Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

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Today’s New York Times article about Judith Miller’s testimony before the grand jury investigating whether Bush Administration officials revealed Valerie Wilson’s CIA identity is a veritable tidal wave of leaked (and provocative) information. In this passage, one of Libby’s top aides (apparently) provides detailed information about what Libby said before the grand jury (if Libby himself had provided this information he probably would’ve been violating the law, but I guess his aide can do it for him somehow without violating a law??):

Judith Miller & Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger arm in arm as she leaves prison
(credit: Doug Mills/NYT

One Libby associate has given details about his testimony in two grand jury appearances.

…Mr. Libby has said, he spoke with reporters, including Ms. Miller. He told her that the vice president had not sent Mr. Wilson to Africa. Mr. Libby also spoke to Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, who has written, “Libby told me Cheney had not been responsible for Wilson’s trip.”

In his conversation with Ms. Miller, Mr. Libby added another detail. He said that he had heard reports that Mr. Wilson’s wife had something to do with sending him on the trip. But he has said he did not know her name or position at the agency.

Isn’t that interesting. Libby “knew” that Ms. Wilson had helped arrange the (allegedly CIA-initiated) trip for her husband, yet didn’t know her name or position at the agency. So first of all, it means Libby admits he knew she worked for the CIA. You mean to tell me he and his staff did incomplete research on Ms. Wilson, finding out that she worked for the CIA, but not finding out what she did there and what was her position or rank? Does this strike anyone as credible?

Of course, I realize that saying Libby must’ve known of Wilson’s real identity is a far cry from PROVING he did. That will be the hard part for Fitzgerald (unless he has hitherto unknown corroboration from other sources).

It also appears that either Libby’s lawyers or Justice Department lawyers spoke anonymously to the Times according to this wording:

A lawyer who knows Mr. Libby’s account said the administration efforts to limit the damage from Mr. Wilson’s criticism extended as high as Mr. Cheney. This lawyer and others who spoke about the case asked that they not be identified because of grand jury secrecy rules.

I’m guessing that this source would be from Libby’s side. And if you add that to the above leak from a “Libby associate” it appears that Libby’s people are engaged in a full court press of the press. But I don’t fully understand what this all means. What motivates Libby to do this? Is there something hidden and extremely damaging that he’s attempting to preempt? So far I don’t see any clear evidence of that, but much more clearly remains to be known about this case.

Another aspect of the Times article that really has me scratching my head is that it implicitly questions Miller’s legal strategy and decisions:

Ms. Miller and her lawyers said she had agreed to testify because her source had released her from any pledge of confidentiality and because she had received a guarantee from the prosecutor in the case that he would restrict his questions to that one source.

Three recent letters from people involved in the case and the experiences of other reporters suggest that a similar deal may have been available for some time, raising questions about why Ms. Miller decided to testify now.

Considering that the leaders of the Times have publicly trumpeted their support for her (she even left prison on the arm of Arthur Sulzberger), it seems unprecedented for line reporters to raise such questions. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they did and it seems like a gutsy thing to do. But it also seems to raise the possibility that there are those in the Times camp who don’t share the heroic view of her, evident from Times editorials and public statements from Sulzberger and Bill Keller.

And another Times story questions her contention that she decided to testify now because Fitzgerald had finally agreed to limit the scope of questions he would ask her to her conversations with Libby:

[Another ] factor in Miller’s decision to go before the grand jury was a change in the position of the special prosecutor, Mr. Fitzgerald, concerning the scope of the questions she would be asked, according to Mr. Abrams [her attorney]. Mr. Fitzgerald only recently agreed to confine his questions to Ms. Miller’s conversations with Mr. Libby concerning the identification of Ms. Wilson, Mr. Abrams said.

But other reporters struck deals with Mr. Fitzgerald last year that also limited the questions they would be asked. For instance, Glenn Kessler, a reporter for The Washington Post, testified in June 2004 on ground rules essentially identical to those Ms. Miller obtained, according to an article in The Post at the time.

While I suppose it is possible that Fitzgerald refused to grant Miller the consideration he’d shown to the other reporters because he felt she had more important or different information than that supplied by them–it strikes me as extremely unlikely. Fitzgerald would realize it would look bad for him if he singled Miller out for more severe treatment.

