing of Ayatollah Khoei last April, shortly after he was returned to Iraq by American military forces.

In describing the warrant, American officials indicated that a decision had been made to seize Mr. Sadr soon, with a spokesman, Dan Senor, saying there would be "no advance warning."

But the American officials in Baghdad declined to say when they would execute the warrant.

"U.S. Says It Won't Move Quickly Against Sadr"

Jehl's doing Senor a favor by presenting that quote the way he does. John Burns was at that press conference, and his article yesterday was cruel enough—and deadpan enough—to offer Senor in full feather:

"You'll know," replied Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the spokesman for the American command, when asked when the bid to arrest Mr. Sadr would be made. "Yeah, let's just say there will be no advance warning," said Dan Senor, the spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator for Iraq.

"U.S. Seeks Arrest of Shiite Cleric"

Isn't that "Yeah" just exactly the cry of the red-breasted American chickenhawk? I can hear the snigger in Senor's voice when he makes his "no advance warning" quip. And without a word on his own, Burns skewers Senor precisely, as one of those nauseating GOP wannabes who can't ever get enough of hearing themselves talk like hard guys.

posted by michael  3:48:53 PM  
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Godspeed. John Burns, with a photographer and an armed escort (supplied by whom, you have to wonder?), was detained on his way to a news conference he thought was being held by Moktada al-Sadr in Kufa yesterday. He takes the opportunity to report on the fervor, and lack of martial discipline, among al-Sadr's militiamen:

A reporter and photographer for The New York Times had a rare — and unplanned — opportunity to see Mr. Sadr's battle troops up close on Tuesday. A 100-mile drive from Baghdad for a supposed news conference by Mr. Sadr ended up with no news conference, and a handful of the newspaper's Baghdad staff, including drivers, security guards and an interpreter, detained for nearly eight hours. They were suspected, their captors said, of being Special Forces operatives or intelligence agents for the United States, Spain or Israel.

But before and after being driven away blindfolded to a makeshift prison deep in the semidesert landscape outside Kufa, the visitors were left under loose guard at the mosque's main entrance and, for about an hour, inside the courtyard. There, seething antagonism for Westerners blended with a haphazard, almost chaotic approach to maintaining control. Hundreds of worshipers made their way into the mosque past groups of men toting Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and a variety of bayonets and knives.

"Anxious Moments in Grip of an Outlaw Iraqi Militia"

[Ignore the headline-writer's parrotating of CPA propaganda in the word "outlaw": it's not seconded anywhere in the report.] The best Times writing so far from Iraq, like Burns' piece today, has been relegated to the inner pages. Before work caught up with me yesterday, I meant to point out that both Jeffrey Gettleman, from inside Kufa ("An Incendiary Cleric Braces His Militia for an Invasion"), and Christine Hauser, on the streets of Sadr City ("In Shiite Enclave, Cheers Have Turned to Fur"), were doing some extraordinarily sharp reporting in what have to be extremely uncomfortable and increasingly dangerous conditions. Burns' experience underscores that fact, and one hopes they'll all continue safe.

This, to my mind, is what committed, observant journalism looks like, from Hauser's article:

Along Chuwadir Street, which slices through the center of Sadr City, the disenchantment and fury about the continued military occupation, the lack of jobs and the instability indicated that the United States may have lost the hearts of a segment of the population it had perhaps initially won over by default.

"The Americans have no more business here," said Juma Majed, 40.

Around him were signs of what happens when war is taken to the doorsteps of a rundown slum teeming with people.

Six American tanks were lined up at a busy intersection, their turrets swinging languidly from side to side as cars and trucks honked and tried to outmaneuver each other to take up what little was left of the intersection. City buses packed with passengers pulled over to the side to make room for passing tanks.

Little girls with schoolbags and old women with vegetable sacks walked past the tanks, guarding a police station that the militiamen had tried to take over.

American soldiers crouched behind concrete blocks, their weapons trained on a huge crowd of Iraqi onlookers, who stood in crowds across the street and stared.

