two sites and much of it at a few others and following just about any link anyone gave me to brilliant close readers like Dan Froomkin and Sidney Blumenthal and Murray Waas if I wasn’t going to sift a few nuggets out of all that data and bring them on home here to POGGE? All I know is that I am now far too intimidated by the encyclopedic minds I’ve met along the way even to attempt an original or independent comment on the trial itself or the many intertangled dramas that led up to it (although I can give you on the flip a modest summary of what smarter people have said, plus one of the real-life flips to end all flips). Anatomy of Criticism Northrop Frye remarks that our trials work according to the structure of classical comedy.
They open on some revelation of a disruption in the social order, the rights and wrongs and truths of which must be unravelled by the action of the play / legal process, and they close with a ritual of some kind that is meant to reestablish a general sense of order. The reading of a verdict hammered out among twelve citizens who have sworn to be fair-minded is not exactly a wedding, the classic happy ending (ha!), but in theory it settles disputes of significance for us all and directs us towards reconciliation.
So much for theory. As weddings tend in real life to lead to many other things (don’t get me started), so will the verdict that the Libby jurors are currently working on (late Wednesday and early yesterday they sent out a request for a flip-chart and easel, Post-Its, masking tape, and documents containing photos of witnesses), in all but one scenario. The jury could acquit, on all five charges, the most serious a single count of obstruction of justice.
Influential voices [still have to find link to David Broder] have argued for acquittal, mainly by trivializing the offence of obstruction. Call me prejudiced, but I have a feeling that those people haven’t been walking through the testimony day by day alongside the jury that called for Post-Its. All the same, the entirely credible Jeralyn Merrit of TalkLeft, Firedoglake, and Huffington Post has worried intelligently and helpfully over the impact on a jury of the questionable credibility of several witnesses.
It would take only one juror to defeat the prosecution’s case against Scooter Libby, which even those who most believe in this investigation concede could stop Patrick Fitzgerald in his tracks. If you’ve been reading and watching Jane, Marcy, Christy, their FDL colleagues and the guest bloggers assembled at Plame House in Washington, though, not to mention the firepups in comments (a number speaking from backgrounds in the law), and especially if you’ve read Froomkin’s and Blumenthal’s pellucid summaries of Tuesday’s closing arguments, you are not expecting anything like acquittal on all charges. Nor do you believe that Patrick Fitzgerald has gone as far as he means to go, even with a conviction in the case against Scooter Libby.
After literally years of keeping his public pronouncements about the case to an absolute minimum, Fitzgerald yesterday finally let slip a bit of the speculation that many of us have long suspected has lurked just beneath the surface of his investigation. Suddenly it wasn't just the defendant alone, it was "they" who decided to tell reporters about Wilson's wife working for the CIA. "To them," Fitzgerald said, "she wasn't a person, she was an argument.
" And it was pretty clear who "they" was: Libby and his boss, Cheney. Back in the summer of 2003, after former ambassador Joseph Wilson had dared suggest that the administration manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq, "they" were obsessed with denying that Wilson had been sent on his mission to Niger as a result of a request for information from the vice president's office, Fitzgerald said. "They" saw his wife Valerie Plame's role in suggesting him for the trip as a way to cast suspicion on his mission and his claim.
In Fitzgerald's last words to the jury, what had been a somewhat innocuous-sounding memo suddenly became something close to a smoking gun documenting Cheney's encouragement to his minions out to spread the word about Wilson's wife. As Fitzgerald explained it: Right after Cheney first read Wilson's op-ed -- and wrote the question, "[D]id his wife send him on a junket?" in the margins of his own carefully clipped copy-- Cheney dictated "talking points" for his staff to use with the press about Wilson's mission.
As a result, the lead talking point morphed from "The Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger" in a version drafted the day before by Cheney press aide Cathie Martin to "It is not clear who authorized Joe Wilson's trip to Niger" in the vice president's version. Without quite coming out and saying so directly, Fitzgerald strongly implied that was an invitation for White House officials to talk about how Plame played a role in her husband's selection for the mission. "There's something funny about how they want to talk about who sent him, but they don't want to talk about the wife," Fitzgerald said, mocking the defense's position that those two were somehow entirely separate issues.
