No rain on this parade. I'll make the obvious point, that yesterday's quickie, furtive "sovereignty" handover in Iraq represents a shocking admission of weakness on the part of the Bush Administration, which would never have let itself be cheated out of its long-prepared media extravaganza (Dan Rather was in the Green Zone, for God's sake, all ready to strap into his flak jacket!) had there been the least prayer of the event going off without major (and untelegenic) insurgent violence.
You'll look in vain to find that obvious point in the reams of feature and analysis with which the Times lards the transfer-of-power event today. Caught flatfooted, like all the morning dailies, by the thief-in-the-night timing, the Times is doing its best to proceed as if the Historical Moment had, indeed, fully expressed its historicalness with all due pomp and ceremony. Of course, some adjustments will have to be made: but the Times loves nothing so much as a parade of official fictions, and it's assembled a crack team of official fiction-mongers to make sure all the floats are lined up and the marching bands in place.
Frankly, I don't have the spirit to go too deep into the paper's coverage of the handover; this is by a decent margin the most dishearteningly obtuse A section, as a collective performance, that I've seen from the Times since I started blogging. [A measure of just how sad things are: John F. Burns, who presided over a brief, welcome dawn of skeptical Iraq reporting through much of April, when the overall failure of the occupation regime was starting to become apparent, hasn't been seen in the pages of the Times since the first week in May. He surfaces today, at last, with a fawning, take-everything-he-says-at-face-value, full-page profile of Jerry Bremer (the gag-me headline: "Looking Beyond His Critics, Bremer Sees Reason for Both Hope and Caution") that'd be risible if it didn't read like some sort of awful Stalinist public penance. Out of respect for Burns, I'll forbear detailing the piece's multiple failures of nerve.] Much of it in fact (David Sanger's so-called "analysis," firmly making its stand in Heroic Bush Gamble territory, Steven R. Weisman gassing on about the mysteries of sovereignty, which he's no closer to solving than he was a month ago) looks pre-written, and proceeds apparently unperturbed by the scheduling hiccup. It's left to Eric Schmitt, in an inner-page account, to fully assimilate the inconvenient fact of the sovereignty surprise party to the grand rhetoric of Decision:
More than a week ago, a handful of top Bush administration officials and their Iraqi allies in Baghdad began seriously mulling a once far-fetched idea: Why wait until June 30 to transfer sovereignty to the new interim Iraqi government?
By Monday morning, their secret plan had become a stunning reality as NATO leaders meeting here, as well as the rest of the world, learned that a transition to formal sovereignty scheduled for Wednesday had happened 48 hours early. American officials said the interim Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, made the final decision late Sunday, with President Bush's blessing.
The story of how a transfer that critics once said could never be done by June 30 was accomplished even earlier offers a peek into the administration's secretive decision making and its desire to bolster a crucial ally and keep a ruthless insurgency off balance.
Did Schmitt come up with this himself, having drunk the Bush Kool-aid, or is he just synthesizing the no doubt hurriedly cobbled-together Administration spin? I guess there's no real practical difference between those alternatives, though, and either way it's a technically impressive propaganda exercise. I'm especially fond of that brave "handful" of planners, "seriously mulling" that crackpot, "once far-fetched idea." Can't you just see it? All of them around the table, going late into the night, shirtsleeves rolled up, cigar smoke choking the lamps, and then the eureka moment: You know, Iyad—that plan's so crazy it just might work! In Schmitt's extraordinary up-is-down telling (Sanger has a version of this, too), the suddenness of the transfer isn't a concession to weakness and lack of initiative: it's an audacious move (secret and stunning) to set the enemy (and an amazed world) reeling! By God, the critics said it couldn't be done—but we showed 'em, didn't we, boys?
Not sure exactly what movie Schmitt has playing in his head—but it's obviously a lot better than the awkward reality. A positively Reaganesque performance, Eric.
Media management. A bittersweet, elegiac tone permeates Kurt Eichenwald's extended interview with Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay, which appeared on A1 yesterday below the fold:
There was a time when Kenneth L. Lay's close relationship with President Bush brought him power and influence in Washington that was virtually unparalleled among his colleagues in corporate America.
Now, Mr. Lay, the former chairman and chief executive of Enron, fears those ties may only serve to bring him criminal charges. ...
The interview was conducted in Mr. Lay's office in downtown Houston. There, a picture window frames the old Enron skyscraper across town, a sight he said he rarely contemplates during his days working as a consultant for two start-up companies.
Tough not to get choked up seeing that old Enron skyscraper framed forlornly in Lay's picture window. Even tougher not to get choked up hearing that Kenny Boy, who was worth "in excess of $400 million" at the start of 2001, "almost all of it in Enron stock," has suffered such a "stunning" reversal that he can now claim less than $20 million in assets—and not even a million in cash on hand, what with the money he has to set aside for legal fees and debt repayment. Jesus, the man doesn't even know where his next four-star meal is coming from!
Eichenwald calls this Lay's "first unrestricted interview since the [Enron] collapse," which would make it something of a coup, I suppose. Eichenwald's protective attitude toward Lay—who is himself "unrestricted" here, in the sense of his version of things begin given full rein, with nary a hint of corrective or critical balance—would suggest that he certainly thinks it's a coup, anyway. Eichenwald may not have had to agree to limit his questions in advance of the interview, but the published article suggests he was more than willing on his own account not to upset the apple cart with any rude questions, or any untoward reminder of all the people Enron managed to fuckover. Call it the self-censorship of opportunism.
The Times' Lay interview is a fine example of the routine dishonesties that all concerned regard as just a cost of doing business in the managed-media era. Here's how Eichenwald presents the occasion of the interview:
Now, on the eve of what may be the government's final decision on whether to charge him with a crime, Mr. Lay is talking for the first time about the company's collapse in 2001 and the scandal that enveloped it. In more than six hours of interviews with The New York Times, Mr. Lay remained steadfast in his expressions of innocence, even as he acknowledged, as head of the company, accountability for the debacle rests rightfully with him. ...
Mr. Lay said that he had remained silent on the advice of lawyers, but is coming forward now to explain his views of a story that he says has become infused with myths. While not saying so explicitly, he suggested that he was motivated by a desire to tell his side both to the prosecutors on the Justice Department’s Enron Task Force who have been investigating him and the citizens of Houston who may well sit in judgment on him.
I work at a marketing/communications firm, and while I'm rather on the periphery (being a Web software developer), I've learned a thing or two in these last couple of years about how PR and media management works. And though I can't rely on evidence, just gauging the odds lets me confidently fill in certain relevant portions of the background that Eichenwald is studiously obscuring:
"Today, he says his worth is below $20 million ..." Ken Lay is far too rich, and too significant a Republican player, not to have retained PR services along with legal counsel. Rich, connected guy facing a potential show trial? This is Martha Stewart territory we're in, even if the personal-fortune numbers are substantially smaller in Lay's case.
"The interview was conducted in Mr. Lay's office in downtown Houston." And Kurt Eichenwald was at no point alone in that office with Ken Lay, though he's happy to allow you to think he was. Eichenwald may have been formally "unrestricted" in the questions he could ask: but no attorney in the world, and no media minder, would have allowed the interview to take place in their absence. Lay was advised throughout those six hours Eichenwald proudly totes up, his people ready to foreclose any inconveniently developing directions, as sure as if he'd been testifying before Congress.
"Mr. Lay is talking for the first time ..." Well, if by "talking" you mean "repeating carefully fabricated and well rehearsed story points in the presence of minders," and if by "first time" you mean "first time in front of somebody not on the Ken Lay payroll," then sure. Lay has had some no doubt high-priced PR talent working for months to craft a set of palatable and exculpatory messages for him (e.g., that prosecution in his case is a matter of "20-20 hindsight"): think there was ever any danger of his going off them?
"Mr. Lay is coming forward now to explain his views." Bullshit. BULLSHIT. Ken Lay has not "come forward," as if he'd somehow approached Eichenwald himself, much less because he was simply "motivated" by a desire to "tell his side." Neither he nor Eichenwald is an independent agent in this—again, much as Eichenwald would like you to think otherwise. Lay's interview will have been the subject of extended negotiations between Lay's media people and either Eichenwald's editors, or more likely Eichenwald himself, who will have been vetted by the media wranglers from a series of possible press targets.
Not telling readers these sorts of things is a standard part of the game of celebrity journalism—which, despite Kurt Eichenwald's impressive credentials as an investigative financial reporter, is exactly the game he's playing here. No doubt many readers are aware of the atmosphere of moral and professional compromise within which puff-piece interviews like this are conducted, and adjust their expectations accordingly—but many presumably aren't, and thus can't. On the evidence of this interview, the Times doesn't feel that it owes those readers any education on the subject.
A1 placement in the Sunday New York Times is a PR gold standard; Ken Lay's media people are definitely earning their bones. It's a transaction that works for all concerned: Ken Lay gets to peddle his story in an enormously influential venue, with a tacitly understood guarantee of sympathy; having the interview conducted by someone with a reputation as a ferreter-out of financial shenanigans is an especially fine PR touch, lending as it does an extra sheen of credibility to the proceedings. And Eichenwald, who's hawked his reporting in two previous books, including a volume about corruption at Archer Daniels Midland, gets a plum interview and, who knows, a leg up on his next shattering corporate exposé. [I haven't read either of Eichenwald's books, and am not expressing an opinion as to their worth.] And who's harmed, except the poor suckers who think the front page of the Times isn't for sale?
Mr. Cheney's foul outburst was not as bad as his foul reasoning. On Fox, he again belabored his obsession with "links" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Exhibiting WASP chutzpah, this time he used The Times to bolster his faux case.
But the Thom Shanker story he cited said only that in the mid-1990's, Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda and that a request from Osama "to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered."
Rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda? As a threat to U.S. security, that's right up there with Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."
Commenting on the Thom Shanker article, and how it played, reader woid says
I had the same reaction you did to this story's headline ["Iraqis, Seeking Foes of Saudis, Contacted bin Laden, File Says"]. I assumed it was the Times AGAIN featuring Bush spin on A1, while burying the day's damage on page 17. Unlike you, I DIDN'T read the article. I might have gotten back to it later. But until I saw your post, I had no idea the story was skeptical of the party line. But here's the point. How many people NEVER get past the A1 headlines? (Or maybe the News Summary...) One of the worst things about the Times writing style is that they often let the lead sink to the bottom of the story. You have to wade through paragraphs of on-the-other-hands before you get to the telling fact. This story is one of those examples. Lots of people don't wade that far, and why would they? So they're left with the message of the misleading headline and the mealy-mouthed "lead" which shouldn't have been the lead at all. The medium IS the message, and the way the Times presents the headline and the opening grafs of a story is just as big a deal as the delayed, subtle nuances - which are called nuances because people not attuned to nuance won't notice them. That's a LOT of people, judging from Bush's continuing lack of collapse in the polls.
Strictly speaking, I don't think Shanker's story buried the lead—I think Shanker wrote an extremely careful but accurate lead, and I have no particular problem with a style of news writing that demands thoughtful attention from a reader. (I'd like to see a lot more of that sort of writing in the Times, actually.) What Shanker buried—or not buried so much as never stated forthrightly—was the implication of his story, its news occasion, namely that yet another prop was being knocked out from under the flimsy Administration claim that real, operationally significant links could be established between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda.
And woid's general point is well taken. I don't imagine that Dick Cheney was unaware of the substance of Shanker's article, or didn't recognize that it told against him—but he's an inveterate liar, and a canny propagandist. (It ain't just chutzpah, Maureen.) For Cheney, what the story said was unimportant; the story has weight, and utility, only in its occasional aspect. And as occasion—in the combination of its A1 placement, a wrong-way headline, and the writer's excessive circumspection, his unwillingness to state fearlessly the real significance of his report—the article is an utter failure. Cheney citing it on his own behalf is testimony to that fact. The Times remains afflicted with a consitutional timidity towards this Administration. It's not enough to document the lies; the documenting may be useful for the record, but if the lies aren't challenged, if the paper refuses to acknowledge and foreground the politics of a piece like Shanker's, then to all intents they're still just playing with Dick Cheney's loaded dice.
Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990's were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq.
was to set up a howl: Just how far will the Times go to whore itself to Dick Cheney's PR agenda? On a more careful read, though—and surprised as I am by my own conclusion—I have little doubt that Cheney will see Thom Shanker's article ("Iraqis, Seeking Foes of Saudis, Contacted bin Laden, File Says"), in spite of the direction its headline seems to point, as a middle finger thrust firmly if discreetly in his face.
The song of the kazoo. Did you know that Jay Bybee, the lawyer and now federal judge who prepared the DoJ's August 2002 torture memo now being disavowed by the department, has a "playful side"? The Times is all over it:
The judge is not without a playful side.
"He has a kazoo collection," said N. Gregory Smith, a former colleague on the law faculty at Louisiana State. "He'd get a little ensemble of kazoo enthusiasts together and play. They would occasionally perform the '1812' Overture."
That's just the kind of fearless, hard-hitting journalism I've come to expect from A1!
The article, on the subject of ... well, on or near the subject of Bybee himself, or his confirmation, or the torture memo (it's a little unclear), bears Adam Liptak's byline but credits reporting by Eric Lichtblau, David Johnston and Richard Stevenson. That's a lot of cooks for some awfully thin broth. With so many hands reaching for the tiller (to switch metaphors), the piece lurches about crazily trying to settle on a topic, and never does. Here are the first three grafs, and if you can see a principle of organization here you're a better reader than I am:
The Bush administration is distancing itself from a memorandum prepared two years ago by a government lawyer asserting that the president's power to use torture to extract information from suspected terrorists is almost unlimited. [News hook—it's about the memos.]
Before the recent controversy concerning his work, however, some of the officials who received the memorandum worked diligently to elevate the lawyer, Jay S. Bybee, to the federal bench. Nominated by President Bush in 2002 and confirmed by the Senate last year, he now sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. [No, it's not a floor wax, it's a dessert topping! The story's about whether Bybee's confirmation was compromised by suppression of his work for the DoJ on interrogation policy.]
