worrisome

Time Magazine to Hand Over Reporter Notes

- By PAT MILTON, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, June 30, 2005

(06-30) 09:07 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) --


Time Inc. said Thursday it would comply with a court order to deliver the notes of a reporter threatened with jail in a probe of the leak of a CIA officer's name. The New York Times, which is also involved in the dispute, said it was "deeply disappointed" at the move, which came days after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected two journalists' appeal.


U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan is threatening to jail Matthew Cooper, Time's White House correspondent, and Judith Miller of the Times for contempt for refusing to disclose their sources. Time said it believed its cooperation would make Cooper's jailing unnecessary.


The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the reporters' appeal and the grand jury investigating the leak expires in October. If jailed, the reporters would be freed at that time.


In a statement, Time, which is a defendant in the case along with the two reporters, said it believes "the Supreme Court has limited press freedom in ways that will have a chilling effect on our work and that may damage the free flow of information that is so necessary in a democratic society."'


But it also said that despite its concerns, it will turn over the records to the special counsel investigating the leak.


"The same Constitution that protects the freedom of the press requires obedience to final decisions of the courts and respect for their rulings and judgments. That Time Inc. strongly disagrees with the courts provides no immunity," the statement said.


Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the newspaper's publisher, said: "We are deeply disappointed by Time Inc.'s decision to deliver the subpoenaed records." He noted that one of its reporters served 40 days in jail in 1978 in a similar dispute.


"Our focus is now on our own reporter, Judith Miller, and in supporting her during this difficult time," Sulzberger said in a statement. Unlike Time Inc., the newspaper itself is not a defendant because it did not publish anything. Miller did some reporting but did not write a story, while Cooper wrote a story about CIA officer Valerie Plame.


Miller was not available for comment, the newspaper said.


In an interview with The Associated Press, Norman Pearlstine, Time's editor in chief, said: "We are in possession of information and e-mail trafficking. I believe we will turn over all the records, notes and e-mail trafficking going over our company system."


"The Supreme Court made its ruling," Pearlstine added. "Once it made its ruling there was no other choice but to comply. I feel we are not above the law."


Pearlstine said he believed that Time's decision "obviates the need for Matt to testify and remove any justification for incarceration."


He said he did not know whether Cooper's position not to cooperate had changed or whether the judge would be satisfied with Time's production of the information sought by the special counsel.


Cooper did not immediately return a call for comment.


On Wednesday, Hogan agreed to hold a hearing next week to consider arguments against jailing the two. But he expressed skepticism that any new arguments would change his mind.


"It's curiouser and curiouser; I don't understand" why the reporters are asking for more time, Hogan said. "It seems to me the time has come. Much more delay and we will be at the end of the grand jury."


Time magazine's lawyers had revealed Wednesday that the company was considering turning over the documents sought by the grand jury, a step that Cooper said he hoped the magazine did not take. Fitzgerald said that the documents are Cooper's notes of his interviews.


"On balance, I think I'd prefer they not turn over the documents but Time can make that decision for itself," Cooper said outside the courthouse.


Columnist Robert Novak, who was the first to identify the CIA agent in print, told CNN he "will reveal all" after the matter is resolved, adding that it is wrong for the government to jail journalists.


Novak, who has not been held in contempt, has not commented on his involvement in the investigation.


Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, has been investigating who in the Bush administration leaked Plame's identity after her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an opinion piece in the Times that undercut President Bush's rationale for invading Iraq.


Theodore Boutrous, an attorney representing Time magazine, told the judge Wednesday, "We don't want to reargue this case."


The magazine hopes to "avoid this crisis and journalists going to jail," Boutrous added.


Robert Bennett, representing Miller, told the judge in asking for more time that "it's a big step to put two people in jail who have committed no crimes."


After Hogan held Miller, Cooper and the magazine in contempt, an appeals court rejected their argument that the First Amendment shielded them from revealing their sources.


It was that appeals court decision upheld Monday without comment by the Supreme Court.


Sulzberger's statement cited a case more than a quarter-century ago. "We faced similar pressures in 1978 when both our reporter Myron Farber and the Times Company were held in contempt of court for refusing to provide the names of confidential sources," he said. "Mr. Farber served 40 days in jail and we were forced to pay significant fines."

Associated Press writer Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report.

a tunnel at the end of the tunnel

In Iraq, we are the new Hessians - Pete McCloskey

Wednesday, June 29, 2005 / SF CHRONICLE


Watching Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his generals defend their policies before a Senate committee recalls another brilliant and persuasive predecessor and his subordinates defending their policies in Vietnam. For six years, they spoke of "a light at the end of the tunnel," that we should stay the course, that "We can't just cut and run." After 58,000 American dead and 153,000 wounded, we finally learned that our confidence in those leaders was sadly misplaced.

