I haven't spent much time thinking about Judith Miller's willingness to tesify before the Grand Jury. I figured she was tired of being in jail, but Powerline has an interesting take on why Miller is now willing to testify.
Several readers have written to point out that I had missed a key fact that was not disclosed in the article I linked to last night, but was in today's article in the Washington Post:
After she received this "personal, voluntary waiver," Miller said, her lawyer approached the special prosecutor in the leak investigation and received an assurance that her testimony would be narrowly limited to her communications with the source. She did not mention the source's name in her brief appearance on the courthouse steps, but he has been identified previously as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby...Bingo. No one is crazy enough to sit in jail over a silly misunderstanding--she wanted a "personal" waiver, and Libby was happy to give it to her, in fact thought he had given it to her last year, but somehow they failed to communicate. No, Judith Miller sat in jail until the prosecutor agreed that she would not have to testify about any source of the information about Valerie Plame other than Libby. Miller had multiple sources, and everyone already knew that she talked to Libby. The real question is, who was her other source? Some have speculated that it may have been Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, or maybe another journalist. Now, we may never know.
It's hard not to find the prosecutor's action here disturbing. Who is the second source that Miller went to jail to protect? Why is the prosecutor willing to forgo information about the second source? If Plame's own husband was telling journalists that his wife was a CIA employee, isn't that highly relevant to whether someone in the administration should be criminally prosecuted for saying the same thing? Or, if Plame's employment was so widely known that journalists were telling one another that she worked for the Agency, isn't that likewise relevant to any prospective criminal prosecution?
Is Scooter Libby being set up? Let's hope not.
Powerline examines some other ideas too. The background is turning out to be more interesting than the supposed crime.
2 comments:
Hello My comments are actually about your review of Ben Hecht's Child of the Century. Glad to see that Hecht has not been forgotten, totally, some 40 years after his death. Hecht had a major influence on my career. I read C of C at 19, in 1954, when I was majoring in accounting. After seeing the magic that could be wrought with words, I decided to become a writer, which I have been ever since. If his section on Zionism on C of C interests you, as it appears that it does, I would recommend Hecht's classic study of anti-Semitism, entitled "Guide for the Bedevilled." His scintillating acrobatics with words reach their zenith in "Guide," and there are phrases on literally every page that imbed themselves in your mind. Some have stayed with me 40 years after having read them. His memoir about Charles MacArthur, "Charlie," is also well worth reading for its warmth, tenderness, and homage to the memory of a longtime friend.
Bernie Braginsky
creativedevel@msn.com
Hi, Braginsky again. Here's a typical section from "Guide." Hecht takes off after Voltaire. First paragraph is my introductory comment.
Of the many books Ben Hecht wrote, he liked "A Guide for the Bedevilled" best. The title is inspired by the Rambam's (Jewish sage)"A Guide for the Perplexed." Hecht's sledgehammer attack on anti-Semitism was much criticized in its time (1943) for its anger and vitriol, yet nothing I have read from that period challenged Hecht's insights or conclusions. The problem seems to have been that he approached the subject as a passionately concerned Jew and not as an ivory tower, "objective" psychologist or sociologist. Hecht begins the section excerpted below with reference to an anonymous letter he received at his Hollywood office stating in red crayon "kill all the Jews."
AN ANTI-SEMITE OF MORE CHARM
Not all anti-Semites write in red crayon. Many of them write in fine ink. Monsieur Voltaire, for instance. Monsieur Voltaire does not come in my mail. He stands on my bookshelf with all his electric sentences alive between covers. That sparkling grin! I know it well. I almost grin back. “Down with the wretched little Jews,” Monsieur Voltaire cries, and I stop grinning.
The red crayon letter is in the wastebasket. Monsieur Voltaire is open on my desk. He is much more articulate than my correspondent from Hollywood. He depresses me much more. Perhaps this is because I am more sensitive to crimes of the intellect than to those of the body. They are more dangerous – because they are more lasting.
Jew hatred was the odd hobby of this Prince of Reason –Voltaire – just as a great detective might practice murder on the side. He was the first witty friend of rationality produced by the Christians. No more engaging cries for tolerance, for justice, and for an end to irrationality ever have been uttered by a friend of man. Yet this ornament to reason, this glowing brain, had, as a sideline, one of the most bumptious hatreds of the Jew to be found in literature.
It is not Jew hatred that ever depresses me. There are many writers whom I would not have without it. There are many minds by whom it is an honor to be disliked, and a victory to be hated. This is not true of Voltaire. To find such a hatred in him is to feel doubly its sting – the sting of being hated by a nearly fine fellow and the sting of having to answer back, of having to treat as an enemy someone who has nearly all the charms of a friend.
Monsieur Voltaire was one who enriched the world. It is for this reason that when I look at him I feel a sadness peculiar to Jews. It is unprofitable for the Jew to look at history’s heroes or philosophers – without skipping a little. He is apt, if he looks intently, to see only monsters. The corner of civilization he occupies is usually running with his blood and loud with his libel, and never looks to him like civilization at all. Men who are saints to other eyes are often horned devils to his. Behind their white plumes, their wit and benevolence, they have but a single face to offer the Jew – the grimace of hate.
It is no pleasure to say of so fine as fellow as Voltaire that he is a fouler enemy of the Jews than the murderous German of today. It is like reporting of a great beauty who dazzles your eyes that she has not so pleasant an effect on your nose. Ah, this extra nose that the Jew carries! It is an organ out of which he gets little delight and much inconvenience. What he would embrace passionately as a man of the world, is sniffed at by this secondary proboscis and found to reek of aversion for the Jew. He may continue his embrace despite this depressing odor, but it is the embrace of a lover whose heart must overlook more than it holds.
My letter to the little Jew-killer with his red crayon was briefer than the answer Monsieur Voltaire inspires in me; for this fearsome and anonymous little fellow from Hollywood was a harmless one –even though he might end up breaking Jewish heads in some studio. He would break only a few Jewish heads and land in jail, his crimes forever at an end.
Monsieur Voltaire has never stopped breaking Jewish heads and, as long as paper endures, he never will. Nor will he ever be dragged off, his own head bowed in disgrace, to any hoosegow. He will remain grinning securely on his pedestal.
To boot, Voltaire is not only yesterday, but today, and the finest part of today. He is the great grandfather of Bernard Shaw, Anatole France, Schopenhauer, Mencken, Nietzsche, H.G.Wells, and all the big and little champions of rationality. No man in our time speaks and writes of a sane world but he quotes Voltaire. He is the smiling ghost who presides over our gathering where companionable understanding of life is sole credential. From these gatherings emanates civilization. And among these gatherings of our most polished and thoughtful citizens we find, as in the brain pan of Voltaire – the same gibbet for the Jew; a gibbet all the more shocking because it stands in so fair a territory.
I shall address myself later in more contemporaneous detail to these “civilization-makers” who persist in keeping the Jew dangling over the feast of reason. But here in my answer to Voltaire are a few generalities that fit them as rightly as they do Voltaire, dead two hundred years. The Jew has changed since the time of Barbarossa, but not his enemies. Folly survives by not changing.
From A Guide for the Bedevilled (1943)
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