The Next Hurrah

Flu Basics II

by DemFromCT

In the Flu Basics post, I tried to cover just what was going on with bird flu. This brief post will deal with politics and further issues.

First of all, the organization in the US that deals with flu and other infectious diseases is the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Long time readers will remeber a few articles on the politicization of this agency, with much of its focus geared toward bioterror rather than its traditional health role. The current Director, Dr. Julie Gerberding has embraced this role, and while she's not Mike Brown, her role has been more administrative tha hands-on health. For example, despite the threat from pandemic flu, it took the CDC ten years to finalize their draft plan. And it only happened because Mike Leavitt at HHS (who gets a lot of credit, despite bizarre lapses like advice to put cans of tuna fish under the bed) pushed hard.

Part of the issue is who's in charge... DHS, HHS, CDC, or Michael Brown. The political issue is that the CDC is far more trusted than the cabinet agencies, but they are doing a relatively poor job in taking the lead.

Flu Basics

by DemFromCT

For the past few days, I've been over at Daily Kos posting on recent H5N1 developments (WHO Gets More Honest About Indonesia, Flu Stories: Indonesia Clusters Show Evidence Of H2H Spread and H5N1: A Teachable Moment, And An Open Letter) all of which involve some discussion of the Indonesian family that show strong evidence of human-to-human (rather than bird-to-human) spread of H5N1 flu. Although you can go there for details, I thought I'd use this opportunity to explain why this is important.

There are actually several different kinds of flu that get tossed around.

Seasonal flu is either influenza A or influenza B, and generally hits the US between November and March for around six miserable weeks. The onset date differs from year to year and location to location. The annual flu shot protects you from this year's seasonal flu only, and generally gives less-than-perfect results, particularly to the elderly. This is because flu changes from year to year. Because it takes 6 months to manufacture flu vaccine, a committee guesstimates which flu will be coming each year before the season starts. Some years they get it right, and some years they don't.

In fact, there are subtypes within the seasonal flus. Influenza A has the most variation, and is named by the proteins on the viral envelope. There's a hemagglutinin (the H protein), which lets the virus latch on to receptors on epithelial cells in the host's body. And there's a neuraminidase (the N protein) that lets the virus escape from the infected cells (see Flu Wiki's science section for more details). There are actually 16 different Hs and 9 different Ns; only H1 and H2 and H3 occur in humans but all of them occur in birds, the natural host for flu. This year's seasonal flu is an H3N2, for example and that's what's in this year's flu shot along with influenza B and H1N1 (more about that one later). But if you see a flu referred to by the H and N, it's influenza A.

Is Someone Protecting Denny?

by emptywheel

Sheesh, between Kenny Boy and Libby and Cheney and Rove and Novak, I totally lost track of Denny Hastert. And it appears DOJ may have done so too.

Let's review, shall we? Yesterday, ABC News came out with the scoop that Denny's under investigation in the Abramoff Scandal.

Federal officials say the Congressional bribery investigation now includes Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, based on information from convicted lobbyists who are now cooperating with the government.

Denny managed to take time away from protecting the Congressional desk drawer where he hides all his bribery receipts separation of the powers to angrily deny that he had any bribery receipts. DOJ helpfully issued a statement seemingly supporting the case.

Speaker Hastert is not under investigation by the Justice Department.

At which point ABC reiterated its claim.

Did You Notice What Waas Didn't Say?

by emptywheel

Here's the lede of Murray Waas' latest, in which he reports that Karl and Novak chatted on September 29, 2003, about the Plame investigation.

On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men.

The date. Waas doesn't tell us in which grand jury appearance Karl discussed the Novak meeting. In fact, Waas never mentions in which appearance Karl discussed this meeting with "the" grand jury, nor with which grand jury:

Rove also told the grand jury, according to sources,
Rove told the grand jury
Rove has testified
Asked during his grand jury appearance
Novak and Rove have testified
Rove has testified
Rove has testified

Now, apparently Rove revealed the conversation to the FBI, so it's clear he revealed some of these details back in Fall 2003.

Rove, according to attorneys involved in the case, volunteered the information about the September 29 call during his initial interview with FBI agents in the fall of 2003.

