Think Again: Mr. Fitzgerald’s Unanswered Questions

by Eric Alterman
November 3, 2005 

According to this week’s Newsweek, the nation enjoyed two historic moments last Friday. The first was special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s press conference outlining his perjury case against “Cheney’s Cheney,” I(rve) Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The second – occurring simultaneously – was that “in the small dining room adjoining the Oval Office, [President Bush] was doing something uncharacteristic: watching live news on TV.” Apparently, the president only watched the first 20 minutes or so of the press conference, but for a guy who famously avoids both print and broadcast news, any small step toward engagement with the “reality-based community” may be a giant step for mankind.

Alas, Fitzgerald’s press conference proved a disappointment to many, in part owing to the attending reporters’ inability to ask him questions he might be likely to answer. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to speculate about where his ongoing investigation might lead, and made clear early on that he wouldn’t discuss certain topics, but numerous reporters appeared more intent on creating sound bites than in garnering whatever information might be available, and instead, inspired repeat after repeat of the special prosecutor’s non-response.

Since Fitzgerald has said he has no intention of issuing a final report about this complicated matter, it remains the responsibility of the reporters themselves to fill in the many holes he left in the story. Americans still need to know just what kind of conspiracy was launched here – not merely to attack the credibility of Joe Wilson and blow the cover off his CIA agent wife, but also to fool the nation into going to war. Here are just a few of them:

Where’s Dick?

As The Washington Post’s Bart Gellman reported in his excellent exegesis of the known story so far, “Libby and Cheney made separate inquiries to the CIA about Wilson’s wife, and each confirmed independently that she worked there. It was Cheney, the indictment states, who supplied Libby the detail ‘that Wilson’s wife worked . . . in the Counterproliferation Division’ – an unambiguous declaration that her position was among the case officers of the operations directorate.” The question we still need to ask is, “Do we know the extent of Cheney’s involvement in his subordinate’s decision to leak classified information and lie about it to a Grand Jury?” We know part of the answer from the indictment itself, and as Josh Marshall pointed out, “Libby had consulted with Cheney about how to handle inquiries from journalists about the vice president’s role in sending Wilson to Africa in early 2002.”

What’s more, on the now-infamous July 12, 2003 Air Force Two flight from Washington to Norfolk, Virginia, according to the indictment, “LIBBY discussed with other officials aboard the plane what LIBBY should say in response to certain pending media inquiries, including questions from Time reporter Matthew Cooper.” Who, exactly, are these “other officials?” Is one of them the vice president? As Gellman wrote in the Post, on that flight “the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson’s credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source.” The question we need to answer is: What else did Cheney “instruct his aide” to do? And are any of these actions indictable? Has Anybody Pled Guilty?

Another thing we still don’t know is if anyone pled guilty in the case. As TNR’s Ryan Lizza reported over the weekend, he asked Fitzgerald’s spokesman Randall Samborn just that question. Samborn partially dodged the question, telling Lizza that there was no “public record” of any pleas. Not satisfied, Lizza put the question to “a white collar criminal defense attorney,” who told him that “Guilty pleas can be taken under seal – and often are – when the person entering the plea is cooperating with the government and they do not want to tip off the other targets or there is a safety concern. Also, plea agreements could have already been reached but not formally entered in court.” Where’s Phase II?

All this was wrought, in the end, by the administration’s use of faulty intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In a bit of crystal ball gazing this past Sunday, Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s failure to issue the “Phase II” section of its report on the administration’s use of that intelligence, calling it a “scandal in its own right.” It is, although it has largely been ignored until Murray Waas reported in The National Journal last week that Cheney and Libby were refusing to hand over to the committee certain documents, which included “the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell’s notorious presentation of W.M.D. ‘evidence’ to the U.N. on the eve of war.” As we know, Harry Reid threw this in the face of the nation on Tuesday, when he invoked Rule 21 and forced Senate Republicans to agree to form a bipartisan committee to find out why we haven’t seen this “Phase II” report.

Where’s Novak?

Enough said.

Will we ever have fully satisfactory answers to questions that initially inspired the Fitzgerald investigation, as well as those it has raised in its wake? Likely not. But if reporters and news organizations decide to invest the time and money in trying to find the answers to these and other key questions, they might at least make a start at making amends to their readers, viewers and listeners for accepting administration claims at face value in the first place, and allowing the nation to be led by lies into war.

Just one request to Bill Keller and the folks at the Times, however: Could you please keep Judy Miller off the story? She’s done her part….

Eric Alterman is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of six books, including most recently, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, just published in paperback by Penguin.

 

www.americanprogress.org

Gmail is hands-down the best web-based email service on the ‘net. Conversation threads, search, tagging, and keyboard shortcuts have completely revolutionized the way I look at my inbox. I manage all of my email from my personal Gmail inbox, including the daily flood of Lifehacker messages. At this point, I can’t imagine a program I could use to manage my email any more efficiently.

Despite my undying love for Gmail, there are still a lot of people who aren’t won over by sheer enthusiasm alone, and still others who just aren’t taking full advantage of the features and functions they’ve got at their fingertips in Gmail. Either way, the only thing a Gmail naysayer needs is a better understanding of everything you can do with Gmail.

Today I’ve got a rundown of the methods and add-ons I use to make Gmail more powerful. By the time you’re done with this article you’ll be a bona fide Gmail power user, too.

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/gmail/hack-attack-become-a-gmail-master-161399.php

WASHINGTON: Citing his role as a likely prosecution witness in a criminal trial involving former vice-presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby, Accuracy in Media said today that Tim Russert of NBC News should voluntarily remove himself from any network coverage of the CIA leak case. “The basic standards of fair and objective journalism require that Russert withdraw from the coverage,” declared AIM editor Cliff Kincaid. “He is a widely respected journalist but he is just too deeply involved in this case to continue to report or comment on it.”
http://www.aim.org/press_release/4130_0_19_0_C/

http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html

Iraq 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.

 

http://www.reason.com/hod/iraqthreeyears.shtml

http://www.antiwar.com/rep/utley9.html

Lawyers 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.”

Newsweek
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

There 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.