Category: Current Affairs

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Conjoined Presidents

It’s a little surprising to look at The New York Times site, a full 24 hours after Dick “Gunner” Cheney announced he had been promoted to co-president, and find the paper still chasing reaction to the former vice president’s accidental wounding of a quail-hunting partner last week. If you missed the announcement, it came during Cheney’s appearance Wednesday on the administration’s broadcast arm, Fox News. He disclosed a fact that really wasn’t secret, yet hadn’t been widely reported: That nearly three years ago, Bush had issued an order extending the power to classify and declassify national security information to the vice president.

Although the Times and others might be a little slow on the uptake, Byron York of the conservative National Review did a nice analysis of the Cheney news that appeared first thing Thursday morning. York concluded:

“In the last several years, there has been much talk about the powerful role Dick Cheney plays in the Bush White House. Some of that talk has been based on anecdotal evidence, and some on entirely fanciful speculation. But Executive Order 13292 is real evidence of real power in the vice president’s office. Since the beginning of the administration, Dick Cheney has favored measures allowing the executive branch to keep more things secret. And in March of 2003, the president gave him the authority to do it.”

Of course, in his Fox interview, Cheney was talking about blabbing secrets, not keeping them. He mentioned his powers when the interviewer, Brit Hume, brought up the Scooter Libby case:

Q: On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors — unidentified — authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?

A: It’s nothing I can talk about, Brit. This is an issue that’s been under investigation for a couple of years. I’ve cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor. All of it is now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He’s a great guy. I’ve worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it’s, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.

Q: Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?

A: There is an executive order to that effect.

Q: There is.

A: Yes.

Q: Have you done it?

A: Well, I’ve certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order …

Q: You ever done it unilaterally?

A: I don’t want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.

Cheney and Bush probably don’t think it’s a big deal to take formal steps to create a conjoined presidency. Maybe they’re right. During today’s White House press briefing? Not a single question on Cheney’s role as a manager of national intelligence.

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Be Free, But Not Too Free

By way of judy b., a piece from The New Republic on the case of Jihad Momani. He’s one of two Jordanian newspaper editors jailed earlier this month for reprinting some of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad that have prompted the recent orgy of outrage across the Muslim world. As The New Republic recounts the case, Momani’s paper, al-Shihan, “published three of the Mohammed caricatures on the grounds that people should know what they were protesting about. The cartoons were accompanied by an editorial that pleaded, ‘Muslims of the world be reasonable,’ and asked, ‘What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?’ ”

Momani and an editor from another publication that also ran some of the caricatures were thrown in jail. Coincidentally, Jordan’s “liberal” potentate, King Abdullah, visited Bush at the White House just after the arrests. As TNR’s James Forsyth points out, the White House has been the source of some pretty heavy rhetoric the last couple of years on the transformative power of liberty and its institutions. Presented with a chance to speak up about a case in which the issue of freedom was a hard-edged reality instead of a soft-focus romance, Bush said nothing.

According to one press account, Momani and the second editor have been freed on bail. But charges under Jordan’s Press and Publication Law are still pending. PEN Center USA, the national chapter of the international group set up to defend writers facing official sanctions for their work, is conducting a letter-writing campaign on the editors’ behalf.

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Dead Veeps Club

You know, looking at the histories of Dick “Gunner” Cheney and Aaron “Unfriendly Fire” Burr — brothers in the fraternity of vice presidents whose hunts have netted human trophies — disclosed yet another fact that until now escaped me: the number of U.S. vice presidents who have died in office. Here’s a brief list. Take note: November is the cruelest month for our unrevered second bananas, having claimed four of the seven executive understudies who died in office.

George Clinton (1739-1812): Served as vice president in Thomas Jefferson’s second term and was re-elected to the office for James Madison’s first term. Died April 20, 1812, the first vice president to expire in office.

Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814): Clinton’s office sat vacant, and Gerry — the Massachusetts pol whose skill at drawing imaginative legislative boundaries is memorialized in the word “gerrymander” — was elected for Madison’s second term. But serving as No. 2 for Madison proved too much for Gerry, too. He died November 23, 1814, having served just 20 months.

