John McQuaid

I’m reluctant to criticize the work of other journalists, and especially that of investigative journalists, because as a reader I usually don’t know enough about the subject matter, or the sources, or the corroborating work that shaped the story in question. But this Washington Post piece, which makes bold claims about the efficacy of waterboarding, bothered me for various reasons. It burned up the blogosphere over the weekend and was a kind of overture to Dick Cheney’s appearance on Fox News Sunday.

My complaint has more to do with the context, or lack of it, than with the content of the story itself. But in this case, context is everything.

The story is titled “How a Detainee Became an Asset: Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding.” And that’s pretty much its only point, gleaned mainly from interviews with anonymous sources and a few lines from CIA reports released last week: waterboarding done on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 plotter, made him cooperate and yield valuable information about al Qaeda.

What happened in KSM’s interrogations is historically and legally significant, and thus politically controversial – hugely so. This story, however, treats its subject matter not from that perspective but as a daily scoop, advancing the story of the week – the release of the CIA’s torture documents and Cheney’s response.

And in that sense, the biggest problem here is opacity. We don’t know who the Post’s anonymous sources are. But we do know what bureaucratic or political agendas they are seeking to advance by talking about this case right now. The CIA is embarrassed and facing a Justice Department investigation. So some elements within the agency – and especially those who participated directly in this program – have a political and legal interest in trying to paint the “EITs” (the official acronym for enhanced interrogation techniques – who knew?) as successful. As do Dick Cheney and his various acolytes. This undermines the story’s credibility, yet the Post basically asks us to take the statements of its anonymous sources at face value.

There’s also the timing. The story appeared the day before a scheduled Cheney interview, and bolstered his arguments (which are not real arguments but demagogic assertions, which in my mind damages whatever actual, utilitarian case might be made for torture). When I saw it I thought instantly of how the Bush administration had played the New York Times with the “aluminum tubes” story. In 2002, “senior administration officials” strategically leaked disputed information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged (and, as it turned out, nonexistent) nuclear program to the Times, then used the NYT’s own story to bolster the case for war. Here’s the NYT’s own retrospective account:

“On Sept. 8., the lead article on Page 1 of The New York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program.

”The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his threat to use chemical and biological weapons,” a senior administration official was quoted as saying. ”Nuclear weapons are his hole card.”

The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes.

The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times’ article. The morning it was published, Mr. Cheney went on the NBC News program ”Meet the Press” and confirmed when asked that the tubes were the most alarming evidence behind the administration’s view that Iraq had resumed its nuclear weapons program. The tubes, he said, had ”raised our level of concern.” Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, went on CNN and said the tubes ”are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.”

After the tubes incident, I never read an intelligence-related story quite the same way again. Did the Post allow itself to be manipulated here in exchange for a scoop? Cheney didn’t mention the Post story in his interview – whew! But clearly, something went wrong here. The scoop here doesn’t tell us anything about the efficacy of torture in producing reliable information – even in KSM’s case, for that matter. If a scoop actually obscures the issue at hand, what good is it?

Barge sits in Lower 9th Ward, December 2005

The fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is upon us, and New Orleans continues to slowly rebound, with a smaller footprint than before but abundant community spirit. But, alarmingly, its long-term predicament remains unchanged, and the opportunity the nation had to confront it has been mostly squandered.

I refer, of course, to the challenge of protecting the city and surrounding coastlines from hurricanes. Three centuries of experience have proven time after time this is a deadly serious risk. And time after time, various government agencies – from New Orleans’s earliest colonial administrations to the Obama White House – have responded in a haphazard fashion, doing just enough to make people feel safe again, but not enough to prevent the next big disaster.

The Katrina disaster was deeply ironic. Turns out America, the nation that tamed rivers and the continent, won World War II and emerged as the globe’s lone superpower, couldn’t build a floodwall. America, the nation of the mass media and instantaneous communication, couldn’t figure out where the New Orleans Convention Center was, or deliver food and water a few blocks to the thousands of people gathered there. Post-K, there was reason to believe these outrages might force a reassessment of how the nation handles not just emergency response – what you do after disaster strikes – but prevention. The rapidly-eroding Louisiana coast seems like an outlier, but this is deceptive – climate change is going to raise the risks not just for coastlines (higher sea levels and – possibly – stronger storms) but for any area where rapid environmental shifts take place and communities built for yesterday’s conditions suddenly find themselves under water, consumed by fire or afflicted by drought or other problems. New Orleans is, in this sense, an important test case.

