This is his defense, remember

by Ted on July 15, 2005

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.

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Dumb enough for you?

by Ted on July 15, 2005

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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Responsibility redux

by Chris Bertram on July 15, 2005

It is always a mistake to pick fights with people when you are about to be away from a computer and so will be unable to take part in further iterations of the argument. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the position I find myself in with respect to “a post from Norman Geras and Eve Garrard”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/bertrams_quibbl.html responding to “my attribution to them”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/14/battle-lines/ of the view that only the immediate perpetrators of bad deeds can be blamed for those deeds. They deny that they hold the view I pinned on them, and say that I should have seen that if I’d read more carefully. I’m happy to receive the correction.

Now comes the “but” bit ….

Nevertheless, my belief that they hold a view like that was not based only on that single post but on many others, especially concerning Iraq. In particular, Norman has often argued against the view that Bush and Blair should be held responsible for the continuing carnage in Iraq, stressing, rather, that the immediate perpetrators of (most of) that carnage, the Iraqi “resistance” should be blamed and that Bush and Blair should not be. Norman and Eve’s latest post quotes an interesting earlier paragraph in this respect, which counts — as they insist — against my attribution.

bq. The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity, doesn’t show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn’t serve to justify it.

There is, I think, doublethink going on here. Norman wants to tell us that the Iraq war was justified because of the many bad things Saddam did and would continue to do to his people if he remained in power. Critics of the war (like me) want to say that we should also take account of the bad consequences of overthrowing Saddam, including the carnage caused by the “resistance”, the many many thousands of excess dead (see the Lancet report …), etc. Norman and Eve’s restrictive clause enables them to argue that, even if things are actually worse, their worseness can’t be blamed on the initiators of the war, because their actions were not in themselves wrong (because justified by stopping Saddam) and don’t serve to justify the Iraqi “resistance” (agreed, they don’t). In other words, Norman helps himself to an essentially consequentialist justification for the Iraq war, but, faced with bad consequences, uses a non-consequentialist discourse of responsibility to filter them out of the consequentialist calculus. At least, that’s what seems to me to be going on.

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Overheard

by Ted on July 14, 2005

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?”

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Odyssey cancellation

by Henry Farrell on July 14, 2005

I’m very sorry to see via “Sean Carroll”:http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_preposterousuniverse_archive.html#112119788542529522 that Chicago Public Radio has cancelled Gretchen Helfrich’s “Odyssey”:http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/odyssey/ show. I appeared on it together with Eugene Volokh a few weeks ago, talking about blogging. Over the last half-year or so, I’ve done several radio/tv appearances and often found the medium and the level of questions pretty unimpressive. _Odyssey_ was the exception; Helfrich was an exceptionally well informed and intelligent moderator/interviewer, and the hour-long format allowed for real conversation. After appearing, I began to listen to the show regularly on the web. I’ll miss it.

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The Church of England is currently having a vote about the advisability of ordaining women as bishops. Apparently up to 1000 clergy are thinking about leaving the C of E over this issue. While pondering this grave crisis in the spiritual life of the nation while watching Newsnight last night (it was my turn to take the bins out), I came up with the following theory, which I think has some predictive power.
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Why is Karl Rove more appalling than Richard Nixon? There are actually any number of answers, but Kevin Drum has a good one.

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Another bite at the apple

by Ted on July 14, 2005

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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Economics of live music?

by Chris Bertram on July 14, 2005

On Tuesday night I went to see the “Bottle Rockets”:http://www.bottlerocketsmusic.com/ , supported by “Romney Leigh Getty”:http://www.romneygetty.com/ , play at the social club attached to my local RC church. Very good they were too (review “here”:http://tinyurl.com/9uzw3 ). But I write not to praise the Bottle Rockets but to wonder how the whole thing makes economic sense. Here are four guys, who have travelled to Europe from St. Louis, Missouri (plus the two Canadians in the support act). They have to meet their expenses, pay their entourage, agent, manager etc. They have to pay the cost of travel. The people who run the club have to break even, etc etc., the bar has to sell enough beer. My guess is that there were 50 people in the audience who all paid 10 pounds (and some of them bought CDs for another tenner). Maximum income for the night is therefore 700 pounds. Sure, touring sells CDs and builds name recognition, but how much difference does it make? Enough? This is the sort of thing which “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ has probably got an opinion on.

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One Week On

by Kieran Healy on July 14, 2005

London and many other places will “observe two minutes of silence”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4679681.stm at noon GMT today for the victims of last week’s bombings. The debate has already begun (“see below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/14/battle-lines/) about the right political and legal response to the attacks. Besides policy and law, though, Britain and Ireland have suffered long enough from terrorism to have produced literature about it. Below the fold I reproduce a powerful poem from the late “James Simmons”:http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/20century/topic_4/simmons.htm. It commemorates one of the earliest, and worst, atrocities of the Northern Ireland conflict, the IRA bombing of Claudy town in July of 1972. The circumstances of that event were different from last week’s attacks, but some things were the same. I don’t know of anything else that conveys them nearly as well.

