Waiting For Wilma

The porch furniture is piled high in the living room, the refrigerator is stocked with cold cuts, the cooler is packed with ice, every appropriate container is full of fresh water, and all the flashlights and the portable radios are ready to go. Now all we need is a storm.

Hurricane Wilma is about 100 miles off the southwestern coast of Florida as I write at 12:42 AM, and was recently bumped up to a Category 3 storm capable of inflicting enormous damage wherever it hits. That would appear to be somewhere between Naples, Fla., where my cousin Patti lives, and the Everglades, the magnificent wild swamp south of Alligator Alley that is one of the largest preserved wetlands in the world.

According to the weather people, the storm will bring winds from 60 to 70 MPH to Bradenton, where I live on the South Florida Gulf Coast, 60 miles south of Tampa.

For the folks on Marco Island, a community of 20,000 boat-owning retirees just south of Naples, it could mean once-in-a-lifetime devastation of the kind suffered in New Orleans. That's because the tightly-organized little city actually is a complex web of interlinked boating canals that could experience a flood surge of anywhere from eight to 17 feet, according to the U.S. Weather Service.

Just off Bradenton, where I live about a half mile from a large bay that opens into the Gulf, is Anna Maria Island to the north, and then Longboat Key, Lido Key, Siesta Key and Casey Key to the south. These barrier islands are not nearly at as much risk from Wilma as they once were from Charlie - they were spared that time - but they are in danger of losing more of their precious beaches, where the sand has been rated the finest and whitest in the world.

Back on the mainland, though, you go down through Sarasota to Philippi Creek, then Venice, North Port, Englewood, Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda. The latter four are tourist and blue-collar communities that were devastated by Hurricane Charlie last year. You realize quickly that this is no highly affluent Gold Coast, not a place of million-dollar tear-downs like Southern California's coast, but a beautiful if humid and sometimes dangerous place for ordinary middle-class Americans.

After Punta Gorda there's a long stretch of mostly nothing all the way down to Fort Myers, where once again the population briefly builds up before fading away into tropical swamps and retirement communities south to Naples.


You're now about 130 miles south of Bradenton via Interstate 75, and 30 or 40 miles south of Fort Myers, a true resort town with a Spring Break rep just shy of Fort Lauderdale's.

Across the Gulf to the southeast, of course, is Cancun and Cozumel, the resort cities on the upper tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, where Wilma just had her way with thousands of tourists and many more Mexicans. Many of those will probably be on their way to Arizona and Texas as soon as the weather clears, having been beaten out of work sometimes left homeless by Wilma.


After a 24-hour whirlwind visit to the Mexican resorts, Wilma took a straighter course to America. On her current northeast-trending trajectory, moving along at 18MPH, she'll hit somewhere south of Naples and Marco Island around 7 AM this morning.


Before she gets here, though, up north in Bradenton we'll have started getting lots of rains from the "feeder bands" of the outer circulation, and those bands of warm air will meet a cold front coming down from Texas, with a lot of tornadoes at the margins.


A tornado is what I fear most, and we've had a tornado warning, a tropical storm warning, a hurricane warning and a whole lot of groceries to prepare us.

But that is hardly the whole of Wilma, or even the least of these storms. We're keeping a wary eye out for Alpha, which doesn't seem to threaten our state, just as we've watched Wilma's development way out in the Caribbean since last Friday afternoon. Then it was just a "tropical wave," which precedes a "tropical depression," which can become a "tropical storm" and then a hurricane when it damn well pleases to blow at 75mph or more.

All of these storms bear a lot of waitful watching, mostly of television and much of it also on the Internet at the government's weather site, www.noaa.gov. There the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center and a whole bunch of departments and branches and sub-branches hold forth in copious forecasts, advisories, warnings, updates, position reports and the like, many of which find their way either onto my desktop as background maps or into my AOL mailbox.


During a big storm like this one, I can expect 30 to 40 pieces of welcome NOAA Storm Advisory mail - I repeat, mail that is welcome - that allows me to save money by not spending the $300 to $1,000 a storm can squeeze even from the pockets - if we had them - of turnips like us when it's unnecessary to evacuate.

Yet the waiting is far from a pleasure. There is nothing remotely sublime or blissful about listening to storm forecasts all day from CNN, our local Bay News 9, the local network channels, the Weather Channel and a couple of Tampa Bay and Sarasota-area radio stations. But I do keep informed.

