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.

"In Florida, Wrestling Again Over Felons and Voting"

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."

Bob Mahlburg, "Florida elections division chief quits amid controvery on voter rolls"

[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.

posted by michael  3:38:28 PM  
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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.

posted by michael  1:06:00 PM  
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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.

Mike Allen and Dana Priest, Washington Post, "Memo on Torture Draws Focus to Bush"

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.

Neil A. Lewis, New York Times, "Bush Didn't Order Any Breach of Torture Laws, Ashcroft Says"

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  
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