He hasn’t won a Pulitzer since 1987, but Charles Krauthammer’s recent essays (off the top of my head) on Harriet Miers, torture, gay marriage, and civil war in Iraq, for their unique perspicuity, cogency, and ability to spur debate, eminently qualify him for this year’s prize for commentary (even if the first two essays appeared late last year).
If Krauthammer doesn’t receive at least a nomination, then, as is the case with Victor Davis Hanson—who has spent the past five years explaining the war on terror with peerless eloquence, passion and historical context—it seems that the prizes (like the Oscars) are more political than I thought.
As a speech (see video below), received first prize in the Young Professionals Speakdebate (Center for Strategic and International Studies) on November 16, 2005. As an essay, received third prize in the Cato Institute’s intern op-ed contest in December 2005.
During his recent trip to Asia, President Bush praised Taiwan as “free and democratic and prosperous.” Why then, if the Taiwanese already have it so good, should the U.S. rock the boat?
For instance, writing in the Asian Wall Street Journal, Gary Schmitt and Dan Blumenthal recently argued that the U.S. should “encourage” Taiwanese politicians who are independence-minded. During a recent hearing of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute protested that Taiwan spends more on defense per capita than does U.S. ally Germany. What’s more, as Justin Logan of the Cato Institute notes, these neoconservatives advocate very provocative measures, such as sending senior U.S. officers to Taiwan to coordinate with Taiwan’s military.
The problem with these proposals is that international relations is not an academic exercise. It’s not about grandiose abstractions or righteous platitudes. On the contrary, international relations is a cost-benefit analysis, behind which lie death and destruction. To wit, when China issues threats over Taiwan, as it does repeatedly, it’s not bluster. Its leaders mean it when they say that Taiwan is part of China and that reunification—as polling data invariably confirm—is the will of the Chinese people.
Why are 23 million Taiwanese so important to 1.3 billion Chinese? Beijing has invested its very identity in Taiwan. Its national destiny, its pride and its rage are inextricably bound up with this little island. On the Taiwan question, the stakes don’t get any higher for the People’s Republic, so it would be willing to incur massive economic and military losses in order to save face.
As a Chinese general told an American diplomat in 1995, “In the end you [Americans] care more about Los Angeles than you do about Taipei.” Indeed, ask any Chinese citizen what he thinks about Taiwan, and the overwhelming odds are that he’ll respond with deep-seated passion. By stark contrast, ask an American about Taiwan, and he’ll respond with indifference.
Moreover, in matters of national security, Americans should care more about our own freedom, fortunes and futures than those of the Taiwanese. We should be, like all countries, self-interested.
Nonetheless, suppose that we follow the advice of the Free Taiwan crowd. What then?
Militarily, Beijing has made it clear that it would launch a war if Taiwan were “separated from China in any name.” Even assuming that we would win, it is unjust to ask Americans to shed the blood and treasure that war with another nuclear power would entail.
Diplomatically, we need China’s cooperation in the United Nations, which includes not only voting with us but also abstaining. But as a permanent member of the Security Council, China can veto any resolution it wants. One example: we’re engaged in talks with North Korea over its nuclear ambitions. On this issue, China’s regional influence is indispensable. Regarding Iran, provocation would give China an excuse to abandon its restraint on selling arms to the ayatollahs.
Economically, pressuring China would destabilize Taiwan. After all, prosperity requires stability; stability gives investors the security to invest. Indeed, past conflicts between China and Taiwan have caused volatility and uncertainty. In 1996, after the U.S. issued a visa to Taiwan’s president in order for him to give a speech at Cornell University, China lobbed a series of missiles over Taiwan. One result: prices in the computer market jumped dramatically.
Finally, even if China annexed Taiwan tomorrow, reunification would not spell disaster. As various Chinese officials have said, a reunified Taiwan would enjoy even greater autonomy than Hong Kong. In theory, Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. In practice, Hong Kong retains its own legal system, currency and customs. A major international center of finance and trade, it is also an economic dynamo. For these reasons, Taiwan’s reunification would occur more in name than in substance. It would amount to new letterhead on a government memo, not serfdom.
