Best of the Web Today - February 28, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
The Times' Turnabout
This column last weighed in on the Valerie Plame kerfuffle back in July, when Joe Wilson, having been cast out of the Kerry campaign after a Senate report impeached his credibility, was fulminating that The Wall Street Journal, which was arguing that the special prosecutor's investigation into the "leaking" of his wife's identity as a CIA "operative" should be shut down, was part of a criminal conspiracy.
Since then, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has subpoenaed several reporters, two of whom, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time, have refused to testify before a grand jury and are now threatened with jail. Fitzgerald also demanded that Miller and another Times reporter, Philip Shenon, turn over their phone records, but last week a federal judge quashed that request, which prompted a Times editorial Saturday that contained a stunning turnabout:
Meanwhile, an even more basic issue has been raised in recent articles in The Washington Post and elsewhere: the real possibility that the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity, while an abuse of power, may not have violated any law. Before any reporters are jailed, searching court review is needed to determine whether the facts indeed support a criminal prosecution under existing provisions of the law protecting the identities of covert operatives.
The "disclosure" may not have been a crime? Wow, that's a shocker! Well, actually, it's not a shocker to anyone who's been reading this column. In a pair of items in 2003, on Oct. 2 and Oct. 6, we laid out extensive evidence--based on information that was publicly available at the time and on the text of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act--that there almost certainly was no crime at the center of the Plame kerfuffle. The Times' editorialists and columnists, however, were singing quite a different tune, and it's worth reviewing their record of pronouncements on the subject.
As far as we know, the first "mainstream" media appearance of the Plame kerfuffle was a column by former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, which appeared on July 22, 2003. Krugman waxed McCarthyite as he leveled criminal accusations:
And while we're on the subject of patriotism, let's talk about the affair of Joseph Wilson's wife. Mr. Wilson is the former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the C.I.A. to investigate reports of attempted Iraqi uranium purchases and who recently went public with his findings. Since then administration allies have sought to discredit him--it's unpleasant stuff. But here's the kicker: both the columnist Robert Novak and Time magazine say that administration officials told them that they believed that Mr. Wilson had been chosen through the influence of his wife, whom they identified as a C.I.A. operative.
Think about that: if their characterization of Mr. Wilson's wife is true (he refuses to confirm or deny it), Bush administration officials have exposed the identity of a covert operative. That happens to be a criminal act; it's also definitely unpatriotic.
Gail Collins & Co. weighed in with an Oct. 2, 2003, editorial, in which they called for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the case and asserted that Plame was indeed a "covert" agent for the purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act:
The law under which the Justice Department is operating prohibits the naming of an undercover intelligence operative--in this case, the wife of Joseph Wilson IV, a retired career diplomat.
The Times urged that "the Bush administration should not use the serious purpose of this inquiry to turn it into an investigation of [Robert] Novak or any other journalist, or to attempt to compel any journalists to reveal their sources" and said "we oppose 'leak investigations' in principle." But it also likened the "leaking" of Plame's identity to "the disclosure of troop movements in wartime" and called it "an egregious abuse of power."
Times columnists went even more over the top:
o Maureen Dowd, Oct. 2: "For Bush officials, who have wielded patriotism as a bludgeon on critics, you'd think that doing something as unpatriotic as outing Mr. Wilson's wife and endangering the lives of her C.I.A. contacts would be enough. Nah. The group that fights so ferally to keep everything secret, from the cronies who met with Dick Cheney to the identities of the people it has tossed into the brig at Gitmo, had no problem spilling the beans on its own spy when self-preservation was at stake."
o Paul Krugman, Oct. 3: "In any case, Mr. Wilson's views and character are irrelevant. Someone high in the administration committed a felony and, in the view of the elder Mr. Bush, treason. End of story."
o Bob Herbert, Oct. 3: "The vicious release to news organizations of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer could serve as a case study of the character of this administration. The Bush II crowd is arrogant, venal, mean-spirited and contemptuous of law and custom. The problem it faces now is not just the criminal investigation into who outed Valerie Plame, but also the fact that the public understands this story only too well. Deliberately blowing the cover of an intelligence or law enforcement official for no good reason is considered by nearly all Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, to be a despicable act."
o Nicholas Kristof, Oct. 11: "We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it."
