Me: Frank Lynch

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Another 2004 re-election myth... In today's Washington Post, Dan Balz writes...

President Bush's descent from the euphoria of an against-the-odds reelection victory one year ago this week to the current reality of a White House in crisis has been as rapid as it has been unexpected. Presidential advisers and outside analysts say the route back to genuine recovery is likely to be slow and difficult -- and without a clear blueprint for success.

What's this "against-the-odds" story Balz is trying to peddle? I just don't see it. The polls had them pretty even for much of the time, and I don't think Kerry ever had a significant lead. So why is Balz putting Bush in an Underdog cape? What gives?
Link | | | 11:27 AM | Home

Surprise: David Brooks gets it wrong! In today's New York Times, David Brooks quickly leads his readers astray... Or tries to:

Patrick Fitzgerald has just completed a 22-month investigation of the Bush presidency. One thing is clear: there is no cancer on this presidency. Fitzgerald, who seems to be a model prosecutor, enjoyed what he called full cooperation from all federal agencies. He found enough evidence to indict one man, Scooter Libby, on serious charges.

But he did not find evidence to prove that there was a broad conspiracy to out a covert agent for political gain. He did not find evidence of wide-ranging criminal behavior. He did not even indict the media's ordained villain, Karl Rove. And as the former prosecutors Robert Ray and Richard Ben-Veniste said on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," he gave little indication he was going to do that in the future.

From there (you should really subscribe...), Brooks shies away from anything Fitzgerald himself said in his press conference or what was included in the indictment. Instead, to make his point that there's "no there there," he relies on what he sees as others' overstatements of the solidity of the case against Rove et al, and concludes that since there is no indictment against Rove, there is no conspiracy, there is no evidence, there is no crime.

This is not what Fitzgerald has said. Certainly Fitzgerald saw harm to the country, for early in his session, prior to questions, Fitzgerald said, for instance, "[T]he damage wasn't to one person. It wasn't just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us."

Did Fitzgerald see no conspiracy, as Brooks claims from the lack of an indictment? Does Fitzgerald think Rove did nothing wrong? What Fitzgerald actually says is that his understanding of the truth is limited thanks to Libby's actions — I refer here to "sand in the umpire's eyes" metaphor. This is completely different from someone saying "I have the truth, and the truth is Karl Rove is an altar boy." That essentially works out to "I can't say there was a conspiracy," and it's because he's unable to say that that out of a rule of law he leaves Rove unindicted for now and unmentioned in the indictment by name. It's out of all of our own best interests that someone like Rove is not named, he says.

As for whether or not Rove will be indicted, Brooks studiously relies on the statements others made on PBS' NewsHour, who concluded Fitzgerald suggested there was little likelihood of that happening. Brooks completely ignores the last point made on that show, from Richard Ben-Veniste: "[Fitzgerald] has also indicated that Mr. Rove is still under investigation." Point? Things can change. Yes, Fitzgerald says he's got most of the evidence, but that's not to say that more won't come out. Libby himself, for instance, may decide to have different discussions with the prosecutor in the coming days.

This is not a vindication of everyone but Libby, as Brooks would have you believe. If he went to the original sources (the indictment and Fitzgerald's statements on Friday), rather than secondary sources, he'd be able to see that.
Link | | | 9:33 AM | Home
 

The obstruction of justice is no insignificant crime. Bush defenders and a questioning public are asking why, after all this time, we still don't know who leaked Plame's name to Novak; well, Fitzgerald has argued that his ability to learn the truth has been hampered by Libby's activities: obstruction of justice, perjury, and lying. The implications of these actions generally include justice being at least delayed and quite possibly not being served in the case, but also there are ripple effects in that justice in other cases may not be served (resources are limited) as well as the waste of taxpayer dollars while the offending individual puts his/her own interests above those of justice.

The impact of the delays was evident in Fitzgerald's statements yesterday. Had everyone in the White House been forthright in September of 2003 (or even July, when the leak occurred), there would have not even been a need to subpoena members of the press:

QUESTION: In the end, was it worth keeping Judy Miller in jail for 85 days in this case? And can you say how important her testimony was in producing this indictment?

FITZGERALD: Let me just say this: No one wanted to have a dispute with the New York Times or anyone else. We can't talk generally about witnesses. There's much said in the public record.

