Many cultures describe old people as having seen many winters. Those elders have seen many cycles come and go, and their wisdom comes from long observation of life’s rising and falling. If we have a long-range view, then we realize that equilibrium comes in the course of nature’s progression. Nature does not achieve balance by keeping to one level. Rather, elements and seasons alternate with one another in succession. Balance, as defined by Tao, is not stasis but a dynamic process of many overlapping alternations; even if some phases seem wildly excessive, they are balanced by others. Everything has its place. Everything has its season. As events turn, balance is to know what is here, what is coming, and how to be in perfect harmony with it. Then one attains a state of sublimity that cannot be challenged. balance 365 Tao daily meditations Deng Ming-Dao (author) ISBN 0-06-250223-9 duckdaotsu.org tao hub support sustain DODGE Leica m3 90mm Zeiss Agfachrome © 1993 - 2005 lisbeth west http://www.cafepress.com/duckdaotsu/883301
archived at http://www.duckdaotsu.org/105/balance.html a reading list of books and interpretations of the Daodejing is available at http://www.duckdaotsu.org/dao_books.html
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Tuesday
dao balance
Monday
Times Report on Judith Miller: Key Moments, My Comments, and What the Blogs Say
Here are my initial annotations of the big report. Key passages and brief comments. (Do add your own.) Plus my eight paragraph summary of the case and its press think.
I give credit to the Times for running the story a few days after they felt the legal clearances were had, for giving readers a look inside at decision-making normally hidden, for airing uncomfortable facts—including internal tensions—and for explaining what happened as well as the editors felt they could. This was a very difficult piece of journalism to do. As language in conveyance of fact, it is superbly edited.
I have a small bit of news to break if you skip down to “After Matter.” My eight-graph view of the case and its mangled press think:
Maybe the biggest mistake the New York Times made was to turn decision-making for the newspaper over to Judith Miller and her “case.” This happened via the magic medium of a First Amendment struggle, the thing that makes the newspaper business more than just a business to the people prominent in it.Miller’s defiance played to their images of Times greatness, and to their understanding of First Amendment virtue. She always described her case in the language of their principles. They heard their principles talking in the facts of the case. She could shape those facts, and so on.
But her second attorney saw it more clearly. “I don’t want to represent a principle,” Robert Bennett told her. “I want to represent Judy Miller.” He did that. The Times was the one left holding the principles.
Mostly they didn’t apply to a case that was bad on the facts, a loser on the law, quite likely to result in victory for the prosecutor, and quite possibly an ethical swamp or political sewer, since it was about using the press to discredit people without being named. All this would warn a prudent person away. It’s why other news organizations settled.
It never seems to have registered with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.—Miller’s biggest supporter and the publisher of the newspaper—how different it is to fight for the right to keep things secret, as against the right to publish what had improperly been kept from us. By taking Miller’s secret-keeping “into” itself the Times took on more and more responsibilities not to speak, not to publish, not to report, not to inquire. All this is deadly for a newspaper, and the staff knew it. At the end the readers knew it and they were crying out. Even the armchair critics knew a thing or two.
So did Bill Keller, so did Jill Abramson. But there was nothing they could do. By the time they realized what Miller’s secrets had done to their people and their journalism, Judith Miller—by staging a First Amendment showdown she escaped from—had effectively hijacked the newspaper. Her principles were in the saddle, and rode the Times to disaster, while people of the Times watched. The newspaper never got its Robert Bennett.
And in the end her secret-keeping extended to stiffing the Times on its own story. The newspaper’s international First Amendment hero wouldn’t talk, share notes, or answer any tough questions. Her copy was late for the big weekend package; so late the report didn’t run in 100,000 papers run off for the bulldog edition.
The spookiest thing to me about her first person account was the suggestion that Judy Miller may have—today—security clearances that her bosses (and colleagues) do not have. This could be the reason her treatment is so singular. She said the prosecutor asked her if she still had special clearances when she met with Lewis Libby. She said she didn’t know. Does that sound good?
On to some key moments in the report, The Miller Case: From a Name on a Pad to Jail, and Back. My eye fell on these passages. I explain a little about why.
And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how “Valerie Flame” appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she “didn’t think” she heard it from him. “I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall,” she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today….
Miller cannot recall where the name at the center of the case came from? Wowzer. Sure to be the center of controversy over the next week. Claiming memory loss about the most important fact in the story is weak. Very.
Miller actually subtracts from public knowledge in this part, a feat. She introduces into the narrative a new “source” who must have been around to plant the name on her, and then promptly tells us she cannot remember anything about him. So we know less if we believe her.
