Robert Capa/International Center of Photography Collection
A 1948 gelatin silver print of Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot in France by Robert Capa, a part of the I.C.P.’s collection.
July 20, 2005
Amassing a Treasury of Photography
By RANDY KENNEDY
In 1999 two proud powerhouses of photography – the George Eastman House in Rochester and the International Center of Photography in Midtown – began to acknowledge that they needed each other.
More specifically, officials at the Eastman House – the world’s oldest photography museum, with more than 400,000 photos and negatives, dating back to the invention of the medium – felt that they needed a New York City presence. And the International Center, a younger institution with a smaller collection, wanted access to Eastman’s vast holdings, which include work by Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.
The collaboration resulted in several joint exhibitions, including “Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes,” still on display at the center, and a show that ended earlier this year of the striking photographs of New Orleans prostitutes from the early 1900′s by E. J. Bellocq, images that were drawn roughly half from Eastman and half from the center.
But now both institutions are at work on an ambitious project to create one of the largest freely accessible databases of masterwork photography anywhere on the Web, a venture that will bring their collections to much greater public notice and provide an immense resource for photography aficionados, both scholars and amateurs.
The Web site – Photomuse.org, now active only as a test site, with a smattering of images – is expected to include almost 200,000 photographs when it is completed in the fall of 2006, and as both institutions work out agreements with estates and living photographers, the intention is to add tens of thousands more pictures.
Many iconic images, the kind long found on posters and greeting cards – Stieglitz’s shot of a spindly tree framed by New York office towers on a rainy spring day; Weegee’s teeming Coney Island hordes; Lewis Hine’s “Icarus Atop Empire State Building” – will be joined by thousands of other works by eminent artists that the general public has rarely had an opportunity to see. There will also be collections of lesser-known photographers like Roman Vishniac, James VanDerZee and Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
The creators say the goal is to organize the site so that works can be found not only by the name of the photographer but also in many other ways. For example, a Hine picture of an Italian immigrant couple could be found under the headings of “immigration,” or “Italian-Americans” or “Ellis Island” or “urban photography” or under the headings of exhibitions where the photograph has been shown through the years.
Each photograph could also be categorized in more technical ways, such as whether it was an albumen print, for example, or a gelatin silver print or even by what type of camera it was taken with.
“We didn’t want simply to create a scholarly site only for researchers,” said Willis E. Hartshorn, the director of the center. “We wanted something that would allow anyone with the interest to easily explore the collections of both institutions and their extraordinary depths in terms of the history of photography and the impact it’s had on our culture.”
While there are now dozens of growing digital databases of photography on the Web, many – like Corbis and Getty Images – are commercial sites that do not allow the public unfettered access to their collections. The Photomuse site will join others, like the digital collections of the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, England, that are beginning to create what amounts to a huge, free, virtual photography museum on the Web.
The project, financed in part by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, is expected to cost $800,000 initially and more later as additional images and documentary information are added to the site. Edward Earle, a curator and the director of information systems at the International Center of Photography, said images of most pictures on the site would be modestly sized, about 300 pixels on the longest side, though higher-resolution images of photos in the public domain would be available.
Anthony Bannon, the director of Eastman House, said one of the biggest hurdles encountered by the project – after overcoming the initial cultural resistance of both institutions to share their collections and expertise – has been converting the images of both Eastman and the center. onto a single computer system. (So far, he said, Eastman has digitized almost 140,000 of its photos and center about 30,000.)
“It’s not just like pushing a button and the images slide over,” he said, adding that copyright issues with many photographers could also keep many images off the Web for years. “Some are generous and understand the positive result by having the images seen on our Web site but others are worried about losing opportunities for revenue,” Mr. Bannon said. “All of us are still learning about how the Web can be used, I think.”
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Limited-edition T-shirts employ any number of images, however cool or obscure, to speaking the language of the street.
July 21, 2005
Keeping T-Shirts in the Moment
By GUY TREBAY
NEVER underestimate the power of a martini when drafting a business plan. This point may not be taught at the Wharton School, but it is probably worth keeping in mind. It was over a boozy discussion of guy trouble three years ago that Kristin Bauer and Liz Vassey had the light-bulb moment that led them to found JustDumped.com, a company that makes T-shirts with slogans that read like semaphores flared from the battleground of contemporary romance.
“It seemed so unfair that you had to hang around with someone for six months before you found out what their issues were,” Ms. Bauer said by telephone from the annex of the house in Burbank, Calif., where she runs her business. “Why not put it all out front?”
