The Blogfodder
Senator Geary: Mr. Cicci, was there always a buffer involved?
Willi Cicci: A what?
Senator Geary: A buffer. Someone in between you and your possible superiors who passed on to you the actual order to kill someone.
Willi Cicci: Oh yeah, a buffer. The family had a lot of buffers. [laughter]
After a month of downtime, the Plame investigation is not only up and running again, but expanding what they consider worthy of closer scrutiny:
Prosecutors investigating whether someone in the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer have expanded their inquiry to examine whether White House officials lied to investigators or mishandled classified information related to the case, lawyers involved in the case and government officials say. … [P]rosecutors have widened the range of conduct under scrutiny and for the first time raised the possibility of bringing charges peripheral to the leak itself. […] The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, has repeatedly said no one wants to get to the bottom of the case more than Mr. Bush. […]
Several lawyers said Mr. Fitzgerald could ask a judge to allow him to issue a report. Or, they said, he could seek to employ a rarely used provision of the Justice Department’s guidelines for prosecutors allowing grand juries to issue reports. But those sections of the prosecutor’s manual appear to relate to public officials in organized crime cases. (04/02/04 NYT/Johnston)
Some of the conduct that deserves particular scrutiny is the Preznit’s. A real wartime leader would be more personally engaged — aggressively so — in discovering who in his inside circle endangered a valuable expert in his mission to find illicit WMDs in the Middle East. Why wasn’t he more curious to discover the identity of the senior administration official who fed Plame’s name to administration megaphone Novak, and later confirmed and/or stoked this classified information? The Republican Palace has no compunction about dispensing with ethics to threaten or smear a critic, as when they revealed Dick Clarke’s identity as a White House source for a background briefing.
Throughout the long day that ended with the president’s WMD joke, the White House directed strikes on Clarke’s integrity. It declassified an off-the-record background briefing given by Clarke in 2002, when he had been ordered to put a “positive spin”, as he put it, on Bush’s pre-September 11 terrorism record in response to a critical report in Time magazine. The White House press secretary read out portions of the briefing out of context. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser whose neglect of terrorism was among Clarke’s revelations, summoned reporters to her office to point to the background briefing and call his story “scurrilous”.
While she was putting a stiletto into Clarke, the background briefing paper was shuffled by her press office to Fox News to broadcast as Clarke testified. Republican members of the 9/11 commission waved the paper at him, and much time was taken up by his explanation of how, as a staffer, he had been acting properly, like a lawyer representing a client, and why his briefing was not at odds with his information now.
This selective declassification signalled to professionals in government that anything they said to reporters could be held against them if they ever in the future contradicted the Bush line. Yet not one news organisation tried to uphold the old rule by threatening to reveal sources of off-the-record briefings unless the White House reverted to the accepted convention that makes informed journalism possible. (04/01/04 Guardian/Blumenthal)
Your hard-working SCLM wasn’t terribly unsettled; later they were roaring at the Prez of Comedy’s WMD routine. (He, like, started a war over WMDs he can’t find … stop, you’re killing us! ) Perhaps the Plame investigation will demand a full accounting of the background briefings and drive-by smears fed to the Kool Aid Kids by this asshole
Bush spoke on “deep background,” meaning that the information can be used but not attributed to anyone. The session was rare for a president, though not unprecedented. Bush has occasionally spoken to network anchors and conservative columnists as a “senior administration official”” (WP 03/02/04/Allen)
(Read the truly weird WP article for insight into media docility in the face of presidential cynicism. Supposedly a background briefing where the source isn’t named, it’s also clear that the Emperor wants to be spotlighted.) So if Clarke’s background briefings can be declassified to destroy him, let’s strip the curtain off any anonymous “background” the Preznit personally gave to conservative megaphones to smear his critics. After this administration’s history of going after people simply for presenting disagreeable work product, I’m not entirely sure the Don and his wartime consiglieri didn’t as a rule abuse classified information for petty, partisan reasons. The following AP item provides a roundup.
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush is playing supercharged hardball in going after his own former anti-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke. It’s a risky strategy that shows the single-mindedness of Bush and his re-election team in trying to deflect politically damaging criticism. Loyalty is a hallmark of Bush’s administration, with the president and his top lieutenants quick to turn on those who stray from the fold. (03/27/2004 AP/Raum)
Talking Points Memo analyzes the NYT piece and thickens the plot with an intriguing memo archived at the site.
Unfortunately, the [NYT] piece doesn’t make clear whether these might be indictments in addition to ones tied to underlying crime or whether the prosecutors are going for this because they can’t make a case on that underlying bad act. […]
A couple weeks back a legal memo fell into my hands from the sky. And it suggests that even the facts Rove has apparently admitted to put him in clear legal jeopardy.
First, a brief note about the memo: this is not a memo that is in any way a product of the investigation itself. […]
The essential argument is that the law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, does more than simply prohibit a governmental official with access to classified information from divulging the identities of covert operatives. The interpretation of the law contained in the memo holds that a government insider, with access to classified information, such as Rove is also prohibited from confirming or further disseminating the identity of a covert agent even after someone else has leaked it. (Italics Marshall’s)
At the outset of the War on Clarke, several media reports included the detail that the Preznit was personally directing the assault. (I guess that slams the lid shut on the lame attempt to portray him as an optimistic pussycat fending off awful awful rudeness from nasty libruls!) What did he know about Plame and when did he know it? I just don’t buy that all that scurrying about Executive Privilege was only to keep Condi Rice from lying under oath for the 9-11 commission, or negotiated for principles. Maybe it was a way of pre-empting the Plame invetigation from writing subpoenas for Bush/Dick.