We've so far spent something under $60 to ready ourselves for Wilma, and most of that will probably be wasted if all goes as it appears it will go a few hours from now (1:12 AM).

I concentrated on getting sweet things that would stave off boredom, while my wife concentrated on keeping me from buying those things. I ended up with two pounds of cooked ham, two pounds of turkey breast, a pound and a half of roast beef, a pound of Swiss cheese, some nice onion rolls, a half-gallon of ice cream and some sugar-free jello cups, along with a box of wheat thins, a can of tuna, two cans of sliced peaches, a small tub of cottage cheese and two small tubs of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. I don't think that list is at all interesting, except that the tab at Wal-Mart came to $45 and I can't figure out how. The lines went on forever.

The wind is picking up now. It's become steady instead of intermittent, and it's coming directly at the seven floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that front on our lanai and the southeast-facing side of the building. The rain has come and gone unpredictably, but it often does that here, and thankfully tonight there has been little lightning and no thunder at all.

But does some evil-minded, humongous tornado await us out there in the dark, out past the parking lot and the swimming pool and the golf course, out there beyond Bradenton Beach and Anna Maria? It's pitch dark beyond the palm trees except for the tiny, infrequent streetlamps swaying in the dark, and there's no way to know.

If it comes, the windows will resist winds of up to 100mph or so, but then things get iffy. A few miles-per-hour more at, say, 115 MPH, stuff starts crashing through the lanai screens. At about 125 MPH, the roof starts to feel a tug, and maybe the corridor's end windows break, meaning that children of the hurricane come screaming past the corridor doors of our condos, stopping only to smash the lights. Our entry door is sucked out into their playground, along with patio furniture too light to resist and any real children not well seated, and then begins a katabatic maelstrom. In a few minutes that will erase the accumulations of our lives, and at last, our lives as well.

That's why some people evacuate. Having neither ready cash nor a current job and lots of bills to pay, it's almost as painful staying as it is when good sense or preternatural instinct tells you to run for your life. Just now (1:26 AM), almost on cue, that old familiar whistle of the wind has started to rise. I'm waiting for Wilma, with my wife and my daughter sound asleep nearby.


It's dark out there.

  ¶ 1:28 AM

  The Judith Miller Case

The American Reporter took a unique approach to the Judith Miller case, in which a Federal judge in the Valerie Plame investigation ordered her jailed for refusing to testify regarding her sources, to whom she had promised anonymity.

We strongly supported Judith Miller's decision not to testify, and even more so, we admired and were inspired by the decision of the New York Times to spend millions of dollars on behalf of a principle that has allowed countless whistleblowers come forward without subjecting them to retaliation for telling the truth.

Every other day during her two months in jail, we ran a boldface notice at the top of our homepage expressing our encouragement for these decisions; I don't think anyone at The Times ever noticed them, but we did make it clear that, as a publication owned by reporters, we do care very much about the principles that protect our confidential sources and permit us to publish otherwise unprintable information.

The right to protect one's sources has no explicit support in the Constitution. The right to a free press granted by the First Amendment is not in itself - without supporting legislation from Congress - sufficiently clear to guarantee that a reporter can shield his or her sources from exposure in court.

For a lot of different reasons, most of them political and some of them constitutional, Congress has been reluctant to create such a shield. There is none for priests who hear murder confessions in the confessional, nor for reporters who hear state secrets in an interview, and thus we all remain equal under the law. Some state laws, such as one in California, do provide a limited exception.

It perhaps begs the question to say the concept of a shield law could have protected many abusive priests; it might also protect abusive journalists.

Our broad and strong support for the principle of confidentiality for news sources must not be confused with any approval of Judith Miller's reporting. It is not enough to state that she supported the Bush administration's case for the war against Iraq by repeatedly reporting unqualified assurances that Saddam Hussein possessed various implements of mass destruction. In my own estimate, Judith Miller is a liar.

In the stunning probe the paper conducted of its own reporting on the WMD story, her articles (some of them written with other Times reporters) comprised five of the six the paper published that supported the administration's assertion that Hussein had such weapons.

Clearly, she was beating the drum for war, and we do not believe for a moment that in her own mind she was convinced such weapons existed or that she did not know and at least intuitively understand that in her reporting she was doing a job not for the Times alone, as she should have been, but for the part of the intelligence community that is tasked to defend the interests of Israel when they can be harmonized with those of the United States - and sometimes even when they cannot.

