Cindy Sheehan, the angry 48-year-old mom from Vacaville, Calif., whose son died while serving in the Army in Iraq and who has been staging a lonely bring-the-troops-home vigil outside President Bush’s ranch beneath the baking Texas sun, has clearly become a thorn in the president’s vacationing side. Putting a public and empathetic face on the war’s toll in America, Sheehan, whose son, Casey, was killed in April 2004, has posed a very simple request to Bush: Come out and talk to me about Iraq and why my son died. To date, Bush has passed on the invitation, but the minions on the far right have decided to try to knock Sheehan off her media perch, just as more military mothers and fathers opposed to the war are set to join Sheehan’s protest.
Taking peculiar pleasure in trying to discredit the small-town mother, right-wingers have been in a tizzy over what they perceive as a flip-flop by Sheehan on Iraq. They excitedly reassure themselves that her alleged inconsistency about the war ought to disqualify her from being a legitimate war critic. Problem is, the oddly playful bloggers, busy mocking Sheehan as a “crazy,” “exploited,” “left-wing moonbat,” aren’t really staring down a lone mother who may or may not have shifted her opinion about Bush and the war since 2004.
If the Republican National Committee-fed bloggers looked up from their monitors for a few seconds, they might realize that when they’re done with Sheehan they’re going to have to discredit a few million other Americans — because, as recent polls indicate, they, like Sheehan, have turned on the war and place the blame for the mess squarely on Bush’s shoulders.
Over the weekend conservatives at the Free Republic unearthed a June 25, 2004, article from Sheehan’s hometown newspaper, the Reporter, which detailed Sheehan’s visit with Bush at Fort Lewis near Seattle earlier that month. Portions of the article suggested Sheehan was grateful for her time with Bush, in contrast with her current complaints about him. Freepers then passed along the clip to Matt Drudge, who talked about it on his Sunday-night syndicated radio show. On Monday morning he hyped his analysis on his Web site, concluding that Sheehan “has dramatically changed her account about what happened when she met the commander-in-chief last summer!”
The pull quotes from the article included, among others, “‘I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,’ Cindy said after their meeting. ‘I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.’”
Bloggers embraced the so-called scoop, demanding to know why Sheehan had changed her mind. “Something has happened to Ms. Sheehan to change her opinion of the President. Until she explains herself, it is very difficult to take her ranting seriously,” wrote Conservative Dialysis (its motto: “Removing liberal waste from the American bloodstream”). “Remember, it may very well be that she has an excellent reason for her change in viewpoint. However, until she reveals it to the public, I don’t think anyone can take her anti-war ranting seriously.”
Again and again the deep thinkers on the right pretended to be stumped — stumped! — as to why Sheehan, over a 14-month span, would change her mind about Bush and about Iraq.
By Monday afternoon, the Raw Story got hold of the original Reporter article, in its entirety (which the newspaper has since reposted online), and discovered that Drudge had torn what he considered the incriminating portions of the article out of context.
Here are the portions of the June 24 newspaper clip Drudge purposefully left out: “We haven’t been happy with the way the war has been handled,” Cindy said. “The president has changed his reasons for being over there every time a reason is proven false or an objective reached.”
The article continued: “But in the end, the family decided against such talk, deferring to how they believed Casey would have wanted them to act. In addition, Pat [Sheehan's husband] noted that Bush wasn’t stumping for votes or trying to gain a political edge for the upcoming election.”
And this: “Sincerity was something Cindy had hoped to find in the meeting. Shortly after Casey died, Bush sent the family a form letter expressing his condolences, and Cindy said she felt it was an impersonal gesture.”
So, out of respect for her son and for Bush, Sheehan, clearly uneasy about the war and Bush’s handling of it in 2004, opted against a face-to-face confrontation 14 months ago. But now she’s itching for one. Put in full context, Drudge’s claim of a flip-flop is easily dismissed.
But what if Sheehan were guilty of a full 180-degree turnaround? What if, even in the wake of her son’s death in 2004, Sheehan had praised Bush’s leadership, only to become a critic by the summer of 2005? What would be so hard to understand about that?
Sheehan herself put it best. Speaking with Air America recently, she noted, “Why is my meeting in June of 2004 relevant? Over 1,100 more soldiers are dead since then, the Downing Street memo report [has come] out, the Senate intelligence report has come out, and the 9/11 Commission report has come out. Saddam is gone, they’ve had free democratic elections in Iraq, and our troops are still there.”