I think Fitzgerald comes out of all this looking strong. He appears to have gotten Miller to back off her previous intransigent position and gotten her to accept essentially the same offer that had been made to the other reporters. Though I’m still not sure what, if anything he’s going to make out of it. Will this end up in a prosecution or not?

And I’m not sure where this leaves Libby. Has his position strengthened (unlikely) or is he more liable to indictment?

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When the future King David first hears about the death of his beloved friend, Jonathan, in battle he poignantly keens: Aich naflu giborim (“how the mighty have fallen”). Tom DeLay certainly doesn’t merit heroic status, but certainly mediocre status, perhaps even monstrous status. And to be candid, he’s not fully fallen yet. To paraphrase Churchill: it’s not the end, but perhaps the beginning of the end. We’ll have to leave Tom’s future up to himself and the prosecutorial skills of Ronnie Earle.

DeLay: the mighty laid low

After the deeply depressing 2004 presidential election I blogged (in Hubris: Why Bush Will Fail) that the only silver lining I could see was that Bush and the Republicans would have to overreach:

It is an act of supreme optimism on the day after such a dismal election, when hope is in tatters and the Republicans have tightened their grip on the levers of power, to think of a future rise of the prospects of the Democratic party. But we should remember that every party goes through long cycles of being out of power; of seeming to be out of favor or out of touch with the electorate. Indeed, this election seems an especially stinging rejection. But this will not last forever.

I think that George Bush, Karl Rove and Tom DeLay will actually help bring that day closer by overreaching. Their hubris in this apparently sweeping victory will, as it did with Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America fiasco, cause them to propose a sweeping, stridently right wing political-social agenda: abolition of the estate tax, new tax cuts, privatizing social security, hard-right Supreme Court candidates, etc. They think this is a mandate. But if the Democrats remaining in the Senate and House can play their cards right (and admittedly they don’t have many good ones in their hand), the Republicans will overplay theirs. It is especially important that Democrats prosecute the campaign against Tom DeLay’s ethical and legal lapses vigorously. That is one of the biggest current chinks in their armor.

It was simply in their political nature and DNA for their reach to exceed their grasp. And when they did (as I strongly suspected they would) I felt sure that the American people would turn on them with a vengeance. Because if you’re mean, vicious and powerful–as soon as you merely become mean and vicious (but weakened), then all those to whom you’ve been mean and vicious will want to stick it to you. In fact, they’ll delight in sticking it to you. Even those citizens who voted for you probably did so not out of any great love, affection or devotion. Rather they did it out of political calculation or expediency. And once you’re expendable you’re history. Nobody has any sense of allegiance to you after you’ve outlived your usefulness to them. Tom DeLay may find this out for himself. Perhaps even Bill Frist and George Bush will find this out too. It’s beginning to look more and more as if this will be the case. We can always hope.

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Michael Ignatieff wrote a brilliant piece, The Broken Contract, in last week’s Sunday New York Times Magazine which claims that the federal government’s feeble response to the victims of Katrina is not merely another incidence of the type of racial injustice that has beset American history from time immemorial. Ignatieff places the failure in a context that embraces the racial element while transcending it in a way.

Michael Ignatieff (credit: The Scotsman)

I found the piece breathtaking not only conceptually, but also for its eloquence and powerful writing. In reading it, you knew you were in the presence of a powerful and probing moral and political mind.

I have to say that the few times I’ve heard Ignatieff interviewed by Charlie Rose on PBS (talking about Iraq) I found him unpersuasive and dithering. He seemed to want to justify our involvement, while also wanting to be critical of it at the same time. It seemed like an intellectual exercise in futility. My problem with him could be summarized by The Scotsman’s sobriquet, “the militant liberal.” The phrase makes me very uncomfortable.

But on the subject of the philosophical and moral issues involved in the Katrina disaster, Ignatieff really comes into his own. As a writer myself interested in some of the same moral questions, I found myself saying: “Damn, I wish I could conceive of ideas and express them half as eloquently as he has here.” Such writing deserves awards and I hope the Pulitzer committee noticed it.

