Perhaps I was too generous.
In the previous post, I noted <$Ad$> an article in Tuesday’s Financial Times about how U.S. sub-contractors in Iraq are importing cheap labor from South Asia rather than hiring locals. While noting how bad a sign this was, I credited some of the quotes from the article which said part of the reason for this was security concerns.
Then I got this email from a regular TPM correspondent who is an American expat living in the United Arab Emirates.
He's got a lot of experience with the contracting business in the Middle East. He’s been an urban planner / project manager for more than thirty years and about half that time has been in North Africa and the Arabian peninsula (Kuwait, Saudi, UAE, etc.) …
Josh: I just read your FT blog - to a certain extent I think this rationale of the "Iraqis can't be trusted" is a bunch of hoo ha.UAE: 20% of the pop is local. Of the 80% of the expat pop, fully 75% are subcontinenters. Why? Dirt cheap, much cheaper than the Arabs (imported or otherwise).
Of the international construction firms here, they all use minimum of 80% subcontinenters (i.e. the Halliburton and Bechtel types take all the money).
Bottom line: wages are a function of the price of living in the home countries. The price of living for subcontinenters in the subcontinent is nothing. E.g. I pay my Indian maid USD 300 month of which she supports a family of 10 people in Bombay and still manages to save probably 50% of her salary here in Dubai.
When you prepare city plans you have to do population studies first, e.g. existing and forecasted pop, breakdown of population by M/F and ethnic mix, et al. Why? as an example - the low wage Indians are in construction camps w/o dependents- I need land for construction camps for them, not houses; they also do not own cars so I don't need to factor in their "trips" as car trips, I factor them in as bus trips since they are bused everywhere, etc.
Think about it: wouldn't you rather have Moslem Arabs that speak Arabic and know the culture (particularly the religious culture) than Hindus??
I don't buy this "Iraqis are dangerous" bull#$%@; its all about money.
None of this is pretty …
--Josh Marshall
According to an article in Tuesday’s Financial Times, US sub-contractors in Iraq are importing cheap labor from South Asia rather than hiring Iraqis.
One key reason, according to the article, is security and force protection.
“We don't want to overlook Iraqis, but we want to protect ourselves," the US Army colonel who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority's procurement office told the paper. "From a force protection standpoint, Iraqis are more vulnerable to a bad guy influence."
Unfortunately, it’s not difficult to grasp the reality behind these concerns.
No getting around it: It’s a lot more likely that an Iraqi Muslim is going to be in league with some local resistance cell than a Hindu you bring in from southern India. But this also shows the ratchet-like cycle of unfortunateness that can develop when you’re occupying an intractable country like Iraq.
As violence has spiraled in Israel over the last two decades, the Israelis have brought in more and more foreign workers to fill jobs once held by Palestinians. This of course is terrible on a symbolic level. And it also deals a crushing blow to the Palestinian economy --- which itself creates a sort of low-term terrorist blowback because it creates a fertile breeding ground for groups like Hamas.
But what exactly are the Israelis supposed to do as long as a certain percentage of Palestinians from the West Bank who come to Israel to work are actually suicide bombers?
The first signs of such a pattern seem to be cropping up in Iraq.
Needless to say, importing foreign workers into Iraq doesn’t do a lot of good for the Iraqi unemployment rate, which is perilously high. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but you don’t have to spend too much time in Southeast Asia, Africa or the Caribbean to know there’s a bit of a precedent for importing South Asian workers into countries under, shall we say, foreign management.
Here are a couple uplifting grafs from the FT article …
"Iraqis are a security threat," says a Pakistani manager in Baghdad for the Tamimi Company, based in the Saudi city of Dammam, which is contracted to cater for 60,000 soldiers in Iraq. "We cannot depend on them."The company, which has 12 years' experience feeding US troops in the Gulf, employs 1,800 Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and Nepalese in its kitchens. It uses only a few dozen Iraqis for cleaning.
In the dusty backyard of the US administrators' Baghdad palace, south Asians, housed 12 to a Saudi-made temporary cabin, organise 180,000 meals a day for US troops and administrators.
A Tamimi manager says the company pays an average salary of one Saudi riyal (Dollars 3) a day and grants leave once every two years. The contracts are awarded by Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, which in 2001 won its second Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, contract to sub-contract the supply of US military provisions. The Logcap is open-ended and its Iraqi share is worth "in excess of Dollars 2bn", according to officials of the Defence Contract Management Agency in Baghdad.