Hand-painted lettering on an abandoned sidewalk juice stand extolled the virtues of apricot nectar. Above the writing, bullet holes shattered the glass. Casings littered the street and greasy coils of rubber, all that was left of burning tires, were plastered in the road.

"What kind of democracy is this?" said Sheik Walid Hassan.

posted by michael  12:43:13 PM  
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Eat your heart out, Bill Keller! From David Carr's report on the Pulitzer awards, which netted the Times exactly one prize while the LA Times walked away with five:

The [LAT's] big win comes on the heels of its strong showing in the awards last year, when it won three Pulitzers. The two-year showing in journalism's most prestigious awards suggests that the newspaper has more than recovered from a 1999 scandal stemming from its sharing advertising profits from a special issue of the paper's magazine with the subject of the issue: the newly completed Staples Center.

After its purchase by the Tribune Company in 2000, The Times hired [John S.] Carroll from The Baltimore Sun, and he has been widely credited with the paper's turnaround.

"It is one of the most impressive performances by an editor I have ever seen," said Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. "It took him just two years to establish this paper as one of the best by giving it a sort of jet-propelled assist. To have two years in a row of multiple Pulitzers is amazing."

Ouch! That's gotta hurt.


posted by michael  3:12:52 PM  
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Not playing well together. David Sanger and Douglas Jehl appear to think they're working on two separate stories in today's lead article ("Generals in Iraq Consider Options for More Troops"): one about the possibility of more American troops being sent to Iraq in the wake of the new wave of Sadrist violence, the other about whether the June 30 date for the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi authority can hold. And rather than make an effort to find a thread, they just figure they'll munge the two stories together and call it a day. So they type up two leads:

American commanders in Iraq are developing contingency plans to send more American forces to the country if the situation worsens, and administration officials said Monday that the new surge of violence by Shiites represented a worrying challenge to their plans to turn over power in less than 90 days.

President Bush, speaking in Charlotte, N.C., said he intended to stick to the June 30 date for giving control of the country to an interim Iraqi government, even as he conceded that the new government's structure had not been settled. He vowed that the violence — which he said was being instigated by Moktada al-Sadr, a young Shiite cleric — would be put down, saying, "We just can't let it stand."

The whole article follows this non-direction, bouncing repeatedly and arbitrarily between the two topics as if the reporters just found the whole assignment tedious and unnecessary. In the face of the urgency of these issues, and given how honorably the Times Iraq-based staff acquits itself today, this sort of lazy, uncommitted effort (another mark of which is the exclusive reliance on background quotes from Administration and military officials) seems particularly shameful.

And you know what? The through line ain't that hard to come by. Writing for Knight-Ridder, William Douglas and Matt Stearn could offer Sanger and Jehl a clinic ("Shiite uprising challenges central premise of U.S. policy"). They lead with Dubya's vow in the Charlotte speech to "stay the course" in Iraq, and then develop both sides of the story as necessary, and uncomfortable, constraints on that insistence. Here's the takeaway graf (and note, incidentally, the well rationalized grant of anonymity):

Some senior U.S. officials now say that with both Sunnis and Shiites rebelling against the occupation, they see no way out of Iraq, no way the United States can oversee a smooth transition to Iraqi democratic rule in the foreseeable future and little chance that U.S. forces in Iraq can restore security without more troops.

"The last thing you want in the months before the (American presidential) election is escalation," said one senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his remarks were unauthorized and pessimistic. "But seeing Iraq descend into civil war probably would be even worse."

Difference being, for Douglas and Stearn there's a logic that ties domestic political stances to their consequences in Iraq, and vice versa; acknowledging that logic also implies an acknowledgement of the history involved. Where Sanger and Jehl are happy to accept mere wishful assertion uncritically as a description of reality,

Senior military and White House officials said the attacks by Mr. Sadr's forces did not represent a full-scale Shiite uprising, or portend a broader civil war. Still, a senior military official described the violence led by Mr. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, as part of "a power grab at a very difficult time," and one that administration officials said could interfere with their efforts to reduce the number of American troops as the presidential election approached,

Douglas and Stearn are willing to do that inconvenient remembering thing:

Talk of additional forces in Iraq is a major departure from White House predictions that the U.S.-led invasion would be hailed by Iraqis. "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in March 2003. A month later, Wolfowitz told foreign journalists that the U.S. entered Iraq "as liberators, not as occupiers."