Why not? The first shirts produced by the two women, who both work regularly as actresses, bore the tag lines, “Wasn’t picked for Cheerleading,” “Ignore Me and I’m Yours” and “Emotionally Unavailable Men Rock.” If the messages were a little heavy on the ironic masochism, the result of the women’s impromptu foray into business was surprisingly empowering.
“We had six of each phrase printed up for $15 a shirt, which is an outrageous price I found out later,” Ms. Bauer said. “And I wore one to all the press stuff for a show I was doing for NBC called ‘Hidden Hills.’ “
The sitcom was eventually pulled, but the shirts caught on when a TV Guide reporter wrote an item about Ms. Bauer’s new company, so loosely organized at the time that it lacked a dedicated phone line. “After TV Guide came out, we got a call that ‘Extra!’ wanted to do a story. We had 60 shirts we were giving to a few friends and a Web site that didn’t work. So we went out to dinner, were drinking martinis again, came back and logged on and there were 500 orders,” Ms. Bauer said. “We decided, ‘O.K., I guess we get some boxes and figure this thing out.’ “
Without realizing it, the two women had accidentally stumbled into the slipstream of a pop cultural trend.
Lately limited edition T-shirts, most likely made in someone’s cellar in Brooklyn, have suddenly become the hipster’s preferred mode of expression. Whether produced by college pals with studio art degrees or sold by highly organized Web companies like threadless.com – visitors to the site offer ideas and vote on designs, which are then put into microproduction – the limited edition T-shirt has become impossible to avoid.
Often crude and uncommercial-looking, its imagery represents a kind of generational response to the bland uniformity of the mass-marketed “vintage” lines found in every mall. This development has not been lost on those same manufacturers, however. Some are already producing T-shirts that mimic the do it yourself look of indie T-shirts. “T-shirts are a really cheap blank slate,” said Ariel Foxman, the editor of Cargo, Condé Nast’s shopping magazine for men. “People have found a relatively inexpensive way to distinguish themselves.”
The trend partly reflects the great democratic welter of the e-commerce ether, and it partly serves as a marker of hipness, defined by the savvy with which a consumer can navigate the Web labyrinth in search of the coolest obscurities. For a snapshot of the estimated 1,500 sites now selling limited edition T-shirts, one might double click on Wowch.com, whose designs ring changes on the visual conventions of painting-on-velvet kitsch, or to Trainwreck Industries, a 10,000-shirts-a-year site run by a San Francisco designer, Alec Patience, whose motifs run to sight gags like Mao as a D.J., or Che Guevara’s face morphed into that of Ace Frehley, the lead guitarist of the rock band Kiss.
For that matter, one might even check out Prada’s recent foray into the arena, a collaboration with the Chilean graffiti artist Flavien Demarigny, also known as Mambo. His shirt, the first in a series of proposed limited edition T-shirts grouped under the highfalutin’ title “Unspoken Dialogues,” has a drawing of a figure and a boom box that could politely be termed an homage to Keith Haring, as if drawn by a 5-year- old.
“It all goes hand in hand with the vintage thing,” said Molly Spaulding, the proprietor of Narnia, an inventive boutique on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that was known as Pullover until about a week ago. “People like the idea that there’s only one, there’s only one size. They like the feeling that it’s their own style.”
That identification with what Kim France, the editor of Lucky magazine, calls “the thinking coolsters,” may help account for the insider fan base behind the success of Kadorables, a subscription T-shirt company Paul Marlow and Matthew Sandager run from a cellar hidden below a sewing factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
In a subterranean space that can be reached through sidewalk trap doors, Mr. Sandager, a 32-year-old graphic designer, and Mr. Marlow, 33, who has a background in fashion, print their designs onto T-shirts that are then sold to subscribers who have paid $145 to receive a shirt a month by mail for five months. Like Ms. Bauer and Ms. Vassey, the Kadorables duo (the name is a loose play on a Spanish phrase meaning, roughly, “How cute”) hatched their T-shirt business several years ago over drinks with a friend.
“We were just boys who wear jeans and great tennis shoes, and we wanted great T-shirts,” Mr. Sandager said. “And a friend said, ‘Why don’t you make me five shirts and gave us some cash.’ ”
Now, Kadorables shirts have been featured in GQ and Cargo and the two are on their 34th edition of shirts in oddly appealing de rigueur drab colors and with unassuming and often primitive graphic motifs. “In order to buy into it, you have to go into the unknown and be excited about that,” Mr. Sandager said.
As recently as three years ago, when mass marketers latched onto the Salvation Army tastes of a generation, a consumer bored with fake vintage trucker or high school team T-shirts would have been lucky to happen on a place like Zakka, an inventive boutique in NoLIta in Manhattan.