To be sure, the U.S. should not support reunification. Instead, we should continue the current course of strategic ambiguity—which, after all, has resulted in the affluent democracy President Bush hailed two weeks ago. The status quo isn’t perfect, but it’s been painstakingly, skillfully crafted over the past 60 years. Let’s not turn statesmanship into brinksmanship.
In naming President Bush Person of the Year 2004, Time magazine received both Oval Office access for its photographer and a second interview with the president in less than four months (the previous story was in August, apropos the Republican National Convention).
Reading such exclusives inevitably prompts one question: in order to attain—and, more important, to maintain—such access, do journalists temper their coverage of the given subject? After all, if they are too critical of, say, the Iraq war, they risk alienating Bush, who reportedly snubbed Peter Jennings, who interviewed the last four sitting presidents, for that reason.
Indeed, the press critic Michael Massing describes today’s relationship between high-powered reporters and the White House this way:
“Karen D. Young, one of the top editors [at the Washington Post], said . . . ‘Let’s face it, we are basically a mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power’. . . . It’s a major admission of how the major media have in fact served as conveyor belts. . . . have gotten so much toward a position to be handmaidens to the people in power. . . . [Take,] for instance, Pentagon correspondents flying with Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to Iraq and Afghanistan. They want to be on the plane. They know if they write things that are too critical, they’re not going to get seats there. . . . Your career can be shredded if you speak out too much against those in power.”
On the other hand, if a journalist is too mealy-mouthed, he sacrifices fairness and balance. See Judy Miller vis-à-vis Ahmed Chalabi.
How, then, do and how should journalists draw the line between closeness to sources and responsibility to readers?
One suggestion: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post columnist, Time essayist, contributing editor to the New Republic and Weekly Standard, and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Granted, Krauthammer opines rather than reports, which means his job doesn’t depend on cultivating sources. But he’s also one of the most eloquent and prominent neoconservatives, and, as such, has consulted with the Bush administration. (In fact, he was criticized for failing to disclose his meeting with White House officials regarding the president’s second inaugural.)
And yet, during the early days of Hurricane Katrina, Krauthammer didn’t hesitate to call W “[l]ate, slow, and simply out of tune with the urgency and magnitude of the disaster.” He continues:
“His flyover on the way to Washington was the worst possible symbolism. And his Friday visit was so tone-deaf and politically disastrous that he had to fly back three days later.”
The point: criticize the presidency, not the president.
Postscript (10/25/2005): Or follow Krauthammer’s conservative colleague on the Post op-ed page, George Will, who in a recent column said this about the president and Harriet Miers: “He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing ap-proaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections.”
Postscript (10/29/2005): The Los Angeles Times reports: “On one occasion, the office [of the vice president] prohibited a reporter from traveling with Cheney aboard Air Force Two, because the vice president’s daughter said Cheney was unhappy with that newspaper’s coverage.”
In January 2004, Scooter Libby signed a waiver allowing Judy Miller to testify about their confidential conversations regarding Valerie Plame Wilson. But as Miller’s former lawyer Floyd Abrams later said, that waiver was “required as a condition for Mr. Libby’s continued em-ployment at the White House.” Hence, most journalists agreed that the waiver was, as Abrams put it, “inherently ‘mixed,’” or coercive.
This left Miller with two options. After publicly announcing that she viewed the waiver as insufficient, she could wait for Libby to assure her, specifically and directly, that he had voluntarily abrogated their agreement. Alternatively, she could ask him herself.
Matt Cooper took the latter route. After receiving—an hour before he would have been incarcerated—“an express personal release from my source,” who turned out to be Karl Rove, he agreed to testify and went free. Miller chose the former route, and so went to jail.
According to Abrams, Libby’s failure to contact Miller as the case proceeded led her to conclude that he did not want her to testify.
This is understandable. If a subpoena requires a reporter to break her confidentiality with a source, then, assuming the source knows about the subpoena (which, in this case, anyone read-ing a newspaper did), the source should approach the reporter, not vice-versa.
