Author: Helena

Cheney as Agnew?

NYT today:

    I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

There had already been several indications that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had Libby and top George W. Bush aide Karl Rove in his sights… Now, might Cheney make three?
The NYT reporters write that Fitz “is expected to decide whether to bring charges in the case by Friday.” So I guess we’ll know soon enough.
From what these reporters’ sources have told them, there so far seems only a small possibility that a threat of imminent indictment might force Cheney to follow the example that Spiro Agnew set in 1973–also, in October– and become only the third vice-president in the history of this republic to resign from office.
But who knows? Thus far, Fitzgerald’s staff has done a good job of holding their cards remarkably close to their chests. (There is no indication that this latest leak to the NYT people came from them.) So we did not know about this new twist in the case until now. What more might we learn in three days’ time?
Anyway, the newly disclosed information about the Cheney-Libby conversation, certainly seem to make matters harder for Libby. The reporters write:

    Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.
    The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV.
    … The notes help explain the legal difficulties facing Mr. Libby. Lawyers in the case said Mr. Libby testified to the grand jury that he had first heard from journalists that Ms. Wilson may have had a role in dispatching her husband on a C.I.A.-sponsored mission to Africa in 2002 in search of evidence that Iraq had acquired nuclear material there for its weapons program.
    But the notes, now in Mr. Fitzgerald’s possession, also indicate that Mr. Libby first heard about Ms. Wilson – who is also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame – from Mr. Cheney. That apparent discrepancy in his testimony suggests why prosecutors are weighing false statement charges against him in what they interpret as an effort by Mr. Libby to protect Mr. Cheney from scrutiny, the lawyers said.
    It is not clear why Mr. Libby would have suggested to the grand jury that he might have learned about Ms. Wilson from journalists if he was aware that Mr. Fitzgerald had obtained the notes of the conversation with Mr. Cheney or might do so. At the beginning of the investigation, Mr. Bush pledged the White House’s full cooperation and instructed aides to provide Mr. Fitzgerald with any information he sought.

We do, however, all need to understand that the serious erosion/implosion of the pro-war “cabal” that is the heart of the Bush administration is not necessarily unmitigated good news for the anti-war, pro-sanity strand in US public life. For the following two reasons:

    (1) The Democratic Party leaders are still nowhere in terms of being out there, advocating a compelling alternative to the cabalists’ view of the world (or even, apparently, able to any significant political profit from the cabalists’ escalating discomfiture, at all.)
    (2) There are numerous “wag the dog” scenarios being feverishly discussed around Washington right now. Ludicrous those each of these scenarios might appear on its own merits– Syria? Iran??– the fact that there are no adults (from either party) on the scene in Washington DC means we need to be very concerned indeed that even the most childish and incendiary scenarios may get played out over the weeks ahead as a desperate attempt at a “wag the dog” diversion…

Time for calm. Time for maturity. Time to subject to radical re-examination not just the possibly criminal past activities of the cabalists, but also the whole philosophy of US global hegemony that has underlain both their actions and also, I fear, far too much of the thinking of the rest of the US “political elite”, of whatever political party or none…
Human equality now!
Addendum 4 p.m.: Check out Nur al-Cubicle’s excellent work on an Italian angle on this story! Hat-tip to Dubhalatch for the tip-off there.)

Newsflash! US/UK troops unloved in Iraq!

The Daily Telegraph has been shown the results of a poll that the British Ministry of Defence recently (and secretly) commissioned in Iraq, which showed that:

    • Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified – rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;
    • 82 per cent are “strongly opposed” to the presence of coalition troops;
    • less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;
    • 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation;
    • 43 per cent of Iraqis believe conditions for peace and stability have worsened;
    • 72 per cent do not have confidence in the multi-national forces…

The poll was conducted nationwide in August, by an Iraqi university research team that was kept unaware of the identity of the body that commissioned it. (I’m wondering about ethical concerns here? Might the university people who organized it now have been put in some jeopardy by the revelation that they were working for the British MOD?)
The D. Tel. article, by Sean Rayment, also notes:

    The results come as it was disclosed yesterday that Lt Col Nick Henderson, the commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards in Basra, in charge of security for the region, has resigned from the Army. He recently voiced concerns over a lack of armoured vehicles for his men, another of whom was killed in a bomb attack in Basra last week.
    The secret poll appears to contradict claims made by Gen Sir Mike Jackson, the Chief of the General Staff, who only days ago congratulated British soldiers for “supporting the Iraqi people in building a new and better Iraq”.

