Thursday, July 28, 2005

no shit sherlock

Iraq Affecting Mental Health of Troops
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN, Associated Press Writer
45 minutes ago

Thirty percent of U.S. troops returning from the Iraq war have developed stress-related mental health problems three to four months after coming home, the Army's surgeon general said Thursday.

The problems include anxiety, depression, nightmares, anger and an inability to concentrate, said Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley and other military medical officials. A smaller number of troops, often with more severe symptoms, were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a serious mental illness.

The 30 percent figure is in contrast to the 3 percent to 5 percent diagnosed with a significant mental health issue immediately after they leave the war theater, according to Col. Elspeth Ritchie, a military psychiatrist on Kiley's staff. A study of troops who were still in the combat zone in 2004 found 13 percent experienced significant mental health problems.

Soldiers departing a war zone are typically given a health evaluation as they leave combat, but the Army is only now instituting a program for follow-up screenings three to six months later, said Kiley, speaking to reporters at a breakfast meeting.

A pilot program for the follow-up screenings, conducted on 1,000 U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq to Italy last year, found a much greater incidence of mental health problems than expected, a fact Kiley attributed to post-combat stress problems taking time to develop once the danger has passed.

Only about 4 percent or 5 percent of troops coming home from combat actually have PTSD, but many others face problems adjusting when they come home, Kiley said.

Such problems are sometimes more acute in members of the National Guard, who return to a civilian job when they leave active military duty, Ritchie said.

Military medical officials, however, cautioned against people reading their data as suggesting the war had driven so many soldiers over the edge. Instead, they characterized the anxiety and stress as normal reactions to combat, seeing dead and mutilated bodies, and feeling helpless to stop a violent situation.

Still, such reactions can lead to problems with spouses and children, substance abuse and just day-to-day life, they said.

Truck drivers and convoy guards in Iraq are developing mental health problems in greater numbers than other troops, Ritchie said, suggesting the long hours on the road, constantly under threat of attack, are taking their toll.

The military has about 200 mental health experts in Iraq, grouped in what the Army calls "combat stress control teams." These teams are at many posts around the country and talk with troops after battles, try to prevent suicides and diagnose troops who should be evacuated from of the country because of mental health problems.

"They are worth their weight in gold," Kiley said of the teams.

An inquiry into the mental health of soldiers serving in Iraq found an improvement in the mental health and morale in 2004 over 2003. The military made its report on the inquiry public last week.

The report said the number of suicides in Iraq and Kuwait declined from 24 in 2003 to nine last year.

Historically, mental health problems have always been a part of warfare, and was looked at systematically when shellshock cases accounted for significant losses during World War I.

Ritchie said mental health cases ebb and flow during a war, and suggested they are sometimes connected to a soldier's sense of success of the larger war effort. During the Korean War, cases increased when U.S. forces were losing ground but decreased as the situation improved, she said.
___

On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil/

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

15% cut for yours truly

Chronicle union approves five-year contract

- Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle Staff Writer

(07-27) 21:28 PDT San Francisco (SF Chronicle) -- The union representing about 900 newsroom, advertising and circulation employees at the San Francisco Chronicle approved a five-year contract tonight that includes many concessions but was viewed as the best deal possible.

Members of the Northern California Media Workers Guild voted 574 to 119 in favor of the deal, which was reached tentatively on July 24 and takes effect immediately. There were five abstentions.

The paper’s management has said cuts are necessary to keep the financially struggling newspaper afloat.

E-mail Leslie Fulbright at lfulbright@sfchronicle.com.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/07/28/BUcontract28.TMP

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

practice makes perfect

Israeli Troops Practice Removing Settlers
- By DANIELLE HAAS, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, July 26, 2005

(07-26) 10:15 PDT ZEELIM MILITARY BASE, Israel (AP) --

Israeli troops practiced the forcible removal of Jewish settlers from their homes Tuesday in the largest dress rehearsal yet for next month's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.


The training ground, at a desert military base, was a mock Arab village initially built to train Israeli security forces in urban warfare against Palestinian militants.


Some of the 5,000 or so police and soldiers played the role of settlers who were carried out of homes, each by a team of four. The "settlers" were put on a bus parked nearby, while other troops formed a cordon around houses being evacuated to prevent protesters from slipping back in.


When the real task arrives, now scheduled to begin Aug. 17, about 50,000 police and soldiers removal 9,000 settlers from Gaza and four small settlements in the northern West Bank, commanders said Tuesday.


Security forces will be deployed in several circles, with about 14,000 police and soldiers directly involved in the removal of settlers and the remainder protecting the front line forces from possible Palestinian fire.


Each settler family will be evacuated by a 17-member force, the police commander of the operation, Haggai Dotan, said at the start of Tuesday's drill. "We will come early in the mornings to introduce ourselves, not say why we are there, but rather how we are going to carry out the evacuation," he said.


Army spokeswoman Yael Hartmann said the troops removing the settlers will not carry guns but will have non-lethal weapons such as water cannons. It remains unclear whether settlers will voluntarily hand over their weapons, many of them army-issue, before the withdrawal, or whether they will be disarmed by the security forces. Each unit will have several female officers to remove settler women, many of whom are religious and observe a strict separation of the sexes.


Settlers who climb onto rooftops to evade the security forces will be dragged into containers dangling from cranes, military officials said. Once a house has been emptied, the settlers' belongings will be packed into boxes and removed by private companies.


"This is very sensitive for us, and a very different mission from what we have previously trained for," said Maj. Gen. Yiftah Rontal, the commander of the army's ground forces.


