I don't know that I agree with his final paragraph, and unfortunately even if I could get my otherwise-intelligent Democrat coworkers to read this, they're so steeped in the "Bush LIED to get us into war" mindset that they won't accept the possibility that reality contradicts them. The nightly news tells them they're right, you see.
What if Mr. Wilson spoke falsely when he asserted that his wife, who was not in fact under "non-official cover," had nothing to do with his visit to Niger? What if he was wrong in stating that Iraqi envoys had never even expressed an interest in Niger's only export? (Most European intelligence services stand by their story that there was indeed such a Baathist initiative.) What if his main friends in Niger were the very people he was supposed to be investigating?
I think they done found a replacement for Kofi Annan.
It doesn't seem to want to accept my WSJ login. If this is the article "What Goes Around Comes Around" then there were a couple of paragraphs that caught my attention:
"I know some apparently sensible people who are prepared to believe, still, that a Machiavellian cabal in the White House wanted to punish Joseph Wilson by exposing his wife to embarrassment and even to danger."
"What if Mr. Wilson spoke falsely when he asserted that his wife, who was not in fact under "non-official cover," had nothing to do with his visit to Niger? What if he was wrong in stating that Iraqi envoys had never even expressed an interest in Niger's only export?"
There *does* seem to be widespread agreement that the White House did organize a deliberate attempt to discredit Mr. Wilson personally? I've been thinking about that a lot. It seems to me that it is prima facie unethical for the government to attack the personal credibility of someone like Mr. Wilson. His charges were, at least on the face of it, serious.
If those charges were bogus, or irrelevant, the administration could easily have vigorously defended itself by sticking to the substance (or lack thereof) of the charges. That they choose to spend their time, at the taxpayer's expense to discredit a critic as well as a critique, seems prima facie unethical. It has also undermined the credibility, and hence future effectiveness of the administration.
The public can't know in advance whether a whistleblower is a Sherron Watkins or Morton Thiokol engineer who does know what they're talking about, or a Tom Zarek who is completely duplicitous and evil but nonetheless uses at least somewhat true statements as a weapon. As in open source software, publicly (and honestly) audited financial statements, etc it seems to be better just to surface the information and deal with it, then attack the messenger.
There *does* seem to be widespread agreement that the White House did organize a deliberate attempt to discredit Mr. Wilson personally?
This is indeed a widely held opinion -- if you talk to the MSM and Democrat partisans. If that constitutes "widespread agreement", then we can just shut down the two-party system and let the Democrats run everything.
So far, I have seen no evidence of an effort to "discredit Mr. Wilson personally". All I have seen is an effort to let reporters know that they shouldn't credulously accept his words at face value, and might not be a reliable source. The idea that telling the other side of the story constitutes a personal attack is one I'm not ready to accept.
Aside from the completely discredit charge of outing, where was the personal attack?
Martin: Mr. Novak's original article mentions that administration officials mentioned that his wife recommended him:
"Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report."
What possible bearing could who Mr. Wilson's wife was have on the case, except to cast doubt Mr. Wilson's suitability for the position?
Whereas a statement like:
"CIA officials did not regard Wilson's intelligence as definitive, being based primarily on what the Niger officials told him and probably would have claimed under any circumstances."
focusses purely on the information content.
I am not aware of definitive evidence, mind you, that there was indeed a plan to discredit Mr. Wilson.
What possible bearing could who Mr. Wilson's wife was have on the case, except to cast doubt Mr. Wilson's suitability for the position?
I agree that that was the reason. Where we disagree, it appears, is that I don't consider questioning a source's credentials to constitute a personal attack. Let us assume an extreme example, one which we know to be false, but will demonstrate my point. Suppose that Mr. Wilson were in fact a delusional schizophrenic who had never actually been to Niger. (No jokes, here, I'm trying to make a point.) It would not be a personal attack to point out that his statements were unreliable.
Now in normal circumstances, I would agree that dragging family relations into the discussion makes it personal; but nepotism makes the personal a public matter. Ms. Plame's recommendation made her a part of the public discussion, and had direct bearing over whether Mr. Wilson was qualified to make the statements that he made.
And since he has discredited all of his op-ed piece in his Senate testimony, I think it's clear in hindsight that people were right to question his credibility.
You're not naive, Robert, you're just not thinking very clearly.
There is nothing in the least bit wrong with attempting to discredit someone personally *if* it's an honest criticism.
Why bring up his wife? Gaaaaah! I'm trying really, really, REALLY hard not to be deeply sarcastic here. In fact I had to erase what I wrote and stop for a bit. So now I try again.
Robert: Joe Wilson is a highly partisan Democrat with no particular expertise on the WMD issue who only got his job through his wife who works at CIA.