Knight-Ridder reporters continually clean the Times' clock on military and intelligence affairs. If I were Arthur Sulzberger, I'd Steinbrenner the lot of them over and fire the timeservers and the neo-con tools currently mucking up my pages.

posted by michael  1:33:05 PM  
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When the snark runs uphill. Funny ... Looks like a little anti-Bush snark got past the editor of the business section today. In "A Heretical View of File Sharing" John Schwartz reports on "the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying," a study whose conclusion is that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero." Unwelcome news for the RIAA and industry file-sharing hatas, of whom the article is sharply critical. Here's the graf:

The industry has reacted with the kind of flustered consternation that the White House might display if Richard A. Clarke showed up at a Rose Garden tea party. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America sent out three versions of a six-page response to the study.

posted by michael  4:16:23 PM  
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A fairly significant event. John Burns, who last week was rude to our military propagandists in Iraq, is seriously not bringing the happy after yesterday's al-Mahdi uprising, which leads A1 today:

The insurrection, which spread across the Shiite heartland in a matter of hours, came five days after the ambush in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of Falluja, outside Baghdad, in which a mob mutilated the bodies of four American security guards and hanged two of them from a bridge. Together, the events in Falluja and the other cities on Sunday appeared likely to shake the American hold on Iraq more than anything since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's government last April 9.

In effect, the militia attacks confronted the American military command with what has been its worst nightmare as it has struggled to pacify Iraq: the spread of an insurgency that has stretched a force of 130,000 American troops from the minority Sunni population to the majority Shiites, who are believed to account for about 60 percent of Iraq's population of 25 million.

Privately, senior American officers have said for months that American prospects here would plummet if the insurgency spread into the Shiite population, leaving American and allied troops with no safe havens anywhere except possibly in the Kurdish areas of the north.

"7 U.S. Soldiers Die in Iraq as a Shiite Militia Rises Up"

Burns is still in a state of high scorn at the information policy of the American military, and ready to show it; he describes "a senior American officer rush[ing] into a news briefing inside the American headquarters compound in central Baghdad wearing a helmet" on his return from a helicopter tour of the Kufa/Najaf fighting, to contrast the officer's bland use of "the insistently understated language that the American command has used at every juncture of the war" to wish away the violence as a "fairly significant event" now "pretty settled down." And note that Burns's lead insists on the fighting as "a coordinated Shiite militia uprising," a description echoed in the caption to the accompanying front-page photos. Add Jeffrey Gettleman's (somewhat scattered) color commentary, off-lead, and it seems the Times may be in full "Fool me once ... shame on ... fool me ... can't get fooled again" mode on this one—now if only they could get there wrt Condi Rice and the gang.

[Juan Cole, whose middle name is apparently "the always indispensible," has been on fire when it comes to this story. Check out this Sunday post, then the one immediately above it, for the crucial stuff.]

posted by michael  1:11:11 PM  
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Fear of a blog planet. If you're unaware of the recent flap surrounding Daily Kos—well, good for you. Though actually it's hard, given the way this has been flying around the left-wing blogosphere in the last several days, to imagine anybody coming to this blog who doesn't already know. Nutshell: Kos, himself a veteran, made an intemperate remark about the dead American mercenaries in Fallujah which he retracted when he had time to think better of it, the remark was picked up as a smear opportunity by a few wingnuts and amplified through the blogosphere by Professor InstaHypocrite (who, as a fellow-traveller of hatebloggers, if not arguably one himself, I refuse to link to), and as an upshot the Kerry campaign pulled ads and delisted Daily Kos from its own blogroll. (For a full account of the flap, and of the issues surrounding it, see Matt Stoller's long, thoughtful post from The Blogging of the President.)

