Footnotes

Apparently Actions Do Not Speak Louder Than Words

Per the AP account of the latest Supreme Court decision, a suspect can not invoke his right to remain silent by doing something so humdrum as remaining silent.  No, the suspect has to speak up!

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, a decision one dissenting justice said turns defendants' rights ''upside down.''

A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But the justices said in a 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.

I assume, or at least hope, that it sounds a bit less wacky in the opinion.  The story does include this:

Van Chester Thompkins was arrested for murder in 2001 and interrogated by police for three hours. At the beginning, Thompkins was read his Miranda rights and said he understood.

The officers in the room said Thompkins said little during the interrogation, occasionally answering ''yes,'' ''no,'' ''I don't know,'' nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for ''shooting that boy down,'' Thompkins said, ''Yes.''

He was convicted, but on appeal he wanted that statement thrown out because he said he invoked his Miranda rights by being uncommunicative with the interrogating officers.

If the police felt the suspect was not being utterly unresponsive, then one can see why they would continue the interrogation.  Near-silence is not silence.

Rolling Into A Ditch

Marcy Wheeler, aka the EmptyWheel, comes up empty with this argument about Robert Novak and I.Lewis Libby.

For brevity let me extract the main points:

I wasn't going to do this. I contemplated letting the whole Plame thing go. But hell, if Novak can blab on about it forever, then I think I ought to take the time (we're talking a four-part series, I think) to show that Novak is a lying [liar].

I know, I know. That Libby is a certified (by 11 jurors) liar is old news. But I think I can demonstrate that Libby--and [Robert Novak]--both lied about their conversation on July 9. I'll start by showing that Novak almost certainly lied about whether Libby told him anything "useful" leading up to Novak's July 14 column.

Here's how Novak described his conversation with Libby:

RN  I was trying to find out more information about Wilson's mission to Niger and VP's connection. Most memorable about call, I asked Libby if he might be helpful to me in establishing timeline in 16 words. When they came in, who proposed it, sort of a consecutive account that I could put in column. I interpreted him as saying he could be helpful.

W In context of talking to Libby did Wilson's wife come up.

RN I don't remember exactly, I might have raised that question, I got no help, and no confirmation on that issue. The reason I'm fuzzy is that I talk to a lot of people in govt an politics everyday and a lot of them are not very helpful and I discard unhelpful conversations in my memory bank.

No matter. For the moment, Novak's line is that Libby didn't give him anything helpful and so he just wiped his conversation with Libby clean from his memory bank. Poof!

But if it was so damned unhelpful, then why is there one of Dick's favorite talking points right in the middle of Novak's column?

The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.

The balance of her post than supports (successfully, I would say) the notion that Novak's mention of State and Pentagon interest in the Niger question very probably came from Libby.

Well, enough hints - between my excerpt and the concession that she probably proves her point about Libby, I suspect it will not puzzle the JOM readership to spot the flaw in her argument, so let me leave it at that for now.

I do appear in her comments section with my answer to this, as does Maybee, so if you are not in the mood for a Saturday puzzle check there. 

And let me add that Maybee and I are greeted nicely but not treated well by Ms. Wheeler herself; like a lot of us, I suspect she does not present well when standing in the wreckage of her latest argument. Whatever - Maybee has been advised to seek reading lessons, I have been alerted to my stupidity and dishonesty, and away we go; another day on the Internet.  Let me hasten to add that normally the readers at her site are, hmm, roughly as tolerant of opposing views as the readers here, which is to say they are fine if you are making sense; in this instance, the petulance starts at the top.

MORE:  Strolling through the arguments I see that it was Maybee herself who sparked the real brawl with this:

First, where in the media did it say OVP sent WIlson? It's not there.

It is exactly what Chris Matthews was saying the day Scooter Libby called Russert to complain. Rockefeller sat there and agreed with him. Kristof alluded to it, but didn't say it directly.

As we both have since learned from the reaction there, the famous Chris Matthews "At the behest of..." interview is not as famous as we thought.  Odd, since as Maybee noted it was mentioned at the trial, but there you go.

Ms. Wheeler's response to that was "Show me the Matthews quote", but you know what - if Google can find it with ["chris matthews" behest], how hard did she look?

Whatever.  All downhill from there.  But skiiing is all downhill too!  And it is sort of fun, in a train-wrecky way, to watch the, uhh, evolution of Ms. Wheeler's arguements.

This may not make sense out of context (OK, it made almost no sense in context), but on the use of "behest", Ms. Wheeler makes the point that it appears on this Libby not reflecting his chat with Cheney (see Libby's note) from about June 12, and then  offers the following to Maybee:

Show me the Matthews quote. And as you admit--no, Kristof didn't say that. He said behest, which is precisely what Dick Cheney said himself, according to Libby. You're now arguing that if Kristof said exactly what Cheney himself said, he was wrong?

Huh?  If Cheney says to Libby, look how these guys are saying Wilson went at my behest", that confirms that Wilson went at Cheney's behest?  Hard to believe she means that, but a bit later she says to me:

You guys keep showing me evidence of people using precisely the same term the VP himself used--behest, behest, behest--and claiming it is wrong!! So which is it? VP was wrong when he informed Libby that Wilson was sent at OVP's behest, along with Joe Wilson and everyone else? Or that everyone who said WIlson was sent at Cheney's behest were actually right, and therefore OVP's leaking of Plame's name was not, in fact justified?

Evidently I misunderstood her twice, because eventually we got this:

Tom - Either you're being deliberately dishonest or just plain stupid. You've just misquoted me and misread your own quote.

First, here's what I said:

VP told Libby that Wilson was sent at OVP's behest.

Now, I did not claim that it was a VP talking point. I claimed that it was a word Cheney gave to Libby. Please don't misquote me (you and MayBee seem to be having a real problem with that today).

...Libby's own testimony says 1) Kristof was an afterthought (and incidentally one that the FBI didn't seem too convinced by). And 2) Libby says clearly that Cheney told him someone told him the trip was done at the behest of OVP. (As he likewise says that the same person told Cheney that Plame was CPD.)

...

Read the document. Read Libby's testimony. Read what I've written. It is clear--at least according to Libby's testimony--that the word "behest" came from somneone telling Cheney about the trip and about Plame. Anything else is a misreading of Libby's own explanation of the note.

Ergo, Cheney, Kristof, and Matthews, all reporting the same information. You can't blame Kristof and Matthews for reporting the same information Cheney himself reported to Libby. It'd reach new heights of dishonesty.

That strikes me as quite a shift.

The Baseball Diary

Let me just put in a few links to some Yankee games I attended:

April 18, 2005:  Why was I at a Monday night game, and with whom?

Yahoo; Times.

The New York Yankees answered George Steinbrenner with a record-setting blowout.

Alex Rodriguez, Tino Martinez and the Yankees broke out for 13 runs in the second inning Monday night on the way to a 19-8 rout of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, ending a four-game skid.

One day after Steinbrenner lashed out at his $200 million team for its 4-8 start, the Yankees quickly showed just how powerful their offense can be.

...

It all started in the second, New York's biggest inning ever at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees sent 17 batters to the plate during an incredible outburst that lasted 34 minutes. They got 11 hits, including seven in a row, and 10 consecutive hitters reached safely.

``It felt like it lasted for hours,'' Tampa Bay outfielder Carl Crawford said. ``That was a tough inning. I just hope it doesn't happen again.''

Hideki Matsui drew a leadoff walk before Rodriguez hit a two-run shot off Rob Bell (1-1).

Giambi doubled, Jorge Posada grounded out and Martinez hit an RBI single. Tony Womack followed with a single off the first-base bag, and Derek Jeter drove in a run with a single.

Williams and Gary Sheffield followed with consecutive RBI singles, and Matsui singled to load the bases.

Rodriguez hit a two-run double to left, making it 8-0 and chasing Bell.

``We got a lot of breaks, too. Some of the balls were just out of their reach,'' Yankees manager Joe Torre said.

Giambi was walked intentionally by reliever Lance Carter, and Posada hit an RBI single. Martinez then hit a 3-1 pitch over the right-field fence for his 11th career slam and a 13-0 lead.

With one out in the second inning, every New York starter had a hit and a run scored.

But, despite the big lead, Jaret Wright got booed off the mound - Torre wanted him to complete five innings and pick up a seemingly easy win (and he did), but Wright stunk:

Yankees starter Jaret Wright (2-1) retired the first six Tampa Bay batters he faced, but he was booed off the mound when he left the game with one out in the sixth inning, having given up 11 hits. He allowed eight runs, tying a career high.

"It's nice to win, and that's the main goal," Wright said, "but there is some stuff I've got to do in the next four days. I've got to straighten some things out."

Torre said of Wright, "He's certainly capable of doing better than that."

April 26, 2005 - A Rod goes animal on the Angels with three homers and ten RBIs.

Yahoo recap:

NEW YORK (AP) -- Alex Rodriguez's teammates made him wait until the fans worked themselves into a frenzy worthy of a three-homer night. They clapped to the music and chanted ``A-Rod! A-Rod!'' until he finally stepped onto the top step of the dugout and raised both hands over his head.

Rodriguez's biggest night with the New York Yankees was over a year in the making, and everybody at Yankee Stadium was in a celebratory mood.

Rodriguez hit three home runs in his first three at-bats and became only the 11th major league player with 10 or more RBIs in a game, leading New York over the Los Angeles Angels 12-4 Tuesday night.

July 30, 2005

Yahoo; ESPN; NY Times; LA Times 

From Yahoo:

  By MIKE FITZPATRICK, AP Sports Writer
July 30, 2005

NEW YORK (AP) -- Francisco Rodriguez looked tired, and he was having trouble throwing strikes. The New York Yankees' patient hitters only made things harder on him.