Mr. Sulzberger and the paper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, knew few details about Ms. Miller’s conversations with her confidential source other than his name. They did not review Ms. Miller’s notes. Mr. Keller said he learned about the “Valerie Flame” notation only this month. Mr. Sulzberger was told about it by Times reporters on Thursday.Interviews show that the paper’s leadership, in taking what they considered to be a principled stand, ultimately left the major decisions in the case up to Ms. Miller, an intrepid reporter whom editors found hard to control.
“This car had her hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk,” Mr. Sulzberger said.
Like I said, it became Judy Miller’s newspaper. Her decision-making, I said on CNN, was driving the newspaper’s. Mr. Sulzberger is the publisher; the Times is a public company. Isn’t his hand supposed to be on the wheel for the newspaper as a public trust?
This car had her hand on the wheel… I know what he meant. It was her call on whether to “end” the case by testifying. But it was his call when the Times declared her case a First Amendment struggle and matter of high journalistic principle. Because the particular high principle invoked by Miller—protecting a reporter’s sources—in this case tied their hands for later stages of the fight their strategy brought on. They turned over the wheel to Judy Miller; her games of telepathy with Libby became the case “logic.”
Just ask yourself when you re-read the Times report, who was actually in charge of these events?
“We have everything to be proud of and nothing to apologize for,” Ms. Miller said in the interview Friday.
Ms. Miller seems incapable of self-doubt. Is this the person you want driving the car in a game of chicken with a federal prosecutor?
Asked what she regretted about The Times’s handling of the matter, Jill Abramson, a managing editor, said: “The entire thing.”…
Indeed.
In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes
I called this The Hypothesis: “Judy Miller would not, in any material way, cooperate with the team of Times reporters.” (See Armchair Critic Speculates, Oct. 12.) Seems like she didn’t. What principle of confidentiality extends to “interactions with editors?” I am not aware of one the Times would uphold.
And how’s this for corporate candor? The Washington Post reported today: “Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said yesterday that Miller is now cooperating with fellow reporters on the story.” Odd definition of cooperating. (See “After Matter” for an update on it.)
This, I think, is what will finally sever Judy Miller from the Times: Ms. Miller generally would not discuss… Not forgivable in the newsroom’s moral code. Your colleagues are trying to finally tell the truth and get it right— and you won’t help? (Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell agrees and calls for Miller to be fired.)
Ms. Miller said in an interview that she “made a strong recommendation to my editor” that a story be pursued. “I was told no,” she said. She would not identify the editor.Ms. Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time, said Ms. Miller never made any such recommendation.
So she won’t even identify the editor, and Jill Abramson says no way, it never happened? Second wowzer.
In the fall of 2003, after The Washington Post reported that “two top White House officials disclosed Plame’s identity to at least six Washington journalists,” Philip Taubman, Ms. Abramson’s successor as Washington bureau chief, asked Ms. Miller and other Times reporters whether they were among the six. Ms. Miller denied it…
Was she lying? Times reporters will have vivid opinions on that. Lying to an editor is an immediate firing offense. It has to be, if the newsroom is going to function. One of many reasons Miller will not be returning to the newsroom.
The Times said it believes that attempts by prosecutors to force reporters to reveal confidential information must be resisted. Otherwise, it argues, the public would be deprived of important information about the government and other powerful institutions.The fact that Ms. Miller’s judgment had been questioned in the past did not affect its stance. “The default position in a case like that is you support the reporter,” Mr. Keller said.
It was in these early days that Mr. Keller and Mr. Sulzberger learned Mr. Libby’s identity. Neither man asked Ms. Miller detailed questions about her conversations with Mr. Libby
A striking feature of the entire story: the men in charge didn’t know some of the key facts because they didn’t ask. Normally this would be bad. But it was okay not to know because Judy was making the calls. She knew.
Mr. Abrams told Ms. Miller and the group that Mr. Tate said she was free to testify. Mr. Abrams said Mr. Tate also passed along some information about Mr. Libby’s grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson’s wife.
The most confusing part of the article is this. From what it says, I can see no reason Abrams or the Times had for not accepting Tate’s “she was free to testify,” except Miller’s subjective feeling about it, and the fact that she didn’t get the call she felt she would get.
“Judy believed Libby was afraid of her testimony,” Mr. Keller said, noting that he did not know the basis for the fear. “She thought Libby had reason to be afraid of her testimony.”Ms. Miller and the paper decided at that point not to pursue additional negotiations with Mr. Tate.
The two sides did not talk for a year.