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Battle lines

by Chris Bertram on July 14, 2005

Following the London bombings, the British “left” pro-war sites “are”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html “busy”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07/14/kingdom_of_the_blind.php “drawing”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07/14/the_problem_we_face_in_a_nutshell.php “battle lines”. The line they are concerned to draw is between themselves and the likes of Seumas Milne of the Guardian. David T at Harry’s Place goes so far as to call Milne a Quisling. (Given who Quisling was, I think this would make David T a Holocaust denier if the argument of “this”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/11/talking_down_th.html Eve Garrard post at normblog were correct. But since it isn’t, it doesn’t.)

“Dickhead” and “idiot” are two of the politer epithets I’m inclined to apply to the hapless and unpleasant Milne and those like him such as our regular commenter abb1, but since there are lines to be drawn, and it is important that we do so, I’d prefer not to draw them there. We now know, that there are Muslim extremists in the UK who are willing to kill us in large numbers. If we are to stop them we need a politics that isolates them from their co-religionists rather than providing them with an environment to swim in. That means talking to, and trying to include on “our” side, all kinds of figures from within that community. That means doing what the Metropolitan Police have done in inviting Tariq Ramadan to speak. That means engaging with a whole bunch of people who have repellent views on topics from Israel to homosexuality. We should say what we think of those views, but we should talk, we should include. Because an isolated and frightened Muslim community, unwilling to talk to the police, unwilling to engage with wider British society would provide a place for the real nutters to hide and recruit, whereas a Muslim community with whom bonds of trust exist provides our best means of fighting the crazies. Ken Livingstone has come in for a lot of flak for his meetings with Sheikh al-Qaradawi. Maybe some of it was justified. But Ken, with a political sureness of touch that eludes the bloggers I mentioned at least know both that we need to draw some lines and draws them in the right place: between those who are disposed to plant bombs on the tube and those who can help us to stop them.

Addendum:
Norman Geras and Eve Garrard, in the course of treating us to “a lecture on drawing battle lines against Milne et al”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html , also attempt a lesson on blame and moral responsibility. Since I agree with them that the terrorists who planted the bombs are responsible for those bombs and that Blair is not, I am reluctant to quibble overmuch. But as a general rule it seems to me wrong to rule out a priori that those who create the conditions under which bad things are done share responsibility for those bad things. One of their examples concerns rape. Of course rapists are responsible for what they do, but suppose a university campus with bad lighting has a history of attacks on women and the university authorities can, at minimal cost, greatly improve the night-time illumination but choose not to do so for penny-pinching reasons. Suppose the pattern of assaults continues in the darkened area: do Geras and Garrard really want to say that the university penny-pinchers should not be blamed for what happens subsquently? At all? I think not.

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Enjoy the moral clarity

by Ted on July 13, 2005

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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Massive Multi-Thinker Online Reviews

by John Holbo on July 12, 2005

I’ve been on sabbatical from CT, working on the Valve and, by extension, pushing pet notions about academic publishing reform. These notions have now born fruit in the form of a book event, conducted more or less on the model of similar events pioneered at CT – massive, multi-thinker online reviews. The book is Theory’s Empire, an anthology of essays critical of Theory – the ofless stuff, mostly indigenous to English departments. Several posts up so far, and several bloggers – inside and outside the Valve – lined up to participate over the next several days. Please feel free to drop by and join the conversation if this sounds interesting. Next month we’ve got a different book lined up: The Literary Wittgenstein. I wrote a long review of it for NDPR about a month back. Under the fold, some general thoughts about academic e-publishing.

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Two thoughts

by Ted on July 12, 2005

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.

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Impersonating OSHA

by Henry Farrell on July 12, 2005

“Jordan Barab”:http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/archive/003203.shtml writes about a quite appalling story at Nathan Newman’s blog today.

bq. Last week federal immigration officials took into custody dozens of undocumented workers from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Ukraine at the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. How did they lure them into the trap? None of your business, says the federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “We’re not going to discuss how we do our business,” Sue Brown, an immigration and customs spokeswoman in Atlanta, said last Thursday.

bq. However, Allen McNeely, head of the state Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health division, said the workers were lured into the arrest by a flier announcing a mandatory Occupational Safety and Health Administration meeting.

bq. McNeely said one of the contractors who employed the immigrants faxed him a copy of the flier. It is printed in English and Spanish. It tells all contract workers to attend an OSHA briefing at the base theater and promises free coffee and doughnuts. … “Federal immigration officials say they have the right to round up illegal immigrants in any manner they see fit — even if it means impersonating Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials.”

Jennifer Gordon wrote an “article”:http://bostonreview.net/BR30.3/gordon.html a few months ago which explains exactly how badly undocumented workers are screwed under the existing system of workplace safety regulation. They rarely know their rights, are reluctant to complain about abuses for fear of deportation, and as a result are killed or maimed far more frequently in workplace accidents than they should be. This utterly, utterly shameful operation will make undocumented workers even less likely to contact OSHA about workplace safety than in the past – and as a result will lead to more cripplings and deaths.

Update: See also this “NYT story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/13/national/13janitor.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=a5044eb5a15dd403&hp&ex=1121227200&partner=homepage

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