FITZGERALD: I would have wished nothing better that, when the subpoenas were issued in August 2004, witnesses testified then, and we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005. No one would have went to jail.

I didn't have a vested interest in litigating it. I was not looking for a First Amendment showdown. I also have to say my job was to find out what happened here, make reasoned judgments about what testimony was necessary, and then pursue it.

Now I believe Fitzgerald is talking there about resistance from the press, I don't know the full range of subpoenas that were issued then; yet the press would not have been an issue had the White House fully cooperated early, and even outed the truth itself in advance of any prosecution.

October 2004 was of course a month before the election, and the odd thing is that had it happened then we know that the Right would have argued that Fitzgerald's timing was politically motivated. We know that because:

• The timing of CBS's Texas Air National Gueard piece was questioned for just this reason;
   
• Similarly, the release of the news on the al Qa Qaa munitions dumps were characterized the same way.

In addition to these two points, read what NRO writer Andy McCarthy wrote earlier this week regarding charges that Fitzgerald is being partisan:

This investigation has gone on for 22 months. Most of the evidence was collected before autumn 2004 the last year of delay has mainly been caused by reporters challenging subpoenas in the federal courts.

If Pat were political — or, worse, if he somehow had it in for the Bush administration — it was fully within his power to return indictments in the weeks before the November elections, which would almost certainly have cinched things for Senator Kerry. It is something, I am quite certain, it would never even have occurred to him to do. The only thing the guy I know would do is bring charges or close the case without charges when the facts of the investigation warranted doing so.

So, if the reporters had caved or the White House had been more open, the case might have come out in October '04, and then the Right could legitimately have claimed that Fitzgerald's timing was partisan? McCarthy is saying it wouldn't have been true, but that it would have been more difficult to defend against the charge of partisanship.

So justice has been delayed, and there's a real good chance that the election would have tuned out otherwise. The country has been robbed in these two arenas, but at the same time, Fitzgerald's energies, his staff's, the FBI: they've all had to spend their time on this rather than pursuing other game. I'm not saying that this wasn't a legitimate pursuit, rather that it was an additional pursuit requiring the allocation of scarce resources.

Let's also be serious about this, Rove and Libby are not the only ones who may be culpable here. Even if the President and Vice President were not directly involved in decisions to provide Plame's name to the Press, it's now apparent that either they took no action to uncover the source: in September 2003, Bush declared about this very case,

I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business.

There are more in the line of platitudes in that session, but it's clear that the President really did little to encourage his staff to go forward. Hell, he could have found it all out himself in July '03 if he'd really wanted to. In that session he complained that there are too many leaks in Washington; he might just as well have said there's too much stonewalling. This could have been over long ago: in fact, it could have been taken care of in '03, and Bush could have gone into the '04 elections with a strong record of meting out punishment even against those in his own White House.
Link | | | 8:41 AM | Home
 

Merry Fitzmas! Is this the day that starts a long-overdue crumbling? Conservative pundits can no longer use a "who cares, only inside the beltway types care, you needn't bother your little mind" ploy to suggest that it's unimportant. I think I saw a Gallup poll release that said something like 80% of Americans thought something was rotten in the state of Denmark:

A CNN-Gallup poll published yesterday found only one in 10 Americans thought the administration had done nothing wrong, while 39% thought it had done something illegal and 39% thought its actions merely unethical.

Much of America is old enough to remember the progress of the drips which brought Nixon down. He resigned in August of 1974, but nearly a year and a half beforehand he accepted Haldeman's and Ehrlichman's resignations and referred to them as "two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know." There was a bit of an odd echo of that in Vice President Cheney's acceptance of the resignation of his newly indicted Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Cheney's statement read in part,

Scooter Libby is one of the most capable and talented individuals I have ever known. He has given many years of his life to public service and has served our nation tirelessly and with great distinction.

I'm not ready to suggest that either Bush or Cheney committed a crime on this specific issue, but we can't help but wonder how high it goes. Libby's indictment mentioned a discussion with an unnamed "Official A" who claimed to have told columnist Robert Novak about Valerie Plame... Who is Official A? And what are we to interpret from his unnamed status? I can't help but think that Rove is too small to go unnamed, maybe I'm wrong; but Josh Marshall has reminded us that Libby reported in to both the Vice President and the President (although some are saying Rove is Official A). How high does this go?