Settler leaders initially said there would be large-scale resistance to the withdrawal. However, government officials have said nearly half of the settler families have in the meantime sought compensation, suggesting a growing number would leave voluntarily.


"We estimate that most of the population will leave" voluntarily, said Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who watched Tuesday's drill.


Security officials are most concerned about hundreds of withdrawal opponents, including extremists, who have sneaked into the Gaza Strip recently to reinforce the settlers. Settler leaders were quoted Tuesday as saying they would stage protest marches in Israel next week to tie up security forces.


In other developments Tuesday:


_ Jerusalem planning authorities have authorized construction of a Jewish neighborhood in the Muslim quarter of the Old City, a plan liable to inflame tensions with the Palestinians, the Maariv newspaper reported.


_ The Palestinian Authority has set dates for final rounds of local elections that are being watched as a barometer of the rising power of Hamas militants and the decline of the ruling Fatah party.


_ Gesher, a group devoted to dialogue between religious and secular Jews in Israel, has set up a hot line for callers interested in discussing the Gaza pullout. The withdrawal plan has created a rift in Israel society, and has provoked fears that some opponents will turn to violence to try to derail it.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/07/26/international/i045015D23.DTL

Saturday, July 23, 2005

fictitious war ... real bastards ....

July 24, 2005
Eight Days in July
By FRANK RICH / NY TIMES

PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack in the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead of the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have been more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill Clinton to change this subject.

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes."

Only 36 hours after the John Roberts unveiling, The Washington Post nudged him aside to second position on its front page. Leading the paper instead was a scoop concerning a State Department memo circulated the week before the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame, in literally the loftiest reaches of the Bush administration - on Air Force One. The memo, The Post reported, marked the paragraph containing information about Ms. Plame with an S for secret. So much for the cover story that no one knew that her identity was covert.

But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much a window into the White House's panic and stonewalling as its haste to put forward the man he did. When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear.

As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months.

Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the early timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory scraps, two damning story lines emerge and both have legs.

The first: for half a year White House hands made the fatal mistake of thinking they could get away with trashing the Wilsons scot-free. They thought so because for nearly three months after the July 6, 2003, publication of Mr. Wilson's New York Times Op-Ed article and the outing of his wife in a Robert Novak column, there was no investigation at all. Once the unthreatening Ashcroft-controlled investigation began, there was another comfy three months.

Only after that did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel, take over and put the heat on. Only after that did investigators hustle to seek Air Force One phone logs and did Mr. Bush feel compelled to hire a private lawyer. But by then the conspirators, drunk with the hubris characteristic of this administration, had already been quite careless.

It was during that pre-Fitzgerald honeymoon that Scott McClellan declared that both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, had personally told him they were "not involved in this" - neither leaking any classified information nor even telling any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. Matt Cooper has now written in Time that it was through his "conversation with Rove" that he "learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A." Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "telling," "involved" or "this" is. If these people were similarly cute with F.B.I. agents and the grand jury, they've got an obstruction-of-justice problem possibly more grave than the hard-to-prosecute original charge of knowingly outing a covert agent.

Most fertile - and apparently ground zero for Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation - is the period at the very outset when those plotting against Mr. Wilson felt safest of all: those eight days in July 2003 between the Wilson Op-Ed, which so infuriated the administration, and the retaliatory Novak column. It was during that long week, on a presidential trip to Africa, that Colin Powell was seen on Air Force One brandishing the classified State Department memo mentioning Valerie Plame, as first reported by The New York Times.

That memo may have been the genesis of an orchestrated assault on the Wilsons. That the administration was then cocky enough and enraged enough to go after its presumed enemies so systematically can be found in a similar, now forgotten attack that was hatched on July 15, the day after the publication of Mr. Novak's column portraying Mr. Wilson as a girlie man dependent on his wife for employment.

On that evening's broadcast of ABC's "World News Tonight," American soldiers in Falluja spoke angrily of how their tour of duty had been extended yet again, only a week after Donald Rumsfeld told them they were going home. Soon the Drudge Report announced that ABC's correspondent, Jeffrey Kofman, was gay. Matt Drudge told Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post at the time that "someone from the White House communications shop" had given him that information.

Mr. McClellan denied White House involvement with any Kofman revelation, a denial now worth as much as his denials of White House involvement with the trashing of the Wilsons. Identifying someone as gay isn't a crime in any event, but the "outing" of Mr. Kofman (who turned out to be openly gay) almost simultaneously with the outing of Ms. Plame points to a pervasive culture of revenge in the White House and offers a clue as to who might be driving it. As Joshua Green reported in detail in The Atlantic Monthly last year, a recurring feature of Mr. Rove's political campaigns throughout his career has been the questioning of an "opponent's sexual orientation."

THE second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal's early timeline is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated "Mission Accomplished." On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to "bring 'em on." But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. "program." Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium "should never have been included" in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

In July 2005, there are still no W.M.D.'s, and we're still waiting to hear the full story of how, in the words of the Downing Street memo, the intelligence was fixed to foretell all those imminent mushroom clouds in the run-up to war in Iraq. The two official investigations into America's prewar intelligence have both found that our intelligence was wrong, but neither has answered the question of how the administration used that wrong intelligence in selling the war. That issue was pointedly kept out of the charter of the Silberman-Robb commission; the Senate Intelligence Committee promised to get to it after the election but conspicuously has not.

The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain.

Monday, July 18, 2005

think about it

republicans always seem concerned with supply
democrats always seem concerned with demand

monitor this

Groups say Bush is trying to stifle political opponents

- Eric Lichtblau, New York Times
Monday, July 18, 2005

Washington -- The FBI has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and anti-war protest groups in what the groups charge is an attempt to stifle political opposition to the Bush administration.