In the wake of the flap, Atrios changed his ad and linking policy: he eliminated what he calls "special fundraising relationships" (dedicated donation pages, donation tracking links) from his blog, stopped accepting new ads from individual candidates, asked the Kerry campaign to de-list Eschaton from its blogroll. I think he was entirely correct to do it. Here's what he writes:

If we haven't grown up enough to realize that one stupid retracted comment posted by a blogger in the comments section of someone else's diary post on that blog deserves absolutely no official written response by a campaign - no matter how offensive it is - then I don't think we're grown up enough yet to have blog/campaign complementarity. The Kerry campaign is now operating on the standard that they are responsible for the comments made by any blogger they link to, and in fact will allow themselves to be forced into commenting on any transgressions. They're trying to get their guy elected, and they're going to do what they think is necessary (I'll let others judge the wisdom), but it shows they're not ready to really have a blog and interact with the rest of the blog world.

I'll go Atrios one further—and this is based off of various comments, in reaction to Billmon's post about the incident, expressing grave disappointment with the Kerry decision. What really bothers me here isn't anything that the decision reveals about the Kerry campaign, since I don't think it reveals a damn thing we didn't already know, and know we were going to have to live with. And it's not that the Kerry campaign isn't ready to live in the rough and tumble of the blogosphere, or fundamentally fails to understand what linking means. What's really distressing here, and unforgiveably short-sighted, is that the Kerry campaign has now created a de facto standard for political candidates in relation to blogs that will tell significantly against efforts to organize money (and manpower) in the blogspace for upcoming races—to do on a wider scale what we did for Ben Chandler in Kentucky. Atrios' response demonstrates what that standard is going to cost—what damage is going to be done, not to Kerry, but downstream, in the score of local races we need to win to begin taking back the Congress, where blog organization has looked like a powerful new mutation of the netroots story. And of course, the standard is entirely asymmetrical: the GOP doesn't need blogspace organization the way the Dems do, in addition to not being geared to produce it.

The Kerry camp has been thoughtlessly, unstrategically reactive in this matter: and even beyond the damage done, that makes me fear in a general way for their—our—electoral prospects.

posted by michael  11:07:23 AM  
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Unwonted vigor? A1 has an unusual configuration this morning. (And I'm not referring to Danny Hakim's gee-whiz robo-car story, which as an A1 item is just weird, not, I'm sorry to say, unusual.) The lead is given to a basically local story (though obviously with national resonance) that fingers financial self-aggrandizement on the part of the private Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation as the cause of delays in the post-9/11 reopening of the Statue (Mike McIntire, "Extra Fund-Raising Put Off Statue of Liberty Reopening"). The article, a sharp critique, thoughtfully places the Statue endowment, which seems to be regarded by its officers as their own permanent employment program, within the larger context of privatization in the maintenance of national parks and other public spaces, noting that "the practice blossomed during the Reagan administration, which urged greater use of public-private partnerships throughout the government."

Add to the unusualness Steven Greenhouse's labor piece, which appears on two columns beneath the Statue of Liberty story ("Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits"). Greenhouse, who's been terrific in the past on abuse of workers at Wal-Mart, expands his corporate focus today to include retailers like Toys "R" Us, Family Dollar, and Pep Boys, but he's still focusing on the consequences of the Wal-Mart economy as he puts together recent lawsuits to discern a real, meaningful trend: retailers who steal wages from their already immiserated employees by forcing store managers to shave worker hours ("Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits"). More great work from Greenhouse, who even nails down the class issues:

Compensation experts say that many managers, whether at discount stores or fast-food restaurants, fear losing their jobs if they fail to keep costs down.

"A lot of this is that district managers might fire you as soon as look at you," said William Rutzick, a lawyer who reached a $1.5 million settlement with Taco Bell last year after a jury found the chain's managers guilty of erasing time and requiring off-the-clock work. "The store managers have a toehold in the lower middle class. They're being paid $20,000, $30,000. They're in management. They get medical. They have no job security at all, and they want to keep their toehold in the lower middle class, and they'll often do whatever is necessary to do it."