There, in what amounts to a toy store for the dedicatedly hip, Toshiki Okazaki, the owner, sold the obligatory anime drawings and plastic collectibles by James Jarvis or Be@rbrick, alongside racks of delightfully original and subversive shirts silk-screened by artists as well known as Ryan McGinnis or as obscure as Print Mafia, Civil Defense, Akane Kodani, Star Electric Eighty Eight or Mana Mizukuchi, a Japanese graphics designer whose bleach-painted T-shirts go on view at the Grand Street store at the end of the month.
“With a T-shirt, it is much easier to show your work than trying to find a gallery,” said Mr. Okazaki, referring to the production of T-shirts in limited editions made by artists looking less for a killing than a populist way to present their art. “Four years ago, nobody really did this,” he said.
These days, whenever two or more people gather to consider the future of consumer society, “customization” and “niche” are certain to be their most frequently uttered terms. Bored and satiated, consumers first took music dissemination into their own hands, via Internet programs like Napster, and then information, in the form of blogs, and, finally, even so-called hard goods, now that it is clear that anyone, more or less, can start a clothing company. As with garage bands and personal Web pages, a little alcoholic lubrication rarely seems to hurt at the point of conception; neither does a taste for unabashed amateurishness, communal expression and the exuberantly ad hoc.
“We could spin our wheels and do progressive graphics all day long, but we didn’t want a force-fed brand aesthetic,” said Olin McKenzie an architect and partner in Momimomi, a three-year-old two-man operation based in Los Angeles. Their limited-edition T-shirts feature poetic images inspired by aerial photographs of freeway traffic patterns or else drawings made from photographs of friends asked to enact expressions of joy or rage.
“The beauty of this whole thing is that no one’s trapped by a dominant brand aesthetic,” Mr. McKenzie said. “And if you’re not locked into that, then the aesthetic is free to change.” There is, of course, one other irresistible element of the T-shirt as cultural marker and Web-era phenomenon. “T-shirts, like blue jeans, are forever,” Mr. McKenzie said. “Nobody is going to stop wearing them any time soon.”
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Today: July 19, 2005 at 9:3:23 PDT
Las Vegas unveils new-look Web site
LAS VEGAS SUN
Las Vegas’ city government Web site unveiled its new look Monday.
The new version of the site at www.lasvegasnevada.gov is intended to be easier to use because it was produced with the understanding that many of the site’s users will be people with minimal experience with the city government.
For example, finding information on the older version of the site depended to some extent upon a person being able to find out which department handled a particular service, whereas now the listings on the site are based on what kind of service a person is looking for.
“Now if you want a license, you go to license,” city spokesman David Riggleman said, referring to the list of categories on the left side of the first page of the site. “Before, you had to know to go to the Department of Finance.
“Now if you want to watch the traffic cameras, you can click on traffic cameras. Before you had to know they were under Public Works.
“The things that people use are the easiest to find,” he said.
The upgrade to the Web site cost $143,338, and was the first major upgrade in three years. This is the third version of the city’s Website, which was first launched on the Internet in 1998.
Riggleman said there have been some glitches, such as links sending users to blank or unavailable pages, but no major problems with the site.
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John H. Richardson
Writer at Large
Writer at large John H. Richardson began his reporting career as a newspaperman and soon moved on to magazines, landing at Esquire in 1998 after writing for New York, GQ and Premiere, among others. He became the envy of men everywhere (and probably more than a few women), when he profiled the irrepressible Angelina Jolie for the February 2000 issue of Esquire. Richardson remains impressed by Jolie’s open, raw and honest interview, touched that she made a “human moment out of what most people would view as a commercial exchange.” But it’s the autobiographical and intensely personal “My Father the Spy” (3/99) that Richardson unhesitatingly names as his favorite Esquire story, saying the personal nature of the piece made it easy rather than difficult to write. He has found himself face to face with numerous leading men for Esquire, including George Clooney (10/99), “a no-bullshit sort of guy.” Richardson’s other work for Esquire includes “Dwarfs: A Love Story” (2/98) and “Scenes from a (group) Marriage” (5/99), a tale of polyamory in suburban New Jersey. Richardson lives in Westchester County, New York with his wife and two daughters.
July 17, 2005
Spies in the House
By JOHN H. RICHARDSON
It’s the summer of 1969, just before my father tells me that he works for the C.I.A., and I am beginning my own secret life. I’m 14 years old, and down in Georgetown, a few blocks west of the White House, a string of new shops burn incense, blast rock music and sell Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead posters. My friend’s older brother, Joe, is painting Blue Meanies on a wall of his room. I know something’s going on, but I’m not quite getting it. I’m convinced that grown-ups hide everything. Then Joe puts down his paintbrush and pulls out a plastic baggie. ”You guys ever smoke grass?”