The FBI has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union, the leading critic of the Bush administration's anti-terror policies, and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace, an environmental group that has led acts of civil disobedience in protest over the administration's policies, the Justice Department disclosed in a court filing earlier this month in federal court in Washington.

The filing came as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act brought by the ACLU and other groups that maintain that the FBI has engaged in a pattern of political surveillance against critics of the Bush administration. A smaller batch of documents already turned over by the government sheds light on the interest of FBI counterterrorism officials in protests surrounding the Iraq war and last year's Republican National Convention.

FBI and Justice Department officials declined to say what was in the ACLU and Greenpeace files, citing the pending lawsuit. But they emphasized that as a matter of both policy and practice, they have not sought to monitor the political activities of any activist groups, and that any intelligence- gathering activities related to political protests are designed to prevent disruptive and criminal activity at demonstrations, not quell free speech. They said there may be an innocuous explanation for the large volume of files, like preserving requests from or complaints about the groups in agency files.

But officials at the two groups said they were troubled by the disclosure.

"Why would the FBI collect almost 1,200 pages on a civil rights organization engaged in lawful activity? What justification could there be, other than political surveillance of lawful First Amendment activities?" said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU.

Protest groups charge that FBI counterterrorism officials have used their expanded powers since the Sept. 11 attacks to blur the line between legitimate civil disobedience and violent or terrorist activity in what they liken to FBI political surveillance of the 1960s.

In all, the ACLU is now seeking FBI records since 2001 or earlier on some 150 groups that have been critical of the Bush administration's policies on the Iraq war and other matters.

The Justice Department is opposing the ACLU's request, saying it does not involve a matter of urgent public interest, and department lawyers say the sheer volume of material will take them eight to 11 months to process for Greenpeace and the ACLU alone.

The files that the FBI has already turned over in recent weeks center on two other groups that were involved in political protests in the last few years, and those files point to previously undisclosed communications by bureau counterterrorism officials regarding activity at protests.

Six pages of internal FBI documents on a group called United for Peace and Justice, which led wide-scale protests over the Iraq war, discuss the group's role in 2003 in preparing protests for last year's Republican National Convention.

A memo by counterterrorism personnel in the FBI's Los Angeles office circulated to other counterterrorism officials in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Washington makes reference to possible anarchist connections of some protesters and the prospect for disruptions but also quotes from more benign statements protesters had released on the Internet and elsewhere to prepare for the Republican convention.

A second file turned over by the FBI on the group American Indian Movement of Colorado includes seven pages of internal documents and press clippings related to protests and possible disruptions in the Denver area in connection with Columbus Day.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

damning

July 17, 2005

Follow the Uranium
By FRANK RICH

"I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here."

- Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.

"Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they didn't have the president's confidence."

- Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on Tuesday.

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.

Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.

To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the Cooper e-mail. It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush bashers and as exculpatory evidence by Bush backers (Mr. Rove, you see, was just trying to ensure that Time had its facts straight). But no one knows what this e-mail means unless it's set against the avalanche of other evidence, most of it secret, including what Mr. Rove said in three appearances before the grand jury. Therein lies the rub, or at least whatever case might be made for perjury.

Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship. But Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-style partisanship (his contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for committing career suicide. What's most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller's fate. That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.

Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush's fiercest defenders and on Mr. Bush himself. Hence, last week's erection of the stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan, who abruptly rendered inoperative his previous statements that any suspicions about Mr. Rove are "totally ridiculous." The morning after Mr. McClellan went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press room - "We've secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters," observed Jon Stewart - the ardently pro-Bush New York Post ran only five paragraphs of a wire-service story on Page 12. That conspicuous burial of what was front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks loudly about the rising anxiety on the right. Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar.

These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops." Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in "Psycho."

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.

By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."

AS if this weren't enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before "shock and awe," his announcement made none of the three evening newscasts. The administration's apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then - not merely in the State of the Union address - and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as "Independence Day" and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.

Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never mind!" with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on "Saturday Night Live." The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.

Friday, July 15, 2005

freedom is on the march

and so is stupidity ...

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

Tenn. Teen Jailed for Burning U.S. Flag Fri Jul 15, 3:10 PM ET

A teenager was jailed for nine days after being accused of burning an American flag on the Fourth of July, and he faces trial next month.

While the case could test a state statute against flag burning — an act the U.S. Supreme Court says is protected under the First Amendment — prosecutors said Andrew Elisha Staley has yet to argue that he was exercising free speech rights.

"Bottom line is, the kid got drunk," said Lisa Lee, his mother. "He's never been in trouble before."

Staley, 18, is accused of taking the flag from a residence and setting it on fire. His father said the teenager "has no reason for anger against the United States" and could easily have ignited a garbage can instead of a flag.

"He was brought up in church, and he knows right from wrong," Doc Staley said.

Doc Staley said his son has been "floundering around" since dropping out of high school. "This is where the drinking came in. And he's not very good at it," the father said.

The teenager was released from jail Thursday on his own recognizance while he awaits his Aug. 2 trial on charges of desecrating a venerated object, underage drinking, littering, evading arrest, burning personal property and theft.

The Tennessee flag-burning statute makes the crime a misdemeanor, punishable by less than a year in jail and up to $2,500 fine.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

my pelvic bone has been located

Large bones unearthed near suburban river

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

(07-12) 17:06 PDT San Jose, Calif. (AP) --

The fossilized bones of a creature that might have been a mastodon were unearthed Tuesday in the creek bed of a suburban river being renovated for flood protection.