I hope this sticks, and that there is more to come. I fully believe there's not an honest bone in Rove's body, and I have lots of reservations about Cheney and Bush, too.

As an aside, I have to tell you I really disagree with Senator Kennedy's assessment that this is an ominous day for America. This could be the first day on our road to recovery; there were many ominous days leading up this one, and those were the darker days. If these indictments stick, and lead us back to the forthrightness with which we founded the country, then this is a hallowed day. But to be honest with you, I am cautiously optimistic, and hope that this is far more significant than the toppling of some statue somewhere.
Link | | | 8:25 PM | Home
 

Curiously malicious emails. (Public service announcement.) Yesterday morning and tonight I received an email (two in total) which contained attachments, and without even clicking on either the email or the attachments (duh...) crashed my browser (Opera 7.22). Norton did not intercept them as being problematic. Once they were in my inbox, I couldn't open the browser with the mailbox open without it crashing immediately, needing to restart. (Opera has a feature that asks you how you want it to restart once it's crashed, and I could restart it with no windows open, but if I went to the mail it immediately crashed again.)

The two times I've been able to get past it, it's required swiftly highlighting something earlier in my inbox, and hitting the delete key repeatedly until the suspect email was gone. This seems to be the only way to, well, for lack of a better description, sneak up on it fast enough. Then, of course, I've had to empty my trash (opening trash to selectively delete the evil item crashes the browser: I have to try to open up on another item, select all, and then delete the trash.) The problem is I wind up deleting mails I'd have liked to have kept.

I have no idea if you're getting these, just want to spread the word in case. With two in the last two days, I figure it can't hurt.
Link | | | 10:26 PM | Home

Oh, great, just what the world needs. The President of Iran decides the world's countries don't have enough cowboys heading them, and wants to expand the rolls by announcing that Israel needs to be wiped off the map. It's a stupid, wrong-headed sentiment; if there's any kind of silver lining in such a 1930's-esque articulation, it's in the lack of ambiguity. This is not the kind of country we want to have nukes, or even conventional weapons for that matter. Sanctions, anyone?
Link | | | 9:23 PM | Home
 

2000. What poor timing: if our troops could have held off just a little longer, perhaps the 2,000th troop might have died in November; the significance of that would have been that November is a "sweeps" month for television ratings, and then the Right could have tried to minimize the attention given the milestone as some kind of ratings ploy, like they tried with Ted Koppel when he wanted to read the names of our dead troops over Memorial Day Weekend (during another sweeps period). But sometimes death does not cooperate with political agendas.

So other talking points must be created, and so Colonel Steve Boylan has asked us all to not pay too much attention to the milestone of the 2,000th death. There is something to be said for that perspective, although his rationale is that there have been many other milestones, positive ones in his view, which have gone unnoticed. My own reaction is a bit different, and it's the chief reason I can't put much significance on the number 2,000.

First, of course, there's something arbitrary: if we counted in base 12 instead of base 10, we wouldn't have all those zeroes after the two yet. (Anyone in the White House taking notes and hoping to use this Sunday morning?)

This is not just me being facile: the 2,000th death matters no more than the 1,999th or the 5th; each is significant, and we are all pieces of the firmament. A righteous person feels them all, although I will admit there is a certain gravity to a number like 2,000.

So let's remember not number 2,000, but 2,000 individual deaths, and also remember that each of those 2,000 was unnecessary. This was a war of choice; it has not made us safer, for Saddam Hussein had no WMDs. We could have stayed the course (containment and sanctions) and the world would have been just as safe now as it was in late 2002. Humanitarian benefit? Well, ask the Pope or Human Rights Watch about whether or not this was a just war.

I feel for how the lives of the dead were cut short; I feel for their families, and I try to imagine their loss even though I know I really can't. The 2,000 (and more to come) sacrificed incredibly, but the sad fact is that they and we, their countrymen, were lied to. This war was conducted under a false pretext: Bush's reason for cutting the inspectors short was not because he imagined them ineffective, but that they would be effective and would undercut his justification for a war which was wrongly started. I can't draw any other conclusion: the inspectors weren't asking for forever, though Bush tried to portray it in that light. The inspectors were doing good work, and he wouldn't hear of it.

Bush bears the blood of all our troops, as well as the thousands of Iraqi citizens who have perished as a result of his excellent adventure. It did not have to be this way.