But as to Rove's grand jury testimony, in which Waas describes Rove providing a great deal of detail, Waas provides no clue about timing.

And So It's Willful Blindness

by emptywheel

I pointed out a few weeks ago that the Kenny Boy Lay/Jeff Skilling trial would come down to whether jury members believed Lay and Skilling acted out of willful blindness or good faith. Proving that at least twelve citizens of Texas know good faith when they don't see it, Lay and Skilling were found guilty of fraud and conspiracy and, in Kenny Boy's case, insider trading. Assuming they don't draw out appeals for the rest of their lives, they're looking at decades of incarceration. (Now here's a business idea: A GOP combo prison and retirement home!! I hear Cunningham is already putting up curtains.)

The Houston Chronicle is the go-to place for updates on this.

But I did want to add one thing. Hey, press corpse. Do you think you could ask Snow Job if Bush is getting nervous, seeing his buddy and big donor get punished for practicing the same kind of leadership Bush himself engages in?

Update: Steve Soto asks two very good questions:

Mr. Cheney, we now know that your Energy Task Force had a convicted felon as a participant. How can you justify keeping those deliberations secret?

Mr. Bush, your administration relied on a convicted fraudster for energy policy advice.  Do you plan on pardoning Mr. Lay?

Helen, I hope you're making a list.

Libby Forgets Dick

by emptywheel

Before I get into the part of Fitzgerald's new filings on Dick Cheney that everyone is talking about, let me just share my favorite part of the Libby testimony Fitzgerald released as an exhibit. If, like me, you believe Libby may be hiding a Novak conversation or two, then you're going to enjoy this slip.

I don't recall the conversation until after the Novak piece. I don't recall it during the week of July 6. I recall it after the Novak conver -- after the Novak article appeared I recall it, and I recall being asked by the Vice President early on, you know, about this envoy, you know, who is it -- but I don't recall that early on he asked about it in connection with the wife, although he may well have given the note that I took.

Silly Libby! Novak wrote an article, he didn't have a conver ... conver ... conversation with you. Or did he?

Then later on, he as much as admits a conversation with Novak.

I certainly don't recall any discussion about [Plame's purported role in Wilson's trip] prior to the Russert/Novak conversations when I learned about the wife, what I thought was the first time.

Though I presume this is supposed to refer to his conversation with Russert and his conversation with Rove about Novak--though this, and Jeffress' prior suggestion Novak told Libby his source directly really make me wonder...

As you can probably tell, the central issue of this part of Libby's testimony is that he did have conversations about Dick's annotated copy of Wilson's op-ed. But that he must not have had them until after Novak's column. Because if he had, then he obviously would have re-remembered Plame's identity, given the way Dick had suggested in the notes that Plame had sent Wilson on a junket. Which puts Libby in the position of arguing that he and Dick had a conversation in which Dick made the case that Plame sent Wilson on a junket ... after Novak already published a column to that effect. Okay, whatever Scooter.

Why Settle the Wen Ho Lee Case?

by emptywheel

Apparently, Wen Ho Lee's civil suit charging the government abused his privacy rights is close to being settled.

Intensive settlement negotiations between former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee and the U.S. government are delaying -- and may ultimately avert -- action by the Supreme Court on appeals by reporters fighting to protect their confidential sources in the case.

The Lee case is viewed by the media as one of the most significant press-freedom battles of recent years. But yesterday, for the second time in two weeks, the court declined to act on the reporters' petitions.

It now appears that the court's lack of a decision may be linked to a May 16 letter to the court from Lee's attorneys, which said that "there have been recent settlement discussions" and that "resolution of the entire case may be imminent." USA Today first reported the letter.

This is actually remarkable news, with many possible implications for the Imperial Presidency. Apparently, the Bush Administration prefers to spend (presumably) a chunk of money to avoid any court rulings on this case. What kind of rulings were they fearing?

Anatomy of a White House Smear, 3.1

by emptywheel

Twice before, I have tried to tell the Plame Story as a narrative. Lots has been revealed since I last told the story, just before Libby got indicted, so I thought I'd update it here. I'll warn you--it has grown from big to gigantic, so I'll do it in three parts or more.