In other words, things change, information accumulates and people react accordingly. Apparently, however, bloggers like Michelle Malkin, who took it upon herself in one of her posts to speak for Sheehan’s dead son (does their arrogance know no bounds?), have convinced themselves that thinking people simply do not change their opinions about dynamic issues like war and peace, ever. No matter how strong the insurgency in Iraq grows, no matter how many coalition countries walk away from the rebuilding effort, no matter how many dates are set for Iraq’s sovereignty, no matter how many Americans are killed, no matter how many billions of dollars Halliburton pockets with no-bid contracts, no matter how much evidence accumulates that the Bush administration was both dishonest about the war during the run-up and incompetent during the so-called reconstruction, Americans, let alone parents of dead service members, are not supposed to alter their views. They’re not supposed to flip-flop.
Somebody forgot to tell the U.S. adult population, because just within the past few months there’s been an awful lot of flip-flopping going on regarding Iraq, with more and more Americans heading for the exits. According to the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, released Monday, 57 percent of American adults think the war has made the United States less safe from terrorism. That’s up 18 percentage points in just 60 days.
Additionally, in the same new poll, 54 percent said they believe it was a mistake to send U.S. troops to Iraq, while 44 percent said it was not a mistake. Those figures are reversed, in a 17-point swing, from those in June.
It seems pretty clear that until the mess in Iraq is cleaned up, more and more Americans are going to join Sheehan in opposing the war. And the ranks of alleged flip-floppers will continue to grow.
Karl Rove and Scott McClellan may not want to talk about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, but Rove’s attorney Robert Luskin seems unnecessarily chatty. A week after darting around the media landscape doing damage control on behalf of Rove — and giving seemingly inconsistent explanations about Rove’s involvement in the Plame affair — Luskin is striking again. This time he’s playing press critic, and he’s not letting the facts get in his way.
Luskin, whose client nearly got Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper thrown in jail because Cooper was determined for two years to protect Rove’s identity as a confidential source, has now turned around to claim it was Cooper who “burned” Rove.
Luskin’s beef: The language Cooper used in a July 17, 2003, Time.com story about Joseph Wilson was misleading. (The article appeared just days after Robert Novak outed Wilson’s wife in his column, which sparked the federal grand jury whodunit.) Luskin, citing the narrow scope of the conversation Rove and Cooper had, denies the White House ever declared a “war on Wilson,” as Cooper’s article suggested.
“If you read what Karl said to him and read how Cooper characterizes it in the article, he really spins it in a pretty ugly fashion to make it seem like people in the White House were affirmatively reaching out to reporters to try to get them to report negative information about Plame,” Luskin tells the National Review Online. The claim rings completely hollow.
Here’s the relevant portion of the Cooper story:
“Some government officials have noted to Time in interviews (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These officials have suggested that she was involved in her husband’s being dispatched to Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein’s government had sought to purchase large quantities of uranium ore, sometimes referred to as yellow cake, which is used to build nuclear devices.”
According to the internal, July 11, 2003, e-mail turned over to prosecutors by Time, Cooper informed his editors that he’d just spoken with Rove, who insisted it was Wilson’s wife, “who apparently works at the [CIA] on wmd issues[,] who authorized the trip” to Niger. And that’s exactly what Cooper wrote in his article: Government officials said Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA and was involved with his being sent to Niger. So where’s the sinister spin? How did Cooper “burn” Rove by accurately reporting his comments?
What’s more, if Rove’s conversation with Cooper was really only intended to “warn Time away from publishing things that were going to be established as false,” as Luskin tells NRO, then Rove would have talked to Cooper off the record. Instead, Rove, clearly hoping Cooper would repeat the Plame information, talked to Cooper on background. Or “double super secret background,” as Cooper called it in his e-mail, which essentially meant Time could use the information but just had to keep Rove’s name out of the story.
In fact, in his e-mail to his editors, Cooper wrote, “Please don’t source this to rove or even WH [White House].” In the Time.com article, he dutifully sourced the information to “some government officials,” which means Cooper kept his word. It was Novak in his column who attributed the Plame leak more specifically to “two senior administration officials.”
As for Luskin’s statement to NRO that Rove’s conversation did not signal any kind of White House war on Wilson, and that it “was not a calculated effort by the White House to get this [Plame] story out,” Luskin is playing dumb, conveniently ignoring the fact, as reported by the Washington Post on Sept. 28, 2003, that “two top White House officials,” in a deliberate attempt to undermine Wilson, peddled Plame’s name “to at least six Washington journalists.”
The Post quoted one of the press recipients: “The official I spoke with thought this was a part of Wilson’s story that wasn’t known and cast doubt on his whole mission. They thought Wilson was having a good ride and this was part of Wilson’s story.”
Rove reportedly told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that Wilson’s wife was “fair game.” In other words, Bush aides were shopping dirt around town in a calculated effort by the White House to get the story out.
But the war on Wilson wasn’t limited to White House officials like Rove blowing a CIA cover via a whispering campaign. As Cooper noted in his article — in fact, this matter took up the bulk of his Time.com story — scores of administration officials, including former CIA director George Tenet and former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, were out front in the summer of 2003 criticizing Wilson’s work as incomplete, naive and contradictory.
