James Wagner

Is the NYTimes about to admit it’s largely responsible for sending the country into an immoral and disastrous war?
See this story which arrived via Cursor tonight.

Sources inside and close to the New York Times say that the newspaper is preparing an “Editors’ Note” that will reassess its pre-Iraq War coverage, particularly its coverage of weapons of mass destruction. The note is said to address the reporting failures of Times staffers, including Judith Miller, and could be published as early as tomorrow (Wednesday, May 26).

So how will they propose to make the world whole now? As Barry pointed out, and with no little acerbity, remembering the last Times “Editors’ Note,” this ain’t just another Jayson Blair!
Will the Washington Post be next? See this Washingtonian article, also sighted on Cursor.

Chalabi has been a political activist in exile for most of his 59 years, and for many of those years the Post has trumpeted and championed his causes. In some ways, Chalabi is a creation of the Post and to a lesser extent the Times, where Judith Miller relied on him as a source in reporting on weapons of mass destruction.

Ah, those sneaky notoriously-Leftwing, Eastern-Establishment media giants have been at it again, pushing their pinko internationalist agenda onto peace-loving Americans across the land, through the halls of the Capitol and into the White House itself.

UPDATE: The “Editors’ Note” now [11:30 pm Tuesday] appears on the Times site and will appear in all editions on Wednesday. It doesn’t begin to describe the scale of the newspaper’s failures, and while it barely touches the subject of moral guilt the geopolitical consequences of those failures is missing altogether.

UPDATE: See below for the announcement that the sentencing has been stayed.



“Can they imprison us for political protest?” We’re about to find out, right here in Gotham.
Yesterday New York City closed down 5th Avenue for the benefit of a group of people wishing to demonstrate American support for Israel. On Wednesday the same city will be sentencing, quite possibly to prison terms, another group of people who briefly closed down the same Avenue last year. Their wish? They hoped to demonstrate oppositon to what America is doing in the Middle East, including its support for the Israeli government’s murderous policy.
Four defendants have already been convicted of “blocking traffic,” but they will hear their sentences read Wednesday morning. The prosecution team is calling for jail time, based on several protest cases previously dismissed and sealed by the courts. All current charges, as well as the past charges which were supposed to have remained hidden, involve non-violent protest. The District Attorney has cited the four advocates’ history of advocacy with AIDS/Queer/Abortion/Police Brutality activism as reason for harsh sentencing, thus officially criminalizing political protest.
It has been decades since New York courts have even tried to argue that such defendants should serve time. If the move is successful this week, the long-term implications for political dissent will be horrendous. But the short-term consequences are surely the agenda of this district attorney, this police commissioner, this born-again-Republican mayor and the administration in Washington he hopes to impress. This is an election year, we are in the midst of a costly and increasingly unpopular war, and we are just now entering an anxious, hot summer which will climax in a massive political rally conducted by a failed, deceptive, radical regime which was imposed upon a world it has horribly wounded. The stakes are very, very high.
Our support of a better way, a better world, is needed this week. Our presence inside and outside of the courtroom will help these four courageous activists and of course it will help us all, including countless people who will never hear about their sacrifice or our modest witness. Please come to the Manhattan Criminal Court Building just east and a few blocks north of City Hall on Wednesday morning, May 26, at 9 am for the 9:30 am sentencing. The address is 100 Centre Street, Room 533.
For photographs and more information, including that on the fate of the 12 defendents sentenced earlier, see the M26 site.

UPDATE (Monday, May 24, 6:35 pm)

SENTENCING POSTPONED
Late today it was announced that the sentencing, originally scheduled for May 26, has been stayed, pending an appeal for review of a petition by the four against Supreme Court Justice Cataldo and the District Attorney of Manhattan (on the issue of the unsealing of dismissed cases). This means that they will appear again in court at a date in July at the earliest.
Do not show up this Wednesday; there will be nothing happening there on this case at that time.
Friends of the convicted activists are asking instead for help in finding lawyers who would want to file a brief on this case. The case is expected to be very important in establishing both political and legal precedent for all kinds of defendants.
Those who know lawyers who might be interested in this important case are asked to contact Jonathan Kirshbaum at [phone number deleted].
Even those who are not close to lawyers can help with the legal fees and fines associated with the case. Contributions of all sizes can be made through paypal on the M26 site.