Indeed it does.
Rayment wrote:

    Andrew Robathan, a former member of the SAS and the Tory shadow defence minister, said last night that the poll clearly showed a complete failure of Government policy.
    He said: “This clearly states that the Government’s hearts-and-minds policy has been disastrous. The coalition is now part of the problem and not the solution.
    “I am not advocating a pull-out but if British soldiers are putting their lives on the line for a cause which is not supported by the Iraqi people then we have to ask the question, ‘what are we doing there?’ ”

So they don’t really have a robust opposition party in the UK, either, at this point.
Still, at least Robathan seems prepared to raise much tougher questions of the party in power in Westminster than the leaders of the Democratic Party are yet prepared to raise in Washington…

The journalist’s nightmare: how it ended for Rory

Yesterday, the Guardian had a tautly written first-person account by Rory Carroll, of what happened during and at the end of his recent kidnaping in Iraq.
Carroll was seized in Sadr City on Wednesday afternoon, and at first feared that– even if his immediate kidnapers were Shiites– they might “sell” him to the highest bidder. Initial utterances from his driver magnified that fear. (Seemed like the driver knew how to terrify Rory.)
But he ended up in an oubliette in the family home of a thirty-something guy with connections to Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army, which wanted to swap him with a Sadrist who was being held by the British. Rory is Irish; and he doesn’t make clear– quite likely, he didn’t even know– whether any such swap took place.
At some point in the second night in the oubliette, he was bundled into the trunk (boot) of another car and taken to the office of — guess who?– Ahmad Chalabi, who had negotiated his release.
A great outcome! Al-hamdu lillah ala salamtak, Rory. And a few moments of quiet to remember the lives of the 73 media workers who’ve been killed in US-occupied Iraq in the line of duty.

Approaching 2K (US dead, only)

We are coming up to hearing about the 2,000th US soldier killed in Iraq. People have different plans for what to do about it. I know the pals over at Today in Iraq have some special posts planned, so y’all should check over there. Here is another interesting suggestion.
Time was, in our weekly peace demonstrations here in Charlottesville, I had a sign with spaces for the digits, then it said “- – – – US dead in Iraq.” We had separate foamcore digits to snap onto velcro fasteners in those spaces there. (The idea was that someone would stand next to that one with a sign saying “We mourn ALL the dead.”) But the whole thing got lost someplace while I was in Europe. Darn.
Anyway, our peace vigils here in Charlottesville have been great for the past 4-5 months, without exception… Trolleys clanging in response to our “Honk 4 peace” sign, Vespa-riders giving a squirty little beep-beep, a logging truck once with a humungous great horn that would blast your ears off; bus-drivers, rusty old pickups, soccer moms, LOTS of female African-American drivers honking, cyclists going ching-ching-ching, grandmas and grandpas, Maseratis, good ol’ boys, Hispanics in rusty old jalopies, joggers running by saying “Honk, honk!”; once, I kid you not, a police officer honking for us from his cruiser…
I’ve been reading the George Packer book, Assassins’ Gate. It is an excellent account of the US war in/on Iraq, starting with a detailed intellectual history of the war’s architects, and passing through Packer’s initial enchantment with Kenaan Makiya’s case for the necessity– on human rights grounds– to back the war effort… Then, soon after the war, both Packer and Makiya go to Iraq; and almost immediately Packer sees that nearly everything he has been told about the country by the Iraqi exiles who fomented the war, including Makiya, doesn’t stand up to the light of day, at all.
So where I am in the book is at the point where Packer is starting to feel disillusioned with the whole war effort, and a little bit with Makiya too, for having gotten it all so hideously wrong– that is, basically, for not having understood Iraqi society as it had become, at all…
Packer comes across as an excellent, clear-eyed observer with a great knack for getting people to talk.
As for me, I want to write something slightly big– possibly for a dead-tree medium– about how everyone who backed the war on “human rights” grounds really, fundamentally did not understand the nature of war. War itself is, by definition, a massive assault on the human rights of members of society in which the war is waged… All the generals’ talk about their ability to use bombs with “pinpoint accuracy” is so much nonsense. Plus, it is NOT just the bombings and other directly lethal assaults that kill, maim, and radically restrict the “rights” of residents of the war-zone… It is also the massive degradation of the infrastructure, and the sequelae of self-sustaining, continuing civil strife.
Look at Kosovo six years after the so-called “humanitarian war” there.
So many western liberals got sort of lulled by the events of the 1990s– Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo– into thinking that the “robust” use of military power could actually serve humanitarian ends… So they were quite primed to see this as a possibility in Iraq, too. (Where of course, the human-rights case against the Saddam Hussein regime was an extremely strong one, indeed.)
George Packer was one of those liberals, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. He writes with great apparent honesty about how, when he got to Baghdad, he was expecting it to be “like Prague in 1989” — a newly “free” country, experimenting with all sorts of new forms of social organization and artistic expression… So he got to Baghdad, just a few weeks after the invasion, and headed for one of the city’s few remaining art galleries, and asked, “So where’s the action? Where are the mushrooming new film clubs, the trendy nightspots, the newly formed civic groups” etc etc… And the people there– who had only recently lived through the shock of the invasion, and the possibly even greater shock of the post-invasion looting and the complete collapse of public security throughout their whole city– just looked at him in amazement… And pretty soon, he realized it wasn’t going to be like Prague 1989 at
…Anyway, this piece I plan to write will take on a lot of that 1990s-era fuzzy thinking by comfortable, salon-based western liberals… the kind of people who by the end of the 1990s came to talk quite glibly about the need, here or there around the world, for a “humanitarian war”; or even more glibly, for a “humanitarian intervention” (meaning, war). I think that what those of us who have experienced warfare “at ground zero” need to do is to address all those fuzzy-headed liberals and say: Iraq, Kosovo– that is the nature of war! Get real! It is time for us all to find ways to deal with our political differences using ways other than war.
I mean, look at where the biggest improvements in the human-rights situation took place over the past 25 years: East Asia, East and central Europe, South America, South Africa… In none of those places did that improvement come about as the result of external military intervention…
So anyway, that’s what I want to write about; and I think now is a good time. I want to try to take the “lessons” of what’s been happening in Iraq and broaden them out a lot.
(I aslo have a bunch of other writing to do. And I’m going to NYC this week. Should be fun.)

