There has been a good deal of murmuring in the blogosphere this week about the new
Seymour Hersh article in the new
New Yorker. Sy Hersh may be one of the finest investigative reporters working today, particularly on military and intelligence stories (some times I think he is the
only investigative reporter working today.) If you haven't seen the story yet, here is the link:
The Stovepipe
The story is quite long, so I gave you the printable link. I don't know about you, but even reading a long newspaper story on my screen isn't my favorite thing to do, or maybe that's just my presbyopian eyes. Need new bifocals.....Anyway, the reason why I'm putting it up tonight, when I'm not going to write about it until tomorrow, is that it is long, and I think you might want to have a chance to look at it before we talk about it, it's a fairly complex piece.
And I know there is a night owl or two on this site. From
Comments on one of my Diary entries:
Angry spouses ...
At 2:30 a.m.:
HER: Are you STILL on the computer?
ME: Yes.
HER: What ARE you doing?
ME: Reading a post by Melanie.
HER: WHO?
ME: Uh ... a big reader with good judgment named Melanie.
HER: One of the loudest, longest sighs ever.
Don't you go getting me in trouble again, Melanie.
========================
On Tuesday last week, pretty much out of the blue, I got an email from Kos asking me if I wanted to join the weekend guest posting team. I thought about that for about a nanosecond, because I'd already downloaded the Hersh piece and I knew what I wanted to write about. I came up out of my hidey hole in the blogoshere to begin commenting in earnest here at Kos when the Plame Affair broke last summer, and the inside baseball stuff that comes with living in Washington is my meat and potatoes.
Tomorrow I'm going to introduce a discussion about all the intel stories and backstories. And I'm going to be forced to write rather compassionately about the career professionals who work in some parts of the government I don't care for much, so you might want to save it for posterity. These are the people I go to church with, meet at the farmers' market or the movies, they are my neighbors. When I become the next I.F. Stone, you can tell the world you "knew her back in the day" when she was a mere guest blogger. This post has sort of been gestating with me all week since Kos's invitation, I want to link together some overarching themes about what is going on in our government right now, which will allow us to engage in some speculation about what it all might mean to next year's election.
As a commentor down the page noted, we are going to have to learn some new vocabulary for this discussion, from "frogmarching" to "stovepiping."
Here is
Josh Marshall's take on the Hersh article. I also bookmarked the Knight-Ridder News Service's
Washington Bureau months ago. Look at the links on the left side of the site, they are all about intel. Clearly, Knight-Ridder thinks this is an important story, and they have been getting some of the prime leaks.
UPDATE: At 7:15 a.m., October 26, 2003
Down the thread, a reader reminds me that
The Nation Washington Editor
David Corn has been all over this story. I've been reading him, too, but forgot. Middle aged brain. Here are some links:
the 9/11 Failures,
Snowflakes: the Rumsfeld Memorandum,
his new book,
and his website for the new book,
the Buzzflash interview. And just for fun, here is the link to
the CIA.
Huh. The Marlins won. Maybe these are the End Times.
UPDATE 2: 8:24 am
Comments was busy overnight. Downthread,
Mary of
The Leftcoaster reminds me that she put up a post with the
timeline of the Niger forgeries/Plame Affair back in July. It's kind of handy to have around.
9:00 am Well, well. It looks like the Kos Frontpage covers today's newscycle.
Josh sums up:
Perhaps this goes without saying, but look at these various controversies: possible subpoenas over White House stonewalling of the 9/11 investigation, the multiple investigations of the pre-war intel on Iraq, the criminal investigation into the Plame disclosure.
There are differences in each, of course. But in each case, fundamentally, we're talking about the same players: the White House and Intelligence Community. Each is coming to a head. It's a combustible mix.
The chat shows should be interesting today.