But I fail to see the great danger if the reporter approaches the source, as Cooper did (through his lawyer). Especially if the consequence of not doing so is four months in jail—and possibly more—a phone call or an e-mail asking for clarification seems eminently fair.
Addendum (10/2/2005): The New York Times: “[P]eople involved in the case have said Ms. Miller did not understand that the waiver had been freely given and did not accept it until she had heard from Mr. Libby directly.”
Arianna: “The claim that Miller ‘has finally received a direct and uncoerced waiver’ is laughable… and, indeed, has already been laughed at by (1) my increasingly frustrated sources within the Times (2) a chorus of voices in the blogosphere (see here, here, and here) and (3) (and much more significantly) Joseph Tate, Scooter Libby’s lawyer, who told the Washington Post yesterday that he informed Miller’s attorney, Floyd Abrams, a year ago that Libby’s waiver ‘was voluntary and that Miller was free to testify’ [actually, these are not Abrams’s words but the Post’s summary].
“So it defies credulity for Miller, Sulzberger [the Times’s publisher], and Bill Keller [the Times’s editor] to keep insisting that Libby’s earlier waiver was coerced when Libby says that it wasn’t. I don’t have much good to say about the vice president’s chief of staff, but I don’t doubt that he knows the difference between being coerced and acting on his own free will.
The Washington Post: “[Tate] said last night [Sept. 29] that he was contacted by [Robert] Bennett [Abrams’s replacement] several weeks ago, and was surprised to learn that Miller had not accepted [Libby’s year-old waiver] as authorization to speak with prosecutors.
“‘We told her lawyers it was not coerced,’ Tate said. ‘We are surprised to learn we had anything to do with her incarceration’ [emphasis added]. . . .
“In July, when Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan ordered Miller to jail, he . . . stress[ed] that the government source she ‘alleges she is protecting’ had released her from her promise of confidentiality.
Addendum (10/4/2005): Miller tells her paper, “I had been in jail, and I thought maybe Scooter Libby was thinking about that and that he might be prepared to do something that, for whatever reason, he didn’t feel comfortable doing before.”
Also from today’s Times: Miller had two other reasons for holding out:
1. She wanted a pledge from Fitzgerald that her testimony would be limited to her conversations with Libby and would not address other sources.
2. She wanted to redact her notes herself, rather than having to submit them to a third party, before turning them over to Fitzgerald.
In an editorial observer in today’s Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg asserts (rather than argues) that creationists are simply dumb. Of the 2004 poll showing that 45% of Americans believe that the Earth’s creation proceeded according to the description in the book of Genesis, he writes, “This isn’t a triumph of faith. It’s a failure of education.”
The implication is that with a little more schooling, creationists will turn the corner and embrace evolution.
Unfortunately, most will not, for Klinkenborg underestimates the power of faith.
Moreover, the real failure of education here is Klinkenborg’s attribution of ignorance to creationists. For instance, my conservative Christian friends not uninformed; they understand evolution, but reject it. Why? Simply put, because they’re ideologues, and, like all ideologues, no amount of textbooks, lectures or secular conversations will change their core values.
Footnote: For a brilliant analysis of “intelligent design,” read William Saletan’s essay, “Unintelligible Redesign.”
Addendum (9/4/2005): Another excellent article on I.D.: Daniel C. Dennett’s “Show Me the Science.”
Those who berate Judy Miller for her coverage of Iraq’s alleged W.M.D. should remember that Miller’s copy was only one aspect of any final article, which, as former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent wrote in a different context, “is the collaborative product of reporter, editor, copy editor, desk or department head, and sometimes, the anointing ministrations of a masthead editor.”
Addendum: Steve Engleberg, former head of investigations at the Times, tellsEditor and Publisher that he puts primary blame on the papers’ editors for printing Miller’s stories on WMD.
We should also remember that some of Miller’s worst articles were coauthored; see here and here.