I don’t even hesitate, and soon I’m noticing my peripheral vision and especially my peripheral thoughts. Before long, I’m sneaking down to Georgetown regularly. One day I buy some acid from a hippie in engineer’s pants. When I come home, my mother insists on talking to me, so I sit babbling about school or the weather or Mrs. Banfield’s azalea garden, and my lips seem to be moving normally even though the hair on my arm is growing at an alarming rate. After a while she seems satisfied, and I realize she doesn’t even see me.
A few weeks later, my father asks me to join him in the study. I sit down in one of the red leather chairs and he sits down in the other, tapping his cigarette into the crystal ashtray. He has been posted to Korea, he says. We will be moving there soon. And there’s something else.
”You’ve reached the age when you’re old enough to know what it is I do,” he says.
He keeps it vague. ”Special assistant to the ambassador” is just a cover story. Then he asks me if I want to go with the family or stay in the States at a boarding school. And that’s it. He doesn’t regale me with tales of chasing Nazi spies on the battlefields of Italy, or the time he recruited history’s first Soviet double agent. He doesn’t mention his role in the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. He doesn’t explain why we’re going to live 30 miles from the most totalitarian country in the world, or why it’s so important to him. It will be years before I learn much of this. Maybe he thinks it’s all covered under his oath of secrecy, along with the rest of his life.
At first, it sounds implausible to me. My father, a spy? The guy wears a suit and horn-rimmed glasses. He goes to the office every day and reads all night. He worries about the ivy on the hill. He badgers me to cut the lawn. He’s a dad. There’s an unreality to the whole idea, an unreality that seems consistent with this strange new world where the song lyrics make no sense and you can watch the hair grow on your arm.
From TV and Time magazine, I have developed the vague impression that people think the C.I.A. is a bad thing, which is intriguing. And there’s James Bond and ”In Like Flint,” the movie in which James Coburn fights off an international conspiracy of playmates. Maybe the old man is cooler than I thought. Maybe our secrets will bind us together. It’s a natural reaction, I understand later. People can’t help thinking that secrets are a kind of magic, that only mysteries reveal the truth.
One night, a man from the C.I.A. sleeps at our house, something that has never happened before. When he and my father drive off in the morning, I snoop through the man’s luggage and find a reel-to-reel tape. Carefully peeling back the seal, I take it downstairs and put it on my father’s giant Teac tape player. It’s something about Kennedy and foreign policy. I’m meticulous about replacing the tape and repacking his suitcase exactly as I found it. (Tradecraft, Mr. Bond.)
Another time, I go poking for clues in my dad’s dresser drawers, and lo and behold, hidden under the perfectly folded handkerchiefs and boxer shorts, I find a loaded snub-nosed .38 with a gleaming oil-slick barrel and his initials — our initials — carved into the ivory handle.
A thrill runs through me. In my excitement, I show it to one of my friends. We sneak out to the woods, and I aim it at a tree.
In the years to come, I will want to know everything I can about my father. I’ll look for him in old letters and yellowing newspapers. I’ll even call the C.I.A. and ask for his personnel records. A pleasant man will ring back with the official response: ”Not only no, but hell no — and if you pursue this, we will have to contact John Richardson Sr. and remind him of his secrecy oath.”
But at 14, I’m not ready for whatever the gun has to tell me. When I pull the trigger, the crack of the gunshot explodes so loud across the hills that we take off running and keep running until I get the damn thing back in the drawer. This is a little too much reality. I’m happy to keep our secrets for now.
The next time I go to find the .38 in his drawer, just to take another look, it’s gone.
John H. Richardson is the author of ”My Father the Spy: A Family History of the C.I.A., the Cold War and the Sixties,” which will be published next month by HarperCollins and from which this essay is adapted.
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July 12, 2005
At White House, a Day of Silence on Rove’s Role in C.I.A. Leak
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, July 11 – Nearly two years after stating that any administration official found to have been involved in leaking the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer would be fired, and assuring that Karl Rove and other senior aides to President Bush had nothing to do with the disclosure, the White House on Monday refused to answer any questions about new evidence of Mr. Rove’s role in the matter.
With the White House silent, Democrats rushed in, demanding that the administration provide a full account of any involvement by Mr. Rove, one of the president’s closest advisers, turning up the political heat in the case and leaving some Republicans worried about the possible effects on Mr. Bush’s second-term agenda.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, cited Mr. Bush’s statements about firing anyone involved in the leak and said, “I trust they will follow through on this pledge.”