Former colleagues say the judge, whose chambers are in Las Vegas, is a serious, soft-spoken, reflective man. They say it is difficult to reconcile his discussion of torture in clinical, dispassionate detail with his background. A former legal academic, Judge Bybee told Meridian, a Mormon magazine, last year that he hoped to be remembered for his probity. "I would like my headstone to read, 'He always tried to do the right thing,' " Judge Bybee said. [Ummm ... it's a floor wax and a dessert topping? A sticky-sweet profile of one of Johnny Ashcroft's best torture apologists?]
The madcap, random discussion that follows, in the course of whose 1200 attention-deficit-disordered words virtually every imaginable facet of the torture memo story (including a few unimaginable ones, like the kazoo enthusiasts) flashes incomprehensibly past, is as apt a metaphor for the dismal intellectual and moral state of the Times at this moment as I've yet seen. You'll have to read it for yourself—I really can't do it justice. On the most important policy scandal in a generation, there's thunder from the WaPo and the Wall Street Journal, but all they've got at the Times are these freakin' kazoos.
The objectivity game. The fact that the Times assigned its lead article yesterday, on the White House's selective, partial, declassified-for-PR-purposes dump of torture policy documents late Monday, to one of its most reliably Administration-oriented propagandists—and that the reporter who basically spent every waking moment for much of May working the torture story was relegated to a secondary, jump-page piece—tells you just how far the paper has backed off from its brief, unaccustomed exercise in relevance last month. (It does not tell you why the paper has decided to abandon the hunt, a question I myself have precious little insight into.)
Since I'm playing catchup from a moderately heavy non-blog schedule (i.e., work) yesterday, I'm not going to try to point out everything wrong with Richard Stevenson's piece (the abominably headlined "Orders by Bush About Prisoners Set Humane Tone"). But the article does offer an instructive example of how a writer like Stevenson can choose his terms of engagement, within an ostensibly objective form, so as to subtly disparage the authority of the independent record in favor of mere assertion and andoyne spin. (Like the Administration he regularly panders to, Stevenson seems to value the conclusions of faith greatly over adherence to the reality principle.) Here's the key passage, in which Stevenson accomplishes a nearly complete inversion of the reporter/politician ratios:
Democrats said the documents released Tuesday appeared to represent only a portion of important legal documents related to detainees.
The administration released the documents after months in which its policies toward interrogation and torture have been called into question by the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib. The documents showed that the effort to draw up new rules for interrogation after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks drastically widened the scope of techniques considered at the highest levels of the administration, but also in the end a reluctance to endorse many of them.
The release of the documents seemed to be driven by a sense at the White House that the gravity of the prison abuses required a fuller disclosure of the legal papers and internal debate that formed the basis for Washington's handling of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Administration officials said that the documents did not circulate widely in the government at the time they were prepared and that there was no connection between their exploration of the legalities of various interrogation techniques and what happened at Abu Ghraib.
On Tuesday, Democrats dismissed the administration's document release as highly selective and said it failed to address important questions about its handling of detainee issues. ... "The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point," Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said in a statement. "Now, responding to public pressure, the White House has released a small subset of the documents that offers glimpses into the genesis of this scandal. All should have been provided earlier to Congress, and much more remains held back and hidden away from public view."
This is artful in its way, though it's a slimy art. Democrats said the document release was partial and selective? Well, yes, they did: but either the release was selective or it wasn't, as a matter of fact, and Stevenson might have—ought to have—reported that fact on his own authority. Instead he chooses to diminish its status as fact, and obscure a rather key point, by slapping the "partisan" label over it.
That's Stevenson's consistent technique: if an assertion would be uncomfortable to the Bushies, even if it's demonstrably true, it's assigned to "Democrats" or "critics." (Administration assertions, conversely, are almost always allowed to stand unqualified, drawn into the orbit of "objective" authority by being mixed, as in this passage, with statements that Stevenson makes in propria.) Meanwhile, Stevenson has no compunction using the rhetoric of objectivity—"the documents showed", the release "seemed [to an (implicitly impartial) observer] to be driven"—to clothe what are after all mere interpretations—sweeping, unjustified, extremely dubious interpretations. And he's organized the passage so that his interpretations gain yet more of the appearance of impartiality, bracketed and set off as they are by "partisan attacks."
If the document release is partial—as indisputably it is, however Stevenson spins away from the fact—then it simply cannot show, by any reasonable standard of evidence, that "in the end" the Administration was reluctant to endorse the torture of prisoners. ("In the end" is a particularly foolish turn of phrase, given that the document dump doesn't extend beyond the spring of 2003, i.e. before pretty much everything that happened in the Iraq gulag had happened. See Billmon for more on the subject. Stevenson nowhere in his article makes it clear just what the extent of the document dump is, or what the relevant timelines are.) And I doubt that even the power of the Times gives Stevenson magical insight into the motives that might have driven the White House (imagine, being able to gauge the motives of an entire institution of government!) to make the document release. Again, and stripped of its rhetorical heat, Pat Leahy's statement points to a more genuinely objective context for thinking about the Administration's motives, appealing as it does to the public history of the controversy, than Stevenson's wholly undeserved compliment to the White House's "sense" of the scandal's gravity and its commitment to "disclosure."
All of which is to say, when I call Richard Stevenson an Administration propagandist, I use the term advisedly. Is the objectivity game still worth playing, for the press? (Jay Rosen has a discussion at PressThink that bears usefully on the question.) That's a thornier issue than I can address now. But caveat lector: if you read Stevenson from within the rules of that game, you're setting yourself up for a dupe. For Stevenson, "objectivity" is just a handy way of stacking the deck for Bush & Co.
There was a time when readers of The New York Times never knew what they were missing. You had to run down to Hotaling's, the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square, to check The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, or wait a few days for the Manchester Guardian. Or you subscribed to I.F. Stone's Weekly and relied on him to call your attention to the 23rd paragraph of the Times piece, the one where your eyes had glazed over but Izzy had unearthed some nugget that shattered the story's otherwise anodyne arc.
Today, all a reader need do to shine a light on the paper is log on and surf around to see what the Times ... has missed, buried, or fuzzed. The New Yorker features the stellar investigations of Seymour Hersh, whose indispensable X-rays of hush-hush government agencies once graced the Times. Slate's "Today's Papers" routinely specifies the Times' misjudgments of omission, commission, and position—placement, in other words—as do any number of persnickety bloggers with hours to fill and advanced degrees in the arts of close reading.
Gitlin is celebrating, or anti-celebrating, the one-year anniversary of Bill Keller's ascension to the Executive Editorship. "It has not been a banner year," says Gitlin, with studied understatement. Writing about the structural problems that have repeatedly caused the Times to embarrass itself in its Washington-based reporting, he doesn't pull any punches.
The Miller problem, which is also her editors' problem, goes to something deeper: the everyday slackness and gullibility, the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand blah-blah and other unreflective stenography that passes for "coverage" of the most powerful government in the history of the world. Omission includes the failure to connect dots. Position means dumping the tough stuff in the back pages. Leave aside the case of the missing weapons of mass destruction and the Times has still not covered itself with glory. ...
One of the Times' own investigative reporters (call him I.R.) told me: "Match the Times against The Washington Post. They're getting their clock cleaned. It's obvious to everyone except the top editors of The New York Times. ... You don't have any sense from the Washington bureau that there's a government—just a lot of politics. ... The bureau is clearly not getting hell from New York for the fact that they're getting beat by The Washington Post and the L.A. Times and even USA Today."
Let's be fair to Jodi Wilgoren, whose piece yesterday on John Kerry's Nantucket getaway ("Rich Bastard John Kerry Lives Like a Rich Bastard") has excited much commentary, including an incomparable takeout in the Daily Howler. Wilgoren spends pretty much the entire piece putting price tags on everything John Kerry comes in contact with during his brief Father's Day weekend—including my favorite item, the "sauteed yuzu-dusted day boat sea scallops" at the Pearl, where Kerry and his family ate Saturday night with Ted Kennedy & co., said scallops running a cool $36. (No word from Wilgoren on whether the scallops were an entree or an appetizer. If the latter, I may just have to vote for the other guy after all. I mean, there are limits.)
Bob Somerby's noticed a small gap in Wilgoren's Price Is Right roundup: there's one item on display without a sticker.
The weekend was Mr. Kerry’s first real holiday since the week he spent at his wife’s Sun Valley, Idaho, home in March, where he was widely photographed snowboarding. It was reminiscent of President Bill Clinton’s vacations in borrowed houses on nearby Martha’s Vineyard, and a sharp contrast to President Bush's frequent brush-clearing forays on his sweltering ranch in Crawford, Tex.
Bob says that the Bush ranch, "to all appearances,"
must have come free. [Wilgoren] sticks price tags on everything else. But Minnie Pearls always know their crowd—and this one knows you don’t mess with Bush.
Which makes it sound as if Jodi's withholding information, motivated by her awareness that Bush (like all his clan) is a pretty mean customer when crossed. And I'm sorry, Bob, but I consider that a slur on Ms. Wilgoren's good name.
Jodi's not withholding anything: she simply doesn't have the information. To have got it, she'd have had to do research [the way Digby did, for instance, on the price tags for things to be found around Dubya's recent weekend at Kennebunkport]—which would have interfered with Jodi's own enjoyment of Nantucket over the weekend! (Who said the life of a big-time journo had to be all drudgery and reporting and stuff?) The only reason the Kerry price tags are all over the story is because they were helpfully provided Wilgoren in the RNC oppo research she was fed, and from which her story was unabashedly steno'd. I'm sure that if the property value of the Bush ranch had been offered her in the same package, she'd have been happy to share it. Blame the real authors, the RNC, for the oversight, Bob, and leave our gal Jodi out of it.
Patent absurdities. When Michiko Kakutani slammed the nearly-released Bill Clinton autobiography for all the world to see on the front page of last Sunday's Times, I didn't blog about it. For one thing, I figured that the review would receive due attention from the larger Times-critical mammals; besides which honestly I couldn't bring myself to care enough to make a response. My feelings about the Big Dog are sufficiently jaundiced that even abundant bad faith on A1, otherwise the central topic in this space, can't much rouse me from my own lefty version of Clinton Fatigue. [Brief side anecdote: I started teaching as a for-real English prof in the fall of '92, at Louisiana State. I recall a class shortly before the election where a couple of my students, as a diversion from Wordsworth or whatever the hell I was making them read, asked about my take on Bush v. Clinton. Since I've never not worn my politics on my sleeve, they had some idea where I could be expected to come down, and one of them said, "So I guess Clinton's your boy, huh?" I'll never forget the looks in the room when I started my reply with something like, "Well, Clinton's a lot further to the right of me than I'm really happy with ..." If I'd ripped off my flesh mask to reveal the alien exoskeleton underneath I doubt that I could have produced substantially more horror in the poor kids. It was my first really vivid indication of what a long tough haul Baton Rouge had in store for me ...]
Bad faith there was, of course, in Kakutani's review, and Eric Boehlert documents it ably in Salon today ("Still smiting Slick Willie"). Here's the passage that caught my eye this morning:
Kakutani ... belittles Clinton for his lack of candor, but fails to inform readers that "My Life" reportedly contains strong criticism of the New York Times, and specifically its Whitewater coverage. As David Brock's Web site Media Matters for America notes, Kakutani did the same thing in her unflattering review of Sen. Hillary Clinton's 2003 memoir "Living History," failing to inform Times readers that the book contained accusations that the Times practiced dishonest journalism. ...
Asked about the omission, [executive editor Bill] Keller responded, "I can't imagine where this question leads that isn't patently absurd."
Clinton Fatigue or no, Bill Keller's bad faith never fails to be noteworthy (or motivating). Boehlert doesn't have any further reaction from Keller to report, but I'd love to know just what "patently absurd" direction the Times editor thought Boehlert was about to try to lead him in.
Is it "patently absurd" to suggest that the Times, in promoting a review by its staff book critic (whose middle name, incidentally, seems to be "feared") to the front page of the week's most significant edition, is investing that review with the paper's full institutional authority? Or that readers will understand the gesture to mean, "This is the official word from the Times"?
Is it "patently absurd" to suggest that it's standard practice, indeed in common understanding an ethical requirement, for a reviewer to inform her readers when some conflict of interest might exist—as, for instance, the text under review containing frequent, sharp criticism of her employer—that could compromise the fairness of her review? So that readers can judge the issue for themselves, with reasonably complete knowledge?
Or perhaps it's "patently absurd" to think that, given the timing and placement of the Kakutani review, the Times might have felt an extra measure of editorial circumspection was called for in avoiding even the appearance of a conflict of interest? And to avoid creating the impression that the paper is bartering yet another piece of its august reputation, this time for the dubious reward of damping the book sales of a political antagonist?
Or is it just "patently absurd" for readers to imagine that the Times has any real contract with them that it feels bound to enforce on itself?
The simple expedient of a paragraph or two, mentioning the Times' own part in the Whitewater controversy and Clinton's criticisms of it, would have pretty thoroughly inoculated the paper against charges of unfairness in the Clinton review. Surely Michiko Kakutani isn't so feared by her own editors that they couldn't have asked for such a thing? But then, even that much acknowledgement must seem to Bill Keller like the nearest thing to accepting another "patently absurd" demand, namely that the Times review and recant its credulous and false reporting of the Whitewater scandal-that-wasn't. That door is, and will remain, stuck shut. Keller's reaction in the Boehlert piece today is a demonstration, if any more were needed, that in the wake of last month's editor's note on the Times' Iraq WMD coverage the experiment in glasnost on W. 43rd has gone as far as it's ever going to.
Go into the right. For the second Monday in a row, David Kirkpatrick lands on A1 with a Big Insight about the politics surrounding the new Clinton autobiography. Today's extraordinary revelation: Conservatives are set to party like it's 1998!
