Wilson/Plame Scandal: The Damage Spreads

President Bush should find the Valerie Plame leakers and get them out of the government, fast. And columnist Robert Novak should re-evaluate what he allows to come out of his mouth. 

This Washington Post article by Walter Pincus and Mike Allen, two of the Post's best, describes how revealing Plame's identity also compromised a CIA front firm, Brewster-Jennings & Associates. And Novak gave some extra assistance to that process:

The name of the CIA front company was broadcast yesterday by Novak, the syndicated journalist who originally identified Plame. Novak, highlighting Wilson's ties to Democrats, said on CNN that Wilson's "wife, the CIA employee, gave $1,000 to Gore and she listed herself as an employee of Brewster-Jennings & Associates."

"There is no such firm, I'm convinced," he continued. "CIA people are not supposed to list themselves with fictitious firms if they're under a deep cover -- they're supposed to be real firms, or so I'm told. Sort of adds to the little mystery."

In fact, it appears the firm did exist, at least on paper. The Dun & Bradstreet database of company names lists a firm that is called both Brewster Jennings & Associates and Jennings Brewster & Associates.

In continuing his cooperation with White House attempts to discredit Wilson and Plame, Novak apparently shot off his mouth carelessly, to put the most generous interpretation on it.  But the damage to the effectiveness of the front company had probably already been done by the original revelation.

Veteran political reporter Jules Witcover, in an excellent article Friday, addressed the issue of protection of sources in this case:

If Mr. Novak initiated the interview [that produced the Plame exposure], then he clearly has the obligation to protect his source. But if some White House rumormonger undertook, unsolicited, to plant the story with other reporters, I don't see where, unless they had some prior understanding with the leaker, they have any obligation to protect him in his efforts of intimidation.

Tags: joseph wilson, jules witcover, robert novak, valerie plame

Iraq War: A Sobering Warning

Competing with Arnie's sex issues and Rush's race and drug problems, Gen. Sanchez' warning this week probably didn't get the intention it deserves. The commander of American forces in Iraq said:

This is still wartime. ... There is still some intense fighting to be done, especially out in the west. We should not be surprised if one of these mornings we wake up and ... there has been a major firefight with some casualties or a significant terrorist attack that kills significant numbers of people.

Apart from the merits of the war or the occupation policy, this is the kind of thing both civilian and military officials at the Pentagon should be saying more often.

Fans of the war are suggesting that the press is causing the Administration's credibility problems. That's way off base. The press generally is still much too little critical on the war.

But over-optimistic expectations that the Administration raised about the costs (human and financial) of the war and the occupation have not so far been met. That's the credibility problem.

But Sanchez' bosses in Washington are still at it:

Sanchez stressed that U.S. forces were improving their ability to confront the resistance, a statement echoed Thursday in Washington by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Suzanne Goldenberg Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who defended American progress in Iraq.

"While there is no question we have faced some challenges and we've got some ahead of us, we have really achieved numerous successes and expect the situation to continue to improve," Myers told reporters at a Pentagon news conference. "We're in this for the long haul and ... we'll get the job done."

And it's starting to look like the US is running a serious risk of losing even the existing level of diplomatic support from the United Nations for the occupation.

Happy talk isn't going to fix this.

Tags: iraq war, richard myers, roberto sanchez, rummy, rumsfeld

Iraq War: A Sobering Prospect

Despite the official happy talk from the Bush Administration, the independent press reports out of Iraq are not encouraging. Suzanne Goldenberg reports on a visit to Iraq in the London Guardian, a report notable because much of it focuses on southern Iraq, which has not had the level of guerrilla fighting experienced in central Iraq.  Several things stand out in her article to me.

Crime and non-state armed groups are critical problems. "The knock at the door at night is no longer a member of Saddam's secret police, but it could very well be an armed robber, an enforcer from a political faction, or an enemy intent on revenge."

Unemployment is severe. This has the doubly dangerous effect of leaving people without legitimate incomes and encouraging black-market activities like smuggling.

Clashes between religious factions could become a major problem. Some violent Sunni-Shia conflict has already begun in the south.

Tribal authorities are being reinforced. The Western reporting on tribal systems in Iraq may suffer from a certain colonialist perspective. But for an Iraqi national state oriented toward becoming a free and democratic Muslim society along the model of Turkey, allowing the tribal systems to move into a void left by the lack of government authority is very dangerous.

There does not seem to be any substantial popular base of support for the American occupation. "At no point in my journey did Iraqis mention the US-appointed governing council as a potential force for good. Although southern Iraq is relatively quiet in the absence of any real authority, it is hard even here to sustain hopes for a stable future."

I don't mean to suggest this article is definitive. But Americans need to be paying attention to this.

Tags: iraq war, suzanne goldenberg

California Recall: Arnie the "Antifa"?

The independent Vienna paper Der Standard is running a piece called "Antifa-Arnie?" "Antifa" is a German short form for "antifascist." A bodybuilding mentor of Arnold's, Alfred Gerstl, a former president of the upper house of the Austrian Parliament, says how he recruited Arnie in 1964 to help bust up a neo-Nazi demonstration when Arnie was 17. Their report is based on an interview with Gerstl in NU, a publication of Vienna's Jewish Kultusgemeinde, the main Jewish organization there.

