Ted

Sam Crane at The Useless Tree states well the pitfalls of the metaphor of “war” in the fight against terrorism.

We do not have to be as linguistically radical as Chuang Tzu to recognize the inadequacy of a word like “war” to encompass all of what goes into a movement like Al-Qaeda. It is a crude little word that forces our thinking into a narrow range of military options (apologies to Clausewitz who saw war as a broader range of options on an even wider continuum of politics). When we call it “war” we do not think of “police activity.” Indeed, war-mongers have continually mocked those who have argued that going after Al-Qaeda is more like a crime-fighting problem than a war-fighting problem. I guess General Myers will now be considered “soft” on terrorism, too.

Sometimes I swear that Christopher Hitchens must be filming a boring PBS spin-off of Punk’d. What kind of a man responds to the exposure of a CIA agent by attacking the law that makes it illegal to expose CIA agents?

It’s a little rude to call arguments “self-refuting”, but I don’t know of a more appropriate term for this. It’s a terminally dishonest piece of work, and an embarassment to Slate. In the middle of sliming Wilson, Plame, and the CIA (“The CIA in general is institutionally committed against the policy of regime change in Iraq”), Hitchens forgets to offer an argument about why the law should be overturned. The reader gets no indication of what protections, if any, undercover CIA operatives are actually warranted. Hitchens just points to a few old New York Times editorials concerned about how the law would affect journalists, believing that Rove’s critics have somehow been hoist by their own petard.

I’d just like to bring one thing up. Hitchens believes that the CIA and Joseph Wilson are to blame, not Rove or anyone in the White House. After all, they failed to find evidence of Saddam’s attempts to buy Nigerean yellowcake, when, says Hitch, “(Niger’s) government, according to unrefuted intelligence-gathering from British and other European intelligence agencies, (was) covertly discussing sanctions-breaking sales of its uranium to a number of outlaw regimes, including that of Saddam Hussein.” But, of course, this intelligence has been refuted. The Iraq Survey Group had the benefit of the occupation of Iraq. They travelled anywhere they liked, interviewed anyone they liked, saw any document they liked. Their conclusion: “ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material—activities that we believe would have constituted an Iraqi effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.” So Wilson and the CIA deserve harsh punishment for failure to find evidence of a non-existent program. Sweet.

I know that I should just file Christopher Hitchens under “Boortz” and let it go. I will, soon. With that, I take you to the Fraysters, who are flaying Hitchens:

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A few links without much comment:

Ezra Klein on the energy bill:

Listening to them, you’d think Jimmy Carter was passing his dream energy legislation. That the reality has no increase in CAFE standards and was held up for a year while Tom DeLay tried to retroactively protect MTBE manufacturers from lawsuits is too perfect. This isn’t conservatism. And it’s only sold as progressivism. In reality, it’s modern Republicanism distilled, a perfectly pure mixture of incoherence and corruption publicly aimed at solving a serious problem but privately written to ignore the issue in favor of industry demands.

An uncomfortably plausible letter (to me, anyway) printed by Mark Kleiman:

Thought experiment: if the USA just quit tomorrow, what would the insurgents do? The jihadis would have achieved aim ( b ); since aim ( c ) is suicidally impossible, they would most likely declare victory and move on. That would leave the secular Baathists. The Kurds would stand on the sidelines while the Shia militias crushed them with Iranian help. Ethnic cleansing of defeated Sunnis would be a possibility. End-state: de facto partition of Iraq into two (think Belgium or Bosnia), with an ongoing low-level Sunni terrorist movement (think ETA, IRA) preventing economic recovery in the Arab part but not strong enough to change the regime. US bases? Privileged access to oil? Cosy reconstruction contracts? Forget it. More likely demands for rendition of Abu Ghraib players to face trial on torture charges.

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Via Thomas Nephew:

The Senate might vote on Sen. McCain’s and Levin’s amendments to the Department of Defense authorization bill as early as today. These amendments would establish a bipartisan, 9/11-style commission to investigate stories of detainee abuse performed in our facilities. They would end the practice of holding secret “ghost detainees” who are not registered with the Red Cross, and would expressly prohibit cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, no matter where they are held.

It would be tremendously helpful if concerned readers would call their Senators today to ask them to support the McCain and Levin amendments to the Department of Defense authorization bill.

