Just shoot them all

Okay, that's an overreaction. But the continued revelations in the Plame case can really make you want to put all the participants in a bus and drive it off a cliff.

On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men....

After the September 29 call, Novak shifted his account of his July 9, 2003, conversation with Rove to show that administration officials had a passive role in leaking Plame's identity.

On July 22, 2003 -- eight days after the publication of Novak's column on Plame -- Newsday reporters Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce quoted Novak as telling them in an interview that it was White House officials who encouraged him to write about Plame. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," Newsday quoted Novak as saying about Plame. "They thought it was significant. They gave me the name, and I used it."

...Novak did not speak publicly on the matter again until September 29 -- later on the same day as his conversation with Rove in which he assured the president's chief political aide that he would protect him in the forthcoming Justice Department investigation.

"I have been beleaguered by television networks around the world, but I am reserving my say for Crossfire," Novak said on his own CNN program, which is no longer on the air. "Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July, I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador [Joseph C.] Wilson's report [on his Niger trip], when [the official] told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing.

Novak is sleaze. Rove, Libby and Cheney all appear to have been actively involved in revealing Plame's identity. The question of whether that was a crime revolves around whether Plame was undercover or not -- and it now appears that she was -- and whether they knew it at the time, which will be very hard to prove even if they did. But at a minimum we have them carelessly bandying about an agent's name, and then scrambling to obscure the fact when it blew up in their face.

So put 'em all on the bus. Put Wilson on it, too, just for being irritating. Drive it up to the highest point on the Pacific Coast Highway, aim it at the ocean, tie a brick to the accelerator and release the brakes. The world will be a better place for having done so.

Novak, Libby, Rove, Plame, politics, midtopia

Newspaper apologizes for false Iran story

Canada's National Post has apologized for printing a story saying Iran was going to require Jews to wear yellow badges.

"It is now clear the story is not true," Douglas Kelly, the National Post's editor in chief, wrote in a long editorial on Page 2. "We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story."

This was unusual in that it's a mainstream newspaper. But it comes at a time when a lot of false stories are getting circulated: the Karl Rove indictment, for instance, or the Internet movie featuring alleged Ranger Jesse Macbeth.

More than ever it pays to pay attention, and try to separate the trustworthy information sources from the trash.

National Post, Iran, Jesse Macbeth, politics, midtopia

Courage or treason?

Donklephant has a great post reflecting on the results of this year's Pulitzer Prizes, notably the prize that went to the New York Times reporters who broke the story about the administration's double super-secret warrantless wiretap program. The right side of the blogosphere has been going nuts about it, repeating claims that the reporters have committed "treason" in "time of war."

Justin Gardner calls bullsh*t. And he's right. This is not a war in any conventional sense, and cases like this illustrate why viewing the fight against terror in that light is dangerous, self-defeating and downright Orwellian.

eavesdropping, Pulitzer, politics, midtopia

Bob Woodruff goes home

Bob Woodruff, the ABC anchorman seriously injured in a roadside bomb blast in Iraq, appears to be well on the way to recovery. He sent a note to his ABC colleagues thanking them for all the support they've shown.

I am moving on to outpatient treatment and I can’t tell you what a blessing it is. Though I know there is still a long road ahead, it’s nice to be feeling more like myself again – laughing with family, reading bedtime stories and reminding my kids to do their homework.

The photo of Woodruff was taken today, and he looks very well.

His cameraman, Doug Vogt, was released from the hospital in February.

Woodruff, midtopia

Scalia photographer barred from working for Archdiocese

The photographer who took the picture of Antonin Scalia flipping off reporters has been blacklisted by the Boston Archdiocese.

Scalia had asked the freelance photographer, Peter Smith, not to publish the photo. Instead, he gave it to the Boston Herald, which put it on its front page on Thursday.

Smith, 51, had freelanced for diocese's The Pilot newspaper for a decade, but he said yesterday, “I did the right thing. I did the ethical thing,” according to the Herald. Smith is also an assistant photojournalism professor at Boston University.

I didn't care about Scalia's Sicilian gesture, which is why I didn't write about it. But this is just silly. The Archdiocese has an absolute right to determine who it will buy pictures from, and cutting ties to a freelancer doesn't have the same legal and ethical baggage as firing an employee. But this is petty with a capital P.

Will it have a chilling effect on future coverage of Scalia? I doubt it, especially with the Herald as a willing alternative market for such images. But overall it doesn't help if reporters and photographers have to worry about jeopardizing existing contracts in order to write about or photograph powerful people. Freelancers should be judged on the quality and reliability of their work for the diocese, not the content of unrelated work.

Boston, Peter Smith, Scalia, politics, midtopia

Why an independent press is important

If you ever want an example of why we should not allow the government to regulate the press, here's one.

Douglas County Coordinator Bill Schalow last Monday sent an eight-point protocol to Echo Press reporter Erin Klegstad, requesting that she submit stories to his office for accuracy checks and go through the office to set up interviews.

"If you willfully ignore this request," it concluded, "or fail to cooperate and comply without contacting me first regarding your concerns, your actions could result in a total system 'gag' and limit your interaction with the county to the coordinator's office only."

Klegstad - who had to call Schalow to find out if he was serious (he said he was) - showed the e-mail to Al Edenloff, the paper's editor.

"I was shocked," Edenloff said. "I thought it was the most ridiculous document I'd ever read. ... We do not need our stories to be pre-authorized, prearranged or sanitized. We're the watchdogs, not them."

The Minnesota Newspaper Association's attorney, Mark Anfinson, said the protocol seemed to violate not only the First Amendment but also the state's open records law.

"This is something you would have expected to see behind the Iron Curtain," Anfinson said. "I told (Edenloff) that the best remedy for this would be a story, that it wouldn't stand the light of day."

That's what happened. When the news broke, the public was infuriated, and some county leaders who hadn't seen the policy said they didn't support it. Schalow quickly backed off.

Irritated as we can sometimes get about perceived excesses by an out-of-control press, the alternative is worse. It's quite refreshing that the citizens of Douglas County not only recognize that, but felt it was important enough to do something about it.


censorship, Minnesota, watchdog, free press, politics, midtopia

The upside to civil war

I don't know the context of this piece on Fox News, but it's pretty hilarious no matter how you slice it.

A segment about escalating sectarian violence in Iraq on the February 23 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto featured onscreen captions that read: " 'Upside' To Civil War?" and "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?"