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Mr. Rove, given his stature and the principles involved in the case, could not hide behind legal advice not to comment.
“The lesson of history for George Bush and Karl Rove is that the best way to help themselves is to bring out all the facts, on their own, quickly,” Mr. Schumer said, citing the second-term scandals that have beset previous administrations.
In two contentious news briefings, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, would not directly address any of a barrage of questions about Mr. Rove’s involvement, a day after new evidence suggested that Mr. Rove had discussed the C.I.A. officer with a reporter from Time magazine in July 2003 without identifying her by name.
Under often hostile questioning, Mr. McClellan repeatedly declined to say whether he stood behind his previous statements that Mr. Rove had played no role in the matter, saying he could not comment while a criminal investigation was under way. He brushed aside questions about whether the president would follow through on his pledge, repeated just over a year ago, to fire anyone in his administration found to have played a role in disclosing the officer’s identity. And he declined to say when Mr. Bush learned that Mr. Rove had mentioned the C.I.A. officer in his conversation with the Time reporter.
When one reporter, David Gregory of NBC News, said that it was “ridiculous” for the White House to dodge all questions about the issue and pointed out that Mr. McClellan had addressed the same issues in detail in the past, Mr. McClellan replied, “I’m well aware, like you, of what was previously said, and I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time.”
A moment later, Terry Moran of ABC News prefaced his question by saying Mr. McClellan was “in a bad spot here” because he had spoken from the same podium in the White House briefing room on Oct. 10, 2003, after the Justice Department began its formal investigation into the leak, and specifically said that neither Mr. Rove nor two other officials – Elliot Abrams, a national security aide, and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff – were involved.
Mr. McClellan disputed the characterization of the question but did not directly address why the White House had appeared now to have adopted a new policy of not commenting on the matter.
Mr. Rove made no public comment. A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House now says its official position is not to comment on the case while it is under investigation by a federal special prosecutor, said Mr. Rove had gone about his business as usual on Monday. The official said Mr. Rove had held his regular meetings with Mr. Bush and other top White House aides, and was deeply involved in preparations for the Supreme Court nomination and efforts to push several major pieces of legislation through Congress this month.
The criminal investigation into how the C.I.A. officer’s name came to appear in a syndicated newspaper column two years ago continued largely out of public view. But the disclosure in recent days of evidence that Mr. Rove had discussed the C.I.A. officer’s identity, though in a vague way, thrust the case squarely back into the political arena, reflecting Mr. Rove’s standing as among the most powerful men in Washington and his place in the innermost councils of the White House.
Because of the powerful role Mr. Rove plays in shaping policy and deploying Mr. Bush’s political support and machinery throughout the party, few Republicans were willing to discuss his situation on the record. Asked for comment on Monday, several Republican senators said they did not know enough or did not want to venture an opinion.
But in private, several prominent Republicans said they were concerned about the possible effects on Mr. Bush and his agenda, in part because Mr. Rove’s stature makes him such a tempting target for Democrats.
“Knowing Rove, he’s still having eight different policy meetings and sticking to his game plan,” said one veteran Republican strategist in Washington who often works with the White House. “But this issue now is looming, and as they peel away another layer of the onion, there’s a lot of consternation. Rove needs to be on his A game now, not huddled with lawyers and press people.”
A senior Congressional Republican aide said most members of Congress were still waiting to learn more about Mr. Rove’s involvement and to assess whether more disclosures about his role were likely.
“The only fear here is where does this go,” the aide said. “We can’t know.”
Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush’s senior adviser, deputy chief of staff and political strategist, was plunged back into the center of the matter on Sunday, when Newsweek reported that an e-mail message written by a Time magazine reporter had recounted a conversation with Mr. Rove in July 2003 in which Mr. Rove had discussed the C.I.A. operative at the heart of the case without naming her.
Mr. Rove’s lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, has said the e-mail message showed that Mr. Rove was not taking part in any organized effort to disclose the identity of the operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV. Mr. Wilson is a former diplomat who traveled to Africa on behalf of the C.I.A. before the Iraq war to investigate reports concerning Saddam Hussein’s efforts to acquire nuclear material.
In July 2003, several months after Mr. Hussein was toppled, Mr. Wilson publicly disputed one of the administration’s claims about the Iraqi nuclear program. He has suggested that the White House sought retribution by publicly identifying his wife, first in a syndicated column written by Robert Novak, effectively ending her career as a covert operative.
Mr. Wilson has at times voiced suspicions that Mr. Rove played a role in identifying his wife to reporters, saying in August 2003 that he was interested in finding out “whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.”