[image, of the March 26 protest, by Fred Askew on the M26 site]

Some day this entire wretched adventure may be known as the “War of Chalabi’s Chutzpah,” rivalling the stupidity of another disastrous imperial obscenity which began with a fake casus belli, the “War of Jenkin’s Ear.”
Newsday seems to have something of a scoop today [has anybody heard from the NYTimes these days, except to hear it mouth Washington’s pieties?], reporting that our own Defense Intelligence Agency has decided that Chalabi, the man the Administration had expected to install as Sadaam Hussein’s successor, had duped his Pentagon paymasters in order to get the U.S. to attack and occupy Iraq.
But the report gets still more incredible. Chalabi was working in the interests of Iran all along, meaning that Bush has been working hard for a prominent member of the “Axis of Evil.” Could the theocrats in that unfortunate land be any more grateful to the Republican Party? Remember Iran-Contra as this latest treason unfolds.

WASHINGTON – The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
The Information Collection Program also “kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing” by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.
An administration official confirmed that “highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel.”
The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi’s program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
‘Sophisticated’ operation
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.

I can appreciate good work too. Those of us who oppose this Administartion with every fiber of our being could hardly have imagined that such a damning scenario might unfold in the media, triggered and abetted by top civilian and military officials in the U.S. government, some of them certainly Republican. I already knew it would be a very interesting year, but I thought we’d probably have to do all of the work ourselves.

[image by Michael Shaw, from BAGnews]

(not that he’s going to notice)

SLACKTAVIST was there first, months ago.

“Reagan’s Bind” describes the conundrum in which one is unable to explain or defend one’s actions except by ascribing them to either: A) malicious intent; or B) glaring stupidity and/or incompetence.

Today Mark Morford brings us up to date:

It is [also] the eternal Bush conundrum. How to appear sort of blank faced and ignorant of the true atrocities your administration commits so as to avoid any sort of direct accountability, and yet still pretend to be a savvy, aware, tough-guy leader who gets things done and takes no bull and launches unprovoked wars on anything that stands in the way of his dad’s portfolio.
After all, it has always been far too easy to smack BushCo around as being an aww-shucks dumb-guy AWOL simpleton daddy’s boy with a low-C average and a painfully inarticulate approach to the world, coupled with an astounding, world-famous ability to mangle both the English language and every foreign policy ever implemented.
It’s always felt like a bit of a grand ruse, Bush’s Forrest Gump-style dunderheadedness, a clever (if entirely plausible) way to deflect much of the responsibility for his regimes’s carnage, all designed to make the nation believe that this guy simply couldn’t be all that bad because, well, he just ain’t all that bright.
But, ironically enough, as far as the Abu Ghraib mega-scandal is concerned, Bush has dug his own hole. It is his very own bull-headed, infantile, stay-the-course, admit-no-mistakes, bomb-first-ask-questions-never approach that has caged him in and makes any move toward getting the U.S. out of the Iraq quagmire nearly impossible. It’s not the sign of a dimwit. It’s the sign of a dimwit with delusions of shrewdness. Which is, of course, far more dangerous.
. . . .
Maybe Bush is stupid in a way that is far worse, and far more dangerous for the health of this planet, than mere inarticulate, nonintellectual, semiliterate Texas cow-pie bumbling.
It is, in short, the stupidity of the indignant and the self-righteous, of the morally arrogant, of someone whose power base is threatened and yet who is still blindly forcing America down this nightmare path, even when all signs and all leaders and all U.N. councils and all weapons investigators and all flagrant U.S.-sanctioned rapes and tortures are veritably screaming in his face that it is a mistake of increasingly epic, treacherous proportions.
And so maybe, ultimately, it all comes back to us. Maybe it is the majority of people in this flag-wavin’, happily deluded, fear-drenched country who can’t believe it could happen, who simply, you know, “misunderestimated” just how poisonous Bush’s savage brand of stupidity really is.

[image from leafpile]