It's a snarky quote-a-palooza from the usual nutballs and timeservers and "we were impeachers once, and young" types. Kirkpatrick has successfully adapted Adam Nagourney's production model (thumb through Rolodex, collect insider quotes that spin in the right direction, spend hard half-hour typing it all up, knock off for early martini) to his own beat, working the conservative movement. The following is a compressed but reasonably accurate representation [formatted without ellipses for readability]:
Rush Limbaugh has begun calling the book "My Lie." A column in the American Spectator, once the leading journal of Clinton-bashing, pronounced "a long hot Clinton summer is upon us" and derided Mr. Clinton's expressions of contrition for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In the conservative Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes called Mr. Clinton "Calvin Coolidge without the ethics and self-restraint." Keith Appel, a Republican media consultant, said that the Web-based Drudge Report is playing a leading role again. "The airwaves are hot with it already, bringing back all the bad news about the Clinton impeachment, lying under oath, the stain he has brought on the presidency. It helps remind people that the Bush administration is the antithesis of Clinton." Bush campaign allies are reviving talk about the honor and dignity of the Oval Office in thinly veiled references to the Clinton years. "Whatever disagreements you may have with President Bush on one issue or another, nobody can argue that he hasn't restored honor to the White house," said Gary L. Bauer. Grover G. Norquist said that after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 the Bush administration had failed to blame the Clinton administration enough. Now, Mr. Norquist said, the discussion of Mr. Clinton's book offered Republicans another chance to blame him. Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant, argued that what would hurt Mr. Kerry most was standing to the left of Mr. Clinton. "[The Lewinsky affair] is Clinton's legacy," said Bob Barr, who will be promoting own book about the impeachment, "The Meaning of Is," when it appears later this summer.
Nice of Kirkpatrick to give a plug to Bob Barr, isn't it? I imagine he can use the hand. Any of you who want to towel off, now's a good time to do it.
[I'm particularly fond, by the way, of Gary Bauer's idea that this is the right time to revive the old "restoring honor and dignity to the White House" gag. Here's a thought, Gary, you dickless weasel: why don't you ask this guy, or any of the other folks you can see here, what the most meaningful contemporary context for the phrase "stain on the presidency" might be?]
There's actually the germ of a real story buried in the late grafs of Kirkpatrick's article:
Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of conservative direct mail, ... [said] that Mr. Clinton's tenure in office was a powerful stimulant to fund-raising. For those potential donors not fully convinced that Mr. Clinton's liberal policies on abortion or gay rights would contribute to the decline of the traditional family, conservatives say, the scandals of his personal life provided an illustration.
[David] Bossie of Citizens United appeared cognizant of Mr. Clinton's fund-raising power. In an e-mail message alerting potential supporters to the advertisement during "60 Minutes," Mr. Bossie noted, "As you can probably imagine running such campaigns is not inexpensive, and this is why we have to ask all of your support."
A journalist might have found an angle on the story in this devil's tango between a demonized politician and the right-wing money operation that throve on him. Kirkpatrick's too busy running the quote-o-matic, though, to find time for it.
Sounds like a real piece, doesn't it—the conservative money factory in the post-Clinton era? Tailor-made, even, for the Times' designated reporter on the conservative movement. You can bet that Kirkpatrick won't be writing the story any time soon, though. Pious objections from Bill Keller's notwithstanding, David Kirkpatrick is much more the paper's ambassador to the movement than an investigator of it. You get the sense in the article today that Kirkpatrick feels just a touch naughty mentioning Bossie's fund-raising email—like he's giving just the least little tweak at a winger's tail. [No notice in the piece, by the way, of the fact that CBS is violating its own professed "advocacy" standard by agreeing to air Bossie's ad.] That tweak is about as rough a gesture as Kirkpatrick can afford, though: he knows who's buttering his bread. The limits, as Keller should certainly have foreseen, are built in to Kirkpatrick's assignment, given the unimaginative kind of reporter he is and the compromised kind of mandate (get access!) he's been handed. The conservos are a notoriously xenophobic and thin-skinned bunch, after all—even if you're not a representative of the evillibrul New York Times—and how is an access whore like Kirkpatrick going to work the beat if none of them will return his calls?
The Times deserves credit for delving deep into this. But the truth is, as TP's new blog mentioned last week, this story has been sitting around waiting for someone to jump on it. In a snoozer of a NYT piece about Gitmo last April, the 20th paragraph mentioned: "Officials said only a small number of the detainees are members of al-Qaida. The rest have either been determined to be nobodies, rounded up in the chaotic aftermath of the war, or presumed to be nobodies whose state has not yet been determined." The only reason this stuff is getting flagged now is that the abuse photos—or really, the response to them—conferred Big Story status on the United States' treatment of prisoners, so editors going aggressive on it would be going with the flow rather than the scarier proposition of striking out their own. Or as Michael Massing recently put it in the New York Review of Books, the Times waited to dig into the mistreatment until after it had "been ratified as important."
And let me highlight that TP's new blog reference. Eric's been doing a fine job writing the Slate feature, which is a consistently valuable resource, and it's nice to see he's going to be extending that work into the blog space.
Strategery update. I don't have the heart, on such a fine Chicago Sunday, to detail precisely how lazy and half-assed an excuse for reporting today's lazy, half-assed
A1 report on the state of ad play in the Presidential campaign really is ("G.O.P.
Offensive Puts Small Dent in Kerry's Image"). [One indicator:
if you were going to assess the effect that three months of advertising had had
on the Presidential race, don't you think you'd offer in evidence more than just
two lousy goddamn polls on candidate favorables, only one (the one less
complimentary to Kerry, of course) with any trend information?] Just remember, for
future reference, that when you see either Adam Nagourney or Jim Rutenberg
bylined on an article—and particularly when you see them jointly bylined—what
follows is going to be an insult to your intelligence, and a trial of your
patience.
But one aspect of the piece I just can't let pass. Here's the
lead:
When John
Kerry effectively nailed down the Democratic presidential nomination on
March 2, the White House was waiting. With relentless precision, it began a
90-day campaign to weaken Mr. Kerry's candidacy, a blast that included record
spending on television advertisements and attacks on Mr. Kerry's credentials and
ideology led by President Bush himself.
The Republican spring offensive—unusual in its early timing, its toughness and
the decision of Mr. Bush to personally engage his opponent so far before
November—effectively ends on Sunday, as the Bush campaign suspends its
broadcast television advertising until next month.
Lost in all the martial music is the article's actual news hook, which slips
unprepossessingly past in that last adverbial clause. I'll bold it, since it's so easy to
miss: The Bush campaign is suspending its television advertising
for most of the next two weeks.
Rutengourney's incuriosity about this
development, for which they offer no rationale and whose significance they
expend no energy trying to understand, mirrors that of the media at large—but
cuts rather against the grain of this pair's previous coverage.
When the Bush ad campaign was first rolled out back in late March,
the Times all but declared an official Bush/Rove Strategery Week, with
both Nagourney
and Rutenberg
separately getting in on the act of celebrating, in tones of breathless awe and
with ample quotes straight from the (anonymous) horses' mouths, the "coordinated
blitz of advertisements, speeches and sound bites" (in Rutenberg's words) that
was an almost certain bet to succeed at "defin[ing] Senator John Kerry as
indecisive and lacking conviction." What's more, when the Kerry campaign
made a minor adjustment to its ad strategy last month—moving up a
previously announced start date for its own national TV ads by a couple of days—Nagourneyberg
were huffing and puffing
all over it,
parsing the non-development as an indicator of some kind of desperation at Kerry
HQ.
I don't know whether the Bush ad suspension represents a change in schedule
or not; Rutneyberg have nothing to tell me on the subject. I don't know
whether the change, if it is one, displays a chink in the Rovian armor. I
can't say I think it's of much significance in the larger electoral scheme of
things either way. I'd just like to see something—anything—by
way of consistency or intellectual honesty from the Times when it reports
on issues of campaign strategy. And I think it's going to be interesting,
when all this is over in a few months, to go back and chart the utter,
cumulative wrongheadedness of the paper's all-spin 2004 political coverage. Assuming, that is, I can muster the strength by then.
Israeli tactics. Buried on A10 today, another distressing moment in the
ongoing Palestinianization of the Iraqi Shi'a*:
The American military on Saturday carried out a rare airstrike in a poor
residential neighborhood in the volatile city of Falluja, firing missiles that
killed at least 17 people, said residents and a doctor. An American general said
the target of the assault was a terrorist safe house.
A warplane fired two missiles that reduced to rubble four homes in the Jubail
district, residents said. People spent the morning and afternoon pulling bodies
and body parts from the debris. They said women and children were among the
dead.
And, for once, a case in which it can be documented beyond question that everybody's favorite
Osama bin Laden cutout, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has been responsible for the loss of innocent life:
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces, said the strike
was aimed at a safe house for fighters linked to the Jordanian terrorist Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, whom American officials accuse of being responsible for many
of the spectacular suicide car bombs that have devastated Iraq.
"We know there were members of the Zarqawi network inside the house," the
general said. He added that the attack was based on "actionable intelligence."
The Times article, a strong performance, makes it clear that the tactic of firing missiles
at the houses of poor people is the direct result of the coalition's spectacular strategic
failure in Falluja:
The strike was the first assault by the Americans on Falluja, 35 miles west of
Baghdad, since the Marines withdrew from the city in late April. Falluja has
become one of the strongest symbols of resistance to the occupation.
After a three-week assault that month, the Marines turned over control of the
city to the Falluja Brigade, a 2,000-member militia composed partly of
insurgents and former members of the ruling Baath Party. But the city remains
firmly under the sway of hard-line Sunni clerics and guerrilla fighters. ...
The airstrike also allowed the military to stage an attack in Falluja without
sending troops into the city, avoiding the kind of pitched urban battles that
resulted in the April bloodbath. Ten marines and hundreds of Iraqis were killed.
This strike could be the first of a series by the Americans in a new style of
offensive there.
Expect these tactics to bear exactly the kind of fruit they have in the West Bank and Gaza:
In the late afternoon, gunmen with straps of bullets crisscrossing their chests
stood at checkpoints in Falluja. Residents of the city predicted angry
reprisals. "They want to provoke the people of Falluja," said Ahmed Sabah, 36.
"This is a very bad violation. It's not only Falluja people who will stand up to
them, it's all of Iraq."
Especially if this, from the
Independent's account of the attack, turns out to be true:
Angry local people said at least five children and three women were among the
dead, and that the Americans had sought to maximise casualties by firing a
second missile at people trying to rescue victims.
[Thanks to Approximately Perfect for
the link.]
Actually, it doesn't even need to be true—just believed, as it undoubtedly will be.
Except, perhaps, by that doughty two percent of Iraqis who still regard the U.S.
as their liberators.
*Update: Falluja is, of course, a Sunni, not a Shiite town. I'm leaving the mistake up there to punish myself for hasty writing.
Pity poor David Halbfinger, whose quest for the Great White Whale of the Kerry
campaign—Kerry's Veep choice—has reduced him to standing like a mook outside
Kerry HQ:
On Friday afternoon, the campaign was mum on the subject, even though a man who
looked exactly like Senator Bob Graham of Florida arrived at and departed from
the building where Mr. Kerry has his campaign headquarters.
[big snip]
On Friday, Mr. Kerry again sought to throw the news media off his scent, but
again was not 100 percent successful. The man who looked exactly like Mr. Graham
arrived in a sedan with dark-tinted windows at 2:35 p.m., about half an hour
before Mr. Kerry's motorcade showed up at the campaign headquarters, but before
reporters had taken up positions at every entrance to the building. The man left
just before 5 p.m., minutes after Mr. Kerry's motorcade had left for Capitol
Hill, with another passenger holding a portfolio in front of the man's face.
[This isn't the first time Halbfinger's been put in this position lately—eRobin
at
Fact-esque noticed an earlier installment of this little access drama just a
couple of days ago.]
It's just not fair, is it—where's the traditional dignity of the Timesman?
Notice Halbfinger's whipped-puppy tone as he
reports Kerry's determination to shield his selection process as far as possible
from media view:
Unlike Mr. Gore, who did little to disavow what his aides were saying to
reporters, Mr. Kerry seems to revel in reminding journalists that even his own
staff is woefully uninformed.
"I read with amusement about aides who don't know what they're talking
about," Mr. Kerry said on Thursday. "I have not made a decision yet, and I'm the
only person who knows when I will make a decision and what direction it will
take."
And on Wednesday, after leaving a scarcely concealed 90-minute meeting with
Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, Mr. Kerry cautioned reporters, "I wouldn't
report anything you haven't confirmed"—though two Democratic officials did
confirm that the men had indeed discussed the vice presidency.
Halbfinger is reduced to rehashing the four-year-old story of Al Gore's VP
selection process (when Kerry was one of the possibles) as background—leading him to what
has to be one of the most laughably pathetic grafs he's ever written:
Through an aide, Mr. Gore declined to comment on Friday. But Mark Fabiani, who
was his deputy campaign manager, defended the way the vice presidential search
was publicized four years ago.
When you're asking the last campaign's operatives to defend their process of four years back,
you're really gasping for air.
And I say to Kerry, brilliant job, keep it up. Don't give these guys an
inch. Pack animals like Halbfinger only learn who's boss when they get
sufficiently well pissed on.
Utterly without balls on its own account, at least where Dick "Dick" Cheney is concerned
(see yesterday's
post), the Times today finds itself in the somewhat humiliating
position of having to report on how those who've managed to retain their cojones
respond to outrageous provocation.
Cheney, of course, continues madly to insist that he knows something nobody else
does, including the 9/11 commission, about those ties-that-didn't-bind between
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
Mr. Cheney, in a television interview on Thursday, was asked whether he knew
things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission did not know.
"Probably," Mr. Cheney replied. ...
Mr. Cheney also said in the television interview that after Osama bin Laden had
requested "terror training from Iraq, the Iraqi intelligence service responded;
it deployed a bomb-making expert, a brigadier general." The commission's report
concluded that Mr. bin Laden's requests went unanswered.