Daniel Tompkins (1774-1825; honorable mention): Just missed becoming the third consecutive veep to die in the traces. He served two terms as James Monroe’s vice president, leaving office in March 1825. He died three months later at age 50 after what one biography describes as “a decade of financial privation and heavy drinking, coupled with accusations that he had mishandled state and federal funds while serving as governor of New York. …”

William Rufus de Vane King (1786-1853): Served just six weeks as understudy to Franklin Pierce in March and April 1853. Actually, “served” might be padding King’s resume a bit. He suffered from tuberculosis when he was elected and was in declining health as his inauguration approached. He repaired to Cuba for his health and was granted permission to be sworn in there (reportedly the only vice president inaugurated outside the United States). With his condition apparently terminal, he returned home to his Alabama plantation, where he died April 18.

Henry Wilson (1812-1875): Grant’s second vice president. Died midway through his term on November 22, 1875. A former Senator from Massachusetts, he was eulogized thus by a former colleague: “He was not learned, he was not eloquent, he was not logical in a high sense, he was not always consistent in his political actions, and yet he gained the confidence of the people, and he retained it to the end of his life.” Except for the “confidence of the people” part, that sounds very familiar.

Thomas A. Hendricks (1819-1885): Elected vice president with Grover Cleveland as part of the first Democratic ticket to win since 1856. Hendricks died November 25, 1885, a little more than eight months into his term.

Garret A. Hobart (1844-1899): Elected with McKinley in 1896. I’m guessing that he and McKinley are probably the only running mates to both die in office — though McKinley wasn’t assassinated until early in his second term, when he had a brand spanking new vice president in place. Hobart, described in a Senate biography as a “rotund, jovial, hospitable man,” was beset by heart problems that finally killed him on November 21, 1899. Before passing into eventual blog fodder, however, Hobart cast the deciding vote against a resolution that would have promised independence to the Philippines. He made a difference.

James Sherman (1855-1912): Taft’s vice president, he came darn close to serving a full term before dying on October 30, 1912, of chronic kidney failure. He died just days before the presidential election (Taft vs. Wilson and Roosevelt, T.), thus became the only deceased candidate for national office to stand for election (that’s an unverified claim).

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Don’t Rush, Don’t Judge

I wrote to the Chronicle’s “readers’ representative” — in quotes because I’d like to meet the readers who appointed him — to ask what the paper might do to explain how it wound up identifying a picture of a cabdriver/security guard, played over six columns, as that of a notoriously violent police officer. I wrote, in part:

“… Does the Chronicle intend to offer a detailed explanation of how the picture wound up in the paper? It’s clear the mistake has damaged what I’d call the presumption of credibility such a thoroughly reported and well-executed investigative project might otherwise be accorded. It’s also clear that a mere acknowledgment of error, or covering a press conference convened by an attorney for the misidentified citizen, doesn’t begin to repair the damage. At a time when papers everywhere are struggling to hang on to readers, and when more and more of the news-consuming public has become dismissive of the established media, it seems the Chron’s long-term cause would best be served by full disclosure of the steps and processes involved in this picture making it into the paper. I think readers have moved on from being a passive audience and want to be treated as partners in the project of journalism. A detailed explanation of the error would be responsive to that demand and help the paper learn how to avoid repeat episodes. …”

Although the readers’ rep is someone I worked with for a decade or so at the old Examiner, I didn’t really expect an answer. So I was pleasantly surprised to get one just a day after I emailed my note. The germane part of the reply:

“Phil [Bronstein, the Chronicle’s executive vice president and editor] has said to me and to the public (Ronn Owens show) that he’s disposed toward telling whatever he can, but he doesn’t want to compound the mistake by misstating what happened. I think that’s a fair position. I certainly wouldn’t address this until I was darn sure what I was talking about. Like you, I’d like to see this clarified sooner rather than later but I’m wary of a rush to judgment.”

That’s a pretty responsive note, I guess, though I’m bothered by the suggestion that the paper’s position is cast as a matter of how the editor feels about things. Beyond that, two observations: First, it stretches credibility a little that the paper and its editors don’t have a pretty good idea what happened. And second, it’s at least a little ironic to hear a paper that often shoots first and asks questions later plead for restraint in examining its own faux pas.

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Picturegate

The Chronicle is out today with a story about The Wrong Picture: The man whose mug was identified as that of San Francisco Police Department serial batterer John Haggett is actually a cab driver and part-time security guard named Jack Neeley. The Chron, proactive as ever, covered a press conference that Neeley’s lawyer called yesterday. Neeley said he’s both perplexed and disturbed at his sudden notoriety. He doesn’t recall the paper taking his picture (the photo credit names a staff photographer and says the image was taken in 2004). He says one friend approached him after the picture ran to ask why Neeley never disclosed that he was an undercover police officer. And, since his image has been identified with a man who has beaten up the locals and subjected them to all the favorite racial and ethnic slurs, Neeley is afraid he’ll wind up the target of some aggrieved citizen.