Sadly, the reportorial vigor on display in A1's off-beat stories isn't matched in the long piece by David Johnston and Eric Schmitt that gets above-the-fold honors ("Uneven Response Seen on Terror in Summer of 2001"). [Everybody seems to get in on the reporting job on this one: David Sanger, Richard Stevenson and Steven Weisman are all credited with contributions.] You glance at it and think, hey, the Times has finally decided to join the party—I did, but shouldn't have got my hopes up; that big accompanying Cowboy Dubya photo from Aug. 6, 2001 (the day of the fateful Al Qaeda hijack briefing) ought to have given pause. So should the byline. Much like Johnston's similary lengthy review of the history of the bin Laden hunt a week and a half ago, written with Todd Purdum ("Missed Chances in a Long Hunt for bin Laden"), this is dull, by-the-numbers, unnamed-Administration-source-happy writing with nothing in the way of a discernible viewpoint. Wherever the authors can repeat an Administration justification for its inaction through Sept. 2001, they do; at no point in the article do they attempt to directly critique any statement from Rice or anybody else on Team Bush, or point out where their reporting contradicts (as implicitly it often does) the official White House line. Josh Marshall calls this "an important article," but to my eye this is strictly CYA on the Times' part in advance of Rice's public testimony. Johnston seems to be their go-to guy for this sort of thing.

posted by michael  4:55:08 PM  
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NY Times exposes Hollywood liberal conspiracy! In which Jim Rutenberg transcribes some right-wing media "critique," calls it reporting, and it lands on A1.

Rutenberg, in case you missed it, is the hack who gave big play to the "story" that Karl Rove had a plan for taking down John Kerry during the Times' week-long Bush Stragedy Stravaganza of last month. So maybe it's no surprise that there's a definite tilt on display in today's performance ("TV Shows Take On Bush, and Pull Few Punches"). Rutenberg's piece is clearly occasioned by some bullshit analysis peddled from the Media Research Center, "a conservative group that monitors the media for signs of liberal bias," as Rutenberg says. (What Rutenberg doesn't say is that the MRC declares that its mission is "to not only prove—through sound scientific research—that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values, but also to neutralize its impact on the American political scene," and that the group was founded and is headed by well-known winger nutball L. Brent Bozell. The Bozell-affiliated TimesWatch site, otherwise mostly devoted to ferreting out instances of Times "labeling bias," the hideous practice of writers calling conservatives "conservative" while failing to call Ted Kennedy and his ilk "screaming pinko baby-killers," praises Rutenberg here for "balanced" coverage during the flap over the aborted CBS Reagan miniseries—and you know what "balanced" means to these guys.) But Rutenberg won't lead his article honestly, i.e. telling you that it wasn't developed through independent reporting, because how would that play on A1? Here's the nut, buried in the middle of the piece, with helpful quotes from MRC "analyst" Tim Graham:

Republicans, conservatives and campaign aides to the president said they expected money to flow from Hollywood, a place they consider a bastion of liberalism, to the Democrats. But they said they were surprised by how much partisan sentiment seemed to be seeping onto television.

Mr. Graham said the anti-Bush sentiment coming across in prime time was more troublesome than usual because it was woven into scripts across so many of the major networks, and not restricted to sketch comedy.

"It's different when you're really involved in `NYPD Blue' or `Law & Order,' and to you it's, `That's my man Sipowicz and he doesn't like Bush,' " Mr. Graham said. "This can be seen, and certainly is seen, by conservatives as Hollywood's in-kind contribution to the Kerry campaign."

Graham, by the way, is the only media-analyst type that Rutenberg calls on; the only non-Hollywood voices in the article belong to him, to the "Republicans, conservatives and campaign aides" collectively paraphrased above, and to Matthew Dowd, Bush's chief campaign strategist, who's quoted forebearingly saying that he's "not planning any move to combat such scripted critiques" as Graham alleges are now flooding the airwaves. Seems that Jim doesn't want any non-Party elements mucking up his nice clean exposition.

