November 16, 2005
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Today’s Papers
today’s papers
Woodward Exits From Woodwork
By Eric Umansky
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 4:24 AM ET
In a near banner headline, the Washington Post leads with the Senate overwhelmingly passing a Republican-sponsored bill requiring the White House to give quarterly updates on Iraq. The bill also declares the hope that 2006 will be “a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty.” A Democratic version of the bill, which included demands for “estimated dates” of departure, was defeated but did get 40 votes. The New York Times leads with GIs in Iraq discovering what the Times calls a “secret torture chamber” inside an Iraqi Interior Ministry building in Baghdad. About 170 malnourished prisoners were found, two of whom were paralyzed and others who had their skin peeled off. The discovery was first noted inside yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, in a piece TP missed. The LAT leads with a few small barriers in the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. For one thing, he appears to have a better intel network than the U.S. or Iraq. “They are watching every time we recruit an Iraqi to come back and inform to us about where he has been and what he has seen,” said one U.S. counterintel official. “And every time we have been able to do that, the person has ended up dead.” USA Today leads with Major League Baseball and the players union agreeing on a tougher steroids policy, including a three-strikes rule. The agreement came after the Senate threatened to impose its own penalties.
As an analysis in the WP emphasizes, Republican leadership could have simply defeated the Democratic bill on Iraq and “left it at that.” The fact that they didn’t means nothing good for the White House.
Tossed into the larger coverage of the Iraq Senate bill are details about the Senate’s passage of a “compromise” amendment on the treatment of Gitmo detainees. It essentially blesses the Gitmo tribunals, which have been heavily criticized by lawyer-types, and gives the detainees some access to U.S. courts. Detainees will be allowed to challenge their designations as enemy combatants. But TP doesn’t see anybody ask an obvious question: What recourse, if any, would a detainee have if he’s being held but hasn’t yet been declared an enemy combatant?
One of those who objected to the detainee bill: Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, who declared it “untenable and unthinkable,” because, he argued, it would eliminate Supreme Court jurisdiction over detainees’ legal cases.
In any case, all these Iraq and detainee measures are amendments to the overall defense budget bill, as is the McCain amendment on the treatment of detainees. And now they’ll face negotiators from the House.
As the LAT emphasizes, Iraq’s prime minister said there will be an investigation pronto into the Interior Ministry dungeon. But the head of the Interior Ministry, who is the former head of a Shiite militia, said the “allegations” were just Sunni propaganda.
Most of those found were Sunni, while the forces at the building were apparently affiliated with a Shiite militia. As the LAT noted, a U.S. general promised to “hit every single” ministry building, looking for abused prisoners.
There are “allegedly” bad headlines in the torture stories. For example, the Post: “TORTURE ALLEGED AFTER U.S.-LED RAID UNCOVERS IRAQI-RUN PRISON.” As NYT notes, “An Interior Ministry statement said flatly that torture had occurred.” So, what’s it take to move something from an allegation to an apparent fact?
One final point on the torture coverage: The papers mention that there have long been “rumors” about torture by the new Iraqi government. What there has also been is scant coverage of the torture that’s been documented. Human Rights Watch released a report early this year titled “Torture and Ill-treatment of Detainees in Iraqi Custody.” Judging from a quickie Nexis search, of the majors only the WP gave it more than wire copy. And then there was the time six months before that when GIs witnessed and photographed Iraqi police torturing prisoners. The Oregonian reported the story, and the national papers let it fly by. The guy the Oregonian suggested was behind the abuse: the then-head of the Interior Ministry.
Though nobody seems to headline it, the military announced that six troops have been killed in Iraq in the last two days: Three Marines were killed in the offensive near the Syrian border, and three GIs were killed by a roadside bomb near Baghdad. The Post also mentions that 46 men were found bound and executed; a police official said all were Sunni.
In today’s most bizarre story, the WP says below-the-fold that nominal WP reporter Bob Woodward testified earlier this week that a “senior administration official”—not Karl or Scooter—told him about Valerie Plame a month before she was outed. Though Woodward said he was told “casually” and didn’t know Plame was undercover, it now appears that, contrary to what the special prosecutor said in his press conference, Woodward was the first reporter to be told about Plame’s identity.
Woodward apparently didn’t tell his bosses about the chat until recently. And he only testified after his source, who the WP won’t name, talked to the special prosecutor. The fact that Woodward was involved and first obviously means … who knows? In any case, Woodward was a bit of a talking head during the height of the leak-investigation speculation and didn’t happen to mention his role.
The WP goes Page One with documents showing that oil companies did indeed meet with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force back in 2001. The White House has always refused to talk about any such meetings, and some oil execs said last week in congressional hearings that they sure didn’t recall any such confabs.
A front-page USAT piece previews a government report reminder that “nearly all” cargo on airlines goes unchecked for little things like, say, explosives.
Bob-ing and Weaving … The Post publishes a letter from Woodward about his role in the Plame saga. The WP‘s story adds this:
Eric Umansky (www.ericumansky.com) writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
Woodward declined to elaborate on the statement he released to The Post late yesterday afternoon and publicly last night. He would not answer any questions, including those not governed by his confidentiality agreement with sources.
Today’s Blogs
today’s blogs
Woodward and the President’s Men
By Michael Weiss
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 7:12 PM ET
Bloggers are abuzz over Bob Woodward’s late-breaking Plame scandal disclosures. They also generally applaud the United Nations’ hands-off policy on regulating the Internet, but are of mixed feelings about President Bush’s China trip.