That is not a smear on his wife. It's not illegal or unethical to say. It's not anything but a reasonable assertion about his character and his credentials and his credibility. It's not an attack on his wife except an assertion that she used her job to pull strings for her spouse, which is extremely common in Washington and no great embarassment--and working at the CIA is not in any way a secret or protected status.
Martin: Good points. The key point to me seems to be when, how, and why you check credentials. Prior to sending Mr. Wilson on a mission one would presumably inquire about education, relevant experience, conflicts of interest, etc.
After the mission is complete one has to check their output. Sometimes you can do it yourself - or sometimes, because of asymmetric information, you get an alternate expert opinion. (I.e. call the "Car Talk" guys and see if the mechanic swindled you). Perhaps you would be tempted to go back and recheck someone's credentials. What doesn't wash with me, however, is that there doesn't seem to *be* evidence that Mr. Wilson's credentials were awry, or his failure to find the desired evidence was in any related to nepotism.
Do you happen to know for sure if Ms. Plame in any way made her recommendation part of the public discourse though. Presumably recommendations between the CIA and the White House would be confidential, no?
From here it looks very much like the administration had several hundred balls in the air at once, and someone determined that it would be worthwhile to send some minor functionary to Nigeria to ask a few questions. It wasn't a priority at all, but someone wanted it done. A recommendation came through from CIA to send this guy, and those making the decision didn't really recognize the name. It didn't seem all that important so someone rubber stamped it.
Once they perceived that he was a partisan with an agenda, they decided to respond by just telling the truth: "Ah, this guy's not that important and he's not credible."
Watching people labor monumentally to turn this into something deeply sinister and evil is like watching a slow-motion trainwreck. The truth is that there's an old game in Washington, which is "throw enough sh*t on the wall and some of it will stick." Every White House faces that, and every White House (yes, all of them in living memory) has had people whose job was to respond to dirty tricks from partisans on the other side. The White House appears to have (correctly) perceived Joe Wilson that way, and responded by simply dismissing him as a partisan with an agenda who slipped through because his wife pulled a couple of strings on his behalf.
You can disagree with them but honestly, if you study history of the workings of government this is literally trivial.
Dean: you are right, I'm not thinking clearly - this just started bugging me the other day and I'm still stewing over it.
I'm on the fence about the legitimacy of personal criticism in a discussion of ideas. A personal critique only seems ok to me if it's relevant. Kind of like the Turing test - if it's a good idea, what difference does it make who said it.
In the case of the government responding to an op-ed piece like Mr. Wilson's I place an additional burden on them - after all they work for us. If you ever go to a local town council, you hear all sorts of people make all sorts of wild, inflammatory, and accusing statements. Local officials rarely resort to personal attacks, and however lop-sided, to me is as it should be.
On the surface, again lifting from the original Novak article, ex ante Mr. Wilson seems to have had plenty of experience. If he needed to be a WMD expert, shouldn't that have been vetted in advance.
"That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.
"
What bugs me about the nepotism business ex post is that the report was already done. At that point I don't care about the nepotism, I care about the contents and reliability of the report. There seems something downright intellectually dishonest about pulling his wife out of a hat at that point because we were then evaluating his past performance, not his future performance.
But as I said, I may be naive, and as you said, I may not be thinking clearly.
I think they done found a replacement for Kofi Annan.
"I know some apparently sensible people who are prepared to believe, still, that a Machiavellian cabal in the White House wanted to punish Joseph Wilson by exposing his wife to embarrassment and even to danger."
"What if Mr. Wilson spoke falsely when he asserted that his wife, who was not in fact under "non-official cover," had nothing to do with his visit to Niger? What if he was wrong in stating that Iraqi envoys had never even expressed an interest in Niger's only export?"
There *does* seem to be widespread agreement that the White House did organize a deliberate attempt to discredit Mr. Wilson personally? I've been thinking about that a lot. It seems to me that it is prima facie unethical for the government to attack the personal credibility of someone like Mr. Wilson. His charges were, at least on the face of it, serious.
If those charges were bogus, or irrelevant, the administration could easily have vigorously defended itself by sticking to the substance (or lack thereof) of the charges. That they choose to spend their time, at the taxpayer's expense to discredit a critic as well as a critique, seems prima facie unethical. It has also undermined the credibility, and hence future effectiveness of the administration.
The public can't know in advance whether a whistleblower is a Sherron Watkins or Morton Thiokol engineer who does know what they're talking about, or a Tom Zarek who is completely duplicitous and evil but nonetheless uses at least somewhat true statements as a weapon. As in open source software, publicly (and honestly) audited financial statements, etc it seems to be better just to surface the information and deal with it, then attack the messenger.
Maybe I'm too naive.