Eventually Ashcroft relented and gave the Times what it wanted: a special prosecutor. A Dec. 31, 2003, editorial applauded the decision and flatly stated that someone had committed a crime:
Mr. Fitzgerald is charged with finding out who violated federal law by giving the name of the undercover intelligence operative to Mr. Novak for publication in his column.
The Times never wavered from its view that Fitzgerald should not force journalists, including Novak, to testify, but on Feb. 6, 2004, it published an op-ed by Geneva Overholser, a journalism prof and former Times editorialist, in which she laid out what The Wall Street Journal would call "the Novak exception":
As a piece of journalism, the Novak column raises disturbing ethical questions. He apparently turned a time-honored use of confidentiality--protecting a whistleblower from government retribution--on its head, delivering government retribution to the whistleblower instead. Worse, he enabled his sources to illegally divulge intelligence information.
The Times has now dispensed with the certainty that a crime was committed here, but the idea that Wilson was a "whistleblower" and a victim of the administration persists; that presumably is what the Times means in its Saturday editorial when it describes the "leak" as "an abuse of power." We think even this goes too far. To see why, let's go back to Novak's original column of July 14, 2003:
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.
Wilson's response to this had three elements:
(a) He denied that has wife had recommended him for the trip.
(b) He accused administration officials of "outing" his wife in retaliation for his "whistleblowing."
(c) He charged that this disclosure violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
It subsequently emerged that Plame had recommended Wilson for the Niger junket, and now even the New York Times doubts that the "leak" was a crime. All that is left of Wilson's response to Novak is point (b), his assertion about the administration's motives. So far as we know, no evidence has ever emerged to support this claim; the Times and others continue to stand by it even though it is based solely on an accusation by Wilson, who was not in a position to know and whose credibility on other matters is in question.
On the other hand, Novak's sources asserted that Plame had recommended Wilson for the trip, which turned out to be true despite Wilson's denials. Thus it would appear that Novak's sources were the ones acting as whistleblowers, calling public attention to nepotism at the CIA.
In other words, it is increasingly likely that the entire Plame investigation--in which two journalists are being threatened with jail--is based on nothing. Yet as a Journal editorial noted last week, it may end up having a deleterious effect on press freedom. If Miller and Cooper appeal their case to the Supreme Court, the justices could "end up eliminating whatever hint of protection for sources remains" under existing law.
Such an outcome might have been avoided if journalists--notably including the Times' editorialists and columnists--had treated Wilson's accusations with responsibility and skepticism in the first place.
Blue Meat
Is the Democratic left practicing the paranoid style of politics, as we suggested in an item Wednesday? Well, a Manichaean Howard Dean showed up at a Lawrence, Kan., fund-raiser Friday, as the local paper, the Journal-Word, reports:
Dean told the . . . fund-raiser that gay marriage was a Republican diversion from discussions of ballooning deficits and lost American jobs. That presents an opportunity to attract moderate Republicans, he said.
"Moderate Republicans can't stand these people (conservatives), because they're intolerant. They don't think tolerance is a virtue," Dean said, adding: "I'm not going to have these right-wingers throw away our right to be tolerant."
And concluding his backyard speech with a litany of Democratic values, he added: "This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good."
Let's go back to Richard Hofstadter:
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.
Dean's comments also call to mind the musical satirist Tom Lehrer--specifically, the introduction to his song "National Brotherhood Week": " I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that."
Democracy Marches On
A peaceful revolution appears to be under way in Beirut: "With shouts of 'Syria out!,'' more than 25,000 flag-waving protesters massed outside Parliament on Monday in a dramatic display of defiance that swept out Lebanon's pro-Syrian government two weeks after the assassination of a former prime minister," reports the Associated Press:
Cheering broke out among the demonstrators in Martyrs' Square when they heard Prime Minister Omar Karami's announcement on loudspeakers that the government was stepping down. Throughout the day, protesters handed out red roses to soldiers and police. . . .
"We want no other army in Lebanon except the Lebanese army!" protesters chanted. . . .
"Today the government fell. Tomorrow, it's the one huddled in Anjar," opposition leader Elias Atallah told the crowd to cheers, referring to the Syrian intelligence chief based in the eastern Lebanese town of Anjar. He said the opposition will continue its actions until all demands are met.