Like Matthew Yglesias, I was a little stunned at this line from Sen. Rick Santorum in today’s kinder, gentler Washington Post forum:

One place the government does not help is through taxes. In fact in 1950 the average American family paid 2% in taxes. Today that average American family pays 27% in taxes to the federal government. Oddly enough the difference, 25%, is what the average second wage earner makes in America today. So you see, on average, the second wage earner is working simply to pay the increased burden the federal government has put on the family.

That’s a showstopping statistic. Can it be true? I’ve gone to the Tax Policy Center site, which has the most detailed information that I could find. This table, “Historical Combined Income and Employee Tax Rates for a Family of Four”, doesn’t seem to back up Santorum. The TPC chart starts in 1955 (not 1950), before Medicare. According to TPC, federal taxes (federal income, Social Security, and Medicare) for a family of four with the median income have risen from 7.35% to 14.36% between 1955 and 2001.

That’s a substantial increase, but isn’t congruent with Santorum’s description. If we managed to recapture the 1955 tax rate, it would have saved this family $4436 in 2001. $4436 is a pleasant sum to contemplate, but it’s not enough to replace the wages of many second earners.

If anyone else can find a source, please let me know. Maybe there was some major change in tax rates between 1950 and 1955; maybe he’s defining “average family” in a different way. I’ve called Santorum’s press secretary, and will update if they get back to me. If this figure is substantially true, Republicans ought to be screaming it off the rooftops. If it isn’t, the Senator really shouldn’t be throwing it around.

When Christopher Hitchens added his voice to the supporters of the Bush Administration, he didn’t do it out of contempt for human intelligence in the battle against weapons of mass destruction. It wasn’t out of admiration for linguistic sophistry, and support of legal hairsplitting. Yet here he is, writing the defence of Karl Rove on just those principles (if that’s the right word).

Despite the rhetorical flourishes (comparing the attacks on Rove to the McCarthy hearings is particularly nauseating), his points are pretty boilerplate:

– Joseph Wilson is an awful man
– the unpaid trip to Niger was a glorious prize, obtained by the former Ambassador through sheer nepotism
– “you must knowingly wish to expose the cover of a CIA officer who you understand may be harmed as a result”, otherwise it’s all good, and
– the CIA deserves what it’s gotten for leaking against the Administration.

Here’s what I’d like to ask Hitchens or his admirers:

We know that Valerie Plame was in a position to recommend her husband for the Niger mission. But she didn’t actually have the authority to send him. That decision was made by her bosses. To the best of my knowledge, the identity of those bosses has never been publicly revealed. We know nothing about them. Did they vote for Bush? Are they Kerry contributors? “Peaceniks”? No one knows.

Rove’s defenders call this “Nadagate”- they think that Karl Rove did nothing wrong by leaking the identity of Valerie Plame. Some even think that he deserves a medal. If this is true, surely he owes it to the American people to reveal the names of her bosses. It’s true that these people could be covert, and exposing them could endanger and expose their contacts and colleagues. However, if Rove takes the precaution of not checking their covert status, he’s free and clear, legally and ethically.

Does anyone believe this?

P.S. Some really enjoyable Hitchens-bashing at Red State Son.

Another P.S.: This is awfully good, too.

“The world needs laughter.”

Leonard Nimoy

The Something Awful column “Your Band Sucks” is an unrelenting, over-the-top assault on every musician, genre and album that it touches. A recent column, “The Greatest Albums Ever Suck”, is just what it sounds like. For example:

On U2’s The Joshua Tree: This managed to weasel its way to number four on the Rolling Stone list, inexplicably. I wish I could write this review like The Edge plays the guitar. I’d just tap a few words into my delay pedal and let them echo and repeat for five minutes so I could leave and read Mad Magazine on the toilet.

A lot of people look at a few critically revered albums with incomprehension, don’t they? I know I do. My big one is Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted. I’ve given this rock milestone a lot of chances, and I just can’t pay attention for more than a few minutes. Fans listen to this album and hear “cryptic”, “primitive”, “disjointed”, “groundbreaking”. I hear a bunch of guys who forgot to write any songs. I’m not saying that my taste is any better than theirs; I just don’t get it.

Anyone else?

Let’s pretend to take the new story seriously.

You’re a senior advisor to the President of the United States. You get a call from Reporter X, who tells you that the wife of a critic of your boss is a [covert? maybe, maybe not; fair point from mdp] CIA agent who recommended him for a mission. (How does Reporter X know that she’s a CIA agent? How does she know, specifically, that she recommended him for the mission? That’s not your responsibility.)