Miller, for her part, asked why no one blamed editors like [former executive editor Howell] Raines, and others, “who knew all of my sources.” (Raines, in an e-mail, said, “I did not know Judy’s sources. At the time, I followed the customary Times practice of relying on the supervising desk editor—in this case, most often the Washington editor and the foreign editor—to make sure the sourcing on the stories they handled was correct. I questioned reporters directly on some stories out of the Pentagon, but, to my regret, I did not do so on these stories. As many journalism critics have noted, the Times has yet to reveal what editors among present staff members were directly involved in assigning and editing Judy Miller’s stories. Scapegoating Judy or anyone else does not erase their responsibility to tell their readers the full truth in this matter.”)
Since I started blogging, I read more thoroughly. Not necessarily because I read with an eye toward how I can blog the given text, but because if I do, I need to be more familiar with it than I would be for a conversation over dinner.
Take, for instance, my posts about the Valerie Plame affair, specifically, whether Plame was undercover when Novak outed her. Before I became a blogger, I would have known the gist of the story—that Plame worked for the C.I.A.—but probably would have lacked sufficient knowledge to form a sold answer. Now, because blogging, like studying for a test, forces you to focus and to understand, I can credibly contribute to the discussion.
To put it another way, blogging sharpens the mind. As the New York Timesobserved in an editorial today, what bloggers call “fisking,” or dissecting another’s argument, is “a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in.”
Indeed, since democracy thrives on an informed and engaged populace, blogs enhance democracy.
Addendum (1/19/2005): As Ana Marie Cox, the blogger formerly known as Wonkette, recently put it, “Blogs in general have democratized the debate about politics.”
Addendum (3/24/2006): Jessica Cutler, aka the Washingtonienne, agrees: “Everyone should have a blog. It’s the most democratic thing ever.”
In an op-ed last week, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney argued that the litmus test for judicial restraint is “controversy,” that courts should intervene only in issues that are not controversial.
The federal system left to us by the Constitution allows people of different states to make their own choices on matters of controversy, thus avoiding the bitter battles engendered by “one size fits all” judicial pronouncements. A federalist approach would allow such disputes to be settled by the citizens and elected representatives of each state, and appropriately defer to democratic governance.
Romney’s words contain too much empirical evidence to be dismissed lightly. As Robert McCloskey shows in The American Supreme Court, with a few exceptions, justices have historically followed the political winds, lest a backlash against judicial activism ensue. As FDR put it while trying to pack the Court in 1937, the American people expect the unelected third branch of government to fall in line behind the elected other two.
Of course, the Constitution sets up the judiciary, the third branch of government, as a deliberately antidemocratic bulwark against the other two. Checks and balances Mr. Romney?
Second, what constitutes “controversy”? When polls show Americans are divided at least 60-40?
Third, rightly or wrongly, many denounce Roe v. Wade not so much for its verdict but for the process by which the Court reached it: through a so-called penumbra crystal establishing the right to “privacy.” Isn’t Romney’s view of the role of the courts just another such implicit crystal?
Ask someone who wants to criminalize same-sex marriage how many gay people he knows, and I bet an uncomfortable silence would ensue. Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, who concurred with the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) that criminalized homosexual sex, never met a homosexual.
With respect to Jews, no one illustrates the point more vividly than Tom Friedman, in his book, From Beirut to Jerusalem (1995): “One day I was waiting to see Salam [a Sunni Muslim living in Lebanon], while he was bawling out some wild-eyed Muslim sheik because his Friday mosque sermons were too hostile to the Lebanese army. As the little sheik with his red-and-white turban and thin beard was leaving Salam’s office, Salam insisted on introducing him to me. He told the sheik that I was a reporter from the New York Times, that I had won a Pulitzer Prize, that I spoke Arabic, and, on top of it all, said Salam, ‘he is Jewish.’ he words hung in the air for a second, before this poor little shiek’s eyes bulged out. I thought his beard might fall off. He’d probably given a few Koran-thumping sermons about the Jews in his day, and I am sure I was the first one he had ever met in the flesh. After a limp handshake he scurried out the door.”
Conversely, when Karol Wojtyła lived in an apartment, his upstairs neighbors and landlord were Jewish. When Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II, he declared the Jewish people “our dearly beloved brothers.”