Well, the chairmen of the 9/11 commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, aren't
having any of it. They've engaged in a bit of polite but extremely pointed
bureaucratic kung fu to emphasize that fact, insisting that Cheney and the White House turn
over whatever "intelligence" they possess that would demonstrate Iraq-Al Qaeda
connections the commission had missed.
Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton made the requests in separate interviews with The
New York Times as the White House continued to question the findings of a staff
report the commission released on Wednesday and to take exception to the way the
report was characterized in news accounts. The report found that there did not
appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and the
terrorist network.
"It sounds like the White House has evidence that we didn't have," Mr. Hamilton
said in an phone interview. "I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is
talking about."
Mr. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in a phone interview
that he was surprised by Mr. Cheney's comments and would be "very disappointed"
if the White House had not shared intelligence information about Al Qaeda with
the commission.
The Hamilton-Kean tag-team play here is admirably deft. By the simple
expedient of pretending to take Cheney seriously (because the Vice President of
the United States wouldn't just
make shit up, would he?), they suggest a world of hurt for the White House:
shut down this insane spin operation, or we'll pummel you for withholding from
the 9/11 commission. [The play wouldn't work, incidentally, if
Hamilton and Kean hadn't skillfully maneuvered the commission in these last
months into a position of greater
political legitimacy—vastly greater at this point, I'd say—than the
Presidency itself can claim. Let's remember the Administration's somewhat
abortive PR effort
of a couple of months ago, in which the Times'
Jim Rutenberg gleefully
and ignobly enlisted, to disparage Kean and Hamilton as politically motivated
blowhards ("9/11
Panel Comments Freely (Some Critics Say Too Freely)"). Yeah, that
didn't get the Bushies anywhere, did it?]
Buried in the report, in fact, is information suggesting that the commission
chairs know, thanks to the White House's own implicit admission, that they're on
quite firm ground.
Other commission officials disclosed on Friday that the White House had sent
a letter to the commission—stamped "secret"—on the eve of this week's
hearings that demanded a variety of changes in its staff reports this week. But
the officials said the White House letter did not seek any changes in the
portions of the report that dispute any relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
[Shenon and Stevenson go on to quote anonymous White House "advisers" promising continued aggressiveness in "countering the commission's conclusions"—without seeming to notice that they've just reported a significant failure of such promised aggressiveness.] This bit of info, by the way, also suggests that it was Kean and Hamilton,
knowing they already held all the cards and determined to go on the offensive,
who initiated their interviews with the Times, rather than the Times
approaching them (which, while not exactly being ballsy, would have shown at
least a minimum of gumption). That, and the fact that Shenon and Stevenson
remain too craven, and too lazy, to oppose Administration spin today with facts
drawn from the record. This is true in several places in the article, nowhere more embarrassingly than in the matter of the much-debunked
fable of a Prague meeting
between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence, which Kean and Hamilton say
they're particularly interested in seeing Cheney's "evidence" for:
Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration
had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove
it either.
"We just don't know," Mr. Cheney said.
Leave aside Cheney's transparent intellectual dishonesty, which turns the
impossibility of absolutely proving a negative into a practical affirmation of
the positive. (Rhetorical notions, like plausibility, or degrees
of proof, have no place in Cheney's Platonic la-la land.) As nearly
complete disproof of the Prague story as possible (to convince reasonable people) has, in
fact, already been offered in the commission staff report—as noted by, among others,
the NY Times' own
James Risen earlier this week:
The report cited a photograph taken by a bank surveillance camera in Virginia
showing Mr. Atta withdrawing money on April 4, 2001, a few days before the
supposed Prague meeting on April 9, and records showing his cellphone was used
on April 6, 9, 10 and 11 in Florida.
Needless to say, none of this manages to surface in today's article, which simply takes Cheney's "We don't know" at face value. I continue to marvel at Richard Stevenson's unwillingness, not just to commit
the sin of reporting fact
(where fact would irritate anyone in the Bush Administration, at least), but to
read his own fucking newspaper.
In the Bush Administration's mad, up-is-down effort to spin yesterday's statement by the 9/11 commission that decisively slapped down its nearly three-year-long PR effort to link Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda, Dick "Dick" Cheney attacked those evil libruls at the NY Times for their coverage of the hoo-ha. Today, the Times reports the flap—an unusual move for a paper whose sense of decorum generally dictates against this kind of self-mention—and on A1, no less.
You may think that the Times is making this move in order to defend itself and critique Cheney's (utterly meritless) position. You are, of course, wrong. The full, sad story is here ...
A postmodernist at the Times. Richard W. Stevenson inhabits a rigorously postmodern world from which the notion of fact has been excluded. In Stevenson's world, there are only statements, made by officials and their critics, and no one, certainly not Richard Stevenson himself, possesses the authority to make independent judgements of them. [I've noticed this Stevensonian tendency in passing before, towards the end of this post; Zachary Roth at CJR's Campaign Desk has a good brief takeout on it here.]
Actually, Stevenson gets a little excited at the start of his hapless news analysis today, on the much ballyhooed 9/11 Commission staff report (with its much, and pathetically*, ballyhooed dismissal of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection), and allows what almost looks like an irruption of fact into his world, but he recovers quickly enough:
In questioning the extent of any ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the commission weakened the already spotty scorecard on Mr. Bush's justifications for sending the military to topple Saddam Hussein.
Banned biological and chemical weapons: none yet found. Percentage of Iraqis who view American-led forces as liberators: 2, according to a poll commissioned last month by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Number of possible Al Qaeda associates known to have been in Iraq in recent years: one, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose links to the terrorist group and Mr. Hussein's government remain sketchy.
That is the difficult reality Mr. Bush faces 15 months after ordering the invasion of Iraq, and less than five months before he faces the voters at home. The commission's latest findings fueled fresh partisan attacks on his credibility and handling of the war.
With "partisan attacks," Stevenson lands on safe ground: you can imagine him breathing easy again. [It appears that not only is there no fact in Stevenson's world, there's no press, either. Would it be at all out of place for him to have noticed that practically the entire mainstream media, including Stevenson's own paper, have reacted to the 9/11 report as if it were the starting bell in a great big Iraq-Al Qaeda gang-bang?]
Stevenson puts the "hapless" in his hapless news analysis when he comes around to reviewing that matter of Zarqawi, and Bush's latest assertions about the Administration's most favoritest putative Al Qaeda operative:
The president has repeatedly asserted that there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, a position he stuck to on Tuesday when he was asked about Vice President Dick Cheney's statement a day earlier that Mr. Hussein had "long-established ties with Al Qaeda."
Mr. Bush pointed specifically on Tuesday to the presence in Iraq of Mr. Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist who sought help from Al Qaeda in waging the anti-American insurgency after the fall of Mr. Hussein, and who has been implicated by American intelligence officials in the killing of Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old American who was beheaded by militants in Iraq in March.
The White House said Wednesday that there was a distinction between Mr. Bush's position and the commission's determination that Iraq did not cooperate with Al Qaeda on attacks on the United States.
The commission's report did not specifically address that distinction or Mr. Zarqawi's role.
And yeah, that's the sum total of Stevenson's discussion of the question. With no statement from the commission about Zarqawi, obviously there's nothing more for Stevenson to say on the subject! The fact that every informed observer—a category that obviously excludes the Boy Churchill (as it excludes William Safire, by the way)—has long since concluded that Zarqawi is useless for demonstrating any link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the fact that Bush's statement is thus off-topic and a lie by indirection: Stevenson obviously feels no responsibility to those facts, as he feels no responsibility to clarify them for his readers. (If Stevenson intends his failure to elaborate on that no doubt contentless "distinction"—patently a fig-leaf "clarification" offered by the White House press office to clean up after Dubya—as some kind of subtle disendorsement of Bush's claim: well, too subtle by half, Richard.)
But facts, as St. Ronnie taught us, are stupid things. By the end of his "analysis" Stevenson is gleefully chucking them all down the memory hole:
Democratic strategists said there was now no question that Mr. Bush would be dogged through the rest of the campaign by questions about whether the war was necessary, justified and sufficiently well planned. But Mr. Bush's supporters said that in political terms, the amazing thing was how well he had weathered the problems thrown at him by Iraq.
"If you look at the last eight months at the White House and in particular the last 90 days, I've never seen more negative stories come out in a concentrated period," said Sig Rogich, a veteran Republican advertising consultant and fund-raiser. "Yet despite all that, the president is still even with John Kerry or, if you count the Electoral College votes in the battleground states, ahead." ...
James M. Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations, who studies the interplay between foreign policy and domestic politics, said the issue now was less whether Mr. Bush was wrong in asserting a tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda than whether he could stabilize Iraq and show progress in bringing American forces home.
Words all but fail me here. Is it really too much to ask that we be allowed to remember, just for a bit, that the "problems thrown at [Bush] by Iraq" are entirely problems of his own making? And thus, that his ability to weather them is utterly beside the point? That those problems are not merely problems of execution, but written into the very determination to prosecute this war? That the "issue" is not, and never has been, whether Bush was merely "wrong in asserting a tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda"—but that the assertion, which was demonstrably false long before the 9/11 commission said it was, was used to bully the nation into supporting Bush's war?
But there I go again, asserting facts on my own authority, just because I know them to be facts. While, unencumbered, Richard Stevenson and his Republican pals spin blithely off into the next in our ever-extending series of New Dispensations.
*God knows I enjoy anything that discomfits the Bush Administration—but my gob rises at today's little free-for-all on the falseness of the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection. One senses a feeling of release in the Times and elsewhere—at last, we can say what we know about it! Is there anything more craven than the institutional press treating itself to one of these feeding frenzies? You knew it all along, you cowardly sons of bitches—why wouldn't you tell the public about it when it would have made a difference, maybe kept us out of a disastrous war? No, you had to wait for a commission report to provide cover. Stevensonism writ large.
Insecure. Buried in Edward Wong's report today on the most recent round of Iraq violence (Edward Wong and James Glanz, "2 Pipeline Blasts Halt Oil Exports at Top Iraq Port") is a piece of telling information I haven't seen before. One of several incidents mentioned in the report is another ambush of a contractor convoy, a "well-organized ambush ... killing at least four foreign contractor workers" staged by "snipers lining a highway and an overpass near Baghdad International Airport."
The attack on the convoy of foreign contractors was also part of a succession well-planned incidents clearly aimed at disrupting rebuilding efforts. It took place between 1:30 and 2 p.m. on a north-south road veering into the highway leading to the Baghdad airport, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces. Insurgents on an overpass raked a three-vehicle convoy with gunfire. Passengers in two of the cars were apparently killed, while a third car pocked with bullet holes limped to a nearby American base. ...
A security contractor who had been briefed on the attack said it appeared that at least four people had been killed but said he did not know their nationalities, which company they worked for or the nature of their jobs. Besides the gunmen on the overpass, he said, snipers opened fire from positions they had taken up along both sides of the road. The contractor said he had been informed that the assault took place on the main road to the airport rather than on an intersecting artery.
The five-mile airport road is considered by foreigners to be the most dangerous thoroughfare in Baghdad.
I'd take issue with Wong/Glanz's conclusion that convoy attacks are part of a campaign to "disrupt rebuilding efforts": it seems to me that, given how much of the CPA's infrastructure is provided by civilian contractors, the Iraqi insurgency (or is that the Zarqawi insurgency? I can never keep it straight ...) is targeting what amounts to the weak point of the Coalition supply lines. But what really jumps out is the highlighted sentence.
It's more than a year after Saddam was deposed. After all this time, we still can't manage to secure the five miles of road between the capital and the main airport?
Block that metaphor! This just pleased me no end this morning, so I thought I'd share. Reading about the Cardinals' big win last night over the Oakland A's (I'm a lifelong Redbirds fan), I ran across this from Oakland manager Ken Macha, on having to go to the bullpen early when Barry Zito proved ineffective against the Cards:
They've got a lot of veteran guys, good hitters, and they've got them spaced out left-right, left-right. Once you paint yourself in that corner, you're looking down a barrel.
Why am I looking down that barrel, exactly? Is there a trap door underneath it that'll get me out of the corner?
Cretinous Kit Seelye. Katharine Seelye is bringing the same deep commitment to journalistic integrity that she displayed covering Al Gore's Presidential campaign in 2000 to the story of the electronic voting controversy.
Naive reader, you might imagine that it would be impossible to write an article about the controversy over touch-screen voting in California without once mentioning the name Diebold: the electronic voting systems company that was recently banned from selling its products in the state, and had its installed products there de-certified for election use. You might think it doubly hard to avoid the name if you were focusing on the California Secretary of State, who not only ordered the Diebold ban but threatened the company with civil and criminal charges for what he called its "fraudulent actions," its "despicable" and "deceitful behavior." The fact that Kit Seelye manages to pull off that trick may tell you all you really need to know about her article today, but if you want the details, we've got 'em ...
You can lead the Times to water ... The news that the Vice President of the United States has lied, demonstrably and in public, about the process by which a no-bid Iraqi reconstruction deal fell to his former company might seem like news to those of us not in the know—but for the Times this morning, it's just ho-hum A6 stuff. Though to be fair, when you've got former publishing-industry correspondent (and current ambassador to the conservative movement) David Kirkpatrick reporting the too-hot-to-touch details of a former President's book tour ("Clinton Planning to Use Book Tour to Assist Kerry"), how could anything else look like A1 material?
In the Times' lamentably standard gee-we-hope-nobody-notices-this style, Erik Eckholm writes his lead in the manner of someone trying to poke at a story with a long stick:
In the fall of 2002, in the preparations for possible war with Iraq, the Pentagon sought and received the assent of senior Bush administration officials, including the vice president's chief of staff, before hiring the Halliburton Company to develop secret plans for restoring Iraq's oil facilities, Pentagon officials have told Congressional investigators.
The newly disclosed details about Pentagon contracting do not suggest improper political pressures to direct business to Halliburton, the Houston-based company that Vice President Dick Cheney once led.
But they raise questions about assertions by Mr. Cheney and other administration officials that he knew nothing in advance of the Halliburton contracts and that the decisions were made by career procurement specialists, without involvement by senior political appointees.