He works from the premise that all Americans feel, whether implicitly or explicitly that they have a contract with their government by which it is obligated to protect them from the vagaries of arbitrary, chaotic societal forces and the forces of nature:

A contract of citizenship defines the duties of care that public officials owe to the people of a democratic society. The Constitution defines some parts of this contract, and statutes define others, but much of it is a tacit understanding that citizens have about what to expect from their government. Its basic term is protection: helping citizens to protect their families and possessions from forces beyond their control…There is enough agreement, most of the time, about what the contract contains for America to hold together as a political community. When disasters strike, they test whether the contract is respected in a citizen’s hour of need. When the levees broke, the contract of American citizenship failed.

The most striking feature of the catastrophe is not that the contract didn’t hold. That is now too obvious to argue about…What has not been noticed is that the people with the most articulate understanding of what the contract of American citizenship entails were the poor, abandoned, hungry people huddled in the stinking darkness of the New Orleans convention center.

“‘We are American,’ a woman at the convention center proclaimed…with scathing anger.” (credit: Tyler Hicks/NYT)

“We are American,” a woman at the convention center proclaimed on television. ..

“We are American”: that single sentence was a lesson in political obligation. Black or white, rich or poor, Americans are not supposed to be strangers to one another. Having been abandoned, the people in the convention center were reduced to reminding their fellow citizens, through the medium of television, that they were not refugees in a foreign country. Citizenship ties are not humanitarian, abstract or discretionary. They are not ties of charity. In America, a citizen has a claim of right on the resources of her government when she cannot – simply cannot – help herself.

…The people of New Orleans believed that, as Americans, they were entitled to levees that would hold, an evacuation plan that would actually evacuate them and a resettlement plan that would get them back on their feet. They were entitled to this because they are Americans and because these simple things, while costly, are well within the means of the richest society on earth.

…When government failed so dismally in New Orleans, the betrayal was of the same order: it was no longer possible to believe in the contract that binds Americans together.

In the following passage, he implicitly criticizes Bush’s constant attempts to divert attention from overall government failure by touting the individual acts of competence by federal agencies and their workers:

This betrayal cannot be made better by charity and generosity…Private benevolence cannot heal the wounds – of humiliation and abandonment – caused by government failure. Nor can exemplary performance by some agencies – the Coast Guard, for example – do that much to redeem the abject performance of others.

In this passage, Ignatieff echos my own critique of the Army Corps’ lamentable failures in designing New Orleans’ levees and flood walls:

The failures were…failures of political imagination. Officials and engineers in charge of the levees reasoned like actuaries, building to a standard designed to protect only most of the people most of the time. Had they reasoned with any degree of political imagination, they might have started from the premise that there are some harms that a government must protect its people from, however unlikely they may turn out to be, whatever the cost. In America, a levee defends a foundational moral intuition: all lives are worth protecting and, since this is America, worth protecting at the highest standard. This principle was betrayed by the Army Corps of Engineers, by the state and local officials who knew the levees needed repair and did nothing and by Congress, which allowed the president to cut appropriations for levee renewal.

He excoriates public officials for not testing out their evacuation plans in the real world and instead relying on statistical projections and theoretical concepts:

[A] betrayal occurred in evacuation plans that assumed that citizens could evacuate by car. It turned out that 27 percent of city households did not own a car…The people involved in municipal, state and federal government simply did not care enough about their own professional morality to find out the true facts. Public officials simply didn’t bother to cross the social distances that divided them from the truth of the New Orleans population. These social distances between rich and poor, between black and white are stubborn and are likely to endure, but the most basic duty of public leadership is always to know how the other half lives – and dies.

…Why weren’t ordinary New Orleans citizens consulted about the evacuation plan? The people in poor wards of the city would have picked its holes apart in a second. In the future, one simple test of an evacuation plan’s adequacy should be: Have the people who are likely to be evacuated been fully consulted on its contents?

I apologize for quoting so much from this article and hope neither Professor Ignatieff nor the Times will mind. This should be read, discussed and debated as widely as possible and I just thought I’d try to do my small part in distributing it a little more widely.