Rummy's Officer Trap

There has developed in the public discussion regarding the denouncement of Secretary Rumsfeld by retired officers a paradox that no one seems to address.

1. Retired officers are saying Rummy messed this up from start to finish (ok, that's a simplification).

2. The common criticism of these officers is one of two:
a. Why didn't you say something at the time? (i.e., it must not have bothered you then)
b. You're retired, what do you know? (i.e., you're not here now so you don't really know what's going on)

3. People from the military (whether they are experts familiar with military culture, the retired officers themeselves, and even current Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace) explain that if you don't like an "order" (by which I mean the handling of a situation by anyone above you) your choice is to either suddenly get behind it and carry it out, or retire.

So you don't like Operation XYZ, and you try to tell your COs that, politely and saying, "With all due respect..." a lot, but in the end they are going with Operation XYZ. They tell you, "Either shut up and do it, or retire and say whatever you want." So because you have a high moral character and can't leak the news or lead your men into disaster, you retire. Then you stand up and publicly say what you believe, and the Pentagon responds, "Well, you weren't publicly complaining at the time, so you must have been fine with it, and besides, you're out of the loop now so what do you know?"

Does anyone else think that is patently unfair? Your bosses give you an option and then attack you for taking it?

Bad News in Iraq

I got an email from my cousin touting some good news from Iraq, a commendation for a civilian who has helped to add infrastructure to the country. She added that "we never hear good news" like this, and so she wanted to spread it around.

We hear a lot about this, that there is a bias toward bad news. Well, this is true of journalism: "If it bleeds, it leads." On my local news I rarely hear about a theatre company finding a new space or a church group feeding the homeless. It always seems to be one story after another about murders and car accidents, even though I live in a safe community. And we hear more about police officers shooting suspects than we do about them getting kittens out of trees, even though I believe on the whole they are honorable people.

And I don't think that we as a people have a grasp at how awful it is to live in Iraq. We in our cushy American lives can't conceive of the difficulty. It's hard enough to live under the threat of kidnappings and rapes and murders, armed militias and coalition forces barging into your homes day and night, and roadside IEDs-- but try doing it with electricity cutting on and off, schools and work opening and closing, no sewer, running water, or garbage pickup. If you really want to know-- and if you have the conscience God gave you YOU SHOULD-- check out the link to the wonderful Baghdad Burning, a blog written by an average person living in Iraq. (I put the link in the sidebar on the right.)

Humor can be an excellent lens-- to get an idea of what it's like to live in Iraq, check out some April Fool's Joke ideas from Baghdad Burning's author (handle: riverbend):

1. “Guess what?! There’s going to be electricity this summer!!!” (For better effect, it is suggested a candle be broken in half and thrown high into the air with a whoop.)

2. “Guess what?! The Americans have declared they will be gone by 2010 and they won’t leave permanent bases behind!!!” (This should be said with a straight face.)

3. “Guess what?! They didn’t actually find three corpses in the strip of trees two streets away!!!”

4. “Guess what?! The Puppets finally formed a government!!!”

5. “Guess what?! They didn’t actually detain [fill in with the name of a relative, friend- everyone knows someone in prison these days]!!!”

6. "Guess what?! Chalabi solved the gasoline crisis!!!"

7. "Guess what?! No more religious militias- they've been banned from the country!!!" (This should be said in a low voice - just in case)

8. "Great news!! The US is going to make public how the billions of dollars in Iraqi oil money AND donations were 'spent'!!!"

9. "Guess what?! They're going to actually begin reconstructing the country and they estimate it will take 5 years!!!"

10. "Guess what?! They caught Zarqawi!!!" (This will only work on Iraqis who actually think he exists.)

I don't think we can talk enough about how awful the living conditions are in Iraq, because even as much as we talk about it, I don't think we as Americans can grasp it without going there.