It wasn’t just a war on Wilson, it was a scorched-earth policy. And guess who engineered it?
As American newspaper editors look back and examine why the controversial Downing Street memo, first published by the Times of London on May 1, received so little coverage in their papers, several of them are pointing to the same culprit: the Associated Press. Editors rely on the worldwide wire service to let them know what’s worthy of attention, and that’s particularly true for international events. In the case of the Downing Street memo out of London, they say the AP simply failed to cover the story.
AP certainly wasn’t alone. An analysis conducted last week by Salon showed a shocking lack of mainstream media interest in the story during the entire month of May and into early June. There was a near blackout of the story on television, and just a handful of print outlets even reported the breaking news. Among the few media outlets with national reach to cover the story in real time was the Washington bureau of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, which provided wire copy for the company’s newspapers with a May 5 comprehensive story about the leaked memo.
Ordinarily, that’s the type of function the AP provides for hundreds of U.S. news organizations. But Jim Cox, USA Today’s senior assignment editor for foreign news, told Salon that when the story first broke last month, “we looked to wires for guidance” but for days didn’t see anything. It was a month before the paper reported on the memo; Cox takes the blame for that omission. “I wish we’d had something in early on, and I wish we’d been able to move the memo story forward. I feel like we missed an opportunity, and that’s my fault,” he told Salon.
On Sunday, the ombudsman at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune addressed readers’ complaints about the paper’s lack of Downing memo coverage. According to that account, the paper’s nation/world editor, Dennis McGrath, was aware of the memo story when it broke in May, and he and his deputies “began watching for a wire story. A week later, they were still watching. ‘We were frustrated the wires weren’t providing stories on this,’ McGrath said.” The paper eventually assigned the story to a local reporter.
At the Portland Oregonian recently, public editor Michael Arrieta-Walden covered the same territory: “For an international story, the Oregonian primarily relies on material provided from about 10 wire services. The Associated Press, the world’s largest news gathering organization, essentially didn’t cover the document in its reports until last weekend in a story mostly about John Bolton, Bush’s nominee to become U.N. ambassador. The document then was reported on in an AP story stemming from last week’s news conference involving Blair and Bush.
“The original story broke on a Sunday, so it was initially difficult to match without access to government officials and documents, said Nick Tatro, the AP’s deputy international editor. Then, the AP editors who repeatedly considered doing a story, he said, didn’t necessarily see the document as a clear-cut case of proving the manipulation of intelligence. Also, the demands of other important stories kept diverting them, he said. ‘Our people felt it wasn’t a completely clear comment from the raw material,’ Tatro said. ‘It was our intent to do a story, and it just didn’t happen.’”
In response to a request for comment, Deborah Seward, AP’s international editor, conceded to Salon in an e-mail, “Yes, there is no question AP dropped the ball in not picking up on the Downing Street memo sooner.”
Seward deserves credit for admitting AP’s error. But a more pressing question remains about the media at large and the group think at play: Why, in the face of the clearly newsworthy memo — which made international headlines and went straight to the issue of how and why President Bush decided to invade Iraq — did senior editors and producers at virtually every major American news outlet let the story slip through the cracks and fail to do the most rudimentary reporting?
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
Suffering yet another setback, Viacom, News Corp., Gannett, NBC and Clear Channel watched today as the Supreme Court rejected the major media companies’ bid to clear the way for a dramatic easing of ownership limits. The Court, without comment, refused to get involved in the long-simmering dispute over media ownership. With the Court’s refusal to act, the question of consolidation goes back to where it started; to the Federal Communications Commission, which four years ago under the Bush administration signaled its strong desire to free major media companies from ownership restrictions.
That FCC push, spearheaded by then-chairman Micahel Powell, ran into fierce grassroots opposition, which translated into an unusual bipartisan coalition of politicians who also opposed granting media companies almost limitless access to cross-ownership possibilities. In June 2003, Powell pushed though a partisan 3-2 vote among the FCC commissioners. But in June 2004, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the FCC’s directive, telling Powell that the FCC had to do a much better job of explaining its rationale for wanting to do away with a decade’s worth of ownership regulations. The court found fault with both the logic and the evidence presented by the FCC.
Major media companies, eager to gobble up newspapers, television stations and radio outlets in the same markets, had hoped the Supreme Court would step in now.
“The rejection is a victory for consumer groups, which say the ownership limits help ensure diversity of local news and programming,” reports Bloomberg News. “For media companies, the high court appeal was ‘the one way out of the box that they’re in right now on ownership,’ said Stanford Washington Research analyst Paul Gallant. ‘The chances of the FCC significantly relaxing the ownership rules are fairly low.’”
