Stephen Kaus
In an unpublished ruling issued Thursday, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal ruled against freelance video journalist Josh Wolf and stated that he must comply with a grand jury subpoena for his unpublished footage. Previous coverage here.
Winning in the Ninth Circuit is very much the luck of the draw these days. Although Wolf drew a favorable three judge panel for his bail motion, that was the August motions panel. This...
Tim Russert hammered Vice President Dick Cheney today on "Meet The Press," hooked on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 but in reality a solid hour of grilling on Iraq, Afghanistan, and WMDs. It was an incredibly dense show, and more than anything shows how carefully Cheney parses words — no question gets a simple yes or no answer and even while acknowledging that, fine, Iraq was not linked to 9/11 he hammers home the meme of Iraq as a sponsor of terrorism and incipient WMD threat. He also claims not to have read the just-declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report that revealed that intelligence linking Iraq to 9/11 was in fact highly disputed before the invasion. A neat sidestep, that.
Notable was the trademark Russert "gotcha" moment wherein he played the infamous clip of Cheney saying in August 2002: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." When asked if, knowing that Saddam did NOT have weapons of mass destruction, if Cheney would still have gone into Iraq, he said "Yes" and went on:
"The world is better off because Saddam Hussein is in jail instead of in power in Baghdad. It was the right thing to do and if we had it to do over again, we'd do exactly the same thing."
Note that Cheney dated Saddam's WMD use at 1991.
Russert also called him on his other infamous comment, the old "insurgency in its last throes" comment, which Cheney admitted was — what's that word? — oh yeah, WRONG but with barely a breath spun it as a good thing, based on Iraqis embracing democracy and being willing to "step up and take on the responsibility for their own fate." Cheney also invoked the tough-guy rationale for staying in Iraq ( "My gosh, the United States hasn't got the stomach for the fight. Bin Laden's right, al-Qaeda's right, the United States has lost its will and will not complete the mission"), lauded the U.S. "detainee policy", claiming it was Constitutional by citing "the blessing of the lawyers" which, considering that the source of that is Gonzales, is an eyebrow-raise (when Tim asked him about "shady" methods, Cheney said stolidly "We have done everything we could think of to make the nation safe"). He also nimbly sidestepped Russert's question about military intervention in Iran, saying "I don't want to speculate on military options. It's not wise. And Rumsfeld would probably object."
Russert also grilled him on Plamegate, where he admitted that "I have the authority, as Vice President under an executive order issued by the President, to classify and declassify information. And everything I have done is consistent with those authorities." He then refused to answer any more questions on the matter, though he began to look annoyed under Russert's repeated questioning. Cheney also had this chilling commentary on midterms: "I feel better about the election now than I did three months ago." SCARY.
Finally, Russert, who has finally seemed to grow a pair, asked Cheney about how he shot his friend in the face:
RUSSERT: Should I be relieved you didn't bring your shotgun in today?
CHENEY: I wouldn't worry about it. You're not in season.
That may be the closest Cheney has ever come to exhibiting a sense of humor. Choice excerpts below; full transcript here and augmented RussertWatch here.
Note: This post has been updated.
New York Magazine
New York Magazine runs a big cover story next week on the beleaguered New York Times, bane of the Bush Administration for its stories on NSA spying and secretly-reviewed bank records. Joe Hagan gets more details on the fateful December 5th* meeting at the White House where Bush had summoned the Times brass — consisting of executive editor Bill Keller, publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Washington Bureau Chief Philip Taubman — to prevail upon them not to publish the warrantless-wiretapping exposé. According to Howard Kurtz in WaPo, those meetings were supposed to be off the record; but in the NY Mag story, Keller reveals to Hagan many previously unpublished details of the meeting, including the fact that Bush warned Keller that, if they published the story, the NYT would bear responsibility if there was another attack:
"The basic message," recalls Keller, "was, 'You'll have blood on your hands."
Hagan also reports that joining Bush, Keller, Sulzberger and Taubman were national security adviser Stephen Hadley, Bush lawyer Harriet Miers, and the then-current NSA Director Michael Hayden "with a thick briefing book in his lap." The story had already been held for over a year. Keller, Sulzberger and Taubman listened to Bush, and eleven days later, they published the story.
Hagan explores the aftermath of that decision, the right-wing backlash against the NYT (as well as from the left), plummeting public support and eroding press freedom in the piece, which the mag teases as wondering "Is this the right time for quiet and deliberate leadership at the Paper of Record?" To this end (based on the cover, which contains a mock-up of the NYT front page with the actual stories excerpted for verisimilitude), New York also profiles Keller, calling him "fiercely intelligent, taciturn, [and] occassionally prickly," and citing New Yorker editor David Remnick who says: "To watch him work, there's a certain kind of cool intelligence to his bearing."
The New York Times is a popular subject at New York: Kurt Anderson wrote scathinly of Sulzberger last fall following the debacle over Judith Miller, and in the recent "Influentials" issue** the magazine described the Times as "America's most vital news outlet, the chief codebook with which New Yorkers (and the world) decipher the interesting times we've been cursed to live in." (NY Mag editor Adam Moss was formerly the editor of the New York Times Magazine). Hagan's most recent NY Mag story was a feature on ABC's Charlie Gibson which was contested by the anchor, who called Hagan a snake (NYMag stood by the story).
The full text of the story can be found here.
* Reported as Dec. 6, 2005, in Newsweek by Jonathan Alter, who originally broke news of the meeting.
**Disclosure: I contributed to that section.