And then on CNN's On The Story* a correspondent was answering the question about why she doesn't report more good news. She said that part of the problem, beyond the difficulty of getting around and security issues, is that the Defense Department will often specifically ask them NOT to report good news. Got a power plant up and running? If you report it, the "bad guys" (of whatever ilk) will bomb it. Got a school open? If you talk about it, they'll shoot it up and kill the children.

ABC's overnight news coverage was doing a story about a sitcom being filmed for Iraqi TV-- which was of course about a hapless George Constanza-type who can't get the girl, because that is universal-- and while they were filming the story, the head of the entertainment division for the Iraqi network had been murdered. Even attempts at happy stories turn bloody in reporting this war. (The online version of this story is here.)

I was trying to track down the CNN quotes from above and instead found an article entitled, Baghdad: Where No One Is Safe.

"Who do you trust in your neighborhood?" [correspondent Cal Perry] asked a resident of Baghdad.

"No one," he said.

"Who secures your house, your family?" [Perry] asked.

"I do. My brother lives downstairs. We have weapons. We are always in touch on the phone; we have codes," he said.

He then added, "It will get worse -- everyone knows this."

Mr. Perry went on to say, "Bodies are found every day, all over Baghdad. Dozens. Sometimes scores. Some are bound, tortured and beheaded. Others are simply shot, execution-style. The spiral continues, and no one knows what the sunrise in Baghdad will bring tomorrow, next week or next month."

So don't blame a biased media for not reporting the happy news, there truly isn't very much, and what there is they're afraid to report on for fear it could be taken away. Do some exploration beyond the daily body count and understand what is really going on there. And then you too might be shouting from the rooftops, demanding to know how our great country let this happen, and what we are going to do to fix it.

*I can't find the transcript, I can't remember the date. This is the kind of sloppy research that bloggers get nailed with all the time, and I can only say, sorry, I wasn't actively blogging when I saw this, and I watch a LOT of CNN and it's easy to get it confused. And I really wish I could find the name of the correspondent in Baghdad, she's got long blond hair and as I recall a British accent. Now that I'm posting more often and more seriously, I'll try to get better about these things.

UPDATE: CNN has started a weekend show called "Iraq: This Week in War" (or something like that, it hasn't appeared on their web site yet as far as I can see) and part of their programming is checking in on the good news, including power plants, schools, etc. It's a sad little section, it almost seems like if you tell the good news it sounds so meager it emphasizes how bad things are. But at least they are trying to "balance" their coverage.

Clarification on "leaking", to a point

We are still waiting for many details surrounding "Leakgate" or "Plamegate", but an answer to my question in the previous post has been provided by Sidney Blumenthal in his article "The Slow-Motion Trap" on Salon.com.

Blumenthal writes,

In the setup for the leak, Fitzgerald writes, Cheney "advised defendant that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE" and that that approval was a secret. Libby was a team player, but he was also anxious about a declassification that was "unique in his experience."

The formal rules for declassification were amended by Bush's Executive Order 13292 of March 25, 2003, on "Classified National Security Information." Under any circumstances the president has the authority, as he always has, to unilaterally declassify official secrets and intelligence "in the public interest." But a decision to declassify a document normally passes through the originating agency and then through the Office of the National Security Advisor. Then the document is stamped declassified and the declassified order is appended to the document.

None of these procedures was followed in this case, which is why Libby's antenna was gyrating. He sought the advice of Cheney's counsel, David Addington, Libby's close ally. In approaching Addington, Libby must have known what he would hear. Addington is the foremost legal advocate in the White House of the idea that the president should be unbound, unchecked, unfettered in his authority, whether in the torture of detainees, domestic surveillance or any other matter. Unsurprisingly, Addington "opined that presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document."

Only four people -- Bush, Cheney, Libby and Addington -- were privy to the declassification. It was kept secret from the director of central intelligence, the secretary of state and the national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, among others. Indeed, Hadley was arguing at the time for declassification of the NIE but was deliberately kept in the dark that it was no longer classified.