Ugh ...
--Josh Marshall
A few days back I had America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay as the TPM Featured Book. Here's my review of it in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.
--Josh Marshall
A brief note on the recent lack of TPM postings.
I’ve gotten a lot of emails asking what’s up. Here’s the deal: As of Wednesday morning of this week I’ve been on jury duty. So, as you might imagine, that’s put a bit of a crimp in my time. Then, as of Thursday morning, the hard drive on my IBM think pad crashed. And, yes, I mean really crashed. As in, all gone.
Luckily, as I’ve ventured further into adulthood, I’ve gotten a little more responsible about backing up data. And even though I’d gotten a little sloppy, a bit lazy about it in the last month or two, I had still done a relatively recent back up – about three weeks ago.
(If you're wondering whether I'm going back to the twice a week back-up routine, well ... yes, you could say that.)
One thing I learned from this regrettable experience is that I’m simply too dependent on computers to have only one. For years, I’ve gotten by with only a laptop, which --- as those who know me could attest --- functions rather like a physical appendage. Actually, I liked only having one, very mobile, computer.
So tonight, after I got home from the courthouse, I ran out to the local mall to get a cheap desktop as a fall-back machine (for cases when my computer is off being repaired for a week) and another layer of data back-up for future technological disasters. An unexpected expense, but a necessary one --- I’m using it right now to write this post.
In any case, expect the regular schedule to resume from right now.
--Josh Marshall
Don't miss this piece in today's Washington Post on the survey Stars and Stripes -- not exactly the liberal media -- did of soldiers in Iraq, and what they found.
What's surreal about the White House's new claims that the press is keeping all the good news from Iraq (reopening schools and so forth) hidden -- faithfully parroted by the usual suspects -- is that it's really hard to find anyone who's been in the country recently or for any significant period of time who thinks that's true.
It seems to be an insight vouchsafed mainly to conservative newspaper columnists.
The Stars and Stripes survey -- though non-scientific -- seems to lend credence to that perception. Despite not being from a randomized cross-section of those serving in Iraq, says Stars and Stripes editor David Mazzarella, "We still think the findings are significant and make clear that the troops have a different idea of things than what their leaders have been saying."
Every time I hear some conservative wag trumpeting "the schools, the schools!" I have to admit it gives me flashbacks to Herve Villechaize and the intro to Fantasy Island ("de plane, de plane!").
The schools are great. But we're not there to reopen schools. More to come soon on this issue of the schools.
--Josh Marshall
In the end I don’t think it <$Ad$> will really matter much. But it was a little painful yesterday watching various media outlets bend over backwards to give credence to the White House’s complaints that the media is conspiring to hide all the good news coming out of Iraq.
CNN was in full grovel mode.
One of the most unintentionally comedic moments came from Bill Hemmer who was filling in on Paula Zahn’s show.
After New Republic Editor Peter Beinart pointed out that the media might actually be understating the problems in the country by underreporting the number of wounded soldiers (as opposed to fatalities), Hemmer shot back with this gem …
I think there's (sic) to sides of that coin. … If you're saying it's actually worse than being reported, could it also be better than what's being reported also, if you consider that these reporters, many of them tell us they want to go cover the new school opening, but they can't because there's another bombing or shooting and that prevents them from sending that story?
I love this logic.
It’s not just the reporters who are keeping a lid on all the good things going on in Iraq. It’s the darned terrorists who are keeping everyone from hearing how good things are by constantly setting off bombs and shooting people.
--Josh Marshall
Mr. Nethercutt, would you like to revise and extend your remarks?
I think he might.
George Nethercutt is a congressman from Washington. And he’s running against the incumbent senator, Patty Murray. In a speech Monday, he got a little carried away with his ‘we’re building new schools right and left in Iraq’ enthusiasm.
"The story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable. It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.”
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where the quote appeared, went on to note that Nethercutt made clear that he did not want any more soldiers to be killed. Which is nice to know.
--Josh Marshall
In his column today Nick Kristof argues that for all the mistakes President Bush made getting us into Iraq --- mistakes both of omission and commission, incompetence and bad-faith --- that now we have no choice but to stay, and to pay what it takes to get the job done right. “I believe that President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq,” Kristof writes in conclusion, “but he's right about staying there.”
I agree, so far as it goes. But I think the sentiment expressed misses the point.