Fitzgerald proved himself to be as well a great actor and more, a great scriptwriter, when he whirled defence counsel Ted Wells’s melodramatic closing lines and performance (“the madness of this prosecution” ...
“Give Scooter Libby back to me” ...
*sob*) right back at him in his own startling opening (“Madness! Madness! Outrageous!
” – which apparently woke more than a few of the assembled up) and then closed powerfully with his own plea to the jury to “give the truth back” to the American people and their judicial system. I would call that spinning on a dime except, as a commenter at FDL observes, Fitz has been focused on precisely that principle since the press conference of 28 October 2005 at which he announced the Libby indictment. So now we wait while the jury work away at their Post-Its and portraits.
Some eat popcorn; some gnaw on their knuckles; some refresh FDL obsessively; and some look at groovy pics of the Prospero of this drama. Sorry, but I have to do this. I’ve had two great companions-in-popcorn through the – gosh: is it years?
– that I’ve followed Plamegate. The first is pogge hisself, who patiently educated a lot of us, first at babble and then at Bread and Roses, until he had us hooked. As we all know, though, there are some things pogge is not going to be doing, and swooning over Patrick Fitzgerald is definitely one of them.
But then I met Goddamnitkitty of Hope and Onions, and I tell you, she’s ‘way further gone than I am. For one thing she knows more than I do – she actually reads the evidence at the DoJ site. Even better, though, she knows where all the great Fitz gossip and pics are, and she is absolutely shameless in tempting me with fresh tidbits morning after morning.
What would I do without her? So I close by thanking both pogge and GDKitty, and then stealing from her this classic shot of our romantic hero doing a bit of a Monroe-ish flip of the skirts ..
. on his way to flipping the Cheney conspiracy back into self-destructive hyperdrive. Posted by skdadl at 09:23 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack Judge threatens to shut down Air India inquiry The head of the Air India inquiry says he will shut down the probe into the 1985 disaster unless a dispute about how much evidence will be made public is resolved.
Former Supreme Court justice John Major called a halt to proceedings Monday until March 9 and said he would not resume the hearings if portions of documents from the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service remain secret. Major has said repeatedly he wants most of the proceedings to be accessible to the families who lost loved ones and to the media. He said Monday it would take years of court proceedings to get the thousands of documents declassified, which would make his inquiry "disappear into the quicksand of bureaucracy.
" The impasse over what evidence can be made public has a mild resemblance to the Maher Arar inquiry, the CBC's Terry Milewski reported. A mild resemblance? I seem to recall an 89 page report from CSIS in which every single word was blacked out until public pressure forced a do-over.
I also recall a long hiatus in the public hearings while thousands of supposedly secret documents were reviewed and testimony took place in camera There were frequent expressions of frustation by O'Connor and the inquiry's counsel about the feds insistence on keeping secrets. Posted by pogge at 12:34 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack Janet Malcolm’s review of Allen Shawn’s memoir , which is unfortunately behind the subscription wall (although you can buy access to it for a week for $3, I believe). Both Shawn’s and Malcolm’s names may ring bells for readers of various backgrounds.
Malcolm’s turf as a writer has long been that shifting, uncertain point where reporting, the law, literary analysis, and psychoanalysis meet, and it is always fascinating to watch her use the tools of one trade to peel back the proprieties of one of the others. In her book about Joe McGinniss’s research for his book about convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, Malcolm famously remarked: “Every journalist knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She survived a years-long defamation suit brought by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and then she dared to tangle with the many keepers of Sylvia Plath’s flame, among them the formidable Olwyn Hughes, sister of Plath's husband Ted Hughes, in itself a measure of sheer nerve.
Malcolm has occasionally set my teeth on edge: she can be oddly block-headed about the most ordinary human failings, and yet she can enter into the minds of people on the edge with compelling accuracy, and sometimes, as with Allen Shawn, moving sympathy. Shawn is an American composer, pianist, and professor. He is also a son of William Shawn, legendary editor of the from 1952 to 1987.