While the decision is “good news” for consumers, “the battle over media ownership is far from over,” warns Gene Kimmelman, senior director of Public Policy for Consumers Union. “We must remain vigilant to ensure efforts to allow a few companies to dominate the major sources of local news and information dont succeed. We are extremely hopeful the new FCC chairman will revisit these issues with a better understanding of how important a diverse and independent local media is to a community.
Scrambling to play catch-up on the unfolding Downing Street memo story, today’s New York Times latches onto a single phrase from a newly leaked eight-page briefing document in order to produce the Bush-friendly headline, “Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn’t Made.” The truth is, the briefing document in question, dated July 21, as well as the previously leaked memo, dated July 23, both stress repeatedly how the Bush administration, despite its public rhetoric, appeared committed to war with Iraq. But thanks to today’s Bush-friendly spin, New York Times readers are getting a very different story.
Here’s how the paper, scooped by yesterday’s Washington Post and Sunday Times of London, plays the release of the July 21 briefing document: “A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made ‘no political decisions’ to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced.” The Times adds, “The publication of the memorandum is significant because a previously leaked document, now known as the Downing Street Memo, appeared to suggest that a decision to go to war may have been made that summer.”
What the Times is saying is that despite the controversy surrounding the original Downing Street memo and its implication that the U.S. had decided on war — contrary to numerous Bush statements — eight months prior to the invasion, the newly leaked briefing document throws all of that into question because British officials noted Washington had made “no political decisions” to invade. In other words, according to the Times, Tony Blair might be right in his public insistence, given with Bush at his side, that the two governments misled nobody during the run-up to war.
Set aside for the moment the fact that the Times’ report completely ignores the portion of the briefing document that raises questions about the legality of going to war. The memo states, “Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law.” According to the Sunday Times of London, “The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was ‘necessary to create the conditions’ which would make it legal.”
Apparently the New York Times did not consider that to be newsworthy. Instead it focused on the notion that “no political decisions” had been made to invade Iraq. The problem here is that the briefing containing the phrase “no political decision” was written July 21, 2002, and the memo containing minutes from a senior meeting of British officials was written July 23, in which it was reported that Washington appeared bent on war. That is, the July 21 briefing paper was distributed to participants in preparation for the meeting two days later with Bush’s closest intelligence advisors, where the updated details of war planning were then discussed — and from which one conclusion reached by the Brits was: “Military action was now seen as inevitable.”
It took six weeks, but the other shoe has dropped regarding the Downing Street Memo. The thud came courtesy of the Sunday Times of London in its report Sunday on yet another damning, top-secret British government document prepared eight months before the war with Iraq. Like the previous unearthed memo published by the Times on May 1, the latest document paints not only a picture of a Bush administration that, despite its talk in 2002 of averting war, was bent on invading Iraq, but one that, according to close counterparts in the British government, was determined to wage war without thinking through the consequences.
The briefing paper was prepared for participants in advance of the now-famous July 23, 2002 meeting, held at Prime Minister Tony Blair’s residence, 10 Downing Street in London. According to the Times report, the briefing paper confirms that Blair had actually signed off on Bush’s plan to invade Iraq back in April, 2002, at a summit in Crawford Texas. The two men then spent the next 11 months working to formulate a justification for the invasion — because, as the briefing paper stressed, it was necessary to create the conditions which would make the invasion legal.
During the run-up to the invasion there was deep concern among Blair’s senior advisors that an unprecedented, preemptive war of regime change would violate international law. According to the United Nations charter, there are only two reasons to legally wage war: self-defense (Article 51), and to restore international peace (Article 42). On the eve of the war with Iraq in 2003, Blair’s Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith, working around the clock with a team of attorneys, stitched together a legal justification for the war. Based on the leaked memos, that justification now appears to have been formulated for the benefit of Blair’s political needs.
The July 2002 briefing paper wasn’t just about “creating the conditions” and circumventing the law, it was about how Bush’s war planners had given “little thought” to the implications of an invasion. That’s the angle the Washington Post played up on Sunday, based on excerpts of the leaked briefing paper it received and separately verified with British sources. “The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq,” wrote the Post’s Walter Pincus. “In its introduction, the memo ‘Iraq: Conditions for Military Action’, notes that U.S. ‘military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace,’ but adds that ‘little thought’ has been given to, among other things, ‘the aftermath and how to shape it.’”
The Post notes that some thought about post-war contingencies took place inside the Bush government, within the State Department — but that the planning there was willfully ignored: “The Bush administration’s failure to plan adequately for the postwar period has been well documented. The Pentagon, for example, ignored extensive State Department studies of how to achieve stability after an invasion, administer a postwar government and rebuild the country.” This took place even though it was the view of Washington’s closest ally, as the briefing paper stated, that “a post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise.”
“As already made clear,” the briefing paper stressed, “the US military plans are virtually silent on this point.”