(Oh, and if you're thinking of leaving a comment along the lines of "what about all the innocent Iraqis who Bush has helped," forget about it. The Pope and Human Rights Watch looked at the impact and decided the war could not be justified on humanitarian grounds. If you know something which they didn't know, go right ahead and lay out the recent abuses which Saddam Hussein was conducting, the quantity, and the number of lives lost.)
Link | | | 7:35 PM | Home
 

Something I've avoided mentioning, but do so now out of, what, boredom? My Johnson site was linked on Friday by a blog, a conservative one, in fact, a conservative one we often deride. Not just the staff here, but also the folks over at Eschaton. Not going to mention any names, but they were once cited as "Blog of the Year" by the folks at Time magazine. Ring a bell?

I don't think it's really to my credit so much as Johnson's, although it may be a credit to my labors. Still, it says something about Johnson that he appeals to such a wide audience. (And yes, we like the traffic, even from them; and no, not a one of the thousand visitors who came through thought it made sense to put a penny in the poor box. Typical Internet behavior.)
Link | | | 10:35 PM | Home

Without mentioning Judith Miller by name... This comes from Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command, chapter titled "Who Lied to Whom?", pages 217-8:

Throughout 2002, reports [from Iraqi defectors with vested interests in an invasion — ed.] were flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice President's office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. "They'd pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided," Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told me. "There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi's sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President."

A routine settled in: the Pentagon's defector reports, classified "secret," would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent analyses of the reports by intelligence agencies—scathing but also classified—would remain secret.

And via Atrios, there's this bit of transcript from David Gergen's appearance on Howard Kurtz's CNN show Reliable Sources:

Were Miller and "The Times" used by Iraqi exiles and by administration officials?

GERGEN: Clearly. Clearly they were used. And the administration was used as well, and it appears that intelligence agencies were used or misused by Chalabi and by -- and others did the same thing.

The use of selective information was of course not limited to what was meted out for the Press. Remember that article by Judis and Ackerman which ran in the The New Republic?

In the late summer of 2002, [Senate Intelligence Committe Chairman Bob] Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes. According to one congressional staffer who read the document, it highlighted "extensive Iraqi chem-bio programs and nuclear programs and links to terrorism" but then included a footnote that read, "This information comes from a source known to fabricate in the past." The staffer concluded that "they didn't do analysis. What they did was they just amassed everything they could that said anything bad about Iraq and put it into a document."

Graham and Durbin had been demanding for more than a month that the CIA produce an NIE on the Iraqi threat--a summary of the available intelligence, reflecting the judgment of the entire intelligence community--and toward the end of September, it was delivered. Like Tenet's earlier letter, the classified NIE was balanced in its assessments. Graham called on Tenet to produce a declassified version of the report that could guide members in voting on the resolution. Graham and Durbin both hoped the declassified report would rebut the kinds of overheated claims they were hearing from administration spokespeople. As Durbin tells TNR, "The most frustrating thing I find is when you have credible evidence on the intelligence committee that is directly contradictory to statements made by the administration."

On October 1, 2002, Tenet produced a declassified NIE. But Graham and Durbin were outraged to find that it omitted the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration's case for war. For instance, the intelligence report cited the much-disputed aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam "remains intent on acquiring" nuclear weapons. And it claimed, "All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program"--a blatant mischaracterization. Subsequently, the NIE allowed that "some" experts might disagree but insisted that "most" did not, never mentioning that the DOE's expert analysts had determined the tubes were not suitable for a nuclear weapons program. The NIE also said that Iraq had "begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents"--which the DIA report had left pointedly in doubt. Graham demanded that the CIA declassify dissenting portions.

In response, Tenet produced a single-page letter. It satisfied one of Graham's requests: It included a statement that there was a "low" likelihood of Iraq launching an unprovoked attack on the United States. But it also contained a sop to the administration, stating without qualification that the CIA had "solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." Graham demanded that Tenet declassify more of the report, and Tenet promised to fax over additional material. But, later that evening, Graham received a call from the CIA, informing him that the White House had ordered Tenet not to release anything more.