What do you do?

(a) Check with the CIA to see if it’s true, and if she’s covert. If she is, fight back against the critic without confirming or denying the story.

(b) Don’t ding your plausible deniability by checking to see if it’s actually true, or if it’s a secret. Even though you don’t actually know, confirm that the critic’s wife is a CIA agent to anyone who asks. Spread the word that his wife is “fair game.”

If you chose (b), congratulations on your moral clarity. Spend the rest of the day making up funny names for the New York Times.

UPDATE: Oh, that’s bad.

Would you believe that Karl Rove has been keeping quiet this long to protect journalists? That’s so him, isn’t it? Greater love hath no man, and all that. But it doesn’t stand up.

Back in 2003, Novak said that his sources had come to him with the information. “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me,” he said. “They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.” That’s inconsistent with the new story.

The lawyer said Novak had telephoned Rove to discuss another column, about Frances Fragos Townsend, who had been named deputy national security adviser for terrorism in May 2003. That column ran in Novak’s home paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, on July 10, 2003, under the headline “Bush sets himself up for another embarrassment.”

At the end of that 15- or 20-minute call, according to the lawyer, Novak said he had learned that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA.

“I heard that, too,” Rove replied, according to the lawyer, confirming the Times account.

If Novak is lying, it turns out that he’s smeared Karl Rove to protect himself. We’re supposed to believe that Rove has just been taking it until now. My heart bleeds for the poor man.

Here’s the Newsweek story about Cooper and Rove:

Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a “big warning” not to “get too far out on Wilson.” Rove told Cooper that Wilson’s trip had not been authorized by “DCIA”—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, “it was, KR said, wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.”

Is that consistent with the new story? I don’t see how. The piece is clear about Rove’s position as the source; I don’t see the wiggle room.

If this was true, why didn’t they mention this until now? Rove’s denials to date have been criticized as absurd exercises in word parsing. “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t leak her name.” Until yesterday’s leak, his lawyer has tried out any number of spins. He also tried the “he didn’t mention her name” defense. He tried the argument that Rove “was sharing what he knew but with the specific understanding it would not be disclosed.” He tried arguing that Cooper was the bad guy here for breaking the Dean Wormer code: “Look at the Cooper e-mail. Karl speaks to him on double super secret background.” He tried arguing that the disclosure was simply incidental; Rove was just trying to correct a reporter’s story.

If Rove didn’t tell any reporters, why all the humiliating mumbo-jumbo? Rove wouldn’t have promised confidentiality to a reporter. Was it to protect Miller? To protect Novak? Because Rove just plum forgot? (The leaker’s story [I’m not kidding] is that Rove has forgotten which journalist told him.) As a brilliant double-cross to embarass the press, at the expense of Bush’s likability and trustworthiness poll numbers? Come on.

In short, this theory is inconsistent with the facts that we know, and with the past statements of the involved parties. I will be sincerely shocked if these statements are operative a week from now.

How does the right react?
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Is there anyone on Earth who heard that Aldrich Ames had uncovered our CIA assets and said, “Hold on. What did their spouses do to deserve it?”

Why is Karl Rove more appalling than Richard Nixon? There are actually any number of answers, but Kevin Drum has a good one.

Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy has joined the chorus of right-wingers whose interest in Joe Wilson outstrips their interest in anything else. He demonstrates how an intelligent mind can be seriously misled by restricting his sources to PowerLine (13 cites), the WSJ editorial page (6 cites), and single news story containing a significant error (5 cites).

Lindgren writes:

As the Washington Post reported: “According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.” So Wilson had found evidence that tended to confirm the substance of the sentence in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Quite a lot of the PowerLine/WSJ/Lindgren argument rests on this slender reed, but it’s not correct. The Washington Post has since printed a correction to that story- it was Iran, not Iraq.

Republicans have tried to argue that Wilson lied about the forged documents. The WSJ writes,

The same bipartisan report also pointed out that the forged documents Mr. Wilson claimed to have discredited hadn’t even entered intelligence channels until eight months after his trip.

This is misleading at best. Wilson didn’t claim that he discredited the documents- he didn’t even claim to have seen them! Wilson actually wrote,

As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors — they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government — and were probably forged. And then there’s the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.