But no such reassessment took place. Instead, the same institution that screwed this up the first time – the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was put in charge of the effort to protect New Orleans and the surrounding coastline. This was crazy and irresponsible, and the results were predictable. The Corps is building a $14 billion stopgap levee system, an upgrade to the old one that is certainly better than what was there before, but not nearly enough to protect the city from a Category 5 hurricane storm surge.

The Corps has been studying the options for bigger and better protection, and how to integrate it with efforts to restore the rapidly-eroding marshlands of south Louisiana, for four years. This is an ambitious project, and (in my view) an essential one. It should have been fast-tracked. It should have gotten some stimulus money. Instead it bogged down. . But there’s nobody really calling the shots at the upper levels of government. It’s not a national priority. President Obama says it is, and is creating a task force that may cut through some of the seemingly hopeless skein of red tape. So, we’ll see. But given the fiscal and political pressures on the Obama administration and the severe bureaucratic inertia holding this thing back (which results from basic power arrangements between Congress, the Corps, and successive administrations) I’m skeptical.

This is human nature, you might say, the way government institutions work. We’re always preparing for the last disaster. We don’t anticipate the “black swans.” But that’s no longer an adequate excuse given what’s at stake – not just a unique American city and cultural treasure, but the shape and structure of the American community in an era of change. Do shrug off these challenges – about which we know a great deal – and consign the vulnerable parts of the country to a slow attrition by disaster? Or do we learn from history, and science, and our own mistakes?

There seems to be some sort of informal contest going on to see who can come up with the most preposterous and reactionary proposal to save newspapers. I thought the American Press Institute pretty much had it in the bag with its action plan and cart-before-the-horse declaration that papers should establish the economic value of their content by charging for it.

Now the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi seems to be out to top the API. His piece in AJR, Build That Pay Wall High, isn’t obtuse like the API report. It’s a provocative, contrarian take, arguing that newspapers should abandon the web and go all-in on print. This sounds crazy, but Farhi makes a real argument, attempting to anticipate and rebut potential objections.

But I think the result is essentially the same as the others – this is not a credible solution. Like everyone else who has looked at this issue, Farhi finds almost no good news for newspapers. Their print ad revenue is declining and online ad revenue can’t begin to take its place. The web is an ocean of content, so it’s going to be hard if not impossible to raise much money via micropayments or the various other paywall ideas that have been proposed to monetize news content. So far so good – we don’t get the economically nonsensical “journalism costs money so people should pay” argument. Instead, Farhi says papers should simply double down on the one thing that has paid the bills consistently – print. Put up paywalls, cut off incoming links from the open web, revitalize the printed product, and basically pray that people will rediscover the virtue of the printed page.

There are dozens of reasons this is a counterproductive idea, most of which you’ve heard before. So I’ll mention only two.

1. The news cycle is now continuous. A printed paper is not. Here’s the experience of one ex-newspaper reporter: I used to buy a paper to read at lunch. Since I’ve had a phone with web access, I’m doing that less. And even when I do, my attention always wanders back to the phone, which tells me what’s going on right now. The influence of Farhi’s own publication in national politics would rapidly decline if it pursued a print-only strategy. It would become a high-end niche publication like the National Journal or CQ Weekly, with a small yet influential Washington-based audience. That’s not nothing, but by any measure it would be a major, historic retreat for a paper like the Washington Post.

2. Farhi is essentially saying that newspapers ought to become more like newsmagazines:

Going print-only implies that newspapers will have to evolve into something they’re not right now. To compensate for the loss of immediacy, they would have to be distinctive and singular, offering something that no Internet competitor could. They would have to differentiate themselves with exclusive information – all fresh, all local – compelling photography and courageous commentary. They’d still have to cover the news, but in a way that offered additional perspective, beyond the broad outlines available elsewhere. Even more than telling readers something they don’t already know, newspapers will need tons of hustle and enterprise and a unique personality.

This is both the nub and the weakest part of Farhi’s argument. Newsmagazines aren’t much better off than newspapers in redefining themselves, and newspaper quality has been in decline. More vague prescriptions to “offer additional perspective” aren’t going to do them any good.

Today’s New York Times Book Review cover piece by Timothy Egan is on Dave Eggers’s new book Zeitoun, a nonfiction narrative of one family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina. So far so good. I haven’t read it yet, but the Eggers book sounds like a fantastic addition to the corpus of Katrina books.

But the review contains a couple of errors. It says the storm hit on Sunday, Aug. 28; actually it made landfall the morning of Aug. 29. Maybe this isn’t a mistake as such – the wind was already blowing pretty hard on Aug. 28. But the second error is significant: “Day 2, the world changes. Zeitoun wakes to a sea of water, after the levees have been overtopped. He’s neck-deep in a city of a thousand acts of desperation.”