The remains of what appears to be a massive pelvic bone, ribcage fragments and a tusk were uncovered along the Guadalupe River in San Jose. The river project has been cited as a model of how to integrate nature and development.

The discovery prompted both wonder and frustration, as officials tried to determine the source of the remains but couldn't find experts to scour the site.

"We've never come across this before. This is a whole new ballgame for us," said Mike DiMarco, a Santa Clara County Water District spokesman.

DiMarco said it was the first find of its kind in the district's 75-year history.

Professional paleontologists will examine the remains Wednesday. Amateur paleontologists were to spend the night at the site to make sure the bones remained safe.

Monday, July 11, 2005

telling and knowing

Plame, By Any Other Name

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, July 11, 2005 1:21 PM

There is no longer any question that top presidential adviser Karl Rove is a key player in the Valerie Plame case.

In fact, what Rove told Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about Plame is apparently one of the last things special prosecutor Patrick J.Fitzgerald is trying to determine before he wraps up his investigation into whether Plame was illegally outed as a CIA agent.

Newsweek yesterday described e-mails from Cooper relating his July 2003 interview with Rove. Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, told The Washington Post yesterday that his client spoke to Cooper, but did not identify Plame by name. Luskin also said Fitzgerald has told him that Rove is not a target of the probe.

But let's look at what we can conclude from all this:

· The latest news reports indicate that Rove is the source who Cooper was trying to protect until last week -- and that Rove tipped Cooper about Plame three days before Robert Novak published his now-famous column exposing Plame's identity.

· Fitzgerald has asserted in his court filings that testimony from Cooper and now-jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller is all he needs to wrap up his investigation into whether a crime was committed. So what Rove said about Plame would therefore appear to be either one of two things -- or the only thing -- that Fitzgerald is still trying to nail down.

· Rove and his lawyer's denials that he was involved in telling reporters about Plame now appear to be at best based on Clintonian hairsplitting about whether he literally used her name and identified her as covert or he simply described her as the CIA-employed wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the administration critic that White House was eager to discredit at the time.

· President Bush and press secretary Scott McClellan's denials that Rove was involved in the Plame matter now appear to be at best based on the position that their responses to broad questions about Rove and Plame were met with narrowly constructed responses specifically about whether Rove leaked "classified information." Or is it possible Rove lied to them?

· And McClellan's frequent implication that, if Rove talked to reporters about Plame it was only after Novak's column had already come out, now appears suspect.

If Karl Rove, Bush's top political strategist, longtime friend and deputy chief of staff is actually indicted by Fitzgerald -- which now appears to be a possibility -- it would be an enormous blow to Bush's second term. Until Fitzgerald wraps up his highly secretive investigation, however, that's all just speculation.

So let's ask ourselves some more practical questions instead:

· Does Rove's current position pass the smell test?

· Taking into account Bush's previous statements about leaks, does this mean he now has no choice but to fire Rove?

· Did Rove keep all this from Bush?

· Or did Bush know, but chose to keep silent and do nothing?

For some quick background, here is what Rove has said directly about Plame:

As ABC News's The Note reported on Sept. 29, 2003, ABC News producer Andrea Owen and a cameraman approached Rove that morning as he walked toward his car.

Owen: "Did you have any knowledge or did you leak the name of the CIA agent to the press?"

Rove: "No."

At which point, Rove shut his car door.

Then on August 31, 2004, Rove spoke to CNN's John King .

King: "Did someone in the White House leak the name of the CIA operative? What is your assessment of the status of the investigation, and can you tell us that you had nothing to do with. . . .

Rove: "Well, I'll repeat what I said to ABC News when this whole thing broke some number of months ago. I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name."

Here is McClellan in a Sept. 16, 2003 briefing :

"Q Now, this is apparently a federal offense, to burn the cover a CIA operative. . . . Did Karl Rove do it?

"MR. McCLELLAN: I said, it's totally ridiculous."

On Sept. 30, 2003 , Bush himself was asked if Rove had a role in the CIA leak.

"Listen, I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information," he said. "If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing."

And here is McClellan in an Oct. 7, 2003 briefing: "If someone in this administration leaked classified information, they will no longer be a part of this administration, because that's not the way this White House operates, that's not the way this President expects people in his administration to conduct their business. . . .

"If someone sought to punish someone for speaking out against the administration, that is wrong, and we would not condone that activity. No one in this White House would condone that activity. . . .

"It's absurd to suggest that the White House would be engaged in that kind of activity. That is not the way this White House operates."

This Just In

On MSNBC, Bob Kur reported out of this morning's off-camera gaggle with McClellan: "Well, they're being pummeled with questions here this morning. Very interesting turn of events. The White House spokesman just a few minutes ago was asked about the latest developments about Karl Rove and he says he can't comment because it's an ongoing criminal investigation -- and yet reporters went after him with questions saying that during this ongoing investigation at earlier stages, he was willing to stand at the podium and say flat out that Karl Rove was not involved in the leak of the C.I.A. operative's identity.

"Well, so those are some tough questions to be answered here at the White House today."

The News

Michael Isikoff writes in Newsweek: "It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. 'Subject: Rove/P&C,' (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. 'Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation. . . . ' Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, 'please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]' and suggested another reporter check with the CIA."