Amazing, especially: he did not know the basis for the fear. This is what the Times staff was afraid of. Had the paper—and the newsroom bosses—taken too great a risk? Maybe Keller didn’t know things he would have to know to guard against it.
Asked in the interview whether he had any regrets about the editorials, given the outcome of the case, Mr. Sulzberger said no.“I felt strongly that, one, Judy deserved the support of the paper in this cause - and the editorial page is the right place for such support, not the news pages,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “And secondly, that this issue of a federal shield law is really important to the nation.”
As I have written, it is sad to me that this stance is repeated, and occupied as some kind of high ground, when it has been admitted by Keller that Miller’s case would not have been covered by a national shield law. How can she be a symbol of it?
And when Sulzberger says “the editorial page is the right place for such support, not the news pages…” I must say I draw a blank. The news pages weren’t supporting Miller? Where did he get that? The news pages of the New York Times were edited for many months under the principle: don’t report anything that would anger the prosecutor or affect Miller’s case. That’s “support.” And the Times report documents this, including the stories that weren’t published and the reporters who did them, and the discouraging “message” the Washington bureau took from it, and so on. If Sulzberger believes the news pages didn’t support Miller, that’s alarming.
A few weeks later on Capitol Hill, in November 2004, Ms. Miller bumped into Robert S. Bennett, the prominent Washington criminal lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and who is known for his blunt style and deal-making skills.Ms. Miller recalled Mr. Bennett saying while he signed on to her case: “I don’t want to represent a principle. I want to represent Judy Miller.”
Three points:
- With his “Judy you need someone to represent you,” Bennett had a clear-eyed view of the case, easier because he was coming to it later.
- Who on the Times side said, “I’m not representing a principle, I have to represent the New York Times?”
- The Times story never explains why Miller switched lawyers or added a criminal defense attorney. (See Mark Schmitt on this.)
How strange:
Every day, she checked outdated copies of The Times for a news article about her case. Most days she was disappointed.
She didn’t know why there weren’t any news articles about her case? By their own account, the editors were holding back in deference to her.
Finally, it says so much about this case, about the information underworld of confidential sources, how little the Times own rules mattered to her, and how far gone Miller herself is when, in her account accompanying the Times article, she says:
Mr. Fitzgerald asked about a notation I made on the first page of my notes about this July 8 meeting, “Former Hill staffer.”My recollection, I told him, was that Mr. Libby wanted to modify our prior understanding that I would attribute information from him to a “senior administration official.” When the subject turned to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Libby requested that he be identified only as a “former Hill staffer.” I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill.
Telling. (Let Josh Marshall explain why.) The new description for Libby is wholly misleading to readers—amounting to a lie, a misdirection play—but Miller is fine with it because it’s technically true.
After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…
My bit of news is
TIMES STANDS BY CLAIM: MILLER COOPERATED.
Meaning I e-mailed New York Times spokesperson Catherine J. Mathis with a question:
The Washington Post said you told them Judith Miller was cooperating with reporters. The Times report says: “In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.” That says she didn’t really cooperate.So my question is: did you want to elaborate or revise your statement? Or is the Times statement [still]: “Judy Miller cooperated with this report?”
Her reply: “While Judy put limits on what she would discuss, the fact that she did sit for interviews and wrote her own account of her testimony certainly represents cooperation.”
Represents to whom? I guarantee you Times journalists did not see her “limits” as reasonable or as cooperation. Susie Madrak, a journalist who blogs as Suburban Guerilla: “Well, the Times spokeswoman ‘misspoke,’ since Judy wouldn’t answer questions nor show her fellow reporters her notes.”
Bill Keller is quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s story on the report (Oct. 17): “Knowing everything I know today about this case, I might have done some things differently, but I don’t feel the least bit apologetic about standing up for a reporter’s right to do the job.”
See Keller’s note to staff from Asia, where he’s visiting bureaus.
Best post I have read on Miller, post-report, is Next Time, Try Monster.com by Jane Hamsher at firedoglake. She thinks Miller wants to land at the Wall Street Journal, and gave a “pitch” interview to their reporters. Read why it didn’t work.
Tom Rosenstiel in Howard Kurtz’s “reactions” story, Oct. 17: “It is still not clear entirely what principle Miller felt she was protecting that also allowed her to testify.” Agreed.
Kurtz’s Media Notes column is better for your range-of-reactions needs. Listen to how how he starts:
The Judy Miller story is so hot right now that I want to get right to the blogosphere reaction, and will make you scroll down to read my print column…
Farhad Manjpoo in Salon: Judy Miller and the damage done. Cogent and it answers questions instead of just posing them. I recommend it, and warn you I am in it.