Hideki Matsui's two-run double in the ninth inning capped a big comeback, and New York took advantage of four walks by Rodriguez to beat the Los Angeles Angels 8-7 Saturday.

``That's what we do best. We take our walks, and eventually somebody's got to be pitched to,'' Jason Giambi said.

What I remember - the Yankees gave up four in the seventh and two in the eighth to fall behind 7-3.  I suggested to David that we call it a day, but he was unrelenting.  Giambi hit a bomb in the bottom of the eigth to make it 7-5, and the bottom of the ninth turned into a Little League finish - 55,000 screaming maniacs helped overpower a tired K-Rod.

Aug 13, 2005: Rangers at Yankees with the Bean; Yanks win in extra innings and 100 degree heat, 7-5.  Considering the heat, that was pretty pricey free baseball.

Yahoo recap:

  By BRIAN MAHONEY, AP Sports Writer
August 13, 2005

NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Yankees kept their cool after Mariano Rivera blew a save for the first time in more than four months. They simply turned to another player they've always relied on in the clutch.

Bernie Williams hit a two-run homer in the 11th inning, and the Yankees overcame Rivera's first blown save since the third game of the season to beat the fading Texas Rangers 7-5 Saturday.

Rivera had converted a career-best 31 consecutive saves before allowing two runs in the ninth -- one day after the Yankees didn't use him in a save situation because he had been overworked of late.

A Sor, aka Soriano, the Bean's fave, homered for Texas.

Aug 27, 2005: Kansas City at Yankees with The Bird; Yanks score 5 in the bottom of the ninth to win; the Bird and I listen to Yankess radio guy tells us that in his fiftten years in the Yankees broadcast booth he has never seen so stunning, so epic, so glorious a Yankees comeback.  OK, he gets excited.

Yahoo recap:

  By HAL BOCK, AP Sports Writer
August 28, 2005

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Yankees bounded out of their dugout, celebrating as if they had just won a postseason game. A ninth-inning error by the Kansas City Royals turned what should have been a distressing New York loss into a memorable comeback.

Reliever Jeremy Affeldt threw away a potential game-ending double play ball, giving the Yankees the opportunity they needed. New York then rallied for five runs on five clutch hits that followed the error, beating the Royals 8-7 Saturday.

``The bottom line is it's never over until the last out,'' said Derek Jeter, whose two-run single pulled New York within a run. ``If you've done something before, you always think you can do it again.''

...

The Royals were ahead 7-3 when Affeldt came in to start the ninth. He walked Jason Giambi, then struck out Bernie Williams. Jorge Posada hit a bouncer back to the mound, and Affeldt turned to throw to second. But the throw was low and wide, and shortstop Angel Berroa dropped the ball.

Affeldt, who seemed to slip on the resin bag as he threw the ball, sat disconsolate in front of his locker after the game and made no excuse.

``The bottom line is I blew it,'' he said. ``It was a routine double play. I can't look anybody in the eye right now. It was an embarrassment.''

Matt Lawton, acquired from the Chicago Cubs earlier Saturday, then loaded the bases with a single and Tino Martinez, pinch hitting for Robinson Cano, singled to cut the deficit to 7-4.

Jeter followed with a two-run single past a diving Berroa, Hideki Matsui flied out, and Gary Sheffield tied the score with a two-out double. Rodriguez followed with the winning single for the Yankees, who had just four hits going into the ninth.

``It looked like they needed oxygen for the first eight innings,'' Yankees manager Joe Torre said. ``And then they suddenly came to life.''

One year later, let's note the key hit by A-Rod.

Nick Kristof, NPR, 6/25/2003

June 25, 2003 Wednesday

Nicholas Kristof discusses his New York Times columns including recent reports from Africa

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR.  I'm Terry Gross.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist who just returned from Iraq. His recent columns have started with him joking about how he was trying to help the Bush administration find those weapons of mass destruction. The mystery of the missing WMD, as he puts it, is a subject he's also taking quite seriously. Several of his columns have quoted current and former American intelligence agents who have told him that the Bush administration leaned on intelligence agents to exaggerate information that supported the case for war and downplay or conceal information that did not. Yesterday Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, quote, "I have every reason to believe that the intelligence we were operating off was correct, and that we will, in fact, find weapons or evidence of weapons programs that are conclusive."

We invited Nicholas Kristof to talk with us about his columns, including his recent reports from Africa. He's worked as The Times bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo and has covered North Korea.

Let's start with intelligence about Iraq.  What are some of the most important things you were told by intelligence agents?

Mr. NICHOLAS KRISTOF (The New York Times Columnist): There were a lot of cases where intelligence was kind of goosed up to some degree, but I think the most striking case, at least in my mind, had to do with the uranium in Niger, because that was a case where it wasn't just that intelligence was kind of, you know, prettied up or some facts were neglected, but you really had something that had no credibility that made it into a presidential speech, and that had to do with the suggestion that Saddam Hussein was working on a nuclear program and was trying to buy radioactive material from the country of Niger to create a nuclear device. And it turned out that this had been around for a long time; that almost a year before the president's State of the Union address in which he used that supposed fact, the CIA had sent an envoy at the behest of the vice president's office to investigate, and had found that it was completely untrue, completely not credible, that the documents that were supposedly evidence of it, you know, had names of people who'd been out of office for more than 10 years, that it was a very obvious fabrication. And this was widely reported, widely known within the intelligence community and still was used by the president to argue the case to the American people in a way that I found deeply disturbing.

GROSS: Now Condoleezza Rice said that the Bush administration didn't find out that this document was forged until after the president cited it in his State of the Union address. And somebody else from the Bush administration said that the vice president's office didn't even know that this document wasn't credible until they read about it in your column.

Mr. KRISTOF: Yeah. You know, I always thought that I should do a deal with Vice President Cheney, that, you know, I'll tell him everything I know about what he's doing if he'll tell me everything he knows about what he's doing. And it seems to me, on that basis that, you know, in that case, he would have come out ahead. But he hasn't bought into that yet.

I think it may well be true that the reports about the Niger deal being fake didn't circulate as widely as they should have, and I think that partly that's because the administration was sending out very, very strong feelers from the highest levels that what they wanted was evidence of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs, not evidence that it was not happening.

And secondly, though, I do know from talking to people directly involved in the Niger deal that information did go to the vice president's office and did go to the national security staff in the White House and went to the top of the CIA. So, I mean, I don't know that it got to the president's desk or that it got to the vice president's desk, but there was clearly some major breakdown here, and so it may well be that Condi Rice is narrowly correct in the sense that the information that the Niger deal was phony did not reach her desk until after the president had spoken. But in any case, something went very badly wrong because the information was widely known, including at senior levels in the administration.

GROSS: I think what you're suggesting is the possibility that if high-place people within the Bush administration, including President Bush himself, didn't know about this, perhaps it was because they let it be known that they didn't want to hear any information that might discredit their case against Iraq.

Mr. KRISTOF: Yeah. And I think that's what I found dispiriting about this, and that's what, I think, you know, is key as we look ahead, because Iraq is behind us, but there are going to be other issues ahead, whether it's North Korea, Iran or Syria. And I think it's just critical that the intelligence that is garnered about those countries be gathered dispassionately without any political agenda, and I think that the system as it is right now is not doing that. The intelligence community has been kind of subverted to serving a political purpose, as has happened at times periodically in the past under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but I think it's happening again in a way that undermines US foreign policy, undermines our credibility and that, you know, the intelligence agencies were set up to be independent and they've really got to try to restore that.

GROSS: Can you just tell us some of the things that current and former intelligence agents told you about ways in which it was suggested to them or implied to them that they needed to exaggerate the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?

Mr. KRISTOF: OK. I mean, there's several areas. One is that the nuclear program, which is sort of the most ominous but also the least developed in the Iraqi overall military effort, was advanced and was a genuine threat to the US. They thought that was hugely pumped up.

Secondly, that the biological and chemical programs were exaggerated so that they weren't just, you know, programs kind of in the background but that they involved huge stockpiles and abilities to strike the US.

Third, that Iraq had close connections to al-Qaeda, which seems not to be the case.

And fourth, that people within the CIA, the DIA and elsewhere in the intelligence community were really told to only pass on one kind of finding, one kind of conclusion, and that which was most incriminating of Iraq, and that the White House wasn't interested in, you know, a kind of thoughtful weighing of the issues or in its analysis; it was interested in evidence that could get into presidential speeches, for example.

And finally, they said that, you know, one result of this is that the CIA in particular and also the DIA, for that matter, are deeply demoralized. And that's unfortunate, because George Tenet, as director of Central Intelligence, really had done a great job of getting the CIA back on its feet, of managing it, of reassuring people inside the agency. And just, I'd say, in the last six months there's a real feeling, particularly among the intelligence people, that they've been let down, that he hasn't stood up for them, that he let the Pentagon people kind of cut the legs out from under some senior intelligence people.

GROSS: Well, in fact, one of the intelligence agents who spoke to you said that Tenet sided with the Department of Defense crowd and cut the legs out from under his own analysts. What do you know about that, about that suggestion that he was so loyal to the Department of Defense and Donald Rumsfeld that he perhaps allowed information to be exaggerated to help the Bush administration make the case?

Mr. KRISTOF: You know, the way intelligence works is that there's always just mountains of tips and information coming in and a lot of it is bad, but you're never quite sure, you know, what is bad, what is good, what the pattern is. And I think that part of the problem was that people in the CIA didn't feel a lot of self-confidence as it was. They had kind of blown it in the run-up to 9/11 and they hadn't been sufficiently alarmed. And traditionally in the intelligence community the way you protect yourself is you are very alarmist and you see threats everywhere. And this time they didn't really see it, but the Pentagon people were screaming, you know, 'connections with al-Qaeda,' you know, 'nuclear threat,"chemical weapons,"biological weapons,"smallpox,' and this kind of thing.

