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A Hurricane Hits the Times
Rich Galen Monday October 24, 2005
Did I happen to mention that the Annual Mullings subscription drive is going on RIGHT NOW?
If you click on the link you will be taken directly to the subscription page after which you can return here to read the rest of this edition of Mullings. I'll wait.
I see the bad moon arising, Dah, dee-dee-dee-dah-dah-dum. There's a bathroom on the right.
Done? Good. Thanks.
Official - and unofficial - Washington was abuzz this weekend with the twin developments in the Valerie Plame/Flame/Miller/Libby/Rove case.
First there was the news that the Special Counsel in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, has put up a web site (http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc/) which he had not done for the first three years of the investigation.
That led everyone to assume that indictments will be announced this week causing Washington-based reporters to cancel any travel plans they may have made so they can be in their actual offices in Washington if and when this happens.
The second CIA-scandal-related development was the extremely rare peek into the newsroom at the New York Times and the increasing tensions between reporters and senior management over the whole Judith Miller deal.
Veteran Washington reporter Kit Seelye was assigned to write a piece about a memo that executive editor Bill Keller sent to the staff which said Ms. Miller had "mislead" the Times' Washington bureau chief as to whether she was one of the reporters involved in the leak at the outset.
Keller's memo also said he had not been aware of the "entanglement" of Ms. Miller and the Vice President's chief of staff, Scooter Libby.
"Entanglement" is a very charged, very provocative word which Mr. Keller must have used with the full knowledge of all the eyebrow-raising it would certainly trigger.
Miller understood what was being implied and denied, in a counter memo, any "personal, social, or other relationship" with Libby other an as a source.
This is not an esoteric inside-the-Beltway deal. It now seems likely that someone (or someoneS) will be indicted and the New York Times apparently believes it was conned by its own, Pulitzer Prize winning, reporter.
On Friday, the NY Times had, in the lead paragraph of its front-pager on the scandal, the following:
� Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel, is focusing on whether Karl Rove � and I. Lewis Libby Jr. � sought to conceal their actions and mislead prosecutors, lawyers involved in the case said Thursday.
Observers here (that's reporter-speak for reporters talking to other reporters, often at the bar in which the press filing center is located) are mulling over whether one of the "lawyers involved in the case" is Robert Bennett who is Judith Miller's lawyer, who is reportedly being paid by the NY Times.
The question overloading the local telephone lines on Friday was: If one of those lawyers is, in fact, Mr. Bennett how can he be used as an anonymous source (in a case which revolves around the misuse of anonymous sources) without disclosing who he is, and what his relationship is to the Times and Ms. Miller.
On the other hand, if Bennett was not one of the lawyers being referenced, why didn't the Times make that clear so that goofballs like me, who have nothing better to do than e-mail real reporters and ask them whether this makes any ethical sense at all, would not raise these uncomfortable questions.
From the London Independent newspaper:
Scientists confirmed last night that a parrot, imported from Surinam in South America, contracted and died from [bird flu] while in a quarantine unit in southern England.
I know that avian flu having been spotted in England is not a subject for amusement, who could not be reminded of the famous dead-parrot sketch monologue by Monty Python's John Cleese:
He's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker! He's a stiff! Bereft of life. He rests in peace! His metabolic processes are now history! He's off the twig! He's kicked the bucket. He's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! This is an ex-parrot!
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On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the CCR lyric mistyped above, a link to the entire Parrot Sketch, and a link to the Kit Seelye NY Times piece. Also a stupid Mullfoto and a Catchy Caption of the Day.
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Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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