His older brother is Wallace Shawn, the tiny perfect playwright and actor I first fell in love with when some smarter friends dragged a reluctant moi off to see , which left me walking several inches above the pavement for weeks afterwards. From Malcolm’s review we learn that Shawn’s memoir is partly about his family, partly about his adult struggle with agoraphobia, with the mysteries of phobias and the severe mental distress he has witnessed in his family – his father’s phobias, his mother’s depression, and most affectingly of all, his twin sister’s autism. There is no easy transcendence in a history like that, and yet Malcolm manages to weave Shawn’s simple, lucid testimony into her own canny analysis of a notably uncanny family to marvellous effect.
From their quite different perspectives – Malcolm, the cool analyst, and Shawn, the bereaved innocent – both resist sentimentalizing the profound tragedy at the heart of his family’s story, the day that an eight-year-old lost his twin to an institution and was plunged into a mental war between feelings of relief and feelings of loss that has never ended. We know from her earlier books that Malcolm will always home in on the cracks in anyone’s façade of niceness. In Allen Shawn, she has met an author who is ahead of her in admitting his own “dark” side, as she is clearly pleased to discover: The "good" self set out to write a book about his phobias and phobia in general, but the "bad" self ensured that the book would defy the conventions of its genre and become a "better, darker" thing.
As Allen Shawn circles his mysterious putative subject, he is drawn to the mysteries that everyone who thinks bumps up against. When he writes about the death anxiety he experienced as a child—lying terrified in the dark at the thought that "there was no help, that my parents could not help me, and that there was no escape from the fact of it, not even some special hint of a way out that might just apply to me"—he is hardly describing thinking exclusive to phobics. Many— perhaps most—normal children and adolescents are terrified, if not traumatized, by the idea of mortality.
Shawn returns to the subject in a poetic passage that suddenly and for no apparent reason floats into a late chapter, and takes on the weight of a vatic message: And here is Shawn himself, facing that mystery and finding words for it: Life's unknowns are often knowable; many can be rehearsed or at least imagined. But death is surrounded by an infinite fog on an ocean without end. It is perhaps simplistic to say it, but one can understand death only in terms of its opposite, life.
For me, it was always the not returning part of it that made me start up in the dark, suffocating. Yet after my father, who had never even ridden on an airplane, disappeared into that fog, it began to take on other meanings, and I began to dimly see that the not returning part of it is there with us all along, inside us, from the moment we appear into the bewildering new stimuli of the world, even from the moment we start to form out of the fertilized ovum. Now that my mother is gone, it is clearer still.
There is only forward motion, and there always was only forward motion. There was never any turning back. Many of us have struggled privately with the puzzles of our own minds or those of the people we love and sometimes fear for.
Libraries of practical, useful books appear every season and the websites proliferate for those who go looking for help in understanding the enigma of the human brain and all the ills to which it may be heir or prey. I’m not discounting the practical, useful books, either: I have my own collection of them, and they help. But every once in a while someone who has struggled with his or her own mind manages to break through to a special receptiveness, as Malcolm puts it, to the subjectivity of others, and she sees that achievement in Shawn’s telling of his family’s many stories as well as his confrontation with himself.
I’ve never read Allen Shawn before, although I’ve read and watched his brother Wallace, so I am entirely prepared to believe the concluding paragraph of Malcolm’s review: The editor, the playwright, and the essayist are bound by a thread of—what? Is the word "innocence"? Allen uses it to describe his father's capacity for listening to writers, in opposition to the word "jaded.
" The writing of both Wallace and Allen Shawn has, as the conversation of William Shawn had, a rare quality of cleanness—as if it came from a spring rather than from the stale pool of received ideas that most talk and writing comes from. Such purity would be chastening were it not accompanied by a playfulness that takes away the sting and puts in a kind of good word for us all. The practical, useful books come and go – they will be overtaken eventually by even more practical, useful books, and that’s as it should be.
But some testaments to the spirit will never be dated, and Shawn’s memoir sounds like one of those to me. two sites and much of it at a few others and following just about any link anyone gave me to brilliant close readers like Dan Froomkin and Sidney Blumenthal and Murray Waas if I wasn’t going to sift a few nuggets out of all that data and bring them on home here to POGGE?
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