The neo-Nazis were demonstrating in Arnold's home city of Graz, the capital of Styria province, against a local official of the People's Party, Austria's Christian Democratic party. According to Gerstl's account in NU, he organized Arnold and some other bodybuilders to, basically, kick their butts. The bodybuilders marched into the crowd of demonstrators. "There was a hubbub, and Arnold and the other bodybuilders chased them out of the Herrengasse [the street where they demonstrated]. (My translation)

Gerstl's father was a Jew who converted to Christianity in the 1920s, but that still made Alfred Jewish under Nazi race laws. Gerstl fought with Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia against the Germans, and a picture of Tito hangs on his wall, along with Arnold's.

Gerstl says Arnold's ex-Nazi father was glad to have Arnold be friends with Gerstl's son Karl. He also says that Arnold often had contact in Gerstl's house with people who had been persecuted by the Nazis, including Jews. He mentions that Albert Kaufmann, whose father was in the British army and who Gerstl counts today as his best friend, was also friends with Arnold in the 1960s.

Gerstl's account is certaily favorable to Arnold's disavowal of any Nazi sympathies. But it complicates Arnold's story. Not that people don't change back and forth during their lives. But when confronted with the Hitler quote this week, why didn't Arnold just say, "Hey, I was busting the heads of Austrian neo-Nazis back in Graz in the mid-1960s. I was no admirer of Hitler"? Conversely, if Arnold had been a militant "antifa" at 17 and had been well acquainted with Jews who had been persecuted during the Third Reich, it makes it all the more bizarre that he would describe an admiration for Hitler at 28 or 29 the way he has been quoted as doing.

Tags: alfred gerstl, schwarzenegger

Iraq War and WMDs: Time to End the Snipe Hunt

How much longer can Bush partisans insist that someday, somehow, some kind of "weapons of mass destruction" will be found that resemble the prewar claims?

David Kay's report this week should be the end of this snipe hunt. It's become a farce. Instead of spending $600 million more to keep this sad joke going, some fraction of that money should be used for a special prosecutor to find out who exposed Valerie Plame, a CIA operative who was specializing in WMDs in Central Asia.

Daily Kos presents an example of how the Administration has cynically exploited public fears of terrorism by presenting alarming-sounding reports that actually mean nothing.

George Paine at his Warblogging  site has an appropriate observation.

Kay says he wants to conclude his work in six to nine months. I can help him "draw a line" early - there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, other than the dirty bomb material that got looted from the Tuwaitha nuclear complex as American troops looked on. That material was safely locked up under Saddam. American soldiers looked on as regular Iraqis and possibly even terrorists broke into the facility and stole highly radioactive substances ...

The joke has run its course.

Tags: george paine, iraq war

California Recall: More on Arnie and the Hitler Quote

To expand on my earlier post, I do not suggest that we judge Schwarzenegger primarily by some stupid comment he made 28 years ago. The quotation does seem to be well sourced, though Arnold denies having said it.

But in the decades following 1975, he willingly lent some of his Hollywood glitz to two of the most genuinely ugly figures in Austrian politics, former President Kurt Waldheim and the far-right leader and Hitler admirer Jörg Haider. In recent years, he distanced himself from Haider. And, to his credit, in 2000, when there was an international outcry over the inclusion of the Haider-led Freedom Party in Austria's national coalition government, he also criticized the inclusion of Haider's party. But given his vaguely defined political positions, people have reason to worry that Arnold, despite his "moderate Republican" posture, may have quite an authoritarian streak.

And at least according to the polls, that may be an issue of immediate practical concern to Californians soon. The Field Poll, which I understand has the best track record on California elections, is also showing the recall leading by 57%-39%, with Schwarzenegger the leading replacement candidate with a 36%-26% lead over Bustamonte.

Since the recall election is the first of its kind in California, the polling organizations face more uncertainty than usual. Also, the short campaign season compared to the year-long marathon in a normal gubernatorial election could mean that voters' decisions are more in flux than they would normally be this close to the vote. We'll see after the votes are counted which polls did the best measurements.

Tags: california politics, california recall, jörg haider, schwarzenegger

AOL Journal Voting

So, John Scalzi of the AOL mothership blog By the Way has challenged us again, this time to list our favorite AOL Journals.  He asked for our top five, actually.  But I only come up with five if I count his, which he probably isn't looking for.  But I do enjoy his blog, and not just for the AOL Journals announcements.  I'm still working on imitating his trick of making photos LARGE, though. :)

I've been trying to look up some of the other Journals that deal with political topics on a regular basis. My critieria would include thought-provoking entries, entries on a fairly regular basis and useful links. And I only came up with four of those. I've come across several that had good entries, but for whatever reason the authors make a few entries and then abandon them for weeks at a time.

So, on the conservative side of the AOL corner of the "blogosphere", I would mention Charlie Eklund's The Other Shoe. I just posted Thursday something about the 1938 Munich agreement that one of his posts started me thinking about.

Another is Cheese Louise by awriterslife. She's been keeping up a steady stream of posts on the California recall, which she favors. She probably won't agree with my previous post, "Arnie and the Hitler Quote."

On the liberal side, there's Progressive Musings by fdtate313, which is kind of on the same wavelength so far as Old Hickory's Weblog. He has a provocative post on "progressive songs" that I hope to post a follow-up on.

And there's the windmills of my mind by marigolds2 that has very literate posts about various topics, including political ones. Also an intriguing list of links, which reminds me I need to work on mine a bit.

Tags: aol journals