The White House, back in July 2003, was eager to discredit Wilson, who was publicly asserting that he had found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and had made that clear to administration officials before Bush included the charge in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Isikoff writes: "In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. . . . Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a 'big warning' not to 'get too far out on Wilson.' Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by 'DCIA' -- CIA Director George Tenet -- or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, 'it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.' "

Isikoff was on MSNBC this morning and said: "Karl Rove has never before acknowledged that he had spoken to Matthew Cooper or anybody else about the Wilson matter prior to the Novak column. The White House initially dismissed claims that Karl Rove was involved, in any way involved, in the outing of Valerie Plame as totally ridiculous and even as recently as last week, Karl Rove's lawyer was saying that it was -- that Rove was never a confidential source for any reporter on this matter. The e-mail conclusively disproves those statements."

Joe Hagan writes in the Wall Street Journal: "After a week of seemingly contradictory reports, one fact appears to have solidified: Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of President Bush's election victories, was a key confidential source used by Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper in his July 2003 article about a Central Intelligence Agency operative. . . .

"The unmasking of Mr. Rove marks an important milestone in the case. On the one hand, the details of Mr. Rove's discussion with Mr. Cooper -- especially if he didn't name Ms. Plame -- may exculpate him of the intentional, illegal disclosure of the identity of a covert CIA operative. Much will depend on whether Mr. Rove truthfully described any conversations in testimony before the grand jury. If he did, that would clear him of even a perjury charge and any criminal liability.

"That said, the disclosure that Mr. Bush's top political strategist discussed the CIA employment of Mr. Wilson's wife amounts to a political embarrassment for Mr. Rove and the White House. A presidential spokesman had previously given what appeared to be an unequivocal public assurance that Mr. Rove hadn't been involved in the disclosure of Ms. Plame as a CIA operative. Discovery that earlier denials may have been carefully parsed would represent another blow to the administration's credibility, compounding damage from the underlying issue that initially brought Mr. Wilson into the spotlight."

Josh White writes in The Washington Post: "White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name. . . .

"Rove's conversation with Cooper could be significant because it indicates a White House official was discussing Plame prior to her being publicly named and could lead to evidence of how Novak learned her name.

"While the information is revelatory, it is still unknown whether Rove is a focus of the investigation. Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, has said that Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has told him that Rove is not a target of the probe. Luskin said yesterday that Rove did not know Plame's name and was not actively trying to push the information into the public realm."

Adam Liptak writes in the New York Times: " 'A fair reading of the e-mail as well as the context in which the conversation took place makes it clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity,' Mr. Luskin said."

Over at Time, where they certainly know what's going on, Bill Saporito simply writes: "And who was Cooper's source? A number of news organizations named Karl Rove, President Bush's senior political adviser. Time's editors have decided not to reveal the source at this time."

On TV

ABC's Good Morning America show today reported that "Presidential adviser Karl Rove may be in hot water with his boss now that his lawyer admitted he gave sensitive info to a reporter -- a leak that's at the center of a federal investigation. Here's ABC's Jessica Yellin."

Yellin: "He is one of the president's most trusted advisors, credited as the architect of the Bush campaign but now Newsweek magazine is reporting that Karl Rove is also one of the people who leaked secret information about a covert C.I.A. Agent to the media.. . . .

"Since the beginning of the investigation, President Bush has taken the position he does not tolerate leaks. . . .

"Legal experts say based on these e-mails Rove did not break the law, he did not name the woman or reveal that she was an undercover agent. But Rove must still answer to the president. The White House has maintained that anyone who leaked the identity of a C.I.A. Operative is not welcomed in the administration."

CNN, which happens to be owned by the same people who own Time magazine, is being oddly silent on the Rove issue this morning.

And on Fox News, they're not taking it too seriously.

On Fox News's Fox and Friends this morning, Kelly Wright reported: "Amid the difficult task of choosing a candidate for the Supreme Court and waging the war on terror, the White House is also dealing with a report about top White House adviser Karl Rove."

But, he concluded: "Bottom line here, guys, when you read between the lines, Karl Rove never mentioned anyone's name. "

Steve Doocy had a follow-up question: "Kelly, did I hear you right? Matthew Cooper wrote that the information that he had received was on double supersecret background ?

Wright: "That's right. According to this report that we're getting. . . .

Doocy: "Well, it must not be too double supersecret because we know about it now!"

Hairsplitting . . . From Cooper?

Adam Liptak in the Times attempts to reconstruct the events of Wednesday morning, when Cooper announced: "A short time ago, in somewhat dramatic fashion, I received an express personal release from my source."

Sounds like a phone call directly from his source, doesn't it?

But Liptak writes: "Mr. Cooper, it turns out, never spoke to his confidential source that day, said Robert D. Luskin, a lawyer for the source, who is now known to be Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser.

"The development was actually the product of a frenzied series of phone calls initiated that morning by a lawyer for Mr. Cooper and involving Mr. Luskin and the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald. . . .

"Mr. Cooper and his personal lawyer, Richard A. Sauber, declined to comment on the negotiations, but Mr. Sauber said that Mr. Cooper had used the word 'personal' to mean specific."

But what Cooper said he got -- and what Miller says she hasn't gotten from her source -- is an explicit assurance that he was no longer bound by his confidentiality pledge. And Liptak writes: "Mr. Luskin said he had only reaffirmed the blanket waiver, in response to a request from Mr. Fitzgerald."

Liptak, by the way, also raises the question of whether Cooper got an explicit assurance before he testified in August about his conversations with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.

Previous Statements

Blogger Billmon has put together an excellent collection of previous White House statements vouching for Rove, so I don't have to.

Questions for the Media

Here are some questions for my fellow journalists:

· For those covering the latest developments: How does it matter whether Rove literally used Plame's name or not?

· Why, as the Think Progress blog has been asking, did no one in the White House press corps ask McClellan even one question about Rove's involvement last week as the story was starting to unfold?