In September 2003, Mr. McClellan said flatly that Mr. Rove had not been involved in disclosing Ms. Plame’s name. Asked about the issue on Sept. 29, 2003, Mr. McClellan said he had “spoken with Karl Rove,” and that it was “simply not true” that Mr. Rove had a role in the disclosure of her identity. Two weeks earlier, he had called suggestions that Mr. Rove had been involved “totally ridiculous.” On Oct. 10, 2003, after the Justice Department opened its formal investigation, Mr. McClellan told reporters that Mr. Rove, Mr. Abrams and Mr. Libby had nothing to do with the leak.
Mr. McClellan and Mr. Bush have both made clear that leaking Ms. Plame’s identity would be considered a firing offense by the White House. Mr. Bush was asked about that position most recently a little over a year ago, when he was asked whether he stood by his pledge to fire anyone found to have leaked the officer’s name. “Yes,” he replied, on June 10, 2004.
Under some circumstances, it can be against the law to disclose the identity of a covert C.I.A. operative. Mr. Luskin has said he has been told by the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, that Mr. Rove is not a target of the investigation.
Democrats, as the minority party in both the House and the Senate, have no ability to push forward with a formal Congressional investigation. But Mr. Rove is such a high-profile political target that his role is sure to draw intense scrutiny from both Democrats in Congress and liberal interest groups.
Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Government Reform committee, called for hearings on what he termed “this disgraceful incident,” saying that if it had happened in the Clinton administration the Republican-controlled House would certainly have summoned the deputy White House chief of staff to testify.
Mr. Rove has been caught up in the inquiry almost from the start. He was first interviewed by F.B.I. agents in 2003 during the preliminary investigation of the case. Later, he was interviewed by prosecutors and testified three times to the grand jury.
The prosecutor is believed to have already extensively questioned Mr. Rove at the grand jury about his conversations with the Time reporter, Matthew Cooper, whose call to Mr. Rove on July 11, 2003, was noted in a White House log that was turned over to the prosecutor. Time turned Mr. Cooper’s notes and e-mails over to the prosecutor last month under court order.
The 1982 law that makes it a crime to disclose the identities of covert agents is not easy to break. It has apparently been the basis of a single prosecution, against Sharon M. Scranage, a C.I.A. clerk in Ghana who pleaded guilty in 1985 to identifying two C.I.A. agents to a boyfriend there.
A prosecutor seeking to establish a violation of the law has to establish an intentional disclosure by someone with authorized access to classified information. That person must know that the disclosure identifies a covert agent “and that the United States was taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States.” A covert agent is defined as someone whose identity is classified information and who has served outside the United States within the last five years.
“We made it exceedingly difficult to violate,” Victoria Toensing, who was chief counsel to the Senate intelligence committee when the law was enacted, said of the law.
The e-mail message from Mr. Cooper to his bureau chief describing a brief conversation with Mr. Rove, first reported in Newsweek, does not by itself establish that Mr. Rove knew Ms. Wilson’s covert status or that the government was taking measures to protect her.
Based on the e-mail message, Mr. Rove’s disclosures are not criminal, said Bruce S. Sanford, a Washington lawyer who helped write the law and submitted a brief on behalf of several news organizations concerning it to the appeals court hearing the case of Mr. Cooper and Judith Miller, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.
“It is clear that Karl Rove’s conversation with Matt Cooper does not fall into that category” of criminal conduct, Mr. Sanford said. “That’s not ‘knowing.’ It doesn’t even come close.”
There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.
“She had a desk job in Langley,” said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.’s headquarters. “When you want someone in deep cover, they don’t go back and forth to Langley.”
Carl Hulse and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Adam Liptak from New York.
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News International, via wireimage.com
Shahara Islam was a 20-year-old bank cashier
July 17, 2005
Lost in Bombings, Diverse and Promising Lives
By SARAH LYALL
LONDON, July 16 – They were mostly in their 20′s, 30′s and 40′s. They were mostly on their way to work. They were the daughter of an Anglican bishop, the son of a Nigerian oil executive, the immigrant mother of two teenagers. Some were Muslims.
The names of the dead – Shahara Islam, Anthony Fatayi-Williams, Jamie Gordon, Ganze Gonoral, and so many more – reflect the diversity of their origins and the indiscriminate nature of the bombs that struck London a week and a half ago.
The death toll from the July 7 bombings – on three subway trains and on a No. 30 double-decker bus – stands at 55, including the bombers. The authorities have officially identified 47 of the dead.
Identification of the victims has lagged in most cases behind their families’ convictions that their loved ones are dead. Part of the problem is that British procedures are slow, and inquests must be held when deaths are unnatural or violent. The difficulties are compounded by the fact that many of the bodies were jumbled together and severely damaged in the explosions.