And the CIA and DIA people didn't believe it and they objected to some degree, but I think that they were also a little bit nervous that they were going to be, you know, sort of proven wrong again, and I think that that was particularly true of George Tenet, and so that when people in the Pentagon's intelligence shop started, you know, plucking out little bits of intelligence here or there to try to prove an al-Qaeda link, for example, that he was very nervous about siding with people who really kind of knew what was going on and signed on to assessments that were really largely, I think, ideologically driven and coming out of the Pentagon and coming out of the White House.

Part of that may also be that he was not really part of the gang in this administration. He was a holdover from the Clinton administration. He's more of a Democrat than a Republican. He's somebody who has a good relationship with President Bush, maybe a better relationship with President Bush than he had with President Clinton, but he's not kind of one of the gang, and he may have felt a little bit insecure about his own position. I think there's a collection of reasons that led to this, to a real breakdown in the intelligence process.

GROSS: How is the CIA supposed to be protected from a politicization of information and intelligence?

Mr. KRISTOF: One of the basics is that the intelligence people, the spooks, are just adamant about they don't do policy. You know, one of the spooks I admire the most is a guy who knows North Korea really well. And because he knows it so well, I remember asking him at one point, you know, 'So, you know, what do you think we should do about North Korea?' And he just looked at me and said, 'I don't go there'; you know, I don't do policy. And, I mean, that's the traditional attitude. That's what the intelligence agencies are supposed to do beginning really at the end of the Clinton administration. The Clinton administration started involving George Tenet in the Middle East process kind of in the policy of bringing peace in a way that, I think, in retrospect was a mistake. And then the Bush administration extended that and George Tenet was really brought much more into the White House kind of policy-making process, and I think that reduces the insulation that is there for the intelligence people.

GROSS: My guest is New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.  We'll talk more after a break.  This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Nicholas Kristof, and he's a columnist for The New York Times.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is going to conduct a review of prewar intelligence and how it was handled. What do you think they might be up against since this has been such a politicized process?

Mr. KRISTOF: I'm not holding my breath on the congressional investigations. I just think that given who's leading them that they're unlikely to be really aggressive and, you know, that they'll poke around the ashes a little bit, but I don't think that it's going to be as thorough an investigation as it should. And I wish that there were a much more aggressive congressional investigation of this, and I think it's just, you know, critical for our national security that we do try to make intelligence honest again.

And, I mean, I must say that I think that one problem with the political process right now is that it is so polarized that, you know, there is a sense that there are a lot of Democrats who want to investigate this, not just to rectify the way the intelligence is gathered, but also to use it as a club to beat the Bush administration, and that makes the Republicans, you know, very nervous about going down that road.

GROSS: The cover story of The New York Times Sunday: Weekend Review this week asked the question: Did President Bush lie to did he exaggerate when he made statements like, 'Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised'? I mean, he said that in a speech to the nation on March 17th of this year. Do you have any thoughts on where that line is between lying and exaggeration in this story?

Mr. KRISTOF: In my columns I keep using words like 'deceive' or, you know, 'mislead,' and I keep getting these incredibly reproachful letters, e-mails from people saying, 'You know, use the "lie" word,' but I'm not comfortable doing so for a few reasons. I mean, one has to do with civility. I think that there's already enough incivility out there that, you know, using extra epithets isn't really going to help.

But beyond that, I do think that what happened was a process of systematic exaggeration rather that just completely fabricating things out of thin air, and that beyond that I think that people at the White House and at the Pentagon who I think were the leaders of this that, you know, they believed the bottom line of what they were saying; they believed that Saddam was a threat to us because of his weapons of mass destruction, and I think they absolutely believed that Saddam had WMD all over.

I think that the problem was more that some of these figures, especially the Pentagon, were ideologues who deceived themselves and deluded themselves and also deceived other people than that they kind of deliberately concocted things and, you know, lied to people. So it seems to me the problem is not, you know, one of lying as such as of people being too ideological, not objective enough about the evidence and creating a system where there were no checks on those ideologues.

GROSS: Have there been supporters of the Bush administration who have tried to discredit your columns?

Mr. KRISTOF: On the intelligence issue, actually, not so much. I mean, the thing that I have been really harping on has been the Niger deal, and there, you know, they do accept that the Niger documents were fabricated; they accept that this--even though they say they learned about it from my column, they do accept that, yes, it is correct that at the behest of the vice president's office a former ambassador was sent to Niger to check, that he said that, you know, the documents were false.  They haven't disputed any of those facts in the column.

They, you know, says it's untrue that there was a sort of deliberate effort to spin things. But I say they haven't, you know, sort of challenged the accuracy of my columns, although they've challenged the interpretation.

GROSS: Do you think what you've written in your column and what other journalists have written about intelligence agents who say that information was exaggerated, that they were pressured to report only selectively on intelligence--do you think that that is changing the way the CIA is operating now? Do you think it is less probable now that information will be exaggerated or used selectively?

Mr. KRISTOF: I think that's true right now vis-a-vis, you know, Iran and North Korea and so on. But I do worry that there is pressure among some of the political people in the administration to make a scapegoat of George Tenet and toss him overboard, and that would really put the Pentagon in the driver's seat for foreign policy as a whole. Already the Pentagon has been kind of chipping away at the intelligence community and gathering more and more of the ability to, you know, use satellites, to collect intercepts, to interpret things; you know, it's started its own intelligence shop. And I do worry that the result of this will be that you will get ideologues who will be in charge of the intelligence process as a whole, and if that were to happen then, I think, you know, it would be a real step backward.

And so what I've written is--I mean, I think that George Tenet really screwed up by not protecting his people, but I do not think that he should be forced out as a result, because I think that, you know, ultimately that would be bad for the independence of the intelligence community.

GROSS: Can you explain about this intelligence agency within the Pentagon that the Pentagon recently started?

Mr. KRISTOF: Yeah. You know, it goes way back in the sense that Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz had a deep, long-standing suspicion of the things the intelligence community were doing. They thought that the intelligence community had kind of become a big bureaucracy, that they just sort of shuffled papers around, came out with very conventional thinking, didn't come up with very good information, and so they started up after 9/11 a small group in the Pentagon that would work with the intelligence agencies and look at raw intelligence and gather it out and pass it on to policy-makers.

I think one unfortunate result was that, you know, the most alarmist intelligence was going on to the president, and, you know, you should be giving the president the best intelligence you have; instead he was getting some of, you know, the worst raw intelligence that came in that was unverified and that, you know, shouldn't have been going even to low-level bureaucrats. It was totally untrustworthy.

GROSS: Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times.  He'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, the rise of the Islamic fundamentalists in southern Iraq. We continue our conversation with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who just returned from Iraq. We'll also talk about his recent trip to Africa and his thoughts on the likelihood of a confrontation with North Korea. And Ken Tucker reviews the new CD by Fountains of Wayne.

...

GROSS: Finally, Nick, I'm wondering if the Jayson Blair story and the resignation of Howell Raines at The New York Times is affecting your day-to-day life at the paper.

Mr. KRISTOF: I'd say that it isn't really affecting, you know, the way I do things. I'd say it's affecting my mail to some degree. I mean, it used to be that when I got e-mails from people, they would just say, you know, 'You're a raving idiot.' Now they say, 'You're a raving idiot who fabricates things just like Jayson Blair.' So it's made the e-mail a little more colorful.

GROSS: Well, Nicholas Kristof, thanks so much for talking with us.

Mr. KRISTOF: Hey, it was my pleasure.

GROSS: Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times.

Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the new CD by Fountains of Wayne. This is FRESH AIR.

Miami Herald, April 4, 2001 - Florida Recount

Here is a competing version of the original Miami Herald story from April 4, 2001 on the Florida recount.  It seems to present the same info as from this version of the story living in the Google cache, but the different scenarios get more emphasis.

Miami Herald, The (FL)

April 4, 2001

REVIEW SHOWS BALLOTS SAY BUSH BUT   GORE BACKERS HAVE SOME POINTS TO ARGUE

Author: MARTIN MERZER, mmerzer@herald.com

Edition: Final
  Section: Front
  Page: 1A

Index Terms:
  US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION FLORIDA VOTING MACHINE DEFECT RECOUNT MH

REPORT RESULTS STATISTICS WINNER BUSH

Estimated printed pages: 14

Article Text:

The Herald's examination of votes cast in all 67   Florida counties projects Gore falling further behind if the recount   Democrats advocated had continued.
  Republican George W. Bush's victory in Florida, which gave him the White   House, almost certainly would have endured even if a recount stopped by the   U.S. Supreme Court had been allowed to go forward.

In fact, a comprehensive review of 64,248 ballots in   all 67 Florida counties by The Herald and its parent company, Knight Ridder,   in partnership with USA Today, found that Bush's slender margin of 537 votes   would have tripled to 1,665 votes under the generous counting standards   advocated by Democrat Al Gore.

The newspapers' ballot review was conducted by the   public accounting firm BDO Seidman, LLP. It was designed to answer a question   asked by many Americans and certain to be examined by historians:

What would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court   had not halted the sweeping r! ecount of undervotes - ballots without   presidential votes detected by counting machines - ordered by the Florida   Supreme Court on Dec. 8, a month after the November election?

The answer: under almost all scenarios, Bush still   would have won.

Indeed, in one of the great ironies of the bitter   2000 election, Bush's lead would have vanished only if the recount had been   conducted under severely restrictive standards advocated by some Republicans.

There is some ammunition in the review for Gore   supporters - though it requires calling into question the manual recounts in   Broward and Palm Beach counties.

The review found that canvassing boards in those   counties discarded hundreds of ballots that bore marks no different from   those on scores of ballots that were accepted as valid presidential votes.

