Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Who did I piss off in this town?

That's what former Miami Commissioner Arthur Teele asked Herald columnist Jim DeFede over the phone last Wednesday afternoon. Not long afterward, Teele walked into the lobby of this newspaper and made a show of shooting himself.

For those who cared about him, and there were many, the grief is deep and scorching. It might seem a harsh time for blunt words, and there's no joy in delivering them.

But facts are facts. Teele was a complicated person who did many good things. He also veered disgracefully astray. Even through the tears and tributes, that cold truth looms. And although he's gone, it's not too late to answer his question: Who did he piss off?

He pissed off the law.

If the evidence is to be believed -- and there's a mountain of it -- he schemed, scammed and ripped off taxpayers. He took kickbacks. He lied. He stiffed the IRS. Worse, he betrayed the African-American community that he claimed to represent. It appears very much that he was corrupt, and that's why he got in trouble.

• Death of a local pol, part two
• Death of a local pol ... media overkill?

On matters of civil rights and affirmative action, there are several memos in which Roberts privately denounced a liberal program or position, but urged his bosses to try to avoid confronting the issue. In September 1982, for example, he wrote a memo preparing Smith for a meeting with Coretta Scott King, who wanted Smith to renew a $250,000 grant for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center.

In reality, Roberts wrote, ''the only reason for the grant was the political ties" between Mrs. King and the former administrator of the grant program, and the money had been squandered by poor management. But in Smith's meeting with King, Roberts advised, the attorney general should praise the program's goals, express ''pleasure" that the federal government could be of assistance, but explain that no further funds were available.

And in a 1981 memo, Roberts wrote a deeply skeptical review of a report outlining the need for affirmative action. Roberts wrote that the report was the ''swan song" of the outgoing Carter-era chairman of the US Commission on Civil Rights. ''The logic of the report is perfectly circular: the evidence of structural discrimination consists of disparate results, so it is only cured when 'correct' results are achieved through affirmative action quotas," Roberts wrote, later adding that a certain minority recruitment had failed because ''the affirmative action program required the recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates."

Nevertheless, Roberts wrote to Smith, there was no reason to be candid about that view: ''I have drafted an innocuous reply to [the civil rights commission chairman]. The report is attached, although I do not recommend reading it."

Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper decided his interests were not the same as those of New York Times reporter Judith Miller. It's true that Cooper cooperated about Libby early on, as did Russert, Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler, and then balked at getting a second subpoena for other sources. I've reported Judith Miller's take on that several times, most recently here.

The more I'm reading about Judy Miller and her actions leading up to and during the early days of the war, and then through the unfolding Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal, the more I’m struck by the special access and relationships she enjoyed with many of the key players in the Iraq debacle (which, at the end of the day, is really what Plamegate is all about).

For starters, of course, we have her still unfolding involvement in the Plame leak. Earlier this month, Howard Kurtz reported that Miller and Libby spoke a few days before Novak outed Plame -- and I’m hearing that the Libby/Miller conversation occurred over breakfast in Washington. Did Valerie Plame come up -- and, if so, who brought her up? There is no question that Miller was angry at Joe Wilson… and continues to be. A social acquaintance of Miller told me that, once, when she spoke of Wilson, it was with “a passionate and heated disgust that went beyond the political and included an irrelevant bit of deeply personal innuendo about him, her mouth twisting in hatred.”

Miller’s special relationships go much further than Scooter Libby, Richard Perle and the rest of the neocon establishment. Take her involvement as an embedded reporter during the war with the Pentagon’s Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha -- the unit charged with hunting down Saddam’s WMD. As extensively reported by both Kurtz and New York Magazine’s Franklin Foer, Miller’s time with the unit was highly unusual.

First, there was the fact that she landed the plumb assignment in the first place. It would give her first dibs on the biggest story of the war… the hoped-for reveal of Saddam’s much-touted WMD (with much of the touting done by Miller herself and her special sources). Was this the reward for her pro-administration prewar reporting?

Foer cites military and New York Times sources as saying that Miller’s assignment was so sensitive that Don Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Once embedded, Miller acted as much more than a reporter. Kurtz quotes one military officer as saying that the MET Alpha unit became a “Judith Miller team.” Another officer said that Miller “came in with a plan. She was leading them… She ended up almost hijacking the mission.” A third officer, a senior staffer of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha was a part, put it this way: “It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better.”

What did Miller do to create such an impression? According to Kurtz, she wasn’t afraid to throw her weight around, threatening to write critical stories and complain to her friends in very high places if things didn’t go her way. “Judith,” said an Army officer, “was always issuing threats of either going to the New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat.”