The Identification Commission, a group of doctors, police officers and forensic scientists convened in response to the bombings, is relying on a variety of methods, including dental records, fingerprints, DNA – and even internal medical devices like pacemakers with serial numbers – to complete its task.
For friends and relatives, the agony of uncertainty has seemed almost as bad as the devastation of knowing. Many families have been left in an awkward limbo, knowing in their hearts that their lost relatives are dead, but unable to mourn properly.
One such relative was Marie Fatayi-Williams, whose son, Anthony, was still officially missing last Monday, four days after the bombing. Mrs. Fatayi-Williams stood in Upper Woburn Place, near the site of the No. 30 bus explosion, that day and gave a speech about him, saying that she had been “destroyed” by his certain death. He had not been heard from since 9:41 a.m. on July 7, she said, when he telephoned his office to say that the subway had been evacuated and that he would find another way to get to work.
“How many mothers’ hearts must be maimed?” Mrs. Fatayi-Williams asked, in an anguished speech that became a striking symbol of the families’ grief.
Mr. Fatayi-Williams, 26, was in many ways an embodiment of modern, postcolonial London – a “world citizen,” as his mother described him. Nigerian by heritage, he grew up in London and graduated from Bradford University. But he was deeply connected to his Nigerian roots and intended to work in Nigeria someday.
Mr. Fatayi-Williams, who lived in Hendon, was an engineering executive, loved rap music and had hopes of starting a record label. His mother is a Catholic, and an oil company executive; his father, a Muslim, is a doctor. “Basically his ultimate aim was to become a politician and sort out Nigeria,” his cousin Sadie Williams told The Evening Standard.
Mr. Fatayi-Williams was her “first son, my only son,” his mother said, and he had promised to take care of her in her old age. “In African society, we hold on to sons,” she said.
But on Friday, her son was declared dead.
As the names have been released, in dribs and drabs, portraits have been emerging of the victims. Many were young and just starting out. Shahara Islam, for instance, was a 20-year-old bank cashier, a second-generation Bengali immigrant who moved easily between the strict religious world of her parents and the secular world of Britain. She died on the No. 30 bus, her body so mangled that she had to be identified through dental records.
Jamie Gordon, 30, a fellow passenger on the bus, spent his early years in Zimbabwe, worked in finance and was planning to marry his girlfriend of seven years, Yvonne Nash. Shyanuja Parathasangary, also 30, and originally from Sri Lanka, worked for the postal service and died on the bus, too.
Other victims, like Gladys Wundowa, 50, were more established in their lives. An immigrant from Ghana, Mrs. Wundowa had two teenage children. She worked the 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift as a cleaner at University College London, and on July 7 left her job, as usual, to go to a class in housing management in Shoreditch. Unable to take the subway, she took the No. 30 bus.
Michelle Otto, 46, was also an immigrant – from Romania – and died on the Piccadilly Line train. She had been en route from the house she shared with her sister’s family in Mill Hill to her job as a dental technician in Knightsbridge.
James Adams, 32, liked to stay in touch. At 7:30 a.m. on July 7, he called his mother to tell her he was at King’s Cross station headed for work. He also sent a text message to a friend, Amanda Garatty.
That was not unusual, said Tony Garatty, who is married to Amanda and who is one of a close-knit group of Mr. Adams’s friends from Bretton Baptist Church in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.
“He would text my wife all the time when he saw something on the telly,” Mr. Garatty said in an interview. “What’s really going to hit me is when football season starts, because if he saw anything about Manchester United he’d text me and say, ‘What about this?’ ”
Mr. Adams, a mortgage consultant with a dry wit, had a wide range of friends: David Lammy, a member of Parliament who had known him since grade school; the Rev. John Boyers, the chaplain of the Manchester United soccer team, who met him after Mr. Adams sent a letter introducing himself; and Mr. Garatty, a 47-year-old father of two who was his partner in crime at rock concerts and soccer games.
Recently, the two men spent a Saturday together at the Live 8 concert for Africa in Hyde Park. Mr. Adams was late in picking up Mr. Garatty – he was known for that, too – but he more than made up for it by supplying not only binoculars but also two little folding stools in case they got tired.
They did not. Mr. Adams stood for the entire concert and was at his happiest when Annie Lennox appeared. “At one point he said, ‘I hope she sings – ‘ and then she started to play the intro to the song, ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),’ ” Mr. Garatty said.
“We were sort of saying, ‘Wow, we’re here and this is history,’ ” he said.
Mr. Adams, believed to have been on the bombed Piccadilly Line train, is still officially missing.