Particular cravennesses highlighted. The details "raise questions" about Cheney's assertions? No, they offer a nearly flat contradiction of them. Is it somehow impolite to point that out? And notice the practice of pre-emptive undercutting of the story in the second graf. Not only does Eckholm split the lead, and damage its force; as he later makes clear the assertion that "improper political pressures" were not brought to bear to send business Halliburton's way is just that—an assertion, made by those same anonymous Pentagon officials in defense of the process that vetted Halliburton. So why does Eckholm write it in his own voice in the lead, as if it were an authoritative conclusion to which his review of the facts had independently led him? That's not just craven, its disingenuous. Besides, what does the information do except suggest improper political influence?
Hell, even in its first clauses the lead underplays: at a glance, that "in the fall of 2002" (followed by yet a second, delaying adverbial clause) makes it look as if the story doesn't have a real news hook. And it's not just as a matter of good form that a lead shouldn't unnecessarily underplay the story. One reason leads are important—particularly leads in the New York Times—is that they do a lot to determine which stories get picked up outside the paper and thus make a wider impact on public consciousness. All too often, the standard Times lead in pieces like this looks like an effort to persuade other editors and writers not to take the article too seriously.
What would the lead look like if if were written by somebody who didn't get the vapors at the thought of official mendacity? Here's my stab at it:
Contradicting repeated assertions made by Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration figures, the Pentagon sought and received the assent of senior political officials, including the vice president's chief of staff, before hiring the Halliburton Company to develop secret plans for restoring Iraq's oil facilities after an invasion, Congressional investigators have learned.
Pentagon officials who disclosed the details of the contract process said they had not been pressured by political leaders to choose Halliburton. The presence of senior political appointees at meetings leading to the Halliburton selection, however, which has not previously been disclosed, raises questions about how the procurement process was directed. Administration spokesmen have consistently denied that decisions on Iraq contracts were made by anyone other than career procurement specialists.
Nothing in that lead goes beyond the facts reported in Eckholm's article, but it suggests a damn sight more urgency about those facts. Because I'm not going beyond the Times article to rewrite the lead, by the way, I haven't mentioned what the WaPo reports from the same sources, namely that "Michael H. Mobbs, a political appointee who works closely with undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, acknowledged that he selected Halliburton for Iraq reconstruction work" (emphasis mine). [That fact makes it into the Post's lead, not incidentally.] I'm also allowing Eckholm his "not pressured" statement, though his article makes me strongly suspect that he's deriving it from the assertion of none other than the same political Michael H. Mobbs who selected Halliburton. But there's still enough here to focus on the salient point that Eckholm dances around: that political appointees were deeply involved in the process, when they weren't supposed to be and when we've been told all along they hadn't been. At what point does the Times allow its reporters to conclude—and say—that we've been lied to?
Update (6/15): Notice that Douglas Feith's name crops up (above graf) as an associate of Michael Mobbs. Journalist Laura Rozen, at War and Piece, adds this to the mix:
Certain people who formerly worked in Feith's office have talked about a number of people from the DC think-tank community participating in a secret Feith-run group looking at Iraq's oil industry, months before the administration declared its intentions to go to war in Iraq. I suppose that would be the Pentagon energy group described above. I was told these consultants worked out of the Pentagon basement. As yet, this story hasn't fully been told that I have seen.
The fall guy. The Washington Post—so far ahead of the Times on this story by now that you can't
help wanting to look away in embarrassment—reports new details today on the history of the approval of
torture in interrogations at Abu Ghraib:
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed
heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S.
detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials
at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep
patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees
whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.
The U.S. policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was
approved in early September, shortly after an Army general [Geoffrey Miller] sent from Washington
completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then returned to brief
Pentagon officials on his ideas for using military police there to help
implement the new high-pressure methods.
The documents obtained by The Washington Post spell out in greater
detail than previously known the interrogation tactics Sanchez authorized, and
make clear for the first time that, before last October, they could be imposed
without first seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison. That gave
officers at Abu Ghraib wide latitude in handling detainees.
[Thanks to Lambert at
Corrente for pointing to the article.] As it happens, I've been wondering about the strange role of Gen. Sanchez in the
Abu Ghraib scandal for some time now. Based on the timeline of Gen. Miller's Iraq consultancy, and on Sanchez's
launching of investigations into prison conditions, which
I posted on last month, it seemed to me there was a serious
case to be made that Sanchez was not approving the torture policy of his own free
will, but that it was being imposed on him by the civilian higher-ups who
deputed Miller in the first place.
Later in the piece, the Post notes that "the policy overlap" between the Abu Ghraib rules approved
in September and the Gitmo rules "was no accident."
No formalized rules for interrogation existed in Iraq before the policy imposed
on Sept. 10, one day after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller—who was then in
charge of the Guantanamo site—departed from Iraq. He was accompanied on the
Iraq visit by at least 11 senior aides from Guantanamo, including officials from
the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.
And look what happened just a month after Miller left, and the rules that he had obviously been brought to Iraq to impose had
indeed been formally adopted by Sanchez's command.
Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which
has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32
interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September, including the more
severe methods that he had said could be used at any time in Abu Ghraib with the
consent of the interrogation officer in charge.
As a result, Sanchez decided on Oct. 12 to remove several items on the
list and to require that prison officials obtain his direct approval for the
remaining high-pressure methods.
If Sanchez had fully endorsed the prior policy, and with full knowledge, why would he subsequently have tried
to rein it in to this degree? What led to the objections from Florida Central Command headquarters to which Sanchez
is said to have been responding? Did those objections come from military lawyers, and had some kind of review of the
policy been ordered in the interim?
As I said last month, "the picture this timeline paints for me is of a man impaled on a stick,
wriggling as hard as he can to get loose from it." I continue to wonder whether the civilian leadership, the real
movers behind the torture policy, weren't looking to create a paper trail that would set Sanchez up as an easy fall guy—insurance in case
things ever got hot.
John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has repeatedly and
personally asked Senator John McCain, the independent-minded Arizona Republican,
to consider being his running mate, but Mr. McCain has refused, people who have
spoken to both men said Friday.
Halbfinger's good enough to place this exercise in useless campaign trivia in context for us:
Word of Mr. Kerry's personal entreaties, and Mr. McCain's flat refusal, may
bring an end to the persistent, and at times fevered, speculation among
Democrats and others about the potential of a bipartisan ticket, with the two
friends and Vietnam veterans matching up against President
Bush and Vice President Cheney, neither of whom fought in that war.
That "and others" stands in for multitudes. Halbfinger's pious noise about laying speculation to rest
notwithstanding, no outlet has been more persistent, or more fevered, in
promoting dreams of
a McCain Veepship these last couple of months than the NY Times.
Another instructive comparison between the Times and the Washington Post. One of these papers, after a two-week burst of energy reporting on the most explosive political story of our generation, the Iraq prisoner torture scandal, has recently reset to its default position: passive and incurious. Guess which one?
In the Post, Dana Milbank and Dana Priest write about a remarkable passage-at-arms in the Bush news conference yesterday marking the end of the G-8 summit:
President Bush said Thursday that he expects U.S. authorities to follow the law when interrogating prisoners abroad, but he declined to say whether he believes torture is permitted under the law.
Pressed repeatedly during a news conference here about a Justice Department memo saying torture could be justified in the war on terrorism, Bush said only that U.S. interrogators had to follow the law.
Asked whether he agrees with the Justice Department view, Bush said he could not remember whether he had seen the memorandum. "The authorization I issued was that anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations," he said.
A second questioner asked Bush whether he would authorize "any means necessary" to elicit information from a prisoner who had information about an imminent terrorist attack. The president replied: "What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law."
Pointing out that the administration lawyers who wrote the memo believe terrorist suspects could be tortured without violating the law, a third questioner asked whether torture is ever morally justified. "Look, I'm going to say it one more time," Bush replied. "Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you."*
The defensiveness, the sneering tone, the repetitive, legalistic refusal to engage with the substantive issue: Milbank and Priest capture it all very efficiently. (You might also want to read Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing today, "A Tortured Non-Denial," with a roundup of coverage of the press conference.) The rest of their article is devoted to summarizing, as background for Bush's testy performance, the evolving understanding of the Administration effort to redefine (to define away any meaning from) the law on torture—a subject to which Milbank and Priest, among others, are devoting sustained and serious attention.
And here's Richard Stevenson and David Sanger of the Times, writing about that same conference and that very passage:
Despite the continuing tensions, Mr. Bush appeared relaxed and at times almost ebullient as he took questions for 40 minutes, ranging from reflections on Ronald Reagan's presidency to the failure so far to find banned weapons in Iraq.
When the subject turned to the treatment of prisoners, Mr. Bush said he could not remember whether he had seen secret Pentagon and Justice Department legal opinions that concluded he had broad authority to determine what techniques could be used to interrogate unlawful combatants seized in Afghanistan. But he insisted several times that his only orders were that interrogators must "conform to U.S. law" and act "consistent with international treaty obligations."
His answer is not likely to put to rest the question of whether the White House condoned harsh treatment of prisoners or coercive interrogation techniques because administration legal memorandums appeared to re-interpret both American law and international treaties concerning torture. One administration memo concluded that "in wartime it is for the president alone to decide what methods to use to be prevail against the enemy," including interrogation techniques.
While the administration has insisted that these advisory opinions never resulted in orders to change the way prisoners were treated, critics have argued that they showed an effort to loosen restrictions on interrogations, and that techniques created at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were eventually used in Iraq.
I'm setting the most generous bounds possible for this, because in an extensive article focused on Bush's news conference it represents all the notice the Times bothers to take of the torture topic. No sneering from Bush here about whether a reporter's moral qualms about torture should find "comfort" in Dubya's mechanically repeated legalisms: no sense that the questioning was difficult at all, or raised any Presidential hackles. Indeed, Stevenson and Sanger go out of their way to remark on Bush's "relaxed and at times ebullient" demeanor. (Froomkin, by contrast, calls it a "moody press conference," with Bush "largely jolly, but sometimes snappish.") Sure, Dubya may have claimed faulty memory about those pesky legal memos, "but he insisted several times" (as if he had felt himself moved to insist, rather than forced to by aggressive questioning) that he's committed to law. No sense from Stevenson/Sanger that Bush was anything other than forthright or anything less than in command, or that readers might have any reason to be skeptical of the sincerity of that expressed commitment.
And how inane is that "critics have argued" disclaimer? A little clue for Stevenson and Sanger: the "effort to loosen restrictions on interrogations," the Gitmo-izing of Iraqi prisons, are facts that have been extensively documented of late in, among others, the pages of the New York Times. You boys might want to try reading it once in a while.
*The transcript provides context that makes Bush's remark about "comfort" seem much less unmotivatedly malicious than it appears in Milbank and Priest's treatment. On the other hand, the barely concealed contempt strikes you even more forcefully (as does the all too familiar mechanical repetition):
Q Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?
THE PRESIDENT: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. If I -- maybe -- maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions out of -- from me to the government.
NYT ADD. Can anyone explain to me how assignments work at the Times?
When the Abu Ghraib torture scandal started breaking in a big way—specifically, when the Senate began taking public testimony at the beginning of May—Douglas Jehl shifted from his regular beat, covering the intelligence establishment. Starting on May 15, Jehl took the lead in a Howell Raines-style "flood the zone" approach to the story; in the last two weeks of the month he was bylined on 16 articles, all of them on the torture scandal, which had become his exclusive focus. And though I found a good dealto criticize in Jehl's work, especially earlier in that period, by the end of May it seemed to me that his efforts were beginning to produce results, particularly on what might be called the entrepreneurial aspects of Gen. Geoffrey Miller's involvement with the Iraq gulag.
And since the beginning of June? Dead silence. Jehl hasn't written a word about torture, and in the wake of George Tenet's resignation he's focused, far less consequentially, on the CIA and its institutional challenges. The Times' coverage of the torture scandal has devolved to the decidedly B-team Neil Lewis and Eric Schmitt, Jehl's most frequent co-author in May. At just the moment when the countours of the legal effort to craft a torture policy are beginning to come clear—when the memorandum trail is making it possible to document the hand of the White House in all this—it would seem that in the Times' judgement the zone no longer requires flooding.
And as an inevitable consequence, the paper is once again getting waxed by the likes of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. As, for instance, yesterday, when the WaPo published an article by R. Jeffrey Smith that, as Susan at Suburban Guerilla puts it, gets us quite a bit closer to the source of the rot:
The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.
Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003, said a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned "any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues."
The Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, asked Jordan whether it concerned "sensitive issues," and Jordan said, "Very sensitive. Yes, sir," according to the account, which was provided by a government official.
The reference by Jordan to a White House link with the military's scandal-plagued intelligence-gathering effort at the prison was not explored further by Taguba, whose primary goal at that time was to assess the scope of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The White House was unable to provide an immediate explanation.
Flooding the zone is nice, but the real trick might be to hire editors who don't suffer from ADD. Or is Bill Keller just turning chickenshit now that the story's edging ever closer to the Torturer-in-Chief? posted by michael 11:22:20 AM tell me about it []
Thursday, June 10, 2004
From the Department of Remove-the-log-from-your-own-eye-first. Douglas Jehl writes critically today about the CIA's failure to date to correct "what senior officials have described as a major flaw in its operations, despite a pledge four months ago that the problem would be resolved within 30 days." The problem has to do with institutional practices that put narrow limits on how much information intelligence analysts are given about the human sources of the intelligence they're responsible for assessing.
The difficulty of working out a solution reflects a deep gulf between the C.I.A.'s operations directorate, which recruits and supervises spies around the world and is always sensitive about revealing information that might endanger them, and the intelligence directorate, which is in charge of sifting through raw intelligence from spies, satellites and eavesdropping devices and drawing broad conclusions from it.