In the Alice in Wonderland world of the Plame/Rove story, Judy Miller, who worked hand-in-glove with the Bush administration to publish bogus stories about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear program, is a hero -- for going to jail to protect, once again, her friends in the administration. And Time-Warner, which turned over Matt Cooper’s notes (for the wrong reasons -- because of Time-Warner’s corporate interests -- but that’s another story) is the villain.

Yet it may be Cooper’s testimony that finally sinks Rove. So who’s the hero and what’s the public interest?

• Mining the Huffpo: Judy, Judy, Judy
• Leak, leak, leak, drip, drip, drip
• There's something about Judy

I once saw promotional material for my colleague, columnist Carl Hiaasen, in which Carl said -- and I paraphrase -- ''They don't pay me to hold hands with my readers and sing Kumbayah.'' That quote has always stayed with me.

Because he's right. It is not the news media's job to spare feelings. Rather, it is media's job to put the corrupt, the inept, the mendacious, the venal, the hypocritical and the plain stupid ''on blast,'' as the kids say, i.e., to publicize their sins and misdeeds broadly. To speak truth to power and truth about power. To call spades spades.

DEHUMANIZING OUR SUBJECTS

It is an unavoidable byproduct of that process that we make people piñatas, objects for others to line up and take a whack. It happened to Bill Clinton, happened to Robert Bork, happened to John Rocker, happened to Arthur Teele.

I intend no apology for, denial of or absolution of those men's sins, real or perceived. My only point is that universal derision has this way of objectifying people, making them not people anymore at all, but caricatures, symbols of this social failing or that human weakness. It makes them seem not quite flesh, not really blood, so that you and I can take our whacks without concern that the thing on the receiving end really feels the blows.

But every once in awhile, you are reminded -- brutally -- otherwise.

Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.

But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.

This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn't the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)… but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn't an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn't to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson's motives. Which Novak did.

Amazingly, however, even as her reporting has been debunked -- and her sources discredited -- Miller has steadfastly refused to apologize for her role in misleading the public in the lead up to the war. Indeed, in an interview with the author of Bush's Brain, James Moore, she, in the words of Moore, "remained righteously indignant, unwilling to accept that she had goofed in the grandest of fashions", telling him: "I was proved fucking right."

As recently as March 2005, in an appearance at Berkeley, she stubbornly refused to express regret. Indeed, she showed that she shares a key attitude with the Bush administration: an unwillingness to admit mistakes when faced with new realities. She even compared herself to the president, saying that she was getting the same information he was getting… and suggested that since he hadn't apologized, why should she?

• Leak, leak, leak, drip, drip, drip
• There's something about Judy

President Bush postponed his visit to the Boy Scout National Jamboree in central Virginia until Sunday so that officials could be sure to make appropriate plans for handling any heat problems in the crowd, White House officials said today.


Officials said last night that Bush would come to the Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill today after storms that moved through the region forced him to cancel a planned appearance yesterday. But those plans were scrapped this morning as Scout officials dealt with the aftereffects from the weather. More than 300 Scouts had to be treated for heat problems, including dehydration and light-headedness, after waiting in the blazing sun for more than two hours in their dress uniforms to see Bush.

The Boy Scouts marched onto the field singing, plopping down in the grass to wait for President Bush. But hours later, the news that Bush couldn't make it was drowned out by sirens and shouts as hundreds fell ill because of the blistering heat.

... Despite temperatures in the high 90s yesterday, hundreds of Scouts stood in long security lines in the afternoon and then sat waiting in an open field for the president. Supplies of ice and water were provided to the Scouts, but still many succumbed to the heat. According to the AP, soldiers from the fort helped carry sick Scouts on stretchers to the hospital and emergency workers from surrounding jurisdictions were called in to help treat and transport them.

At the last jamboree four years ago, Bush's trip was also canceled because of bad weather, in which lightning strikes caused minor injuries to two Scouts. He spoke to the group a day later by videotape.

"It was the first thing that crossed my mind, that this was a response to our story, and it filled me with dread" New Times editor Jim Mullin said. "Who knows? It's all speculation."

The writer of the New Times story, Francisco Alvarado, told the Herald it was a "surreal coincidence'' that Teele shot himself the same day his article was published."I really feel bad,'' he said. "I would never want anyone to harm themselves over something I wrote, but at the end of the day, I was just doing my job.''