The Chron dutifully reports all that and mentions a couple times what a swell job it’s doing responding to Neeley’s concerns. But the paper offers no explanation for how the mistake happened. I’m sure there’s a debate going on there right now about what to do. The paper has a “readers’ representative” and he’s probably getting an earful from his audience.

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They Regret the Error

The San Francisco Chronicle went to press Sunday with a big front-page series detailing the results of its years-long investigation into use of excessive force by some city police officers (the paper’s online site, SFGate.com, has created a special site for the stories). The paper says it took years to secure thousands of documents using the state’s Public Records Act . “The newspaper used these documents to do something the Police Department has never done,” the Chronicle says. “It created a computerized database capable of providing a profile of the use-of-force patterns of individual officers.” The paper reports it conducted hundreds of interviews with cops, city officials, abuse victims, and experts in police practices.

The findings are devastating: The Chron says San Francisco officers rack up more excessive-force complaints than those in Oakland, San Jose, San Diego, and Seattle combined. The Chron stories detail example after harrowing example of officers brutalizing citizens innocuously going about their day-to-day business. The articles suggest that in most cases, attempts to rein in the habitual batterers on the force are ineffectual at best and that some of the worst offenders have gotten promotions and assigned to train rookies.

The stories (today is day three of the series) look like they add up to an excellent piece of public-service journalism. There’s a Pulitzer Prize for that. But the Chron didn’t stop there.

In Sunday’s launch of the series, the paper published a 4,100-word profile of one of the department’s bad actors, a Sergeant John Haggett. Google him, and you’ll find that he’s got the special, if not unique, distinction of having been cited for brutality in a 1998 Human Rights Watch report that relies heavily on reporting by the local papers. The profile recounts Haggett’s history of unprovoked violence against suspects going back to the late 1980s, including shooting and killing an unarmed man after a chase through downtown traffic and two beatings that led to separate three-month suspensions.

Sergeant Haggett sounds like a lovely man, and two of the three reporters with bylines on the Sunday piece should know: Bill Wallace and Susan Sward wrote a 1,500-word piece on him in October 1996. That story is one of the sources for the Human Rights Watch report. Several of the incidents they recounted then were repeated nearly verbatim Sunday, supplemented by several more episodes of Haggett’s ugly behavior and the fair-and-balanced mention of facts that might temper the impression he’s a monster: He won a departmental award for valor in the line of duty and once released a teen hold-up suspect so he could attend his high school graduation.

Given the Chron’s history with Haggett and the seriousness of the charges it’s printing, then, it’s just short of incredible that the picture the paper ran to introduce this villain to the world — small on page one, splashed across six columns on an inside page — wasn’t of Haggett at all. It’s just an anonymous puffy guy in a jacket with a big collar; according to some, such as the head of the police union, the anonymous puffy guy bears little resemblance to Haggett.

The Chronicle’s response? Yes, we were wrong. The paper on Tuesday mentioned the mistake in its story on the chief’s reaction and runs a weak “we regret the error” correction. But it doesn’t explain how the picture of the unknown man wound up so prominently displayed on its pages.

Meantime, the paper is trying to fend off San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, who is upset that the Chronicle reported he did not make himself available for interviews on the excessive-force issue. The paper’s response is that a reporter emailed nine interview requests over three weeks and that Newsom’s spokesman, while saying the mayor would be available, never nailed down a time for the talk to happen. The paper suggests without coming out and saying so that its efforts to get an interview were reasonable enough and that it did what any reasonable party might do in such a situation and published without the mayor’s comments.

What I’d suggest the Chron isn’t getting is that despite the years of reporting it says it has done, the sloppiness of its presentation has cost it the presumption of credibility. The police chief understands that and is trying to use the picture mistake to discredit the rest of the paper’s reporting.

All this is happening in a sort of crisis context for daily newspapers. They are less trusted than they have been — perhaps ever been — and a manifestly imperfect but still potent alternate news channel has appeared online, just waiting to pick apart mistakes like this. It’s no longer enough for the Chronicle and other papers to hunker down, issue an ephemeral acknowledgment of error and an empty statement of regret — like that’s a public service — and move on as if nothing happened.