Wilfred Owen poem for the day

I just found a marvellous new source for Wilfred Owen’s war poetry, thanks to Oxford University. It lets you view multiple manuscript versions of these poems.

And today’s poem is…

Insensibility



1


Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers

Or makes their feet

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers,

But they are troops who fade, not flowers,

For poets’ tearful fooling:

Men, gaps for filling:

Losses, who might have fought

Longer; but no one bothers.



2


And some cease feeling

Even themselves or for themselves.

Dullness best solves

The tease and doubt of shelling,

And Chance’s strange arithmetic

Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.

They keep no check on armies’ decimation.



3


Happy are these who lose imagination:

They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Their spirit drags no pack.

Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.

Having seen all things red,

Their eyes are rid

Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.

And terror’s first constriction over,

Their hearts remain small-drawn.

Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

Now long since ironed,

Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.



4


Happy the soldier home, with not a notion

How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,

And many sighs are drained.

Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:

His days are worth forgetting more than not.

He sings along the march

Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,

The long, forlorn, relentless trend

From larger day to huger night.



5


We wise, who with a thought besmirch

Blood over all our soul,

How should we see our task

But through his blunt and lashless eyes?

Alive, he is not vital overmuch;

Dying,* not mortal overmuch;

Nor sad, nor proud,

Nor curious at all.

He cannot tell

Old men’s placidity from his.



6


But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones.

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever moans in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.


Manuscript Sources


OEFL,
Fasc T, f328r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f329r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f330r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f328v |
BL,
MS 43720, f19a |
BL,
MS 43720, f20a |



* In the original text taken from the Oxford website, this was written “Drying”. But sense and a tiny bit of detective work in the ms. sources (see Comments) indicate alike that it should be “Dying”.

Asef Shawkat and Karl Rove

It’s pretty amazing to sit here in the US watching the administration drumming up an anti-murder, pro-good governance campaign against Syrian President Bashar al-Asad on the very same day– yesterday– on which (a) Tom DeLay got indicted, and (b) the big speculation is how long before Karl Rove gets indicted in the Valerie Plame case…
The NYT’s John Kifner and Warren Hoge got an apparent “scoop” by reporting that an unnamed “diplomat” in New York told them, regarding the UN’s Mehlis investigation into last February’s killing of Rafiq Hariri, that,

    the investigators were focusing on Syria’s military intelligence chief, Asef Shawkat, the president’s brother-in-law.
    “Their main lead is that he is the ringleader,” the diplomat said. “This is where it is heading.”
    … He spoke on condition of anonymity because of what he described as the extreme sensitivity of the matter.
    … The diplomat, describing Syria as a “country run by a little family clique,” said the involvement of any one in Mr. Assad’s inner circle would be a severe blow to the government.
    “There is absolutely no doubt, it goes right to the top,” he said. “This is Murder Inc.”