That same evening, October 7, 2002, Bush gave a major speech in Cincinnati defending the resolution now before Congress and laying out the case for war. Bush's speech brought together all the misinformation and exaggeration that the White House had been disseminating that fall. "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the president declared. "Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." Bush also argued that, through its ties to Al Qaeda, Iraq would be able to use biological and chemical weapons against the United States. "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," he warned. If Iraq had to deliver these weapons on its own, Bush said, Iraq could use the new unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that it was developing. "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas," he said. "We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." This claim represented the height of absurdity. Iraq's UAVs had ranges of, at most, 300 miles. They could not make the flight from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, let alone to New York.

After the speech, when reporters pointed out that Bush's warning of an imminent threat was contradicted by Tenet's statement the same day that there was little likelihood of an Iraqi attack, Tenet dutifully offered a clarification, explaining that there was "no inconsistency" between the president's statement and his own and that he had personally fact-checked the president's speech. He also issued a public statement that read, "There is no question that the likelihood of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or our allies ... grows as his arsenal continues to build."

It's plain as day: intelligence was not only abused, but we were lied to in order to accelerate the country towards Bush's goal of warring against Iraq. Lies of omission are lies, too: the intent was to leave us with mistaken impressions (and don't get me started about the conflation of Iraq with 9/11 — that little effort was played out on a regular basis here in New York, even, when Pataki called to have the metal from Saddam Hussein's statue melted down and put into Ground Zero). Some stupid inferiority complex or something — no longer content with challenging his dad to a fistfight, it looks like he decided to flat-out eclipse his dad. We're now a hair under 2,000 American troop deaths in Iraq. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you also, alert members of the Press.
Link | | | 3:31 PM | Home
 

Maybe Senator John Cornyn needs a crash course from the L.A. Times? Yesterday, Cornyn took exception to Senator Arlen Specter's suggestion that SCOTUS nominee Harriet Miers needs a "crash course on constitutional law." "Condescending and really inappropriate," said Cornyn.

Well, via Kevin Drum, Specter gets support from the LA Times. It seems there was one — and only one — question on the Constitution on her Senate questionnaire, and her answer was way off base. So much so that one scholar couldn't figure out why it wasn't checked by anyone in the White House and wondered if Miers is being set up for failure.

Oddly, it's not the first time I've seen this proposition given voice. Over at NRO's The Corner, Jonah Goldberg posted an email from a reader suggesting that Miers might be a head fake of some kind, some kind of unrealistically poor choice to momentarily appease those who were looking for a woman, and allow Bush to then move on to someone else.

There are a few problems I see with this line of reasoning, though.

• From everything we know about the White House in the last two and a half months (beginning with the vacation in Crawford), the WH has been completely politically tone deaf: Rove seems to have been very busy.
   
• Given how poorly Bernie Kerik was vetted, the WH didn't have any mulligans to spare. That is, if Miers' is just an attempt to fail, it doesn't look good in the context of a really screwed up process over Bernie Kerik.
   
• In the process of nominating Miers, Bush has angered a lot of his political base. Normally reliable conservatives like Paul Weyrich have frowned upon the choice. The GOP needs these groups in order to maintain momentum for '06.
   
• Coming on the heels of a nominee like John Roberts, Bush looks even more stupid with a nomination like Harriet Miers. If you read reports earlier this week that suggested Bush gave Rove a severe dressing down after the Valerie Plame scandal first broke, you know (if you believe the reports) that Bush doesn't willingly look stupid.

No, I don't think this was cleverness; I think this was Bush's own ineptness, an interest in deciding on emotions rather than careful thought. (You will have to decide for yourself whether or not you think Bush is capable of careful thought; my own feelings are that he quickly clings to the easy answers like "It's a slam dunk.")
Link | | | 12:16 PM | Home

Unbelievable self-centeredness from the Social Security "reformers." Bush's ratings are very much in the tank and could well get flushed further; the Administration is in perpetual midnight over the Valerie Plame CIA-leak scandal; Congressional hearings confirm the inefficacy of FEMA during hurricane Katrina; the Pentagon has another scandal to handle what with reports of burning the bodies of dead Taliban in Afghanistan; the concept of justice in Iraq is under renewed scrutiny with the murder of a defense attorney in Iraq... the list of problems facing the White House is starting to sound a bit like the Catalogue Aria doncha think? And in the midst of this, Social Security Choice (funded by the Club For Growth, with content contributors like Donald Luskin) thinks that the Administration may turn its eyes back to the non-starter of privatized accounts. Unbelievable.
Link | | | 11:25 AM | Home
 

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