So, based on my criteria in the post below, I call that leaking. It's tantamount to spoiling the surprise of the b-day party but not telling any of the guests so that they still hide and yell surprise and the guest of honor has to pretend to be shocked. (Except, of course, it's illegal and unethical, not just poor party hosting.) It's not what they're claiming now, which is that they were responding to calls from the public for clarification on the need to invade Iraq so they declassified some intel (which, BTW, was totally bogus) and gave it to reporters. This is sneaky and smarmy and only a man who thinks that he can get away with anything ("If the President does it, it's not illegal" as someone famously said about Nixon)-- oh, wait, but that's the guy who's our President.

Two other interesting points in Blumenthal's article:

1) He points out eloquently (if not for the first time) the circular logic used in the run-up to the war. I wish I knew how to make a flowchart for this blog. Our intel says ABC, we give ABC to the Europeans, they print it in their papers, we tell it to our people and say, "Look, the Europeans think the same thing!" And in this case, Libby leaks to Miller (in separate conversations) that Saddam "has" WMD, she reports it in the New York Times, and then the Administration says, "Look, even the Times says the same thing! And if that lefty rag the Times is actually agreeing with us, then it must be true!" And frankly, I think there were a lot of us on the Left who trust the Times-- and when we saw them saying the same thing, we bought into it too. I think that might account for a few Senators that voted for the war that now wish they hadn't.

2) He quotes Colin Powell finally, finally speaking out saying, "Indeed, last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told journalist Robert Scheer that the notorious 16 words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address concerning Iraq's supposed efforts to buy uranium -- the claim that former ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate -- were bogus. 'That was a big mistake,' Powell said. 'It should never have been in the speech. I didn't need Wilson to tell me that there wasn't a Niger connection. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. I never believed it.' ...Powell finally admitted publicly that the president spoke falsely about the reason for war, that there were interested parties inside the administration determined to put false words in his mouth, and that the secretary of state, knowing this, lacked the power to stop it." Now, there is something I thought would never happen. I knew in my heart that he was being railroaded, I just thought his loyalty to these people would make him take his criticism to his grave. Not a coward, just being reserved and dignified.

Powell seems to be on a roll, however, as Salon.com is also reporting that he is yet another retired general who is calling for Rumsfeld's resignation.

A Point of Contention on "Leaking"

[This is another letter I wrote to Salon. The topic was Libby's revelation that "Cheney told me that POTUS told him" to leak informaton from the NIE. The previous poster couldn't understand why everyone wasn't up in arms about this.]

I think maybe one of the reasons this isn't drawing the attention the last LW wanted is that it has a little bit for everyone to grab onto and back up their side. The Left obviously thinks this is evidence of lying and leaking, while the Right claims it proves nothing was leaked (because the NIE was at some point declassified).

But I need some help answering a question, and I think others do too. It's a question that people keep almost asking, some of the WH press corps came close with McClellan, but they can't seem to find the right words:

Is it technically possible for the POTUS (or anyone in a similar position of being able to classify/declassify intel) to leak? Is a leak defacto declassification? Or is there some official protocol for declassifying something-- a paper has to be signed, a memo sent out, the folders changed from top-secret red to help-yourself blue-- that until it's completed, anyone who talks is leaking?

If I throw a suprise party for my roommate and his mother clues him in, she's spilling my secret. But if I mention it, as the partygiver, am I leaking it and ruining the surprise, or changing the party to a non-surprise party?

It seems to come down to this mysterious protocol. What happens when the POTUS wants something declassified? Does he have to sign something? Tell other people? Buy new folders? If the answer is yes, then he CAN leak and probably did. If the answer is no, and the act of saying he wants it declassified makes it so and the rest is just tidying up the paperwork for posterity, then he didn't actually leak anything, he was just walking the line in a smarmy way. Like, god love him, our former leader questioning the definition of "is." Oh, Bill...