I certainly don’t think we should pull out of Iraq. More importantly, I don’t know many of what I’d call mainstream foreign policy voices who think we should pull out of Iraq any time in the near future. (No, Dennis Kucinich doesn’t count.) I know the president would like to conjure up opponents who favor an immediate pull-out from Iraq because shadow-boxing with them would make for good politics. But I really don’t know quite who Kristof is arguing against.
As I said, I think Kristof has it a bit wrong.
The question is not whether we should pull out immediately, nor is it precisely how long we’ll need to stay, nor even the precise sums of money we should be willing to expend. The question is how to make a success --- or at least not a failure --- of the situation we’re currently in.
And if our task is to figure out how to find our way to success, then it makes a lot of sense to look skeptically at the roadmap to success being charted by those who got us into the mess in the first place.
--Josh Marshall
Eh ... 12 letters from northern Iraq. Or maybe 500, give or take. Turns out that 500 of those phony letters from soldiers in Iraq got sent out. For the moment it looks like it was all the brainchild of Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, the commander of the battalion in question.
--Josh Marshall
I’m trying to put together a list of the most ridiculous historical analogies Bush partisans are putting forward to explain the difficulties we’re now facing in Iraq. This is sort of related, I guess, to the hunt for the Holy Grail of an innocent explanation of the Plame debacle we noted a few days ago.
The contest is just beginning. But John Fund is definitely in the hunt. Just a few minutes ago on CNN, Fund was on Paula Zahn’s show debating Peter Beinart on the senseless ‘press is keeping all the good news from Iraq hidden' story line.
When asked about the on-going toll of dead and wounded American soldiers, Fund interjected: “But remember after World War II we had Japanese soldiers fighting on islands for years.”
(Next time I see Fund I’m going to have to have word with him because I’m holding him responsible for the Diet Coke that exploded out of my mouth and got all over my shirt when I heard his boneheaded analogy.)
If you’re a World War II buff, you’ll remember that for years after Japan’s surrender in 1945 there was a smattering of Japanese soldiers on this or that Pacific island who had never gotten the news that the war was over. The stories are touching. And I think I remember that the very last of them were found in the early 1970s. But for America, their prime historical legacy was to provide fodder for a few episodes of Gilligan’s Island. So somehow I think they’re a rather strained analogy to the guerilla insurgency and suicide attacks we’re now wrestling with in central Iraq.
Maybe someone else will come up with something more ridiculous. But for the moment, John, you’re the man to beat!
--Josh Marshall
Bob Novak seems to be doing everything he can to lay the groundwork for his sources -- those "two top administration officials" -- to claim they didn't know Valerie Plame was a clandestine agent. Frankly, the available facts say otherwise. Here's my run-down of the evidence in my new column in The Hill.
--Josh Marshall
A bounce back in the polls?
That might be a bit of an overstatement. Here are a number of recently-released presidential approval polls (with the most recent listed first) and how far the president moved up or down from the last time that news outlet did a poll. ABC/WaPo: 53%, down 1; CNN/USA Today: 56%, up 1; Newsweek: 51%, down 1; Ipsos-Reid/Cook Political Report: 51%, down 4.
One extra bit of info, CNN/USA Today Gallup did two polls in rapid succession: one at the beginning of last week and one over the weekend. If we go back one more poll, to the one they did September 19th through 21st, that one had Bush at 50%. So if you bend the measure a bit in the president’s favor, you get one poll with a six point bump.
Things are very politically unsettled at the moment. So I don’t think we can make too many judgments from this snapshot other than to say that the president has gotten a bit of a foothold just a hair’s breadth over 50%.
Equally important, perhaps more so, is the re-elect number. The ABC/Post poll has that at Bush 46%, Dem Nominee 47%. The Newsweek poll has him at 44% re-elect. I couldn’t find the internals on the CNN-USA Today poll. But if someone knows what re-elect number they got, please send it along.
For my part, I'll be waiting to hear what the all-knowing Ruy has to say about these numbers.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, can I have five minutes of your time?
You've gotta hear this.
If you click on this link you can hear a short segment from NPR's 'Marketplace' about one of the American businessmen, Tompie Hall, trying to get a piece of the Iraqi reconstruction action.
Believe me, you've gotta hear this.
--Josh Marshall
To mark Columbus Day, let me suggest a book: The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo.
It’s not as current as Conason’s Big Lies or Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It was written a bit more than four-hundred years ago. But I think it holds up pretty well.