As any New Orleans resident will tell you, the levees around central New Orleans, including the area where Zeitoun lives, were never overtopped. Rather, badly-designed floodwalls collapsed and breached in several places before Katrina’s storm surge got anywhere near the top. There was some overtopping in more-exposed areas to the east, but the vast majority of the flooding was caused by those breaches – in other words, human error by the Corps of Engineers.

This is not a minor semantic point. The responsibility for most of the damage to New Orleans and the awful events immediately following the storm lies with the Corps – that is, the federal government. This is not in dispute; three distinct investigations have laid the blame on the Corps, including the Corps’s own study. In any assessment of what happened – scientific, political, historical – this is crux of what went wrong, a terrible failure American know-how whose broader implications are alarming and remain mostly unexamined. New Orleanians and Louisiana politicians and media types do their best to remind the powers that be of these scandalous facts. Harry Shearer has been tireless in making this point. To his credit, Brad Pitt made it on Bill Maher’s HBO show Friday night.

But for some reason, this never quite sunk in with many in the media world, or for that matter the nation as a whole. The shorthand of “New Orleans levees overtopped” – with its underlying associations of “natural disaster swamps city below sea level – what the heck are those people doing living down there?” seems to have been dropped into the review without much thought. I’m assuming that Egan – whose work I like and respect – made the error and not Eggers; but even if it was Eggers, it was up to Egan and his editors not to repeat it in the NYT.

Recently, two friends in their forties have died – way too early. Rebecca Lipkin had breast cancer. Bill Cahir was a Marine killed in Afghanistan yesterday. They had little in common except journalism backgrounds, a great vitality and sense of adventure, and a basic graciousness. They have been, and will be, memorialized by people who knew them longer and/or better than I, but I wanted to write a bit about them here.

Bill Cahir and I worked together at the (now closed) Newhouse News Service for several years. He worked for a Newhouse-owned chain of small papers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (covering, among other things, staunch conservative Rep. Pat Toomey, now a PA Republican Senate candidate). He humorously endured the gentle hazing our colleague Bruce Alpert put newcomers to the bureau through – typically, the assignment of extremely trivial stories by fictional editors. He chatted up my kids when we all found ourselves at the office one weekend, managing to get a full account of their recent school experiences than I ever had.

Post-9/11, he felt a calling and joined the Marine Reserve. He was 34 at the time, a lot older than the usual age for recruitment. Frankly, it seemed kind of crazy to to most of us at the Newhouse bureau (many of us were, of course, both out of shape and wary of authority and the kind of total commitment being a Marine requires). Bill agonized over the decision and all its possible consequences, as Dave Wood recalls here.

But as Bill tells it in this piece, he was persistent and managed to talk his way in. He came from a different world than most other Marines: he was a college-educated professional who chatted with members of Congress every day. He was also, basically, an old man trying to keep up with young men almost half his age. Yet he did. And when he returned to the office between boot camp graduation and his first assignment, the change was remarkable. He was leaner and meaner, of course. But he also was more focused and self-assured; the man damn nearly glowed. He had found what he was looking for and it agreed with him. He worried – a little – that being away from the Marines even for a short while would erode some of that physical and mental edge.

His unique skillset – intelligence, education, life experience, extraordinary focus and determination – is the kind that the U.S. needs in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Bill did two tours in Iraq in a Marine Civil Affairs Group – the people who work with local towns and villages, smoothing the often rocky path for peacekeeping and rebuilding. Bill came back and worked at Newhouse for a while, but it was clear he was moving in a new direction; he left journalism and last year ran for Congress in Pennsylvania, narrowly losing the Democratic primary. Later, it was back to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province where all we know so far is that he was killed by “enemy fire.” He leaves a wife, Rene, who is pregnant with twins.

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I met Rebecca Lipkin at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston – which, as you may remember, was inexplicably given over the religious right, leading to night after night of scorn and invective that would make even Sarah Palin blanch (well, maybe not). I can still hear the College Republicans roaming the vicinity of Astrodome, chanting “Bush-Quayle ‘92!” day after day. A friend had recommended I go introduce myself to Rebecca, and I have a clear memory of finding her in the tented warren of media workspaces in the heat. She was a treat – good humored and, in a crazy and frenzied environment, eminently sane. We agreed to meet up later in Washington, where I lived and she was soon to, and we hung out intermittently thereafter. She was very funny and forthright. At a shiva for her, a friend recalled how she had discovered a piece of metal in a deli sandwich, sent them a strongly-worded letter intimating a lawsuit (though she had not actually eaten the sandwich in question) and gotten them to pay up. Her sister, a lawyer, noted that she declined to represent Rebecca in small claims court.