This is indeed a widely held opinion -- if you talk to the MSM and Democrat partisans. If that constitutes "widespread agreement", then we can just shut down the two-party system and let the Democrats run everything.
So far, I have seen no evidence of an effort to "discredit Mr. Wilson personally". All I have seen is an effort to let reporters know that they shouldn't credulously accept his words at face value, and might not be a reliable source. The idea that telling the other side of the story constitutes a personal attack is one I'm not ready to accept.
Aside from the completely discredit charge of outing, where was the personal attack?
"Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report."
What possible bearing could who Mr. Wilson's wife was have on the case, except to cast doubt Mr. Wilson's suitability for the position?
Whereas a statement like:
"CIA officials did not regard Wilson's intelligence as definitive, being based primarily on what the Niger officials told him and probably would have claimed under any circumstances."
focusses purely on the information content.
I am not aware of definitive evidence, mind you, that there was indeed a plan to discredit Mr. Wilson.
I agree that that was the reason. Where we disagree, it appears, is that I don't consider questioning a source's credentials to constitute a personal attack. Let us assume an extreme example, one which we know to be false, but will demonstrate my point. Suppose that Mr. Wilson were in fact a delusional schizophrenic who had never actually been to Niger. (No jokes, here, I'm trying to make a point.) It would not be a personal attack to point out that his statements were unreliable.
Now in normal circumstances, I would agree that dragging family relations into the discussion makes it personal; but nepotism makes the personal a public matter. Ms. Plame's recommendation made her a part of the public discussion, and had direct bearing over whether Mr. Wilson was qualified to make the statements that he made.
And since he has discredited all of his op-ed piece in his Senate testimony, I think it's clear in hindsight that people were right to question his credibility.
There is nothing in the least bit wrong with attempting to discredit someone personally *if* it's an honest criticism.
Why bring up his wife? Gaaaaah! I'm trying really, really, REALLY hard not to be deeply sarcastic here. In fact I had to erase what I wrote and stop for a bit. So now I try again.
Robert: Joe Wilson is a highly partisan Democrat with no particular expertise on the WMD issue who only got his job through his wife who works at CIA.
That is not a smear on his wife. It's not illegal or unethical to say. It's not anything but a reasonable assertion about his character and his credentials and his credibility. It's not an attack on his wife except an assertion that she used her job to pull strings for her spouse, which is extremely common in Washington and no great embarassment--and working at the CIA is not in any way a secret or protected status.
Okay?
After the mission is complete one has to check their output. Sometimes you can do it yourself - or sometimes, because of asymmetric information, you get an alternate expert opinion. (I.e. call the "Car Talk" guys and see if the mechanic swindled you). Perhaps you would be tempted to go back and recheck someone's credentials. What doesn't wash with me, however, is that there doesn't seem to *be* evidence that Mr. Wilson's credentials were awry, or his failure to find the desired evidence was in any related to nepotism.
Do you happen to know for sure if Ms. Plame in any way made her recommendation part of the public discourse though. Presumably recommendations between the CIA and the White House would be confidential, no?
Once they perceived that he was a partisan with an agenda, they decided to respond by just telling the truth: "Ah, this guy's not that important and he's not credible."
Watching people labor monumentally to turn this into something deeply sinister and evil is like watching a slow-motion trainwreck. The truth is that there's an old game in Washington, which is "throw enough sh*t on the wall and some of it will stick." Every White House faces that, and every White House (yes, all of them in living memory) has had people whose job was to respond to dirty tricks from partisans on the other side. The White House appears to have (correctly) perceived Joe Wilson that way, and responded by simply dismissing him as a partisan with an agenda who slipped through because his wife pulled a couple of strings on his behalf.
You can disagree with them but honestly, if you study history of the workings of government this is literally trivial.
I'm on the fence about the legitimacy of personal criticism in a discussion of ideas. A personal critique only seems ok to me if it's relevant. Kind of like the Turing test - if it's a good idea, what difference does it make who said it.
In the case of the government responding to an op-ed piece like Mr. Wilson's I place an additional burden on them - after all they work for us. If you ever go to a local town council, you hear all sorts of people make all sorts of wild, inflammatory, and accusing statements. Local officials rarely resort to personal attacks, and however lop-sided, to me is as it should be.
On the surface, again lifting from the original Novak article, ex ante Mr. Wilson seems to have had plenty of experience. If he needed to be a WMD expert, shouldn't that have been vetted in advance.
"That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.
"
What bugs me about the nepotism business ex post is that the report was already done. At that point I don't care about the nepotism, I care about the contents and reliability of the report. There seems something downright intellectually dishonest about pulling his wife out of a hat at that point because we were then evaluating his past performance, not his future performance.
But as I said, I may be naive, and as you said, I may not be thinking clearly.