Day: August 5, 2005

Judith Miller’s time in the hoosegow will not earn her a Conscience in Media Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), according to Editor & Publisher.

Following an earlier decision by the ASJA’s First Amendment Committee to give the “New York Times” reporter the award (which prompted one committee member to resign), the organization’s board of directors voted unanimously to not bestow the honor on the tight-lipped jailbird.

The board voted to not accept the committee’s decision to reward Miller, because “her entire career, and even her current actions in the Plame/CIA leak case, cast doubt on her credentials for this award.”

The group’s president, Jack El-Hai, posted an explanation on an internal list-serve yesterday, noting the opposition from the rank and file, and also mentioning two other reasons for the unanimous vote:

• “A feeling that Miller’s career, taken as a whole, did not make her the best candidate for the award”
• “Divided opinions on the board over whether her recent actions merit the award.”

The American Society of Journalists and Authors is a 50-year-old group of some 1,100 independent nonfiction writers.

Anita Bartholomew, a freelance journalist, quit the First Amendment Committee following the first vote. She wrote in her resignation letter:

“The First Amendment is designed to prevent government interference with a free press. Miller, by shielding a government official or officials who attempted to use the press to retaliate against a whistleblower, and scare off other would-be whistleblowers, has allied herself with government interference with, and censorship of, whistleblowers. When your source IS the government, and the government is attempting to use you to target a whistleblower, the notion of shielding a source must be reconsidered. To apply standard practices regarding sources to hiding wrongdoing at the highest levels of government perverts the intent of the First Amendment.”

Yesterday was not Bob Novak’s first raging outburst. From Vanity Fair comes this interesting tidbit:

On the afternoon of last year’s New Hampshire primary, Robert Novak was in the Merrimack Diner in Manchester broadcasting a segment of Crossfire. It was a garden-variety event for Novak, then on his 12th presidential campaign and his umpteenth edition of CNN’s gabfest, until a local man, furious with Novak for outing a covert C.I.A. agent in his syndicated column, started shouting at him during a commercial break. “You’re a traitor!” he shrieked. “You’re a traitor!” The man was hushed up, the program resumed, and Novak talked more politics.

But afterward, as Novak made his way to the CNN bus, his tormentor followed, taunted him some more, and allegedly shoved him from behind. Novak, a short septuagenarian whose three-piece suits hide a considerable gut, grabbed the much larger man by the arm and gave him a shove back, sending him sprawling. Then he prepared for more serious skirmishing. “Novak looked like a little caged animal, fist locked and cocked back,” an unsympathetic observer later wrote, “like a garden troll gone insane.” Before he could take another swing, his Crossfire counterpart Paul Begala dragged him away.

Another Crossfire colleague, Tucker Carlson, watched it all in amazement. When Carlson joined the program, in 1999, Novak had received him frostily. To him, Carlson was an arriviste and a wimp, someone of insufficient conservative ardor and experience. For a time, the two barely spoke. But that wintry night in New England, Novak won Carlson over. “He decked a guy 20 years younger, and I have to say, I respected that,” Carlson recalls. “I thought it was such a ballsy thing to do. It’s the reason he’s stuck around so long and been so productive: he’s a tough guy. There was something admirable—something not of my generation—about it.”

Your plane lands. You crank up the cell and call home. “Honey, we’ve landed. I can’t wait to get home and #%$@ your *&%$#@ with my #$@*&^.”

That presumably private call could have yobs from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security listening in and getting their jollies — if the departments have their way.

DOJ and DHS in May and July submitted proposals to the Federal Communications Commission to institute broad, no, absolute, wiretapping capabilities for cell phone calls and Internet connections made by any and all airline passengers. Yeah, I know, pretty shocking, ain’t it?

This is all going on in the background while we worry about DHS’s reorganization and funding, and we just worry about DOJ. Period.

Fortunately, a couple of lesser-known watchdog organizations are watching all our backs — the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They filed a petition with the FCC stating that DOJ and DHS are essentially mounting an end-run around the Consitution and our civil rights by going directly to the FCC and not proposing their Orwellian plans directly to Congress.

CDT and EFF argue that granting wiretapping privileges without a court order to these two federal departments goes well beyond the jurisdiction of the FCC, which is mainly supposed to listen for bad words on radio and TV and watch for errant tits on the telly. The groups also charge that tapping Internet connections without a specific court order would be illegal because those connections are not considered telecommunications connections, anyway. (I did not know that.)

Consider: On any given day, there are well over 500,000 airline passengers traveling in the United States. Let’s be conservative and say that only 75 percent of them have cell phones. That’s 375,000. If only half of them make one cell phone call, that’s still over 180,000 phone calls that could potentially be tapped in a single day. Who’s going to do that?

It’s a ridiculous proposal, just based on the logistics of the thing, not to mention the trampling of personal privacy rights and due process and … well, you see the point. Just be glad there are organizations out there that are keeping an eye on the government thugs.

• Pentagon can no longer hide coffins: In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Pentagon will now release photos of flag-draped coffins containing the remains of U.S. servicemembers killed in the Iraqi war. The Bush Administration has censored such photos in order to keep public approval of the war from slipping. Too late for all that, anyway.
• Israel lobbyists charged with spying on U.S.: Two former employees of the lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) were indicted yesterday on charges that they illegally received and passed on classified information to foreign officials and reporters over a period of five years. A Pentagon security analyst has been charged with feeding the two men secret U.S. information about Iran.
• Military scours online personals to route out gay servicemembers: The U.S. military apparently has nothing better to do than surf Gay.com and other websites looking for service personnel who may have profiles online so they can kick out the homos under the “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” rules. Hey, it’s not like there’s a war going on or anything.

Bob Novak, the rightwing propagandist who merrily gave away the secret identity of CIA expert in WMD to help President Bush smear a political enemy, was put on suspension yesterday by CNN after he stormed off the set of “Inside Politics.” The reasons for Novak’s snit are the subject of a lot of speculation this morning.

Perhaps it’s unrelated, but yesterday Novak was also attacked head on by Sen. Arlen Specter, the liberal Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, over a column Novak wrote about a Senate staffer’s role in hearings related to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It’s doubtful Novak would take notice of what Specter thinks about his columns – except for the fact that Specter, who once served as the District Attorney of Philadelphia, characterized Novak’s written statements about the staffer with the word “libel.”

Here’s Specter’s letter, which was published in the rightwing New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper:

[…]