Diaz was born in 1492 and was one of the small band of soldiers under Hernan Cortes who landed on the Yucatan Peninsula in 1519 and eventually conquered most of what we now call Mexico. Whatever political implications and questions linger over the conquest today, this is a truly amazing story, and one that is difficult to fully explain even today.
Diaz was part of Cortes’ expedition. But he was also on two previous, less ambitious, voyages of exploration and potential conquest to these lands in the years just before 1519. For all these reasons he was uniquely qualified to tell the story of what happened. And he was also blessed with an unadorned but gripping and graphic writing style which brings the events marvelously alive.
Diaz finished the book when he was seventy-six, an old man living on an isolated estate in what is now Guatemala. He died in 1580.
As some of you know I spent most of my twenties studying the 17th century North American colonies, particularly New England --- my dissertation was about the first decades of contact between English settlers and Algonquian Indians in southern New England. My great interest in Anglo-Indian contact in that period was the profound alienness of each group in the eyes of the other.
When I was in grad school I also prepared a field in Colonial Latin American history. And that’s where I first came across Bernal Diaz’s book --- which is one of the basic primary documents of the Conquest. (I'm rereading it now.) That same sense of the unknown, the mix of bewilderment, horror and fascination with which each group views the other, is what I find so gripping about it.
As Cortes and his small group make their way into the interior, the Indians they come into contact with have difficulty making sense of whether the Spaniards are even human or some sort of gods. At least at first, they think the men on horses are actually one single creature. Horses turn out to have been a profoundly important military asset. Fire-arms, though not as decisive as a weapon as you might imagine, were literally terrifying.
As 'my' settlers did in 17th century New England, the Spaniards made conscious and quite effective use of terror (not in the sense we now commonly use the word) as a weapon.
The Spaniards meanwhile are fixed on two things: finding gold --- and miscellaneous other precious objects --- and compelling the Indians to accept Christ. Given that human sacrifice was an essential part of religious practice in pre-Columbian Mexico, it’s not surprising that the Spaniards found the Indians' religion shocking and revolting. And as they make their way into the interior --- first defeating and then making alliances with various city-states --- they are constantly demanding that their new allies destroy their idols, end human sacrifice, ban sodomy and adopt various other au courant codes of behavior. This is usually accompanied by whitewashing one or more temples, setting up a cross, and giving a brief lesson on the basic tenets of Christianity, before they move on their way towards Tenochtitlan.
If you like reading history, and discovering unknown, alien worlds, I think you’ll like this book.
--Josh Marshall
Well, there’s the first high-profile response to the Great Push-Back from the White House: the Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says the president has lost control of his Iraq policy because he has failed to assert control over his vice president, his over-mighty cabinet secretaries, and their endless squabbles.
“The president has to be the president,” Lugar told Tim Russert yesterday on Meet the Press. “That means the president over the vice president and over these secretaries. And Dr. Rice cannot carry that burden alone.”
Lugar is not a Bush loyalist. He was a lukewarm supporter of the war, a voice of the old-line Republican foreign policy establishment. But he’s also no John McCain, nor even a Chuck Hagel. He’s not someone who looks for reasons to criticize the president.
Nor is Lugar the only one making this point.
Last week Bill Kristol noted the foreign policy "disarray within his administration" and said the "administration [was] at war with itself."
Clearly, Kristol doesn't agree with Lugar about a lot, and even less with me -- less and less every day, it seems. And he'd like to see the conflict in DC won by different folks than I would. But the objective reality of disarray at the highest levels is impossible to miss or ignore.
Rumsfeld is on the retreat on every front in the administration’s internecine battles. Powell lacks the clout to fully assert himself --- he remains fundamentally isolated. Cheney is a power unto himself. And Rice has largely abdicated the principal role of the National Security Advisor: to discipline and ride herd over competing institutional and ideological factions within the national security bureaucracy.
By default, our current policy in Iraq is drift.
--Josh Marshall
If you're interested in seeing the audio/visual version of TPM, I'll be on the Aaron Brown show tonight on CNN talking about phony letters to the editors and the phony phonies who write them.
--Josh Marshall
Yesterday we discussed the business of placing phony letters to the editor and OpEds in newspapers --- a real growth industry in Washington, DC. This business, of course, is a subset of what’s called ‘astroturf’ organizing, as in companies that are in the business of whipping up phony ‘grassroots’ support for this or that cause --- something we discussed at some length back in the spring of 2002.
Now, the phony letter and OpEd racket comes in many shapes and sizes. But just to get the ball rolling, let’s look at one example from the TPM archives.