Why is this a significant issue? Well, for one thing, intelligence assessments may be inaccurate or compromised if the information being assessed is derived from untrustworthy sources. In fact, as Jehl notes, just such a problem has arisen in the recent past:
In the case of Iraq, senior intelligence officials have said, analysts who produced reports stating that Iraq possessed illicit weapons did so without knowing that some of the central charges came from defectors linked to exile organizations that were promoting an American invasion, including Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Much of the information that Mr. Chalabi's organization provided to the United States and to news organizations including The New York Times now appears to have been wrong, exaggerated or fabricated, according to internal reviews by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Intelligence Council, an interagency group charged with putting forward a consensus on matters important to national security that reports to Mr. Tenet.
Imagine that. Jehl cites a "senior intelligence official" as saying that "the recently announced departures of [George] Tenet and James L. Pavitt, the deputy director for operations," have slowed progress toward a new intelligence-sharing arrangement within the CIA. No word from Jehl, though, on what may be delaying any needed institutional rearrangements at the New York Times.
Pressure drop. Abby Goodnough, the Times' see-no-evil correspondent to the Florida election system, has noticed that there may be a wee problem with the latest effort to purge felons from the Florida rolls:
Identifying legal voters as felons and purging them from the rolls was one of Florida's biggest stumbles in the 2000 election. Now, some county elections supervisors worry that a new list of 48,000 possible felons might also be flawed and that a new state law makes it too easy to disqualify legal voters.
A significant amount of outside scrutiny has led to this sudden increase of worry—worry in Goodnough, I mean, who has ostensibly been writing a series on voting in Florida but only now finds herself forced to acknowledge that everything may not be hunky-dory in the Sunshine State. CNN filed suit almost two weeks ago for access to the state's list of suspected felons targeted for purging, which state law has prohibited from public distribution; the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU has also filed suit this week, seeking to overturn the Florida ban, alleging among other things that felons with legitimately restored voting rights have been targeted in voting purges. (Neither action was reported previously in the Times.)
On Monday, Ed Kast, the head of Florida's elections division, resigned his post suddenly and without explanation. With her usual wide-eyed, credulous sympathy for all officialdom, Ms. Goodnough clucks approvingly with Ion Sancho, a Florida county elections supervisor, at how bad all that scrutiny must have made Ed Kast feel:
Mr. Sancho said that concerns about the purging mounted on Monday, after Ed Kast, the head of the state's Elections Division, resigned with little explanation. In a brief letter, Mr. Kast wrote, "I find it necessary to tender my resignation."
Mr. Sancho said he suspected that the recent criticism of the purging process was a factor.
"The timing is terrible," Mr. Sancho said. "But the election system is under a micron microscope at this point. Can you pay somebody enough to take this kind of pressure?"
Unfortunately for the egregious Abby, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel previously quoted the selfsame Ion Sancho offering a different, and evidently less speculative, assessment of the pressures on Mr. Kast:
Kast has told a handful of associates that he was uncomfortable with growing pressure to trim felons from voter rolls in time for the fall election, friends say.
"I've known him for 20 years, and I believe he has acted because under the circumstances it's the only thing he could do," said Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho, past president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.
"Ed had made a number of comments that the nature and timing of this felons list was not something he was responsible for. I think he felt in good conscience he could no longer be involved in the operations."
[Thanks to Suburban Guerilla for the reference.] Was Goodnough unaware of the prior reporting, or is she simply ignoring it? Did Sancho revise his story after he spoke to the Sun-Sentinel? Notice that the quote he gave to Goodnough isn't so much contradictory as it is tangential to his earlier statement. Did Goodnough, who hates to impute bad motives to the Florida powers-that-be, exert her own pressure, and push Sancho in the direction of her preferred interpretation?
Update (6/10): See Fact-esque on Goodnough's story, where eRobin notes what a shoddy job Goodnough does giving her readers the background necessary to understand what's at issue here.
Correction. I'm going to leave my previous post up, but I have to acknowledge that I've been unfair to Neil Lewis in placing his report on Ashcroft's testimony beside the WaPo article from Mike Allen and Dana Priest: it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, as I should have immediately seen. Allen and Priest mention Ashcroft's testimony—his refusal to release the memo they discuss provides the occasion for their story—but the Post's direct treatment of his appearance is this front-page article by Susan Schmidt.
Schmidt's lead still makes an instructive comparison with Lewis's; like him she repeats Ashcroft's denial that any presidential order was issued to permit torture, but within the necessary context of his stonewalling on the memo in question:
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft told Congress yesterday that he would not release a 2002 policy memo on the degree of pain and suffering legally permitted during enemy interrogations, but said he knows of no presidential order that would allow al Qaeda suspects to be tortured by U.S. personnel.
Lewis doesn't get to the stonewalling until his third graf, where he's also careful to point out Ashcroft's claims that he's protecting "confidential legal advice given the president" that Congress isn't entitled to see. And in Lewis's account it's a general set of "memos" he's shielding, rather than a specific questionable (smoking gun?) memo.
The comparison to Schmidt's piece doesn't flatter Lewis either, but it's not anything like as dramatic as the (illegitimate) comparison I made to Allen and Priest. Of course, I might also add that there's no reporting in the Times today that could legitimately compare to the Allen/Priest article, and so much the worse for the Times.
Let's compare the leads on John Ashcroft's appearance yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The disclosure that the Justice Department advised the White House in 2002 that the torture of al Qaeda terrorist suspects might be legally defensible has focused new attention on the role President Bush played in setting the rules for interrogations in the war on terrorism.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose subordinates have written confidential legal memorandums seemingly approving of torture, told a Senate committee today that President Bush had "made no order that would require or direct the violation" of either the international treaties or domestic laws prohibiting torture.
I don't know how you could draw a clearer distinction between the two papers, as they stand at this moment: the WaPo sees a story and looks to highlight its implications; the Times sees damage and looks to contain it. [To such an extent that Lewis is careful to point out that it's "subordinates" who wrote the offending memos, lest we jump to the idea that Pastor John's own hands are imperfectly clean.] But leave that aside: What kind of deracinated journalism is it that thinks the proper way to begin a report about official misconduct is with the official denial that there's anything to report? One wonders what tortures are applied in the dungeons of W. 43rd St. to breaks writers like Neil Lewis of their will to narrative.
And then there's the depthless cynicism of the official denial that Lewis chooses to repeat. (Not to mention of the official making the denial.) "Made no order that would require or direct" violation of laws or treaties: how many ways are there to parse that one as a non-denial denial? Might Bush have "required or directed" without actually making an order? Beyond that, what was the purpose of the whole legal charade that's now being exposed? Wasn't the gambit exactly to construe "torture" in such a way that the techniques of torture could be used without consequences, in a law-free zone? Any torture policy Bush might have approved (if not "required" or "directed") would have already had the requisite fig leaves of technical compliance pasted on. The WaPo quotes an interview with Alberto Gonzalez:
White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales said in a May 21 interview with The Washington Post: "Anytime a discussion came up about interrogations with the president, ... the directive was, 'Make sure it is lawful. Make sure it meets all of our obligations under the Constitution, U.S. federal statutes and applicable treaties.'"
Which might represent a heartening committment, except that we know now how strenuous the effort was to define away any such "obligations."
By the way, that "focused new attention" in the WaPo lead isn't just a journalist's weasel construction ("new criticism emerged," that kind of thing). The article pays it off with specific reporting to establish the institutional logic of a possible Bush role.
A former senior administration official involved in discussions about CIA interrogation techniques said Bush's aides knew he wanted them to take an aggressive approach.
"He felt very keenly that his primary responsibility was to do everything within his power to keep the country safe, and he was not concerned with appearances or politics or hiding behind lower-level officials," the official said. "That is not to say he was ready to authorize stuff that would be contrary to law. The whole reason for having the careful legal reviews that went on was to ensure he was not doing that."
The August memo was written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, as agency operatives began to detain and interrogate key al Qaeda leaders. The fact that the memo was signed by Jay S. Bybee, head of the Office Legal Counsel, who has since become a federal judge, and is 50 pages long indicates that the issue was treated as a significant matter.
"Given the topic and length of opinion, it had to get pretty high-level attention," said Beth Nolan, commenting on the process that was in place when she was President Bill Clinton's White House counsel, from 1999 to 2001, and, previously, when she was a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel.
How close are we now to having documented evidence of impeachable acts on Bush's part? How can a President who has specifically approved a policy of torture be considered to have met his responsibility to faithfully execute the laws, and how can he be allowed to continue in office? posted by michael 12:26:55 PM tell me about it []
My condolences go to his family, and to everyone who feels his loss as a bereavement. I am unable to share that feeling, but I credit its genuineness, at least in most instances. (I exempt the political opportunists, from George W. Bush on down, who will treat Reagan's death as money in the bank, but that's a topic for another time.) Of the man himself, I know little and have nothing to say; Reagan will be justly praised for his good qualities, and his bad, whatever they may have been, will be passed over in appropriate silence. (De mortuis nil nisi bonum.) Of what he represented in life and will represent in death, to the mass of Americans who are attached to him as a figure almost of myth, all I can do is hope for the best.
I do plan on spending time in remembrance these next few days, but not in remembrance of Ronald Reagan, precisely. Ronald Reagan will have an abundance of mourners, some paid, many sincere. (Of the paid, let Todd Purdum's contemptible hagiography in today's Times stand for all.) The tributes began flowing as soon as his death was announced, and will be impossible to avoid. But who will spare some thought for all those who were trodden underfoot in Ronald Reagan's triumph? There will be no profit in remembering them, no airtime devoted to their stories; they have endowed no think tanks and own no media conglomerates. They have slender purchase on our sympathies: in the political world we have (largely) inherited from Reagan, we feel with the strong and the celebrated, and Reagan's victims were always weak, unlovely, hard to see and easy to look away from.
Nevertheless, against the grain for just a moment, a few words for those who lived—and died—in the shadows of the Gipper's sunny optimism:
the tens or hundreds of thousands dead in Central America at the hands of the Reagan Administration's proxy murderers;
the millions of South Africans whose oppression at the hands of the apartheid regime Ronald Reagan condoned and thus extended;
the Lebanese and Israeli dead, and the dead American Marines, slaughtered when Reagan fecklessly approved Israel's invasion of Lebanon;
the tens of thousands in this country dead or needlessly afflicted when the AIDS epidemic raged, and Ronald Reagan did nothing;
the thousands and tens of thousands of the mentally ill whose lives were shortened, or further blighted, when Ronald Reagan demolished the mental health care system and condemned them to life on the streets;
the tens and hundreds of thousands of children who Ronald Reagan condemned to greater poverty and worse hunger when he gutted their housing subsidies and their food programs;
the workers, millions of them, whose wages and (even more) whose hopes contracted under Ronald Reagan's relentless assault against the right to unionize;
the poor in their millions, who Ronald Reagan made a career of villifying (in the most genial way possible, of course) and leaving exposed to social violence and decay.
The list could go on, of course, but I'm no scholar of the Reagan years. These are simply the examples that come most readily to mind.
As an executive—in his moral obtuseness, his cronyism, his indifference to democracy and constitutional government—Ronald Reagan was the perfect pattern of the leader who now afflicts us. He promoted bad men to power (Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, Oliver North, John Negroponte) and let them do as they pleased, the people and the law be damned. As a politician, he lent an aura of spurious good feeling to policies of greed and to the depredations of the rich on the poor, which he never failed to celebrate. He offered himself, in all humility and with down-to-earth charm, as the center of a cult of fascist image-making and calculated deceit that continues to dictate the shape of our politics a generation later. He gave us oligarchy, and called it democracy. He gave us lies, and taught us to thank him for them.
When Ronald Reagan goes into the ground, my thoughts will be with those he dispossessed, the chaff of the Reagan revolution, who our courtier press have no time for. I invite any of you reading this to make the same kind of memorial. If you feel the need of an icon to focus your thoughts, try remembering Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Remember the country they gave their lives for, a country whose aspirations for justice and equality had no place in the Reagan ascendancy. Mourn that country, if you need to mourn: and remember that it still lies in our power to see it live again.
Saturday in the Bizarro Times. Since I started this blog, my impression has been that the Saturday edition of the Times dependably features
the paper's weakest and most politically obtuse reporting. [I don't have the patience right now to construct a
tour of the lowlights, but you could browse randomly through Saturday posts in the last several months to understand
how I come by that impression.] But what the hell's going on today?
Sarah Kershaw's article on how the FBI's case against Brandon Mayfield fell apart—Mayfield, the Portland lawyer
who was held for two weeks as a material witness in the Madrid bombing on the basis of a miserably
botched fingerprint id (and on the basis that he was a Muslim)—is impressively detailed and clear-sighted
and unwilling to pull its punches on behalf of the Feebies. That's for a start.
But what really shocks me is David Halbfinger's article on John Kerry's intimate circle of long-time campaign advisors.
I feared the worst when the lead suggested a repeat of the Saturday edition's recent habit of rehashing ancient Kerry
gaffes when new ones haven't cropped up recently enough:
When word broke on May 21 that Senator
John Kerry was thinking of delaying his acceptance of the Democratic
nomination for president until after the convention next month in Boston, the
reaction to the news there was swift, blunt and negative.
And that was among Mr. Kerry's friends.
All weekend long, as the idea met with an avalanche of public scorn, the men
who have known Mr. Kerry longest and best made their opinions known in private.
David Thorne, a college classmate whose sister was Mr. Kerry's first wife,
brought it up face to face that Saturday and again by phone on Sunday.
You can see how I started to tighten up a bit in anticipation.
But, David, where's the snark? Where's the snark? The report that follows is respectful, it focuses on a
legitimate subject of examination—who a candidate trusts for political counsel and why—and
Halbfinger avoids any temptation to turn the piece into an exercise in retailing the standard anti-Kerry memes. On the
contrary—amazingly, considering the source—Halbfinger justifies the piece by writing it explicitly against
one of the linchpins of the Kerry-bashing narrative:
The episode underlined the low-profile high-impact role of a graying coterie
of hometown advisers who have ridden in the backseat with Mr. Kerry throughout
his career. This year, they are helping out again — in positions high and low,
official and unofficial, big and small. ...