There is a fact of life that has rarely been mentioned since Seymour Hersh back in the 1970's reported (in the Times) that the Central Intelligence Agency had long been paying journalists at major newspapers, networks and wire services to be part of their teams. I should add that a "fact of life" is by all means a "fact" that may not be availed of proof, and then I must say that Judith Miller is more than a reporter. In later years, "pay" has instead become "access" and a book.

In her reporting on weapons of mass destruction, Miller has been fulfilling a vaguely defined but politically vital function that allows government - permanent, constitutional government - to go about its business in the national security sphere with the critical support of public opinion.

Her role was simple: to repeat what she was told in print while rejecting any critical analysis that disproved it. Moreover, her role has broad support in government, and one need only hear the criticism that attends attacks on the falsity of government statements regarding national security issues to know that her role is secure. She is not alone in what she does; otherwise respected reporters for major news organizations, such as Wolf Blitzer, Brit Hume and a few others, do the same job for government.

Those reporters, when pressed, would likely explain themselves as having been forced to make critical choices between accuracy and access; they would likely say that uncritical reporting of government views on national security issues is the only way to gain access to the highest levels of power. But in fact, that access - especially to high-level liars - is only necessary when government wants to tell us its point of view. That is often obvious from its actions, which are more easily and accurately reported.

Misleading the American people is a time-honored tradition of many famous politicians. Most presidents have engaged in it. They marshal slender files of evidence and from it construct reams of elaboration, giving their chosen reporters a substantive-seeming defense and supporting documentation to persuade wary editors. The handful of reporters being used by the government must have sufficient autonomy to be able to safely report a lie, and sufficient standing in the journalistic community - and support from the owners of their news organizations - to resist the attacks that may come when they publish lies.

Many Americans find such reporting defensible, and even desirable. They feel no need to know all of the truth, as it does not assist them at all in their daily lives; they similarly respect the need of government to do things in secret, and to have secret goals and operations, so that it can defend us from our enemies and carry out the actions that smart government people believe are necessary.

Thus the agenda items of first, protecting Israel - whose physical presence as a state is our ultimate insurance against a catastrophic denial of access to Middle Eastern oil, and whose supporters produce a substantial portion of all the campaign contributions given each year - and second, defending America - which, after all, except for internal subversion and the occasional Al-Qaeda attack is probably unassailable - are goals and operations that fulfill certain aims of American foreign policy and of the grateful people who create it.

I will disappoint many when I say I cannot dispute the rationality of these goals. Israel's odious approach to the Palestinians could never justify our generous financial help, if only due to its impact on public opinion; if we did not fully support Israel, though, its security would be quickly eroded, and the armies of Araby would conquer and destroy it once they got past the nuclear arsenal that we probably provided.

Who would the United States then have as an ally in that region? Saudi Arabia? It would go next. Jordan, third. Bahrain, the tamer Emirates, etc.? Simultaneously.

And what would it cost us to switch our fondness for Israel to fondness for Islamic states? Perhaps nothing economically, but it would be extremely painful; who wants to be in bed with people who chop off heads for adultery, and force women not to wear miniskirts?

It's a lot worse than that, of course. It would require us to back off all of our human rights stands, all of our hopes for Middle Eastern democracies, all of our resistance to the use of shari'a (Islamic law) in international courts, all of our commitment to human rights based on gender, religion and due process - it would degrade and deprave our shelter, our culture, our Constitution.

What troubles me is that we have to lie so much about it. Our government cannot afford to be explicitly so pro-Israel and anti-Islam that it concretely risks access to oil - not unless, that is, we are guaranteed access to the vast and very long-lived resources of Iraq, which dwarf those of most oil-producing nations combined.
That guarantee will only be fulfilled by a friendly government there.

We must acknowledge that in any historic fight with Islam and its extreme defenders, we need a secure and highly strategic base of operations, a mountain redoubt, if you will, that allows us to attack and destroy our enemies with a good degree of impunity, and that is what Iraq is for us. It borders most of the nations that hate us and in so doing fulfills the Godfather's dictum, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

Judith Miller is an instrument of all that. Firing her would only achieve the promotion of a Miller-in-waiting. I wish her no harm. There must always be a Miller, just as there must always be a Shea.  ¶ 1:26 PM

  Starting Over

I've decided I would like to start commenting on a lot of things, as I once did daily for the American Reporter. These days, there is not enough new content daily in AR to allow me to do so without making it appear I write seven articles for each one someone else writes. So, I've decided to do it here. I'll get started on that tomorrow.  ¶ 12:26 AM