Had those ballots instead been counted as valid   votes, allowing dimples, pinpricks and hanging chads, Gore would be in the White   House today.

VAL! IDATION CLAIMED

The multiple layers of The Herald's findings al   lowed both parties to claim validation Tuesday of their positions during the   protracted election dispute.

Speaking for the Republicans, former Montana Gov.   Marc Racicot expressed satisfaction with the broad results of the review, but   rejected any suggestion that additional ballots could have been salvaged and   the outcome might have changed.

``We have a problem with efforts by different people   in different places at different times trying to discern what other people   really meant to do,'' Racicot said.

``The American people knew it was a close election.   They accepted the fact that President Bush won under any reasonable scenario.   The decision made by the American people now is numerically confirmed by The   Herald and its partners.''

At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer said:   ``The president believes, just as the American people do, that this election   was settled months ago. The voters spoke, and George W. Bush won.''

Bob Poe, chairman ! of Florida's Democratic Party,   said The Herald's review shows that many official tallies were incomplete and   inaccurate.

``My feeling is still that more people went to the   polls to vote for Al Gore than went to vote for George W. Bush, and that some   really bad things happened,'' Poe said. ``This tells us that the system has   some major flaws that need to be improved. We cannot continue to have this   kind of ambiguity in an election.''

Said Doug Hattaway, a former Gore campaign   spokesman: ``If you count every vote, Gore wins. This study confirms that   Florida's election system failed the voters.''

The Herald's findings underscore the agonizing   closeness of last fall's presidential election and the vital importance of -   and tumultuous debates over - the various standards that can be employed to   gauge punch-card ballots.

Though this portion of the project examined only   undervotes, The Herald, Knight Ridder, several other Florida newspapers and   USA Toda! y also are conducting a full review of at least 110,000 overvotes -   ba llots for which machines recorded more than one presidential candidate.

That project should be concluded within a month, but   those results will not affect the conclusions of the undercount review   because the Florida Supreme Court excluded overvotes from its sweeping   recount.

In addition, a group of national news organizations   and Florida newspapers has hired a University of Chicago research center to   conduct a statewide survey of undervotes and overvotes. That effort is still   underway.

Regardless of the ballot reviews, debate is likely   to continue over the outcome of last year's presidential election, the   closest in 124 years.

While the ballot reviews accentuate how imprecise   numbers released on Election Night can be, election officials nationwide say   the possibility of human error is so great that it is almost impossible to   conduct a mistake-free election.

That imprecision is not an issue, they say, except   when the results are extremely cl! ose - as they were in Florida.

KEY FINDINGS

Here's what The Herald's ballot review found:

* Under the Florida Supreme Court order, which   exempted counties where manual counts had already taken place, Bush would   have added 1,128 votes to his official 537-vote lead - if every dimple,   pinprick or hanging chad on a punch-card ballot is considered a valid vote.   That would have yielded a final margin of 1,665 votes.

His final lead would have fallen to 884 if dimples   were counted as presidential votes only on ballots that had dimples in other   races.

His lead would have dwindled to 363 if votes were   counted only when a punch-card chad was detached by at least two corners,   perhaps the most common standard applied nationally.

And his margin of victory would have disappeared,   replaced by a Gore lead of only three votes, if only clean punches were   accepted.

That nearly invisible Gore advantage - 0.00005   percent of the 5.9 million votes c! ast by Floridians - is so tiny that it   leaves the outcome in question. In addition, it is produced by a highly   unlikely scenario.

Like the all-inclusive standard, the severely   restrictive clean-punch standard is rarely employed. Among two dozen states   that impose standards on manual recounts of undervotes, only Indiana insists   on cleanly punched chads.

Nevertheless, many Republicans have advocated that   standard since The Herald's ballot review began more than three months ago.

``The context in which we viewed this entire recount   is that, the election is over [and] there is only one legal standard for a   vote, the standard that was in place when people went in to vote, and that   was a clear punch,'' Portia Palmer, a spokeswoman for the Republican Party of   Florida, recently told The Herald.

* Contrary to popular belief, mismarks for Gore were   less likely than mismarks for Bush in punch-card counties. Marks of some type   were found in the Bush position on one ballot for every 172 valid Bush   punch-card votes; marks in the ! Gore position were found on one ballot for   every 181 valid Gore punch-card votes.

But the opposite was true in optical scan counties.   Marks were found in the Gore position on one ballot for every 1,489 valid   Gore optical-scan votes; marks in the Bush position were found on one ballot   for every 2,600 valid Bush optical-scan votes.

* More specifically, dimples were only slightly more   likely to appear in the Gore position than in the Bush position. Statewide,   10,745 dimples were found in chads assigned to Gore and 10,004 dimples were   found on chads assigned to Bush, a nearly equal result.

This suggests that dimpled punch-card ballots were   related more to machine failure, which affects everyone equally, than to   human error, which might disproportionately affect inexperienced voters.

* Optical-scan balloting does not solve the problem   of discarded ballots.

While the sheer number of problem ballots was far   higher in punch-card counties, 2,119 di! scernible presidential votes were   left untabulated in counties that us e optical-scan systems. Gore would have   received 1,179 of those votes; Bush would have received 860.

UNCOUNTED VOTES

The large number of seemingly valid votes that went   uncounted suggests that election reform may need to go beyond the replacement   of punch-card systems with optical-scan systems.

For example, Florida law says no ballot may be   discarded if the intent of the voter is clear. But the law is less definitive   concerning the obligations of canvassing boards to examine discarded ballots   to determine if the intent of voters can be ascertained.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that   canvassing boards must examine ``damaged or defective'' ballots for voter   intent and further defined the term ``defective ballot'' as ``a ballot which   is marked in a manner such that it cannot be read by a scanner.''

Though some canvassing boards in optical-scan   counties conducted such reviews on Election Night, most boards around the   state did not.

!

THOUSANDS OF VOTES

Had all canvassing boards in all counties examined   all undervotes, thousands of votes would have been salvaged in Broward   County, Palm Beach County and elsewhere long before the election dispute   landed in court - and the outcome might have been different, The Herald   found.

In that scenario, under the most inclusive standard,   Gore might have won Florida's election - and the White House - by 393 votes,   The Herald found. If dimples were counted as votes only when other races were   dimpled, Gore would have won by 299 votes.

But if ballots were counted as votes only when a   chad was detached by at least two corners (the standard most commonly used   nationally), Bush would have won by 352 votes.

The ballot review also accentuated the latitude   local elections officials enjoy under state law to establish standards and   practices that can differ from those employed in other counties.

For example, nearly all optical-scan systems ! can   alert voters to errors on their ballots - if scanners are deployed in each   precinct.

But Herald reviewers found that some elections   officials intentionally don't use the scanning equipment's full capabilities.   The result: voters in some counties are able to correct fewer errors than   voters in other counties.

One consequence of this latitude was clear in   Escambia County, where vote tabulating equipment was programmed to flag as   undervotes only those ballots on which no votes were apparent anywhere. Few   other counties adhere to that policy.

When Escambia was ordered by the Florida Supreme   Court to recount its undervotes, it only examined ballots that fit that limited   definition - a total of 16. Nine votes went to Gore and six went to Bush, a   net gain of three for Gore.

But when The Herald insisted that Escambia identify   ballots where no votes were tabulated specifically in the presidential race,   the county presented 677 ballots for inspection. Of those, 20 were deemed to   be votes for Bush and 45 were deemed to be ! votes for Gore - a net gain of   25 for the former vice-president.

ACCESS REQUESTED

The Herald requested access to undervotes in all 67   Florida counties on Dec. 13, one day after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed   the Florida court and terminated the official undervote recount.

The nation's highest court said the lack of a   consistent statewide standard for judging ballots raised constitutional   issues. It declined to give Florida time to develop such a standard,   effectively handing the state's 25 electoral votes and the White House to   Bush.

The Herald's requests cited the Florida Public   Records Law, which makes ballots subject to public examination. The newspaper   later retained BDO Seidman, LLP, to inspect the ballots.

The comprehensive review of undervotes began on Dec.   18 in Broward County, and teams of accountants and reporters soon visited all   67 counties. The last undervote was inspected March 13 in Hamilton County.

Under its agreeme! nt with The Herald, BDO's   accountants noted what kind of mark was pres ent on each ballot and the   mark's location, then totaled the marks of various kinds and reported them to   The Herald. But BDO made no effort to determine voter intent or whether a   mark on a ballot was a legally valid vote.

Reporters from The Herald, other Knight Ridder   newspapers and USA Today also reviewed every undervote ballot and made   separate and independent assessments of their characteristics. That effort was   designed as a statistical check of variation between observers, but was not   considered in the tabulations BDO reported.

Of the 64,248 ballots inspected by BDO, only 42,897   came from precincts affected by the Florida Supreme Court order or from   counties that did not complete the recount before the U.S. Supreme Court   issued its stay.

The state court specifically excluded from the   statewide recount Broward, Palm Beach, Volusia and 139 precincts in   Miami-Dade where manual recounts already had been conducted. In addition,   three counties - Escambia,! Manatee and Madison - completed the count before   the U.S. Supreme Court froze the process. Another, Hamilton County, reported   that it had no undervotes, although that proved untrue when The Herald   inspected its ballots.

Of the 42,897 ballots, no marks for president were   found on 20,861. These were true undervotes - with no evidence of any attempt   to vote for president.

Another 861 ballots showed marks for write-in   candidates or for presidential candidates other than Bush or Gore, and 2,912   had marks in ballot locations that were not assigned to candidates.

NOT TABULATED

Not included in the tabulation were 1,512 ballots that   BDO determined had marks for more than one presidential candidate. State law   specifically prohibits the tabulation of ballots with marks for more   candidates than are to be elected to the office.