They seldom speak for or about Mr. Kerry, at least on the record. But they know
him well enough to tell him when he is wrong. Or when he is taking too long to
finish a speech or make a decision. ...
They know Mr. Kerry's often-concealed sense of humor, too, they say - and his
loyalty. And they know how much he depends on theirs.
"This is a group that's remained incredibly close for 30-plus years," said
Mr. Marttila, a strategist who first worked with Mr. Kerry in 1970. "One of the
reputations that John has is for being aloof. But I think the existence of this
extended family over this long period of time, a family of considerable numbers,
completely belies that phenomenon."
As tough as I've been on Halbfinger—and he's deserved it—in fairness his piece today is
genuinely praiseworthy, not simply because it displays a correct attitude (and not at all because it might seem favorable
to Kerry) but because it's an example of finely judged and genuinely informative political reporting.
Now let's add that, on the jump page for Halbfinger's article, Jodi Wilgoren shows up writing about Kerry's
effort to appeal to the "crossover bloc" of military veterans ("Kerry Woos a Crossover Bloc: Others Who Served").
And Jodi doesn't sneer at Kerry for his emphasis on his military service. (Check out Fact-esque to watch
Wilgoren acting more like herself on the topic just a week ago.) Granted, she does let in a sneering "expert" reference
to Kerry needing "props to make him look appealing" to vets, given that he's an elitist and not your typical VFW good-ol-boy and
all, but the reference is late and not emphasized in a piece that otherwise takes this aspect of the Kerry campaign seriously, and is built
around extended and even moving quotes from veterans on their political loyalties and motivations.
If I were more suspicious, I'd think these guys were conspiring to put me out of business ...
When reporters get the shakes. David Johnston is so busy reassuring everybody that the news he's reporting
isn't really news, God forbid, that he buries a telling detail.
Vice President Dick Cheney was recently interviewed by federal prosecutors who
asked whether he knew of anyone at the White House who had improperly disclosed
the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer, people who have been involved in
official discussions about the case said on Friday.
Mr. Cheney was also asked about conversations with
senior aides, including his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, according to
people officially informed about the case. In addition, those people said, Mr.
Cheney was asked whether he knew of any concerted effort by White House aides to
name the officer.
Writing that lead seems to have given Mr. Johnston a bad case of the shakes. What
follows is an avalanche of before-the-fact exculpations and disclaimers and
protestations of Administration goodwill, consuming fully half the space of the
article.
Mr. Cheney is not thought to be a focus of the inquiry ...
His willingness to answer questions was voluntary and apparently followed Mr.
Bush's repeated instructions to aides to cooperate with the investigation. ...
Mr. Bush is not thought to be a focus of the grand jury inquiry. On Thursday,
Mr. Bush said he did not object to the prosecutors' inquiry. "I've told our
administration that we'll fully cooperate with their investigation," Mr. Bush
said. ... "I want to know the truth, and I'm willing to cooperate myself." ...
The decision by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney to seek private legal counsel is routine
for high-level officials when they become involved, even tangentially, in legal
issues unrelated to their official duties. ...
[In what I'm going to assume is simply an error, this last sentence, which
occurs just before the print-edition jump, is where the Web version of the
article cuts off.]
White House lawyers have not sought to restrict the scope of the prosecutors'
questions ...
Some lawyers in the case said that Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel,
had advised them to tell their clients to answer all the prosecutor's questions.
Please, please don't get the impression that, by paying attention to
the Plame investigation on A1, the Times thinks anything could remotely
be amiss with Dear Leader or Dear Vice-Leader!
But looka here! If you've survived the avalanche, you can retrieve a nugget of
information from the rubble of Johnston's verbiage. Scooter Libby, mentioned in
the lead only to be promptly disappeared, rears his head again:
In Mr. Libby's case, the prosecutors have also obtained copious notes that he took at White House meetings that
some lawyers described as a guidebook for prosecutors to
events in July 2003, when the leak apparently occurred.
[What's with that "apparently," by the way? Why is Johnston hedging on known
fact?] I don't know about you, but when I hear that prosecutors consider Scooter
Libby's contemporaneous notes a "guidebook" to the leak—well, that strikes
me as newsworthy. In fact, it strikes me as something like confirmation that
Libby is the key to the Plame affair, and regarded as such by prosecutors.
Perhaps the Times should ask a reporter less subject than David
Johnston to fits of nervousness to do its reporting on the Plame investigation.
Someone who might recognize when he's learned something valuable and be willing
to share it forthrightly with readers.
Dropping the bin Laden ball? Reuters today reports a secret meeting between U.S. and Taliban officials in Frankfurt, Germany, "almost a year before the Sept. 11 attacks," whose purpose was to "discuss terms for Afghanistan to hand over Osama bin Laden." A German television documentary broadcast last night quotes
Kabir Mohabbat, an Afghan-American businessman, as saying he tried to broker a deal between the Americans and the purist Islamic Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who were sheltering bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.
He quoted the Taliban foreign minister, Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, as saying: "You can have him whenever the Americans are ready. Name us a country and we will extradite him."
A German member of the European Parliament, Elmar Brok, confirmed to Reuters that he had helped Mohabbat in 1999 to establish initial contact with the Americans.
"I was told (by Mohabbat) that the Taliban had certain ideas about handing over bin Laden, not to the United States but to a third country or to the Court of Justice in The Hague," Brok said.
"The message was: 'There is willingness to talk about handing over bin Laden', and the aim of the Taliban was clearly to win the recognition of the American government and the lifting of the boycott," he said, referring to the international isolation of the Taliban.
Link via Corrente, where several commenters looked at the "almost a year before the Sept. 11 attacks" and concluded the report was the product of another attempt to smear the Clinton administration for lack of diligence in the effort to take down Osama. Corrente's Lambert, who posted the item, was led to apologize for an "insufficient display of cynicism," but I think he was too hasty.
The ZDF documentary claims the Frankfurt meeting happened in November, 2000, and goes on to say that "there was talk of holding further negotiations at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan," but that no more talks took place. That leaves it entirely open whether or not this was a ball the Bush transition simply dropped. If so, it would be of a piece with the incoming Bush team ignoring warnings from the outgoing Clintonites about the seriousness of the bin Laden threat.
And a CBS News report of Sept. 25, 2001, would seem to substantiate that idea. (All hail Google!) It reports a covert meeting between a U.S. delegation and two Afghanis, one a Taliban military commander, at a hotel in Quetta, Pakistan just four days after 9/11. The other Afghani, possibly the broker of the meeting, may have been none other than that same Kabir Mohabbat, the Afghan businessman at the center of today's Reuters story.
Four days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, five Americans checked into a hotel in Quetta, one of the most potentially dangerous cities in Pakistan.
Hotel records show they were booked in as U.S. embassy employees. CBS is not making public the names of those embassy employees but at least one was a military officer.
The following day, two Afghanis checked in as Afghan embassy employees.
Taliban sources say one of them was a Taliban military commander. ...
CBS News has met with an Afghan-American businessman who
describes himself as a middleman and says he attended a meeting on September 16th between the U.S. and Taliban officials in the hotel in Quetta.
"I was very encouraged by the United States officials," recalls Kabir Mohabbat. "They used restraint and very friendly terms, and they spoke very friendly with each other."
Tough to imagine how such a meeting could have been arranged so quickly if there had been no prior contacts on the subject of a bin Laden handover. Did the Bush administration belatedly come to recognize it had let an opportunity slide? posted by michael 12:29:33 PM tell me about it []
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Interfacing with faith. George W. Bush is using a program of executive orders and funding rules to undermine the Constitutional separation of church and state. But apparently that's not news.
On Tuesday, Bush signed an executive order mandating the creation of "faith-based centers" at the Commerce Department, the Veterans Affairs Department and the Small Business Administration. It's his third order in a series. As Mike Allen notes in the WaPo, that
brings to 10 the [number of] federal agencies that have offices devoted to serving as advocates of religious organizations. Officials said these three will probably be the final centers, since they complete the coverage of agencies involved in providing social services and humanitarian aid.
But as I said, that's not news, that's the fine print: both Allen and Elisabeth Bumiller in the Times can't manage to cough up those facts until near the end of their reports. The announcement of the executive order was made to coincide with Dubya's speech to the first White House Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, what Bumiller calls "a pep talk to religious groups seeking money that his administration has made available to them." And it's the speech that's news—if you can call it news when everybody reporting the story buries it deep in the inner pages.
Predictably, for Bumiller it's all about Dear Leader's sincerity and the emotional dynamic between him and his audience. Tough to get the ick off the story after a lead like this:
President Bush rallied nearly 2,000 supporters at a White House conference of religious organizations on Tuesday morning, telling them that the federal government gave $1.1 billion in grants last year to social programs operated by churches, synagogues and mosques, but that "governments cannot put love in a person's heart or a sense of purpose in a person's life."
"Amen," said a member of the audience.
Compare to Allen in the WaPo, who seems to lack Bumiller's instinct for toadying and who has an eye for the disturbing graphic detail:
The cover of the glossy, full-color booklet being distributed during a conference at the Washington Hilton yesterday showed a flaming shrub and proclaimed: "Not everyone has a burning bush to tell them their life's calling."
The Old Testament imagery suggested a religious tract, but this was a government brochure.
[Allen will, I'm sure, disclaim any intention of a pun in that "shrub," but you're free to read it as you see fit.] He's also irreverent enough to quote Dubya with his rhetorical pants down:
"Listen, I fully understand there are people in the faith community who have said, 'Why do I want to interface with the federal government?' " he said. "'Why would I want to interface with a group of people that want to try to get me to not practice my faith?' It's hard to be a faith-based program if you can't practice faith. And the message to you is, we're changing the culture here in America."
In the LA Times, Peter Wallsten comes closest to directly grappling with the question of Bush's agenda. His lead ignores the Bush speech, and focuses instead on remarks made later by Jim Towey, director of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and a real piece of work:
The head of the White House's faith-based initiatives program said Tuesday that a "culture war" was dividing the Bush administration and its critics who challenge the constitutionality of mixing church and state.
"It's true that much attention is being placed on the war in Iraq, but there's also another war that's going on," said Jim Towey ... "It's a culture war that really gets to the heart of the questions about what is the role of faith in the public square."
Towey, who has worked for Democrats and Republicans and was a lawyer for Mother Teresa of Calcutta, warned that when faith was driven out of that public square, "you almost wind up creating a godless orthodoxy."
And yet no one reports forthrightly on Bush's creeping theocratization of the federal human services bureaucracy—even when, as yesterday, the White House provided a ready-made news hook for the story. The sole straightforward article I can find on the subject in the past year appeared last November in the Boston Globe; it seems to have generated no followup anywhere. Is it just the lassitude of a corporate press that can't be bothered to pay attention to administrative issues?
The conventional wisdom in Washington is the faith-based initiative collapsed in 2002 when the Senate refused to pass White House legislation giving pervasively religious groups both access to federal grants and an exemption from civil rights laws that bar discrimination in hiring. The Charity Aid, Recovery and Empowerment Act, or CARE Act, a stripped-down version of an earlier bill that offers tax incentives for charitable giving, passed the House and Senate this year but is stalled in a conference committee.
Through an executive order he signed last December, and new federal-agency rules that went into effect in September, Bush has accomplished administratively many of the policy changes he proposed in the original legislation.
Turned aside in the Congress, Bush employs executive fiat to put the federal government in the business of establishing religion. A complacent press yawns and goes back to sleep. posted by michael 5:45:55 PM tell me about it []
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Eric Lichtblau is down with the New Order. If there's any genuine news value in the Justice Department news conference yesterday that hyped a declassified summary of the government's non-case against José Padilla—much less any genuine front-page news value—I confess I'm unable to see it. Yet it's not just the Times: both the Washington Post and the LA Times give the story A1 play, and Knight-Ridder gives it the off-lead position on their Washington Bureau site. Granted, what's involved here is a pioneering addition to the arsenal of law enforcement on John Ashcroft's part: but what can we learn about PR-driven document declassification that we didn't already know from the Pastor General's performance before the 9/11 commission?
Compare-and-contrast is always a useful exercise, and in this case it demonstrates that nobody works harder shilling for the DoJ than the Times' Eric Lichtblau. Given the shared editorial cravenness that lands this trial-by-press-conference on all those front pages, there's obviously a narrow limit to permissible skepticism here, but most reports manage to convey less than wholehearted endorsement of the DoJ position. The other article leads are fairly dry—the WaPo's first sentence notes the document release as "unusual," code for "of suspect motivation"—but Lichtblau works so hard to pump air into the occasion, after three grafs he's practically in need of a shower:
Just weeks before the Supreme Court is to decide whether the Bush administration improperly declared Jose Padilla an enemy combatant, the Justice Department on Tuesday released newly declassified documents that it said showed the grave terrorist threat he posed to the United States.
Officials disclosed for the first time that Mr. Padilla, a former Chicago gang member accused of becoming an operative for Al Qaeda, had cooperated extensively with American interrogators after his capture in May 2002. While the broad outline of the accusations against Mr. Padilla has been known for two years, the declassified documents provided new details about plots to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb" or blow up an apartment building, perhaps in New York City.
"We now know much of what Jose Padilla knows, and what we have learned confirms that the president of the United States made that right call and that that call saved lives," James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, said in releasing the declassified documents.
[Of the articles in this set, by the way, only Knight-Ridder's has the decency to mention in its lead that Padilla is an American citizen who has been imprisoned without charges for two years now.] No one else offers Comey's triumphal quote, or especially gives his statements more than the minimum of coverage. Lichtblau, on the other hand, is all over the guy, and never lets go throughout the piece.
Skepticism, in the form of a litotes, tinges the graf in which the WaPo's Dan Eggen explains what doesn't provide an occasion for the press conference:
The release of information yesterday was not related to the Supreme Court case, Comey said, but was in response to a request for information from Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Nor did yesterday's news conference come in response to criticism last week that new warnings of a heightened terrorist threat were vague and unsubstantiated by new information, he said.