· Has Karl Rove routinely hidden behind confidentiality to spread damaging information about the White House's enemies?

· Should there maybe be a new category of "I'll-go-to-jail-for-you" on background reserved exclusively for whistle-blowers?

· Will any of you ever grant Karl Rove confidentiality again?

The Wild, Wild Web

The left side of the Web is in a state of near ecstasy. And the right side is enraged -- primarily by the left side's ecstasy and the media's presumed feeding frenzy.

On the left:

The Nation's David Corn writes: "There now is clear-cut evidence that Rove was involved in -- if not the chief architect of -- the actions that led to the outing of Plame/Wilson. If he's not in severe legal trouble, he ought to be in political peril. . . .

"[T]his is proof that the Bush White House was using any information it could gather on Joseph Wilson -- even classified information related to national security -- to pursue a vendetta against Wilson, a White House critic. Even if it turns out Rove did not break the law regarding the naming of intelligence officials, this new disclosure could prove Rove guilty of leaking a national security secret to a reporter for political ends. What would George W. Bush do about that?"

Here's Tim Grieve on Salon.com: "It's plainly no defense to the crime of leaking the identity of a CIA agent to say that you didn't actually use her name: Federal law prohibits the intentional disclosure of 'any information identifying' a covert agent."

On Huffingtonpost.com, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) writes: "Remember during the 2000 Presidential campaign when the Republican mantra was that President Bush was going to 'restore honesty and dignity to the White House?' How's that going?"

On the right:

Blogger Tom Maguire writes: "This Newsweek revelation may create some political heat for Karl, but it is far from clear that, if these notes accurately describe the conversation, Karl Rove had the intent and knowledge that are also elements of a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act."

A post on the Powerline blog suggests: "The media feeding frenzy will, indeed, be massive. But absent a serious claim of a statutory violation or perjury, it's questionable whether anyone apart from liberal bloggers and other pre-existing Bush haters will partake in the media's dog food. This isn't a top presidential aide accepting an expensive gift, or engaging in lewd sexual conduct. It's a top aide providing truthful information to journalists in response to lies told to embarrass the administration and our government."

Blogger Hugh Hewitt says its all particularly unseemly in the wake of the London transit bombings. "[T]he president values and trusts Rove, and the assault on Rove has nothing to do with outrage over injury to the national security and everything to do with bleeding Bush. The idea that the forces that defended Clinton's bald lies under oath are now 'outraged' over spun-up pretend perjury charges would be wildly amusing but for the fact that the tragic losses of the past few days have not interrupted the vendettaists for even a decent interval."

Rove Speaks

Rove was in Nebraska on Friday, talking about . . . Social Security.

In town primarily for a fundraiser, Rove also stopped by the offices of Ameritrade.

Nate Jenkins writes in the Lincoln Journal Star: "Rove spoke for about 15 minutes at the online brokerage firm, answered a few written questions from employees, and then left without taking questions from reporters. He stuck solely to the Social Security message, not mentioning the bombings that left at least 50 dead in London. Nor did he address the pending investigation into whether Bush administration officials in 2003 illegally leaked the name of a CIA agent to reporters after the agent's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly criticized the Bush administration's arguments for going to war in Iraq. . . .

"The event Friday was closed to the public, and Rove's message was delivered to a company that Ameritrade Chief Operating Officer J. Peter Ricketts said would not directly benefit from partially privatizing Social Security but that he said could 'in the grand scheme of things.' "

knowing and telling

Writers make good bloggers, but does blogging affect good writing?

- Tom Dolby, Special to The Chronicle
Monday, July 11, 2005

New York -- As a novelist, I love blogs. Though this does not make me particularly unusual, it does place me in the minority of online Americans -- 27 percent, to be exact -- who, according to a poll last year, have ever read a blog. Since my blog affair began, I have often asked myself whether I should, like scores of other writers, add a proper Web log feature to my site, www.TomDolby.com.

I currently have a news page, but it's not a real blog in the sense of running daily musings on the inner life of a writer. My faux-blog -- the guy who designed my site calls it the "Dolblog," a nickname I may formally adopt someday -- is the ultimate in self-aggrandizement, something I am the first to admit. It notes bookstore appearances, mentions in the press, and funny experiences I've had while promoting my novel. It's not like other authors' blogs, in which they reveal their insecurities, their slights, the fact that their partners are angry at them. Through their blogs, many of which are updated daily, these authors are able to grow and cultivate an audience between books.

These blogs -- and there are many, many of them out there, possibly hundreds and thousands of blogs maintained by traditionally published writers -- remove the skin and reveal the skeleton, the guts, of creative life. Unlike previous eras, in which artists divulged such intimate details in their journals, through letters, or in cafes over a glass of wine, they now do it online, writ large on a cyber screen for all the world to see. As with everything else in our society (the omnipotence of reality television, the voracious paparazzi), privacy be damned. Or, to put it more optimistically, as San Francisco literary prognosticator Kevin Smokler notes in the introduction to his recent anthology "Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times," "we live in a culture where we expect the creative to be visible."

The novelist Jennifer Weiner, for example, has an entertaining blog (jenniferweiner.blogspot.com) in which she fills her readers in on everything from the novels she's working on to the television shows she watches to what her toddler ate for lunch. Like Weiner, I am also a devotee of popular culture. I have all sorts of comical daily experiences and observations, and I surf other blogs and have opinions about them as much as any writer does.

