Pulitzer winner David Leonhardt, National Magazine Award winner Scott Horton, Filmmaker Mary Murphy, New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti

Winner: Mary Murphy, for her superb documentary Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and To Kill a Mocking Bird, which opens today at the Quad Cinema in New York and soon in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Boston, Mobile, Long Beach, Palm Springs and Norfolk, Va.  

Murphy, a veteran journalist, fell in love with Scout as a child and has  fashioned a beautiful love letter to her creator and this great American novel.   Watch the trailer here   or listen to Murphy charm her interviewer on NPR here.  And then get yourself to the theatre as soon as possible, for a treat for the whole family.

Sinner: Mark Mazzetti, whose coverage of American torture will forever live in infamy.  His latest contribution to his torture canon, the day after Osama Bin Laden was assassinated, was a story (with Helene Cooper and Peter Baker) which credulously adopted the line of former Bush administration officials (as Mazzetti has done dozens of times before) who  were desperately trying to convince the world that torture was the main reason that Bin Laden had been located.   The offending paragraphs were these:

The raid was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, including the interrogation of CIA detainees in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, where sometimes what was not said was as useful as what was…

It wasn’t until after 2002, when the agency began rounding up Qaeda operatives  and subjecting them to hours of brutal interrogation sessions in secret overseas prisons  that they finally began filling in the gaps about the foot soldiers, couriers and money men Bin Laden relied on.

Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees  the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi  the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.

This prompted FCP to write the following e-mail to Mazzetti, Times executive editor Bill Keller, managing editor Jill Abramson, and Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet:

Everything I’ve read today–from Feinstein’s press conference to Donald Rumsfeld in NewsMax [Rumsfeld reversed himself under neocon pressure the following day] to Jane Mayer to the round-up in Talking Points Memo–suggests that your strong implication on the front page of today’s newspaper that torture played an essential role in developing the information that led to Osama’s killing is flatly false… Judging from what everyone else has said today, once again, for the umpteenth time,  all you are doing is repeating the CIA line to protect the people who tortured their prisoners.
I trust  tomorrow’s newspaper will either
1) retract the implication of those graphs
or
2) provide some substance to support them?

Keller acknowledged receipt of the e-mail but did not respond to it; Abramson and Mazzetti ignored it.  Baquet wrote, “Good to hear from you again. I’m not sure I read those paragraphs the way you did.”

However, in the following day’s paper, there was indeed a new story on the front page by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage which seemed to take back the implication of Mazzetti’s story:

As intelligence officials disclosed the trail of evidence that led to the compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden was hiding, a chorus of Bush administration officials claimed vindication for their policy of “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding…But a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out.

Harper’s contributing editor Scott Horton, whose writing about torture always features all of the skepticism and sophistication which Mazzetti’s–and, frequently Shane’s–so often lack–said this to FCP about the first day story in the Times: 

I’m quite sure that this is precisely the way the folks who provided this info from the agency wanted them to be understood, but there is certainly more than a measure of ambiguity in them, planted with care by the NYT writers or their editors.  This episode shows again how easily the Times can be spun by unnamed government sources, the factual premises of whose statements invariably escape any examination.

Winner: the very same Scott Horton, for winning a National Magazine Award for his blockbuster piece in Harper’s which explored the possibility that what had been described as the suicide of three prisoners at Guantanamo may actually have been murders committed by their captors.  FCP first wrote about Horton’s piece in January of last year.

Horton’s reporting directly contradicted an earlier piece in The New York Times magazine and the Times has alternated between ignoring Horton’s story and denigrating it.   Happily, the judges of the National Magazine Awards felt very differently about it.

Sinners: The Pulitzer Board for awarding Joseph Rago a Pulitzer for “for his well-crafted, against-the-grain editorials challenging the health care reform advocated by President Barack Obama.”   As the Nation’s Greg Mitchell pointed out,  the young Rago’s arguments were not only utterly predictable but also frequently “fact-challenged.”

Among the editorials for which Rago was honored was one in which he blasted PolitiFact for identifying the right’s successful branding of Obama’s “government takeover of health care” as its “lie of the year”–which of course, is exactly what it was.

Winner: David Leonhardt, whose Pulitzer Prize for his superb economic analysis in the New York Times was as deserved as Rago’s honor was misguided.   For many years, Leonhardt has done a brilliant job of making the field of economics accessible to his lay readers.   And the fact that FCP has known Leonhardt since birth–and shared the same table at Passover for more than three decades–has absolutely nothing to do with this citation.

Winner: Barack Obama, for his splendid interview with Steve Croft for 60 Minutes in which he explained all of the risks in the operation and all of the very sensible reasons for burying the terrorist at sea–and not releasing any photographs of his corpse afterwards. 

Obama on Osama with Steve Kroft

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Quick Takes

    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says  the only thing left that is holding up a bill that would prevent a government shutdown is the intransigence of Republican extremists in the House, who are demanding the complete defunding of Planned Parenthood.