Ciaran Cassidy was an unusual combination, a hard-core Arsenal soccer fan who also seemed to be one of Earth’s cheeriest shop assistants. Along Chancery Lane, where he worked in the Bridge & Co. stationery store, Mr. Cassidy, 22, was known as a young man who could chat about anything to anyone, who enthusiastically made copies of even the most tedious documents, and who invariably urged customers to partake of the free jelly beans in the jar on the counter.
So the news of his death affected the little neighborhood along the road in London’s legal district, where Mr. Cassidy had become, in however fleeting a way, part of the fabric of daily life. His boss, Mike Harris, set up a book of condolence, and dozens of people stopped by to sign it and to reminisce about Mr. Cassidy.
Mr. Cassidy, the son of an Irish postal worker and a teacher’s assistant who grew up in London, had been saving for his dream trip: a year’s working holiday in Australia. He spent the night before he died discussing his plans with his sister, Lisa.
“People used to say that you could never walk down the road with him because he knew so may people and would forever be stopping to talk to them,” Lisa told The Standard. That certainly seemed to be the case on Chancery Lane.
“I remember him from when he started,” Angela Thomson, who works in a travel agency nearby and who stopped in to sign the condolence book, said in an interview. “Such a lovely boy. He was one of life’s sweet souls – he really wanted to be helpful.”
“Ciaran – it’s Rita here!” went one of the entries in the book, from a regular customer. “I will always come in and think of you. Will miss you.”
Mr. Cassidy’s body was found in the wreckage of the bombed Piccadilly Line train. His death became official on Tuesday.
Giles Hart, 55, was from Hornchurch, had a large family – three children, a wife, an 85-year-old mother who lived with them, a sister – and worked as an engineer for British Telecom in Islington. But there was much more to him. A former chairman of the Polish Solidarity Campaign of Great Britain, Mr. Hart met his future wife, Danuta Gorzynska, who had fled Poland when martial law was imposed there, in London more than 20 years ago.
He also loved books, particularly those of Lewis Carroll – he was a big fan of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” – and of H. G. Wells. He was chairman of the local branch of the H. G. Wells Society. On July 7, he was due to give a speech titled “The Lesser-Known Works of Lewis Carroll.”
He was a humanist – one of his many other voluntary posts was as vice chairman of the local branch of the British Humanist Association – a campaigner for peace, a member of the Anti-Slavery Society, a fighter against bigotry and human rights abuses. “It is tragic that he fell victim to the very evil against which he had struggled,” the family said in a statement.
Like many of the families, Mr. Hart’s asked not to be contacted by the news media. “We hope his many friends and colleagues will continue with his campaigns for freedom and justice, to make the world a fairer and greener place to live in,” the family said. “May he rest in peace and his ideals eventually triumph.”
Mr. Hart usually took the Northern Line to work. But because of the subway closures, he got on the No. 30 bus. He was declared dead on Friday.
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Associated Press file photo
Mick Jagger and the rest of the Rolling Stones have been rehearsing at Greenwood College School in Toronto
They’re back. The Rolling Stones are in Toronto, preparing for their 2005 World Tour at the Greenwood College School.
The location was confirmed Wednesday by entertainment industry impresario Gino Empry.
When asked whether Greenwood, near Mount Pleasant Road and Davisville Avenue, would be a locale for the Stones, he replied: “As far as I know. They have a couple of spots they’re practicing at.”
Jerry Stone, who knows Keith Richards and Mick Jagger and owns Stone’s Place, a Queen Street West bar, confirmed the band would rehearse at Greenwood and said roadies and backup crew are expected in town soon.
“You starting to bug them already?” he asked.
Music pulsed from behind the school’s blacked-out windows this week and a handful of people dressed in black who loitered outside the exits would allow only that a “private event” was being held inside.
The neighborhood has been buzzing with news of the Stones’ arrival for days.
“It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened on Davisville,” said Lorne Hogan, a contractor who lives beside the school. “There are famous people at the end of our street.”
Hogan said he could hear the bass Wednesday night, but he wasn’t distracted by it.
The band has rehearsed at Maple Leaf Gardens, Crescent School, the Masonic Temple and Downsview Park before other world tours, Empry said. The band’s tour promoter, Michael Cohl, lives in Toronto.
“They like Canadians. We’re very polite and we don’t demand they do certain things and bother them,” Empry said.
Hosting an internationally renowned band has been a little off-putting for Greenwood staff members who confirm they have had limited access to the premises this month.
But fans hoping to catch a glimpse of the legendary rockers won’t “get no satisfaction” because the entrance to the school’s property is sealed off by gates very similar to the mesh fencing used to control crowds at concerts.
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