Then, as now, we were trying to build a new democratic nation for which we had trained an army half again the size of that of their adversaries.

Then, as now, it was difficult for military leaders to speak out against a policy American soldiers and Marines were doing their best to carry out. Former Marine Commandant David Shoup, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient for his valor in World War II, had the courage to say that the war was a terrible mistake, but was castigated for criticizing military decisions and leadership while Marines were fighting and dying.

Then, as now, Congress had been led into authorizing a war because of deception by a president. Then, it was a nonexistent attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. Now, it was nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and a nonexistent conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In both cases, an American president and secretary of defense sincerely believed that a war was in our best interests, and that initiating that war justified deceiving the American people.

Sadly, then and now, Marines and soldiers were dying and being maimed for life because leaders at the Pentagon and in the White House, many of whom had never experienced combat themselves, were confidently claiming that they were building a new democratic nation, that they could see victory on the horizon, and, deliberately or implicitly, that it was unpatriotic to suggest otherwise.

Today, it is argued that it would be premature to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis before we have trained an Iraqi army and police force capable of sustaining a "democratic" Iraqi government. But what Iraqi leader, put in power and maintained by the American military, can expect support from Iraqis in the future? No occupying power can become beloved while it destroys cities and neighborhoods to root out local insurgents. In Vietnam, we sought to win the minds and hearts of the people only to learn that this could not be done while destroying their villages and countryside. Does this not seem reasonably parallel to the situation we face in Iraq?

Now, as in the late 1960s and early 1970s, our leaders believe in and have staked their reputations on the principle that we can successfully occupy a country whose history, culture and religions are alien to ours. Have they forgotten our own sense of outrage when the British brought in the hated Hessians to put down our own insurgency back in 1776, the anniversary of which we will shortly celebrate? I suspect that the brave young men and women now fighting in Iraq would be the first to rebel against any foreign force occupying Texas, Kansas or California. No matter how many successful sweeps of insurgent strongholds and weapons caches or young Iraqis imprisoned, I doubt that American firepower can ever permanently overcome the rage for revenge on the part of young men who see us as the hated Hessians of our time.

So it seems proper for our best minds and statesmen to debate publicly the wisdom of continuing military occupation of Iraq until those whom we put and sustain in power feel that the Iraqi army and police are "ready." Who can be sure that such an army and police force will be loyal to whomever may happen to be elected, or that a brutal civil war is not a necessity of our blunders? It is wholly proper to suggest that our neocon civilian leadership has simply been dead wrong in its assumptions and conviction that American military power should be projected abroad in the manner we have pursued in Iraq. In no way should this be considered an unpatriotic debate.

Robert McNamara was fully as intelligent and persuasive as Rumsfeld. Then, as now, most members of Congress had little military experience, and were extremely anxious that their sons not suffer. Is it any different today? I can identify no neocon leader who has served in a shooting war, or who indeed made any effort to so serve in the wars of his own youth.

Let us then not shy from a free, open and reasoned debate as to whether Americans should tell our leaders that it is time to commence an orderly withdrawal from our position as a military occupier of Iraq. As in Vietnam, we might consider the possibility that trying to insert American values and processes at the barrel of a gun may simply not be possible. The most terrible weaponry in history may not be able to overcome the historic desire of a people to be free of foreign domination. Iraq should be for the Iraqis, whatever they may try to resolve from the chaos we have created there.

Pete McCloskey, a farmer in Yolo County, was a Marine Reserve lieutenant colonel in 1967, the year he was elected to Congress from San Mateo County as the first Republican opposing the Vietnam War. During the Korean War, he was awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

there ain't shit on tv tonight

how can i
make an outline of myself?
where's the guidelines?
for the profiles?
for my country?
how do others see me?
i'm worried
worried about the feel guilty
the media
robs and betrays us
no more lies!
we are responsible

double triple quadruplethink

The return of '1984'

By H.D.S. Greenway

Boston Globe
June 24, 2005

IF YOU TAKE something to read at the beach this summer make sure it is not one of George Orwell's books. The comparison with current events will ruin your day.

In what was then the futuristic, nightmare world of "1984," written in 1949, Orwell introduced the concepts of "newspeak," "doublethink," and "the mutability of the past," all concepts that seem to be alive and well in 2005, half a century after Orwell's death. In the ever-changing rationale of why we went to war in Iraq, we can imagine ourselves working in Orwell's "Ministry of Truth," in which "reality control" is used to ensure that "the lie passed into history and became the truth."