And the facts? Rutenberg manages to cite all of three recent instances of some kind of anti-Bush message being offered on series TV; apparently that's all the proof he needs that there's a liberal seepage "across so many of the major networks." But facts don't really enter into it. Rutenberg is following the MRC's script, whose chief rhetorical ploy is in that "in-kind contribution" statement. The aim is to smear the legitimate political activism of Hollywood liberals as somehow conspiratorial: they're making money contributions, what other kinds of nefarious "contributions" are they making? Rutenberg consistently, tendentiously elides the difference between the "sentiments" that might get into TV scripts and those of the Hollywood community at large. He does it in his lead ("Galvanized politically in ways they have not been since the early 1990's, Hollywood's more liberal producers and writers are increasingly expressing their displeasure with President Bush with not only their wallets, but also their scripts"), he does it again when he segues from Whoopi Goldberg saying she'd be "pleased if her show could contribute to the defeat of Mr. Bush" to Laurie David, a liberal Hollywood activist and Larry David's wife and not a TV producer, saying that she's "never, ever seen this community more united than now." To Rutenberg, Ms. David's fundraising has the smell of conspiracy, even though it's completely overt and completely unconnected with the supposed spate of TV shows surreptitiously injecting Bush-hatred into the unsuspected mass mind:

"Not a day goes by when I'm not getting a dozen calls from people saying to me, `What can I do?' And it's all with one goal: to change the course of what's going on in this country and get rid of this administration."

Ms. David and her like-minded peers are putting a lot of money behind the push. She, for one, has given $100,000 to the Media Fund and America Coming Together, Democratic groups using unlimited donations to run television commercials and to motivate voters against the president. Marcy Carsey, whose production house Carsey-Werner-Mandabach produces "Whoopi," has given $500,000 to the Media Fund, federal election records show. Ms. Carsey declined to be interviewed for this article.

[Remember the plaintive tone of that "unlimited donations to ... motivate voters against the president" next time Rutenberg writes about MoveOn and the 527 issue.] Ms. Carsey got it right not talking to Rutenberg, though they way he drops it in it's as if she'd just decided to plead the fifth in front of the HUAC.

Fortunately, there's at least one thing to grin about in the piece.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many in Hollywood seemed to get behind the president to see how they could help bolster the image of the United States abroad. Some executives later produced programming like "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," a Showtime movie about Mr. Bush's handling of the attacks that liberal critics said unduly lionized him.

Does Rutenberg actually read while he's typing? Liberal bias gets the full-on conspiracy treatment: but right-wing producers who suck up to Dubya aren't partisans, they're just pitching in and lending a patriotic hand to burnish our national image.

So, congratulations to Jim Rutenberg! It's early yet, Jim, but you've already made a strong case for yourself as A1 sleazebag of the month.

posted by michael  7:48:52 PM  
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Won't someone please think of the widows? When is a story about bare-knuckle, high-stakes politics not a story about politics? Evidently, when it's about women, and the women are victims, or victims' advocates. Sentimentalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg icks all over the 9/11 commission Family Steering Committee, or rather over its four most prominent widow members, the "Jersey girls," Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Lorie Van Auken and Mindy Kleinberg.

The story of how they helped move a seemingly immoveable bureaucracy is at once the tale of a political education, and a sisterhood born of grief. ... On Capitol Hill, lawmakers were pressing for a commission; in December 2001, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, had proposed a bill. By the spring of 2002, Ms. Kleinberg had befriended the father of a victim of Pan Am Flight 103, the plane that was bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. "He said, `The bill is languishing. If you want it to go anywhere, you have to make it happen.' "

The women went to Home Depot, sawed wood for signs and staged a Washington rally; 300 people came out in the blistering heat. They staked out lawmakers and boarded the elevators marked "Senators Only." They wheedled their way into the White House. Jay Lefkowitz, a former Bush domestic policy adviser, recalls giving them chocolate chip cookies, even as he successfully opposed some demands. ... In the Capitol, they cried, they pleaded, they cajoled.