Yeah, he used a lot of buffers.
(Tip: Josh Marshall of the invaluable Talking Points Memo will be on Air America’s Unfiltered between 9:00am and noon today [04/02/04]. I’m listening to a great interview with Gloria Steinem right now. Jump to the web stream off the link, or find a station in your area. The program is replayed later.)
Update: corrected some bad linkage and shortened some of the excerpts for scrollability. Apologies if you experienced any stalls while surfing.
That Peanut can post.
Very intriguing catch from the Mike Allen article. Allen has done some of the best work on the Plame story so I am sure he is alert to the possible implications. If former CIA employee Larry Johnson is right at least one of the original leakers to Novak is in the Vice-President’s office.
If I remember correctly the second, confirming source to Novak said something like “oh, you know about that.” That always seemed to me to be something odd for an immediate supervisor to say but something that either an underling or a remote superior might say.
Off topic but just out of curiosity, how long does a post like this – graphics included – take a talent like you to complete?
If I remember correctly the second, confirming source to Novak said something like “oh, you know about that.” That always seemed to me to be something odd for an immediate supervisor to say but something that either an underling or a remote superior might say.
Heh, the hunt is on. Don’t forget, Wilson’s book comes out in May. If Clarke was hard for the Bush intimistration to knock down, wait’ll they go up against Joltin’ Joe. Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly recalls that some WH staff could face jail time, which might be used as leverage for testimony and/or grounds for charging their superiors. Forget the reality-show crud that’s around now, the Plame probe is definitely my idea of must-see TV.
Off topic but just out of curiosity, how long does a post like this – graphics included – take a talent like you to complete?
Let’s see, this one took between 30-60 minutes, evenly divided between text and graphic. It’s not that I’m a fast or brilliant writer/photo artist, but especially good at “unwasting” time from other activities.
When I surf the news, I save articles and links that might be good posting fodder. I put quotes and topics into a database as I read. My db is always open while I read an article the first time to accept tasty quotes, a nugget/detail, my own observations, ancillary links etc. Saves me the time of re-researching what I already know. It also promotes connecting the dots, as sometimes BushCo will send out a swarm of spokesthings to hammer away at different aspects of a story.
If a quote or event resonates with something other than the obvious agenda — like the tone of that quote you pointed out — I definitely keep my antenna tuned for more (eg, when Condi’s lie was exposed that the administration was never warned about planes being used as missiles, I noticed that the Preznit said he was never warned that terrorists might strike with planes on September 11th. Yeesh, that dodge isn’t worthy of a six-year old. The SCLM did pounce but the Prez is sure to be asked about that weasely phrasing at some point.)
I usually goof my graphics while on the phone — it’s digital doodling. I have lots of assorted graphics on my drive from my habit of harvesting pics from my internet cache before I purge it. (I already downloaded the stuff; why not keep what I might need?) I reuse a lot of stuff, too. If I’ve cut, say, a Bush head out of a pic to paste onto a goofy poster, I save a copy of that head so it’s ready to paste again when I need it.
There you have it, posting secrets of the stars. Don’t tell anyone or, if you do, score some cash off them and split it with me, ‘kay?
Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly recalls that some WH staff could face jail time, which might be used as leverage for testimony and/or grounds for charging their superiors.
Prosecutor Fitzgerald and progressive bloggers are dreaming if they think someone in this White House is going to roll. Expect Elliot Abrams, currently the National Security Council’s Director for Near East and North African Affairs, to assume new responsibilities as White House Czar for Staff Morale.
In his new position Abrams will regale White House staffers with the heart warming story of the pardon he received on Christmas Eve 1992 from the then lame duck prez George H. W. Bush. Abrams’ pardon came with rights to a lifetime sinecure from the right-wing think tank of his choice and subsequent government employment in the next Republican administration.
Like health insurance, pardon insurance is part of an employee benefit package at all Bush White Houses – you hope you won’t need to use it but it is a comfort to know you have it. To relieve stress Bush and Cheney staffers chant the mantra “just don’t get caught breaking any state laws.”
On an unrelated note, thanks to Peanut for most of your “how to” on blogging. Of course, your 30-60 minute estimate is pretty deflating to a fledgling and there you could have lied a little.
On an unrelated note, thanks to Peanut for most of your “how to” on blogging. Of course, your 30-60 minute estimate is pretty deflating to a fledgling and there you could have lied a little.
Hey, good housekeeping tips aside, don’t take me as a model blogger: I’ve only been filling in here for a couple of weeks and am in awe of the real champs of the medium. I admire their ability to stay up to date on everything and convey a complex, unique take with wit and style for the long haul.
But if a solo blog is daunting, why not share your analytical abilities and writing in a group blog? I like how some of them have organized themselves to have different bloggers tackle different areas of expertise or stay on top of complex story areas, eg, someone on Iraq, someone on Ashcroft-watch, etc.