Month: March 2006
Iraq 3-year report —Reason Online
StoriesIraq Progress Report
Advocates for liberty weigh in after three years
A Reason survey
As the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaches, Reason asked a wide range of libertarian, conservative, and freedom-minded journalists and academics to assess the war, the occupation, and how their views have or have not changed.
Eight Lies about IRAQ | | | from 4 years ago
StoriesLibby Lawyers Law Thingy Judy and the Times
StoriesLawyers for Libby Subpoena Reporter and New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK
Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who faces charges of obstruction of justice, served subpoenas on Tuesday on The New York Times Company and a former reporter for The Times, Judith Miller.
The subpoenas seek documents concerning the disclosure of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. Mr. Libby has been charged with lying to a grand jury about how he learned about Ms. Wilson’s identity.
Ms. Miller testified before the grand jury last fall, after having served 85 days in jail to protect a confidential source later revealed to be Mr. Libby. She also provided the grand jury with edited notes of her interviews with Mr. Libby. Ms. Miller retired from The Times in November.
The new subpoenas seek her notes and other materials, including any other documents concerning Ms. Wilson prepared by Ms. Miller and Nicholas D. Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times; drafts of a personal account by Ms. Miller published in The Times in October concerning her grand jury testimony; documents concerning her interactions with an editor of The Times; and documents concerning a recent Vanity Fair article on the investigation.
A lawyer for Mr. Libby, William H. Jeffress Jr., would not say whether other reporters and news organizations had been subpoenaed. Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC News have received subpoenas, their representatives said.
A spokeswoman for The Times said its lawyers were reviewing the subpoena served on it. A lawyer for Ms. Miller, Robert S. Bennett, said she would probably fight her subpoena.
“It’s entirely too broad,” Mr. Bennett said. “It’s highly likely we’ll be filing something with the court.”
CIA “Was Making Specific Efforts To Conceal Plame’s Covvert Status
StoriesNewsweek
Feb. 13, 2006 issue – Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case. Lawyers for Libby, and White House allies, have repeatedly questioned whether Plame, the wife of White House critic Joe Wilson, really had covert status when she was outed to the media in July 2003. But special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done “covert work overseas” on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA “was making specific efforts to conceal” her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge’s opinion. (A CIA spokesman at the time is quoted as saying Plame was “unlikely” to take further trips overseas, though.) Fitzgerald concluded he could not charge Libby for violating a 1982 law banning the outing of a covert CIA agent; apparently he lacked proof Libby was aware of her covert status when he talked about her three times with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Fitzgerald did consider charging Libby with violating the so-called Espionage Act, which prohibits the disclosure of “national defense information,” the papers show; he ended up indicting Libby for lying about when and from whom he learned about Plame.
The new papers show Libby testified he was told about Plame by Cheney “in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion” in mid-June—before he talked about her with Miller and Time magazine’s Matt Cooper. Libby’s trial has been put off until January 2007, keeping Cheney off the witness stand until after the elections. A spokeswoman for Libby’s lawyers declined to comment on Plame’s status.
—Michael Isikoff
Arrianna On The Vanity Fair piece on Judy Miller the Willfull Misleader
StoriesThere are three fundamental problems with Marie Brenner’s 15-page piece on Plamegate and Judy Miller in the April Vanity Fair (hitting newsstands tomorrow):
1.) It’s laughably biased. Brenner is a close friend of Miller — she co-hosted a dinner for her on July 4th before Miller headed to jail, visited her at the Alexandria Detention Center, partied with her after her release, and is longtime friends with Miller’s husband, who used to be Brenner’s editor.
The article is nothing more than a massive attempt to rehab the disgraced reporter.
But Brenner doesn’t mention that she even knows Miller until 7 pages into the article and doesn’t mention that they are friends until 11 pages in (long after painting a highly favorable picture of Judy as a misunderstood victim/martyr/heroine).
“At times,” writes Brenner of Plamegate, “the complexities of reporters’ commenting on one another’s behavior had the feel of a taffy pull as friends wrote about friends while trying to exhibit detachment.” That surely makes this piece the ultimate taffy pull.
Full disclosure: I have been friends with Brenner for thirty years — I can’t swear that she danced at my wedding, but she definitely attended it — and I respect her loyalty to her friend. But that loyalty should be expressed privately, not by trying to rewrite history in the pages of a national magazine. Also, especially given our friendship, I find it telling that Brenner — even though the Huffington Post‘s coverage of Plamegate is discussed repeatedly in the article — never talked to me for her piece. Instead, the weekend before her deadline, she left me an obligatory voice mail message saying she had some questions for me; I promptly returned her call but never heard back.
This isn’t journalism; it’s a Sag Harbor circle jerk.