Settling that would help us have a better discussion, instead of each side saying it's their proof, which tends to shut conversation down, or at least bog it down into arguing over that very point.

But a better question might be-- is it even true? Cheney, who we know had a real bee in his bonnet about Wilson, apparently told Libby to go out and discredit Wilson (using either very selective quotes from a classified NIE, or outing his CIA wife, it's unclear at this time). Libby thought this was hinky and tried to make sure he covered his butt by asking Cheney for Presidential orders. Cheney went away and came back saying, "It's fine, he said it was OK."

Does anyone else find this strange? It's like an older sibling trying to get a younger sibling to do something stupid, who balks, and the older goes off and comes back and says, "Mom says it's OK, just do it." Or when you go to a car dealership and your salesman keeps disappearing into the back and returning with proclamations from a mysterious "manager" that we all know isn't even back there.

I think the more dangerous part of all this is Cheney appearing to run amok and possibly lying about what the POTUS did or did not approve. And because we're arguing over the rituals of declassification, he's getting away with it.

OK, Back off, Lou Dobbs.

First, I have to say, I love Lou Dobbs. He rocks my world every evening at 5pm CST. But when Congress attempted to address a big, red, hotbutton issue for Lou, he was so happy he didn't seem to understand why people took to the streets. It's really about the Sensenbrenner bill.

I think the real underlying hotbutton in the Sensenbrenner bill is that it criminalized aiding one's fellow man. Whatever you do to an illegal (make him a felon, etc.), it outraged me that I, an American citizen, could get in trouble for giving a starving man a sandwich. What's next, soup kitchen workers are held responsible for checking IDs like a bartender? It may be necessary to enforce labor laws and punish those who hire illegals (if the lure of the job isn't there, that would go a long way to solving this problem) and perhaps that might need to extend to those who provide long-term housing (primarily in a business context, as, a landlord renting to illegals). But faced with the choice in the moment, I WILL give a sandwich to a starving man, I WILL give water to a thirsty man, and I WILL invite inside my warm home a man standing out in the snow. (These are meant to be proverbial statements, I would give more than a sandwich and water, and it rarely snows in Texas, and not enough to threaten someone's life.) And I'm just a regular ol' citizen. If I were part of the church, a pastor or a priest or a nun, I wouldn't just be doing that to be kind, but because kindness is the essential part of my job. The real reason that the Church got involved is not because they want to meddle in politics, but because the politics threatened to meddle in their most basic, fundemental mission-- to help the helpless, right there, in the moment, without asking for papers or really caring what Man's law has to say about it. What's next? They can't help drug addicts or prostitutes on the street because drugs and prostitution are illegal and therefore those people are criminals? This is ridiculous. But this really outrageous point of legislature is really just in the Sensenbrenner bill and I don’t think that any other part of the debate, short of the silly idea that we would round up 11 (or 12, or 20) million hiding illegals at gunpoint and ship them back where they came from–as if we could pull that off, we couldn’t even get a few thousand people out of New Orleans who were holding up signs saying here we are, please come get us– would have driven anyone to the streets or gotten the Church involved.

I have a little story. When I was in high school, I turned into my neighborhood's entrance to find a man whose car had run out of gas and he had managed to coast off the road and into our entrance, where he got stuck. I was young and naive and had never heard of Ted Bundy (who used to pretend to have car trouble or other issues) and so I immediately jumped out of the car to help. I ended up using my car to push his safely out of the way, then we went and got my mom who got us a gas can and helped us get some gas for his car. Now this might have been foolish (Ted Bundy) and we did drive with a container of gas in the front seat (boom), but I will never regret helping this man. Never mind that his English was quite broken, never mind that he might have been legal or illegal, never mind that he smelled like hard labor and his car should have been in the junkyard, he needed help and I helped him. And I defy anyone to put me in jail for that. I would go with a bigger smile than Tom Delay at his booking.