H’mm. I wonder who this “diplomat” is, or whose instructions he may have been acting on in holding this conversation with the NYT reporters. The name “John Bolton” springs to mind…
Okay, maybe some readers here would say that there is gross disproportionality between the kinds of actions that are at stake in these three “cases”. The Detlev Mehlis investigation in Lebanon and Syria, after all, involved the wilfull murder of Hariri, and reckless disregard for the safety of scores of people in the area around him, some 20 of whom were killed. The Tom DeLay indictment has (until now) involved “only” some large political kickbacks and improper administration of fincancial affairs; and the Plame investigation involves “only” the revelation of the CIA links of one Washington-area professional woman…
Well, yes. Except that we know that the Plame investigation involves a whole lot more than that one apparent incidence of illegal information handling by a high administration official. In a real sense, because the Republican-controlled Congress has been totally unwilling to go back and re-examine the fallacious claims on the basis of which President Bush jerked the country into this terrible war, this special prosecutor’s investigation into just one tiny part of that story– the ex-post-facto intimidation of Amb. Joseph Wilson– has come to serve (for now) as a substitute for the broader investigation that the country certainly needs.
The death toll from the administration’s fallacious claims about Saddam’s alleged “WMDs” now stands at nearly 2,000 US servicemen killed, and scores of thousands of Iraqis dead.
So yes, there is disproportionality among these acts. The killing of Hariri led to some 16-20 deaths on that day– and then, through a twist of history, to the very welcome liberation of Lebanon from the heavy hand of Damascus… The Bush administration’s fabrication and twisting of the evidence about Iraqi WMDs (including the whole fallacious “yellow cake” story) has led to hundreds of times as many deaths, and the plunging of much of Iraq into prolonged civil strife.
Meanwhile, key top officials in each of these capitals– tiny Damascus and that lumbering great elephant of a place, Washington DC– are nervously watching to see how close to them the investigators will reach…

Former Powell aide tells all (okay, “much”)

Col. Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, and had worked for Powell for many years before that, gave a blockbuster speech at the New America Foundation in Washington yesterday. (I was invited to the event, couldn’t make it. Kinda wish I had been able to.)
Anyway, the speech got some great press coverage today. Here is the full transcript from the NAF.
The first portion contains a decent, solid, poli-sci-ey sort of study of the “virtues” of the 1947 National Security Act, some nostalgia for Eisenhower, etc. Then we get to this:

    Read George Packer’s book, “The Assassin’s Gate,” if you haven’t already. George Packer, a New Yorker – reporter for the New Yorker, has got it right… [I]f you want to read how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book. And of course there are other names in there: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Franks said was the stupidest blankety, blank man in the world. He was. (Laughter.) Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. (Laughter.) And yet – and yet – and yet, after the secretary of State agrees to a $40 billion department rather than a $30 billion department having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere. Now, that’s not making excuses for the State Department; that’s telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. Read George’s book. [I am, Larry, I am… ]
    In so many ways I wanted to believe for four years that what I was seeing – as an academic now – what I was seeing was an extremely weak national security advisor, and an extremely powerful vice president, and an extremely powerful in the issues that impacted him secretary of Defense – remember, a vice president who has been secretary of Defense too and obviously has an inclination that way, and also has known the secretary of Defense for a long time, and also is a member of what Dwight Eisenhower warned about – God bless Eisenhower – in 1961 in his farewell address, the military industrial complex – and don’t you think they aren’t among us today – in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled. …

Continue reading “Former Powell aide tells all (okay, “much”)”

Mehlis Report accusing Syria

UN-appointed German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis handed his report on the Hariri killing over to Kofi Annan, the Security Council’s 15 members, and the government of Lebanon today.
AFP was one of the first to see the newly-released text. It reported:

