Judith Miller: The media should have “hung together” instead of caving in to Patrick Fitzgerald’s subpoenas.
Jon Alter writes about his cancer, which, happily, is in remission.
As anyone who has paid a lick of attention to the U.S. Attorney scandal knows, it is just one example–perhaps the most egregious example–of the Bush Administration’s deep and widespread politicization of the Justice Department:
No other administration in contemporary times has had such a clear pattern of filling chief prosecutors’ jobs with its own staff members, said experts on U.S. attorney’s offices. Those experts said the emphasis in appointments traditionally has been on local roots and deference to home-state senators, whose support has been crucial to win confirmation of the nominees.
The pattern from Bush’s second term suggests that the dismissals were half of a two-pronged approach: While getting rid of prosecutors who did not adhere closely to administration priorities, such as rigorous enforcement of immigration violations and GOP allegations of voter fraud, White House and Justice officials also have seeded federal prosecutors’ offices with people on whom they can depend to carry out the administration’s agenda.
Jonathan Landay explores the curious case of Amir Mohamed Meshal, a U.S. citizen with alleged, albeit obscure, ties to al Qaeda who fled the fighting in Somalia earlier this year, was detained upon his arrival in Kenya, reportedly with U.S. help, and was subsequently deported to Ethiopia, where he now sits in a secret prison in the custody of Ethiopia’s intelligence service, even though the FBI interviewed him twice and declined to pursue charges. Confused? Landay maps out what is known to this point about the status of the 24-year-old from New Jersey.
As I’ve mentioned, we’re working on a redesign of this site. And that process has meant putting a lot of time into thinking about web design. Not just the pure aesthetics of what looks nice or doesn’t — but how news reporting and political writing can best be arranged on a page.
One thing that recently occurred to me — obvious, but it had never occurred to me — is how print newspapers are highly formulaic in their graphic presentation. They’re pretty much all the same with relatively minor differences at the margins. There’s the tabloid and the broadsheet. But within those two broad categories the basic way layout is remarkably similar — at least in comparison to the wild variety of modes of presentation on the web. To get some examples, see this page from Newseum, which shows daily front pages of hundreds of newspapers around the country and around the world.
I bring all this up because there are two questions I want to throw out there. One is, which papers do you think are the best designed ones on the web? The second is a bit broader. Is a basic formula emerging for publishing ‘newspapers’ on the web? Are certain idioms and styles becoming more and more common while fewer and fewer papers diverge radically from the standard model?
For my money, the New York Times is a very nicely designed site. The Post, on the other hand, just a did a limited redesign. And I think the result is disappointing. They tried to make the front page less busy and add more white space. But the result has an oddly unsegmented and ordered quality. And the fonts seem lifeless. (Yes, you can tell I’ve been thinking a lot about news site design.)
One of the design issues that interests me most about newspapers online is how you recapture the topical serendipity that is a lot of the magic of real newsprint. As you’d probably expect, I gravitate pretty heavily toward political coverage. And in doing so I miss a lot of stuff I don’t know I want to read. I want to read that story on such and such in India or … well, I don’t know what it is. That’s the point. But I want to read it. And it will enrich my day and turn my mind in different directions. Newsprint has that quality that you see these pieces sitting alongside the articles you’re accustomed to reading. There are various ways designers try to capture this experience online — mostly by putting collections of story links adjacent to the article you’re reading. But somehow it’s not quite the same.
Your thoughts about newspaper design online? And what do you think — setting aside the underlying quality of the journalism — is the best designed newspaper website?
Pete Domenici and Heather Wilson, the New Mexico pols whose phone calls to then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias ultimately lit the fire under Purgegate, have been laying low, but the Post has a nice takeout on how close their political relationship has been from the very beginning and remains to this day. Says Domenici’s chief of staff of the role his boss had in first getting Wilson elected to Congress, “It was substantially more than an endorsement.” All of which helps explain why Domenici would take such an interest in Wilson’s re-election last fall, going so far as to call Iglesias to pressure him to bring corruption indictments against state Democrats before election day.
We learn more of the sordid details of the plea agreement of Australian David Hicks, whose five-year detention by the U.S., mostly at Guantanamo Bay among the purportedly most dangerous of the dangerous, ended in a nine-month prison sentence.
The plea agreement, which includes a one-year gag order on Hicks, was not negotiated by the military tribunal’s prosecutors but by the official overseeing the tribunals, reports the Post this morning. In fact, the agreement was reached without the knowledge of the prosecutors, who favored a much stiffer penalty.
Australians have long suspected that the political fortunes of Prime Minister John Howard, who is up for re-election this year, would have some bearing on Hicks’ fate. The circumstances of the plea agreement further cement that notion:
Marine Maj. Michael “Dan” Mori, representing Hicks, took his plea negotiations to Susan J. Crawford, the top military commission official, rather than dealing with prosecutors who were seeking a lengthy penalty, according to both sides in the case. In what became a highly politicized situation involving the Australian government, Crawford allowed Hicks a short sentence in exchange for a year-long gag order, a guarantee that he will not allege illegal treatment at the hands of his U.S. captors, and a waiver of any right to appeal or sue.
Though Australian officials have said they were not directly involved in plea negotiations, Mori declined to answer questions about what, if any, influence they had. Australian Prime Minister John Howard, up for reelection this year, has been under public pressure to bring Hicks home. He turned to Vice President Cheney to implore that the case be resolved. Crawford was the Defense Department’s inspector general from 1989 to 1991, when Cheney was defense secretary.
“What an amazing coincidence that, with an election in Australia by the end of the year, he gets nine months and he is gagged for 12 months from talking about it,” said Australian lawyer Lex Lasry, who was in Cuba to monitor the case over the past week.
Could the outcome of the Hicks case be any less legitimate?
On the one hand, you have Hicks being held for five years without trial amidst allegations of torture and other mistreatment, fighting simply to get a fair hearing. His case has become an internationally known example of the Bush Administration’s blatant disregard for basic human rights.
On the other hand, you have the outcome of the case determined not by conventional Anglo-American standards of due process, including evidence presented to an impartial fact-finder, but by the political considerations of the Bush Administration and its ally Howard. Or as a spokesperson for the military commissions candidly told the Post, “Like it or not, the detainees at Guantanamo are from different countries, and that sometimes is a factor.”
It’s another example of politics trumping the War on Terror when it suits the Bush Administration. While you might feel some relief that there is an end in sight to Hicks’ Kafkaesque detention, you can’t help but be left with niggling doubts. Was Hicks a true danger? Perhaps not. But prosecutors thought Hicks would have received a decades-long sentence if the case went to trial. Has Hicks been vindicated? Not at all. The able representation of Hicks by Maj. Dan Mori took advantage of the political situation in Australia to win his client’s eventual release. Mori knew the game that was being played, and played it.
It is a deeply unsatisfying outcome.
Late update: Here’s the Hicks plea agreement. [Thanks to TPM Reader JG for the link.]
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (via Atrios): âIf Republicans in this election vote in such a way as to say a candidateâs personal life and personal conduct in office doesnât matter, then a lot of Christian evangelical leaders owe Bill Clinton a public apology.â