The moral: When you interact with the Other, when you live together or go to school together or do business together, you begin to see each other as people. Familiarity breeds tolerance, whereas ignorance incubates hate.
But is this really true? Andrew Sullivan articulates the counterargument with eloquence: “It is one of the most foolish clichés of our time that prejudice is always rooted in ignorance, and can usually be overcome by familiarity with the objects of our loathing. The racism of many Southern whites under segregation was not appeased by familiarity with Southern blacks; the virulent loathing of Tutsis by many Hutus was not undermined by living next door to them for centuries. Theirs was a hatred that sprang, for whatever reasons, from experience. It cannot easily be compared with, for example, the resilience of anti-Semitism in Japan, or hostility to immigration in areas where immigrants are unknown, or fear of homosexuals by people who have never knowingly met one.”
Sullivan continues: “Just as there is possessive love and needy love; family love and friendship; romantic love and unrequited love; passion and respect, affection and obsession, so hatred has its shadings. There is hate that fears, and hate that merely feels contempt; there is hate that expresses power, and hate that comes from powerlessness; there is revenge, and there is hate that comes from envy. There is hate that was love, and hate that is a curious expression of love. There is hate of the other, and hate of something that reminds us too much of ourselves. There is the oppressor’s hate, and the victim’s hate. There is hate that burns slowly, and hate that fades. And there is hate that explodes, and hate that never catches fire. The modern words that we have created to describe the varieties of hate—’sexism,’ ‘racism,’ ‘anti-Semitism,’ ‘homophobia’—tell us very little about any of this. They tell us merely the identities of the victims; they don’t reveal the identities of the perpetrators, or what they think, or how they feel. They don’t even tell us how the victims feel. And this simplicity is no accident. Coming from the theories of Marxist and post-Marxist academics, these ‘isms’ are far better at alleging structures of power than at delineating the workings of the individual heart or mind. In fact, these ‘isms’ can exist without mentioning individuals at all.”
I feel the day is incomplete if I haven’t read the New York Times, especially the op-ed page. But I’m bothered that op-eds sometimes appear more because of the writer’s status and less because of the merits of his argument.
Exhibit A: Today’s op-ed by Senator Arlen Specter may include bits of news, but it is not newsworthy—especially for the Sunday paper and especially with a kicker like “I am confident that we [the United States Senate] can meet our responsibilities.”
As it happens, David Shipely, the op-ed editor (by the way, why isn’t this position on the masthead?) would seem to agree. “Does it help to be famous” in order to get published, he asked in February 2004?
Not really. In fact, the bar of acceptance gets nudged a little higher for people who have the means to get their message out in other ways—elected officials, heads of state, corporate titans. It’s incumbent on them to say something forthright and unexpected. Op-ed real estate is too valuable to be taken up with press releases.
A similar situation occured this past April, when I sent the Times a letter to the editor regarding its editorial on pharmacists who refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions. It may very well be that my words simply didn’t merit publication—although Steve Chapman made the same point in his syndicated column a few days later—but I suspect that it was passed over for the press release-letter by Senators Santorum and Kerry.
Addendum (7/26/2005): I sent the above thoughts to the Times’s Public Editor, and received the following reply from his assistant today:
Thanks for writing and sharing your thoughts. Mr. Calame is very interested in how letters and op-ed pieces are selected for publication, and may write about it in a future column or on his Web journal. So we will keep your comments on file for his possible future use.
Ayn Rand held that “the purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.” Dr. Leon Kass seems to embrace the antithetical view.
As James Stacey Taylor writes in a review of Kass’s book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (Encounter, 2002): “[F]or Kass, a life with human dignity is one that is ‘lived always with and against necessity, struggling to meet it, not to eliminate it.’ It thus appears that Kass’s objection to gene therapy lies in its possibility to secure for ‘a painless, suffering-free’ existence for people. Similarly, his objection to voluntary, active euthanasia is that it is more dignified to face one’s ‘troubles and pains.’”
