Great Moments in Self-Promotion
When Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald released the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby Friday afternoon, staffers at the New Republic were so thrilled to learn that one of their articles had been cited in the text of the indictment that they mentioned it in three separate posts on their new blog, "The Plank."
"A 2003 TNR article by Spencer Ackerman and John Judis plays an important role in the Libby indictment," read one of the entries, modestly headlined "TNR and the Indictment." Here is how the prosecutor cited it:
On or about June 19, 2003, an article appeared in The New Republic magazine online entitled "The First Casualty: The Selling of the Iraq War." Among other things, the article . . . stated that following a request for information from the Vice President, the CIA had asked an unnamed ambassador to travel to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. The article included a quotation attributed to the unnamed ambassador alleging that administration officials "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie."
Prosecutors are not in the business of providing helpful political context and neither, in this case, is the New Republic. The reason this article "started the 'chain of events' leading to the Libby indictment," as one of their bloggers put it, was not its tasty, chewy goodness. Rather, the article was full of toxic untruths from the "unnamed ambassador"--Joe Wilson--that Ackerman and Judis credulously published (and that Wilson himself would later, under oath, retract). In the face of this provocation, one can well understand why the vice president's chief of staff might have hit the roof: Who the hell is this ambassador? What mission to Niger? What does he mean we were telling a "flat-out lie"?
At the heart of Ackerman and Judis's 7,000-word opus, and the apparent justification for the magazine's unworthy implication that the Bush administration had lied us into the war in Iraq, was this paragraph:
One year earlier [in 2002], Cheney's office had received from the British, via the Italians, documents purporting to show Iraq's purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the State of the Union. "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," the former ambassador tells TNR. "They . . . added this to make their case more persuasive."
It's perhaps understandable that any magazine's staffers might want to make the most out of some free publicity provided courtesy of the U.S. Department of Justice. But surely they can't really want people to reread the article. As anyone who followed the Joe Wilson saga subsequently discovered, every critical claim in the paragraph above is false.
The Niger story was not "a flat-out lie." The documents relating the purchase of several hundred tons of Nigerien uranium by the government of Saddam Hussein were not debunked by Wilson, but a year later by the International Atomic Energy Agency (well after the president's January 2003 State of the Union address). "The prominent diplomat," upon returning from Niger, did not tell the State Department and the CIA that "the documents were forgeries." As he would later admit, he had never seen the documents and was unaware of their existence at the time of his mission. And it is not true to say that "the CIA circulated the ambassador's report to the vice president's office." In fact, Wilson only gave an oral debriefing to the CIA, the contents of which, not incidentally, were found to bolster, not undermine, the idea that Saddam had sent his agents to Niger seeking uranium in the late 1990s. All of this has been publicly known since July 2004, when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report shredding Wilson's credibility.
So hip hip hooray for TNR's role in the indictment. After all, there are worse things for a magazine to be famous for. Just ask Stephen Glass.
A Miers Postscript
Had Harriet Miers not asked that her nomination to the Supreme Court be withdrawn, perhaps this Associated Press scoop might have gotten more attention: Miers "spent her teens" attending an "all-white high school" in the northern suburbs of Dallas, Texas, "far removed" from the "racial and social upheaval of the early 1960s," reported AP's Matt Slagle. The October 26 story--headlined "Miers Isolated From Social Turmoil As Teen"--contained the following explosive revelations: (1) While Miers was in high school, "civil rights touched nearly every corner of the South," hither and yon, from "lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, NC, in 1960" to "the Freedom Riders who traveled the South to test the 1960 Supreme Court ruling outlawing racial segregation in interstate public transit."
(2) And yet, it turns out, "racial integration had not yet reached" Hillcrest high, from which Miers graduated in 1963.
(3) And yet, it further turns out, rather than burn her bras, light up a doobie, and join the Panthers, the 17-year-old Miers "captained the tennis team, served as secretary of the Latin Club and the National Honor Society and"--talk about being an establishmentarian--"was treasurer of her senior class."
(4) More, "cultural changes in dress and lifestyle also remained on a distant horizon" in 1963, Slagle reports. Says classmate Ron Natinsky: "Our teachers were 'Yes ma'am, yes sir.' We didn't have long hair. We weren't into the revolution that came a couple of years later." The horror. And reminiscent of an equally preposterous AP "scrutiny" of John Roberts's Indiana upbringing, which uncovered the shocking fact that when "two days of looting and vandalism" erupted in nearby Michigan City when Roberts was 15, it "barely intrud[ed] on the Mayberry-like community that was largely insulated from the racial strife of that era."
All of which makes us wonder: How many of our nation's print and television journalists were not in some way "isolated" from "racial and social upheaval" while in high school?
Animal Update
As Wesley J. Smith reported in these pages three weeks ago ("Wall Street Goes Wobbly"), animal liberation extremists have declared war on Life Sciences Research because the company engages in medical testing on animals. Their main tactic is known as "tertiary targeting." Liberationists threaten employees of companies doing business with Life Sciences, such as insurers and bankers. And the mere threat of being so targeted apparently drove executives at the New York Stock Exchange to "delay" plans to list Life Sciences on the Big Board.
Adding credence to the charge of appeasement by the NYSE, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held hearings on the matter last week in which an Exchange lawyer refused to explain the NYSE's sudden change of plans. Meanwhile, Jerry Vlasak, a spokesperson for the "liberationists," claimed that "murdering" people "who hurt animals and don't stop when told to stop" is a "morally justified solution to the problem"--as chilling an apologia for terrorism as you will ever hear in a Senate hearing.
The NYSE's buckling under to such threats should be huge news but instead has barely been covered. The Scrapbook can only imagine the font size of the headlines if these animal-rights terrorists were seeking to stop abortion or illegal immigration.