The one-time Reagan-era appointee at the U.S. Department of Transportation won two terms on the Dade County Commission in the 1990s -- and was elected its powerful chairman three times. He withstood a bitter loss when he ran for county mayor against a rising Alex Penelas, but staged a remarkable second act, rebounding as a Miami city commissioner -- powerful enough to survive an effort to recall him from office.

Long haunted by financial woes and improprieties -- he was once accused of putting a woman arrested on prostitution and grand theft charges on the city payroll to fetch him coffee -- Teele saw his troubles multiply in recent years.

As an attorney, Teele was an influential voice on the City Commission, serving as head of the Community Redevelopment Agency created to renovate blighted areas of Overtown and nearby neighborhoods. But it was the CRA that proved his political unraveling. He was under surveillance in an investigation of CRA-related corruption allegations when he chased and threatened a police officer. And Friday -- just four months after a felony conviction for assault -- his troubles snowballed: He was arraigned on federal charges of fraud and money laundering.

Osama bin usin'?

• June 16: Bo knows Idol
• May 19: Palast calls out Newsweek
• May 11: Fun with orange alerts
• May 9: Will you marry me Bill?
• May 9: Fast and loose Nancy Grace
• April 18: Reaching out to Muslims ...badly
• April 13: Hello Afghanistan, think we'll stay awhile

"We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant or deny the defendant the right to counsel," he said Wednesday. "The message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart."

He added that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have made Americans realize they are vulnerable to terrorism and that some believe "this threat renders our Constitution obsolete ... If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won."

We wrote Sunday about Dick Cheney's personal visits to the Hill to lobby against the inclusion of an anti-torture Amendment in the Pentagon's 2006 spending bill. Today, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist canceled the planned hearing on the bill.

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street. In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

In a strange twist in the investigation, the grand jury -- acting on a tip from Wilson -- has questioned a person who approached Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue on July 8, 2003, six days before his column appeared in The Post and other publications, Wilson said in an interview. The person, whom Wilson declined to identify to The Post, asked Novak about the "yellow cake" uranium matter and then about Wilson, Wilson said. He first revealed that conversation in a book he wrote last year. In the book, he said that he tried to reach Novak on July 8, and that they finally connected on July 10. In that conversation, Wilson said that he did not confirm his wife worked for the CIA but that Novak told him he had obtained the information from a "CIA source."

Novak told the person that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA as a specialist in weapons of mass destruction and had arranged her husband's trip to Niger, Wilson said. Unknown to Novak, the person was a friend of Wilson and reported the conversation to him, Wilson said.

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was
classified.

In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA official he spoke to "asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties' if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name."

Earlier Tuesday, Holloway's stepfather, George Twitty, said two new witnesses had come forward with information about the night she disappeared. One witness told investigators that he saw Joran van der Sloot, the 17-year-old who has been detained as the main suspect, driving to a nightclub across the road from the Marriott Hotel around 2:30 a.m. the night Holloway disappeared, Twitty said.

The witness said van der Sloot tried to hide his face with his hands as he drove to the Racquet Club with two Surinamese brothers, Satish and Deepak Kalpoe, Twitty said. The Kalpoe brothers were detained as suspects and later released.

The stepfather said the account places the three individuals near the hotel beach where van der Sloot says he left 18-year-old Holloway alone the last night she was seen in public.

"What's interesting is the time — 2:30 a.m. — when the three were supposedly on their way home," said Twitty, referring to their previous accounts to investigators. The witness, a gardener whose name was not disclosed, gave his account to investigators on Friday, Twitty said.

A second new witness told a private investigator hired by Holloway's family that she saw van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers drive into the Racquet Club three times that same night. The woman, who lives near the nightclub, has not yet spoken with investigators, he said.

• Has anyone seen this girl?
  

A city press release that promised a ''Ghetto Style Talent Show'' and ''Watermelon Eating Contest'' during a summer camp picnic in the heart of Miami's black community drew sharp outrage on Monday from some Model City residents who live near the park where the events are scheduled.

The press release said, "campers who think they know the true meaning of ghetto style will take to the stage to prove just how ghetto they are.''

''We're not trying to be ghetto, we're trying to come out of the ghetto and be a civilized people,'' said Model City resident Grady Muhammad, who added that the billed talent show portrayed the neighborhood's youth as ''subhuman'' or "animals.'' Likewise, the watermeloneating contest echoes unflattering stereotypes and is ''an insult to black history and black pride,'' said Marvin Dunn, a Florida International University psychology professor and an expert on Miami's historically tense race relations.

• Do you find this racist?