Van Kloberg & Associates is a DC lobbying firm which specializes in representing what … well, what would you call them? … let’s say, the most misunderstood of nations. Countries like Burma, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Liberia under Samuel Doe, Zaire under Mobutu, all sorts of good places.
If you look here you can view a November 26th, 1990 letter from Edward van Kloberg to the then-Ambassador of Zaire, Tatanene Manata. The subject of the letter is what Kloberg called the “Zaire Program 1991.”
Basically, this was the firm’s program to flack for Zaire by harrying opponents of the Zairian dictatorship in the United States, lobbying congress and getting stories planted in the press about how the mind-bogglingly corrupt and brutal Zairian dictatorship wasn’t such a bad place after all.
(For a good run-down of Mobutu’s Zaire --- and there’s really no other Zaire since Mobutu changed the country’s name from the Congo to Zaire when he took power and it was changed back after he was run out of the country --- see Michela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo.)
By all means take a look at the whole thing. It makes for delightfully entertaining reading, in a sort of surreal and amoral sort of way. But note one part of their ‘press campaign’: placing letters-to-the editor and OpEds in newspapers.
“Our press outreach placed dozens of letters-to-the-editor in newspapers across the country,” Kloberg says on the first page of the letter. He later notes how the firm “responded to criticism of the government of Zaire by drafting and placing letters-to-the-editor and op-ed pieces.”
In mid-2001 an employee of one DC foreign lobbying firm told me that many of these outfits have a few ex-foreign service officers, ex-ambassadors or other luminaries on retainer who can lend a hand by affixing a signature to such letters, or perhaps even writing them.
So this is one part of the racket. Later we’ll discuss others.
--Josh Marshall
At an American Enterprise Institute confab last April entitled (now rather ironically) “What Lies Ahead,” Charles Krauthammer said …
Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We've had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven't found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don't have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time.
Krauthammer five and one half months later on David Kay’s inability to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction whatsoever and his need to hang his hat on various dual use facilities which could have been used to produce weapons of mass destruction …
Hussein was simply making his WMD program more efficient and concealable. His intent and capacity were unchanged.
Sic transit …
--Josh Marshall
Don't miss the lengthy and masterful piece on the 'Lackawanna Six' in today's New York Times. This is the group of Yemeni-Americans from near Buffalo, New York who went to Afghanistan for what amounted to al Qaida basic training in early 2001. The Times may be nowhere to be found on the Wilson/Plame matter and a number of other recent stories. But this piece is an example of the sort of detailed investigation and nuanced exposition that only a great newspaper can manage. This is good stuff.
--Josh Marshall
There’s an interesting new story making the rounds about letters to the editor from soldiers in northern Iraq showing up in local and regional newspapers around the country. The letters explain how things are much better than people think in Iraq and how the Army is helping to rebuild the country with support from the locals.
The only problem is that it’s the same letter --- the identical letter --- showing up in multiple newspapers over the names of at least a dozen different soldiers. The blogger who’s on top of this is ‘Hesiod’ who’s been on the story for a few days. And The Olympian, from Olympia, Washington, reported the story out in helpful detail yesterday.
This is just one example. And the search seemed to have been triggered when The Olympian got two copies of the letter from two hometown soldiers stationed in northern Iraq. In other words, I doubt this is the only example -- just the one where someone got caught.
It’s worth saying that most of the soldiers contacted by the paper said they agreed with its contents, though none of them said they wrote it, and one said he’d never even signed it. But clearly that doesn’t answer the mystery of who was behind the letter writing campaign.
I can imagine all sorts of different scenarios behind it --- including this being the innocent, but over-eager effort of a single Army public affairs officer somewhere in northern Iraq.
But there’s another possibility that deserves a serious look.
There are a number of firms in Washington whose business it is to orchestrate phony letter writing campaigns on behalf of pricey clients.
Usually, the gig works something like this. Say you’re the hot dog makers lobby and congress is fixing to hit you with some new regs about hot dog making. Let’s say it’s something truly outlandish like requiring you to include some meat in the product.
If you go up to the hill with your gripes as the National Hot Dog Makers Association you might not do so well. And your ideological compatriots in the media might not be able to get up much of a head of steam banging the table for a bunch of hot dog magnates. So you call up one of the phony letter writing firms --- let’s call one hypothetical outfit The Former Republican Communications Staffers and Speechwriters Group of Washington.