    How extreme are those extremists?  As the indispensable Steve Benen has reported, Oklahoma neanderthal Senator Tom Coburn, and Minnesota’s maniacal Michelle Bachman–yes, Michelle Bachman!–have both said they are in favor of a bill without the Planned Parenthood rider.   So the Tea Party members in the House are way to the right of Coburn and Bachman–which means they probably think Glenn Beck is a hopeless moderate.

    Meanwhile, Paul Krugman vivisects the “responsible conservatives”–everyone from David Brooks to The Economist–who have been praising Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget.  (The Economist called it “a brave counterproposal” which “puts fiscal responsibility at the centre of his plan”–although even this Republican-friendly publication admits that “Too much of the gain goes to the rich, and too much of the pain is felt by the poor.”)

    Krugman sees things rather differently in today’s Times.
   
    “…The G.O.P. plan turns out not to be serious at all. Instead, it’s simultaneously ridiculous and heartless. ..Republicans have once again gone all in for voodoo economics — the claim, refuted by experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves. [The Congressional Budget Office] finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts…

    “The point here is that privatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

    “The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care…

    “In short, this plan isn’t remotely serious; on the contrary, it’s ludicrous.  And it’s also cruel.”

    Amen.

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Paul Ryan’s budget is being championed by “sensible” conservatives like David Brooks  To read the sober truth about it, don’t miss the great Harold Meyerson in Wednesday’s Washington Post, where he explains what it really is: “the repeal of the 20th Century.”

The cover under which Ryan and other Republicans operate is their concern for the deficit and national debt. But Ryan blows that cover by proposing to reduce the top income tax rate to just 25 percent. He imposes the burden for reducing our debt not on the bankers who forced our government to spend trillions averting a collapse but on seniors and the poor. The reductions in aid to the poor, says the budget blueprint that Ryan released, will be made “to ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” That’s a pretty good description of America’s top bankers, but Ryan’s budget showers them with tax cuts.

And for the most amazing television experience of the 21st Century, don’t miss The Kennedys, which is so much worse than anything you have read about it.  The first challenge will be finding ReelzChannel  on your cable box (131 for Time-Warner subscribers in Manhattan.)

Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker and Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times both gave the miniseries mixed reviews, and praised the acting of Tom Wilkinson–who is not quite as terrible as everyone else in this disaster.   Whatever Franklin and Stanley are smoking, FCP doesn’t want any.

Forget about all the historical inventions: they are overwhelmed by pathetic writing, terrible acting–and the cheesiest wardrobe in cable history.  Whatever else you think about him, Jack Kennedy wore the most beautiful shirts of any modern American president; here, they are all off the rack from Filene’s Basement.  

Spoiler alert: if you can’t Tivo it, you’ll be bombarded by what must be the longest commercial interruptions in television history.

                                                                                           -30-

Barack Obama, speaking about Libya, and Muammar Gaddafi, the longest-lasting dictator in the world

Above the Fold

    I think it does show a huge amount of decay, distrust, and breakdown at the heart of the
Gaddafi regime.
    –British Prime Minister  David Cameron, speaking Thursday about the defection of Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa in London.   

 
    Although the Libyan rebels have been pushed back sharply by Gaddafi loyalists during the last forty-eight hours, the defections of Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa and former foreign minister Ali Abdussalam Treki (who only last month was appointed to replace the Libyan mission to the United Nations, after it resigned en masse), strongly suggest that the center around the world’s longest-serving dictator is dissolving so quickly, there may soon be no one left to cling to him except for his own sons.

    Koussa was a Gaddafi intimate (and former Libyan intelligence chief) who should bring the NATO coalition crucial information about 
Gaddafi’s remaining capabilities.  He and Treki were the eighth and ninth senior Libyan officials to flee the regime, following the former Justice and Interior Ministers, a former head of Libya’s national planning council, a Gaddafi cousin who was one of his closest advisors—and the Libyan ambassadors to the United States, the United Nations, the Arab League, India, and Indonesia.

    Timesman David Kirkpatrick, who has led splendid coverage of the uprisings in Egypt and Libya,  reported Thursday night that Tripoli residents were “in shock” over the defections of the two former foreign ministers, and “rumors swirled of a cascade of high-level defections.”

    Meanwhile, the chattering classes on both sides of the aisle in Washington remain furious because the Obama administration refuses to predict how the war in Libya will end.  “What is the end game?” is their constant, ridiculous refrain.

    If only the Obama administration were more like its predecessor, there would never be any uncertainty about the outcome of any military operation.  Thus, in February, 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz were both certain that Gen. Eric K. Shinseki had been crazy to suggest that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to pacify Iraq.  Wolfowitz told Congress he was also sure 100,000 would be plenty—partly because there was “no history” of ethnic conflict in Iraq!

    Wolfowitz was equally certain that the upper estimate of the cost of the war in Iraq—$97 billion—was way too high.  The generally accepted figure today is at least $1 trillion.