Because I don't have a regular column anywhere, and not every reflection about life as Tom Dolby fits into the novel I'm currently writing, often these experiences sit dormant in my journal or in some file on my computer. If I had a blog, they could be out there in the world. They could sing! I could write about my wonderfully eccentric family; I could let my readers know about my recent breakup and re-entry on the dating scene. I could discuss books I've enjoyed and articles I've read. In my most egotistical moments, I imagine that since it's all fascinating to me, it would be of interest to my readers as well. That is, of course, the essence of a personal blog: "I am, therefore I blog."

My first real interaction with the blogosphere began in February; after having been a dedicated blog reader for several years, I did a Virtual Book Tour (www.virtualbooktour.org) to promote the paperback edition of my first novel, "The Trouble Boy." Coordinated by Smokler, 11 different blogs ran content related to my book over the course of one day; the tour reached 50,000 viewers.

As the guest blogger for the brilliant Los Angeles-based literary blog the Elegant Variation (www.elegvar.com), the process was easy and fun. No editors to pitch to! No one to limit the narcissistic ramblings I could foist upon my audience! I posted interviews with my friends, wrote about sending an early draft of my latest manuscript to my agent and linked to articles I thought were provocative. It was all promotional and self-serving, but I also found it strangely therapeutic. Unlike my regular writing routine, in which I have to wait at least a few weeks until something of mine is published, it was immediate; in contrast to working alone at my laptop, I felt connected to a community of others.

When I told my mother about the Virtual Book Tour, she said to me, "You won't start a blog, will you? I wouldn't want you to write anything too personal!" Unfortunately, the jig is already up, and she knows it. As an author who works in a confessional vein, I believe that writing is the art of telling secrets. I find no shame in it; while not all of my work is autobiographical, I have no problem with using some of my life's stories as inspiration. A portion of what I write about in my fiction and nonfiction is material that could also be covered in a blog. Yet were I to start blogging, whatever the benefits might be -- increased visibility for my books, that sense of instant cyberspace gratification -- I'm not certain what the damage would be to my other work.

Imagine, for a moment, if blogs were not a recent phenomenon: Would Philip Roth have blogged about his divorces? Would J.D. Salinger have posted entries about his reluctance to publish again? I was asked recently, "If you're a real writer, do you blog?" Absolutely, if you want to. I think someday bloggers will be recognized, server space permitting, as the great chroniclers of our time, joining serial scribes like Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens, Herb Caen and Armistead Maupin. For unpublished writers, blogging is a fantastic -- arguably, the best -- way to get noticed by an agent or publisher and get a book deal. But I wonder how many published or even unpublished writers would do better to spend less time blogging and more time working on their books.

I'm certainly not the first person to express a dissenting voice about this. When I was in San Francisco recently as a Library Laureate, I spoke with the writer Ayelet Waldman about it. "Don't do it," she said. "Blogging will ruin your life." Several months ago, Waldman wrote about her own experience in Salon, concluding that when she was blogging, "The fertile composting that I count on to generate my fiction was no longer happening."

What Waldman was referring to was the gap -- that is, the time between an event happening and a writer putting it out into the world. For a blogger, it could be five minutes; for a novelist or memoirist, it could be years. As writers, it is critical that we protect that period, that we preserve the burgeoning vitality of our ideas while they are still in their developmental phases. There is an alchemy that takes place in that interval, during which reality turns into art. Bloggers who are also long-form writers risk losing that magic. Offered the rewards of immediacy, they may miss out on the gestational stages between having an experience or idea and its fruition on the page. I am reminded of that famous Grace Paley short story, "Debts," in which the narrator, a writer, says, "There is a long time in me between knowing and telling."

That long time may best be experienced alone. As a novelist, so much of my interior life is already exposed -- when a book of mine is published, I'm giving my readers eight or 12 or 24 hours of myself -- that to give up that essential energy and put it all online would be to spill some of the blood that fuels my work. For now, I want to experience at least part of my world privately, to let my ideas percolate in my imagination before they make their way to the printed page or the screen.

As for the rest of the blogo-sphere, blog away. I've got you bookmarked.

Tom Dolby is the author of the best-selling novel "The Trouble Boy" (Kensington Books). A native San Franciscan, he currently lives in Manhattan and is working on his second novel, set at a New England boarding school. He can be reached at www.tomdolby.com.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

worse than watergate

July 10, 2005

We're Not in Watergate Anymore

FRANK RICH / NY TIMES

WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.

To start to see why, forget all the legalistic chatter about shield laws and turn instead to "The Secret Man," Bob Woodward's new memoir about life with Deep Throat. The book arrived in stores just as Judy Miller was jailed, as if by divine intervention to help illuminate her case.

Should a journalist protect a sleazy, possibly even criminal, source? Yes, sometimes, if the public is to get news of wrongdoing. Mark Felt was a turncoat with alternately impenetrable and self-interested motives who betrayed the F.B.I. and, in Mr. Woodward's words, "lied to his colleagues, friends and even his family." (Mr. Felt even lied in his own 1979 memoir.) Should a journalist break a promise of confidentiality after, let alone before, the story is over? "It is critical that confidential sources feel they would be protected for life," Mr. Woodward writes. "There needed to be a model out there where people could come forward or speak when contacted, knowing they would be protected. It was a matter of my work, a matter of honor."

That honorable model, which has now been demolished at Time, was a given in what seems like the halcyon Watergate era of "The Secret Man." Mr. Woodward and Carl Bernstein had confidence that The Washington Post's publisher, Katharine Graham, and editor, Ben Bradlee, would back them to the hilt, even though the Nixon White House demonized their reporting as inaccurate (as did some journalistic competitors) and threatened the licenses of television stations owned by the Post Company.