That left 9,114 ballots with marks or write-in   notations that might, under the most permissive standard, be interpreted as   vo! tes for Bush. And it left 7,637 ballots that bore marks that, under th at   same standard, might be interpreted as votes for Gore.

To recreate the conditions that existed at the time   of the court's order, The Herald accepted the official results of the recount   in Escambia, Madison and Manatee - an additional 20 votes for Bush and 27 for   Gore - and Hamilton's claim of no undervotes.

That brought the Bush total to 9,134 and the Gore   total to 7,664.

The Herald then followed the court's order, adding   174 votes to Gore's total as the net gain from Palm Beach County's official   recount. It also added 168 votes to Gore's total as the net gain from the 139   Miami-Dade precincts that had been recounted manually.

That left Gore with a potential total after the   recount of 8,006, under the most permissive standard.

The Herald then added 537 - Bush's statewide lead at   the time the Florida court acted - to Bush's result, leaving him with a total   of 9,671 - 1,665 more than Gore.

The Herald's statewide review adds to a gro! wing   body of material that brings the outcome of the disputed election into   sharper focus.

Five weeks ago, for instance, The Herald reported   that if Secretary of State Katherine Harris had allowed South Florida   counties to complete manual recounts before certifying the election, Bush   likely would have won the presidency outright - ending the dispute before the   Florida Supreme Court ordered the recount of undervotes.

Last month, The Palm Beach Post reported in some   detail on the results in Palm Beach County. Among other things, it found that   5,062 residents of that county voted for three or more candidates for   president, an indication of voter inexperience.

The Palm Beach Post also found, like The Herald,   that hundreds of potential votes for Gore were not counted.

Of course, regardless of the undervote reviews, only   one thing is truly clear: Precise numbers released on Election Night mask a   world of imprecision and chaos.

Responding to Hera! ld requests for undervotes, only   eight of Florida's 67 counties were a ble to produce for inspection the exact   number they reported on Election Night. Elsewhere, there is no way to know   whether the Election Night figure, the number of ballots actually inspected,   or some other number is correct.

At one point, Pasco County Supervisor of Elections   Kurt Browning testified during a hearing that multiple machine recounts in   his county produced a different number of undervotes each time.

Nov. 8: 1,776. Dec. 9: 1,712. Feb 5: 1,744.

But it was not machine sorting alone that proved   inaccurate. In Duval County, elections officials - acting under court order -   hand-sorted the county's 291,000 ballots in search of the 4,967 undervotes   they had reported on Election Night.

They ended up delivering 5,106 ballots for   inspection by The Herald.

That's close, but it also raises the possibility   that some of those ballots were actually tabulated in the Election Night   machine count.

On the other hand, BDO determined that only! 4,880 qualified   as undervotes. The other 226 bore marks for at least two presidential   candidates, apparent overvotes.

This review did not attempt to inspect overvotes.   Florida's Supreme Court order specifically called for the recounting only of   undervote ballots, leaving the estimated 110,000 overvotes unaffected.

But Herald reviewers saw numerous overvotes, and it   became clear that many could have been declared valid votes - if they had   been examined in time.

For instance, in some counties that use optical   scanning equipment, people managed to vote for Gore and then again for his   running mate, Joseph Lieberman, or for Bush and then again for his running   mate, Richard Cheney.

Throughout the state, many people voted for Bush or   Gore - and then did so again in the write-in category.

All such votes were rejected by machines as   overvotes. However, many elections supervisors agree that some of those votes   could have been rehabilitated through ! manual recounts by canvassing boards   employing nothing more than commo n sense.

``It's sad,'' said Levy County Elections Supervisor   Connie Asbell. ``These are people who really wanted to vote for president.''

EXAMINING THE NUMBERS
  The Herald applied the BDO Seidman ballot review results to several scenarios   to project the possible impact of a statewide recount on November's election.
  SCENARIO 1: Florida Supreme Court Order

The Florida Supreme Court on Dec. 8 ordered that all   undervote ballots be counted in counties that had not already conducted a   hand recount. The court also ordered that the secretary of state's office   include 174 net votes from Palm Beach and 168 net votes from a partial   recount in Miami-Dade be added to Gore's certified total. At the time, Bush   was leading by 537 votes.

The recount order was halted the next day by the   U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled that the Florida court's order   violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

To see how the election might ! have been affected   had the Florida court's order not been stopped, The Herald considered ballots   only in counties where manual recounts had not been completed. That meant   excluding review results from Broward, Palm Beach, Volusia and portions of   Miami-Dade County.

The Herald also excluded the results of its review   in three counties - Escambia, Manatee and Madison - that had completed the   state-court-mandated recount before the U.S. Supreme Court acted. In   addition, ballots reviewed in Hamilton County were not included because   officials there had said they had no undervotes at the time of the court   rulings.

The Herald applied three standards in computing   this: a loose standard where every dimple, hanging chad and pinprick was a   vote, a tougher standard where a dimple counted only if the ballot had other   dimples onit, and a still tougher standard where a ballot had to have chads   detached by at least two corners to count as a vote. In all three instances,   Bush wo! uld have been victorious.

STRENGTH - This is as close an approx imation as   possible to the conditions when the Florida court order was issued.

WEAKNESS - There is no way to be certain how   canvassing boards in each county would have judged each ballot.

THE NUMBERS
  Bush Gore

9,134 7,664

537 (lead) 174 - Palm Beach County

168 - Miami-Dade ballots

9,672 8,006

Bush margin - 1,665

Palm Beach standard

Bush Gore

5,877 5,188

+ 537 +174

+168

6,415 5,531

Bush margin - 884

2-corner chad standard

Bush Gore

1,749 1,581

+ 537 +174

+168

2,286 1,923

Bush margin - 363

The Clean Punch Scenario

There is one scenario that would have led to a Gore   victory - though it was unlikely. That would have happened if the precincts   affected by the Florida Supreme Court order had been counted with only cle!   an punches counting in the punch card counties.

Why is it so unlikely? Because the application of   that standard only in the affected precincts would have required the   Miami-Dade canvassing board to switch standards in the middle of its count.

Nevertheless, applying the standard shows the irony   of the insistence by some Reublicans that only clean punches be counted. In   the counties to be counted under the state court order, Bush actually   benefited from the inclusion of dimples, pinpricks and hanging chads.

The scenario also assumes that the results in   optical scan counties would have remained the same, since markings for   president on those ballots are more obvious.

The Numbers

Bush Gore

988 1,186

+ 537 +174

+168

1,525 1,528

Gore wins by 8.

The Statewide Standard

What if the canvassing boards in all 67 counties had   reviewed their undervote ballots immediately afte! r the last state-mandated   machine tabulation Nov. 8? Such a review pro bably is required by state law,   but few canvassing boards conduct one.

But such a review would have avoided court fights.   And using The Herald ballot review allows all ballots to be judged by the   same standard.

To accomplish this, The Herald excluded no counties   where it had inspected ballots. It also used as it's starting point the final   machine recount, which had given Bush a lead of 300 votes. It then also added   to the Bush total 630 votes, which was the margin of overseas absentee   ballots that Bush won when those ballots were open Nov. 17.

STRENGTH: This also would have satisifed the feeling   of the minority of the U.S. Supreme Court who felt Florida should have been   given time to devise a statewide standard for recounts.

WEAKNESS: A ballot review such as this might have   included an unknown number of overvote ballots, where tabulation machines saw   two votes or more for president. In some counties, a review of those ballots   - not part of this re! view of undervotes - have found many were in fact   valid votes. Those ballots would certainly affect totals.

The Numbers

Bush Gore

13,055 14,378

+ 300

+ 630

13,985 14,378

Gore margin - 393

Palm Beach standard

Bush Gore

6,644 8,873

+300

+630

8,574 8,873
  Gore margin - 299 votes

2-corner chad

Bush Gore

2,169 2,747

+ 300

+ 630

3,099 2,7487

Bush margin - 352

HIRAM HENRIQUEZ/HERALD STAFF
  RECOUNT STAFF
  The following Herald staff writers contributed to these reports:
  Lila Arzua, Steve Bousquet, Tyler Bridges, Paul Brinkley-Rogers, Lesley   Clark, Tina Cummings, Daniel de Vise, Anabelle de Gale, Geoff Dougherty, Amy   Driscoll, Lisa Fuss, Jasmine Kripalani, Larry Lebowitz, Phil Long, Beth   Reinhard, Shari Rudavsky, Charles Savage, Mark Silva and Andres! Viglucci.
  HERALD REPORT
  The Miami Herald staff has prepared a book about Florida's 2000 presidental   election, to be published in early May by St. Martin's Press.

Titled The Miami Herald Report: Democracy Held   Hostage, the book provides the most detailed account yet of an election   process that went awry and include the full results of the ballot review   conducted by the accounting firm BDO Seidman, LLP.