So you go to FRCSSGW. They find out what your beef is and they write up a letter to the editor. Then they go out and find some guy who runs a hot dog stand downtown in some major city and ask him if he’ll sign it for a few hundred bucks. Maybe money changes hands; maybe it doesn’t. It depends on the circumstances. Then they take that letter and find some newspaper to print it.
Local newspapers are usually easier to bamboozle than the big national ones --- though at least one major national paper is known to be an easy mark for phony letters with an appealing ideological tilt.
The letter usually has the nominal author of the letter telling congress that those woeful new regulations will make it impossible for an independent hot dog vendor to stay in business, etc., etc., etc.
Voila! Suddenly those new hot dogs regs aren’t just an annoyance to the hot dog makers. They’re a new burden to some struggling immigrant entrepreneur who’s trying to build his American dream one dog at a time.
I’d be curious to find out whether some outfit like our hypothetical Former Republican Communications Staffers and Speechwriters Group of Washington is doing some of their letter-campaign consulting for the White House or the Pentagon as part of the Great Push-Back.
--Josh Marshall
No question about it: The Washington Post is the first, second and third paper to go to on the Wilson/Plame story. To be fair, Newsday deserves a big mention in there too. But the article in Sunday’s Post is another piece with precise and story-advancing detail almost on a par with the September 28th piece that started the whole ball running.
(The Times? What ever happened to the Times? Lord knows, I'm no Times-basher. But they've been totally AWOL on this story. In fact, they have the ironic and in many ways dubious distinction of having seen the story advanced far more on their OpEd page than in their news pages.)
The Post story begins with a map of the Justice Department investigation. The initial focus of the inquiry, it seems, is not so much on who leaked to Novak as just how the information --- Plame’s status and her relationship to Joe Wilson --- made its way to and then around the White House.
Check out the piece for the details on that point. But this brings up something about the nature of this investigation. I’m all for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate this case. It seems like a textbook example of an inquiry that calls for one.
But I haven’t made too big a point of it because I think that once a full-scale criminal probe gets underway it's really not that easy to control. Once lawyers and FBI agents and depositions and the rest of it get involved, these things have a way of taking on a life of their own. As I’ve said before, I’m convinced that the White House will eventually rue the day the president didn’t just do the right thing on day one: find the culprits, fire them and move on.
But back to the Post article.
There’s been a lot of chatter over the last week about whether that Post piece from September 28th --- in which a ‘senior administration official’ pointed the finger at two “top White House officials” --- may have gotten some key points wrong. Some have speculated that perhaps the senior administration official, who was the source for that article, got confused about which calls to reporters were made before and after Novak published his first column.
This new piece seems to clear that up. This from the new article ...
That same week, two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to least six Washington journalists, an administration official told The Post for an article published Sept. 28. The source elaborated on the conversations last week, saying that officials brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson.
"It was unsolicited," the source said. "They were pushing back. They used everything they had.”
The point here is clear. The reporters --- one would assume Mike Allen, since he has a byline on both pieces --- went back to the source with all the new information we know now. And the source stuck to his story on every key point. Note too that we’re back to “top White House officials.”
Another key point to notice in this piece is the way the authors start turning some of the spotlight on the press itself. They don’t do so in an adversarial manner. But they’ve gotten at least one reporter to discuss off the record that they’d been told about Plame’s relationship with Wilson by White House officials before Novak's column appeared.
Again, the key passage …
On July 12, two days before Novak's column, a Post reporter was told by an administration official that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction. Plame's name was never mentioned and the purpose of the disclosure did not appear to be to generate an article, but rather to undermine Wilson's report.
This last point sums up another of the key themes of the piece. The White House was at war with Joe Wilson. And they were using everything in their arsenal to take him down. The authors of the piece seem to have spoken to “administration sources” who told them that the motive for naming Plame wasn’t retaliation but an effort to destroy Wilson’s credibility and thus get reporters to ignore him. That theory of the crime, shall we say, seems to conflict with the account of the administration official who told the Post on he September 28th that the calls were “meant purely and simply for revenge.”
For my part, I’ve always thought that this question of motivation was greatly over-determined. Revenge, a warning to other potential whistleblowers, attempts to undermine Wilson’s credibility --- none of these strikes me as contradictory or necessarily exclusive of the others. I suspect they were all involved.
In fact, the “senior administration official” who was the source for the September 28th article seemed to believe both motives were involved, since he or she called the disclosure not only wrong but “a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility.”
--Josh Marshall