Lindgren is correct that Wilson has falsely claimed that his wife had nothing to do with suggesting that he make the trip to Niger.[1][2] He is also correct to claim that the Senate report said differently. I’m pretty sure that the Senate report is correct, Wilson was lying, and Wilson deserves criticism for this.

However, Lindgren writes:

The Wall Street Journal says that Wilson had started lying to the press and public about how he was hired before his wife was outed, in part by Rove. (my emphasis)

Maybe I’m not reading carefully enough. But as far as I can see, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t actually claim this, and the charge itself isn’t true. Wilson’s editorial told the truth about how he was hired in his original New York Times column. He correctly identifies the people who sent him only as “agency officials.” Republicans have seriously misrepresented what Wilson said after his wife was outed (here, the RNC talking points claim that Wilson falsely asserted that Cheney sent him. In the very same interview cited by the RNC, Wilson said, “it’s absolutely true that neither the vice president nor Dr. Rice nor even George Tenet knew that I was traveling to Niger.”)
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Rove wasn’t talking to journalists yesterday. He was just talking to FOX News, where notorious dignityphobe John Gibson argued that Rove deserves a medal for exposing Valerie Plame. Here’s what he said (any transcription errors are my own):

I say give Karl Rove a medal, even if Bush has to fire him. Why? Because Valerie Plame should have been outed by somebody, and nobody else had the cajones to do it. I’m glad Rove did, if he did do it, which he still says he didn’t.[1] Why should she have been outed? Well, despite her husband’s repeated denials, even in the face of a pile of evidence, and conclusions of a joint investigation of Congress, it appears that all evidence points to Joe Wilson’s wife, the spy Valerie Plame, as the one who recommended him to the job of going to Niger to discover Saddam was trying to buy nuke bomb material.

Why is this important? Because Wilson was opposed to the war in Iraq, opposed to Bush policy, and pointedly and loudly said so. Consequently, there was some interest in how he got chosen for the sensitive job, which people at the time might have thought would be a fulcrum point in the decision about the war. You wouldn’t send a peacenik to see if we should go to war, if we need to go to war, now would you? That’s exactly what happened. As they say in the news business, enquiring minds now want to know how the heck did this happen.[2]

Well, it turned out little wifey did it.[3] She touted husband Joe, her CIA bosses bit, and off Wilson went to completely knock down any notion that Saddam wanted Niger’s nuke bomb making stuff, which is called yellowcake. Problem is, reporters say many in intelligence said the information said no such thing. In fact, it was still a bit of a mystery, and Saddam could might have been trying to buy the nuke bomb material.[4]

So why should Rove get a medal? Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitude toward the war in Iraq. She was married to him. Then sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policy. Where I come from, we want to know who that is. We do not want secret spy masters pulling the puppet strings in the background. That is something that should be out in the open, and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it. So, Rove should get a medal, even if he did do what he said he didn’t do. And that is my word.

This is idiotic. Even if I were to grant Gibson every element of his argument- even if I stipulated that Wilson was a biased “peacenik” who did a shoddy job, and that Plame shouldn’t have recommended him because of his anti-Administration views- all I’m granting is that Plame used bad judgement in suggesting her husband.

Gibson is forced to argue that a covert CIA agent who shows bad judgement in a personnel suggestion should be exposed, rather than (say) ignored, reprimanded or even fired. Exposing Plame didn’t just hurt her and her family: it exposed all of her foreign contacts and all of her CIA colleagues “employed” by the same cover firm. Republicans can wag their fingers at Plame all day long. But unless they’re prepared to state that she deserved exposure, they’ve got no argument. She obviously didn’t. The cost to national security is far too great.
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1. Karl Rove’s defense lawyer has been pushing the story that his client identified Joseph Wilson’s wife as a covert CIA operative simply to discourage Time from printing that Joseph Wilson’s trip had been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney. (Wilson never claimed that it was.)

“Rove did not mention her name to Cooper,” Luskin said. “This was not an effort to encourage Time to disclose her identity. What he was doing was discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren’t true.”

What I’d like to ask, if I were in a position to do so:

If Karl Rove believes that it was appropriate to mention that Joseph Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent in order to improve a journalist’s work product, will he continue to reveal the identities of other covert CIA agents if similar opportunities present themselves?

2. Holding an old-fashioned pity party about the media’s anti-Bush bias would be a lot more convincing if that same media hadn’t completely sat on this story, despite possession of all relevant facts about Rove, for two years through an election cycle.