The Background--Niger Claims and Power Struggles: 2002-2003

I'll start with some background. There are two reasons why members of the Bush Administration were reckless enough to out a covert spy. First, Joe Wilson's criticisms risked exposing the Administration's efforts to sustain claims about the Niger intelligence they knew to be false. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Neocons Michael Ledeen and Harold Rhode may have played a role in planting the Niger forgeries and John Bolton played a role in stovepiping the forgeries within the US Intelligence Community (IC). And whether or not BushCo had a active, deliberate role in producing the forgeries, they certainly sustained the claim that Niger tried to sell Iraq yellowcake even after that claim had been debunked. eRiposte details the many warnings against the Niger intelligence here, and he proves that the SOTU claim depended on the Niger intelligence here. In other words, the "16 words" in the State of the Union Address (SOTU)--claiming that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa--were based on the Niger claim, and the Administration had known that claim to be bogus by October 2002.

I'll add just two critical points: the INR Iraq nuclear analyst--whose October 15 debunking of the Niger forgeries appears to have been suppressed--definitely warned WINPAC (the same part of the CIA that eventually approved the SOTU claims) that the documents were forgeries by January 12 or 13, 2003, two weeks before the SOTU. Also in January, the National Intelligence Council (the intelligence organization charged with issuing definitive statements about the IC's judgments) issued a memo just completely dismissing the intelligence.

The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. ... the memo ...arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

In other words, the Bush Administration was warned they should not use the Niger claim just before they used it in the SOTU. So when, in a March CNN appearance, Joe Wilson stated "the U.S. government knew more about the Niger uranium matter than it was letting on," the comment had to have made BushCo worry that their deliberate disregard for warnings from the IC would be exposed, regardless of whether it was Wilson's report--or other intelligence reports--that debunked the Niger claims.

And not only had the Bush Administration been warned before they used this intelligence. They were reminded they had been warned. Sometime in spring-summer 2003, Stephen Hadley did a review of the intelligence claims Bush used to justify war; he concluded the aluminum tube claim was based on discredited intelligence. And the INR memo--which Grossman briefed the White House on in June 2003--documented the INR analyst's January warning that the Niger documents were forgeries. BushCo had pleaded ignorance that the Niger documents were forgeries in March 2003, presumably so they could still launch their war. But as early as June 2003, more evidence surfaced that their plea of ignorance was a lie.

Gut Check

by emptypockets

I've been a Red Sox fan since the 1986 World Series. As Game 6 fell apart, I got a quick lesson in what every Red Sox fan already knew. When things look grim, you can relax. But when it looks like you have a chance -- get ready for the heartbreak.

That is why I've gotten a little queasy at the recent spate of "Dems will take back Congress" articles in the last few days. Maybe it's like birthdays: if you say your wish, it won't come true. And lately it seems that everyone is saying my wish.

Wired Calls Abu Gonzales' Bluff

by emptywheel

My favorite thing--among many favored things--about Wired posting Mark Klein's documents about AT&T's complicity in Bush's domestic spying? They're basically calling Abu Gonzales' bluff. All over the Sunday talk shows, there he was, threatening to incarcerate journalists. Not Dana Priest and James Risen, mind you. Just unnamed future journalists. And have you noticed how quiet WaPo and NYT have gotten? Well, that's what Abu Gonzales is looking for. Not direct confrontation, nosiree! He's looking for fear. A cowed media. And unfortunately, our media is well-practiced at assuming the bovine position.

But if there were a case that would require some kind of retaliation, it'd be this one. These are technical descriptions of their spying program. These are much of what anyone needs to understand how our one functional spy agency, the NSA, does its job. These are the Pentagon Papers of the Internet era.

Now, I apologize in advance if my hubris gets Klein or Wired in trouble. But I don't think he'll take their bluff. Gonzales has been faced with a leak challenging BushCo's audacity. But, as Glenn Greenwald has argued so well, they want to avoid a court challenge at all costs. They don't want the Pentagon Papers, they want fear.

So if, as I'm hoping and suspecting, Abu Gonzales just lets this go, then it'll expose the tactic these cowards are adopting. Try to cow the media with empty threats, but avoid a direct legal confrontation with them at all costs. Let's just hope NYT and WaPo are watching Abu Gonzales' reaction to Wired's act.

And let's just hope--for Klein's sake--that I'm right.