November Surprise, the Sequel

The possibility that this particularly convenient verdict postponement might have been the result of Bush administration planning and pressure to create a November surprise for the midterm elections was first raised here at the Nation magazine's "The Notion" blog on October 17. Since then the mainstream American media has failed to explore the subject.

Just to review for a second: Saddam's trial, as the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer reported last January, was a key priority of the Bush administration, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars exhuming evidence for it, refurbished the courtroom for it, trained judges for it, provided security for it, and even drafted many of the statutes under which Saddam was to be tried. The trial has been significantly stage-managed and run on a daily basis by the US Regime Crimes Liaison Office, working out of the US embassy in Baghdad.

As the Media Matters website has ably reported, the Bush administration (think: Karl Rove) has a penchant for and a "history of timing national security-related actions to the political calendar," thereby causing presidential approval ratings to providentially bump up at just the right moments; and White House Press Spokesman Tony Snow, when asked last week by CNBC's Larry Kudlow whether the verdict would be a "November surprise," even welcomed the question, as well as the prospective verdict, this way:

"[Y]ou are absolutely right, it will be a factor. But you know what, it may fit into a larger narrative about an Iraqi government that has been doing what the president has said all along which is developing the capacity to sustain itself, defend itself and govern itself and to help us out on the war on terror."

You would think that all this might have inspired the odd editor at the odd major (or even minor) newspaper to assign a story, however speculative, on the possibility of a Bush-manipulated Saddam-execution special, or that a major columnist somewhere might have commented, or that the odd reporter might have called someone other than the usual suspects. But no such luck, it seems.

Instead, where reporters did anything on the subject, they took the charge of possibly tampering with the verdict date for political advantage on the "home front" directly to administration figures -- last week, Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad (""The United States had nothing to do with the selection of the date and we don't know whether the judges have come to a judgment or not."); this Sunday, Tony Snow ("absolutely crazy"; "‘The idea is preposterous,' he said in an interview on CNN's ‘Late Edition,' that ‘somehow we've been scheming and plotting with the Iraqis.'") -- who naturally denied that it was faintly conceivable. In fact, in such articles, all you could read were denials of the charge. There was never a sense that the charge came from anywhere.

In the meantime, the idea was mocked on CNN; while NBC's Tim Russert fluffed it off, based on administration denials, evidently without (like every other reporter around) even bothering to explore the all too plausible possibility, or calling anyone on Earth who might have another opinion. How about, for instance, the articulate and knowledgeable human rights lawyer Scott Horton, whose private e-newsletter, "No Comment," first tipped off "The Notion" to the providential postponement? (Leading Democrats, of course, just ducked as always.) For our "balanced" press, this was little short of dereliction of duty.

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