Intended by Mr. Eggen as dry humor, I don't doubt. But Lichtblau, again, works hard at maintaining the maximum of credulity, and seems to endorse the notion that the DoJ is just doing its best to try to work its way out of a "conundrum":
Mr. Comey said the timing of the release in advance of the Supreme Court decision was coincidental [since of course the timing of the decision couldn't have been anticipated or anything—ed.], and said the Justice Department, the Defense Department and other agencies had been working on the declassification for several months as a way of answering public concerns about the case. "If it had been done sooner, it would have been released sooner," he said.
The Bush administration has endured criticism for months for declaring Mr. Padilla an enemy combatant in 2002 and jailing him in a military brig in South Carolina with only scant public disclosure of what he was accused of doing.
While defending the enemy combatant policy, Mr. Comey acknowledged the public relations conundrum that the case represented. "Every place I went to speak," he said, "people would say, 'We agree with the war on terror, but we've got a problem with this Padilla thing. I wish we knew more about it.'"
Darn critics! Some folks just won't be pleased, no matter what you do. Only Lichtblau finds Comey's aw-shucks antics quote-worthy or (apparently) persuasive.
Comey also gets the last word in Lichtblau's piece, and as is often the case that's where the writer clues you in to the attitude you're to come away from the story with. Accordingly, we have to guess that Eric is of one mind with our Republican Torquemadas in thinking that the TerraWar does, indeed, change everything—such as niggling interest in civil rights. Lichtblau's final two grafs:
Mr. Comey said that had the Bush administration brought criminal charges against Mr. Padilla in the beginning, rather than jailing him as an enemy combatant, it might never have found out about his plotting.
"He would very likely have followed his lawyer's advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right," Mr. Comey said. "He would likely have ended up a free man, with our only hope being to try to follow him 24 hours a day, seven days a week and hope - pray really - that we didn't lose him."
[Gosh, he's right! The Justice Department isn't set up to maintain surveillance on people!] But compare the curt conclusion of Ken Moritsugu's article for Knight-Ridder, where Mr. Comey comes off in a slightly more ominous light:
The government maintains that Padilla needs to be detained to protect Americans. There are no immediate plans to release or try him.
"We'll figure out down the road what we do with Jose Padilla," Comey said.
Still carrying Chalabi's water. Media Views, at FAIR, has the goods on Judith Miller's astonishing resurrection today ("Former Oil-for-Food Director Criticizes Security Council"), Judy once again stoutly seeing no evil on the subject of Ahmed Chalabi. (After this last week, how does anybody at the Times allow Judith Miller anywhere near a Chalabi-related story?) The occasion for Miller's article (written with Warren Hoge) is an email self-defense from Benon V. Sevan, former executive director of the UN's oil-for-food program, that an unnamed recipient passed along to the Times.
The e-mail message to what one United Nations official called Mr. Sevan's "inner circle" is his first comment on the allegations of corruption and cover-up that have damaged the United Nations at a time when it is grappling to shape an interim government in Iraq scheduled to take power on June 30, and to assist the country in planning elections and drawing up a constitution.
In his e-mail message, Mr. Sevan said he was the victim of an "intense smear campaign."
[Silly me, after the events of the last few days I didn't realize that the UN was still on the spot for forming an interim Iraqi government: the IGC seems to have taken that job in hand.] As it happens, that "intense smear campaign" was likely orchestrated by none other than Ahmed Chalabi, who in addition to being an all-around con man and Iranian spy is a blackmailer, enabled in that role by the U.S., which allowed Chalabi and his thugs to help themselves to a treasure trove of Mukhabarat and Baath party secret files. Judy's having none of that, though: as far as she's concerned, Ahmed's hands are clean, and she "reports" the story without mentioning any of that detail, credulously limiting discussion to an INC spokesman's pious denials.
He said Mr. Chalabi had not been happy when an Arab newspaper listed Mr. Sevan's name along with others for alleged special oil allotments under the program. "The publishing of such names complicated the inquiry," Mr. Qanbar said.
Unfortunately for Judy, that same spokesman didn't seem at all displeased at the publishing of names when the story first broke—probably since they were published at Chalabi's behest. Read the FAIR research catching Miller out, and wonder what the hell is going on inside the Times that lets a thing like this see print now.
Update: OK, after getting over my initial shock and thinking about it for two minutes, there's only one conclusion I can draw here. What else can Miller's byline on this story be, but another Bill Keller fuck-you to the paper's critics? Last week's Editor's Note promised "aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight": I guess we know now where Keller's aggression is really directed. The brief era of self-examination at the New York Times is officially over.
Torture and bureaucratic imperative, part 2. [A follow-on, more or less, to the preceding post.] My eyes kind of lit up on Sunday at this report from Douglas Jehl and Andrea Elliott:
Interrogation experts from the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were sent to Iraq last fall and played a major role in training American military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison there, senior military officials said Friday.
The teams from Guantánamo Bay, which had operated there under directives allowing broad latitude in questioning "enemy combatants," played a central role at Abu Ghraib through December, the officials said, a time when the worst abuses of prisoners were taking place. ... The teams were sent to Iraq for 90-day tours at the urging of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the head of detention operations at Guantánamo. ...
Confirming an account from military intelligence soldiers who served in Iraq, a senior military official in Iraq said Friday that five interrogation teams, or about 15 interrogators, analysts and other specialists, were sent in October from Guantánamo Bay to the American command in Iraq "for use in the interrogation effort" at Abu Ghraib. ... According to a military officer on the Miller delegation to Iraq, interrogation teams from Guantánamo took part in interrogations at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq. The interrogators demonstrated the "tiger team" concept that was developed at Guantánamo, integrating interrogators with an intelligence analyst and an interpreter to focus on particular groups of detainees and pieces of information being sought.
What do you want to bet that those Gitmo teams were sent to Iraq equipped with nicely formatted PowerPoint presentations?
The Jehl/Elliott article is interesting to me because it fills in my developing picture of Gen. Geoffrey "Gitmo" Miller. [You can start here to see Miller, via Dexter Filkins, offering a self-satisfied account of his Tiger Teams in more innocent days, at the start of his pick-up-the-pieces tenure as Abu Ghraib commandant. Bottom of the post.] Gen. Miller seems to be the Pentagon's very own torture bureaucrat: a careerist whose stars came into alignment when Donald Rumsfeld (with his henchman Stephen Cambone) decided that the mission to reinvent the military for a new era of warfare meant getting rid of an antiquated attachment to the rights of prisoners. (So Old Europe, that.) Miller went down to Gitmo, spreadsheets blazing, and he made torture systematic, rational: in the place vacated by law (with its prohibitions) he established something better, a psuedo-legal matrix of permissions.
Even before General Miller's arrival at Guantánamo, the military lawyer who had taken over as the staff judge advocate there, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, sought formal clarification of what were acceptable interrogation methods, Pentagon officials said. That request prompted a broad legal review of interrogation techniques by a working group of Pentagon lawyers.
When the review was completed in February 2003, it included a spreadsheet with 24 approved techniques, officials who viewed it said. For each method, the matrix indicated whether it posed problems under various United States and international laws, and at what level of the military bureaucracy it needed to be approved. The following month, a brief document spelling out specific guidelines for approved interrogation techniques was sent to Guantánamo.
[I'd love to know who was in charge of that "working group of Pentagon lawyers."] The signal advantage of the matrix approach, of course, is that it offers a structure for producing the sort of reportable, quantifiable results on which bureaucratic advancement can depend. Miller didn't create the torture matrix, certainly, but it was central to his regime at Gitmo and he evangelized for it to commanders during his stint in Iraq as an interrogation consultant.
And now we have Miller promoting his other torture innovation, the Tiger Team, even after having completed his summer tour of the Iraq gulag. It smacks of entrepreneurship: Miller recognizing a need, and seeing in it an opportunity to advance his system and his career. Whatever the reasons that Cambone deputed Miller to Iraq last August, it's hard not to think that Miller saw it as a vote of confidence, and as a warrant for his hopes: he was on the side of history, as mapped out by Rummy and Cambone, and before long history was likely to be dropping a nice promotion in his path. Why not seize the day?
From this angle, the idea of "Gitmo"-izing Abu Ghraib starts to look more like Gitmo®-izing. Independent of a desire to produce actionable intelligence, is there another agenda at work: the desire, on the part of Miller and (more important) his Pentagon sponsors, to go from strength to strength, to extend the Gitmo model and demonstrate its global utility? And the prison having been Gitmo®-ized, how much of the pressure put on the poor suckers working there would have derived from bureaucratic urgency? Because the System was in place, the System was proven, and so results would have to follow, and woe to them that failed to produce.
Last fall, military-intelligence interrogators at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison found themselves in a bind.
With attacks on both civilians and American troops occurring almost daily, and demands building from Washington to round up insurgents, soldiers at Abu Ghraib were under enormous pressure to produce information that could be used on the battlefield. But their sources were dubious: a collection of Iraqi prisoners who didn't seem to have much information and who frequently arrived in huge numbers without documentation showing why they had been detained or even who they were. ...
For many of the interrogators, the unrelenting pressure to ramp up the number of interrogations and intelligence reports brought a sense of futility. "The whole ball game over there is numbers," said Sgt. First Class Roger Brokaw, one of the senior interrogators at Abu Ghraib. "How many raids did you do last week? How many prisoners were arrested? How many interrogations were conducted? How many [intelligence] reports were written? It was incredibly frustrating." Sgt. Brokaw, a 59-year-old reservist, left Iraq in January and now works as a security guard in Minneapolis, Minn. "We all knew the system was broken," he said.
Interviews with more than 20 interrogators and analysts at the prison -- most of whom haven't spoken out before -- suggest the problems at the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison were more complex than suggested by the widely distributed images of abuse. ... The interviews show an intelligence system ill-equipped to battle a largely faceless insurgency. Interrogators and analysts at Abu Ghraib, some of whom say they had little experience interrogating prisoners, knew little about the enemy they were fighting. And they were working within a military-intelligence system that was never designed to incarcerate and interrogate thousands of prisoners for months on end.
Problems were exacerbated by a corrosive relationship between soldiers and some of their superiors, who pressed interrogators to meet quotas on the number of interviews and reports they generated. The soldiers also faced unclear rules of interrogation that often seemed improvised on the fly.
Christopher Cooper and Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal (June 1, 2004), "Under Fire: At Abu Ghraib, Soldiers Faced Pressure to Produce Intelligence"
[Sorry, no link—WSJ online is subscription only.] Much of the article focuses on the role of Col. Thomas Pappas, chief military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib. Pappas seems to have played an ambiguous role: brought on to tighten a set of ad hoc, improvised interrogation procedures, he also tightened the screws on his often untrained interrogators, with disastrous results.
Col. Pappas and his team were responsible for gleaning as much information as possible about the insurgency's leaders, supply routes and structure, often from detained Iraqis. But many of them were trained to analyze data about opposing armies on an organized battlefield. ...
Col. Pappas constantly sought ways to speed up the assembly line, even instituting a quota system in late November for the five interrogation teams, said several interrogators. Depending on the workload, interrogation teams were required to conduct as many as half a dozen interrogations and file a similar number of reports each day. "If an interrogation isn't going well you might cut it short after 30 minutes, but if it is going well you might want to go eight hours," said one interrogator. "We kept having to cut interrogations short so we could meet our numbers."
Col. Pappas also imposed the round-the-clock shifts. The 24-hour schedule created a perception among some interrogators that Col. Pappas wasn't concerned about their safety. Facing mortar attacks, which almost always took place between midnight and 4 a.m., several soldiers said they felt uncomfortable conducting interviews in canvas tents during those hours.
Why doesn't this surprise me? Partly because I see something like an iron law of bureaucracy at work here: a demand for results inevitably becomes interpreted, as it moves down through the layers, as a demand for quantity of result, in proportion as the demand is urgent and the source of the demand is insulated from the producers. (Add to which the fact that bureaucracies are biased toward the measurable to begin with: quantity is always easier to demonstrate to your superiors than quality.)
More immediately, I'm not surprised because Douglas Jehl's reporting in the Times last week was already leading in this direction. An article on Friday, written by Jehl and Kate Zernike ("Greater Urgency on Prison Interrogation Led to Use of Untrained Workers"), suggested a system being stressed not just from below, by an influx of (often randomly detained) prisoners, but by pressure from above for more intelligence product, faster. In fact, today's WSJ report seems incomplete without this context: it's no accident that interrogators at Abu Ghraib were ill-equipped for their jobs, they were poorly trained because they were rushed into place to meet a demand:
The interrogation effort at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq took on such urgency last fall that untrained personnel were pressed into service as analysts and even interrogators, according to accounts spelled out in documents and interviews.
The pace accelerated last December, after the capture of Saddam Hussein, which led to a near-doubling of the number of two-person "Tiger Teams" assigned to an interrogation center at the prison ... The accounts depict a high-pressure environment at the prison, particularly within the interrogation center, where military intelligence personnel exerted substantial influence over a cellblock where most of the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently took place. In interviews, some soldiers who served in military intelligence units at the prison said the sense of urgency contributed to the loosened standards and the abuses that followed.
"By early January, the number of interrogation teams at the center had gone from about 16 to 30, all to help run down leads about the opposition," said a senior Army officer who served in Iraq. These Tiger Teams consisted of an interrogator and an intelligence analyst, who would usually be accompanied by a translator during interrogations. ... All fall, said Sergeant [Samuel] Provance [of the 302nd MI Battalion], "Personnel just started coming faster and faster, there was more and more stuff, more expansion, and it just never slowed down."
Most of the intelligence officers who worked in the interrogation center said they had been assigned to their posts in October or November, the period when the worst abuses are believed to have taken place, according to the documents and interviews.
"We all came there because they were short-handed," said the intelligence analyst, who asked that he not be identified. "None of us did the jobs we were trained for."
The question becomes: What's the source and character of the demand that the interrogation system at Abu Ghraib was rigged up to meet? Since this post is getting long, with all the quoting, and there's another report I want to fit in here to add to the picture, consider this part 1. I'll post part 2 in a bit. posted by michael 10:18:32 AM tell me about it []
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