It will be available wherever books are sold, and   now can be ordered in advance from The Miami Herald's HeraldStore.   HeraldStore can be found on the World Wide Web at www.heraldstore.com or   contacted Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at:
  * Miami-Dade: 305-376-3719
  * Broward: 954-764-7026 ext 3719
  * From elsewhere toll-free: 1-877-242-0001

Caption:
  WALTER MICHOT/HERALD STAFFLOOKING CAREFULLY: Herald reporter Phil Long and   auditor Elena Chari examine a questionable ballot that was cast for the Nov.   7 presidential election in Duval County. The ballot is held by a municipal   employee.
  WALTER MICHOT/HERALD STAFFIN REVIEW: Duval County's director of operations,   Robert Phillips, and ballot checkers Joyce Roland and Zerelda Thomas, left,   work amid a camera-produced swirl.
  WALTER MICHOT/HERALD STAFFTAKING STUDIOUS LOOKS: In Duval County, from left,   are auditor Elena Stetsenko, Herald reporter Daniel de Vise, Republican   observer Marc Ross, auditor Elena Chari, Herald reporter Phil Long and   municipal employee Joyce Roland.
  WALTER MICHOT/HERALD STAFFREADY TO MOVE: Duval's director of operations,   Robert Phillips, loads a cart with ballots that were stored in a secure area.   They were then rolled out to the site of the review.
  WALTER MICHOT/HERALD STAFF LEGAL ACTION: At left, Mark Seibel, The Herald's !   managing editor/news, studies paperwork while waiting for a judge in   Jacksonville. Below, a stack of ballots.color photo: Phil Long and Elena   Chari examine a questionable
  ballot (a), George W. Bush (a), Al Gore (a); photo: Robert Phillips and Joyce
  Roland and Zeralda Thomas work amid a camera-produced swirl (a), Elena
  Stetsenko and Daniel de Vise and Marc Ross and Elena Chari and Phil Long and
  Joyce Roland examine ballots (a), Mark Seibel studies paperwork in
  Jacksonville (a), A stack of ballots (a), Robert Phillips loads a cart with
  ballots (a)

Memo:
  WHO WON?/A HERALD REPORT

Copyright (c) 2001 The Miami Herald
  Record Number: 0104060072

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Miami Herald, April 5, 2001

The Miami Herald wrote a follow-up to their original story on the disputed Florida 2000 recount.

The gist of the first story can be found in this USA Today piece.  Below is the Miami Herald follow-up.  My source was this site, and I have added my own paragraph breaks.

Recounts could have given Gore the edge

Broward, Palm Beach checked

BY SHARI RUDAVSKY AND BETH REINHARD breinhard@herald.com

Broward and Palm Beach canvassing boards, although besieged by Republican claims that they used lax standards to award votes to Al Gore, could have credited hundreds more ballots to the Democrat if they had counted every dimple, pinprick and hanging chad as a vote, a review of ballots in both counties shows.

In Broward, where the official hand recount added 567 votes to Gore's county lead over Bush, a Herald-sponsored ballot review found that Gore's margin could have been 1,475, if every mark had been counted as a valid vote. In Palm Beach, where the official hand recount added a net gain of 174 votes to Gore's tally, the Herald-sponsored review found a potential Gore net gain of 1,081.

``It's hard to believe that the canvassing boards could have counted even more votes,'' said Broward Republican Party Chairman George LeMieux. ``It was our contention all along that the canvassing board was being extremely loose in their standards.'' The review also revealed that the canvassing boards in both counties had difficulty maintaining uniform standards of judging ballots throughout a process that involved scores of people, hundreds of thousands of ballots, and intense deadline pressure.

Among the ballots examined in Broward and Palm Beach by The Herald and auditors from BDO Seidman, LLP, were hundreds of dimpled ballots credited to no candidate that were virtually identical to scores of dimpled ballots awarded to Bush or Gore. Canvassing board members said they did the best they could to discern voter intent fairly. ``We didn't make the Democrats happy, we didn't make the Republicans happy, so I think we did something right,'' said Carol Roberts, a Democratic county commissioner who served on the Palm Beach canvassing board. Suzanne Gunzburger, a Democratic county commissioner on the Broward board who was accused of favoring Gore, said, ``We represented the will of the voter to the best of our ability. I feel comfortable with the job we did.''

The review, sponsored by The Herald, its parent company Knight Ridder and USA Today, examined 16,669 ballots in the two counties as part of a statewide review to determine the possible outcome of a Florida Supreme Court order that undervote ballots throughout the state be counted, a ruling later blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Florida court's order exempted Palm Beach, Broward, Volusia and 139 precincts of Miami-Dade, where canvassing boards had already reviewed ballots. The results of those counties were not included when The Herald computed that the Florida court's order probably would have resulted in Bush still being declared the winner. But viewing the Palm Beach and Broward ballots, while not illuminating the potential outcome of the state court order, did provide an opportunity to assess the actions of the canvassing boards in their pressured manual counting of all ballots.

Some conclusions: * Had the Broward and Palm Beach canvassing boards used the loosest standard in judging ballots and finished the recount by the court-set deadline -- which Palm Beach did not meet -- Gore almost certainly would have won. He might have gained 2,022 votes in the two counties when Bush's state lead was only 930.

And that tally may be conservative because it excludes the cleanly punched ballots in Broward, 252 Bush votes and 786 Gore votes. Broward election officials say they cannot be certain that cleanly punched ballots weren't also read during the machine count.

U.S. Rep. Peter Deutsch, D-Pembroke Pines, a constant presence at the Broward recount, argued that every ballot mark was made deliberately by a voter indicating a candidate. All impressions should have counted, catapulting Gore over the top.

``The reality is that the canvassing board did not use a liberal standard and did not use the correct standard,'' Deustch said. ``Had they used the correct standard, Al Gore would be president.'' *

Both political parties adopted strategies in Palm Beach and Broward that turned out to favor their candidates. Republicans correctly anticipated that a lenient standard would benefit Gore in those two counties and fought strenuously against it. Democrats fought unsuccessfully for including more ballots as valid votes. *

Consistency was hard to come by. Piles of dimpled ballots never made it to the canvassing boards for scrutiny because elections workers and observers agreed among themselves that they contained no valid votes. The canvassing boards only scrutinized ballots when teams of two election workers and two representatives of the parties did not agree.

``If we missed that many, I'll have to go kill some people,'' said Dennis Newman, a Boston attorney who represented the Democratic Party in Palm Beach. ``That depresses me. Our instructions were very clear. When in doubt, question it or challenge it if you see anything.''

Broward and Palm Beach kicked off their countywide manual recounts with basically the same benchmark for judging a ballot: the bit of paper the voter expels from the punch-card ballot, the chad, had to be detached by at least two corners to count as a vote. But as the recount battle went to court again and again, and the canvassing board members saw dimpled ballot after dimpled ballot, the basis for judging a vote evolved.

In both counties, board members started looking at the whole ballot rather than just the presidential chad in an effort to determine voter intent. In Palm Beach, the canvassing board counted dimples as votes if the rest of the ballot bore similar marks instead of clean punches.

``Generally there had to be some pattern that this was how the person voted,'' said Judge Charles Burton, the chairman of the Palm Beach board. ``Out of 22 votes if you just had two little dings, we wouldn't necessarily count that.''

Broward canvassing board members Robert W. Lee and Gunzburger tended to view a dimple as a vote if there were other marks on the ballot for candidates of the same party. Lee, a Democrat and county court judge, even made a list showing which punch-card numbers corresponded to Democrats and which ones corresponded to Republicans. A quick glance at the list and the ballot would show whether the voter appeared to choose a straight ticket.

``There had to be a pattern of two or three dimples in the Democratic field for me to feel comfortable to count a dimple for Gore,'' Lee said. ``That's the way I interpreted the law.'' Lee's rationale: Many people vote along party lines.

Republicans and some election law experts strongly objected to that standard. Daniel Lowenstein, a UCLA law professor and an expert on elections law, called the voting pattern standard ``profoundly wrong.'' ``If you're going to count marks like that, you're surely going to count some significant number of votes that were not intended,'' he said. If people voted straight-party tickets then Democratic congressional candidate Elaine Bloom should have defeated Republican U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw (she didn't), and Republican Property Appraiser William Markham would have lost (he didn't).

Gunzburger conceded that some voters cross party lines but said, ``We had to come up with a standard, and this is the standard we chose.'' Maintaining even an arguably flawed standard, however, proved impossible. The Herald compared similarly dimpled ballots to see if the pattern held up. While many dimpled ballots that were counted as votes did show a pattern of other dimples, others assigned to candidates did not.

In the week and a half of recounting, boards often worked 14-hour-plus days, tediously inspecting ballots. In Broward, the board did not even break for Thanksgiving. The Palm Beach canvassing board worked non-stop before the recount deadline from 8 a.m. Saturday to 7 p.m. Sunday. All of this came under intense media scrutiny. Reporters and television cameras from all over the world hovered just outside the glass-paned rooms where the canvassing boards toiled. The late hours, life-in-a fishbowl atmosphere, and overall enormity of the task ahead took a toll on board members, despite their valiant efforts.

Palm Beach had a written policy on recounts, which called for the two-corner standard and left little opportunity for partisan objections. But Democratic and Republican activists whittled away at the canvassing board's resolve. ``We blew every policy and procedure with all of that because of the demands placed upon us,'' said Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore. ``Looking back, we were trying to please everybody, we probably should have said, `This is the way it is.' ''

Adding pressure on boards was the inherent difficulty of assessing punch cards. A chad is no bigger than a freckle. A dimple to one person can be a shadow to another. ``It's like reading tea leaves. Everybody sees something different,'' said William Scherer, a Fort Lauderdale attorney who represented the Republican Party in Broward's recount.

Even canvassing board members acknowledge they could not be 100 percent consistent over the long days. ``I'm sure there's a few [ballots] in there now that if I went back and looked, I'd say these are votes, and if I went through the votes, I'd say some are not votes,'' Burton said.

The order in which ballots came before the canvassing board was another variable. If the board saw a dimpled ballot and called it for Gore, they might call the next dimpled ballot for Bush. But if a similar ballot came three hours later, it might be discarded.

``At 10 a.m. a person might be a little more conservative, and by 10 p.m they may be a little more liberal,'' said LeMieux of the Broward GOP. Multiply the boards' inconsistency times 60 -- roughly the number of election workers and partisan observers in each county who reviewed the ballots first. If they agreed, the canvassing board never saw the ballot. A ballot ruled as bearing no valid vote and not reviewed by the canvassing board had no chance to count.