Ditto for FishbowlNY’s wrap-up. Also see Fishbowl DC’s Miller post. (Both Oct. 17)
Kathy Gill, a “guide” at About.com for US Politics, has a nicely thorough round up of bloggers reactions. About is owned by the Times.
Mickey Kaus is asking good questions. Jeff Jarvis has a good round-up of reactions. He’d have more to say but he’s a consultant to the Times. Also see Joe Gandelman, as you always should when these things break.
It’s one thing to be gamed by a punk like Jayson Blair who lied so outrageously that you’d have to be as nuts as him to think he was making it all up. It’s another to be gamed by a senior Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. That requires a systemic flaw.
And that requires David—a philosopher—to think about it, and tell us what the flaw might be.
Halley Suitt, keeping it real: “And as for metaphors of who was running the show, the Times publisher suggests Judy Miller was in the driver’s seat at the paper, but c’mon guys, can’t we call it what it was … she seemed to have the boys by the balls.”
James Wolcott: “You’re sitting there having breakfast at the St. Regis with Scooter Aspen, buttering each other’s toast, and somehow the name ‘Valerie Flame’ pops up in your notebook without you knowing how it got there! It’s your handwriting, sure enough, but rack your brain much as you will, you just can’t remember which little birdie tweeted that name into your ear.”
Dan Gillmor: “This is a sad day for the Times and for journalism.”
Mark Jurkowitz, Boston Phoenix: “Plenty to suggest that the Times has paid a major price for again failing in its oversight of a strong-willed reporter who had generated internal skepticism about work habits and work product. And that sounds all too familiar.”
Steve Lovelady at CJR Daily: “The Times Gives Us a Modified, Limited Hangout.”
Historian David Kaiser: “the Times seems to have forgotten not only the purpose of protecting confidential sources, but also the reason we have a free press at all.”
“Then she starts to get a little crazy and reckless,” writes Jane Hamsher. “She sticks it to her lawyer, which is not really the best idea when he’s the only thing standing between you and a ten year stretch in chick prison…”
Mickey Kaus explains why Sulzberger’s stand on “principle” has actually made it harder for journalists.
KAUS: It’s now clear confinement wasn’t pointless. It worked for the prosecutor exactly as intended. After a couple of months of sleeping on “two thin mats on a concrete slab,” Miller decided, in her words, “I owed it to myself” to check and see if just maybe Libby really meant to release her from her promise of confidentiality. And sure enough - you know what? - it turns out he did! The message sent to every prosecutor in the country is “Don’t believe journalists who say they will never testify. A bit of hard time and they just might find a reason to change their minds. Judy Miller did.”
SPECIAL SECTION: Judy Miller And Her Security Status
Q. Does Judy Miller have security clearances enabling her to deal in classified information, preventing her editors from knowing what she knows, even if they knew to ask?
A. From Judith Miller’s My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room come these passages suggesting she may:
… Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment “embedded” with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby. I said I believed so, but could not be sure. He asked how Mr. Libby treated classified information. I said, Very carefully.
Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Libby had shown any of the documents to me. I said no, I didn’t think so. I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.
I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq. At the same time, I told the grand jury I thought that at our July 8 meeting I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.
Mr. Fitzgerald asked me if I knew whether I was cleared to discuss classified information at the time of my meetings with Mr. Libby. I said I did not know.
She did not know? I wrote this at PressThink on Oct. 13:
Jack Shafer in a column on the risk of criminalizing relations with sources writes: “National-security reporters—none of whom have clearances—receive classified information for a living.” How does he know that there aren’t any reporters with security clearences? It would be a good way of favoring a favorite, says I. Surely such arrangements would be secret if they existed. In fact, I could see a journalist fighting pretty hard to keep that kind of secret.
Military and media blogger Sisyphus (Tim Schmoyer) has some good background on Miller’s “security clearance” during the hunt for WMD’s. Interesting portrait of Miller in the field. TPM Cafe is asking questions about this too.
I say it’s either 1.) a big nothing—Miller’s exagerrated description of clearances other embedded reporters had during the war, a kind of puffing up—or 2.) a very big deal if she had “special” clearances post-embed that came into play during her talks with Libby. Reporters I have talked to said that would be shocking and troubling, if true. 1) seems more likely, 2.) would explain a lot.
Read William Jackson’s September 2003 column (just put back online by E & P) about Judith Miller… “It appeared that she was, once again, the ‘drop’ of choice for a politically-motivated leaker.” It has a portrait of Judy Miller operating in Iraq, where she claimed to have “secret” clearence to see things other reporters could not. (Judy calls this kind of behavior “having sharp elbows.”)