Kass is right that struggle is important. Grunt work is crucial to character. But let us never conflate, say, learning long division before using a calculator with perpetuating a life wracked by anguish. The former has a time and place, even in adulthood. The latter—whether hypertension or hypochondria, scleroderma or stress—is always and forever unwelcome.
It is appalling that a human being as erudite as Kass has the gall to tell another human being in pain that his suffering is dignified. It is unconscionable that this PhD and MD chairs the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Addendum (10/30/2013): According to Dick Cavett, in her German childhood upbringing, the great Marlene Dietrich was commanded to go without a drink of water when thirsty “to build character.” Did it? Cavett asked. “Not one brick’s worth of character was built. It probably injured my kidneys.”
1. Dinesh D’Souza, The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence (New York: Touchstone, 2001 [2000]), p. 127.
Who has done more to eradicate poverty and suffering in the Third World, Bill Gates or Mother Teresa? To the extent that he has placed the power of information technology at the disposal of millions of people, the obvious answer is Gates.
Who is the poor man better off under: Mother Teresa or Bill Gates? A Mother Teresa . . . hands them bowls of slop every day, so they can barely exist . . . [A] . . . Bill Gates . . . creates a fortune for himself by helping others to create fortunes for themselves . . . Where the first feeds [people] for a day, the second helps [people] feed themselves.
Last month Rep. Robin Hayes, vicechair of the House subcommittee on terrorism, declared that Saddam Hussein was “very much involved in 9/11.” Hayes claimed that he has access to evidence few others do. Told no investigation has ever implicated Baghdad in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the congressman responded, “I’m sorry, but you must have looked in the wrong places.”
Let’s take another look. Shortly after 9/11, a U.S. official leaked to the Associated Press that “the United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service that Mohamed Atta,” the ringleader of the 9/11 gang, “met earlier this year in Europe with an Iraqi intelligence agent.” As the story unfoldedoverthe next month, the world learned that in early April 2001, Atta had allegedly rendezvoused with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, a vice consul in Iraq’s embassy in Prague but actually a spymaster. The meeting would have been Atta’s second time in the Czech capital in less than a year, having passed through the city’s airport en route from Germany to New Jersey in June 2000, and was the sole evidence tying Saddam to 9/11.
On one hand, the Czech domestic intelligence service, who by virtue of proximity had the best data, held that the rendezvous happened. It was certainly plausible, since before communist Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, Iraq had been a major buyer of Czechoslovak arms. Additionally, according to Richard Perle, then the chair of the Defense Policy Board, an influential advisory group to the Pentagon, operations like 9/11 “are not planned in caves; they’re planned in offices by people who have secretaries and support staffs and research and communications and technology.” Finally, as James Woolsey, who visited England to investigate the case on behalf of the Justice Department, contends, even with all the ambiguity, the evidence was “about as clear as these things get.”
On the other hand, counters Daniel Benjamin, the director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 1998-1999, it is “very difficult to hide serious ties” between a regime and a terrorist client. For in collaborating, “they negotiate over targets, finances, materiel, and tactics.” Similarly, the apparatuses of bureaucracy—including employees who will swap secrets for cash—afford ample opportunity for spying on governments. This is why state sponsors, like Libya vis-à-vis the 1998 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and Iran vis-à-vis the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers, have historically left ample trails.
And yet the only Iraqi trail pertaining to 9/11 was one meeting in Prague, during a month for which neither the F.B.I. nor C.I.A. could uncover any visa, airline or financial records showing that Mohamed Atta had left or reentered the U.S. (Their research placed him in Florida two days before the meeting.) Second, all the evidence rested on the uncorroborated allegation of a single informant, who could produce neither any audio nor visual recordings. Third, no one could verify what Atta and Ani had discussed—for instance, whether Atta requested help or updated Ani on his progress. Accordingly, as Cheney told Tim Russert in September 2003. “[W]e’ve never been able to . . . confirm[] [the meeting] or discredit[] it. We just don’t know.”