And what about the Bush administration's insistence that all is going well in Iraq? In the Ministry of Truth, statistics are adjustable to suit politics -- "merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another," Orwell wrote. "Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection to anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in the rectified version." Welcome to the Iraq war, Mr. Orwell.

What of Donald Rumsfeld's newspeak, or was it doublethink, saying that "no detention facility in the history of warfare has been more transparent" than Guantanamo? We have the FBI's word for it that prisoners were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, left for 18 to 24 hours with no food and no water, left to defecate and urinate on themselves.

The deaths by torture in Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan sound very much like what happens in Orwell's fictional torture chamber: Room 101.

He might as well have been writing about the Bush administration's redefinition of torture when he wrote about using "logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it."

In Orwell's profoundly pessimistic view: "Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

There is something profoundly Orwellian, too, about the administration's attempts to impose thought control on public broadcasting. The sometimes secret machinations to place impositions on editorial freedom, the efforts to see which people interviewed by Bill Moyers might be considered anti-Bush or anti-Defense Department or insufficiently conservative, were just the kind of efforts to squash intellectual opposition to state power that Orwell wrote about.

I was amused to see even a conservative Republican senator, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, was branded as a "liberal" because he dared criticize the Pentagon -- a "thought criminal" in Orwell's parlance.

The drum beat by some conservatives to bring down an independent judiciary is another case in point. We learned from the case of unfortunate, blind, and brain-dead Terri Schiavo that it isn't activist judges who are the enemy. It is judges who are not active in the correct causes.

It is the intended persecution of Michael Schiavo, who defended his wife's right to die, however, that has for me the most sinister echoes of Orwell. Florida Governor Jeb Bush, according to news reports, will have the case reopened after 15 years to investigate how long it took Schiavo to dial 911. Thus will Michael Schiavo feel the displeasure of the state for challenging the conservative orthodoxy.

In the effort to squash dissent, as evidenced by moves to change the Sentate's filibuster rules, there seems to be the belief among the majority that they will always stay in the majority, that they will never lose the Senate, and, therefore, never themselves need to filibuster.

Orwell had something to say about this too. "Power worship blurs political judgment," he wrote in an essay, "because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."

There are any number of Guantanamo defenders who could fit neatly into George Orwell's essay when he wrote: "In our time, political speech and writing is largely the defense of the indefensible."

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

shorter post

president ass clown can go to hell

freedom with an asterisk

9/11 Kin Want Freedom Museum Cancelled

- By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN, AP Writer
Monday, June 20, 2005


(06-20) 17:01 PDT New York (AP) --


Dozens of relatives of people killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks are opposing plans for a freedom museum at ground zero, saying it would spoil the site's solemnity by injecting controversy and political debate.


Relatives representing 14 family groups gathered at the site Monday to condemn plans for the International Freedom Center, which officials said would place the terror attacks in a historical context.


"It doesn't belong at a memorial," said Charles Wolf, whose wife, Katherine, died in the World Trade Center collapse. "You wouldn't put a debate about Nazism and authoritarianism at Dachau."


Officials charged with rebuilding the World Trade Center site said the center will host discussions on historical and current events, exhibits on global freedom movements and a service program encouraging activities that could range from joining the Peace Corps to enlisting in the U.S. military.


The center's use of advisers that include some critics of U.S. policy has prompted criticism from conservative commentators in recent weeks.


Center President Richard J. Tofel said that while the causes of the Sept. 11 attacks would not be up for debate, the center would not bar criticism of the United States and its actions.


"Part of the way we celebrate freedom is to acknowledge that even the greatest societies in the world and those that have made the greatest contribution to freedom are not perfect," he said.


The center would be part of a cultural complex set to open in 2009 at the northeast end of the trade center site.

entrails

JON CARROLL / SF CHRONICLE
Monday, June 20, 2005

I wrote a column last week about the general wretched state of things among the current governing classes, and I got more negative e-mail. Maybe the column got linked to some right-wing Web site; I'm not sure. One note came from a man who called me a "morron," which was lovely. And I got two that started more or less the same way: "Thank you for telling us what to think." I believe that was meant sarcastically.

They weren't form letters; I got a rashette of those, but these were not. What interested me was the resentment behind the phrase. I have long been amazed at the tendency of Republicans to still feel aggrieved and angry, even though they control both houses of Congress, the presidency and pretty soon will control the Supreme Court. There was a battle, and they won -- why do they still behave as though they lost? Why do they keep attacking like cornered animals? Why do Republicans whine so much? Whining in victory is just impolite.