Woodward and the president’s men: Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward has divulged that he was tipped off about Valerie Plame’s identity by an anonymous White House official before Scooter Libby is said to have disclosed it to reporters. In a public statement released last night (read it in full here), Woodward said he knew Joseph Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent as early as mid-June 2003. Woodward, who was called to testify before investigator Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury, also said he relayed this skinny to WaPo journo Walter Pincus in October 2003. Pincus’ much-bruited response: “Are you kidding? I certainly would have remembered that.”
Bloggers on either end of the spectrum are in a state of high pique. Conservative Tom Maguire at Just One Minute wonders: “With Bob Woodward as a potential witness, the defense can have fun with an updated version of the old Watergate question – ‘What else did Fitzgerald not know, and when did he not know it?’” Lefty Political Animal and Washington Monthly regular Kevin Drum is flummoxed as to who this mysterious 11th-hour source might be: “Perhaps Mr. X is a cooperating witness, or perhaps he’s someone who started to feel some heat and decided to come forward because he got scared. Who knows?” Resident D.C. snarktrix Wonkette suggests we follow the screen time: “We have another theory: Bob Woodward had not been on television in the last week or so.” Brit Avedon Carol at The Sideshow shrugs aggressively, “So Bob Woodward turns out to be part of the story. … And he’s part of Washington Post editorial management, which tells you something about why the paper has been such a disaster in reporting on this administration.”
As to the claims Woodward previously made on Larry King Live that the outing of Plame caused only “embarrassment” and “quite minimal damage” within the CIA, vehement Bush critic Atrios says, “If I were Booby’s editors, and perhaps a wee bit peeved at not being previously informed of what he was up to, and perhaps a wee bit more likely that Pincus, the not celebrity journalist, is telling the truth than Booby is I’d start looking into where Booby got his information. …” But to what does all this translate in the perjury and false testimony indictment of Scooter Libby? A small shadow of doubt, according to Bulldogpundit at conservative AnkleBitingPundits: “Anytime a defense attorney can point to errors and omissions by a prosecutor, even if not directly related to the issue at hand, it calls into question the prosecutions credibility on every aspect of the case.”
ICANN and I will: Today’s decision by the United Nations to allow the United States to retain (for now) its control of Internet domain names and IP addresses is good news for bloggers. The United Nations, which is hosting a World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis this week, has agreed to allow the California-based ICANN to continue to manage the technical aspects of assigning global Web portals and also to adjudicate on matters of intellectual copyright infringement. Both the United Nations and the European Union had expressed fears about total U.S. jurisdiction over the laws that govern cyberspace.
Libertarian Julian Sanchez at libertarian Reason magazine’s Hit and Run writes, “Opponents of international (and, more to the point, intergovernmental) Net oversight made much of the fact that the U.S. doesn’t generally exercise that authority. Great. So cut the umbilical cord once and for all.” Tech-market scribe Suitably Flip is also against the prospect of Net internationalization: “Set aside that it was predominantly American capital, information systems, and intellectual resources that gave rise to the internet (which of course is how U.S.-based organizations grew organically into the role of de facto overseers). From a strictly utilitarian, what’s-best-for-the-future-of-the-internet perspective, it’s senseless that there’s such hue and cry to upturn a status quo that in fact serves phenomenally well.” Ray Gifford at the Progress & Freedom Foundation blog agrees: “ICANN is far from a perfect creature, but handing the Internet over to a multi-lateral, international body is a sure way to dampen innovation, kill openness and slow progress. Then again, that is often what the EU seems to be about. …”
Shay at the classical liberal Dean’s World is also happy. He’s delimited the opposition thusly: “This was an attempt by socialists to tax us to death and limit our speech. And it was no surprise that dictator nations were the ones most supportive of the European Union’s proposal.” Even Canadian Jay Currie is equable about the short-term U.S. gain. “The silly threat of the Chinese and the more aggressive euros was that they would set up their own root servers and have their own internet … which no one would use because it would lack several billion of the 8 billion pages of content Google indexes and, potentially, lack Google itself,” he writes. New Media maven Eripsa is slightly more cautious, suggesting that the simmering anti-Americanism behind U.N./EU attempts to change the status quo be confronted with non-American camouflage: “What we need to see now is the US backing off of any appearance of control over ICANN, and ICANN itself taking measures to distance itself from US policy.”
Mainlining democracy on the mainland: Bloggers are weighing in on President Bush’s speech in China today, wherein he indicated Taiwan as a model for the democratic and human rights reforms needed in Beijing. The Shanghai-born Harry Chen thinks Bush’s tough talk is cheap: “I wonder if he knows the true implication of asking the Chinese to suddenly switch to a democratic system. In a democratic system, people are expected to make decisions for the society. There are so many people in China didn’t have good education, and probably won’t be able to make sound decisions on their own.” The pro-reform Doug at Rear View Mirror notes, “If Bush believes China does not meet certain international standards on how it treats its citizens then he should not have gone on the trip. He should have China’s favorite nation trading status revoked by Congress and take other measures, such as stopping the import of Chinese goods until that country decides to adhere to copy write regulations.” RightWingBob, however, sees a more positive tilt in the U.S. approach: “It’s almost as if George W. Bush has decided to take Victor Davis Hanson’s advice from a few weeks ago, now that he’s taking on his domestic war critics and speaking aggressively about freedom – in this case to China, North Korea and Myanmar/Burma. Keep it up, Dubya.”
Michael Weiss, a writer in New York, is co-founder and managing editor of Snarksmith.com.
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