    But no one on television in Washington can remember anything that happened earlier than the day before yesterday, so the cable crazies (and the echo chamber of the wackosphere) continue to highlight the keen insights of Republican sages (and of quite a few Democrats) into the alleged dangers of the current operation in Libya.

    Donald Trump is worried that Libya could end up as a pawn of Iran because of the allies’ air operation—even though, as the indispensable Juan Cole has pointed out,  “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei roundly condemned the US action in Libya, accusing Washington of seeking a toehold in that country. In other words, bringing up some sort of alleged link of the Benghazi provisional government, which has reached out to Washington, and Iran is about the stupidest thing anyone could say about the situation.”

    Similarly, the brilliant Michelle Bachman opined that, “We don’t know if this is led by Hamas, Hezbollah, or possibly al Qaeda of North Africa. Are we really better off, are United States, our interests better off, if, let’s say, Al-Qaeda of North Africa now runs Libya?”

    Cole noted that “Hezbollah is a Shiite movement of southern Lebanon. There are no Shiites in North Africa, where almost all Muslims are Sunni. Hamas is a Palestinian movement and does not have a branch franchise in Libya. The people of Benghazi and Misrata, together amounting to 1.3 million, the backbone of the liberation movement, are not al-Qaeda, which is not a mass movement. In fact, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is like a few hundred guys and is an Algerian organization. I know, I know, pointing out that Michelle Bachmann has said something uninformed is like pointing out that Lady Gaga has done something outrageous.”

    And then there is Newt Gingrich, a completely discredited demagogue whose only purpose in life is to enrich himself through dubious get-rich-quick schemes—and yet remains among the most popular of all guests on all the Sunday chat shows.  Newt has the distinction of having been strongly in favor of a no fly zone—until Obama implemented one.  Then, of course, Gingrich was totally against it.

    The truth is, the speech that Obama gave earlier this week about Libya embodied all of the qualities which attracted so many of us to him in the first place: He was rational, he was intelligent, he had an impressive grasp of the issues at hand—and he was persuasive.

    While those same Washington talking heads demanded to know whether our action in Libya represented some kind of new Obama doctrine—and if not, why not—the president was careful to explain exactly why what was appropriate for us to do here would not work elsewhere in the region:

    Much of the debate in Washington has put forward a false choice when it comes to Libya. On the one hand, some question why America should intervene at all — even in limited ways — in this distant land. They argue that there are many places in the world where innocent civilians face brutal violence at the hands of their government, and America should not be expected to police the world, particularly when we have so many pressing needs here at home.

    It’s true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs. And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action. But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right. In this particular country — Libya — at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale. We had a unique ability to stop that violence: an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves. We also had the ability to stop Gaddafi’s forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground.

    To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and — more profoundly — our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.

    While Juan Cole has provided the most intelligent defense of the president’s decision from the left, The Economist has performed the same service from the center right.  Its Libyan leader a week ago was refreshingly sane, and—so far—remarkably prescient:

    One of the skeptics’ complaints “is that the West has entered this campaign without defining the mission,” the magazine wrote.  “That is both unfair and true…because dictators do not work to a diplomatic timetable. Colonel Gaddafi’s rapid advance to Benghazi meant that the outside world had to intervene within days or not at all.”

    It’s clear that one reason Obama finally decided to act was that he became convinced that what is actually an extremely modest military operation—especially in comparison with Iraq and Afghanistan-—has at least the potential of achieving an extremely positive outcome.

    As the Economist pointed out,

     Libya is not Iraq. The West has learned through bitter experience to avoid the grievous mistakes it made from the outset of that venture. For one thing, the current mission is indisputably legal. For another, it has, at least for now, the backing of Libya’s own people and–even allowing for some wobbles from Turkey and the Arab League–of most Arab and Muslim countries.  Libya’s population is a quarter the size of Iraq’s, and the country should be easier to control: almost all its people, a more homogeneous lot albeit with sharp tribal loyalties, live along the Mediterranean coastal strip. If Colonel Gaddafi’s state crumbles, the West should not seek to disband his army or the upper echelons of his administration, as it foolishly did in Iraq. The opposition’s interim national council contains secular liberals, Islamists, Muslim Brothers, tribal figures and recent defectors from the camp of Colonel Gaddafi. The West should recognize the council as a transitional government, provided that it promises to hold multiparty elections. Above all, there must be no military occupation by outsiders. It is tempting to put time-limits on such a venture, but that would be futile.

    The Economist’s conclusion is especially on target:

    Success in Libya is not guaranteed—how could it be? It is a violent country that may well succumb to more violence, and will not become a democracy any time soon. But its people deserve to be spared the dictator’s gun and be given a chance of a better future.

    And if Obama had remained motionless while Gaddafi had carried out his planned massacre of the rebel residents of Benghazi, the reaction of Republicans and everyone else would, of course, have been vastly more violent than any of the criticism the president has endured so far for acting—carefully, and intelligently.

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