I know there's a feeling that smarty-pants academics and lawyers and show- business executives have been denigrating middle America, or conservative values, or Christianity. That is, of course, true, just as conservatives have been denigrating academics and lawyers and show-business executives. But the pants of smartness tend to live on the coasts, in large rooms in large cities, and to take up a lot of room in the culture. They are the elite. Conservatives would say "self-styled" elite, but it wouldn't make the right wing crazy if it were just self-styled. I'm sure it occurs to a lot of people that the elite are telling them what to think.

I have a lot of problems with George Bush, but I would never complain that he was telling me what to think. I'm not sure what kind of resentment "telling me what to think" is. I'd call it a class resentment, but we'd have to get a new definition of "class."

Here's the problem with that mind-set -- not all facts are created equal. Indeed, not all "facts" are facts. Some "facts" are really opinion, and they may or may not be useful ways of looking at reality. But some "facts" are just bits of bad data. The moon is not a balloon, the Rocky Mountains are not made of Gouda, and "disassemble" does not mean "lie."

AIDS is not spread through tears or sweat, and saying so 300 times doesn't make it right. When Sen. Bill Frist arrived at a diagnosis of Terri Schiavo by examining a videotape, he was wrong -- not because his diagnosis was wrong (although it was) but because you just can't do it that way. (If you think you can, you could save a lot of money on doctor's appointments -- just make a videotape of yourself and send it to your family physician, or your family senator.)

You can't vote on the truth. I don't care how many people believe it, there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. There is no evidence at all that Iraq was connected to the Sept. 11 disaster, and anyone who thinks otherwise does so without evidence, meaning that it is a faith-based belief.

And I think we may be at the crux of the problem. Some people may think that I am saying that their religious faith is wrong, and I am not saying that. I have no idea what supernatural spirits control the world or how they control it. As it happens, I believe in the power of prayer, but I have no idea how it works because I have never seen an effective demonstration of any causal relationship. Maybe prayer changes lives because people believe that prayer changes lives. Maybe it's the world's biggest placebo effect.

But faith does not work on every problem, any more than a screwdriver or a Venn diagram works on every problem. It is our challenge as humans to select the proper tool for the job. There's an ancient warning, "When you have only a hammer, everything looks like a nail." When you have only faith, everything looks like God's will. And that may be right, but you can't figure out that two plus two equals four by consulting with God, or the stars, or goat entrails.

(Well, maybe you could -- I have two entrails here and two entrails there, so I have one, two, three, four goat entrails.)

Really good teachers do not tell us what to think; they teach us how to think. I understand that there are a lot of people in the media trying to tell you what to think, and it is kind of depressing, all that opinion floating around without visible means of support. I resent it myself sometimes; I think maybe it's time to fire all the pundits and hire a lot more reporters.

Present company excluded, of course. I have two hungry mouths to feed, plus the opinion garden out back.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I didn't much care for the Reagan administration, but at least those guys knew how to win gracefully. Generosity in victory? That's such 20th century thinking.

Well you know that it's a shame and a pity, you were raised up in the city and you never learned nothing 'bout jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

problem

i'd rather talk to you than type in some godforsaken blog

catapulting the propaganda

Official altered reports on links to global warming
U.S. climate research edited to downplay effects of greenhouse gases on environment

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In most cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

The documents were obtained by the New York Times from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers.

The group is representing Rick Piltz, who resigned in March as a senior associate in the office that coordinates government climate research. That office, now called the Climate Change Science Program, issued the documents that Cooney edited.

A White House spokeswoman, Michele St. Martin, said Tuesday that Cooney would not be made available to comment.

Other White House officials said the changes made by Cooney were part of the normal interagency review that takes place on all documents related to global environmental change.

But critics say that though all administrations routinely vet government reports, scientific content in such reports should be reviewed by scientists. Climate experts and representatives of environmental groups, when shown examples of the revisions, said they illustrated the significant if largely invisible influence of Cooney and other White House officials with ties to energy industries that have long fought greenhouse gas restrictions.

In a memorandum sent last week to the top officials dealing with climate change at a dozen agencies, Piltz said the White House editing and other actions threatened to taint the government's $1.8 billion-a-year effort to clarify the causes and consequences of climate change.

"Each administration has a policy position on climate change," Piltz wrote. "But I have not seen a situation like the one that has developed under this administration during the past four years, in which politicization by the White House has fed back directly into the science program in such a way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of the program."