    “There is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former prime minister Rafiq Hariri could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services,” the report said…
    Citing “converging evidence” pointing at both Syrian and Lebanese involvement in what it described as a “terrorist act,” the report said: “The likely motive of the assassination was political.”
    Syria, Lebanon’s long-time power broker, and its political allies in Lebanon had been widely accused of having had a hand in the killing, which plunged the nation into turmoil. Damascus has strenuously denied the allegations.
    It [that is, the report] pointed out that Syrian military intelligence was well known to have had a pervasive presence in Lebanon at least until the withdrawal of Syrian forces in line with UN Security Council resolution 1559.
    “Given the infiltration of Lebanese institutions and society by the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services working in tandem, it would be difficult to envisage a scenario whereby such a complex assassination plot could have been carried out without their knowledge,” the report said.
    “It is the commission’s conclusion that, after having interviewed witnesses and suspects in the Syrian Arab Republic and establishing that many leads point directly towards Syrian security officials as being involved with the assassination, it is incumbent upon Syria to clarify a considerable part of the unresolved questions,” it added.
    “While the Syrian authorities, after initial hesitation, have cooperated to a limited degree… several interviewees tried to mislead the investigation,” it said.
    It noted that a letter addressed to the Mehlis panel by Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara “proved to contain false information.”
    The Mehlis report stressed the need for full Syrian cooperation if the investigation is to be completed…

France and the US are expected to introduce a draft resolution to respond to this report, early next week. By then, too, Terje Larsen should be presenting his report to the Security Council on the (separate) issue of whether Syria has complied with the portion of UNSC resolution 1559 that called for the disarmament of non-government forces in Lebanon (i.e. Hizbullah and the Palestinian militias in the camps in south Lebanon.)
Earlier today, Josh Landis was predicting an ugly standoff between Washington and Damascus:

    Washington wants a public and total Syrian climb down. In essence, it wants Syria to renounce its core ideology of Arabism. It wants Syria to concede that its regional policies and anti-American stand are wrong. In a sense it wants a public apology and mea culpa from Bashar. It wants him to take Syria on a 180 degree about-face, ideologically and strategically.
    The Syrian government will probably refuse to do this. The Syrian opposition says the government will refuse because the government is too weak. Others claim the government is strong enough to weather sanctions. Still others suggest it is because the President’s and regime’s legitimacy is founded on Arab nationalist principles, thus it cannot abandon them without facing internal collapse. And there are other explanations. Perhaps the Syrian leaders really believe in their principles? Perhaps it is the Arab desire not to lose face and be publicly humiliated? Everyone has their pet theory, but most agree that it comes down to a clash of ideologies. Most insist things will have to get worse before they get better.

I agree with his basic assessment. John Bolton seems to be running quite a high proportion of the Bush administration’s policy towards Syria. He’s a tough nut, and has given clear signals to, e.g., Sharon’s government that it should not respond even to very conciliatory peace overtures from Damascus. From Bashar’s side, he is not a tough nut. But he’s boxed in by his own relatively weak position inside Syrian politics, and is in no position to “pull a Qadhafi” and start dancing to Washington’s tune.
Then, of course, there’s the uncomfortable prospect that any serious weakening of Bashar would open up more space in Syria not for the (relatively small in number, and disorganized) elements of the pro-liberalizing opposition, but for the militant Sunni-Islamist opposition, instead. Yes, Bashar “uses” this prospect quite frequently, to try to ward off too much pressure coming at him from washington or Paris. But yes, he is also, to a large extent a prisoner of it.
Since the Hariri killing, Bashar’s lost the “strategic defense” he used to have against his local Sunni-Islamists by virtue of his close political relationship with Saudi Arabia. Now, that relationship is considerably weakened. I think that makes the Sunni-Islamist threat that much greater to him.
Interesting days. Let’s hope and pray that Syria can avoid any breakdown into civil war. (When I was there last November, the one thing all the Syrians we talked to– liberal-opposition people and regime people– united on was that they sought if at all possible to avoid the fate of Iraq.)

Judy Miller and the U.N.

The whole sorry story of NYT pseudo-journo Judy Miller and her entanglement in disinformation campaigns concerning Iraq’s alleged WMD arsenal, that were designed to jerk the Bush administration into invading Iraq, has obscured another very important part of Miller’s record: the role she has played in disinformation campaigns aimed against the UN.
Now, Barbara Crosette, who was the NYT’s bureau chief at UN headquarters 1994-2001, has reminded people that:

    Over the last year or so, Judith Miller also wrote a series of damaging reports on the “oil for food” scandal at the United Nations — in particular, personally damaging to Secretary General Kofi Annan because the reports were frequently based on half-truths or hearsay peddled on Capitol Hill by people determined to force Annan out of office. At the UN, this was interpreted as payback for the UN’s refusal to back the US war in Iraq. As a former NYT UN bureau chief [now retired] I have been asked repeatedly by diplomats, former US government officials, journalists still reporting from the organization and others why Times editors did not step in to question some of this reporting — a lot of it proved wrong by the recent report by Paul Volcker — or why the paper seemed to be on a vendetta against the UN. The Times answered that question Sunday in its page one report on the Miller affair. Ms. Run Amok [i.e. Miller] had at least one very highly placed friend at the paper, and many Timespeople were afraid to tangle with her because of that. Note also, that Ambassador John Bolton, a severe critic of the UN and a figure so controversial he could not face a confirmation hearing in the Senate, was one of the administration officials who took time to visit Miller in jail.