At Time, Norman Pearlstine - a member of the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, no less - described his decision to turn over Matt Cooper's files to the feds as his own, made on the merits and without consulting any higher-ups at Time Warner. That's no doubt the truth, but a corporate mentality needn't be imposed by direct fiat; it's a virus that metastasizes in the bureaucratic bloodstream. I doubt anyone at Time Warner ever orders an editor to promote a schlocky Warner Brothers movie either. (Entertainment Weekly did two covers in one month on "The Matrix Reloaded.")

Time Warner seems to have far too much money on the table in Washington to exercise absolute editorial freedom when covering the government; at this moment it's awaiting an F.C.C. review of its joint acquisition (with Comcast) of the bankrupt cable company Adelphia. "Is this a journalistic company or an entertainment company?" David Halberstam asked after the Pearlstine decision. We have the answer now. What high-level source would risk talking to Time about governmental corruption after this cave-in? What top investigative reporter would choose to work there?

But the most important difference between the Bush and Nixon eras has less to do with the press than with the grave origins of the particular case that has sent Judy Miller to jail. This scandal didn't begin, as Watergate did, simply with dirty tricks and spying on the political opposition. It began with the sending of American men and women to war in Iraq.

Specifically, it began with the former ambassador Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003, account on the Times Op-Ed page (and in concurrent broadcast appearances) of his 2002 C.I.A. mission to Africa to determine whether Saddam Hussein had struck a deal in Niger for uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson concluded that there was no such deal, as my colleague Nicholas Kristof reported, without divulging Mr. Wilson's name, that spring. But the envoy's dramatic Op-Ed piece got everyone's attention: a government insider with firsthand knowledge had stepped out of the shadows of anonymity to expose the administration's game authoritatively on the record. He had made palpable what Bush critics increasingly suspected, writing that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Up until that point, the White House had consistently stuck by the 16 incendiary words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The administration had ignored all reports, not just Mr. Wilson's, that this information might well be bogus. But it still didn't retract Mr. Bush's fiction some five weeks after the State of the Union, when Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced that the uranium claim was based on fake documents. Instead, we marched on to war in Iraq days later. It was not until Mr. Wilson's public recounting of his African mission more than five months after the State of the Union that George Tenet at long last released a hasty statement (on a Friday evening, just after the Wilson Op-Ed piece) conceding that "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

The Niger uranium was hardly the only dubious evidence testifying to Saddam's supposed nuclear threat in the run-up to war. Judy Miller herself was one of two reporters responsible for a notoriously credulous front-page Times story about aluminum tubes that enabled the administration's propaganda campaign to trump up Saddam's W.M.D. arsenal. But red-hot uranium was sexy, and it was Mr. Wilson's flat refutation of it that drove administration officials to seek their revenge: they told the columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson had secured his (nonpaying) African mission through the nepotistic intervention of his wife, a covert C.I.A. officer whom they outed by name. The pettiness of this retribution shows just how successfully Mr. Wilson hit the administration's jugular: his revelation threatened the legitimacy of the war on which both the president's reputation and re-election campaign had been staked.

This was another variation on a Watergate theme. Charles Colson's hit men broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, seeking information to smear Mr. Ellsberg after he leaked the Pentagon Papers, the classified history of the Vietnam War, to The Times. But there was even greater incentive to smear Mr. Wilson than Mr. Ellsberg. Nixon compounded the Vietnam War but didn't start it. The war in Iraq, by contrast, is Mr. Bush's invention.

Again following the Watergate template, the Bush administration at first tried to bury the whole Wilson affair by investigating itself. Even when The Washington Post reported two months after Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed that "two top White House officials" had called at least six reporters, not just Mr. Novak, to destroy Mr. Wilson and his wife, the inquiry was kept safely within the John Ashcroft Justice Department, with the attorney general, according to a Times report, being briefed regularly on details of the investigation. If that rings a Watergate bell now, that's because on Thursday you may have read the obituary of L. Patrick Gray, Mark Felt's F.B.I. boss, who, in a similarly cozy conflict of interest, kept the Nixon White House abreast of the supposedly independent Watergate inquiry in its early going.

Political pressure didn't force Mr. Ashcroft to relinquish control of the Wilson investigation to a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, until Dec. 30, 2003, more than five months after Mr. Novak's column ran. Now 18 more months have passed, and no one knows what crime Mr. Fitzgerald is investigating. Is it the tricky-to-prosecute outing of Mr. Wilson's wife, the story Judy Miller never even wrote about? Or has Mr. Fitzgerald moved on to perjury and obstruction of justice possibly committed by those who tried to hide their roles in that outing? If so, it would mean the Bush administration was too arrogant to heed the most basic lesson of Watergate: the cover-up is worse than the crime.

"Mr. Fitzgerald made his bones prosecuting the mob," intoned the pro-Bush editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, "and doesn't seem to realize that this case isn't about organized crime." But that may be exactly what it is about to an ambitious prosecutor with his own career on the line. That the Bush administration would risk breaking the law with an act as self-destructive to American interests as revealing a C.I.A. officer's identity smacks of desperation. It makes you wonder just what else might have been done to suppress embarrassing election-season questions about the war that has mired us in Iraq even as the true perpetrators of 9/11 resurface in Madrid, London and who knows where else.

IN his original Op-Ed piece in The Times, published two years to the day before Judy Miller went to jail, Mr. Wilson noted that "more than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already," before concluding that "we have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons." As that death toll surges past 1,700, that sacred duty cannot be abandoned by a free press now.

Monday, July 04, 2005

god bless my ass

beer
burgers
baseball