Efforts by the Bush administration to highlight uncertainties in science pointing to human-caused warming have put the United States at odds with other nations and with scientific groups at home.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who met with President Bush at the White House on Tuesday, has been trying for several months to persuade Bush to intensify U.S. efforts to curb greenhouse gases.

Bush has called only for voluntary measures to slow growth in emissions through 2012.

On Tuesday, saying their goal was to influence that meeting, the scientific academies of 11 countries, including those of the United States and Britain, released a joint letter saying "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action."

- Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times

just around the bloody corner

As Casualties Mount, Bush Ignores Reality

Conservatives believe they know the best way to honor the sacrifices of our troops in Iraq: We must all pretend that the war is going fine, that progress is proceeding according to plan, that the insurgency is soon to be routed, and that victory is somewhere just over the horizon.

When things momentarily went well last winter during the Iraqi elections, we were urged to proclaim an imminent triumph—just as the right-wing pundits and politicians did so deliriously back then. When things began to deteriorate again with the recent upsurge in bombings and attacks, we were told to ignore the bad news—as those same pundits and politicians are doing so quietly now.

Although the ongoing carnage in Iraq no longer gets the headlines reserved for exhibitionist celebrities, even the flickering attention paid to death’s daily drumbeat is too much for certain war enthusiasts. A conservative columnist for The New York Times has suggested that the media simply cease coverage of suicide bombings. This was a strange proposal from someone working for one of the world’s most important news organizations, but one that aptly reflected current attitudes in the White House, the Defense Department and much of official Washington.

Both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney evidently believe their own uplifting rhetoric and brusque dismissals of criticism. They won’t let reality-based analysis intrude on their faith-based perspective.

At his latest press conference, Mr. Bush said he thinks the new Iraqi government "will be up to the task of defeating the insurgents." He harked back to the elections and said he was "heartened" to learn that there are now "40,000 Iraqi troops" sufficiently well trained to protect Baghdad. (In fact, our own commanders place little credence in that encouraging statistic.) To Mr. Bush, every devastating attack merely serves as further proof that the insurgents are "desperate."

Mr. Cheney takes the same optimistic approach, explaining that in his estimation, bad news is really good news. He told CNN interviewer Larry King that he perceives "major progress" in Iraq, where "they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." He didn’t seem to realize that he contradicted that remark when he then predicted that the war might conclude before 2009, the end of the President’s second term, although his general assessment remained vague. "I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time," he said.

How that "presence" will serve American interests remains as vague as Mr. Cheney’s timetable. In the meantime, it is worth noting that the Bush administration’s predictions have proven considerably less reliable than those of the war’s opponents. That observation goes beyond the absence of "weapons of mass destruction" or the enormous human and financial costs of what was supposed to be a cheap, easy cakewalk.

Many months ago, C.I.A. analysts indicated that bitter conflicts among Iraq’s competing ethnic and religious groups were driving the country toward civil war. At the time, Mr. Bush brushed aside such warnings as mere static from habitual critics. Yet now we can see that the car bombings, partisan assassinations and sectarian massacres are vindicating that grim assessment.

The cities and villages beset by the insurgency have become training camps for militant Islamists, the future cadre of the next terrorist movement. As Joshua Micah Marshall noted, the Iraqi killing fields are creating new terrorists, just as the bloody civil war in Afghanistan encouraged the rise of Al Qaeda.

The war’s advocates once suggested that Iraq would serve as "flypaper" for those terrorists, gathering them all in one place where our superior firepower and tactics could decimate them. "America will be safer in the long run when Iraq, and Afghanistan as well, are no longer safe havens for terrorists or places where people can gather and plan and organize attacks against the United States," insists Mr. Cheney.

But according to The Washington Post, Bush administration counterterrorism officials now anticipate the "bleeding out" of "hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe."

So while the President may tell us that the terrorists are being vanquished in Iraq, his own officials know better. The American people seem to be realizing that their initial support for the war was misplaced. Over the past month, polls have consistently showed decreasing confidence in the way Mr. Bush has conducted the war and diminishing confidence that the price in lives and treasure was justified.

By substantial margins, most Americans no longer approve of administration policy in Iraq, no longer think the war was worth its costs, and no longer feel certain that this misadventure will end happily. Very few are willing to say that we are losing the war, but even fewer agree with the President that things are going very well.

Unfortunately, Mr. Bush doesn’t seem to realize that he cannot wave away those misgivings—and that he may already have foreclosed an orderly and honorable conclusion to this war during his Presidency.

You may reach Joe Conason via email at: jconason@observer.com.