Meanwhile in Cairo, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, who succeeded the assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981 and has periodically won sham elections ever since, made a "dramatic decision to allow a competitive presidential election," which "comes amid a behind-the-scenes struggle by the Bush administration and Congress to require Cairo to spend part of its annual $2 billion in U.S. aid on political and economic reform," the Los Angeles Times reports:
Officials said they did not believe that U.S. pressure alone forced Mubarak's hand.
"U.S. pressure was certainly material," said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But [Mubarak's] people are sitting watching TV. You've seen free elections in Palestine, free elections in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating on the streets in Lebanon, illegitimate elections overturned in Georgia, illegitimate elections being overturned in Ukraine. . . . It's a combination of all these things."
Those who thought Arab democracy was a hopeless cause are looking more and more naive.
Spot the Idiot
The Daily Collegian, student paper at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, turns out to be a cornucopian source of material for this feature. Here's part of a column by Samantha Sharac called "Women's Perpetual Struggle":
The Constitution was ratified with the nineteenth Amendment, yet the Declaration of Independence remains the same. Women now have the legal right to vote but they are not entitled to "certain unalienable rights . . . among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The Declaration of Independence provide these three rights to "all men," with no mention of women. Now, one may argue that women are legally given these rights as citizens of the United States.
If women were granted these three rights, I doubt that there would be a gender gap in wage earnings, violence against women, unsafe abortions and substantially more women than men in poverty; these ugly realities severely undercut women's right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Most people these days understand "all men" to include women. In any case, if "gender neutral" language in the Declaration of Independence would free women's lives from "ugly realities," how come men have problems?
Zero-Tolerance Watch
A Kentucky high schooler "was in jail Friday, charged with threatening an armed takeover of his school," reports the Associated Press:
William Poole, a junior at George Rogers Clark High School in Winchester, was arrested Thursday at school on a terroristic threatening charge.
The arrest came after a tip from a family member that Pool [sic] was trying to "recruit a gang to take over the school," Detective Berl Perdue said.
"He didn't have a gang, but he was attempting to organize one," Perdue said.
But Lexington's WLEX-TV tells a different story:
Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.
"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran [sic] by zombies."
No word whether they're planning to charge Poole with a bias crime for singling out ambulatory metabolically challenged Americans.
Homelessness Rediscovery Watch
"If George W. Bush becomes president, the armies of the homeless, hundreds of thousands strong, will once again be used to illustrate the opposition's arguments about welfare, the economy, and taxation."--Mark Helprin, Oct. 31, 2000
"Number of Homeless in America Has Grown"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 26, 2005
This Just In
"Marriage Is About More Than Sexuality"--headline, Los Angeles Daily News, Feb. 27
Franco? Isn't He Still Dead?
"Spain's Garzon Calls for 'Truth Commission' on Franco"--headline, Reuters, Feb. 27
What Would We Do Without Experts?
"Experts: Serial Killers Crave Power, Resort to Violence to Achieve It"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 27
Good Idea, We're Going to Down a Martini
"Virginia Men's Lacrosse Downs Manhattan 18-2"--headline, UVa press release, Feb. 26
Later, He'll Preach to the Tiny Choir
"Clinton to Address Little Rock Group"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 27
The Iced Tea Is Especially Good
"Pacific Currents: Gore Draws Chinese to Animal Parks"--headline, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. 28
Pencil Thin Mustache
"Amidst the Threat of 'Dirty Bob' Nuclear Expert Urges Tighter Global Security"--headline, A2Gay, Feb. 27
Midnight Cowboy
"University of Colorado officials are considering offering Ward Churchill an early retirement package that could end an increasingly uncomfortable standoff with the controversial professor," reports the Denver Post. Churchill, of course, infamously wrote after Sept. 11 that World Trade Center murder victims were "little Eichmanns":
David Lane, Churchill's attorney, said he has not been contacted about a buyout offer.
But, he said, while his primary focus is on protecting Churchill's constitutional right to speak out, he would be willing to listen to a university proposal.
"If they offer $10 million, I would think about it. If they offer him $10, I wouldn't," Lane said.
As another Churchill might say, now that we've established what he is, we're just haggling over price. |