2.) It’s shockingly incomplete and incoherent. In order to make her Plamegate narrative fit a predetermined frame of Judy as First Amendment martyr, Brenner has to leap over huge chunks of the story. Because of this, the article is both extremely basic — Plamegate 101, seemingly written for folks who haven’t picked up a newspaper or turned on a computer in the last couple of years — and almost impossible to follow. If Brenner were your sole source of information, you’d have absolutely no idea what really happened with Miller and the Times. There is no mention of the unprecedented Times mea culpa about Miller’s prewar coverage, and next to nothing on the internal struggle at the paper that saw Miller go from Judy of Arc, lauded in 15 Times editorials and compared to Rosa Parks, to a W 43rd Street pariah being publicly slammed by Times editors and columnists and shown the door. We get Floyd Abrams as avuncular Free Speech hero but no explanation of why he was eventually replaced by Bob Bennett as Judy’s lead attorney. Maureen Dowd warrants the most minor of mentions, and, most bizarrely, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. — long Judy’s staunchest supporter — isn’t mentioned at all.
And since Brenner is so intent on casting Judy as a journalistic superhero (even though no one bought her in that role last time around), she needs to put her up against a villain — and casts the dastardly blogosphere in that part. She cluelessly treats bloggers as some kind of monolithic entity, “a vast amoeba,” while totally missing the point of the blogosphere — its relentlessness and its willingness to go where the establishment media won’t.
In Brenner’s telling, “the noisy new democracy of the blogs” — “Chalabi-haters, Rove fanatics, bloviators” — is inaccurate, quick to judge, and unencumbered by conventional journalistic constraints.
Incredibly, Brenner sees no irony in accusing bloggers of being inaccurate and without editorial constraints while defending Miller, whose tragically inaccurate reporting, plastered all over the front page of the “paper of record,” became an indispensable tool used by the White House to sell the Iraq war to the American people.
Leave it to Brenner to totally ignore this giant pink elephant in the middle of the room.
3.) Brenner’s central thesis is wrong. Her overarching premise is that that Judy Miller went to jail for a noble cause — the ability of reporters to protect confidential sources — but the public and the press (led by those nasty bloggers) failed her and now it’s open season on the free press.
“Traditionally,” she writes, “there have been two generally recognized exceptions to journalistic privilege: matters of life and death and imminent actual threat to national security.” But there is a third exception that Brenner conveniently leaves out, an exception spelled out in the ethical guidelines of the New York Times: “We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack.” This was unequivocally the case with Plamegate. And, as the Times‘ ethical guidelines make clear, there is a world of difference between sources using confidentiality to blow the whistle on government or corporate misconduct, and sources using it to promote a war — or to smear a critic of that war.
Even inaccurate, unedited, bloviating bloggers know that.
Brenner’s piece is hyped as “the untold story of Plamegate.” Turns out, there is nothing untold here — but a whole lot that the untold story doesn’t tell.
Pat Tillman’s dad is angry
StoriesPat Tillman’s Dad: ” What Happened To My Son…It Has Been Lie After Lie After Lie”…
Posted on March 20, 2006 at 8:06 PM.
Patrick K. Tillman stood outside his law office here, staring intently at a yellow house across the street, just over 70 yards away. That, he recalled, is how far away his eldest son, Pat, who gave up a successful N.F.L. career to become an Army Ranger, was standing from his fellow Rangers when they shot him dead in Afghanistan almost two years ago.
Richard Cohen calls C.I.A. leak “crappy little crime”
StoriesBig-Name Journalists Spar Over Sources at NYC Gathering
By Jennifer Saba
Source: Editor & Publisher
NEW YORK This morning, Court TV gathered a group of columnists, editors, attorneys, and academics to discuss “the rule of the law vs. the rule of journalism” at the popular media haunt Michael’s in mid-town New York. With panelists Norman Pearlstine, Floyd Abrams, Nicholas Lemann, Richard Cohen, Michael Goodwin, Michael Wolff, Paul Holmes, and moderator Catherine Crier, the allotted hour was barely enough time to kick around complicated issues — like the unfolding of the Plame story and other related concerns about confidentially and anonymous sources.
During his opening remarks, Henry Schleiff, chairman and CEO of Court TV, tried to sum up the theme of the breakfast panel as “Sophie’s Choice for the mensa group.”
With that, Court TV’s Crier threw out the first question, seized by the call-’em-as-he-sees-’em Vanity Fair Contributing Editor Michael Wolff.
Crier: “When is a source not a source?”
Wolff: “When the source is a story. That’s a softball question.”
Wolff, whose column in the September issue of Vanity Fair sharply hit the role of journalists in the Plame story, pushed his argument even further this morning over a plate of scrambled eggs and pancakes. He posited that if Time magazine had run the Matt Cooper story — i.e. Rove as the leaker and master puppeteer — a year ago, President Bush may not be in office serving a second term or we may not have had as many deaths in Iraq.