An e-mail message to me from her PAO sergeant escort regarding a three-week trip with META in April stated: “She did not have a SECRET clearance.” She was “high maintenance and came to the field badly prepared. The problem I had with her was that whenever other members of the press showed up, which they did as embeds from other units or as unilaterals, she would insist that I get rid of them and that the 75th’s story was her story, exclusively. She didn’t seem to have any idea that the Army needed as much coverage of the 75th’s mission as possible and that excluding everyone else was detrimental to the credibility of what the 75th was trying to accomplish.
Bill Lynch, retired CBS News correspondent, in a letter to Romenesko:
There is one enormous journalism scandal hidden in Judith Miller’s Oct. 16th first person article about the (perhaps lesser) CIA leak scandal. And that is Ms. Miller’s revelation that she was granted a DoD security clearance while embedded with the WMD search team in Iraq in 2003.
Read the rest; it’s interesting.
Franklin Foer’s New York magazine profile of Miller also has background on this. The Source of the Trouble, it’s called.
About.com has good background on military security clearances.
This is a very good compendium of facts and links to articles about Judith Miller. And here’s an index of everything that’s appeared at Romenesko about Miller, Libby, Plame, Fitzgerald, Cooper, Novak, etc.
Posted by Jay Rosen at October 15, 2005 07:00 PM
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/10/15/mlr_act.html
Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State
More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she's facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration's "outing" of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: "During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment 'embedded' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons." And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, "I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq."
Let's replay that one again in slow motion.
Judith Miller is a reporter for the New York Times. After the invasion, on assignment to cover a U.S. military unit as it searches for WMDs in Iraq, she's given "clearance" by the Pentagon "to see secret information" -- which she "was not permitted to discuss" with Times editors.
There's nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government. But if she's supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation -- and the fact that the New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.
Notably, the front-page story about Miller in the Times on Sunday bypassed Miller's "clearance" status and merely reported: "In the spring of 2003, Ms. Miller returned from covering the war in Iraq, where she had been embedded with an American military team searching unsuccessfully for evidence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons."
In effect, during the propaganda buildup for the invasion of Iraq, while Miller was the paper's lead reporter on weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times news department served as a key asset of the warfare state.
"WMD -- I got it totally wrong," the Times quoted Miller as saying in a Friday interview. "The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong."
But analysts, experts and journalists were not "all wrong." Some very experienced weapons inspectors -- including Mohamed ElBaradei, Hans Blix and Scott Ritter -- challenged key assertions from the White House. Well before the invasion, many other analysts also disputed various aspects of the U.S. government's claims about WMDs in Iraq. (For examples, see archived news releases put out by my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy in 2002 and early 2003.) Meanwhile journalists at some British newspapers, including the Independent and the Guardian, raised tough questions that were virtually ignored by mainstream U.S. reporters in the Washington press corps.
Reporters select sources -- and the unnamed ones that Miller chose to rely on, like the Pentagon's pet Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, were predictably eager to spin tales about WMDs in order to fuel momentum for an invasion. Yet the official line at the New York Times has been that its news department was fooled with the rest of the media best.
On May 26, 2004 -- more than a year after the invasion of Iraq -- the Times published a belated semi-mea-culpa article by two top editors, including executive editor Bill Keller. The piece contended that the Times, along with policy makers in Washington, were victims rather than perpetrators: "Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one."
But the Times did not "fall for misinformation" as much as jump for it. The newspaper eagerly helped the administration portray deceptions as facts.
The carnage set loose by those deceptions is continuing every day. But the Times' extensive Sunday coverage of its own machinations, with Judith Miller at the center of the intrigue, had nothing to say about the human consequences in Iraq.
In elite medialand, the careers of journalists at the New York Times loom large. In contrast, the lives of American soldiers -- and especially the lives of Iraqis -- are more like abstractions while the breathless accounts of press palace intrigues unfold.
The apex of the Times hierarchy has provided no indication of personal remorse or institutional accountability. And the next time agenda-setting for U.S. military action -- against Iran or Syria or wherever -- shifts into high gear, it's very unlikely that the New York Times or other top-tier U.S. media outlets will present major roadblocks.
On June 14, 2003, shortly before he was promoted to the job of executive editor at the New York Times, the newspaper published an essay by Bill Keller that explained why the U.S. government should strive to improve the quality of its intelligence. "The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted," he wrote. "To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face."
Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
http://www.alternet.org/story/26947/
RACISM AND RECOVERY IN NEW ORLEANS
thanks to GSN for this information
Yesterday I received an e-mail from Lance Hill. Lance is an old friend and was one of the founders of the original Oread Daily back in 1970. Lance is truly one of the best organizers I have ever known. He is also the author of the book "Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement."
Hill is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University; he currently is a resident of New Orleans and he has a story to tell about the aftermath of Katrina and what it means now.
Below is the e-mail, followed by an unpublished op/ed piece Hill wrote back in September. You will also find a bio of Hill published by the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University.
E-mail from Lance
Friends:
I am sorry about the long delay in response to all of your many queries, but we only now got an email connection so that we can communicate with rest of the world.
Eileen and I are fine. As you may know, we ignored the evacuation order and spent 33 days under martial law inside New Orleans, leaving only to get medical treatment and supplies to bring back inside the Parish. It was quite an experience. On Friday, September 2nd we filled our car with food and water and began runs into the Morial Convention Center, where more than 10,000 people were languishing outside in the heat with little food or water. Police, guardsmen, and the Red Cross refused to enter the convention center to help people because they claimed it was too dangerous.
Their claims of danger were just an excuse to starve people out of the center. The refugees were kind, grateful, and protective of me (I was, though, chased and fired upon by state police on one of my return trips for supplies). On my fourth and final run I was stopped at gunpoint by city and state police and told not return because they were preparing to bring in food and water themselves, which they did. It was the single most emotionally disturbing day of my life. On the way to the center I drove past a bloated body on one of the city's main intersections: it remained there for ten days.
Eileen and I spent the rest of our 33 days inside taking care of people who had also refused to evacuate, mostly elderly people who would not abandon their pets to go to the shelters and who lived on the historically high and dry alluvial ridges. We also spent a great deal of time trying to communicate to the media what was happening inside. Despite endless threats of "forcible extraction" from our house by a number of law enforcement agencies and guard units, we managed to avoid arrest and forced evacuation.
The closest we came was on September 28 when the police kicked in our front door and illegally searched our apartment in response to my refusal to provide identification to a patrolling Oklahoma guard unit. The "police" turned out to be Tulane University security guards loaned out to the militarily to make arrests in the surrounding neighborhoods. No apology from Tulane and they did not even suspend the officer. But that's another story.
Tulane has sealed off the campus and locked us out of the Southern Institute office building for nearly seven weeks now, though our building took on only 18 inches of water on the main floor. So we have had to set up a satellite office and we are now up and running. We can only hope that our irreplaceable collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors and veterans of the civil rights movement has not been destroyed by the heat and mold.
Eileen and I left after 33 days to get some "R & R" and returned last Monday. The martial law and curfew orders are, for the most part, unenforced now and most of our neighbors are back and things are returning to normal. We are in good health, though Eileen has permanently lost her teaching position in Orleans Parish schools-- along with virtually all the other 5,000 teachers. But we fared far better than most: only today Eileen learned that one of her co- workers lost her husband in the flood.
I have attached an op-ed piece I wrote the second week of the hurricane. It was never published, but I still agree with most of what it, though now I think there is little hope that New Orleans will ever reconstitute its black majority community. The locus for the struggle for racial justice is now, and will remain for years to come, in the predominantly white cities to which New Orleanian blacks have been exiled.
Lance Hill, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Southern Institute for Education and Research
Tulane University
M.R. Box 1692
31 McAlister Drive
New Orleans, LA 70118
(504)220-4609
www.SouthernInstitute.info
Unpublished op/ed piece from Lance
Lance Hill
September 16. 2005
New Orleans
DAY NINETEEN OF MARTIAL LAW
"The niggers are killing each other over in Lafayette" said the pickup driver, referring to the black New Orleanians who had relocated to a shelter in Cajun country following Hurricane Katrina. The driver, a middle-aged white man employed in disaster clean business, was accompanied by the owner of several gas stations. I sat quietly observing from the back seat of a Texas National Guard humvee on my way to receive a tetanus shot at a military hospital.
(I had refused to evacuate and, thankfully, the Texans had decided to defy city and state authorities who prohibited providing food, water, or medical assistance to "outlaws" such as myself). "Thank God you guys are here," the driver shouted over din of his diesel engine. "Keep the blacks out," he yelled. "Don't let them back in. We're going make this a beautiful city."
New Orleans authorities will soon suspend martial law and permit the reentry of all New Orleanians to their city. This will result in one the most remarkable political transformation of any major city in United States' history. New Orleans will resurrect under a white political majority in a city where African Americans were 70% of the population only a month ago. This seismic shift is the direct result of Katrina's destruction of tens of thousands of black homes that, notwithstanding massive federal aid and flood insurance guarantees, will never be rebuilt, or will be rebuilt at costs far beyond the reach of most blacks.