Well, having John Bolton visit her in jail is strongly suggestive of a relationship of friendship, but not necessarily of anything more than that. But the “protection” she enjoyed from the people at the top of the NYT– primarily the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and executive editor, Bill Keller— is incontestable, and is amply demonstrated in that story I linked to there.
Between them, those two guys allowed Miller to do virtually as she pleased at the newspaper, without apparently being subject to any of the kinds of control and supervision by a departmental editor that are the norm at all reputable media institutions. Given that a newspaper is indeed liable for huge damages if a reporter publishes something libelous, or makes other serious mistakes, such supervision is natural… But not for Miller….
And then, when she decided for whatever idiosyncratic reason not to accept at face value the waiver of confidentiality that her source in Cheney’s office, Lewis Libby, had offered her a year ago, Sulzberger and Keller continued to back her to the hilt on that. They even had the NYT pay out millions of dollars to hire top-notch lawyers to defend her from the Special Prosecutor, in court. (Also, though she had by that time told them– or at least, Keller– the identity of her mystery “source”, they did not share that info with other Times journos, and indeed squelched the paper’s reporting on the case for quite a period of time.)
What a debacle for a once-great newspaper…
But I’m also intrigued by the point Barbara Crosette made. Time to look again through the portfolio of reporting that Judy Miller did on Kofi Annan and the UN, and look at the damage she caused there.

Worries in South Africa

    A friend sent me the following opinion piece, which is by veteran South African journalist Tony Hall. I am very honored and happy to be able to publish it on JWN because nearly 25 years ago, when I was a mixed-up single parent, fresh from having taken my kids out of the maelstrom of Beirut and trying to make ends meet as a journo in London, I did quite a bit of work for Tony, who was then editing a London-based weekly called ‘Eight Days’.
    I’m also happy to publish it here because I want JWN to deal with all kinds of global issues. So I need to work to make sure the Iraq mess doesn’t suck my energy out of everything else that’s happening in the world. The state of democracy in South Africa eleven years after 1994 is really important to me.
    Anyway, enough about yours truly…

Save the Alliance
View from the bush, mid-October 2005
By Tony Hall
There was widespread alarm and dismay around South Africa this past week, at the sight on our TV screens and front pages, of ANC supporters burning t-shirts bearing the face of President Thabo Mbeki.
It was one thing for protestors, including members of the ANC-allied trade unions and communist party, to be chanting “Zuma, Zuma” in support of the recently ousted Deputy President, as he marched through a big crowd towards the law courts in Durban to appear at the first hearing of a corruption charge.
It was quite another to see Mbeki so publicly vilified – the leader of the most popular party and government anywhere in recent decades, a man whose own struggle credentials and leading role in the liberation movement have never been questioned. His management of almost a decade of majority rule has been seen as competent and careful.
So the week sent a shock through the system and tragically, cracked open a fault line which started showing just a couple of years ago.
It was a magic, joyful day back in 1994 when people lined up for hours to vote. Democracy was won not only after hard negotiation, but after four years, from 1990, of widespread “third force” violence and mayhem to try and undermine the transition, instigated and managed by some leading members and foot-soldiers of the outgoing apartheid regime.
Thousands of black South Africans were killed, on trains, in hostels, in townships. A civil war raged in KwaZulu Natal, which could have led to its secession, and a former bantustan, the tribal apartheid ‘homeland’ Bophutatswana, was nearly restored after an uprising, to its stooge leadership. That could have led to another apartheid-supported breakaway, and the balkanisation of South Africa.
The story now unfolding, with people burning the image of their own president, begins with the policy choices made under President Mandela, whose early enthusiasm for empowering his people through the state was firmly sat on by the big corporations — and reviled by the now comfortably corporatised Afrikaner leaders whose example of using the state to economically empower their community he generously quoted.
Mbeki reinforced those “free market” policies…

Continue reading “Worries in South Africa”