Further, Wolff called this the “biggest story of our age.”
First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, who is representing jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller in the Plame case, dismissed Wolff’s remarks as pure hyperbole. “Reporters should keep their word to their sources,” he said.
Washington Post Op-Ed columnist Richard Cohen seemed to enjoy sparring with Wolff the most: “This is not a major story. It’s a crappy little crime and it may not be a crime at all,” he said. “The issue is this: You gave your word, you stick to it.”
AIM Urges NBC’s Russert to Step Aside From Network Coverage of CIA Leak Case
StoriesWhat a bunch of fuck-ups at The Department of Justice…I mean really
TullycastFrom the Los Angeles Times
Moussaoui Case Is Latest Misstep in Prosecutions
‘There have been a lot of flubs,’ a law professor says of the U.S. record in terrorism trials.
By David G. Savage and Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writers
March 14, 2006
WASHINGTON — The botched handling of witnesses in the sentencing trial of Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is the latest in a series of missteps and false starts that have beset the Bush administration’s prosecution of terrorism cases.
The government has seen juries reject high-profile terrorism charges, judges throw out convictions because of mistakes by the prosecution and the FBI suffer the embarrassment of wrongly accusing an Oregon lawyer of participating in the 2004 Madrid train bombings.
“There have been a lot of flubs,” said George Washington University law professor Stephen A. Saltzburg. “I think most observers would say they were underwhelmed by the prosecutions brought so far.”
On several occasions, top administration officials have promised more than they delivered. For example, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced in 2002 that Jose Padilla, a Bronx-born Muslim, had been arrested on suspicion of “exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.”
Padilla was held nearly four years in a military brig without being charged. This year, as his lawyers appealed his case to the Supreme Court, the administration indicted him in Miami on charges of conspiring to aid terrorists abroad. There was no mention of a “dirty bomb.”
In May 2004, the FBI arrested Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer and Muslim convert, saying that his fingerprint was on a bag containing detonators and explosives linked to the Madrid train bombings that had killed 191 people two months before. The former Army officer was held as a material witness even though officials in Spain considered the fingerprint evidence inconclusive.
Mayfield was freed after almost three weeks in custody and received an apology from the FBI, which blamed the misidentification on a substandard digital image from Spanish authorities.
In other instances, prosecutors took cases to court that proved to be weak:
• A computer science student in Idaho was accused of aiding terrorists when he designed a website that included information on terrorists in Chechnya and Israel. A jury in Boise acquitted Sami Omar Al-Hussayen of the charges in June 2004.
• A Florida college professor was indicted on charges of supporting terrorists by promoting the cause of Palestinian groups. A jury in Tampa acquitted Sami Al-Arian in December.
• Two Detroit men arrested a week after the Sept. 11 attacks were believed to be plotting a terrorist incident, in part based on sketches found in their apartment. A judge overturned the convictions of Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi after he learned that the prosecutor’s key witness had admitted lying to the FBI, a fact the prosecutor had kept hidden.
David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has been critical of such prosecutions, blamed pressure from the top. “The government in the war on terrorism has generally swept broadly and put a high premium on convictions at any cost,” he said. “That puts pressures on prosecutors — to overcharge, to coach witnesses, to fail to disclose exculpatory evidence.”
But Andrew McBride, a former federal prosecutor in Virginia, said it was unfair to blame prosecutors for the apparent witness tampering in the Moussaoui case.
“You can’t really lay this at the door of the prosecution,” he said. “This is a lawyer at the TSA [Transportation Security Administration] who screwed up. The rule of witnesses is pretty well known. You would think she would know you are not supposed to discuss the earlier testimony with your witnesses.”
In a recent report on its terrorism prosecutions, the Justice Department called Moussaoui’s decision last year to plead guilty to conspiracy charges one of its leading successes.
But U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema already has questioned whether the French citizen deserves the death penalty; Moussaoui was in jail in Minnesota on a visa violation when hijackers seized four passenger jets and caused almost 3,000 deaths by crashing them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. the Supreme Court has said the death penalty should be reserved for murderers and “major participants” in murder plots. Prosecutors are pushing for the death penalty under the theory that Moussaoui could have prevented the terrorist attacks by telling the FBI about the plot.
Terrorism cases have proved to be especially difficult for prosecutors because investigators need to disrupt plots before they come to fruition. That leaves prosecutors to make a decision on whether to bring a thin case to court. By contrast, in drug cases, police and drug agents can track suspects and arrest them when they take possession of large quantities of narcotics.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, officials feared there were terrorist “sleeper cells” throughout the nation, ready to spring into action. Since then, the determined pursuit of Al Qaeda members and sympathizers has turned up relatively few terrorists.
“The good news may be that there are not as many threatening people out there as we once thought,” law professor Saltzburg said.
The New York Herald Sun 