The question that will face New Orleanians in the coming weeks is "In whose image will New Orleans be reconstituted?" What will become of black New Orleans and its dynamic culture that gave the world Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Mardis Gras Indians, brass bands, and uniquely inflected contemporary musical innovations in rap and hip hop music?
What will become of the endearing culture of celebration that served as an antidote for the numbing boredom of repressed but and colorless Midwestern lives. The spirit and ethnic diversity of New Orleans is worth saving as much as the Italianate mansions along St. Charles Avenue. But as we rebuild this city there will be tremendous pressure to commercialize, package, and deliver the culture without the people who made it. New Orleans, the city of majestic homes and elegant muscular oaks will no doubt be reborn; but possibly without a soul. Such a spiritual death will result in New Orleans becoming the Orlando of the South. That's when I will voluntarily evacuate.
Since Hurricane Katrina came ashore on August 29, I have traveled by bicycle through hundreds of neighborhoods taking care of strangers (mostly pet lovers who would not leave their pets) talking to people from all walks of life. I do not pretend to know what the nation's perception of the events here have been. We "resisters", as the government has dubbed us (odd, I thought I was a "resident") have gone three weeks without newspapers, internet access, postal service, land-line phones, and receive almost all of our news through one officially designated radio/television station. So I do not know the issues in the national policy debate on the rescue and recovery efforts. But I do know what I have seen and heard on the streets, and it is not encouraging.
There is a growing and powerful "racial exclusion movement" among a significant section of the white New Orleanian community that sees Katrina as an opportunity to eliminate poverty and crime by eliminating black people. It is not a new movement, nor is it the sole province of parvenu gas station owners. Proposals of remove the New Orleans black population enjoyed a measure of support as late as the 1950s. I now hear many members of the old moneyed "carnival royalty" families openly arguing that Katrina provides an opening to depose black majority rule in the same way that their confederate forbearers overthrew the bi-racial Reconstruction government in?
I draw a distinction between a disaster and a tragedy. Disasters are something nature inflicts upon humans. Tragedies are something humans inflict upon other humans in their botched efforts to remedy disasters. The rescue efforts were clearly a tragedy; now we are faced with a second tragedy in the recovery processes both material and moral.
The decisions that will set the course for recovery for decades to come are being made today — with only one percent of the city's voters present. It is not a foregone conclusion that the issues of equity and fairness will make it to the table. The table has already been set, and who will be at it is anyone's guess.
The New Orleans African American community finds itself fragmented and living in exile; not only the thousands of poor and unemployed African Americans in shelters, but also the thousands of educated black middle class professionals who comprised the city's political, intellectual, religious, and social justice activist leadership. When these people return things will no doubt heat up, given that the majority of black voters opposed Mayor Ray Nagin's election and his strongest critics, like the rest of the city's residents, have not been allowed back into the city.
There are already ominous signs that the recovery path may end up reproducing privilege inside New Orleans and poverty outside. Economically secure white New Orleanians have, for the most part, returned to secure their homes, yet no return provisions have been made for poor homeowners and renter.
Particularly disturbing is the failure of corporate and institutional leadership in the city to set an example of equity. As thousands of unemployed black New Orleanians sit idle in relocation centers in Texas, many of New Orleans' leading businesses and institutions are rapidly cleaning up with the help of thousands of workers--largely Hispanics imported from Texas. The city is flooded with Latinos who will soon become the new preferred service class. This development does not bode well for the eventual return of the black working poor.
Despite the dearth of outside news, I did listen to President George Bush's speech on the radio when he laid out his recovery plan. His call to build 4,000 new homes for low-income people is a good start; but that will provide housing for less than six percent of the 350,000 blacks who lived in New Orleans before Katrina. What was missing from his speech was a commitment to a specific funding level and the guarantee of equality in outcomes, not simply treatment.
The degrading treatment of black New Orleanians during the rescue phase also raises questions about the recovery process and equity. To this day, the city and state governments refuse to provide water, food, or medical aid to anyone remaining in New Orleans, though virtually all of those people live in the thousands of homes that sit on historically high ground and have never flooded by way of Lake Ponchartrain. Many of these residents are wondering aloud if we should place our confidence in the same people to plan and direct a recovery process that results in a vibrantly diverse city?