She was extraordinarily good at what she did. Working as a producer for ABC News, she traveled the country during the 1990s, usually working with reporter Carole Simpson. Half the time I called she was on the road. Later, she worked for Nightline, where among other things she recruited Frank McCourt – he of the archetypal miserable Irish childhood – to return to Ireland to document its economic renaissance. She and McCourt died on the same day, July 19. On Facebook, a friend imagined them knocking back pints together somewhere, smiling down on us.

Since 2001, she was a principal architect of Al Jazeera English, based in London, where she joked about writing a book called “A Jew at Al Jazeera.” I regret I never got a chance to visit her there. Rebecca was a good friend: always ready to listen, open to new things. In Washington there’s a power-journalism hierarchy that she was a part of and I was not, which in my experience can sometimes make things awkward – but never did. She helped my wife and me find an apartment in the housing complex where she lived. She hooked me up with other influential journalists when I was promoting my book.

When she came down with inflammatory breast cancer two years ago – one of the rarer and most deadly forms of the disease – she resolved to fight it aggressively, and did so with typical grace and humor, filing a series of video breast cancer diva diaries which are interesting, informative – and, naturally, good TV. She should have been on camera more often.

A Rebecca Lipkin memorial page can be found here.

I don’t like bloggy displays of sentiment, but obviously, life is short – too short sometimes. Cherish it. Give each moment its due.

I’m going to play devil’s advocate with myself here for a moment. Conor Friedersdorf has the best explanation I’ve seen of the public anxiety surrounding health care reform. While it’s clear that all those angry and misinformed town hall attendees are a small minority of the voting public, their anxieties – stoked by our current economic travails, rapid social and demographic changes, and government and politics that haven’t really worked for oh, a decade or longer – are real, and shared by millions more. For all the problems in the current health care system, and for all of Barack Obama’s talents, it would be crazy not to feel some trepidation at such a big undertaking. Many more people still have health insurance than don’t, and they don’t want to end up like those who don’t; so any change is perceived as a threat:

My grandmother, my mother, and countless other Americans may be misinformed about the particulars of health-care reform, and express certain misbegotten fears, but health care proponents would do well to understand the anxiety’s source: Theirs is ultimately a fear of rapid, sweeping policy shifts, especially those brought about by lengthy, amorphous legislative proposals that leave unclear exactly what might change the month after next.

How could that uncertainty fail to rile anyone with health care they like? Ours is a country where many citizens have premised career choices, financial decisions, and even where they reside on ensuring affordable access to quality insurance. Investment in any system, no matter how flawed, breeds a perfectly rational risk-aversion when changes are proposed. What perplexes me is how frequently elected officials underestimate that impulse.

This, he says, is an argument for taking an incremental approach to health care reform and other big structural problems. Handle it one piece at a time, in more digestible bites. Don’t overreach like Bill Clinton did on health care or George W. Bush did on immigration and Social Security.

This is a good argument – and, indeed, that’s pretty much how the modern welfare state came about, as Paul Begala points out in this piece – but I don’t completely buy it for the reason that so often, such anxiety proves politically transient.

A lot of people – liberals, skeptics of big government, deficit hawks – denounced Bush’s Medicare-prescription drug program (which Friedersdorf cites as an example of an incremental approach, but as increments go was pretty large) as unworkable. While it’s deeply flawed in various ways, bureaucratically it works better than anyone expected. Seniors aren’t storming into town halls demanding it be dismantled. The same thing is likely to happen with health care reform. Once something passes – and it may end up substantially closer to “incremental” than what Obama originally wanted – health care reform will disappear as a political wedge issue. There will be problems, of course, and controversies – the problems it addresses won’t go away overnight. But it’s unlikely that the Republicans will be running against Obamacare at this time next year.

Clearly, Obama underestimated public anxieties over health care reform – and a little extra humility won’t hurt him. But the political viability of reform efforts depends on a lot of things besides the public mood (which is by no means foursquare against health care reform): the party breakdowns in Congress, the actual need for the reform in question, the president’s own skills and ability to adapt. I’m betting Obama can leverage his advantages here.

Aside from the issue of whether the congressional “town hall” has outlived its usefulness as a way for politicians and the public to interact, there’s an important underlying question in those confrontations over health care reform now playing out. Do they represent an incipient a 1994- or 1980-style backlash against Obama?