Ideally, people looking at ballots would get the same training and follow it to the letter, minimizing discrepancies. But different teams behaved differently, noted Jeff Darter, informations technology manager for the Palm Beach elections office. ``There was a huge variation in their intensity, in observing or dissenting.''

Democrats in Palm Beach received clear instructions: insist that any ballot with a mark near Gore be canvassed. As the recount wore on, however, spirits and efforts flagged. ``There were less and less challenges. People were tired, too, so unless it was something glaring, they weren't challenged,'' said Kartik Krishnaiyer, assistant to the chairman of the Palm Beach Democratic Party. Krishnaiyer admits he failed to forward some ballots for canvassing in an effort to deflect GOP accusations that Democrats wanted to manufacture votes for Gore. ``There were a couple of times when I thought that I'd better just let that one go because it's going to be a hard sell,'' he said. ``Still the voter intent was clearly there.''

But others involved in the recount retort that ballot marks don't necessarily reflect voters' choices. ``If you just count a ding as a vote, you're no better off than a machine,'' said Palm Beach County Canvassing Board Chairman Burton, a Democrat. ``If you're just counting impressions, then you're really not interpreting the intent of the voter.''

While the quarrel over standards for manual recounts continues, there's one point where there is little debate. Said Brigham McCown, a lawyer who represented the Republican Party in Palm Beach: ``I think everyone's in agreement it did not work as advertised.''

Herald staff writer Geoff Dougherty contributed to this report.

Joe Wilson W/ Katie Couric

Highlight - Joe talks about damage due to release of his wife's maiden name (which was available in his Who's Who entry):

HEADLINE: Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson discusses the content of the State
of the Union and alleges White House repercussions against him for speaking
out

ANCHORS: KATIE COURIC

BODY:
KATIE COURIC, co-host:

With us now from Washington is former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Mr. Ambassador, good morning to you.

Mr. JOSEPH WILSON (Former Acting United States Ambassador To Iraq): Hi, Katie. How are you this morning?

COURIC: I'm fine, thank you. I know that you were one of the first to warn the CIA that Iraq was not trying to buy uranium from Niger after the agents--agency sent you there to investigate the situation in--in, I believe, February of 2002. Now you say after you recently went public that you were the administration's secret envoy, but the White House is trying to discredit and intimidate you. Why would you say that and what specifically do you think the White House is doing?

Mr. WILSON: Well, first of all, I was the discreet envoy as opposed to a secret envoy. I'm not a secret agent. And, secondly, I went out there at the request of the--of the government to look into the allegations that Iraq might have been trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger.

I looked into those thoroughly. I had a--a longstanding knowledge of the uranium business, as well as a number of very senior level contacts in the former Niger government which would have been in power at the time that the supposed memorandum of agreement was done. I came back, I reported those findings, and I went back to my--my normal life. When--first, the State Department spokesman, in response to the IAEI***(as spoken)***assertion that these documents were forged, said we were fooled, I felt it important to make the point that, in fact, the US government had information long before the IAEA statement to the effect that it was highly unlikely that Niger could have been selling uranium to Iraq.

And then subsequently when there was another statement made by the--by the national security adviser that perhaps somebody in the bowels of the agency knew about it but not at her level, I felt it was important to ensure that--that everybody understand that this was a--senior levels of the government that had asked me to--that had asked for the information that had led to my going out there.

COURIC: So how--let me get back to--to my original question, if I could, how do you think now the White House is trying to discredit and intimidate you?

Mr. WILSON: Sure. Well, during--during the last couple of weeks, there have been a number of articles written attacking me. The most amusing ones basically suggesting that I told the truth because I'm a--a Democrat. This was not a partisan activity, but if you want to lay it out as Democratic truth-tellers and what the Republicans equal. 

But the most serious allegation was in a--in a--an article by Bob Novak, a Washington columnist for the Chicago Sun Times in which he asserted that my wife, who he named by her maiden name, was a CIA operative. And he quoted two senior administration sources. I spoke to him about it afterwards because he had asked me for a confirmation. He had told me when he asked for the confirmation, they were CIA sources. I called him afterwards and said, 'You told me they were CIA sources, now you're saying they were senior administration sources.' He said, 'I misspoke the first time,' which means, as I well understood, that the CIA would never do something like that. And so that basically means that somebody at the political level of the administration.

COURIC: And you think this happened after you went public saying you were, in fact, the discreet envoy, as you say, who ascertained that Iraq was not, in fact, buying uranium from Niger?

Mr. WILSON: Oh, absolutely. The article appeared a week after my--my New York Times op-ed.

COURIC: Which was July 6th?

Mr. WILSON: Which was July 6th. I've since learned from a--a couple of different reporters that the White House has been--White House sources have been telling the story as 'Wilson and his wife,' which is absolutely not the case. It's neither about Wilson nor is it about his wife. It's about the 16 words that somebody managed to insert in the State of the Union address that the president--that the president spoke to the United States, to the US Congress and to the world.

COURIC: How damaging would this be to your wife's work?

Mr. WILSON: Well, you know, what was left out of my interview with Andrea Mitchell was--was my comment that I would not answer any specific questions about my wife. But hypothetically speaking, as others have reported, including TODAY, it would be--it would be damaging not just to her career, since she's been married to me, but since they mentioned her by her maiden name, to her entire career. So it would be her entire network that she may have established, any operations, any programs or projects she was working on. It's a--it's a breach of national security. My understanding is it may,
in fact, be a violation of American law.

COURIC: Well, what would the White House--what motivation would the White House have in divulging your wife's name?

Mr. WILSON: Well, it does--it does nothing to intimidate me since my story is already out there. A day after I--I--I wrote my op-ed, the White House acknowledged that the 16 words should never have been in the State of the Union address. A week after my article appeared, the president's--the vice president's chief of staff acknowledged to Time magazine that the vice president had, in fact, expressed an interest to this subject matter. So it's not to intimidate me. I--I--what I'm most worried about and most concerned about is that it is probably intended to intimidate others and keep them from stepping forward, less...

COURIC: Why did you--I'm sorry to interrupt.

Mr. WILSON: Mm-hmm.

COURIC: But why did you wait so long to come forward? If the president included this sentence in his State of the Union address in January and used it as a rationale for the invasion into Iraq, why did you wait to go public until July 6th?

Mr. WILSON: Well, Katie, remember that the president's statement and the British white paper referred only to Africa, generically. There are three other countries in Africa that actually produce and export uranium, South Africa and Namibia/Gabon. So long as they were talking only about Africa, my curiosity was aroused, but there was no particular reason for me to think they were talking about Niger. It was only after the State Department spokesman make it very clear that, in fact, they were talking about Niger, that was the country they were referring to from Africa, that I felt that it was important to--to clear the record.

COURIC: You were anti-war, you were for--you supported the containment of Saddam Hussein. So how can you convince people--and, reportedly, you are close to Democrats. Is this politically motivated any--in any way, shape or form?

Mr. WILSON: Well, let me--let me say, Katie, that I went out to--to Niger six months before I ever wrote any article on the particular subject.

Secondly, all my articles made the case that, in fact, disarmament was a legitimate national security and indeed international security objective and that in order to effect disarmament, you had to have the credible threat of force. And in order to--for that credible threat--for that force to be credible, you had to be prepared to use it. What I was against was the high-risk global war option of invasion, conquest and subsequently occupation. And the reason that I was against that was because I never believed it was going to be a cake walk. I never believed, based on my experience of two and half years living in Iraq...

COURIC: Mm-hmm.

Mr. WILSON: ...I never believed that the Iraqis were going to be waving flags as we marched into Baghdad. I always feared that the occupation would be the most difficult part of this. And I always thought that we needed to take a good hard look at what objectives we were trying to achieve in engaging in this activity.

COURIC: We're almost out of time. In a few seconds, what would you like to happen if, in fact, it is found to be true that senior officials at the White House did disseminate this information about your wife and her job?

Mr. WILSON: Well, I fully expect the appropriate authorities will look into it, as well they should, if, in fact, it is a--it's a violation of US law. I have every confidence in--in the institutions of our government. I've never been prouder to be an American than during these days when--when speaking truth to power has--has been an important thing to do. So I have every confidence that this will all be looked into and--and--and decided
appropriately.

COURIC: Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Ambachader--Ambassador Wilson, thanks very much for your time this morning.

Mr. WILSON: Thanks, Katie.

Joe Wilson Denial Of Wife's Involvement

An excerpt from "The Politics of Truth" (p. 346) on the question of whether Valerie Plame was involved in the decision to send Joe Wilson to Niger:

Quite apart form the matter of her employment, the assertion that Valerie had played any substantive role in the decision to ask me ot go to Niger was false on the face of it. Anyone who knows anything about the government bureaucracy knows that public servants go to great lengths to avoid nepotism or any appearance of it... Valerie could not havce stood in the chain of command had she tried to. Dick Cheney might be able to find a way to appoint one of his daughters to a key decision-making position in the Staet Dept's Middle East Bureau, as he did; but Valerie could not - and would not if she could - have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey.

[SKIP A Few Paragraphs...

So what of she conveyed a request to me to come to the Agency to talk about Niger? She played absolutely no part in the decision to send me there.

Here is a WSJ article from Oct 2003 noting her involvement; more here.

"Absolutely no part in the decision"?

Per Time, he is no longer denying it.

WSJ On INR Memo

Memo Underscored
Issue of Shielding
Plame's Identity

By ANNE MARIE SQUEO and JOHN D. MCKINNON
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 19, 2005; Page A3

   

A classified State Department memo that may be pivotal to the CIA leak case made clear that information identifying an agent and her role in her husband's intelligence-gathering mission was sensitive and shouldn't be shared, according to a person familiar with the document.