Critical readers want and deserve to know how the papers’ internal processes work and why mistakes like the non-Haggett picture are made. In this case, the Chron needs to show that its error was exceptional and that its efforts to get high-level official comment were reasonable. That means a full explanation of the chain of events that led to the wrong picture being run, complete with an account of the key people who signed off on it and what they have to say about the process. The disagreement over the mayor’s interview might be clarified by publishing the whole email exchange between the paper and the mayor’s office so that readers can see who asked and who promised what. (For extra credit, the paper could make a version of its excessive-force database available online — it is based on public information, after all — so that readers could have a chance to explore the issue more deeply.)

At the end of having to explain itself, the paper might even learn something about itself that will save it from the same mistakes next time.

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Democracy, Iraq Style

An Iraqi professor, a Kurd, writes harsh things about fellow Kurds who rule their de facto independent state in northern Iraq. Then the liberators show up — our men and women, the Brits, the coalition of the willing, Halliburton, and every U.S. taxpayer — to throw out the Kurds’ long-time persecutor and plant the flag of democracy. The professor returns to his native country, now basking in the light of freedom. He is arrested for the mean things he’s said about the boss Kurds, subjected to a perfunctory trial, convicted, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The story is in Thursday’s New York Times.

Before I say the obvious — For this we’ve given 2,237 U.S. lives (and counting), spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and required tens of thousands of Iraqis to bear the ultimate price? — let’s consider for a minute: The merchandise we were told we would buy with all that blood and money , the goods our president insists we’re still buying, is American civics-class democracy, transplanted to a grateful nation yearning for its own modestly dressed Miss Liberty. Granted that it’s a ludicrously simplistic expectation — that is at the heart of the administration’s argument for going to war.

Now the fantasy meets the reality that was always waiting. Or, as the Times puts it, straight-man style: Iraq “has made remarkable steps away from totalitarian rule. … But it remains to be seen how far Iraq will ultimately travel toward true Western-style democracy.”

You have to wonder: If people here had been able to see a little way down the road — say to the place we’re standing now — would they have been nearly so satisfied to tell the president to go ahead with his plan? How many look at the mess Iraq is, and will likely remain for decades, and feel satisfied with our handiwork? Will it make any difference on the day that’s sure to come when this president or a successor stands up and tells us there’s another threat we need to extinguish by force of arms?

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The War We Can’t See

Sydney Schanberg, the former Times reporter (played by Sam Waterston in “The Killing Fields“), borrows on his Vietnam/Cambodia experience to speculate in The Village Voice on the past, present and future dimensions of the U.S. air war in Iraq:

“Little is known or seen of the air part of the American war of today, in Iraq. One of the reasons is that the press, with less mobility because of security risks, has to be focused on what’s happening on the ground, where the damage, human and material, is taking place. A more crucial reason is that the Pentagon and the CIA prefer to tell us as little as possible about air war operations.

“Recently, but only in bits and pieces, military officials in Washington have acknowledged that after the U.S. and Britain withdraw the bulk of their ground troops, the American air component will be kept in the region to support the American-trained Iraqi ground forces who will be taking over the ground war. While the Pentagon doesn’t say anything about increasing air power in Iraq, other military sources—speaking anonymously because the information is classified—confirm that the plans call for the air war to be beefed up and kept that way for years to come. These sources also point to Iran and its nuclear ambitions as a reason for keeping air power at a high-alert level in the region.

“Since air strikes cause a significant percentage of civilian casualties, the air war’s continuance ensures that the U.S. will wear a bull’s-eye on its back indefinitely in the Middle East. It also means that the American press will have to push harder to provide more detailed and regular coverage of the air war.”

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How to Win Friends and Monetize People

Just after New Year’s, I got an email from a former colleague. The subject line carried the sender’s name and said, “Do Not Delete.” I recognized the name — we’ll call him Stephen, since that’s his name — though it’s been years, I think, since I last saw him. His message asked for my home address so that he could mail me something. He was a little cryptic about what it might be, saying only that it wasn’t what his mother hoped he’d been sending. (What his mother hopes for, I’m guessing, is a wedding announcement.)

I let the email sit there for a day or two before replying. I sent him my home address, which is publicly available for anyone who wants to spend 10 seconds looking for it, along with a 23-word greeting. Why did I reply? What was I expecting?

I was curious. What was it my non-bosom-pal Stephen wanted to share with me? Maybe he was inviting some old acquaintances to a party of some kind; nothing extraordinary in that. Maybe he had just found out he was terminally ill and wanted to bid his friends goodbye (I’ve never shaken off the shock of getting a flyer in the mail announcing the memorial service for a friend I hadn’t seen for awhile and hadn’t known was dying). Maybe he’d won the lottery and would be showering those most dear to him (me?!) with surprise checks (that’s what I’d have done if I won — I’m sure of it). I didn’t think about it too hard, though, and by the time a big manila envelope from Stephen arrived in the mail last week, I had more or less forgotten about it.