To most of us on the outside, the town-halls-gone-wild appear to reflect the intense feelings of a relatively small group of people who are very badly misinformed about what’s actually happening in Washington. They’re angry at Obama for all kinds of things the government isn’t doing and has no plans to do. In the broadest sense, some of their suspicions are legitimate – if government does have more power over health care, it will screw it up somehow. But the health care system is very badly screwed up already, and there appears to be no awareness of that fact in those rude, angry outbursts.

But is this the start of a good, old-fashioned right-wing populist prairie fire? The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder argued yesterday that, strictly in terms of the health care issue, the protestors and their organizers have overplayed their hand – that they are alienating the independents who want a real political debate, not a shouting match, i.e., the voters who matter most to centrist Democrats who will make or break any health care bill.

Patrick Ruffini shot back, saying Ambinder is misreading things. His post, titled “Energy at the edges moves the center,” cites the left’s at-times over-the-top Iraq protests, ca. 2003 and 2004, as an example of something that seemed politically marginal at the time, with polls showing broad support for the war effort, but later became the majority view.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen in politics. And there are signs of serious discontent with Democrats in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races. But the circumstances here seem very different from 1980, 1994 – or 2003, for that matter. Ruffini’s argument likens health care reform to Iraq. But it took several years of disastrous mismanagement and dysfunctional leadership from the White House to turn the public against the war – and George W. Bush. Obama has been in office six months. Assuming some kind of health care reform passes, it’s unlikely to turn into an Iraq-like disaster. Most people will be only marginally affected, if at all. Many people will see their situations improve. There will be problems, no doubt. But “death panels” won’t be killing grannies every day like IEDs were in Baghdad ca. 2006. And remember, unlike his predecessor Obama actually seems to know some things about making government institutions work. If some kind of health care reform doesn’t pass (which I think is unlikely given the stakes), it will damage Obama. But it will also be over quickly.

In 1980, there was broad anger at, and structural problems within, the government and the Democratic Party. In the 1990s, those problems lingered: Bill Clinton was never elected with more than 50 percent of the vote. Obama won with 53 percent of the vote. Some of those Obama voters are no doubt disillusioned with what they’ve seen so far. But “government” is always a proxy for other things – in this case, widespread economic distress, wrenching social change, etc. The town hall craziness is channeling some of that – it is unfocused rage coming from a narrow segment of the population. But the circumstances in which we find ourselves are fluid: if the economy improves and health care reform passes, and America doesn’t turn into Nazi Germany, that anger is unlikely to result in a huge anti-Obama backlash. In part because there just aren’t any good alternatives right now.

Has the Gross Domestic Product has outlived its usefulness as a measure of economic activity? That’s what Eric Zencey argues, citing the GDP itself, which supplanted the Gross National Product as global trade made “nationality” more or less irrelevant and geography became a better guide to economic activity. (Here’s the Wikipedia explanation: GDP measures output within a country’s boundaries; GNP starts with that and subtracts out income made by foreigners and adds income by citizens abroad – confusing!)

Zencey says we’re at the cusp of an even bigger change now, chiefly because the costs of environmental damage of various kinds – burning fossil fuels, for instance, or the erosion of the Louisiana coastline putting New Orleans in ever-greater danger – are rising rapidly. These have obvious economic impacts that aren’t reflected in GDP. Or rather, they show up only as positive contributions to GDP (in spending on gasoline and in rebuilding New Orleans). It’s an absurd convention when you think about it:

Because we use such a flawed measure of economic well-being, it’s foolish to pursue policies whose primary purpose is to raise it. Doing so is an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness — mistaking the map for the terrain, or treating an instrument reading as though it were the reality rather than a representation. When you’re feeling a little chilly in your living room, you don’t hold a match to a thermometer and then claim that the room has gotten warmer. But that’s what we do when we seek to improve economic well-being by prodding G.D.P.

The problem, as Zencey acknowledges, is how to assign value to things that we currently ignore. What value to place on Louisiana’s wetlands, for instance, which provide hurricane protection, fishery habitats, and, of course, living space? Is the value dropping as the wetlands disappear, or rising as the remaining land becomes more precious? There are models for doing this, and Zencey recommends a presidential commission to hash it out, while renaming but not ditching GDP. The real obstacle to this change, though, isn’t even politics but institutional inertia. But as the after-effects of the past century’s bad decisions mount, the politics will inevitably push us in the direction of a more intelligent measurements of economic activity.