Of course, circumstantiality is not a basis—or even a partial basis, really—for taking a country to war. After all, the burden of proof always falls on he who asserts a positive. In the 16 months between 9/11 and the Iraq war, despite considerable efforts, hawks failed to meet this burden. Consequently, neither of the administration’s two most publicized arguments for the war—the State of the Union address (1/28/03) and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. Security Council (2/5/03)—even mentioned Prague. And lest we misconstrue the subtext, on January 31—seven weeks before the war began—Newsweek asked the President specifically about a 9/11 connection to Iraq, to which Bush replied, “I cannot make that claim.” Eight months later, in September 2003, Bush repeated, “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.”
Moreover, in July 2003, U.S. troops arrested Ani in Iraq. The Iraqi denied ever meeting Atta, a denial that officials found credible. Also in July, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declassified the much-delayed report of their Joint Inquiry into 9/11. Tellingly, nowhere in 858 pages does the report mention Iraq’s purported involvement in our day of infamy. Finally, a year later, the 9/11 Commission Reportconcluded that “[t]he available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta-Ani meeting.” The report added that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh both denied that any Atta-Ani meeting occurred.
Still, Rep. Hayes persists. The “evidence is clear,” he told CNN. In fact, it is illusory. And at a time when the American people increasingly mistrust journalists for their reliance on anonymous sources, isn’t it time we turn the same scrutiny to politicians who rely on anonymous evidence?
Unpublished Notes
In a 10,500-word article in a recent issue of the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn charge those who dismiss the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship as having “an acute case of denial”: “We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden’s request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a “trusted confidante” of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.”
But ex post facto evidence cannot be a casus belli.
“[T]he Free World is not interested in epistemological debates over what constitutes a connection. We are not engaged in a court case, or a classroom debate. We are fighting a war.” [1]
[1] Claudia Rosett, “Saddam and al Qaeda,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2005.
[T]wo stories of profound importance languish in our hands. The public would be well served to know them, but both are based on documents leaked to us by people who would face deep trouble for having leaked them. Publishing the stories would almost certainly lead to a leak investigation and the ultimate choice: talk or go to jail.
Because talking isn’t an option and jail is too high a price to pay, these two stories will go untold for now.
Time reporters have said that at least two sources have told them they would no longer provide information because the company turned over [Cooper’s] documents.
Addendum (7/23/2005): Pearlstine confirms, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that Time reporters have received e-mails from sources saying they no longer trust the magazine.
Addendum (10/1/2005): Jim Kelly, Time’s managing editor, tells the New York Times, “Looking at what we’ve managed to publish since [Cooper testified], it is very hard for me to point to any damage that was done to Time magazine with its sources.”
On July 6, having received an hour earlier, “in somewhat dramatic fashion . . . an express personal release from my source,” Matt Cooper agreed to testify. But as the New York Timesreports, that source—Karl Rove—never gave Cooper the release himself. Rather, the release resulted from a “frenzied series of phone calls initiated that morning” by Cooper’s lawyer, Richard Sauber, to Karl Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, and which involved the special prosecutor.
Here’s what happened (with additional reporting from Editor and Publisher). On his way back from Alaska to Washington on the night of July 5, Sauber passed through Chicago at 6 a.m., where he picked up the Times and the Wall Street Journal. Back on the phone, he read an article in the Journal that quoted Luskin as saying, “Mr. Rove hasn’t asked any reporter to treat him as a confidential source in the matter. So if Matt Cooper is going to jail to protect a source, it’s not Karl he’s protecting.”
Sauber immediately called Cooper from the plane, and they agreed to ask Luskin for a specific release from Rove. “I think we should take a shot,” Cooper recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s an invitation.’”
When he landed in Washington, Sauber called Luskin, who called back at around 12:30 p.m.—an hour and half before court re-adjourned. Luskin dictated a waiver to Sauber, who then sent it Luskin, who signed and returned it at around 1 p.m.
The new waiver said only that Rove “affirm[ed]” his previous, blanket waiver, but it specified “any conversation he [Rove] may have had with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine during the month of July 2003.”
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
Scholars “use an intellectual scalpel…