The final task is that of moral recovery. My wife, Eileen San Juan and I originally stayed because we have lived through thirty years of hurricanes and floods and have always stayed to care for our homes and help our neighbors. It is the appalling indifference to the suffering of others that I have witnessed as a "resister" inside the city that convinces me that we urgently need a carefully planned and comprehensive program for "moral and ethical" recovery. My own experience was particularly disturbing.
On September 2nd I awoke to radio news that thousands of evacuees were continuing to languish in the sun at the Morial Convention Center because city officials had ordered police and guardsmen not to issue food, water, or medical support. The news account also reported that two corpses were propped by the front door of the convention center.
I frantically loaded our car with supplies, spay-painted "AID" on all the doors and windows and headed for the convention center. On the way I passed a dead bloated body at Magazine and Jackson. She was wearing white socks with large blue stars. The scene at the convention center was one of unspeakable and shameful suffering.
Women begged me to take their babies who were dehydrating. I had to tell them that there were no hospitals: all medical personnel had been forcible evacuated, even on dry land. Contrary to official pronouncements that the convention center was too dangerous for police, let along unarmed relief workers, people at the center greeted me like an angel from the heavens. People orderly distributed my goods as others implored me to bring back baby formula, water, and antibiotics. A man approached my car as I tried to leave. His eyes were dark and hollow. "Please mister," he said in daze. "Tell the world what's going on down here. Tell them that people are killing each other just for a drink of water."
Shaken, I raced back to my home to get more water and supplies. A mile from the center a white pick-up truck fell in behind me with two police officers. The unmarked truck had no siren or lights. I decided not to stop because I was sure they would tell me not to come back. Then suddenly, "Boom! Boom! Boom!" The state patrolman had fired three shots into the air from his handgun to force me to stop. I stopped, though furious that they had nothing better to do then chase relief workers. The policeman demanded to know what I was doing and why did I have "AID" painted on my car. I heatedly explained that I was taking food, water, and medical supplies to babies and elderly people who were dying in the sun at the convention center. Then I asked what were they doing heading away from the problem with an empty truck. They let me go.
The moral recovery in Katrina's wake needs to be approached with the same forethought and resources as the material recovery. I have directed an organization for thirteen years that has the simple mission to teach the moral imperative to speak out against the suffering and persecution of others. We have used the history of the Holocaust and the civil rights movement to teach young people the causes and consequences of racism and moral indifference. Now, we no longer have to reach back decades to find a telling case-study of human failure and redemption.
Hurricanes bring out the best and worst of human behavior. It is heartening that so many communities have opened their schools to the 60,000 black New Orleanian students left homeless by this disaster, but plunging children into strange worlds without preparing and training them, their families, and their host schools for the culture shock is a recipe for a second disaster.
The recovery process is not written in stone — yet. The only guarantee for a recovery that does not exacerbate racism and compound inequality, and one that brings New Orleans back to life in both body and spirit, is a national mobilization of African Americans and all those lovers of "the city that care forgot" to relentlessly pressure the federal government for an inclusive and fair decision-making process.
Lance Hill, Ph.D.
Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University
Author of "Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement" UNC press
Brief biography of Lance
Dr. Lance Hill is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. Dr. Hill worked as a community activist and labor organizer for twenty years before embarking on an academic career. From 1989 to 1992, Dr. Hill served as the Executive Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism (LCARN), the grass roots organization that led the opposition to former Klansman David Duke's Senate and Gubernatorial campaigns. One of the coalition's founders, Hill directed the organization's extensive television, radio and direct mail campaigns. The New York Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune credited LCARN with playing the leading role in Duke's ultimate political demise.
In 1993, Hill co-founded the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. Over the past ten years the Institute's tolerance education program-the most comprehensive project of its kind in the South-- has provided training to more than 3,600 teachers from 785 schools in the Deep South. The program uses case studies of the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement to teach the causes and consequences of prejudice. With a geographic scope of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle, the Institute prides itself on successful implementing programs in rural and isolated communities that have been traditional strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups.
Dr. Hill also directs the Southern Institute's cross-cultural communication training and research program which teaches advanced skills to improve communication and collaboration among ethnic groups in the United States.
Hill holds a PhD from Tulane University, where he has taught US History and Intercultural Communication. His scholarly research field is the history of race relations and the radical right. He is the author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and "National Socialist Race Doctrine in the Political Thought of David Duke," in The Emergence of David Duke by Doug Rose (University of North Carolina Press, 1994). He has served as a consultant on several PBS documentaries on the radical right and the civil rights movement and has written extensively on racial politics in the South.
Dr. Hill resides in New Orleans with his wife of thirty years,
Eileen SanJuan.