The questions themselves that the committee want answered just disappear from the piece, as does any sense of a political process that isn't about powerful men responding to, or trying to resist, emotional coercion. (See the committee website for its list of unanswered questions.) Somehow I think if it were a group of men in the forefront of the organization, Bill Keller wouldn't have his paper serving up this kind of treacle.

Update (Fri., 4/2): For a look at an acutal news article that honors what the 9/11 widows have done by treating their work as substantive, and not just as women's-magazine inspirational, check out Joe Conason today in Salon.

posted by michael  4:35:36 PM  
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A local uptick. John F. Burns' A1 news analysis in the wake of yesterday's atrocity in Falluja is remarkable, among other things, for how deliberately its lead sets out to ridicule Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq:

Hours after the deaths of the four American civilians who were dragged from their vehicle and mutilated in Falluja on Wednesday, an American general went before reporters in Baghdad with the air of measured assurance that has characterized every daily briefing on the military situation across Iraq.

"Despite an uptick in local engagements, the overall area of operations remains relatively stable with negligible impact on the coalition's ability to continue progress in governance, economic development, and restoration of essential services," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, 51, the former paratrooper who is chief spokesman for the United States military command.

Nearly a year into the insurgency, the command, in lock step with the civilian administration headed by L. Paul Bremer III, remains relentlessly positive.

"U.S. Optimism Is Tested Again After Ambush Kills 4 in Iraq"

It's not that Kimmitt's bloodless bureaucratese ("an uptick in local engagements") doesn't deserve it, just that I'm surprised to see this on the front page of the Times.

Burns uses Falluja as the occasion for a comprehensive, summary critique of the history of official narrative promulgated by American forces during the course of the Iraq insurgency. I find it particularly remarkable that Burns focuses on the so-called "Zarqawi letter," which the Times' own rather credulous reporting flogged when it first surfaced, as a prime example of American military propaganda.

By February, American generals had begun to say that the worst of the "Saddamist" insurgency was over ...At the same time, senior officers around Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the American commander, said that Hussein loyalists were increasingly being replaced as America's principal enemy in Iraq by Islamic terrorists with at least loose links to Al Qaeda.

On Feb. 8, United States officials produced a document that became known as the "Zarqawi letter." In this, they said, a man they believed to be responsible for several major attacks, including the August bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed 22 people, had urged Qaeda leaders to support further attacks aimed at provoking a civil war in Iraq — and halting American progress toward the establishment of a Western-style democratic state.

Questions remain about the letter, including whether the writer really was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Islamic militant. But it provided the Americans with a ready-made template for their new interpretation of the war. They said the letter, found on a computer disk carried by a Qaeda-linked courier, was proof that the conflict in Iraq had been transformed from a battle to restore Mr. Hussein into a regional theater for the worldwide war against terrorism.

Mr. Zarqawi's photograph was posted in operations centers at American bases across Iraq, and soldiers in their Humvees began cursing Mr. Zarqawi more than Mr. Hussein. Virtually every briefing for reporters tied developments in the war to the growing role of the Islamic militants and the receding threat from what military jargon calls F.R.E.'s, or former regime elements.

Pretty strong meat for A1, especially that last paragraph. Burns goes on to note how little real evidence there is for foreigner-incited violence as a central concern in Iraq (of 12,000 detainees in American camps in the country, fewer than 150 are foreigners—though how many of the detained Iraqis are legitimately detained Burns doesn't ask). "The United States command has occasionally announced the arrest of a suspected Islamic terrorist," Burns adds, "but has then fallen silent."

Burns ends his piece with a dangerous, and for A1 rare, gesture toward the bleeding fucking obvious:

Several Iraqis interviewed on Wednesday, including middle-class professionals, merchants and former members of Mr. Hussein's army, suggested that that the United States might be facing a war in which the common bonds of Iraqi nationalism and Arab sensibility have transcended other differences, fostering a war of national resistance that could pose still greater challenges to the Americans in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.

Given how much space A1 has provided in the last couple of weeks for CPA cheerleading, let's hope this marks an "uptick" of more robust skepticism on the front page.

posted by michael  4:06:13 PM  
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