Here’s what was inside:

A one-page letter from Stephen talking about how, after 15 years as a writer and editor, he had changed careers a couple of years ago and gone into real-estate sales. You can probably guess what came next: He talked about how rewarding and challenging his new line of work was. He cleared $6 million in sales last year. And now, he wanted to reach out to his wide circle of buddies and semi-buddies to spread the good news and ask for referrals, either directly from us or from anyone we know who might be contemplating a real-estate deal. For our convenience, he had enclosed his business card.

I’ve got to say this: The letter has as much class as any of its kind can have; which is to say, not much. It was well thought out. It was nicely crafted. It had a friendly tone (I’d quote it, but the message seems to have found its way into the recycling). But at its heart — the mysterious email, the group letter personalized with the salutation “Hi, Brekke!” scrawled at the bottom — the effort was still crass, right out of some playbook on how to “leverage” friends and family as part of creating a successful business enterprise: “I know and like you. You know and like me. I’m in a new business now. Won’t you let me sell you my service? It’ll help you as much as me.”

Don’t get me wrong. First, I’d feel different if I were dealing with someone I’m close to. With a real relationship in place, I certainly wouldn’t resent the suggestion that I might consider using a service, and chances are I’d try to figure out a way to help. Second, I don’t have anything against people who make their living in a tough, unforgiving profession. Sales is brutally direct in its feedback on your product and performance. To do well at it requires a combination of knowledge, preparation, endurance, optimism and perhaps charm with which I, for one, have not been abundantly blessed. Third, I don’t dismiss the advantages of engaging someone you know and trust to help with a daunting business transaction. I got an attorney who played on one of my old softball teams to help Kate and me when we bought our house in the late ’80s. And the last time I wanted to refinance the (same) house, I looked up a former colleague from my last news gig who has since become a mortgage broker.

Would I have gone to either guy if they had first let me know beforehand, the way Stephen did, that they viewed our acquaintance as a sales opportunity? I can’t say for sure, though it’s clear that I have a low tolerance for marketing. For me, the difference is that the only marketing either the lawyer or the mortgage banker did was to be themselves; and until I initiated a conversation about doing business, I never got the feeling either one of them saw me as a potential source of income or our relationship as a resource to be monetized.

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Monetizing Democracy

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday opinion section ran a stunning piece today reviewing the rise and fall of the government of Peru’s Alberto Fujimori. More specifically, the story (a cut-down version of an article that ran in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in fall 2004) focuses on how Fujimori’s chief of national intelligence, Vladimiro Montesinos Torres systematically turned the nation’s legislature, judiciary and news media into subsidiaries of the executive. Montesinos set up a bribery network in which everyone who needed to be bought to ensure the administration’s success — lawmakers, judges, media magnates — was paid.

The breathtaking part of Montesinos’s scheme: He documented everything: The people he bribed were required to sign contracts laying out exactly what they’d promised to do for the money they were getting; Montesinos videotaped many of his meetngs with bribe takers (and givers) to ensure he could pressure those who might want to back out of their arrangements. The end to all this came when cable network that had refused bribes got hold of one of the tapes and put it on the air.

The authors, John McMillan and Pablo Zoido (a professor and former student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, respectively, emphasize the importance Montesinos attached to controlling the media. TV broadcasters and newspaper owners received payments in the millions of dollars to ensure their coverage both promoted the government’s views and attacked the opposition. Montesinos’s contract with one station gave him direct editorial control over its daily newscasts. The media bribes were orders of magnitude larger than anything paid to elected and appointed officials. The rationale was twofold, McMillan and Zoido say:

“The judges’ bribes were one-and-a-half times to four times their official salaries. The politicians’ bribes were multiples of their official income. By contrast, a few thousand dollars a month might not have impressed a wealthy television-channel owner.

“The difference between the news media and the other checks and balances in a democracy is that television, by informing the citizenry, can bring forth the ultimate sanction of citizen reaction. In the absence of citizens’ oversight, there would be little to prevent the government from buying off politicians and judges. …

“…’If we do not control the television, we do not do anything,’ said Gen. Elesván Bello at a 1999 meeting involving Montesinos, high-ranking members of the armed forces and television executives.”

The original McMillan-Zoidos study is available through the Journal of Economic Perspectives (for $11) or from Zoidos’s personal Stanford home page: (PDF file).

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