A special prosecutor is investigating whether Bush administration officials broke the law by intentionally outing a covert intelligence operative. Investigators are trying to determine if the memo, dated June 10, 2003, was how White House officials learned that Valerie Wilson was an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.

News that the memo was marked for its sensitivity emerged as President Bush yesterday appeared to backtrack from his 2004 pledge to fire any member of his staff involved in the leaking of the CIA agent's name. In a news conference yesterday that followed disclosures that his top strategist, Karl Rove, had discussed Ms. Wilson's CIA employment with two reporters, Mr. Bush adopted a different formulation, specifying criminality as the standard for firing.

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration," Mr. Bush said. White House spokesman Scott McClellan later disputed the suggestion that the president had shifted his position.

The memo's details are significant because they will make it harder for officials who saw the document to claim that they didn't realize the identity of the CIA officer was a sensitive matter. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, may also be looking at whether other crimes -- such as perjury, obstruction of justice or leaking classified information -- were committed.

On July 6, 2003, former diplomat Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, disputing administration arguments that Iraq had sought to buy uranium ore from Africa to make nuclear weapons. The following day, President Bush and top cabinet officials left for Africa, and the memo was aboard Air Force One.

The paragraph in the memo discussing Ms. Wilson's involvement in her husband's trip is marked at the beginning with a letter designation in brackets to indicate the information shouldn't be shared, according to the person familiar with the memo. Such a designation would indicate to a reader that the information was sensitive. The memo, though, doesn't specifically describe Ms. Wilson as an undercover agent, the person familiar with the memo said.

Generally, the federal government has three levels of classified information -- top secret, secret and confidential -- all indicating various levels of "damage" to national security if disclosed. There also is an unclassified designation -- indicating information that wouldn't harm national security if shared with the public -- but that wasn't the case for the material on the Wilsons prepared by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It isn't known what level of classification was assigned to the information in the memo.

Who received the memo, which was prepared for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and how widely it was circulated are issues as Mr. Fitzgerald tries to pinpoint the origin of the leak of Ms. Wilson's identity. According to the person familiar with the document, it didn't include a distribution list. It isn't known if President Bush has seen the memo.

Mr. Fitzgerald has subpoenaed the phone logs from Air Force One for the week of the Africa tour, which precedes the revelation of Ms. Wilson's CIA identity in a column by Robert Novak on July 14. In that piece, Mr. Novak identified Valerie Plame, using Ms. Wilson's maiden name, saying that "two senior administration officials" had told him that Ms. Wilson suggested sending her husband to Niger.

Mr. Novak attempted to reach Ari Fleischer, then the White House press secretary, in the days before his column appeared. However, Mr. Fleischer didn't respond to Mr. Novak's inquiries, according to a person familiar with his account. Mr. Fleischer, who has since left the administration, is one of several officials who testified before the grand jury.

In an October 2003 article on the memo, The Wall Street Journal reported that it details a meeting in early 2002 in which CIA officials discussed how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium ore from Niger. Ms. Wilson, an agent working on issues related to weapons of mass destruction, recommended her husband, an expert on Africa, to travel to Niger to investigate the matter.

White House officials had been warning reporters off the notion that the trip to Niger was ordered by Vice President Dick Cheney, as Mr. Wilson had suggested. Emails and a first-person account published this week of his grand-jury testimony by Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper support this notion. The grand jury is set to expire in October in this case, though its tenure could be extended for six months.

It is possible that reporters learned Ms. Wilson's identity from government officials who hadn't seen the memo. Mr. Cooper has testified and written that he was first told of Mr. Wilson's wife by Mr. Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff. Mr. Rove didn't identify Ms. Wilson by name. Similarly, one of Mr. Cooper's other sources, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, said he had heard Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, but he didn't identify her any further, according to Mr. Cooper.

The fact that two top White House officials discussed a CIA agent with reporters has prompted a furor in Washington, with Democrats calling for the firing of Mr. Rove.

A new ABC News poll signaled how the matter has damaged the administration's credibility -- and the political peril Mr. Rove still faces. Just 25% of Americans say the White House is fully cooperating with the federal investigation into the leak of Ms. Wilson's identity, down from about half when the investigation began nearly two years ago. Moreover, 75% said Mr. Rove should lose his job if he leaked classified information. The poll of 1,008 adults, conducted July 13-17, has a margin of error of three percentage points.

---- John Harwood contributed to this article.

Put Down That Doughnut!

Federal researchers released a new study on obesity last week which created as much excitement as a Good Humor Man at a Weight Watcher's meeting.  The headline grabbing conclusion, as reported by the NY Times - "Some Extra Heft May Be Helpful, New Study Says".

Oh, my.  The study confirmed the widely-held belief that the truly obese have high mortality rates.  However, the notion that "extra heft may be helpful" followed from the reported result that people classified as "overweight" have a slightly lower mortality rate than the group researchers put in the "normal" weight category.

Pundits immediately leaped to the wrong conclusion.  Here is John Tierney of the Times:

After decades of listening to emaciated ascetics lecture us about diet and exercise, it's tempting to return the favor. We could turn into activists ourselves and stand in picket lines outside gyms with signs proclaiming, "StairMaster = Death."

David Brooks, also of the Times, delivered a virtually perfect misreading of the report:

People who work out, eat responsibly and deserve to live are more likely to be culled by the Thin Reaper.

That is simply not what the report said, which led Blogger "Ogged" to chastise Mr. Brooks with energy and commitment.

So, what did the researchers really say, and why the confusion?  A few words describing the study will be helpful.

The study looked at health surveys that followed people from the 1970's and forward to observe mortality patterns among different groups.  Because of the data collected, researchers were able to control for certain variables, such as age, race, smoking, and alcohol consumption.  However, researchers lacked other data such as information on body composition (e.g., percent body fat), or measures of cardiovascular fitness.  (These shortcomings have been corrected in surveys from 1999 and forward.)

The researchers divided the survey participants into five groups - thin, normal, overweight, obese, and very obese - based on a simple measure called "Body Mass Index", which is calculated based on a person's height and weight.  Tracking mortality for the different groups (and subgroups, based on age, race, smoking, and alcohol use) the researchers reached the headline-grabbing conclusion that the "overweight" group had the lowest mortality rate.

Now, John Tierney and David Brooks are familiar with the use of statistics, so they know a guideline that is critical in understanding this report - Correlation is not Causation.  A fun illustration of this truism is the correlation of ice cream sales with shark attacks on swimmers - both are down in December and up in July, but no one has concluded that sharks are hungry for ice cream eaters, or that banning ice cream sales would improve public safety.

Bearing that rule of statistics in mind, what happened in this study?

The first thing to notice is that, although Messrs. Brooks and Tierney concluded that exercise is futile, or even dangerous, the researchers did not control for physical fitness as a separate variable.  In fact, fitness buffs may be confounding the data a bit. 

There is a bit of a problem with the Body Mass Index, which was used as a proxy for obesity.  The people who study these things are satisfied that most people with a high BMI are overweight.  Most - but not all.  Regular exercisers can add sufficient muscle mass to confound the classifications.  For example, First Fitness Fanatic George Bush, with a BMI of roughly 26, would be classified as overweight despite a percentage of body fat that ranks as "lean".

This suggests two problems with the conclusion reached by Brooks and Tierney - first, "fitness" was not a separate control variable, so there is no basis to conclude that fitness is futile.  Secondly, there may be some very fit but not-so-fat people slipping into the "overweight" category and boosting the mortality outlook for that group.  We should note that "fitness" and "fatness" are independent concepts, although they tend to be correlated (and linked in the imagination of pundits at the Times).

The folks at the Cooper Institute in Dallas have been gathering data on the relationship between weight and cardiovascular fitness for decades.  Their conclusion - a person can be overweight, yet still have good cardiovascular fitness.  Such a person will have a much lower mortality risk than an equally overweight person with poor cardiovascular fitness.  Conversely, a person can be sedentary and slim - such folks have a poorer mortality outlook than the fit fatties.

For the purposes of this study as reported in the popular press, BMI became a proxy for two things - excess fat (rather than muscle), and a sedentary lifestyle - but it is not a perfect proxy for either characteristic.  After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that folks classified as "overweight" based on BMI had a better mortality outlook than people in the normal range. 

However, all that means is that a group of people which includes the sedentary overweight, the fit fatties, and the muscled up fitness fools experienced lower mortality than a different group with lower BMIs.  That is very different from saying, as Messrs. Tierney and Brooks did, that people who are truly overweight and do not exercise have a better health outlook than folks who watch their weight and hit the gym regularly.

So what is the truth?  Is exercise a waste of time? 

No.  The researchers noted that mortality was reduced in part because medical techniques have improved - drugs control high blood pressure and high cholesterol, surgery repairs damaged hearts, and so on.

And the medical consensus is clear, as described by the National Institute of Health - carrying excess pounds is a bad idea, and regular exercise is a good one.  Doctors with the President's Council on Physical Fitness also offer a very interesting perspective on the efficacy of dieting - don't worry about the pounds!  You may not lose weight, but it's the effort that counts:

Physical activity is clearly viewed as being essential to the prevention of weight gain but fairly ineffective (at least in clinical trials) at promoting weight loss...

On the positive side, recent evidence suggests that physical activity confers health benefits that are largely or entirely independent of changes in body composition. These findings suggest that overweight and obese individuals can obtain the same benefits of physical activity as lean individuals.

...While the public health concerns about the increasing prevalence of obesity are well founded, they may be misplaced. The epidemiological studies reviewed here suggest that the health risks of obesity are largely controlled if a person is physically active and physically fit. The protection appears to come, at least in part, from positive metabolic changes that occur as a result of regular participation in physical activity.

Stop reading Brooks, ignore Tierney, put down that doughnut, and walk to the gym.  And walk right past it, if you are not a member.  But get moving.